Twilight at Mac’s Place

Twenty-five

Seated in leather armchairs before three blazing pine logs that occasionally spat and hissed at the fire screen, McCorkle and Padillo resembled nothing so much as a pair of senior club members listening with mild interest to a younger member’s account of the so-so polo match he had just witnessed.

What they were actually listening to was Granville Haynes’s theory of how his dead father and the equally dead Isabelle Gelinet had conspired to sell Steadfast Haynes’s nonexistent memoirs for large sums.

“Sums?” McCorkle said.

“Steady would’ve figured out how to sell them more than once.”

“And Isabelle?” Padillo said.

“If she and Steady were working a con, and if Isabelle decided to solo on after he died, she could’ve made some basic mistake. Steady was always very cautious, very secretive, and he might not’ve told her what step two was. So it could be that Isabelle skipped from step one to step three, missed step two, tripped, fell and drowned.”

Padillo rose, looked at his watch, saw it was 12:32 P.M. and asked, “Who wants a drink?”

Both Haynes and McCorkle asked for Scotch and water. Padillo turned and headed for the small dining room that was really an extension of the living room. To the left of the dining room was the kitchen and, beyond that, the tiny snow-covered backyard. The yard was divided between a ten-by-twelve-foot garden, in which Padillo grew roses and basil, and a one-car alley garage, in which he kept his 1972 Mercedes 280 SL coupe.

His small white brick Foggy Bottom row house sat on a thirty-foot lot and would have had a flat front were it not for a bay window that McCorkle said made it look seven months pregnant. The house had two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Downstairs were the living and dining rooms, kitchen, a half-bath and another flight of stairs that led down to the full basement, where there was a regulation Brunswick snooker table, at least sixty years old.

The snooker table had come with the house and nobody remembered how it had made it down the stairs and into the basement that also contained the furnace and a washer and dryer. The basement was a place Padillo tried not to visit more than three or four times a year.

He had bought the house the day Richard Nixon resigned and furnished it the following Saturday morning by walking through an upscale furniture store out on Wisconsin Avenue and pointing to floor samples that could be delivered that same afternoon. He had wound up with a lot of leather, tweed, teak and pine stuff that McCorkle told him made the downstairs look like a psychiatrist’s waiting room. Padillo had replied that that was exactly how he wanted it to look.

The only memorable pieces in the house were the dining room’s refectory table, reportedly four hundred years old, and the intricately carved mahogany sideboard that Padillo used as a bar. A young candy heiress, now more than twenty years dead, had given him the refectory table as a birthday present. He had bought the sideboard from a former first secretary at the Finnish embassy who needed the money to pay off some poker debts.

Padillo returned with the drinks, carrying two in his left hand and one in his right. He served McCorkle first, then Haynes and said, “What makes you so sure Steady’s memoirs don’t exist?”

“You saw the so-called manuscript I left in your safe?”

Padillo nodded as he sat back down in the leather chair, but McCorkle said, “I never saw it.”

“Three hundred and eighty-odd mostly blank pages,” Padillo said.

“That should miff the lady with the Sauer,” McCorkle said.

Haynes said, “Let’s come back to her.”

McCorkle shrugged. “No hurry.”

After tasting his drink, Haynes said, “When Erika and I reached Steady’s farm yesterday, his ex-wife was there. The fourth and last one. Letitia Melon. You two know her?”

“We know Letty,” Padillo said.

“But not well,” McCorkle added.

“She was locked in a hall closet under the stairs, bound and gagged.”

“She hurt?” Padillo asked.

“No.”

“Who’d she say did it?”

“Two guys with grocery sacks over their heads. She said they were already in the house when she got there.”

McCorkle asked, “Why was she there?”

“Because of Steady’s horse. She claimed she was worried nobody was looking after it.”

“Why do I get the impression you don’t believe her?” Padillo said.

“Because after she left I called Howard Mott. He told me Letty’d called him right after Steady died to remind him of the horse. Mott told her not to worry, that he’d take care of it, and he did.”

“Where’s the horse now?” McCorkle said.

“Dead.”

“How?”

“Shot. Either by Letty or the guys with sacks over their heads.”

“Why would she shoot him?”

“Why would they?”

Padillo said, “Then what?”

“I reported the dead horse to the sheriff, who seemed to be a member of Steady’s fan club. Then Erika and I searched the house, looking for a true manuscript.”

“You told her what you were looking for?” McCorkle asked.

“Why not?”

McCorkle frowned first, then shrugged and said, “Go on.”

“Erika discovered a new version of the manuscript in Steady’s computer. This new version reads just like the one I left in your safe except for one thing. Instead of three hundred and eighty-odd blank pages, this one has line after line and page after page filled with just one word: endit — spelled e-n-d-i-t. I think of it as the long version of the false manuscript. The woman with the Sauer got the short version.” He smiled slightly at McCorkle. “It would be awfully neat if she were Letty Melon in disguise.”

“It wasn’t Letty” McCorkle said.

“Tell me about her — whoever she was.”

“I didn’t see her hair,” McCorkle said, “because she wore a red knit cap pulled down almost to her eyebrows. I didn’t see her hands because she wore red knit gloves. I didn’t see her feet because she wore rubber boots. I can’t tell you much about her build because she wore a man’s old London Fog raincoat, probably with a zip-out liner. I know it was old because the waterproofing was gone — maybe dry-cleaned away. That leaves her face. She wore yellow-tinted glasses and her eyes were a blue that could’ve come from contacts. She had a regular nose, mouth, chin and no makeup. She had two voices. One was her flibbertigibbet voice. Her other voice was the convincer — uninflected, exact, experienced. It and the Sauer made me do exactly what she said I should do.”

