and concluded you’d left the grocery bag with me for safekeeping.” McCorkle paused to sip his drink. “Safekeeping suggests a locked box of some kind. Maybe even a safe.”
“Someone had a tail on him,” Padillo said.
“Maybe,” Haynes said. “I wasn’t in Howard Mott’s office more than ten minutes before he got a call. By then he’d handed me all those blank pages. The call was from a lawyer, some ex-senator who wants to buy all rights to Steady’s memoirs for an anonymous client. He offered one hundred thousand. On my instructions, Mott told him I wanted five hundred thousand because I claim to know where I can raise enough offshore money to turn Steady’s life into a film I’d write, direct and star in. Mott may even have told him I was going to produce it.”
“What’d the ex-senator say?” McCorkle asked.
“He moaned and groused, then said he’d have to consult his client and get back to Mott on Monday. Tomorrow.”
“Any other offers?” Padillo said.
“One.”
“Who from?”
“After Isabelle was killed,” Haynes said, “and after I’d talked to the cops and was up in my room at the Willard, a guy from the CIA dropped by and offered me fifty thousand.”
“Sight unseen?” McCorkle said.
“Nobody seems to want to read the thing,” Haynes said. “They just want to bury it. I told the CIA guy about the hundred thousand I’d just turned down, then gave him the same crap about turning the memoirs into a feature and finished by telling him my new asking price was seven hundred and fifty thousand.”
“What’d he say when he recovered?”
“He seemed pleased—in a strange kind of way.”
“Heard from him since?” Padillo said.
“Indirectly,” Haynes said. “He’s the dead body Tinker Burns discovered out in Reston. Gilbert Undean.”
McCorkle leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling. Padillo rose and stood, staring at the fire. Finally, he turned to Haynes and said, “Steady left you a mess, didn’t he?”
“He led a messy life.”
“Our lady of the silenced Sauer,” McCorkle said, still gazing at the ceiling. “I keep wondering just how pissed off she was as she leafed through those three hundred and eighty-odd blank pages.”
“If she is pissed off,” Haynes said, “she’s pissed off at you guys, not at me. She might even suspect you two of pulling a switch. She might even suspect that you know where the true manuscript is.”
“I think,” Padillo said to McCorkle, “that we’ve just been invited to the dance.”
“Summoned is more like it,” McCorkle said. “I wonder if it’ll be fast or slow and if I can remember the steps.”
“You might still manage a waltz,” Padillo said. “If it’s not too brisk.”
“You’ve already accepted, right?”
Padillo nodded and said, “Isabelle,” as if the dead woman’s name explained everything.
McCorkle took a moody swallow of his drink, the last swallow, placed the glass on a table and turned to Haynes. “What d’you plan to do—auction the memoirs off, or at least pretend to?”
“Only the rights to them.”
“What if the bidders demand a quick peek?”
“Each bidder is already convinced of what’s in them,” Haynes said. “If they weren’t convinced, they wouldn’t be bidding.” He smiled then, that charming smile he had inherited from his dead father. “But the important thing now is to convince the bidders that the true manuscript is guarded by a pair of dragons.”
“He means us,” Padillo said.
“Then he means a pair of old dragons with dull claws, missing teeth and not too much fire left in their bellies.”
Haynes smiled his inherited smile again and said, “You could even let it be known around town that for a slice of the gross you’ve agreed to handle—what’s the best thing to call it, the security?—on a very fat but very murky deal.”
“I suppose we could drop a discreet word here and there,” Padillo said, looking at McCorkle, who frowned, as if trying to think of ears a discreet word could be dropped into. A moment later the frown disappeared and he smiled contentedly.
“I believe this is called setting out the bait,” Padillo said.
Haynes nodded. “If the prospective buyer or buyers believe they can steal what otherwise they’d have to pay a great deal of money for, I think they’ll try to steal it.”
“Especially,” McCorkle said, “if they’re convinced that only the Alzheimer boys will be guarding it.”
“It might be better,” Haynes said, “if they hear that I’m guarding the true manuscript and that you two’re guarding me.”
“How easy or hard do you want us to make it for them?” Padillo said.
“Medium hard.”
