slammed his cupped palms against the man’s ears.
Openmouthed now and screaming silently, the man dropped to his knees, curled up on the sidewalk and began to whimper softly, hands to his ears.
Durant spun around to find the first of Wu’s would-be assailants still cradling his testicles and crooning to himself. The other one was struggling to breathe because of the massive forearm that had been clamped around his neck from behind.
“If you talk, you breathe,” Wu said, loosening the hold slightly.
The man gasped three times first, then said some guy’d hired them for $500 each to wait outside the beach house in the car for a real tan tall guy and a big fat Chinaman to come out.
Wu increased the pressure on the man’s throat, asked, “Then what?”—and relaxed the hold.
The man sucked in more air and used it to say, “If you drove off in a car, we were gonna follow and force you over and, you know, maybe mess you up a little.”
“A little or a lot?”
“Maybe a little more’n a little.”
“Who was he—the guy who hired you?”
The man said he didn’t know, honest to God he didn’t. Wu increased the pressure, eased it and asked, “How’d he pay you?”
“He said the money’d be in the glove compartment of the car and the car’d be in the parking lot of a Carl’s Junior—the one at La Brea and Santa Monica where all the kiddy fags hang out.”
“How’d he tell you?”
“On the phone, how else? He said the car was hot and we could keep it, lose it, whatever.”
“When did he call you?”
“Real late this afternoon—around six.”
“How long were you going to wait outside the beach house?”
“Till two A.M. Then we could split and try again tomorrow night for another five hundred each in another hot car the guy said he’d find us.”
Wu removed his forearm, pointed the man at the black Caprice and said, “Take off. All of you. But when he calls again, tell him the Chinaman knows who he is.”
“So who is he?” Durant asked as they watched the black sedan pull slowly away from the curb.
“The same guy who killed the Goodisons this afternoon and tried to run over Booth and me,” Wu said, turned and resumed walking toward the Malibu Beach Inn.
“You didn’t see the driver this afternoon,” Durant said as he fell into step.
“No, but it was the same car—same make, model, color, everything
—and I made the logical conclusion.”
“More of a logical leap,” Durant said. “How many black Chevrolet Caprices do you think GM turned out last year?”
“More than they sold probably.”
“Which is still plenty because it’s very anonymous, very comfortable and much favored by cops, cabbies and old folks who like a mushy ride. Too bad you didn’t get the license number in Oxnard.”
“Why too bad?”
“Then we could be sure it was the same car.”
“What good would that do, if it’s a stolen car?”
“It would at least prove your powers of observation.”
“I see no need to prove anything,” Wu said and increased his pace.
The only noticeable change in Enno Glimm was the garish green and red Hawaiian shirt he wore, tails out, over pants that seemed to belong to a blue pinstripe suit. Glimm sat in an easy chair in the sitting room of his two rooms on the inn’s third floor. To his left on a couch was Jenny Arliss, wearing white duck pants and a navy-blue Tshirt. Wu and Durant, after a perfunctory greeting from Glimm, chose a pair of matching armchairs.
Once they were seated, Glimm said, “This place hasn’t got a restaurant.”
“You can send out for a pizza,” Durant said.
Glimm ignored the suggestion. “Okay. Let’s hear it. What’ve you done right so far?”
“So far,” Wu said, “we’ve discovered the murdered bodies of Hughes and Pauline Goodison—thus completing the task you set for us, which essentially was, ‘Find the Goodisons.’ “
Jenny Arliss murmured, “My God.”
All Glimm did was rise, move to the window and pull a drawn curtain back just far enough to peer out at the miles-away lights of Santa Monica. While staring at them, he said, “They claim there’s a hell of a daytime view from here. Too bad I won’t get to see it.” He let the curtain go, turned to Arliss and said, “Get us on the next flight to New York.”
“I think we should hear the rest first,” she said.
