Crashed (30 page)

“When she could,” said her TV dad.

“Yeah, when she could. When she could still stand up, when she could hit her marks, when she could find the light, when she could say her lines, when she could remember not to look at the camera, when she didn’t decide to fuck up the take just for the fun of it, when she—”

“When she could keep everybody employed,” I said. “When she could lay the golden eggs for you to scramble.”

“Without me—” Luella Downing began.

“Got it,” I said. “You were the hero. And basically, you don’t give a shit.”

Luella Downing tapped her cigarette into an ashtray, amputating an inch of ash. “That’s about right,” she said. “If I got upset every time she decided to disappear—”

“It would wreck your card game,” I said. I turned to go. “By the way, Thistle’s pop there has a pair of aces in the hole. But what do you care? It’s Thistle’s money.”

A second after I slammed the door, hard enough to shake the frame, I heard glass break, and then I heard some more. The gold-veined glass squares, I figured, hitting the floor and taking all that grandeur with them.

Hidden Valley is tucked away in the mountains between LA and Van Nuys, reached by an anonymous-looking road that drops suddenly and steeply off of Coldwater Canyon. Once you’re down, you find yourself in a grassy expanse of eight million-dollar ranch-style houses, each on an acre or so of what I suppose the residents think of as ranch. Here and there you see a stable, nicer than lots of houses in the Valley, with horses looking over the doors of the stalls with that serious, dreamy expression that horses always wear.

I pulled into the driveway of Lissa Wellman’s house just as a silvery Lexus SUV started to back out. The woman driving it stopped, leaned out of the window, and looked back at me. Her hair in the sunlight was a rich coppery color found nowhere in nature, and bright enough to make me wince.

I got out and walked up to the driver’s door. The woman at the wheel wore big sunglasses that emphasized bold cheekbones and a jaw that was surprisingly square in a face so feminine. She was wearing the kind of makeup that was designed for the old Technicolor process—vivid, expert, and none too subtle.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Are you going to rob me?”

“Not today, Miss Wellman. I need to talk to you about Thistle.”

“I don’t talk to the press,” she said. “Especially not about Thistle.”

“I’m a friend of hers. She’s disappeared.”

She shook her head slowly. “Oh, my. Still, that’s more or less the story, isn’t it? She’s been trying to disappear for years.”

“Well, there’s some question, in my mind at least, as to whether she disappeared on her own this time, or whether it was someone else’s idea.”

Lissa Wellman let out a sigh. “I hate to hear that, but I haven’t seen her.”

“I didn’t think you had. I’m just hoping for information. Something that might tell me where to look.”

She glanced in her rear-view mirror. “Move your car so I can get out, and come with me,” she said. “I’m on my way to see Henry.” She put the car back into reverse and said, “But we can talk in front of Henry with no problem. Henry’s dead.”

“My husband,” Lissa
Wellman said, carefully negotiating a curve. She drove as though a fortune-teller had warned her about the day. “Nicest man I ever knew. Not necessarily the most exciting or the most amusing—actually, Paul Lynde was probably the most amusing—but Henry was nice all the way to his bone marrow. Niceness goes a long way.”

“It’s got staying power, too,” I said.

“You know something about it, don’t you? I’m afraid that puts you in the minority. It seems to me to be getting rarer and rarer. We value other things now. Intelligence, I guess, or wit, or the ability to stay half an hour ahead of what everyone else is thinking or doing. Or even wearing. But I’ll take niceness. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. In a small town, it’s important to be nice because you see the same people every day. In LA, you can be all kinds of awful because people generally only go by once. I read somewhere that the act that tells you most about someone is how they look at themselves in a mirror, but I’d say it’s how nice they are to someone they know they’ll never see again.”

“How long were you and Henry married?”

“We’re still married. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean we’re not married. But we were married in the flesh, so to speak, for thirty-three years.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing much. Oh, he worked when I was getting started. Sold real estate. But then I began to make some money, and he decided to take care of me. He took what I made and invested it in property and built it all into a very tidy little empire, which he called LissaLand. Apartment houses and regular houses and acreage up north, some kind of shopping mall, and, oh, I don’t know, all sorts of places I never even saw. But they all brought in money every month. And a week after he died, I sold all of it, every square foot. I didn’t want to be a landlord, have all those people’s lives in my hands.” She turned on the indicator for a left. “So here I am, old, previously famous, and rich.”

“Not all that old,” I said.

“Keep it up, dear,” she said. “You’re doing very well for someone who’s not in show business.” The left led us up a gentle hill, and then under an archway, heavy with climbing roses, that said
ROSEHAVEN
on a large metal plaque.

“By genetic standards,” she said, “I don’t suppose I’m very old. And the women in my family have always gone on just forever, I mean we continually live almost a century. But even if I disregard your flattery, there was no reason to expect I’d ever be famous, much less rich. The nicest thing anyone ever wrote about me was that I had a ‘modest but congenial talent.’ ” She shook her head, and the orange hair grabbed at the sunlight. “And he meant it as a
compliment
. But an angel took a hand and made me rich and semi-famous, and you know who she was.”

“I do. And I know that she thinks your talent was something special.”

“Really. How do you know that?”

“This is embarrassing to admit, but I had to read her journals
to figure out where she might be. She said you had a light in your center, and that’s what the camera saw. She was just reflective, she said, but you were a lighthouse.”

“That poor child. If I was a lighthouse, I did a rotten job of keeping her from hitting the rocks.”

