that?”
“Maybe she panicked,” Haynes said.
Erika shook her head and said, “Anyway, Isabelle refuses to divulge—another Undean word—where the manuscript is and Muriel—you want me to go into all that? There’s a whole lot of gruesome detail.”
“No need,” Haynes said.
“Undean suggests that regardless of whether or not Isabelle revealed where the manuscript was, Muriel couldn’t let her live because Isabelle knew her festering Laotian secret. That festering phrase is mine, not Undean’s. So Isabelle dies and you and Tinker Burns discover her body. As soon as Hamilton Keyes learns of Isabelle’s death, he summons Undean and instructs him to offer up to fifty thousand for the memoirs. Undean then goes into a lot of self-justification about how, earlier that same day, he had urged Keyes to buy the memoirs from you and how Keyes pooh-poohed the idea. Anyway, Undean finds you and offers the fifty thousand and you turn it down. Undean then reports to Keyes about how you’d also turned down the one hundred thousand from the senator and are now asking five hundred thousand because you think you can make a film out of Steady’s life. Undean then counsels Keyes to walk away from the deal. And that’s the end of the Undean memo.”
“You did very well,” Haynes said.
“I have a good memory.”
“What was left out?” Haynes asked. “By Undean?”
“Well, he couldn’t tell how Muriel killed him.”
“Well, no,” Haynes said. “But what else?”
“There’s almost no mention of Tinker Burns and none of Horace Purchase.”
“Undean wouldn’t have known about Purchase and must’ve assumed that Tinker found Isabelle’s body by accident.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“What’s your overall impression?”
“It all seems to be aimed at giving Muriel Keyes sufficient motive. If she can’t buy or destroy the memoirs, she can at least do away with the remaining witnesses to the Laotian mess. With Steady gone, the only witnesses left are Undean, her husband and—since she wrote the memoirs—Isabelle.”
“Why do you think Tinker was killed?”
“I guess he was trying to blackmail her with the Undean memo.”
“A logical guess.”
“Why did you ask me to make that…that recitation?” she asked. “Your real reason?”
“The memo’s too smooth—too logical. Too neat. I wanted to see how it would sound if it came out disjointed.”
Erika’s eyes went wide. “You bastard! You know who killed them all—Isabelle and Undean and Tinker Burns.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You know something. I can tell.”
“The only thing I know for a fact is that Gilbert Undean didn’t write that memo.”
Chapter 45
McCorkle shifted his position again, trying to accommodate his long legs to Padillo’s 280 SL. After failing to cross them for the third time, he said, “You ever think of buying something a little more sedate and comfortable—maybe a Volvo station wagon?”
Padillo ignored the question and said, “He should’ve left by now.”
“It’s only a little after nine and the meeting’s not till ten.”
“Keyes isn’t one to arrive last at any meeting,” Padillo said. “Especially this one.”
They were parked on California Street two houses east of the Georgian one that belonged to Hamilton and Muriel Keyes. They assumed that when Keyes left he would probably head west—away from them—then south. Otherwise, he would have to cope with California Street when it suddenly turned one-way.
“He’s in there, sipping his second cup of coffee out of a gold-rimmed Haviland cup,” McCorkle said. “And we’re trapped in this clapped-out roadster with a slit top that lets in wind with a chill factor of fifteen degrees. And what have we got to drink? Cold Roy Rogers coffee in plastic cups.”
“Howard Johnson coffee,” Padillo said.
“I haven’t had a cup of Ho-Jo coffee in twenty years and, by my troth, it hasn’t improved any.”
“I’d almost forgotten,” Padillo said.
“What?”
“What a sunbeam you are in the morning.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
“Open the window.”
