“I told Glimm that, as a policeman, I couldn’t possibly recommend them to anybody. But if I weren’t a policeman and needed somebody to, say, see me safely to the gates of hell and back, I’d certainly call on Wu and that—uh—Quincy Durant.”
Georgia Blue rose and said, “They’re calling our flight.”
Captain Hermenegildo Cruz cocked his head to the right and smiled up at Georgia Blue, who, in her heels, topped him by four inches. He said, “Don’t come back. Don’t even think about it.”
She gave him her nicest smile. “What a sensible suggestion.”
Twelve
Seated once again behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk, Ione Gamble used only silence and a pencil to create a tension so palpable that Howard Mott thought he could almost taste and feel it. If she were to increase the tension only slightly, he suspected it would taste like electricity must taste and feel like a death threat must feel.
He judged Gamble’s performance to be superb and wondered which bits and pieces he would eventually steal or borrow for his own use in future courtroom appearances. Mott particularly admired the way she had helped set the scene by skinning her thick light brown hair back into a spinster’s knot and scrubbing all makeup from her face to emphasize its remarkable character and minimize its essential prettiness. However, the prettiness quota was amply filled by her obviously bare breasts beneath a simple white polo shirt.
And finally there was the pencil—long, yellow and freshly sharpened
—which she had studied for nearly three silent minutes, turning it this way and that, but making sure its point always swung back, compass-like, until it was aimed directly at Howard Mott’s throat.
Mott was again sitting on the couch with the chintz slipcover. Jack Broach, the elegant agent-lawyer-business manager, was back in the no-nonsense armchair and it was he who broke the tension with a question: “Ione, will you stop fucking with that pencil?”
Gamble looked up with a practice-perfect expression of surprised hurt, then looked down at the pencil, as if she had never seen it before. Slowly opening her hand, she let it roll from her fingers and fall to the desk with a small clatter and bounce. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I—I didn’t realize.”
Jack Broach praised the performance with three weary handclaps.
Ignoring Broach, she gave Mott a too-sweet smile and said, “I was wondering, Howie, if you’d mind explaining just one more time—and do try to make it simple—why you ever hired those two shit-for-brains hypnotists.”
“Of course,” Mott said. “As I mentioned before, I first learned of them from a favorable account in a British law journal. But I hired them only after talking to three reputable barristers in London, who recommended them highly, as did two ranking Metropolitan Police officers. Of equal importance, at least to me, was the fact that the Goodisons, brother Hughes and sister Pauline, were clients of Enno Glimm—”
“The hypnotist broker,” she said.
“—which is in itself sufficient recommendation.”
“You mean Glimm offers a money-back guarantee that his hypnotists won’t turn out to be blackmailers or rip-off artists?”
“Exactly,” said Mott. “In fact, he’s already taken corrective measures, not the least of them being the return of the hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee you paid for the Goodisons’ services.”
Mott turned to Broach. “You got the money, right?”
Broach nodded. “By wire transfer yesterday.”
Gamble again picked up the yellow pencil and absently tested its point with a thumb. “You said Glimm’s taken ‘corrective measures.’
What are they—other than sending back my money?”
“He’s retained—at his own considerable expense—a London firm called Wudu, Limited. Its job is to track down the Goodisons and provide any assistance you and I might require.”
“Spell Wudu.”
After Mott spelled it, she asked, “What’s it mean?”
“Nothing. It’s only a play on the two partners’ surnames, Arthur Wu and Quincy Durant.”
“Wu’d be what—Chinese?”
“Yes.”
“So now I have to depend on a couple of English twits to save me from the gallows.”
“Gas chamber,” Broach said.
Before Gamble could snarl or swear at Broach, Mott said, “Both Wu and Durant are American and I assure you they’re not twits.”
“What are they, then—confidential inquiry agents to the gentry?”
Mott was about to reply when Broach snapped his fingers and said,
“Christ, yes! Ivory, Lace and Silk, right?”
The question went to Mott, who, after a moment’s hesitation, agreed with a slight nod.
Obviously irritated, Ione Gamble asked, “The folksingers? The ones I used to listen to when I was a real little kid? What the hell’ve they got to do with me?”
