Forty-three

After Booth Stallings hung up the telephone on the blond secretary’s desk in Mott’s hotel suite office, he turned to Ione Gamble, who was still slumped in the room’s only easy chair. “More bad news?” she asked.

“Jack Broach is dead,” Stallings said. “Somebody shot him. He was the one blackmailing you — the one we called Oil Drum.”

The shock twisted Ione Gamble’s face and made her eyes bulge until she said, “Jack’s dead?”

Stallings nodded.

“He was blackmailing me?”

“Broach always was a no-good son of a bitch,” Rick Cleveland said from his seat behind the brunette secretary’s desk. He lifted his glass of Scotch, said, “To old Jack,” drank it and poured himself another from the bottle that was now one-third empty.

The shock had gone away from Gamble’s face, replaced by an odd serenity that seemed to erase all other emotions. “You knew Jack?” she asked Cleveland, as though inquiring about some mutual acquaintance neither had seen in years.

“Knew him when he was first starting out,” Cleveland said.

“I was one of his first clients. When he got too big or I got too small, he dumped me.”

She nodded politely, looked at Stallings again and asked, “Why would Jack blackmail me? Did he need money? I would’ve lent him money.”

“You don’t have any to lend,” Stallings said. “He stole it all. Maybe embezzled’s a better word.”

“I have no money?”

“Not much.”

“And you say Jack stole it?”

Stallings only nodded.

“Then how do I pay Howie Mott?”

“You don’t have to worry about paying Howie,” Stallings said, took the small .25-caliber semiautomatic from a pocket, placed it on the desktop and seemed to forget it.

“He won’t defend me for nothing,” she said. “I can’t expect him to.”

“There’s not going to be any trial,” Stallings said. “Not for you anyway.”

“What the hell’s going on, Booth?” she said, her serene look suddenly replaced by anger. “Spell it out. Use babytalk if you have to.”

“We’re going down to the sheriff’s office in Malibu,” Stallings said.

“Or maybe it’s called the substation.”

“The three of us?” she said.

“Just Rick and me,” Stallings said, picking up the small pistol. “And Rick’s going to tell ’em you didn’t shoot Billy Rice, but that he did.”

“You’re not trying to be funny, are you?” she said. “No. Of course you’re not.”

“Know how much it costs a day to rent a car like yours, Ione?” Stallings said.

“What the hell’re you getting at now?”

“Four hundred a day plus fifty cents a mile. That’s how much. Plus a five-thousand-dollar deposit — cash or credit card, providing your credit card can stand it. Rick here rented a car just like yours last New Year’s Eve, didn’t you, Rick?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Sure you did. Then you drove into Billy Rice’s driveway that same night around eleven or eleven-thirty, parked it, got out and rang the doorbell. You told whoever answered the door, maybe Rice himself, that you wanted to patch things up — make amends. Something like that. Once you’re both in the living room, you shoot Rice two times, then leave the gun oil that little elm table in the hall beneath the Hockney where whoever comes in will be sure to see it and maybe even pick it up. Which is just what Ione did.” Stallings looked at her. “Rick even left the front door open so you or someone else could go right in. The gun Rick used is kind of important because it was stolen off a movie set at Paramount where they were filming a pilot. Rick was a member of the cast — right, Rick?”

Cleveland ignored Stallings, finished his whisky, then poured himself another one.

Ione kept staring at Cleveland, who refused to look at her. “Why would you do it?” she said. “Kill Billy?”

Rick Cleveland downed his new drink, made a face, finally looked at Gamble and said, “Because the fucker spoiled my view, that’s why.”

“Your view?”

“You’ve got a view, don’t you?” Cleveland said. “Sure you do. Suppose some asshole comes along and builds an eight-or nine-story building right in front of it. Wouldn’t that piss you off?”

“Not enough to kill him,” she said.

“What if your view was all you had left in the world?” Rick Cleveland said.


At just past 2 A.M. the sheriff’s substation in Malibu locked Rick Cleveland in the same cell from which it had just released Artie Wu. By then Cleveland had freely admitted killing William A. C. Rice IV and even announced that, given the same circumstances, he would do it all over again.

At 3:16 A.M. The state Highway Patrol, acting on an anonymous tip, discovered the bodies of Colleen Cullen and Jack Broach in the Topanga Canyon bed-and-breakfast inn. Otherguy Overby, the anonymous tipster, had called the Highway Patrol because he remembered Cullen telling him she was paying off certain deputy sheriffs to let her keep the lie-low establishment in business.

At 3:38 A.M. Overby, carrying a blue canvas bag, rang the door chimes at Ione Gamble’s house on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica. After demanding that he identify himself, a fully dressed Gamble opened the door.

“Let’s go up to your office, Ione,” Overby said.

“I can’t handle any more shit tonight.”

“You’ll like this kind,” he said.


Seated in her office behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, an extremely wary Ione Gamble watched Overby place the blue zip-up bag in front of her. “What’s that?” she said.

“Open it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a nice surprise.”

Gamble rose and zipped open the bag that was still stuffed with bound hundred-dollar bills. “Jesus,” she said. “Whose is it?”

“Yours. Three hundred thousand — almost. It’s part of what Jack Broach stole from you. I stole it back. Not all by myself, of course. I had a little help from Georgia and that fucking Durant.”

“This is the mythical million, then, right?” she said. “The million that was supposed to buy back the tapes — except there wasn’t any million and there weren’t any tapes.”

“That’s about right,” Overby said.

“What do I do with it?”

“You got a safe-deposit box, don’t you? Put it in there. When you need some, take some out.” Overby rose. “I’ve gotta go — but it’s been awfully nice seeing you again, Ione.”

“What’ll you do now?”

Overby smiled contentedly. “Probably not much right away.”

“Sit down, Otherguy.”

He sat down. There was a long silence as she studied him before speaking again. “You want to be my agent?”

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