start the descent, which is sometimes slow and sometimes fast, very fast.”
“Thirty’s awfully young,” Mott said. “But so is forty, for that matter.”
“But forty-five isn’t and that’s why I used every trick I knew to get directing jobs. That meant guesting on TV sitcoms and episodic action-adventure stuff—but only if they’d let me direct. And that’s how I served my apprenticeship.”
“I get the impression that directing to you is something like an annuity.”
“Look. I still intend to act when I’m forty-five and fifty-five and sixty-five, if I live that long, although the roles will get fewer and fewer. But a good director can get work at almost any age.”
“You decided all this at thirty?”
“Sure,” she said. “For an actor, thirty’s still young. He’s just getting rid of the last of his baby fat and for the next twenty-five or thirty-five years he can go on playing leads opposite actresses who’re twenty-five and thirty and forty. But do you know any fifty-five-year-old actresses who’re doing love scenes with thirty-year-old actors—unless it’s some kinky incest story? I’ll give you an hour to name one.”
“Is Ann-Margret fifty-five yet?” Mott said, picking up the last slice of pizza.
Gamble began a smile that turned into a grin. “You a fan of hers?”
“Merely a preservationist,” Mott said and bit into his pizza.
“Well, anyway, that’s why I got drunk on my thirtieth birthday and why I haven’t had more than three beers and eight glasses of wine since—until the thirty-first of December.”
“Let’s go back to your first meeting with Mr. Rice.”
“Okay. He had this office, as I said, in Century City. He’d called Jack Broach and Jack’d called me and suggested I give it a go. So I ride the elevator up to the what—the thirty-fifth floor?—where I’m ushered into this okay-but-nothing-special office, where Billy turns on the charm and hands me a screenplay based on Lorna Wiley’s novel, The Milner Sisters.”
She looked at Mott apprehensively until he said he’d read it. After a small relieved sigh, she said, “So after somebody brings in the coffee, Billy says, ‘I want you for this.’ Well, both sisters are great parts, but Louise is the plum, so I ask, ‘Which do I play—Louise or Rose?’ And guess what he says?”
“I can’t.”
“He says, ‘I think the director should make that decision and since you’ll be directing, the decision is yours.’ And right about then I thought I ought to fall in love with Billy Rice, the prick.”
“So far, he sounds fine.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —8
“So far. Well, we make The Milner Sisters and it gets great reviews and doesn’t make a dime. But Billy doesn’t seem to care and plunks down a one-hundred-thousand-dollar option on some god-awful techno-thriller, then pays another million for a screenplay, exercises his option on the novel—another one point four million—and hires himself a twenty-four-year-old British MTV director. I’m to play Mavis, the gutsy heroine who walks and talks like a fella, opposite dumb old Niles Brand, who’s getting five million plus points. Well, the whole thing costs thirty-eight million and it’s a hit and a half. I win the L.A.
Film critics award and get nominated by the Academy and don’t win, but who the hell cares except me?”
“Then what?”
“Then Billy asks me to marry him. This is around the first of last year. And I, the eternal klutz, say sure, Billy, love to, and we set the wedding date for December thirtieth. In the meantime, Billy buys The Bad Dead Indian, which has been on the NYT bestseller list for thirteen months. It cost him two million. Cash. No options. He spends another million or so on writers and announces that his bride-to-be will not only star in this sixty-five-million-plus epic of the Old West with dumb old Niles Brand, but she’ll also direct it. Still with me, Mr.
Mott?”
“You make it exceedingly clear.”
“Then it’s Christmas Eve, a little more than a month ago. Billy issues what the newsies call a ‘terse’ three-line press release that says he’s not going to marry Ione Gamble after all and she’s not going to direct or star in his wonderful picture about native Americans either. And this is all one big goddamn surprise to me.”
“Had you signed either a contract for the picture or a prenuptial agreement of any kind?”
“Jack Broach was still negotiating the movie deal. And when Billy’d hinted at a prenuptial agreement, I told him I wanted a marriage, not a merger, which wasn’t original, but he didn’t seem to’ve heard it before.”
“Why do you think Rice changed his mind?”
“I don’t know. I never spoke to him again. At least, I don’t think I did.”
“But you tried.”
“I must’ve called him a couple of hundred times but never got through. Then on New Year’s Eve, the day after our cancelled wedding day, I started drinking. I drank all day, slept a little, woke up and drank some more. Then I remember getting into my car with a pint of vodka and heading for a showdown with Billy at his place in Malibu. But I don’t remember anything else until the deputies woke me up at the beach house with Billy lying there dead on the floor.”
“You blacked out?”
“Yes.”
Voodoo, Ltd. —9
Mott leaned back on the couch with the chintz slipcover and studied Gamble, who was now across the coffee table from him, perched on the edge of the businesslike armchair. “Then this was your second blackout,” he said. “What do you know about them?”
“Until I saw a doctor, I only knew they were plot twists for soap operas. Need a conflict? Give her a blackout. Or amnesia. The doctor told me blackouts are a form of alcohol-produced amnesia common to alcoholics and some binge drinkers. He said that hypnotism’s been used to regain memory lost by blackouts. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. But if I wanted to try it, he could recommend several very well qualified hypnotherapists. I told him I’d think about it.”
“Did you?”
“Sure. I thought about it. I also thought about what would happen if I confessed to something embarrassing or incriminating—maybe even to Billy’s murder. If the hypnotist had it down on audiotape, he could sell it for a whole lot of money. If he’d videotaped it, he could sell it for God knows how much.”
“He’d also go to jail.”
“Not if he claimed somebody broke in and stole it from him. I remember Watergate—well, part of it. They did something like that then, didn’t they?”
“Not quite.”
“But there’s one more thing he could do with the tape that nobody’d ever have to know about,” she said. “He could sell it to me, which, I believe, is called blackmail.”
She gave Mott the small cool smile that debaters use after making a telling point. Mott scratched the back of his left hand and said, “What if I could find you a hypnotherapist whose discretion is guaranteed?
Would you be interested in trying to regain your memory of that night?”
Gamble frowned. “It’s important, isn’t it? My memory?”
“Extremely so.”
“You know any hypnotists?”
“I know of somebody who does.”
“You mean that’s his business—supplying hypnotists for wives and girlfriends who get drunk, black out, do in their husbands or boyfriends, but remember fuck-all about it?”
Mott smiled. “He supplies extremely well-qualified, extremely discreet professionals to perform any number of extremely delicate tasks.”