by Ross Thomas
Cleveland ignored Stallings, finished his whisky, then poured himself another one.
Ione kept staring at Cleveland, who refused to look at her. “Why would you do it?” she said. “Kill Billy?”
Rick Cleveland downed his new drink, made a face, finally looked at Gamble and said, “Because the fucker spoiled my view, that’s why.”
“Your view?”
“You’ve got a view, don’t you?” Cleveland said. “Sure you do.
Suppose some asshole comes along and builds an eight-or nine-story building right in front of it. Wouldn’t that piss you off?”
“Not enough to kill him,” she said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —208
“What if your view was all you had left in the world?” Rick Cleveland said.
At just past 2 A.M. the sheriff’s substation in Malibu locked Rick Cleveland in the same cell from which it had just released Artie Wu.
By then Cleveland had freely admitted killing William A. C. Rice IV
and even announced that, given the same circumstances, he would do it all over again.
At 3:16 A.M. The state Highway Patrol, acting on an anonymous tip, discovered the bodies of Colleen Cullen and Jack Broach in the Topanga Canyon bed-and-breakfast inn. Otherguy Overby, the anonymous tipster, had called the Highway Patrol because he remembered Cullen telling him she was paying off certain deputy sheriffs to let her keep the lie-low establishment in business.
At 3:38 A.M. Overby, carrying a blue canvas bag, rang the door chimes at Ione Gamble’s house on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica.
After demanding that he identify himself, a fully dressed Gamble opened the door.
“Let’s go up to your office, Ione,” Overby said.
“I can’t handle any more shit tonight.”
“You’ll like this kind,” he said.
Seated in her office behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, an extremely wary Ione Gamble watched Overby place the blue zip-up bag in front of her. “What’s that?” she said.
“Open it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a nice surprise.”
Gamble rose and zipped open the bag that was still stuffed with bound hundred-dollar bills. “Jesus,” she said. “Whose is it?”
“Yours. Three hundred thousand—almost. It’s part of what Jack Broach stole from you. I stole it back. Not all by myself, of course. I had a little help from Georgia and that fucking Durant.”
“This is the mythical million, then, right?” she said. “The million that was supposed to buy back the tapes—except there wasn’t any million and there weren’t any tapes.”
“That’s about right,” Overby said.
“What do I do with it?”
“You got a safe-deposit box, don’t you? Put it in there. When you need some, take some out.” Overby rose. “I’ve gotta go—but it’s been awfully nice seeing you again, Ione.”
“What’ll you do now?”
Overby smiled contentedly. “Probably not much right away.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —209
“Sit down, Otherguy.”
He sat down. There was a long silence as she studied him before speaking again. “You want to be my agent?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —210
Forty-four
When Quincy Durant, seated at the old refectory table in the late William Rice’s dining room, got off the telephone with Enno Glimm in London it was 2:05 P.M. There and 6:05 A.M. in Malibu. Durant turned to Otherguy Overby and said, “Mr. Glimm is very appreciative of our efforts. It may not be exact, but he said something like: You guys did a pretty fucking fair job.”
“What about the money?” Overby said.
“Jenny Arliss is making the wire transfer. Glimm says Westminster Bank will handle it. It should be here by nine when our bank opens.”
“All of it?” Overby asked.
“All of it.”
“And our shares are still going to be what Artie said?”
“Nobody’s going to stiff you, Otherguy.”
“If you don’t ask, they don’t tell you.”
There was a pause before Durant said, “How is she?”
“Who?”
Durant only stared at him.
“Oh. You mean Ione. Ione’s fine. Sort of tired. Sort of mystified. But the money cheered her up a little. Not a hell of a lot, but some.” He paused and decided to lie. “She asked about you.”
“Asked what?”
“You know. If you were all right and what your plans were. Stuff like that.” Overby paused. “She also asked me to be her agent.”
Once again Durant’s mouth clamped itself into its unforgiving line.
His eyes drilled into Overby as the mouth opened just enough to ask,
“And you said what? It sure as hell wasn’t no.”
