Voodoo Ltd qd-3 Read online

  Film critics award and get nominated by the Academy and don’t win, but who the hell cares except me?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then Billy asks me to marry him. This is around the first of last year. And I, the eternal klutz, say sure, Billy, love to, and we set the wedding date for December thirtieth. In the meantime, Billy buys The Bad Dead Indian, which has been on the NYT bestseller list for thirteen months. It cost him two million. Cash. No options. He spends another million or so on writers and announces that his bride-to-be will not only star in this sixty-five-million-plus epic of the Old West with dumb old Niles Brand, but she’ll also direct it. Still with me, Mr.

  Mott?”

  “You make it exceedingly clear.”

  “Then it’s Christmas Eve, a little more than a month ago. Billy issues what the newsies call a ‘terse’ three-line press release that says he’s not going to marry Ione Gamble after all and she’s not going to direct or star in his wonderful picture about native Americans either. And this is all one big goddamn surprise to me.”

  “Had you signed either a contract for the picture or a prenuptial agreement of any kind?”

  “Jack Broach was still negotiating the movie deal. And when Billy’d hinted at a prenuptial agreement, I told him I wanted a marriage, not a merger, which wasn’t original, but he didn’t seem to’ve heard it before.”

  “Why do you think Rice changed his mind?”

  “I don’t know. I never spoke to him again. At least, I don’t think I did.”

  “But you tried.”

  “I must’ve called him a couple of hundred times but never got through. Then on New Year’s Eve, the day after our cancelled wedding day, I started drinking. I drank all day, slept a little, woke up and drank some more. Then I remember getting into my car with a pint of vodka and heading for a showdown with Billy at his place in Malibu. But I don’t remember anything else until the deputies woke me up at the beach house with Billy lying there dead on the floor.”

  “You blacked out?”

  “Yes.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —9

  Mott leaned back on the couch with the chintz slipcover and studied Gamble, who was now across the coffee table from him, perched on the edge of the businesslike armchair. “Then this was your second blackout,” he said. “What do you know about them?”

  “Until I saw a doctor, I only knew they were plot twists for soap operas. Need a conflict? Give her a blackout. Or amnesia. The doctor told me blackouts are a form of alcohol-produced amnesia common to alcoholics and some binge drinkers. He said that hypnotism’s been used to regain memory lost by blackouts. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. But if I wanted to try it, he could recommend several very well qualified hypnotherapists. I told him I’d think about it.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sure. I thought about it. I also thought about what would happen if I confessed to something embarrassing or incriminating—maybe even to Billy’s murder. If the hypnotist had it down on audiotape, he could sell it for a whole lot of money. If he’d videotaped it, he could sell it for God knows how much.”

  “He’d also go to jail.”

  “Not if he claimed somebody broke in and stole it from him. I remember Watergate—well, part of it. They did something like that then, didn’t they?”

  “Not quite.”

  “But there’s one more thing he could do with the tape that nobody’d ever have to know about,” she said. “He could sell it to me, which, I believe, is called blackmail.”

  She gave Mott the small cool smile that debaters use after making a telling point. Mott scratched the back of his left hand and said, “What if I could find you a hypnotherapist whose discretion is guaranteed?

  Would you be interested in trying to regain your memory of that night?”

  Gamble frowned. “It’s important, isn’t it? My memory?”

  “Extremely so.”

  “You know any hypnotists?”

  “I know of somebody who does.”

  “You mean that’s his business—supplying hypnotists for wives and girlfriends who get drunk, black out, do in their husbands or boyfriends, but remember fuck-all about it?”

  Mott smiled. “He supplies extremely well-qualified, extremely discreet professionals to perform any number of extremely delicate tasks.”

  She stared at him, frowned again and said, “Do all those extremelys mean you’re going to be my lawyer?”

  “If you like.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —10

  “Okay. As my lawyer, what d’you recommend?”

