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  “I’m with you.”

  “Not that it’s a total piece of shit,” she said. “I’ll give it to Trey. I’ve worked on real porno, and this isn’t it. I mean, she got an actual writer, she got Rodd, who, for all that he’s the dickwad of the century, has directed some good actors. She got a cameraman-camerawoman, I mean-Lauren Wister, who’s shot a couple of independent features, and I think it’ll be easier for Thistle with a woman behind the camera. And the second-line people-me, Craig-Robert, whom you’ll meet in a minute, a bunch of others-well, we’re pretty good. Trey’s probably dropping five, six million on this thing. The average budget for porn is lower than most home movies.”

  “That’s one of the reasons Trey’s wound so tight,” I said.

  “But even with all that money, and people who know how to do their jobs, the thing that scares me senseless-” She broke off and looked past me, and I turned to see two people come in to the coffee shop, one a worried-looking young woman in her early twenties and the other a play-it-to-the-rafters African American queen with orange hair and honeybee yellow lips, wearing a kelly green semitransparent scarf that swirled around him dramatically as he made what was, apparently for him, the newest in an unending succession of grand entrances.

  “How astonishingly dreary,” he announced while he was still eight feet away. “Couldn’t we think of anything more middle class? All we need is a tailgate party in the parking lot, and a nice mug of beer, and I’ll hit high C, and aren’t you the tall one? Where’s your basketball, or do you only play at night?”

  “Craig-Robert Loftus,” Tatiana said. “This is Junior Bender. And Junior, the girl sort of lost in Craig-Robert’s blinding aura is Ellie Wynn.”

  “Oh, my God,” Craig-Robert said, placing a splayed hand in the center of his chest. “You’re that criminal. Well, I have to say it: Crooks do furnish a room. You’ve certainly dressed this dump.” He sat next to me. “Scoot over,” he said. Then he said, “Not that far.”

  “Ellie works with me,” Tatiana said, as the young woman sat down. “And she’s also Thistle’s double. Craig-Robert, in case you hadn’t guessed already, is the costume designer.”

  “Costumer,” Craig-Robert corrected her. “Nice plaid shirt, by the way, Tatty. Did it belong to one of the members of Nirvana?”

  “Fuck off, C-R. We’ve just had an hour of Rodd, and we’re in no mood for more drama.”

  “Rodd,” Craig-Robert said in italics. “Such an inappropriate name for someone who’s probably hung like a mosquito.”

  “Are you a criminal?” Ellie Wynn asked. She was slight, almost childish, with foxlike features that had something vaguely feral about them, something that suggested a small animal that hadn’t learned to trust people. There are people who radiate well-being and people who radiate misery. Ellie Wynn radiated insecurity.

  “Oh, please,” Craig-Robert said. “Weren’t you listening yesterday? Miss Trey-swell outfit this morning, by the way-Miss Trey said she’d be bringing in a specialist to deal with The Problem. And we’re all aware that Trey, for all that she’d look good wearing a bookshelf, is a crook. I mean, is there someone here who does not get a paper?” He choked the flow long enough to look at me. “I must say, though, that I was expecting something more lethal looking, maybe with sallow skin and dead eyes-you know dead eyes? Like this.” He dropped his lids halfway.

  A young waitress who had ignored us thus far came over to the table, pad in hand, mainly to get a better look at Craig-Robert, and Tatiana said, “Keep the coffee away from this man.”

  “Uh, sure,” the waitress said, and her accent briefly filled the air with the scent of Georgia peach blossoms. “What y’all want to-”

  But Tatiana was already talking.

  “Bring us five chef’s salads, all in a big bowl in the middle of the table. That way, Ellie can eat around the meat and Craig-Robert can hog the avocados.”

  “Um, gosh” the waitress said, “Ahm not sure ah can-”

  “Sure you can,” Tatiana said. “You’re not on Walton Mountain any more. You know the chef’s salad? Eight-ninety-five on the menu? You know those big bowls in the kitchen your illegal immigrant staff uses to mix things up in? Put five chef’s salads in one of those bowls and bring it here. Write five chef’s salads on your little pad. Bring us five plates. What could be easier?”

