by Ross Thomas
Inside, Haynes pretended to listen to Erika McCorkle’s diatribe against the destruction of places and things that composed her memories. She stopped only when the waitress came over, handed them menus and waited until they both ordered chicken fried steaks at 9:16 in the morning.
A little more than an hour later they reached Berryville, the Clarke County seat. Its four- or five-block-long Main Street offered two traffic lights, two banks, two restaurants (one open, one permanently closed), the usual antique shops and too many marginal-looking businesses. Haynes thought the closed restaurant must have been the place where Berryville’s establishment once gathered for morning coffee.
After he asked Erika McCorkle to double-park, Haynes got out and bought a newspaper from a vending machine. The paper’s masthead said it was an independent publication established four years after the Civil War and published every Thursday.
Back in the car, Haynes turned the page until he came to the obituaries. “He made it.”
“Who?”
“Steady,” Haynes said and began reading aloud. “ ‘Steadfast Haynes, 57, of Route 1, Berryville, died Monday in Washington, D.C., where he was to have attended the inauguration.’
“Paragraph. ‘Born in Philadelphia, Haynes served in the Korean conflict, later attending the University of Pennsylvania, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He subsequently joined the U.S. State Department, serving in Africa, Central America, the Middle East and Asia. Mr. Haynes had lived in the Berryville area for the past several years.’
“Last paragraph. ‘He is survived by his son Granville Haynes of Los Angeles, California. Interment was scheduled for Arlington National Cemetery.’ ”
As Haynes refolded the paper and placed it on the rear seat, Erika McCorkle pulled out into the traffic and said, “I didn’t know he was Phi Beta Kappa.”
“He wasn’t. Turn left at the next light, go one mile, turn right and go another mile.”
She glanced at the odometer, turned left on green and said, “But he did serve in all those places.”
“I’m not sure ‘serve’ is the operative word, but he was there, although not for the State Department.”
“The CIA, right?”
When Haynes only shrugged, she said, “That’s what I figured,” and, one mile later, turned the Cutlass onto a narrow county blacktop that ran straight as a knife past small farms of not much more than thirty or forty acres. Some of the farms boasted orchards. Others seemed to grow mostly alfalfa, now baled into fat rolls that would feed the dozens of horses who, standing behind barbed wire or split-rail fences, marked the car’s passing with indifferent stares.
Exactly one mile from where they had turned off was a crooked, left-leaning oak post that supported a small box on whose side someone had painted “S. Haynes” in neat black letters. The mailbox was at the foot of a long drive that could have used another load or two of gravel.
The drive swept up a gentle slope to a six- or seven-room two-story house. Painted white, although not recently, the house was shielded by a stand or grove of winter-bare trees at least forty or fifty feet tall. To the left of the house was a large pasture of ten or fifteen acres. Behind the house was a sturdy-looking brown barn built of wood. A white board fence, in need of both paint and repair, marked the property lines.
Dead grass and weeds decorated the center of the long drive that ended in front of the house, where a big blue Ford pickup was hitched to a horse trailer.
“Whose truck and trailer?” Erika McCorkle asked.
“I don’t know,” Haynes said.
She drove slowly up the drive, which was at least seventy-five yards long, and parked behind the empty horse trailer. They got out and went up seven steps to a covered porch. As Haynes took from his pocket the front door key Howard Mott had given him, he noticed a large thermometer. Its reading was thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit.
Out of habit, Haynes tried the door before using the key. It was unlocked. He looked at Erika McCorkle, who shrugged. Haynes opened the door and they went in to find themselves in an entry hall. To the right was the living room. To the left, an old mirrored hatrack, possibly an antique. From it hung a duffle coat. Just ahead were stairs that led to the second floor.
Haynes called, “Anyone home?”
He was answered by a thumping sound that seemed to come from a closet built beneath the staircase. When they reached the closet door, Haynes tried the knob and found it locked. He knocked on the door and was again answered by the thumping noise.
