Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“Yes,” I said. “I know exactly what I’m going to do. And it’s nothing you’ll be ashamed of.”

“What? Can you tell me what it is?”

I was driving past the lighted windows now as more lights snapped on behind tens of thousands of windows below, whole square miles of them, on the Valley floor. Just once, I thought, just once, I was going to put myself on the right side of that illuminated glass.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to make absolutely sure that Thistle doesn’t make that movie.”

“Daddy-” Rina said.

“It’s a promise. Don’t tell your mother. I’ll tell her tomorrow, when I said I would. I love you, and I’ve got to go.”

I broke the connection and let the car free-wheel downhill. Trey, Hacker, Wattles. I would have to deal with all of them. But, on the other hand, I knew why the black dress had been in the wastebasket, and why we couldn’t find Thistle in that building. And, thanks to Thistle’s remark, I probably knew who had shot Jimmy.

When I got to Ventura Boulevard, I didn’t cross it to pick up the freeway to Thistle’s apartment. Instead, I turned left, toward Palomar Studio. Where my little murderer probably was.

They came out together in Tatiana’s car, Tatiana and Ellie in the front seat, Craig-Robert in back, leaning forward and talking as fast as the other two put together. They waited for the gate to swing open.

“This one’s mine,” I said into the cell phone. “Yours should be coming out any minute, assuming he hasn’t left already.”

“Looks like Doc in ‘Gunsmoke’?” Louie the Lost said.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, “not for someone who watches as much TV as you do.”

“What about my girl?” Louie asked.

“That’s what all this is about. Your girl.”

“So you don’t want a Caddy,” Louie said, returning to an earlier theme. “I got a nice BMW, real clean.”

“I’m happy with what I’ve got.”

“That piece of shit? Looks like everything on the road. You get a landslide on Laurel Canyon, five of the six cars get smashed, they’re going to look just like yours.”

“That’s more or less the point.” The gate was mostly open, and Tatiana started edging the car around it, too eager to wait. Craig-Robert said something and they all fell all over themselves laughing. “Toyota Camry has been the best-selling car in America since anybody started counting. You tell the cops it was a white Camry you saw, and you don’t have a license plate, they throw it in the inactive file.”

“Huh,” Louie said. “This him?”

I looked through the chain link gate, now closing behind Tatiana’s car. “Sure is. Just stay with him, don’t get too close, don’t let him see you.”

“Don’t let him see me?” Louie said. “Jesus Christ, would you tell Sherlock Holmes, don’t trip on the clue? Then how about a Jag? They actually run now, you know, go forward and backward, not like before.”

“You’re not going to tell me how clean it is?” I had pulled out behind Tatiana, and some big Meezer in a Lincoln behind me leaned on the horn. “Meezer” is what my old burglar mentor Herbie used to call guys who drove like they’d just finished buying the road. He said they should all have horns that said MEEEEEEE, MEEEEEEE.

But the horn didn’t attract any attention from the passengers in Tatiana’s car. They were having so much fun it was hard to believe that one of them was a murderer. But one of them almost certainly was: even if it weren’t for the fact that one of the people in that car was the only one who could have been responsible for the problem with the black dress, there was also the figure Jimmy had drawn on his windshield, which I should have recognized, since he obviously meant it for me and it was the only Chinese character I knew. Put it together, and you had two questions-the black dress? and who killed Jimmy? — with the same answer.

“What’s with all the sales pitches?” I asked Louie. “You opening a used car lot?”

“It’s like a sideline,” Louie said. “I got all this inventory I need to turn over from time to time, I might as well make some money selling it. But there’s something wrong with my technique.”

“With all due respect,” I said, “you couldn’t sell aspirin to a woodpecker.”

“Ow,” Louie said. “He’s coming out now. Hey, he’s going left.”

“Does your car turn left?”

“Yeah.”

“Then is there something I’m missing?”

“Jeez,” Louie said. “Take my fuckin’ ear off, why don’t you.” He hung up.

The mystery of the motor pooling was solved two blocks away when Tatiana pulled into a baking expanse of asphalt with a sign that said PALOMAR STUDIOS OVERFLOW LOT and went on to warn all sorts of dire consequences to anyone who parked there without being part of the Palomar Studios overflow, which didn’t sound like a particularly exclusive club to me. Hollywood is nothing if not status-conscious, and nothing defines status like a parking space. Tatiana, as production supervisor, rated; Ellie and Craig-Robert did not. So I pulled over and waited for the two members of the overflow club to depart, and once all three cars were on the road I hitched myself to the murderer’s tail and followed in her wake.

It’s always the little things, I thought. Cops know it; that’s why there’s no such thing as a detail to a really good detective. I was once acquainted with a con man, a guy with the impeccable plausibility that Trey had described in Tony-her soon-to-be ex-husband-the quality that marks a real sociopath. The con man made quite a lot of money selling houses he didn’t, in any recognizably legal sense, own. He put ads in the papers offering amazing deals on probate properties and simply showed the marks houses that were on the market and vacant, meeting them there only moments after he’d picked the lock and opened the place up. Very complicated situation, he’d say; probate was likely to be challenged, and if the challenge was successful, the deceased owner’s son or daughter would take the property off the market. But right now, it was still in probate, and it was priced about forty percent under the comps for the neighborhood, a printout of which he happened to have in his jacket pocket. But if an offer was made quickly, an offer he had the sole power to accept, there would be no grounds for challenge because the house would no longer belong to the estate.

Most of the customers would very sensibly walk away from the deal, but he “showed” four or five houses a day, six days a week, and two or three times a week he’d get a check for $2500 or $3500 to prevent him from showing the house to anyone else while the suckers thought about it. The money was fully refundable if, twenty-four hours later, the buyers came to their senses. Of course, ten minutes after they drove away, their check was cashed.

But this story was about details. This guy dressed like Cary Grant. I mean, he had really beautiful clothes, Vogue -for-men clothes, all wool and silk, hand-tailored, pleats all over the place, shoes too nice to wear outdoors. As a finishing touch, he liked to sport a pocket handkerchief, which for most men has gone the way of the hairline mustache, and since the handkerchiefs were the finest silk and very expensive, he showed just about a quarter of an inch too much. And that quarter of an inch was what got him: it turned up in too many descriptions, and one day the customer he showed up for was a cop with such a sharp eye he didn’t even need a ruler. A quarter of an inch got our sociopath six years.

And the detail here was a little black dress.