Voodoo Ltd qd-3

by Ross Thomas

  Voodoo, Ltd. —71

  Her surprise came and went quickly, replaced by a bleak stare that was aimed at Durant while she asked a question of Howard Mott. “Am I paying for the house, Howie?”

  “Enno Glimm is,” Mott said.

  The bleak stare gave way to a smile and she said, “Then I hope you guys enjoy it because it’s a lovely place.”

  “Did you rent it just by happy chance?” Mott said.

  Artie Wu nodded. “It’s one of those fortuitous events that may or may not prove useful. But as Miss Gamble says, it’s a hell of a house.”

  “You’d better call me Ione and I’ll call you Artie and— Quincy, isn’t it?”

  “Quincy,” Durant agreed. “Since we’re here to ask questions, maybe we should establish the ground rules. Are there any areas you want declared out of bounds?”

  “If there are, I’ll tell you when to stay the fuck away.”

  “That ought to be warning enough.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Where do we start?”

  “With the Goodisons,” Durant said. “Pauline and Hughes.”

  “Yes, the Goodisons. Well, they wanted me to call them Paulie and Hughsie two minutes after we met. I’ve lived in this town for thirty years—and by ‘this town,’ I mean L.A.— and I didn’t have what you’d call a sheltered upbringing. By the time I was twenty I figured I’d met every kind of slime king and ooze queen known in Christendom—until I met the Goodisons.”

  “Tell us about them,” Wu said.

  “Okay. I met with them three times and it was after the last meeting that Howie got that phone call from Hughes Goodison who claimed he had all sorts of new information, important facts or something like that. Anyway, Hughes said he was calling from the Bel-Air but by the time Howie got there, the Goodisons’d disappeared.”

  “They check out?” Durant asked.

  Mott said, “No, they simply vanished, leaving everything behind.”

  “Shall we go back to that first meeting with them?” Wu said.

  “All right,” she said. “Here we go. The Goodisons fly in from London and check into the Bel-Air. Then they call me—or Hughes does—and after the usual jabber-jabber, he gets to it—the hypnotism. Hughes thinks it’d be nice if I came to their Bel-Air suite that has an ever so quiet and relaxing atmosphere. I’m not going to bore you with an impression of his voice, but it’s faux plummy, if you know what that sounds like and, being from London, I guess you do.”

  “Yes,” Wu said. “We do.”

  “Well, I learned not to go to strange men’s hotel rooms pretty early on—when I was around four or five. So I tell Hughes my house also has an atmosphere that’s ever so quiet and relaxing and that’s where Voodoo, Ltd. —72

  the hypnotizing, if any, will take place. Then I give him the address and the directions and they show up in a limo, for God’s sake.”

  “What time was this?” Durant asked.

  “About four in the afternoon.”

  Durant looked at Mott. “Were you here?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wasn’t told of either the Goodisons’ arrival in L.A. Or of their appointment with Ione.”

  Durant looked at Gamble. “Why not let him know?”

  “I was going to call him, but then Jack Broach dropped by with some stuff I had to sign. He was still here when Hughes called and I asked him to stay. I also asked Jack if I should call Howie and he said it might be a good idea. But when I told him it was just going to be a let’s-get-acquainted session, but no hypnotism, Jack said there probably wasn’t any reason to bother Howie and I didn’t.”

  Durant again looked at Mott. “You ever meet the Goodisons?”

  “Just once. They came to the Santa Monica hotel where I’m staying, called me on the house phone and wanted to come up for a drink. I suggested the bar would be more comfortable. We had a drink there, some very idle talk of no consequence and they left.”

  “How did you read them?”

  Mott smiled slightly. “Let’s say I suspected that they lacked moral fiber.”

  “Bent?”

  “I’m not a mind reader.”

  “Did Enno Glimm swear by them?”

  “Nobody ever swore by them, Quincy. But a lot of people in London, who should’ve known better, told me they were wonderful.”

