Voodoo Ltd qd-3

by Ross Thomas

  Satisfied that everything in the large office was as it should be, Miss Hazlitt softly closed the door, went to her desk, sat down and picked up a novel about a brokenhearted middle-aged lawyer in Savannah in the 1930s.

  Behind each of the place cards were bottles of Evian water and Dortmunder beer with separate glasses for each. Teacups were provided for later, if needed, and ashtrays were placed to the right of each place card, except Durant’s because he no longer smoked. The oval table was covered with a rarely used green baize cloth, one of Miss Hazlitt’s first purchases. Two just-sharpened pencils rested on each of the four unlined notepads.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —32

  Jenny Arliss seemed more amused than surprised when she found her name on a place card. She looked up at Durant, smiled and said,

  “How long’ve you known I was with Help!?”

  “Since the day after you picked me up at the Tate. If you play mystery lady again, don’t use your real name.”

  “I’ve always thought I lie rather well.”

  “You do all right,” Durant said.

  After half listening to Arliss and Durant, an obviously impatient Enno Glimm turned to Wu and said, “Can we for Christ sake sit down and get started?”

  “Of course,” Wu said, pulled out his own chair and waited for the others to sit. After all were seated, Glimm was on Wu’s right, Jenny Arliss on his left. Wu smiled at Arliss, turned to Glimm and said,

  “Suppose you tell us your problem and we’ll tell you what, if anything, we can do about it.”

  “I wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t do something.”

  “Don’t overestimate us,” Durant said.

  “Look,” Glimm said. “My business is never overestimating anybody.

  But before we get to me and my problem, I need to ask you guys something.”

  “Please,” Artie Wu said.

  “What d’you call yourselves? I mean, if somebody says, ‘I take from Voodoo, Limited, the whatchamacallit people,’ that’s not much of a description, especially if you two’re depending on word of mouth.”

  “Not much,” Durant agreed.

  Glimm frowned at Durant, then turned again to Wu. “And don’t get pissed off at the way I pronounce your company name. That’s what I started calling it and now it just pops out. But let’s get back to what you guys are. I know you’re not private enquiry agents. And your overhead’s too big to be con men. You might be into industrial espionage, but everybody tells me that’s kind of boring. So what do you think you are? High-priced gofers? Noncombatant mercenaries? I classify everybody I meet by occupation and not being able to pigeonhole you two’s giving me the jimjams.”

  “The jimjams?” Durant said.

  “They’re sort of like the willies.”

  “Would you be offended,” Wu said, “if I were to ask where you learned your English?”

  “In a minute. I want a job description first.”

  “Wudu, Limited,” Wu said slowly, “is a closely held limited liability company that does for others what they cannot do for themselves.”

  “For a price,” Glimm said.

  “Certainly for a price.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —33

  “Then if it wasn’t for the fucking price,” Glimm said, “you guys could call yourselves saints.”

  “But since we do charge,” Wu said, beaming, “why not just think of us as professional altruists?”

  “I’ll try,” Glimm said, paused, then asked, “So you wanta know where I learned my American? In Frankfurt, that’s where. Not far from a big PX and within spitting distance of the I. G. Farben building and its funny nonstop elevators that your Air Corps forgot to bomb for reasons there’s no need to go into because it’s all ancient history.”

  “Very ancient,” Durant said.

  Glimm poured himself a glass of beer, tasted it and said, “My mother was a maid after the war, a live-in Putzfrau for American army officers and later for army civilian personnel. I grew up surrounded by GIs and bilingual. My old man was either an American army captain, a lieutenant or maybe even a certain staff sergeant. Mom could never quite pin it down. I was born in late forty-six when she was twenty and after all my possible daddies had gone back to the States.”

  “You ever try to locate him?” Wu asked.

