Crashed (18 page)

Get out and check the Chevy, or sit here?

I angled the mirror back toward the Porsche and studied the activity. With a sinking feeling I recognized Detective Al Tallerico, a hard case from Hollywood Division, who’d almost arrested me twice for jobs I hadn’t done. He must have been promoted to Homicide. I would have to walk past him to get to the Chevy. Tallerico looked busy, but not so busy he wouldn’t look at anyone who approached the crime scene on foot. And if he looked at me, he’d recognize me. And if he recognized me, he’d detain me on general principles, a crook in the vicinity of a homicide. And if he detained me, Rabbits Stennet would see the wrong videotape. And, and, and.

So stay in the car.

Except.

Except that Doc was standing in the door of the Camelot Arms, gesturing with a certain amount of urgency for me to get
out
of the car and get my ass across the street. He was flapping a hand at me, and it was only a matter of moments before one of the cops noticed. I held up my hand in a
stop
gesture and got out of the car into a morning that was entirely too bright, too bright for the aftermath of what had happened in the Porsche last night, and far too bright for my own personal comfort with Al Tallerico less than twenty yards away.

The key to being inconspicuous is to look like you know where you’re going and why. So I made a show of glancing at my watch and then turned my head away from the cops, like someone making sure he isn’t about to step in front of a speeding bus, and crossed the street, just another citizen on a perfectly upright errand. Every step, I expected to hear Tallerico’s voice yelling for me to stop, and every step I didn’t, and after a certain number of steps, I was inside the doorway of the Camelot Arms and Doc was grabbing my sleeve.

“She got her hands on something,” he said. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. “I need help.” He tugged me inside, toward a stairway.

“
You
need help?” I said. “What skill set do you think I possess?”

“You can walk,” he said, pulling me along. “She needs to be walked.”

“Walking I can do. How could she have gotten anything? I thought you knocked her out last night.”

We were most of the way up the stairs now, and the second story yawned in front of us. “I did,” Doc said. “All I can figure is that somebody delivered. Come on, pick it up. I’m afraid she’ll heave and then aspirate it. It’s remarkable she hasn’t already done that, the way she’s been living.”

The second-floor hallway was dim, barren, and windowless: just filthy linoleum, finger-marked walls, and doors on either side, most of them absolute arsenals of locks. It smelled of damp wood, with a sharp note of urine. The door three down, on the right, stood open. Doc towed me the rest of the way down the hall, and we went through the open door into Thistle Downing’s world.

The door opened into what I supposed would be called the living room, although there wasn’t much on view to recommend the life that was being lived there. It was cramped, maybe ten feet by twelve, and haphazardly furnished with a threadbare,
blood-red Oriental carpet in an abstract pineapple pattern, set crookedly on the linoleum floor, and a sagging couch, missing one front leg, all of it covered, except for the arm nearest me, with a dirty bedsheet. The carpet, the bedsheet, and the exposed arm of the couch were pockmarked with cigarette burns, as though butts had been laid down anywhere and everywhere to smolder forgotten. Big water stains surrounding some of them announced the places where fires had been doused. More water stains created a map of ghost continents on the ceiling. Grit scraped beneath my feet and dust rats huddled in the corners. It felt like the room had been sealed for a long time. The air smelled like cheese gone wrong.

Other than the sofa and a badly abused coffee table, the only pieces of furniture in the room were four old-fashioned standing floor lamps, probably rescued from dumpsters. They stood in the corners or leaned in exhausted poses against a wall. Scarves of red and orange had been draped over the shades, along with bright, cheap plastic beads that looked like the ones thrown from floats in the Mardi Gras. Between the scarves and the beads, the lamps reminded me of old Gypsy women. On the wall opposite the door, two small windows had been sloppily covered with aluminum foil.

“Through there,” Doc said, pointing at a doorway to our right. The room on the other side was darker than the one we were in, and I realized that Doc or someone had turned on one of the floor lamps in the living room. I followed him through the door and found myself in an even smaller room. This one had no furniture at all except for two more standing lamps and a mattress on the floor against the far wall. On the mattress I saw a crumpled form wrapped in something white and shapeless.

One hand hung over the edge of the mattress, dangling palm-up from an almost childishly slender wrist. Doc ripped a scarf off one of the lights and turned it on, and the blue veins in the wrist leapt into sharp relief. The figure did not move.