  “They’re bent,” Durant said. “After I found out they’d gone missing, it took me less than twenty-four hours to learn just how bent. What bothers me is why Enno Glimm and company didn’t do the same thing.”

  “I think we can get to the ‘Who Struck John?’ section of our agenda later,” Wu said. “Right now I’d like to ask Ione a few questions. Any objections?”

  Hearing none, Wu leaned forward on the couch, elbows on his big knees, hands clasped. He gave Gamble the kind of smile that made her smile back and said, “The Goodisons—your very first impression?”

  “Star fuckers.”

  “I was thinking more of their act—the one they put on after the initial star fucking was over.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —73

  Gamble first looked suspicious—then interested. “You knew them in London?”

  “Not them, but people like them. Everyone has a personal act of some kind—especially hypnotists.”

  “What’s yours?” she said.

  “We usually begin with terse questions and end up offering sympathetic understanding and a measure of hope.”

  She gave him a wry, even rueful smile and said, “You’re right. They had an act. It was something like going to a doctor for the first time.

  Even before you tell him where it hurts, he’s already into his act—

  shooting you those sharp little side glances while he jots down your vital statistics. Hughes and Pauline had that kind of patter. While Hughes said his lines, Pauline studied me for—well, for whatever they were looking for. Then it was Pauline’s time to talk and Hughes’s time to study.”

  “You’re very observant.”

  “In Howie’s trade and mine, we’re always on the lookout for blinks, smirks and twitches to steal or borrow, right, Howie?”

  Mott agreed with a small nod and a smaller smile.

  “What happened when their act was over?” Durant said.

  “They offered to hypnotize me—sort of a test run kind of thing.

  When I said I wasn’t ready yet, they offered to put on a demonstration. So I said okay and Hughes put Pauline into a trance in about five seconds flat. I mean, zap—she was under. He then took her back to when she was six and asked her to show us what she’d learned that day at dancing school. She got up and did an awkward little time step and sat back down.”

  “Then what?” Wu asked.

  “He brought her out of it looking relaxed, happy and not remembering anything—or saying she didn’t. And that’s when Hughes asked if he could test my receptiveness. I told him I still didn’t want to be hypnotized yet. Well, he turns on all of his considerable smarm and says he can’t hypnotize anyone who resists it and that he just wants to test my receptiveness, which was a word he really seemed to like.

  Then he starts talking about all the stars who’re known for their receptiveness. About half of them are long dead but still it was kind of an impressive list. And since Jack was there, I said all right.”

  She paused then and asked, “Would you guys like coffee or something to drink?”

  Wu shook his head. “I think we’d rather hear the end of the story.”

  “Okay. Well, we’re all still here in the office—me, Jack, Hughes and Pauline. Then Hughes is telling me to relax, close my eyes and think of all the colors in the rainbow and name them one by one. So I do and feel myself sort of going—I don’t know where—under, I guess. But I fight it and snap back. When I open my eyes, Hughes and Pauline are Voodoo, Ltd. —74

  looking disappointed and Jack is looking half-amused, the way he always does. So I get rid of the Goodisons by agreeing to another session the n
ext day.”

  She stopped talking and turned in her chair to stare again through the floor-to-ceiling window at ocean and canyon. She was still looking at the view when she said, “But by the next day I’d decided I wasn’t going to be hypnotized by anybody— especially not by the Goodisons.”

  She turned back. “I let them try anyway and the same thing happens. I started to go under—then snapped myself back. Their third and last test of my so-called receptiveness ended the same way. And that’s when I told them there weren’t going to be any more sessions and it was the last time I ever saw them.”

  “What was their reaction?” Wu said.

  “Nothing much. They apologized for not being more helpful and that was that. They left.”

  Durant looked at Howard Mott. “And this was the same day you got that panicky call from Hughes Goodison?”

  “Yes,” Mott said.

