Crashed jb-1 Read online

  “I liked that car,” Louie said. “Put a lot of work into that engine.”

  “Other engines will manifest,” I said poetically as I looked for flashing red lights. “Engines abound.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Louie said. “Detroit iron, eight cylinders. That stuff don’t grow on trees.” He sucked on his teeth, then laughed. “They gotcha, didn’t they, with that ohmigod my car’s stuck routine.”

  “Yes, Louie. If it helps to comfort you for the loss of the Firebird, they got me.” I cut the wheel sharply left to get us onto a through street.

  “Who were they?”

  “Mexican guys. Never saw them before.” I was not about to tell Louie that I’d been suckered, and his favorite car destroyed, by a couple of girls whose combined ages would barely let them buy a drink.

  “Were they carrying?”

  Colored pencils, maybe, I thought. A three-ring notebook or two, cocked and ready to fire. “If they were, they didn’t point it at me.”

  “Didn’t have to. You did everything except offer them a push.”

  We turned onto Sherman Way. “Sorry about the car,” I said.

  “Aaaahhhhh,” Louie said. “It was almost worth it. You standing there with your hands up while they hit the booster rockets.” He laughed again. “Guy drove like a fuckin’ teenager,” he said.

  I said, “Didn’t he.” I dug into my front pocket and brought my hand out with diamonds dripping from my fingers. “I figure this is worth thirty to forty, fenced. Take it, and we’ll call it even.”

  Louie took the necklace and turned it over a couple of times, checking the backs of the settings. “That’s a lot better than even. I’d owe you. This good, you think?”

  “Good enough to be all by itself in a wall safe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You might want to fence it carefully.”

  He turned to look at me, all the colored lights of the street blazing in the diamonds’ cold crystalline hearts as they hung from his hand. “Whose wall safe?”

  “Well,” I said. “Rabbits Stennet’s. It belongs to his wife.”

  “Holy shit,” Louie said, practically throwing the necklace at me. “Bunny’s? Get it away from me.” He rubbed his hands together as though to wipe off any traces of contact. “If I fenced that thing in Timbuktu, Rabbits would know.”

  “Nice piece,” I said.

  “I ain’t met her, but that’s what everybody says.”

  “I meant the necklace.”

  “Yeah, and it might as well be radioactive.”

  I checked the mirror, just in case. They weren’t behind me, and I found I missed them. “So I’ll use it as a paperweight,” I said.

  Just to be on the safe side, I checked into a Travelodge in Encino. I doubted that the girls, as I was coming to think of them, were likely to come around and kick in my door, but they knew where I’d been sleeping. I don’t usually let people know where I’m sleeping.

  Not that I did much sleeping that night.

  I’d seen a lot of lighted windows, on both sides of the streets we’d driven down, and glowing in the houses that looked onto Westwind Circle. Lighted windows aren’t my favorite thing, although I can usually deal with them. There’s something about those warm yellow rectangles, with the unavoidable implication that there are families inside, still whole and complete, safe and comfortable, living by the rules and loving each other. I know it’s not always that way, I know that terrible things can happen in a lighted window, but that’s not what I see. What I see is one of the candles that holds the world together. When the world seems to be running along as it should, which it is most of the time in the part of it I’m lucky enough to live in, I sometimes think of it as held together by millions of people just doing their best, looking out for each other, keeping their promises. Nothing heroic, nothing dramatic, just plain everyday goodness. And when I’m thinking this way I see the structure of the world as an enormous palace made of light, with the walls and floors and ceilings held in place by the energy from millions of candles, and all those candles are in the hands of people who are doing the things they should, the little tiny things they told each other they’d do. And I’m somewhere outside, looking for a dark window I can break in through.

  Especially since the divorce.

  Like I say, I can usually deal with it. But in the Travelodge’s king size bed that night, I had Thistle Downing on my mind, and it didn’t make me feel even a little bit like someone carrying a candle.

