Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

Although the acronym was hopelessly inappropriate and dated back at least twenty years to Vietnam and Laos, Keyes nodded politely and said, “The Fucking New Guy.”

Pall enlarged the smile to reveal a top row of light gray teeth. “You wanta beat around the bush awhile or what?”

Keyes looked at his watch. “Not really. I presume the White House sent you out to do the deed?”

Pall stopped smiling and nodded, serious now, even grave. “We’ve got a whole lot of pastrdue bills, political stuff, and we need your slot and some others to pay ’em off with. Nothing personal. Fact is, everybody I’ve talked to says you do one hell of a job.”

After acknowledging the compliment with a slight smile that vanished almost instantly, Keyes removed the sealed envelope that contained the letter he had written and placed it on the desk.

Frowning at the unexpected, Pall picked up the envelope, used a thumb to rip it open, fumbled a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and read the letter with a glance. His frown disappeared. “Okay. Great. You’re talking early retirement.” He looked up from the letter. “But, hey, there’s no big rush. Next week, the week after, that’ll be soon enough.”

“I see no reason to prolong things.”

“What about the hand-over?”

“Everything my successor needs is in the files and he’ll probably be ecstatic that I’m no longer underfoot.”

Pall rose with a grin that displayed most of the light gray teeth. “After listening to sniffles all day from a bunch of crybabies, it’s a treat to run across a grown-up.” He held out his hand and added, “Anything else you’d like to mention?”

“I don’t believe so,” Keyes said, shook the offered hand, nodded a cordial good-bye, turned, headed for the door, then turned back. “There might be one thing not yet in the files.”

“What?”

“The Steady Haynes manuscript.”

Pall sat down slowly in the swivel chair and leaned back, his mouth now pursed, his small greenish eyes alert and wary. “Tell me,” he said.

It took the still standing Hamilton Keyes not quite three minutes to give a thumbnail sketch of the late Steadfast Haynes and tell of Isabelle Gelinet’s initial blackmail call; the burial at Arlington; Gelinet’s death; and of his own and someone else’s subsequent attempts to buy all rights to the Haynes manuscript from the dead man’s son.

“Sit down, fella,” Pall said.

Keyes resumed his seat in the armless chair.

“Okay,” Pall said. “Once again, nice and slow, step by step, from the beginning.”

Keyes led him through it again with a still precise but much more detailed summary that left Pall pink-faced, smoldering and reminding Keyes of some just-lit giant firecracker that might or might not go off.

After completing his second account, Keyes asked, “Any questions?”

“Questions?” Pall said, snapping the word in two. “Well, yeah, friend, I’ve got a couple or three. You offered this kid, Granville Haynes—”

“He’s thirty-two and scarcely a kid.”

“—this kid fifty K for his old man’s memoirs, but he turns it down because he’s already turned down a hundred K from God knows who and thinks he can raise enough foreign money to produce a flick about his old man’s life with him playing the lead?”

When Keyes remained silent, Pall said, “Well?”

“Was that a question?”

“What the fuck did you think it was?”

“A rather pithy recapitulation.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Essentially. Yes.”

“Okay. You believe any or all of it?”

“Without evidence to the contrary, I don’t disbelieve it.”

“Let’s go back to the French broad, what’s her name, Gelinet? Was she killed over the Haynes manuscript?”

“I’m not positive,” Keyes said, “but it seems sensible to assume she was, which is why I had that offer made to young Mr. Haynes.”

“What were you going to use for money?”

“Discretionary funds.”

“Who’d you clear it with?”

“Nobody.”

“Why the hell not?”

“There was no need,” Keyes said. “If our offer was turned down by Haynes the younger, as, in fact, it was, then we were dealing in imaginary money. In other words—”

Pall cut him off. “Okay, okay, I’ve got it.”

Rage again surfaced in Pall’s green eyes as he leaned forward, rested his arms on the desktop and clasped his hands together so tightly that they turned pale from lack of circulation. He also locked eyes with Keyes, who stared back calmly, taking note of Pall’s barely suppressed rage and, just below it, something else, which Keyes quickly diagnosed as fear.

The stare-down was ended by Pall, who gave his watch a quick glance and asked a question. “It ever occur to you that somebody might be trying to run a shitty past us?”

“My very first thought.”

“Then why’d you fold so quick and ask DOD to bury him at Arlington?”

“One, because I knew Steady well. Very well. And two, because I know a bargain when I see one. The blackmail price was cheap — a plot of land. The blackmail threat was grave because if Haynes’s memoirs do exist, and if they reveal what he actually did, their publication could cause serious political embarrassment. Extremely serious. So that’s why I folded and asked DOD to have the Army bury him with a bugler blowing ‘Taps’ over his grave.” Keyes paused. “If you don’t like it, of course, you can always dig him up.”

“We’ll leave him lie for now,” Pall said. “But let’s go back to the mystery offer — the one for a hundred K.”

“We have only young Haynes’s word on that.”

“You believe him?”

“I have no reason not to.”

“Next question: who else wants to buy ’em and why?”

“There’re two possibilities,” Keyes said. “The prospective buyer could be someone — and by that I mean an individual, a group, even a country — who feels that publication of the memoirs would cause unacceptable repercussions. Or it could be someone who simply wants a club to beat the administration over the head with.”

“The fucking Democrats maybe?”

“That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“I bet,” Pall said, frowned and asked, “You claim Steadfast Haynes never worked for us officially and was always paid in either cash or gold, right?”

Keyes nodded.

“Well, if there’s no record, why don’t we just say we never heard of the son of a bitch?”

“Because I must assume that Steady had acquired proof to the contrary.”

An almost wistful note crept into Pall’s voice when he asked, “Isn’t it possible that the Haynes stuff isn’t nearly as bad as you think?”

Keyes conceded the point with a nod, then promptly obliterated his concession. “You can probably measure the damage it could cause by the one-hundred-thousand-dollar price somebody’s apparently willing to pay for it. Then there’s Steady’s rather curious behavior just prior to his death.”

“Curious how?”

“He reserved a room at the Hay-Adams for the next three months and was all over town, calling in old markers to get himself a permanent seat at the North trial.”

“Jesus,” Pall said.

“Of course, it could’ve been mere advertising.”

“For what?”

Keyes shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe his manuscript. Or he even may have been hinting that he knew something awfully juicy about North, Poindexter and company — or perhaps about other White House residents, past and present, whose names needn’t be mentioned.” Keyes paused. “Unless you want me to, of course.”

Pall swiveled away from Keyes to stare at the top left corner of the room behind the desk. Still staring, he said, “The Haynes kid turned down your offer of fifty K and that other so-called offer of a hundred K. So what’s his asking price?”