they all disappeared. They put in a year or two, stashed some money in the bank, and quit.”
On the screen, Thistle Downing crossed the room, dragging her feet like her shoes were made out of cement, and opened the door. A stuffy-looking older man barged in, accompanied by his wife, an imperious woman of stately carriage wearing one of those fur pieces made up of small animals biting each others’ tails. The older man handed Thistle his coat without even looking at her, and when it landed in her hands it turned into a little boy’s sailor suit with short pants. Thistle’s eyes filled half her face, and she whipped it behind her. In the meantime, her father had collapsed on the couch, bending forward awkwardly to put his hands, with the platters attached, at table level. The older man, apparently Thistle’s father’s boss, sat down and began taking handfuls of cheese. Mrs. Boss claimed the armchair and gave Thistle a disapproving look. Thistle summoned up a hopeful smile, and the woman turned away with her nose in the air, and then Thistle, in one uninterrupted ten-second arc, took the painful smile to an expression of pure horror as one of the animals around Mrs. Boss’ neck lifted its head, winked at her, and bared its teeth.
“Turn it off,” I said.
“This is the good part,” Louie said as the mink, or whatever it was turned its head to eye the neck it was draped around.
I took the remote out of his hand and turned the set off. “That’s her?”
“That’s her. Hottest thing in America from the time she was eight until she was maybe fifteen, when she quit the show. Grew up in my fucking living room. I never missed her.”
“What happened?”
Louie got up and went to the window, using one finger to part the curtain. “They’re still out there.” He turned back to me. “She grew up, I guess. And no show lasts forever. Some of the papers, they said she gave people a hard time the last couple of years, but you know? She was worth it. She’d been working since she was way little, carrying the whole thing, and she probably got fed up.” He looked with some longing at the dark screen. “She was something, though.”
Looking at my own reflection in the screen, I could still see the child, see her uptilted features and bright, intelligent eyes. “How old would she be now?”
Louie screwed up his face. “Twenty-two, twenty-three. She got seriously beautiful when she was fourteen, fifteen, toward the end. You know, you don’t think of beautiful girls as funny. But she was. She could do anything. Shit, she coulda played that Shakespeare guy.”
“Hamlet?”
“That’s the one.”
“A funny Hamlet is probably a good idea. But she didn’t.”
“I think there was drugs,” Louie said. “You know, back then people sorta left stars alone, not like it is now where you’re looking up their skirts and up their noses all the time. But I think she was getting loaded and screwing up. She got fired off some movie, I remember that.”
“Thistle Downing,” I said.
“Whydya turn off the TV?”
“I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t want to see how good she was.”
“What you didn’t want to see,” Louie said, nailing it, “was that she was a little kid.”
“Louie. You said it yourself. She’s in her twenties by now.”
“For me and about two hundred million other clowns, she’ll
“She’s twenty-three,” I said. “I don’t think there is.”
“Well, there oughta be. This is just fuckin’ wrong. And you know it.”
I went and sat across the table from him. “I do,” I said.
“And maybe I missed this,” Louie said,” but how, exactly, are you going to be involved?”
“Trey believes the movie is being sabotaged. I’m the smart guy who’s supposed to figure out how and by whom, and keep things on track.”
“In other words,” Louie said, “you’re supposed to make sure it happens.”
“I am.” Suddenly my daughter Rina’s face flashed in front of me, not much older than the child I’d just seen on the television screen, and I blinked it away.
Louie laced his fingers together on the table, avoiding the pile of loose wet tobacco, and stared at me. Finally, he said, “You gonna do it?”
“There’s Rabbits,” I said.
“Rabbits,” Louie said, nodding. “Rabbits is definitely something to keep in mind.”
“I don’t think I’m in much danger of forgetting about him.”
Louie nodded again and let his eyes drift down to the table. He seemed to be working something through in his mind. Louie was a slow thinker, but a long one. And when he went into thinking mode, I always had to remind myself that, friend or not, Louie the Lost was a crook. It was not safe to bet the farm, or even the back forty, on which side of his mental coin would land up. Whichever side it landed on, he kept it to himself. “So,” he said at last. “What now?”
10
The Snor-Mor was built on the classic California motel plan: a two-story stucco “L” edging a parking lot. The car that had followed me from Trey’s was parked not in the lot, but about three spaces back, on the near side of the street, so it would be in position to pick me up if I went out to the Safeway or to burgle Aladdin’s cave. The car was a heap, an old Chevy that looked like it had been thrown off the top of Pike’s Peak and bounced all the way down. A few dents had been half-heartedly pounded out and primer applied. Altogether, the car couldn’t have been more conspicuous if it had been a giant chrysanthemum.
The Chevy had picked me up as I drove Hacker out of Trey’s Chinese theme park. Acting on the assumption that anything I knew and Hacker didn’t was probably a plus, I kept my eyes off the rear-view mirror except when there was a reason to check it out. And the Chevy was always there, lumbering along one or two cars behind me, trailing the dark-colored smoke that makes mechanics so happy. Two heads were visible through the front windshield, but they never got close enough for details, except that one of them rode really low, sitting way down on his or her lungs so that only about half of the face was visible over the dash. The position seemed so furtive that I wondered whether it was a face I’d recognize.
So after I dropped Hacker around the corner from Rabbits’ mansion, now filled with dogs, I took it nice and slow downhill so they could keep up, and when I got into the room, I’d called Louie.
What with eight or ten changes of sheets on some of the beds every day, the Snor-Mor wasn’t quite in the Ritz-Carlton league, but it had my two minimum deliverables: a king-size bed, since I’m almost six-four, and some adjoining pairs of rooms with a door linking them, probably intended for moms and dads whose kids were too old to sleep in the same room but too young to want to sneak out on their own. The situation, in other words, that Kathy and I would be in with Rina if we were still married. So the watchers had seen me go into room 204, and twenty minutes later, Louie had gone into the room next door, 203, which I’d left dark. He’d pretended to screw around with a key while I opened the door from the inside, backing out of sight as he came in, and then we’d turned on the light.
“Around the block, right?” Louie said as I followed him into 203.
“And about five or six cars back,” I said. I turned off the light and counted out loud to three, and Louie went out, pulling the door closed behind him. I heard his steps on the stairs, and a minute later the eight-cylinder roar of the reconditioned Pontiac Firebird he’d chosen for the night’s work. Like a lot of crooks, Louie was both a
