“I’m trying.”
“You could have fooled me. You looked so big on TV. It looked like you were there to keep her from running away.”
“That’s not true. It’s not even close.”
“Whatever’s true, you need to call me by about noon tomorrow and tell me how you’re going to resolve this in a way that satisfies me. Because I’m telling you, if you don’t, you can kiss your daughter goodbye until she’s eighteen.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“Are you listening to me at all? Of course, I’m not going to let you talk to her.” In the background, I could hear Rina arguing with her mother, and Kathy said, “You hush.” Then, to me, she said, “By noon tomorrow, do you hear me?”
She hung up.
I slid the phone into my pocket and focused on inching my way up the hill, shutting everything else out. When in doubt, put one foot in front of the other until the view clears. I was approaching the top of the canyon now, because there were periods of forty to sixty seconds where we’d actually get up to ten or twelve miles per hour, which meant we were nearing the stoplight on Mulholland that’s the last thing before the long downhill.
The phone rang again. Rina.
“Hello, sweetie,” I said.
“Daddy. How could you not tell me?” She sounded younger and less certain of herself. She sounded hurt.
“Honey, I didn’t know …”
“Didn’t know what? You asked me about her. You let me talk about her, and all the time you were doing, doing this-this thing with her. It was-it was just the same as lying to me.”
“I wasn’t trying to lie-”
“Don’t tell me that,” she said, sounding exactly like her mother. “Don’t tell me what you were trying to do. We sat there and talked about her, and you never said one thing-”
“Wait. Wait just a second, okay? Let me try to tell you something.”
There was a silence on the line.
“Haven’t you ever been in a situation where you don’t know what to do? Where you’ve been told to do one thing and there are good reasons to do it, like maybe you’ll get into some kind of trouble if you don’t, but deep inside you know you don’t want to do it? And you don’t know how you’re going to resolve it?”
A long pause, and then an extremely grudging, “I suppose.”
“Well, that was me. Yesterday, that was me. I didn’t want talk to you about it until I knew what I was going to do.”
We crested the hill at last and the Valley spread itself out below me, tens of thousands of houses, offices, buildings. Lives in process. The sun was dropping fast now, and I could see it glaring off of west-facing windows, and, in much closer houses on the side of the mountain I was driving down, lights were coming on. Lights behind windows.
“And now?” Rina said. “Do you know now what you’re going to do?”
“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.
PART THREE
35
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.