She pulled out a top drawer and said, “Empty. All empty.”
Haynes opened and closed a couple of the drawers, glanced around the room and indicated the personal computer that was next to the IBM Wheelwriter. “How friendly are you with computers?” he asked.
“Chummy,” she said, sat down, switched it on, studied its keyboard and tapped out a demand for entry. The computer promptly requested a password. Erika first tried “Steady” without success, then several others with the same result. She looked up at Haynes and asked, “What was Steady’s mother’s maiden name?”
“Cobbett with two b’s and two t’s.”
After she tried Cobbett, the computer lowered its drawbridge and moments later Steadfast Haynes’s memoirs appeared on the screen, line by line.
“Stop and start over,” Haynes said.
“Slower?” she asked, tapping the keys.
“Slower.”
Once again the title page appeared, followed by the four lines of Housman, then the father’s cryptic dedication to the son and, finally, page four and Chapter One, containing the two sentences that composed what Haynes had come to think of as the false manuscript:
“I have led an exceedingly interesting life and, looking back, have no regrets. Or almost none.”
There was a short gap on the screen until one word began appearing in capital letters, filling the rest of the fourth page and all of the fifth, sixth and seventh with, “ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT ENDIT…”
“Shut it down,” Haynes said.
After the screen went blank, Erika McCorkle said, “What’s an endit?”
“Cablese. Steady used to sign off his cables with it when I was a kid: ‘Arriving Tuesday Air France 1732 GMT meet me endit Steady.’ Ten words exactly.”
Erika McCorkle’s face shone with what Haynes suspected was yet another revelation. “That’s why the house is so damned neat. Those two guys with sacks over their heads knew just where to look. In the computer.”
“Unless they weren’t here to find but to plant something. Maybe a dead end.”
“The endits?”
Haynes nodded, rose, went over to the computer and bent down to unplug it. “Let’s put this in your car.”
“Are you stealing or borrowing it?”
“Neither. I’m inheriting it. Howard Mott says Steady left me all of his keepsakes, souvenirs and memorabilia.”
“There aren’t any.”
“Right, but should the question arise, Mott can argue that a man’s personal computer is as much a part of his memorabilia as his diary.”
“That’s bullshit trying to be sophistry.”
Haynes nodded agreeably. “So it is.”
They were going down the slippery snow-covered front porch steps, carrying the computer, when the sedan silently emerged from behind the curtain of falling snow. The sedan, a large Ford with chains on its rear wheels, came to a stop and a lean man in his fifties got out. Staring at Haynes with blue eyes that looked as if they would stay well chilled, winter or summer, the man let his right hand stray toward the holstered revolver on his hip just before he used a hard baritone voice to say, “I sure as hell hope that’s you, Granville.”
It took five minutes under the shelter of the covered porch to convince Sheriff Jenkins Shipp that the son and heir of Steadfast Haynes was carting off the computer only because he hoped it would contain his dead father’s last thoughts.
Finally, the sheriff nodded his narrow head in half-convinced agreement. The head was topped by an abused Stetson that once must have been pearl gray but was now the color of old city sidewalks. The sheriff’s face seemed to be mostly cheekbones and chilly blue eyes, but there was also an assertive chin, an interesting nose and a thin-lipped mouth that would have looked cruel if it hadn’t curled up at both ends.
“You’re saying a computer’s like a man’s diary?” the sheriff asked, his skepticism still evident.
“Exactly,” Erika McCorkle said.
He acknowledged her answer with a small neutral smile that said he didn’t believe her, then studied Haynes for a moment or two before he posed another question. “Know why I don’t ask you for any ID, Granville?”
“Because I look so much like him.”
“Spittin’ image,” Shipp said, gave Erika another small but more friendly smile and added, “Or is that spit and image, Miss McCorkle?”
“Authorities disagree,” she said. “But in this case it’s irrelevant because he sure as hell looks like Steady.”
“Don’t he though?” said Sheriff Shipp.
After he helped Haynes carry the computer to the Cutlass and put it in the trunk, the sheriff, now back on the porch, carefully wiped his boots on the doormat. Once inside the house, the first thing he said was, “How come that door’s off its hinges?”
Haynes said it was because of the snow. He had left his topcoat in Washington and needed one to go to the barn. He thought there might be one in the closet but it was locked.
“And was there?” Shipp asked. “A coat?”
“Right behind you,” Haynes said.
Shipp turned to eye the old duffle coat that hung from the hall coat-rack. He touched the coat, as if to make sure it was damp, nodded, turned back to Haynes and said, “Want some help with the door?”
Once the door was back on its hinges, the sheriff, apparently musing aloud, said, “Wonder if I’d best take a look upstairs?”
“You think whoever shot Zip might’ve left some clues up there?” Erika asked.
“Never can tell,” Shipp said, turned toward the stairs, then turned back. “How’d you all know his name was Zip?” Before either could answer, the sheriff said, “I didn’t tell you, did I?”
“You must have,” Haynes said.
Shipp frowned, as if recalling their telephone conversation. “Believe I did, at that,” he said, headed again for the stairs and mounted the first two steps before he stopped and again turned back. “Aren’t you all coming?”
“We’d only get in the way,” Haynes said.
When the sheriff came back down the stairs five minutes later his tanned cheeks had turned dull red and Haynes knew Shipp had found the sex magazines. He also knew the sheriff would never mention them.
They trailed Shipp through the living room, the office/dining room and into the kitchen, where it was obvious that the sheriff made mental notes of the three coffee cups on the kitchen table, Letty Melon’s whisky glass and also the three cigarette butts she had ground out in an ashtray.
As Shipp went through the kitchen door, heading for the barn, he noticed the gouged-out doorjamb. “What happened?”
“When we went out to the barn that first time,” Haynes said, “we locked ourselves out and had to use a lug wrench on it.”
As he inspected the damage, Shipp asked, “Either of you happen to smoke?”
“Sometimes,” Haynes said.
“Luckies?” the sheriff said hopefully.
Haynes recalled Letty Melon’s gold Zippo and the pack of cigarettes she had taken from her flight jacket pocket. “Sorry,” Haynes said. “Camels.” His right hand dipped into his jacket pocket as if to make sure a pack was still there. “Want one?”
“Quit thirteen years ago,” Shipp said and gave the ruined doorjamb another look. “Better get some boards and nail that sucker up.”
“I plan to,” Haynes said.
In the barn, Shipp knelt beside the dead Zip and, like Letty Melon, ran a commiserative hand down the dead animal’s neck. “Talk to your daddy’s insurance man yet, Granville?”
“I’m not going to file a claim.”
Shipp rose. “Then I don’t reckon you shot him.”
The sheriff helped Haynes and Erika McCorkle carry some old boards, nails and a hammer from the barn to the house. But when Haynes, who couldn’t recall the last time he had driven a nail, kept bending the first one he tried to hammer, Sheriff Shipp began to fidget. When he could no longer stand it, he said, “Lemme try.”