“Pick the lock,” Erika McCorkle said.
“With what?”
“A credit card.”
He ignored her and inspected the door, which seemed to be a thick, solid one that had been hung by a craftsman who had left the usual three-quarters-of-an-inch clearance at the bottom.
He looked at Erika McCorkle and said, “Ever change a tire on that car of yours?”
“Sure.”
“You know the thing that takes the nuts off the wheel?”
“The lug wrench.”
“I could use it.”
She was back with the lug wrench in less than two minutes. Haynes was relieved to see that one end of it formed a jimmy, useful for prying off hubcaps. He used the lug wrench to knock the pin out of the door’s top hinge, then repeated the process on the lower one. After slipping the fingers of both hands beneath the bottom of the door, he gave it a tug and it came off its hinges.
A woman lay on her back in the closet among the rubber boots, old shoes and two pairs of ancient galoshes. She wore a blue knitted watch cap. Across her mouth was a two-inch-wide strip of industrial duct tape. She also wore an old zipped-up leather flight jacket and a pair of straight-leg blue jeans that were stuffed into expensive riding boots. The boots were taped together at the ankles. Her obviously bound hands were beneath her.
“Take the tape off her mouth while I go find something to cut her loose,” Haynes said.
Erika McCorkle nodded and knelt beside the woman. Haynes turned and entered the living room that contained mismatched pieces of sixty-to-seventy-year-old furniture, much of it gathered around the fireplace. A pair of open sliding doors could divide the living room from the dining room, which had been converted into an office furnished with two battered metal desks and a pair of fairly new four-drawer metal file cabinets. There were also a couple of phones, one on each desk, an IBM Wheelwriter and a personal computer. A swinging door led from the dining room/office into the kitchen, where Haynes found a paring knife with a sharp blade.
He hurried back to the staircase closet. The tape had been removed from the woman’s mouth and she now sat leaning against the closet wall, her feet still bound, her hands still behind her back. She stared up at Haynes and whispered, “My God.”
Erika McCorkle said, “Mr. Haynes, may I present your former stepmother, Letitia Melon. Letty, this is Steady’s son, Granville.”
Chapter 16
Although no great beauty, Letty Melon was a noticeably pretty woman in her early forties with short dark hair, eyes of such a deep blue that they verged on violet and the legatee of a Virginia drawl that she used to announce her immediate needs.
Her most pressing need, she said, was to pee. After that she would need a drink. “There’s got to be a bottle around here someplace,” she said. “If you all can’t find any in the kitchen, look behind the books in the front room where he used to keep his emergency ration.”
By the time she rejoined Haynes and Erika McCorkle in the kitchen, they had found a bottle of Scotch whisky in the bookshelves behind Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Vidal’s Burr. Erika had also found a jar of instant Yuban and a kettle. The kettle was just coming to a boil on the electric stove.
Letty Melon sat down at the pine kitchen table, reached for the bottle of Scotch and poured a measure into a glass. She drank it off in two swallows, sighed appreciatively, removed a package of Camels from her old flight jacket and lit one with a gold Zippo that Haynes knew to be a col
lector’s item worth at least a thousand dollars. She inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out and said, “There were two of them.”
Haynes nodded.
“They had sacks over their heads with eyeholes in them.”
“Cloth or paper?”
“Paper. Brown paper. Grocery sacks.”
“Which grocery?”
“Safeway.”
Erika placed two cups of coffee on the table and said, “There’s sugar but no milk or cream.”
“I’ll just sweeten mine with a drop of this,” Letty Melon said and poured a taste of whisky into her cup. After sipping the Scotch and coffee, she said, “I knew they were here the moment I stepped through the door.”
“How?” Haynes said.
