Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“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 srx- 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 straightleg 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 Wheel-writer 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.”

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 collector’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.”