see her car parked in the courtyard. A lot of times it’d be there all night.”
“Whose car?”
“Ione Gamble’s—the one who shot him, God bless her.”
“Think she really killed him, do you?”
“She sure as hell had the opportunity. Had two of ‘em, in fact.”
“Why two?”
“I don’t sleep so good anymore,” Cleveland said and reached for the bottle of Vat 69 to top up his drink. After adding at least one and a half ounces, he put the bottle back on the marbletop table. “And even when I do get to sleep, I have to get up every couple of hours or so and go pee because of my goddamn prostate. Well, when I’m standing there peeing in the upstairs John, which takes forever, I like to look out the bathroom window at the ocean because it’s always more interesting than looking down at what I’m doing or trying to do, right?”
Stallings nodded sympathetically.
“So I’m standing there peeing New Year’s Eve about eleven-thirty when I notice her car parked in Rice’s courtyard. She’s got one of those fancy new Mercedes roadsters that sell for close to a hundred thousand a pop. But I don’t think anything about it and head on back to the bedroom for my traditional New Year’s Eve celebration, which means lying up in bed with a bottle and watching strangers making damn fools of themselves on TV. Then about twelve-thirty, after I’m fairly sure I’ve made it through another year, I gotta go take another leak. And that’s when I notice it.”
“Notice what?” Stallings said.
“That her car’s gone. Ione Gamble’s.”
“So?”
“So I thought it was kinda funny she didn’t stick around for New Year’s Eve or, if she did, only spent half an hour of the new year with her former fiance. But what the hell. It wasn’t any of my business so I went back to bed. Then around five in the morning, I have to pee again. And there’s her car back, its horn tooting away. Then she pops out of it and yells something I can’t hear. And that’s when she goes inside the house either to shoot him or make sure he’s really dead.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Stallings. “How’d you see all this at night? Did Rice keep his outside lights on like I do as a kind of burglar insurance?”
“He didn’t just have his regular lights on. He had all his Christmas lights on, too.”
“What’d the cops say?”
“When?”
“When you told ‘em what you just told me?”
“Nothing. They wrote it all down and then wanted to know how much I’d had to drink New Year’s Eve and if maybe it wasn’t time I started going to meetings again.”
“Couldn’t it have been somebody else that first time?” Stallings said.
“I mean somebody else driving a car just like hers?”
Cleveland shrugged. “That’s exactly what the cops said and I’ll tell you what I told them. The odds are a hundred to one against it.”
There was a silence that Stallings finally broke with a final question.
“So what do you think’ll happen to her?”
“What do I think or what do I hope?”
“Either one.”
“I hope they give her a medal,” Rick Cleveland said. “But I don’t much think they will.”
Twenty-one
During what Georgia Blue later called the Colonel Sanders Seminar, Booth Stallings’s report on the old actor’s two sightings of Ione Gamble’s roadster caused what should have been a stunned silence.
And it would have been if a heavy surf hadn’t been hammering the beach just below the huge living room where Wu, Durant, Overby, Blue and Stallings were dining on $73 worth of Kentucky fried chicken.
Booth Stallings, the designated provisioner, had bought the chicken at the local franchise and served it without apology just before Wu and Durant reported on their hypnotism session with Ione Gamble.
This was followed by Georgia Blue and Otherguy Overby with reports on their respective meetings with Jack Broach, the agent, and Richard Brackeen, the dirty-movie man. Blue and Overby then spelled each other in the telling of their joint encounter with Colleen Cullen at her lie-low bed-and-breakfast inn.
Stallings made his report last, smiled at its effect, dipped a hand into a bucket of chicken, withdrew a drumstick and gnawed it while waiting to see who reacted first.
It turned out to be Artie Wu, who, after shifting around in the big dark red leather chair, cleared his throat and asked, “You say this Mr.
Cleveland’s an actor?”
His mouth still full of drumstick, Stallings only nodded.
“How old is he?”
