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  Trey stepped forward, claiming the small room as hers. She was maintaining the smile, but it had very sharp corners. “Let’s all just modulate our tone. This is a big morning, and we don’t want to get off on the wrong foot.’

  “We already have,” I said. “That mob scene outside-”

  Trey held up a peremptory hand. “Thistle was told there would be reporters here,” she said. She leaned a little on the smile. “Weren’t you, dear?”

  I turned to Thistle. She raised her shoulders to her ears, pulled down the corners of her mouth, and let her shoulders drop.

  “Somebody should have told me,” I said.

  “I can’t think of a single reason why,” Trey said in the brightly empty tone of someone who is determined to be pleasant no matter what.

  “Because Thistle either wasn’t told or doesn’t remember. If she wasn’t told, I should have known about it. If she forgot, someone should have anticipated that she might, and told me. I was in charge of getting her here.”

  “You put yourself in charge,” Trey said. “You put yourself in charge of her last night, too, but that didn’t keep her from doping herself into a coma, did it? Sorry to talk about you in the third person, darling.”

  “You were there last night?” Thistle asked, her face screwed up. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I wasn’t there. You and I need to talk,” I said to Trey.

  “Yes, and I’ve been sending Eduardo to you all morning to tell you that,” she said. “But before we close the subject of the media, let’s make sure that Thistle hasn’t also forgotten the press conference that starts in”-she looked at a watch that was thinner than hope-“about fifteen minutes.”

  “No,” Thistle said, mostly breath. Her eyes went to me.

  “It’s in your contract. You agreed to do it,”

  “No.”

  “Let’s not waste time. You need a little makeup and hair, and I’ve got a team outside-”

  “You are not hearing me,” Thistle said, more loudly. She swallowed twice before continuing. “I said no. Go away and leave me alone.”

  “All right,” Trey said with resignation. “I suppose it’s just as well to get this over now.” She came the rest of the way into the room, edging past Doc, and leaned her backside against the edge of the makeup counter. “I want to get along with you, I really do. I loved you when I was a child. I’m sure a million people have told you this, but I had a lot of problems with my own parents, and all I wanted in the world was to be you, with magic powers that could fix everything-”

  “You’re right,” Thistle said. “A million people have told me this.”

  “Well, dear, you’re going to hear it again. We actually have a lot in common, did you know that? We both had our whole families depending on us all the time, watching us, making sure we were who they wanted us to be. And I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t who they wanted me to be. I was the daughter of a gangster who only wanted a son. I was given a male name, did you know that?”

  “Poor you,” Thistle said. “I was named after a weed.”

  “But as much as we have in common and as much as I admire your talent, you are contractually obligated to keep your commitments to me. You’re a competent adult, more or less, who has made an agreement to deliver services in exchange for remuneration. California law is very clear on this: you are nailed to this project. I have a lot of money riding on these movies, dear, quite a bit of which is going to you. You are going to show up and do your job, and when you’re finished you’ll be given two hundred thousand dollars, in cash, which you can do anything you want with. If you cross me-and by that, I mean, if you don’t keep your promises, all your promises-you won’t get a penny. Is that clear? It’s all in your contract, which you have signed and initialed profusely. This press conference is in that contract. If you’re going to go back on your word, if you’re going to breach the contract, now is the time to do it, before I waste any more money.”

  Trey crossed her arms, and the diamonds in her watch sparkled. “So, dear, it’s really up to you. Quit right now or play the game.” She pushed herself away from the counter and took a couple of steps closer to Thistle, so she was looking down at her. “You can do it,” she said more softly. “You’re a smart, talented girl. You just go out there and tell them the truth, and we’ll be fine.” She reached out and smoothed Thistle’s hair and removed the sunglasses, and Thistle stood for it, didn’t move her head a fraction of an inch. Her eyes were locked on Trey’s sternum. “What do you say? Let’s get along for a few days and get this done, and then you’ll have all that money. You can go back to your life.”

  Thistle turned her face away and said, “You were doing great until then.” She recaptured her shades but didn’t put them on. To me, she said, “What do you think?”

  Trey involuntarily raised one eyebrow a millimeter at the question, and her eyes went speculatively from me to Thistle.

  “Do I think you can do it?” I asked. “Or do I think you should do it?”

  “Can,” she said. “We both know I shouldn’t.”

  “I think you can. But I agree that you shouldn’t.”

  “Miss Thing here has made it clear that I should. That I have to, if I want grocery money. I want you with me.”

  “I think the press has seen enough of Mr. Bender today,” Trey said.

  “Hold on,” Thistle said, without looking at her. “Just hold on one fucking minute. You’re used to being agreed with, so this might be hard for you, but here it is.” She swung her head around to face Trey. “I may have to do the things I said I would, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do them my way. You want this to happen, right?”

  Trey was glaring at me, as though I were to blame for Thistle’s resistance. “Of course.”

  Suddenly something happened to Thistle. It took only an instant; there seemed to be no transition at all. Her face mirrored Trey’s expression precisely, and her spine straightened in exact mimicry of Trey’s stance. When she spoke, her voice sounded uncannily like Trey’s. “Of course,” she said. “Of course you do. You have money invested. Then go away. Go manage someone.”

