Crashed

40

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.

“That’s a terrific sentence,” I said. “Gets you off to a fast start, takes the audience right into the thick of the action. Raises all sorts of fascinating questions. What girl? Why isn’t she happy? And who the hell is this?”

“Wattles,” Wattles said. “You want to watch that lip, you know that?”

“My lip is the least of my problems.”

“Listen, I don’t really give a shit one way or the other, you know? This is like a friendly call, like a heads-up. But Hacker, you want to watch out for Hacker. This girl Trey is half his paycheck. Something goes wrong, he’s gonna be like the Bloodmobile, but in reverse.”

“Do they still have the Bloodmobile?”

“I’m dating myself, huh? Hey, you asked Janice out yet?”

“I’ve actually been kind of busy.”

“You gotta look at your priorities,” he said. “Life is short, although you wouldn’t know it to look at me, and I’m telling you, that girl’s ready. Buy a new shirt, get rid of some of that hair-”

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Huh? Probably nothing. But, you know, a guy like you, you can use any edge you can get. I’m telling you, though, she thinks you sweat perfume.” He hung up.

Hacker, I thought.

I gave up on the omelet and went into the parking lot to call Kathy. The drizzle had intensified slightly, so I stepped under the overhang above the restaurant’s front door.

“Is your watch broken?” she said by way of openers.

“I am calling to tell you personally that there will be no movie.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you have something to do with that.”

“I can’t help what you believe or don’t believe. But I’m putting a stick into the spokes of this project. If this movie is made, Thistle won’t be in it.”

“If that’s the best I can get, it’ll have to do,” Kathy said. “Rina’s fighting me anyway. There are times I wish she didn’t love you so much.”

“Not a wish I can share.”

“Okay, then, I wish there were times you loved me more.”

“I do love you,” I said. “I love you the best I can.”

“And look where that’s gotten us.”

I said, “Kathy,”

“There was a time,” she said, “when I thought that hearing you say my name in the morning was the way I wanted to begin every day for the rest of my life.” She paused, while I tried to think of something, anything, to say. “That time lasted quite a while, too.”

“Kathy,” I said again. “I haven’t bought a house yet.”

“Oh,” she said. There was another pause, and I could see her in my mind’s eye, standing at the kitchen table with the little stone Buddha on it, phone to her ear. “Well,” she finally said, “you’ve always liked motels.”

“I hate motels.”

“Poor us. I guess we’re both someplace we hate.”

“We’re both a hell of a lot better off than Thistle Downing,” I said.

Kathy let a few seconds pass, probably to let me know I wasn’t getting away with changing the subject unnoticed, and then she said, “How bad is she?”

I said, “She’s the saddest person I ever knew.”