He looked at Erika McCorkle and said, “Ever change a tire on that car of yours?”
“Sure.”
“You know the thing that takes the nuts off the wheel?”
“The lug wrench.”
“I could use it.”
She was back with the lug wrench in less than two minutes. Haynes was relieved to see that one end of it formed a jimmy, useful for prying off hubcaps. He used the lug wrench to knock the pin out of the door’s top hinge, then repeated the process on the lower one. After slipping the fingers of both hands beneath the bottom of the door, he gave it a tug and it came off its hinges.
A woman lay on her back in the closet among the rubber boots, old shoes and two pairs of ancient galoshes. She wore a blue knitted watch cap. Across her mouth was a two-inch-wide strip of industrial duct tape. She also wore an old zipped-up leather flight jacket and a pair of straight-leg blue jeans that were stuffed into expensive riding boots. The boots were taped together at the ankles. Her obviously bound hands were beneath her.
“Take the tape off her mouth while I go find something to cut her loose,” Haynes said.
Erika McCorkle nodded and knelt beside the woman. Haynes turned and entered the living room that contained mismatched pieces of sixty-to-seventy-year-old furniture, much of it gathered around the fireplace. A pair of open sliding doors could divide the living room from the dining room, which had been converted into an office furnished with two battered metal desks and a pair of fairly new four-drawer metal file cabinets. There were also a couple of phones, one on each desk, an IBM Wheelwriter and a personal computer. A swinging door led from the dining room/office into the kitchen, where Haynes found a paring knife with a sharp blade.
He hurried back to the staircase closet. The tape had been removed from the woman’s mouth and she now sat leaning against the closet wall, her feet still bound, her hands still behind her back. She stared up at Haynes and whispered, “My God.”
Erika McCorkle said, “Mr. Haynes, may I present your former stepmother, Letitia Melon. Letty, this is Steady’s son, Granville.”
Chapter 16
Although no great beauty, Letty Melon was a noticeably pretty woman in her early forties with short dark hair, eyes of such a deep blue that they verged on violet and the legatee of a Virginia drawl that she used to announce her immediate needs.
Her most pressing need, she said, was to pee. After that she would need a drink. “There’s got to be a bottle around here someplace,” she said. “If you all can’t find any in the kitchen, look behind the books in the front room where he used to keep his emergency ration.”
By the time she rejoined Haynes and Erika McCorkle in the kitchen, they had found a bottle of Scotch whisky in the bookshelves behind Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Vidal’s Burr. Erika had also found a jar of instant Yuban and a kettle. The kettle was just coming to a boil on the electric stove.
Letty Melon sat down at the pine kitchen table, reached for the bottle of Scotch and poured a measure into a glass. She drank it off in two swallows, sighed appreciatively, removed a package of Camels from her old flight jacket and lit one with a gold Zippo that Haynes knew to be a collector’s item worth at least a thousand dollars. She inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out and said, “There were two of them.”
Haynes nodded.
“They had sacks over their heads with eyeholes in them.”
“Cloth or paper?”
“Paper. Brown paper. Grocery sacks.”
“Which grocery?”
“Safeway.”
Erika placed two cups of coffee on the table and said, “There’s sugar but no milk or cream.”
“I’ll just sweeten mine with a drop of this,” Letty Melon said and poured a taste of whisky into her cup. After sipping the Scotch and coffee, she said, “I knew they were here the moment I stepped through the door.”
“How?” Haynes said.
“The place was warm. As warm as it is now. That meant somebody’d turned on the heat. So I did what you did. I called to see who was home. When nobody answered, I went from the living room into the dining room that looks like some kind of office now, and then on through the swinging door into the kitchen. And here they were. I started to yell, but one of them grabbed me and the other slapped that tape across my mouth. Then they taped my hands and feet and locked me into that little old stairway closet and, damn, I got mad.”
Erika McCorkle sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. She offered the sugar bowl to Haynes, who put a spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred it slowly and said, “What time was this?”
“A little after eight.”
“You didn’t see a car?” Haynes said.
“There wasn’t any unless it was in the barn where Steady keeps that old Cadillac of his.”
“Was the front door locked?”
“It was locked.”
“But you had a key?”
“Of course I had a key.”
“They say anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Were they tall, short, fat, skinny, what?”
“Tall.”
“How were they dressed—other than the sacks?”
“Jeans. Running shoes. Down jackets, one brown, one blue. And gloves. They both wore gloves.”
“What kind?”
“Driving gloves. You know the kind that’re half leather and half knitted with open backs just below the fingers?”
Haynes nodded. “Did you hear them leave?”
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
“Just outside Middleburg.”
“That means you left there when—around seven?”
“Around in there.”
“Why’d you want to get here so early?”
She smiled at him then, displaying some remarkably well cared for teeth. “That sounds like something Steady might’ve asked. Not what the hell were you doing here, but why’d you come so early? Well, the reason is I got worried about old Zip.”
“Who’s he?”
“Steady’s nine-year-old hunter. A bay gelding. I didn’t even think about Zip till late last night and then I almost couldn’t sleep for worrying about whether Steady’d got somebody to look after him or even boarded him out somewhere.”
She stopped talking and stared down into her cup, as if she felt the late Steadfast Haynes was due a second or two of silence. Erika McCorkle quickly ended the silence with a question. “He’d be in the barn if he’s still here?”
Letty Melon looked up and nodded.
“I’ll go look,” Erika McCorkle said, rose, opened the kitchen door, examined it briefly and turned back to Haynes. “They came in here,” she said. “The door’s been jimmied.”
Haynes rose and went over to examine the gouged-out doorjamb. Erika left and Haynes returned to the kitchen table.
“Where’d you all meet?” Letty Melon asked.
“Her father introduced us.”
“They at Steady’s burial?”
“No.”
“I heard it was at Arlington. I didn’t go because, well, because Steady and I’d grown to detest each other in a fairly cordial sort of way.”
Haynes nodded.
“Many people there?”
“Not many.”
“Tinker Burns?”
“Yes.”
“Isabelle?”
“She was there.”
“And you. Anybody else?”
“One or two others.”
“I suppose everybody tells you how much you look like him.”
Haynes again nodded.
“When that closet door opened and I saw you—well, for a second there I thought it was Steady. Or maybe his ghost.”
Haynes smiled slightly, drank the rest of his coffee and said, “What d’you think those two guys wanted?”
“Something to steal.”
“That’s a Rolex you’re wearing. You lit your cigarette with a gold Zippo. They didn’t take those. What about your purse?”
“I carry a wallet,” she said, removed it from her right hip pocket and looked inside. “All my credit cards are still here along with about eighty dollars in cash.”