Crashed (11 page)

“Holy shit,” Louie said, practically throwing the necklace at me. “Bunny’s? Get it away from me.” He rubbed his hands together as though to wipe off any traces of contact. “If I fenced that thing in Timbuktu, Rabbits would know.”

“Nice piece,” I said.

“I ain’t met her, but that’s what everybody says.”

“I meant the necklace.”

“Yeah, and it might as well be radioactive.”

I checked the mirror, just in case. They weren’t behind me, and I found I missed them. “So I’ll use it as a paperweight,” I said.

Just to be
on the safe side, I checked into a Travelodge in Encino. I doubted that
the girls
, as I was coming to think of them, were
likely to come around and kick in my door, but they knew where I’d been sleeping. I don’t usually let people know where I’m sleeping.

Not that I did much sleeping that night.

I’d seen a lot of lighted windows, on both sides of the streets we’d driven down, and glowing in the houses that looked onto Westwind Circle. Lighted windows aren’t my favorite thing, although I can usually deal with them. There’s something about those warm yellow rectangles, with the unavoidable implication that there are families inside, still whole and complete, safe and comfortable, living by the rules and loving each other. I know it’s not always that way, I know that terrible things can happen in a lighted window, but that’s not what I see. What I see is one of the candles that holds the world together. When the world seems to be running along as it should, which it is most of the time in the part of it I’m lucky enough to live in, I sometimes think of it as held together by millions of people just doing their best, looking out for each other, keeping their promises. Nothing heroic, nothing dramatic, just plain everyday goodness. And when I’m thinking this way I see the structure of the world as an enormous palace made of light, with the walls and floors and ceilings held in place by the energy from millions of candles, and all those candles are in the hands of people who are doing the things they should, the little tiny things they told each other they’d do. And I’m somewhere outside, looking for a dark window I can break in through.

Especially since the divorce.

Like I say, I can usually deal with it. But in the Travelodge’s king size bed that night, I had Thistle Downing on my mind, and it didn’t make me feel even a little bit like someone carrying a candle.

“Three Wishes,”
Rodd
Hull said, so proudly he might have thought of it himself. “Three films, one film for each of the wishes. Taken
together,” he said, framing the rectangle of a motion picture screen with his thumbs and index fingers and panning the room with it, “taken together, they comprise a complete arc in the life of a modern-day woman. An arc that takes her from repression to empowerment.” He sat back, picked up a paper cup full of coffee with his pinky extended, and waited for people to fall out of their chairs.

I said, “Wow.”

“Get to basics,” Trey Annunziato said.

Rodd Hull looked disappointed. He wore a photographer’s vest with more pockets than a pool table, a meticulously wrinkled linen shirt, and jeans that had been pressed to a razor-sharp crease. Around his neck was a lanyard dangling one of those incredibly expensive little viewfinders that cameramen sometimes wear when they’re not sure everyone on the set knows how important they are. Rodd Hull, I had learned on Google the previous evening, had once received an Emmy nomination for daytime drama, which I guess meant soap operas. He was obviously determined to see this as a step up.

“Actually,” I said to Trey. “I’d like at least to get the framework. The main, um, story elements, the other characters, sort of who’s who. Might help me see the production’s weak spots, from a security perspective. Maybe anticipate problems.”

Trey looked at her watch for the fourth time in the ten minutes we’d been in the room. “It’s your morning,” she said. “Did you know that Rodd almost won an Emmy?”

I expressed suitable awe and amazement, and Rodd got to practice looking modest.

“What’s so thrilling,” Rodd said, only slightly grimly, “is that we’re using an entirely new modality to tell the story. Sex. When you think about the women’s movement, it’s obvious that it’s always been basically about sex. The great metaphor:
Woman on the bottom
. It applied to everything, but it began in the bedroom.”

“Not in my bedroom, it didn’t,” said Tatiana Himmelman. Tatiana, four feet tall, three feet wide, wearing a well-waxed flattop and jeans festooned with chains, was the production supervisor, the person responsible for making sure that everything necessary to the day’s filming was in place: performers, props, set elements, crew, everything. In other words, she did the actual work.

“Let’s not think about your bedroom, Tat,” Rodd Hull said. “It’s just too grim.”

“As opposed to yours, Rodd,” Tatiana said, “which uses the old set from
Romper Room
.”

Trey said, “Children. Play in a time-efficient manner, please. We have a movie here that’s already two days behind schedule, and every day costs me about twenty-one thousand dollars.” She got up and went to the chalkboard at the front of the room, which was actually a three-walled set built to impersonate a high school classroom for reasons I preferred not to speculate about. Tatiana and I were crammed into desks in the front row while Rodd Hull sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk in front of the chalkboard. Trey, wearing a golden dog-collar today, along with a pale yellow silk business suit that would have turned heads at a Braille convention, had been leaning against a wall until the squabbling prompted her into motion. Three of her hard guys, one of whom was Eduardo, bristled at the world in the corners. All of them bulged in the obvious places. Eduardo was obviously thrilled at being taken for a walk. He was wearing black leather gloves as though to conceal the tiny biceps in his fingers.

