Twilight at Mac’s Place

Fifteen

Erika McCorkle picked Haynes up in front of the Willard Hotel at exactly 7 A.M. that Saturday, each of them surprised at the other’s promptness. After muttered good mornings, she handed him a plastic container of Roy Rogers coffee and sped them to Pennsylvania Avenue and M Street, then across Key Bridge and onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway in what Haynes suspected was record time, even for a Saturday morning.

After passing the road sign that beckoned passersby to CIA headquarters, Haynes ended the long silence with a question: “You usually eat breakfast?”

“Never. Do you?”

“No.”

“You’re not much on morning chatter either,” she said.

“Turn on the radio.”

She said it was broken.

Another silence began and lasted until she turned off to take the Old Georgetown Pike that dipped and curled its way through rolling Virginia countryside. They were now in a holdout exurbia of wintry browns and grays where a faded bumper sticker on an old Volvo station wagon begged for propertied recruits to enlist in a rearguard action against unnamed developers. Haynes guessed it was a skirmish the exurbanites had already lost.

In some of the deeper brush- and tree-protected gullies — or runs, which were what Haynes remembered arroyos were called in Virginia — he could see patches of dirty snow. And since the sky was overcast with dark wet-looking clouds, he asked Erika McCorkle if she had heard a weather forecast.

She glanced at him, frowning at his tweed jacket, gray slacks, blue tie-less shirt and absent topcoat. “Fifty percent chance of snow — or can you remember what snow is?”

“I saw some two weeks ago.”

“Where?”

“Big Bear.”

“Where’s that?”

“Up in the mountains a couple of hours east of L.A.”

“You went skiing?”

“I did a commercial.”

“You were in a TV commercial?”

“Right.”

“What’s a homicide cop doing in a TV commercial?”

“Selling mustard.”

“That yellow hot-dog stuff?”

“Grey Poupon. And I’m no longer a homicide cop. I quit. Three weeks ago. Almost four.”

“And now you’re what — security consultant to the rich and famous?”

“An actor.”

There was another silence that lasted long enough for the Cutlass to accelerate from fifty to sixty-eight miles per hour. “An actor” she said. “Steady was an actor, which is probably why I believed everything he said — some of the time.”

“You’re doing seventy-three,” Haynes said.

She slowed the car to fifty. “Did it just happen?”

“You mean like cancer?”

“You know what I mean.”

“A TV producer’s fourteen-year-old daughter was killed and raped in that order. I nailed the guy, and the producer was so grateful he decided to make my dreams come true by offering me a one-line part in his cop series that was about to be canceled.”

“Was it your dream?”

“No. But he thought it was everyone’s. So I did it. An agent caught the episode, called up and asked if I’d like to do more TV stuff. We had lunch and she said I might make a bare living at it because the camera was kind to me. But if I wanted to make a decent living, I’d have to go against the box.” He paused. “She talks like that.”

“What’d she mean?”

“That there’re an awful lot of blond guys in Hollywood who want to play lifeguards and fighter pilots because they look like lifeguards and fighter pilots are supposed to look.”

She glanced at him. “You could play a fighter pilot. An older one.”

“I’d rather play a bank teller turned embezzler”

“You look too honest.”

“Exactly her point.”

“When’d you get the big break?” she said, slowing down for the red light at the intersection where the Old Georgetown Pike met the Leesburg Pike. “The one that let you quit the cops.”

“About three weeks ago,” he said.

“What’s the part?”

“I get to play a working stiff who wins a million-dollar lottery.”

She sniffed. “Not too original.”

“No,” Haynes said, “but I think I’ll enjoy it.”