Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

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.”

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.”

“Exactly 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.’

“Last paragraph. ‘He is survived by his son Granville Haynes of Los Angeles, California. Interment was scheduled for Arlington National Cemetery.’ ”

As Haynes refolded the paper and placed it on the rear seat, Erika McCorkle pulled out into the traffic and said, “I didn’t know he was Phi Beta Kappa.”