by Ross Thomas
“James Bond meets Erma Bombeck.”
“Let’s eat,” she said.
She traded him her Baby Ruth for one of his almond Hersheys because she said Baby Ruths always tasted like Ex-Lax. They divided the packets of peanut butter and Ritz crackers evenly, washing everything down with Coke. They ate and drank in silence, Haynes in his chair, Erika McCorkle now on the bed, leaning against its headboard.
After another commercial came on she said, “You watch TV a lot?”
“No. Do you?”
“I like disaster reruns. A president or a premier gets shot. A shuttle blows up. A crown prince falls off his horse. A cardinal checks into Betty Ford’s. Why accept substitutes when you can watch the real thing?”
“You may have a point,” Haynes said, leaned forward and switched off the set.
She finished the last of her Coke, carefully crushed the can, aimed it at the wastebasket, made the shot and said, “When you were a cop, did it ever happen to you—the real bad shit?”
“Once in a while, but with homicide I usually got the residue—the leavings.”
“Ever shoot anyone?”
“No.”
“Anyone ever shoot at you?”
“Twice.”
“Did you like it—being a homicide detective?”
He thought about her question. “I got to be good at it and most people like doing what they’re good at.”
“You like acting?”
“Not yet, but it’s a pleasant way to meet women.”
She swung her bare feet off the bed and reached for the telephone. “I’d better call Pop and tell him not to worry.” After she picked up the telephone, she looked back at Haynes as if to reassess his harmlessness.
He gave her his inherited smile and said, “You’re safe.”
“Too bad,” she said and tapped out the long-distance number. After McCorkle came on the line, she told him they were snowed in at the Tall Pine Motel eighteen miles east of Berryville.
McCorkle wanted the motel phone number and address. After she read them to him, he asked when she’d be back. She said probably tomorrow morning. McCorkle said he had a message for Haynes and, after he told her what it was, she promised to deliver it, urged him not to fret and hung up.
Once more turning toward Haynes, she said. “Pop said Tinker Burns has been calling him every fifteen minutes to ask if anybody’s heard from you. Pop says he would very much appreciate it if you’d get Tinker off his back. He’s at the Madison.”
“I know,” Haynes said.
“But you aren’t going to call him, are you?”
Haynes shook his head.
“What if it’s important?”
“If it is, it’s important to Tinker, not to me.”
She rose from the bed and pulled down its covers. “I bet you let phones ring.”
“Sometimes.”
“The TV won’t bother me if you want to turn it back on,” she said, removed the polo coat and draped it over the back of the room’s other chair. She was wearing only a brassiere and panties, which Haynes thought were probably less revealing than the standard bikini. She slipped into the bed and drew the covers up to her chin.
“Good night, Mr. Haynes.”
“Good night, Miss McCorkle.”
He rose, switched off the room lights and sat back down. He continued to sit in the dark, recalling in detail everything he had seen and heard that day, especially his encounter with his former stepmother, Letty Melon. He had just reached the point where he had mistaken the pool of blood for engine oil when he heard Erika McCorkle stir and ask in a soft but wide-awake voice, “Aren’t you ever coming to bed?”
“Right away,” said Granville Haynes.
Chapter 21
In his fourth-floor room at the Madison Hotel, which offered an unspectacular view of Fifteenth Street to the north, Tinker Burns listened, the phone to his right ear, the good one, as McCorkle, lying cheerfully, said that Erika had just called from a gas station between Berryville and Leesburg to tell him that because of the snow she and Granville Haynes wouldn’t make it back to Washington until two or three in the morning.
“Well, thanks for letting me know,” Burns said, put the phone down and turned to the pair of seated men whom he knew only by their work names of Mr. Schlitz and Mr. Pabst.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Burns said, resumed his seat in a wingback chair and leaned forward enough to rest elbows on knees. After clasping his hands together, he spread a look of deep interest across his face, aiming the interest first at Schlitz, then at Pabst.
“Since you guys didn’t get very far before the phone rang, I wonder if you’d back up and start from the beginning?”
