Voodoo Ltd qd-3

by Ross Thomas

“What else?”

  “Tell Otherguy to go to the Cullen inn as soon as possible.”

  “Before Durant and Georgia get there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Wu blew cigar smoke off to his left this time. “You were in the infantry during the war?”

  Stallings nodded.

  “A platoon leader?”

  “Right.”

  “You sent out scouts?”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —191

  “I sent ‘em out and sometimes they didn’t come back.”

  “Which told you something was amiss up ahead.”

  “And why nobody ever wanted to be a scout. Otherguy won’t either.”

  “But he’ll do it,” Wu said.

  “What about Ione Gamble, whose body he’s supposed to be guarding?”

  “I’d like you to deliver her to Howie Mott and leave her with him until it’s over.”

  “Howie know about this yet?”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “You going to tell Georgia and Durant about Otherguy?”

  “No,” Wu said, reached into a pants pocket, brought out some car keys and offered them to Stallings. “You’d better take the Mercedes.”

  Stallings shook his head and rose. “I rented myself a car this afternoon.”

  “Good.”

  Stallings looked down at Wu for several moments before he said,

  “Why aren’t you going, Artie—instead of Otherguy?”

  “Because I’m not needed.”

  “You hope.”

  “I hope,” Wu agreed.

  “Okay, so what else do I tell Otherguy besides all that ‘scouts out’

  bullshit?”

  “Tell him to fix it.”

  “Fix what?”

  “Whatever breaks,” said Artie Wu.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —192

  Forty

  Ione Gamble, trailed by Moose the dog, reached the bottom of the staircase, turned right and entered her living room just as the seated Booth Stallings drew the Sauer semiautomatic from his right hip pocket and seemed to aim it at the standing Otherguy Overby.

  “Oh, shit, please don’t!” Gamble said in a cry that was almost a yell.

  Stallings rose and turned, pistol in hand. It wasn’t a quick turn but it was quick enough to terrify Gamble. Her eyes seemed to double in size, her mouth dropped open and her hands flew up, palms out, as if to ward off the aged assassin’s bullet.

  “For chrissake, Ione,” said an exasperated Overby. “He’s Booth Stallings—Howie’s father-in-law.”

  The hands were slowly lowered. The mouth shut itself like a trap and the eyes returned to normal. A flush raced up her cheeks as she pried open her now grim and angry mouth just enough to say, “I don’t like people waving guns around in my living room.”

  “I wasn’t waving it around,” Stallings said. “I was delivering it.”

  He turned and offered the Sauer to Overby, butt first.

  Overby took the weapon, gave it a glance and dropped it into his jacket pocket as if it were something he did every morning just after he strapped on his watch.

  Fresh anger streaked across Gamble’s face and her voice turned bitter and accusative. “You didn’t even have a gun? What kind of fucking bodyguard doesn’t have his own gun?”

  “Somebody you want me to shoot?” Overby said. Before Gamble could reply, he moved over to her and said, “Listen, Ione. There’s something you’ve gotta do. You—”

  She cut him off, not with words, but by sinking slowly into a chair, bending forward and burying her face in her hands. Her shoulders shuddered when she spoke in what was almost a murmur. A stage murmur, Overby thought.

  “When he turned—with that gun—I was never so scared in my—”

  Overby, unmoved, interrupted. “The thing you gotta do, Ione, is go upstairs and pack an overnight bag. Won’t take five minutes. Then Booth here’ll drive you to Howie’s suite, where you’ll spend the night.”

  She glared up at him. “Are you trying to dump me off?”

  “Go pack the bag, Ione.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —193

  She rose instead and wandered over to Stallings, studied him for a moment, then gave him a smile that he felt was full of false promise.

  She reached up to brush an imaginary speck of something from his left shoulder just before she asked, “So what exactly do you do for Wudu?”

  “I’m the wise old head. The bank of memory. I’m also chief provisioner, exchequer designate and general factotum.”

  “And before that?” she asked, still seeming to be deeply interested.

  “Boy soldier. Professional graduate student, government consultant.

  Itinerant professor without hope of tenure. Frequent beneficiary of any number of think tank and foundation grants. And most recently, the aging but junior partner in Overby, Stallings Associates.”