  “What for?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “I’m not that curious,” Glimm said. “Nineteen forty-six, in case you don’t know, was a tough year for us Krauts and Mom did whatever she had to do to keep us from starving. And if that ‘whatever’ hadn’t included a certain amount of fraternization with the Amis, we could’ve starved. She’s sixty-five now and lives in Hamburg but spends her winters in Spain or Florida. A couple of years ago she tried Hawaii and liked that okay, too. So that’s me, Enno Glimm, rich bastard.” He turned quickly to Wu again and said, “What’s all this crap I hear about you being a pretender to the Chinese Emperor’s throne?”

  Before Wu could reply, Jenny Arliss said, “Mr. Wu does have a well-documented, if tenuous, claim to the Chinese throne.”

  Glimm, still staring at Wu, said, “China’s never gonna have another Emperor.”

  “One can but hope,” Wu said.

  Durant leaned forward, elbows on the table, his eyes on Glimm.

  “Okay. Tell us what you want done and we’ll tell you if we can do it. If not, we’ll all have a goodbye drink.”

  Glimm turned to Jenny Arliss and said, “You tell it.”

  She thought for a moment or two, frowned, as if having trouble with her phrasing, then said, “We want you to find two British hypnotists who’ve gone missing in California.”

  There was a brief silence. During it Wu and Durant refrained from looking at each other. Then Wu nodded, smiled and said, “I believe we can handle that nicely.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —34

  Eight

  Jenny Arliss said the two missing hypnotists, Hughes Goodison, 32, and his sister, Pauline, 27, had wandered into the hypnotist’s trade by accident.

  “Their fascination with it began at a drinks party,” she said.

  “Hughes was twenty-five then, a bookkeeper, and Pauline was five years younger and a clerk-typist. They shared a flat in Hammersmith left to them by their parents who’d died the year before of food poisoning while on holiday in Malta.”

  “Botulism,” Glimm said. “Somebody forgot to boil the milk.” Artie Wu made a careful note on his pad that read, “Cigars.”

  “It was at this party,” Arliss said, “that an amateur hypnotist was putting people into trances and suggesting they do silly things such as barking like a dog, crowing like a rooster or meowing like a cat. Silly harmless nonsense.”

  “That fascinated them?” Durant said.

  “Of course not. What did fascinate them was that they themselves were such easy subjects. The amateur hypnotist told them he’d never worked with anyone more susceptible.”

  “You can’t hypnotize anyone who doesn’t wanta be,” said Glimm, looking at Wu, as if expecting him to make another note. Wu obliged by writing another reminder, “Call Booth in Manila.”

  Jenny Arliss said that brother and sister were so intrigued by their brush with hypnotism that Hughes Goodison bought a book on the subject. “It was one of those oversimplified popularizations, something like, ‘How to Hypnotize and Amaze Your Friends.’ They practiced on each other first, then on their chums, and discovered they were really quite good at it. They even laid on a study course and began reading books by recognized authorities such as, well, Estabrook was one, then there were Moodie and Gilla and Fromm and, let me think, Shor.”

  “Some memory, huh?” Glimm asked.

  “Remarkable,” Durant said.

  It was just after the Goodisons began their course of study, Arliss said, that Hughes began looking into ways he and his sister could become certified hypnotists and discovered the requirements were surprisingly lax. He also learned of schools of hypnotism where the course lasted only forty hours—follow
ed by sixteen hours of supervised practice. He and his sister could even attend classes at Voodoo, Ltd. —35

  night and, once all courses were completed, hang out their shingle as certified hypnotists.

  “And that’s exactly what they did,” Arliss said.

  “Tell ‘em about their gimmick,” Glimm said.

  She nodded. “Right. Their gimmick, as Mr. Glimm calls it, was to open a lose-weight, stop-smoking clinic—except they didn’t call it a clinic. They called it a workshop and their success rate was about what it is for most such places—anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent, if that. But one boasts about successes, not failures, and Hughes and Pauline were quite good at self-promotion. They worked up a fairly witty lecture-cum-demonstration, wisely keeping it to fifteen minutes, and offered it free to civic and professional groups that met weekly or monthly. They sprinkled their act—I suppose I should call it that—with generous dollops of psychobabble and lots of audience participation. Pauline was especially clever at choosing those in the audience who were most easily hypnotized.”

