by Ross Thomas
Voodoo Ltd
( Quincy Durant - 3 )
Ross Thomas
Voodoo, Ltd.
Ross Thomas
1992
One
The two-passenger car that raced through Malibu shortly after 5 A.M.
on New Year’s Day at speeds exceeding 82 miles per hour was an almost new Mercedes-Benz 500SL with an out-the-door price of $101,414.28. It was driven with one hand, the left, by the not quite beautiful hyphenate, Ione Gamble, whose blood alcohol level would later be measured at 0.16, proving her to be quite drunk, legally and otherwise, for the second time in her life.
The actress-director, whose two crafts or professions made her a hyphenate in Hollywood parlance, still drove with her left hand as she used the right one to hold a telephone to her ear and listen to its thirty-fifth and final ring. She then traded the telephone for the pint of Smirnoff 80-proof vodka that lay on the passenger seat. After swallowing the last one and a half ounces, she lowered the right door’s window with the touch of a button and tossed out the empty bottle, which smashed against somebody’s 1986 Honda Civic.
Gamble was tempted to stop and leave a note offering to pay for any damage. But by the time the mental note was composed, revised and re-revised, she was already a mile past the Honda and nearing her Carbon Beach destination. When she reached it seconds later, the note, the smashed bottle and the Honda had vanished from her memory.
By then she had slowed to the legal speed limit of 45 miles per hour and was almost coasting along the Pacific Coast Highway’s center turn lane. She was also trying to find the misplaced electronic gadget that would open the steel gates guarding the $13-million house whose owner irritated nearly everyone by calling it his beach shack.
Gamble never found the electronic gate opener. But as she turned left across the highway’s two east-bound lanes, her headlights revealed the gates to be already open. She drove through and parked in front of the three-car garage whose doors, almost seven days after Christmas, still offered a fanciful triptych of Santa Claus, his reindeer and the elves.
Gamble switched off engine and lights and again picked up the car phone. She called the number she had called before and let it ring fifteen times. She then gave up on the phone and started honking the Mercedes horn in a series of three-short-and-one-long tattoos, which were a rough approximation of Morse code for the letter V—the only Morse code she knew.
Voodoo, Ltd. —2
Gamble stopped the noise three minutes later, lowered the car’s left window and waited for something to happen. She would have settled for an irate neighbor yelling at her to shut the fuck up. Or for Billy Rice to hurry out of his house and implore her, for God’s sake, to come in and have a drink—or even for a suddenly lighted window somewhere to prove that life still existed in Malibu at 5:11 A.M. On Tuesday, January 1, 1991.
But when there were no rude shouts or drink offers or suddenly lighted windows, Gamble got out of the car, slamming its door as hard as she could and hoping something would break, but relieved when nothing did. She went around the car’s rear, backed up three overly cautious steps, sucked in as much air as her lungs would hold and yelled, “BILLY RICE FUCKS MICE!”
She waited, listening, but when there was neither denial nor rebuttal she turned and headed for the front entrance. As she did, a light came on in the second floor of a yellow house across the highway. But it came from a small high window, the kind that bathrooms have, and Gamble decided it was probably some poor old guy rousted out of bed by a troublesome prostate.
A short stretch of seven-foot-high wall, built of glazed brick, shielded the entrance to the house from the curious and served as a baffle against the highway traffic noise. The wall and the house itself formed a short ceilingless passageway that Gamble slowly walked along as she searched all three pockets of her cream suede jacket for the key to Billy Rice’s front door.
It was only after searching each pocket four times that she remembered, if dimly, tearing out of her house in Santa Monica and pausing just long enough to grab the car keys and the pint of vodka, but not the brown leather clutch purse. And that’s where the Rice front door key was, of course, in the purse’s zippered coin pocket.
Gamble still believed there was a way to wake up Billy Rice. She could pound on his door and ring his bell and even howl and yap like a coyote until something happened. She had almost decided on the coyote imitation when she noticed the door was already ajar. She gave it a tentative push and then a hard shove that opened it all the way.