  Artie Wu sighed and rose. He went slowly over to the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, picked up the long yellow pencil and began rolling it with the thumbs and fingers of both hands. “When Hughes tested your receptiveness that first time, did he use any object such as this pencil?”

  She stared at the pencil. “No.”

  “But he talked about the colors of the rainbow?”

  “Yes.”

  “He asked you to concentrate on them, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “And say them aloud?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yellow’s a rainbow color, isn’t it, Ione?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like the yellow of this pencil.”

  “Yes.”

  “Close your eyes and tell me if you can still see the yellow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t it make you feel relaxed?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you’re fully relaxed, Ione, you’ll go to sleep. To help you relax, think of the rainbow again. Start with red. When you get to the last color, yellow, you’ll be fully, completely relaxed.”

  “All right.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —75

  “Have you reached yellow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to remember something you tried to remember but couldn’t?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like to remember the night you drove to Billy’s house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember what happened that night, Ione. Remember it aloud—

  everything that happened from the time you left your house.”

  She began to speak in a soft voice and told all about her fast drive to the beach house of William A. C. Rice IV and what she found there and about the one phone call she made.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —76

  Fifteen

  Ione Gamble still sat behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk with her eyes closed and her hands resting on the arms of the chair. Her lips had formed a faint smile and she looked rested, content—even happy.

  After staring at her for almost a minute, Howard Mott turned to Wu and asked, “Can she hear me?”

  Wu shook his head.

  “She didn’t kill him,” Mott said, more to himself than to Wu and Durant.

  “You thought she did?” Durant said.

  “I try not to let hope interfere with logic,” Mott said, turned to Wu and asked, “Where’d you learn diat?”

  “In a carnival when I was sixteen.”

  “Seventeen,” Durant said. “It was Little Doc Mingo’s Amazing Carnival and Traveling Panorama. Little Doc was a midget. Three feet tall. His regular hypnotist was Szabo, the Mystifying Mesmerist.

  Szabo’s real name was Hank Steem and the only mystifying thing about him was how he could still drink a fifth of rotgut a day at sixty-eight.”

  “Hank was okay,” Wu said.

  “He was a happy drunk at least,” Durant said. “And just after we were hired as roustabouts, Hank decided to retire to his daughter’s place in Corpus Christi. So Little Doc came up with a replacement—

  the Amazing Fu Chang Wu.”

  “Me,” Wu said with a grin. “Quincy and I were hired in El Paso and the Mystifying Mesmerist was going to quit the carnival when it reached Longview—which is clear across Texas. In the four or five weeks it took to get there, Hank taught us everything he knew about hypnotism. After Hank finally left, Little Doc dressed me up in red and black silk pyjamas he’d found somewhere, stuck a funny hat on my head and turned Quincy into my roper.”

  “Your shill?” Mott said.

  “Close,” Durant said. “We had an outside act to draw the rubes into the tent, but it needed volunteers. Hank’d taught us how to pick the ones easiest to hypnotize—the loudmouths, the gigglers, the extroverts and exhibitionists. While the talker gave his spiel about the Amazing Fu Chang Wu, I’d mingle with the rubes and tip Artie off to Voodoo, Ltd. —77

  the three or four I wanted. Then after the talker asked for volunteers, I’d be the first to hop up on the stage and then Artie’d coax the three or four I’d picked out into joining me.”

  “To do what?”

  “Perform the come-on,” Durant said. “First, Artie’d hypnotize me and I’d go stiff as a board. Then he’d pick me up and lay me on two chairs—my head on one chair, my heels on the other. Then he’d invite the three or four volunteer rubes to stand on me—which they were always happy to do. And that’s what drew the rest of the crowd inside at four bits a head for the real show, which mostly involved letting the rubes we’d picked make idiots of themselves.”

  “How long did you guys . . . do this?”

  Durant looked at Wu. “Five or six months, wasn’t it?”

