“Spell Wudu.”
After Mott spelled it, she asked, “What’s it mean?”
“Nothing. It’s only a play on the two partners’ surnames, Arthur Wu and Quincy Durant.”
“Wu’d be what — Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“So now I have to depend on a couple of English twits to save me from the gallows.”
“Gas chamber,” Broach said.
Before Gamble could snarl or swear at Broach, Mott said, “Both Wu and Durant are American and I assure you they’re not twits.”
“What are they, then — confidential inquiry agents to the gentry?”
Mott was about to reply when Broach snapped his fingers and said, “Christ, yes! Ivory, Lace and Silk, right?”
The question went to Mott, who, after a moment’s hesitation, agreed with a slight nod.
Obviously irritated, Ione Gamble asked, “The folksingers? The ones I used to listen to when I was a real little kid? What the hell’ve they got to do with me?”
“With you, nothing,” Broach said. “But with Wu and Durant, a hell of a lot. Remember when Silk disappeared back in the seventies?”
Gamble shook her head.
“It was these same two guys, Wu and Durant, who found her and turned Pelican Bay inside out doing it.” He again looked at Mott for confirmation. “Right, Howie?”
“That’s a fair summary.”
“What happened to them?” Gamble asked.
“Wu and Durant?”
“No, goddamnit. Ivory, Lace and Silk.”
Broach studied the back of his hand for a moment, then turned it over and studied his palm. One side or the other apparently jogged his memory. “Ivory died of an overdose in Miami, I think. Lace’d married a semi-billionaire and got out of the business. The last I heard of Silk she was down in El Salvador doing the Lord’s work.”
Gamble turned to look through her floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window at canyon and ocean. She was still staring at her view when she said, “What brand are they, Howie?”
A puzzled Mott turned to Broach, who said, “She wants to know their religion — Wu and Durant’s.”
“May I ask why?” Mott said, putting an edge on his question.
Gamble turned from the window. “I don’t care what they are. It just helps me crawl inside their heads.”
“They’re not characters in a play.”
“Humor me.”
Mott flicked an invisible something from the left sleeve of his dark blue suit and said, “I believe both Wu and Durant are nominal Methodists since, at age fourteen, they ran away together from a Methodist orphanage in San Francisco. By now, of course, they may’ve switched brands — or abstained altogether.”
“When do I meet them?”
“Late this afternoon or early evening?”
“Anytime,” she said, paused, then asked, “If you had to pick one word to describe them what would it be?”
“Resourceful,” Mott said without hesitation. “Extremely resourceful — although that’s two words.”
“Resourceful enough to find the Goodison creeps?”
“Definitely.”
“Resourceful enough to find out who killed Billy Rice?”
Mott looked at her steadily before asking, “If you’re really sure you want to know that.”
Ione Gamble frowned and bit her lower lip. Then the biting stopped and the frown went away and she said, “I’m sure.”
The manager of the Bank of America branch on the old Malibu Road wasn’t particularly impressed by the $50,000 Artie Wu had wired Booth Stallings. She routinely opened a regular joint checking account for him, provided two signature cards for Wu and Durant to fill out and handed over $5,000 in cash without caution or comment. When Stallings asked for the name of a real estate agent who handled “the larger beachfront rental properties,” she promptly recommended Phil Quill.
“He’s also an actor,” she said. “You probably saw him in either Miami Vice or an episode or two of Jake and the Fatman.”
Quill’s name was somehow familiar to Stallings, but not from any television series. He admitted as much to the bank manager, excusing his ignorance by again mentioning that he had spent much of the past five years abroad, most recently in Amman as the permanent representative of Wudu, Ltd.
She said, “I was almost sure they’d dubbed Miami Vice into Arabic.”
After they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport the previous evening, Stallings had rented a Lincoln Town Car from the Budget people. He and Georgia Blue then headed for the 405 freeway and switched from it to the 10 that ended at the Pacific Ocean. Fifteen miles farther north on the Pacific Coast Highway, they found themselves in Malibu, looking for a motel.
Georgia Blue was the first to notice the Malibu Beach Inn, a large three-story affair of an artful Spanish Colonial design that almost made it look old. From a brief visit to Malibu in 1986, Stallings thought he remembered another motel that had once stood on the same site. The vanished motel had had a vaguely Polynesian name — something like the Manakura or the Tonga Lei or maybe even the Tondaleya.
The Malibu Beach Inn rented them two adjoining rooms for $180 a night each. They were large nicely furnished rooms that featured an ocean view and the sound of pounding surf. The man who helped with the bags looked like a retired lifeguard or maybe a superannuated surfer who, without the hint of a leer, informed Stallings that X-rated videotapes were available from the motel’s library. Stallings said he was too sleepy, tipped the bellhop, or whatever he was, five dollars and, when he was gone, knocked on Georgia Blue’s connecting door.
She said through the door that she’d see him in the morning. Stallings found some miniatures of Scotch in the mini-refrigerator, mixed a drink, opened a can of cashew nuts and went out on the balcony. He sat there, drinking the Scotch, eating the nuts and wondering why he hadn’t moved to Malibu in 1949 and gone into real estate.
The next morning Stallings and Georgia Blue went down to the lobby for the inn’s complimentary buffet breakfast. Stallings’s breakfast was two cups of coffee. Georgia Blue had just finished two glasses of milk, whole-wheat toast and a mound of fruit when a tanned stocky man entered the lobby, looked around, saw Stallings and Blue, gave them a dazzling smile and walked toward them with quick small steps that scarcely seemed to touch the Mexican tiles. Those quick light steps nudged Stallings’s memory and he finally remembered who Phil Quill had once been.
The real estate man was wearing double-pleated gabardine slacks that were several shades paler than daisy yellow; sock-less thin-soled loafers, which Georgia Blue, if not Stallings, knew to be Ferragamos; a dark blue polo shirt, probably from the Gap, and five or six hundred dollars’ worth of light blue cashmere sweater that hung down his broad back, its sleeves crossed over his breastbone in the loosest of knots. Quill had just shoved a pair of sunglasses up into thick, still-blond hair, revealing a pair of blue eyes that nearly matched his sweater and the ocean.
When he reached their table, he used a soft southern voice to say, “I’m Phil Quill, the real estate man. Betty at the bank said you all’d like to rent a beach place for a month or so.” He smiled again. “Providing, of course, that you, ma’am, are Miss Blue and you, sir, are Mr. Stallings.”
Stallings rose, said, “We are indeed,” then shook the offered hand and invited him to join them for coffee or even breakfast.
“A cup of coffee would be nice and I’ll fetch it myself.”
As Quill quickstepped away, Georgia Blue watched him go and said, “I wonder why he walks like that?”
“At one time he could do it backwards or sideways almost as fast.”