“Was she conscious?”
“Probably. There wasn’t any concussion. No scrapes or bruises except where they wired her up. We found the gag they must’ve used to keep her quiet. It was in the trash. But no sign of opiate use and no alcohol to speak of.”
“She had a glass of wine at lunch,” Haynes said. “A vermouth.”
“Well, using that lunch to measure by, the coroner figures she wasn’t dead long when you and Burns showed up. So it looks like they wired her up, filled the tub and drowned her.”
“They?”
“Not too easy for one person to wire somebody up with coat hangers. You gotta use two hands to straighten the things out. So if you don’t bop your victim over the head first, how you gonna do it? Especially if the victim’s young, fit and—” Pouncy paused. “I was gonna say: and don’t wanta be drowned. But who the hell does? So I’m guessing it took two of ’em. At least two. Bathroom floor wasn’t even wet. Mop was dry. No wet towels.” He paused again. “She wasn’t raped or sodomized.”
“Anything missing?” Haynes asked.
“TV set, VCR and CD player are all still there. So’s that nice new personal computer. Her watch was still on her wrist.”
“That was a thirty-two-dollar Swatch.”
Pouncy praised Haynes’s memory with a tiny smile and said, “Don’t know if she had any diamonds, gold, pearls or stuff like that because we didn’t find any. But she did have a nice full-length mink and it’s still hanging in her closet. So if it wasn’t rape or robbery, it’s gotta be something else and I figure there’re two possibilities. One, somebody hated her to death. Or two, she wouldn’t tell somebody something they wanted to know.”
Pouncy finished his coffee, pushed the cup and saucer away, again used his napkin on his lips, leaned across the white marble-top table toward Haynes and said, “So that’s why you and me’re having strawberries and coffee at a quarter to ten of a Sunday morning.”
“Because you’ve decided I might know what they thought Isabelle knew—providing there was a they.”
Pouncy nodded.
“I saw Isabelle for the first time in almost twenty years at my old man’s grave at Arlington. She said maybe fifteen or twenty words. Then she, Tinker Burns and I had lunch at Mac’s Place, where she said maybe another fifty or seventy-five words. If that.”
“Talked about a book, I believe.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“Talked about your daddy’s autobiography. Memoirs.”
“They were mentioned.”
“She either wrote the thing or helped write it.”
Haynes nodded.
“What kind of book you think it is?”
“The story of his life.”
“Well, shit, I know that. I mean is it one of those red-hot exposé books? You know: Bill stole this. Tom stole that. But I didn’t steal nothing.”
“Some might think so.”
“Even worry about it?”
“Possibly.”
“Maybe even try to hush it up? Put a lid on it?”
“Who d’you have in mind?”
Pouncy shrugged. “The CIA. Who else?”
“Then ask them.”
“Your daddy worked for them, didn’t he?”
“A lot of people say he did, but you’ll have to ask the people out at Langley.”
“Already have,” Pouncy said. “At least, I got somebody to ask for me. Somebody with a little more clout than I got since mine’s right down there next to zero. Know what they told him, this deacon of mine with all the clout? Told him they got no trace of any Steadfast Haynes ever working for them.”
“I’m not surprised,” Haynes said.
“Not surprised at what? That they didn’t have any trace of him? Or that they’d lie about it?”
“Take your pick,” Haynes said.
After Sergeant Pouncy left to take his wife to church, Haynes checked with the concierge and found that he had eight messages. Six of them were from Mr. Burns. The other two were from Mr. McCorkle, who had called at 8:42 A.M., and Mr. Padillo, who had called at a quarter past nine.
Up in his room, Haynes called Tinker Burns first at the Madison Hotel and listened to the phone in room 427 ring nineteen times before the hotel operator suggested that Mr. Burns must not be in his room. Haynes agreed, thanked her, broke the connection and called McCorkle.
When his daughter answered the call, Haynes said, “Your dad left a message for me to call him. Is he apoplectic?”
“Apologetic,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’d better let him tell you.”
Although she obviously had covered the mouthpiece with her hands, Haynes could still hear the yell. “Pop. It’s Granville.”
There was the sound of an extension phone being picked up, followed by McCorkle’s voice. “Granville?”
“Yes.”
McCorkle was silent for a few seconds until he sighed and said, “Okay, Erika, hang it up.”
Once his daughter did so, McCorkle said, “I’ve got rotten news.”
“How rotten?”
“I was stuck up last night by a false frump with a dummy bomb and a silenced Sauer thirty-two.” He paused, sighed again and said, “She got Steady’s manuscript. I’m very sorry.”
There was a long pause that Haynes finally ended with, “A silenced Sauer is what a pro would use. But the dummy bomb’s a new touch. I’d like to hear about it after you answer one question.”
“What?”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Only my pride.”
“Then you must’ve done everything exactly right.”
“Padillo doesn’t think so.”
“She take both of you?”
“Just me. But Padillo’s even more burned than I am. He saw her heading out the front door, carrying that grocery bag the manuscript’s in. He thinks he should’ve stopped her.”
“I think he’s lucky he didn’t try.”
“We’d like to get together,” McCorkle said. “The three of us.”
“That must be what he called about,” Haynes said. “When?”
“Noon today?”
“At the restaurant?”
“His place,” McCorkle said and recited an address. “It’s a small town house in Foggy Bottom. The best way to get there is—”
“I’ll let the cabdriver find it,” Haynes said.
“Just one other thing,” McCorkle said. “I want to thank you for looking after Erika last night. I was worried about her being out in that blizzard.”
“It was my pleasure.”
“Yes,” McCorkle said. “I imagine it was.”
Chapter 24
The nine-hour blizzard had dumped eleven inches of snow on Reston, Virginia, the carefully planned new town that was no longer new and had been built twenty-four years ago not far from Dulles International Airport and—depending on the traffic—within reasonable commuting distance from the District line.
Reston’s eleven inches of snow would lie undisturbed for a day or so before it was either melted by the sun or, less likely, shoveled and plowed away by removal crews. Meanwhile, Reston residents could ice-skate on Lake Anne, the thirty-two-acre artificial pond that had been named for the daughter of the town’s visionary founder, who, pressed for cash, had sold out to Gulf Oil, which in turn had been swallowed by Chevron.
Whenever this much snow fell, some Restonites got out their skis to test weak ankles on gentle slopes. Others hauled out the $65 Flexible Flyers they had ordered by phone from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue during bouts of nostalgia, and went coasting down the steepest slopes they could find.
One skier, well bundled up against the cold in sweater, ski pants, ski mask, dark glasses and knitted cap, glided expertly down the center of the sloping Waterview Cluster Drive and came to a neat stop in front of 12430, a three-story town house that was almost at the end of the cul-de-sac.
The town house, one of the first built on the shores of the artificial lake, featured a small wooden dock, a loggia, two bedrooms, two baths, two fireplaces and an outside steel spiral staircase that went from the dock up to a second-floor balcony. When new in 1965, the town house had sold for $32,500 with ten percent down. Its mirror twin, three doors up, had sold a month ago for $225,000.