After Gamble had butter melting in a small frying pan, she tossed the garlic and onion into a mini-Cuisinart, gave it a couple of bursts, then another one, and dumped the chopped results into the now sizzling butter. Once the garlic and onion turned golden brown, she spooned them, butter and all, into the simmering beans, stirred, added salt, a little water, lots of pepper and a dash or two of Tabasco. She almost forgot the bay leaf but tossed it in at the last minute, admitting it provided more style than flavor.
She found two soup bowls, two napkins, two soup spoons and a loaf of dark rye bread sliced at the bakery. She then asked Durant if he wanted anything besides Scotch to drink. He said he didn’t.
After serving the soup, she sat down, picked up her spoon and said, “This recipe was taught me a long time ago by a very young one-term congressman from L.A. who, when last heard of, was living in semi-permanent exile just outside of Lisbon.”
“Chubb Dunjee,” Durant said and tasted the soup.
She halted her spoon a few inches from her mouth. Her eyes widened. “You know him?”
“Artie and I ran into him down in Mexico years ago. Chubb certainly knew some... shortcuts.”
“What were you guys doing in—”
The kitchen’s wall telephone rang, interrupting her question. Gamble rose, crossed to the phone, put it to her left ear and said, “Allo,” in what Durant thought must have been a perfect imitation of her Salvadoran housekeeper.
Gamble then listened to the voice on the phone for nearly fifteen seconds before she said, “Un momento, por favor.” Again, the accent was perfect.
She used her right hand to indicate the telephone, then used the same hand to point at the hall leading into the living room. Durant nodded, rose and hurried into the living room where he picked up an extension phone with his right hand and looked at his watch. It was 3:13 P.M. Just as the phone touched his right ear, he heard Ione Gamble say, “Who’s this?”
“Recognize the voice, love?” a British tenor said.
“Hughes, you dipshit. What the hell happened?”
“Paulie and I went on a retreat — to sort out our options,” said Hughes Goodison.
“Why call me?”
“Because we’ve decided you’re our best option — although we do have several others.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Of course I am, love. And you’ll understand perfectly once I play a tape of you talking to Paulie and me while you were deep in hypnosis. 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.”
“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. Moments later she looked up at him, frowned, then grinned and said, “Why the fuck do I believe you?”
Twenty-nine
Artie Wu remembered the Oxnard of nearly thirteen years ago as a small, agriculturally dependent city with a predominantly 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.