  “A discreet and well-qualified hypnotist.”

  “Then you’d better go ahead and call your jobber—whoever he is.”

  “His name is Glimm,” Howard Mott said. “Enno Glimm.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —11

  Three

  The left cheek of Enno Glimm, the walk-in, was flawed by a puckered scar that would almost pass for a dimple—just as his English could almost pass for American were it not for those Rhine-flavored w’s that turned Wudu, Ltd., into Voodoo, Ltd.

  Quincy Durant, sensing profit, made no effort to correct the prospective client. As for the scar, Durant guessed it could have been made by a small-caliber round—either a .22 or a .25—or by some 9-year-old bully jabbing a pencil through Glimm’s left cheek thirty-five years ago during a schoolyard scuffle.

  It was Arctic cold in England and throughout most of Europe that February. Eight inches of snow fell on London and a few flakes had even dusted the French Riviera. The cold and damp penetrated everywhere, including the panelled conference room/office of Wudu, Ltd., where Durant had hauled a three-bar electric fire out of a closet and stuck it in the false fireplace to supplement the building’s inadequate central heating.

  Enno Glimm sat in one of the twin wingback chairs that flanked the fireplace. Above its mantel hung a large oil portrait of Mrs. Arthur Case Wu (the former Agnes Goriach) and the two sets of Wu twins.

  The seated 14-year-old twin girls looked both worldly and a trifle mischievous. Their standing 17-year-old brothers, Arthur and Angus, wore identical half-smiles that made them look faintly sinister. The artist had brilliantly caught the mother’s handsome features, regal bearing and even the sparkle in her huge gray eyes that suggested she was thinking of something bawdy.

  Enno Glimm ignored the portrait and remained hunched-over in the wingback chair, toasting his palms before the electric fire and frowning, as if sorry that he had let Durant relieve him of the black double-breasted cashmere overcoat.

  Durant guessed the coat had cost at least a thousand pounds or, more likely, three thousand deutsche marks. After hanging it on the overly elaborate coatrack that had been carved out of black walnut, supposedly in 1903, Durant went over to the other wingback chair, sat down, crossed his legs and waited for Glimm to say whatever he had come to say.

  Glimm was still toasting his palms when, without looking at Durant, he said, “Mr. Wu won’t be joining us?” This time he made Artie Wu’s Voodoo, Ltd. —12

  surname sound like the vieux in Vieux Carré and even gave it a passable French pronunciation.

  “He’s away,” Durant said. “A family matter.”

  Glimm looked up at the portrait with pale gray eyes that Durant thought weren’t much darker or warmer than sleet. “Someone is ill?”

  Glimm asked, coating the question with just the right amount of concern.

  “His sons are having a problem at school,” Durant said.

  “Neglecting their studies?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Their school is here—in London?”

  “Why?” Durant asked, turning the one-word question into a warning and possibly a threat.

  It made Glimm smile. “You think I’m a kidnapper—a terrorist maybe?”

  “I don’t know what you are,” Durant said. “Maybe we should get to that.”

  “Listen. When I deal with a business, any business, I like to deal with its principals, its t
op guys, the yes-or-no people. In this case, you and Voo. So after I fly into Heathrow last night in the snowstorm—”

  “From where?”

  Glimm ignored the question. “—and check into the Connaught, where they’ve got rooms going begging, I decide to take a little walk, snow or no snow, and have a look at Eight Bruton Street, Berkeley

  “Square, London Doubleyou One, heart of Mayfair and all that. I wanta make sure Voodoo, Limited’s a real business and not just some combination Xerox copy shop and accommodation address—know what I mean? And if it is real, then I’ll walk in the next morning unannounced and unexpected.”

  “And possibly unwelcome.”

  “We’ll see,” Glimm said. “Anyhow, when I walk into your pretty little reception room out there, the first thing I notice is there’s no pretty little receptionist to go with it. Then I notice some dust on her desk—

  not much, but enough to tell me she hasn’t been to work in a week or ten days. But so what? Maybe she’s out sick in bed with a doctor.”

