“Why d’you believe that and not the other?”
“Because somebody recognized her leaving Mac’s Place.”
“Who did?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, turned, went to the small refrigerator and took out a small can with a label that claimed it contained pink grapefruit juice from Texas. He held the the can up for Erika to see and said, “Want some?”
“No.”
Haynes opened the can and drank. “Tell me what it said.”
She frowned. “What d’you mean?”
“Build a case for me. Pretend you’re a lawyer.”
She reached for the memo.
“No,” Haynes said. “From memory.”
“I don’t understand what you want.”
“That’s a two-page single-spaced memo. I don’t think Undean just sat down and batted it out. I think it was very carefully composed and went through maybe three or four drafts before all the holes were plugged.”
“I’ll have to tell it my own way then.”
“Fine.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay. It’s Laos, early nineteen seventy-four. March. They were all in Vientiane, the capital. Steady. Muriel Lamphier, later to become Muriel Keyes, and Undean. Muriel’s a young CIA—what— operative?”
“You’re telling it,” Haynes said.
“Okay. She’s an operative, junior grade, with some kind of embassy cover job. Steady’s doing his usual propaganda stuff and Undean’s analyzing whatever he analyzes. Then somebody—and it’s not clear from the memo who—suspects that a young American married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Fred—uh—Nimes aren’t really doing church- sponsored relief work, but are actually homegrown antiwar lefties who’re spying for the opposition, the Pathet Lao. Well, what to do?
“The solution somebody comes up with is to send in a femme fatale. So they send in Muriel to seduce Fred, feed him some false stuff and see if it’s passed on. Well, Muriel gets Fred in the sack all right, apparently on more than one occasion. But one afternoon when they’re rolling around in bed, Mrs. Nimes comes home unexpectedly. Her name’s Angie—for Angela.
“What happens next is what the memo calls a ‘domestic altercation.’ Angie picks up a bottle and cracks it over Fred’s head. Fred slams Angie up alongside the head. Angie produces a gun and shoots Fred dead. She then turns the gun on Muriel. But Muriel doesn’t want to die and the two ladies wrestle for the gun. It goes off and Angie takes a bullet in the face and dies.
“Muriel gets dressed, well, I guess she got dressed, the memo doesn’t say, and bolts out of the house, almost petrified. But she has enough sense to find Steady. He goes to the Nimes house and has a look. Then he goes to see the CIA’s pet Laotian general and offers him two hundred thousand U.S. dollars to put the fix in. The general agrees but wants cash in advance. Okay?”
“You’re doing fine,” Haynes said.
“Steady confides in Undean that he needs two hundred thousand for a special ultra-secret operation. But Undean isn’t buying, probably with good reason, and insists on knowing the details. Steady tells him. Undean suggests that Steady get word to Hamilton Keyes in Saigon. Steady does and Keyes flies to Vientiane with the money. Steady hands it over to the general. I think all this took about a day. Meanwhile, the tropics are going to work on the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Nimes.
“Well, once the pet general has the cash in hand, he orders six fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Laotian soldiers to burn down the Nimes house that night. They do and at dawn the kid soldiers are arrested, tried, convicted and shot for having raped Mrs. Nimes, killed Mr. Nimes, who tried to defend her, and then, to cover it all up, burned down the Nimes house.
“The two Nimes bodies, what’s left of them, are gathered up, boxed and buried. Steady writes letters to their respective parents, lamenting the young folks’ death and praising them for having done the Lord’s work. Meanwhile, Hamilton Keyes instructs Undean to run an exhaustive check on the Nimeses’ background. Undean does and discovers they weren’t secret agents for another foreign power after all, but merely a couple of left-leaning, run-of- the-mill do-gooders. Undean doesn’t make a written report of his findings, but does make separate verbal ones to Keyes and Steady.
“Keyes decides the best thing to do is arrange for their pet general to receive a special commendation and forget the whole thing—except for the beautiful Muriel Lamphier, whom he consoles, woos and, once they’re both back in the States, weds. And that’s the terrible secret of Mrs. Hamilton Keyes, nee Lamphier.” Erika paused, then asked, “Does that sound like some of your late daddy’s handiwork?”
“Exactly,” Haynes said.
“Okay,” she said, “now we—what do they call it in Hollyweird?—we cut to—”
“Dissolve would be better,” Haynes said.
“Okay, we dissolve to Washington some fifteen years later—make it almost sixteen. Steadfast Haynes is spreading word around town that he’s just finished his searing memoirs. The word reaches Mrs. Hamilton Keyes. She contacts her lawyer, a distinguished former U.S. senator from the great state of Alabama, and instructs him to buy up the memoirs and hang the cost. But before negotiations can begin, Steady dies. The lawyer quickly contacts the son and heir’s new lawyer, Mr. Howard Mott, and makes an offer of one hundred thousand dollars for the memoirs, sight unseen. But the son and heir, that’s you, demurs and asks for half a million bucks. All this money talk happened the same day Steady was buried at Arlington.
“Well, that same afternoon, Mrs. Hamilton Keyes—or so Gilbert Undean suspects—goes calling on Mlle Isabelle Gelinet and demands to know where the manuscript is.” Erika paused and frowned. “Why would Muriel do
