by Ross Thomas
“I think Howie doesn’t want to hear what maybe he shouldn’t hear,”
Stallings said.
“And what’s that, Booth?” Wu said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —130
“I rented you guys a new car—a black Mercedes sedan, the 560. It’s even got a telephone. I also gave Rosa Alicia Chavez a certified check for two thousand dollars along with the sympathy of the Independent Limousine Operators Association. She was most grateful and told me she’ll never forget the two guys who killed her intended. She especially won’t forget the big fat one she called ‘el chino grande.’ “
“How’d she describe me?” Durant said.
“Tall, dark and mean-looking.”
“What’d she say about the Goodisons?” Wu asked.
“All her late fiancé told her was that both Goodisons are locos and that he picked them up by prearrangement at the bed-and-breakfast place in Topanga Canyon, then drove them to a motel in Oxnard. She didn’t say which one because he didn’t tell her. I found Oxnard on the map and it’s about thirty miles up the coast from Malibu. I called its Visitors’ Bureau and they told me they have a couple of dozen motels.”
“What about Otherguy?” Durant said.
“When last heard from, he was spreading the word about the booming new market for home videos of people doing awful stuff they shouldn’t. He said he’d begun at a poker parlor in Gardena and was working his way back.”
“Oxnard,” Wu said to Stallings. “Why don’t you and I run up there this afternoon and check out some motels?”
Stallings nodded and was about to add something when the door opened and Howard Mott came in with three open bottles of Mexican beer. He kept one for himself, served the others to Wu and Durant, then asked, “Who wants to go first?”
“Why don’t you?” Durant said when everyone was seated— Mott behind his desk, which occupied the space where the missing twin bed had been, and Wu on the bed next to Stallings. Durant half sat on the windowsill.
Mott took a long drink of beer from the bottle as if he were parched, then said, “We have a problem. The sleaze media’s staked out Ione’s house and she has to go to the dentist.”
“Sounds like a job for Jack Broach, super agent,” Durant said.
“He’s having a long lunch with your Ms. Blue—or so his secretary says.”
“I take it this isn’t just Ione’s regular six-month checkup?” Wu said.
“It’s an impacted wisdom tooth that has to come out before it develops an abscess,” Mott said. “She’d drive herself but they’re going to give her sodium Pentothal to knock her out. The dental surgeon insists somebody has to drive her home and Ione insists somebody trustworthy has to be on hand to monitor her babbling while she’s under the influence of what she calls ‘the truth serum.’ “
“When’s her appointment?” Durant asked.
“Two.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —131
“I’ll drive her, if her car’s out of impound.”
“It is,” Mott said.
Durant asked, “What else, Howie?”
“They traced the murder weapon—that Beretta semiautomatic—to its previous owner, which turns out to be Paramount Studios. It was stolen from a movie set there nine years ago. Fortunately, Ione didn’t do anything at Paramount that year.”
“What movie was it?” Stallings asked.
“A TV pilot that none of the networks picked up. Something called The Keepers. I have copies of the script and the names of everyone in the cast and crew. I have a videotape of the pilot itself and I’m told that everyone connected with it who’s still alive is being questioned by the sheriffs investigators.”
“Could I get copies of everything you have?” Stallings said.
“Ask Mary Jo,” said Mott.
“She the blonde?”
“The brunette.”
Wu rose. “Anything else?”
Mott nodded. “Enno Glimm.”
“He called?” Durant said.
“No, but Jenny Arliss did. She and Glimm’re flying in late tonight.
But there’s no need to meet them because she’s arranged a limo that’ll whisk them out to the Malibu Beach Inn, which she thinks’ll be quite convenient for all concerned.”
“She say why they’re coming?” Durant asked.
Mott nodded. “She says Glimm wants to know how you’re spending his money.”
The paparazzi had gathered at the northwest corner of Seventh Street and Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. They had arrived in three vans and five cars and positioned themselves less than a block from Ione Gamble’s house. Durant, with Gamble beside him, backed out of her driveway in her almost new Mercedes 500SL roadster and started around the curve where the photographers waited. Durant automatically counted the number of what he thought of as the opposition, if not the enemy, and came up with seventeen—five of them women. Six were armed with camcorders and the rest had one or more 35mm cameras. They were uniformly young, uniformly scruffy and, Durant decided, about as congenial as sea gulls.
“What should I do—duck?” Gamble asked.
“Ignore them.”
He stopped the Mercedes in the center of the street, shifted into neutral and raced the engine up to five thousand revolutions per minute. The paparazzi, unfazed, formed a wavering line across the Voodoo, Ltd. —132
street a dozen yards ahead. His left foot firmly on the brake, Durant shifted into low, raced the engine again and took his foot off the brake.
The Mercedes leaped forward, its fat rear tires clawing at the asphalt. The acceleration slammed Durant and Gamble back into their seats. Durant had read somewhere that the 500SL could accelerate from 0 to 60 in less than seven seconds. The claim was apparently valid.
