“I heard her say it a couple of times. She said, That wasn’t me, it was Thistle.”
“Exactly,” Lissa said. “And it just got worse and worse. Because, of course, who she was, when Thistle was gone, was a failure. She was a phony, someone who was pretending to do things she couldn’t really do, and everyone was beginning to see that she couldn’t do it. I’ll never in my life, not if I live to be a hundred, forget the morning in season five after the TV Guide review came out that panned her. I remember every word of it. It said, ‘The problem with the show is that Thistle Downing seems to have lost what used to be the surest touch in television. Before, she dominated the scripts, but now she’s just trying to live up to them. And the scripts aren’t much to live up to.’ And then the press piled on. The child was twelve or thirteen years old.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Everyone on the set was so kind to her that day,” Lissa said. “I think it would have been better if we’d all made jokes about it, or just surrounded her and hugged her, even though I think Californians overestimate the healing power of a hug. But that would have been better than what she got. Everyone was just so, please sit here Thistle; lovely take, Thistle; that was wonderful, Thistle; let’s do it one more time, Thistle. It was enough to make you sick. About four o’clock, she disappeared. The call went out for her, we were all in place on the set, and she just wasn’t there. We looked absolutely everywhere for her-I honestly think some of us were afraid she’d done herself harm-but it turned out she’d gone out to the street, gotten into a cab, and just taken off. A week later, she told me she’d come up here, up where her father was.” She fell silent for a moment. “She had nowhere to run, so she ran to a rose bush.”
Lissa Wellman took off the big glasses and touched the sides of her index fingers to her lower eyelids, a blotting motion. She put both hands on the wheel and sat there, chewing on her upper lip, her sunglasses forgotten in her lap, and looked at the featureless weathered redwood wall in front of us as though something were written there. “I could have helped more than I did,” she said. “I always told her I loved her. And she believed me, God help her. She didn’t know how little it meant. Everybody in show business loves everybody else so much, it’s darling this and darling that, people fall in love and drink together and swear eternal friendship and then the shoot ends and we all lose each other’s phone numbers. I loved Thistle, but it was something like that, sort of talk-show love, not the kind of all-out, no-holds-barred, no-questions-asked, I’ll-love-you-forever-no-matter-what love she needed. Probably still needs. And, of course, no one was giving her that except the millions of fans who never got anywhere near her and who were beginning to wonder what was wrong with her anyway. Who were beginning to change the station. Abandoning her by the tens of thousands every week. So the problems started. The tantrums, the lines she didn’t learn because she didn’t believe she could do the scene, the days she was late because she couldn’t sleep at night and then couldn’t get out of bed because she was terrified of failing again.” She sighed. “And the drugs.”
“The drugs could kill her,” I said.
“If they haven’t already. Killed whatever was inside her, I mean. Doing something creative is tough, but it comes from a fragile place. I can name lots of people who killed their talent with less cause than Thistle. I think Hollywood’s continuing fascination with zombies comes from the fact that there are so many of them among us. They look the same, they sound the same, but they’ve been unplugged. The thing that made us want to look at them, listen to them: it’s gone. They’re still here, but they’re just waiting to be embalmed. I’d do anything, I’d give years off my life, to turn the clock back for that girl.”
“She’s still in there,” I said. “She doesn’t believe anything good about herself, but she’s still in there.”
Lissa Wellman put a hand on my wrist. “Listen. In your life, there must have been one horrible, unforgettable, humiliating moment, maybe when you were ten or eleven, at the most sensitive time in your life, there must have been one moment when you wished you could disappear forever. More than that, not only wanting to disappear, but wishing you’d never existed at all. A moment that can still make you cringe, twenty or twenty-five years later.”
“There was,” I said.
“Well, multiply that moment by a million, imagine it happening to you on national television, and make it last for four years.” She put the sunglasses back on and looked away from me, toward the life and color of the roses, rooted in people’s dead loved ones. “That’s what happened to Thistle Downing.”
34
My little murderer
By the time I was back in my own car, making the long climb out of Hidden Valley, the sun was close to the day’s finish line. The expensive homes in the basin beneath me were being swallowed up in the mountains’ shadows, the rooftops just darker rectangles against the darkness of the earth, but the sky was still a thinly scattered blue, and high above me the tops of the Santa Monica mountains gleamed in the last of the sunlight. I had the windows down, feeling a new cooling in the air. Sometimes, in the middle of the hottest summer, the Los Angeles nights will suddenly turn cold, as though to remind us that this place was the next thing to a desert before the old men stole all that water and piped it down here to the thirsty city.
6:10 by my watch. Almost six hours since anyone had seen Thistle. And I still had no idea where she was.
