“No idea.”
“Guess.”
“Maybe a guy prowling for a TV set. Maybe the neighborhood rapist. Maybe even some weirdo who followed her home and got off on tying her up and drowning her in the bathtub.”
“They said there weren’t any signs of forced entry.”
“Forced... entry,” Haynes said, spacing the words as if to savor them. “Let’s say he rings the bell from downstairs. Isabelle asks ‘Who is it?’ over the intercom and he says it’s Federal Express. Well, Federal Express people are about as common as mailmen. I know guys in Century City who use Federal Express to send scripts from the tenth to the thirty-sixth floor by way of Memphis. So Isabelle buzzes him up. He knocks at her door. She opens it on the chain and sees this guy with a clipboard and a Federal Express packet he’s fished out of the trash can. She opens the door all the way and winds up dead in the bathtub.” Haynes paused. “How’d you get in?”
“When I pulled up in the limo there was an old couple coming out who held the door for me. Isabelle’s door was unlocked.”
“A limo’s almost as good as being from Federal Express. You don’t expect a killer to take one to work. Although there were two guys in L.A. who used to hire limos whenever they decided to go stick up a bank.”
“Know what I think?” Burns said.
“What?”
“I think it’s got to do with that book she and Steady wrote.”
“Must be some book.”
Burns turned to give Haynes his coldest stare. “The difference between you and me, kid, is I’ve got a damn good idea of what Steady did over the years. How he did it and who to. Who paid him and how much. And last, but as sure as hell not least, who told him to go do it.”
“What about lately, Tinker? Fifteen, ten, even five years ago is ancient history.”
“You’re forgetting it’s a brand-new administration.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a succession.”
“But the guy who took the oath last Friday was DCI when certain people at Langley went after Steady back during the Ford administration. Jesus. It was like a vendetta. Let’s all jump up and down on Steady Haynes. Then it stopped. All of a sudden. It was just like Steady gave the rug a jerk. Just a little one — know what I mean?”
“Thirteen or fourteen years ago is the Ice Age.”
“Yeah, but what you’ve got now is the first Director of Central Intelligence ever to be President, which they don’t seem to mention much anymore. So maybe Steady decided it was time to give the rug another jerk, harder this time, just to see what’d happen. So he checks into the Hay-Adams with Isabelle and tries to fix himself up with choice seats at the North trial. He’s advertising, that’s what he’s doing, because you know damn well Steady’s not gonna pop for the Hay-Adams when Isabelle’s got a free-for-nothing pad up on Connecticut.”
“Advertising what?” Haynes said.
“That he’s got something to sell.”
“His book?”
“What else?”
“And after he died, you think Isabelle decided to solo?”
“How the hell you think she got him buried at Arlington? Remember
when I asked her if she’d blackmailed them into it? And she said, ‘Of course.’ I was kidding. She wasn’t.”
“Tell me something, Tinker. Do you think you’re in Steady’s book?”
“What the fuck kind of question is that?”
“The kind you should avoid answering,” Haynes said.
Just before leaving Mac’s Place, Haynes had called United Airlines to have the bag he had left in its care sent to the Willard. When the rented gray limousine dropped him at the hotel, after first depositing Tinker Burns at the Madison, Haynes was pleasantly astonished to discover the bag had been delivered.
A Latino bellhop was dispatched to collect it from the checkroom. Haynes used the time to inspect the restored lobby that boasted a concierge desk that resembled a flower petal built out of rich-looking yellow marble. There was also a long, long corridor or promenade that led off the main lobby and seemed to go on forever. A bellhop later told him it was called Peacock Alley and went all the way to F Street. Both it and the lobby boasted big comfortable-looking chairs, convenient tables and a near jungle of potted palms growing out of glazed Chinese pots.
It all looked like old expensive stuff or like new old stuff that was three times as expensive. Haynes thought a fifth of the lobby must have been dipped in gilt. There was an abundance, maybe even a wealth of intricate plaster moldings. Huge milky chandeliers of the half-globe variety hung down from thick bronze chains. Haynes started to count them and had reached number twelve when the bellhop returned with his bag.
In the elevator, the bellhop boasted that the mint julep had been introduced to Washington in the Willard bar by a certain Señor Henry Clay. Haynes said he hadn’t known that.
After the bellhop was tipped and gone, Haynes discovered yet again that regardless of price a hotel room is primarily a box the bed comes in. His $145-a-night box also came with a bath, two phones, a radio, a TV set, a miniature refrigerator and a window with a view of the National Press Building across Fourteenth Street where quite a few people, mostly men in shirt sleeves, still seemed to be working.
Haynes had just finished hanging up his other jacket and his other pair of pants when he heard the knock. After opening the door he found Gilbert Undean standing in the corridor, wearing a sheepish look and the same clothes he had worn to Steadfast Haynes’s interment.
“Got a minute?” Undean said.
“Come in.”
Undean entered the room and looked around curiously. “First time I’ve been up in one of these rooms in twenty-five years. I was out of the country when they closed the place in ’sixty-eight after downtown business went to hell.” He nodded approvingly. “Pretty fancy. They claim Julia Ward Howe wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ here. Or in the Willard that was here way back then. But it’s probably bullshit.”
“I sometimes enjoy bullshit,” Haynes said. “Care for a beer or something?”
“A beer’d be fine — if you’re having one.”
Haynes removed two cans of Heineken from the small refrigerator, opened both and handed one to Undean, who took a long swallow, sighed and sat down in an armchair. Haynes chose the edge of the bed.
“They heard about Isabelle Gelinet,” Undean said.
“They?”
“The agency.”
“You must be their utility mourner.”
“I’m not here to express condolences. I’m here because of that book Steady wrote.”
“What about it?”
“They want to buy it.”
“Why not just suppress it the way they did some others I can think of?”
“That’s what I told ’em. They said they can’t because, one, Steady’s dead, and two, he never worked for them. At least they can’t prove he ever did.”
“How do they know about the book?”
“Gelinet. She used it to blackmail them into burying Steady at Arlington.”
“That’s all she asked for?” Haynes said. “No money?”
“Just a plot of hallowed ground,” Undean said. “I’m quoting them. They thought they’d got off cheap.”
“Have they read it?”
Undean drank two more swallows of beer, then shook his head. “Say they haven’t.”
“But they think Isabelle’s murder and the book are somehow connected.”
“They get paid to think like that. First I heard of the book was this afternoon right after they buried Steady. I told ’em to buy it and save themselves a lot of grief. They laughed it off.”
“Why’d you tell them to buy it, Mr. Undean?”
“Because I knew Steady. Saw him operate and know some of the corners he cut, the lies he told, the deals he made, the promises he broke, the deaths he caused.”