Twilight at Mac's Place (6 page)

“You’re sure it’s a celebration and not a memorial service?”

“You didn’t see the smile,” McCorkle said, once more staring into his glass.

“What smile?”

“The one Haynes gave her.”

“Ah. That one.”

“Exactly.”

“Don’t worry,” Padillo said. “The Haynes kid is four or five times as smart as his old man ever was, which is very bright indeed, and maybe ten times as honest, which brings him up to about average. But if you really need something to brood about these long January nights, think on this: who does Granville Haynes remind you of—other than Steady? Take your time.”

McCorkle continued to stare down into his drink. He was still staring down into it fifteen seconds later when he said, “Of you.”

“And somebody else.”

“Who?”

“Yourself,” Padillo said.

McCorkle only grunted.

“Erika could do worse,” Padillo said.

McCorkle finally looked up. “How?”

They scarcely talked until Erika McCorkle stopped her five-year-old Oldsmobile
Cutlass for a red light at Connecticut and R. She indicated the venerable Schwartz drugstore on the intersection’s northwest corner and said, “I used to hang out there when I was a real little kid.”

“How little?” Haynes said.

“Six or seven. The world’s two fastest soda jerks worked there. One had a bad leg; the other had terribly crossed eyes and both must’ve been well over forty. Pop sometimes took me there for what he said were the best ice cream sodas in town. We’d sit at the fountain and watch the two guys work. God, they were fast. I remember Pop kept telling them they were an endangered species. Think they’re still there?”

“We could find out,” Haynes said.

“You’re serious?”

“Sure.”

As the light changed to green, Erika McCorkle spotted an empty metered parking space just south of Larimer’s market, raced a BMW for it and won. She stopped parallel with the car in front of the empty space, shifted into reverse, spun the steering wheel to the right, backed up, spun the steering wheel again, this time to the left, and shot the Cutlass into the empty space, its two right wheels coming to a stop no more than three inches from the curb.

Haynes dug into a pants pocket for some quarters to feed the meter. “Very smooth,” he said.

“More slick than smooth.”

They crossed Connecticut on the green light only to find themselves marooned on the center traffic island. “When you were hanging out with the sandwich and soda artists,” Haynes said, “did you live around here?”

“My folks’ve always lived within a mile of Dupont Circle. It’s because Pop likes to walk to work although lately he’s been taking a lot of cabs.”

“Nothing wrong with him, is there?”

“Yes,” she said, stepping off the curb as the light changed. “He’s lazy.” She glanced at Haynes. “Known him long?”

“We talked once in nineteen seventy-four. It was my eighteenth birthday and Steady took me to dinner at Mac’s Place. Your father stopped by the table and later sent over two cognacs that made me feel all grown-up.”

“That makes you thirty-three then, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Not until August.”

There were no longer any soda jerks or a fountain for them to work behind in the Schwartz drugstore. The young Nigerian pharmacist in the rear told Haynes the fountain had been gone for at least ten years, maybe even twelve. The drugstore now seemed to concentrate on selling toiletries, discount vitamins, over-the-counter cure-alls, junk food and the occasional prescription.

They were in the drugstore just long enough for Haynes to question the young pharmacist. After they left, Erika McCorkle stood on the corner, looking around and glowering, as if trying to will the neighborhood back into what it had been when she was six or seven.

“I’m not old enough to hate change,” she said more to herself than to Haynes.

“You hate it most when you’re five or six.”

“Nothing changed when I was five or six.”

“Then you obviously had a happy childhood.”

“What I had were two older but remarkably well suited and reasonably well adjusted parents.”

“Then you were also lucky,” Haynes said. “Want some coffee?”

“The Junkanoo,” she said. “The bastards tore down the Junkanoo.”

“A nightclub, wasn’t it?”

“Right over there,” she said, pointing to a missing-tooth gap on the east side of Connecticut Avenue in the 1600 block. “I knew it closed. But now it’s gone. It just—aw, fuck it. Let’s get that coffee.”

