he did.”
“How’d you know about the horse?”
“Steady told me about—what’d he call him, Zip?—a year or so ago. But I forgot about him till Steady’s ex-wife called me.”
“When?”
“The morning after Steady died. She was worried about the horse. I told her I’d take care of it and to stop worrying. What’s wrong?”
“Somebody shot the horse.”
There was a brief silence until Mott said, “What d’you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“Good,” Howard Mott said and hung up.
Chapter 18
They began the search upstairs, where they discovered three bedrooms, one bath, two old mirrored wardrobes and a lone closet. Haynes’s inspection of the bathroom medicine cabinet revealed an empty bottle of St. Joseph’s aspirin, a new toothbrush still in its plastic package and somebody’s diaphragm.
The smallest of the three bedrooms was meanly furnished with a thin mattress on a brass bed that was little more than a cot. An oval rag rug lay beside it on the pine floor that had been stained a dark brown. A chest of drawers, painted Chinese red, was empty. The other furniture consisted of a 1940s bridge lamp, a straight-backed wooden chair and an ancient wardrobe whose mirror was turning silver-gray. Haynes looked inside the wardrobe, found two wire coat hangers and decided he was in a guest room that had been deliberately furnished to discourage long stays.
They found little of interest in the next bedroom other than a short stack of explicit sex magazines in a bedside table drawer. The magazines featured photographs of pairs of naked women, fairly young, who groped and grabbed each other while apparently trying to decide whether to fix hamburgers or meat loaf for dinner.
Erika McCorkle flipped through one of the magazines and called it a sexual crutch. Haynes went through another issue more slowly and said nothing. As he put the magazines back into the table drawer, Erika McCorkle gave the room a further inspection and said, “I don’t know why, but this doesn’t look like Steady’s room to me.”
“Maybe it was Isabelle’s.”
Erika McCorkle nodded at the table that held the magazines. “Those were hers?”
“Maybe,” Haynes said, went to the wardrobe and opened it, revealing some neatly hung dresses, blouses, pants, skirts and, below them, a half dozen pairs of women’s shoes. He closed the wardrobe door, turned to Erika McCorkle and said, “This must’ve been her room unless Steady was into cross-dressing.”
“And the magazines?”
He shrugged. “Maybe when Steady got the urge, he’d hurry down the hall, hop into bed and they’d lie there, flip through the magazines and get it on. But if you’re really curious about which way Isabelle went, ask Padillo.”
“Go to hell,” she said and stalked out of the room.
Haynes caught up with her in the third and last bedroom, the only one with a closet. She was standing near the double bed, sniffing at something. “This was his room,” she said. “You can still smell the cigarette smoke.”
Haynes opened the two doors of the wide shallow closet. There were six blue shirts and six white shirts from Paul Stuart that had been bought in New York or Tokyo or, more likely, by mail order. The shirts were on hangers and looked as if they had been washed and ironed by loving hands.
A row of tweed jackets, all remarkably alike, took up another yard of closet space. The rest was occupied by a dozen pairs of gray and tan trousers, which were followed by a dark blue suit, a windbreaker and a Burberry raincoat with raglan sleeves.
Haynes knew he was viewing a collection of the semi-uniforms his father had worn throughout his adult life, even in the hot countries. He remembered color photographs—mostly Polaroids—obviously taken in one tropical clime or other, where Steadfast Haynes’s dress code had been either a blue or white long-sleeved oxford button- down shirt, but no tie, tan cotton pants and shoes that didn’t have to be laced up. If it were only hot, the shirt sleeves might be rolled up two full turns; if sizzling, they might be rolled above the elbows.
“Steady’s room,” he agreed and shut the closet door.
Turning to give it all one final look, Erika McCorkle said, “Not much, is there? No watercolors on the walls or oriental rugs on the floor. No snapshots of you at seven or nine. No souvenir ashtrays from Djakarta or assegai spears from Africa.”
“They didn’t use assegais where he was and he traveled light.”
“And alone?”
“Nearly always.” Haynes gave the room his own final inspection. “This must be the only house he ever owned.”
“What’d he do with his money?”
“Lived well, spent it on alimony and sent me to expensive schools.”
“Which university?”
“Virginia.”
“Huh,” she said. “That’s where I went.”
