Crashed (33 page)

“You’re not going to tell me how clean it is?” I had pulled out behind Tatiana, and some big Meezer in a Lincoln behind me leaned on the horn. “Meezer” is what my old burglar mentor Herbie used to call guys who drove like they’d just finished buying the road. He said they should all have horns that said MEEEEEEE, MEEEEEEE.

But the horn didn’t attract any attention from the passengers in Tatiana’s car. They were having so much fun it was hard to believe that one of them was a murderer. But one of them almost certainly was: even if it weren’t for the fact that one of the people in that car was the only one who could have been responsible for the problem with the black dress, there was also the figure Jimmy had drawn on his windshield, which I should have recognized, since he obviously meant it for me and it was the only Chinese character I knew. Put it together, and you had two questions—the black dress? and who killed Jimmy?—with the same answer.

“What’s with all the sales pitches?” I asked Louie. “You opening a used car lot?”

“It’s like a sideline,” Louie said. “I got all this inventory I need to turn over from time to time, I might as well make some money selling it. But there’s something wrong with my technique.”

“With all due respect,” I said, “you couldn’t sell aspirin to a woodpecker.”

“Ow,” Louie said. “He’s coming out now. Hey, he’s going left.”

“Does your car turn left?”

“Yeah.”

“Then is there something I’m missing?”

“Jeez,” Louie said. “Take my fuckin’ ear off, why don’t you.” He hung up.

The mystery of the motor pooling was solved two blocks away when Tatiana pulled into a baking expanse of asphalt with a sign that said
PALOMAR STUDIOS OVERFLOW LOT
and went on to warn all sorts of dire consequences to anyone who parked there without being part of the Palomar Studios overflow, which didn’t sound like a particularly exclusive club to me. Hollywood is nothing if not status-conscious, and nothing defines status like a parking space. Tatiana, as production supervisor, rated; Ellie and Craig-Robert did not. So I pulled over and waited for the two members of the overflow club to depart, and once all three cars were on the road I hitched myself to the murderer’s tail and followed in her wake.

It’s always the little things, I thought. Cops know it; that’s why there’s no such thing as a detail to a really good detective. I was once acquainted with a con man, a guy with the impeccable plausibility that Trey had described in Tony—her soon-to-be ex-husband—the quality that marks a real sociopath. The con man made quite a lot of money selling houses he didn’t, in any recognizably legal sense, own. He put ads in the papers offering amazing deals on probate properties and simply showed the marks houses that were on the market and vacant, meeting them there only moments after he’d picked the lock and opened the place up. Very complicated situation, he’d say; probate was likely to be challenged, and if the challenge was successful, the deceased owner’s son or daughter would take the property off the market. But right now, it was still in probate, and it was priced about forty percent under the comps for the neighborhood, a printout
of which he happened to have in his jacket pocket. But if an offer was made quickly, an offer he had the sole power to accept, there would be no grounds for challenge because the house would no longer belong to the estate.

Most of the customers would very sensibly walk away from the deal, but he “showed” four or five houses a day, six days a week, and two or three times a week he’d get a check for $2500 or $3500 to prevent him from showing the house to anyone else while the suckers thought about it. The money was fully refundable if, twenty-four hours later, the buyers came to their senses. Of course, ten minutes after they drove away, their check was cashed.

But this story was about details. This guy dressed like Cary Grant. I mean, he had really beautiful clothes,
Vogue
-for-men clothes, all wool and silk, hand-tailored, pleats all over the place, shoes too nice to wear outdoors. As a finishing touch, he liked to sport a pocket handkerchief, which for most men has gone the way of the hairline mustache, and since the handkerchiefs were the finest silk and very expensive, he showed just about a quarter of an inch too much. And that quarter of an inch was what got him: it turned up in too many descriptions, and one day the customer he showed up for was a cop with such a sharp eye he didn’t even need a ruler. A quarter of an inch got our sociopath six years.

And the detail here was a little black dress.

She wasn’t driving
very fast. She drove with the blithe obliviousness of someone who was early, who had time to kill and a really insatiable curiosity about the contents of store windows. Doing the tail was a character-building exercise in patience; if I’d been behind her by accident instead of on purpose, I’d have probably had my horn welded permanently into
honk
position by now. But, of course, I couldn’t do that. The people behind
me
, however, were free to abuse both her and me in any way they felt was
appropriate, and they did. If there was any comfort to be taken, it was that the exercise gave me some time for thought.

The way it looked, I had five problems.