Once inside the dark house, Gamble fumbled for the switch she knew to be on the left, found it and turned on lights illuminating the marble foyer that led to the immense living room and, beyond that, to the equally immense deck.
The foyer’s indirect lighting was designed to enhance two paintings that faced each other from opposite walls. On the left was the Chagall; on the right, the Hockney. Beneath the Hockney was a small square table of burled elm, just large enough to hold the day’s mail, three sets of car keys and also, in this instance, a 9mm semiautomatic Beretta.
Voodoo, Ltd. —3
Gamble picked up the gun, examined it, then called, “Hey, Billy, wanta come watch me blow off my big toe?”
She waited, head bowed, pistol down at her right side, as if hoping for some kind of protest. But when none came, she lifted the Beretta, aimed carefully, squeezed the trigger, just as she had been taught at the Beverly Hills pistol range, and blew a small neat hole through the lower left quadrant of the Chagall.
When the gunshot produced neither outcry nor whimper, Gamble moved slowly along the rest of the marble foyer and into the living room. Through its far all-glass wall she could see the lights of Santa Monica and, much farther on, the dimmer lights of Palos Verdes, where, she knew for a fact, lived the dullest people in California and maybe even the world.
Turning from the view, she noticed a big pale lump in the room’s southwest corner. The lump for some reason looked as if it had been lost, abandoned or maybe just forgotten. Ever curious, Gamble crossed the living room, shifting the pistol to her left hand. With her right hand she switched on a table lamp and discovered the lump to be William A. C. Rice IV.
He lay on his back, blue eyes open and aimed at the beamed cathedral ceiling. The long right leg was slightly bent at the knee. The long left leg was straight. His arms and hands were haphazardly arranged with the right hand pointing due north and the left hand south by southwest. There were two dark holes in his bare hairless chest just to the left of the right nipple. His feet were also bare and his white tennis shorts were stained.
Ione Gamble stared down at the dead man for at least thirty seconds, breathing through her mouth in short gasps until she stopped gasping and said, “Aw, hell, Billy, I wish I were sorry.”
She turned then, swaying a little, and made it to the small wet bar where she poured two unmeasured ounces of whisky into a glass and gulped them down. The whisky caused a coughing fit. When it ended two minutes later, she stumbled across the room to a console telephone, collapsed into what she knew to be Billy Rice’s favorite chair, placed the Beretta in her lap, picked up the phone and tapped out 911.
The police emergency number began to ring. On the eighth ring she yawned. On the tenth ring she put the still-ringing phone on the table, wrapped both hands around the butt of the Beretta in her lap, closed her eyes and passed out. She was still passed out and still clutching the Beretta when two deputy sheriffs entered the living room at 6:27
A.M., snatched away the pistol, shook Ione Gamble awake, read her her rights and arrested her on suspicion of murdering William A. C.
Rice IV, who, ever since 1950 when he enrolled in Kansas City’s first private kindergarten, was called Billy the Fourth by all who di
sliked or despised him, which, someone later said, “was almost everyone who’d known him for more than three minutes.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —4
Two
By the third week in January of 1991, Ione Gamble had been indicted for the murder of William A. C. Rice IV and released on bond. An assistant Los Angeles County attorney had argued for a bail bond of at least $2 million but the county Superior Court judge in Santa Monica had instead set it at $200,000 and defended his decision with a rhetorical question: “With a face known throughout the world, where can she possibly skip to and where can she possibly hide?”
Gamble was now concealed, if not hidden, in her 35-year-old, thirteen-room mission-style house on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica.
She lived there alone, except for the Salvadoran couple in the garage apartment and her six cats, three dogs and a housebroken flop-eared rabbit who spent most of his waking hours hopping up and down the staircase.
Gamble was up in the second-floor study she called her office, discussing criminal defense lawyers with Jack Broach, her combination business manager, agent and personal attorney. Broach was a product of UCLA (’68), Boalt Hall (71) and the William Morris Agency (’73—’79). Like many entertainment industry agents in their mid-forties, he resembled a meticulously groomed character actor who would be perfect to play either a young lean-jawed President or an aging lean-jawed fighter pilot.
