With Ione Gamble as passenger, Stallings drove his rented Mercedes roadster south on Seventh Street to Montana Avenue, turned right toward the ocean, then turned south again on Fourth Street because Gamble said Fourth was both the quickest and safest way. She didn’t speak again until they reached Wilshire Boulevard.
“I have a car just like this,” she said.
“Not quite. This one’s rented. Yours isn’t.”
“What’s her name — your daughter who’s Howie’s wife?”
“Lydia.”
“She your only child?”
“I have another daughter. Joanna. But she’s sort of bitchy.”
Ione Gamble was silent again until they were a block from Howard Mott’s ocean view hotel. “D’you think there’s any chance of this turning out all right?”
“Like in the movies?” Stallings said. “No chance.”
“I don’t think so either,” she said.
When it was 8:14 P.M. And time to go, Durant and Georgia Blue presented themselves to Artie Wu, who still sat at the head of the old refectory table, enjoying a cigar and a glass of excellent Armagnac. Wu had discovered a bottle of it hidden away by someone in an empty flour canister. Possibly by Billy Rice himself, Wu thought, because the Armagnac was far too good to share with anyone.
Georgia Blue was wearing black jeans from the Gap, a black sweatshirt from the same place and her dark blue Ked sneakers but no socks. She had concealed her reddish-brown hair with a turban fashioned out of a dark blue silk scarf. She raised her sweatshirt to reveal the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver that was clamped against her bare flat stomach by the tightly fitting jeans.
Wu nodded approvingly and turned to examine Durant, who wore a pair of gray-green tweed trousers with cuffs that evidently had belonged to an old but expensive suit. On his feet were a pair of weathered New Balance running shoes, and covering his upper body was a dark maroon sweatshirt that bore the Greek letters of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.
“I never knew you were a Phi Delt,” Georgia Blue said, not trying to hide her mockery.
“I found it on the top shelf of a closet,” Durant said as he produced the other .38-caliber S&W revolver Overby and Blue had bought from Colleen Cullen. He checked it carefully, then shoved it back into a hip pocket and said, “The pants come from an old clothes bag in the garage.”
“I was wondering,” Wu said. “Now then. An announcement or two. If something rotten happens, try to get to a phone and call here. If nobody answers, call Howie Mott. If something good happens, do exactly the same thing — call here first and, if no answer, call Howie.”
“What you’re saying is you might not be here,” Durant said.
“That’s a possibility.”
“If you’ve got nothing else to do, Artie,” Georgia Blue said, “you can always tag along and backstop us.”
“You don’t need me,” he said. “Together, you’re better at this sort of thing than anybody. Notice I said together. Separately, you’re very, very good but not quite — I hate to say it — tops. Because of that I strongly recommend the team approach — as distasteful as I know it must seem.”
“Are you sick or something?” Durant said.
“Why?”
“Whenever you’re sick you get preachy.”
“I may be suffering from a slight premonition,” Wu said.
“Which is the real reason you’re not coming with us,” Blue said.
“Exactly.”
“What’s the premonition, Artie?” Durant asked. “The sky beginning to fall?”
“If I told you, it would no longer be a premonition but a prophecy and I have no desire to be a prophet just yet.” He looked from Georgia Blue to Durant, then back to Blue. “Anything else?”
“You can wish us luck,” she said.
“I sincerely wish you won’t need it,” said Artie Wu.
Forty-one
After he left Howard Mott and Ione Gamble in the hotel suite discussing who would sleep where — or whether they would sleep at all — Booth Stallings stopped at the first liquor store he came to on the Pacific Coast Highway and bought a bottle of very expensive Scotch whisky.
Traffic began to slow when he was still half a mile from the Rice house. It then slowed even further and turned into stop-and-go. When Stallings finally crept around the last curve he saw flashing bar lights of black and white police cars. When he got closer he counted three black-and-whites belonging to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and a pair of black matched sedans that he guessed were those of the sheriffs plainclothes investigators. The cars were parked just outside the Rice house.
Two uniformed deputies stood in the center of the highway, waving flashlights and trying to hurry the gawkers along. Since he was driving a $100,000 car, Stallings lowered its left window, stopped and used what he hoped was a $100,000 voice to ask the nearer deputy what the hell was going on.
The deputy was 30 or so and had grown the obligatory gunfighter mustache. “Just a little domestic disturbance,” he said. “Nobody hurt. Nothing to see. Please keep it moving.”
“That’s Billy Rice’s house, isn’t it?” Stallings asked.
“I don’t know whose house it is.”
“That big producer who got shot dead New Year’s Eve?”
“Please move your fucking car, sir. Now.”
Stallings drove another one hundred feet, found an illegal parking space and pulled into it. Once out of the Mercedes he stuffed the brown paper sack containing the Scotch down into a jacket pocket, then darted across the highway and almost got hit by a car whose driver called him a dumb shit.
Stallings walked back toward the Rice house on the beach side of the highway and got there just in time to see Artie Wu, wearing exactly what he had worn at the early pizza dinner, being herded by two plainclothes investigators toward one of the unmarked sedans. Wu’s wrists were handcuffed behind him. His face was impassive. One investigator opened the sedan’s rear door and the other investigator put a hand on top of Wu’s head to keep it from bumping into anything when he turned and backed into the rear seat. As Wu turned and lowered himself, his eyes met Stallings’s. There was no flicker of recognition in the eyes of either man.
A small crowd of a dozen or so had gathered just outside the steel gates that guarded the Rice driveway. Stallings recognized a few of them as neighbors to whom he had paid, or tried to pay, courtesy calls. He avoided them and instead picked out the smartest-looking neighbor he hadn’t met, sidled up to him and said, “I’ve seen that Chinese guy down at the Hughes market. What’d he do?”
“Killed some Mexican taxi driver.”
“Huh,” Stallings said. “He the only one they arrested?”
“So far.”
“Bad-luck house, I guess. Billy Rice got his there on New Year’s Eve and now this Chinese guy takes a fall.”
“No telling who you’re living next to out here,” the neighbor said. “They let any asshole with a few bucks rent whatever he can pay for. I figure the Chinese guy for a coke dealer.”
“Must’ve been, to afford this place,” Stallings said and wandered away. When the stop-and-go traffic stopped again, he hurried across the highway to the yellow duplex and knocked on its door. It was opened seconds later by Rick Cleveland, the Gone With the Wind alumnus. Cleveland was still wearing a bathrobe but this one was canary yellow and came down to his calves. He also wore some new sandals along with a lighted cigarette in the left corner of his wide bitter mouth.
“Got some excitement over your way,” he said around the cigarette.
“Damned if we don’t,” Stallings said. “Mind if I use your phone?”