“I’m sort of his agent.”
“Sort of?”
“Okay, I’m his agent. You wanta talk to him, you talk to me first.”
Overby nodded, looked over his shoulder again, leaned toward the woman, lowered his voice and said, “Okay. Here’s how it works. I represent a guy I’ll call Mr. Z—okay? Mr. Z is outta London—in England—and he’s putting together a TV show for worldwide syndication. It won’t need any actors and hardly any voice-over because everything’ll explain itself. That’s because it’ll all be home videos of real shock stuff.”
“Like what?” she said.
“Like the one Mr. Z paid a hundred thousand pounds for.”
“What’s that in American?”
“About a hundred and eighty thou.” He looked over his shoulder again and dropped his voice into a confidential murmur. The woman leaned toward him. “There was this murder that happened in London two years ago,” Overby said. “A guy comes home from a business trip to the States and finds his wife and mother-in-law with their heads chopped off.”
The woman’s eyes went wide. “You got all that on tape?”
Overby sighed, looked over his shoulder again and said, “Of course we haven’t got it on tape. What we’ve got is a home-video tape of the killer confessing and then turning on the gas and sticking his head in the oven. We left his confession pretty much the way it is but edited the oven scene down to six or seven seconds—just long enough to make impact.”
“Who was it?” she asked.
“Who was what?”
“The killer?”
“Yeah, well, it was the husband. He was in Washington, D.C. Bought or stole himself an American passport, flew the Concorde both ways, chopped their heads off with an ax and got back to Washington before anybody knew he was gone. Then he flew economy-class back to London thirty-six hours later, discovered the bodies and called the cops. Perfect crime, perfect alibi.”
“Why’d he kill ‘em?” Cheyne Grace asked.
Overby decided to go with the standard motive. “Money, what else?
His mother-in-law was kind of rich and his wife was her only heir. So
he kills the mother-in-law first, makes his wife fix them both something to eat, then kills her an hour later. The autopsy proves the mother-in-law died first and that means her daughter inherits everything. So the husband inherits it all from his dead wife. The mother-in-law left a real nice little place down in Torquay near the water and that’s where the husband taped his confession and then stuck his head in the oven.”
“How much did he inherit?” Cheyne Grace asked.
“It was about four hundred thousand pounds,” Overby said after deciding to make it less than a million.
“Who’d you buy the confession tape from?”
Overby smiled for what he thought must be the first time in three hours. “That’s confidential.”
She nodded her understanding, then said, “That drowning-the-baby thing. I just made that up.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah, but this guy I know does know lots of weird people, know what I mean?”
Overby only nodded.
“So how do we contact you—in case he’s got something?”
Overby recited the 456 number of the William Rice house. “Four-five-six,” Cheyne Grace said, impressed. “That’s Malibu.”
“It’s Mr. Z’s place,” Overby said. “But don’t ask for him, ask for Mr.
X.”
“That’s you, isn’t it—Mr. X?”
Before Overby could reply a big hand landed on his left shoulder. He jumped, then looked up and around at a man who was well over six feet tall and wore a tightly belted tan bush jacket, dark aviator glasses, a pigskin hat with its brim turned down and a beard that had been growing for at least three days.
The man spoke in a low rumble that was half-accusation, half-threat.
“You said you’d be alone, man.”
“I am,” Overby said.
“Then who the fuck’s that?”
Overby looked at Cheyne Grace and shrugged an apology. “You mind?”
“No,” she said, rising quickly. “Not at all.”
When she was gone, the man sat down at Overby’s left and said,
“She’s still watching us.”