“The place was warm. As warm as it is now. That meant somebody’d turned on the heat. So I did what you did. I called to see who was home. When nobody answered, I went from the living room into the dining room that looks like some kind of office now, and then on through the swinging door into the kitchen. And here they were. I started to yell, but one of them grabbed me and the other slapped that tape across my mouth. Then they taped my hands and feet and locked me into that little old stairway closet and, damn, I got mad.”
Erika McCorkle sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. She offered the sugar bowl to Haynes, who put a spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred it slowly and said, “What time was this?”
“A little after eight.”
“You didn’t see a car?” Haynes said.
“There wasn’t any unless it was in the barn where Steady keeps that old Cadillac of his.”
“Was the front door locked?”
“It was locked.”
“But you had a key?”
“Of course I had a key.”
“They say anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Were they tall, short, fat, skinny, what?”
“Tall.”
“How were they dressed—other than the sacks?”
“Jeans. Running shoes. Down jackets, one brown, one blue. And gloves. They both wore gloves.”
“What kind?”
“Driving gloves. You know the kind that’re half leather and half knitted with open backs just below the fingers?”
Haynes nodded. “Did you hear them leave?”
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
“Just outside Middleburg.”
“That means you left there when—around seven?”
“Around in there.”
“Why’d you want to get here so early?”
She smiled at him then, displaying some remarkably well cared for teeth. “That sounds like something Steady might’ve asked. Not what the hell were you doing here, but why’d you come so early? Well, the reason is I got worried about old Zip.”
“Who’s he?”
“Steady’s nine-year-old hunter. A bay gelding. I didn’t even think about Zip till late last night and then I almost couldn’t sleep for worrying about whether Steady’d got somebody to look after him or even boarded him out somewhere.”
She stopped talking and stared down into her cup, as if she felt the late Steadfast Haynes was due a second or two of silence. Erika McCorkle quickly ended the silence with a question. “He’d be in the barn if he’s still here?”
Letty Melon looked up and nodded.
“I’ll go look,” Erika McCorkle said, rose, opened the kitchen door, examined it briefly and turned back to Haynes. “They came in here,” she said. “The door’s been jimmied.”
Haynes rose and went over to examine the gouged-out doorjamb. Erika left and Haynes returned to the kitchen table.
“Where’d you all meet?” Letty Melon asked.
“Her father introduced us.”
“They at Steady’s burial?”
“No.”
“I heard it was at Arlington. I didn’t go because, well, because Steady and I’d grown to detest each other in a fairly cordial sort of way.”
Haynes nodded.
“Many people there?”
“Not many.”
“Tinker Burns?”
“Yes.”
“Isabelle?”
“She was there.”
“And you. Anybody else?”
“One or two others.”
“I suppose everybody tells you how much you look like him.”
Haynes again nodded.
“When that closet door opened and I saw you—well, for a second there I thought it was Steady. Or maybe his ghost.”
Haynes smiled slightly, drank the rest of his coffee and said, “What d’you think those two guys wanted?”
“Something to steal.”
“That’s a Rolex you’re wearing. You lit your cigarette with a gold Zippo. They didn’t take those. What about your purse?”
“I carry a wallet,” she said, removed it from her right hip pocket and looked inside. “All my credit cards are still here along with about eighty dollars in cash.”
“Want me to call the sheriff?”
She seemed to think about it as she replaced her wallet. After a couple of slow headshakes, she said, “I wasn’t robbed and I wasn’t really hurt—except for some bruised dignity. But I can get over that without any help from the sheriff.” She looked around the kitchen, as if searching for any other major changes her ex-husband might have made. When she was done, she looked at Haynes and said, “He leave this place to you?”
“To Isabelle,” Haynes said.
If he hadn’t been watching for it, Haynes might not have noticed the slight tremor that barely rippled her shoulders. “Isabelle,” she said, pouring another measure of whisky into her glass. She drank the whisky, put her cigarette out, lit another one and said, “I suppose she’ll sell it.”
“Isabelle’s dead.”
She stared at him, eyes wide, as a flush began at the base of her neck and rushed to her cheeks. “When?”
