Seated once again behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, Ione Gamble used only silence and a pencil to create a tension so palpable that Howard Mott thought he could almost taste and feel it. If she were to increase the tension only slightly, he suspected it would taste like electricity must taste and feel like a death threat must feel.
He judged Gamble’s performance to be superb and wondered which bits and pieces he would eventually steal or borrow for his own use in future courtroom appearances. Mott particularly admired the way she had helped set the scene by skinning her thick light brown hair back into a spinster’s knot and scrubbing all makeup from her face to emphasize its remarkable character and minimize its essential prettiness. However, the prettiness quota was amply filled by her obviously bare breasts beneath a simple white polo shirt.
And finally there was the pencil — long, yellow and freshly sharpened — which she had studied for nearly three silent minutes, turning it this way and that, but making sure its point always swung back, compass-like, until it was aimed directly at Howard Mott’s throat.
Mott was again sitting on the couch with the chintz slipcover. Jack Broach, the elegant agent-lawyer-business manager, was back in the no-nonsense armchair and it was he who broke the tension with a question: “Ione, will you stop fucking with that pencil?”
Gamble looked up with a practice-perfect expression of surprised hurt, then looked down at the pencil, as if she had never seen it before. Slowly opening her hand, she let it roll from her fingers and fall to the desk with a small clatter and bounce. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I... I didn’t realize.”
Jack Broach praised the performance with three weary handclaps.
Ignoring Broach, she gave Mott a too-sweet smile and said, “I was wondering, Howie, if you’d mind explaining just one more time — and do try to make it simple — why you ever hired those two shit-for-brains hypnotists.”
“Of course,” Mott said. “As I mentioned before, I first learned of them from a favorable account in a British law journal. But I hired them only after talking to three reputable barristers in London, who recommended them highly, as did two ranking Metropolitan Police officers. Of equal importance, at least to me, was the fact that the Goodisons, brother Hughes and sister Pauline, were clients of Enno Glimm—”
“The hypnotist broker,” she said.
“—which is in itself sufficient recommendation.”
“You mean Glimm offers a money-back guarantee that his hypnotists won’t turn out to be blackmailers or rip-off artists?”
“Exactly,” said Mott. “In fact, he’s already taken corrective measures, not the least of them being the return of the hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee you paid for the Goodisons’ services.” Mott turned to Broach. “You got the money, right?”
Broach nodded. “By wire transfer yesterday.”
Gamble again picked up the yellow pencil and absently tested its point with a thumb. “You said Glimm’s taken ‘corrective measures.’ What are they — other than sending back my money?”
“He’s retained — at his own considerable expense — a London firm called Wudu, Limited. Its job is to track down the Goodisons and provide any assistance you and I might require.”
“Spell Wudu.”
After Mott spelled it, she asked, “What’s it mean?”
“Nothing. It’s only a play on the two partners’ surnames, Arthur Wu and Quincy Durant.”
“Wu’d be what — Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“So now I have to depend on a couple of English twits to save me from the gallows.”
“Gas chamber,” Broach said.
Before Gamble could snarl or swear at Broach, Mott said, “Both Wu and Durant are American and I assure you they’re not twits.”
“What are they, then — confidential inquiry agents to the gentry?”
Mott was about to reply when Broach snapped his fingers and said, “Christ, yes! Ivory, Lace and Silk, right?”
The question went to Mott, who, after a moment’s hesitation, agreed with a slight nod.
Obviously irritated, Ione Gamble asked, “The folksingers? The ones I used to listen to when I was a real little kid? What the hell’ve they got to do with me?”
“With you, nothing,” Broach said. “But with Wu and Durant, a hell of a lot. Remember when Silk disappeared back in the seventies?”
Gamble shook her head.
“It was these same two guys, Wu and Durant, who found her and turned Pelican Bay inside out doing it.” He again looked at Mott for confirmation. “Right, Howie?”
“That’s a fair summary.”
“What happened to them?” Gamble asked.
“Wu and Durant?”
“No, goddamnit. Ivory, Lace and Silk.”
Broach studied the back of his hand for a moment, then turned it over and studied his palm. One side or the other apparently jogged his memory. “Ivory died of an overdose in Miami, I think. Lace’d married a semi-billionaire and got out of the business. The last I heard of Silk she was down in El Salvador doing the Lord’s work.”
