Crashed (35 page)

“Massive,” I said. “And it was on a hardwood floor, so I glued the legs down, too.”

“What did he do?”

“My guess is that he moved the TV. But if he had, it would have been in front of the fireplace. And then I went back out
through the window and spent the next four or five days just keeping an ear cocked. Every time he started to scream, I ran over and knocked on his door and asked him if he was okay, and was there anything I could do? The fourth time, when he opened the door, something came into his eyes, and he looked down at me for about a minute and then closed the door.”

“Did he ever do that again? With the dog, I mean?” Wendy asked.

“No.”

“That is so
beamed
,” Jennie said. “I’d like to do something like that to a couple of Mom’s guys.”

“Beamed?” I said.

“That’s Thistle’s word,” Jennie said proudly “She makes up her own slang. Did you ever see her on TV?”

“Quite a bit, lately. When did you see her last?”

“Last night,” Jennie said. “We were at her apartment.”

“Really,” I said. “Who else was there?”

“Nobody. Just Thistle, Wendy, and me.”

“Um,” I said. “Who drank all that wine?”

The look Jennie gave me was rich in pity. “Thistle, Wendy, and me.” she said patiently.

“You kids aren’t old enough to—”

“We smoked cigarettes, too,” Jennie said. “We do whatever we want.”

“It’s okay,” Wendy said in all seriousness. “We didn’t drive.”

“Fine,” I said, mentally throwing up my hands. “Good, that’s good. Drinking and driving don’t mix. Especially when you can barely see over the steering wheel.”

“Eat something,” Doc said to me. “These kids are okay. Better than you were at their age.”

“And it’s not like
you
drive so great,” Jennie said, a burger less than an inch from her mouth. “You drive like an old lady. You signal with the flicker, you use your arm. You do everything except get out of the car and say, ‘I’m going to turn now.’ ”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve always been too careful.”

“Boy,” Jennie said. “It’s like a driver’s ed movie.”

“Did anybody knock on the door when you were there?”

Wendy thought about it for a minute and said, “Uh-uh.”

“What time did you leave?”

“Eleven?” Wendy asked. “Jennie’s the one with a watch,” she explained.

“About eleven,” Jennie confirmed.

“Was she taking pills when you were there?”

“Not in front of us,” Jennie said. “She doesn’t. She always goes in the other room. She does that when she sniffs stuff, too.”

“Did you see a little box, like a present?” I described it, but both girls shook their heads.

“Probably came later,” Doc said.

“Not too much later,” I said. “Jimmy called me a little after midnight, and she’d had time to take some of them by then.”

Jennie said, “Some of what?” and Wendy said, “Who’s Jimmy?”

“Somebody delivered some bad dope to Thistle last night. Knocked on the door and ran, left the package for her to find. Jimmy’s a friend of mine.”

Jenny looked away, slightly uncomfortably, at nothing in particular.

Wendy shook her head. “We don’t know anything about that.”

“So,” I said, looking at Jennie, “any idea where Thistle might be?”

“She fades in Hollywood sometimes,” Jennie said, her eyes coming back to mine. “It’s like, you know, a dope pad.” She picked up a packet of ketchup, tore the end off with her teeth, and squeezed the contents directly onto her tongue, then took another bite out of the burger.

“Gross,” her sister said.

“It’s all going to the same place anyway,” Jennie said with ketchup on her chin. Doc made a little mopping motion on his
own chin, and she followed suit. “But she’ll come over sometime soon. After she sees what that big guy did to her place—”

“You saw who did that?” I asked.

“Sure,” Jennie said. “
Boy
, was he pissed.”

“Because Thistle wasn’t there?”

“Well,
yeah
.” I got the wide eyes the young reserve for idiots. “Why else?”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“I’d know him anywhere,” she said. “I’d know him in the dark. He was like the Hulk.”

All of a sudden, for the second time in two days, I wanted to be somewhere else. Florida, maybe. “Big, was he?”

“He was just a bunch of muscles,” she said. “And he was wearing black clothes.”

“Tell me about his shirt,” I said.

“His shirt?”

“You know,” I said. I tugged at my sleeve.

“I know what a
shirt
is,” she said with a massive amount of patience.

“What about …?” I took hold of the near point of Doc’s collar and yanked it, and he pulled away as though he thought I might be wiping my hands on it.

Jenny closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, she looked puzzled. “How did you know?” she said. “He didn’t have a collar.”

By the time we dropped the girls at their garage, we were all on first-name terms. Jennie told Doc and me that she had read, with horror, the scripts Trey had sent to Thistle. Trey’s address was on the envelope, and Jennie and Wendy had spent a couple of days following people out of her driveway. One of them seemed to have been Rodd Hull (“He just kept fluffing his hair in the rear-view mirror,” Wendy said, “like a
girl
.”) and another was certainly Craig-Robert, who Jennie thought was pretty.

I was the third one they’d trailed, and the only one who turned around and bit them.

“We flipped you off pretty cool,” Jennie said.

There was widespread agreement that it had been pretty cool, and the two of them started laughing about the expression on my face. “Dumb” was the descriptive term of choice. They were still laughing as they made their way up the driveway, toting a take-out sack of quarter-pounders.

“One of the world’s least-celebrated joys,” Doc said, watching them go, “is being a cause of mirth in children.”

“You can have it,” I said.

“Am I going to be allowed to drive home without an escort?”

“Oh, sure. Louie’s probably all tucked in by now.”

“Good, good. Nice to know that the criminal element gets to bed early. I always think of them as nocturnal.”

“If you had to take a guess, where would you say Thistle is?”

He mulled it for a second. “Hollywood. She knows some of the sidewalk entrepreneurs well enough to score small on credit. She probably bought something and crashed in some squat. She’s too smart to have gone home. She would have figured that’s the first place Trey would have checked.”

