“What’d she look like?” Burns said.
Pabst glanced at Schlitz and said, “Not bad, huh?”
Schlitz agreed with the all-purpose smile.
“Dark hair,” Pabst said. “Good teeth. She’s got on blue jeans and riding boots and a leather jacket. Pretty good muscle tone for somebody her age.”
“How old was she?”
Again, Pabst looked at Schlitz. “Forty — around in there?”
“Forty-two at least,” Schlitz said.
“You steal anything?” Burns asked.
Schlitz’s smile appeared, vanished and reappeared. “What d’you mean, steal anything?”
“A TV set. Her watch. Even her purse. Anything to make it look like a burglary.”
“You didn’t say to steal anything,” Schlitz said, still smiling. “You just told us to go in and try and find something.”
Tinker Burns leaned back in the big chair, rested his arms on its arms, took a deep breath, let some of it out and said, “After you tied her up and locked her in the closet, then what’d you do?”
“We take off,” Pabst said. “But we do it quiet. Schlitz sneaks down to the road first and signals when it’s all clear. Then I drive out of the barn, coast down the drive, pick him up and leave without nobody seeing us.”
“But before you did all that you searched her car, didn’t you?” Burns said.
Schlitz, forgetting to smile, looked puzzled. “What the hell for?”
“You said she came into the house,” Burns said. “Then she went into the dining room and stayed there for almost a minute, very quiet, then went back out to her car and came back in again. It kind of hit me that maybe she knew where to look for what you guys didn’t find. That maybe she found it and took it out to her car.”
Schlitz, smiling again, shook his head from side to side three times. “Never happen, Mr. Burns.”
“Why not?” Burns said, his voice almost gentle.
“Because she wasn’t there for that.”
All gentleness deserted Burns’s voice. “How the fuck d’you know what she came for?”
“You weren’t there, Mr. Burns,” Pabst said. “And you didn’t see it.”
“See what?”
“The horse trailer hitched to her pickup,” Schlitz said, his smile triumphant. “She wasn’t there for what we were after. She was there for the horse.”
“Right,” Burns said. “Of course.” He rose. “The horse.” Reaching into the breast pocket of his gray suit, he withdrew a plain white No. 10 envelope and handed it to the still seated Schlitz, who looked inside, counted the forty $100 bills, smiled his satisfaction and rose. Pabst also got to his feet.
Still smiling, Schlitz stuffed the envelope into his right hip pocket and said, “You ever want us to handle anything else, Mr. Burns, you know how to get in touch.”
“That I do,” said Burns, went with them to the door, saw them out, locked the door and put on the chain. Back in the center of the room he took a slip of paper from his pants pocket. Printed on it in pencil were two names. Mr. Schlitz and Mr. Pabst. Below the names was a telephone number.
Tinker Burns looked around for an ashtray until he remembered he had checked into a nonsmoking room. He went into the bathroom, burned the slip of paper over the toilet, let the ashes fall into the bowl and flushed them away.
Again in the room, he sat down on the bed next to the telephone and took a small address book from a pocket. With the phone cradled between his right ear and shoulder, the address book held open in his right hand, Burns used his left hand to tap out an eleven-digit number.
After five rings it was answered by a woman’s voice. Burns said, “Letty? Tinker Burns. I think maybe we oughta get together and have a little talk.”
“Go fuck yourself, Tinker,” Letitia Melon Haynes said and broke the connection.
Burns slowly hung up the phone, rose, stared down at it for a moment, then went to the desk and poured three fingers of Scotch into a glass. He added tap water in the bathroom. When he came out he crossed to the window, where he stood for a little more than thirty minutes, sipping his whisky and watching the snow fall on Fifteenth Street at night.
Twenty-two
McCorkle broke up the drunken two-blow bar fight just before the third punch was thrown. He broke it up the way he usually did, by grabbing each man by an ear and holding him as far away as possible from his opponent.
Once he had them separated, McCorkle issued his standard injunction: “All right, gentlemen. I let go the ears when I see the car keys on the bar.”
The keys to a Jaguar landed on the bar first, followed by those to a Mercedes. Karl Triller, the bartender, scooped them up and said, “You guys can pick ’em up anytime after noon tomorrow.”
The two barroom fighters were both well regarded and highly paid K Street lobbyists in their mid-forties, who would have been prosperous, even wealthy, had it not been for their recent and very expensive divorces. For solace and comfort they had formed a two-man support group whose therapy consisted of drinking too much while reminiscing about the dimly remembered 1950s. For the past two months they had done much of their reminiscing in Mac’s Place.
The shorter of the lobbyists, who looked the way everyone thought a senator should look, and who was often mistaken for one by tourists, stood five-ten and weighed 182 pounds, very little of it muscle. He peered up at McCorkle with the old spaniel eyes that were his trademark and asked, “This mean we’re eighty-sixed?”
McCorkle turned with a sigh to Triller. “Let them nurse one more till their cab comes.”
“When the snow failed to cease,” said the taller lobbyist, drawling the words, “I fear we came down with a slight case of cabin fever.”
At six-four, the other lobbyist was so lean and weathered that strangers often assumed he must be from somewhere west of Cheyenne where he was probably called Slim or Hoot or even Tex — until they learned he was from Connecticut and had been called Nipsy by childhood friends and classmates at Phillips Academy and Yale. It was what most people still called him, even on slight acquaintance.
“Do me a favor, Nipsy,” McCorkle said. “The next time it snows, pick another cabin.”
There had been seventeen dinner cancellations because of the snow, which, as usual, had caused as much havoc in Washington as it would have in Palm Beach. After checking with Herr Horst, who informed him of three more cancellations, McCorkle made a circuit of the dining room, nodding at regulars but avoiding Padillo, who was listening over braised veal to the woes of a former girlfriend and recent widow with money problems and a son at MIT.
McCorkle was wondering whether the check Padillo would write her would be for $2,000 or $3,000 when a woman’s voice behind him asked, “Excuse me, sir, but do you work here?”
McCorkle turned to find himself confronted by a remarkably plain woman who wore tinted snow-wet glasses, no makeup, a knitted red cap and a long tan raincoat that years ago had lost its waterproofing. The coat ended just above her ankles, which were concealed by tan rubber boots. On her hands were knitted red gloves that matched her cap. The gloved hands clutched a package wrapped in heavy white paper and sealed with Scotch tape.
Guessing she was either an old twenty-five or a young forty, McCorkle replied that yes, as a matter of fact, he did work there.
“Then maybe you can help me,” she said.
“How?”
“It’s awfully complicated.”
“Maybe you’d like to sit down?”
She looked around nervously and McCorkle could see her eyes moving behind the tinted glasses. He guessed that her eyes were blue — not bright blue or dark blue, but plain old blue. She said, “I really shouldn’t because, well, I’m not dressed or anything and, you know, I wouldn’t feel—”