Twilight at Mac's Place

by Ross Thomas

“Right. It won’t take long.”

  Letty Melon smiled for the first time. “No, it probably won’t.”

  She rose and began walking toward a wall of books at the room’s far end. Burns rose and followed. In front of the books was a black walnut library table. On it was a white Keebord stationery box. Letty Melon indicated the box and said, “Help yourself.”

  Burns stared at the box, picked it up gently, gave it a little shake, put it down and carefully removed its lid. He bent over slightly to read the title page, then lifted out all 386 pages and placed them almost reverently on the table. After turning the title page facedown on the table, he read the Housman lines, turned them facedown, read the dedication to Granville Haynes, put it facedown on top of the other pages and began reading Chapter One. He read its two lines, stopped, read them again and slowly turned his head to glare at a now grinning Letty Melon.

  Burns opened his mouth, as if to say something, changed his mind and, his face now turning a dangerous red, flipped quickly through the remaining blank pages. It was then that he straightened, turned and bellowed his question: “Where the fuck is it, Letty?”

  “You’re looking at it, Tinker, just as I found it. A fake manuscript. If you want it, it’s all yours.”

  Tinker Burns turned back to the four-inch-high stack of mostly blank pages and, after arranging them neatly, put them back in the box and replaced the lid. He picked up the box, cradled it against his chest and looked around the room, as if trying to remember where he’d left his coat.

  “I’ll talk to Granny,” he said, more to himself than to Letty Melon. “He’s gotta know where it is.”

  “What if there isn’t any book?” she said. “What if it’s Steady’s farewell hoax? His last lie?”

  He stared at her long enough for his face to resume its normal tanned and weathered look. “Then a couple of people died for nothing, didn’t they?”

  Chapter 29

  Granville Haynes, propped up in bed on pillows and wearing only Jockey shorts, looked up from a New York Times feature about Hollywood agents to watch a nude Erika McCorkle stroll out of the bathroom, cross to the wheeled room-service table and pop a cold French-fried potato into her mouth. From there she went to the closet to slip on a long white terry-cloth robe that the Willard Hotel gently warned guests they would be billed for if they stole it.

  While tying the robe’s belt, she said, “That was the best seventeen-dollar-plus-tip cheeseburger I ever ate.”

  A mildly bawdy response occurred to Haynes but before he could utter it the phone rang. He picked it up, said hello and heard a pleasant baritone voice ask, “Mr. Haynes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m replacing Gilbert Undean.”

  “Not in the morgue, I trust.”

  There was a hesitation, not quite long enough to be considered a pause, before the baritone said, “Then you’ve heard?”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “On the radio?”

  “I haven’t listened to a radio recently.”

  “Perhaps from Mr. Padillo then? Or even from Mr. Mott, who, I understand, is now representing Tinker Burns.”

  “Since you’re dropping names, why not drop yours?”

  “Not over the phone,” the baritone said. “I was hoping you’d come down to the lobby and join me for a drink.”

  “We can drink up here.”

  “You’re asking me up?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything, Ace. But if we talk, we talk up here in front of a witness.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Too bad,” Haynes said and hung up.

  Erika McCorkle said, “Who the hell was that?”

  Haynes shook his head and held up a warning hand. The telephone rang a moment later. He answered it with, “Well?”

  “Who’s your witness?” the baritone asked.

  “Think of her as my fiancée,” Haynes said, causing Erika McCorkle to chuckle.

  “Her name?”

  “Introductions aren’t necessary. You know who I am but I don’t know who you are. That gives you the advantage.”

  “A very slight one.”

  “Take what you can get.”

  There was another hesitation that this time lasted long enough to qualify as a pause. “Five minutes?”

  “Make it ten,” Haynes said and broke the connection.

  Erika McCorkle returned to the room-service table, picked up another French fry, bit off half of it, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed and asked, “Who were you on the phone just then?”

  “Hardcase Haynes of Homicide.”

  “A bit overdone, wasn’t it?”

