My car was two blocks away.
31
Mom number one
Luella Downing had left the Valley far behind.
The house was in the flats, but it was still in Beverly Hills, set back from the street by thirty or forty feet of green lawn, bordered by azaleas in a pink so pure it looked like the first time God had tried out the color, before it got diluted with overuse.
The basic theme was used brick: the house was used brick. The driveway and the walkway to the door were used brick. The bricks had been painted different colors in their previous lives and then acid-scrubbed or sandblasted back into a semblance of brickiness. It might have looked like a quaint economy to someone who didn’t know that used bricks were a lot more expensive than new bricks.
But, of course, the house hadn’t been designed to impress people like that.
The guy who answered the door was pale and puffy enough to have solidified from the billows of cigarette smoke that accompanied him. He glanced down at my coveralls and said, “Pool’s around back.”
“How long since you checked the pH level?” I asked.
He blinked heavily and screwed up his left eye in complete incomprehension. He was drunk. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”
“You’d be brother Robert,” I said. “Still living at home, I see.”
Robert said, “Uhh, the pool?”
“I’ll just take a short cut,” I said, and pushed him out of the way.
“Hey,” he said. “Wait.”
I went down a short, dim entry hall with the walls covered in those mirrored squares with gold veins running through them that I’ve always seen as an attempt to recapture some age of grandeur when the grand had really bad taste. Two marbletop tables, amateurishly antiqued, sported big, slightly dusty arrangements of silk flowers. The place smelled like Rush Limbaugh’s pillow.
A turn to the left took me into the living room, which ran half the width of the house and culminated at the far end in what were probably sliding glass doors to the back yard. The doors were heavily curtained in some light-repellent fabric. It was bright outside but dim in here. The only illumination came from a brass fixture hanging over the green felt-covered card table at the near end of the room. Four chairs circled the table. The empty one probably belonged to pasty old Robert. Three people turned to look at me from the other chairs.
One was a woman in her early fifties, working hard to look seventy. Her face was lined and bloated, a cigarette dangled from her lips, and she’d combed her hair very carefully, probably no more than four or five days ago. The other two were men, and I recognized both of them. The one nearer to me I had seen trying to get dinner platters off his hands on TV. He was older and heavier now but had maintained the residual undercurrent of cluelessness I’d spotted on the small screen. The man in the middle was a third-rank, lounge-level comic whose catchline, “Do I look like that kind of guy?” was always answered with a resounding Yes by the wandering members of the mysteriously idle class who show up at game show tapings, inhabit bars in the daytime, and go to Vegas for the Muscular Dystrophy telethon.
The men had cigars, and not, to judge from the mountains in the ashtrays, the first of the day. Each of them seemed to be nursing a glass of amber liquid that was probably bourbon on the rocks. The cards on the table were arrayed in a classic Texas Hold’em configuration: two face-down in front of each player and four face-up in the center of the table. The guy who had played Thistle’s father on TV picked up his hole cards and checked them for a second, as though he’d forgotten what they were, then replaced them.
“He’s the pool guy,” Robert said from behind me.
“Honey,” Luella Downing said to me around the cigarette, “The pool is outside. How many houses you go to, where they got the pool in the living room?”
“None,” I said, “but that’s probably because I’m not the pool guy. Do you know where Thistle is?”
Luella Downing said, “Ahhhh, shit.” She pushed her chair back to look at me better. “She’s disappeared, right? What day of the week is it?”
“Tuesday,” said Thistle’s fictional father.
“I’m asking him,” Luella Downing said.
“Tuesday,” I said.
“Then she’s on schedule. She usually disappears for the first time every week on Tuesday. She’s busy on Monday, getting loaded enough not to be able to find her way home. She’ll wander in on Thursday and disappear again on Friday.”
“This is different,” I said.
“They’re all different,” Luella Downing said. “Every single one is a unique little human tragedy. You’re what? The latest masked man to ride down from the hills to try to rescue her, right? Well, let me give you some advice, masked man. Put that horse in reverse and leave her wherever the hell she is. Edith is like trouble in a concentrate, you know? Add a few drops to some water, you got gallons of it.”
“Edith?” I said.
“That’s her name. Edith. That’s the name me and her father gave her. I never heard the name Thistle until she tried out for that show. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ the casting guy said, and Edith said, ‘Thistle.’ Didn’t even look at me. What was I supposed to do, contradict her? Anyway, it’s her name, right? If she wants to call herself Clyde, she’s Clyde.”
“So you don’t know where she is.”
“What’s the current hot dope street in Hollywood? That’s where she is. Has to be cut-rate, though. She’s run through the money pretty good.”
“I notice you haven’t,” I said, just because she made me feel nasty.
“Honey, I earned every nickel of it. I know you probably think she’s the poster girl for victims everywhere, but let me tell you, she’s a fucking nightmare, and she’s been like that since she was thirteen. If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t have been a show. Who do you think got her out of the house every morning and onto the set? Who went and found her every time they needed her and dragged her out of her trailer? Who had to watch her go through a quarter-ounce of cocaine at lunch and then get her into some sort of shape to work for the afternoon?”
“When she could,” said her TV dad.
“Yeah, when she could. When she could still stand up, when she could hit her marks, when she could find the light, when she could say her lines, when she could remember not to look at the camera, when she didn’t decide to fuck up the take just for the fun of it, when she-”
“When she could keep everybody employed,” I said. “When she could lay the golden eggs for you to scramble.”
“Without me-” Luella Downing began.
“Got it,” I said. “You were the hero. And basically, you don’t give a shit.”
Luella Downing tapped her cigarette into an ashtray, amputating an inch of ash. “That’s about right,” she said. “If I got upset every time she decided to disappear-”
“It would wreck your card game,” I said. I turned to go. “By the way, Thistle’s pop there has a pair of aces in the hole. But what do you care? It’s Thistle’s money.”
A second after I slammed the door, hard enough to shake the frame, I heard glass break, and then I heard some more. The gold-veined glass squares, I figured, hitting the floor and taking all that grandeur with them.
32
Hidden Valley is tucked away in the mountains between LA and Van Nuys, reached by an anonymous-looking road that drops suddenly and steeply off of Coldwater Canyon. Once you’re down, you find yourself in a grassy expanse of eight million-dollar ranch-style houses, each on an acre or so of what I suppose the residents think of as ranch. Here and there you see a stable, nicer than lots of houses in the Valley, with horses looking over the doors of the stalls with that serious, dreamy expression that horses always wear.