“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 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, 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.
The extraction of the impacted wisdom tooth took less than ten minutes. Durant calculated that Dr. Unger, working at top speed, could gross around $7,200 an hour. Ione Gamble was still out when Durant helped the dental technician half walk, half carry her into the quiet room where they eased her onto a narrow couch.
The technician handed Durant a box of Kleenex and said, “There shouldn’t be any more bleeding, but if there is, give her some of these.”
“What about pain?”
“No pain,” she said. “Just some mild discomfort.”
“When can she eat?”
“An hour or two from now. But I’d suggest soup, medium warm. Later this evening, anything she wants within reason.”
After the technician left, Durant sat down next to Ione Gamble, watched her for several seconds, then said, “Ione?”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Did anyone borrow your car New Year’s Eve?”
“No.”
“Did you go out to Billy Rice’s house twice that day — once in the late afternoon or evening and again early the next morning?”
“No.”
“Did you shoot Billy Rice?”
“No.”
“Do you know who did?”
“No,” she said just as the dental technician bustled in and asked, “She coming around?”
“Seems to be,” Durant said.
“Let’s have a look.” She bent over Ione Gamble and, using a voice she would use on someone hard of hearing, said, “Miss Gamble? Can you hear me?”
Ione Gamble opened her eyes and said, “Is it over yet?”
The technician smiled. “All over and everything’s fine.”
“God, that Pentothal’s wonderful stuff.”
The technician beamed. “Isn’t it, though?”
Gamble turned her head and found Durant leaning against a wall. “I say anything?”
“Nothing I could understand,” he said.
Twenty-eight
After they left the medical building, Durant followed Ione Gamble’s advice and took San Vicente Boulevard all the way to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. After two acute right turns he drove up the short steep incline that was a seldom-used back way into Adelaide Drive.
This stretch of the drive had been transformed into a one-way street by those who lived in the huge houses that lined its right side. To the left of the street the land fell sharply away, almost straight down, and provided a see-forever view of canyon, mountains and ocean.
At the end of the one-way section was a white-painted steel barrier that blocked two-way traffic and gave the long row of huge houses the air of a gated community. As he squeezed the Mercedes past the steel barrier, Durant noticed a group of six or seven fit-looking men and women in their early twenties. Some were doing cramp-relieving exercises. Others were gulping Evian water from one-liter plastic bottles. Nearly all were wearing shorts, tank tops, running shoes, and sweating at half past three on a late February afternoon with the temperature in the low sixties and falling.
“They still bounce up and down those steps?” Durant asked.
“Night and day,” Gamble said. “One hundred and eighty-nine steps up from the floor of the canyon and one hundred and eighty-nine down. The same as in a fourteen-story building. A few of them make three or four round trips a day. Some of them even do it two steps at a time.”
Because Durant couldn’t think of anything to say except “Ah, youth,” he said nothing. His silence provoked a smile from Gamble. “They make me feel the same way and you’ve got ten years on me.”
“More like fifteen,” Durant said.
They were both silent for almost a block until they turned into her driveway, stopped, and she asked, “Is Pentothal like opium?”
“Why?”
“If it is, then I finally figured out why the British fought the opium wars with China.”
“To corner the euphoria market, right?”
“Sure, but what I felt at the dentist’s was ten notches up from euphoria. What I felt was, well, perfection.”
“I’ll remember that the next time they try to give me novocaine,” Durant said, switched off the engine and handed her the keys. He had his door half-open when he turned back to ask, “Any letdown? Pain? Discomfort?”
She shook her head. “A slight twinge now and then — just enough to make you wonder if getting up for a couple of aspirins is worth the effort.” She opened her own door, paused and said, “Why not come in for a drink and some almost instant mock Senate bean soup?”
Durant said it sounded interesting.
He sat at the kitchen table with a Scotch on ice and watched her open a large can of Great Northern beans. She dumped the contents into a saucepan and placed it on the stove over low heat. She found some garlic, then located a large onion, cut it in half and removed its outer skin. She didn’t bother with the outer skin of the garlic.