The line of paparazzi wavered—then broke mostly to the right, the passenger side. They had less than a second to aim and shoot as the roadster flashed by, its passenger staring straight ahead. By the time the photographers had piled into their cars and vans, the Mercedes had disappeared around the corner and was racing south on Seventh Street.
Ione Gamble’s destination was a medical building on the southwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and San Vicente. But instead of taking the most direct route, which would have been east on San Vicente, Durant used tree-lined side streets, turning south or north at almost every intersection, but bearing always east.
Ione Gamble finally said, “You seem to know the way— sort of.”
“Wu and his wife used to live in Santa Monica.”
“And you?”
“In Malibu—Paradise Cove.”
“Where the rumrunners used to unload,” she said. “During Prohibition.”
“I missed that by about fifty years.”
“You were there in the seventies, then?”
“In the late seventies,” he said. “For a while.”
“How long’ve you lived in London?”
“Nearly five years.”
“You like it?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Listen,” she said. “No matter how much they bitch, I want you with me every second we’re there.”
“You won’t say anything.”
“How d’you know?”
“Because he’ll have both hands in your mouth.”
Dr. Melvin Unger didn’t want any spectators. Ione Gamble told him that unless Mr. Durant were present, her impacted wisdom tooth would stay right where it was. Dr. Unger, a pale, very thin man with soft brown eyes that were either extremely sad or extremely kind, Voodoo, Ltd. —133
remained adamant for nearly ten seconds before he relented and agreed that Durant could stay.
A practitioner of four-handed dentistry, Dr. Unger let his dental technician inject the sodium Pentothal. Ione Gamble was now almost horizontal on the dental chair. Just as the needle went into a vein in her left arm, she was asked to count backwards from ten. She reached six before she went under and out.
The extraction of the impacted wisdom to
oth took less than ten minutes. Durant calculated that Dr. Unger, working at top speed, could gross around $7,200 an hour. Ione Gamble was still out when Durant helped the dental technician half walk, half carry her into the quiet room where they eased her onto a narrow couch.
The technician handed Durant a box of Kleenex and said, “There shouldn’t be any more bleeding, but if there is, give her some of these.”
“What about pain?”
“No pain,” she said. “Just some mild discomfort.”
“When can she eat?”
“An hour or two from now. But I’d suggest soup, medium warm.
Later this evening, anything she wants within reason.”
After the technician left, Durant sat down next to Ione Gamble, watched her for several seconds, then said, “Ione?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Did anyone borrow your car New Year’s Eve?”
“No.”
“Did you go out to Billy Rice’s house twice that day—once in the late afternoon or evening and again early the next morning?”
“No.”
“Did you shoot Billy Rice?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“No,” she said just as the dental technician bustled in and asked,
“She coming around?”
“Seems to be,” Durant said.
“Let’s have a look.” She bent over Ione Gamble and, using a voice she would use on someone hard of hearing, said, “Miss Gamble? Can you hear me?”
Ione Gamble opened her eyes and said, “Is it over yet?”
The technician smiled. “All over and everything’s fine.”
“God, that Pentothal’s wonderful stuff.”
The technician beamed. “Isn’t it, though?”
Gamble turned her head and found Durant leaning against a wall. “I say anything?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —134
“Nothing I could understand,” he said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —135
Twenty-eight
After they left the medical building, Durant followed Ione Gamble’s advice and took San Vicente Boulevard all the way to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. After two acute right turns he drove up the short steep incline that was a seldom-used back way into Adelaide Drive.
This stretch of the drive had been transformed into a one-way street by those who lived in the huge houses that lined its right side. To the left of the street the land fell sharply away, almost straight down, and provided a see-forever view of canyon, mountains and ocean.
At the end of the one-way section was a white-painted steel barrier that blocked two-way traffic and gave the long row of huge houses the air of a gated community. As he squeezed the Mercedes past the steel barrier, Durant noticed a group of six or seven fit-looking men and women in their early twenties. Some were doing cramp-relieving exercises. Others were gulping Evian water from one-liter plastic bottles. Nearly all were wearing shorts, tank tops, running shoes, and sweating at half past three on a late February afternoon with the temperature in the low sixties and falling.
“They still bounce up and down those steps?” Durant asked.
“Night and day,” Gamble said. “One hundred and eighty-nine steps up from the floor of the canyon and one hundred and eighty-nine down. The same as in a fourteen-story building. A few of them make three or four round trips a day. Some of them even do it two steps at a time.”
Because Durant couldn’t think of anything to say except “Ah, youth,” he said nothing. His silence provoked a smile from Gamble.
“They make me feel the same way and you’ve got ten years on me.”
“More like fifteen,” Durant said.
They were both silent for almost a block until they turned into her driveway, stopped, and she asked, “Is Pentothal like opium?”
“Why?”
“If it is, then I finally figured out why the British fought the opium wars with China.”
“To corner the euphoria market, right?”
“Sure, but what I felt at the dentist’s was ten notches up from euphoria. What I felt was, well, perfection.”
“I’ll remember that the next time they try to give me novocaine,”
Durant said, switched off the engine and handed her the keys. He had Voodoo, Ltd. —136
his door half-open when he turned back to ask, “Any letdown? Pain?