Something Lissa Wellman had said to me was picking at a corner of my mind, something about the relationship between Thistle and Edith, but try as I would, I couldn’t focus on it. There was an answer there somewhere, if I could get a clear view of it. And I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with my own position. No matter how ridiculous they were at times, Hacker and Wattles were not comic figures, and Rabbits Stennet was undiluted murder. And yet I was finding it difficult to see myself actually doing anything that would put Thistle Downing in front of the cameras with those five gym rats.
With nothing else to do, I decided to head back to the Camelot Arms. It was possible she’d finally made it home, that she was there alone now, bewildered by the destruction of the few things she’d called her own. She’d need someone with her. She’d probably need someone to hide her, at least for the time being.
I replayed what I’d just thought. I was going to hide Thistle? I wasn’t taking Rabbits seriously enough.
Well, first, see if she’s home. So I made the left on Coldwater and joined the long line of cars that headed over the mountains to the Valley at the end of every business day. I’d pick up the Hollywood Freeway and go back to Thistle’s apartment.
And then something else popped into my mind. A question I should have asked hours ago.
Since I was barely moving anyway, I looked at the touchpad on my cell phone rather than trying to punch in the number by feel. One ring, then two, and I was saying, “Come on” when Tatiana picked it up and said, “Have you found her?”
“No. Is Craig-Robert around?”
“Why would I know? He may have left. Hold on, I’m walking down there now. Where have you looked?”
“At her apartment, which somebody trashed. At her father’s grave. In her past.”
“Nothing?”
The car in front of me came to a complete stop. “Something in her past, and it’s kind of tickling me. But am I any closer to knowing where she is physically? No.”
“Hang on, I’m at the costume lab. Here’s the dramatic part, I’m opening the door now. Oh, well, you are in luck. By now Craig-Robert is usually at home trying to figure out which Supreme he’ll be for the evening. Craig-Robert, talk to Junior for a second.”
“With barely suppressed pleasure at any time of day or night. Hello, hello.”
“Hello, hello yourself. Listen, are you missing any costumes? It wouldn’t be anything fancy, just-”
“How did you know? I was just writing it up.”
“What was it?” We were moving again,
a tire-screeching three or four miles per hour up the hill.
“Strictly Ross Dress for Less, but with Miss Trey, the balance sheets are expected to balance. So here we are, on paper, in my finest cover your precious ass style: Missing: One pair of jeans, one long-sleeved blue cotton blouse, one pair of sneakers.”
“Women’s clothes, right?”
“Mein Gott, I should have put that in, shouldn’t I? Yes, for the fairer sex, as they like to style themselves.”
“Thanks.” Traffic started moving again, and the car behind me gave me a discreet toot.
“Is this important?” Craig-Robert asked. “Should I feel the plot thickening or something?”
“It answers some questions.” Now I knew why I’d been picking at the thing Thistle told Lissa.
My phone beeped to tell me I had an incoming call. I took a look at the caller ID and saw it was Kathy. My ex-wife rarely calls to chew the fat, unless the fat she wants to chew is still attached to my body. I told Craig-Robert I had another call, took a deep breath, punched the button, and said, “Hello.”
“Junior,” Kathy said, and she sounded like it was taking most of her energy to keep her voice level. “I might as well come right to the point. You are this far from having me challenge your visitation rights. And I mean a total ban, no contact with Rina whatsoever. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you’re severely pissed off,” I said. “It’s a little hard to respond when I have no idea what the context is.”
“You don’t?”
The cars ahead of me, which had been at full stop, started to move, and I followed along. “I just said I don’t.”
“Burglary was bad enough. But pornography-”
“Stop. Stop right there.”
“We saw the news, Junior. We saw it together, Rina and I. I had to watch Rina’s face as she saw it. You and that poor girl. And you even talked to Rina about her, yesterday. You know perfectly well that she’s one of Rina’s heroes, and here you are, practically carrying her into the studio where she’s going to film, I don’t know what you’d call it, probably something fancy, but in my father’s day, it was a stag movie.”
“I don’t have anything to do with the movie,” I said. And I listened to my own lie echo down the phone line. Of course, I had something to do with the movie.
“That’s not what it looked like to us. I’m telling you, Junior, if Rina weren’t fighting me tooth and nail on this right now, I’d be on the phone with my lawyer, not you, and you wouldn’t see your daughter until she’s of legal age to make these decisions for herself.”
“Kathy,” I said. “It’s really not what it looks like.”
“That poor baby. She looked so lost, all that bravado and those terrible people.”
“She is lost,” I said.
“The only good thing you did was knock that bitch on her ass.”
“Listen, Kathy, this is more complicated than it seems-”
“It’s always complicated with you, Junior. Because you don’t understand that the only thing that’s not complicated is doing the right thing. Telling the truth and doing the right thing.”
“I’m trying.”
“You could have fooled me. You looked so big on TV. It looked like you were there to keep her from running away.”
“That’s not true. It’s not even close.”
