by Ross Thomas
“To a very big city,” Broach said, then smiled and added, “Los Angeles maybe.”
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Broach,” Georgia Blue said, rose and turned to give the Daumier drawings a closer examination. Then she turned back to Broach, smiled and said, “Those three Daumiers are fakes, just in case you didn’t know.”
Broach was also smiling as he rose from the too-tall wing-back chair. “But very good fakes, right?”
“Not bad.”
“The Secret Service teach you to do that?”
“They taught me to spot counterfeit.”
“Even counterfeit people?”
“My specialty.”
“Sure you don’t want a job?”
“Quite sure.”
“One more question?”
She nodded.
“Have dinner with me tonight?”
“Sorry.”
“Some other night?”
“Who knows?” Georgia Blue said, smiled her goodbye, crossed to the door, opened it and was gone. Jack Broach assessed it as an absolutely first-class exit.
Voodoo, Ltd. —88
Eighteen
Were it not for the Hollywood Freeway, the old Trussel mansion would never have made the forty-four-mile journey in 1947 from the fringe of what was then downtown Los Angeles to a five-acre lot near the top of Topanga Canyon.
Once a loosely knit community of assorted free spirits, dopers, mystics, working stiffs, 1960s holdouts, actors, writers, artists and other poor credit risks, Topanga in the late 1970s and ‘80s suffered a plague of gentrification that transformed it from a low-rent semi-rural hideout into what one critic called bosky dells with neon.
The fifteen-room mansion that would make the long trip to Topanga in 1947 had been built in 1910 just late enough to escape the Victorian gingerbread craze. The house, destined to be torn down in 1948 because it was in the path of the freeway, was saved only because its owner, Miss Martha Trussel, who had been born in the house in 1911 and fully intended to die there, called on the senior partner of her law firm, handed him a brown paper bag containing $10,000 in cash—a considerable sum in 1947—and told him to “go grease whoever has to be greased, Henry.”
Permission was quickly granted and the mansion was eventually sliced into three sections and hauled at 3 to 4 miles per hour to the fairly flat five-acre lot in Topanga Canyon that had been left to Miss Trussel by her dead father, who had accepted the five acres in 1932 as repayment for a $300 debt.
Because of breakdowns, steep canyon grades and minor accidents, it took thirteen days to move the house to its new site. The Los Angeles Times thought the event newsworthy enough to run a three-column photograph on page seven of one of the twenty-one traffic jams it caused. The move was directed by Miss Trussel herself, who later supervised the mansion’s reassembly and modernization. She lived in the huge old house alone, save for a series of Mexican housekeepers, until she died in bed of emphysema in 1981, an unlit Chesterfield in one hand, an unstruck kitchen match in the other.
By then the old Trussel mansion had deteriorated to the point where it brought only $165,000 at probate auction in 1982. Twenty-two-year-old Colleen Cullen purchased it with twenty certified checks, each drawn on a different bank or savings and loan, and each made out for less than $9,000. Miss Cullen made it a point to tell anyone who would listen how she planned to turn the old place into a bed-and-break-fast inn, which she boasted would be “the best in the West.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —89
◊ ◊ ◊
From the San Fernando Valley, State Highway 27 winds up through the Santa Monica Mountains to Topanga. It then winds back down the other side to the ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway. There, at the junction of Highway 27 and the ocean, knowledgeable drivers, heading for San Francisco or Santa Barbara or even Oxnard, slowed down lest they fall prey to the county deputy sheriffs who had been rented by the recently incorporated city of Malibu, which was suffering from a shortage of funds.
About halfway between the ocean and the Valley, at the very top of State Highway 27, is the Summit Bar & Grill. And it was there that Otherguy Overby sat behind the wheel of his rented Ford sedan, studying a Thomas Brothers map of Los Angeles County. Minutes later, Georgia Blue pulled in beside him, got out of her own rented car and into his.
