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 that?”
“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 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 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 least, 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.”