  Startled, Trey took a step back.

  “You won, okay?” Thistle/Trey continued. She even had Trey’s hand gestures, the way she held her head. “Junior will help me do this, just like he helped me get in here. And it won’t be in fifteen minutes, it’ll be in half an hour. Or a little more. You go away and make money, and let the makeup people get in here. Doc,” she said, turning, “I’m feeling that little elevator, so I want an extra smoothie. Or maybe a couple, all things considered.” She looked back at Trey. “Are you still here?”

  Trey regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “That’s a cute trick,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re that good on camera.” Then she turned to me, and her voice when she said, “Mister Bender?” could have frozen meat.

  “Coming.” Trey was out the door. “I’ll be back,” I said to Thistle.

  With Trey gone, she was herself again. She slumped back into the chair as though she’d run a hundred yards. “Good, because if you’re not, they’re going to have to carry this whole chair onstage.”

  I followed Trey out of the room and into the hallway. Tatiana, leading the makeup and hair crew into the room, gave me a questioning glance and then looked at Trey’s rigid back as she marched down the hall. “If you were a stock,” she whispered, “would you advise me to buy or sell?”

  “Sell,” I said. “But I don’t think you could get anything for it.”

  Before trying to catch up with Trey, I made a ninety-second telephone call. Essentially just the studio’s address and a question that might prove useful in half an hour or so.

  24

  Sew this back into your Leonardo

  “I want an explanation,” Trey said, her hands folded in front of her, her back plumb-straight. We were back in the classroom set, facing each other over the teacher’s desk, and she was the image of the strict third-grade teacher wh
o’s just found a bad word on the chalkboard. I suppose I was expected to feel chastened, but it was hard for me to look at her without seeing Thistle’s extraordinary impersonation.

  “Is there anything in particular you’d like explained? I’m reasonably well-informed on a relatively broad spectrum of subjects.”

  “Let’s begin with what’s going on between Thistle and you.” “That’s easy. There’s nothing going on between Thistle and me.”

  “She looks at you every time I ask her a question. She consults with you. I’m paying her, and she’s turning to you for advice. I want to know why.”

  “She’s got nobody in the world,” I said. “I made her laugh this morning. I dragged her through that pack of parasites when we arrived. I’m the temporary hero. She’s not exactly aces in the self-confidence department, and she needs to turn to somebody. Right now, I’m it.”

  “For someone with no self-confidence, she told me to fuck off rather effectively.”

  “She used to be a star. Stars are good at that.”

  “Well, I don’t like it, you siding with her like that. You’re working for me, not her.”

  “I’ve got two answers to that. The first is that she needs a friend or she’s not going to be functional, and she’s chosen me. The second is that you have a much bigger problem than Thistle telling you to fuck off.” I reached into my pocket and took out the snippet of painting. “Here. You can sew this back into your Leonardo.”

  She looked down at it but made no move to take it. “I told you to give that to your lookout.”

  I dropped it onto the desk. “He won’t need it any more. Somebody shot him.”

  One hand went to the surface of the desk although her face didn’t change. “Excuse me?”

  “Last night, outside Thistle’s apartment house, someone put one through his throat at close range.”

  She took a mechanical step back, pulled the chair out from under the desk without looking down at it, and sat. She seemed to be giving her movements no attention whatsoever. She finally said, “Murdered?”

  “If you know a nicer word, share it with me.”

  “Was he a friend, or just someone you hired?”

  “A friend.”

  She turned her head an inch to the right and then brought it back. It was almost a sympathetic shake of the head. “I’m sorry.” She licked her lips. “How-don’t take this badly-how good was he?”

  “The best I knew.”

  Her right hand did a little side-to-side movement, disagreement she might not have known she was expressing. “But you said it-the shot, I mean-was fired at close range.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Then how good could he have been?” I had a feeling I was hearing her father’s voice.

  I said, “He had his weaknesses. Like most of us. Somebody who looked like you could have gotten close.”

  “Like-like me? Are you serious?”

  “I didn’t say you, I said someone who looked like you. Attractive, in other words. He liked women too much, more than I do, anyway. Or a kid could have gotten close. He wouldn’t have felt threatened by a kid.”

  Two fingers went to her left eyebrow and smoothed it while her eyes searched mine. “You mean a child?”

  “Or Thistle,” I said, just to be thorough. “He was there to protect her. If she’d come out of the apartment house and approached him, he’d have just sat there and watched her come. Which is apparently what he did. His gun was still in his holster.”

  Trey shook her head, not so much disagreeing as having trouble processing the information. “But you know Thistle better than-I mean, you obviously don’t think she shot your friend.”

  “I have no idea whether I know Thistle. This is someone who talks about herself in the third person. I like her, the bits of her she lets me see, which isn’t much.”

  “How can you be sure? What you see is mostly chemicals.”

  “There’s somebody under all that fog, somebody interesting. So I like her, and I feel sorry for her. But even if I didn’t like her, I’d be sure she didn’t kill him, because I’m pretty sure someone tried to kill her, too.”

