It’s just a tiny bit of a much, much longer tape, but, still and all, rather a fair sample.”
The next voice was Gamble’s, but filtered by tape and telephone.
Her voice was also deeper than normal and nearly toneless. “I wanted to kill him,” she said.
Then Hughes Goodison’s voice, similarly filtered, asked a question:
“Billy Rice?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?” Goodison’s voice asked.
A long pause, followed by Gamble’s uninfiected answer: “Yes.”
“That’s it, Ione,” Goodison said in his normal voice. “We want you to know we’re willing to sell all forty-nine and a half minutes of the tape you just heard.”
“You mean you want to sell me one of the God knows how many copies you’ve made.”
“Lord, no. Paulie and I are risk avoiders, not risk takers. Whoever pays our price buys the original. There are no copies. None.”
“Bullshit.”
Goodison giggled. “Believe what you like. But I’ll say it again. There is only one copy. Just one.”
“How much?” Gamble asked.
“One million—dollars, of course. Cash.”
“What happens if I can’t or won’t buy?”
“Then we sell to the highest bidder. Only today we heard about a mysterious Mr. X who’s in town looking for confessional-type videotapes of, you know, people doing naughty things—and that’s exactly what we have to sell.”
“You told me there’s only one tape.”
“One audiotape—and one videotape. Those camcorders are such a marvelous treat. But you get both tapes for the same low, low price.”
“I’ll go two hundred and fifty thousand.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —138
“Don’t be tiresome, Ione.”
“Five hundred thousand.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay,” she said with a long sigh. “One million—but it’ll take time to raise that much cash.”
“You have four days. No more.”
“What if I can’t raise it in four days?”
“I happen to know you can,” Goodison said. “But if you won’t, I’ll have to get in touch with Mr. X and then people all over the world can sit in their most comfy chairs, watching Ione Gamble, movie star, confess to the murder of poor Billy Rice.”
“Where do I call, if I manage to get the money together?”
“You’re being tiresome again, Ione.”
“Okay. You call me. But let’s get something straight, Hughes. You’re a slimebug and your sister’s a certifiable weirdo and I won’t come anywhere near either of you. So if I do get the money, I’ll send somebody with it, somebody who’ll insist on inspecting the merchandise before paying for it.”
“Who is he?” Goodison demanded, his voice almost cracking on the
“he.”
“Who said anything about a he?” Ione Gamble said and hung up.
When Durant returned to the kitchen, she was again seated at the table, head bowed, hands folded in front of her, the bowl of soup shoved to her right.
“You were fine,” Durant said as he sat down, picked up the spoon and tasted his soup again. “In fact, you were perfect.”
She looked up. “Really?”
“Absolutely perfect.”
She looked around the kitchen curiously, as if seeing it for the last time. “I’ll have to sell it.”
“What?”
“The house.”
“Why?”
“You heard him. If I don’t buy, they’ll sell to Mr. X or Y or Z—
whoever. To the sleazoids. And I can’t raise a million cash unless I sell the house.”
Durant had two more spoonfuls of soup, nodded appreciatively, then said, “The Goodisons won’t sell to anybody else and you’ll never pay them a dime.”
Ione Gamble, dry-eyed and skeptical, stared at Durant for moments before she pulled her soup bowl back and began eating hungrily.
Voodoo, Ltd. —139
Moments later she looked up at him, frowned, then grinned and said,
“Why the fuck do I believe you?”
Voodoo, Ltd. —140
Twenty-nine
Artie Wu remembered the Oxnard of nearly thirteen years ago as a small, agriculturally dependent city with a predominandy Mexican flavor and a Japanese mayor. But after he and Booth Stallings paid gruff calls on four of the city’s twenty-four motels, Wu read a tourist leaflet and discovered Oxnard had transformed itself into a diversified business center that boasted industrial parks, a new museum of muscle cars from the fifties and sixties and an almost new passenger train depot, which Booth Stallings claimed was the only passenger train depot built in the United States since 1940.
It was around 4 P.M. When they reached the ninth motel. Wu was wearing a blue blazer, khaki pants, a white shirt open halfway down his bare chest and, on his feet, plain-toed black oxfords with white socks. Stallings had suggested a cheap gold chain to go with the open shirt but Wu said he didn’t want to soften his image. Stallings himself wore a gray suit, white shirt and a dark gray tie with maroon polka dots.
After they got out of the rented Mercedes at the ninth motel, Stallings said, “I’m damn near out of business cards.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Wu said and led the way into the motel office.
Redundantly named “The La Paz Inn,” the motel was independently owned, fairly new, and offered a small coffee shop, an equally small swimming pool and, Wu guessed, about three dozen units. Behind the reception counter was a stocky man in his late fifties with thin silky gray hair, bifocals and the suspicious pursed mouth that many motel owner-operators seem to acquire after only a year or so in the business. The man stared at Wu for a moment, dismissed him as a potential lodger and turned to Stallings, who was now leaning on the counter.
“Help you?” said the man in a twangy voice that dared Stallings to sell him something.
“Hope so,” Stallings said and handed over one of the last business cards that claimed he was Jerome K. Walters, executive vice-president of the Independent Limousine Operators Association.
The man read the card, handed it back and said, “Don’t get much call here for limos.”
Stallings straightened, glanced around the room, nodded understandingly and said, “Didn’t think you would. But that’s not why Voodoo, Ltd. —141
we’re here.” He looked around the room again, then leaned toward the gray-haired man and used a soft conspiratorial tone to say, “We’re here on an in-ves-ti-ga-tion.” Stallings pronounced each syllable of investigation lovingly, as if he liked the word’s sound.
The man behind the counter frowned. “Investigation of what?”
“One of our owner-operator members, a fine young man of Mexican descent, drives a couple up here from L.A. Just before the couple checks into a motel—not yours—they give our member twenty dollars to go buy ‘em a bottle of drinking whisky.”
“So?”
“So our fine young man, glad to be of service, heads for the nearest liquor store. But when he comes back with the booze, the couple’s skedaddled. Never checked in. And that leaves our fine young man stuck with a two-hundred-and-thirty-five-dollar tab he’d run up driving them all over L.A. And then on up here.”
“That’s one pitiful story,” the man said.
“The thing is, Mr.—?”
“Deason.”
“The thing is, Mr. Deason, my organization’s bound and determined to put a stop to this sort of thing. We want to prosecute those two thieves—and that’s what they are, thieves—to the full extent of the law. But cops don’t get too excited about some Mexican limo driver who’s been stiffed for a couple of hundred bucks. So we in the ILOA are offering a five-hundred-dollar cash reward for any information leading not to the arrest and conviction of this thieving pair, but just to their present whereabouts.”