Twilight at Mac's Place m-4

by Ross Thomas

  This lighting, or lack of it, had been chosen by McCorkle and Padillo long ago after a series of unscientific experiments had convinced them that midsummer twilight—at a certain moment not too long after sunset, but well before moonrise—was precisely what was needed to flatter the features of customers over thirty, yet enable them to read the menu without striking a match. Customers under thirty, McCorkle had argued, would regard the gloom as atmosphere, maybe even ambience.

  Haynes counted four solitary males at the long bar, all of whom bore the stamp of practicing topers. At widely separated tables, two obviously married couples dawdled over coffee and dessert, as if dreading the prospect of home and bed. A pair of waiters, one old, the other young, stood talking quietly in their native tongue. Something the young waiter said made the old one yawn.

  Herr Horst, his coat off, was making short work of a trout at the management table near the kitchen’s swinging doors. He looked up from his supper, saw Haynes and pointed, thumb over shoulder, to the office in the rear, then returned to the trout.

  When he reached the office door, Haynes knocked, waited for the “Come in” and entered to find Padillo, in shirt sleeves and loosened tie, seated at what Haynes thought was his side of the partners desk, a pot of coffee and two cups at his elbow. Padillo indicated the brown leather couch. Haynes sat down.

  “Why would anyone kill her?” Padillo asked.

  Haynes said, “Where’d you first meet Steady?”

  “Coffee?” Padillo said.

  Haynes shook his head.

  Padillo poured himself a cup, sipped it, put the cup down, leaned back in the chair, put his feet on the desk and crossed them at the ankles, revealing muted argyle socks but no shoes. “I met him in Africa,” Padillo said. “In the early sixties.”

  “Where in Africa?”

  “What’re we going to do—trade confidences?”

  “It might be useful.”

  After thinking about it, Padillo said, “Then I’ll go first and begin with Isabelle. Maybe I’ll get to Steady later. Maybe not.”

  “Fine,” Haynes said.

  With his feet still on the desk, his hands and forearms relaxed on the arms of his chair, Padillo, staring at Haynes, began to speak in a voice so quiet and uninflected it was almost a monotone. Leaning forward a little to make certain he missed nothing, Haynes suspected Padillo must have used that same quiet voice to tell truths, half-truths and lies to other trained listeners, and found himself wondering who they were and what languages had been spoken.

  “Nine years ago this month,” Padillo said, “a twenty-four-year-old French woman walked in here and introduced herself as Isabelle Gelinet of Agence France-Presse. She said she’d been sent over from Paris to write fluff features on the presidential campaign and election. But she didn’t want to write fluff and wondered whether I could help her with advice, tips, introductions, anything. Her sole personal reference was a letter from Tinker Burns to me.”

  “Not the most impeccable reference,” Haynes said.

  “But an interesting one.”

  “Where’d you first meet Tinker?” Haynes asked.

  “In France.”

  “When?”

  “March of ’forty-five.”

  “Was that after he parachuted in with the fifty thousand in gold that fell into the Loire and never quite made it to the Resistance?”

  “One of Steady’s taller tales, right?”

  Haynes confirmed the guess with a nod and said, “They send you after Tinker?”

  “Who?”

  “The OSS.”

  “I had better things to do,” Padillo said. “But in ’forty-six in Marseilles, I believe I did bump into Tinker again and mention that the Army’s CID was getting warm, thus earning his eternal gratitude. On Tinker time, of course, eternity is about two and a half weeks.”

  “That must’ve been when he joined the Legion.”

  “About then,” Padillo said. “But to get back to Isabelle. When she walked in here with nothing but Tinker’s letter, it hit me that she might be more than just another kid reporter looking for the big break.” He paused. “Although God knows this town’s always had a surplus of them.”

  “L.A., too,” Haynes said.

  “So I introduced her to Karl Triller.”

  “Your bartender.”

  “And minority stockholder.”

