Erika seemed to ponder what he had told her before she asked, “So you think, or maybe just suspect, that somewhere, maybe even here, there’s a true honest-to-God manuscript chock-full of political dynamite and shocking revelations and other assorted hot stuff?”
“Right,” Haynes said and watched a sudden thought streak across her face, which, he realized, would never be any good at dissembling.
“Then that’s what those two guys were really after, wasn’t it?” she said. “The ones who tied up Letty.”
“That doesn’t exactly follow.”
“Sure it does,” she said. “And the same two guys who shot Zip and tied up Letty must’ve threatened to drown Isabelle unless she told them where the manuscript was. But after she told them it was here at the farm, they drowned her anyway.”
“You just set the new indoor record for intuitive leaps.”
“I take it you’re not buying.”
“I might,” Haynes said. “If everything checks out.”
“What the hell’s everything?”
“Let’s start with Letty and why she was here.”
“She was worried about Zip.”
Haynes stared at her for a moment, turned, went back to the phone, picked it up and tapped out a long-distance number. When the phone began to ring, he said, “Get on the extension.”
After Erika McCorkle lifted the extension phone to her ear, she heard it ring two times before a woman answered with, “Mott, James, Lovelandy and Nathan.”
“Mr. Mott, please. This is Granville Haynes and it’s important.”
After a brief pause, Howard Mott came on the line with, “Nothing can be important on a Saturday morning.”
“I’m at Steady’s farm.”
“So?”
“Did you call Sheriff Shipp and ask him to find somebody to take care of Steady’s horse?”
“Sure,” Mott said. “When I called to tell him Steady was dead and that I was sending a guy out to pick up the Cadillac, I also asked if he knew anybody who’d feed, water and exercise the horse for twenty bucks a day. He said he did.”
“How’d you know about the horse?”
“Steady told me about—what’d he call him, Zip?—a year or so ago. But I forgot about him till Steady’s ex-wife called me.”
“When?”
“The morning after Steady died. She was worried about the horse. I told her I’d take care of it and to stop worrying. What’s wrong?”
“Somebody shot the horse.”
There was a brief silence until Mott said, “What d’you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Good,” Howard Mott said and hung up.
Chapter 18
They began the search upstairs, where they discovered three bedrooms, one bath, two old mirrored wardrobes and a lone closet. Haynes’s inspection of the bathroom medicine cabinet revealed an empty bottle of St. Joseph’s aspirin, a new toothbrush still in its plastic package and somebody’s diaphragm.
The smallest of the three bedrooms was meanly furnished with a thin mattress on a brass bed that was little more than a cot. An oval rag rug lay beside it on the pine floor that had been stained a dark brown. A chest of drawers, painted Chinese red, was empty. The other furniture consisted of a 1940s bridge lamp, a straight-backed wooden chair and an ancient wardrobe whose mirror was turning silver-gray. Haynes looked inside the wardrobe, found two wire coat hangers and decided he was in a guest room that had been deliberately furnished to discourage long stays.
They found little of interest in the next bedroom other than a short stack of explicit sex magazines in a bedside table drawer. The magazines featured photographs of pairs of naked women, fairly young, who groped and grabbed each other while apparently trying to decide whether to fix hamburgers or meat loaf for dinner.
Erika McCorkle flipped through one of the magazines and called it a sexual crutch. Haynes went through another issue more slowly and said nothing. As he put the magazines back into the table drawer, Erika McCorkle gave the room a further inspection and said, “I don’t know why, but this doesn’t look like Steady’s room to me.”
“Maybe it was Isabelle’s.”
Erika McCorkle nodded at the table that held the magazines. “Those were hers?”
“Maybe,” Haynes said, went to the wardrobe and opened it, revealing some neatly hung dresses, blouses, pants, skirts and, below them, a half dozen pairs of women’s shoes. He closed the wardrobe door, turned to Erika McCorkle and said, “This must’ve been her room unless Steady was into cross-dressing.”
“And the magazines?”
He shrugged. “Maybe when Steady got the urge, he’d hurry down the hall, hop into bed and they’d lie there, flip through the magazines and get it on. But if you’re really curious about which way Isabelle went, ask Padillo.”
“Go to hell,” she said and stalked out of the room.
Haynes caught up with her in the third and last bedroom, the only one with a closet. She was standing near the double bed, sniffing at something. “This was his room,” she said. “You can still smell the cigarette smoke.”
Haynes opened the two doors of the wide shallow closet. There were six blue shirts and six white shirts from Paul Stuart that had been bought in New York or Tokyo or, more likely, by mail order. The shirts were on hangers and looked as if they had been washed and ironed by loving hands.
A row of tweed jackets, all remarkably alike, took up another yard of closet space. The rest was occupied by a dozen pairs of gray and tan trousers, which were followed by a dark blue suit, a windbreaker and a Burberry raincoat with raglan sleeves.
Haynes knew he was viewing a collection of the semi-uniforms his father had worn throughout his adult life, even in the hot countries. He remembered color photographs—mostly Polaroids—obviously taken in one tropical clime or other, where Steadfast Haynes’s dress code had been either a blue or white long-sleeved oxford button-down shirt, but no tie, tan cotton pants and shoes that didn’t have to be laced up. If it were only hot, the shirt sleeves might be rolled up two full turns; if sizzling, they might be rolled above the elbows.
“Steady’s room,” he agreed and shut the closet door.
Turning to give it all one final look, Erika McCorkle said, “Not much, is there? No watercolors on the walls or oriental rugs on the floor. No snapshots of you at seven or nine. No souvenir ashtrays from Djakarta or assegai spears from Africa.”
“They didn’t use assegais where he was and he traveled light.”
“And alone?”
“Nearly always.” Haynes gave the room his own final inspection. “This must be the only house he ever owned.”
“What’d he do with his money?”
“Lived well, spent it on alimony and sent me to expensive schools.”
“Which university?”
“Virginia.”
“Huh,” she said. “That’s where I went.”
Downstairs, they searched the kitchen first, Haynes using a kebab skewer he had come across to probe sacks, bags and cartons of staples, not at all sure of what he expected to find. He found nothing.
While Erika McCorkle searched the living room, Haynes put on the old duffle coat that hung from the hall hatrack and walked through the falling snow to the barn. He spent twenty minutes searching it, saving Zip’s stall until last, but found nothing beneath the oats or under the straw or in the half barrel of water.
He finally knelt beside the dead horse and looked closely at the entry wound. There was no exit wound and Haynes guessed that the single round had been fired from either a revolver or semiautomatic handgun of 9mm caliber or less.
It was snowing even more as he walked back to the house, entered through the jimmied kitchen door, hung the duffle coat back on the hall hatrack and found Erika McCorkle in the dining room/office, standing beside the two gray steel filing cabinets.