Overby showed Durant his hard, white and, this time, strangely merry smile. “I said, Ione, that’s the worst fucking idea you ever had in your life.”
Durant slumped back in the dining room chair as if exhausted. “I don’t understand you anymore, Otherguy.”
Overby nodded thoughtfully. “Not many people do.”
After they had walked approximately a hundred yards up the beach, Artie Wu and Howard Mott turned and started back to the Rice house.
Voodoo, Ltd. —211
They walked in silence for several moments until Mott said, “I assume you heard about the war?”
“About it being over? One of the deputies told me. Perhaps it was a preoccupation with my own problems, but I had a very curious ‘So what?’ reaction. I think we must be living in strange times.”
“The war’ll be useful to them in the election,” Mott said.
“You think so? That’s what—twenty-two months off? If there’s a bad slump, nobody’ll remember it. Well, virtually nobody.”
“You still vote?” Mott asked.
“Religiously.”
“Against or for?”
“Against,” Wu said. “I don’t think anyone votes for anyone anymore”
They walked on in silence until Wu looked down at Mott and said,
“Okay, Howie. How did you spring me?”
“Favors.”
Wu nodded several times, the nods indicating his understanding, and also his curiosity. “I like details,” he said.
“I called a senior partner in the law firm I’m associated with in the Gamble case. Or what was the Gamble case. He owed me a favor—a considerable one. I told him quite candidly that I would be in his debt if he could think of some way to quash the whole thing. I also mentioned that, if necessary, I could round up a dozen or so street people who’d swear you and Durant were passing out dollar bills on Ocean Avenue at precisely the time Miss Rosa Alicia Chavez thinks she saw el chino grande. I also hinted at other witnesses.”
“He believe you?”
“No, but it gave him ammunition. So he called someone who owed him a favor and that someone called someone else and it went on up the line until they reached the somebody who could pick up the phone and make the call that set you free.”
“I’m in your debt,” Artie Wu said.
“You are indeed,” Mott said. They walked on in silence for a few more paces until Mott asked, “Why’d you sit still for it?”
“Because they needed to arrest somebody,” Wu said. “There were all those rental car receipts and credit card trails and too many people who knew we were in town. We had to give the cops somebody. It couldn’t be Georgia since she was the most vulnerable because of her passport, which isn’t quite kosher. Otherguy was a possibility. He could have tap-danced his way through it, but he had contacts we needed and, besides, we’d have to hear about his noble sacrifice until the end of time. Then there was Booth. But he, thank God, was off riding his own hobbyhorse—the Rick Cleveland connection—and he was also looking after the money and keeping us fed, if not very well.
That left Durant or me. But I wanted to keep the Blue-Durant experiment going so that left only
me. And as I thought about it, I had Voodoo, Ltd. —212
to admit I didn’t have anything more constructive to do.” He smiled down at Mott. “Satisfied?”
“Interesting,” Mott said.
“Stay for breakfast?”
“What’re you having?”
“I think Booth’s about due back with some Egg McMuffins.”
“Maybe I’ll call Ione instead and see if she’d like an early lunch at—
what d’you think—the Bel-Air?”
“Perfect,” Wu said.
The passing out of the five certified checks and five envelopes, each containing $5,000 in cash, was done without ceremony at 10:19 A.M.
by Booth Stallings. Durant then excused himself and went to his bedroom phone to call Ione Gamble and ask her to lunch.
“I can’t make lunch,” she said, “but I’m free for dinner.”
“I’m leaving.”
“Back to London?”
“For a while.”
“Will you be coming back?”
“In about a month.”
“Call me,” she said, “and we’ll have dinner here.”’
“I’ll do that,” said Durant and ended the call with the realization that if he did come back to Los Angeles next month, next year or even next week, he wouldn’t call her and she knew that he wouldn’t.
As Durant passed Georgia Blue’s open bedroom door, he noticed her standing at the window, looking at the ocean. The envelope containing the check and the $5,000 in cash was on the bed, as if tossed there.
“You okay?” he asked.
She turned. “I’m fine.”
“I was wrong, wasn’t I?”
“Were you?”