“No scars, moles or tattoos?” Haynes said.

“No, but she did have nice skin,” McCorkle said. “Very few lines and no wrinkles — although she could’ve rubbed her face with Preparation H just before she came through the door. That can tighten things up for an hour or two.”

“She had two walks,” Padillo said. “One was shy and one was bold. She used the shy walk when she came in — a pigeon-toed shuffle, almost clumsy. On the way out: long strides, graceful, even athletic.”

“How old was she?” Haynes asked.

“More than thirty,” McCorkle said. “Less than fifty.”

Haynes finished his drink and turned away from McCorkle to put it down on a side table. Still turned away, he asked, “How’d she know the manuscript was in your safe?”

McCorkle winked at Padillo and said, “That’s been bothering me. It’s been bothering me so much that when I woke up this morning the first thing I asked myself was: Who knew I’d put the thing in my safe?”

“I knew,” Haynes said. “You knew.” He indicated Padillo with a nod. “And so did he.”

“Did Mott know?” Padillo asked.

“He knew I had the manuscript. He didn’t know it was in your safe.”

“Remember when I got out of the cab Friday afternoon and mistook you for Steady?” McCorkle said. “You were headed for Howard Mott’s office empty-handed.”

Haynes nodded.

“The next time I saw you was at the bar — just you, me, Tinker Burns and Karl. And by then you were carrying that folded-over grocery bag.”

Haynes again nodded.

“But when you left with Erika, you weren’t carrying anything. A fairly observant person might’ve noticed this and concluded you’d left the grocery bag with me for safekeeping.” McCorkle paused to sip his drink. “Safekeeping suggests a locked box of some kind. Maybe even a safe.”

“Someone had a tail on him,” Padillo said.

“Maybe,” Haynes said. “I wasn’t in Howard Mott’s office more than ten minutes before he got a call. By then he’d handed me all those blank pages. The call was from a lawyer, some ex-senator who wants to buy all rights to Steady’s memoirs for an anonymous client. He offered one hundred thousand. On my instructions, Mott told him I wanted five hundred thousand because I claim to know where I can raise enough offshore money to turn Steady’s life into a film I’d write, direct and star in. Mott may even have told him I was going to produce it.”

“What’d the ex-senator say?” McCorkle asked.

“He moaned and groused, then said he’d have to consult his client and get back to Mott on Monday. Tomorrow.”

“Any other offers?” Padillo said.

“One.”

“Who from?”

“After Isabelle was killed,” Haynes said, “and after I’d talked to the cops and was up in my room at the Willard, a guy from the CIA dropped by and offered me fifty thousand.”

“Sight unseen?” McCorkle said.

“Nobody seems to want to read the thing,” Haynes said. “They just want to bury it. I told the CIA guy about the hundred thousand I’d just turned down, then gave him the same crap about turning the memoirs into a feature and finished by telling him my new asking price was seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

“What’d he say when he recovered?”

“He seemed pleased — in a strange kind of way.”

“Heard from him since?” Padillo said.

“Indirectly,” Haynes said. “He’s the dead body Tinker Burns discovered out in Reston. Gilbert Undean.”

McCorkle leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling. Padillo rose and stood, staring at the fire. Finally, he turned to Haynes and said, “Steady left you a mess, didn’t he?”

“He led a messy life.”

“Our lady of the silenced Sauer,” McCorkle said, still gazing at the ceiling. “I keep wondering just how pissed off she was as she leafed through those three hundred and eighty-odd blank pages.”

“If she is pissed off,” Haynes said, “she’s pissed off at you guys, not at me. She might even suspect you two of pulling a switch. She might even suspect that you know where the true manuscript is.”

“I think,” Padillo said to McCorkle, “that we’ve just been invited to the dance.”

“Summoned is more like it,” McCorkle said. “I wonder if it’ll be fast or slow and if I can remember the steps.”

“You might still manage a waltz,” Padillo said. “If it’s not too brisk.”

“You’ve already accepted, right?”

Padillo nodded and said, “Isabelle,” as if the dead woman’s name explained everything.

McCorkle took a moody swallow of his drink, the last swallow, placed the glass on a table and turned to Haynes. “What d’you plan to do — auction the memoirs off, or at least pretend to?”

“Only the rights to them.”

“What if the bidders demand a quick peek?”

“Each bidder is already convinced of what’s in them,” Haynes said. “If they weren’t convinced, they wouldn’t be bidding.” He smiled then, that charming smile he had inherited from his dead father. “But the important thing now is to convince the bidders that the true manuscript is guarded by a pair of dragons.”

“He means us,” Padillo said.

“Then he means a pair of old dragons with dull claws, missing teeth and not too much fire left in their bellies.”

Haynes smiled his inherited smile again and said, “You could even let it be known around town that for a slice of the gross you’ve agreed to handle — what’s the best thing to call it, the security? — on a very fat but very murky deal.”

“I suppose we could drop a discreet word here and there,” Padillo said, looking at McCorkle, who frowned, as if trying to think of ears a discreet word could be dropped into. A moment later the frown disappeared and he smiled contentedly.

“I believe this is called setting out the bait,” Padillo said.

Haynes nodded. “If the prospective buyer or buyers believe they can steal what otherwise they’d have to pay a great deal of money for, I think they’ll try to steal it.”

“Especially,” McCorkle said, “if they’re convinced that only the Alzheimer boys will be guarding it.”

“It might be better,” Haynes said, “if they hear that I’m guarding the true manuscript and that you two’re guarding me.”

“How easy or hard do you want us to make it for them?” Padillo said.

“Medium hard.”

“And after they get past us — then what?”

“Well, then I suppose I’ll have to make some kind of citizen’s arrest, won’t I?” said Granville Haynes.