“About Trey,” I said. “How well do you know her?”

“
Know
her?” We were standing next to Doc’s car, parked beside the driveway the girls had gone down. He tilted his head back at me, and the streetlight filled the lenses of his glasses. “Well, I didn’t deliver her or anything. I can’t claim to have carried her around like a papoose. But I think I know her pretty well. She accidentally shot herself when she was ten or eleven and they brought her to me because they knew I wouldn’t report the gunshot wound. I’ve treated her on and off ever since.”

“Accidentally?”

“Unless she was trying to kill herself by blowing off a toe. The house was bristling with guns. She picked one up and fooled around with it.”

“And they had you treat her after that.”

“I was a pediatrician, remember?” A little steel came into his tone. “She was a child.”

“Lower your head,” I said. “I want to see your eyes.”

Doc brought his head down, and there were his eyes again, warm and kindly as ever. “Am I under suspicion again?”

“I’ve told you about my commitment to Thistle,” I said. “And now I’ve got my doubts about Trey, and I want to know for sure who I’m talking to. It’s helpful to see your eyes.”

“Well, then,” Doc said, and took off his glasses. It made his eyes look smaller.

“Here’s one edge of the problem. The person who trashed Thistle’s apartment today was Trey’s guy. Eduardo.”

“Steroids, probably,” Doc said. “He was sent to find her, he
didn’t, and it hit the rage button. These guys are always a couple of seconds away from tearing a Buick in half.”

“It’s not so much his reaction that gives me pause. It’s the timing. He was there about an hour
before
I told Trey that Thistle was missing, and she put quite a bit of effort into being surprised by the news. So was she lying to me, or is it possible she didn’t know Eduardo was there?”

Doc said, “Ah.”

“Here’s where things get shaky. Oh, and just to make things clear, I’m trusting you here, and it would be good policy for you to bear in mind that, despite the fact I inspire mirth in children, I’m a career criminal. And as much as I may like you personally, if I find out you’re fucking around with me, I’ll take you to pieces and scatter the bits from here to Tijuana in a pattern that spells out
he shouldn’t have
.”

Doc nodded. “Noted.”

“Background, okay? Just to set things up. Since all this started, which I guess was only the day before yesterday, I’ve been operating on the thesis that the problems with the production were being caused by a member of the crew, who was, in turn, reporting to someone who wanted to cripple the movie, someone who wanted to bring Trey down. A crook, in other words.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“Well, I know who the person on the crew was. And I know that she and at least one of the crooks murdered somebody last night.”

The avuncular Milburn Stone facade slipped a bit. “Murdered?”

I told him about Jimmy.

“Oh, criminy,” he said. “I had no idea.”

“Nobody did, except Trey and me. So it worries me that Trey may have lied to me about knowing that Thistle disappeared. Because
why
Jimmy was murdered isn’t an issue: he was killed,
I’m about ninety percent sure, because he saw who delivered that little present to Thistle, after the girls left. And
who
isn’t an issue, because I know who it was. But
how
is an issue. How did they know who he was? He was just a Chinese guy sitting in a car, in front of the apartment house.”

“Unless they knew somehow that …” Doc said and then trailed off.

“That’s right. And Trey and I were alone in her living room when she authorized me to put Jimmy out there. And, of course, there’s every chance in the world that Eduardo heard it, since he’s attached to her by an invisible rope.”

“And if he heard it, then what?”

“Then one of two things. Either he sold Trey out and told the people who killed Jimmy and then went to ransack the apartment on their behalf. Or, and this is the one that worries me, he did it all on Trey’s orders.”

“Slow it down,” Doc said. “Are you suggesting that Trey is sabotaging her own movie?”

“I’m suggesting that it’s one possible explanation for everything that’s happened.”

Doc hooked his thumbs in his suspenders and gave them a snap. “But why? She needs the money. It’s part of her plan.”

“Money would be the answer,” I said. “Something that would make more money than actually finishing the movies. But the only thing I can think of that would pay her anything substantial is a huge insurance loss.”

Doc nodded. “I hadn’t considered that.”

“Well, forget it. Tatiana made it very clear to me. Thistle is completely uninsurable.”

He turned his head and looked down at the sidewalk. I didn’t think he was going to reply, but then he said, “And you believe Tatiana.”

The question stopped me. I
had
believed her, certainly. There was something plausible and solid about her. As there was, I
thought, about so many crooks. “I’ll find a way to check it,” I said. “But I don’t know. The way Trey held Thistle’s feet to the fire yesterday, threatening her with her contract and everything. Seems like she could have had her default right then.”

“This is your area,” Doc said. “I’m a simple pediatrician.”

“Okay, one more question, purely about Trey. How do you think she really feels about her ex-husband?”

“That one’s easy,” he said. “She hates the ground his shadow falls on. She’d pay scalper’s rates for a front-row seat at his execution.”

“Not likely, then, that they’d be working together.”

“Here’s how unlikely it is,” he said. “I’ll bet you five thousand dollars right now that he’s dead within eighteen months.”

I shook my head. “A lot earlier than that.”

“Omaha,” I said
to the guard.

“Long way,” the guard said, although it sounded like a guess.

“That’s why they need me. Hard to run an office that far away without having a man right there.”

“Johnny on the spot,” the guard suggested. He was a liberally weathered fifty-five or so, with a richly veined nose and enough alcohol on his breath to float an olive. His name tag said
CARL
.

“Johnny on the spot,”
I said admiringly. “Exactly. Boots on the ground. Local talent. ZIP code savvy. You gotta know the territory.” I was, just conceivably, over-extending.

“You the man,” Carl contributed, offering proof, if further proof were needed, that here was one more expression that needed permanent retirement.