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Ross Thomas

Voodoo, Ltd.

One

The two-passenger car that raced through Malibu shortly after 5 A. M. on New Year’s Day at speeds exceeding 82 miles per hour was an almost new Mercedes-Benz 500SL with an out-the-door price of $101,414. 28. It was driven with one hand, the left, by the not quite beautiful hyphenate, Ione Gamble, whose blood alcohol level would later be measured at 0. 16, proving her to be quite drunk, legally and otherwise, for the second time in her life.

The actress-director, whose two crafts or professions made her a hyphenate in Hollywood parlance, still drove with her left hand as she used the right one to hold a telephone to her ear and listen to its thirty-fifth and final ring. She then traded the telephone for the pint of Smirnoff 80-proof vodka that lay on the passenger seat. After swallowing the last one and a half ounces, she lowered the right door’s window with the touch of a button and tossed out the empty bottle, which smashed against somebody’s 1986 Honda Civic.

Gamble was tempted to stop and leave a note offering to pay for any damage. But by the time the mental note was composed, revised and re-revised, she was already a mile past the Honda and nearing her Carbon Beach destination. When she reached it seconds later, the note, the smashed bottle and the Honda had vanished from her memory.

By then she had slowed to the legal speed limit of 45 miles per hour and was almost coasting along the Pacific Coast Highway’s center turn lane. She was also trying to find the misplaced electronic gadget that would open the steel gates guarding the $13-million house whose owner irritated nearly everyone by calling it his beach shack.

Gamble never found the electronic gate opener. But as she turned left across the highway’s two east-bound lanes, her headlights revealed the gates to be already open. She drove through and parked in front of the three-car garage whose doors, almost seven days after Christmas, still offered a fanciful triptych of Santa Claus, his reindeer and the elves.

Gamble switched off engine and lights and again picked up the car phone. She called the number she had called before and let it ring fifteen times. She then gave up on the phone and started honking the Mercedes horn in a series of three-short-and-one-long tattoos, which were a rough approximation of Morse code for the letter V — the only Morse code she knew.

Gamble stopped the noise three minutes later, lowered the car’s left window and waited for something to happen. She would have settled for an irate neighbor yelling at her to shut the fuck up. Or for Billy Rice to hurry out of his house and implore her, for God’s sake, to come in and have a drink — or even for a suddenly lighted window somewhere to prove that life still existed in Malibu at 5:11 A. M. On Tuesday, January 1, 1991.

But when there were no rude shouts or drink offers or suddenly lighted windows, Gamble got out of the car, slamming its door as hard as she could and hoping something would break, but relieved when nothing did. She went around the car’s rear, backed up three overly cautious steps, sucked in as much air as her lungs would hold and yelled, “BILLY RICE FUCKS MICE!”