Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“And the magazines?”

He shrugged. “Maybe when Steady got the urge, he’d hurry down the hall, hop into bed and they’d lie there, flip through the.magazines and get it on. But if you’re really curious about which way Isabelle went, ask Padillo.”

“Go to hell,” she said and stalked out of the room.

Haynes caught up with her in the third and last bedroom, the only one with a closet. She was standing near the double bed, sniffing at something. “This was his room,” she said. “You can still smell the cigarette smoke.”

Haynes opened the two doors of the wide shallow closet. There were six blue shirts and six white shirts from Paul Stuart that had been bought in New York or Tokyo or, more likely, by mail order. The shirts were on hangers and looked as if they had been washed and ironed by loving hands.

A row of tweed jackets, all remarkably alike, took up another yard of closet space. The rest was occupied by a dozen pairs of gray and tan trousers, which were followed by a dark blue suit, a windbreaker and a Burberry raincoat with raglan sleeves.

Haynes knew he was viewing a collection of the semi-uniforms his father had worn throughout his adult life, even in the hot countries. He remembered color photographs — mostly Polaroids — obviously taken in one tropical clime or other, where Steadfast Haynes’s dress code had been either a blue or white long-sleeved oxford button-down shirt, but no tie, tan cotton pants and shoes that didn’t have to be laced up. If it were only hot, the shirt sleeves might be rolled up two full turns; if sizzling, they might be rolled above the elbows.

“Steady’s room,” he agreed and shut the closet door.

Turning to give it all one final look, Erika McCorkle said, “Not much, is there? No watercolors on the walls or oriental rugs on the floor. No snapshots of you at seven or nine. No souvenir ashtrays from Djakarta or assegai spears from Africa.”

“They didn’t use assegais where he was and he traveled light.”

“And alone?”

“Nearly always.” Haynes gave the room his own final inspection. “This must be the only house he ever owned.”

“What’d he do with his money?”

“Lived well, spent it on alimony and sent me to expensive schools.”

“Which university?”

“Virginia.”

“Huh,” she said. “That’s where I went.”

Downstairs, they searched the kitchen first, Haynes using a kebab skewer he had come across to probe sacks, bags and cartons of staples, not at all sure of what he expected to find. He found nothing.

While Erika McCorkle searched the living room, Haynes put on the old duffle coat that hung from the hall hatrack and walked through the falling snow to the barn. He spent twenty minutes searching it, saving Zip’s stall until last, but found nothing beneath the oats or under the straw or in the half barrel of water.

He finally knelt beside the dead horse and looked closely at the entry wound. There was no exit wound and Haynes guessed that the single round had been fired from either a revolver or semiautomatic handgun of 9mm caliber or less.

It was snowing even more as he walked back to the house, entered through the jimmied kitchen door, hung the duffle coat back on the hall hatrack and found Erika McCorkle in the dining room/office, standing beside the two gray steel filing cabinets.

She pulled out a top drawer and said, “Empty. All empty.”

Haynes opened and closed a couple of the drawers, glanced around the room and indicated the personal computer that was next to the IBM Wheelwriter. “How friendly are you with computers?” he asked.

“Chummy,” she said, sat down, switched it on, studied its keyboard and tapped out a demand for entry. The computer promptly requested a password. Erika first tried “Steady” without success, then several others with the same result. She looked up at Haynes and asked, “What was Steady’s mother’s maiden name?”

“Cobbétt with two b ’s and two t ’s.”

After she tried Cobbett, the computer lowered its drawbridge and moments later Steadfast Haynes’s memoirs appeared on the screen, line by line.

“Stop and start over,” Haynes said.

“Slower?” she asked, tapping the keys.

“Slower.”

Once again the title page appeared, followed by the four, lines of Housman, then the father’s cryptic dedication to the son and, finally, page four and Chapter One, containing the two sentences that composed what Haynes had come to think of as the false manuscript:

“I have led an exceedingly interesting life and, looking back, have no regrets. Or almost none.”

There was a short gap on the screen until one word began appearing in capital letters, filling the rest of the fourth page and all of the fifth, sixth and seventh with, “ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT...”

“Shut it down,” Haynes said.

After the screen went blank, Erika McCorkle said, “What’s an endit?”

“Cablese. Steady used to sign off his cables with it when I was a kid: ‘Arriving Tuesday Air France 1732 GMT meet me endit Steady.’ Ten words exactly.”

Erika McCorkle’s face shone with what Haynes suspected was yet another revelation. “That’s why the house is so damned neat. Those two guys with sacks over their heads knew just where to look. In the computer.”

“Unless they weren’t here to find but to plant something. Maybe a dead end.”

“The endits?”

Haynes nodded, rose, went over to the computer and bent down to unplug it. “Let’s put this in your car.”

“Are you stealing or borrowing it?”

“Neither. I’m inheriting it. Howard Mott says Steady left me all of his keepsakes, souvenirs and memorabilia.”

“There aren’t any.”

“Right, but should the question arise, Mott can argue that a man’s personal computer is as much a part of his memorabilia as his diary.”

“That’s bullshit trying to be sophistry.”

Haynes nodded agreeably. “So it is.”

They were going down the slippery snow-covered front porch steps, carrying the computer, when the sedan silently emerged from behind the curtain of falling snow. The sedan, a large Ford with chains on its rear wheels, came to a stop and a lean man in his fifties got out. Staring at Haynes with blue eyes that looked as if they would stay well chilled, winter or summer, the man let his right hand stray toward the holstered revolver on his hip just before he used a hard baritone voice to say, “I sure as hell hope that’s you, Granville.”

It took five minutes under the shelter of the covered porch to convince Sheriff Jenkins Shipp that the son and heir of Steadfast Haynes was carting off the computer only because he hoped it would contain his dead father’s last thoughts.

Finally, the sheriff nodded his narrow head in half-convinced agreement. The head was topped by an abused Stetson that once must have been pearl gray but was now the color of old city sidewalks. The sheriff’s face seemed to be mostly cheekbones and chilly blue eyes, but there was also an assertive chin, an interesting nose and a thin-lipped mouth that would have looked cruel if it hadn’t curled up at both ends.

“You’re saying a computer’s like a man’s diary?” the sheriff asked, his skepticism still evident.

“Exactly,” Erika McCorkle said.

He acknowledged her answer with a small neutral smile that said he didn’t believe her, then studied Haynes for a moment or two before he posed another question. “Know why I don’t ask you for any ID, Granville?”

“Because I look so much like him.”

“Spittin’ image,” Shipp said, gave Erika another small but more friendly smile and added, “Or is that spit and image, Miss McCorkle?”