Gamble turned to look through her floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window at canyon and ocean. She was still staring at her view when she said, “What brand are they, Howie?”
A puzzled Mott turned to Broach, who said, “She wants to know their religion — Wu and Durant’s.”
“May I ask why?” Mott said, putting an edge on his question.
Gamble turned from the window. “I don’t care what they are. It just helps me crawl inside their heads.”
“They’re not characters in a play.”
“Humor me.”
Mott flicked an invisible something from the left sleeve of his dark blue suit and said, “I believe both Wu and Durant are nominal Methodists since, at age fourteen, they ran away together from a Methodist orphanage in San Francisco. By now, of course, they may’ve switched brands — or abstained altogether.”
“When do I meet them?”
“Late this afternoon or early evening?”
“Anytime,” she said, paused, then asked, “If you had to pick one word to describe them what would it be?”
“Resourceful,” Mott said without hesitation. “Extremely resourceful — although that’s two words.”
“Resourceful enough to find the Goodison creeps?”
“Definitely.”
“Resourceful enough to find out who killed Billy Rice?”
Mott looked at her steadily before asking, “If you’re really sure you want to know that.”
Ione Gamble frowned and bit her lower lip. Then the biting stopped and the frown went away and she said, “I’m sure.”
The manager of the Bank of America branch on the old Malibu Road wasn’t particularly impressed by the $50,000 Artie Wu had wired Booth Stallings. She routinely opened a regular joint checking account for him, provided two signature cards for Wu and Durant to fill out and handed over $5,000 in cash without caution or comment. When Stallings asked for the name of a real estate agent who handled “the larger beachfront rental properties,” she promptly recommended Phil Quill.
“He’s also an actor,” she said. “You probably saw him in either Miami Vice or an episode or two of Jake and the Fatman.”
Quill’s name was somehow familiar to Stallings, but not from any television series. He admitted as much to the bank manager, excusing his ignorance by again mentioning that he had spent much of the past five years abroad, most recently in Amman as the permanent representative of Wudu, Ltd.
She said, “I was almost sure they’d dubbed Miami Vice into Arabic.”
After they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport the previous evening, Stallings had rented a Lincoln Town Car from the Budget people. He and Georgia Blue then headed for the 405 freeway and switched from it to the 10 that ended at the Pacific Ocean. Fifteen miles farther north on the Pacific Coast Highway, they found themselves in Malibu, looking for a motel.
Georgia Blue was the first to notice the Malibu Beach Inn, a large three-story affair of an artful Spanish Colonial design that almost made it look old. From a brief visit to Malibu in 1986, Stallings thought he remembered another motel that had once stood on the same site. The vanished motel had had a vaguely Polynesian name — something like the Manakura or the Tonga Lei or maybe even the Tondaleya.
The Malibu Beach Inn rented them two adjoining rooms for $180 a night each. They were large nicely furnished rooms that featured an ocean view and the sound of pounding surf. The man who helped with the bags looked like a retired lifeguard or maybe a superannuated surfer who, without the hint of a leer, informed Stallings that X-rated videotapes were available from the motel’s library. Stallings said he was too sleepy, tipped the bellhop, or whatever he was, five dollars and, when he was gone, knocked on Georgia Blue’s connecting door.
She said through the door that she’d see him in the morning. Stallings found some miniatures of Scotch in the mini-refrigerator, mixed a drink, opened a can of cashew nuts and went out on the balcony. He sat there, drinking the Scotch, eating the nuts and wondering why he hadn’t moved to Malibu in 1949 and gone into real estate.
The next morning Stallings and Georgia Blue went down to the lobby for the inn’s complimentary buffet breakfast. Stallings’s breakfast was two cups of coffee. Georgia Blue had just finished two glasses of milk, whole-wheat toast and a mound of fruit when a tanned stocky man entered the lobby, looked around, saw Stallings and Blue, gave them a dazzling smile and walked toward them with quick small steps that scarcely seemed to touch the Mexican tiles. Those quick light steps nudged Stallings’s memory and he finally remembered who Phil Quill had once been.
