Voodoo Ltd qd-3

by Ross Thomas

  “Might?”

  “That’s as specific as I can get,” Wu said. “But there’s one thing you must do and that’s to give Ione some sense of progress. Simply call her and say that Durant and Georgia are dropping by to bring her up to date and introduce her to her new bodyguard.”

  “Who is?”

  “I’m not quite sure yet.”

  “The hell you’re not.”

  “Bear with me, Howie.”

  Another very long pause was followed by a grunt from Howard Mott, who then changed the subject and asked, “How was Enno Glimm?”

  “Nervous,” Wu said. “He offered us an additional five hundred thousand to keep him all the way out of it and get Ione off the hook.

  Then he flew back to London.”

  “Artie,” Mott said.

  “Yes?”

  “I really don’t need to hear everything,” Mott said and broke the connection.

  Wu recradled the phone, frowned at it for a moment, then turned to Stallings. “What d’you think, Booth?”

  “I think your phone pal Oil Drum not only stole the tapes but also killed the limo driver, Mr. Santillan, then did in the Goodisons and tried to run over you and me at the motel in Oxnard.”

  “How very neat,” Wu said.

  “It’d be even neater if he also killed Billy Rice,” Stallings said.

  “Except he didn’t,” Wu said.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —173

  “No.”

  “But you think you know who did.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Like to share your suspicions?”

  “Depends,” Stallings said.

  “On what?”

  “On what happens to Georgia,” Stallings said.

  Artie Wu tugged at his right earlobe as he seemed to examine something that was just beyond Stallings’s left shoulder. “You think I’ve sent Georgia down the path to temptation rather than redemption, don’t you?”

  “You sure as hell’ve pointed the way.”

  “Then why would I send Quincy with her?”

  “That stumps me.”

  “How does Quincy seem to you—compared to five years ago?”

  Stallings considered the question. “He’s turned sour and about as remote as the moon—although he never was what I’d call a bucket of laughs.”

  “And Georgia?”

  “She’s moved to the outback of remote.”

  “What I’ve done,” Wu said slowly, “or what I hope I’ve done, is to send them on a cure together.”

  “A cure that can get ‘em both killed—if they don’t kill each other first.”

  “But the interesting thing is, Booth, they both know what I’m doing and neither objects.”

  “Maybe the cure will take and maybe it won’t,” Stallings said. “But as long as I know you’re not setting Georgia up, I’ll go along.”

  “I’m very fond of Georgia,” Wu said. “You know that.”

  “Ever been stuck on her?”

  “No,” Wu said. “But then Agnes was already—present.”

  “Durant was once,” Stallings said. “Stuck on her.”

  Wu nodded.

  “So was Otherguy.”

  Wu moved his shoulders just enough to form a slight shrug.

  “And now me,” Stallings said.

  “You’re a lucky man, Booth,” Wu said, paused, then asked, “About what you said earlier?”

  “About who killed Rice?”

  Wu nodded. “Is it a hunch?”

  “More notion than hunch.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —174

  “Notions are good, too,” Wu said with a couple of judicious nods.

  “Need anything?”

  “Money, but I’ll cash a check at the bank for five thousand.”

  “Want me to tag along?”

  Stallings shook his head and rose.

  “May I ask what you think you might come up with?”

  “What about a signed confession?”

  “That’ll do nicely,” said Artie Wu.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —175

  Thirty-six

  The three of them were following the Salvadoran housekeeper and the flop-cared rabbit up the stairs to Ione Gamble’s office when the 7-year-old shepherd-Labrador began its charge.

  Otherguy Overby, bringing up the rear, turned just in time for eighty-two pounds of dog to spring and slam into his chest. A second later Overby found himself in a sitting position on the stair’s fifth step, the shep-Lab licking his face and emitting yelps and whines of joy and delight.

