sandwich?”
“They’d find a way.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Overby said, closing the map book.
“Know where we’re going?” she asked.
Overby nodded and started the engine. “How was what’s his name—
Broach?”
“Slick.”
“He say anything interesting about Ione Gamble?”
“Only that he’s her very best friend and also her agent, business manager and personal attorney. He doesn’t charge for being best friend but gets twenty percent of her gross for the rest.”
“What’d he say about the Goodisons?”
“That he pegged them right off as two sick fucks.”
Shrugging, as if at old news, Overby then asked, “You ever hear of Colleen Cullen?”
Georgia Blue frowned first, then looked at Overby and said, “There was a Cullen years back in Chicago who had ties to both the Black Panthers and the IRA, but her first name wasn’t Colleen. Why?”
“This Cullen’s supposed to run the best lie-low place in L.A.”
“And you want to ask her about the Goodisons?”
He said he did.
“Think she passes out free information?”
“If she’s got any, it’ll cost us. You still have that thousand Booth gave you?”
“I spent it.”
“On what?”
“Shoes and a dress.”
Overby took his eyes off the road and inspected her new shoes and dress, as if for the first time. “Nice. How much?”
“Nine hundred and sixty-something with the shoes.”
Nodding his approval, Overby said, “You and me, Georgia, we always did understand why the right clothes can give you an edge.”
Overby turned his rented Ford off a narrow winding blacktop and onto a brick drive. The Ford’s headlights illuminated a green sign with gold lettering that read, “Cousin Colleen’s Bed & Breakfast Inn.” Stuck up on top of the wooden sign, almost as an afterthought, was a row of small red neon letters that blinked “No Vacancy.”
As the brick drive went on and on, Overby guessed that the inn had been set as far back from the narrow blacktop as possible—probably at the point where the flat land suddenly turned itself into the steep slope of a Santa Monica mountain There were a great many trees, which, even at night, Georgia Blue identified by shape and size as pines, sycamores and the odd eucalyptus. The headlights revealed no lawn to speak of, but did give glimpses of neglected flower beds that featured freeway daisies, Mexican poppies and other drought- resistant strains whose names she didn’t know or had forgotten.
The brick drive ended just past the old house and fanned out into a parking area large enough for a dozen cars. Yet it now held only two cars. One was a white Toyota pickup, fairly new, and the other was an elderly MG roadster with no top. Overby stopped the Ford, shifted into park, switched off the engine and lights, looked at Georgia Blue and said, “Well?”
“Nine steps up to a covered porch that wraps around the front and the west side,” she said. “The front door’s solid wood and lit by what’re probably hundred-watt bulbs inside two frosted globes.
There’s a narrow stained-glass window just to the right of the door.
Bunches of fruit, I think. It’s a three-story house and big, probably fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen rooms, and there’s a light on in one room on the second floor, but it’s dark on the first and third floors. No cars except for that Toyota pickup and the MG that looks like it hasn’t been moved in six months, maybe a year.”
“No cars and a ‘no vacancy’ sign don’t match,” Overby said.
“Maybe her lie-lows all come by limo.”
“Maybe,” Overby said and opened his door. She joined him at the steps and they mounted them together. It was Overby who found the doorbell and pressed it, causing a loud buzz instead of a ring. When
no one answered the summons, he rang again—this time for at least twenty seconds. They waited another twenty seconds before Georgia Blue tried the door. It was locked. Overby shrugged and turned away, as if giving up. If she hadn’t been watching for it, Georgia Blue wouldn’t have seen the quick sudden move of his right elbow as it slammed back against the narrow stained-glass window, breaking a six-by-ten-inch panel of what had been a bowl of ripe cherries.
Overby spun around, reached through the broken panel and unlocked the front door from the inside. “I must’ve slipped,” he said with his hard white grin just before he went inside.
It was Georgia Blue who found the light switch and turned on a pair of lamps that revealed a large foyer with a well-cared-for parquet floor. The two lamps were a pair of milky globes on fluted brass columns that grew out of the staircase’s twin newel-posts. The staircase went halfway up to the fourteen-foot ceiling before turning back on itself for the rest of the rise. A hall on the left side of the staircase led back to what seemed to be a pantry and probably, farther on, to a kitchen. At the far left of the foyer were two panelled sliding doors. On the foyer’s far right, the same thing.