White and tightly curled, she looked like something that had been wadded up and tossed. “You’re sure she’s not, um—”

“Nope.” Doc pulled out the flask and took a nip, then screwed the top back on. “If she were dead, we’d be long gone. She’s out, though, and I mean out. Right through the transparent wall. You could set off firecrackers and she wouldn’t hear them. Heartbeat is steady, nothing wrong with her breathing. Skin’s not cold, so the circulation is all right. Her pupils are dilated, but it’d be a surprise if they weren’t. If she were conscious, she could probably see through the floor.” He bent over her and wrapped a big hand around the small wrist. “This is either gonna work or it isn’t and if it doesn’t, we’ll have to get her stomach pumped.” He looked up at me. “You gonna stand there, or you gonna help?”

“Right,” I said. “Walk her.”

“Get her other side.” I hesitated, reluctant to step onto the mattress wearing my shoes, and Doc said, “For God’s sake. When do you think was the last time these sheets were washed? Don’t be so fucking delicate. Just get her.”

So I got in between her and the wall and took her other arm, which was folded under her face, straightened it, and imitated Doc’s actions, putting the arm around my shoulders and grabbing the dangling hand. Throughout all of this, the unconscious woman never moved, groaned, or gave any sign that she knew she was being manhandled. I crouched there, her arm around my shoulders, and Doc said, “Up on three. Careful to come up with me, or I’ll put my back out, sure as the sun rises. You set?”

I allowed as how I was set.

“One … two … 
three
,” Doc said, and the two of us straightened in unison. Doc grunted with the effort, but I had been anticipating much more weight and I came up too fast, so that for a moment it felt as though she and I were going to topple over onto Doc.

“Jesus,” Doc said. “You want to carry both of us? Now
come on, just haul her off the mattress and get her into the middle of the floor.” One of her feet squealed on the linoleum, and I winced. “Toughen up,” Doc said. “You’re not going to do her any good if you treat her like she’s some kind of goddamn fawn. She’s tougher than you are. If she wasn’t she’d be dead.”

The two of us now stood in the middle of the small bedroom with Thistle Downing dangling between us, limp as a Slinky. She was tiny. I was at least fourteen inches taller than she, so she couldn’t have been much above five feet, and she was light enough to be porous. Her arms and wrists were so slender I could close my hand around her forearm, with room to spare. The white garment she was wearing proved to be a terrycloth bathrobe that had long ceased to be dirty and was now certifiably filthy. It said
PLAZA HOTEL
in a crimson cursive script on the left, beside the lapel, and its bottom hem brushed the floor. Both it and Thistle had come a long way from the Plaza.

“Walk,” Doc commanded. “Not fast, but steady. And don’t lift her so much. Let her feet drag, or she won’t try to move them.”

And so the two of us walked, Thistle’s feet trailing behind, her head hanging down, veiled with hair. The hair was snarled but fine, slightly curly, a little past shoulder-length and the reddish-gold color of flax. It had been chopped any old how—I guessed she’d done it herself—and it smelled of cigarettes. I hadn’t actually seen her face yet. Her hand was cold and damp in mine. Doc kept up a stream of words, encouraging, cajoling, challenging Thistle to start walking, but her feet just dragged along the floor, no livelier than the robe’s hem, until we hit the edge of the carpet in the living room, and some impulse—probably an automatic reaction to a possible stumble—brought one of her feet forward, and she took two steps and sagged again.

“Turn around,” Doc said. “Drag her off the carpet again and then back onto it.” We did, and when we hit the carpet this time Thistle managed four steps. We reversed direction to get back onto the bare floor and repeat the procedure.