  Overby finally grinned, gave the dog a rough hug, pushed him away and said, “How the hell are you, Moose?” The dog replied with yet another wet lick, rested his head on Overby’s knee and gazed up at him with what seemed to be total adoration.

  It was then that Ione Gamble appeared at the top of the stairs and asked Durant, “What happened?”

  “Your dog just took out your new bodyguard,” said Durant and quickly introduced Gamble to Georgia Blue.

  After the introduction, Gamble stared down at the back of Overby’s head and called, “Are you okay?”

  Overby rose slowly, turned around even more slowly, looked up at Gamble and said, “I’m fine.”

  “Godalmighty,” she said. “It’s Otherguy Overby himself.”

  Overby smiled up at her—a little wanly, Durant thought— and said,

  “Howya doing, Ione?”

  “You’ve met, I see,” Georgia Blue said.

  Ione Gamble nodded, still staring down at Overby, whose faint smile had now almost faded away. “The first time was in seventy-four,” she said. “I was eighteen and Otherguy was what—thirty-three?”

  “Thirty,” Overby said.

  “As I said, thirty-three, and he was going to make me a star. Well, he did get me my first job—leading an iguana by a rope over to Cal Worthington in one of those ‘My Dog, Spot’ used-car commercials.”

  “You had to start somewhere,” Overby said.

  “And the next time?” Georgia Blue said.

  “Ten years later.”

  “Eleven,” Overby said. “Eighty-five.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —176

  “Okay. Eighty-five. I’d just bought this house and had to do a picture in London. I needed someone to house-sit and a friend recommended what she called ‘this perfectly marvelous house-sitter.’ So I said okay, send him around. Well, who shows up but Maurice Overby, House-sitter to the Stars.”

  “Tell ‘em who saved the house, Ione,” Overby said.

  “You did. The firemen ordered him out because a fire was sweeping up the canyon. But Otherguy stayed on the roof all night with a garden hose and nobody got hurt and nothing got burned. But when he left six weeks later, my animals pined for him so much, especially Moose here, that they’d hardly eat. The bastard had alienated their affections and I had to pay him fifty bucks every Sunday for two months just to come over and play with ‘em for an hour.”

  Overby shrugged. “Animals like me.”

  “If you don’t want him as bodyguard,” said Durant, “just say so.”

  “How long will I need one?”

  “Two or three days, if that.”

  “If he stays more than three days, my animals will fall for him again.

  On the other hand, Otherguy’s mean and crafty and ought to make an okay bodyguard. So let’s go on in the office and you guys can have a beer or something.” She looked back down the stairs at Overby. “You, too.”

  Ione Gamble indicated the way to her office, which Durant already knew. He led the way, followed by Georgia Blue. When Overby reached the top of the stairs, trailed by Moose, Gamble looked over her left shoulder to make sure Blue and Durant were inside the office.

  She then turned back to Overby and said, “You going to give me a hug or not?”

  After he gave her a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek, she said,

  “Why didn’t you tell them you knew me?”

  “It was a long time ago, Ione.”


  “Something told me to ride you a little. Was I right?”

  He nodded. “As always.”

  “How are you—really?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said, and intuition told Gamble that Otherguy Overby, for once, was probably telling the truth.

  No one wanted a beer at 10:45 in the morning so the Salvadoran housekeeper served coffee to everyone except Gamble, who, seated behind her Memphis cotton broker’s desk with the flop-eared rabbit in her lap, stuck to diet Dr Pepper.

  After a sip of the soft drink, she looked at Durant and said, “I talked to Howie Mott. He called forty-five minutes ago and told me the blackmailer wants a million dollars for the Goodison tapes. I asked Voodoo, Ltd. —177

  him what I should do and Howie said he’s against paying blackmail in any form. But it’s my reputation at stake and it has to be my choice.”

  “That’s a nonanswer,” said Overby, who was sitting in the businesslike armchair with Moose curled up at his feet.