  “The one who helped nurse Steady through his fourth divorce.”

  “The same,” Padillo said. “For more than twenty years Karl has studied congressional antics. It’s been a very thorough, very German study, and notice I said antics, not actions.”

  “I noticed.”

  “What began as a hobby turned into an informal clearinghouse of information.”

  “A gossip exchange.”

  Ignoring Haynes’s clarification, Padillo said, “Karl gets quoted a lot by air and print reporters, although never by name. He’s always a veteran Congress watcher, a well-informed source, or that grand old standby, the seasoned Washington observer. It was Karl who tipped Isabelle off to a couple of stories that she beat AP on and impressed her editors so much that, after the nineteen eighty conventions, they assigned her to the Bush campaign and, in the final month, to Reagan’s.”

  “A couple of nice hops,” Haynes said.

  “So nice that soon after the election she began getting invitations. To dinners. Embassy receptions. Various balls. Intimate gatherings of twelve in Spring Valley. Things like that. Sometimes she needed an escort; sometimes she didn’t. When she did, she usually asked me, probably because I had a dinner jacket and knew how to tango.”

  Haynes grinned, which again caused Padillo to realize how closely the son resembled the dead father. “Anyway,” Padillo said, “we lasted eighteen months, maybe twenty, and then came Steady.”

  “What’d he have to offer other than limitless charm?”

  “New directions.”

  “Leading where?”

  “To covert action fiascoes. Terrorism, theirs and ours. An assortment of foreign intrigue imbroglios. Homegrown money spies. Redefecting defectors. It was heady times and Isabelle began to wonder if it wasn’t mostly because old Bill Casey was back.”

  “Back?”

  “From his glory days in OSS.”

  “You knew him then?”

  “In a way.”

  “And Isabelle?”

  “Eventually, she did an unauthorized and very unflattering three-part profile on Casey,” Padillo said. “She had a lot of help from Steady and a mixed bag of Casey watchers he’d rounded up for her. A few even let her quote them by name. She later sent me a copy of the piece. I think I still have it somewhere—a hell of a story. But twenty minutes after AF-P moved it, they sent out a kill. Isabelle got mad and quit, did some free-lancing for a while, then moved in with Steady at his farm either to write or help him write his memoirs—or so I gathered from what she said at lunch today.”

  After studying Padillo for almost fifteen seconds, Haynes said, “You haven’t always run a saloon, have you?”

  “I’ve always wanted to.”

  “What’d you do before you and McCorkle opened this one?”

  “We ran one in Bonn.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “They blew it up.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “McCorkle’s always been convinced it was the CIA who supplied the bomb and the KGB who threw it.” He smiled slightly. “But then McCorkle has a rather jaundiced view of world events.”

  Another silence was again ended by Haynes, talking at first to the floor, then to Padillo. “Isabelle was my oldest friend. We grew up almost next door in Nice. When Tinker came back from the Legion, Dien Bien Phu and all that, he rented a room in the house of a pregnant widow in Nice. Three months later, Isabelle was born. Tinker stayed on as Madeleine Gelinet’s paying guest, lover and surrogate father to Isabelle. In nineteen fifty-nine my mother died. I was three. Steady and I moved from Paris to Nice and rented a house
three doors up from Madeleine Gelinet. That’s how Steady and I met Isabelle and Tinker.”

  “I’ve wondered,” Padillo said.

  “Not long after Steady married my stepmother number one, he and Tinker were off to the Congo—but on different sides. When Tinker came back, he started up his arms business and resumed his on-again, off-again affair with Isabelle’s mother.”

  “Where’d he get the capital?” Padillo asked. “One day Tinker’s an out-of-work mercenary, the next day he’s a budding international arms dealer.”

  “He stole it. He and Steady. Want the details?”

  “I don’t think so,” Padillo said. “When’d you last see Isabelle—before today?”

