Twilight at Mac’s Place

Ten

It wasn’t until after he had used the dead Isabelle Gelinet’s telephone to call the Los Angeles Police Department and speak to the irrepressible Sergeant Virgil Stroud in robbery and homicide that Detective-Sergeant Darius Pouncy was nearly convinced that Haynes and even Tinker Burns were probably what they claimed to be.

After an exchange of the usual amenities and the usual information about the weather (a high of seventy-two degrees and fair in Los Angeles; down to forty-one degrees and looking like rain or snow in Washington), Pouncy asked, “You ever have a real slick article out there in homicide by the name of Granville Haynes?”

“Haynes... Haynes” said Sergeant Stroud. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Claims he used to work for you people.”

“And you need his home phone number, right?”

“What the fuck I want with his phone number?”

There was a brief silence until Stroud said, “Oh. You mean Granny Haynes. Sure. He used to work here. What’s he up to?”

“Up to his ass in a homicide investigation, is what.”

“Who bought it — somebody rich?”

“Not hardly.”

“Reason I asked is because Granny’s the one we liked to send when rich folks bought it. Real nice manners. Neat dresser. Spoke French, Italian and fair Spanish. Made some damn good cases, too. You’re lucky you—”

Pouncy broke it off. “Hey. We’re not looking to hire him. We just wanta check him out. Claims he used to be a homicide cop but now he’s an actor”

“Ever see a low-budget slasher flick called Thirteen Hangingtree Lane?” Stroud asked. “Came out two, three years back and Granny goes down into the basement of this big old house. The one in Hangingtree Lane. And there’s this fat sack of slime down there with an ax. Now, this is Granny’s first feature speaking role. So just before this guy with a face like a four-cheese pizza takes Granny’s head off with the ax, Granny gets to say, ‘Listen! Please! I’m here to help you!’ And then his head goes flying off and they cut to the corner of the basement and there’s Granny’s head, looking surprised as hell.”

“Guess I missed it,” Pouncy said. “How much you figure he got paid for doing all that?”

“Probably SAG minimum. Maybe four hundred bucks.”

“What’s SAG?”

“Screen Actors Guild.”

“He was a cop then?”

“Sure.”

“Out there you let cops be actors?”

“Lemme ask you something,” Stroud said. “If you’ve gotta moonlight, which’d you rather be — an actor or a liquor store security guard in some low-rent neighborhood?” Without waiting for an answer, Sergeant Stroud chuckled his good-bye and broke the connection.

The driver of Tinker Burns’s hired limousine had chosen Park Road as the best route to Sixteenth Street. It was nearly 8 P.M. and they were somewhere in darkest Rock Creek Park when Burns ended the long silence in the backseat. “I’ll take care of Isabelle’s cremation and funeral and everything.”

“They’ll have to do the autopsy first,” Haynes said.

“I mean after that.”

“Will the cops call Madeleine?” Haynes asked. Madeleine was Madeleine Gelinet, mother of the dead Isabelle and former mistress of Tinker Burns.

“You think Sergeant Pouncy speaks French?”

“Maybe Madeleine’s learned English.”

“Never” Burns said. “I figured I’d go back to the hotel, have a couple of drinks and then call her.”

“Does she know about Steady?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You can tell her about him, too.”

Burns shifted uneasily in the seat, not quite squirming. “Maybe you’d rather call her?” he asked without hope.

“No thanks,” Haynes said. “She still in Nice?”

“Where else? She’ll never part with that house.”

There was another silence that lasted until they turned south down Sixteenth Street. It was then that Burns asked, “Who d’you think killed her?”

“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.”