  All of Gamble’s real or pretended interest vanished, replaced by more rage. “You and Otherguy are partners?” she said, making it sound, in Stallings’s opinion, more like a felony than a misdemeanor.

  “Ione,” Overby said.

  “What?”

  “Go pack the fucking bag.”

  Gamble turned on him, obviously prepared to refuse, argue and even rant until Overby nodded just once toward the door. Yet it wasn’t really a nod, Stallings thought. It was instead a silent peremptory command that brooked no refusal. She hesitated, then turned, headed for the foyer, almost turned back, again changed her mind and hurried out of the living room, Moose at her heels. After Overby made sure she really had gone up the stairs, he came back into the living room and asked, “Who’s worrying Artie the most—Durant or Georgia?”

  “He only mentioned some slight misgivings about Colleen Cullen,”

  Stallings said.

  Overby considered the Topanga innkeeper for a moment, arrived at a conclusion and shared it with Stallings. “Yeah, you could spin Colleen around for a price.” He frowned then and studied Stallings the way he might have studied some not quite legible handwriting. “Tell me again what Artie said— exactly.”

  “He said you’re to fix whatever gets broken.”

  “You’re sure he said ‘what’ and not ‘who’?”

  “He said ‘what.’”

  Overby’s hard white grin came and went quickly, replaced by a look of anticipation. “Know something, Booth? This whole thing could turn out to be kind of interesting after all.”

  With Ione Gamble as passenger, Stallings drove his rented Mercedes roadster south on Seventh Street to Montana Avenue, turned right toward the ocean, then turned south again on Fourth Street because Voodoo, Ltd. —194

  Gamble said Fourth was both the quickest and safest way. She didn’t speak again until they reached Wilshire Boulevard.

  “I have a car just like this,” she said.

  “Not quite. This one’s rented. Yours isn’t.”

  “What’s her name—your daughter who’s Howie’s wife?”

  “Lydia.”

  “She your only child?”

  “I have another daughter. Joanna. But she’s sort of bitchy.”

  Ione Gamble was silent again until they were a block from Howard Mott’s ocean view hotel. “D’you think there’s any chance of this turning out all right?”

  “Like in the movies?” Stallings said. “No chance.”

  “I don’t think so either,” she said.

  When it was 8:14 P.M. And time to go, Durant and Georgia Blue presented themselves to Artie Wu, who still sat at the head of the old refectory table, enjoying a cigar and a glass of excellent Armagnac.

  Wu had discovered a bottle of it hidden away by someone in an empty flour canister. Possibly by Billy Rice himself, Wu thought, because the Armagnac was far too good to share with anyone.

  Georgia Blue was wearing black jeans from the Gap, a black sweatshirt from the same place and her dark blue Ked sneakers but no socks. She had concealed her reddish-brown hair with a turban fas
hioned out of a dark blue silk scarf. She raised her sweatshirt to reveal the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver that was clamped against her bare flat stomach by the tightly fitting jeans.

  Wu nodded approvingly and turned to examine Durant, who wore a pair of gray-green tweed trousers with cuffs that evidently had belonged to an old but expensive suit. On his feet were a pair of weathered New Balance running shoes, and covering his upper body was a dark maroon sweatshirt that bore the Greek letters of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.

  “I never knew you were a Phi Delt,” Georgia Blue said, not trying to hide her mockery.

  “I found it on the top shelf of a closet,” Durant said as he produced the other .38-caliber S&W revolver Overby and Blue had bought from Colleen Cullen. He checked it carefully, then shoved it back into a hip pocket and said, “The pants come from an old clothes bag in the garage.”

  “I was wondering,” Wu said. “Now then. An announcement or two. If something rotten happens, try to get to a phone and call here. If nobody answers, call Howie Mott. If something good happens, do exactly the same thing—call here first and, if no answer, call Howie.”

  “What you’re saying is you might not be here,” Durant said.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —195

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “If you’ve got nothing else to do, Artie,” Georgia Blue said, “you can always tag along and backstop us.”

  “You don’t need me,” he said. “Together, you’re better at this sort of thing than anybody. Notice I said together. Separately, you’re very, very good but not quite—I hate to say it—tops. Because of that I strongly recommend the team approach—as distasteful as I know it must seem.”