“You eat yet?” Overby said, not looking up from the map.
“No. Did you?”
“We can get something here.”
Georgia Blue gave the Summit Bar & Grill a quick appraisal, shook her head and said she would eat later.
“You can have a grilled cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer,” he said. “How can they fuck up a grilled cheese sandwich?”
“They’d find a way.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Overby said, closing the map book.
“Know where we’re going?” she asked.
Overby nodded and started the engine. “How was what’s his name—
Broach?”
“Slick.”
“He say anything interesting about Ione Gamble?”
“Only that he’s her very best friend and also her agent, business manager and personal attorney. He doesn’t charge for being best friend but gets twenty percent of her gross for the rest.”
“What’d he say about the Goodisons?”
“That he pegged them right off as two sick fucks.”
Shrugging, as if at old news, Overby then asked, “You ever hear of Colleen Cullen?”
Georgia Blue frowned first, then looked at Overby and said, “There was a Cullen years back in Chicago who had ties to both the Black Panthers and the IRA, but her first name wasn’t Colleen. Why?”
“This Cullen’s supposed to run the best lie-low place in L.A.”
“And you want to ask her about the Goodisons?”
He said he did.
“Think she passes out free information?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —90
“If she’s got any, it’ll cost us. You still have that thousand Booth gave you?”
“I spent it.”
“On what?”
“Shoes and a dress.”
Overby took his eyes off the road and inspected her new shoes and dress, as if for the first time. “Nice. How much?”
“Nine hundred and sixty-something with the shoes.”
Nodding his approval, Overby said, “You and me, Georgia, we always did understand why the right clothes can give you an edge.”
Overby turned his rented Ford off a narrow winding blacktop and onto a brick drive. The Ford’s headlights illuminated a green sign with gold lettering that read, “Cousin Colleen’s Bed & Breakfast Inn.” Stuck up on top of the wooden sign, almost as an afterthought, was a row of small red neon letters that blinked “No Vacancy.”
As the brick drive went on and on, Overby guessed that the inn had been set as far back from the narrow blacktop as possible—probably at the point where the flat land suddenly turned itself into the steep slope of a Santa Monica mountain There were a great many trees, which, even at night, Georgia Blue identified by shape and size as pines, sycamores and the odd eucalyptus. The headlights revealed no lawn to speak of, but did give glimpses of neglected flower beds that featured freeway daisies, Mexican poppies and other drought-resistant strains whose names she didn’t know or had forgotten.
The brick drive ended just past the old house and fanned out into a parking area large enough for a dozen cars. Yet it now held only two cars. One was a white Toyota pickup, fairly new, and the other was an elderly MG roadster with no top. Overby stopped the Ford, shifted into park, switched off the engine and lights, looked at Georgia Blue and said, “Well?”
“Nine steps up to a covered porch that wraps around the front and the west side,” she said. “The front door’s solid wood and lit by what’re probably hundred-watt bulbs inside two frosted globes.
There’s a narrow stained-glass window just to the right of the door.
Bunches of fruit, I think. It’s a three-story house and big,
probably fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen rooms, and there’s a light on in one room on the second floor, but it’s dark on the first and third floors. No cars except for that Toyota pickup and the MG that looks like it hasn’t been moved in six months, maybe a year.”
“No cars and a ‘no vacancy’ sign don’t match,” Overby said.
“Maybe her lie-lows all come by limo.”
“Maybe,” Overby said and opened his door. She joined him at the steps and they mounted them together. It was Overby who found the doorbell and pressed it, causing a loud buzz instead of a ring. When Voodoo, Ltd. —91
no one answered the summons, he rang again—this time for at least twenty seconds. They waited another twenty seconds before Georgia Blue tried the door. It was locked. Overby shrugged and turned away, as if giving up. If she hadn’t been watching for it, Georgia Blue wouldn’t have seen the quick sudden move of his right elbow as it slammed back against the narrow stained-glass window, breaking a six-by-ten-inch panel of what had been a bowl of ripe cherries.
