“We’ve met,” Padillo said.
Chapter 35
The one-term senator from Alabama practiced law in a three-story building that sat on a small triangle of land where Connecticut Avenue met Nineteenth Street just north of Dupont Circle.
The building had once offered fine apartments, including one that a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, now dead, had lived in for years. It was still an article of faith in Washington that its weird taxicab zones had been redrawn to make sure the Speaker would pay the absolute minimum fare for his rides to and from the Capitol.
Tinker Burns paid off his own taxi, got out and examined the yellow brick building that time and smog were turning light tan. He hoped the senator hadn’t chosen the building for its quaintness. Burns despised and mistrusted anything that hinted of quaint.
The senator had made his law office look as much like his Senate office as possible. There were the same dark blue leather chairs and couches, the same massive desk and, on one wall, the same rather good watercolors of Mobile Bay. The other walls were covered by either bookshelves or the eighty-seven black-and-white photographs of the senator and eight-seven of his oldest and dearest friends, past and present. Some of the past friends had died and others had quickly—too quickly, some said—drifted away after the senator lost his bid for reelection in 1986.
But the photographs remained on display, offering informal portraits of the senator with three living former U.S. Presidents, one prince, six premiers, one chancellor, two prime ministers, twenty-one U.S. senators, thirteen U.S. representatives, nine state governors, three secretaries of state, five directors of Central Intelligence, one ex- President-for-Life and a five-year-old blue tick hound who was now curled up fast asleep on one of the leather couches.
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?”