Lissa guided the car along a narrow road that took us between banks of roses, not so much a formal garden as an almost impromptu arrangement of beds, all different sizes and shapes, with lawn stretching like green aisles between them. Here and there a stone bench sprouted, a double bench, actually, with seats facing in both directions and sharing a single backrest between them. Then a high wall appeared in front of us, nothing fancy, just rough, weathered redwood, grayed by exposure to the elements and absolutely perfect for the site. Lissa pulled around it, and I saw half a dozen parking spaces.

“This is beautiful,” I said.

“Isn’t it.” She undid her seat belt and got out of the car. “Like a lot of the good things in my life, it came from ‘Once a Witch.’ ” We were walking by now, heading back around the wall toward the roses. “Years ago, back in the 1980s, I had a part in another sitcom, ‘In the Family Way.’ You don’t have to pretend to remember me. I played the next-door neighbor, and I had brown hair and nothing but straight lines. We had this darling makeup man, Buddy Mendoza, who’d been forever with his friend Charles. Charles was an agent who’d done very well, and he and Buddy were just rolling in money. I once asked Buddy why he continued to work, and he said, ‘All my life I’ve been playing with makeup, Lissa, so why would I stop now?’ ”

She led me along a strip of meticulously mowed grass between beds of roses that stood four and five feet high, most of them in full bloom. The air was thick with scent, and I could hear the lazy drone of bees. “Anyway, during our second season on ‘Family Way,’ Charles died. When Buddy read his will, it turned out that he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes placed in a
hole and have a rose bush—he specified a damask rose, one of the very old varieties—planted on top of him, so he could supply nitrogen to the flowers. He’d bought a few acres up here but he and Buddy had never built on it. We go right, here.”

I followed her as she turned. The green path we were now taking led to a circle of roses perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with a smaller circle of grass in the center. “So Buddy brought Charles’s ashes up here and did what Charles had wanted, and that rose just exploded. You could practically see it grow. This was the time, I’m sure you’ll remember, when men like Buddy and Charles were dying by the dozen every day. And Buddy had brought some of his friends up here when he planted Charles’s rose. The idea sort of took hold in their hearts.”

We entered the circle of roses. At the center was a round bench, and Lissa sat down and indicated a rosebush, not very tall but profusely adorned with blooms of a red so dark it was almost black. There was a small pewter plaque in front of it that said
Henry Wellman
. “There he is,” she said. “My Henry. He chose the rose, which is called ‘Othello,’ because of its color, thank you, not as a comment on our marriage, which was mostly free of jealousy. By the time Henry passed on, there were almost fifty people buried up here, mostly gay men, but not all of them, and Buddy was fighting tooth and nail with the city, which wanted to close the place down. Anything new, anything beautiful, just brings out the worst in bureaucrats. By that time, I was rich from ‘Once a Witch’ and Henry’s real estate, and I bought all the property on both sides and hired lawyers. It took a bunch of lawsuits and newspaper stories and some stuff on television, but the little gray men eventually went away. The funny thing is that two of the men who fought the hardest to stop Buddy have their own roses here now.”

“How many people are up here?”

“Twelve, thirteen hundred, and more every week. Buddy doesn’t charge fees, but everybody has to bring the rose,
naturally, and for the first ten years they’re expected to pay twenty or thirty dollars a month for upkeep. Of course, everybody does. Some people have left the place thousands of dollars. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to see their loved ones continue to bloom? Properly cared for, a rose bush can live fifty or sixty years.”

“You’re a very nice woman,” I said.

“It’s easy to be nice when you’ve been blessed. Isn’t Henry blooming, though? He was never what you would have called a handsome man, although he had his angles, so it’s especially nice that he’s so beautiful now. It’s more like how he was inside.” She folded her hands in her lap and sat quietly, looking at the new incarnation of Henry for several minutes. Then she said, “Thistle’s father is here.”

I said, “Oh.”

“
She
fought it of course, the mother, I mean. Luella the Cruel.
It’s all faggots up there
, she said. She wanted to plant him in Forest Lawn, probably under a life-size sculpture of herself, paid for by Thistle, of course, with a stone saying something like,
Can you imagine leaving someone like this behind
? I’m sorry, I’m being terrible.”

“I’ve met her,” I said.

“Then you know. The poor child, as if she wasn’t having enough trouble by then. Oh, good heavens, you came to see me to talk about Thistle, and all I’ve done is rattle on about everything under the sun.”

“I could listen to you rattle for weeks.”

“Well, that’s sweet of you, but it’s not going to help you find out what’s happened to our girl.” She got up and blew Henry’s rose a kiss and said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to Howard.” With Lissa leading the way, we left the circle and followed a path that led around a large gray boulder. On the far side of the stone was a bed of roses planted directly against the rockface, their colors especially intense on the gray background. “He’s the
Sterling Silver,” she said, “the sort of lavender one. A very delicate rose, subject to mildew and other problems. In that way, I’m afraid it was an appropriate choice.” The pewter plaque read
Howard Downing
. “He was a pleasant man, but no match for Luella.”

“Vlad the Impaler would have been no match for Luella.”

“You know, it never ceased to amaze me that she felt no concern for that child. Later, I mean, when things began to go wrong. All the misbehavior, all the acting out and the drugs. It was just an
inconvenience
to Luella, an irritation. And, of course, it threatened her lifestyle. That little girl was a miracle at the beginning, but then …” She broke off, looking down at Harold Downing’s plaque. “But then,” she said, “it was just heartbreaking.”