Stallings nodded, turned again and headed for the study door.
“Mind how you go, Booth,” his son-in-law said.
“You bet,” Booth Stallings said.
After his younger daughter, Lydia Mott, greeted Stallings with a neck-wrenching hug and a smacking midnight kiss in the foyer of the old Cleveland Park house on 35th Street Northwest, he was led by the hand back to the kitchen, seated at the big round scarred table, and forced to eat a slice of lemon meringue pie. Since there was no coffee ready and she didn’t want to make any, Lydia Mott mixed her father a bloody mary, assuring him that it went amazingly well with lemon pie. To his surprise, it did.
Stallings was halfway through the pie when Howard Mott, the criminal lawyer, entered the kitchen, wearing an old plaid bathrobe. He winked at Stallings, served himself some pie along with a bloody mary, nodded encouragingly, and sat down at the table to eat, drink and listen.
“All ears?” Stallings said, looking first at Mott, who nodded again, and then at Lydia Mott, noticing not for the first time that she wasn’t nearly as pretty as her older sister. For one thing her face was so mobile and her emotions so transparent that friends and utter strangers liked to tell her their most godawful secrets just to watch the light show her face put on as sympathy, consternation, amazement, concern, grief and joy blazed across it. Stallings often thought his younger daughter’s pathologically forgiving nature made her the perfect mate for a criminal lawyer.
When he was finished with his tale — a slightly longer version than he had spun Neal Hineline — the awed Lydia Mott whispered, “Oh, my God, Pappy!” She then turned to her husband and said, “What d’you think, sugar?”
Sugar was short and chunky and 36 years old with a curiously unfinished look. Just a few more blows from the DNA chisel and Howard Mott might have looked distinguished, if not exactly handsome. Instead he looked as if he had been put together by someone who hadn’t bothered to read the directions.
His intimidating half-finished look was complemented by a magnificent mind, not much hair and countersunk black eyes that some thought could peep into souls. He used a silken bass voice to thunder, cajole and produce a rumbling confidential whisper that an often mesmerized jury could easily hear from 30 feet away. He won most of his cases.
“What do I think?” Mott said. “I think the shit’s deep and rising.”
“That’s understood,” Stallings said.
“It’s also illegal, despite what my brother-in-law, the beloved simpleton, says. I can think of a dozen laws you’d break. But what’s most important is this: nobody ever pays a bagman half a million to deliver five million unless the deal’s dirty.”
“Another given,” Stallings said.
“But you’re still going ahead and doing it, aren’t you?” Lydia Mott said.
Stallings nodded and then said, “But I’m also going to need some help.”
“Handholders,” Mott said.
“You know any?”
Mott put the final bite of pie into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, put down his fork and rose. “Come on upstairs.”
Stallings followed his son-in-law up the stairs and into a room that held a very old rolltop desk, a couch for Saturday afternoon naps, and an elaborate stereo system to play the operas that were Mott’s passion. He waved Stallings to a chair, sat down at the desk, and began rummaging through its drawers and pigeonholes until he found the business card he wanted.
Mott read the card, tapped it against a thumbnail, read it again, looked at Stallings for a long moment, turned to the desk, picked up a ballpoint pen and wrote two names on the back of the card.
“These two guys are probably about what you need,” Mott said as he wrote. “I hear from the usual unimpeachable sources that they’re very good, fairly honest and awfully expensive. You willing to pay?”
“I expect to,” Stallings said.
Mott again turned to his father-in-law. “The last I heard they were out on the Rim someplace. Hong Kong. Singapore. Bangkok. Malacca. They move around. But this is their stateside contact. Sort of their agent.” He handed the card to Stallings who noticed it was engraved and that it read:
The only thing on the card was a phone number with a 213 area code that Stallings knew meant Los Angeles. He looked up at Mott. “How’s he pronounce it? Maurice or Morris?”
“Close friends and slight acquaintances usually call him Otherguy. Now why would they call him that?”
Stallings smiled. “Because some other guy always did it, didn’t he? Whatever it was.”
“Exactly,” Howard Mott said.
Chapter Five
A shirtless Otherguy Overby, wearing only baggy chino walking shorts and a pair of laceless New Balance jogging shoes, stood in front of the open four-door garage, waiting for water and trying to decide what to drive to the Los Angeles International Airport. He could choose from a Mercedes 560 SEC sedan; a Porsche 911 cabriolet; a seven-passenger Oldsmobile station wagon; or a high-sprung, four-wheel-drive Ford pickup.
He had almost decided on the Mercedes when he heard the truck grinding up the long gravel drive. He turned to watch as the Peterbilt tractor-cab nosed around the corner of the enormous house and shuddered to a stop, air brakes hissing. Coupled to the Peterbilt was a tanker containing ten thousand gallons of fairly pure water that wholesaled at two cents a gallon.
Luis Garfias, the young Mexican driver, lit a cigarette and stared down at Overby for several seconds, as if trying to place him. He finally nodded in the self-satisfied way some do when they’ve managed to match a face to a name. “Your water, Señor Otherguy.”
“You’re late, Luis.”
Luis Garfias smiled and blew out some smoke. “Your mother,” he said, put the Peterbilt in gear, and started creeping toward the ten-thousand-gallon water tank that rested on a man-made earth mound just to the right of the drive. The mound was high enough to raise the bottom of the tank level with the roofline of the two-story house, thus permitting gravity to do its work and send water flowing to the nine bathrooms, two kitchens, three wet bars, two Jacuzzis and one laundry room, not to mention the octagonal swimming pool that twice a year required twenty thousand gallons all for itself.
Now wearing a paisley tie, starched white broadcloth shirt, well-tended black oxfords and what he thought of as his gloom-blue suit, which seemed a size or so too large, Overby opened one of the two large refrigerators, removed two bottles of San Miguel beer, snapped off their caps and served one of them to Luis Garfias who sat slumped in a chair at the round kitchen table whose top had been fashioned out of two pieces of invisibly bonded rare old maple and would easily seat eight.
Garfias looked at the beer’s label. “Who likes this Flip beer — you or Billy?”
“Me,” Overby said, pouring his own beer into a tall glass. “Billy doesn’t drink.”
“Anymore.”
“Anymore.”
Garfias drank two swallows of beer from the bottle. “Mex beer is better.” He had another swallow. “But this ain’t bad. So when’s Billy getting out?”
“Friday,” Overby said, sitting down on one of the custom cane-bottomed chairs that surrounded the table.
“She coming back?”
“No.”
Garfias glanced around the huge kitchen, obviously pricing an O’Keefe & Merritt restaurant-size gas range, two microwave ovens, a commercial freezer, the twin refrigerators, a double rack of copper pots and pans, and an assortment of other appliances that may or may not have been used in the past year or two. “Christ,” Garfias said, “he built this fucking place for her.”