He turned the Jeep Wagoneer into the drive, stopped and studied the house and the snow-covered roof of the long low horse barn which could be seen just beyond the crest of the rise. Burns looked for signs of life but found none. The last of the sun’s rays were turning the stonework of the house into old gold but Burns ignored the pretty-picture effect and instead examined the six chimneys for smoke. There wasn’t any.
He drove up to the house and parked in front of its entrance on jigsaw slabs of black slate. Once out of the station wagon, he scanned the windows for chinks of light. Finding none, he went back to the station wagon and blew its horn five times. Somewhere, close by, a dog barked. Thus encouraged, Burns mounted the six steps and rang the doorbell. He rang it six times before trying the big brass knob only to find the door locked. Burns stubbornly jammed his right thumb against the doorbell and hammered the door itself with his left fist.
He was still ringing and hammering away when a woman’s voice from behind him said, “Get the fuck off my property, Tinker.”
Twenty-eight
Without turning, Tinker Burns stuck cold bare hands into his topcoat pockets and said, “How you doing, Letty?”
“Get off my property. Now.”
“We’ve gotta talk.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Mind if I turn around?”
“You have to turn around to get off my property.”
Burns turned slowly to his left and, when all the way around, smiled at Letty Melon and the pump shotgun she was aiming at his chest.
“You look cold, Letty. Have a long wait?”
“Go, Tinker. Now.”
“I figured Howard Mott’d let you know I was coming. That’s why I didn’t call myself.”
“You’ve got ten seconds to get in your car.”
“Look. You know you’re not gonna shoot me and I know I’m not gonna leave till we talk. Now, we could stand out here all night freezing our butts off, but that’s sort of dumb. So why not go inside where it’s nice and warm and have a taste and a talk? After that, I’ll be on my way. I even brought a jug of Turkey along. You still drink Turkey, Letty?”
Letty Melon said nothing. She wore a buttoned-up shearling coat and had tied a gray cashmere scarf over her head. The rest of her outfit consisted of blue jeans, boots and the pump shotgun. She raised the shotgun with her left hand, letting its barrel rest on her left shoulder. Her right hand dug a key out of her jeans pocket. She moved around Burns, went up to the front door, unlocked it and went inside. Burns turned and followed.
They sat in front of an enormous fireplace where four oak logs blazed. They held tumblers half full of 101-proof Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey, the good stuff, undiluted by either ice or water. After a sip of whiskey, Letty Melon lit an unfiltered Camel. Tinker Burns swallowed a third of his drink and looked around the fifty-foot-long living room with obvious appreciation.
“I never got invited here,” he said. “I got invited to that little place over by, what’s its name, Berryville, a couple of times when you and Steady were still married, but never here.”
“We couldn’t stand each other’s friends,” she said. “I invited mine here; he invited his there. I reckon we couldn’t stand them because his friends were mostly women and mine were mostly men.”
“Well, that’s how it goes sometimes.”
“What’s really on your mind, Tinker?”
“That fire,” he said. “We come in here and it’s all dark and kind of cold, but you turn on a gas jet, put a match to it, throw on some logs, and a couple of minutes later we got ourselves a real nice fire going. Now, some people’d claim that’s no way to build a fire — that you oughta do it with kindling and—”
“Is this some kind of allegory?” she said.
Burns tried to look hurt and almost succeeded. “I was just trying to edge into it.”
“Don’t edge. Jump.”
Tinker Burns sipped his bourbon, stared at the fire and said, “Ever know a spook name of Undean? Gilbert Undean?”
“No. Why?”
“He died.”
“So?”
“He was one of the mourners at Steady’s burial at Arlington. There were only four of us there. Steady’s kid, me, Undean and Isabelle. Steady was buried Friday. Isabelle was killed the same day. Undean got killed this morning.”
Letty Melon drank more bourbon, inhaled smoke, blew it out and said, “I heard about Isabelle.”
“I found her body. I also found Undean’s — about noon today. Maybe a little after.”
“What’d you do?”
“I called the cops. What else?”
“Where’d he live?”
“Reston.”
“So you zipped straight out here. What the hell for? I told you last night we’ve got nothing to talk about.”
Burns took another mouthful of bourbon, rolled this one around on his tongue, swallowed and sighed his appreciation. “Did you know Steady’d written his memoirs — him and Isabelle?”
“I know he’d threatened to for years.”
“Well, he finally did.”
“Have you read them?”
“No.”
“Who has?”
“Maybe Granny. Maybe not.”
“You ask him?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Lemme tell you how I got into this thing,” Burns said, finished his bourbon, put the glass down and leaned toward Letty Melon with the confident and faintly conspiratorial air of a man who’d spent much of his adult life selling dubious wares to suspicious customers.
“I really don’t want to know, Tinker.”
He ignored her and said, “About nine or ten days ago, right before Steady died, I get this call from a guy I once did some business with. I’m in Paris and he’s in, well, it doesn’t matter where he is. He tells me he’s heard Steady’s written his memoirs. Now, this guy knew Steady in Zaire when it was still the Congo. They later cut up a few touches together in Southeast Asia and Central America. Know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“Did stuff they maybe shouldn’t’ve. Stuff that there’s no statute of limitations on.”
“Shitty stuff,” she said. “Steady’s specialty.”
“Yeah, all right. Shitty stuff. But since then this guy’s moved uptown. And now whenever the world’s about to end, he gets calls from CNN or maybe from that kid with the speech impediment on NBC and they want him to give ’em the exact time and date of Armageddon and a rundown on the aftermath in fifteen seconds or less.”
“He’s in government then,” she said.
“No. He’s not in government, but he makes a lot of money advising governments.”
“I see. One of those.”
“Yeah. Right. One of those. So he calls me and says he’s heard about Steady’s book and since I’m an old asshole buddy of Steady’s, he’s wondering if I can get a peek at the thing and see if Steady’s mentioned those touches they cut up together years ago. He also says he just happens to know where I can unload some twenty-year-old left-behind Vietnam ordnance I got rusting away down in Marseilles on a certain party with an end-use certificate who’ll pay in Swiss francs. So I tell this guy, sure, I’ll try and look into it. But before I get around to it, I get this call in Paris from Isabelle, who’s at the Hay-Adams, telling me Steady’s lying there dead in the bed. Okay so far?”