“Three right, forty-seven left, two right,” Stallings chanted. “Three right, forty-seven left, two—”
“Please, Frank,” Wu said. Stallings fell silent, hung his head and stared at his shoes.
“The number he wants, if it’s available, is thirty-four seventy-two. I do hope you’ll be able to indulge him.”
“How long’s he want it for?” she asked.
“Till two thousand twenty-six,” Stallings said. “When I hit a hundred.”
“Six months,” Wu said.
The woman turned to her computer, tapped out some numbers, studied them briefly, turned back to Wu with a cool smile and said, “You’re in luck. Three-four-seven-two just came vacant this afternoon.”
Wu turned to Stallings with a broad smile. “Hear that, Frank? It’s available. Old three right, forty-seven left, two right.”
Stallings gave him a sly look. “Wanta see it first. Wanta make sure everything’s all hunky-dory.”
“Zip up, Frank,” Wu said, turned back to the woman and whispered, “How much for six months?” He put a finger to his lips. She nodded and wrote a number on a pad, then turned it around so Wu could read it. The number was $100 per month plus tax.
After glancing at Stallings, who was now engrossed in pulling his zipper up and down, Wu reached into a pocket, brought out some crumpled bills and handed the redheaded woman $700.
Wu whispered, “I’ll pick up the change later.”
She used a whisper to ask, “What’s wrong with him?”
Wu smiled sadly and whispered, “Just age.”
She handed over a key along with a photocopy map of the container’s location and, no longer concerned that Stallings could hear her, said, “I’ve got a granddaddy just like that.”
The color of the storage container was green and there was nothing in it. Stallings and Wu wandered around inside for a few minutes, but there was nothing to see, nothing to pry into. When they came out, Stallings said, “Well, what d’you think, Reverend?”
“Two things,” Wu said. “One, Ione Gamble’s going to be hearing fairly soon from whoever was driving that black Caprice. And two, you’d better zip up your pants.”
Thirty-one
Otherguy Overby, seated in the late Billy Rice’s big port-wine leather chair, picked up the console phone just before its third ring, said hello and heard an electronically distorted male voice say, “Mr. X, please.”
“Lemme get to the other phone,” Overby said and sent a look and a nod to Georgia Blue, who rose from the long living room couch and hurried into the kitchen. Overby, staring at his watch, noted that the time was exactly 5:03 P.M. When he heard her pick up the kitchen’s wall phone. It was then that Overby said, “That’s better,” into his own phone and, in turn, was treated to a bass chuckle that, sounded like tired thunder.
“Put somebody on the extension, did you?” said the man with the distorted bass voice. “Well, that’s fine. Means you’re careful.”
Overby made no response and let the silence build. While waiting, he decided the caller’s altered voice sounded as if it were coining from the bottom of a steel oil drum. The caller was in no hurry to end the silence because it went on and on until the reverberating voice finally said, “I hear you’re interested in videotapes.”
“Depends,” Overby said.
“On what?”
“On quality.”
“What’s the quality market’s top price?”
“For prime stuff,” Overby said, “up to a hundred thousand pounds — about a hundred and seventy-five or eighty thousand U.S.”
“Listen,” the distorted voice said.
First, there was a very soft click — much like the sound a mercury light switch might make. Then a male voice with a pronounced British accent said, “Tell me your name.”
A woman’s voice that to Overby sounded either sleepy or tired said, “Ione Gamble.”
After a too-long pause, which Overby blamed on incompetent splicing, the British-accented male voice asked, “When you learned Billy Rice wasn’t going to marry you or let you star and direct his Bad Dead Indian picture, how did that make you feel?”
There was only a slight pause this time before the woman’s voice said, “I wanted to kill him.”
“Did you?” the male voice asked.
“Yes,” said the woman who claimed she was Ione Gamble.
After a final soft click, the caller’s distorted voice rumbled up out of the oil drum again. “Like the quality?”
“Seemed a little short.”
“That’s just a taste, a sniff,” said Oil Drum, which was the name Overby had now given him. “I’ve got forty-nine and a half minutes of stuff just as rich. Maybe even richer. Interested?”
“Could be,” Overby said, “if it’s really on video and not just audiotape and I get to screen it first.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Oil Drum said.
“When?”
“Eight tomorrow morning. By then I’ll’ve figured out a way to set up a screening.”
“What if I gotta get in touch with you before that — in case something comes up?”
Oil Drum chuckled again. “Nice try,” he said and broke the connection.
Georgia Blue waited for Overby to hang up before she replaced the kitchen wall phone and returned to the living room. She was wearing the jeans and a white sweatshirt she had bought that afternoon during a seven-minute shopping spree at the Gap on Wilshire in Santa Monica. On her feet were a pair of sockless dark blue Keds that were also new.
Overby was frowning at the phone console when Blue sank cross-legged to the floor, looked up at him and said, “How’re you going to work it?”
“What?”
“The fuck-him-over.”
“Won’t be easy. Not old Oil Drum.”
“Oil Drum,” she said. “I like it. Why d’you think he altered his voice? Because he thought you might be taping him?”
“Or that I might recognize it.”
“Did you?”
“No. Did you?”
“No,” she said. “But it must’ve been Hughes Goodison’s voice asking Gamble those questions. And that could mean the tapes’ve been sold or stolen or the Goodisons have taken in a new partner.”
Overby frowned. “He didn’t even mention blackmail, did he, Oil Drum?”
“No.”
Overby frowned again, obviously concentrating until the frown disappeared, replaced by his hard white grin. “If I was them, the Goodisons, I know what I’d do. I’d collect as much as I could from Ione Gamble and then use somebody else, somebody like Oil Drum, to peddle the videotape to the highest bidder.” He nodded comfortably at the scheme and said, “Very rich and very nice. It’s got, you know, symmetry.”
“Oil Drum would handle both the blackmail and the videotape sale?” Georgia Blue asked.
“Sure.”
“Then the Goodisons would never see a dime, would they?”
“Of course not,” Overby said. “They’re amateurs and too much money’s up for grabs. What they should’ve done is got in and out for a quick two hundred and fifty K. If they’d done that, they could already be spending it somewhere nice.”
“What did you think of the tape?” she asked.
Overby shook his head dismissively. “It’d been doctored by somebody who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. Take that question Goodison asked Gamble about how she felt after Rice dumped her and she said she wanted to kill him. Then Goodison asks, ‘Did you?’ and she says, ‘Yes.’ That was all spliced together by somebody in a hurry.”
“They must have something else they’re banking on.”
“Sure they do,” Overby said. “They got the videotape. Audio’s simple. If you know what you’re doing, you can make it say damn near anything. But video’s different because it’s lip-synched and then there’re the expressions and eye movements and body language and all that to worry about. But if you find yourself a real good cutter, the best, you can still do a hell of a lot with videotape.”