  “Real operators, huh?” Glimm said.

  “But so far very small-time,” Durant said.

  “Just wait.”

  “Opportunity knocked or banged on their door,” Arliss said, “when a woman detective, who happened to be a heavy smoker, attended one of the professional women’s meetings, although I don’t remember which one.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Glimm said.

  “The detective signed up for the Goodison’s stop-smoking program and even joked that if they didn’t make her stop smoking, she’d arrest them for fraud. But after only two sessions she did stop smoking, apparently forever.”

  “Why apparently?” Wu asked.

  “Because I haven’t seen her in several months. The detective was working on a rape case when she met the Goodisons. The victim was a seven-year-old girl who suffered traumatic memory loss and couldn’t or wouldn’t say who’d attacked her, although the detective had begun to suspect Uncle Ned.”

  Arliss poured herself some Evian water, sipped it and said, “The detective and the Goodisons were chums by then and she asked them if they’d done much work with children. They said children were often the most receptive subjects—which obviously didn’t answer the question. The detective then asked if they’d be willing to hypnotize a seven-year-old rape victim suffering from traumatic memory loss. This time Pauline admitted they’d never done anything quite like that but very much wanted to cooperate with the police in any way they could.”

  “You’re putting in too much detail,” Glimm said.

  “I like detail,” Wu said, smiling encouragingly at Arliss.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —36

  She had another sip of Evian water. “The detective had by now struck up a kind of silent rapport with the seven-year-old girl, who hadn’t said a word since her rape. But sometimes she’d nod or shake her head to the detective’s questions, which is more than she’d do for her parents or anyone else. So after getting the parents’ permission the detective explained everything to the child, then went to her masters and told them what she had in mind. After a certain amount of bureaucratic bump and shuffle, it was decided to give the Goodisons a try, providing a doctor was present.”

  “I thought the Metro cops had their own hypnotists,” Durant said.

  “They do,” Arliss said. “But they’re all male coppers. In any event, Pauline—with brother Hughes as backup—hypnotized the child, who regained both speech and memory and promptly named her dad as the rapist.”

  “Well, now,” said Wu because Jenny Arliss had paused, as if expecting comment or exclamation.

  “Then what?” Durant said.

  “Then the story was leaked by someone,” she said. “The police still don’t know who, but I always suspected Hughes. The tabloids had a perfectly marvelous time. Hypnotized Tot Says Daddy Raped Me. Stuff like that. The tot’s name was never mentioned, nor were the names of her parents—until much later. But the names of Hughes and Pauline were all over the papers and that’s when I swooped in and gathered them up.”

  “When did all this happen?” Wu said. “A couple of years ago?”

  “Just about. Since then, the Goodisons have opened four more lose-weight, stop-smoking workshops, the police’ve consulted them repeatedly and they’ve given ever so many interviews and made any number of television appearances.”

  “You’re what—their agent?” Durant asked.

  “No. Help! signed them solely for foreign representation on a just-in-case basis. That’s how we sign all our clients. We neither charge them a fee nor take a percentage of their gross because the employer always pays our fee.”

  “Which is how much?” Wu asked.

  “Twenty-five percent on top of what our client gets,” Glimm said.

  “Sounds profitable,” Wu said, opened a beer, poured himself a glass, had two swallows and said, “I’d like to hear about California now—and how the Goodisons went missing.”

  “Okay,” Glimm said. “But first I wanta mention a couple of names because, if you recognize them, it’ll save a hell of a lot of time and explanation. The names are Ione Gamble and William A. C. Rice the Fourth. Ring any bells?”

  Durant said, “Jilted Actress Slays Billionaire, Cops Claim.”

  “What about you?” Glimm said to Wu. “You up on it?”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —37

  “I’ve kept abreast,” Wu said. “It would’ve been difficult not to.”

  “Then you know she claims she got drunk and blacked out and can’t remember anything. You know about that, right?”

  “We know,” Durant said.

  “You know about her auditions?”

  “For what?” Wu said.

