Twilight at Mac's Place by Ross Thomas Page A

selling toiletries, discount vitamins, over-the-counter cure-alls, junk food and the occasional prescription.
    They were in the drugstore just long enough for Haynes to question the young pharmacist. After they left, Erika McCorkle stood on the corner, looking around and glowering, as if trying to will the neighborhood back into what it had been when she was six or seven.
    “I’m not old enough to hate change,” she said more to herself than to Haynes.
    “You hate it most when you’re five or six.”
    “Nothing changed when I was five or six.”
    “Then you obviously had a happy childhood.”
    “What I had were two older but remarkably well suited and reasonably well adjusted parents.”
    “Then you were also lucky,” Haynes said. “Want some coffee?”
    “The Junkanoo,” she said. “The bastards tore down the Junkanoo.”
    “A nightclub, wasn’t it?”
    “Right over there,” she said, pointing to a missing-tooth gap on the east side of Connecticut Avenue in the 1600 block. “I knew it closed. But now it’s gone. It just—aw, fuck it. Let’s get that coffee.”
    They found a small Greek restaurant up the street called the Odeon that seemed willing, if not anxious, to serve them. He drank his coffee with cream and sugar; she drank hers black. As he stirred the coffee, Haynes said, “You see much of Steady?”
    “Not till I was seventeen. It was just after he and Letty split, and Steady was using Pop’s place as a kind of headquarters. That was the summer before I went off to school and I was helping out, doing scut work mostly. Steady was there night and day, looking for somebody to talk to. When I wasn’t busy, I listened. Sometimes he even talked about you, which must be what you’re really interested in.”
    “Am I,” Haynes said, somehow not making it a question.
    “He could never understand why you became a cop.”
    “He never asked.”
    “I’ll ask.”
    “Because I needed a job and they were willing to hire me.”
    “That’s what I guessed, but Steady claimed it was a lot more complicated than that.”
    “Well, if you’re a lapsed Quaker turned anarchist who hires out to prop up rotten governments you despise, everything might seem complicated. Even getting out of bed.”
    “Did he know you despised him so much?”
    “I never knew him well enough to despise him.”
    “He once told me he was worried that you’d never got over the death of your mother.”
    There was no trace of the inherited charm in Haynes’s bleak smile. “That sounds too pat even for Steady.”
    “Why?”
    “Because my mother died when I was three and I can’t even remember her. Three months later, Steady married a French woman who was stepmother number one. She and I were very close. When I was nine, he divorced her and married an Italian and the three of us went to live in Italy. Stepmother number two and I became such good pals that she wanted me to go on living with her after Steady got the Mexican divorce. And I did.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then I was thirteen and Steady brought me to the States and popped me into St. Alban’s here. I still get birthday letters from stepmothers one and two, but I never did meet stepmother number four. What was she like?”
    “Pretty and rather rich. Letty once told my mother that she married Steady because he could make her giggle. Not laugh. Giggle.”
    “ ‘Giggles Ended, Wife Charges.’ ”
    “Was she there?” Erika asked.
    “At Arlington? No.”
    “Who was?”
    “Some guy from the CIA. Me. Tinker Burns. And Isabelle Gelinet.”
    “Dear Isabelle,” she said. “When I was thirteen I used to daydream about her drowning. Sometimes she drowned in the C and O Canal. Sometimes just below Great Falls. But the one I liked best was her drowning over and over in the yuckiest stretch of the Anacostia.”
    Haynes smiled. “Jealous?”
    “Of her brains, looks, style and foreign correspondent job. What thirteen-year-old wouldn’t be? But most of all I was jealous