  Haynes smiled. “Think so?”

  She frowned. “Unless that wasn’t acting.”

  A silence grew as she waited for his response. When he made none she untied the robe’s belt and said, “I’ll get dressed.”

  “Don’t,” Haynes said as he rose from the bed, picked up his shirt and began putting it on.

  Erika McCorkle slowly retied the robe’s belt as she watched him button the shirt and pull on his pants. When he sat down and reached for a sock, she said, “You’re setting the scene, right? The remains of a room-service meal. The half-drunk drinks. The rumpled bed. And the unmistakable reek of sex on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “I want an edge,” Haynes said.

  “And where do you want me—recumbent on the bed, showing a little thigh, a glimpse of tit?”

  Haynes now had one sock on, changed his mind, stripped it off and stuck both bare feet into his loafers. “I want you on the bed, well wrapped in the robe and doing the Times Sunday crossword puzzle. With a ballpoint.”

  Her grim expression vanished, replaced by her sunshine smile. “Blasé and bored, right?”

  “Exactly,” Haynes said, rose, found the crossword puzzle and handed it to her along with a ballpoint pen. She rearranged the pillows, settled cross-legged onto the bed, tucked the robe carefully around her, glanced at the puzzle, then looked up at Haynes and asked, “What does whoever he is want?”

  “He wants to offer me a lot of money.”

  “For Steady’s memoirs?”

  Haynes nodded.

  “Will you take it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Maybe tomorrow—or the next day.”

  She gave him a sudden smile that Haynes thought was full of childlike anticipation—her can’t-wait smile.

  “God, this is interesting,” said Erika McCorkle.

  Exactly ten minutes after Haynes had hung up the telephone, there was a soft knock at the door. He opened it to admit the courtly Hamilton Keyes, carrying a gabardine topcoat and still wearing his old tweed jacket, corduroy pants, pink shirt and ancient loafers.

  Once inside, Keyes’s glance flickered past Erika McCorkle to inventory the room itself, noting the wheeled table, the female clothing draped carelessly over a wingback chair, the bucket of melting ice, the half-full glasses and the two empty miniature bottles of vodka and Scotch. Done with his survey, he turned to Haynes and said, “I’m Hamilton Keyes. I knew your father.”

  After a nod from Haynes that was mere acknowledgment and nothing more, Keyes turned to Erika McCorkle, who still sat cross-legged on the bed, obviously engrossed in her puzzle. “I also know your father slightly, Miss McCorkle.”

  “How nice,” she said without looking up.

  “Have a chair,” Haynes said, wondering how Hamilton Keyes had managed to identify Erika so quickly.

  The courtly man chose the chair draped with female clothing. He picked it up, a piece at a time, placed it on top of the mini-refrigerator, sat down, topcoat in his lap, and said, “As I mentioned, I also know Michael Padillo.”

  Haynes was now leaning his rear against the sill of the window that overlooked Fourteenth Street. “Who else?”

  “Quite a few people across the street in the National Press Building—many of whom, I’m afraid, keep binoculars in their desk drawers.”


  Realizing he had just been given a polite, if oblique, reply to his unasked question about how Erika McCorkle had been so quickly identified, Haynes abandoned the windowsill, drew the curtains, crossed to the writing desk and leaned against that.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Are you the guy who can say yes or no?”

  “I am, providing you’re the guy who has something to sell.”

  “Steady left his memoirs to me in his will. The copyright to them anyhow.”

  “Have you read the manuscript?”

  “Some of it.”

  “And do you still think it might make a motion picture?”

  “All-American boy—Steady, of course—turns badass mercenary agent. That’s one film they won’t have to clutter up with a lot of boring cold-war spy crap.”

  “But surely not yet another dreary motion picture with no hero?”

  “There’ll be a hero: Steady’s kid, the overeducated, ex-L.A. homicide cop who backtracks Steady’s life while hunting down whoever killed his old man’s two best friends. And if Steady and Undean weren’t really all that friendly, well, we can fudge it a little.”

