Crashed jb-1 Page 12

  Mother and daughter were not reputed to be on good terms.

  And that was only the beginning. Thistle’s money had been a banquet for the harpies to swoop down on. Her first manager, the guy who got her the part in “Once a Witch,” sued and won a few million. Her own lawyer, having lost the case, sued her for seven million and won. Her business manager, who was supposed to manage the money that was left, discovered cocaine and bolted the country with another sixteen million. Thistle ran over a paparazzi’s foot, and that cost a million and a half. She drove a car into someone’s living room, and the settlement was apparently substantial, even though the amount was undisclosed.

  It was a familiar cautionary tale, celebrity downhill skiing, leaving a trail of unflattering photographs, nightmare encounters, and thousand-dollar bills. And then, beginning about three years ago, pretty much nothing. Two stories that she’d been arrested for drug possession but released without going to trial. The mug shots had not been released, which was probably a mercy.

  At midnight I started to shut down and then decided instead to Google Rabbits Stennet.

  Not much there, and nothing that would lead you to believe that Robert R. Stennet was in the habit of feeding business associates to his Rottweilers. He was pleasant-even intelligent-looking, with a long collie face and a tame flop of silvery hair over a high, Sherlock Holmes brow. The overall effect was that of a college professor in some placid backwater of the Humanities rather than a ranking thug with a rep for brutality. He was active in community affairs, which I’ve always thought is kind of a dicey phrase, and there were a couple of pictures of him and the Missus at events. One of the shots, of the two of them on the red carpet to the Grammy Awards, with her glittering at the camera like a Christmas tree ornament in the diamonds I’d boosted plus a lot more, stopped me cold.

  I’d forgotten that Bunny Stennet had looked familiar when I’d seen the photos on the bedroom wall. But there was no question about it. I had seen Bunny Stennet before. I couldn’t pull it out of the snarl of yarn in my head-the end of the strand broke off every time I located it and tugged. But she was familiar, and what’s more, she was familiar in a recent way. Whenever I’d seen her, it hadn’t been long ago.

  I couldn’t remember meeting anyone new-anyone who looked like Bunny Stennet, that is-in months. And months.

  I turned off the computer, climbed into bed, and set my cell phone to bleat at me around seven, since I was supposed to meet Doc at 7:45. I closed my eyes and settled into the pillow, tried to bring Bunny’s features to mind again, and the phone rang.

  I picked it up and flipped it open.

  “Ummm,” Jimmy Dean said. “Something’s, um-maybe you’d better. Oh. Oh. Wait!”

  A gunshot punched a hole in my eardrum.

  The Porsche was at the curb, five cars north of the Camelot Arms. I passed it without slowing, went halfway around the block and parked, and then hiked back. I could see him when I was ten feet away.

  Li Bai Chen, aka Ji Ming Ding, aka Jimmy Dean, had been shot once through the throat. The bullet had entered the left side of his neck, obviously fired through the open driver’s window, and plowed into the back of the passenger seat. A spray of blood and brains had spattered across the window on the passenger side. Powder burns stippled Jimmy’s cheek. He’d let whoever it was get close.

  I smelled scorched cloth. Jimmy’s cigarette had dropped from his mouth onto the thigh of his jeans, where it had burned through the denim to the skin. His right hand rested in his lap, palm up. His left was extended, the wrist caught in an opening in the steering wheel.

  I followed the left arm and the hand with my eyes. In his own blood, on the inside of the windshield, Jimmy had drawn what looked like an uneven “greater than” character:

  He had come fifteen thousand miles, drawn by Hollywood’s vision of a young man who died in a Porsche, and here he was, a young man in Hollywood, dead in a Porsche. I closed my eyes for a moment and said goodbye, then begged his pardon as I slipped a hand inside his jacket and rifled his shirt pocket. Luck was with me, and I found it in the first place I looked: the face Trey had cut from the painting.

