Crashed (32 page)

By the time I was back in my own car, making the long climb out of Hidden Valley, the sun was close to the day’s finish line. The expensive homes in the basin beneath me were being swallowed up in the mountains’ shadows, the rooftops just darker rectangles against the darkness of the earth, but the sky was still a thinly scattered blue, and high above me the tops of the Santa Monica mountains gleamed in the last of the sunlight. I had the windows down, feeling a new cooling in the air. Sometimes, in the middle of the hottest summer, the Los Angeles nights will suddenly turn cold, as though to remind us that this place was the next thing to a desert before the old men stole all that water and piped it down here to the thirsty city.

6:10 by my watch. Almost six hours since anyone had seen Thistle. And I still had no idea where she was.

Something Lissa Wellman had said to me was picking at a corner of my mind, something about the relationship between Thistle and Edith, but try as I would, I couldn’t focus on it. There was an answer there somewhere, if I could get a clear view of it. And I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with my own position. No matter how ridiculous they were at times, Hacker and Wattles were not comic figures, and Rabbits Stennet was undiluted murder. And yet I was finding it difficult to see myself actually doing anything
that would put Thistle Downing in front of the cameras with those five gym rats.

With nothing else to do, I decided to head back to the Camelot Arms. It was possible she’d finally made it home, that she was there alone now, bewildered by the destruction of the few things she’d called her own. She’d need someone with her. She’d probably need someone to hide her, at least for the time being.

I replayed what I’d just thought. I was going to hide Thistle? I wasn’t taking Rabbits seriously enough.

Well, first, see if she’s home. So I made the left on Coldwater and joined the long line of cars that headed over the mountains to the Valley at the end of every business day. I’d pick up the Hollywood Freeway and go back to Thistle’s apartment.

And then something else popped into my mind. A question I should have asked hours ago.

Since I was barely moving anyway, I looked at the touchpad on my cell phone rather than trying to punch in the number by feel. One ring, then two, and I was saying, “Come on” when Tatiana picked it up and said, “Have you found her?”

“No. Is Craig-Robert around?”

“Why would I know? He may have left. Hold on, I’m walking down there now. Where have you looked?”

“At her apartment, which somebody trashed. At her father’s grave. In her past.”

“Nothing?”

The car in front of me came to a complete stop. “Something in her past, and it’s kind of tickling me. But am I any closer to knowing where she is physically? No.”

“Hang on, I’m at the costume lab. Here’s the dramatic part, I’m opening the door now. Oh, well, you
are
in luck. By now Craig-Robert is usually at home trying to figure out which Supreme he’ll be for the evening. Craig-Robert, talk to Junior for a second.”

“With
barely
suppressed pleasure at any time of day or night. Hello, hello.”

“Hello, hello yourself. Listen, are you missing any costumes? It wouldn’t be anything fancy, just—”

“How did
you
know? I was just writing it up.”

“What was it?” We were moving again, a tire-screeching three or four miles per hour up the hill.

“Strictly Ross Dress for Less, but with Miss Trey, the balance sheets are expected to balance. So here we are, on paper, in my finest cover your precious ass style:
Missing: One pair of jeans, one long-sleeved blue cotton blouse, one pair of sneakers
.”

“Women’s clothes, right?”

“
Mein Gott
, I should have put that in, shouldn’t I? Yes, for the fairer sex, as they like to style themselves.”

“Thanks.” Traffic started moving again, and the car behind me gave me a discreet toot.

“Is this important?” Craig-Robert asked. “Should I feel the plot thickening or something?”

“It answers some questions.” Now I knew why I’d been picking at the thing Thistle told Lissa.

My phone beeped to tell me I had an incoming call. I took a look at the caller ID and saw it was Kathy. My ex-wife rarely calls to chew the fat, unless the fat she wants to chew is still attached to my body. I told Craig-Robert I had another call, took a deep breath, punched the button, and said, “Hello.”

“Junior,” Kathy said, and she sounded like it was taking most of her energy to keep her voice level. “I might as well come right to the point. You are
this far
from having me challenge your visitation rights. And I mean a total ban, no contact with Rina whatsoever. Do you understand?”

“I understand that you’re severely pissed off,” I said. “It’s a little hard to respond when I have no idea what the context is.”

“You
don’t?
”

The cars ahead of me, which had been at full stop, started to move, and I followed along. “I just said I don’t.”

“Burglary was bad enough. But pornography—”

“Stop. Stop right there.”

“We saw the news, Junior. We saw it together, Rina and I. I had to watch Rina’s face as she saw it. You and that poor girl. And you even talked to Rina about her, yesterday. You know perfectly well that she’s one of Rina’s heroes, and here you are, practically carrying her into the studio where she’s going to film, I don’t know what
you’d
call it, probably something fancy, but in my father’s day, it was a stag movie.”

“I don’t have anything to do with the movie,” I said. And I listened to my own lie echo down the phone line. Of
course
, I had something to do with the movie.

“That’s not what it looked like to us. I’m telling you, Junior, if Rina weren’t fighting me tooth and nail on this right now, I’d be on the phone with my lawyer, not you, and you wouldn’t see your daughter until she’s of legal age to make these decisions for herself.”

“Kathy,” I said. “It’s really not what it looks like.”