  “Um, okay.”

  Craig-Robert said, “Don’t you want to tell her what order to put the utensils in?”

  “Why bother?” Tatiana said. “You’ll eat with your fingers anyway.”

  “And, uh, drinks?” the waitress said, speaking only to Tatiana. “Y’all want-”

  “Diet Coke for me and the lady next to me, regular Coke for the Queen of Spades there, and Junior?”

  “Coffee, black.” To Tatiana, I said, “Is there someone here I can’t see?”

  “Sorry?” She was watching the waitress retreat.

  “Five plates. Four people.”

  “I arranged for Doc to come by as soon as he gets back.”

  “Back from where?”

  “From Thistle’s place.”

  “Ah. And you,” I said to Ellie. “You’re a vegetarian?”

  “Um,” Ellie said. She was clearly flustered by the question, which had seemed relatively harmless to me. “I try, you know, not to eat anything that’s got, like, a spinal cord? Except fish, I guess. They’ve got a spinal cord, don’t they, Tatiana?” She was blushing.

  “They do,” Tatiana said, a bit wearily. “But they are too dumb to know they’ve got one, so that makes it okay, wouldn’t you say, Junior?”

  “Junior?” Craig-Robert said, looking terrifically interested. “What ghastly secret does that mask?”

  “None,” I said. “It’s my name. My father was named Merle and he wanted his son named after him, but he’d had a skinful of being named Merle and he wasn’t about to hang it on me. So he just named me Junior.”

  “Mmmmm,” Craig-Robert said. “So what are your qualifications? Aside from the obvious ones, I mean.”

  “Got me. I have some history with Trey, I guess. And she seems to think I might be her little trouble-shooter. But to tell you the truth, I’ve got almost no idea why I’m here.”

  “The human condition,” Craig-Robert said. “None of us know. You need someone sensitive to explain it all to you.”

  Tatiana rapped on the table. “Craig-Robert, if you could put all the fabulous on hold for a few minutes?”

  “Certainly,” Craig-Robert said in a deep radio announcer’s voice. He crossed his hands on the table in front of him in a businesslike manner and said, “You’re probably wondering why I called you here tonight.”

  “My life is passing before my eyes,” Tatiana said.

  “It’s to clear up the age-old question: Why are gay men so fascinating and gay women so grim?”

  “Maybe because you’re imitating the interesting sex,” Tatiana said. “We’re stuck with acting like men.”

  “We really don’t have a lot of time?” Ellie Wynn said, phrasing it as a question. “We need to eat and get back? Everything, and I mean everything, has to be ready for tomorrow.”

  “What’s gone wrong so far?” I asked.

  “Little things,” Tatiana said. “But obviously intentional.”

  “Costumes,” Craig-Robert said. “Ergo, moi being invited to this confab. Four costumes disappeared. And you may say, so what?, but there was something very interesting about the choice of costumes.”

  “And you’re going to make him ask what it is, aren’t you?” Tatiana said.

  “What it is,” Craig-Robert said, “is, A, they were all for Thistle, and B, they had all been worn by little Miss Ellie here in second-unit shots.” Ellie blinked at the sound of her name as though someone had thrown a dinner roll at her.

  “Which means?” I said.

  “Which means they all had to be replaced with identical stuff,” Tatiana said. “Otherwise, you’d see Thistle from behind wearing a gray dress as she pushe
s open a door and then, when you cut to inside the building and she comes in, she’d be wearing, I don’t know, a pink one for example.”

  “Pink doesn’t work for Thistle,” Craig-Robert said.

  “Oh, who gives a fuck?” Tatiana said. “I said, for example. It’s not going to endanger your Golden Pecker or whatever they call the adult film Oscar.”

  “Le Peqoir d’or,” Craig-Robert said. “And I have a place all ready for it.”

  “And those were the only costumes taken,” Ellie said, looking vaguely surprised at the sound of her own voice. “The ones I’d worn on film, pretending to be Thistle. Which meant that we either had to re-shoot, or remake the costumes. Right, Craig-Robert?”

  “So you remade them.”

