Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“You’ve got ten seconds to get in your car.”

“Look. You know you’re not gonna shoot me and I know I’m not gonna leave till we talk. Now, we could stand out here all night freezing our butts off, but that’s sort of dumb. So why not go inside where it’s nice and warm and have a taste and a talk? After that, I’ll be on my way. I even brought a jug of Turkey along. You still drink Turkey, Letty?”

Letty Melon said nothing. She wore a buttoned-up shearling coat and had tied a gray cashmere scarf over her head. The rest of her outfit consisted of blue jeans, boots and the pump shotgun. She raised the shotgun with her left hand, letting its barrel rest on her left shoulder. Her right hand dug a key out of her jeans pocket. She moved around Burns, went up to the front door, unlocked it and went inside. Burns turned and followed.

They sat in front of an enormous fireplace where four oak logs blazed. They held tumblers half full of 101-proof Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey, the good stuff, undiluted by either ice or water. After a sip of whiskey, Letty Melon lit an unfiltered Camel. Tinker Burns swallowed a third of his drink and looked around the fifty-foot-long living room with obvious appreciation.

“I never got invited here,” he said. “I got invited to that little place over by, what’s its name, Berryville, a couple of times when you and Steady were still married, but never here.”

“We couldn’t stand each other’s friends,” she said. “I invited mine here; he invited his there. I reckon we couldn’t stand them because his friends were mostly women and mine were mostly men.”

“Well, that’s how it goes sometimes.”

“What’s really on your mind, Tinker?”

“That fire,” he said. “We come in here and it’s all dark and kind of cold, but you turn on a gas jet, put a match to it, throw on some logs, and a couple of minutes later we got ourselves a real nice fire going. Now, some people’d claim that’s no way to build a fire — that you oughta do it with kindling and—”

“Is this some kind of allegory?” she said.

Burns tried to look hurt and almost succeeded. “I was just trying to edge into it.”

“Don’t edge. Jump.”

Tinker Burns sipped his bourbon, stared at the fire and said, “Ever know a spook name of Undean? Gilbert Undean?”

“No. Why?”

“He died.”

“So?”

“He was one of the mourners at Steady’s burial at Arlington. There were only four of us there. Steady’s kid, me, Undean and Isabelle. Steady was buried Friday. Isabelle was killed the same day. Undean got killed this morning.”

Letty Melon drank more bourbon, inhaled smoke, blew it out and said, “I heard about Isabelle.”

“I found her body. I also found Undean’s — about noon today. Maybe a little after.”

“What’d you do?”

“I called the cops. What else?”

“Where’d he live?”

“Reston.”

“So you zipped straight out here. What the hell for? I told you last night we’ve got nothing to talk about.”

Burns took another mouthful of bourbon, rolled this one around on his tongue, swallowed and sighed his appreciation. “Did you know Steady’d written his memoirs — him and Isabelle?”

“I know he’d threatened to for years.”

“Well, he finally did.”

“Have you read them?”

“No.”

“Who has?”

“Maybe Granny. Maybe not.”

“You ask him?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Lemme tell you how I got into this thing,” Burns said, finished his bourbon, put the glass down and leaned toward Letty Melon with the confident and faintly conspiratorial air of a man who’d spent much of his adult life selling dubious wares to suspicious customers.

“I really don’t want to know, Tinker.”

He ignored her and said, “About nine or ten days ago, right before Steady died, I get this call from a guy I once did some business with. I’m in Paris and he’s in, well, it doesn’t matter where he is. He tells me he’s heard Steady’s written his memoirs. Now, this guy knew Steady in Zaire when it was still the Congo. They later cut up a few touches together in Southeast Asia and Central America. Know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Did stuff they maybe shouldn’t’ve. Stuff that there’s no statute of limitations on.”

“Shitty stuff,” she said. “Steady’s specialty.”

“Yeah, all right. Shitty stuff. But since then this guy’s moved uptown. And now whenever the world’s about to end, he gets calls from CNN or maybe from that kid with the speech impediment on NBC and they want him to give ’em the exact time and date of Armageddon and a rundown on the aftermath in fifteen seconds or less.”

“He’s in government then,” she said.

“No. He’s not in government, but he makes a lot of money advising governments.”

“I see. One of those.”

“Yeah. Right. One of those. So he calls me and says he’s heard about Steady’s book and since I’m an old asshole buddy of Steady’s, he’s wondering if I can get a peek at the thing and see if Steady’s mentioned those touches they cut up together years ago. He also says he just happens to know where I can unload some twenty-year-old left-behind Vietnam ordnance I got rusting away down in Marseilles on a certain party with an end-use certificate who’ll pay in Swiss francs. So I tell this guy, sure, I’ll try and look into it. But before I get around to it, I get this call in Paris from Isabelle, who’s at the Hay-Adams, telling me Steady’s lying there dead in the bed. Okay so far?”

“So far.”

“Well, I fly over for the burial. And what gets me is that Steady knew hundreds and hundreds of people, but nobody shows up at Arlington except me, Granny, Isabelle and this old semi-retired spook, Gilbert Undean. So Isabelle, Granny and me have lunch and Isabelle starts talking about how she’d helped Steady write his memoirs. But I can’t talk to her in front of Granny and Padillo—”

“You ate at Mac’s Place,” Letty Melon said. “How sweet. I think Steady practically lived there for a time after we split.”

Burns ignored the interruption. “Anyway, an hour or two later I go in this limo I rented out to Isabelle’s apartment to see if I can talk her into letting me read the thing. Steady’s book. I go up to her floor, knock on her door, no answer. So I try the door and it opens. I go in and find her stark naked in the bathtub, wrists and ankles wired, drowned. Probably.”

Letty Melon looked away from Burns and toward the far end of the big room. “How was the Undean guy killed?”

“Shot.”

She turned back to him. “You also found him, right?”

Burns nodded. “Looks kinda funny, doesn’t it?”

“Very.”

“I can’t help how it looks. All I can do is keep nosing around, trying to find out who’s got Steady’s book.”

“Maybe I should get up and poke the fire, Tinker. Isn’t that what people in movies do when they’re about to deliver the bad news?”

Burns thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I’ve seen a lot of fire-poking in movies. You got some bad news, Letty?”

Instead of answering his question, she said, “Right after Steady died, the next day, in fact, I got a call from one of our few mutual friends who told me Steady’d been quietly spreading the word around Washington that he’d written his memoirs. So I asked this mutual friend, a rather silly little bitch, ‘Why tell me?’ She said she just thought I might be curious about how Steady’d treated me in his book. I told her I didn’t give a damn and hung up.”

“But you gave a real big damn, right?”

“Sure I did. Mostly because he was such a liar.”

“He could dream ’em up all right,” Burns said with obvious admiration.