right hand and looked at his watch. It was
3:13 P.M. Just as the phone touched his right ear, he heard Ione Gamble say, “Who’s this?”
“Recognize the voice, love?” a British tenor said.
“Hughes, you dipshit. What the hell happened?”
“Paulie and I went on a retreat—to sort out our options,” said Hughes Goodison.
“Why call me?”
“Because we’ve decided you’re our best option—although we do have several others.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Of course I am, love. And you’ll understand perfectly once I play a tape of you talking to Paulie and me while you were deep in hypnosis.
It’s just a tiny bit of a much, much longer tape, but, still and all, rather a fair sample.”
The next voice was Gamble’s, but filtered by tape and telephone.
Her voice was also deeper than normal and nearly toneless. “I wanted to kill him,” she said.
Then Hughes Goodison’s voice, similarly filtered, asked a question:
“Billy Rice?”
“Yes.”
“Did you?” Goodison’s voice asked.
A long pause, followed by Gamble’s uninfiected answer: “Yes.”
“That’s it, Ione,” Goodison said in his normal voice. “We want you to know we’re willing to sell all forty-nine and a half minutes of the tape you just heard.”
“You mean you want to sell me one of the God knows how many copies you’ve made.”
“Lord, no. Paulie and I are risk avoiders, not risk takers. Whoever pays our price buys the original. There are no copies. None.”
“Bullshit.”
Goodison giggled. “Believe what you like. But I’ll say it again. There is only one copy. Just one.”
“How much?” Gamble asked.
“One million—dollars, of course. Cash.”
“What happens if I can’t or won’t buy?”
“Then we sell to the highest bidder. Only today we heard about a mysterious Mr. X who’s in town looking for confessional-type videotapes of, you know, people doing naughty things—and that’s exactly what we have to sell.”
“You told me there’s only one tape.”
“One audiotape—and one videotape. Those camcorders are such a marvelous treat. But you get both tapes for the same low, low price.”
“I’ll go two hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Don’t be tiresome, Ione.”
“Five hundred thousand.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay,” she said with a long sigh. “One million—but it’ll take time to raise that much cash.”
“You have four days. No more.”
“What if I can’t raise it in four days?”
“I happen to know you can,” Goodison said. “But if you won’t, I’ll have to get in touch with Mr. X and then people all over the world can sit in their most comfy chairs, watching Ione Gamble, movie star, confess to the murder of poor Billy Rice.”
“Where do I call, if I manage to get the money together?”
“You’re being tiresome again, Ione.”
“Okay. You call me. But let’s get something straight, Hughes. You’re a slimebug and your sister’s a certifiable weirdo and I won’t come anywhere near either of you. So if I do get the money, I’ll send somebody with it, somebody who’ll insist on inspecting the merchandise before paying for it.”
“Who is he?” Goodison demanded, his voice almost cracking on the
“he.”
“Who said anything about a he?” Ione Gamble said and hung up.
When Durant returned to the kitchen, she was again seated at the table, head bowed, hands folded in front of her, the bowl of soup shoved to her right.
“You were fine,” Durant said as he sat down, picked up the spoon and tasted his soup again. “In fact, you were perfect.”