  “Three Wishes,” Rodd Hull said, so proudly he might have thought of it himself. “Three films, one film for each of the wishes. Taken together,” he said, framing the rectangle of a motion picture screen with his thumbs and index fingers and panning the room with it, “taken together, they comprise a complete arc in the life of a modern-day woman. An arc that takes her from repression to empowerment.” He sat back, picked up a paper cup full of coffee with his pinky extended, and waited for people to fall out of their chairs.

  I said, “Wow.”

  “Get to basics,” Trey Annunziato said.

  Rodd Hull looked disappointed. He wore a photographer’s vest with more pockets than a pool table, a meticulously wrinkled linen shirt, and jeans that had been pressed to a razor-sharp crease. Around his neck was a lanyard dangling one of those incredibly expensive little viewfinders that cameramen sometimes wear when they’re not sure everyone on the set knows how important they are. Rodd Hull, I had learned on Google the previous evening, had once received an Emmy nomination for daytime drama, which I guess meant soap operas. He was obviously determined to see this as a step up.

  “Actually,” I said to Trey. “I’d like at least to get the framework. The main, um, story elements, the other characters, sort of who’s who. Might help me see the production’s weak spots, from a security perspective. Maybe anticipate problems.”

  Trey looked at her watch for the fourth time in the ten minutes we’d been in the room. “It’s your morning,” she said. “Did you know that Rodd almost won an Emmy?”

  I expressed suitable awe and amazement, and Rodd got to practice looking modest.

  “What’s so thrilling,” Rodd said, only slightly grimly, “is that we’re using an entirely new modality to tell the story. Sex. When you think about the women’s movement, it’s obvious that it’s always been basically about sex. The great metaphor: Woman on the bottom. It applied to everything, but it began in the bedroom.”

  “Not in my bedroom, it didn’t,” said Tatiana Himmelman. Tatiana, four feet tall, three feet wide, wearing a well-waxed flattop and jeans festooned with chains, was the production supervisor, the person responsible for making sure that everything necessary to the day’s filming was in place: performers, props, set elements, crew, everything. In other words, she did the actual work.

  “Let’s not think about your bedroom, Tat,” Rodd Hull said. “It’s just too grim.”

  “As opposed to yours, Rodd,” Tatiana said, “which uses the old set from Romper Room.”

  Trey said, “Children. Play in a time-efficient manner, please. We have a movie here that’s already two days behind schedule, and every day costs me about twenty-one thousand dollars.” She got up and went to the chalkboard at the front of the room, which was actually a three-walled set built to impersonate a high school classroom for reasons I preferred not to speculate about. Tatiana and I were crammed into desks in the front row while Rodd Hull sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk in front of the chalkboard. Trey, wearing a golden dog-collar today, along with a pale yellow silk business suit that would have turned heads at a Braille convention, had been leaning against a wall until the squabbling prompted her into motion. Three of her hard guys, one of whom was Eduardo, bristled at the world in the corners. All of them bulged in the obvious places. Eduardo was obviously thrilled at being taken for a walk. He was wearing black leather gloves as though to conceal the tiny biceps in his fingers.

  Trey picked up a piece of chalk and said, “Here are your basics
.” She drew three horizontal lines on the board, each about two feet long, stacking one above the other, but staggering them so that the second line began below the one-quarter point in the top line, and the third line began a quarter of a way into the second. Next to the top line, Trey wrote, “First Wish.” She wrote “Second Wish” next to the second line and, apparently getting impatient with the process, put the number “3” next to the bottom line. “This is our time line,” she said.

  It looked like this:

  “Each of these lines is one of the movies,” she said. “The staggered lines represent start dates. You can get plot details and arches-”

  “Arcs,” Rodd Hull said.

  “I’m paying for them,” Trey said, “and I’ll call them whatever I want.” She waited to see whether Rodd would respond, but he found something that needed to be viewed through his viewfinder, and he viewed it.

