Crashed (23 page)

So I gave her all of it, including the little gift box of Rohypnol someone had so thoughtfully left on Thistle’s doorstep. The only thing I left out was the banged-up white Chevy, because I had no idea what to make of it, and Trey had denied any knowledge of the two girls who had been driving it. When I’d finished, we sat there in that parody of a schoolroom like two students who’d been sentenced to silent detention for twenty years.

She reached up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Why didn’t they just shoot Thistle?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.

“I don’t know. She may not have been alone. There were three dirty wineglasses on the floor. Maybe whoever it was heard voices through the door, didn’t want to have to kill a bunch of people. Maybe they figured killing Thistle Downing would start a firestorm in the media, so they’d let her do the job herself with the pills. But the truth is that I don’t even know why they shot Jimmy.”

“Because he saw them?”

“He was just a guy in a car,” I said. “How would they know what he was looking for? At first, I figured he’d spotted your husband and maybe he’d reacted somehow. But then he’d have had his gun out, and he didn’t. And if he didn’t give them some sort of reaction, then why shoot him? They were there to leave those pills for Thistle and sneak away, not to shoot people out in the street. So that leaves another possibility, which is that someone told them Jimmy would be there.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Well, certainly you don’t think that I—”

“Did you?”

“That’s both unintelligent and offensive.” She pushed the chair back a couple of inches. Her hands were on the desk, all the fine bones visible beneath the skin. She was at least ten pounds underweight—not as thin as Thistle, but whip-thin, and I thought again of Thistle’s imitation. Trey, I realized, was one of the people Thistle might have grown up to be, if she’d remained a star and held the drugs at bay.

“I find it offensive that he’s dead,” I said. “And I didn’t talk to anyone.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and willed her face to soften. When she opened them, she said, “I’m sorry about your friend. I know how it is to lose people. But you have to realize that what I want most right now is to get these movies made. We can avoid another exchange like this if you’ll keep that in mind. I wouldn’t do anything, not anything, that would endanger this project.”

It didn’t cost anything, so I said, “I’m sorry.”

She nodded once, just acknowledgment. She said, “There are times one doesn’t want to be right, and this is one of them. I said yesterday that this was the critical period, but I never thought it would get to murder.”

“I can’t imagine why you didn’t. You’re surrounded by people who shoot other people the way most of us choose a breakfast cereal. And you said it yourself: there are a lot of them who don’t like your new direction.” I pushed the scrap of canvas toward her. “You cut this out. How serious are you about it?”

“You mean, do I actually think my husband is involved?” She put her face into her hands and rubbed it for a second, looking briefly like the young woman in her twenties she actually was. Then she pulled her hands back and raked her hair off her face. “I think he could be. He’s a big enough shit, and he doesn’t like the position I’ve put him in.”

“Which is?”

“He married me in the firm belief that he would be the master, that I would love, honor, and obey, by which he meant I’d get up and cook breakfast and wear an apron all day and have kids who looked just like him, and leave all the hard stuff, all the
guy
stuff, to him. Stuff like running my father’s family. He was going to be King Tony the First. He did everything except go out and buy a crown.”

“What’s his full name?”

“Tony Ramirez. Antonio, actually, but he likes Tony. It’s easier for him to remember. He’s not exactly Mensa material. And he doesn’t expect anybody else to be, either. I think his first unpleasant surprise came when I didn’t change all the monograms so I could become Trey Ramirez. And it’s a good thing I didn’t, since I’d be changing it back now anyway.”

“Divorced?”

“All but.” She picked up the scrap of painted canvas and looked at it as though from a great height, then put it face down on the desk. “A few weeks more, and the paper sword will fall on the knot binding us together. Then he’ll really be out in the cold. Just another unemployed hunk of muscle with a good profile. So, yeah, I think he might be behind this. Among the more macho guys who do chores for us, there are some who figure that working for my father’s son-in-law beats the hell out of working for his daughter.”

“
Could
he run the business? You say he’s not smart, but how smart would he have to be?”

“He operates at about the same level of intelligence as a microwave oven. But some of the guys who’ll back him are counting on that. They’re figuring that he’ll be so busy counting his money and looking at himself in a mirror that they’ll pretty much have things their way. And to answer your second question, to run an operation as complex as the one my father put together, you have to be
very
smart.”

“Personal question?”

She shook her head, and then offered me the sliver of a smile. “Oh, why not?”

“You’re too intelligent to marry a household appliance. Why?”

“Would you buy it if I told you I was girlishly swept off my feet?”

“Not by a tailor’s dummy.”

“Okay,” she said. “Tony is really good. He has two skills. The first one is to stand there and let people look at him. He’s pretty enough to preserve in amber, and he knows how to use it. The second thing is talking people around. You’ve dealt with sociopaths?”

“Who hasn’t? In our line of work, I mean.”

“Well, Tony qualifies. It’s not just that he doesn’t have a conscience, although he doesn’t. I think he could shoot you and his major worry would be the price of the bullet. But mostly it’s the way he can read you, play to your weaknesses, make you feel like—like whatever your question is, he’s the answer. He read me down to my gene sequence. I was twenty-two and dumb and in full revolt against everything my father wanted for me. Like most kids in criminal families, I was brought up on the straight and narrow, Catholic school and everything. Tony was so far off the path my father had planned for me he might as well have been on another continent. And he played that for all it was worth. Defying my father, who didn’t like Mexicans and would have been horrified at me marrying some mid-level knuckleduster. And aiming that face straight at all that pent-up Catholic schoolgirl lust. I’d never felt so brave and alive in my life.”