  “No, it’s not,” Gamble said. “Howie said that before I decided anything I should find out from Jack Broach if I can even raise a million dollars in cash by five this afternoon. If I can’t, he says the question of payment is moot.” She paused. “Academic?”

  “Or irrelevant,” Georgia Blue said. Durant, sitting next to her on the chintz-covered couch, agreed with a nod.

  “Well, I called Jack and asked if it was possible and he said just barely, but I’d have to take a beating on some of my stocks and bonds and all my annuities. I told him to go ahead. Of course, he wanted to know what to do with a million in cash. I told him Howie said a Ms.

  Georgia Blue would be by to pick it up.”

  “What did Mr. Broach say?” Blue asked.

  “He sounded relieved and said you were very competent.”

  “You have to sign anything?” Durant asked Gamble.

  She shook her head. “Jack’s got my power of attorney.”

  “I’d never give anybody my power of attorney,” Overby said.

  Ione Gamble dismissed Overby’s comment with a derisive roll of her eyes and turned again to Georgia Blue. “You’ve had a lot of experience in stuff like this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Georgia used to be a Secret Service agent,” Overby said.

  “Really?”

  Blue nodded.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Get the tapes back. You don’t have any choice.”

  “But they tell me they’re inadmissible as evidence because I was hypnotized.”

  “This isn’t about evidence anymore,” Blue said. “It’s about Ione Gamble, movie star. If you don’t get the tapes back, they’ll be sold to slash-and-burn TV shows and tabloids. They’ll run tapes of you on TV

  saying God knows what—maybe describing the details of your sex life with Billy Rice. And everything they run on TV will be boiled down by the tabloids into three- and four-word Second Coming headlines that’ll scream the whole story.” Georgia Blue paused, then continued. “Okay.

  You’re tough and you can take it. But it’ll be an avalanche of pretrial publicity—all of it bad.”

  “Maybe it won’t ever come to trial,” Overby said.

  “Maybe it won’t,” Georgia Blue said.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —178

  “What you’re really telling me is that those tapes could help send me to the gas chamber.”

  “That’s melodramatic,” Blue said. “What I’m saying is that they can do you no possible good and could cause you a great deal of harm.”

  Gamble looked at Durant. “What d’you think?”

  “I think Georgia’s right.”

  Gamble seemed drawn back to Blue. “In the Secret Service you must’ve had a lot of experience protecting people.”

  Georgia Blue nodded.

  “Anybody famous?”

  “Imelda Marcos. Mrs. Bush—when he first became Vice-President.

  Some others.”

  “Then you’re an expert.”

  “I was.”

  “Well, if I need a bodyguard, why is it Otherguy and not you?”

  “You’ll have to ask Mr. Durant,” Georgia Blue said.

  Gamble shifted her gaze to Durant, who said, “We don’t know that your life’s in danger. But we think it’s a possibility and Otherguy is the precaution we’ve taken. And a competent one.”

  “As competent as Ms. Blue?”

  “Nobody is.”

  Georgia Blue turned to stare at Durant, then looked quickly away.

  “So you and Ms. Blue—”

  “Better call me Georgia.”

  “So you and Georgia will buy the tapes from the blackmailer with my million dollars?”

  “You tell her, Georgia,” Durant said.

  “When it’s all over,” Georgia Blue said slowly, “we plan to hand you the tapes and also your million dollars and possibly even the blackmailer.”

  Ione Gamble seemed to shrink back in her wooden swivel chair.

  “Possibly?” she said, almost whispering the word.

  “It’s possible the blackmailer will be dead.”

  Ione Gamble shrank even farther back in the chair, as if to get as far away from Blue and Durant as possible. She stared down at her desktop, stroked the flop-eared rabbit, as though for reassurance, then looked up at Overby and said, “I don’t really want to hear any more, Otherguy.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —179

  Thirty-seven

  It was 2:42 P.M. When Georgia Blue began counting the $300,000 in Jack Broach’s Beverly Hills office. There were thirty bound packets of currency stacked on his eighteenth-century French desk, each packet containing $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills. Blue stood, counting silently. When done, she carefully packed the money into a dark blue nylon carryall she had bought at a Sav-On drugstore for $8.95 plus tax.

