Twilight at Mac's Place

by Ross Thomas

  “No idea.”

  “Guess.”

  “Maybe a guy prowling for a TV set. Maybe the neighborhood rapist. Maybe even some weirdo who followed her home and got off on tying her up and drowning her in the bathtub.”

  “They said there weren’t any signs of forced entry.”

  “Forced…. entry,” Haynes said, spacing the words as if to savor them. “Let’s say he rings the bell from downstairs. Isabelle asks ‘Who is it?’ over the intercom and he says it’s Federal Express. Well, Federal Express people are about as common as mailmen. I know guys in Century City who use Federal Express to send scripts from the tenth to the thirty-sixth floor by way of Memphis. So Isabelle buzzes him up. He knocks at her door. She opens it on the chain and sees this guy with a clipboard and a Federal Express packet he’s fished out of the trash can. She opens the door all the way and winds up dead in the bathtub.” Haynes paused. “How’d you get in?”

  “When I pulled up in the limo there was an old couple coming out who held the door for me. Isabelle’s door was unlocked.”

  “A limo’s almost as good as being from Federal Express. You don’t expect a killer to take one to work. Although there were two guys in L.A. who used to hire limos whenever they decided to go stick up a bank.”

  “Know what I think?” Burns said.

  “What?”

  “I think it’s got to do with that book she and Steady wrote.”

  “Must be some book.”

  Burns turned to give Haynes his coldest stare. “The difference between you and me, kid, is I’ve got a damn good idea of what Steady did over the years. How he did it and who to. Who paid him and how much. And last, but as sure as hell not least, who told him to go do it.”

  “What about lately, Tinker? Fifteen, ten, even five years ago is ancient history.”

  “You’re forgetting it’s a brand-new administration.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a succession.”

  “But the guy who took the oath last Friday was DCI when certain people at Langley went after Steady back during the Ford administration. Jesus. It was like a vendetta. Let’s all jump up and down on Steady Haynes. Then it stopped. All of a sudden. It was just like Steady gave the rug a jerk. Just a little one—know what I mean?”

  “Thirteen or fourteen years ago is the Ice Age.”

  “Yeah, but what you’ve got now is the first Director of Central Intelligence ever to be President, which they don’t seem to mention much anymore. So maybe Steady decided it was time to give the rug another jerk, harder this time, just to see what’d happen. So he checks into the Hay-Adams with Isabelle and tries to fix himself up with choice seats at the North trial. He’s advertising, that’s what he’s doing, because you know damn well Steady’s not gonna pop for the Hay-Adams when Isabelle’s got a free-for-nothing pad up on Connecticut.”

  “Advertising what?” Haynes said.

  “That he’s got something to sell.”

  “His book?”

  “What else?”

  “And after he died, you think Isabelle decided to solo?”

  “How the hell you think she got him buried at Arlington? Remember when I asked her if she’d blackmailed them into it? And she said, ‘Of course.’ I was kidding. She wasn’t.”

  “Tell me something, Tinker. Do you think you’re in Steady’s book?”

  “What the fuck kind of question is that?”

  “The kind you should avoid answering,” Haynes said.

  Just before leaving Mac’s Place, Haynes had called United Airlines to have the bag he had left in its care sent to the Willard. When the rented gray limousine dropped him at the hotel, after first depositing Tinker Burns at the Madison, Haynes was pleasantly astonished to discover the bag had been delivered.

  A Latino bellhop was dispatched to collect it from the checkroom. Haynes used the time to inspect the restored lobby that boasted a concierge desk that resembled a flower petal built out of rich-looking yellow marble. There was also a long, long corridor or promenade that led off the main lobby and seemed to go on forever. A bellhop later told him it was called Peacock Alley and went all the way to F Street. Both it and the lobby boasted big comfortable-looking chairs, convenient tables and a near jungle of potted palms growing out of glazed Chinese pots.

  It all looked like old expensive stuff or like new old stuff that was three times as expensive. Haynes thought a fifth of the lobby must have been dipped in gilt. There was an abundance, maybe even a wealth of intricate plaster moldings. Huge milky chandeliers of the half-globe variety hung down from thick bronze chains. Haynes started to count them and had reached number twelve when the bellhop returned with his bag.

  In the elevator, the bellhop boasted that the mint julep had been introduced to Washington in the Willard bar by a certain Señor Henry Clay. Haynes said he hadn’t known that.

  After the bellhop was tipped and gone, Haynes discovered yet again that regardless of price a hotel room is primarily a box the bed comes in. His $145-a-night box also came with a bath, two phones, a radio, a TV set, a miniature refrigerator and a window with a view of the National Press Building across Fourteenth Street where quite a few people, mostly men in shirt sleeves, still seemed to be working.

  Haynes had just finished hanging up his other jacket and his other pair of pants when he heard the knock. After opening the door he found Gilbert Undean standing in the corridor, wearing a sheepish look and the same clothes he had worn to Steadfast Haynes’s interment.

  “Got a minute?” Undean said.

  “Come in.”