The real estate man was wearing double-pleated gabardine slacks that were several shades paler than daisy yellow; sock-less thin-soled loafers, which Georgia Blue, if not Stallings, knew to be Ferragamos; a dark blue polo shirt, probably from the Gap, and five or six hundred dollars’ worth of light blue cashmere sweater that hung down his broad back, its sleeves crossed over his breastbone in the loosest of knots. Quill had just shoved a pair of sunglasses up into thick, still-blond hair, revealing a pair of blue eyes that nearly matched his sweater and the ocean.
When he reached their table, he used a soft southern voice to say, “I’m Phil Quill, the real estate man. Betty at the bank said you all’d like to rent a beach place for a month or so.” He smiled again. “Providing, of course, that you, ma’am, are Miss Blue and you, sir, are Mr. Stallings.”
Stallings rose, said, “We are indeed,” then shook the offered hand and invited him to join them for coffee or even breakfast.
“A cup of coffee would be nice and I’ll fetch it myself.”
As Quill quickstepped away, Georgia Blue watched him go and said, “I wonder why he walks like that?”
“At one time he could do it backwards or sideways almost as fast.”
“When?”
“When he was quarterback for Arkansas in the early sixties. He even made UPI All-American his senior year.”
“You saw him play?”
“On TV.”
Quill returned, sat down, sipped his coffee, then asked a question. The first half of it was directed to Georgia Blue, the second half to Stallings. “I wonder if you folks could give me some idea? Of just what kind of place you’re looking for?”
“We’d like something right on the beach with at least five bedrooms,” Stallings said.
“For how long?”
“One month — with an option to extend for another month.”
“You all want it close in, far out or sorta in between? Reason I ask is because Malibu’s about twenty-five miles long and a mile thick.”
“What about around in here?” Blue said.
“Well, around in here, Miss Blue, is practically Carbon Beach and that gets expensive now that it’s February and the snowbirds are flying down from Canada and the Europeans are swarming in to take advantage of the two-dollar pound, the sixty-nine-cent mark and the damn near twenty-cent franc.”
“What do you call expensive?” Stallings asked.
“Ten, fifteen, twenty thousand a month.”
“You have anything with five bedrooms in that price range?”
Quill gave his magnificent chin a quick brush with his left thumb, as if it helped him think. Stallings touched his own chin, almost by reflex, and said, “You used to do that just before you passed, didn’t you?”
It had been a long time since Stallings had seen a grown man blush, but Quill turned quite pink. He then tried a grin that was almost a grimace. “I keep hoping folks’ll say, ‘Hey, didn’t I see you in Bloody Valentine and also in that MOW turkey, Pickled Noon?” But none of ’em ever remember the fourteen features and fifty-one series episodes I’ve been in. All they remember is football.”
“Sorry I mentioned it,” Stallings said.
“Well, it’s just that I’d rather be known for what I’ve done these last twenty-five years instead of for what I did between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. I could’ve turned pro but didn’t. Instead, I came out here right after college and thought of myself as an actor ever since — even though there was one month in nineteen eighty-eight when I made more in real estate commissions than I ever made acting — and that includes all my TV residuals.”
“I’ll always think of you as an actor, Mr. Quill,” Blue said.
“Appreciate that, Miss Blue, but right now I gotta change back to Phil Quill, real estate man.”
He looked at Stallings again, then back at Georgia Blue, frowned a little, gave the great chin another quick thumb brush and said, “You all seem like sensible, sophisticated folks, and I’m not using ‘sophisticated’ in any pejorative sense. So that’s why I’m gonna ask you this question.” After an actor’s short beat, Quill said, “Would you consider renting a mighty fine six-bedroom house smack-dab on Carbon Beach for fifteen thousand a month even if its former owner got shot dead in it last New Year’s Eve or thereabouts?”
“Who got shot dead?” Stallings said.
“William A. C. Rice the Rich. The cops say Ione Gamble shot him.”
“It’s right on the beach?” Georgia Blue said.
“With your own one hundred feet of sand.”
“Fifteen thousand?” Stallings said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Take twelve-five?”
“Take thirteen-five.”
“With an option to extend?”
“Yes, sir, I can do that.”
“We’ll take it.”
“Don’t you all wanta go look at it first?”
“You said it was nice, Mr. Quill,” Georgia Blue said, “Just how nice will be our surprise.”