  “For criminal defense lawyers,” Glimm said. “She flew ‘em in from all over, guys with big reputations. Then she picks one from Washington, D.C., who she says is the smartest man she ever met and I’ve gotta agree with her there. She picked Howard Mott. Know him?”

  Wu looked at Durant, then said, “I don’t think we’ve ever actually met, have we?”

  “No,” Durant said. “We haven’t.”

  “But you know who he is?” Glimm said.

  Wu nodded.

  “Well, Mott and I’ve done business before so I wasn’t all that surprised when I got a call from him. I was in Frankfurt and he was in L.A. Santa Monica, anyway. He tells me he’s representing Ione Gamble and wants me to tell him about Hughes and Pauline Goodison.

  So I tell him to call Jenny here in London—or I’ll have her call him.

  Mott says he’s in a hurry, so I give him her number and he calls her.

  She’ll tell you what happened then.”

  Durant and Wu looked at Jenny Arliss. She stared at Wu first, then shifted her gaze to Durant and said, “Mr. Mott rang and grilled me for thirty minutes or more about the Goodisons. I gave him some telephone numbers to call, including several at the Metropolitan Police. Two hours later he rang back and said he’d like to employ or retain the Goodisons to help Ione Gamble recover her memory. I was curious as to why he’d pick them when southern California is brimming over with all sorts of hypnotherapists, reputable and otherwise. So I asked him.”

  “What did he say?” Durant asked.

  She looked away for a moment to stare at the portrait of Agnes Wu and the two sets of twins. She then looked back at Durant and said,

  “Mr. Mott wanted to engage a hypnotist—in this case, a pair of them—

  whose discretion would be guaranteed. He then asked if Help! would guarantee the Goodisons’ silence or discretion, whatever. I told him of course—that we guarantee the discretion of all our specialists. We then settled on a fee and—”

  Durant interrupted. “What do you mean ‘guarantee’?”

  “She means we’ll indemnify any loss Ione Gamble takes because of the Goodisons,” Glimm said. “Which could be a great big bundle.” He paused to stare at Wu. “That’s why I want ‘em found.”

&
nbsp; After nodding pleasantly, Wu looked at Jenny Arliss and said, “You were talking about their fee.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —38

  She said, “I rang Hughes and asked whether he and Pauline would fly to Los Angeles and hypnotize Ione Gamble for one hundred thousand dollars plus expenses. He almost went into a fit but accepted, of course, and they left the next day.”

  “Then what?” Wu asked.

  “A week later I had a call from Mr. Mott, who said the Goodisons had had three sessions with Ione Gamble. After the third session, they rang Mr. Mott at two in the morning to report a serious problem, but refused to discuss it over the phone. Mott told them not to stir, that he was coming right over. He was in a Santa Monica hotel and they were in the Bel-Air Hotel. I understand it usually takes twenty or twenty-five minutes to get from one to the other. Mr. Mott made it in less than twenty. But the Goodisons had already vanished.”

  “Have they been heard from since?” Wu asked.

  “Mott got a call from the brother,” Glimm said. “He said it was nothing but gibberish.”

  “So what’s worrying you—blackmail?” Durant said.

  “Exactly,” Glimm said.

  “There’s no proof of it,” Wu said.

  “Yet,” said Glimm. “Look,” he continued. “Maybe they’re blackmailers or maybe they aren’t. Or maybe they’ve been kidnapped and somebody else is the blackmailer. I could maybe this and maybe that the rest of the afternoon. But maybes aren’t answers, are they?”

  “If it is blackmail,” Wu said, “who pays—you or Gamble?”

  “I do,”

  “You could wiggle out of it,” Durant said.

  “Sure,” said Glimm, “but the word’d get around, wouldn’t it? I’d lose all my clients and spend the rest of my life kicking myself because I didn’t fork over a lousy million bucks. And when I wasn’t kicking myself, I’d be talking to lawyers about how to wiggle out of the ten or fifteen million Ione Gamble’s suing me for. But I don’t wanta do any of that, which is why I’m hiring you guys.”