  “It wasn’t quite that easy,” Craig-Robert said. “We’re scheduled down to our hineys. It put us back by a full day.”

  “Trey said two days,” I said.

  “We’d actually be three days behind if people hadn’t busted their butts to catch things up,” Tatiana said. “Tell him, Ellie.”

  “Oh.” She took a second to organize her thoughts. “Umm, two days ago, I got a call at seven-forty-five A.M., just as I was about to head for the set. It was a girl, telling me that the location had changed? We weren’t going to be shooting in Hollywood, she said, we’d moved it to a shopping mall in Chatsworth. I should leave immediately, because the crew was on their way there.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And, um, the crew was right where they were supposed to be. You know, in Hollywood. But by the time they wondered where I was and called me, I was all the way out in the Valley and I’d gone into the mall to find the closed store we were supposed to be shooting in. And then, when I got the call on my cell phone and went back outside, someone had slashed my tires.”

  “Cost us a day,” Tatiana said. “Then yesterday, it was Lauren, the camera operator, who got the call. Toted herself halfway down to Torrance before it occurred to her that it might be bogus. And by then she was in total rush hour, just gridlock all the way back up. Just like whoever it was planned it. Half a day gone.”

  “Here y’all go,” the young waitress said. She leaned forward with a grunt and put a massive bowl in the middle of the table. Behind her was another girl with five plates. “Will that do it?” the waitress asked.

  “Fluids, dear,” Tatiana said. “We would all like to take in some fluids.”

  “The Cokes, huh?” the waitress said, crestfallen.

  “And one coffee,” Tatiana said brightly. “There’s a good girl.”

  “She fancies you,” Craig-Robert said as the waitress retreated.

  “She’s straighter than Nebraska,” Tatiana said. Ellie’s eyes went back and forth between them, her mouth half-open as though she wanted to join in but didn’t trust herself to say anything interesting.

  “So, not to be boring,” I said, “but whatever’s up, it’s being caused by someone who has access to the costumes, who knows which outfits have been filmed already, who knows where the crew is shooting each day, who has or is able to get everybody’s phone number, and is also capable of slitting four tires in broad daylight in the parking lot of a busy shopping mall. Does that sound right?”

  Tatiana thought for a moment and then nodded.

  “And,” I asked, “who has that kind of access?”

  “Sweetie,” Craig-Robert trilled, “all of us.”

  13

  Achilles Heel

  “I’m looking at this the wrong way,” I said. Craig-Robert had departed in a swirl of psychic drama with Ellie trailing along in his wake like a towed rowboat. That left Tatiana and me facing about twenty-six pounds of avocado-free chef’s salad. Tatiana had been right; Craig-Robert had located, and eaten, every single piece. Ellie had concentrated on lettuce and the anchovies, once Tatiana had told her they were too small to have a spine.

  “What’s the wrong way?” Tatiana said, making a little lettuce house on her plate.

  “Points of access. There are too many of them, and too many people can walk right through them. By the time I checked out everybody, the movie would either be abandoned or in the can.”

  She mashed the roof with her fork. “So what’s the right way?”

  “Before I get to that, there are two other questions to ask. First, how far is this person willing to go? Are we talking about people being in danger? And second, if we decide people aren’t in danger now, at what point will they be? And then we get to the big question. Since the stuff we’ve seen so far hasn’t worked, and it’s been sort of frittering around the edges-missing costumes, mixed-up crew calls-where’s the real pressure point? Where would damage be fatal to the movie?”

  “As far as danger is concerned,” Tatiana said, “The way I understand it, half the crooks in the Valley-nothing personal-want the picture to tank so they can get rid of Trey. I think those people could be considered dangerous. I mean, they’re sort of dangerous for a living.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s do something that’s rarely useful. Let’s divide the world into two groups of people. Over on one side you’ve got a bunch of guys whose necks are thicker than their thighs, and they want the movie to fail so Trey will go down and they can go back to boosting cars and breaking legs. Yeah, those folks are dangerous. And over here you’ve got a bunch of movie people who presumably want the filming to go on so they’ll continue to get paid. And they’re, theoretically, at least, less dangerous. And somewhere between those two types of people is one of three things: a movie person who wants the movie to fail, which I think is unlikely; a crook who can work his or her way in among the movie people, which is almost equally unlikely; or a movie person who’s been promised a big bouquet of money if the movie shuts down. That’s likely, and that person is not very dangerous.”