  Trey drew a dot roughly in the middle of the top line. “This is about where we’ll be tomorrow morning, roughly nine weeks into the process. We’ve used all the time until now getting the scripts right, doing the schedules and the budgets, developing the graphics for the titles and the ads, because we’re going to start advertising this movie long before we finish shooting it. We’ve hired Todd-sorry, Rodd-and Tatiana, and all the other talented people who will actually make the films. We’ve cast all the secondary parts, even the crowd scenes. And we’ve shot a bunch of second-unit stuff-cars in motion, the outsides of buildings, some scenes that don’t have our star in them. And finally, we’ve done some doubles work, by which I mean using a double for Thistle, wearing Thistle’s wardrobe-mostly shot from the back, walking on sidewalks, going through doors, getting onto elevators, and so forth.” She lowered the hand with the chalk in it and looked over at Rodd. “What have I forgotten?”

  “Nothing whatsoever,” Rodd said. “Absolutely nothing. Brilliant, just brilliant.”

  “We also designed and built the sets,” Tatiana said without a glance at Rodd. “We identified and locked the locations. We leased the equipment we’re shooting with. We hired the publicist and the still man.”

  “Thank you, Tatiana,” Trey said. Then, to me, she said, “And all of that hasn’t given us one second of what we’re all here to do, which is to get a single frame of film on Thistle Downing. And here’s where it gets hairy.”

  She put the chalk on the dot in the top line and drew a vertical straight down so it intersected the other two horizontals. Then she measured off about another eight inches, made another dot on the top line, and drew another vertical line straight down.

  Now it looked like this:

  “This is it,” she said. “This little bit of space between those two vertical lines. This is the twelve-day period when we live or die. This period, which begins tomorrow morning, everybody, is the window of time during which we have Miss Thistle Downing in our sights, and I mean that literally. She’s going to be here, she’s going to be babysat every second of the day and night, and she’s going to work her ass off, twenty-four hours straight, if necessary. And when we see the last of her, right about here”-She tapped the top of the second vertical line-“we’ll be finished with every scene she does in all three movies.”

  “Why stack it like that?” I asked.

  “Because,” Rodd Hull said, “Miss Downing is a piece of work the likes of which you have never had to experience, if life has been kind of you. Remember that cute little kid? Well, forget about her. What’s going to walk in here tomorrow morning is the kind of thing that makes Catholic priests think about exorcism. Which is not to say,” he added hurriedly, with a nervous glance at Trey, “that she isn’t beautiful. Made up just right, shot carefully, lighted perfectly, with lots of soft-focus in the close-ups-the facial close-ups, anyway-people will recognize her.”

  “What about that sore on her lip?” Trey demanded.

  “The good news is that Doc says it’s not herpes. The bad news is that it’s going away at its own rate, which is slower than we’d like. So for the first couple of days, she’s Claudette Colbert.”

  Trey said, “Who?”

  “Movie star from the thirties and forties. She was pathologically convinced that the left side of her face was her good side. People called her right profile ‘the dark side of the moon.’ ”

  “It’s not that bad,” Tatiana said. “Poor little chickie, she’s taking in like exactly zero vitamins. I’m not surprised she’s got a couple of sores here and there.”

  “A little sunlight wouldn’t hurt, either,” said Rodd Hull. “She probably hasn’t seen her shadow in years.”

  “Well, just stop piling on,” Tatiana said. “She’s not, like, dead, you know. You think she won’t pick up on this attitude? Anyway, there’s more talent scattered on the floor after she gets her hair cut than you’ve demonstrated in your entire career.”

  “Well, of course, she’s our little star,” Rodd Hull said, his eyebrows practically at his hairline. “We’ll strew petals at her feet.”

  I was well into developing a strong dislike for Rodd Hull.

  “Good idea,” Trey said. “Tatiana. Tonight send a couple of gnomes to three or four flower shops. Tell them to buy the oldest flowers in the place, the stuff that’s going to get tossed. They should try to get a deal. I want those flowers stripped of petals, and I want those petals in buckets-no, in big gift boxes-at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Eduardo,” she said. “Make a note for me to find out about the profitability of flower shops, maybe a change of pace for dope dealers. We can build a chain. What should we call it, Mr. Bender?”

