Keyes cocked his head to examine Haynes almost sympathetically. “You don’t even know you’re raving, do you?”
Haynes raised a forefinger to his lips. “Shhh. They’ll hear us.”
When they reached Keyes’s dark blue Buick sedan, Haynes stared at it for fifteen seconds, not moving, not even breathing.
“I’ve seen this fucking car before,” he said and walked slowly all the way around it, pausing to kick two of the tires. He then whirled on Keyes and said, “This is the fucking car she shot at me from.”
“She?”
“Your heiress wife. Muriel Lamphier Keyes.”
“Shot at you, did she?”
“Last night at the Bellevue Motel out in Bethesda where nobody knew I was, except Muriel. She used a twenty-two rifle, probably loaded with longs. Could’ve wiped me out if she’d wanted to. Hell of a good shot.”
“You saw her?”
“I saw this same exact car take off like a scalded snake right after she shot at me. Now I’m about to be taken for a ride in it. You might like coincidences, but I hate ’em.” Haynes sounded even less happy when he asked, “This really your car?”
Keyes quickly unlocked the passenger door, as if to prove ownership. Haynes got in. After Keyes was behind the wheel, Haynes said, “Muriel borrowed your car last night, right? Sure she did. Probably scooted over in the seat, rolled down this very same window, used the sill for a rest—maybe even had herself a scope—squeezed off three rounds, bang, bang, bang, and missed me by inches on purpose.”
Keyes started the engine and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea of what you’re talking about.”
“Stick up for her then. I don’t blame you.”
With a sigh, Keyes asked, “Where to?”
“Straight out Connecticut to the District line. Makes a nice drive and ought to give us plenty of time to talk.”
“About the Undean memo,” Keyes said, pulling away from the curb. “Whatever that is.”
Haynes said nothing for nearly two minutes, then snarled his question. “Where the fuck was she Sunday morning right after the big snow?”
“It’s none of your fucking business, but she was with an old friend in McLean.”
Haynes’s expression turned sly, his voice insinuating. “Muriel a pretty fair skier?”
“She didn’t go skiing in McLean.”
“No, but she skied right up to old Gilbert Undean’s front door in Reston, didn’t she? All masked and goggled and bundled up so nobody could tell if she was male, female or in between. Undean let her in. Can’t really blame him for that since she was pointing her piece at him. They go up the stairs to his office. Maybe they talk a little; maybe they don’t. Or maybe they reminisce about old times in Vientiane when Muriel got caught fucking some woman’s husband, and how the woman got mad and shot him and then fought Muriel for the gun, but Muriel won and shot the woman dead. All that was in the Undean memo.”
“Really,” Keyes said.
“This is all old stuff to you, isn’t it, Ham? In the memo it says you were the guy who brought the money from Saigon to Vientiane that paid off the slope general who covered the whole mess up. What a nasty piece of shit he must’ve been. But it wasn’t a total loss because that’s when you met Muriel, right?”
“That’s when I met her,” Keyes said, stopping for a light at Connecticut and Columbia Road.
“Can’t be too hard to fall for a beauty who’s got sixty million bucks in the bank. Most guys wouldn’t have any trouble at all—even if Muriel is kinda weird. Take old Gilbert Undean. He was still covering up for her after all these years.”
“Covering up what?” Keyes said, sounding a bit interested for the first time.
“In his memo Undean claims the two-hundred-thousand-dollar payoff to the slope general was spook money. But it wasn’t. It was Muriel’s. Of course, that’s no flash to you since you were the bag man who toted it to Vientiane.”
Keyes frowned, looking almost puzzled. “You’re claiming the two hundred thousand wasn’t agency money?”
“Hey! I said something he didn’t already know. Lemme ask you this: Where’d you pick up all that cash in Saigon? At a bank? The embassy?”
“It was delivered to me.”
“Who by?”
“You don’t ask.”
“White man?”
“Yes.”
“You sign for it?”
“Never.”
“Well, there you go. It wasn’t agency money. It was Muriel’s. You wanta know what really happened?”
Keyes shrugged.
“I didn’t hear that, Ham.”
“I’ll listen.”
“Okay. Here’s the no-shit story. After Steady makes his deal for the cover-up with the general, he tells Muriel she’s gotta come up with two hundred K—all cash. Now, Muriel could’ve asked the spooks for it. And maybe they’d’ve come up with it and maybe they wouldn’t have. But she’d’ve had to tell ’em all about what a wife-killer she was and once they heard that, they’d’ve bounced her back home and out of the agency, right?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, two hundred K’s no problem to Muriel,” Haynes said, recalling the information Erika McCorkle had relayed to him from Padillo. “But the slope general is an all-cash kind of guy, and there’s no way Muriel can lay hands on that much cash in twelve hours or whatever time she’s got. But Steady knows how.”
“He would,” Keyes said.
“Steady knows some three-for-two black-market guys in Saigon who’ll front Muriel the two hundred K if she’ll pay back three hundred K in a week or ten days. Well, what’s a hundred thou in vigorish to somebody like Muriel? So she says, swell, let’s do it.”
“I doubt that she said ‘swell,’ but go on.”
“Okay. She and Steady’ve got the money all lined up. But now they’ve gotta figure out how to get it from Saigon to Vientiane fast. Very fast. And that’s where you come in, Ham.”
“Steady’s choice. I suppose I should be flattered.”
“You were first pick because Steady figured that when you heard the Lamphier name, bells would go off. Cash register bells. You know the kind in old-timey cash registers that rang when you—”
“You’re wearing it out,” Keyes said.
Haynes smiled not only at his cash register metaphor but also at the irritation it had caused Keyes. “Bet it was love at first sight. You and Muriel.”
“Hardly,” Keyes said. “Are you sure Undean didn’t know it was Muriel’s money?”
“Absolutely positive. The only ones who knew were Muriel and Steady—plus the three-for-two guys in Saigon.”
“But you said none of this was in Undean’s memo.”
“You calling me a liar, Ham?” Haynes said, trying to turn the question into a softly spoken death threat and not at all displeased with the result.
“Merely curious,” Keyes said.
“I accept your apology.”
“I made none.”
“But the thought was there and I shouldn’t blame you for asking dumb questions. If I was married to somebody who’d knocked off three people, I’d sure as hell want to learn everything about her I could.”
“Please answer my question,” Keyes said.
“Okay. I found out about the money stuff in Steady’s memoirs.”
“You read them?”
“What else would I do—lick it off the page?”
“When?”
“Right after I found them yesterday—or was it the day before? But lemme tell you one thing about the memoirs and it’s just what I said in the senator’s office. They’d make just one hell of a picture.”
“May I ask where you found the manuscript?”
“Sure. In Steady’s car. He had this old Caddie ragtop that he left me in his will and I’ve been driving it around. Well, it had a flat and when I changed it, there was the manuscript in a nice safe nest under the spare. And you wanta know something else about Muriel—about her and the old Caddie?”
Keyes nodded once as if he no longer trusted himself to speak.
“Muriel tried to buy the Caddie on the Q.T. because she figured the manuscript might be in it. She didn’t try herself, of course. What she did was hire some pro hitter, a guy called Horace Purchase, to buy it. Ever hear of him?”