Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“Authorities disagree,” she said. “But in this case it’s irrelevant because he sure as hell looks like Steady.”

“Don’t he though?” said Sheriff Shipp.

After he helped Haynes carry the computer to the Cutlass and put it in the trunk, the sheriff, now back on the porch, carefully wiped his boots on the doormat. Once inside the house, the first thing he said was, “How come that door’s off its hinges?”

Haynes said it was because of the snow. He had left his topcoat in Washington and needed one to go to the barn. He thought there might be one in the closet but it was locked.

“And was there?” Shipp asked. “A coat?”

“Right behind you,” Haynes said.

Shipp turned to eye the old duffle coat that hung from the hall coat-rack. He touched the coat, as if to make sure it was damp, nodded, turned back to Haynes and said, “Want some help with the door?”

Once the door was back on its hinges, the sheriff, apparently musing aloud, said, “Wonder if I’d best take a look upstairs?”

“You think whoever shot Zip might’ve left some clues up there?” Erika asked.

“Never can tell,” Shipp said, turned toward the stairs, then turned back. “How’d you all know his name was Zip?” Before either could answer, the sheriff said, “I didn’t tell you, did I?”

“You must have” Haynes said.

Shipp frowned, as if recalling their telephone conversation. “Believe I did, at that,” he said, headed again for the stairs and mounted the first two steps before he stopped and again turned back. “Aren’t you all coming?”

“We’d only get in the way,” Haynes said.

When the sheriff came back down the stairs five minutes later his tanned cheeks had turned dull red and Haynes knew Shipp had found the sex magazines. He also knew the sheriff would never mention them.

They trailed Shipp through the living room, the office/dining room and into the kitchen, where it was obvious that the sheriff made mental notes of the three coffee cups on the kitchen table, Letty Melon’s whisky glass and also the three cigarette butts she had ground out in an ashtray.

As Shipp went through the kitchen door, heading for the barn, he noticed the gouged-out doorjamb. “What happened?”

“When we went out to the barn that first time,” Haynes said, “we locked ourselves out and had to use a lug wrench on it.”

As he inspected the damage, Shipp asked, “Either of you happen to smoke?”

“Sometimes,” Haynes said.

“Luckies?” the sheriff said hopefully.

Haynes recalled Letty Melon’s gold Zippo and the pack of cigarettes she had taken from her flight jacket pocket. “Sorry,” Haynes said. “Camels.” His right hand dipped into his jacket pocket as if to make sure a pack was still there. “Want one?”

“Quit thirteen years ago,” Shipp said and gave the ruined doorjamb another look. “Better get some boards and nail that sucker up.”

“I plan to,” Haynes said.

In the barn, Shipp knelt beside the dead Zip and, like Letty Melon, ran a commiserative hand down the dead animal’s neck. “Talk to your daddy’s insurance man yet, Granville?”

“I’m not going to file a claim.”

Shipp rose. “Then I don’t reckon you shot him.”

The sheriff helped Haynes and Erika McCorkle carry some old boards, nails and a hammer from the barn to the house. But when Haynes, who couldn’t recall the last time he had driven a nail, kept bending the first one he tried to hammer, Sheriff Shipp began to fidget. When he could no longer stand it, he said, “Lemme try.”

Shipp nailed the boards over the back door in less than ten minutes, driving each nail home with no more than four blows of the hammer and sometimes only three. When done, he stepped back to admire his work and say, “That oughta hold her.”

His audience thanked him, praised his skill and walked him back to the Ford sedan, where Shipp gave Haynes, Erika and the farm one long last curious look. “You all planning to drive back to Washington today?”

Erika McCorkle, the driver, said they were.

The sheriff looked up at the falling snow. “That deputy I was gonna send out here went off the road, hit a tree and busted his left leg. And when I was driving out here the weatherman was talking blizzard. I was you, I’d find me a place to spend the night real quick. Maybe even right here.”

“You don’t think they’ll be back?” Erika McCorkle asked.

“Who’s they, Miss McCorkle?”

“He. They. Whoever killed Zip.”

“Can’t kill a horse twice,” Sheriff Shipp said, touched the brim of his old gray Stetson, climbed into the Ford, started the engine and drove off into the snow.

At seven o’clock that same Saturday morning, Hamilton Keyes, the courtly CIA careerist, had received a wake-up call summoning him to Langley for an emergency meeting at nine. When he arrived at 8:45, another caller informed him the meeting had been postponed until noon.

Keyes’s office phone rang again at 11:45 A.M., and yet a different caller told him, without apology or explanation, that the meeting wouldn’t be held until three that afternoon, or possibly even four. It was then that Keyes recognized the nearby sound of the woodman’s ax in the bureaucratic forest.

Just to make certain, Keyes made two brief phone calls and, once they were completed, began removing all personal effects from his 137-year-old rosewood desk and placing them in his own 105-year-old walnut wastebasket. With that done, he uncapped a fountain pen, wrote the date at the top of a sheet of personal stationery and began a letter of resignation.

The meeting finally took place at 4:07 P.M. just as the snow that had been falling on Berryville since before noon finally reached Washington and its suburbs. Keyes was confident that the forecast of six to seven inches of snow would not only shorten his meeting, but also ruin God knows how many carefully planned dinner parties, including the one his wife was giving.

The office Keyes entered was on the same floor as his own. But even though it was appreciably larger than his, it contained only a gray metal desk, a standard high-backed swivel chair, a telephone and a single visitor’s chair, which was armless. Keyes immediately understood the sparse furnishings were meant to alert him that he had indeed been summoned to the den of bad news.

A man in his late forties sat behind the desk, a telephone pressed to his left ear. As the man listened impassively to whatever the voice on the phone had to say, he flicked his eyes from Keyes to the lone visitor’s chair. Keyes took it as an invitation and sat down.

Although they had never met, Keyes knew the man’s background, reputation and, of course, his name, C. Robert Pall. He also remembered that the C. stood for Clair; that Pall held a doctorate in economics from Chicago and had served three terms as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania until being trounced in 1986. Before serving in Congress, Pall had taught at Stanford and the Wharton School; summered at a number of prosperous think tanks; written a couple of The-End-Is-Nigh books; and, less than two years ago, signed on with the Bush campaign as what Pall himself had called its “token troglodyte.”

The man with the phone to his ear had one of those curiously sweet round faces in which almost everything pointed up — his nose, the corners of his mouth, the outer ends of the dark thickets that were his eyebrows — everything except his backsliding chin that was poorly camouflaged by a short patchy beard the color of ginger.

After nearly thirty seconds of listening, Pall finally spoke into the phone and ended the one-sided conversation with, “Sorry, Larry, but there’s not one goddamn thing I can do about it.” After putting the phone down, he smiled at Keyes without displaying any teeth and said, “You must be Hamilton Keyes. I’m Bob Pall, the FNG.”