Overby spun around, reached through the broken panel and unlocked the front door from the inside. “I must’ve slipped,” he said with his hard white grin just before he went inside.
It was Georgia Blue who found the light switch and turned on a pair of lamps that revealed a large foyer with a well-cared-for parquet floor. The two lamps were a pair of milky globes on fluted brass columns that grew out of the staircase’s twin newel-posts. The staircase went halfway up to the fourteen-foot ceiling before turning back on itself for the rest of the rise. A hall on the left side of the staircase led back to what seemed to be a pantry and probably, farther on, to a kitchen. At the far left of the foyer were two panelled sliding doors. On the foyer’s far right, the same thing.
Overby cleared his throat, then barked a question: “Anybody home?”
When there was no reply, Georgia Blue said, “The doors on the left probably lead to a dining room and the ones on the right to the living room.”
“A house this old, it’d be the parlor.”
“Okay. Parlor.”
Overby went to the sliding doors on the right and knocked. When there was still no response, he shoved one of the doors back into its walled recess and again asked, “Anybody home?” He waited a moment or two, heard nothing, then looked back at Georgia Blue, who nodded.
Overby moved slowly into the room, followed by Blue. He fumbled for a switch, found it and turned on some lights that were at the room’s far end. Before either he or Blue could turn toward them, a woman’s voice snapped out a warning, “You move, I shoot.”
Overby and Georgia Blue froze. Then Overby, moving only his lips, asked, “You Colleen Cullen?”
“Hands on your heads,” the voice said. “Do it.”
Overby and Blue did as instructed.
“Turn around slow, then go down on your knees, but keep your hands where they are.”
“That’s kinda hard to do,” Overby said.
“Try one knee at a time, asshole.”
“You want us to turn around first?” Overby said.
“You as dumb as you sound? Turn around, get down on your knees and lemme see if you look as dumb as you sound.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —92
Overby and Georgia Blue, hands on their heads, turned around slowly and stared at the woman who held a sawed-off 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun with a chopped stock.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “You expecting something with blue eyes, blond hair and dimples?”
“Well, sepia’s nice, too,” Overby said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —93
Nineteen
Georgia Blue frowned at the woman with the shotgun for nearly ten seconds before the frown went away and she said, “Now I remember.”
“Remember what, Slim?”
“Junior Gibbons. Before he joined the Panthers he lived with Mary Margaret Cullen, who used to raise money for the IRA in Chicago.
You’re their daughter, right?”
The twin barrels of the shotgun moved until both were aimed at Georgia Blue. “On your knees, sis. You, too, Ace.”
Once Blue and Overby were on their knees with their hands on their heads, Cullen said, “Okay. You know my name and my mama’s and daddy’s names. Now let’s hear yours. You first, Slim.”
“Georgia Blue.”
“And you?”
“Maurice Overby.”
“Maw-reese. That sounds way uptown, don’t it?”
Her skin had too much luster to be the sepia Overby had called it. It was more like coffee two-thirds diluted by rich cream. Although her eyes were too large and her nose a trifle thin, and her mouth a bit wide, the combination was so striking it would make her face stick in memory far longer than mere prettiness and almost as long as true beauty.
Below the face was a long neck, then a black tank top that revealed smooth shoulders, well-muscled arms and the outline of small taut breasts. A pair of tight black pants advertised a firm butt and exaggerated the length of the long legs. Her stance and the familiar, confident way she held the shotgun suggested good coordination and also a possible oversupply of self-assurance.
Colleen Cullen gave her head an almost reflexive shake that got the thick black hair out of her eyes. The hair had been cut in a virtual 1920s bob—short in back, parted in the middle and long enough at the sides to hang down just below her ears. With the hair out of her eyes, she stared at Overby and said, “I gotta hear why you broke into my house.”
