“What’s here?” I asked.
“Friends.”
“Didn’t know she had any.”
“Counting you and me, I can think of four,” Doc said. “The other two live here.”
He led me around to the right of the garage. In the center of the wall was a crappy-looking door, warped, blistered wood and four panes of glass, which had been painted an opaque color that looked like Wedgewood blue, with a lot of gray in it. Doc waved me to the left-hand side of the door, put a finger to his lips, and knocked.
No answer.
He knocked again, in a pattern this time: three fast, two slow, then two fast. A moment later, a high female voice said, “Who?”
Doc said, “Doc.”
“Hold on,” said the female voice, and in a few seconds the door opened. “I brought a friend,” Doc said, and I came around the edge of the door, just in time to see it start to slam closed. I got a foot wedged in there, and looked down at the eight- or nine-year-old whom I’d chased out of the Camelot Arms that afternoon.
Up close, she was even smaller than I’d thought. She had fine, flyaway blond hair that had been chopped into some semblance of an intentional haircut, a high, narrow nose, and wide, very startled blue eyes, which were staring up at me as though Charles the Child-Eater had just materialized in front of her.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m a friend of Thistle’s.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “You liar. You’re working for that, that-”
“No,” I said. “I was, but now I’m not. Look, do you think Doc would bring me here if I wasn’t Thistle’s friend?”
“If you told him a bunch of lies,” she said.
“Who is it?” another voice said from inside.
“The big bad guy,” the little one said. “He’s with Doc.”
“Well,” said the other voice, “there’s no way to keep him out. If he leans on the door it’ll probably fall over.”
The little one’s face twisted as she pulled her mouth to one side, as though it was chasing her left ear. “I don’t like it, though,” she said for the record. She stepped back and let Doc push the door open.
“Junior,” Doc said, “this is Wendy.” He knelt down so they were eye to eye. We hadn’t yet taken a step over the threshold. “Wendy, this big clown is named Junior, and he’s not as dumb as he looks.”
Wendy said, “He couldn’t be.”
“May we come in?” Doc asked.
“Jennie said it was okay,” Wendy said.
“Is it okay with you?”
The mouth twisted again as she considered the question. “I guess,” she finally said.
“Wait,” Doc said. “Have you girls eaten?”
Wendy didn’t say anything, but her tongue flicked her upper lip. I could have counted to ten by the time the other one, Jennie, said from wherever she was, “No.”
“Come on, then,” Doc said, standing up. “We’ll let the big ugly guy buy.”
Jennie came around from behind the door with a cast-iron frying pan in both hands, gave me a quick but thorough look, and said, “This was for hitting, not cooking.”
Five minutes later, we were sitting in the nearest McDonald’s, which had come in first, second, and third on the list of places the girls wanted to go. Before we left I’d seen the inside of the garage apartment, a single room of absolutely astonishing messiness: clothes, shoes, boxes, and cooking implements everywhere, whole odd lots of stuff piled in corners. The basic organizational principle seemed to be, if this won’t tip the stack over, put it on top.
“Where’s your mom?” I asked as Jennie bit into the first of the two quarter-pounders in front of her.
Jennie was chewing, so Wendy said, “She went shopping.”
“When?” I asked.
Wendy said, “February.”
Doc kicked me under the table, but I asked anyway. “So you’re all alone?”
“Not zhe firsht time,” Jennie said around three or four ounces of meat.
“Mommy likes boys,” Wendy said.
“Men,” Jennie corrected her. She considered the burger, looking for the next point of attack.
“And we don’t like the men Mommy likes,” Wendy said. She picked up a fry and nibbled the tip. “So Mommy takes them someplace.”
“They’re doing fine,” Doc said, giving me a Meaningful Look. “A lot better than they’d be doing if those pinheads in Child Protective Services got involved.” He pushed Wendy’s burger a tactful half an inch toward her. “They’re together, for one thing.”
“I’ll eat it later,” Wendy said, looking at the burger.
“No, you won’t,” Doc said. “You’ll eat it now, and later you can eat the one we’ll buy to go.”
Wendy said, “A whole nother one?”
“Or two,” Doc said. “Maybe two for each of you. Junior’s got lots of money, don’t you, Junior?”
“I can hardly walk, my pockets are so full.”
Wendy said, “Maybe your pants will fall down,” and laughed, and Jennie joined in, sneaking one of her sister’s fries during the general merriment.
“Where do you get all your money?” Jennie said once sobriety had been restored. “We can hardly get enough for macaroni and cheese.”
Wendy said, “And we don’t even like macaroni and cheese.”
“I steal it,” I said. “I’m a burglar.”
“Nuh-uh,” Wendy said. Then she said, “Are you?”
“How old are you?” I asked Jennie.
“Fifteen.” Wendy’s head came around, and Jennie said, “Almost.”
“I started when I was your age,” I said. “I broke into my first house when I was fourteen.”
Wendy was looking at me uneasily. “What did you steal?”
“Nothing. I did it to get even with the guy next door. You know anybody who’s only happy when somebody else is miserable?”
“Come on,” Jennie said. “We live in Hollywood.”
“Right. Well, Mr. Potts was like that. And the summer I was fourteen, Mr. Potts made himself happy by opening the gate to our back yard and letting my dog out, and then calling animal control. The fifth or sixth time he did it, I decided to send him a message. I put a set of tools together and then waited one morning until he’d left for work. Then I let myself in through a back window-”
“Weren’t you scared?” Wendy asked.
“Are you guys scared living alone?”
“No.”
“Okay. You’re good at living on your own. I’m good-I was good even then-at breaking into houses.”
“What did you do to him?” Jennie asked, her chin on her hand while her other hand fished another of her sister’s fries off the plate.
“A bunch of things. I put cayenne pepper in his jar of cinnamon and sand in his salt shaker. Ajax cleanser in his sugar bowl. Some cat poop into the Tupperware containers in his refrigerator.”
Wendy said, “Ick” and slapped her sister’s hand, which was once again straying toward the fries.
“And I used Superglue to seal every one of the little holes in the burners on his stove. And since I had the Superglue in my hand, I glued the TV remote to the coffee table.”
“Facing which way?” Jenny immediately asked.
“Away from the screen, of course.”
“Was the coffee table heavy?” Jenny was displaying some unexpected talent.
“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 d
o 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.”
37
My sweet inflatable you
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.”
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