The office-study had three walls of bookshelves, filled mostly with novels and biographies, and one wall of glass that offered a view of Santa Monica Canyon, some mountains and also the Pacific Ocean.
Gamble was seated behind her 1857 Memphis cotton broker’s desk and Broach was in a nearby businesslike armchair.
After sipping some bottled diet Dr Pepper through two paper straws, Gamble said, “So far I’ve talked to the Massachusetts Unitarian, the Wyoming Jew, the Texas Episcopalian and the New York Baptist. Comes now the Washington what?”
“I’m quite sure he’s not a Muslim,” Broach said.
“Tell me about him—the guy from Washington.”
“I called him,” Broach said, “just as I called all the others and said, in effect, ‘Hi, there, I’m the best friend and personal attorney of Ione Gamble and she needs the best damn criminal lawyer alive. You interested?’ The other four said, Gosh, yes, but the guy in Washington said, ‘Not especially.’ As usual, I was impressed by the unimpressed.”
“He’s good though—the one from Washington?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —5
“He’s not as well known as the others, but the legal minds I revere most say he’s top gun.”
Gamble frowned. “Is ‘top gun’ your cliché or theirs?”
“Mine. I use clichés because everybody understands them. That’s why they’re clichés.”
Gamble sipped more diet Dr Pepper and said, “You think I should pick him, don’t you—the guy from Washington?”
Broach shook his head. “I think you should pick the one you trust and respect most.”
“What about like?”
“Like’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Will he ask me if I killed Billy?”
“I don’t know.”
Ione Gamble looked at the ceiling, as if notes for her next remarks Were written there. She was still looking at it when she said, “I liked the Jew and respected the Baptist and trusted the Episcopalian—
despite his shit-kicking Texas ways—but the Unitarian seemed consumed by the notion that he and I’d finally wind up in bed.”
“Is there something wrong with optimism?”
Her gaze came down.
“Help me, damnit.”
Broach shook his head. “You’ll know—or your instinct will.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
They heard the two-note front door chimes. Broach rose and said,
“He’s here. I’ll go down, bring him up, introduce you and be on my way.”
“Do I look all right?”
Jack Broach didn’t bother to reply.
Ione Gamble, wearing jeans, a checked shirt and scuffed Timberlands over bare feet, was standing at the glass wall, staring out at ocean and canyon, when Broach came back with the Washington lawyer. She turned and found him to be a medium-tall man in his forties who wore a very expensive but ill-fitting dark blue suit along with plain black shoes, a white shirt and a muted tie. He had extraordinarily long arms, a face that seemed to have been put together from odds and ends, and the wisest black eyes she had ever seen. As Gamble looked into them she found herself engulfed by an intense feeling of relief.
Jack Broach said, “Ione Gamble, Howard Mott.”
Gamble smiled and walked toward Mott, her right hand outstretched. “I very much hope you’ll be my lawyer, Mr. Mott.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —6
Howard Mott took the cool dry hand, smiled back and said, “Let’s see whether you still feel that way after we talk.”
Mott had arrived at 11 A.M. And at 12:45 P.M. They sent out for a giant cheese and pepperoni pizza. The Salvadoran housekeeper-cook served it in the office-study along with a bottle of beer for Mott and another diet Dr Pepper for Gamble.
Mott took a polite bite of the pizza, chewed, swallowed, drank some beer and said, “Tell me how you met him.”
“Billy Rice?”
Mott nodded and had another bite of pizza.
“You know who he was, don’t you? I mean, before?”
“Before Hollywood? Yes, but tell me who you think he was.”
“He was the Kansas City Post,” she said.
“The paper Hemingway didn’t work for.”
“It was also one of the first newspapers to go into radio in the twenties and TV in the late forties. It wound up owning three TV and four radio stations around the country, six small dailies, a farm magazine, a block-long printing plant and a big chunk of downtown Kansas City. Ninety percent of the stock in all this was owned outright by William A. C. Rice the third, who was the grandson of William A. C.
