Crashed (38 page)

His name was Wain, which he spelled twice, because, I was
pretty sure, he forgot he’d already spelled it once. If NASA had ever had his phone number, they’d probably tossed it. His office was in an auto repair shop off of Western Boulevard, dirty in the way only auto repair shops can be, and stinking of old black sludge. The sky, which had been turning gray when Louie and I left the Valley, was now dark, and the air was warm and unusually humid. Some sort of tropical storm system seemed to be wheeling up from Baja, so we were all sweating, which did not add to the spirit of camaraderie.

“You know, this ain’t an automatic,” he said. He was talking to me as though I were a kindergarten student with a tenuous grasp of English. “It’s not like you got a clip or something, you can put it on full repeat and just stand there with the gun getting hot and watch stuff fall over.”

“Got it,” I said. “It’s okay. I plan just to stand there, shooting and loading, shooting and loading, until I’m done.”

“Uh-huh. And everybody’s just going to hang around while you shoot them.” He looked at Louie, and Louie shrugged. “Tell you what,” Wain said. “If that’s your plan, I want a deposit for the whole thing, gun, cartridges, darts, and all. You come back alive, I’ll give it back to you.”

“What are we talking about?”

He wiped sweat off his forehead, leaving a trail of dark grease. “I got fourteen sets. You really want fourteen? I mean it’s gonna take all day to fire the damn things.”

“I’ll take ten,” I said.

“Okey-doke.” He grabbed a brown paper bag that a burrito had drained onto, wiped his palm on his filthy jeans, and painstakingly wrote a column of numbers, threading a path between the oil spots, where the ball point ink wouldn’t take to the paper. It was modestly impressive. “Four-twenty,” he said. “And one-seventy-five for the rental.”

“Why don’t I just pay you the deposit, and when I return the gun and the unused cartridges, you deduct the rental?”

I got the squint. “Why don’t you just do what I said. Four-twenty and one-seventy five is five-ninety-five.”

“That’s what I like,” I said, reaching into my hip pocket. “The old give and take.”

“Ain’t no point in making friends,” Wain said. “You probably gonna be dead by dark.”

I wound up taking all fourteen of the cartridges after all. I went back to the Snor-Mor, blew up Dora again, and, once the spots had retreated from my field of vision, I practiced firing the gun. It didn’t make much noise, which was a point in its favor, but it wasn’t very accurate, either. Six cartridges later, I had eight left, three were stuck in various pieces of furniture, Dora was deflating rapidly, and I knew that the gun threw to the left and that I’d have to sight above the target because the darts dropped pretty fast if they had to travel much more than about six feet.

So, not perfect. But under the circumstances, probably the best I could hope for.

I turned on the lights. It was getting darker outside, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Once in a great while Los Angeles gets a summer rainstorm, usually just the ragged end of something that was much bigger eight or nine hundred miles south, but every four or five years we catch more of it. I had the feeling that this was going to be one of those times.

The phone rang for the seventh or eighth time, Trey wanting to get hold of me, and I figured it was probably time to cool her off. I answered and lived through three or four minutes of frustration and recrimination, and when she’d gotten herself to the point where she had to inhale occasionally, I told her I hadn’t found Thistle yet.

“And assuming you’ve actually looked anywhere, where
did
you look?”

I bypassed the dudgeon and gave her the short version: the apartment, both moms, the graveyard. “By the way,” I said, “somebody tore the hell out of her apartment.”

“Really,” Trey said. “How could you tell?” Oh, she was in fine spirits.

I decided to treat it as a genuine question. “They broke everything, they turned the refrigerator over, threw the couch across the room. Not your normal wear and tear, not even at Thistle’s.”

“Oh, who cares,” she said, after a long silence. “If someone’s got her, they’re not going to give her back. If she’s run away, she’s not going to come back of her own free will.”

“I don’t think anyone’s got her,” I said. “I think she’s hiding out.”

“Well, that’s not much help, since you can’t seem to find her. Or aren’t interested in finding her.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s twice. You want to tell me what you’re so pissed off about?”

“Your sympathy for poor little Miss Downing has been obvious from the beginning. I’m sitting here watching this whole enterprise go south, and all I have to depend on is someone who may not even be on my side.”

“That’s absolutely correct. Emotionally, I’m not on your side. You’re very perceptive about that. I think the whole enterprise stinks.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “Speak right up.”

“Not much point in my trying to lie to you. But you’re just going to have to believe that my desire to continue living, with all four limbs functioning, is stronger than whatever sympathy I might feel for Thistle.”

“Even the most useless,” she said, “cling to life.”

“I’m hoping that’s a quotation that just sort of sprang to
mind,” I said. “Because I may be in a tight spot, but that doesn’t give you a license to fuck with me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s self-indulgent and counterproductive. What’s your assessment right now?

“I think we’ll hear from her soon. I’ve turned up some friends of hers, and I think she’ll contact either them or Doc pretty quickly.”

“Why?”

“Dope. She probably hasn’t had any since yesterday morning.” “Who were the friends?”

“Nobody.” There was no way I could risk telling Trey about Jennie and Wendy. “Just a couple of people in the apartment. George and Martha. I didn’t know you’d actually been there.”