Trey picked up a piece of chalk and said, “Here are your basics.” She drew three horizontal lines on the board, each about two feet long, stacking one above the other, but staggering them so that the second line began below the one-quarter point in the top line, and the third line began a quarter of a way into the second. Next to the top line, Trey wrote, “First Wish.” She wrote “Second Wish” next to the second line and, apparently
getting impatient with the process, put the number “3” next to the bottom line. “This is our time line,” she said.

It looked like this:

“Each of these lines is one of the movies,” she said. “The staggered lines represent start dates. You can get plot details and arches—”

“Arcs,” Rodd Hull said.

“I’m paying for them,” Trey said, “and I’ll call them whatever I want.” She waited to see whether Rodd would respond, but he found something that needed to be viewed through his viewfinder, and he viewed it.

Trey drew a dot roughly in the middle of the top line. “This is about where we’ll be tomorrow morning, roughly nine weeks into the process. We’ve used all the time until now getting the scripts right, doing the schedules and the budgets, developing the graphics for the titles and the ads, because we’re going to start advertising this movie long before we finish shooting it. We’ve hired Todd—sorry, Rodd—and Tatiana, and all the other talented people who will actually make the films. We’ve cast all the secondary parts, even the crowd scenes. And we’ve shot a bunch of second-unit stuff—cars in motion, the outsides of buildings, some scenes that don’t have our star in them. And finally, we’ve done some doubles work, by which I mean using a double for Thistle, wearing Thistle’s wardrobe—mostly shot from the back, walking on sidewalks, going through doors, getting onto elevators, and so forth.” She lowered the hand with the chalk in it and looked over at Rodd. “What have I forgotten?”

“Nothing whatsoever,” Rodd said. “Absolutely nothing. Brilliant, just brilliant.”

“We also designed and built the sets,” Tatiana said without
a glance at Rodd. “We identified and locked the locations. We leased the equipment we’re shooting with. We hired the publicist and the still man.”

“Thank you, Tatiana,” Trey said. Then, to me, she said, “And all of that hasn’t given us one second of what we’re all here to do, which is to get a single frame of film on Thistle Downing. And here’s where it gets hairy.”

She put the chalk on the dot in the top line and drew a vertical straight down so it intersected the other two horizontals. Then she measured off about another eight inches, made another dot on the top line, and drew another vertical line straight down.

Now it looked like this:

“This is it,” she said. “This little bit of space between those two vertical lines. This is the twelve-day period when we live or die. This period, which begins
tomorrow morning
, everybody, is the window of time during which we have Miss Thistle Downing in our sights, and I mean that literally. She’s going to be here, she’s going to be babysat every second of the day and night, and she’s going to work her ass off, twenty-four hours straight, if necessary. And when we see the last of her, right about
here
”—She tapped the top of the second vertical line—“we’ll be finished with every scene she does in all three movies.”

“Why stack it like that?” I asked.

“Because,” Rodd Hull said, “Miss Downing is a piece of work the likes of which you have never had to experience, if life has been kind of you. Remember that cute little kid? Well, forget about her. What’s going to walk in here tomorrow morning is the kind of thing that makes Catholic priests think about exorcism. Which is not to say,” he added hurriedly, with a nervous
glance at Trey, “that she isn’t beautiful. Made up just right, shot carefully, lighted perfectly, with lots of soft-focus in the close-ups—the
facial
close-ups, anyway—people will recognize her.”

“What about that sore on her lip?” Trey demanded.

“The good news is that Doc says it’s not herpes. The bad news is that it’s going away at its own rate, which is slower than we’d like. So for the first couple of days, she’s Claudette Colbert.”

Trey said, “Who?”

“Movie star from the thirties and forties. She was pathologically convinced that the left side of her face was her good side. People called her right profile ‘the dark side of the moon.’ ”

“It’s not that bad,” Tatiana said. “Poor little chickie, she’s taking in like exactly zero vitamins. I’m not surprised she’s got a couple of sores here and there.”

“A little sunlight wouldn’t hurt, either,” said Rodd Hull. “She probably hasn’t seen her shadow in years.”

“Well, just stop piling on,” Tatiana said. “She’s not, like, dead, you know. You think she won’t pick up on this attitude? Anyway, there’s more talent scattered on the floor after she gets her hair cut than you’ve demonstrated in your entire career.”

“Well, of course, she’s our little
star
,” Rodd Hull said, his eyebrows practically at his hairline. “We’ll strew petals at her feet.”

I was well into developing a strong dislike for Rodd Hull.

“Good idea,” Trey said. “Tatiana. Tonight send a couple of gnomes to three or four flower shops. Tell them to buy the oldest flowers in the place, the stuff that’s going to get tossed. They should try to get a deal. I want those flowers stripped of petals, and I want those petals in buckets—no, in big gift boxes—at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Eduardo,” she said. “Make a note for me to find out about the profitability of flower shops, maybe a change of pace for dope dealers. We can build a chain. What should we call it, Mr. Bender?”

“Todd, I mean Rodd, here, already named it,” I said. “Petals at Her Feet.”