  Trey brought up both hands, palms out. “Wait, wait. Time out.” She got up, walked around the desk, and went to the edge of the set. She peered behind the wall to the left, apparently making certain no one was there, and then she checked behind the other wall. When she was certain we were alone, she came back to the desk and sat. She pointed to the nearest student desk and made a little come-here gesture. Since the desk wasn’t paying attention to her, I grabbed it and hauled it over to her and sat down. Once I was down, she pointed at the walls and then touched her ear. She leaned forward conspiratorially. “You’re going to have to back things up,” she said very quietly. “This is the beginning of the day, and I came into it with a couple of dozen things on my mind. Now I have to toss most of them and focus on this. I want you to take a breath and tell me everything in some sort of order. Try chronological. Maybe we can make some sense out of it.”

  So I gave her all of it, including the little gift box of Rohypnol someone had so thoughtfully left on Thistle’s doorstep. The only thing I left out was the banged-up white Chevy, because I had no idea what to make of it, and Trey had denied any knowledge of the two girls who had been driving it. When I’d finished, we sat there in that parody of a schoolroom like two students who’d been sentenced to silent detention for twenty years.

  She reached up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Why didn’t they just shoot Thistle?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.

  “I don’t know. She may not have been alone. There were three dirty wineglasses on the floor. Maybe whoever it was heard voices through the door, didn’t want to have to kill a bunch of people. Maybe they figured killing Thistle Downing would start a firestorm in the media, so they’d let her do the job herself with the pills. But the truth is that I don’t even know why they shot Jimmy.”

  “Because he saw them?”

  “He was just a guy in a car,” I said. “How would they know what he was looking for? At first, I figured he’d spotted your husband and maybe he’d reacted somehow. But then he’d have had his gun out, and he didn’t. And if he didn’t give them some sort of reaction, then why shoot him? They were there to leave those pills for Thistle and sneak away, not to shoot people out in the street. So that leaves another possibility, which is that someone told them Jimmy would be there.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Well, certainly you don’t think that I-”

  “Did you?”

  “That’s both unintelligent and offensive.” She pushed the chair back a couple of inches. Her hands were on the desk, all the fine bones visible beneath the skin. She was at least ten pounds underweight-not as thin as Thistle, but whip-thin, and I thought again of Thistle’s imitation. Trey, I realized, was one of the people Thistle might have grown up to be, if she’d remained a star and held the drugs at bay.

  “I find it offensive that he’s dead,” I said. “And I didn’t talk to anyone.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and willed her face to soften. When she opened them, she said, “I’m sorry about your friend. I know how it is to lose people. But you have to realize that what I want most right now is to get these movies made. We can avoid another exchange like this if you’ll keep that in mind. I wouldn’t do anything, not anything, that would endanger this project.”

  It didn’t cost anything, so I said, “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded once, just acknowledgment. She said, “There are times one doesn’t want to be right, and this is one of them. I said yesterday that this was the critical period, but I never thought it would get to murder.”

  “I can’t imagine why you didn’t. You’re surrounded by people who shoot other people the way most of us choose a breakfast cereal. And you said it yourself: there are a lot of them who don’t like your new direction.” I pushed the scrap of canvas toward her. �
��You cut this out. How serious are you about it?”

  “You mean, do I actually think my husband is involved?” She put her face into her hands and rubbed it for a second, looking briefly like the young woman in her twenties she actually was. Then she pulled her hands back and raked her hair off her face. “I think he could be. He’s a big enough shit, and he doesn’t like the position I’ve put him in.”

  “Which is?”

  “He married me in the firm belief that he would be the master, that I would love, honor, and obey, by which he meant I’d get up and cook breakfast and wear an apron all day and have kids who looked just like him, and leave all the hard stuff, all the guy stuff, to him. Stuff like running my father’s family. He was going to be King Tony the First. He did everything except go out and buy a crown.”

  “What’s his full name?”

  “Tony Ramirez. Antonio, actually, but he likes Tony. It’s easier for him to remember. He’s not exactly Mensa material. And he doesn’t expect anybody else to be, either. I think his first unpleasant surprise came when I didn’t change all the monograms so I could become Trey Ramirez. And it’s a good thing I didn’t, since I’d be changing it back now anyway.”

  “Divorced?”

  “All but.” She picked up the scrap of painted canvas and looked at it as though from a great height, then put it face down on the desk. “A few weeks more, and the paper sword will fall on the knot binding us together. Then he’ll really be out in the cold. Just another unemployed hunk of muscle with a good profile. So, yeah, I think he might be behind this. Among the more macho guys who do chores for us, there are some who figure that working for my father’s son-in-law beats the hell out of working for his daughter.”

  “Could he run the business? You say he’s not smart, but how smart would he have to be?”

  “He operates at about the same level of intelligence as a microwave oven. But some of the guys who’ll back him are counting on that. They’re figuring that he’ll be so busy counting his money and looking at himself in a mirror that they’ll pretty much have things their way. And to answer your second question, to run an operation as complex as the one my father put together, you have to be very smart.”