Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“I know,” I said. “I’ve always been too careful.”

“Boy,” Jennie said. “It’s like a driver’s ed movie.”

“Did anybody knock on the door when you were there?”

Wendy thought about it for a minute and said, “Uh-uh.”

“What time did you leave?”

“Eleven?” Wendy asked. “Jennie’s the one with a watch,” she explained.

“About eleven,” Jennie confirmed.

“Was she taking pills when you were there?”

“Not in front of us,” Jennie said. “She doesn’t. She always goes in the other room. She does that when she sniffs stuff, too.”

“Did you see a little box, like a present?” I described it, but both girls shook their heads.

“Probably came later,” Doc said.

“Not too much later,” I said. “Jimmy called me a little after midnight, and she’d had time to take some of them by then.”

Jennie said, “Some of what?” and Wendy said, “Who’s Jimmy?”

“Somebody delivered some bad dope to Thistle last night. Knocked on the door and ran, left the package for her to find. Jimmy’s a friend of mine.”

Jenny looked away, slightly uncomfortably, at nothing in particular.

Wendy shook her head. “We don’t know anything about that.”

“So,” I said, looking at Jennie, “any idea where Thistle might be?”

“She fades in Hollywood sometimes,” Jennie said, her eyes coming back to mine. “It’s like, you know, a dope pad.” She picked up a packet of ketchup, tore the end off with her teeth, and squeezed the contents directly onto her tongue, then took another bite out of the burger.

“Gross,” her sister said.

“It’s all going to the same place anyway,” Jennie said with ketchup on her chin. Doc made a little mopping motion on his own chin, and she followed suit. “But she’ll come over sometime soon. After she sees what that big guy did to her place-”

“You saw who did that?” I asked.

“Sure,” Jennie said. “ Boy , was he pissed.”

“Because Thistle wasn’t there?”

“Well, yeah .” I got the wide eyes the young reserve for idiots. “Why else?”

“Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“I’d know him anywhere,” she said. “I’d know him in the dark. He was like the Hulk.”

All of a sudden, for the second time in two days, I wanted to be somewhere else. Florida, maybe. “Big, was he?”

“He was just a bunch of muscles,” she said. “And he was wearing black clothes.”

“Tell me about his shirt,” I said.

“His shirt?”

“You know,” I said. I tugged at my sleeve.

“I know what a shirt is,” she said with a massive amount of patience.

“What about …?” I took hold of the near point of Doc’s collar and yanked it, and he pulled away as though he thought I might be wiping my hands on it.

Jenny closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, she looked puzzled. “How did you know?” she said. “He didn’t have a collar.”

I was the third one they’d trailed, and the only one who turned around and bit them.

“We flipped you off pretty cool,” Jennie said.

There was widespread agreement that it had been pretty cool, and the two of them started laughing about the expression on my face. “Dumb” was the descriptive term of choice. They were still laughing as they made their way up the driveway, toting a take-out sack of quarter-pounders.

“One of the world’s least-celebrated joys,” Doc said, watching them go, “is being a cause of mirth in children.”

“You can have it,” I said.

“Am I going to be allowed to drive home without an escort?”

“Oh, sure. Louie’s probably all tucked in by now.”

“Good, good. Nice to know that the criminal element gets to bed early. I always think of them as nocturnal.”

“If you had to take a guess, where would you say Thistle is?”

He mulled it for a second. “Hollywood. She knows some of the sidewalk entrepreneurs well enough to score small on credit. She probably bought something and crashed in some squat. She’s too smart to have gone home. She would have figured that’s the first place Trey would have checked.”

“About Trey,” I said. “How well do you know her?”

“ Know her?” We were standing next to Doc’s car, parked beside the driveway the girls had gone down. He tilted his head back at me, and the streetlight filled the lenses of his glasses. “Well, I didn’t deliver her or anything. I can’t claim to have carried her around like a papoose. But I think I know her pretty well. She accidentally shot herself when she was ten or eleven and they brought her to me because they knew I wouldn’t report the gunshot wound. I’ve treated her on and off ever since.”

“Accidentally?”

“Unless she was trying to kill herself by blowing off a toe. The house was bristling with guns. She picked one up and fooled around with it.”

“And they had you treat her after that.”

“I was a pediatrician, remember?” A little steel came into his tone. “She was a child.”

“Lower your head,” I said. “I want to see your eyes.”

Doc brought his head down, and there were his eyes again, warm and kindly as ever. “Am I under suspicion again?”

“I’ve told you about my commitment to Thistle,” I said. “And now I’ve got my doubts about Trey, and I want to know for sure who I’m talking to. It’s helpful to see your eyes.”

“Well, then,” Doc said, and took off his glasses. It made his eyes look smaller.

“Here’s one edge of the problem. The person who trashed Thistle’s apartment today was Trey’s guy. Eduardo.”

“Steroids, probably,” Doc said. “He was sent to find her, he didn’t, and it hit the rage button. These guys are always a couple of seconds away from tearing a Buick in half.”

“It’s not so much his reaction that gives me pause. It’s the timing. He was there about an hour before I told Trey that Thistle was missing, and she put quite a bit of effort into being surprised by the news. So was she lying to me, or is it possible she didn’t know Eduardo was there?”

Doc said, “Ah.”

“Here’s where things get shaky. Oh, and just to make things clear, I’m trusting you here, and it would be good policy for you to bear in mind that, despite the fact I inspire mirth in children, I’m a career criminal. And as much as I may like you personally, if I find out you’re fucking around with me, I’ll take you to pieces and scatter the bits from here to Tijuana in a pattern that spells out he shouldn’t have .”

Doc nodded. “Noted.”

“Background, okay? Just to set things up. Since all this started, which I guess was only the day before yesterday, I’ve been operating on the thesis that the problems with the production were being caused by a member of the crew, who was, in turn, reporting to someone who wanted to cripple the movie, someone who wanted to bring Trey down. A crook, in other words.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“Well, I know who the person on the crew was. And I know that she and at least one of the crooks murdered somebody last night.”

The avuncular Milburn Stone facade slipped a bit. “Murdered?”

I told him about Jimmy.

“Oh, criminy,” he said. “I had no idea.”

“Nobody did, except Trey and me. So it worries me that Trey may have lied to me about knowing that Thistle disappeared. Because why Jimmy was murdered isn’t an issue: he was killed, I’m about ninety percent sure, because he saw who delivered that little present to Thistle, after the girls left. And who isn’t an issue, because I know who it was. But how is an issue. How did they know who he was? He was just a Chinese guy sitting in a car, in front of the apartment house.”