Crashed

“Right dress, right hair, right size. You know, she was running, and she didn’t look back and wave at them or anything, but it was Thistle.”

“Get everybody. I want all the doors to the administration building watched by at least two people while we search every foot of the place. Have somebody tell the rent-a-cops to keep their eyes open. Nobody who could conceivably be Thistle goes out of the building until we’ve been through it. And I mean conceivably-if somebody sees a short guy with a beard, I want to know that the beard is real. She could make herself look like anything with the stuff that’s available here.”

“We’re on it.” Tatiana ran toward the stage Thistle had been going to shoot on to round up the crew. I kept my eyes on the back door to the administration building, fighting a feeling that this was going to be a waste of time.

And it was. Two hours later, the building had been turned inside out. All the exits had been monitored. The basement and a small crawlspace attic had both been checked. The people who’d been searching were tired, frustrated, and cranky. The people whose offices we’d ransacked were irritated, self-righteous, and cranky.

“Go back,” I said to Tatiana. “Go through every wastebasket. Every trash receptacle in every rest room. Empty them completely. Turn the fuckers upside down.”

“What are we looking for?” Tatiana asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

Thirty minutes later, she came out with the black dress in her hands.

29

Destructo the furios

“Do you have any idea how much this is costing me?” Trey Annunziato demanded on the cell phone. “I’m paying for a full day’s shoot.”

“About twenty-one thousand,” I said.

A short pause. Then she said, “That’s right. I told you. So you don’t know whether she left or was taken. What’s your feeling?”

“That there’s something wrong either way.”

“What does that mean?”

“The dress doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?”

I checked my mirror and followed the exit lane onto the off ramp into Hollywood. “Okay, she ducks out of the makeup room wearing the costume. Maybe she was freaking out, maybe all that dope peaked, and she wanted to be somewhere dark and quiet for a while. Maybe she realized she didn’t have any choice except to do the scene, and she just couldn’t face it. So she hides out for forty-five minutes or so, and then somebody comes into the stage she was hiding on, and she runs. She runs into the admin building and disappears into thin air. We turned the building upside down. And two hours later, we find the dress in a waste bin in one of the women’s bathrooms.”

“And? I’m not following you.”

“Well, what did she do? Put something else on? What? Her own clothes are still in the dressing room. No costumes are kept in the administration building. She wasn’t carrying a change of clothes when she ran into the building. And no one saw her come out, no matter what she was wearing. She ran in, she left the dress, she disappeared.”

“Into thin air,” Trey said flatly.

“That’s the point. I know there’s a rational explanation, but I can’t find it yet.”

“While you’re searching for it, what do you intend to do?”

“I’m going to operate on the assumption she left under her own will. I’m going to try to figure out where she would have gone, and I’m going to look there. Then, if none of that pans out, I’ll assume someone took her, and I’ll start looking for that.”

“Why not look for that first?”

“Because as hard as it is to figure how she got out of there alone, it’s impossible to imagine her being dragged out without anyone noticing. And also, I don’t know where to look yet.”

“Damn it. I suppose I should call off the shoot.”

“Rodd said something about shooting inserts, close up-what did he call them? — money shots to cover the things Thistle wouldn’t or couldn’t do. You’ve got the set, you’ve got the guys. They need to do something with those thumbs. Why not shoot those?”

“I haven’t got a body double.”

“You got the guys there pretty damn fast when you made that spur-of-the-moment decision to film the gang-bang.”

There was a moment’s silence. “Better than nothing, I suppose.”

I said, “You’re welcome.”

“You want thanks? Get her back.”

Trey hung up and I breezed across Hollywood Boulevard on Highland, the traffic mysteriously light for mid- day. Good Lord, I thought, mid-day? I checked my watch: one-forty. It felt like it should be getting dark already.

If Thistle had left voluntarily, I needed to find her for her own sake. Feeling the way she did, all alone, pumped full of dope and face to face at last with the reality of the deal she’d made, there was no way to know what she’d do. I found myself somewhat taken aback by the intensity of my anxiety. I’d met her only that morning and she’d been stoned on a potpourri of psychotropic substances the whole time I’d been with her. She was hopeless, aimless, self-loathing, self-destructive, probably not long for the world. The wreckage, I supposed, of someone who had briefly possessed a remarkable talent and hadn’t been able to adjust to life without it.

Except, I asked myself as I slowed for a red light, who loses a talent like that? It was innate; she’d had it at seven. Something like that doesn’t just decide to change ZIP codes, wander away, and desert the person it animated.

What had she said about her genius for mimicry? “It’s about the only thing I have left.”

The light changed, and I forced myself to confront the alternative. If she hadn’t left voluntarily, if she’d been taken-well, that was exactly what I’d been hired to prevent. I’d assumed from the beginning that someone on the crew was involved in the disruption, and now-if she’d been snatched-in her disappearance. And behind that person, I was certain, was someone much more dangerous. Someone who’d proved that by shooting Jimmy. Someone who would probably be capable of writing full stop to Trey’s project by killing Thistle.

So, one way or the other-alone, on her own, loaded and probably self-destructive, or taken by someone who wished her ill-Thistle Downing was in trouble.

I made the turn onto Romaine, forcing myself to focus on nothing but what was in front of me. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I could see. No lingering cops, no obvious hoods hanging around. If Thistle had run and word had gotten out, then whoever was trying to wreck the filming would be doing exactly what I was doing, but for a different reason. She finds her way here, they’re waiting, and just like that, no movie. Maybe they kill her, maybe they just lock her up for a month, maybe they put her in the trunk of a car and drive her up to Canada or down into Mexico, then keep her stoned and happy until Trey’s either given up or has been surgically removed from the situation. Then let her wander back on her own.

I knew a couple of people who would have handled it exactly like that. Unfortunately, I also knew a couple of people who would have just put a bullet in her head and sunk her into the Pacific off Catalina. Well-weighted and soon forgotten, just another fallen star.

No one seemed to be loitering around the Camelot Arms, no one was sitting in a parked car on either side of the street. The white Chevy was gone, and Jimmy’s Porsche had been hauled and was probably being taken to