“Whatever’s true, you need to call me by about noon tomorrow and tell me how you’re going to resolve this in a way that satisfies me. Because I’m telling you, if you don’t, you can kiss your daughter goodbye until she’s eighteen.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“Are you listening to me at all? Of course, I’m not going to let you talk to her.” In the background, I could hear Rina arguing with her mother, and Kathy said, “You hush.” Then, to me, she said, “By noon tomorrow, do you hear me?”
She hung up.
I slid the phone into my pocket and focused on inching my way up the hill, shutting everything else out. When in doubt, put one foot in front of the other until the view clears. I was approaching the top of the canyon now, because there were periods of forty to sixty seconds where we’d actually get up to ten or twelve miles per hour, which meant we were nearing the stoplight on Mulholland that’s the last thing before the long downhill.
The phone rang again. Rina.
“Hello, sweetie,” I said.
“Daddy. How could you not tell me?” She sounded younger and less certain of herself. She sounded hurt.
“Honey, I didn’t know …”
“Didn’t know what? You asked me about her. You let me talk about her, and all the time you were doing, doing this-this thing with her. It was-it was just the same as lying to me.”
“I wasn’t trying to lie-”
“Don’t tell me that,” she said, sounding exactly like her mother. “Don’t tell me what you were trying to do. We sat there and talked about her, and you never said one thing-”
“Wait. Wait just a second, okay? Let me try to tell you something.”
There was a silence on the line.
“Haven’t you ever been in a situation where you don’t know what to do? Where you’ve been told to do one thing and there are good reasons to do it, like maybe you’ll get into some kind of trouble if you don’t, but deep inside you know you don’t want to do it? And you don’t know how you’re going to resolve it?”
A long pause, and then an extremely grudging, “I suppose.”
“Well, that was me. Yesterday, that was me. I didn’t want talk to you about it until I knew what I was going to do.”
We crested the hill at last and the Valley spread itself out below me, tens of thousands of houses, offices, buildings. Lives in process. The sun was dropping fast now, and I could see it glaring off of west-facing windows, and, in much closer houses on the side of the mountain I was driving down, lights were coming on. Lights behind windows.
“And now?” Rina said. “Do you know now what you’re going to do?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know exactly what I’m going to do. And it’s nothing you’ll be ashamed of.”
“What? Can you tell me what it is?”
I was driving past the lighted windows now as more lights snapped on behind tens of thousands of windows below, whole square miles of them, on the Valley floor. Just once, I thought, just once, I was going to put myself on the right side of that illuminated glass.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to make absolutely sure that Thistle doesn’t make that movie.”
“Daddy-” Rina said.
“It’s a promise. Don’t tell your mother. I’ll tell her tomorrow, when I said I would. I love you, and I’ve got to go.”
I broke the connection and let the car free-wheel downhill. Trey, Hacker, Wattles. I would have to deal with all of them. But, on the other hand, I knew why the black dress had been in the wastebasket, and why we couldn’t find Thistle in that building. And, thanks to Thistle’s remark, I probably knew who had shot Jimmy.
When I got to Ventura Boulevard, I didn’t cross it to pick up the freeway to Thistle’s apartment. Instead, I turned left, toward Palomar Studio. Where my little murderer probably was.
PART THREE
Action
35
The character for woman
They came out together in Tatiana’s car, Tatiana and Ellie in the front seat, Craig-Robert in back, leaning forward and talking as fast as the other two put together. They waited for the gate to swing open.
“This one’s mine,” I said into the cell phone. “Yours should be coming out any minute, assuming he hasn’t left already.”
“Looks like Doc in ‘Gunsmoke’?” Louie the Lost said.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, “not for someone who watches as much TV as you do.”
“What about my girl?” Louie asked.
“That’s what all this is about. Your girl.”
“So you don’t want a Caddy,” Louie said, returning to an earlier
theme. “I got a nice BMW, real clean.”
“I’m happy with what I’ve got.”
“That piece of shit? Looks like everything on the road. You get a landslide on Laurel Canyon, five of the six cars get smashed, they’re going to look just like yours.”
“That’s more or less the point.” The gate was mostly open, and Tatiana started edging the car around it, too eager to wait. Craig-Robert said something and they all fell all over themselves laughing. “Toyota Camry has been the best-selling car in America since anybody started counting. You tell the cops it was a white Camry you saw, and you don’t have a license plate, they throw it in the inactive file.”
“Huh,” Louie said. “This him?”
I looked through the chain link gate, now closing behind Tatiana’s car. “Sure is. Just stay with him, don’t get too close, don’t let him see you.”
“Don’t let him see me?” Louie said. “Jesus Christ, would you tell Sherlock Holmes, don’t trip on the clue? Then how about a Jag? They actually run now, you know, go forward and backward, not like before.”
“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.
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