I had a feeling that the last point was a lot easier to put into a simple declarative sentence than it would be to implement. First, there was the issue of finding her, although I didn’t think she was in the hands of anyone who meant her harm. The state of the apartment announced the searcher’s failure to find her in the most likely place, and I doubted they knew any of her other hidey-holes, of which there must have been several. After all, her bone-grinder of a mother had said she disappeared on a regular basis. My best guess was that she’d gone to ground somewhere and she’d reveal herself whenever her internal clock said it was time.

Even if I could have located her in the next quarter-hour though, Thistle had more problems than most saints have blessings, and there was nothing I could do about some of them. She was going to have to deal with the drugs by herself, although Doc had said something, back in the coffee shop the first time we met, about helping her out. She was going to need some money, especially if she didn’t do Trey’s “art film,” as Thistle had described it in her journal. And since I was going to try to make sure she didn’t, it might also be nice if I could find some
way to put some bucks in her pocket. Not to mention giving her an opportunity to rediscover the talent she believed had abandoned her.

And maybe, while I was at it, I could arrange for two Sundays in every week, too.

But I’ve always figured that aiming high is just as easy as aiming low, so what the hell. And actually, now that I’d opened my mind to it, there was a slim chance I actually could so something for Thistle’s moribund career, if my educated guess about Wattles’s customer for that ugly Klee I’d stolen was correct. Assuming, of course, that I survived past Friday night, when Rabbits and Bunny came back.

And this, I remembered uncomfortably, was Wednesday.

Following my murderer as she navigated her browser’s course down Ventura, it was impossible not to focus on the item I’d left off of my list.

I was going to avenge Jimmy.

It all came down to the dress. I’d said that Jimmy liked women too much, but until the dress, I hadn’t been certain that his weakness had been responsible for his death. But when the dress suggested a physical impossibility, the dematerialization of a living woman, I’d thought
woman
and suddenly seen in my mind’s eye the symbol Jimmy had drawn with his own blood on the inside of his windshield:

He’d been making the first two strokes of one of the most common Chinese radicals, the character
nü
, or “woman.” Jimmy had taught it to me as indispensable if I ever went to China if only as insurance against stumbling into a women’s bathroom. He’d helped me to remember it by pointing out that the first two
strokes resembled a breast. And after the breast, only two simple strokes remained to complete it.

But it had taken the dress to prod me to that recognition, and I’d almost missed it. It had nearly slipped past me because the whole thing had been unnecessary, a diversion to give the other side a one- or two-hour start on trying to find Thistle before I started searching for her. And so they made something impossible happen. A woman went into a building and never came out, and wasn’t there when it was searched.

The murderer put on her right-turn signal and braked, although she was already a good ten miles per hour under the speed limit. She made a right into the parking lot of a three-story, poison-green office building that had once been a Cadillac dealership and now played host to entertainment-business fly-by-nights, the kinds of companies whose most substantial asset was their logo, plus one very substantial thug, a thug whose business address I’d already researched.

Thistle never came out of the administration building because she had never gone in. She had left Palomar Studios on her own, probably hiding in the back of some car, wearing the jeans and blouse she stole from wardrobe, about five minutes after Tatiana and Ellie left her in the dressing room. And the person wearing the black dress who had run into the administration building was, of course, the young woman who had reported the dress as missing, who had already doubled for Thistle in a few dozen shots, a woman who looked enough like her, from the back at least, to fool the camera even when it was up close. And almost certainly the young woman who had shot Jimmy.

So I sat at the curb and watched yet another link fall into
place as mousy little Ellie Wynn got out of her car, her face alight with love and tenderness, and fell into the arms of an impossibly handsome lunk whom I recognized, with no surprise at all, as Antonio Ramirez, aka Tony Ramirez, aka Mr. Trey Annunziato.

Back in the days of my apprenticeship, Herbie always said,
When in doubt
,
find out
.

So I was back at the Snor-Mor for the first time in almost forty-eight hours, preparing for an informational burglary with the well-equipped modern burglar’s tools, which include the amazing portable Canon IP90v printer and a stack of business card stock, when the phone rang.

“He’s just staying in there,” Louie the Lost said. “For all I know, he’s climbed into the freezer. He could be in there all night.”

“And by
in there
, you mean …”

“The Encino address you gave me. His house.”

I was watching a business card emerge from the printer and I said, “What time is it?”

“Maybe I should forget the cars and sell you a watch,” Louie said. “It’s a little before nine.”