Pabst looked at Schlitz. “Where’d I start?”
“With the horse.”
“Right,” Pabst said and nodded a head that seemed a shade less wide than his nineteen-inch neck. The rest of Pabst was also broad and thick, although not very tall. Probably five-eleven, Burns guessed, still using feet and inches to measure height despite his more than four decades of exposure to the metric system.
Pabst frowned as he tried to recall what he’d already said. The frown wrinkled a pale forehead below a shock of hair so blond it looked almost white. He wore the hair long—too long, Burns thought—as if to compensate for his nearly invisible eyebrows. Below the faint brows were eyes that seemed to be fading from pale sky blue into rain gray. They were set too close to a tiny nose that Burns suspected of having stopped growing when Pabst was five or six some thirty years ago.
“Yeah, the horse,” Pabst said. “Well, we get there, like I already told you, about six in the morning when it’s still dark, and park in the barn. Then this horse starts kicking up a fuss and screaming or whatever horses do—”
“They neigh,” said Schlitz.
“Okay, he’s neighing and kicking with his hind feet and when he gets tired of that he rears up and tries to use his front feet to duke it out with us. So the last time he goes up and comes down, I shoot him.”
“Right between the eyes,” Schlitz said with a strange wide smile. “Hell of a shot.”
Although Schlitz, like Pabst, had a tree-trunk neck, he also had one of those reflexive all-purpose smiles that show too much gum and are used to express pleasure, rage, pain, hope, fear, mirth, approval and sometimes nothing at all.
Tinker Burns had seen such smiles in the Legion and knew that they often belonged to nut cases. He remembered two particular Legionnaires, both borderline sociopaths, who had died two days apart in terrible agony, each of them gut-shot, their all-purpose smiles firmly in place.
In addition to the smile, Schlitz came with popped brown eyes that were divided by a nose that went straight, then left, then straight again. Above was a tangle of thick black curls frosted with gray, while down below, at the face’s bottom, was a jutting chin that Burns thought you could hang your hat on.
“So you shot the horse, huh?” Burns said to Pabst.
“Yeah.”
“That was dumb.”
“He was about to wake up the whole fucking neighborhood.”
“The nearest neighbor is half a klick down the road.”
Schlitz smiled the all-purpose smile. “He’s still dead, Mr. Burns.”
“So he is,” Burns said. “Go on.”
“Well, after I shoot him,” Pabst said, “we go in through the back door.”
“Still dark out?”
“Yeah, and once we jimmy the door and get inside, we wait till it gets light because we don’t wanta turn on any lamps or use a flash in case somebody driving by sees them. So after it gets light, we start looking—upstairs first, then downstairs. We’d just got started in the kitchen when we hear her.”
“Hear her do what?” Burns said.
“Drive up,” Schlitz said. “She makes a hell of a racket on the gravel. Slams her door, bangs her heels on the porch and then comes in.”
“Through the front door, right?”
�
��She’s got a key.”
“Where were you two then?”
“Still in the kitchen,” Schlitz said. “We hear her go in the dining room and walk around. Then she stops and doesn’t make a sound for about a minute. After that she goes back outside, comes back in and walks right into the kitchen.”
“And sees you two,” Burns said.
“Yeah, but by then we got grocery bags over our heads,” Schlitz said. “Pabst here grabs her and I slap some duct tape across her mouth. Then we tape her wrists and ankles up good and stick her in a closet—the only place that’s got a door we can lock. I still got the key.”
Burns sighed. “Then what?”
“Me and Pabst leave.”
“What’d she look like?” Burns said.
Pabst glanced at Schlitz and said, “Not bad, huh?”
Schlitz agreed with the all-purpose smile.
“Dark hair,” Pabst said. “Good teeth. She’s got on blue jeans and riding boots and a leather jacket. Pretty good muscle tone for somebody her age.”
“How old was she?”
Again, Pabst looked at Schlitz. “Forty—around in there?”
“Forty-two at least,” Schlitz said.
