“Butt out, Tinker,” Haynes said. “They’re my memoirs now. Steady left them to me in his will. I’m going to auction them off Wednesday. The bidding will start at three quarters of a million. But if you keep messing around, you’ll just fuck things up. So go back to Paris, Tinker. Go home and forget about the memoirs.”
Burns’s old tan couldn’t quite conceal the dark red flush that raced up his neck and spread to his cheeks and ears. “Who the hell’re you to tell me what to do? About anything? Especially Steady. I knew him better and liked him more’n you ever did. But you waltz in here at three in the morning like God’s last messenger, and who the fuck d’you bring with you? Why, it’s Señor Death himself, that’s who.” Burns jerked a thumb at Padillo. “What d’you really know about this guy, Granny?”
“A family friend,” Haynes said.
Burns grunted. “Some fucking family. Some fucking friend.”
“Tell him, Tinker,” Padillo said. “It might lower your blood pressure ”
Burns jumped to his feet and stretched one arm out full length to aim an accusatory finger at Padillo. Haynes thought Burns’s blazing eyes, quivering forefinger, bare feet and long white robe made him look rather biblical — like some ancient prophet with too much time in the wilderness.
“Know who they used to send when they needed somebody fixed?” Burns demanded. “They sent him. That’s who. Michael Padillo, the assassin’s assassin. How many did you fix over the years, Mike? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?”
Padillo smiled. “Counting the war?”
Burns opened his mouth to say or shout something. But before he could, Haynes said, “Just answer one question, Tinker. How well do you know the former Muriel Lamphier who’s now Mrs. Hamilton Keyes?”
It was then that Burns warned them to get the fuck out before he called the hotel security people.
In the elevator, Haynes asked, “What was all that assassin stuff?”
“History.”
“Real or invented?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“Ask McCorkle.”
“Does he know?”
“He knows.”
“Will he tell me?”
“I have no idea.”
“What about Erika?”
“I think she suspects.”
“Should I ask her?”
“You can ask anyone you want to.”
“Will she tell me?”
“I don’t think so,” Padillo said.
Padillo gave the Madison’s drowsy doorman twenty dollars to let them park the old Mercedes coupe in front of the hotel’s Fifteenth Street entrance, where the big glass doors allowed them to watch the bank of pay telephones near the elevators. After they waited five minutes, Padillo said, “Maybe he used his room phone after all.”
“And leave a record of the phone number on his bill?” Haynes said. “Tinker’s way too cagey for that. Let’s give him another ten minutes.”
After two minutes of silence, Padillo said, “That was a nice performance you gave.”
Haynes smiled at the praise. “You mean the way I let my paranoia peep shyly forth?”
Padillo nodded. “You must’ve drawn on your time with the L.A. cops. I say that because half the cops I ever met were paranoid.”
“Half the cops,” Haynes said, “and all the actors.”
Thirty seconds later Tinker Burns came out of one of the two elevators they could see from the car and headed for the pay phones. Burns had dressed quickly and was wearing only a shirt, pants, shoes, but no socks. As he neared the pay phones, he hesitated, looked around, made a quick tour of the virtually empty lobby, then went back to the phones and dropped coins into one of them.
With Padillo’s powerful binoculars now up to his eyes and the long-memorized three-across-and-four-down Touch Tone phone pattern firmly in mind, Haynes read off the seven numbers that Burns tapped as Padillo jotted them down on the back of an envelope.
“Four. Six. Five. Nine. One. Nine. One.”
“You’re sure?” Padillo said.
“Christ, no.”
“Good. I’d be a little edgy if you were.”
They watched Burns talk and listen for two minutes and thirteen seconds by Padillo’s watch. Burns then hung up and reentered the same, still waiting elevator. As its doors closed, Padillo said, “Any ideas?”
“About how we find out who belongs to 465-9191?”
Padillo nodded, started the engine and pulled away from the curb.
“Tonight?” Haynes asked.
“Why not?”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
Padillo glanced at him. “Are you much of a mimic?”
“Try me.”
“Do Tinker Burns.”
Haynes closed his eyes, breathed deeply two times, opened his eyes, deepened his voice, gave it a rough edge and bellowed, “Okay! That’s it! Now get the fuck outta here before I call security!”
Padillo smiled. “Perfect.”
They made the call from Padillo’s Foggy Bottom house. Haynes made it from the wall phone in the kitchen with Padillo on the living room extension.
After Haynes tapped out the 465-9191 number, it rang four and a half times before it was answered by a man’s sleepy mumbled hello.
“Tinker Burns again,” Haynes said. “There’s one more thing I forgot to tell you.”
“Mr. Burns, this is twice tonight that you’ve robbed me of sleep,” said the voice that once again reminded Haynes of soothing syrup. “I assure you we can discuss it, whatever it is, when we meet tomorrow morning. And now, sir, good night.”
The connection was broken. Haynes put the wall phone back on its hook and went into the living room. Padillo turned from the extension and said, “Well?”
“One, he’s a lawyer. Two, he’s an ex-U.S. senator. Three, he’s the guy who’s been talking to Howard Mott about buying all rights to the memoirs for some anonymous client. And four, he’s obviously from way down south.”
“Near Mobile,” Padillo said.
“Is that a guess or do you know him?”
“We’ve met,” Padillo said.
Thirty-five
The one-term senator from Alabama practiced law in a three-story building that sat on a small triangle of land where Connecticut Avenue met Nineteenth Street just north of Dupont Circle.
The building had once offered fine apartments, including one that a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, now dead, had lived in for years. It was still an article of faith in Washington that its weird taxicab zones had been redrawn to make sure the Speaker would pay the absolute minimum fare for his rides to and from the Capitol.
Tinker Burns paid off his own taxi, got out and examined the yellow brick building that time and smog were turning light tan. He hoped the senator hadn’t chosen the building for its quaintness. Burns despised and mistrusted anything that hinted of quaint.
The senator had made his law office look as much like his Senate office as possible. There were the same dark blue leather chairs and couches, the same massive desk and, on one wall, the same rather good watercolors of Mobile Bay. The other walls were covered by either book-shelves or the eighty-seven black-and-white photographs of the senator and eight-seven of his oldest and dearest friends, past and present. Some of the past friends had died and others had quickly — too quickly, some said — drifted away after the senator lost his bid for reelection in 1986.
But the photographs remained on display, offering informal portraits of the senator with three living former U.S. Presidents, one prince, six premiers, one chancellor, two prime ministers, twenty-one U.S. senators, thirteen U.S. representatives, nine state governors, three secretaries of state, five directors of Central Intelligence, one ex-President-for-Life and a five-year-old blue tick hound who was now curled up fast asleep on one of the leather couches.