  “Todd, I mean Rodd, here, already named it,” I said. “Petals at Her Feet.”

  12

  Tatiana

  “It’s about what you’d figure,” Tatiana said. She was folding a restaurant napkin into a tight, tiny square. “Take an eighteen-year-old girl, give her no education because she worked six days a week from the time she was seven until she was fifteen. Make her as sensitive as a fern, and throw in an absolute beast of a mother who’s trying to rip her off and a brother who hates her because she’s famous. Then give her an almost unlimited amount of money and no one to say no to her. Dig up a crowd of parasites, some of whom are her relatives, to sue her for big chunks of the money. Add unimaginable amounts of cocaine, methedrine, ice, and, for all I know, heroin, and a bunch of bloodsucking motherfuckers who pretend to be her friends so she’ll keep buying dope for them. Let her trust them and believe they care about her, so they’ll be able to break her heart when the money runs out. Close the doors on all that and leave it to cook for five years. Then let her stagger out into the sunlight, broke, friendless, strung out, and unable to tell up from down. Uninsurable in an industry that won’t cut a fart without taking out a policy. Bingo: You’ve got Thistle Downing.”

  “This year’s model,” I said.

  “That fucker Rodd,” she said. She tore the napkin in half. “Goddamn television directors. What have they got? The best technical crews and the best journeyman actors in the world. Pretty good writing, as good as they could appreciate, anyway. And it’s all about them, the genius directors. They’re fucking auteurs. D.W. Griffith, Murnau, von Stroheim. Nobody as vulgar as Hitchcock or Spielberg.”

  “I’d like to feed him his viewfinder.”

  “He’s too dumb to know that Thistle, whatever shape she’s in, is the most talented person he’s ever been in a room with. If she hadn’t fucked herself up, she could be one of the biggest stars in the world. I mean, she could have been on a career path that would have kept her working until she was eighty. Instead, here she is, doing …” She crumpled the napkin with both hands and threw the wad over her shoulder, and went, “Puh.”

  We were at a coffee shop on Ventura, about a mile from Palomar Studios, the complex Trey had bought and was using for Three Wishes. Trey had gone back to adding assets to her newly legitimate empire, and Rodd was probably looking at his reflection through the viewfinder. A couple of people from the crew were due to join us and bri
ng me up to speed on what had been happening, but Tatiana was still steaming from the encounter with Rodd.

  “And what’s with that second ‘D’?” she said, loudly enough that people were looking at her. “One isn’t enough? Maybe we ought to pronounce it that way. Hi, Rod-d. Morning, Rod-d. Or start doing it to other words. That’s rid-diculous. Sorry, Rod-d, I d-didn’t hear you. Honestly, Rod-d, d-don’t you think that’s red-dund-dant?”

  “Do it with other letters,” I suggested. “F-frankly, Rod-d, I d-don’t give a d-damn.”

  Tatiana started to laugh, and then cut it off. “Why do I trust you?” she said, leaning forward across the table to look at me more closely.

  I’m not actually fond of being looked at closely, but I held my ground. “Got me. Why shouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know anything about you.” She picked at a cuticle, and I noticed that they’d all been worked ragged. “This movie, if you can call it a movie, has more intrigue behind the cameras than the Italian Renaissance. I know you’re with Trey, who I sort of like, but as we all know, she’s made out of ice. I guess I don’t know which side you’re on.”

  “If there’s a side that wants to see Thistle treated like a human being, that’s the side I’m on.”

  “That’s better than nothing,” she said. “Rod-d would run over her with a truck if he thought it would cap a scene.”

  “And you don’t like that.”

  “I like talent. There’s never enough of it. I grew up with her. On TV, I mean. She’s one of the best things I ever saw, and she did it week after week, up to those last couple of years.”

  “What happened then?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. She ran out of steam. She’d been, and I hate to use this word because nobody ever means it, but she’d been unique. Even the last couple of years, she was better than most actresses on their best day. And then there’s the movie itself. It’s bad enough that she has to be making this piece of shit without her being treated like a bagged-out crack whore.”