  Undean entered the room and looked around curiously. “First time I’ve been up in one of these rooms in twenty-five years. I was out of the country when they closed the place in ’sixty-eight after downtown business went to hell.” He nodded approvingly. “Pretty fancy. They claim Julia Ward Howe wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ here. Or in the Willard that was here way back then. But it’s probably bullshit.”

  “I sometimes enjoy bullshit,” Haynes said. “Care for a beer or something?”

  “A beer’d be fine—if you’re having one.”

  Haynes removed two cans of Heineken from the small refrigerator, opened both and handed one to Undean, who took a long swallow, sighed and sat down in an armchair. Haynes chose the edge of the bed.

  “They heard about Isabelle Gelinet,” Undean said.

  “They?”

  “The agency.”

  “You must be their utility mourner.”

  “I’m not here to express condolences. I’m here because of that book Steady wrote.”

  “What about it?”

  “They want to buy it.”

  “Why not just suppress it the way they did some others I can think of?”

  “That’s what I told ’em. They said they can’t because, one, Steady’s dead, and two, he never worked for them. At least they can’t prove he ever did.”

  “How do they know about the book?”

  “Gelinet. She used it to blackmail them into burying Steady at Arlington.”

  “That’s all she asked for?” Haynes said. “No money?”

  “Just a plot of hallowed ground,” Undean said. “I’m quoting them. They thought they’d got off cheap.”

  “Have they read it?”

  Undean drank two more swallows of beer, then shook his head. “Say they haven’t.”

  “But they think Isabelle’s murder and the book are somehow connected.”

  “They get paid to think like that. First I heard of the book was this afternoon right after they buried Steady. I told ’em to buy it and save themselves a lot of grief. They laughed it off.”

  “Why’d you tell them to buy it, Mr. Undean?”

  “Because I knew Steady. Saw him operate and know some of the corners he cut, the lies he told, the deals he made, the promises he broke, the deaths he caused.”

  “He killed people?”

  “The things he did and the lies he told caused people to die. And those who
died put the fear of God in the ones who managed to stay alive. Their minds got changed. And maybe their politics. When you get right down to it, Steady was sort of a mental terrorist.”

  “My father, the mindfucker.”

  “And damned good at it, too.”

  “In Laos?”

  “That’s where I watched him work. Even hurrahed him on some. I’ve only heard about what he did in other places, but I believe eighty percent of what I’ve heard.”

  “What’s the real reason they didn’t try to buy the book after Isabelle told them about it?”

  “No demand.”

  Haynes frowned. “I just lost my place.”

  “No demand for dog vomit,” Undean said after a swallow of beer. “That’s what they figured Steady’s book’d be and why there’d be no demand for it. Even if it got published, nobody’d buy it. But when Gelinet got killed, the price of dog vomit shot up and now they figure there must be a big demand for it after all.”

  “Have they figured out where the demand’s coming from?”

  “They’re still working on that.”

  “How bad do they want it?”

  Undean shrugged. “Pretty bad.”

  “What’s your lowball offer?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “And you can bump it to what?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Cash?”

  “Any way you want it.”

  “What happens to the book?”

  “What book?”

  “Will they read it before it goes into the shredder?”

  “I doubt it. If they read it, it’d ruin their deniability. If nobody reads it, then nobody knows what’s in it and they can deny all knowledge of its contents. Then it’d be just like it was never written.”

  “What if I read it before I sold it to them?”

  “I’d advise you not to mention it.”

  “And fifty thousand is your best offer?”

  “That’s it,” Undean said. “So what do I tell ’em?”

  “Tell them I want a minimum of seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “They’ll fall about laughing.”

  “When they’re finished, tell them I know where I can put my hands on enough offshore development money to produce a feature film based on Steady’s book. Tell them I’ll also direct, write and play the lead. And finally, you can tell them the name of the film will be the same as the book, Mercenary Calling.”

  Undean smiled for the first time that night. “I’ll also tell ’em you look just like him.”

  “One more thing, Mr. Undean.”

  Undean nodded, still smiling.

  “Tell them I’ve already had an unsolicited offer of one hundred thousand for all rights to the manuscript but turned it down. So if they want to stay in the bidding, they’d better start thinking in terms of important money.”

  Undean’s smile broadened until he looked almost delighted. “Know what else I can say? I can say you not only look and talk just like him, you also think just like him. Except faster. And right after I tell ’em that is when they’ll start passing peach pits.”

  Chapter 11

  Howard Mott, the criminal defense lawyer, ignored the flashing red light that meant his telephone was ringing. With his feet up on an ottoman and the rest of him sunk into a favorite armchair, Mott was listening to the final act of Tosca on a new compact disc that magically had recaptured the voice of Leontyne Price with Karajan conducting.

  It was 9:47 P.M. and Mott had been lost in the opera since a dinner of roast pork tenderloin that a second cognac was helping him digest in his study-cum-music room on the second floor of the large old house on Thirty-fifth Street Northwest in Cleveland Park. His household had been given firm instructions not to disturb him for any reason—his household consisting solely of his pregnant wife, the former Lydia Stallings.

  The red telephone light stopped flashing, but stayed on, which meant that Lydia had taken the call. The light was still on a minute or so later when she entered and silently handed him the yellow three-by-five Post-it notepad she always used for messages. This message read: “G. Haynes on phone. I. Gelinet murdered. Needs advice & counsel.”