“I think so. Thank you.”
“Goodbye, Quincy,” she said and turned back to the ocean.
Durant and Wu left to catch a plane to New York, where they hoped to fly the Concorde on to London. After Otherguy Overby packed, he phoned the Gemstar limousine service in Malibu and asked to be delivered to the Bridges Hotel, where he had booked a small suite for a week. If nothing interesting turned up at the Bridges, he’d try San Francisco. After that, there was always Hong Kong—at least until 1997.
Voodoo, Ltd. —213
After he saw Overby off, Booth Stallings walked into Georgia Blue’s bedroom as she packed her clothes into a small carry-on bag. He sat on a chair and watched her fold the gray dress she had bought at Neiman’s. After it was folded and packed away, he said, “How bad was it—at the inn?”
“I got to choose between Durant and Jack Broach and I chose Durant. But Broach knew I would, or seemed to, and just walked away. Or tried. He might have made it if it hadn’t been for Otherguy.”
“What did Durant say?”
“Thank you. What else was there to say?”
She looked around the room, saw nothing else that needed packing and closed the carry-on bag’s zipper. She picked up the envelope from the bed and stuffed it into her Coach purse. She then knelt beside the bed, reached beneath the mattress and brought out the small .25-caliber semiautomatic that she had used to shoot Jack Broach high in the left arm, almost in the shoulder. “Here,” Blue said and tossed the gun to Stallings, who made a one-handed catch.
“It’s what I shot Broach with,” she said.
“Looks like an ankle gun.”
“It is.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“That day I went shopping at the Gap?”
He nodded.
“I stopped by a bar afterwards and asked the bartender if he knew where a lady might acquire some protection. He happened to have a friend who delivered.”
“Want me to dump it for you?” Stallings said.
She nodded.
“Still want to run off with me and live in fancy hotels and drink champagne till the money runs out?” he said.
She smiled. “Do you?”
Stallings knew she would go with him if he said yes and he also knew it would end badly. So he said yes silently, but aloud he said,
“Not really.”
“I’ll be in New York,” she said. “If you need anything—or change your mind. Howie will have my number.”
He nodded and turned to go but turned back when she said,
“Booth.”
“What?”
“I’m still sort of stuck on you,” said Georgia Blue.
By the time Stallings threw the .25-caliber semiautomatic out into the ocean and returned the Rice house keys to Phil Quill, the actor-real Voodoo, Ltd. —214
estate man, it was 2:47 P.M. He got in the Mercedes 500SL and drove to the Budget office in Beverly Hills, where he handed the car keys over to Gloria Ransome of the perpetually sunny disposition.
She greeted him with her usual warmth and together they went out to make sure the $100,000 car didn’t have a crumpled fender or a broken window. On the way back to the office, she asked him how his movie deal was progressing.
“We’ve got a picture,” said Stallings, who vaguely remembered somebody quoting somebody else as saying that.
After she said “wow” and “terrific” and “that’s wonderful,” as if it were happening to her instead of to him, Stallings said, “You work tomorrow?”
“I get weekends off.”
“Want to go to Tahoe?”
“You kidding?”
He shook his head. “What time d’you get off?”
“Six?” She made it a question as if fearful it might be too late.
“I’ll pick you up then. Maybe we’ll charter a plane and fly up tonight.”
“Oh-my-God!”
“See you at six, Gloria,” Stallings said, smiled and left. Outside, he crossed the street and walked down the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard until he came to a park bench, where he sat down next to a man in his late sixties or early seventies who said he was a retired film cutter. Eventually, they talked about the government and the economy and compared the just-ended gulf war with Korea and Vietnam and World War Two. The retired film cutter seemed very well informed and not at all optimistic.
When the man rose to go, he looked down at Stallings and said,
“You’re not retired yet, are you?”
“Not just yet,” Booth Stallings said.
Voodoo, Ltd. —215
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FB2 document info
Document ID: ca048877-8b63-41db-b5cf-8ee957e9520f
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 6.8.2011
Created using: calibre 0.8.10 software
Document authors :
Ross Thomas
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