  Jimmy’s gun was holstered under his left shoulder. The jacket hadn’t even been unbuttoned. The buttons were snaps so he could open them almost instantly, but they were still closed, not all the way because the evening hadn’t been cool enough, but high enough to make it awkward to get to the gun.

  And I couldn’t find his cell phone.

  I did everything I dared: leaned in as far as I could, checked the backseat, peered through the windows. Then I did what I didn’t want to do-I opened the driver’s door, turning on the interior light, which seemed very bright, and spent fifteen extremely anxious seconds looking for the phone. Not on the floor, not under the seat, not trapped beneath Jimmy’s thighs. I closed the door and did a quick survey of the street. As far as I could tell, I was unobserved.

  Other than trying to find that phone, there was no reason to stay here and many reasons to leave. Cops would probably arrive very soon, and I couldn’t be anywhere around. There was nothing I could do about Thistle. If she was in her apartment, there was no point in knocking, and if she wasn’t, there was no way I could find her now. Moving quickly, I wiped the driver’s door where I had touched it, then went around to the Porsche’s passenger side and wiped the door handle and the top of the door, then, after looking around again, I opened the door and wiped the inside, smearing some of Jimmy’s blood in the process. No cell phone on the passenger side, either. Then I wadded up the handkerchief, stuffed it in my pocket, put my head down, and walked off, briskly but not hurriedly. As I got to my car and climbed in, I heard the sirens.

  Coming for Jimmy.

  PART TWO

  Camera

  17

  Closure

  Crooks don’t get much opportunity to mourn, and that’s regrettable, since we probably lose friends more often than most demographic groups-water delivery men, for example, or the insurance actuaries who tell us which professions have the highest mortality rate. This is one reason that some of us are reluctant to make friends. You never knew when one of them might get hauled to the hospital with an incurable lead tumor or put away for life and a week.

  But that night I did what I could. I spent most of an hour sitting on the bed at the Hillsider Motel, sending off whatever energy I could to accompany Jimmy wherever he was headed. At first I pictured someplace like Trey Annunziato’s yard, but bigger and less corny, with lots of incense, and then dismissed it as faux-Asian claptrap. Jimmy was headed East of Eden, where he could hang out with the other James Dean.

  And I couldn’t call Theresa, Jimmy’s wife, because the cops would be knocking on her door in an hour or two, and they couldn’t see she’d been crying. Cops being cops, they’d regard her as a suspect, or someone who was shielding a suspect. She was going to have a rough enough time as it was.

  And, of course, if the cops eventually got her to talk to them, she’d have to tell them that I was the one who’d called.

  Back when I was a semi-pro, just a patzer who broke into houses on weekends and took things that interested him, I got to know a guy named Herbie, who became a mentor to me. At the time I met him, Herbie was already deep into a long and illustrious career, specializing in the houses of psychiatrists. He really had a burr under his saddle about psychiatrists. The operation was simplicity itself: he’d get their patterns down so he could identify the signs that announced that the house was really empty, as opposed to apparently empty when there was actually someone inside with ready access to a shotgun. When the place was verifiably vacant, Herbie would go in and take everything small enough to fit into a doctor’s valise-and he had a really exquisite eye for value, so he wasn’t bagging a kid’s stamp collection and a bag of garnets-and then he’d go through the doctor’s files, if they were kept at home. He was looking for two specific things: first, some sensational case notes, real headline-quality stuff, the kind of thing it takes a wh
ile for a patient to tell even his or her therapist; and second, evidence that the shrink was underreporting income to the IRS. To hear him tell it, two out of three were doing exactly that.

  Then he’d blackmail them. He’d make a single phone call to announce what he had and to inform the doctor that the patient’s secrets would be made public and the IRS would get an anonymous package in the mail, followed by the reassuring news that these problems could be made to go away by a substantial wire transfer into a numbered bank account in Aruba. The payment was a whopper, and once he got it, Herbie shredded everything, and the doctor never heard from him again. Blackmailers get caught, Herbie said, because they don’t stop.