“That’s it, darlin’,” Doc said. “I knew you could do it. Boy, whatever you took last night, you ought to put it on your
do not do
list. Another couple of whatever they were, you’d have gone out of here in a bag. You know what they were? You know how many you took?” No response. “That’s okay, it’ll wait till later.
That’s
right, sweetheart, walk, you’re not a goddamn mermaid. You’ve got a big day ahead of you, lots of people waiting for you, half a dozen of them sitting around with mirrors and brushes, just can’t wait to make you beautiful. This’ll be an easy day, honey, five or six little shots, a few lines, and you can come home. Nothing compared to what you used to do. In the old days, you’d have done all of that and more before breakfast. You know Lillian Gish? Maybe a century before your time, but the first great American film actress, right? Wonderful story about Lillian Gish, somebody told me yesterday. She’d been working on a movie with D. W. Griffith back in the twenties, when they just went outdoors and shot in sunlight and nobody had to talk, although the great ones always did, always played their scenes like everyone would hear them. Even the indoors sets were just three walls and no roof, so the sunlight could come in, did you know that? So Lillian Gish had been working her elegant ass off for months, all over California, and then they had the big premiere and she went with Griffith, since he was her director. And when the movie was over, you know what she said to him? She said, ‘Did I do all that? All I remember is the waiting.’ ”

Thistle made a choked sound and it took me a moment to recognize it as a laugh.

“That’s good, baby,” Doc said. “Keep those feet going, and let’s see if you can’t get your eyes open for a couple of minutes. By the way, the tall ugly guy on the other side of you is named Junior. Hey, Junior, do you know any movie stories? I just told the only one I know.”

I wasn’t exactly a film encyclopedia—none of my books had led me to it—but I knew a few things, one of which I had picked
up that morning, courtesy of Rodd Hull. “Um, Claudette Colbert,” I said.

Thistle said something that was all sibilants, and Doc said, “What, sugar? What did you say?”

“Shaid … she’sh … good,” Thistle said, very slowly.

“She, um, hated the left side of her face,” I said, trying desperately to remember Rodd’s story, “and she always—”

“Timing,” Thistle said. “Had, uhhhhhh, timing.”

“Yeah, timing,” I said, and glanced over Thistle’s head, still hanging on her chest, at Doc, who made a rolling gesture with his free hand that meant,
Keep talking
. “So,” I said, “her face,” and Thistle said something. “What?”

“Side … moon,” she whispered.

“Right, dark side of the moon.” I considered and rejected a bunch of stories that suddenly came to mind, and then remembered something else about Colbert. “She had one of the funniest lines I ever heard,” I said. “In a movie made in the middle thirties. I don’t remember the name of it, but she’s a poor girl who’s working in a hat shop and having an affair with an unhappily married older man, and the man’s unpleasant wife comes in to try on some hats. Colbert chooses one for her and helps her put it on, and studies her for a minute, and then says, ‘That hat does something for you. It—it gives you a chin.’ ”

This time Doc laughed, too, and Thistle managed a couple of unclassifiable sounds, more damp little whuffles than guffaws, but progress. I was ready to talk about Bogart in
Casablanca
, how George Raft turned the part down, but I remembered how young Thistle was, and my chat with Rina the prior afternoon came to mind. I did ten or fifteen reasonably interesting minutes on dead wet girl ghosts, on the derivation and iconography of dead wet girls in Asian film, and by the time I’d used that up, Thistle was almost keeping up with us, although she still hadn’t lifted her head, and without us she would have fallen in a heap.

“Keep it up,” Doc said. “You’re doing great.”

“That’s it,” I said. “I can’t think of anything else.”

“So make something up. Talk about whatever comes to mind,” Doc said. “How’d you get your face so banged up? Have you seen his face, Thistle? Looks like somebody thought it was a piece of beef and tried to grind it. Go on, take a look. You can do it.”

The head turned a few inches, and the flax-colored hair parted just enough for me to see an eye, surprisingly deep green, uptilted at the end, and heavy-lidded. Then she let her head drop again and stumbled, but we had her in our grasp, and a few steps later her feet were moving again.

“Isn’t he ugly?” Doc said. “Tell her, Junior. Tell her what happened to your face.”

So for the third time in two days I described my encounter with Rabbits’s chandelier and Rottweilers. Doc got so interested he almost walked us into the couch, and I had to pull us left to avoid a stumble. I could feel the energy returning slowly to Thistle’s body; she was bearing more of her own weight and walking less erratically, so I stretched the story out, elaborated on it, exaggerated the number of marital aids and the size of the dogs, turned the swing on the chandelier into the kind of adventure Tarzan might have had if Tarzan had been an interior decorator. She laughed two or three times, although they could have been coughs. By the time I finished, she was walking relatively well, and we stopped in the center of the carpet.