  Broach sat behind his desk, not speaking until she zipped up the carryall. He then smiled and said, “One million exactly, right?”

  Georgia Blue sat down in a chair in front of the desk, stared at him for a moment, then said, “Exactly.”

  “A receipt in that amount might prove useful someday.”

  “Useful to you, not to me.”

  “I thought it worth a try.”

  She shrugged. “Anything else?”

  He leaned toward her, forearms on the ornate desktop, the well-cared-for hands clasped, a look of what seemed to be genuine interest, even curiosity, on his face. “I’d like to know how it’ll work—the mechanics of it.”

  “The details,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “That’s normal,” she said. “Most people become curious when they find themselves in a mess like this for the first time. They ask who-does-what-and-when questions—probably because so much money’s involved.”

  “It does spark the curiosity,” Broach said.

  “All right. Here’s how it’ll work. When Oil Drum calls later this afternoon—”

  “Oil Drum?”

  “It’s our name for the seller because of his electronically distorted voice.”

  “I see.”

  “When he calls—”

  Again Broach interrupted. “Who’ll be taking the call?”

  “Artie Wu. I’ll probably listen in on an extension. Quincy Durant might also listen in—or he might not.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —180

  Broach nodded, satisfied.

  “Anyway,” she said, “after Oil Drum calls, he’ll be told the money’s ready.”

  “The million?”

  “The million. We’ll then settle on where to make the buy. It’ll be a quiet, out-of-the-way place.”

  “What kind of place?”

  “A place where he can count the money in private and where I can check out the tape on a VCR.”

  “You have such a place in mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Of course,” Broach said. “Security.”

&nbs
p; “Common sense,” said Georgia Blue. “Artie and Oil Drum will dicker about the place. Oil Drum’ll turn our first suggestion down and we’ll reject his alternate proposal. Artie’ll then recommend the place we wanted all along and make it clear that unless Oil Drum agrees, the deal’s off.”

  Broach frowned. “That sounds risky. All ultimatums do.”

  “Oil Drum’s selling, we’re buying and we have the customer’s leverage. After he finally agrees, we’ll haggle about the time. We’ll suggest eight o’clock and he’ll come back with nine or ten. We’ll let him win because unless he has time to scout out the meeting place, he won’t show and who could blame him for that?”

  “Interesting,” Broach said. “Will you be going alone?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s occurred to me that if you don’t go alone, then you’ll have to share this—” He touched the carryall. “— with somebody else.”

  “I won’t be going alone,” Georgia Blue said, rose and picked up the carryall.

  Broach also rose. “Who’re they sending with you?”

  “Durant,” she said. “But he and I won’t be sharing anything.”

  She turned then, strode to the door, the carryall in her right hand, opened the door, looked back, smiled and left. Jack Broach judged it to be another perfect exit.

  Georgia Blue walked south on the west side of Robertson Boulevard, moving with long quick strides until she came to the rented Ford. She walked with the blue money bag in her left hand, her right one thrust deeply into her new over-the-shoulder Coach purse that contained Voodoo, Ltd. —181

  the .38-caliber revolver she and Overby had bought from Colleen Cullen.

  After reaching the Ford, she opened its front curbside door, tossed in the carryall, got quickly into the car, closed the door and locked it.

  Durant started the engine, glanced over his left shoulder, then pulled out of the metered parking space and asked, “How’d it go?”

  “Fine,” she said. “He was very interested in what he called the mechanics.”

  “Translated, I’d say that means: are you going alone or with somebody?”

  “He also said that if somebody does tag along, I’ll have to share this.” She patted the blue moneybag.

  “And you said?”

  “I said Durant is coming with me but he and I won’t be sharing anything.”