  It was obvious to me that Herbie had been through a lot of therapy. He talked about complexes and conflicts and childhood traumas and invalid self-images and self-punishment and acting out, and all those other terms that shrinks use to mystify the way pretty much everyone acts. And one of the terms Herbie used most was closure. Sure, Herbie was getting rich when he held these therapists over the fire, but he was also obtaining ongoing closure for some unrevealed wrong that had been done to him while he was stretched out on an analyst’s couch.

  One evening in Reseda, a blood brother of Herbie’s, a hapless, judgment-free skell named Willis, robbed a liquor store in the company of some meth-addled tweaker he’d met that night. They got away with $362, a bunch of full bottles, and a string of curses in Korean from the store’s owner, but they didn’t get all the way away; the next morning Willis was found in a vacant lot with a broken bottle stuck in his neck. No money, of course. A couple of days later, the tweaker went down under a dark sedan with no license plates that didn’t even slow down to let the driver take a look, and that night Herbie said something to me that I actually went home and wrote down.

  If you can’t get closure, Herbie said, get even.

  Before I turned off the bedside lamp for the second time that night, I made a promise to Jimmy, Ji Ming, Bai Chen, or whatever name he was going by now. I promised to get even.

  I closed my eyes, and my cell phone rang. When I looked at it, it displayed Jimmy’s number.

  18

  The point of Paranoia

  I watched it ring.

  This was a problem. Like a total amateur, I was carrying my real phone, the number Rina and the people in my straight life had, not some throwaway bought with cash for one-time use on a job, with no name attached to the number. I just hadn’t anticipated, when I drove into Hollywood, that my cell phone would be a line to me for someone I would much rather not meet.

  So, I thought, let’s say it’s the cops. One of the first things they would do is look at the log in the phone, and they’d see that Jimmy had called me just about the time the shots were reported. Then they’d get a name for the number. Then, using a different phone so they wouldn’t run the risk of destroying any trace evidence on Jimmy’s, they’d call me.

  The phone stopped ringing. I realized I’d shrugged off the blankets and sat up, and was now perched on the edge of the bed with my bare feet on the Hillsider’s faintly tacky carpet.

  The cops would definitely call. But probably not on Jimmy’s phone.

  So who? Only one real possibility.

  Jimmy, I thought again, had let whoever it was get pretty close. Jimmy was not a trusting soul. With half the gangsters in China, plus the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the LAPD, and assorted personal enemies eager to take his scalp, Jimmy was careful to the point of paranoia.

  Either Jimmy knew the shooter, or the shooter looked helpless, or the shooter was very, very good. And I thought I could dismiss the third possibility. Jimmy was a lookout, one of the best. He kept his eyes open, took in the big picture all the time, and had installed convex rear-view mirrors on the Porsche for a wide-angle view. He used them constantly. In all the time he’d been in Los Angeles, he’d never blown a job. He’d never been arrested. On the job, Jimmy had more eyes than a spider.

  Nobody had come up on him from behind. He’d seen them. He’d seen them cross the street or step off the curb to come around to the driver’s side. And he hadn’t even unsnapped his jacket.

  If Thistle came out, he’d let her get close.

  If a highly attractive girl approached, he’d probably let her get close, but he’d have his gun in his hand, out of sight. His gun had still been in the shoulder holster.

  If a little kid approached, he’d let him or her get close.

  If someone he knew well-

  The phone rang again.

  I picked it up and said “Hello.”

  No one answered. I heard a motorcycle or something go by in the background. The person on the other end of the phone was on the street somewhere.

  “I’m not saying it again,” I said. “Talk or let me go to sleep.”

  No reply, and suddenly I was blindly, hotly, pulse-poundingly furious. “I’m at the Hillsider motel on Highland, in room 210. I don’t have a gun. I’m getting up right now and opening the door. I’ll leave it wide open. Come over here, you asshole, and let me get a look at you.” I slammed the phone closed, got up, opened the door, and got dressed, in the same coveralls I’d been wearing for two days. Then I turned off the phone, since I didn’t plan to go to sleep and I didn’t need the alarm, and I didn’t want whoever had shot Jimmy to call me again. I was giving him or her only one way to talk to me.

