Crashed

Oh,yeah

… I read the New York Times now, just to see what’s up with Thistle. Her cure took, and she was three weeks straight by the time she reported for work on the movie. I’d called Jake Whelan to ask him to make sure that the crew would applaud the first time she nailed a take. They had, and she blossomed after that. She wasn’t amazing, no best supporting actress nomination, but she got good reviews and a bunch of offers, including one for a new series. She turned them all down and went to New York to study at the Actor’s Studio. Right now she’s playing Rosalind in an off-Broadway production of “As You Like It,” getting respectable reviews, and packing them in. She used to call regularly, but I don’t hear from her any more. I know she’s busy.

Tony Ramirez’s death was seen as a mob hit, and there was the inevitable speculation that Trey had been involved, but she had an unshakable alibi: She’d been in a conference practically that whole night, working with Rodd Hull and the writer and Tatiana to see whether there was any way to do the movie with somebody else. Around three A.M., they decided to scrap it and started drinking. No charges were brought against Trey, but privately she has allowed people in her organization to believe that she killed both her father and her former husband, which has had the Lucrezia Borgia effect. Her troops are being very careful around her. She’s still going legal, but more slowly than she’d wanted to.

A few months after all this happened, Eduardo’s left hand was found by a camper in the Angeles National Forest. Searchers found his right thigh about a quarter of a mile away. It had been pretty extensively gnawed by the local four-footers, but a DNA test identified it as genetically identical with the hand. So it was Eduardo, not I, who got eaten by canines, even if, in his case, it was post-mortem. It’s not a fate I’d wish on anyone, but if I were forced to be frank, I’d have to say I’m happier than I would be if it had been the other way around.

No one I know ever saw Ellie Wynn again.

I buried most of Jake Whelan’s hundred thousand and lived on the rest. Pretty soon now, I’ll have to go dig up some more.

I finally asked Janice out again, and she told me she was just about to get married, so I guess Wattles got himself another laugh. But that’s okay, because Kathy and I are getting along a lot better now.

Hacker wound up in the hospital with two broken arms, a broken leg, and a nice new three-piece pelvis. He’ll be trouble when he gets out, but that won’t be for a quite a while.

And my mentor, Herbie-you remember Herbie? — he burgled a psychiatrist’s office and found a file that made it clear that the good doctor was treating a patient who was “conflicted,” to use the doctor’s term, by the fact that he’d murdered two people. Herbie made his usual phone call, and then some very unsettling stuff started to happen, and Herbie called me, and-

Oh, forget it. That’s another story.