Padillo tapped the memo. “Now I understand your problem. Tomorrow you have to be in two places at the same time.”
“Exactly.”
“And you want me to be at the other place.”
“You and McCorkle.”
Padillo grimaced slightly, as if at some seldom-felt tinge of regret or even a pang of self-reproach. “I should’ve told McCorkle.”
“You knew?”
“Not when she came in. She fooled me with her frumpy outfit and that shuffling walk. But when she came out of the office, she was in a hurry, forgot her shuffle and shifted into her long athletic stride that’s hard to forget once you’ve seen it. And that’s when I knew it was Muriel Keyes.”
“But you didn’t know about the fake bomb then?”
“Not then.”
“And you haven’t told McCorkle it was Mrs. Keyes?”
“No. I haven’t told him.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe because he wasn’t hurt—except for some injured pride. Or because of my secretive nature. Or because of Muriel and me a long time ago. Or maybe I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“It just dropped.”
“So it did,” Padillo said and again tapped the Undean memo. “This suggests that Mrs. Hamilton Keyes walked in here with a fake bomb and out with an equally fake manuscript to save her husband’s career and her neck.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t know,” said Padillo. “But why not let McCorkle ask her tomorrow?”
Chapter 44
At 3:21 A.M. that Tuesday, Granville Haynes left Howard Mott’s house on Thirty-fifth Street Northwest and drove back to the Willard in twenty-four minutes. At eight minutes to four he entered his room to find Erika McCorkle propped up in bed, reading a paperback novel that had on its cover a huge Nazi swastika formed out of human bones.
“Who’s winning?” Haynes asked as he stripped off his topcoat and jacket and hung them in the closet.
“The Krauts—but it’s only nineteen forty.”
Haynes removed two sheets of stapled-together paper from his jacket’s inside breast pocket and crossed to the bed. “More ancient history,” he said as he handed them over.
Erika put her book down and accepted the stapled papers without glancing at them. “You look tired,” she said.
“I am.”
“Come to bed.”
“I’ll take a shower while you read it.”
She looked at the first sheet. “The notorious Undean memo. I thought Howie Mott said nobody but you should read it.”
“He changed his mind,” Haynes said. “Padillo’s read it. And by now so has your dad. Mott is probably reading it for the fourth or fifth time.”
Erika read the memo’s first line, muttered, “My God,” and, without looking up, said, “Go take your shower.”
When Haynes came out of the shower ten minutes later, wearing a hotel robe, he found Erika still propped up in bed against the pillows, staring at the far wall, the memo now in her lap. She had locked her hands behind her head, which thrust her breasts out against the thin fabric of the thigh-length T-shirt that was her nightgown. Silk- screened across the front of the T-shirt was the line “This Space Available.”
She stopped staring at the wall to stare at Haynes. “Have you told the cops yet—Detective-Sergeant what’s his name?”
“Darius Pouncy. No.”
“Why not?”
“Because a lot of the memo’s conjecture and there’s no proof that Undean wrote it. Maybe Tinker wrote it.”
“Couldn’t they compare the typing with Undean’s typewriter? The FBI’s always doing that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe Tinker wrote it on Undean’s typewriter.”
“You really think she killed Isabelle and stuck a pistol in Pop’s face?”
“I believe she stuck a pistol in McCorkle’s face,” Haynes said.