  Wu nodded. “We played across Texas, north Louisiana and down into Cajun country—Crowley, Lafayette, New Iberia, Opelousas. We parted company with Little Doc just outside New Orleans, where we were going to ship out to either South America or the South Pacific.”

  “What happened?”

  “We met a guy in New Orleans who thought we should go to Princeton instead.”

  Mott turned to examine Ione Gamble, who still wore her faint, contented smile. “The Goodisons hypnotized her, didn’t they, and made her believe they hadn’t?”

  “It’s not hard to do,” Wu said. “And most actors are easy. They keep their emotions very near the surface, almost on tap, which makes them highly susceptible to suggestive hypnosis.”

  “When Ione wakes up, will she remember she didn’t kill Billy Rice?”

  Wu nodded. “This time she will.”

  “Aren’t we forgetting Jack Broach?” Durant said. “If he was here for her first session, he must’ve heard her say she didn’t shoot Rice. So why the hell didn’t he say so?”

  “What must’ve happened the first time,” Wu said, “is that the Goodisons took her to the brink, saw how easily they could hypnotize her, then brought her back before she could say anything and claimed they’d failed. Broach may have assumed she couldn’t be hypnotized—

  which is what Ione also believed—and didn’t bother to show up for the second and third sessions when the Goodisons probably used a tape recorder.”

  Mott looked at Ione Gamble again and said, “They must’ve thought she’d confess to Rice’s murder.” He shook his head. “Which is exactly what she was afraid might happen.”

  “You could argue,” Durant said, “that they did just what they were paid to do—help Ione regain her memory.”

  “The hell they did,” Mott said. “They hypnotized her, all right, then pushed her erase button and made her believe, one, that she hadn’t Voodoo, Ltd. —78

  been hypnotized and, two, that she couldn’t ever remember anything of what happened the night of Rice’s murder.” He looked at Wu. “You say that wasn’t difficult to do?”

  “Not at all,” Wu said.

  Howard Mott wasn’t satisfied. He scratched his chin, then the back of his left hand, looked at Wu again and said, “When they called me late that night from the Bel-Air Hotel, they claimed they’d run into a problem. At l
east, Hughes said they had. He was the one I talked to.

  But he wouldn’t say what kind of problem and by the time I got there, they’d gone—leaving all their personal stuff behind. It looked as if something had scared them away.”

  “Or that’s the way they wanted it to look,” Durant said.

  “Perhaps. At any rate, it was a week or ten days later—I’ll have to look up the exact date—when I got my other call from Hughes. He wanted to talk about the weather and how lovely it was for this time of year. I started asking questions, but he cut me off and told me not to worry about him or his sister, that they’d been under a strain and were trying to work out some personal problems that he’d rather not go into. It was a stall. An obvious one.”

  “What questions did you ask him?” Durant said.

  “I asked why they had disappeared. Where were they? Was there anything I could do? How could I get in touch? He just kept telling me not to worry.”

  “You’re sure it was Hughes’s voice?” Durant said.

  “Positive.”

  Mott turned to examine Ione Gamble, who still sat behind her desk, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips. “Will she really remember what she said to us?”

  “Every word,” Wu said and used a soft, almost seductive voice to ask, “Remember the rainbow, Ione?”

  “Yes, I remember,” she said, her eyes still closed.

  “Let’s go through the colors again. When you come to the very last one—to yellow—you’ll wake up and feel very relaxed, very rested and remember everything you said. Now start naming the rainbow’s colors to yourself.”

  Six seconds later, Ione Gamble opened her eyes, smiled at Artie Wu, then frowned, exchanged the frown for a puzzled look and said, “I shot the Chagall, not Billy, didn’t I?”

  “That’s right,” Wu said. “You shot the Chagall.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —79

  Sixteen

  Otherguy Overby had been sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Bridges for sixty-seven minutes before he finally saw someone who might prove useful. The hotel was less than thirteen years old but already had acquired a kind of genteel shabbiness that attracted those in need of an address just within the Beverly Hills zip code.