“Maybe we should talk about the money first,” Overby said.
“Whose money?”
“Mine.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —94
The shotgun barrels dipped a little but then came back up. “What you got, I can take.”
“I’ve got maybe three hundred tops in my right pants pocket. My partner’s got sixty more, if that. But we came here hoping to buy something for important money, and somehow I don’t think any of us’d call three hundred and sixty bucks important.”
The shotgun barrels dipped slightly again and this time stayed dipped. “You’re looking to buy what exactly?”
“Information.”
“About what?”
“The Goodisons, Pauline and Hughes,” said Georgia Blue, who rose, then bent over to brush real or imaginary dust from her knees.
“I say you could get up, Slim?”
Georgia Blue straightened and said, “When money was mentioned you forgot about the sawed-off.”
“You wish,” Cullen said, again aiming the shotgun at her.
Overby then rose and also bent over to brush dust from the knees of his blue London suit. While still dusting, he said, “You know the Goodisons, Colleen? Say yes and you get a thousand dollars.”
“We met,” Cullen said.
“That’s one thousand,” said Overby, straightening up all the way.
“How much if I got ‘em locked in the cellar?”
Overby, taking his time, examined her for signs of trick and guile.
Finding none, he said, “Too bad you don’t.”
Colleen Cullen lowered the shotgun, turned and went to a large round oak table that held a brass lamp with a bowl shade of green glass. Also on the table were a bottle of Virginia Gentleman, four tumblers and a pitcher of water.
“I was about to have a toddy,” she said, placing the shotgun on the table. “You guys drink bourbon?”
“Now and then,” Overby said.
Cullen poured generous measures into three tumblers, added a little water and, carrying two of the tumblers in one hand, served Georgia Blue first, then Overby.
“Sit down if you want to,” she said, returning to the table and pulling out a chair for herself. Overby and Blue joined her.
“Lemme guess,” Colleen Cullen said, staring at Blue. “You used to be some brand of cop, right?”
Blue answered by tasting the bourbon and water.
“But you, Ace,” Cullen said, turning to Overby. “I think your main job’s staying a
way from cops, right?”
Overby’s tiny smile revealed nothing at all.
Voodoo, Ltd. —95
“If I tell you about them, the Goodisons,” Cullen said, “how much do I get?”
“You’ve already made one thousand.”
“All I got so far is say-so.”
“Tell us what you know about them, you get another thousand. Tell us where we can find them, two thousand.”
“Four thousand in all?”
Overby nodded. “Four in all.”
“Who told you about me?”
Overby frowned, as if reluctant to betray his informer.
Then the frown gave way to a sigh and a look of regret as he said,
“Dickie Brackeen.”
“The dirty-movie man?”
Overby nodded.
“Tell us about the Goodisons,” Georgia Blue said.
“You’re not much for gossip, are you, sis?”
“The Goodisons,” Blue said.
“Okay. The Goodisons, Hughsie and Paulie. Brother and sister. They fuck each other, but I guess you know that?”
Overby nodded.
“There at the last, they even tried to get me into bed with ’em.”
“Exactly when was ‘there at the last’?” Blue said.
“There at the last was a week ago tomorrow.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning.”
“What about my money?”
Overby leaned forward, placed a possessive hand on the shotgun and said, “When my partner gets the sawed-off, you get some money.”
Cullen blinked rapidly more times than Overby could count. “Not to keep, she don’t.”
“Okay. You keep the sawed-off but she gets the shells.”
Without waiting for more debate, Overby slid the shotgun across the table to Georgia Blue, who broke it open, removed the two shells, put them in her purse, then slid the still-broken-open shotgun back to Cullen.
Cullen put a hand on it, looked at Overby and said, “My money.”
Overby reached into a hip pocket and removed ten pre-counted hundred-dollar bills. He handed them to Cullen, who counted them slowly twice, then looked up and said, “When’ll I get my next thousand?”