  Durant smiled faintly. “A temporary indisposition.”

  “Just like I thought. And since there’s nobody to receive me, I knock on the door that says Private and wait while all those locks and dead bolts and chains are shot back and undone. Finally, the door opens and I see some guy wearing way too much tan for February—a guy who’s six-three or -four and carries maybe one-seventy-five or -eighty pounds, if that. This is a guy who’ll never see forty again and probably not even forty-five, but who’s got the moves of somebody in their twenties. Okay. Their late, late twenties. And right away I know I’m in Voodoo, Ltd. —13

  the presence of none other than that fucking Durant, which is what everybody I talked to calls you.”

  “My references,” Durant said. “And bona fides.”

  Glimm nodded.

  “Name two,” Durant said.

  “Ever know a Manila police captain called Cruz?”

  “I knew a police lieutenant called Hermenegildo Cruz.”

  “He got promoted,” Glimm said. “What about a Maurice Overby in Amman?”

  Something changed in Durant’s expression—a certain tightening around the mouth. But then it went away and he said, “What’s Overby doing in Jordan?”

  “He claims he’s there to analyze the BYK’s personal security system.”

  “All by himself?”

  “He says his principal resource asset, whatever that means, is Dr.

  Booth Stallings, the world-famous expert on terrorism that I never heard of. You ever hear of him?”

  Durant only nodded.

  Glimm permitted himself another small smile. “I notice you don’t ask what BYK stands for. I don’t know and have to ask Overby. He’s down there in Amman, Jordan, and I’m calling from—well, it doesn’t matter where—and Overby goes all snotty over the phone and tells me BYK stands for Brave Young King, which is what he and all the other old Middle East hands call King Hussein.” Glimm paused. “Even though the King’s not all that young anymore, is he?”

  “Overby told you he’s an old Middle East hand?” Durant said.

  “You saying he’s not?”

  “I’m saying it’s just another fascinating and heretofore undisclosed chapter in Mr. Overby’s life.”

  “Okay. So he’s a liar. Who the hell cares about Overby? What about you? You ever been there—the Middle East? I mean on business?”

  “Beirut,” Durant said.

  “When?”

  “A few years ago.”

  “A few years ago was when it was still kinda hairy, right?”

  Durant only shrugged and waited for what came next, which he assumed would be the sell. Instead, it turned out to be a silence that went on and on until it had Glimm crossing and uncrossing his legs and even shifting a little in the wing-back chair. Because silences had never bothered Durant, he waited it out with a small polite smile, and Glimm finally ended it with yet another question. “What were you doing there—in Beirut?”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —14

  “Looking for something,” Durant said.

  “Find him?”

  “I don’t think I said ‘him.’ “

  “Okay. Him? Her? It?”

  “We found what we were looking for.”

  “ ‘We’ meaning you and Mr. Voo, right?” Glimm said and, not waiting for confirmation, hurried on, his manner and tone brusque and just shy of rude. “What you guys went looking for in Beirut was somebody fairly important’s dead body. I hear this somebody fairly important’s widow wants to collect on her missing-and-presumed-dead husband’s million-dollar life policy, but doesn’t want to wait around seven years—or whatever it is—till he’s declared legally dead. And her dead husband—or whoever he’s working for—must’ve been paying one hell of a premium if the insurance company agreed to waive its act-of-war and insurrection rider, which it sure as hell did or the widow wouldn’t’ve hired you and Voo to go find proof he was dead—or maybe buy it from somebody.”

  “Tell me something,” Durant said. “Since you don’t really have any trouble with your w’s, why mess up Mr. Wu’s name? Is it a test? A sales gimmick? Or just your notion of cute and clever?”