  “Until,” Tatiana said.

  “Exactly right. When, if ever, will it become dangerous? Everything that’s been done so far looks like it was the work of a movie person under pressure, except maybe the tire slashing. So figure a movie person made the phone call to Ellie, who seems to be suggestible, to say the least-”

  “If I were casting the role of Second Lemming, it would go to Ellie.”

  “Okay, so a movie person phoned Ellie, and the crook in charge-whoever promised all that money-dispatched some thug with a knife to slash the tires. The until is obviously the point at which the person behind the scenes feels he or she has to take direct action.”

  She nodded. “And that would be when?”

  “If Trey’s diagrams this morning were straight, I’d say the dangerous period will begin tomorrow morning. Up until now they’ve been focused on screwing up the process so the company wouldn’t get to the point when Thistle starts to shoot her scenes, but here you are. You’ve gotten there. And that takes us right to the other question, the one about the movie’s Achilles Heel, which is-”

  “Hold the thought,” Tatiana said, getting up. “Here’s Doc.”

  I turned to see Milburn Stone, the guy who played Doc in the iconic TV series “Gunsmoke,” limp into the coffee shop. Same white hair, same drooping white mustache, even the string tie. It wasn’t until he was practically sitting down that I realized I was looking at someone who bore a passing resemblance to Milburn Stone and had decided to push it.

  “This is Doc,” Tatiana said. “Doc, Junior Bender. Junior’s working with Trey.”

  Doc nodded at me and said, so help me God, “Howdy.”

  “Howdy,” I said. I raised my hand for the waitress. “Wet your whistle, partner?”

  “Sure thing, stranger,” Doc said, and then grinned at me. “Pretty good,” he said. “Some people think I’m doing Walter Cronkite.”

  “Y’all didn’t finish your salad,” the waitress said.

  “You have a keen eye, Daughter of the South,” Doc said. “Gimme a beer.”

  “What kind?”

  “Whatever leaps into your hand. I’d be a fool to turn my back on fate when it comes in such a pret
ty package.”

  “Golly,” the waitress said, and blushed. She backed away from the table until she bumped into an empty chair.

  “I may be an old fart,” Doc said, “but, by God, I’ve got it.”

  “Oh, come on,” Tatiana said. “She’s still got grits in her hair.”

  “And a discerning eye for men,” Doc said.

  “You’ve been with Thistle?” I asked.

  “I have indeed, poor child.”

  “In what way?”

  “In every way you could think of. Physically, she’s underweight, anemic, got half a dozen low-grade infections, several dangerous vitamin deficiencies, and a complete spectrum of full-on addictions. Emotionally, she’s isolated, depressed, possibly suicidal, terrified of everything that moves. Spiritually, although that’s not my normal territory, I’d say she’s the sole inhabitant of Planet Zero, where the sky is black and the rivers are full of dead animals.”

  Tatiana looked stricken. Doc spread his hands and said, “You asked.”

  “Is she-Jesus, I hate to even ask this,” Tatiana said. “Is she going to be able to work tomorrow?”

  “It won’t be anything you’d expect from having seen her on TV,” Doc said. “She’s going to get a good night’s sleep because I gave her enough Xanax to knock out the mule our waitress rode to California. Tomorrow, I’m going to top her up with some mild amphetamines and a couple of tranquilizers. So she’ll be awake and able to go where she’s pointed. She’ll probably be able to hit a mark if it’s a really big mark. Dialog is going to have to be on cards, and whoever’s holding them may have to wave to get her attention. I don’t think old Rodd’s going to get a lot of long takes. But I’m told it’s an easy day, so she’ll probably get through it.”

  I asked, “What kind of a doctor are you?”

  “A disbarred one,” Doc said, “with a practice that specializes in the criminal community.” He looked up as the waitress, blushing all over again, put a bottle of beer in front of him.