  “Almost twenty years ago. It was just before Steady had me fly here to enroll in St. Alban’s. By then, I was living in Italy with stepmother number two. As always, Steady sent cash. So I took a bus to Nice, saw Isabelle and caught a flight from Paris to Washington. But before I left Nice, Isabelle and I swore our undying love, which expired six or seven months later. But we always wrote each other long letters at Christmas—until she moved in with Steady.”

  “Who stopped writing?”

  “She did.”

  “I would’ve guessed you.”

  “Along with my old man’s goofy smile, I also inherited a lot of his goofy laissez-faire attitudes.”

  Padillo took his feet down from the desk and slipped them into a pair of black loafers. As he bent down to tug the left shoe up over his heel, he said, “Is there really a book?”

  “Steady’s lawyer and your landlord handed me a manuscript this afternoon.”

  “You look at it?” Padillo said, once more leaning back in his chair.

  Haynes nodded.

  “A lot of people in this town would pray they’re not in it.”

  “Think you’re in it?”

  “I hope so. It might give our lunch business a boost.”

  Haynes rose. “Like to see it?”

  Padillo nodded. “Especially if it has an index.”

  “It doesn’t, but McCorkle was kind enough to put it in your safe for me this afternoon.”

  Padillo examined Haynes thoughtfully. “The Willard has a much better safe.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  “But the Willard also gives receipts and keeps records.”

  “Right again,” Haynes said.

  Padillo rose, went over to the old safe, spun the combination and tugged open the heavy door. From the safe he took the folded-over grocery sack and handed it to Haynes, who placed it on the partners desk. “Have a look,” Haynes said.

  Padillo studied him again, briefly this time, before turning to the desk and removing the brown-paper-wrapped package from the sack. He read the address label and asked, “Steady mailed it to himself?”

  “He thought it would ensure the copyright’s validity.”

  “Did it?”

  “It was already valid.”

  Padillo slowly removed the wrapping paper and lifted the top from the Keebord box. He read the title page without expression, then the four lines by Housman and the dedication to the dead author’s son. After reading the two sentences that composed Chapter One and also the entire book, Padillo quickly leafed through the rest of the blank pages, turned to Haynes and said, “Why’d you really want me to see this?”

  “Because you were Isabelle’s friend.”

  “Did this all begin as one of Steady’s diddles?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there a book somewhere?”

  “I’m not sure, but everything you just read is copyrighted—except the Housman quote.”

  Padillo carefully put the top back on the box. “And what can you do with the copyright to a two-sentence book?”

  “I can sell it.”

  “As is?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Who to?”

  “The highest bidder. Which is when I might need a little help.”

  Padillo nodded, but it was a noncommittal nod. “And who do you think the highest bidder will be?”

  “Whoever killed Isabelle,” Haynes said. “Or had her killed.”

  Chapter 15

  Erika McCorkle picked Haynes up in front of the Willard Hotel at exactly 7 A.M. that Saturday, each of them surprised at the other’s promptness. After muttered good mornings, she handed him a plastic container of Roy Rogers coffee and sped them to Pennsylvania Avenue and M Street, then across Key Bridge and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway in what Haynes suspected was record time, even for a Saturday morning.

  After passing the road sign that beckoned passersby to CIA headquarters, Haynes ended the long silence with a question: “You usually eat breakfast?”

  “Never. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not much on morning chatter either,” she said.

  “Turn on the radio.”

  She said it was broken.

  Another silence began and lasted until she turned off to take the Old Georgetown Pike that dipped and curled its way through rolling Virginia countryside. They were now in a holdout exurbia of wintry browns and grays where a faded bumper sticker on an old Volvo station wagon begged for propertied recruits to enlist in a rearguard action against unnamed developers. Haynes guessed it was a skirmish the exurbanites had already lost.

  In some of the deeper brush- and tree-protected gullies—or runs, which were what Haynes remembered arroyos were called in Virginia—he could see patches of dirty snow. And since the sky was overcast with dark wet-looking clouds, he asked Erika McCorkle if she had heard a weather forecast.