  I sat in the armchair, facing out through the open door, and waited. I waited for two or three of the slowest, darkest hours of my life.

  And then I found myself talking to Jimmy with steep blue-green mountains in the background, definitely a Chinese landscape with lots of mist, and he had that cigarette in the middle of his mouth, and the cigarette was putting out an enormous amount of smoke. It got harder to see Jimmy through the smoke, and then everything just seemed to go white. And I was someplace cold, sitting in the white on something hard.

  Out of the white, something prodded my shoulder.

  I bolted up, coming out of the chair so fast that I almost knocked Doc over.

  “Do you know your door is wide open?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I rubbed at my face, which seemed to be all there. “It was too hot in here.”

  “Seven-thirty,” Doc said. “We should get over there.”

  “Sure, sure. Did you bring coffee?”

  “No, but I’ve got this.” He held out a little flask. “Cognac,” he said. “Pretty good, too.”

  “No, thanks. Maybe they’ve got coffee in the office. Let me get my stuff.”

  “I’ll check the office for you,” Doc said. He got halfway through the door, and then said, “Did you drop this?”

  I went over and looked. On the cement walkway to the immediate right of my door was Jimmy’s cell phone.

  “No,” I said, picking it up. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

  We had to slow when we made the turn onto Romaine. A uniformed cop was there, detouring people to the first right turn. Doc rolled down the window and explained that we had to pick someone up at the Camelot Arms, and rattled off the address.

  The cop eyed him for a moment. Then he said, “Are you on television?”

  “You spotted me,” Doc said modestly.

  “Tell you what,” the cop said. “Give me an autograph for my daughter, and I’ll let you through. Just tell the officer at the corner that Willett said it was okay.”

  “That’s right nice of you,” Doc said, in Milburn Stone mode. He grabbed a pad that was fastened to the center console with a suction cup, took a pen out of his pocket, and said, “What’s your daughter’s name?”

  “Um, Dennis,” Officer Willett said. He was very young.

  “Fine, fine.” Doc wrote, “For Dennis, a big howdy,” and signed it “Milburn Stone.” When he handed it to Willett, he said, “That’s a rare one. I haven’t been signing much lately.”

  “Thanks.” Willett pocketed the signature. “Straight ahead. Remember, the name’s Willett.”

  “Got it
,” Doc said, raising the window.

  “Rare,” I said, sipping the coffee he’d grabbed in the Hillsider lobby.

  “Well, the new ones are. Milburn Stone died in 1980.”

  A block ahead, another cop tried to wave us off, but Doc lowered the window and said the magic words, and we were allowed to make the turn onto Thistle’s street. A knot of cops, including three black-and-whites, a bunch of uniforms, and some detectives in suits almost as awful as Hacker’s, snarled the street around Jimmy’s car. Both doors were wide open and the car was empty; Jimmy had been hauled away with the night’s other dead.

  Doc had no problem finding a place to park. The people who went to work early had vacated their spaces, and no one had been allowed into the street to replace them. “I’ll go get her,” he said. “I want to give her a little wake-up injection, and I don’t want to surprise her with you, standing there all tall and threatening.”

  “Fine,” I said. I really didn’t want to get out of the car anyway. You never know when you might run into a cop who’d recognize you. After Doc climbed out and closed the door, I leaned over and angled the rear-view mirror so I could see what was going on around the Porsche. But I overshot it and had to turn it back-and then froze. I thought I’d seen something.

  “Nah,” I said out loud.

  But I readjusted the mirror anyway, and about thirty yards away, some five or six spaces behind Jimmy’s Porsche, there it was. A dented white Chevy with some halfhearted primer applied at random. And the last time I’d seen it, I’d watched it dig up a bunch of lawns on Windward Circle.