“We’re not sure,” Durant said, and lowered himself to the couch. “We’re trying to put a man inside.”
“Inside where?”
“Reginald Simms — consultants. Mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
Durant shrugged. “Let me try another one, Vince Imperlino.”
Piers’s face grew still. He put his coffee mug down on a small table with a white marble top. He had to turn slightly to do it. When he turned back, his face had become more stiff than still. He stared at Durant for a moment and then said, “What about him?”
“They say you sold your record company to him.”
“It was a complicated deal. Very complicated. By the time Imperlino surfaced it was too late to pull back. Too many commitments had already been made. You want the details?”
“No.”
“It was a complicated deal.”
“You said that.”
“There was a lot of pressure on me then.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“How did Imperlino’s name come up?”
“He’s bought himself something else. Or so they say.”
“What?” Piers said.
“The newspaper at Pelican Bay. The Times-Bulletin.”
Piers’s face relaxed. “How’d he buy it?”
Durant shrugged. “For cash, I suppose. Probably a lot of it.”
“I mean, what device did he use?”
“I think there was a company that owned a company that owned a company and so forth that bought it. Imperlino’s name doesn’t appear anywhere. Or so we’re told.”
“That’s usually the way they work.”
“Who’s they?”
“Who do you think?”
Durant smiled. “The ones whose names all end in vowels.”
“That’s close enough. They’re buying a lot of things.”
“For instance?”
“I could name you a couple of movie studios that if they don’t own yet, they control.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, I guess that is pretty common knowledge. Maybe I’m just trying to rationalize my letting them grab off Nightshade. There was a certain point after I finally found out about Imperlino that I could have still said no. It would have been difficult, very difficult, but I still could’ve killed the deal.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No.”
“Did your sister-in-law ever know him?”
“Which one?”
“Silk.”
“Yeah, Silk knew him. So did Lace. But Ivory knew him best of all. She was living with him for a while. That’s really why they broke up the group. Silk wouldn’t put up with it. I mean, she wouldn’t record for him. She didn’t object to Ivory’s being shacked up with him. She didn’t like it any more tha Lace did, but neither one of them would ever have dreamed of telling their sister who she could sleep with. He kept her in dope, of course. Ivory, I mean — but she finally left him. Went off by herself, just wandering around the country, and then wound up dead of an overdose down in Miami Beach.”
“What kind of affair was it?” Durant said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, was it public or private? Did the press pick up on it? You know Mob Boss Squires Folk Star — that kind of thing.”
“You don’t know much about Imperlino, I take it.”
Durant shook his head. “Not a hell of a lot.”
“He’s a hermit. Well, maybe not exactly a hermit. Recluse would be better. And Ivory, except when she was singing, was probably the world’s most private person. They got along alone, if you follow me. Imperlino has three guys on his payroll who do nothing but try to keep his name out of the paper. They did a good job then and they do a good job now.”
“What’s he like?” Durant said.
“I only met him twice.”
“What about when the negotiations were going on for the record company?”
Piers shook his head. “He was never a part of those. Even today, I doubt that anyone could actually prove that he controls Nightshade. Everybody knows it, of course, or thinks they do.”
“But you met him?”
“Twice, as I said. Once he and Ivory had Lace and me over to dinner at his place in Bel Air. They’d wanted Silk to come too, but she refused. Silk has — well — principles. Lace and I went because Ivory asked us to.” Piers smiled — a crooked, rueful smile. “And I suppose our principles are a little more, well, flexible than Silk’s. Also, I was just curious as hell. I take a lot of kidding about that place of mine, you know. But it’s what I wanted, I paid for it, and I live there, so to hell with them. But this place Imperlino built himself in Bel Air. It’s got everything but a moat.”
“A castle, huh?”
“Not exactly. He built it in the ’60s and it looks as though it’s been there since 1647. There’re some who claim that he had a guy on Disney’s staff design it for him. It’s sort of half fairy tale and half English country house, it works. God knows how much it cost him. So anyway, Lace and I went to dinner there that time.”
Piers paused as though remembering, then picked up his coffee and finished it. “Jesus, that’s good.”
“Like some more?”
“Yeah, I would, thanks.”
Durant picked up the two mugs and took them into the kitchen. When he came back, Piers said, “That recipe you gave my wife. It’s not bad, but it’s not like this.”
“I’m not sure I told her to put in a pinch of salt.”
“Salt?”
“Just a pinch.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“What was he like?”
“Imperlino?”
Durant nodded.
Piers took a sip of his coffee first. “Smooth,” he said. “Not slick smooth, but gracious smooth, if you know what I mean. Somewhere he’s acquired a lot of polish — the effortless kind. I mean, he doesn’t have to remember his manners, and let me tell you something, they’re perfect. And he also must have gone to a voice coach at one time, because he skips his R’s a little and the A’s are slightly broadened, but not much. Lace claims to know for a fact that he hired George Sanders to give him elocution lessons, but Lace knows more apocryphal tales than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“You didn’t talk about the record company, I take it?” Durant said.
Piers shook his head. “It never came up. Well, all four of us were there in what he called the Big Hall with the fireplace blazing in July and the air conditioning keeping the temperature down to sixty-five and Imperlino and I in black tie and the two ladies in party dresses and four servants and six courses, or maybe seven, I don’t remember now, and Imperlino orchestrating the conversation.”
“What’d he talk about?”
“Eliot.”
“T.S.?”
“Right. Imperlino delivered a nice little fifteen-minute lecture on how Ezra Pound’s editing saved Eliot’s — uh—”
“The Waste Land?”
“Right. Well, Christ, I hadn’t read Eliot since I was in college and didn’t much care for him then. But Imperlino managed to make him and Pound sound fascinating as hell. I don’t know. Maybe they are. It seemed so while he was talking, at least. After that he somehow very smoothly, very gently coaxed Ivory into reciting some poetry she’d written. I didn’t know she wrote poetry. I knew she wrote lyrics, of course, but the poetry was a surprise. And it was good. Damned good, although, of course, I’m no critic, but that’s not the point. The point is how he got Ivory to recite it Then he starts drawing Lace out on growing up in Arkansas. Well, that was no big deal. Lace’ll go on about that for hours if you’ll let her. But she made it funny and amusing, and the next thing I know he’s got me going on about how brilliant and clever I am. I must have gone on for ten minutes all about me before I realized what was happening. But even then I didn’t mind. Who would?”