The story so far: Detective Rocky Stone has been hired by Wanda Marcellus, aide of Congressional candidate George Wilson, for the purposes of discovering financial improprieties by the incumbent, Congressman Howard Dixon. While investigating the unusual amounts of telephone poles and booths on the streets of town, Rocky discovers connections between a spiritualist guide named Inglehoff, Candidate Geroge Wilson and his wife Martha, and Clarissa King, the wife of prominent businessman and philanthropist Gilbert King. In the last episode, Rocky followed Clarissa to a sporting goods shop, where she unexplainably pulled a gun on him. Rocky subdued her, then, when he realized she was under the influence of hypnosis, snapped his fingers, causing her to pass out:
Her eyes opened somewhere near the limits of Los Diablos County. It was a quiet awakening, as if she had been roused from her afternoon nap by the sounds of the gardener trimming the hedges. The lids fluttered for a moment and remained heavy, opening by the narrowest of margins. Her head turned. She saw me clearly, saw my hands on the wheel, saw that she was in a car driving somewhere without her say so. The eyelids stayed heavy. If she had any protests, she kept them to herself.
I said: “Remember me?”
Clarissa King didn't commit one way or the other. She pushed in to the upholstery and turned away, settling in to the front seat of my car as if she owned the place.
I made a telephone call shortly before our journey began, to a guy on the Post's payroll, name of Frank Pollard. He owed me a favor after I was an “unnamed source” in a story of his back when I was in the D.A.'s office and had something to be an unnamed source about. Pollard gave me the Kings' addresses: they had a beach home up in Parker Beach, one in Palm Springs, another in Sacramento, and a hundred-room monstrosity tucked into a quiet neighborhood south and east of town where they did a majority of their entertaining. I figured if Mrs. King had yet to wake up by the time I got there I might as well drop her off. Now that she was conscious, I felt a change in plan was needed.
I pulled in to the parking lot of a hardware store and hit the brakes. She moaned softly at the intrusion of her slumber and stretched out like a cat. She mumbled, “Why did you have to do that?” before settling back in the same comfortable spot she had been in a second earlier.
“I need answers,” I replied.
“I don't have any.” Her voice had a spoiled brat living inside of it.
“You remember who I am?”
She uncoiled from her nest and studied my face to make sure her first impression wasn't incorrect. I showed her the full view of my face to give her all the facts before she rendered her final decision. “I thought you were Gilbert's new chauffeur, but...” She put her feet on the floor and straightened her skirt. “I've seen a picture of you.”
“By a man named Inglehoff. Remember him?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Yes,” she drawled, uncertain. “We met at a party, a fundraiser. He was a short man and mostly bald and he wore the most atrocious tie. What does that have to do with you? Who are you?”
I passed her one of my newly-minted cards, just to say that I had given one away. Clarissa King was far from impressed by it, and had her manners been a touch more slack she would have tossed it over her shoulder into the back seat. As it was, she sneered at it and placed it gently in her purse.
“So you don't remember anything about him? Not two hours ago you described him as a beautiful man and a strong man.”
Now her eyes got big. Her hand swiped at the door handle and I caught it before she had the chance to get out of the car. We struggled for a moment and that seemed to awaken something else in her: the gun. She had threatened me with a gun and I had taken it from her. The horror of that moment hit her directly, and it made her whole body fall limp.
“I could have killed you,” she whispered. “Why would I do such a thing?” I let her go and she grabbed on to her forehead with both hands. “I'm so sorry, I don't know...why I would...”
“Because you were hypnotized. By Inglehoff. Listen, you remember you had a gun and you tried to shoot me with it, so whatever you did under the ether is locked inside your head. Do you remember what you did before that?”
“I...I went to lunch.”
“That's right. Do you know who you had lunch with?”
Clarissa King thought, and when she couldn't come up with the answer she slammed her hand against her thigh in frustration. “I don't know her name! She's one of my oldest and dearest friends and I don't know her name!”
“Martha Wilson,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “What's happening to me? I don't know the name of the friend I had lunch with and even when you say it, it doesn't sound familiar.”
“Maybe it isn't,” I replied. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but when Inglehoff put you under, you stayed under. He's a dangerous man, Mrs. King. He's responsible for the death of Congressman Dixon's legal counsel and he placed you square in harm's way. I've got to find him, so if you can remember anything, and I mean, anything...”
She looked straight ahead, at a sign on the hardware store wall that announced in crude, hand-painted red letters the sale of claw hammers at a rate of 30 per cent off. “I saw him this morning,” said Clarissa. “He...kissed me.”
“Do you know where?”
“On the lips, of course.”
“No, where did you see him?”
“Oh, I see. An apartment. I believe it was in San Cristobal. Shabby little thing.”
“Do you think you could find it again?”
She sat up. “Drive,” she said.
Will they find Inglehoff, and what will Rocky do to him once he finds him? Find out in the next episode of The Adventures of Rocky Stone!
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