“That poor baby. She looked so
lost
, all that bravado and those terrible people.”

“She is lost,” I said.

“The only good thing you did was knock that bitch on her ass.”

“Listen, Kathy, this is more complicated than it seems—”

“It’s always complicated with you, Junior. Because you don’t understand that the only thing that’s not complicated is doing the right thing. Telling the truth and doing the right thing.”

“I’m trying.”

“You could have fooled me. You looked so big on TV. It looked like you were there to keep her from running away.”

“That’s not true. It’s not even close.”

“Whatever’s true, you need to call me by about noon tomorrow and tell me how you’re going to resolve this in a way that
satisfies me. Because I’m telling you, if you don’t, you can kiss your daughter goodbye until she’s eighteen.”

“Let me talk to her.”

“Are you listening to me
at all
? Of course, I’m not going to let you talk to her.” In the background, I could hear Rina arguing with her mother, and Kathy said, “You hush.” Then, to me, she said, “By noon tomorrow, do you hear me?”

She hung up.

I slid the phone into my pocket and focused on inching my way up the hill, shutting everything else out. When in doubt, put one foot in front of the other until the view clears. I was approaching the top of the canyon now, because there were periods of forty to sixty seconds where we’d actually get up to ten or twelve miles per hour, which meant we were nearing the stoplight on Mulholland that’s the last thing before the long downhill.

The phone rang again. Rina.

“Hello, sweetie,” I said.

“Daddy. How could you not tell me?” She sounded younger and less certain of herself. She sounded hurt.

“Honey, I didn’t know …”

“Didn’t know
what
? You
asked
me about her. You let me talk about her, and all the time you were doing, doing this—this
thing
with her. It was—it was just the same as lying to me.”

“I wasn’t trying to lie—”

“Don’t tell me that,” she said, sounding exactly like her mother. “Don’t tell me what you were trying to do. We sat there and talked about her, and you never said
one thing—
”

“Wait. Wait just a second, okay? Let me try to tell you something.”

There was a silence on the line.

“Haven’t you ever been in a situation where you don’t know what to do? Where you’ve been told to do one thing and there are good reasons to do it, like maybe you’ll get into some kind
of trouble if you don’t, but deep inside you know you don’t want to do it? And you don’t know how you’re going to resolve it?”

A long pause, and then an extremely grudging, “I suppose.”

“Well, that was me. Yesterday, that was me. I didn’t want talk to you about it until I knew what I was going to do.”

We crested the hill at last and the Valley spread itself out below me, tens of thousands of houses, offices, buildings. Lives in process. The sun was dropping fast now, and I could see it glaring off of west-facing windows, and, in much closer houses on the side of the mountain I was driving down, lights were coming on. Lights behind windows.

“And now?” Rina said. “Do you know now what you’re going to do?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know exactly what I’m going to do. And it’s nothing you’ll be ashamed of.”

“What? Can you tell me what it is?”

I was driving past the lighted windows now as more lights snapped on behind tens of thousands of windows below, whole square miles of them, on the Valley floor. Just once, I thought, just once, I was going to put myself on the right side of that illuminated glass.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to make absolutely sure that Thistle doesn’t make that movie.”

“Daddy—” Rina said.

“It’s a promise. Don’t tell your mother. I’ll tell her tomorrow, when I said I would. I love you, and I’ve got to go.”

I broke the connection and let the car free-wheel downhill. Trey, Hacker, Wattles. I would have to deal with all of them. But, on the other hand, I knew why the black dress had been in the wastebasket, and why we couldn’t find Thistle in that building. And, thanks to Thistle’s remark, I probably knew who had shot Jimmy.

When I got to Ventura Boulevard, I didn’t cross it to pick up the freeway to Thistle’s apartment. Instead, I turned left, toward Palomar Studio. Where my little murderer probably was.

They came out together in Tatiana’s car, Tatiana and Ellie in the front seat, Craig-Robert in back, leaning forward and talking as fast as the other two put together. They waited for the gate to swing open.

“This one’s mine,” I said into the cell phone. “Yours should be coming out any minute, assuming he hasn’t left already.”

“Looks like Doc in ‘Gunsmoke’?” Louie the Lost said.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, “not for someone who watches as much TV as you do.”

“What about my girl?” Louie asked.

“That’s what all this is about. Your girl.”

“So you don’t want a Caddy,” Louie said, returning to an earlier theme. “I got a nice BMW, real clean.”

“I’m happy with what I’ve got.”

“That piece of shit? Looks like everything on the road. You get a landslide on Laurel Canyon, five of the six cars get smashed, they’re going to look just like yours.”

“That’s more or less the point.” The gate was mostly open, and Tatiana started edging the car around it, too eager to wait. Craig-Robert said something and they all fell all over themselves laughing. “Toyota Camry has been the best-selling car in America since anybody started counting. You tell the cops it was a
white Camry you saw, and you don’t have a license plate, they throw it in the
inactive
file.”

“Huh,” Louie said. “This him?”

I looked through the chain link gate, now closing behind Tatiana’s car. “Sure is. Just stay with him, don’t get too close, don’t let him see you.”

“Don’t let him see me?” Louie said. “Jesus Christ, would you tell Sherlock Holmes,
don’t trip on the clue?
Then how about a Jag? They actually run now, you know, go forward and backward, not like before.”