“It’s not hard to do,” Wu said. “And most actors are easy. They keep their emotions very near the surface, almost on tap, which makes them highly susceptible to suggestive hypnosis.”
“When Ione wakes up, will she remember she didn’t kill Billy Rice?”
Wu nodded. “This time she will.”
“Aren’t we forgetting Jack Broach?” Durant said. “If he was here for her first session, he must’ve heard her say she didn’t shoot Rice. So why the hell didn’t he say so?”
“What must’ve happened the first time,” Wu said, “is that the Goodisons took her to the brink, saw how easily they could hypnotize her, then brought her back before she could say anything and claimed they’d failed. Broach may have assumed she couldn’t be hypnotized—
which is what Ione also believed—and didn’t bother to show up for the second and third sessions when the Goodisons probably used a tape recorder.”
Mott looked at Ione Gamble again and said, “They must’ve thought she’d confess to Rice’s murder.” He shook his head. “Which is exactly what she was afraid might happen.”
“You could argue,” Durant said, “that they did just what they were paid to do—help Ione regain her memory.”
“The hell they did,” Mott said. “They hypnotized her, all right, then pushed her erase button and made her believe, one, that she hadn’t
been hypnotized and, two, that she couldn’t ever remember anything of what happened the night of Rice’s murder.” He looked at Wu. “You say that wasn’t difficult to do?”
“Not at all,” Wu said.
Howard Mott wasn’t satisfied. He scratched his chin, then the back of his left hand, looked at Wu again and said, “When they called me late that night from the Bel-Air Hotel, they claimed they’d run into a problem. At least, Hughes said they had. He was the one I talked to.
But he wouldn’t say what kind of problem and by the time I got there, they’d gone—leaving all their personal stuff behind. It looked as if something had scared them away.”
“Or that’s the way they wanted it to look,” Durant said.
“Perhaps. At any rate, it was a week or ten days later—I’ll have to look up the exact date—when I got my other call from Hughes. He wanted to talk about the weather and how lovely it was for this time of year. I started asking questions, but he cut me off and told me not to worry about him or his sister, that they’d been under a strain and were trying to work out some personal problems that he’d rather not go into. It was a stall. An obvious one.”
“What questions did you ask him?” Durant said.
“I asked why they had disappeared. Where were they? Was there anything I could do? How could I get in touch? He just kept telling me not to worry.”
“You’re sure it was Hughes’s voice?” Durant said.
“Positive.”
Mott turned to examine Ione Gamble, who still sat behind her desk, eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips. “Will she really remember what she said to us?”
“Every word,” Wu said and used a soft, almost seductive voice to ask, “Remember the rainbow, Ione?”
“Yes, I remember,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Let’s go through the colors again. When you come to the very last one—to yellow—you’ll wake up and feel very relaxed, very rested and remember everything you said. Now start naming the rainbow’s colors to yourself.”
Six seconds later, Ione Gamble opened her eyes, smiled at Artie Wu, then frowned, exchanged the frown for a puzzled look and said, “I shot the Chagall, not Billy, didn’t I?”
“That’s right,” Wu said. “You shot the Chagall.”
Sixteen
Otherguy Overby had been sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Bridges for sixty-seven minutes before he finally saw someone who might prove useful. The hotel was less than thirteen years old but already had acquired a kind of genteel shabbiness that attracted those in need of an address just within the Beverly Hills zip code.
Although not cheap, the hotel was comparatively inexpensive and much favored by foreign and domestic journalists, promoters, actors and the occasional aging mercenary who thought his life story would make a wonderful movie.
The lobby, panelled in something that imitated oak, offered a variety of couches and easy chairs that were upholstered in a good grade of dark brown Naugahyde. On the walls were large prints of middle European landscapes and in the air was one of Los Angeles’s classical FM stations with the volume turned down so low it sounded more like murmur than music.
The cashier’s cage was protected by bulletproof plastic and behind the unbarred reception counter stood a melancholy-looking man in his forties. He wore a thick black mustache and the resigned air of someone who has learned nine languages and now wonders why he went to the bother.
The house detective—renamed the security executive by the hotel—
was a moonlighting Beverly Hills police sergeant who passed by Overby twice without giving him more than a glance. This may have been because Overby sat in one of the lobby’s two armless straight chairs, feet and knees together, a dark gray fedora in his lap and the rest of him clothed in black shoes that had to be laced up, white shirt, dull gray tie and a double-breasted blue pinstripe suit he had bought off the rack in London. It was a carefully chosen costume that would stamp Overby as a foreigner, possibly a northern European, until he opened his mouth.
The someone who Overby thought might prove useful was a stout, medium tall man with three chins. He had just collected his mail and Wall Street Journal at the reception desk and was thumbing through four or five