  She glanced at him, frowning at his tweed jacket, gray slacks, blue tie-less shirt and absent topcoat. “Fifty percent chance of snow—or can you remember what snow is?”

  “I saw some two weeks ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Big Bear.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up in the mountains a couple of hours east of L.A.”

  “You went skiing?”

  “I did a commercial.”

  “You were in a TV commercial?”

  “Right.”

  “What’s a homicide cop doing in a TV commercial?”

  “Selling mustard.”

  “That yellow hot-dog stuff?”

  “Grey Poupon. And I’m no longer a homicide cop. I quit. Three weeks ago. Almost four.”

  “And now you’re what—security consultant to the rich and famous?”

  “An actor.”

  There was another silence that lasted long enough for the Cutlass to accelerate from fifty to sixty-eight miles per hour. “An actor,” she said. “Steady was an actor, which is probably why I believed everything he said—some of the time.”

  “You’re doing seventy-three,” Haynes said.

  She slowed the car to fifty. “Did it just happen?”

  “You mean like cancer?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “A TV producer’s fourteen-year-old daughter was killed and raped in that order. I nailed the guy, and the producer was so grateful he decided to make my dreams come true by offering me a one-line part in his cop series that was about to be canceled.”

  “Was it your dream?”

  “No. But he thought it was everyone’s. So I did it. An agent caught the episode, called up and asked if I’d like to do more TV stuff. We had lunch and she said I might make a bare living at it because the camera was kind to me. But if I wanted to make a decent living, I’d have to go against the box.” He paused. “She talks like that.”

  “What’d she mean?”

  “That there’re an awful lot of blond guys in Hollywood who want to play lifeguards and fighter pilots because they look like lifeguards and fighter pilots are supposed to look.”

  She glanced at him. “You could play a fighter pilot. An older one.”

  “I’d rather play a bank teller turned embezzler.”

  “You look too honest.”

  “E
xactly her point.”

  “When’d you get the big break?” she said, slowing down for the red light at the intersection where the Old Georgetown Pike met the Leesburg Pike. “The one that let you quit the cops.”

  “About three weeks ago,” he said.

  “What’s the part?”

  “I get to play a working stiff who wins a million-dollar lottery.”

  She sniffed. “Not too original.”

  “No,” Haynes said, “but I think I’ll enjoy it.”

  By the time they reached the outskirts of Leesburg they were hungry and Erika McCorkle claimed to know an old diner, a real one, where the food was cheap, fast and good. But the old diner had been demolished to make way for a discount appliance store and they had to settle for a Denny’s a little farther on.

  Inside, Haynes pretended to listen to Erika McCorkle’s diatribe against the destruction of places and things that composed her memories. She stopped only when the waitress came over, handed them menus and waited until they both ordered chicken fried steaks at 9:16 in the morning.

  A little more than an hour later they reached Berryville, the Clarke County seat. Its four- or five-block-long Main Street offered two traffic lights, two banks, two restaurants (one open, one permanently closed), the usual antique shops and too many marginal-looking businesses. Haynes thought the closed restaurant must have been the place where Berryville’s establishment once gathered for morning coffee.

  After he asked Erika McCorkle to double-park, Haynes got out and bought a newspaper from a vending machine. The paper’s masthead said it was an independent publication established four years after the Civil War and published every Thursday.

  Back in the car, Haynes turned the page until he came to the obituaries. “He made it.”

  “Who?”

  “Steady,” Haynes said and began reading aloud. “ ‘Steadfast Haynes, 57, of Route 1, Berryville, died Monday in Washington, D.C., where he was to have attended the inauguration.’

  “Paragraph. ‘Born in Philadelphia, Haynes served in the Korean conflict, later attending the University of Pennsylvania, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He subsequently joined the U.S. State Department, serving in Africa, Central America, the Middle East and Asia. Mr. Haynes had lived in the Berryville area for the past several years.’