They found a small Greek restaurant up the street called the Odeon that seemed willing, if not anxious, to serve them. He drank his coffee with cream and sugar; she drank hers black. As he stirred the coffee, Haynes said, “You see much of Steady?”

“Not till I was seventeen. It was just after he and Letty split, and Steady was using Pop’s place as a kind of headquarters. That was the summer before I went off to school and I was helping out, doing scut work mostly. Steady was there night and day, looking for somebody to talk to. When I wasn’t busy, I listened. Sometimes he even talked about you, which must be what you’re really interested in.”

“Am I,” Haynes said, somehow not making it a question.

“He could never understand why you became a cop.”

“He never asked.”

“I’ll ask.”

“Because I needed a job and they were willing to hire me.”

“That’s what I guessed, but Steady claimed it was a lot more complicated than that.”

“Well, if you’re a lapsed Quaker turned anarchist who hires out to prop up rotten governments you despise, everything might seem complicated. Even getting out of bed.”

“Did he know you despised him so much?”

“I never knew him well enough to despise him.”

“He once told me he was worried that you’d never got over the death of your mother.”

There was no trace of the inherited charm in Haynes’s bleak smile. “That sounds too pat even for Steady.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother died when I was three and I can’t even remember her. Three months later, Steady married a French woman who was stepmother number one. She and I were very close. When I was nine, he divorced her and married an Italian and the three of us went to live in Italy. Stepmother number two and I became such good pals that she wanted me to go on living with her after Steady got the Mexican divorce. And I did.”

“Then what?”

“Then I was thirteen and Steady brought me to the States and popped me into St. Alban’s here. I still get birthday letters from stepmothers one and two, but I never did meet stepmother number four. What was she like?”

“Pretty and rather rich. Letty once told my mother that she married Steady because he could make her giggle. Not laugh. Giggle.”

“ ‘Giggles Ended, Wife Charges.’ ”

“Was she there?” Erika asked.

“At Arlington? No.”

“Who was?”

“Some guy from the CIA. Me. Tinker Burns. And Isabelle Gelinet.”

“Dear Isabelle,” she said. “When I was thirteen I used to daydream about her drowning. Sometimes she drowned in the C and O Canal. Sometimes just below Great Falls. But the one I liked best was her drowning over and over in the yuckiest stretch of the Anacostia.”

Haynes smiled. “Jealous?”

“Of her brains, looks, style and foreign correspondent job. What thirteen-year-old wouldn’t be? But most of all I was jealous of her hopping into bed with Michael Padillo anytime she wanted to.”

“You and Padillo? Dear me.”

“I fell in love with him when I was five and wrote him all about it when I was six. I wrote it with a crayon. A blue one. Pop was my mailman. Padillo wrote back that we should wait awhile. I’m still waiting, but Isabelle didn’t have to. And neither did about a hundred and one other bimbos.”

“Still want her to drown?”

“I guess not.”

“Just as well. She’s a damn good swimmer.”

“How do you know?”

“We used to go skinny-dipping together.”

“When?”

“When she was seven and I was six. Or maybe vice versa. In Nice.”

“I bet she was gorgeous even then.”

“I always told her she was too fat.”

Just past the Hilton Hotel where Reagan was shot, Connecticut Avenue began curving its way to the bridge that was guarded by the stone lions. A block or so before the bridge, Erika McCorkle flicked her left hand at an imposing gray stone apartment building that Haynes guessed to be sixty or seventy years old.

“Where my folks live,” she said. “It’s one of the city’s first condos. They bought theirs in ’sixty-eight during the riots when Padillo convinced them that riots and revolutions are the best time to buy property and diamonds.”

“Sounds like an oft-told family tale,” Haynes said.

“It is—and ’sixty-eight must’ve been one weird year. Can you remember it?”

“Only the Italian version.”

“What d’you remember most about the sixties?”

Haynes didn’t reply for several seconds. “The music,” he said. “And, in retrospect, the innocence.”