Discomfort?”
She shook her head. “A slight twinge now and then—just enough to make you wonder if getting up for a couple of aspirins is worth the effort.” She opened her own door, paused and said, “Why not come in for a drink and some almost instant mock Senate bean soup?”
Durant said it sounded interesting.
He sat at the kitchen table with a Scotch on ice and watched her open a large can of Great Northern beans. She dumped the contents into a saucepan and placed it on the stove over low heat. She found some garlic, then located a large onion, cut it in half and removed its outer skin. She didn’t bother with the outer skin of the garlic.
After Gamble had butter melting in a small frying pan, she tossed the garlic and onion into a mini-Cuisinart, gave it a couple of bursts, then another one, and dumped the chopped results into the now sizzling butter. Once the garlic and onion turned golden brown, she spooned them, butter and all, into the simmering beans, stirred, added salt, a little water, lots of pepper and a dash or two of Tabasco.
She almost forgot the bay leaf but tossed it in at the last minute, admitting it provided more style than flavor.
She found two soup bowls, two napkins, two soup spoons and a loaf of dark rye bread sliced at the bakery. She then asked Durant if he wanted anything besides Scotch to drink. He said he didn’t.
After serving the soup, she sat down, picked up her spoon and said,
“This recipe was taught me a long time ago by a very young one-term congressman from L.A. who, when last heard of, was living in semi-permanent exile just outside of Lisbon.”
“Chubb Dunjee,” Durant said and tasted the soup.
She halted her spoon a few inches from her mouth. Her eyes widened. “You know him?”
“Artie and I ran into him down in Mexico years ago. Chubb certainly knew some . . . shortcuts.”
“What were you guys doing in—”
The kitchen’s wall telephone rang, interrupting her question.
Gamble rose, crossed to the phone, put it to her left ear and said,
“Allo,” in what Durant thought must have been a perfect imitation of her Salvadoran housekeeper.
Gamble then listened to the voice on the phone for nearly fifteen seconds before she said, “Un momento, por favor.” Again, the accent was perfect.
She used her right hand to indicate the telephone, then used the same hand to point at the hall leading into the living room. Durant nodded, rose and hurried into the living room where he picked up an extension phone with his right hand and looked at his watch. It was Voodoo, Ltd. —137
3:13 P.M. Just as the phone touched his right ear, he heard Ione Gamble say, “Who’s this?”
“Recognize the voice, love?” a British tenor said.
“Hughes, you dipshit. What the hell happened?”
“Paulie and I went on a retreat—to sort out our options,” said Hughes Goodison.
“Why call me?”
“Because we’ve decided you’re our best option—although we do have several others.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Of course I am, love. And you’ll understand perfectly once I play a tape of you talking to Paulie and me while you were deep in hypnosis.
It’s just a tiny bit of a much, much longer tape, but, still and all, rather a fair sample.”
The next voice was Gamble’s, but filtered by tape and telephone.
Her voice was also deeper than normal and nearly toneless. “I wanted to kill him,” she said.
Then Hughes Goodison’s voice, similarly filtered, asked a questi
on:
“Billy Rice?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?” Goodison’s voice asked.
A long pause, followed by Gamble’s uninfiected answer: “Yes.”
“That’s it, Ione,” Goodison said in his normal voice. “We want you to know we’re willing to sell all forty-nine and a half minutes of the tape you just heard.”
“You mean you want to sell me one of the God knows how many copies you’ve made.”
“Lord, no. Paulie and I are risk avoiders, not risk takers. Whoever pays our price buys the original. There are no copies. None.”
“Bullshit.”
Goodison giggled. “Believe what you like. But I’ll say it again. There is only one copy. Just one.”
“How much?” Gamble asked.
“One million—dollars, of course. Cash.”
“What happens if I can’t or won’t buy?”
“Then we sell to the highest bidder. Only today we heard about a mysterious Mr. X who’s in town looking for confessional-type videotapes of, you know, people doing naughty things—and that’s exactly what we have to sell.”
“You told me there’s only one tape.”
“One audiotape—and one videotape. Those camcorders are such a marvelous treat. But you get both tapes for the same low, low price.”
“I’ll go two hundred and fifty thousand.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —138
“Don’t be tiresome, Ione.”
“Five hundred thousand.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay,” she said with a long sigh. “One million—but it’ll take time to raise that much cash.”
“You have four days. No more.”
“What if I can’t raise it in four days?”
“I happen to know you can,” Goodison said. “But if you won’t, I’ll have to get in touch with Mr. X and then people all over the world can sit in their most comfy chairs, watching Ione Gamble, movie star, confess to the murder of poor Billy Rice.”
“Where do I call, if I manage to get the money together?”
“You’re being tiresome again, Ione.”
“Okay. You call me. But let’s get something straight, Hughes. You’re a slimebug and your sister’s a certifiable weirdo and I won’t come anywhere near either of you. So if I do get the money, I’ll send somebody with it, somebody who’ll insist on inspecting the merchandise before paying for it.”