She looked up. “Really?”
“Absolutely perfect.”
She looked around the kitchen curiously, as if seeing it for the last time. “I’ll have to sell it.”
“What?”
“The house.”
“Why?”
“You heard him. If I don’t buy, they’ll sell to Mr. X or Y or Z—
whoever. To the sleazoids. And I can’t raise a million cash unless I sell the house.”
Durant had two more spoonfuls of soup, nodded appreciatively, then said, “The Goodisons won’t sell to anybody else and you’ll never pay them a dime.”
Ione Gamble, dry-eyed and skeptical, stared at Durant for moments before she pulled her soup bowl back and began eating hungrily.
Moments later she looked up at him, frowned, then grinned and said,
“Why the fuck do I believe you?”
Twenty-nine
Artie Wu remembered the Oxnard of nearly thirteen years ago as a small, agriculturally dependent city with a predominandy Mexican flavor and a Japanese mayor. But after he and Booth Stallings paid gruff calls on four of the city’s twenty-four motels, Wu read a tourist leaflet and discovered Oxnard had transformed itself into a diversified business center that boasted industrial parks, a new museum of muscle cars from the fifties and sixties and an almost new passenger train depot, which Booth Stallings claimed was the only passenger train depot built in the United States since 1940.
It was around 4 P.M. When they reached the ninth motel. Wu was wearing a blue blazer, khaki pants, a white shirt open halfway down his bare chest and, on his feet, plain-toed black oxfords with white socks. Stallings had suggested a cheap gold chain to go with the open shirt but Wu said he didn’t want to soften his image. Stallings himself wore a gray suit, white shirt and a dark gray tie with maroon polka dots.
After they got out of the rented Mercedes at the ninth motel, Stallings said, “I’m damn near out of business cards.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Wu said and led the way into the motel office.
Redundantly named “The La Paz Inn,” the motel was independently owned, fairly new, and offered a small coffee shop, an equally small swimming pool and, Wu guessed, about three dozen units. Behind the reception counter was a stocky man in his late fifties with thin silky gray hair, bifocals and the suspicious pursed mouth that many motel owner-operators seem to acquire after only a year or so in the business. The man stared at Wu for a moment, dismissed him as a potential lodger and turned to Stallings, who was now leaning on the counter.
“Help you?” said the man in a twangy voice that dared Stallings to sell him something.
“Hope so,” Stallings said and handed over one of the last business cards that claimed he was Jerome K. Walters, executive vice-president of the Independent Limousine Operators Association.
The man read the card, handed it back and said, “Don’t get much call here for limos.”
Stallings straightened, glanced around the room, nodded understandingly and said, “Didn’t think you would. But that’s not why
we’re here.” He looked around the room again, then leaned toward the gray-haired man and used a soft conspiratorial tone to say, “We’re here on an in-ves-ti-ga-tion.” Stallings pronounced each syllable of investigation lovingly, as if he liked the word’s sound.
The man behind the counter frowned. “Investigation of what?”
“One of our owner-operator members, a fine young man of Mexican descent, drives a couple up here from L.A. Just before the couple checks into a motel—not yours—they give our member twenty dollars to go buy ‘em a bottle of drinking whisky.”
“So?”
“So our fine young man, glad to be of service, heads for the nearest liquor store. But when he comes back with the booze, the couple’s skedaddled. Never checked in. And that leaves our fine young man stuck with a two- hundred-and-thirty-five-dollar tab he’d run up driving them all over L.A. And then on up here.”
“That’s one pitiful story,” the man said.
“The thing is, Mr.—?”
“Deason.”
“The thing is, Mr. Deason, my organization’s bound and determined to put a stop to this sort of thing. We want to prosecute those two thieves—and that’s what they are, thieves—to the full extent of the law. But cops don’t get too excited about some Mexican limo driver who’s been stiffed for a couple of hundred bucks. So we in the ILOA are offering a five-hundred-dollar cash reward for any information leading not to the arrest and conviction of this thieving pair, but just to their present whereabouts.”
“They got names?” Deason asked.
“Yes, sir, they do. Their real names are Hughes and Pauline Goodison.”
Deason looked down at the counter, then up at Stallings, shook his head regretfully and said, “Never registered ‘em.”
“In their late twenties or early thirties?” Stallings said. “Both blond and look a lot alike on account of they’re
