When finished, he looked up at Haynes and asked, “Anyone else read this?”
“Just you and I and Tinker Burns.”
“And whoever has the original.”
“I’d almost forgotten about the original.”
Padillo tapped the memo. “Now I understand your problem. Tomorrow you have to be in two places at the same time.”
“Exactly.”
“And you want me to be at the other place.”
“You and McCorkle.”
Padillo grimaced slightly, as if at some seldom-felt tinge of regret or even a pang of self-reproach. “I should’ve told McCorkle.”
“You knew?”
“Not when she came in. She fooled me with her frumpy outfit and that shuffling walk. But when she came out of the office, she was in a hurry, forgot her shuffle and shifted into her long athletic stride that’s hard to forget once you’ve seen it. And that’s when I knew it was Muriel Keyes.”
“But you didn’t know about the fake bomb then?”
“Not then.”
“And you haven’t told McCorkle it was Mrs. Keyes?”
“No. I haven’t told him.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe because he wasn’t hurt — except for some injured pride. Or because of my secretive nature. Or because of Muriel and me a long time ago. Or maybe I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“It just dropped.”
“So it did,” Padillo said and again tapped the Undean memo. “This suggests that Mrs. Hamilton Keyes walked in here with a fake bomb and out with an equally fake manuscript to save her husband’s career and her neck.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t know,” said Padillo. “But why not let McCorkle ask her tomorrow?”
Forty-four
At 3:21 A.M. that Tuesday, Granville Haynes left Howard Mott’s house on Thirty-fifth Street Northwest and drove back to the Willard in twenty-four minutes. At eight minutes to four he entered his room to find Erika McCorkle propped up in bed, reading a paperback novel that had on its cover a huge Nazi swastika formed out of human bones.
“Who’s winning?” Haynes asked as he stripped off his topcoat and jacket and hung them in the closet.
“The Krauts — but it’s only nineteen forty.”
Haynes removed two sheets of stapled-together paper from his jacket’s inside breast pocket and crossed to the bed. “More ancient history” he said as he handed them over.
Erika put her book down and accepted the stapled papers without glancing at them. “You look tired,” she said.
“I am.”
“Come to bed.”
“I’ll take a shower while you read it.”
She looked at the first sheet. “The notorious Undean memo. I thought Howie Mott said nobody but you should read it.”
“He changed his mind,” Haynes said. “Padillo’s read it. And by now so has your dad. Mott is probably reading it for the fourth or fifth time.”
Erika read the memo’s first line, muttered, “My God,” and, without looking up, said, “Go take your shower.”
When Haynes came out of the shower ten minutes later, wearing a hotel robe, he found Erika still propped up in bed against the pillows, staring at the far wall, the memo now in her lap. She had locked her hands behind her head, which thrust her breasts out against the thin fabric of the thigh-length T-shirt that was her nightgown. Silk-screened across the front of the T-shirt was the line “This Space Available.”
She stopped staring at the wall to stare at Haynes. “Have you told the cops yet — Detective-Sergeant what’s his name?”
“Darius Pouncy. No.”
“Why not?”
“Because a lot of the memo’s conjecture and there’s no proof that Undean wrote it. Maybe Tinker wrote it.”
“Couldn’t they compare the typing with Undean’s typewriter? The FBI’s always doing that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe Tinker wrote it on Undean’s typewriter.”
“You really think she killed Isabelle and stuck a pistol in Pop’s face?”
“I believe she stuck a pistol in McCorkle’s face,” Haynes said.
“Why d’you believe that and not the other?”
“Because somebody recognized her leaving Mac’s Place.”
“Who did?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, turned, went to the small refrigerator and took out a small can with a label that claimed it contained pink grapefruit juice from Texas. He held the the can up for Erika to see and said, “Want some?”
“No.”
Haynes opened the can and drank. “Tell me what it said.”
She frowned. “What d’you mean?”
“Build a case for me. Pretend you’re a lawyer.”
She reached for the memo.
“No,” Haynes said. “From memory.”
“I don’t understand what you want.”
“That’s a two-page single-spaced memo. I don’t think Undean just sat down and batted it out. I think it was very carefully composed and went through maybe three or four drafts before all the holes were plugged.”
“I’ll have to tell it my own way then.”
“Fine.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay. It’s Laos, early nineteen seventy-four. March. They were all in Vientiane, the capital. Steady. Muriel Lamphier, later to become Muriel Keyes, and Undean. Muriel’s a young CIA — what — operative?”
“You’re telling it,” Haynes said.
“Okay. She’s an operative, junior grade, with some kind of embassy cover job. Steady’s doing his usual propaganda stuff and Undean’s analyzing whatever he analyzes. Then somebody — and it’s not clear from the memo who — suspects that a young American married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Fred — uh — Nimes aren’t really doing church-sponsored relief work, but are actually homegrown antiwar lefties who’re spying for the opposition, the Pathet Lao. Well, what to do?
“The solution somebody comes up with is to send in a femme fatale. So they send in Muriel to seduce Fred, feed him some false stuff and see if it’s passed on. Well, Muriel gets Fred in the sack all right, apparently on more than one occasion. But one afternoon when they’re rolling around in bed, Mrs. Nimes comes home unexpectedly. Her name’s Angie — for Angela.
“What happens next is what the memo calls a ‘domestic altercation.’ Angie picks up a bottle and cracks it over Fred’s head. Fred slams Angie up alongside the head. Angie produces a gun and shoots Fred dead. She then turns the gun on Muriel. But Muriel doesn’t want to die and the two ladies wrestle for the gun. It goes off and Angie takes a bullet in the face and dies.
“Muriel gets dressed, well, I guess she got dressed, the memo doesn’t say, and bolts out of the house, almost petrified. But she has enough sense to find Steady. He goes to the Nimes house and has a look. Then he goes to see the CIA’s pet Laotian general and offers him two hundred thousand U.S. dollars to put the fix in. The general agrees but wants cash in advance. Okay?”
“You’re doing fine,” Haynes said.
“Steady confides in Undean that he needs two hundred thousand for a special ultra-secret operation. But Undean isn’t buying, probably with good reason, and insists on knowing the details. Steady tells him. Undean suggests that Steady get word to Hamilton Keyes in Saigon. Steady does and Keyes flies to Vientiane with the money. Steady hands it over to the general. I think all this took about a day. Meanwhile, the tropics are going to work on the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Nimes.
“Well, once the pet general has the cash in hand, he orders six fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Laotian soldiers to burn down the Nimes house that night. They do and at dawn the kid soldiers are arrested, tried, convicted and shot for having raped Mrs. Nimes, killed Mr. Nimes, who tried to defend her, and then, to cover it all up, burned down the Nimes house.