  “I presume you’d play both Steady and yourself?”

  “My catapult to stardom.”

  “Well, I must say you do resemble him—in more than one respect.” Keyes looked away and rested his eyes on Erika McCorkle. He was still looking at her when he said, “How much?”

  “The same price I quoted Undean,” said Haynes. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

  “A very respectable sum,” Keyes said, now looking at Haynes.

  “For a very hot property. It’s so hot that Steady wasn’t three hours in his grave before somebody was offering me a hundred thousand for it.”

  “Which you rejected?”

  “Yes.”

  “And demanded how much instead?”

  “Half a million.”

  “And what was the reaction to your counterproposal?”

  “They said they’d get back to me tomorrow.”

  “They?”

  “They.”

  “And if they do offer you five hundred thousand?”

  “I’ll tell them I’ve since been offered seven hundred and fifty thousand,” said Haynes with the charming smile that made him so resemble his dead father. “I have been offered seven fifty, haven’t I, Mr. Keyes?”

  “Yes. Providing I have last refusal.”

  “The right to top any bid, whatever it is?”

  Keyes nodded.

  “Okay,” Haynes said. “You have it.”

  “What precisely am I buying?” Keyes asked. “And please be specific.”

  “World rights to everything. No exclusions. Full copyright. Which means nobody can legally use a word of it without your permission.”

  “How many Xerox copies are floating around?”

  “No idea.”

  “Who’ll conduct the bidding?”

  “Howard Mott, Steady’s lawyer and now mine.”

  “How?”

  “By phone, I suppose.”

  “Oh,” Keyes said, sounding less than pleased.

  “You want everybody in the same room?”

  “I’d have no objection.”

  “They might.”

  “Very well, by phone then,” Keyes said. “What about payment?”

  “What d’you suggest?”

  “It can be deposited in any currency you choose in virtually any bank in the world.”

  “The IRS wouldn’t like that, so make it a certified U.S. dollars check.”

  “Then you intend to pay taxes on it,” Keyes said.

  “Disappointed?”

  “Not in the least. It means we’ll be getting some of it back.” Keyes rose and handed Haynes a card. “Please ask Mr. Mott to call me at my home number once the bidding arrangements are completed.”

  “Okay.”

  Keyes went to the door, turned back and, nodding farewell to each in turn, said, “Mr. Haynes. Miss McCorkle.”

  Erika McCorkle looked up from her crossword puzzle. “What’s a five-letter word for blackguard that begins with a k?”

  “I tried ‘knave’ this morning,” said Hamilton Keyes. “And it worked quite nicely.” He opened the door and left, closing it softly behind him.

  Chapter 30

  Rumor insisted that it all began on a gloomy Bay of Pigs Sunday afternoon in 1961 when two depressed mid-level CIA careerists left the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House and, desperate for drink, wandered by chance into a dingy bar-cafe hard by the now demolished Roger Smith Hotel at Eighteenth and Pennsylvania.

  Once inside, the careerists were pleasantly surprised to discover they could buy coffee cups of Scotch whisky in direct violation of the District of Columbia’s since-repealed Sunday prohibition law. It was shortly after this discovery that members of the capital’s intelligence and freebooter community made the scofflaw bar their unofficial rendezvous. They continued to drink, if not eat, there for nearly fourteen years until that day in 1975 when the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

  The next day, as if compelled by some migratory instinct, they abandoned the bar back of the Roger Smith and trekked a few blocks farther west out Pennsylvania Avenue to another gin mill not quite opposite the now vanished Circle Theatre. And it was here, in what was always called “the new joint,” that five years later they held their notorious eighteen-hour-long postmortem on the botched U.S. hostage rescue mission that had ended with death and, some claimed, dishonor in a Persian desert.

  It turned out to be less of a postmortem than a verbal brawl that began around noon and was still raging at 5:57 the next morning when Metropolitan Police, summoned by shouts, yells, oaths and the sound of breaking glass, arrived, closed the new joint down and sent everyone home in taxis.

