Voodoo, Ltd.
Ross Thomas
1992
One
The two-passenger car that raced through Malibu shortly after 5 A.M.
on New Year’s Day at speeds exceeding 82 miles per hour was an almost new Mercedes-Benz 500SL with an out-the-door price of $101,414.28. It was driven with one hand, the left, by the not quite beautiful hyphenate, Ione Gamble, whose blood alcohol level would later be measured at 0.16, proving her to be quite drunk, legally and otherwise, for the second time in her life.
The actress-director, whose two crafts or professions made her a hyphenate in Hollywood parlance, still drove with her left hand as she used the right one to hold a telephone to her ear and listen to its thirty-fifth and final ring. She then traded the telephone for the pint of Smirnoff 80-proof vodka that lay on the passenger seat. After swallowing the last one and a half ounces, she lowered the right door’s window with the touch of a button and tossed out the empty bottle, which smashed against somebody’s 1986 Honda Civic.
Gamble was tempted to stop and leave a note offering to pay for any damage. But by the time the mental note was composed, revised and re-revised, she was already a mile past the Honda and nearing her Carbon Beach destination. When she reached it seconds later, the note, the smashed bottle and the Honda had vanished from her memory.
By then she had slowed to the legal speed limit of 45 miles per hour and was almost coasting along the Pacific Coast Highway’s center turn lane. She was also trying to find the misplaced electronic gadget that would open the steel gates guarding the $13-million house whose owner irritated nearly everyone by calling it his beach shack.
Gamble never found the electronic gate opener. But as she turned left across the highway’s two east-bound lanes, her headlights revealed the gates to be already open. She drove through and parked in front of the three-car garage whose doors, almost seven days after Christmas, still offered a fanciful triptych of Santa Claus, his reindeer and the elves.
Gamble switched off engine and lights and again picked up the car phone. She called the number she had called before and let it ring fifteen times. She then gave up on the phone and started honking the Mercedes horn in a series of three-short-and-one-long tattoos, which were a rough approximation of Morse code for the letter V—the only Morse code she knew.
Voodoo, Ltd. —2
Gamble stopped the noise three minutes later, lowered the car’s left window and waited for something to happen. She would have settled for an irate neighbor yelling at her to shut the fuck up. Or for Billy Rice to hurry out of his house and implore her, for God’s sake, to come in and have a drink—or even for a suddenly lighted window somewhere to prove that life still existed in Malibu at 5:11 A.M. On Tuesday, January 1, 1991.
But when there were no rude shouts or drink offers or suddenly lighted windows, Gamble got out of the car, slamming its door as hard as she could and hoping something would break, but relieved when nothing did. She went around the car’s rear, backed up three overly cautious steps, sucked in as much air as her lungs would hold and yelled, “BILLY RICE FUCKS MICE!”
She waited, listening, but when there was neither denial nor rebuttal she turned and headed for the front entrance. As she did, a light came on in the second floor of a yellow house across the highway. But it came from a small high window, the kind that bathrooms have, and Gamble decided it was probably some poor old guy rousted out of bed by a troublesome prostate.
A short stretch of seven-foot-high wall, built of glazed brick, shielded the entrance to the house from the curious and served as a baffle against the highway traffic noise. The wall and the house itself formed a short ceilingless passageway that Gamble slowly walked along as she searched all three pockets of her cream suede jacket for the key to Billy Rice’s front door.
It was only after searching each pocket four times that she remembered, if dimly, tearing out of her house in Santa Monica and pausing just long enough to grab the car keys and the pint of vodka, but not the brown leather clutch purse. And that’s where the Rice front door key was, of course, in the purse’s zippered coin pocket.
Gamble still believed there was a way to wake up Billy Rice. She could pound on his door and ring his bell and even howl and yap like a coyote until something happened. She had almost decided on the coyote imitation when she noticed the door was already ajar. She gave it a tentative push and then a hard shove that opened it all the way.
Once inside the dark house, Gamble fumbled for the switch she knew to be on the left, found it and turned on lights illuminating the marble foyer that led to the immense living room and, beyond that, to the equally immense deck.
The foyer’s indirect lighting was designed to enhance two paintings that faced each other from opposite walls. On the left was the Chagall; on the right, the Hockney. Beneath the Hockney was a small square table of burled elm, just large enough to hold the day’s mail, three sets of car keys and also, in this instance, a 9mm semiautomatic Beretta.
Voodoo, Ltd. —3
Gamble picked up the gun, examined it, then called, “Hey, Billy, wanta come watch me blow off my big toe?”
She waited, head bowed, pistol down at her right side, as if hoping for some kind of protest. But when none came, she lifted the Beretta, aimed carefully, squeezed the trigger, just as she had been taught at the Beverly Hills pistol range, and blew a small neat hole through the lower left quadrant of the Chagall.
When the gunshot produced neither outcry nor whimper, Gamble moved slowly along the rest of the marble foyer and into the living room. Through its far all-glass wall she could see the lights of Santa Monica and, much farther on, the dimmer lights of Palos Verdes, where, she knew for a fact, lived the dullest people in California and maybe even the world.
Turning from the view, she noticed a big pale lump in the room’s southwest corner. The lump for some reason looked as if it had been lost, abandoned or maybe just forgotten. Ever curious, Gamble crossed the living room, shifting the pistol to her left hand. With her right hand she switched on a table lamp and discovered the lump to be William A. C. Rice IV.
He lay on his back, blue eyes open and aimed at the beamed cathedral ceiling. The long right leg was slightly bent at the knee. The long left leg was straight. His arms and hands were haphazardly arranged with the right hand pointing due north and the left hand south by southwest. There were two dark holes in his bare hairless chest just to the left of the right nipple. His feet were also bare and his white tennis shorts were stained.
Ione Gamble stared down at the dead man for at least thirty seconds, breathing through her mouth in short gasps until she stopped gasping and said, “Aw, hell, Billy, I wish I were sorry.”
She turned then, swaying a little, and made it to the small wet bar where she poured two unmeasured ounces of whisky into a glass and gulped them down. The whisky caused a coughing fit. When it ended two minutes later, she stumbled across the room to a console telephone, collapsed into what she knew to be Billy Rice’s favorite chair, placed the Beretta in her lap, picked up the phone and tapped out 911.
The police emergency number began to ring. On the eighth ring she yawned. On the tenth ring she put the still-ringing phone on the table, wrapped both hands around the butt of the Beretta in her lap, closed her eyes and passed out. She was still passed out and still clutching the Beretta when two deputy sheriffs entered the living room at 6:27