Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“I’m not surprised,” Haynes said.

“Not surprised at what? That they didn’t have any trace of him? Or that they’d lie about it?”

“Take your pick,” Haynes said.

After Sergeant Pouncy left to take his wife to church, Haynes checked with the concierge and found that he had eight messages. Six of them were from Mr. Burns. The other two were from Mr. McCorkle, who had called at 8:42 A.M., and Mr. Padillo, who had called at a quarter past nine.

Up in his room, Haynes called Tinker Burns first at the Madison Hotel and listened to the phone in room 427 ring nineteen times before the hotel operator suggested that Mr. Burns must not be in his room. Haynes agreed, thanked her, broke the connection and called McCorkle.

When his daughter answered the call, Haynes said, “Your dad left a message for me to call him. Is he apoplectic?”

“Apologetic,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’d better let him tell you.”

Although she obviously had covered the mouthpiece with her hands, Haynes could still hear the yell. “Pop. It’s Granville.”

There was the sound of an extension phone being picked up, followed by McCorkle’s voice. “Granville?”

“Yes.”

McCorkle was silent for a few seconds until he sighed and said, “Okay, Erika, hang it up.”

Once his daughter did so, McCorkle said, “I’ve got rotten news.”

“How rotten?”

“I was stuck up last night by a false frump with a dummy bomb and a silenced Sauer thirty-two.” He paused, sighed again and said, “She got Steady’s manuscript. I’m very sorry.”

There was a long pause that Haynes finally ended with, “A silenced Sauer is what a pro would use. But the dummy bomb’s a new touch. I’d like to hear about it after you answer one question.”

“What?”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Only my pride.”

“Then you must’ve done everything exactly right.”

“Padillo doesn’t think so.”

“She take both of you?”

“Just me. But Padillo’s even more burnedthan I am. He saw her heading out the front door, carrying that grocery bag the manuscript’s in . He thinks he should’ve stopped her.”

“I think he’s lucky he didn’t try.”

“We’d like to get together” McCorkle said. “The three of us.”

“That must be what he called about,” Haynes said. “When?”

“Noon today?”

“At the restaurant?”

“His place,” McCorkle said and recited an address. “It’s a small town house in Foggy Bottom. The best way to get there is—”

“I’ll let the cabdriver find it,” Haynes said.

“Just one other thing,” McCorkle said. “I want to thank you for looking after Erika last night. I was worried about her being out in that blizzard.”

“It was my pleasure.”

“Yes,” McCorkle said. “I imagine it was.”

The nine-hour blizzard had dumped eleven inches of snow on Reston, Virginia, the carefully planned new town that was no longer new and had been built twenty-four years ago not far from Dulles International Airport and — depending on the traffic — within reasonable commuting distance from the District line.

Reston’s eleven inches of snow would lie undisturbed for a day or so before it was either melted by the sun or, less likely, shoveled and plowed away by removal crews. Meanwhile, Reston residents could ice-skate on Lake Anne, the thirty-two-acre artificial pond that had been named for the daughter of the town’s visionary founder, who, pressed for cash, had sold out to Gulf Oil, which in turn had been swallowed by Chevron.

Whenever this much snow fell, some Restonites got out their skis to test weak ankles on gentle slopes. Others hauled out the $65 Flexible Flyers they had ordered by phone from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue during bouts of nostalgia, and went coasting down the steepest slopes they could find.

One skier, well bundled up against the cold in sweater, ski pants, ski mask, dark glasses and knitted cap, glided expertly down the center of the sloping Waterview Cluster Drive and came to a neat stop in front of 12430, a three-story town house that was almost at the end of the cul-de-sac.

The town house, one of the first built on the shores of the artificial lake, featured a small wooden dock, a loggia, two bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces and an outside steel spiral staircase that went from the dock up to a second-floor balcony. When new in 1965, the town house had sold for $32,500 with ten percent down. Its mirror twin, three doors up, had sold a month ago for $225,000.

After leaning the skis against the house, the skier rang the door chimes. The door was opened two minutes later by Gilbert Undean, the sixty-seven-year-old Burma expert, who had had to walk down two flights of stairs from his third-floor office-study, where, dressed in an old blue flannel shirt, khaki pants and fleece-lined slippers, he had been reading a gloomy editorial in the Sunday Washington Post .

“I think you’d better let me in,” the skier said.

Undean, staring down at the small silenced semiautomatic pistol in the skier’s right hand, nodded and backed away. The skier entered, closed the door and used the gun to indicate the stairs. Undean started up them with the skier close behind.

On the second floor, they made a quick tour of the living room, dining alcove and kitchen before climbing the second flight of stairs to the third floor, where they inspected the master bedroom that had a view of the lake.

They then went down a short hall to the smaller bedroom that Undean thought of as his office. Except for the space taken up by two closet doors and a window that overlooked the street, the walls of the smaller room were covered from floor to ceiling by crowded bookshelves.

Again using the pistol to issue instructions, the skier waved Undean into a swivel chair behind an old golden oak flat-top desk. Once Undean was seated, the skier opened the closet door to reveal a pair of gray metal filing cabinets but no clothing. The rest of the closet was taken up by back copies of the New York Times that were piled in two five-foot-high stacks.

A wingback brown leather chair was the only inviting piece of furniture in the room. A brass floor lamp was positioned just so on the left-hand side of the chair. The skier, still wearing ski mask, gloves, dark glasses and knitted cap, sat down in the chair, aiming the pistol at Undean with both hands.

“You don’t seem surprised,” the skier said.

Undean shrugged. “You really going to do it?”

The skier nodded.

“There oughta be some way we could work it out.”

“Don’t beg.”

“Well, what the fuck,” Undean said. “I’d’ve been dead soon anyway.”

The silenced semiautomatic coughed almost apologetically. A small dark hole appeared in the lower left quadrant of Undean’s forehead. He rocked back, slumped forward and since there was nothing to prevent it, toppled out of the swivel chair onto the floor.

Tinker Burns sat behind the wheel of the rented Jeep Wagoneer, trying to decide whether he could make it through the two- and three-foot snow-drifts that blocked Waterview Cluster Drive. Burns had hoped to find pioneer tire tracks made by braver drivers and was disappointed that there weren’t any.

He did see footprints in the snow. But they only led from front doors to parked cars whose owners apparently had come out to brush snow off windshields before ducking back inside. Burns also noticed that someone had skied toward the bottom of the Waterview Cluster cul-de-sac, but he couldn’t quite make out where the ski tracks ended.

With little faith in the Wagoneer’s snow tires and four-wheel drive, and even less in his snow-driving ability, Burns got out of the station wagon and stepped into seventeen inches of drifted snow that came up over the tops of the rubber boots he had bought that morning at a Peoples Drugstore.