“Once,” Trey said, “although my chat with Thistle is apparently one of thousands she’s forgotten.”

“Did you meet anyone she knew?”

“I got the impression she didn’t know anybody in the world except drug dealers.”

“That’s about right. But she doesn’t have any money, so it’ll either be Doc or George and Martha.”

“All right.” Now that she’d parked the anger, she sounded discouraged and dispirited.

“What happens?” I asked. “What happens if you have to fold the movie?”

She blew air past the mouthpiece. “I’m in trouble.”

“How serious?”

“It doesn’t concern you. But there are a bunch of people sitting around waiting for me to hit a bump. I probably talked about this more than I should have.”

“Are you insured? The film, I mean? Is the film insured?”

“Sure, but it’s pennies. No one would sell me completion insurance with Thistle in the movie.”

“But you can get back some of what you spent.”

“Some. Rodd and the cinematographer both have play or
pay, which means they get their money one way or the other. But most of the rest of it, I can get back. The problem is that I’ve fallen on my ass, made promises I couldn’t deliver. It was a bad judgment call. I’m not in a business where people forget bad judgment calls.”

“Listen,” I said. “This is probably a stupid question, but suppose I could find Thistle and bring her in, and she’d work for you, but not in that kind of movie?”

“She’s a television star,” Trey said, “and, sure, she was big, but it’s been years since she’s been on the air. There’s some curiosity about her, we saw that yesterday, but I doubt she could carry a movie, not a
real
movie, anyway. The kink thing, that’s what would have driven the sales. All I needed was four, five million units worldwide at twenty, twenty-five bucks, maybe sell to one out of every hundred people who thought she was so great, and I’d have been solid gold. Put her in some other movie, you’re talking art house. English majors, people in sandals. And anyway, what do I know about making movies? Porn, sure. That’s easy. Buy some Viagra, rent a camera, find a star in some strip club. But something good? Like with a story and everything? I’m just a girl from the Valley.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s not over yet.” I suddenly had a case of the guilts about Trey.

“It’s over as of tomorrow night,” she said. “We’re doing inserts today, but Friday at six I’m pulling the plug unless you’ve got Thistle back and she’s working. And if I do pull the plug because she’s not around, I’m not going to go out of my way to make sure you get any kind of cushy treatment from Hacker and Wattles.”

“No reason you should,” I said.

“On the contrary,” she said. “You’re a nice person and everything, but if I really have to fold this thing, and I find out later you’ve actually been working against me, I’d probably shoot you myself.”

I ate lunch
at a coffee shop on Ventura. This being Los Angeles, there was a coin newsstand selling the entertainment trade papers, and I spotted Thistle’s name on the front page of
Variety
, so I parted with quite a lot of change and bought it. What the damn thing costs, you’d think they print it on money.

Variety
writers, at least the journeymen hacks, use one-name bylines, and this story was by someone who signed him/herself as
Vern
. According to
Vern
, Thistle had “emerged from seclusion” to appear in front of the press at a “local indie studio” to announce plans to star in a “multiple adult flix package.”
Vern
went on to say that Ms. Downing had appeared high-strung and contentious, displaying a tendency to ramble and, at times, to forget which of the reporters had asked the question she was answering. And a lot more, all of it shorthand for
drug problem
.

But the placement was interesting: front-page, below the fold. I left my mushroom and grease omelet to cool and solidify, and went out to the news vending machines on the sidewalk and bought the
Reporter
and the
LA Times
. It was starting to sprinkle, so I got back inside at a trot. Both the
Reporter
and the
Times
“Calendar” section had put Thistle in prime position. The
Times
ran the story in the lower corner of the section’s front page, with a big jump to page five, where there was a two-column story on her, with photos from “Once a Witch.” The story felt like it might have been adapted from a pre-written obituary, the
Times
always being in the forefront of the vulture watch. It told the story of her discovery, of the amazing success of the series and the fall-off in ratings toward the end, and it referred to vague “problems” during the show’s last two seasons, followed by Thistle’s plummet out of the public eye. The reporter who had been at the press conference described Thistle’s demeanor as “troubled,” another code word for
stoned
. In one of the pictures from the press conference, I loomed beside her, arms crossed
menacingly, looking like a gargoyle on loan from Notre Dame. The caption referred to me as “Ms. Downing’s companion, ‘Pockets’ Mahoney.” It was good to know someone had been listening when Thistle suggested the quotes around “Pockets.”

The
Reporter
was less chatty, but they had what qualifies in entertainment news coverage as a scoop: they’d somehow got hold of the fact that Thistle was to be paid $200,000 for the movies. They spent a paragraph on the historic deal she’d made for her “Once a Witch” residuals and then speculated that “an erratic lifestyle” may have accounted for the fact that she was now, as far as anyone could tell, the next thing to indigent. Yet
more
code for drugs.

So, loaded or not, Thistle was big news. This was important, if the part of my plan that involved proud new Paul Klee-owner Jake Whelan was to have any possibility of working out. Hollywood reads these three publications every morning as though Moses personally brings them down from the mountain at dawn. Jake Whelan’s participation, assuming he’d play, would be plausible.

I was blotting cooking oil off the top of the omelet with a napkin when the phone rang. It wasn’t a number I recognized.

“Our girl ain’t happy,” a man said.