Padillo entered the office twenty minutes later to find McCorkle sitting at the partners desk, glumly drinking Irish whiskey.
“Somebody else die?” Padillo said as he located a glass and poured himself a measure of Bushmills.
“Childhood,” McCorkle said.
“Well, it couldn’t last forever—not even yours.”
“Erika’s. They somehow messed up her college credits and discovered she had more than enough to graduate now instead of in June. We’re celebrating tonight. You’re invited.”
“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?”
Chapter 8
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.”