“There was some family business to clear up.”
“Your wife’s first name, Mr. McCorkle?”
“Fredl.”
“Eine gute Deutsche Hausfrau, ja?”
“Washington correspondent for a Frankfurt paper.”
“You’re kidding. Which one?”
After McCorkle told him, the inspector nodded approvingly and said, “The serious one.”
“Profoundly so.”
“And what do you do, Mr. McCorkle?” the inspector asked, his eyes pricing the five-year-old gray worsted Southwick suit McCorkle had bought on sale at Arthur Adler’s.
“I run a saloon.”
“In Washington?”
“Right.”
“What’s it called?”
“Mac’s Place.”
“Ate there once,” the inspector said. “Not bad.” He looked down at the passport again, read the name “Cyril McCorkle” aloud and looked up with a smile. “Bet everybody calls you Mac.”
“You win.”
The inspector bent down, marked the old suitcase with a piece of chalk, straightened and handed McCorkle a slip of paper that was the treasured laissez-passer. “Take the express line, Cyril,” the inspector said. “And welcome home.”
McCorkle later blamed his sunglasses for having caused the case of mistaken identity in front of Mac’s Place just after he paid off the taxi, picked up his old suitcase and turned. Although his eyesight in recent years had gone from near perfect to good to the stage where he now needed reading glasses, McCorkle refused to wear prescription sunglasses because he couldn’t remember, offhand, ever having read a book all the way through in the sunshine. And since he felt the need to blame something, he blamed the sunglasses for causing him to mistake the man who came out of Mac’s Place for the late Steadfast Haynes.
“It was a quarter past three or a little earlier,” he said as he later recounted the incident to Padillo. “And he was in the shade and the sun was just low enough to stab me right in the eyes. So when I looked away from the sun into the shade, there he was — same tennis-pro build, same walk that makes you wonder when he’ll start tap-dancing and that same face.”
“But a face at least twenty-five years younger,” Padillo said.
“Not if you’re half blind from the sun and looking into deep shade through dirty dark glasses. So what I saw were the same moves, height, build — plus a face that shade, sunglasses and memory were adding twenty-five years to.”
“The world’s most honest face,” Padillo said.
“I always felt it was those flag-blue eyes.”
“Plus the resolute chin and that most serene brow.”
“But somehow you knew nobody could be as honest as Steady looked,” McCorkle said. “So just before you started edging away from him, he’d grin that god-awful kid’s grin that could melt rocks.”
“And also make you want to believe everything he said.”
“Another mistake,” McCorkle said. “How big a tab did he run up?”
Padillo shrugged. “A few hundred dollars that we might as well eat.” He paused, obviously curious. “So what’d you say to him?”
“Well, since I didn’t know he was dead, I said, ‘How the hell are you, Steady?’ ”
Granville Haynes said, “I’m afraid he’s dead, Mr. McCorkle.”
McCorkle put the old suitcase down, removed his dirty sunglasses, stared at Haynes and said, “When?”
“About a week ago. A stroke.”
“Then you’re... Granville, right?”
Haynes nodded. “We buried him earlier today. At Arlington.”
“I’m very sorry” McCorkle said. “I didn’t know. I would like to have been there.”
“Thank you. Tinker Burns flew in. Isabelle Gelinet was there. And some guy from Langley.”
“I know Padillo would’ve gone except—”
Haynes interrupted him with a smile. “He told me.”
McCorkle found the smile to be an exact and uncanny replica of the one the late Steadfast Haynes had so successfully employed. “How long will you be in town?”
“A day or two. I have to see a lawyer whose office seems to be in this same building.” He looked up. “They just built it over and around you, didn’t they?”
“We were lucky,” McCorkle said.
“The lawyer’s name is Mott. Howard Mott. You know him?”
“He’s one of our landlords.”
“What’s he like?”
“I don’t know how he is on probate,” McCorkle said, “but if I ever got in a real jam, he’s the one I’d call.”
Haynes smiled his inherited smile again. “Sounds like Steady’s lawyer, doesn’t it?”
Six
Mott, James, Lovelandy & Nathan specialized in the defense of white-collar criminals and had grown from two to fourteen partners in less than eight years. With offices that now occupied the top three floors of their seven-story building that crouched over Mac’s Place, the firm was prospering almost indecently because of the bevy of frightened clients who had retained its costly services during the final years of the Reagan administration.
Howard Mott, one of the two founding partners, looked as if he had been assembled from mismatched parts by unskilled labor. He stood a bit under five-ten, had a long, long trunk supported by stubby legs and required custom shirts with thirty-seven-inch sleeves. For eyes he had a pair of shiny black vibrant things that glared out from deep inside the two small dark caves they dwelt in.
But most people, especially those in jury boxes, usually forgot what Mott looked like once he opened his mouth. He had a deep voice that would do anything: entreat, thunder, cajole, accuse, reason and even sing a remarkably bawdy parody of how they were hanging Michael Deaver in the morning.
Mott’s principal asset, however, was his mind, which a respectable majority of the Washington legal fraternity, not all of them admirers, agreed was brilliant.
He lived in an old three-story house in Cleveland Park with his thirty-six-year-old wife, Lydia, who was expecting their first child in July. Mott usually felt that he was as lucky as anyone deserves to be and it bothered him, although not very much, to discover he was almost envying the man who sat in the client’s chair across the desk.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make the services,” Mott said. “But I had to be in court all morning. And I’m very, very sorry that Steady’s gone.”
“Thank you,” Granville Haynes said.
“You sure as hell look like him, don’t you?”
“So I’m told.”
“I’ve sometimes wondered how it would be to go through life with Steady’s looks.”
“It makes some people, especially women, mistrust you.” Haynes paused, didn’t quite smile and added, “At first.”
“Then it’s just like being ugly, isn’t it?”
“I never quite thought of it like that, Mr. Mott.”
After a deep sigh, Mott said, “Better call me Howard. When I’m through with what I have to say, you may want to go back to ‘Mr. Mott.’ “
“Bad news?”
Mott leaned back in his chair to study Haynes. “Depends upon your expectations.”
“Nonexistent.”
“That’s fortunate because Steady died broke — or damn near.”
Haynes said nothing.
“His principal assets consist of the farm near Berryville and a ’seventy-six Cadillac convertible with around forty-three thousand miles on it.”
“Now comes the ‘but,’ ” Haynes said.
“A realist, I see,” Mott said with a small approving nod. “But the farm is only twenty acres and has a ramshackle 119-year-old house, a fair barn and two very fat mortgages. If sold, it might net twenty or even thirty thousand, once the two mortgages are paid off.”