  A grin made a quick white slash across Glimm’s bony face. His pale eyes crinkled with pleasure or perhaps even delight and Durant prepared himself for a chuckle that never came. But Glimm still wore the pleased look when he said, “It’s a test.”

  “How’d I do?”

  Glimm glanced at his fat gold wristwatch. “Not bad. You lasted twelve minutes. That means you’re hungry all right, but not exactly starving.”

  Although Durant made no response, Glimm didn’t really seem to expect one and went on talking with the glib confidence of a veteran salesman who’s decided it’s time to close the deal.

  “Here’s how it works: whenever I negotiate anything, I always mispronounce either the name of the guy I’m negotiating with or the name of his company.”

  “Or both,” Durant said.

  “Yeah. Right. In this case, both.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if the guy corrects me right off, I know he’s not hungry. If it takes him ten or fifteen minutes, he’s just medium hungry. But if he never does correct me, I know he’s practically starving to death and I can negotiate my own deal.”

  “We’re not negotiating anything,” Durant said.

  “The hell we’re not,” said Enno Glimm.

  Voodoo, Ltd. —15

  Four

  Artie Wu sat in front of the headmaster’s desk in the massive armless 121-year-old wooden punishment chair where countless small boys had perched, awaiting their fates with tears and dangling feet.

  At a litde less than six-foot-three, and with his weight back down to just under 250 pounds, Wu was much too large to perch anywhere.

  But he did manage to relax, if not quite loll, in the big chair—even tipping its front legs up a few inches as he leaned back and listened to Perkin Ramsay, the headmaster, deliver a bill of indictment against the Wu twins, Arthur and Angus.

  The charges were made in a tenor drone that Wu feared might never end. As it went on and on, he looked up to admire the enormous room’s vaulted stone ceiling, then over to his left at the tireless fireplace that was so vast you could walk right into it, providing you were no more than five-foot-two or -three.

  The public school that had undertaken the education of the twin Wu males was seventeen miles north of Edinburgh. Much of the school was contained within a small castle, thought to have been completed around 1179 and still in remarkably good repair. It was here that the Reverend Robert Cameron had founded his school in 1821 after persuading the prosperous parents of his first pupils that he could indeed transform their wee monsters into wee gentlemen scholars.

  Since then, all Goriach males had attended Cameron and Agnes Goriach Wu saw no reason why her twin sons shouldn’t carry on the tradition.

  His indictment delivered, the headmaster drew a large handkerchief fro
m a pocket and delicately blew his nose, one nostril at a time. It was a bright pink nose, thin and sharply pointed, that went nicely with his gaunt cheeks and the deep sockets that sheltered eyes of a startling blue. A high forehead soared up and back from the blue eyes until it finally caught up with the retreating thicket of coarse red hair.

  After Perkin Ramsay put away his handkerchief, Wu spoke for the first time in nearly fifteen minutes. “You say the twins sent five of them to your infirmary?”

  Ramsay’s answering sigh was melancholy. “Please listen carefully this time, Mr. Wu. Five boys went to hospital in Edinburgh—not to our infirmary. Angus and Arthur were attacked by eight boys of their own approximate age and size. Three of these eight boys escaped to tell the tale. It was not a fair fight.”

  Voodoo, Ltd. —16

  “Eight against two? I think not.”

  “I mean your sons did not fight fairly.”

  Artie Wu looked relieved. “Used whatever was lying around, did they? A rock or two? A bit of stick? A nice length of pipe?”

  “They used their hands, feet, knees and elbows.”

  “How long did it last?”

  “Three or four minutes. Not more.”

  Wu took a long fat cigar from an inside coat pocket, studied it with evident longing, then put it away again. “You say the name-calling started it?”

  “Yes.”

  Wu nodded thoughtfully as if all at last had been revealed. “So this gang of eight called the twins names, then jumped them and got knocked about a bit for their trouble. Still, the gang did have the satisfaction of using all those grand old names such as chink and wog and slope and dink and—”