Crashed

37

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.

I resisted offering Carl a knuckle-bump and said instead, “So anyway, Jack said to me, ‘Just show all this stuff to Carl, and he’ll let you go on up.’ ” I paired the homemade business card with the bogus driver’s license and held them nice and steady in front of Carl’s eyes. It took him a second to home in on them. “I just need to drop something off,” I said.

“Kind of late,” Carl said.

“Damn airplanes,” I said. “You know how it is.”

“Do I ever.” Carl snorted. “Damn airplanes,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, heading for the elevators. I half expected him to call me back, but all he said was, “Damn airplanes,” and then he snorted again. Apparently, he flew a lot more than I’d guessed.

The company on the card I’d made was called Earl Distribution and it was run by someone named Jack Earl. That, and the fact that it was on the same floor as Wattles, Inc., was one hundred percent of what I knew about it, since that was all that the office directory in the lobby had on offer when I’d read it on my way out with Hacker. I’d been worried that old Carl might have asked me something about what we were distributing, but I’d underestimated the vehemence of the universal frustration with the airline industry.

I turned my back to the camera on the elevator and waited until the doors opened before I put on the ski mask. If there was a camera in the hallway, I couldn’t see it, but I kept my head down anyway. And I was wearing the stupid wig to match the driver’s license, so any camera above me would be getting a nice clear shot of someone who looked like he’d kept his head in a jar since 1968.

I took one look at Wattles’s door and felt like he was letting down the team. He was a crook, and he should have been ashamed of himself for relying on those locks. If I’d had a few more minutes, I probably could have sweet-talked them open, just a little judicious lock flattery. As it was, it took less than forty-five seconds before the door swung wide.

I slipped in, closed the door behind me, turned on the lights, and jumped half a foot straight up into the air.

I’d forgotten all about Dora, the inflatable receptionist, who sat behind the desk, looking at me expectantly. I was leaning against the door, trying to get my knees to stop wobbling, when I looked at her more closely. I blinked a couple of times, but it didn’t go away. A cherry bomb went off in my head.

I knew who she looked like. How could I have been so stupid?

Laughter was an appropriate response, and I gave her quite a lot of it. If she’d been sentient, she probably would have approved of it, if only as a change from the steady diet of necessarily humorless lust she’d been created to endure. One thing about guys who buy blow-up dolls: there’s probably a pretty good chance they aren’t hypersensitive to the funny side of things.

But Dora wasn’t just funny. I had to look at her three times to be sure, but there was no question about it. Wattles had screwed up on a planetary scale. Dora was a chance at deliverance.

I went through the closet in the reception room and found half a dozen of her, neatly packed into their garish cardboard boxes, made in China, of course. It was easy to picture the assembly line of Chinese peasants, yanked from the mud of their little Puritan villages so fast their shoes were probably still stuck there, trying to figure out exactly what it was they were making. The company name Wattles had come up with was My Sweet Inflatable You, and the box copy waxed sub-poetic to describe Dora’s infinite willingness to be penetrated in a variety of ways and her deluxe feature, a voicebox that said, “Oh, baby,” and/or “Don’t stop now” when the eager lover pressed her left ear. I guessed the phrases came at random, although “Don’t stop now” seemed a little risky, especially if lover boy had just wrapped it up, so to speak. These guys are probably fragile enough without being urged to exceed their sexual capacity by a blow-up doll.

Anyway, I had a vitally important use for Dora. It wasn’t the one Wattles had planned on, but it met my needs so perfectly that I guessed things averaged out.

I put two Doras, all boxed up, just beside the door, and went to the files. In the locked drawer for My Sweet Inflatable You, I found that Wattles kept two sets of books, one for himself and one for the government, with remarkably little in common. The one for himself contained a tidy little spread sheet that told me that Dora had been purchased by more than 24,000 presumably blissful consumers, who had paid $79.95 each for her latex companionship and conversational skills, which meant that Wattles had grossed about a million nine on her. Suddenly his choice of models didn’t look quite so dumb, at least not from a commercial perspective. I wrote down the precise number of sales for that persuasive touch of verisimilitude. Sometimes, when you want to make a point, a detail really nails it, and I thought this number would make a truly lethal difference.

The file I had come for wasn’t in a filing cabinet. There were four cabinets in all, with four drawers in each, and I went through all sixteen of them before I gave up. The sale of a hot Paul Klee canvas was too sensitive to be kept in anything as obvious as a filing cabinet.

And then I remembered Wattles’s admiration of Rabbits Stennet’s technological approach to security. Rabbits had good tech, he’d said, or something like that. So, if I were a tech enthusiast like Wattles, I’d rely on a little tech to hide the things I really didn’t want anyone to see.

The remote.

The remote Hacker had used to reveal the flatscreen was in the top drawer of Wattles’s desk. I pointed it at the wall and pushed a bunch of buttons, and nothing happened, but I heard something behind me and turned to see a section of drywall behind Wattles’s desk slide obediently to one side.

Inside the cupboard behind the sliding wall were two manila folders. One of them told me that my guess about the new owner of the ugly Klee was correct. There just isn’t that big a market in Los Angeles for people who are rich enough and crazy enough to buy an extremely expensive painting they’ll only be able to show a few very close friends. The proud new owner of the painting that had gotten me into all this trouble was Jake Whelan, legendary film producer and world-class narcissist, a human cocaine scoop with a year-round tan who would have been an automatic and unanimous choice to lead Team America in the Olympic Flaming Jerk competition. Now semiretired, mostly because even Hollywood wouldn’t put up with him any more, he nevertheless retained some influence in the industry, in small part because he had done some people favors back in his day, and in large part because he knew enough about the currently employed to end an enormous number of careers.

The second folder in the cabinet stopped me cold. It was a photocopy of a bank statement documenting a wire transfer from Jake Whelan to an account in the Cayman Islands. It told me what Whelan had paid for the painting. And it also told me I was the sap of the century.

I’d been promised $20,000 to take it off the wall in the face of a pack of man-eating Rottweilers and a vengeful gangster who would undoubtedly enjoy feeding me to them. Wattles, who had spent the entire time with his gut resting comfortably on his desk, had been paid $1,750,000 for it.

I felt decisively stiffed, especially since I still hadn’t seen the money. But, as I put the folders back, I found myself thinking that it was good news, too.

So when I left the office, I had two blow-up dolls and a bunch of new information. Now all I needed was a lot of luck, a couple of sixty-hour days in the forty-eight hours before Rabbits and Bunny got back on Friday, and a very special gun.