Росс Томас - Twilight at Mac’s Place

“I’ll have to tell it my own way then.”

“Fine.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. It’s Laos, early nineteen seventy-four. March. They were all in Vientiane, the capital. Steady. Muriel Lamphier, later to become Muriel Keyes, and Undean. Muriel’s a young CIA — what — operative?”

“You’re telling it,” Haynes said.

“Okay. She’s an operative, junior grade, with some kind of embassy cover job. Steady’s doing his usual propaganda stuff and Undean’s analyzing whatever he analyzes. Then somebody — and it’s not clear from the memo who — suspects that a young American married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Fred — uh — Nimes aren’t really doing church-sponsored relief work, but are actually homegrown antiwar lefties who’re spying for the opposition, the Pathet Lao. Well, what to do?

“The solution somebody comes up with is to send in a femme fatale. So they send in Muriel to seduce Fred, feed him some false stuff and see if it’s passed on. Well, Muriel gets Fred in the sack all right, apparently on more than one occasion. But one afternoon when they’re rolling around in bed, Mrs. Nimes comes home unexpectedly. Her name’s Angie — for Angela.

“What happens next is what the memo calls a ‘domestic altercation.’ Angie picks up a bottle and cracks it over Fred’s head. Fred slams Angie up alongside the head. Angie produces a gun and shoots Fred dead. She then turns the gun on Muriel. But Muriel doesn’t want to die and the two ladies wrestle for the gun. It goes off and Angie takes a bullet in the face and dies.

“Muriel gets dressed, well, I guess she got dressed, the memo doesn’t say, and bolts out of the house, almost petrified. But she has enough sense to find Steady. He goes to the Nimes house and has a look. Then he goes to see the CIA’s pet Laotian general and offers him two hundred thousand U.S. dollars to put the fix in. The general agrees but wants cash in advance. Okay?”

“You’re doing fine,” Haynes said.

“Steady confides in Undean that he needs two hundred thousand for a special ultra-secret operation. But Undean isn’t buying, probably with good reason, and insists on knowing the details. Steady tells him. Undean suggests that Steady get word to Hamilton Keyes in Saigon. Steady does and Keyes flies to Vientiane with the money. Steady hands it over to the general. I think all this took about a day. Meanwhile, the tropics are going to work on the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Nimes.

“Well, once the pet general has the cash in hand, he orders six fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Laotian soldiers to burn down the Nimes house that night. They do and at dawn the kid soldiers are arrested, tried, convicted and shot for having raped Mrs. Nimes, killed Mr. Nimes, who tried to defend her, and then, to cover it all up, burned down the Nimes house.

“The two Nimes bodies, what’s left of them, are gathered up, boxed and buried. Steady writes letters to their respective parents, lamenting the young folks’ death and praising them for having done the Lord’s work. Meanwhile, Hamilton Keyes instructs Undean to run an exhaustive check on the Nimeses’ background. Undean does and discovers they weren’t secret agents for another foreign power after all, but merely a couple of left-leaning, run-of-the-mill do-gooders. Undean doesn’t make a written report of his findings, but does make separate verbal ones to Keyes and Steady.

“Keyes decides the best thing to do is arrange for their pet general to receive a special commendation and forget the whole thing — except for the beautiful Muriel Lamphier, whom he consoles, woos and, once they’re both back in the States, weds. And that’s the terrible secret of Mrs. Hamilton Keyes, née Lamphier.” Erika paused, then asked, “Does that sound like some of your late daddy’s handiwork?”

“Exactly,” Haynes said.

“Okay,” she said, “now we — what do they call it in Hollyweird? — we cut to—”

“Dissolve would be better,” Haynes said.

“Okay, we dissolve to Washington some fifteen years later — make it almost sixteen. Steadfast Haynes is spreading word around town that he’s just finished his searing memoirs. The word reaches Mrs. Hamilton Keyes. She contacts her lawyer, a distinguished former U.S. senator from the great state of Alabama, and instructs him to buy up the memoirs and hang the cost. But before negotiations can begin, Steady dies. The lawyer quickly contacts the son and heir’s new lawyer, Mr. Howard Mott, and makes an offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the memoirs, sight unseen. But the son and heir, that’s you, demurs and asks for half a million bucks. All this money talk happened the same day Steady was buried at Arlington.

“Well, that same afternoon, Mrs. Hamilton Keyes — or so Gilbert Undean suspects — goes calling on Mlle Isabelle Gelinet and demands to know where the manuscript is.” Erika paused and frowned. “Why would Muriel do that?”

“Maybe she panicked,” Haynes said.

Erika shook her head and said, “Anyway, Isabelle refuses to divulge — another Undean word — where the manuscript is and Muriel — you want me to go into all that? There’s a whole lot of gruesome detail.”

“No need,” Haynes said.

“Undean suggests that regardless of whether or not Isabelle revealed where the manuscript was, Muriel couldn’t let her live because Isabelle knew her festering Laotian secret. That festering phrase is mine, not Undean’s. So Isabelle dies and you and Tinker Burns discover her body. As soon as Hamilton Keyes learns of Isabelle’s death, he summons Undean and instructs him to offer up to fifty thousand for the memoirs. Undean then goes into a lot of self-justification about how, earlier that same day, he had urged Keyes to buy the memoirs from you and how Keyes pooh-poohed the idea. Anyway, Undean finds you and offers the fifty thousand and you turn it down. Undean then reports to Keyes about how you’d also turned down the one hundred thousand from the senator and are now asking five hundred thousand because you think you can make a film out of Steady’s life. Undean then counsels Keyes to walk away from the deal. And that’s the end of the Undean memo.”

“You did very well,” Haynes said.

“I have a good memory.”

“What was left out?” Haynes asked. “By Undean?”

“Well, he couldn’t tell how Muriel killed him.”

“Well, no,” Haynes said. “But what else?”

“There’s almost no mention of Tinker Burns and none of Horace Purchase.”

“Undean wouldn’t have known about Purchase and must’ve assumed that Tinker found Isabelle’s body by accident.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“What’s your overall impression?”

“It all seems to be aimed at giving Muriel Keyes sufficient motive. If she can’t buy or destroy the memoirs, she can at least do away with the remaining witnesses to the Laotian mess. With Steady gone, the only witnesses left are Undean, her husband and — since she wrote the memoirs — Isabelle.”

“Why do you think Tinker was killed?”

“I guess he was trying to blackmail her with the Undean memo.”

“A logical guess.”

“Why did you ask me to make that... that recitation?” she asked. “Your real reason?”

“The memo’s too smooth — too logical. Too neat. I wanted to see how it would sound if it came out disjointed.”

Erika’s eyes went wide. “You bastard! You know who killed them all — Isabelle and Undean and Tinker Burns.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You know something. I can tell.”

“The only thing I know for a fact is that Gilbert Undean didn’t write that memo.”

McCorkle shifted his position again, trying to accommodate his long legs to Padillo’s 280 SL. After failing to cross them for the third time, he said, “You ever think of buying something a little more sedate and comfortable — maybe a Volvo station wagon?”