“Not over the phone,” the baritone said. “I was hoping you’d come down to the lobby and join me for a drink.”
“We can drink up here.”
“You’re asking me up?”
“I’m not asking you to do anything, Ace. But if we talk, we talk up here in front of a witness.”
“Out of the question.”
“Too bad,” Haynes said and hung up.
Erika McCorkle said, “Who the hell was that?”
Haynes shook his head and held up a warning hand. The telephone rang a moment later. He answered it with, “Well?”
“Who’s your witness?” the baritone asked.
“Think of her as my fiancée,” Haynes said, causing Erika McCorkle to chuckle.
“Her name?”
“Introductions aren’t necessary. You know who I am but I don’t know who you are. That gives you the advantage.”
“A very slight one.”
“Take what you can get.”
There was another hesitation that this time lasted long enough to qualify as a pause. “Five minutes?”
“Make it ten,” Haynes said and broke the connection.
Erika McCorkle returned to the room-service table, picked up another French fry, bit off half of it, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed and asked, “Who were you on the phone just then?”
“Hardcase Haynes of Homicide.”
“A bit overdone, wasn’t it?”
Haynes smiled. “Think so?”
She frowned. “Unless that wasn’t acting.”
A silence grew as she waited for his response. When he made none she untied the robe’s belt and said, “I’ll get dressed.”
“Don’t,” Haynes said as he rose from the bed, picked up his shirt and began putting it on.
Erika McCorkle slowly retied the robe’s belt as she watched him button the shirt and pull on his pants. When he sat down and reached for a sock, she said, “You’re setting the scene, right? The remains of a room-service meal. The half-drunk drinks. The rumpled bed. And the unmistakable reek of sex on a Sunday afternoon.”
“I want an edge,” Haynes said.
“And where do you want me—recumbent on the bed, showing a little thigh, a glimpse of tit?”
Haynes now had one sock on, changed his mind, stripped it off and stuck both bare feet into his loafers. “I want you on the bed, well wrapped in the robe and doing the Times Sunday crossword puzzle. With a ballpoint.”
Her grim expression vanished, replaced by her sunshine smile. “Blasé and bored, right?”
“Exactly,” Haynes said, rose, found the crossword puzzle and handed it to her along with a ballpoint pen. She rearranged the pillows, settled cross-legged onto the bed, tucked the robe carefully around her, glanced at the puzzle, then looked up at Haynes and asked, “What does whoever he is want?”
“He wants to offer me a lot of money.”
“For Steady’s memoirs?”
Haynes nodded.
“Will you take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“When will you know?”
“Maybe tomorrow—or the next day.”
She gave him a sudden smile that Haynes thought was full of childlike anticipation—her can’t-wait smile.
“God, this is interesting,” said Erika McCorkle.
Exactly ten minutes after Haynes had hung up the telephone, there was a soft knock at the door. He opened it to admit the courtly Hamilton Keyes, carrying a gabardine topcoat and still wearing his old tweed jacket, corduroy pants, pink shirt and ancient loafers.
Once inside, Keyes’s glance flickered past Erika McCorkle to inventory the room itself, noting the wheeled table, the female clothing draped carelessly over a wingback chair, the bucket of melting ice, the half-full glasses and the two empty miniature bottles of vodka and Scotch. Done with his survey, he turned to Haynes and said, “I’m Hamilton Keyes. I knew your father.”
After a nod from Haynes that was mere acknowledgment and nothing more, Keyes turned to Erika McCorkle, who still sat cross-legged on the bed, obviously engrossed in her puzzle. “I also know your father slightly, Miss McCorkle.”
“How nice,” she said without looking up.
“Have a chair,” Haynes said, wondering how Hamilton Keyes had managed to identify Erika so quickly.
The courtly man chose the chair draped with female clothing. He picked it up, a piece at a time, placed it on top of the mini-refrigerator, sat down, topcoat in his lap, and said, “As I mentioned, I also know Michael Padillo.”
Haynes was now leaning his rear against the sill of the window that overlooked Fourteenth Street. “Who else?”
“Quite a few people across the street in the National Press Building—many of whom, I’m afraid, keep binoculars in their desk drawers.”
Realizing he had just been given a polite, if oblique, reply to his unasked question about how Erika McCorkle had been so quickly identified, Haynes abandoned the windowsill, drew the curtains, crossed to the writing desk and leaned against that.
“Tell me,” he said. “Are you the guy who can say yes or no?”
“I am, providing you’re the guy who has something to sell.”
“Steady left his memoirs to me in his will. The copyright to them anyhow.”
“Have you read the manuscript?”
“Some of it.”
“And do you still think it might make a motion picture?”
“All-American boy—Steady, of course—turns badass mercenary agent. That’s one film they won’t have to clutter up with a lot of boring cold-war spy crap.”
“But surely not yet another dreary motion picture with no hero?”
“There’ll be a hero: Steady’s kid, the overeducated, ex-L.A. homicide cop who backtracks Steady’s life while hunting down whoever killed his old man’s two best friends. And if Steady and Undean weren’t really all that friendly, well, we can fudge it a little.”
“I presume you’d play both Steady and yourself?”
“My catapult to stardom.”
“Well, I must say you do resemble him—in more than one respect.” Keyes looked away and rested his eyes on Erika McCorkle. He was still looking at her when he said, “How much?”
“The same price I quoted Undean,” said Haynes. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand.”
“A very respectable sum,” Keyes said, now looking at Haynes.
“For a very hot property. It’s so hot that Steady wasn’t three hours in his grave before somebody was offering me a hundred thousand for it.”
“Which you rejected?”
“Yes.”
“And demanded how much instead?”
“Half a million.”
“And what was the reaction to your counterproposal?”
“They said they’d get back to me tomorrow.”
“They?”
“They.”
“And if they do offer you five hundred thousand?”
“I’ll tell them I’ve since been offered seven hundred and fifty thousand,” said Haynes with the charming smile that made him so resemble his dead father. “I have been offered seven fifty, haven’t I, Mr. Keyes?”
“Yes. Providing I have last refusal.”
“The right to top any bid, whatever it is?”
Keyes nodded.
“Okay,” Haynes said. “You have it.”
“What precisely am I buying?” Keyes asked. “And please be specific.”
“World rights to everything. No exclusions. Full copyright. Which means nobody can legally use a word of it without your permission.”
“How many Xerox copies are floating around?”
“No idea.”
“Who’ll conduct the bidding?”
“Howard Mott, Steady’s lawyer and now mine.”
“How?”
“By phone, I suppose.”
“Oh,” Keyes said, sounding less than pleased.
“You want everybody in the same room?”
“I’d have no objection.”
“They might.”
“Very well, by phone then,” Keyes said. “What about payment?”
“What d’you suggest?”
“It can be deposited in any currency you choose in virtually any bank in the world.”
“The IRS wouldn’t like that, so make it a certified U.S. dollars check.”