“How’d she describe me?” Durant said.
“Tall, dark and mean-looking.”
“What’d she say about the Goodisons?” Wu asked.
“All her late fiancé told her was that both Goodisons are locos and that he picked them up by prearrangement at the bed-and-breakfast place in Topanga Canyon, then drove them to a motel in Oxnard. She didn’t say which one because he didn’t tell her. I found Oxnard on the map and it’s about thirty miles up the coast from Malibu. I called its Visitors’ Bureau and they told me they have a couple of dozen motels.”
“What about Otherguy?” Durant said.
“When last heard from, he was spreading the word about the booming new market for home videos of people doing awful stuff they shouldn’t. He said he’d begun at a poker parlor in Gardena and was working his way back.”
“Oxnard,” Wu said to Stallings. “Why don’t you and I run up there this afternoon and check out some motels?”
Stallings nodded and was about to add something when the door opened and Howard Mott came in with three open bottles of Mexican beer. He kept one for himself, served the others to Wu and Durant, then asked, “Who wants to go first?”
“Why don’t you?” Durant said when everyone was seated— Mott behind his desk, which occupied the space where the missing twin bed had been, and Wu on the bed next to Stallings. Durant half sat on the windowsill.
Mott took a long drink of beer from the bottle as if he were parched, then said, “We have a problem. The sleaze media’s staked out Ione’s house and she has to go to the dentist.”
“Sounds like a job for Jack Broach, super agent,” Durant said.
“He’s having a long lunch with your Ms. Blue—or so his secretary says.”
“I take it this isn’t just Ione’s regular six-month checkup?” Wu said.
“It’s an impacted wisdom tooth that has to come out before it develops an abscess,” Mott said. “She’d drive herself but they’re going to give her sodium Pentothal to knock her out. The dental surgeon insists somebody has to drive her home and Ione insists somebody trustworthy has to be on hand to monitor her babbling while she’s under the influence of what she calls ‘the truth serum.’ “
“When’s her appointment?” Durant asked.
“Two.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —131
“I’ll drive her, if her car’s out of impound.”
“It is,” Mott said.
Durant asked, “What else, Howie?”
“They traced the murder weapon—that Beretta semiautomatic—to its previous owner, which turns out to be Paramount Studios. It was stolen from a movie set there nine years ago. Fortunately, Ione didn’t do anything at Paramount that year.”
“What movie was it?” Stallings asked.
“A TV pilot that none of the networks picked up. Something called The Keepers. I have copies of the script and the names of everyone in the cast and crew. I have a videotape of the pilot itself and I’m told that everyone connected with it who’s still alive is being questioned by the sheriffs investigators.”
“Could I get copies of everything you have?” Stallings said.
“Ask Mary Jo,” said Mott.
“She the blonde?”
“The brunette.”
Wu rose. “Anything else?”
Mott nodded. “Enno Glimm.”
“He called?” Durant said.
“No, but Jenny Arliss did. She and Glimm’re flying in late tonight.
But there’s no need to meet them because she’s arranged a limo that’ll whisk them out to the Malibu Beach Inn, which she thinks’ll be quite convenient for all concerned.”
“She say why they’re coming?” Durant asked.
Mott nodded. “She says Glimm wants to know how you’re spending his money.”
The paparazzi had gathered at the northwest corner of Seventh Street and Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. They had arrived in three vans and five cars and positioned themselves less than a block from Ione Gamble’s house. Durant, with Gamble beside him, backed out of her driveway in her almost new Mercedes 500SL roadster and started around the curve where the photographers waited. Durant automatically counted the number of what he thought of as the opposition, if not the enemy, and came up with seventeen—five of them women. Six were armed with camcorders and the rest had one or more 35mm cameras. They were uniformly young, uniformly scruffy and, Durant decided, about as congenial as sea gulls.
“What should I do—duck?” Gamble asked.
“Ignore them.”
He stopped the Mercedes in the center of the street, shifted into neutral and raced the engine up to five thousand revolutions per minute. The paparazzi, unfazed, formed a wavering line across the Voodoo, Ltd. —132
street a dozen yards ahead. His left foot firmly on the brake, Durant shifted into low, raced the engine again and took his foot off the brake.
The Mercedes leaped forward, its fat rear tires clawing at the asphalt. The acceleration slammed Durant and Gamble back into their seats. Durant had read somewhere that the 500SL could accelerate from 0 to 60 in less than seven seconds. The claim was apparently valid.
The line of paparazzi wavered—then broke mostly to the right, the passenger side. They had less than a second to aim and shoot as the roadster flashed by, its passenger staring straight ahead. By the time the photographers had piled into their cars and vans, the Mercedes had disappeared around the corner and was racing south on Seventh Street.
Ione Gamble’s destination was a medical building on the southwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and San Vicente. But instead of taking the most direct route, which would have been east on San Vicente, Durant used tree-lined side streets, turning south or north at almost every intersection, but bearing always east.
Ione Gamble finally said, “You seem to know the way— sort of.”
“Wu and his wife used to live in Santa Monica.”
“And you?”
“In Malibu—Paradise Cove.”
“Where the rumrunners used to unload,” she said. “During Prohibition.”
“I missed that by about fifty years.”
“You were there in the seventies, then?”
“In the late seventies,” he said. “For a while.”
“How long’ve you lived in London?”
“Nearly five years.”
“You like it?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Listen,” she said. “No matter how much they bitch, I want you with me every second we’re there.”
“You won’t say anything.”
“How d’you know?”
“Because he’ll have both hands in your mouth.”
Dr. Melvin Unger didn’t want any spectators. Ione Gamble told him that unless Mr. Durant were present, her impacted wisdom tooth would stay right where it was. Dr. Unger, a pale, very thin man with soft brown eyes that were either extremely sad or extremely kind, Voodoo, Ltd. —133
remained adamant for nearly ten seconds before he relented and agreed that Durant could stay.
A practitioner of four-handed dentistry, Dr. Unger let his dental technician inject the sodium Pentothal. Ione Gamble was now almost horizontal on the dental chair. Just as the needle went into a vein in her left arm, she was asked to count backwards from ten. She reached six before she went under and out.