puzzle, then looked up at Haynes and asked, “What does whoever he is want?”
“He wants to offer me a lot of money.”
“For Steady’s memoirs?”
Haynes nodded.
“Will you take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“When will you know?”
“Maybe tomorrow—or the next day.”
She gave him a sudden smile that Haynes thought was full of childlike anticipation—her can’t-wait smile.
“God, this is interesting,” said Erika McCorkle.
Exactly ten minutes after Haynes had hung up the telephone, there was a soft knock at the door. He opened it to admit the courtly Hamilton Keyes, carrying a gabardine topcoat and still wearing his old tweed jacket, corduroy pants, pink shirt and ancient loafers.
Once inside, Keyes’s glance flickered past Erika McCorkle to inventory the room itself, noting the wheeled table, the female clothing draped carelessly over a wingback chair, the bucket of melting ice, the half-full glasses and the two empty miniature bottles of vodka and Scotch. Done with his survey, he turned to Haynes and said, “I’m Hamilton Keyes. I knew your father.”
After a nod from Haynes that was mere acknowledgment and nothing more, Keyes turned to Erika McCorkle, who still sat cross-legged on the bed, obviously engrossed in her puzzle. “I also know your father slightly, Miss McCorkle.”
“How nice,” she said without looking up.
“Have a chair,” Haynes said, wondering how Hamilton Keyes had managed to identify Erika so quickly.
The courtly man chose the chair draped with female clothing. He picked it up, a piece at a time, placed it on top of the mini-refrigerator, sat down, topcoat in his lap, and said, “As I mentioned, I also know Michael Padillo.”
Haynes was now leaning his rear against the sill of the window that overlooked Fourteenth Street. “Who else?”
“Quite a few people across the street in the National Press Building—many of whom, I’m afraid, keep binoculars in their desk drawers.”
Realizing he had just been given a polite, if oblique, reply to his unasked question about how Erika McCorkle had been so quickly identified, Haynes abandoned the windowsill, drew the curtains, crossed to the writing desk and leaned against that.
“Tell me,” he said. “Are you the guy who can say yes or no?”
“I am, providing you’re the guy who has something to sell.”
“Steady left his memoirs to me in his will. The copyright to them anyhow.”
“Have you read the manuscript?”
“Some of it.”
“And do you still think it might make a motion picture?”
“All-American boy—Steady, of course—turns badass mercenary agent. That’s one film they won’t have to clutter up with a lot of boring cold-war spy crap.”
“But surely not yet another dreary motion picture with no hero?”
“There’ll be a hero: Steady’s kid, the overeducated, ex-L.A. homicide cop who backtracks Steady’s life while hunting down whoever killed his old man’s two best friends. And if Steady and Undean weren’t really all that friendly, well, we can fudge it a little.”
“I presume you’d play both Steady and yourself?”
“My catapult to stardom.”
“Well, I must say you do resemble him—in more than one respect.” Keyes looked away and rested his eyes on Erika McCorkle. He was still looking at her when he said, “How much?”
“The same price I quoted Undean,” said Haynes. “Seven hundred and fifty thousand.”
“A very respectable sum,” Keyes said, now looking at Haynes.
“For a very hot property. It’s so hot that Steady wasn’t three hours in his grave before somebody was offering me a hundred thousand for it.”
“Which you rejected?”
“Yes.”
“And demanded how much instead?”
“Half a million.”
“And what was the reaction to your counterproposal?”
“They said they’d get back to me tomorrow.”
“They?”
