“Sold.”
“Then I need Blue’s full name and a date and place of birth.”
Stallings’s right hand dipped back into the jacket pocket and came out with a slip of paper. He rose, handed it to Minnie Espiritu, sat back down and asked, “When can I pick it up?”
“If you brought the money, you can wait for it.”
“I’ll wait,” Stallings said, unbuttoned the three middle buttons of his shirt and zipped open the nylon money belt.
At 11:25 A.M. The following day, Stallings and Georgia Blue sat in the departure lounge of China Airlines at Benigno Aquino International Airport, waiting for their flight to Taipei, when a medium-size Filipino in his late thirties or early forties came up to them, smiled and said, “You two make a cute couple.”
Georgia Blue looked up from her copy of Time to examine the faultless ice-cream suit, shiny black pompadour, pale beige complexion, inquisitive nose, perfect, if meaningless, smile and the big dark brown eyes that advertised just how smart he really was.
She smiled back, nudged Stallings and said, “You remember Lieutenant Cruz, sweetie — the nice policeman?”
“Captain Cruz,” the man said.
“Of course,” she said. “It would be by now, wouldn’t it? Congratulations.”
Cruz gave her a brief smile of thanks, turned to Stallings and said, “You and I met five years ago.”
“So we did.”
“I’m here for two reasons. The first is to wave goodbye and the second is to ask you about a funny-strange phone call I got a week or ten days ago. But before we go into that, I need to see your passports and tickets.”
“Why?” Stallings said.
“Why not?”
Stallings shrugged and handed over his passport and the tickets. Georgia Blue’s passport followed a moment later.
Captain Cruz examined the tickets first. “China Airlines to Taipei, then a connection with Singapore Airlines for a first-class, one-stop flight to Los Angeles. Should be fairly pleasant.”
After handing back the tickets, he studied Stallings’s passport. “How was Jordan?”
“Raining when I left,” Stallings said.
“Really,” Cruz said, returned the passport and began a careful examination of Georgia Blue’s. Finally, he looked at her and asked, “Enjoy your extended stay in the Philippines, Miss Blue?”
“Not really.”
“Planning a return trip?”
“No.”
“Remarkable document,” he said, tapping her passport against his left thumbnail. He went on with the tapping as if it might help him decide whether to confiscate or return it. Beneath Cruz’s creamy jacket there was a slight movement of the shoulders, which Stallings interpreted as a shrug. He discovered he was right seconds later when Cruz handed Blue her passport and said, “Have a safe flight.”
Before she could say thank you or anything else, Stallings asked, “What about that funny-strange phone call?”
“Right,” Cruz said. “The phone call. Well, it came from Germany — Frankfurt — and the caller said his name was Glimm. Enno Glimm. Know him?”
Stallings shook his head.
“He wanted to know if I’d recommend, or maybe just vouch for, Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, your ex-what? Partners?”
“Recommend them for what?”
“Some sort of vague and strictly temporary deal. Glimm wasn’t specific. In fact, the only thing he was specific about was that it’s not going to happen here, whatever it is. But I had to work to even get that much out of him. Then after I heard you were passing through town, it hit me that maybe you’d know what Wu and Durant are up to.”
“Haven’t seen either of them in at least five years.”
“Too bad.”
“Did you?” Stallings said. “Recommend them?”
“I told Glimm that, as a policeman, I couldn’t possibly recommend them to anybody. But if I weren’t a policeman and needed somebody to, say, see me safely to the gates of hell and back, I’d certainly call on Wu and that — uh — Quincy Durant.”
Georgia Blue rose and said, “They’re calling our flight.”
Captain Hermenegildo Cruz cocked his head to the right and smiled up at Georgia Blue, who, in her heels, topped him by four inches. He said, “Don’t come back. Don’t even think about it.”
She gave him her nicest smile. “What a sensible suggestion.”
Twelve
Seated once again behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, Ione Gamble used only silence and a pencil to create a tension so palpable that Howard Mott thought he could almost taste and feel it. If she were to increase the tension only slightly, he suspected it would taste like electricity must taste and feel like a death threat must feel.
He judged Gamble’s performance to be superb and wondered which bits and pieces he would eventually steal or borrow for his own use in future courtroom appearances. Mott particularly admired the way she had helped set the scene by skinning her thick light brown hair back into a spinster’s knot and scrubbing all makeup from her face to emphasize its remarkable character and minimize its essential prettiness. However, the prettiness quota was amply filled by her obviously bare breasts beneath a simple white polo shirt.
And finally there was the pencil — long, yellow and freshly sharpened — which she had studied for nearly three silent minutes, turning it this way and that, but making sure its point always swung back, compass-like, until it was aimed directly at Howard Mott’s throat.
Mott was again sitting on the couch with the chintz slipcover. Jack Broach, the elegant agent-lawyer-business manager, was back in the no-nonsense armchair and it was he who broke the tension with a question: “Ione, will you stop fucking with that pencil?”
Gamble looked up with a practice-perfect expression of surprised hurt, then looked down at the pencil, as if she had never seen it before. Slowly opening her hand, she let it roll from her fingers and fall to the desk with a small clatter and bounce. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I... I didn’t realize.”
Jack Broach praised the performance with three weary handclaps.
Ignoring Broach, she gave Mott a too-sweet smile and said, “I was wondering, Howie, if you’d mind explaining just one more time — and do try to make it simple — why you ever hired those two shit-for-brains hypnotists.”
“Of course,” Mott said. “As I mentioned before, I first learned of them from a favorable account in a British law journal. But I hired them only after talking to three reputable barristers in London, who recommended them highly, as did two ranking Metropolitan Police officers. Of equal importance, at least to me, was the fact that the Goodisons, brother Hughes and sister Pauline, were clients of Enno Glimm—”
“The hypnotist broker,” she said.
“—which is in itself sufficient recommendation.”
“You mean Glimm offers a money-back guarantee that his hypnotists won’t turn out to be blackmailers or rip-off artists?”
“Exactly,” said Mott. “In fact, he’s already taken corrective measures, not the least of them being the return of the hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee you paid for the Goodisons’ services.” Mott turned to Broach. “You got the money, right?”
Broach nodded. “By wire transfer yesterday.”
Gamble again picked up the yellow pencil and absently tested its point with a thumb. “You said Glimm’s taken ‘corrective measures.’ What are they — other than sending back my money?”
“He’s retained — at his own considerable expense — a London firm called Wudu, Limited. Its job is to track down the Goodisons and provide any assistance you and I might require.”