As the party wound down and the guests began to leave, Lace Armitage came up to Durant, put a tentative hand on his arm, and said, “You’ll stay for a while longer, won’t you, Mr. Durant — you and Mr. Wu? My husband and I really haven’t had a chance to talk with you.”
Durant looked at her and she gave him her best smile, one that contained an amazing amount of what seemed to be genuine warmth. Durant said, “All right, I’ll go talk to Artie.”
She smiled at him again, touched his arm gratefully, and moved off to say good-bye to the rest of her guests. Durant went over to Artie Wu, who stood by the pool, drink in hand, staring at the house.
“How do you like the way the rich folks live?” Durant said.
“I like it. Damned if I don’t.”
“They want us to stay.”
Wu nodded. “Piers mentioned it to me.”
“Maybe they’re just being neighborly.”
Wu shook his head. “If you had a hundred and sixty million, would you invite us over?”
“No,” Durant said, “now that you mention it, I wouldn’t.”
Randall Piers took a sip of his drink, looked at Wu and then at Durant, and said, “How much do you know about me?”
They were in Piers’s office-study. Lace Armitage was behind her husband’s big desk, playing with a silver letter opener. Piers was on a couch, and Wu and Durant were in two of the brown leather chairs. Hart Ebsworth, the lawyer, was in another chair beneath a very good oil portrait of Lace Armitage.
Durant answered Piers’s question. “Not much,” he said.
“How much?”
“You went through MIT on the GI bill, got your doctorate in ’51, started teaching at Cal Tech, got fascinated by electronics and symbolic logic, eventually set up a company called International Data Systems, and nine years later sold out to IBM for roughly one billion dollars. You had almost fifteen percent of the stock, so your cut was about a hundred and fifty million. After that you sort of dabbled in things — politics, a couple of films, a record company, and that magazine you founded, The Pacific, which always looks to me like an uneasy cross between the National Enquirer and Arizona Highways.”
“You’ve been busy,” Piers said.
Durant shook his head. “Not really. Artie took a run over to the Malibu library this afternoon.”
“We ran a check on you two,” Piers said.
Artie Wu frowned. “What does that mean?”
“You’ve been around.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Wu said.
“It means I was interested in your bona fides because I’m going to make you a proposition.”
“What my husband is saying is that we’d like you to help us,” Lace Armitage said.
“To do what?” Durant said.
Piers looked out through the huge window at Santa Monica, whose lights were just beginning to come on. “I have a sister-in-law whom you’ve probably heard of, Silk Armitage.”
Wu looked at Lace Armitage. “She was the Silk in Ivory, Lace, and Silk right?”
Lace nodded.
“And she’s in trouble,” Piers said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Durant said, “but I can’t see what it has to do with us. We’re not exactly in the trouble business. In fact, we try to avoid it.”
“Not always,” Ebsworth said.
Durant looked at Ebsworth and then at Piers. “What does he do?”
“As I said, he’s my lawyer.”
“You need a lawyer for this?”
“Maybe.”
Durant shook his head. “Then I don’t think I’m going to like it.”
Lace Armitage tossed the silver letter opener on to the desk with a clatter. “This is becoming a waste of time.”
“Probably,” Artie Wu said.
“Maybe we’re going a little fast for you,” Piers said to Durant.
“Maybe. We meet a guy in the morning. We have a cup of coffee together and a few laughs, and being neighborly, he invites us over for drinks that evening. By the time we get here he’s run a check on us. Whatever it is he finds out about our pasts — something unsavory, probably — convinces him that we’re the kind who can get his sister-in-law out of some jam she’s in. As you say, it’s a little swift for me, a little sudden.”
“Mention money,” Ebsworth said to Piers.
Piers shook his head. “Not yet. We’ll get to that later.”
“How much money are we going to get to later?” Artie Wu said.
Piers looked at him. “Enough.”
Wu shrugged and grinned. “I’ll listen.”
“What about you?” Piers said to Durant.
Durant sighed and rattled the ice in his glass. “I think I could use another drink first.”
Ebsworth rose and took Durant’s glass. “Scotch?”
“Anything.”
“You care for one?” Ebsworth said to Artie Wu.
Wu shook his head. He produced one of his long cigars. “I’ll just smoke this if nobody minds.”
Nobody did, and Wu used his tiny knife to slice off the end, stuck the ear into his mouth, and lit it with a kitchen match.
Piers waited until Durant had his drink. Then he said, “What do you know about Pelican Bay?”
“Not much. It’s a city down the coast on the other side of Venice. About a hundred and fifty thousand in population. Sort of ugly. And I hear it’s a little like Philadelphia used to be, corrupt and contented.”
“Pelican Bay,” Piers said, “was part of the district of a Congressman who died a couple of months ago. Congressman Floyd Ranshaw. Know anything about him?”
“I know how he died,” Wu said. “He died messy. His wife shot him and then shot herself.”
“So they say.”
“Who’s they?” Durant said.
“The Pelican Bay cops. The Ranshaws had been separated for a year. His wife checked into a motel room with a bottle. She’d been having trouble with the booze. The Congressman was back in town from Washington. She called him. He went over, probably to see if he could get her into a drying-out place. She pulled a gun and shot him and then shot herself. Suicide-murder. Case closed.”
Piers waited for the question he knew would come.
“What’s this got to do with your sister-in-law?” Durant said.
“Silk was living with Ranshaw,” Lace Armitage said. “She had been for not quite a year.”
“In fact, she was waiting outside the motel in her car when he was killed,” Piers said. “And that’s the last time anyone’s seen her.”
“But you’ve heard from her?” Durant said.
“Just once.”
“What’d she say?”
“She talked to me,” Lace Armitage said. “It was two days after it happened. My sister is usually a very relaxed person, calm as clams. But this time she was nervous, all tensed up, and very, very scared. I could tell. She said it didn’t happen the way the cops said it did. She wouldn’t say how she knew that, but she did say she was in just one hell of a lot of danger so much so that she was going to have to disappear.
“She said she knew some people who would help her and that she would need money, but not too much because too much might draw attention to her. She said she would have somebody call us every week. It would be in a kind of code. Whoever called would mention something that only she and I would know about, something from when we were kids. Then whoever called would tell us where to drop the money off. The same amount every week, one thousand dollars. And that’s the last time I ever talked to her.”