The senator was on the telephone when his secretary ushered Tinker Burns into the paneled office. Burns was greeted with a warm smile and a beckoning hand that waved him silently into the most comfortable leather armchair.
Once assured that Burns was safely seated, the senator went back to his listening. He did it with his eyes closed. When open, the eyes were a remarkable blue that reminded one former Senate colleague, no admirer, of twin neon periods.
The rest of the face was lean, maybe even skinny, with scooped-out cheeks, sharp nose, thin gray lips and a chin that came to a point. The face was topped by lank gray hair that was inexpertly cut by his wife every three weeks. The kitchen haircut and the shabby suits he wore helped foster the senator’s chosen image — that of a sly rustic. At twenty-three and just out of law school, he had nicknamed himself Rube. Now fifty-three, he still liked to be called that by close friends.
The senator stopped listening, opened his eyes and spoke into the phone. “I respect that, Frank, but we’ve still got a long way to go before we get to the well. Lemme call you back later today... Yes, sir, I’ll surely do that... G’bye.”
The senator put the phone back into its nook on the console and rose, right hand extended. “Mr. Burns. Sorry to be so rude.”
Burns half rose, gave the offered hand a quick shake and sat back down, confining his greeting to, “How you doing?”
“Not too sure,” the senator said, resuming his seat. “Not too sure at all. I was kind of hoping you could let me know.”
“I’m going to tell you what I think, Senator, and then I’m going to tell you what I know.”
“Logic would dictate the other way around but you just go right ahead.”
“I think Steady and Isabelle never wrote any memoirs, never intended to write any and that the whole thing’s been a shuck from start to finish.”
The senator stuck out his lower lip and nodded judiciously. “Early this morning — very early, I might add — you called to tell me you’d met with Letitia Melon, the former Mrs. Steadfast Haynes, and that she’d given you something ‘important,’ I believe you said.”
“Yeah. She gave me a copy of Steady’s manuscript that turned out to be three hundred and eighty-something mostly blank pages.”
“And from this you reason there is not now, nor has there ever been, a true manuscript?”
“I knew Steady a long, long time and I knew Isabelle all her life. What I’m pretty sure they did was hole up at Steady’s farm and map the whole thing out.”
“The shuck — not the manuscript?”
“Yeah. Then right before the inauguration, they check into the Hay-Adams and start spreading the word around town that Steady’s just finished his red-hot memoirs and needs a permanent seat at the North trial because it’s gonna provide him with the epilogue for his book. Now lemme ask you this: Was Steady really trying to end his book, or was he trying to scare the shit out of somebody?”
“An interesting question.”
“I say he was trying to scare the shit out of somebody,” Burns said. “Your client.”
“We will not discuss my client, Mr. Burns.”
“Okay. Fine. Then let’s discuss Steady’s kid and his backup, the grim reaper, who came pounding on my door at three o’clock this morning just like they were the Gestapo or the fucking FBI making a house call.”
“The grim reaper?”
“Michael Padillo. Know him?”
“We’ve met.”
“I imagine you have,” Burns said, paused and then continued. “Anyway, they barge in and start their rain dance that’s supposed to make me wet my drawers. And I’ve gotta admit, it’s not bad. Padillo can just sit there, saying nothing, and make you believe he’s gonna bite your nose off. And Granny, well, he’s the big bass drum, the talker, the one who tells you to get outta town. Mr. Deadly Do-right. But he also made damn sure he told me how he’s gonna auction off his old man’s memoirs and that the bidding’s gonna start at three quarters of a mill and climb on up from there. And it’s just about then that he says the two magic names.”
“What magic names?”
“Muriel Lamphier and Hamilton Keyes.”
Tinker Burns liked the way he had tossed in the two names right there at the end. He leaned back in the blue leather chair to study the senator, who had just shuttered his neon eyes again and was arranging his thin mouth into the faintest of smiles.
A moment later, the eyes opened and the smile, if it had been a smile, went away and the senator said, “Lamphier, I believe you said, and Keyes.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Keyes. He’s a top spook out at Langley. She’s rich.”
“How were the names mentioned?” the senator said. “I mean, in what context?”
“They came up all of a sudden. Granny wanted to know how well I knew Muriel Lamphier, who’s also Mrs. Hamilton Keyes. So I told ’em to get the fuck outta my room before I called security.”
“And they went without argument?”
“Like lambs.”
“Then what?”
“Then I went down to the lobby and called you from a pay phone and said — well, you know what I said.”
“That you were having second thoughts.”
“Yeah.”
The senator leaned back in his chief justice swivel chair and again gave the almost invisible smile permission to play around his thin lips for a second or two. “Are we now going to share these second thoughts of yours, Mr. Burns?”
“I can’t decide.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m a businessman, Senator. The kind who believes that market forces should set the price of everything. If there’s a strong demand, raise your price. If demand’s weak, drop it. And never, never give anything away.”
“Not even a sample.”
“Well, maybe a sample.”
“You’re very generous.”
“No, I’m not,” Burns said, paused, frowned, nodded to himself and said, “I got a lot of friends who used to fly for Air America.”
“When it was a CIA proprietary venture.”
“Yeah, then. Hell, some of my friends even used to fly for Chennault and Chancre Jack in China. But they’re all pushing eighty now and not too right in the head. But I’m talking about ex-Air America pilots who’re a lot younger’n that and used to fly out of Laos. Out of a place called Long Tieng, otherwise known as Spook Heaven. Ever hear of it?”
The senator only nodded.
“Well, I figured you would’ve since you were on one of those intelligence oversight committees. Anyway, these not-so-young-anymore Air America guys I know still like to drink and bullshit and they sort of look up to me because I was at Dien Bien Phu with the Legion and all, and they still think that was pretty hot shit. Okay?”
The senator nodded again.
“If I remember right,” Burns said, “the CIA went into Laos back in ’sixty-one but by ’sixty-three it was already a backwater operation — what old Dean Rusk called the wart on the hog or something like that. But there was still lots of dope. Lots of booze. Lots of flying. And just one hell of a lot of spooks. Okay?”
“Still with you, Mr. Burns.”
“Good. So now it’s nineteen eighty or eighty-one and I’m in Bangkok doing a little business when I bump into some of these ex-Air America hotshots I know who never went home. It was in some bar, Spiffy’s, I think, and they were all reminiscing about Laos in the good old days. For them, that’s just before the end in ’seventy-four when everything fell apart and you guys bugged out.”
“In May and June of nineteen seventy-four, I believe,” the senator said.
“That’s what I said. So we’re sitting around in Spiffy’s and they’re talking about all the weird and wonderful characters they’d known in Laos. But none of the names meant much to me till somebody mentions Steady Haynes.”