  “Are you sick or something?” Durant said.

  “Why?”

  “Whenever you’re sick you get preachy.”

  “I may be suffering from a slight premonition,” Wu said.

  “Which is the real reason you’re not coming with us,” Blue said.

  “Exactly.”

  “What’s the premonition, Artie?” Durant asked. “The sky beginning to fall?”

  “If I told you, it would no longer be a premonition but a prophecy and I have no desire to be a prophet just yet.” He looked from Georgia Blue to Durant, then back to Blue. “Anything else?”

  “You can wish us luck,” she said.

  “I sincerely wish you won’t need it,” said Artie Wu.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —196

  Forty-one

  After he left Howard Mott and Ione Gamble in the hotel suite discussing who would sleep where—or whether they would sleep at all

  —Booth Stallings stopped at the first liquor store he came to on the Pacific Coast Highway and bought a bottle of very expensive Scotch whisky.

  Traffic began to slow when he was still half a mile from the Rice house. It then slowed even further and turned into stop-and-go. When Stallings finally crept around the last curve he saw flashing bar lights of black and white police cars. When he got closer he counted three black-and-whites belonging to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and a pair of black matched sedans that he guessed were those of the sheriffs plainclothes investigators. The cars were parked just outside the Rice house.

  Two uniformed deputies stood in the center of the highway, waving flashlights and trying to hurry the gawkers along. Since he was driving a $100,000 car, Stallings lowered its left window, stopped and used what he hoped was a $100,000 voice to ask the nearer deputy what the hell was going on.

  The deputy was 30 or so and had grown the obligatory gunfighter mustache. “Just a little domestic disturbance,” he said. “Nobody hurt.

  Nothing to see. Please keep it moving.”

  “That’s Billy Rice’s house, isn’t it?” Stallings asked.

  “I don’t know whose house it is.”

  “That big producer who got shot dead New Year’s Eve?”

  “Please move your fucking car, sir. Now.”

  Stallings drove another one hundred feet, found an illegal parking space and pulled into it. Once out of the Mercedes he stuffed the brown paper sack containing the Scotch down into a jacket pocket, then darted across the highway and almost got hit by a car whose driver called him a dumb shit.

  Stallings walked back toward the Rice house on the beach side of the highway and got there just in time to see Artie Wu, wearing exactly what he had worn at the early pizza dinner, being herded by two plainclothes investigators toward one of the unmarked sedans.

  Wu’s wrists were handcuffed behind him. His face was impassive. One investigator opened the sedan’s rear door and the other investigator put a hand on top of Wu’s head to keep it from bumping into anything when he turned and backed into the rear seat. As Wu turned and Voodoo, Ltd. —197

  lowered himself, his eyes met Stallings’s. There was no flicker of recognition in the eyes of either man.

  A small crowd of a dozen or so had gathered just outside the steel gates that guarded the Rice driveway. Stallings recognized a few of them as neighbors to whom he had paid, or tried to pay, courtesy calls. He avoided them and instead picked out the smartest-looking neighbor he hadn’t met, sidled up to him and said, “I’ve seen that Chinese guy down at the Hughes market. What’d he do?”

  “Killed some Mexican taxi driver.”

  “Huh,” Stallings said. “He the only one they arrested?”

  “So far.”

  “Bad-luck house, I guess. Billy Rice got his there on New Year’s Eve and now this Chinese guy takes a fall.”

  “No telling who you’re living next to out here,” the neighbor said.

  “They let any asshole with a few bucks rent whatever he can pay for. I figure the Chinese guy for a coke dealer.”

  “Must’ve been, to afford this place,” Stallings said and wandered away. When the stop-and-go traffic stopped again, he hurried across the highway to the yellow duplex and knocked on its door. It was opened seconds later by Rick Cleveland, the Gone With the Wind alumnus. Cleveland was still wearing a bathrobe but this one was canary yellow and came down to his calves. He also wore some new sandals along with a lighted cigarette in the left corner of his wide bitter mouth.

  “Got some excitement over your way,” he said around the cigarette.

  “Damned if we don’t,” Stallings said. “Mind if I use your phone?”

  “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.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —198

  “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.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —199

  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.