Twilight at Mac's Place m-4

by Ross Thomas

  “Three.”

  “Still prefer to be seated with your back to the wall?”

  “Old habits, good or bad, die hard.”

  “But as Proust noted, they also fill up time. This way, please.”

  After he had seated them at a banquette, handed out the menus and complimented Gelinet by name on what he called her frock, Herr Horst, as even Padillo called him, examined Granville Haynes and said, “We haven’t had the pleasure of your custom, Mr. Haynes, since September of nineteen seventy-four when you and your father dined with us. It was your eighteenth birthday, as I recall, and you were off the next day to the university at Charlottesville.” Herr Horst paused, dropped his voice to a somber note and added, “I was extremely saddened to learn of his death.”

  “You’re very kind,” said Haynes.

  Still studying his menu, Tinker Burns said, “You ever think of maybe taking that memory act of yours on the road with some carnival?”

  “Not recently,” Herr Horst said.

  Burns looked up. “The McCorkle around?”

  “Alas, no.”

  “What about Padillo?”

  “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  Herr Horst’s lips twitched, as if he were considering a smile. “But he would be desolate were he not told.”

  After the maître d’ turned and marched slowly away, still leading his invisible procession, a waiter hurried over to take their drink orders. Burns wanted a martini, straight up; Gelinet, a vermouth; and Haynes, a bottle of Beck’s. Arriving with the waiter and the drinks was Michael Padillo.

  Haynes couldn’t remember Padillo from that seemingly endless birthday dinner of more than fourteen years ago. Yet there was something about him that he found oddly familiar.

  Recalling the long-ago birthday dinner, Haynes discovered he could easily draw a mental picture of the man Tinker Burns had referred to as the McCorkle—a big man, well over six feet, who had stopped by their table to exchange pleasantries and quips with Steadfast Haynes. McCorkle had been wearing too many laugh lines around self-mocking eyes that were either hazel or brown. He also had a skeptical grin, most of his hair and the build of a middle-aged jock who had long since stopped bothering with the Canadian Air Force exercises. But the real reason you remember him so well, Haynes decided, is that he sent over two cognacs, which was the first time a publican ever bought you a drink.

  Still watching Padillo, who was bowing over the hand of a smiling Isabelle Gelinet, Haynes found himself reverting to his abandoned role of homicide detective as he measured Padillo’s height at a little less than six feet; weighed him in at 160 or 165; classified his nose as straight-long, his mouth as thin-wide; judged his complexion to be a light olive, his hair a gray-streaked dark brown.

  Haynes wondered briefly whether Padillo was part Mexican or part Spanish but decided it didn’t really matter because he’d never seen anyone with that many years move with so much athletic grace, which usually was the franchise of those who’d made a living from it on some playing field—or in rings where they send in either the bull or another middleweight.

  What made Padillo so strangely familiar to Haynes were his eyes. Not their color, which on Haynes’s private chart was coded as Gray-Green Cools #1, but rather their look of semi-devout fatalism. This look, he believed, was acquired only by those who at some risk have peered into the human abyss and aren’t at all reassured by what they’ve seen.

  Haynes had known old homicide badges, nearing their pensions, who had worn that same look. So had two poets, one young, one old, both women. And once, on the rooftop of a Wilshire Boulevard office building in Westwood, a forty-seven-year-old psychiatrist had turned to gaze briefly at Haynes with that same look just before he turned yet again and stepped off the edge.

  It was Isabelle Gelinet who introduced Padillo to Granville Haynes. After they shook hands, Padillo said he was very sorry about Steady’s death. Haynes thanked him and asked whether they had been close friends.

  “Close acquaintances,” Padillo said.

  “You knew Steady well enough to have shown up at Arlington,” Tinker Burns said. “Either you or the McCorkle.”

  Padillo, still standing, examined the seated Burns as if for signs of moth and rust. “McCorkle’s out of town and I no longer go to funerals.”

