“Help yourself,” Cleveland said, opened the door wide, stepped back and then followed Stallings into the duplex’s living room.
“It’s right over there,” Cleveland said and pointed.
Stallings took the sack-wrapped bottle of Scotch out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Cleveland. “Pour us one while I make my call.”
The old actor slipped the bottle out of the sack and brightened at the sight of its label. “Jesus. I haven’t had a jolt of this in years.”
Stallings went over to pick up the phone and tap out Howard Mott’s number. As it rang, he noticed that Cleveland had moved to within easy listening distance while working on the bottle’s cork.
When Mott answered the telephone, Stallings said, “The sheriff’s people just took Artie away in handcuffs. The rumor is that he killed a Mexican cabdriver.”
“You’re not alone, then,” Mott said.
“No.”
“Where’d they take him — the Malibu jail?”
“Probably.”
“Then I’d better get busy — except we have a problem. Not enough baby-sitters.”
“Tell you what,” Stallings said, raising his voice slightly. “There’s an actor friend of mine out here who might be willing to help out while you tend to Artie.”
“You’re up to something, Booth.”
“I thought you’d like the idea. Let’s see what my friend says.”
He turned to Rick Cleveland, who had poured two stiff drinks and now stood no more than four feet away, sipping one of the drinks and holding the other in his left hand.
“You want to make five hundred bucks tonight?” Stallings said.
“How?”
“Help me bodyguard Ione Gamble.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Yes or no?” Stallings said.
“Hell, yes.”
Into the phone Stallings said, “We’ll be there in twenty or twenty-five minutes.”
“After you get there, take a look in the lower left-hand drawer of my secretary’s desk,” Mott said.
“The blonde’s desk?”
“The brunette’s.”
“One other thing, Howie.”
“What?”
“Take Artie some cigars.”
Rick Cleveland was wearing a tweed jacket, blue shirt and faded Levi’s jeans when he and Booth Stallings reached the illegally parked Mercedes 500SL. Cleveland stopped and stared at the car. “Christ, that looks just like the one Ione Gamble drove that night.”
“That’s because it is the same one,” Stallings said.
They drove to Howard Mott’s hotel in twenty-one minutes. Mott opened the door to the suite, was introduced to Cleveland and, in turn, introduced him to Ione Gamble, who was seated in the lone easy chair in the secretaries’ office. Gamble smiled up at the actor and said, “I must’ve seen you a hundred times on one screen or other. Funny we haven’t met before this.”
“Haven’t been working much lately,” Cleveland said and looked curiously at the two desks and the two word processors.
“I must go,” Mott said. “Good of you to accommodate us, Mr. Cleveland.”
“Glad to help out,” Cleveland said. “At least I think I am.”
Mott smiled his goodbye and left. After the door closed, Ione Gamble looked up at Stallings and said, “So you and your young friend here are my new bodyguards.”
Because it wasn’t a question, Stallings made no reply. Instead, he went over to the blond secretary’s desk and opened the deep bottom drawer. The only thing it contained was a .25-caliber semiautomatic.
It was a very small vest-pocket-size weapon of Italian manufacture that held five .25-caliber rounds. Stallings could almost conceal it with one hand. But he made a point of showing it to Ione Gamble. “It’s a gun, Ione. I’m not going to shoot you with it. I just want you to know your new bodyguard is armed.” He dropped the small gun into his jacket pocket.
“And with such a very little gun,” she said. “What now?”
“We wait,” Stallings said.
Rick Cleveland sat down behind the brunette secretary’s desk. “Wait for what?” he asked.
“For whatever happens,” Stallings said.
“Well, what d’you guys think’s going to happen?”
“Something awful,” said Ione Gamble.
Forty-two
At 8:49 that night, Otherguy Overby lay flat on the treehouse floor, peering down at Colleen Cullen as she ended her final security sweep through her five-acre grounds. In her left hand was a two-foot-long flashlight and, in her right, the sawed-off shotgun — aimed straight ahead — its shortened stock pressed hard against her right hip.
At 8:51 Cullen returned to the inn, mounted the nine steps to the porch and went inside. A minute later all the interior lights went out. The only lights left burning were the two 100-watt ones on the porch.
Overby had discovered the treehouse just after 8 P.M. as he slowly made his way through what he regarded as the forest primeval but was actually a well-tended three-acre stand of pines, sycamores, eucalyptus and a few rather old live-oak trees. Earlier, he drove past the entrance to the inn’s long brick drive with its always lit red neon sign warning of no vacancy. He stopped a quarter mile farther up the narrow blacktop road, parked the rented Ford on the shoulder, got out, locked the car and disappeared into what he suspected to be the wild wood.
Eight minutes later he tripped on a root, tried to regain his balance, but fell on his butt and found himself staring up at the moonlit treehouse in the old sycamore. The tree was only a yard or so from the long brick drive and less than twenty yards from the inn itself. Overby guessed that the treehouse was fairly new and at least fourteen feet above the ground. Six 2 x4s, each two feet long, had been nailed to the tree’s thick trunk at two-foot intervals to provide a crude ladder.
The treehouse itself wasn’t a house at all but merely a platform in the form of a trapezoid that had been wedged into the sycamore’s first crotch. Its floor was about six feet long by four to five feet wide. The support frame was more 2 X 4s; its flooring, 1x10 pine planks. It was obviously a place far too dangerous for kids, and Overby, who had never had a treehouse, wondered if Colleen Cullen had built it — or had had it built — because she’d never had one either.
Just before 9 P.M., a black Ford sedan sped up the brick drive, stopped, then backed into the fan-shaped parking area as if positioning itself for a getaway. Overby watched from the treehouse as Georgia Blue, illuminated by moon and porch lights, slipped out on the passenger side. She held a revolver with both hands and made a quick visual sweep of everything in front of her. Quincy Durant got out on the driver’s side, a pistol in his right hand, the blue $8.95-plus-tax moneybag in his left. Durant hurried to the nine steps that led up to the inn’s wraparound porch.
Georgia Blue, walking backwards, followed Durant — her eyes and weapon raking everything to his rear. When Durant reached the bottom step he stopped and said something over his shoulder that Overby couldn’t hear. Durant then waited for Blue’s back to touch his. Overby nodded his approval.
Durant took his time going up the steps. Georgia Blue, her back still to him, went up even more slowly, placing both feet on each step before moving up to the next riser. After they reached the front door, Durant rang the bell. A moment later every light bulb in every room on every floor of the old three-story mansion was ablaze. Overby, from his treehouse perch, liked Colleen Cullen’s decision to light up the whole place all at once with the master power switch. Yet he wondered how she’d managed to keep the front porch lights on but everything else dark and decided to ask her.
Durant tried the front door. It opened and he went in. Georgia Blue backed in slowly, her pistol still in its two-handed grip and moving from side to side in a sixty-degree arc. After the inn’s front door closed behind them, Otherguy Overby looked at his digital watch. The time was 8:59:33.