  Mott sighed and looked at his watch. There were at least fifteen or twenty minutes of Leontyne Price to come. He took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and scrawled something on the yellow notepad. Lydia read it, borrowed the pen and wrote, “He be hungry?”

  Mott quickly answered the written question with a firm headshake, hoping it would discourage her from preparing a meal that would feed everyone within walking distance. He blamed his wife’s growing compulsion to feed the world on her pregnancy and the two years she had spent in the Peace Corps.

  In the kitchen, Lydia Mott picked up the beige wall phone and said, “Mr. Haynes? Howie’s worried that you may not have eaten and wonders if you could make it out here by ten or ten-fifteen? He’ll be having some soup and sandwiches then and thought you might like to join him.”

  Haynes hung up the hotel room phone and memorized the Thirty-fifth Street address he had written down. He put his hand back on the phone, hesitated, picked it up, tapped a number for an outside line, then tapped 411 and asked directory assistance for the number of Mac’s Place.

  Haynes recognized the faintly Teutonic tones of Herr Horst when a man’s voice answered with, “Reservations.” Haynes identified himself and asked to speak to Michael Padillo, adding that it was a personal call.

  Thirty seconds later another voice said, “This is Michael Padillo.”

  “Granville Haynes. Sorry, but it’s bad news.”

  “All right.”

  “Isabelle’s dead. She was murdered sometime this afternoon in her apartment. Tinker Burns and I found her.”

  There was the usual silence. When he had first joined homicide, Haynes often suspected that such silences would never end or, at best, continue on and on into next week. But he soon discovered that they ended quickly, usually with a sob, a curse or an expression of disbelief. Sometimes with all three.

  Padillo, however, ended his brief silence with the essential question: “Who killed her?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “They have any idea?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was found in the bathtub, her head under water, her wrists and ankles wired with what looked like coat hangers. No other visible marks or abrasions.”

  “Drowned?”

  “Maybe. An autopsy will tell.”

  There was another silence before Padillo said, “You’ve known her a long time, haven’t you?”

  “About as long as I can remember.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Steady?”

  “It might.”

  “I want—well, I’d like to talk to you about it.”

  “All right.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “The Willard.”

  “Can you come over here?”

  “I have to see a lawyer first.”

  “Can you make it by midnight?”

  “Probably.”

  “I’ll be here,” Padillo said.

  The table was the one McCorkle and Padillo always reserved for themselves, the one near the swinging kitchen doors that everybody else shunned. It allowed them to keep an eye on both the help and the customers. It also allowed the chef to poke his head out occasionally to ask a question, register a complaint or merely satisfy himself that someone was really eating his cooking.

  When the call for Padillo came, the three of them had almost finished a celebratory dinner in honor of Erika McCorkle’s completion of her university studies. All celebration ended when Padillo returned to the table, sat down as if he had grown suddenly weary, pushed away his plate and said, “Isabelle’s dead. Apparently murdered.” He then repeated in a low voice everything he had been told about the death.

  McCorkle was the first to speak, but only after he leaned back in his chair to study Padi
llo carefully. It was then that he sighed and said, “I’m sorry, Mike. There was always something splendid and unique about Isabelle. I’m going to miss her.” He paused. “They have any idea of who did it?”

  “No.”

  Erika McCorkle had turned pale. When she tried to speak, it came out as a croak. She cleared her throat, and this time it came out as a whisper. “In her—bathtub?”

  Padillo nodded.

  “Drowned?”

  “Possibly.”

  Still whispering, she said, “Then it’s all my fault.”

  “Why yours?” Padillo said. “And why all the whispering?”

  She made no reply, letting the silence continue until she finally spoke again in a voice not much louder than her whisper. “Because I used to daydream about her drowning. But not in a bathtub. In the Anacostia.”

  McCorkle, an eyebrow raised, looked at Padillo, as if hoping for an explanation. But Padillo only shrugged. McCorkle turned back to his daughter and asked, “Why did you dream about her…drowning?”

  “I told you. I was jealous.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” McCorkle said.

  She frowned, staring at him. A moment later the frown vanished and she said, “Right. It wasn’t you. It was Granville Haynes I told. This afternoon.”

  “You told him you were jealous of Isabelle because of her and Steady?”

  The frown returned. “Not of her and Steady.” She looked at Padillo. “Of Isabelle and you.”

  Padillo stared at her as his right hand dipped automatically into his shirt pocket, seeking the cigarettes he had abandoned five years ago. “Christ, kid,” he said. “Isabelle and I ended it when you were thirteen, maybe fourteen.”

  Although her expression seemed to be one of pity, there was only scorn in Erika McCorkle’s voice when she said, “You have no idea, do you?”

  “Of what?” Padillo said.

  “Of what vicious daydreams a lovesick thirteen-year-old can have when the man she’s in love with is fucking somebody else?”

  Nodding calmly, Padillo said, “Go on.”

  “With what?”

  “With why it’s all your fault.”

  “Because I used to daydream about it and—and, oh God, I’m so sorry she’s dead.”