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.
38
Bleak receptors
Since Jenny and Wendy didn’t appear to be any more dangerous than the average Brownie troop, I spent the night at the Snor-Mor, but I took the minor precaution of moving from room 204 to 203 and locking the connecting door. Not much of a tactic, but not much was called for.
The night I’d been forced into this thing, I’d slept badly because I hated the idea of dragging someone as talented as Thistle into a porn film, even an extra-fancy porn film with arcs and sequels and Rodd Hull and everything. The second night, I’d barely slept at all, sitting in that chair at the Hillsider Motel hoping that whoever killed Jimmy would show. So here I was, one night later; I had committed to keep Thistle out of the movie, I knew who had killed Jimmy, and I was pretty clear on what I was going to do about it.
And I still couldn’t sleep.
The early morning hours are the Valley of the Shadow of Death for the fearful. For some reason, people’s Bleak Receptors are yawning wide at that time, waiting hungrily to clamp onto every doubt, unanswered question, possible reversal, potential disastrous outcome, and negative self-assessment that might be floating around in the local ether. I had every one of those items, a museum-quality collection, a veritable royal flush of worries, dreads, and night-terrors. With them in charge of my perspective, it seemed inescapably clear that I had built a rickety bridge from here to there constructed from dubious assumptions, character miscalculations, underestimations of the amount of malice and cunning on the other side’s team, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the laws of probability. What had looked to me, when I left Wattles’s office, like a relatively good hand of cards that might prevail with skillful play now looked like muck.
And I wasn’t just frightened for myself. I was frightened for Thistle, for Doc, for Louie, for anyone who had done or was going to do anything at all to help me try to get out of this mess with my skin and my ethics, such as they were, intact. And, of course, I was worried about the spatter effect, especially where Rina and Kathy were concerned. I couldn’t let anything endanger them. And Hacker, that multifaceted son of a bitch, had, at least obliquely, threatened Rina.
Another reason to put Hacker in a different category.
Around three-fifteen, I got honest with myself and stopped pretending I was going to drop off to sleep just any minute now. I got up, turned on the lights, and wandered around the room. The rooms at the Snor-Mor offer a minimum of wandering area, complemented by a minimum number of items of interest. Finally, out of desperation at the sheer absence of anything useful to do, I turned on CNN and spent about forty-five minutes watching the coverage of Thistle Downing’s emergence from obscurity to star in a porno flick, tastefully referred to as an adult film. I got to see myself deck the lady reporter a couple of times-that was what they’d chosen as the promo-and watched myself standing next to Thistle at the press conference. I could see why Kathy had gotten so upset; I looked like some human trafficking enforcer who’d been stationed there to break her spine if she got out of line.
Thistle had predicted the angles precisely. CNN went with what she had characterized as the compassionate approach: “Isn’t it tragic? That cute little girl turned out to be a slut.” The surprise was that they spent quite a bit of the segment on excerpts from the press conference in which Thistle excoriated the ladies and gentlemen who had turned out, and then cut to some brief street interviews of people who, by and large, agreed with her. The general consensus seemed to be that the press was a bunch of scumbags, that they were interested only in bad news and cheap angles, and that they should leave the poor kid alone. These compelling tidbits were followed by a very carefully worded piece, a piece many lawyers had reviewed, about the possibility of there being crime-family money behind the enterprise. When the CNN all-night anchorwoman, who was attractively weary-looking, or maybe it was just me, promised an upcoming editorial on The Media: Are We Out of Control?, I turned off the set and looked for something else, anything else, to do.
And there, jammed provocatively into her four-color box, was Dora.
I unwrapped her and blew her up, which turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded. By the time she was sitting propped up in the armchair opposite the bed, looking at me with a certain passive interest, I had spots floating in front of my eyes. I checked the package for a health warning, something like DO NOT ATTEMPT SEXUAL ACTIVITY WHILE HYPERVENTILATED, but it seemed as though Wattles hadn’t had his legal team evaluate the language on the box. If he had, I thought, there would be more of those infuriating cautions for the clueless that have become such a permanent part of the American landscape: DO NOT FILL WITH MOLTEN LEAD. DO NOT USE ON LIGHTED STOVE. DO NOT SHARE WITH STRANGERS. DO NOT INFLATE AND TAKE TO DENTIST.
There was one nice lawyerly touch: in small print on the back of the package were the words MODEL WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER AT TIME OF MANUFACTURE. I knew for a fact that that was true. So Wattles, whatever other kinds of nefarious activity he might be engaged in, wasn’t promoting plastic pedophilia. I found myself wondering whether there might not be a worldwide underground traffic in used department-store mannequins of children. Somewhere, I figured, there was probably a catalog.
Catalog, I thought. Good idea; here was something useful I could do. I went online, brought up Google, and typed MY SWEET INFLATABLE YOU, hoping this query wasn’t being electronically filed in an indelible record of my online activities by some gray government bureau. Wham! With the absolute moral neutrality that makes Google so perversely fascinating, it filled my screen with a whole bouquet of hits. And the very first one had everything I needed, and more: a picture of Dora at her most alluring (high-definition version available), the price, some truly unsettling prose about her capabilities, a couple of even more unsettling endorsements from happy customers, and-almost too good to be true-Wattles’s mailing address for those who wished to pay with checks or money orders rather than having Visa or Mastercard know they were buying inflatable companionship.
I printed five copies of the page, using glossy paper for the full effect. Then I killed half an hour writing the letter I planned to roll up in Dora’s open mouth when it came time for her to take center stage. I
t was good, even by my strict editorial standards.
“You’re going out there a limp bag of latex,” I said to Dora. “But you’re coming back a star.”
I thought it would be polite for her to answer me, so I pressed her left ear, expecting either, “Oh, Baby” or “Don’t stop now,” or maybe both of them together to show I was someone special, not just another guy with a good pair of lungs. Nothing. I pressed the right ear, and I have to admit that pressing either ear was mildly creepy-feeling. Not a word, not a syllable, not a perfunctory appreciative moan. In addition to being a second-rate burglar, a bad planner, a danger to those around me, and someone whose personal clock was set on fast forward, I couldn’t get a cheap rise out of a blow-up doll.
I picked up the package, and my spirits lifted: in print that was smaller than most punctuation marks were the words, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED.
Okay. It wasn’t me. I went to sleep.
“Geez, I’m sorry,” Louie said in the doorway. “Didn’t know you had company.”
I’d shot halfway across the room, traveling eight inches above the carpet, at the sound of the door opening, and I stood there now, panting, trapped somewhere between the adrenaline rush of panic and the post-sleep fog of no-coffee-yet. “Jesus,” I said. “Don’t do that. And look a little closer before you apologize to the lady.”
“Holy smoke,” Louie said, peering at Dora. He’d come in from a bright morning and the room was as dim as I’d been able to make it. He looked concerned. “You know, Junior,” he said slowly, “you’re not what I call handsome, but you’re not a bad-looking guy. I mean, Alice knows some girls she could introduce …” His voice trailed off. “She looks a lot like somebody,” he said.
I said, “Doesn’t she.”
Louie said, “You’re fuckin’ kidding me” in the tone of someone who has just seen the Virgin Mary in a swirl of powdered coffee creamer. He came the rest of the way into the room and tugged a lock of Dora’s Dynel hairdo. “I mean, same hair and everything.”
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