“Yes.”
“Doesn’t it make you feel relaxed?”
“Yes.”
“When you’re fully relaxed, Ione, you’ll go to sleep. To help you relax, think of the rainbow again. Start with red. When you get to the last color, yellow, you’ll be fully, completely relaxed.”
“All right.”
“Have you reached yellow?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to remember something you tried to remember but couldn’t?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to remember the night you drove to Billy’s house?”
“Yes.”
“Remember what happened that night, Ione. Remember it aloud—
everything that happened from the time you left your house.”
She began to speak in a soft voice and told all about her fast drive to the beach house of William A. C. Rice IV and what she found there and about the one phone call she made.
Fifteen
Ione Gamble still sat behind the Memphis cotton broker’s desk with her eyes closed and her hands resting on the arms of the chair. Her lips had formed a faint smile and she looked rested, content—even happy.
After staring at her for almost a minute, Howard Mott turned to Wu and asked, “Can she hear me?”
Wu shook his head.
“She didn’t kill him,” Mott said, more to himself than to Wu and Durant.
“You thought she did?” Durant said.
“I try not to let hope interfere with logic,” Mott said, turned to Wu and asked, “Where’d you learn diat?”
“In a carnival when I was sixteen.”
“Seventeen,” Durant said. “It was Little Doc Mingo’s Amazing Carnival and Traveling Panorama. Little Doc was a midget. Three feet tall. His regular hypnotist was Szabo, the Mystifying Mesmerist.
Szabo’s real name was Hank Steem and the only mystifying thing about him was how he could still drink a fifth of rotgut a day at sixty-eight.”
“Hank was okay,” Wu said.
“He was a happy drunk at least,” Durant said. “And just after we were hired as roustabouts, Hank decided to retire to his daughter’s place in Corpus Christi. So Little Doc came up with a replacement—
the Amazing Fu Chang Wu.”
“Me,” Wu said with a grin. “Quincy and I were hired in El Paso and the Mystifying Mesmerist was going to quit the carnival when it reached Longview—which is clear across Texas. In the four or five weeks it took to get there, Hank taught us everything he knew about hypnotism. After Hank finally left, Little Doc dressed me up in red and black silk pyjamas he’d found somewhere, stuck a funny hat on my head and turned Quincy into my roper.”
“Your shill?” Mott said.
“Close,” Durant said. “We had an outside act to draw the rubes into the tent, but it needed volunteers. Hank’d taught us how to pick the ones easiest to hypnotize—the loudmouths, the gigglers, the extroverts and exhibitionists. While the talker gave his spiel about the Amazing Fu Chang Wu, I’d mingle with the rubes and tip Artie off to
the three or four I wanted. Then after the talker asked for volunteers, I’d be the first to hop up on the stage and then Artie’d coax the three or four I’d picked out into joining me.”
“To do what?”
“Perform the come-on,” Durant said. “First, Artie’d hypnotize me and I’d go stiff as a board. Then he’d pick me up and lay me on two chairs—my head on one chair, my heels on the other. Then he’d invite the three or four volunteer rubes to stand on me—which they were always happy to do. And that’s what drew the rest of the crowd inside at four bits a head for the real show, which mostly involved letting the rubes we’d picked make idiots of themselves.”
“How long did you guys . . . do this?”
Durant looked at Wu. “Five or six months, wasn’t it?”
Wu nodded. “We played across Texas, north Louisiana and down into Cajun country—Crowley, Lafayette, New Iberia, Opelousas. We parted company with Little Doc just outside New Orleans, where we were going to ship out to either South America or the South Pacific.”
“What happened?”
“We met a guy in New Orleans who thought we should go to Princeton instead.”
Mott turned to examine Ione Gamble, who still wore her faint, contented smile. “The Goodisons hypnotized her, didn’t they, and made her believe they hadn’t?”
