“No tapes, no deal, Jack,” Georgia Blue said. “Sorry.”
Jack Broach shook his head as if disappointed. He rose with the Uzi in his right hand, pointed downward, his finger nowhere near the trigger. He seemed unaware of the blood that ran down his left arm beneath the sweater and dripped to the floor.
Clenching his teeth and barely moving his lips, Durant said, “Make him drop the fucking piece, Georgia.”
“I’m leaving now,” Jack Broach said and walked slowly toward the open sliding door. Just before reaching it, he stopped and looked back at Georgia Blue, who still used two hands to aim the small semiautomatic at him. “Regardless of what you now claim, Georgia, we really did have a deal.”
He turned and walked through the door into the foyer. Standing near the stairs was Otherguy Overby, the Sauer semiautomatic he had borrowed from Artie Wu in his right hand.
When Broach saw Overby, he tried to bring the Uzi up. He was still trying when Overby shot him three times without hesitation. Once Broach lay sprawled on the parquet floor, Overby went over, stared down at him curiously, nudged him with the toe of a shoe, then looked up as Durant came through the door, holding one of Colleen Cullen’s revolvers. He was followed a moment later by Georgia Blue, whose small five-shot weapon dangled at her side, seemingly forgotten.
Overby looked back down at the dead man, then up at Georgia Blue. “Jack Broach?”
She nodded.
“What about the tapes?”
“There aren’t any tapes,” she said.
“None they could use anyway,” Durant said.
Overby frowned, then looked around. “What about Colleen?”
“Broach didn’t want any witnesses,” Blue said.
“Except you,” Durant said.
“He didn’t want me as a witness. He wanted me as a conspirator.”
She paused. “But then he and I had a deal, didn’t we?”
“The guy had an Uzi,” Overby said. “A fucking Uzi. How come you two are still walking around?”
“It’s all Georgia’s fault,” Durant said.
Forty-three
After Booth Stallings hung up the telephone on the blond secretary’s desk in Mott’s hotel suite office, he turned to Ione Gamble, who was still slumped in the room’s only easy chair. “More bad news?” she asked.
“Jack Broach is dead,” Stallings said. “Somebody shot him. He was the one blackmailing you — the one we called Oil Drum.”
The shock twisted Ione Gamble’s face and made her eyes bulge until she said, “Jack’s dead?”
Stallings nodded.
“He was blackmailing me?”
“Broach always was a no-good son of a bitch,” Rick Cleveland said from his seat behind the brunette secretary’s desk. He lifted his glass of Scotch, said, “To old Jack,” drank it and poured himself another from the bottle that was now one-third empty.
The shock had gone away from Gamble’s face, replaced by an odd serenity that seemed to erase all other emotions. “You knew Jack?” she asked Cleveland, as though inquiring about some mutual acquaintance neither had seen in years.
“Knew him when he was first starting out,” Cleveland said.
“I was one of his first clients. When he got too big or I got too small, he dumped me.”
She nodded politely, looked at Stallings again and asked, “Why would Jack blackmail me? Did he need money? I would’ve lent him money.”
“You don’t have any to lend,” Stallings said. “He stole it all. Maybe embezzled’s a better word.”
“I have no money?”
“Not much.”
“And you say Jack stole it?”
Stallings only nodded.
“Then how do I pay Howie Mott?”
“You don’t have to worry about paying Howie,” Stallings said, took the small .25-caliber semiautomatic from a pocket, placed it on the desktop and seemed to forget it.
“He won’t defend me for nothing,” she said. “I can’t expect him to.”
“There’s not going to be any trial,” Stallings said. “Not for you anyway.”
“What the hell’s going on, Booth?” she said, her serene look suddenly replaced by anger. “Spell it out. Use babytalk if you have to.”
“We’re going down to the sheriff’s office in Malibu,” Stallings said.
“Or maybe it’s called the substation.”
“The three of us?” she said.
“Just Rick and me,” Stallings said, picking up the small pistol. “And Rick’s going to tell ’em you didn’t shoot Billy Rice, but that he did.”
“You’re not trying to be funny, are you?” she said. “No. Of course you’re not.”
“Know how much it costs a day to rent a car like yours, Ione?” Stallings said.
“What the hell’re you getting at now?”
“Four hundred a day plus fifty cents a mile. That’s how much. Plus a five-thousand-dollar deposit — cash or credit card, providing your credit card can stand it. Rick here rented a car just like yours last New Year’s Eve, didn’t you, Rick?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Sure you did. Then you drove into Billy Rice’s driveway that same night around eleven or eleven-thirty, parked it, got out and rang the doorbell. You told whoever answered the door, maybe Rice himself, that you wanted to patch things up — make amends. Something like that. Once you’re both in the living room, you shoot Rice two times, then leave the gun oil that little elm table in the hall beneath the Hockney where whoever comes in will be sure to see it and maybe even pick it up. Which is just what Ione did.” Stallings looked at her. “Rick even left the front door open so you or someone else could go right in. The gun Rick used is kind of important because it was stolen off a movie set at Paramount where they were filming a pilot. Rick was a member of the cast — right, Rick?”
Cleveland ignored Stallings, finished his whisky, then poured himself another one.
Ione kept staring at Cleveland, who refused to look at her. “Why would you do it?” she said. “Kill Billy?”
Rick Cleveland downed his new drink, made a face, finally looked at Gamble and said, “Because the fucker spoiled my view, that’s why.”
“Your view?”
“You’ve got a view, don’t you?” Cleveland said. “Sure you do. Suppose some asshole comes along and builds an eight-or nine-story building right in front of it. Wouldn’t that piss you off?”
“Not enough to kill him,” she said.
“What if your view was all you had left in the world?” Rick Cleveland said.
At just past 2 A.M. the sheriff’s substation in Malibu locked Rick Cleveland in the same cell from which it had just released Artie Wu. By then Cleveland had freely admitted killing William A. C. Rice IV and even announced that, given the same circumstances, he would do it all over again.
At 3:16 A.M. The state Highway Patrol, acting on an anonymous tip, discovered the bodies of Colleen Cullen and Jack Broach in the Topanga Canyon bed-and-breakfast inn. Otherguy Overby, the anonymous tipster, had called the Highway Patrol because he remembered Cullen telling him she was paying off certain deputy sheriffs to let her keep the lie-low establishment in business.
At 3:38 A.M. Overby, carrying a blue canvas bag, rang the door chimes at Ione Gamble’s house on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. After demanding that he identify himself, a fully dressed Gamble opened the door.
“Let’s go up to your office, Ione,” Overby said.
“I can’t handle any more shit tonight.”
“You’ll like this kind,” he said.
Seated in her office behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, an extremely wary Ione Gamble watched Overby place the blue zip-up bag in front of her. “What’s that?” she said.