“You steal anything?” Burns asked.
Schlitz’s smile appeared, vanished and reappeared. “What d’you mean, steal anything?”
“A TV set. Her watch. Even her purse. Anything to make it look like a burglary.”
“You didn’t say to steal anything,” Schlitz said, still smiling. “You just told us to go in and try and find something.”
Tinker Burns leaned back in the big chair, rested his arms on its arms, took a deep breath, let some of it out and said, “After you tied her up and locked her in the closet, then what’d you do?”
“We take off,” Pabst said. “But we do it quiet. Schlitz sneaks down to the road first and signals when it’s all clear. Then I drive out of the barn, coast down the drive, pick him up and leave without nobody seeing us.”
“But before you did all that you searched her car, didn’t you?” Burns said.
Schlitz, forgetting to smile, looked puzzled. “What the hell for?”
“You said she came into the house,” Burns said. “Then she went into the dining room and stayed there for almost a minute, very quiet, then went back out to her car and came back in again. It kind of hit me that maybe she knew where to look for what you guys didn’t find. That maybe she found it and took it out to her car.”
Schlitz, smiling again, shook his head from side to side three times. “Never happen, Mr. Burns.”
“Why not?” Burns said, his voice almost gentle.
“Because she wasn’t there for that.”
All gentleness deserted Burns’s voice. “How the fuck d’you know what she came for?”
“You weren’t there, Mr. Burns,” Pabst said. “And you didn’t see it.”
“See what?”
“The horse trailer hitched to her pickup,” Schlitz said, his smile triumphant. “She wasn’t there for what we were after. She was there for the horse.”
“Right,” Burns said. “Of course.” He rose. “The horse.” Reaching into the breast pocket of his gray suit, he withdrew a plain white No. 10 envelope and handed it to the still seated Schlitz, who looked inside, counted the forty $100 bills, smiled his satisfaction and rose. Pabst also got to his feet.
Still smiling, Schlitz stuffed the envelope into his right hip pocket and said, “You ever want us to handle anything else, Mr. Burns, you know how to get in touch.”
“That I do,” said Burns, went with them to the door, saw them out, locked the door and put on the chain. Back in the center of the room he took a slip of paper from his pants pocket. Printed on it in pencil were two names. Mr. Schlitz and Mr. Pabst. Below the names was a telephone number.
Tinker Burns looked around for an ashtray until he remembered he had checked into a nonsmoking room. He went into the bathroom, burned the slip of paper over the toilet, let the ashes fall into the bowl and flushed them away.
Again in the room, he sat down on the bed next to the telephone and took a small address book from a pocket. With the phone cradled between his right ear and shoulder, the address book held open in his right hand, Burns used his left hand to tap out an eleven-digit number.
After five rings it was answered by a woman’s voice. Burns said, “Letty? Tinker Burns. I think maybe we oughta get together and have a little talk.”
“Go fuck yourself, Tinker,” Letitia Melon Haynes said and broke the connection.
Burns slowly hung up the phone, rose, stared down at it for a moment, then went to the desk and poured three fingers of Scotch into a glass. He added tap water in the bathroom. When he came out he crossed to the window, where he stood for a little more than thirty minutes, sipping his whisky and watching the snow fall on Fifteenth Street at night.
Chapter 22
McCorkle broke up the drunken two-blow bar fight just before the third punch was thrown. He broke it up the way he usually did, by grabbing each man by an ear and holding him as far away as possible from his opponent.
Once he had them separated, McCorkle issued his standard injunction: “All right, gentlemen. I let go the ears when I see the car keys on the bar.”
The keys to a Jaguar landed on the bar first, followed by those to a Mercedes. Karl Triller, the bartender, scooped them up and said, “You guys can pick ’em up anytime after noon tomorrow.”
The two barroom fighters were both well regarded and highly paid K Street lobbyists in their mid-forties, who would have been prosperous, even wealthy, had it not been for their recent and very expensive divorces. For solace and comfort they had formed a two-man support group whose therapy consisted of drinking too much while reminiscing about the dimly remembered 1950s. For the past two months they had done much of their reminiscing in Mac’s Place.
