“Or maybe from the back-east-in-Chicago guys.”
“I’d go to Mexico—a little place just south of La Paz where nobody speaks anything but Spanish, including me.”
“Suppose you didn’t speak anything but English English?”
“Accent and all?”
Overby nodded.
“You’re not talking about going to ground in some one-room studio in Palms with maybe a freezer full of frozen pizzas, a microwave and a TV set?”
Overby shook his head.
“Full service?”
Overby again nodded, then drank some of his beer.
“Well, the only place in the L.A. area I know of is Colleen Cullen’s.
Know her?”
“I think somebody told me her wrapping’s come loose.”
“She’s a partisan, Otherguy, and all partisans are a bit touched.”
“What’s she offering these days—other than room and board?”
Brackeen looked up, as if to think about what his answer should be, then nodded to himself and said, “Say you need a fully automatic personal weapon to protect hearth and home? Or say you want to get into Canada rather quickly, but without troubling the bureaucracy? Or suppose you find something that fell off a truck— perhaps three dozen TV sets—but don’t know what to do with them? For a fair price and minimum fuss, the person to see is Miss Colleen Cullen.”
“She prejudiced?” Overby said.
“Who isn’t? But prejudiced against whom?”
“The British.”
“Hates the British.”
“Think she’d do business with them anyway?”
“As always, Otherguy, prejudice exits when profit enters.”
A thoughtful look settled on Overby’s face. “Would she take their money and then maybe . . . you know?”
“Betray them?” Brackeen said.
Overby’s reply was a slight shrug.
“She’s a well-regarded businesswoman and to do what you seem to want her to do could put her reputation at risk.”
“How much?”
“To do what you’re hinting at? She’d want top dollar.”
Overby reached into his shirt pocket, brought out three $100 bills that had been folded in half. He let Brackeen see them, then folded them again, covered the money with his palm and slid it across the table. Overby’s hand was still covering the money when he said,
“Three hundred for Colleen Cullen’s phone number and address.”
“Like me to write them down?”
“Just tell me what they are,” Overby said. “Twice.”
Seventeen
The offices of Jack Broach & Co. were just south of Wilshire on the west side of Robertson Boulevard and a few blocks north of where Jane Fonda once had her aerobic studio. Broach’s company occupied all three floors of a small U-shaped building that was covered by a veneer of carefully chosen used bricks that featured oozing mortar, long dried. A fine stand of jacarandas shaded a courtyard paved with slate and decorated with a gurgling three-tier Mexican tile fountain whose small carefully hand-lettered sign boasted, “I Use Only Recycled Water.”
Whoever designed the Broach Building had been fond of small Roman arches, because Georgia Blue passed beneath three of them to reach the blond receptionist. After Blue gave her name and stated her business, the receptionist murmured into a telephone, then smiled at Blue and said Mr. Broach would see her presently. Georgia Blue tried but failed to recall the last time she had heard an American substitute
“presently” for “soon.”
After declining the receptionist’s offer of coffee, tea or Perrier, Blue waited in a chrome and leather chair, unconsciously plucking at the hem of the dark gray Anne Klein dress she had bought at Neiman-Marcus earlier that day with much of the $1,000 in walking-around money Booth Stallings had given her. She then had spent most of what was left on a pair of Joan & David black pumps and was surprised to learn she now wore a 7-A shoe instead of a 7-AAA, which was her size when she had entered the Mandaluyong prison.
Blue wore the new shoes and dress out of Neiman’s, using a shopping bag to carry away the outfit she had bought at Rustan’s department store in Manila. Just before reaching the parking lot where she had left her rented Ford, she dropped the shopping bag into a trash bin.
After waiting sixteen minutes in the Jack Broach & Co. reception area, Georgia Blue got to watch a female