  “Then you must miss out on a lot of quiet satisfaction,” Haynes said.

  The small surprised smile Padillo gave him was that of a very minor prophet discovering his first disciple. It encouraged Haynes to say, “Join us for a drink?”

  Padillo thought about it, agreed with a nod and glanced at a waiter, who hurried over with a chair. Once seated, Padillo resumed his inspection of Tinker Burns, nodded again, as if partially satisfied, and said, “That arms boutique of yours must be flourishing, Tinker.”

  “A steady, unseasonal demand,” Burns said. “Much like the toilet paper business.”

  The waiter returned with a pale drink that could have been either plain ginger ale or a very weak Scotch and water. Padillo ignored it and looked at Gelinet. “Who showed, Isabelle?”

  “We three—and a man from Langley. Gilbert Undean.”

  “They send him?”

  “He said he’d known Steady in Laos and volunteered before he got sent.” She shrugged. “But who can say?”

  Padillo picked up his drink, tasted it and put it back down. “I heard Steady died of a stroke in the Hay-Adams the night before the inauguration. He wasn’t in town for that, was he?”

  “We were here for the North trial,” she said. “Steady had booked us rooms for the next three months.”

  “Why so early?”

  “He was trying to arrange for a permanent seat in the courtroom.”

  “Did he know North?” Granville Haynes asked.

  “Not North,” she said. “But he’d known Secord since the Congo and, of course, Albert Hakim.” She paused. “And some of the others.”

  “Dear Albert,” Tinker Burns said and, displaying a remarkable flair for mimicry, added, “ ‘Just let us handle the money, Ollie, so you won’t be burdened with all that tedious bookkeeping.’ ”

  “Was he in on it, Tinker?” Haynes asked.

  “Steady? Nah. Nowhere near it. And it’s too bad in a way. If they’d’ve had Steady doing the retouch, Secord, Hakim, North and the others might be thinking about what they oughta say at Oslo when they got handed the peace prize.”

  Haynes turned to Padillo and said, “My old man and the truth were never more than nodding acquaintances.”

  “He was exactly what he claimed to be—a propagandist,” Gelinet said. “And a superb one.”

  Haynes stared at her. “That’s what I just said. What I don’t understand is why he’d want to spend weeks or even months in some courtroom.”

  “It was to be the epilogue,” she said.

  “To what?”

  “His memoirs. He thought the North verdict, however it goes, would serve as the perfect metaphor for an epilogue—although there won’t be one now.”

  “No book or no epilogue?” Padillo said.

  “No epilogue.”

  “But there will be a book?”

  She shrugged.

  “Who’s in it?”

  Isabelle Gelinet made a small but encompassing gesture that managed to capture the restaurant, Washington and half the world.

  Padillo rose. “Then I’ll have to buy a copy, won’t I?”

  Chapter 5

  Standing at the very end of the long line, McCorkle rearranged his expression into one of terminal boredom and used a foot to shove his ancient one-suiter toward customs at Dulles International Airport. For years he had been convinced that a bored look, when combined with a suit and tie, made the perfect match to the U.S. Customs Service’s profile of the innocent traveler.

  Still looking bored, McCorkle watched two Federal dogs, both mutts, sniff out a pile of luggage for drugs. He continued to watch the dogs when a roving unifo
rmed customs inspector appeared at his elbow and said, “Nice flight?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Could I see your passport?”

  McCorkle turned and began the search, slowly patting his pockets with no sign of panic. He finally removed the passport from his hip pocket, the last one left, and handed it over, trusting that his carefully unhurried search was another hallmark of innocence.

  The inspector opened the passport and leafed through it. “Frankfurt, huh?”

  “Frankfurt,” McCorkle agreed.

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Neither. My wife’s brother died. We went to his funeral.”

  The inspector glanced around as if hoping to discover a Mrs. McCorkle. “She stayed on?”

  “There was some family business to clear up.”

  “Your wife’s first name, Mr. McCorkle?”

  “Fredl.”