“Yesterday afternoon. In her apartment on Connecticut Avenue. Tinker Burns and I found her—more or less.”
“Well, did you or didn’t you?”
“Tinker found her and when I got there a few minutes later, he took me into the bathroom. Isabelle was lying in a tub of water with her wrists and ankles wired.”
Haynes couldn’t decide whether it was a delayed reaction to her own ordeal or the shock of Isabelle Gelinet’s death that caused Letty Melon to tremble and then to shake. She was still shaking, although not nearly as much, when Erika McCorkle came through the kitchen door and said, without preamble, “There’s a dead horse in the barn.”
Zip, the nine-year-old bay gelding, apparently had gone down on his forelegs first because they were still tucked beneath him. His rear legs were splayed out to the side. His head rested on the fairly clean straw in his stall. The feed bin was half full and there was water in a wooden tub made from a large barrel that had been sawed in half. He had been shot once through the white blaze that formed a rough diamond between his eyes.
Letty Melon, no longer shaking, ran a gentle hand down his neck. She looked up and said, “He’s still almost warm.” She rose, glanced around the stall and said, “Poor old Zip.”
“Did you hear the shot, Letty?” Erika McCorkle asked.
“No, but he could’ve been dead when I got here.”
She took what seemed to be a long last look at the dead Zip, turned and walked to the center of the barn where four Dukakis posters had been arranged to catch a car’s slight oil leak and prevent it from soaking into the barn’s hard-packed dirt floor. Letty Melon stood for a moment, staring down at the Dukakis signs, then turned to Haynes and said, “Somebody pick up his old Cadillac?”
“His lawyer sent someone.”
“It was a mistake.”
“What?” Haynes said.
“My coming here. If I’d known about Isabelle, I wouldn’t’ve come near the place. With both her and Steady dead, it makes me look like a ghoul.” She paused, took a deep breath and said, “Look.
I don’t want to have anything more to do with Steady. Nothing at all ever again.”
Haynes nodded.
“I want to go home now.”
“Fine.”
“And after I get there, I don’t want any calls or visits from the Clarke County sheriff or his deputies.”
Haynes again nodded.
“You going to talk to him—the sheriff?”
“I have to.”
“But you won’t mention me?”
“No.”
“Or the guys with sacks over their heads?”
“If I don’t tell the sheriff about you, I can’t tell him about them.”
“Well, what are you gonna tell him?”
Haynes turned to look at the dead Zip. “I’m going to ask him what to do with a dead horse.”
Chapter 17
Haynes got the number of the sheriff’s office in Berryville from directory assistance. After the man who answered said he was Deputy Soullard, Haynes identified himself and reported the death of the horse.
The deputy put Haynes on hold until a stern baritone voice came on, announced that it belonged to Sheriff Jenkins Shipp-with-two-p’s and asked, “You Steady’s boy?”—somehow turning the abrupt question into a warm greeting.
After Haynes replied yes, Sheriff Shipp asked, “What’s your name again?”
“Granville Haynes.”
“I’m sure sorry about your daddy, Granville, and I do mourn his passing.”
“You’re very kind.”
“Now what’s this about old Zip?”
Haynes said he had arrived at the farm to discover the horse had been shot and killed.
“Got a call from your daddy’s lawyer in Washington about Zip last Thursday. Tell a lie, Friday. He’s the one that told me Steady was dead and gone. Lawyer by the name of Mott, I believe.”
“Howard Mott.”
“That’s right, Howard. Said he was sending somebody out to pick up Steady’s old Cadillac and wanted to know if I could think of anybody who’d go out there and take care of Zip till he made other arrangements. Right away I thought of the Dyson kid—lives just down the road from Steady. Mott said he’d pay the kid twenty bucks a day to water and feed Zip, clean out his stall and exercise him some.” The sheriff paused. “And that’s what the kid’s been doing.”