The shorter of the lobbyists, who looked the way everyone thought a senator should look, and who was often mistaken for one by tourists, stood five-ten and weighed 182 pounds, very little of it muscle. He peered up at McCorkle with the old spaniel eyes that were his trademark and asked, “This mean we’re eighty-sixed?”
McCorkle turned with a sigh to Triller. “Let them nurse one more till their cab comes.”
“When the snow failed to cease,” said the taller lobbyist, drawling the words, “I fear we came down with a slight case of cabin fever.”
At six-four, the other lobbyist was so lean and weathered that strangers often assumed he must be from somewhere west of Cheyenne where he was probably called Slim or Hoot or even Tex—until they learned he was from Connecticut and had been called Nipsy by childhood friends and classmates at Phillips Academy and Yale. It was what most people still called him, even on slight acquaintance.
“Do me a favor, Nipsy,” McCorkle said. “The next time it snows, pick another cabin.”
There had been seventeen dinner cancellations because of the snow, which, as usual, had caused as much havoc in Washington as it would have in Palm Beach. After checking with Herr Horst, who informed him of three more cancellations, McCorkle made a circuit of the dining room, nodding at regulars but avoiding Padillo, who was listening over braised veal to the woes of a former girlfriend and recent widow with money problems and a son at MIT.
McCorkle was wondering whether the check Padillo would write her would be for $2,000 or $3,000 when a woman’s voice behind him asked, “Excuse me, sir, but do you work here?”
McCorkle turned to find himself confronted by a remarkably plain woman who wore tinted snow-wet glasses, no makeup, a knitted red cap and a long tan raincoat that years ago had lost its waterproofing. The coat ended just above her ankles, which were concealed by tan rubber boots. On her hands were knitted red gloves that matched her cap. The gloved hands clutched a package wrapped in heavy white paper and sealed with Scotch tape.
Guessing she was either an old twenty-five or a young forty, McCorkle replied that yes, as a matter of fact, he di
d work there.
“Then maybe you can help me,” she said.
“How?”
“It’s awfully complicated.”
“Maybe you’d like to sit down?”
She looked around nervously and McCorkle could see her eyes moving behind the tinted glasses. He guessed that her eyes were blue—not bright blue or dark blue, but plain old blue. She said, “I really shouldn’t because, well, I’m not dressed or anything and, you know, I wouldn’t feel—”
“There’s an office.”
She brightened. “I’d feel a whole lot more comfortable in an office.”
As he and the plain woman headed toward it, McCorkle noticed Padillo glance up. Once he and the woman were in the office and seated on opposite sides of the partners desk, McCorkle also noticed that she held the white package in her lap with her still gloved hands resting on top of it.
“You’re Mr.—?”
“McCorkle.”
“I’m Miss Skelton. Reba Skelton. I’m a professional typist and word processor and also do some calligraphy. You know. Invitations. Announcements. Things like that.”
McCorkle nodded.
“About a month ago, maybe a little more, a Mr. Steadfast Haynes asked me to type a single copy of a manuscript he’d written. I charge a dollar fifty a page, but if they want carbons, I get fifty cents per carbon copy. Except hardly anybody ever asks for carbons nowadays because, you know, it’s just a whole lot simpler and cheaper to have Xerox copies made.”
To keep up his end of the conversation, McCorkle said, “I suppose.”
“Well, the manuscript Mr. Haynes gave me was an awful mess. Some of it was typed—and single-spaced at that. Some of it was written in pencil. Some in ink—or with a ballpoint anyway. And he used all kinds of paper. Legal pads. Hotel stationery. Some cheap yellow stuff. Even pages from school tablets. It wasn’t, well, you know, orderly.”
Because she seemed to expect a response, McCorkle gave her an understanding smile.
“So that’s why I didn’t get it done on time. Because it was so, well, you know, messy.”