It was 4:47
P.M
. when Erika McCorkle parked next to a
NO STOPPING, NO STANDING
sign in front of the seven-story apartment building at 3801 Connecticut Avenue. Because the rush hour was nearing its peak, Connecticut Avenue had increased the number of lanes going north and Haynes had only a moment to thank her for the lift.

She gave the building a curious glance. “Who lives here?”

“Isabelle.”

“Shit.”

An irate driver behind the Cutlass started honking. Erika McCorkle gave him the finger.

“That can get you shot in L.A.,” said Haynes as he climbed quickly out of the car. The irate driver honked again.

“Fuck off,” Erika McCorkle snapped as Haynes slammed the door. The Cutlass sped away. Haynes watched it go, wondering whether her farewell had been aimed at him or the honker.

He turned to study the apartment building from the sidewalk. It was built of a brick that Haynes, for some reason, had always thought of as orphanage yellow. The only frill the architect had allowed was the white stone facing around the severe casement windows. A sign in front claimed that one-bedroom and studio apartments were available. Minimum maintenance, maximum rents, Haynes thought, and wondered whether Isabelle Gelinet, after moving in with his father at the Berryville farm, had kept her apartment as a bolthole.

After he reached the building entrance with its inch-thick glass door, Haynes noticed the intercom system to the left that featured the usual tiny speakerphone and the usual row of black buttons. He ran a finger down the buttons until it came to the inked-in name of I. Gelinet. He pushed the button and waited for the speaker to ask who he was. Instead, the buzzer sounded, unlocking the glass door.

Haynes made no move toward the door until the buzzer stopped. He then reached over to give the metal handle a tug. The door was locked. Haynes turned back to the intercom and again pushed the I. Gelinet button. Again, the speaker failed to ask his name or business. But when the unlocking buzzer sounded this time, Haynes went quickly through the glass door and into the lobby.

Unless four newspaper vending machines and rows of stainless-steel mailboxes counted, there was no furniture in the lobby. To the right of the mailboxes was a narrow reception cubicle with an almost chest-high counter that was guarded by a steel mesh screen. Safely behind the steel mesh was a three-sided brass stick with raised letters that read,
MANAGER
. But no manager was in sight.

Haynes crossed to the four newspaper vending machines that offered the
Washington Post,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Times
and
USA Today.
Haynes bought a copy of the
New York Times
and rang for the elevator.

When he got out on the fourth floor, the news section of the
Times
was rolled into a tight cylinder that was one foot long and two inches thick.

Haynes went slowly down the corridor until he came to apartment 409. Standing well to the right of the door, he knocked on it with his left hand. When nothing happened, he knocked again. When there was still no response, he used his left hand to try the doorknob. It turned.

Haynes pushed the door open and found no lights on in the apartment. He took one slow step inside and was turning back to flick on the light switch when an arm wrapped itself around his neck in what he immediately diagnosed as an interesting variation on the chokehold he had been taught at the Los Angeles Police Academy. He also had been taught how to break it.

Haynes stamped down hard with his right heel, drove back hard with his left elbow and connected both times. Behind him somebody’s breath exploded. The chokehold loosened just enough for Haynes to tear himself away, whirl and thrust his pointless paper spear up as hard as possible, hoping for an eye.

But the light from the still open corridor door gave him a glimpse of his would-be strangler and made him deflect the thrust just enough to miss the left eye and smash the paper spear into Tinker Burns’s nose. The resulting flow of blood was immediate and, Haynes felt, most gratifying.

“For Chrissake, Granny,” said a snarling, bleeding Burns. “How the fuck’d I know it was you?”

Leaning forward to let the blood drip onto the carpet instead of his expensive gray suit, Burns plucked the silk display handkerchief from his outside breast pocket and applied it to his nose.

“Where’s the kitchen?” Haynes said. “You might as well go bleed in the sink.”

“Over there. One of those Pullman things.”

The only light in the apartment came from the open corridor door. Haynes switched on a lamp, closed the door and steered Burns to the stainless-steel kitchen unit. Burns bent over the small sink, turned on the cold water, soaked his handkerchief and reapplied it to his nose. “I don’t bleed long,” he announced.