Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“I understand it to be seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

Pall spun around to face Keyes. “Buy ’em.”

“The memoirs?”

Pall nodded.

“With what?”

“With any currency he wants, in any bank he chooses.”

“You’ll arrange the money,” Keyes said and succeeded in not making it a question.

Pall again nodded.

“But suppose,” Keyes said, “just suppose that the memoirs turn out to be nothing more than a rehash of wicked deeds done long ago and very far away — in the Congo, for instance?”

“You believe that?”

“No, but it remains a possibility.”

“Buy ’em,” Pall said again. “Once they’re bought, you get a ten percent finder’s fee. Seventy-five thousand bucks, cash in hand.”

Keyes sighed and looked away as if faintly embarrassed.

“This is extremely awkward, but I do feel I should mention that my wife is rather rich and awfully generous.”

It took a moment or two for Pall to erase his surprised look and replace it with a knowing gray smile. “I get it. You want your old job back.”

“Not really.”

“Then what?”

“Ambassador.”

First came a pained expression, then a sigh and, finally, the question. “Where?”

“I rather fancy the Caribbean.”

“The Caribbean,” Pall said, staring at Keyes with a mixture of wonder and dislike. “Okay. You’ve got it. But let me spell out what else you’ve got. And that’s exactly one week to get ahold of the Haynes memoirs. If you’ve got ’em by then, we’ll announce your nomination as ambassador to the democratic island republic of Rumandsun or some such.”

Pall fell silent for a moment, leaned forward, bared most of the light gray teeth in a snarling smile and said, “But if you haven’t got ahold of ’em by then, we’ll leak it that you’ve been fired from the agency for gross incompetency or worse. Probably a lot worse.” He paused to let the awful smile vanish. “Did I make all that clear?”

“Yes, I do believe you did,” said Hamilton Keyes.

Erika McCorkle gave up eighteen miles out of Berryville when she saw the Tall Pine Motel’s blue neon vacancy sign winking at her through the snowfall.

She and Granville Haynes had left his dead father’s farm shortly before 5 P.M. It was now 6:07 P.M. and dark, but they had managed to drive only eighteen miles, their progress impeded first by the snow, which gave no sign of letting up, and then by four wrecks, the last a Chevrolet pickup that had spun out on a curve and flipped over, killing its fifty-two-year-old driver and his thirty-seven-year-old girlfriend.

Haynes and Erika McCorkle reached this fourth accident just after state troopers had set out warning flares. Two patrol cars, bar lights flashing, aimed their headlights at the wreck. Haynes rolled down his window and talked to one of the troopers briefly while waiting for him to wave them on. When the trooper did, Haynes stared at the dark pool beneath the upside-down pickup and decided it was blood and not engine oil after all.

As the Cutlass slid to a stop on the packed snow in front of the Tall Pine Motel office, Erika McCorkle said, “See if you can get two rooms. If not, try for twin beds. But if all they have left is a double bed, we can work it out.”

“There’s nothing to work out,” Haynes said.

“Like hell.”

“If there’s only one bed,” he explained, “I’ll sleep in it. You’re welcome to join me, of course. But if you feel that’s too intimate, there’s either the floor or the bathtub.”

“Just get the room, prince, before a two-man line forms with you at the end.”

Haynes got out, brushed snow and ice off the car’s Virginia license plate, memorized the number and entered the motel office. He came out five minutes later, carrying a paper sack full of something. Back in the car with the sack on his lap, he said, “We got the last room left — down at the end on your right.”

“Twin beds?” she asked as she put the car into reverse and backed up.

“I didn’t ask.”

They drove to the room in silence. The Tall Pine Motel formed a curve that bowed back from the highway. There were eighteen units, nine on each side of the office. The motel was built of used brick and covered with a sharply pitched shake-shingle roof. Each unit had a window, a door and space for a single car. Haynes looked for the tall pine but couldn’t find it and blamed his failure on the snow.

After she pulled to a stop in front of their room, Erika McCorkle ended the silence with a question: “What’s in the sack?”

“Dinner,” Haynes said. “Four Cokes, two Baby Ruths, four almond Hersheys and four packets of things that look like peanut butter between Ritz crackers.”

“Those peanut butter things aren’t bad,” she said.

Erika McCorkle came out of the bathroom after a ten-minute shower, wearing her camel’s-hair polo coat as a robe. Haynes sat near the double bed in one of the room’s two chairs, watching a rerun of The Scarecrow and Mrs. King .

Erika McCorkle stood, watching the program and running a comb through her damp hair. When a commercial came on she said, “I never understood the premise of that show.”

“James Bond meets Erma Bombeck.”

“Let’s eat,” she said.

She traded him her Baby Ruth for one of his almond Hersheys because she said Baby Ruths always tasted like Ex-Lax. They divided the packets of peanut butter and Ritz crackers evenly, washing everything down with Coke. They ate and drank in silence, Haynes in his chair, Erika McCorkle now on the bed, leaning against its headboard.

After another commercial came on she said, “You watch TV a lot?”

“No. Do you?”

“I like disaster reruns. A president or a premier gets shot. A shuttle blows up. A crown prince falls off his horse. A cardinal checks into Betty Ford’s. Why accept substitutes when you can watch the real thing?”

“You may have a point,” Haynes said, leaned forward and switched off the set.

She finished the last of her Coke, carefully crushed the can, aimed it at the wastebasket, made the shot and said, “When you were a cop, did it ever happen to you — the real bad shit?”

“Once in a while, but with homicide I usually got the residue — the leavings.”

“Ever shoot anyone?”

“No.”

“Anyone ever shoot at you?”

“Twice.”

“Did you like it — being a homicide detective?”

He thought about her question. “I got to be good at it and most people like doing what they’re good at.”

“You like acting?”

“Not yet, but it’s a pleasant way to meet women.”

She swung her bare feet off the bed and reached for the telephone. “I’d better call Pop and tell him not to worry.” After she picked up the telephone, she looked back at Haynes as if to reassess his harmlessness.

He gave her his inherited smile and said, “You’re safe.”

“Too bad,” she said and tapped out the long-distance number. After McCorkle came on the line, she told him they were snowed in at the Tall Pine Motel eighteen miles east of Berryville.

McCorkle wanted the motel phone number and address. After she read them to him, he asked when she’d be back. She said probably tomorrow morning. McCorkle said he had a message for Haynes and, after he told her what it was, she promised to deliver it, urged him not to fret and hung up.

Once more turning toward Haynes, she said. “Pop said Tinker Burns has been calling him every fifteen minutes to ask if anybody’s heard from you. Pop says he would very much appreciate it if you’d get Tinker off his back. He’s at the Madison.”

“I know,” Haynes said.

“But you aren’t going to call him, are you?”