  A week after the disastrous postmortem session, they migrated yet again, this time far, far out Wisconsin Avenue, almost to the Maryland state line, where scouts had discovered a nearly bankrupt Thai restaurant called Pong’s Palace that was located in a strip mall and offered the four prime requisites: a valid liquor license, few customers, bad food and ample parking. Two weeks later, by silent acclamation, Pong’s Palace was elected to serve as the third unofficial sub-rosa watering hole.

  The dark green seventeen-year-old Mercedes 280 SL turned into a parking space three doors up from Pong’s and came to a stop in front of Naughty Marietta’s XXX Video Shoppe. After the car’s engine was cut and its lights switched off, the driver’s door opened and Michael Padillo got out. McCorkle emerged from the passenger side a moment later. When they reached the entrance to Pong’s Palace, Padillo went in first.

  When he opened the Palace in 1978, Pong had devoted most of its interior to a dining area, leaving only enough space for a small bar with a few stools where customers could have a drink while waiting for their tables.

  But there had never been any waiting because there had never been any customers except for a few neighborhood ancients who didn’t much care what they ate as long as it was cheap and filling. Pong was seriously considering bankruptcy when the first of the scouts arrived.

  The scouts were a clutch of white-haired OSS relics from the Second World War and the cold one that was its substitute. They were quickly followed by the assessors. These were prosperous-looking, gray-haired ex-Kennedy operatives, who still seemed to come in only two models, hearty or smooth.

  After the assessors made their favorable report, the others descended on Pong’s. The largest contingent was composed of ex-CIA types (most of them dumped by Jimmy Carter) who, if pressed, admitted they still might be willing to do a little of this or a little of that. Right behind them came the new bunch—survivors of the longest war—whose thousand-yard stares had then been reduced by a third or even by half, and who kept asking everyone whether the jungles of Central America could really be all that fucking different from those of Southeast Asia.

  Two months after what Pong
and his wife always referred to as the invasion of les anciens espions, the Palace’s books were in the black. Pong quickly transformed the large dining area into a large drinking area; installed a much longer bar and fired his chef, replacing him with a microwave oven and a steady supply of almost edible frozen pizzas. He also hired his wife’s three pretty cousins to serve as barmaids. The cousins spoke little English but it didn’t seem to matter because many of les anciens espions spoke a semblance of French and a few even knew some Thai.

  McCorkle and Padillo didn’t have to wait for their eyes to adjust inside Pong’s Palace, where the dominant colors were firecracker red and grass green and where it was always afternoon bright. As usual, most of the customers were intelligence types, past and present. There were also some mercenary hangers-on, hustling their suspect services. Unacknowledged accomplices were represented by an assortment of co-opted reporters and ambitious congressional committee staff members.

  At the rear of the Palace two tables had been pushed together to accommodate seven men who sat, three to a side, with the seventh man at the far end, his back to the wall. The seventh man was a fortyish big-shouldered redhead whose bright pink skin and green eyes almost allowed him to blend in with Pong’s color scheme. The redhead now looked up, saw McCorkle and Padillo, and invited them over with a grin and a beckoning wave.

  The noise in Pong’s was that of a cocktail party that had lasted ninety minutes too long. Padillo raised his voice to make himself heard. “We might as well start with Warnock.”

  McCorkle agreed with a nod and a near shout. “I’ll pay the courtesy call.” He crossed to the bar and smiled at the small man who presided behind the cash register near the entrance. “How’s business, Billy?”

  “It sucks. And yours?”

  “Also.”

  Billy Pong’s grin was gleeful. “We both a couple of fancy-pantsy liars, huh, Mac?”

  Matching Pong’s grin, McCorkle said, “Still following Padillo’s advice—all cash, no plastic or checks?”

  “What’s a check?” said Pong.

  After McCorkle rejoined Padillo, they made their way past serious and even devout drinkers, some of them occasional customers at Mac’s Place. A few looked up to shoot quick baleful glances at Padillo.