  “Eine gute Deutsche Hausfrau, ja?”

  “Washington correspondent for a Frankfurt paper.”

  “You’re kidding. Which one?”

  After McCorkle told him, the inspector nodded approvingly and said, “The serious one.”

  “Profoundly so.”

  “And what do you do, Mr. McCorkle?” the inspector asked, his eyes pricing the five-year-old gray worsted Southwick suit McCorkle had bought on sale at Arthur Adler’s.

  “I run a saloon.”

  “In Washington?”

  “Right.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Mac’s Place.”

  “Ate there once,” the inspector said. “Not bad.” He looked down at the passport again, read the name “Cyril McCorkle” aloud and looked up with a smile. “Bet everybody calls you Mac.”

  “You win.”

  The inspector bent down, marked the old suitcase with a piece of chalk, straightened and handed McCorkle a slip of paper that was the treasured laissez-passer. “Take the express line, Cyril,” the inspector said. “And welcome home.”

  McCorkle later blamed his sunglasses for having caused the case of mistaken identity in front of Mac’s Place just after he paid off the taxi, picked up his old suitcase and turned. Although his eyesight in recent years had gone from near perfect to good to the stage where he now needed reading glasses, McCorkle refused to wear prescription sunglasses because he couldn’t remember, offhand, ever having read a book all the way through in the sunshine. And since he felt the need to blame something, he blamed the sunglasses for causing him to mistake the man who came out of Mac’s Place for the late Steadfast Haynes.

  “It was a quarter past three or a little earlier,” he said as he later recounted the incident to Padillo. “And he was in the shade and the sun was just low enough to stab me right in the eyes. So when I looked away from the sun into the shade, there he was—same tennis-pro build, same walk that makes you wonder when he’ll start tap-dancing and that same face.”

  “But a face at least twenty-five years younger,” Padillo said.

  “Not if you’re half blind from the sun and looking into deep shade through dirty dark glasses. So what I saw were the same moves, height, build—plus a face that shade, sunglasses and memory were adding twenty-five years to.”

  “The world’s most honest face,” Padillo said.

  “I always felt it was those flag-blue eyes.”

  “Plus the resolute chin and that most serene brow.”

  “But somehow you knew nobody could be as honest as Steady looked,” McCorkle said. “So just before you started edging away from him, he’d grin that god-awful kid’s grin that could melt rocks.”

  “And also make you want to believe everything he said.”

  “Another mistake,” McCorkle said. “How big a tab did he run up?”

  Padillo shrugged. “A few hundred dollars that we might as well eat.” He paused, obviously curious. “So what’d you say to him?”

  “Well, since I didn’t know he was dead, I said, ‘How the hell are you, Steady?’ ”

  Granville Haynes said, “I’m afraid he’s dead, Mr. McCorkle.”

  McCorkle put the old suitcase down, removed his dirty sunglasses, stared at Haynes and said, “When?”

  “About a week ago. A stroke.”

  “Then you’re…Granville, right?”

  Haynes nodded. “We buried him earlier today. At Arlington.”

  “I’m very sorry,” McCorkle said. “I didn’t know. I would like to have been there.”

  “Thank you. Tinker Burns flew in. Isabelle Gelinet was there. And some guy from Langley.”

  “I know Padillo would’ve gone except—”

  Haynes interrupted him with a smile. “He told me.”

  McCorkle found the smile to be an exact and uncanny replica of the one the late Steadfast Haynes had so successfully employed. “How long will you be in town?”

  “A day or two. I have to see a lawyer whose office seems to be in this same building.” He looked up. “They just built it over and around you, didn’t they?”

  “We were lucky,” McCorkle said.

  “The lawyer’s name is Mott. Howard Mott. You know him?”

  “He’s one of our landlords.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “I don’t know how he is on probate,” McCorkle said, “but if I ever got in a real jam, he’s the one I’d call.”

  Haynes smiled his inherited smile again. “Sounds like Steady’s lawyer, doesn’t it?”