Rice the first, the one who’d started it all. When Billy the third died, everything went to Billy the fourth.”
“When did the third die?” Mott asked. “Ten years ago?”
“Twelve,” she said. “Billy the fourth hung onto everything for eight years, then sold out in early eighty-six at the top of the market. He walked away with at least a billion, maybe more. Then he moved out here and announced he was an independent motion picture producer and, with a billion or so in the bank, everybody said, ‘That’s right, you are.’”
“Is that when you met him?”
She nodded. “He had an office in Century City—just him, a secretary and a story editor.”
“That was when—eighty-six, eighty-seven?”
“Late eighty-six—a month after my thirtieth birthday, which makes me thirty-four, going on thirty-five, if you don’t want to bother with the math.”
Mott only smiled and drank more beer.
“I also got drunk and blacked out on my thirtieth birthday,” she said, making it a statement of fact rather than a confession.
“Why?”
“For an actress, thirty means you’re no longer on the ascent but’ve reached the plateau where you’ll stay, if lucky, till you hit forty and Voodoo, Ltd. —7
start the descent, which is sometimes slow and sometimes fast, very fast.”
“Thirty’s awfully young,” Mott said. “But so is forty, for that matter.”
“But forty-five isn’t and that’s why I used every trick I knew to get directing jobs. That meant guesting on TV sitcoms and episodic action-adventure stuff—but only if they’d let me direct. And that’s how I served my apprenticeship.”
“I get the impression that directing to you is something like an annuity.”
“Look. I still intend to act when I’m forty-five and fifty-five and sixty-five, if I live that long, although the roles will get fewer and fewer. But a good director can get work at almost any age.”
“You decided all this at thirty?”
“Sure,” she said. “For an actor, thirty’s still young. He’s just getting rid of the last of his baby fat and for the next twenty-five or thirty-five years he can go on playing leads opposite actresses who’re twenty-five and thirty and forty. But do you know any fifty-five-year-old actresses who’re doing love scenes with thirty-year-old actors—unless it’s some kinky incest story? I’ll give you an hour to name one.”
“Is Ann-Margret fifty-five yet?” Mott said, picking up the last slice of pizza.
Gamble began a smile that turned into a grin. “You a fan of hers?”
“Merely a preservationist,” Mott said and bit into his pizza.
“Well, anyway, that’s why I got drunk on my thirtieth birthday and why I haven’t had more than three beers and eight glasses of wine since—until the thirty-first of December.”
“Let’s go back to your first meeting with Mr. Rice.”
“Okay. He had this office, as I said, in Century City. He’d called Jack Broach and Jack’d called me and suggested I give it a go. So I ride the elevator up to the what—the thirty-fifth floor?—where I’m ushered into this okay-but-nothing-special office, where Billy turns on the charm and hands me a screenplay based on Lorna Wiley’s novel, The Milner Sisters.”
She looked at Mott apprehensively until he said he’d read it. After a small relieved sigh, she said, “So after somebody brings in the coffee, Billy says, ‘I want you for this.’ Well, both sisters are great parts, but Louise is the plum, so I ask, ‘Which do I play—Louise or Rose?’ And guess what he says?”
“I can’t.”
“He says, ‘I think the director should make that decision and since you’ll be directing, the decision is yours.’ And right about then I thought I ought to fall in love with Billy Rice, the prick.”
“So far, he sounds fine.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —8
“So far. Well, we make The Milner Sisters and it gets great reviews and doesn’t make a dime. But Billy doesn’t seem to care and plunks down a one-hundred-thousand-dollar option on some god-awful techno-thriller, then pays another million for a screenplay, exercises his option on the novel—another one point four million—and hires himself a twenty-four-year-old British MTV director. I’m to play Mavis, the gutsy heroine who walks and talks like a fella, opposite dumb old Niles Brand, who’s getting five million plus points. Well, the whole thing costs thirty-eight million and it’s a hit and a half. I win the L.A.