Twilight at Mac's Place by Ross Thomas Read Free Book Online

mercenaries had escaped from Enugu in eastern Nigeria in a hijacked DC-3 during the final days of the Biafran war. The names of the two mercenaries, Burns said, spelling them carefully, in case McCorkle wanted to write them down, were Guice and Spates.
    “I never heard from old Spates again,” he said. “But about a year ago I got a letter—well, a postcard really—from Guice in Tijuana, where he said he’d finally found a doctor who could cure his AIDS. You think that’s possible?”
    McCorkle was saved from answering when the restaurant’s door opened and Granville Haynes entered. He stood for several moments, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the interior gloom, his left hand clutching a brown paper grocery bag by its folded-over top.
    “Hey, Granny,” Burns called.
    Haynes crossed to the bar, nodded at McCorkle, took a stool, placed the grocery bag on his lap and examined Burns. “Are you recently returned or still here?”
    “Where would I go?”
    “The National Gallery’s nice.”
    “Already been.”
    “Today?”
    “Nineteen—” Tinker Burns broke off to search his memory for the correct year, finally located it and said, “—seventy-nine, right before they junked Somoza, who I’d just done a little business with and never got paid for. But you’re right. The Mellon’s nice although I think the Louvre’s a lot nicer. What’re you drinking?”
    “Beer. Where’s Isabelle?”
    “She left.” Burns turned his head and called, “Hey, Karl.”
    Karl Triller, the fiftyish head bartender, had distanced himself as far as possible from his only paying customer. He sighed, put away his Wall Street Journal, moved down the bar to Tinker Burns, picked up a bottle of Rémy-Martin, poured an exact one and a half ounces into Burns’s glass and said, “You just failed to make the cut, Tinker, so sip it.”
    Before Burns could protest, Triller turned to Haynes and said, “Beck’s okay?”
    “Fine.”
    As he poured the beer, Triller said, “You’re Steady Haynes’s son, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m Karl Triller and I’m real sorry Steady died and wish I could’ve made it to the funeral or whatever it was. A few years ago, right after he broke up with your stepmother, Steady and I’d close the place up almost every night and go have dim sum or ribs at this Chinese joint up on Connecticut where he claimed all the embassy staff ate. The Chinese embassy.”
    “Which stepmother was this?” Haynes said.
    “Letty Melon—spelled with one l instead of two like the Pittsburgh Mellons. Letty’s only medium rich, if that.”
    “Then she would’ve been stepmother number four. The one I never met.”
    “Well, she and Steady weren’t really married all that long. But he still took it pretty hard after they split and started drinking more than usual. I’ll say this for Steady though: the more he drank, the more polite he got to everybody.”
    “The last egalitarian?”
    Triller thought about that, shrugged and turned to McCorkle. “You want anything now that I’m all the way down here?”
    “No.”
    “Good,” Triller said and headed back to the far end of the bar and his Wall Street Journal.
    Haynes turned to McCorkle. “You have a minute?”
    “Sure.”
    “It’s private.”
    McCorkle got down from the stool. “Then let’s go back to the office.”
     
    The office was a small room at the rear of the restaurant behind the kitchen. Before Mac’s Place had been swallowed by the seven-story office building, the room had had a window and a view of the wall on the other side of the alley. The window had been bricked up and plastered over. In its place was a trompe l’oeil view of Washington as seen from the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. The painting had been a gift from Fredl McCorkle. Padillo always claimed he especially liked it because it was the only painting from that viewpoint that didn’t have the cherry blossoms in bloom.
    Another, earlier gift from Fredl to McCorkle and