“Danger is addictive.”

“Sure, but I knew I wasn’t really the one who was in the line of fire. My father might just have resolved the situation by having him killed. Dad favored direct solutions. Tony said he was willing to risk that, and I have to admit that my reaction was
pretty much,
For little me?
I figured it proved he loved me.” She sat back, hearing herself. “I’m telling you this because I suppose there’s a chance you’re going to come up against him.”

I knew the next remark might take me straight off the map, but I needed to say it, if only to begin to figure out how much trouble I was in. “But your father
didn’t
kill Tony.”

Trey’s eyes were on me, and they didn’t waver a hundredth of an inch. She held my gaze, and then said, “That’s right. He might have, in a week or two, but he didn’t. As you know, his plans, whatever they were, were rudely interrupted.”

I said, “Yes,” and let it hang.

After a moment, she said, “I don’t actually know that Tony did it. Not for a fact.”

This was pretty close to exactly what I didn’t want to hear. “But you suspected it.”

“I tried not to. Tony and I were already married. That’s why my father was so furious. We eloped. I was in New York on business, staying at the Carlyle, and one evening there was a knock on the door, and surprise, surprise, guess who. We had a ridiculously romantic week, real gigolo stuff. And I fell for it. We stopped in Las Vegas on the way home. I thought my father was going to have a heart attack. Me, trading my last name for
Ramirez
.”

“You’re aware,” I said, “that people think you had your father done.”

“Sure,” she said. “And I let them. I’m a girl, remember? Everybody figured I was going to be Miss Valentine, the sweetheart of the underworld. So I took the blame, and it made a lot of people afraid of me, people who wouldn’t have been afraid of me otherwise. It was useful.”

“And I might be up against the guy who had your father killed.”

She drew a square on the surface of the table with a carnelian-tipped index finger. “Believe me,” she said, “I never thought
it would get to this point.” She erased the imaginary square with her palm and offered me a slender smile. “And maybe it won’t.”

“Whether it does or not, here’s the problem. I’m only one guy. I haven’t got a squad I can deploy. I can check out your ex, or I can stick with Thistle. I can’t do both. And I can’t protect this whole movie, although I’m pretty sure that Thistle is the obvious target.”

“She’s the only indispensable element.” Trey said.

“But you’ve got resources,” I said. “It’s just you and me here, and nobody else is listening. Why don’t you kill somebody?”

She didn’t look surprised, although she let a three-heartbeat pause go by before answering. “Kill whom? If I put Tony under, I’m the first place the cops will look. Lots of public rancor there, wrangling over assets, the whole mess.”

“Somebody close to him. Somebody you think might be working for him, helping with this. Send a message right back, let them know that the film is not to be fucked with.”

“Aren’t you the cold one? Kill this one, kill that one. I thought you were a burglar, not a hitman.”

“They killed a friend of mine. Somebody’s probably going to die for that, anyway.”

“I see,” she said. “But it’ll wait until you have some time on your hands.”

“It might, it might not. So what about it? There’s nothing like a well-placed bullet for getting people’s attention.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m supposed to be turning my back on all that. Kicking it off with a murder seems inconsistent, to say the least.”

“Just a thought.” I got up. “By the way, as long as we’re talking, you know that this movie isn’t good for Thistle.”

“That’s on my conscience, not yours.” She stood as well. “And listen. Underneath all the dope and the psychic wreckage, Thistle may be a perfectly nice girl. I admit that. You might be right about her. And you know what? That’s too bad. For my
purposes, she’s irreplaceable. She did to the whole world what Tony did to me. Hundreds of millions of people bought into what she was selling, and she blew them off. She’s my primary asset here. I’m deadly serious about protecting her, up to the point where it endangers her making the movie. Don’t make any mistakes about that.”

“Noted,” I said.

“And as you said,
as long as we’re talking
, I think you have a problem with women. You sympathize with Thistle in a way you wouldn’t if she were male. And you don’t take me as seriously as you would if I’d been my father’s son instead of his daughter. But I’m telling you now. I am every bit as dangerous as my father was. And if you find yourself torn between taking care of Thistle or taking care of me, just remember that I’m an Annunziato, and we don’t deal well with betrayal. Is that clear?”

“Transparent.”

“Your job is to help me get this movie done, no matter what you think about it. Understand?”

“No one would accuse you of ambiguity.”

“When it’s all over, we’ll sit down and discuss things.” She smiled and put a hand on my upper arm. “We can probably wind up friends, as hard as that may be to believe right now.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “A man can always use a friend.”

Her hand in mine was a surprise.

Trey had commandeered a large screening room for the press conference. It seated maybe forty people, and from the sound of it, it was jammed. We could hear the hubbub the moment we opened the door into the backstage area, a jumble of voices like a crowd scene in an old radio show.

The moment she heard them, Thistle reached over and grabbed my hand. Her palm was damp and her hand was as small as a child’s.

It was dark backstage, but there was a spill of light from the proscenium, which was brighter than the equator at high noon. We came in stage left, about ten feet from the brilliant stage, and the first things I saw were two sixty-inch flat-screen TVs with a tall wood-and-canvas director’s chair dead center between them. The chair was on the monitors, too. And then I saw the five gigantic blow-ups of Thistle, taken when she was fourteen or fifteen, propped up on easels. Judging from their underexposure and general graininess, they were probably blowups from video. Technically they were a mess, but their message was clear, and it was sick enough to stop Thistle in her tracks.

“How could she?”

“She’s smart, Thistle. She knows what her visual is. You, talking about doing this kind of a movie, in front of those pictures.”