Free Twilight at Mac's Place by Ross Thomas Page B

chandeliers of the half-globe variety hung down from thick bronze chains. Haynes started to count them and had reached number twelve when the bellhop returned with his bag.
    In the elevator, the bellhop boasted that the mint julep had been introduced to Washington in the Willard bar by a certain Señor Henry Clay. Haynes said he hadn’t known that.
    After the bellhop was tipped and gone, Haynes discovered yet again that regardless of price a hotel room is primarily a box the bed comes in. His $145-a-night box also came with a bath, two phones, a radio, a TV set, a miniature refrigerator and a window with a view of the National Press Building across Fourteenth Street where quite a few people, mostly men in shirt sleeves, still seemed to be working.
    Haynes had just finished hanging up his other jacket and his other pair of pants when he heard the knock. After opening the door he found Gilbert Undean standing in the corridor, wearing a sheepish look and the same clothes he had worn to Steadfast Haynes’s interment.
    “Got a minute?” Undean said.
    “Come in.”
    Undean entered the room and looked around curiously. “First time I’ve been up in one of these rooms in twenty-five years. I was out of the country when they closed the place in ’sixty-eight after downtown business went to hell.” He nodded approvingly. “Pretty fancy. They claim Julia Ward Howe wrote ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ here. Or in the Willard that was here way back then. But it’s probably bullshit.”
    “I sometimes enjoy bullshit,” Haynes said. “Care for a beer or something?”
    “A beer’d be fine—if you’re having one.”
    Haynes removed two cans of Heineken from the small refrigerator, opened both and handed one to Undean, who took a long swallow, sighed and sat down in an armchair. Haynes chose the edge of the bed.
    “They heard about Isabelle Gelinet,” Undean said.
    “They?”
    “The agency.”
    “You must be their utility mourner.”
    “I’m not here to express condolences. I’m here because of that book Steady wrote.”
    “What about it?”
    “They want to buy it.”
    “Why not just suppress it the way they did some others I can think of?”
    “That’s what I told ’em. They said they can’t because, one, Steady’s dead, and two, he never worked for them. At least they can’t prove he ever did.”
    “How do they know about the book?”
    “Gelinet. She used it to blackmail them into burying Steady at Arlington.”
    “That’s all she asked for?” Haynes said. “No money?”
    “Just a plot of hallowed ground,” Undean said. “I’m quoting them. They thought they’d got off cheap.”
    “Have they read it?”
    Undean drank two more swallows of beer, then shook his head. “Say they haven’t.”
    “But they think Isabelle’s murder and the book are somehow connected.”
    “They get paid to think like that. First I heard of the book was this afternoon right after they buried Steady. I told ’em to buy it and save themselves a lot of grief. They laughed it off.”
    “Why’d you tell them to buy it, Mr. Undean?”
    “Because I knew Steady. Saw him operate and know some of the corners he cut, the lies he told, the deals he made, the promises he broke, the deaths he caused.”
    “He killed people?”
    “The things he did and the lies he told caused people to die. And those who died put the fear of God in the ones who managed to stay alive. Their minds got changed. And maybe their politics. When you get right down to it, Steady was sort of a mental terrorist.”
    “My father, the mindfucker.”
    “And damned good at it, too.”
    “In Laos?”
    “That’s where I watched him work. Even hurrahed him on some. I’ve only heard about what he did in other places, but I believe eighty percent of what I’ve heard.”
    “What’s the real reason they didn’t try to buy the book after Isabelle told them about it?”
    “No demand.”
    Haynes frowned. “I just lost my place.”
    “No demand