Crashed

One hand went to the surface of the desk although her face didn’t change. “Excuse me?”

“Last night, outside Thistle’s apartment house, someone put one through his throat at close range.”

She took a mechanical step back, pulled the chair out from under the desk without looking down at it, and sat. She seemed to be giving her movements no attention whatsoever. She finally said, “Murdered?”

“If you know a nicer word, share it with me.”

“Was he a friend, or just someone you hired?”

“A friend.”

She turned her head an inch to the right and then brought it back. It was almost a sympathetic shake of the head. “I’m sorry.” She licked her lips. “How-don’t take this badly-how good was he?”

“The best I knew.”

Her right hand did a little side-to-side movement, disagreement she might not have known she was expressing. “But you said it-the shot, I mean-was fired at close range.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then how good could he have been?” I had a feeling I was hearing her father’s voice.

I said, “He had his weaknesses. Like most of us. Somebody who looked like you could have gotten close.”

“Like-like me? Are you serious?”

“I didn’t say you, I said someone who looked like you. Attractive, in other words. He liked women too much, more than I do, anyway. Or a kid could have gotten close. He wouldn’t have felt threatened by a kid.”

Two fingers went to her left eyebrow and smoothed it while her eyes searched mine. “You mean a child?”

“Or Thistle,” I said, just to be thorough. “He was there to protect her. If she’d come out of the apartment house and approached him, he’d have just sat there and watched her come. Which is apparently what he did. His gun was still in his holster.”

Trey shook her head, not so much disagreeing as having trouble processing the information. “But you know Thistle better than-I mean, you obviously don’t think she shot your friend.”

“I have no idea whether I know Thistle. This is someone who talks about herself in the third person. I like her, the bits of her she lets me see, which isn’t much.”

“How can you be sure? What you see is mostly chemicals.”

“There’s somebody under all that fog, somebody interesting. So I like her, and I feel sorry for her. But even if I didn’t like her, I’d be sure she didn’t kill him, because I’m pretty sure someone tried to kill her, too.”

Trey brought up both hands, palms out. “Wait, wait. Time out.” She got up, walked around the desk, and went to the edge of the set. She peered behind the wall to the left, apparently making certain no one was there, and then she checked behind the other wall. When she was certain we were alone, she came back to the desk and sat. She pointed to the nearest student desk and made a little come-here gesture. Since the desk wasn’t paying attention to her, I grabbed it and hauled it over to her and sat down. Once I was down, she pointed at the walls and then touched her ear. She leaned forward conspiratorially. “You’re going to have to back things up,” she said very quietly. “This is the beginning of the day, and I came into it with a couple of dozen things on my mind. Now I have to toss most of them and focus on this. I want you to take a breath and tell me everything in some sort of order. Try chronological. Maybe we can make some sense out of it.”

So I gave her all of it, including the little gift box of Rohypnol someone had so thoughtfully left on Thistle’s doorstep. The only thing I left out was the banged-up white Chevy, because I had no idea what to make of it, and Trey had denied any knowledge of the two girls who had been driving it. When I’d finished, we sat there in that parody of a schoolroom like two students who’d been sentenced to silent detention for twenty years.

She reached up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Why didn’t they just shoot Thistle?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.

“I don’t know. She may not have been alone. There were three dirty wineglasses on the floor. Maybe whoever it was heard voices through the door, didn’t want to have to kill a bunch of people. Maybe they figured killing Thistle Downing would start a firestorm in the media, so they’d let her do the job herself with the pills. But the truth is that I don’t even know why they shot Jimmy.”

“Because he saw them?”

“He was just a guy in a car,” I said. “How would they know what he was looking for? At first, I figured he’d spotted your husband and maybe he’d reacted somehow. But then he’d have had his gun out, and he didn’t. And if he didn’t give them some sort of reaction, then why shoot him? They were there to leave those pills for Thistle and sneak away, not to shoot people out in the street. So that leaves another possibility, which is that someone told them Jimmy would be there.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“No.”

“Well, certainly you don’t think that I-”

“Did you?”

“That’s both unintelligent and offensive.” She pushed the chair back a couple of inches. Her hands were on the desk, all the fine bones visible beneath the skin. She was at least ten pounds underweight-not as thin as Thistle, but whip-thin, and I thought again of Thistle’s imitation. Trey, I realized, was one of the people Thistle might have grown up to be, if she’d remained a star and held the drugs at bay.

“I find it offensive that he’s dead,” I said. “And I didn’t talk to anyone.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and willed her face to soften. When she opened them, she said, “I’m sorry about your friend. I know how it is to lose people. But you have to realize that what I want most right now is to get these movies made. We can avoid another exchange like this if you’ll keep that in mind. I wouldn’t do anything, not anything, that would endanger this project.”

It didn’t cost anything, so I said, “I’m sorry.”

She nodded once, just acknowledgment. She said, “There are times one doesn’t want to be right, and this is one of them. I said yesterday that this was the critical period, but I never thought it would get to murder.”

“I can’t imagine why you didn’t. You’re surrounded by people who shoot other people the way most of us choose a breakfast cereal. And you said it yourself: there are a lot of them who don’t like your new direction.” I pushed the scrap of canvas toward her. “You cut this out. How serious are you about it?”

“You mean, do I actually think my husband is involved?” She put her face into her hands and rubbed it for a second, looking briefly like the young woman in her twenties she actually was. Then she pulled her hands back and raked her hair off her face. “I think he could be. He’s a big enough shit, and he doesn’t like the position I’ve put him in.”

“Which is?”

“He married me in the firm belief that he would be the master, that I would love, honor, and obey, by which he meant I’d get up and cook breakfast and wear an apron all day and have kids who looked just like him, and leave all the hard stuff, all the guy stuff, to him. Stuff like running my father’s family. He was going to be King Tony the First. He did everything except go out and buy a crown.”

“What’s his full name?”

“Tony Ramirez. Antonio, actually, but he likes Tony. It’s easier for him to remember. He’s not exactly Mensa material. And he doesn’t expect anybody else to be, either. I think his first unpleasant surprise came when I didn’t change all the monograms so I could become Trey Ramirez. And it’s a good thing I didn’t, since I’d be changing it back now anyway.”

“Divorced?”

“All but.” She picked up the scrap of painted canvas and looked at it as though from a great height, then put it face down on the desk. “A few weeks more, and the paper sword will fall on the knot binding us together. Then he’ll really be out in the cold. Just another unemployed hunk of muscle with a good profile. So, yeah, I think he might be behind this. Among the more macho guys who do chores for us, there are some who figure that working for my father’s son-in-law beats the hell out of working for his daughter.”

“Could he run the business? You say he’s not smart, but how smart would he have to be?”

“He operates at about the same level of intelligence as a microwave oven. But some of the guys who’ll back him are counting on that. They’re figuring that he’ll be so busy counting his money and looking at himself in a mirror