  Chapter 6

  Mott, James, Lovelandy & Nathan specialized in the defense of white-collar criminals and had grown from two to fourteen partners in less than eight years. With offices that now occupied the top three floors of their seven-story building that crouched over Mac’s Place, the firm was prospering almost indecently because of the bevy of frightened clients who had retained its costly services during the final years of the Reagan administration.

  Howard Mott, one of the two founding partners, looked as if he had been assembled from mismatched parts by unskilled labor. He stood a bit under five-ten, had a long, long trunk supported by stubby legs and required custom shirts with thirty-seven-inch sleeves. For eyes he had a pair of shiny black vibrant things that glared out from deep inside the two small dark caves they dwelt in.

  But most people, especially those in jury boxes, usually forgot what Mott looked like once he opened his mouth. He had a deep voice that would do anything: entreat, thunder, cajole, accuse, reason and even sing a remarkably bawdy parody of how they were hanging Michael Deaver in the morning.

  Mott’s principal asset, however, was his mind, which a respectable majority of the Washington legal fraternity, not all of them admirers, agreed was brilliant.

  He lived in an old three-story house in Cleveland Park with his thirty-six-year-old wife, Lydia, who was expecting their first child in July. Mott usually felt that he was as lucky as anyone deserves to be and it bothered him, although not very much, to discover he was almost envying the man who sat in the client’s chair across the desk.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t make the services,” Mott said. “But I had to be in court all morning. And I’m very, very sorry that Steady’s gone.”

  “Thank you,” Granville Haynes said.

  “You sure as hell look like him, don’t you?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “I’ve sometimes wondered how it would be to go through life with Steady’s looks.”

  “It makes some people, especially women, mistrust you.” Haynes paused, didn’t quite smile and added, “At first.”

  “Then it’s just like being ugly, isn’t it?”

  “I never quite thought of it like that, Mr. Mott.”

  After a deep sigh, Mott said, “Better call me Howard. When I’m through with what I have to say, you may want to go back to ‘Mr. Mott.’ ”

  “Bad news?”

  Mott leaned back in his chair to study Haynes. “Depends upon your expectations.”

  “Nonexistent.”

  “That’s fortunate because Stea
dy died broke—or damn near.”

  Haynes said nothing.

  “His principal assets consist of the farm near Berryville and a ’seventy-six Cadillac convertible with around forty-three thousand miles on it.”

  “Now comes the ‘but,’ ” Haynes said.

  “A realist, I see,” Mott said with a small approving nod. “But the farm is only twenty acres and has a ramshackle 119-year-old house, a fair barn and two very fat mortgages. If sold, it might net twenty or even thirty thousand, once the two mortgages are paid off.”

  “He left it to me?”

  “To Isabelle Gelinet.”

  “Good.”

  “You know her, I understand.”

  “Since I was three and she was four. Or maybe it was the other way around. We grew up together for a time. Playmates. In Nice. Then Steady married stepmother number two and we moved to Italy.”

  “Sounds like a strange childhood.”

  “Different anyway,” Haynes said. “Does Isabelle know about the farm?”

  “Not from me, but Steady might’ve told her.”

  “What about his debts?”

  “Maybe two or three thousand around town and to American Express. Nothing major.”

  “I’ll take care of them.”

  “No rush.”

  “How’d he live?” Haynes asked. “I mean he hadn’t really worked at anything for two or three years, had he?”

  Mott inspected the ceiling. “I’m trying to decide how circumspect I should be.”

  “As much as you like.”

  Mott brought his gaze back down. “We did Steady’s taxes because he always said he wanted one-stop service. Our house CPA did them. Steady received a check for four thousand dollars every month from Burns Exports et Cie. in Paris. The check was always earmarked ‘For Consultative Services.’ ”

  Sounding more amused than surprised, Haynes said, “So old Tinker was carrying him.”

  “Out of what? Compassion? Moral obligation?”