“You’re probably right.”
Pouncy finished his cappuccino, sighed his appreciation and said, “Ever know a Mr. Gilbert Undean?”
“No.”
“What about Isabelle Gelinet?”
“I knew Isabelle.”
“Tinker Burns?”
“I know Tinker.”
“Seen him recently?”
“Not since Friday, but my partner had a phone call from him Sunday. Yesterday.”
“Then he’s probably still alive,” Pouncy said. “Reason I say that is because Mr. Undean and Miss Gelinet were both murdered and Tinker Burns discovered their bodies. Now, there were only four mourners — I reckon they were mourners — at the burial of Steadfast Haynes on Friday and here it is Monday and half of ’em are already dead. What I’m getting at, Mr. McCorkle, is that I sure hope I don’t get another call from Tinker Burns telling me he’s just stumbled across the body of Granville Haynes.”
“I hope not either,” McCorkle said.
“If you see Mr. Burns, you mind telling him he oughta call me?”
Pouncy paused. “Might even put it a little stronger than that.”
“You try his hotel?”
“Been trying all morning. He’s not there.”
“If I see him, I’ll tell him,” McCorkle said. “Is that it?”
“Just about,” Pouncy said and looked at his watch. “I got a few more questions but they’re not gonna take much more’n thirty or forty-five minutes.”
McCorkle leaned back in the booth, took out his cigarettes, lit one and said, “Maybe I’ll have some cappuccino after all.”
When Granville Haynes slipped out of the Willard Hotel through its rear F Street exit, he was surprised to find the temperature had shot up into the mid-fifties. The mild weather, along with its accompanying sunshine, convinced Haynes that he should walk to McCorkle’s apartment, which he remembered was in either the 2200 or 2300 block of Connecticut Avenue.
Haynes’s route took him past the Treasury Building and the White House and the Old Executive Office Building to Seventeenth Street where he turned north. By the time he reached the Mayflower Hotel it had clouded over and the temperature had dropped into the mid-forties. Long accustomed to southern California’s weather, Haynes decided his choices were to take a cab, buy a coat or freeze to death.
Haynes spotted a Burberry shop at the intersection of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Inside, he asked to see a topcoat. The saleswoman said she thought he would look marvelous in a trench coat. Haynes said he would prefer something a little less dashing. She showed him a lamb’s-wool topcoat with raglan sleeves. The lightweight wool had a pattern of small brown and beige houndstooth checks. Haynes tried the coat on without asking its price, looked at himself briefly in a mirror, said he would wear it and handed her an American Express card.
He walked the rest of the Way to McCorkle’s old gray stone apartment building on the west side of Connecticut Avenue. He reached the building at about the same time Darius Pouncy began asking McCorkle the first of the “few more questions” that would continue for another twenty-six minutes.
Haynes examined the key McCorkle had given him and noticed it was one of the tricky Swiss kind that had “pimples and craters” rather than teeth, and which couldn’t be duplicated, at least not in the United States. Haynes wasn’t sure about Switzerland.
McCorkle had said his apartment number was 405. Haynes reached it after a ride up on an obviously new Otis elevator. He knocked on the door. When there was still no answer after he knocked a second and third time, he used the Swiss key to let himself in.
He entered a small foyer with a parquet floor and a wall table that might have been a very good imitation Sheraton. On the table was a large cut-glass bowl full of M&M candy. Hanging above the table and illuminated by a single light were two oil paintings. The first was a rainy-day scene of a cozy-looking European bar-cafe with a small red neon sign that spelled out “Mac’s Place.” The second painting was a rainy-day scene of the same bar-cafe after it had been destroyed by either a bomb, a fire or both.
Haynes breakfasted on four of the M&Ms as he studied the two pictures, deciding that they must have been painted from photographs. The M&Ms, he discovered, were of the chocolate-covered peanut variety.
Popping another M&M into his mouth, Haynes went down the long hall, heading for the last bedroom on the left. It was a fairly large room, at least twelve by eighteen feet, with parquet floors, an oriental rug and a huge double bed that had been hastily made up. The room also contained a dressing table, the promised chiffonier and, placed in front of the casement windows, two disparate but comfortable-looking armchairs, each with its own table and reading lamp.
One of the chairs was of an elegant Scandinavian design and looked particularly inviting. Piled on the table beside it were books dealing with American politics and economics, plus four recent autobiographies of former White House aides who had left the Reagan administration under clouds of varying density.
The other chair, an old and battered leather wingback affair of impressive dimensions, seemed vaguely familiar until Haynes realized it was very much like the chair in his Ocean Park apartment — the one in which he could sit and stare at the monster pale yellow house across the street.
On a table beside the leather chair were four books without dust jackets. Haynes picked them up, one by one, and saw they were library books, four days overdue. They consisted of an early Vonnegut, an H. Allen Smith, a Mark Twain diatribe against Mary Baker Eddy and Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, a book that Haynes had never finished.
He replaced the books, crossed to the chiffonier and opened the third drawer down. Under what seemed to be five layers of cashmere sweaters, he found the short-barreled Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special. It was the airweight aluminum frame model loaded with .38 Special cartridges. Haynes knew the pistol to be fairly accurate within six or seven feet.
He closed the chiffonier drawer and was about to slip the revolver into one of his new topcoat’s pockets when the sleepy voice behind him asked, “What the hell’re you doing here?”
Haynes turned to find a tousled, barefoot Erika McCorkle, wearing a flaming red silk robe that looked like a Japanese kimono.
“Borrowing this,” he said and displayed the revolver before dropping it into the topcoat pocket.
“Bought yourself a new coat, I see,” she said.
“You just get up?”
“What was wrong with Steady’s old duffle coat?”
“I decided to walk.”
“From the hotel?”
Haynes nodded.
“And?”
“Halfway here it turned cold so I bought a coat.”
“That’s a Burberry,” she said. “I can tell.”
Haynes held the coat open and looked at the inside breast label for the first time. “So it is.”
“You want some coffee?” she said.
“When did you get to sleep last night?”
“Four. Five. Around in there.”
“Why so late?”
“I need coffee,” she said, turned and left the room.
The kitchen was larger than Haynes had expected and filled with intimidating German appliances that looked expensive. There was even a breakfast nook, which measured the age of the apartment and its building as surely as tree rings. To Haynes, breakfast nooks belonged to a prehistoric age of nuclear families with four or five members who sat down to breakfasts of juice, cereal, eggs, bacon and toast. Haynes thought such families to be as nearly extinct as breakfast nooks. None of the families he knew ever ate sit-down breakfasts together. Or lunch or dinner for that matter.