Crashed

Whoever it was, he or she was trying to come in.

Nothing I could see in the room had any value as a weapon. The only thing I would have had was surprise, and I’d squandered that, short of jumping out and yelling “Boo.”

The more I considered that idea, the better it seemed. Among the arguments in its favor was the fact that it was absolutely the only thing I could think of. A moment of complete disorientation would at least give me a chance to get close. I looked around the room again. It seemed to come down either to “Boo” or trying to bludgeon to death whoever it was with a pair of Thistle’s jeans.

So I got up and edged toward the door, putting my feet down on the very back edge of the heel and then lowering the rest of the foot to the floor. The back of the heel, on a man’s shoe at least, is usually the softest part of the sole.

The table moved again, just as I reached the edge of the door. I took a deep breath, centered myself in a flimsy conviction that what I was about to do was not idiocy, no matter how much it felt like it, bent my knees slightly, whirled, and jumped through the door with the most horrifying bellow I could manage.

Through the partially open front door I saw a little girl’s face turn into a collection of perfect, and perfectly horrified, circles, and then she screamed back at me-a sound high enough to put a gouge in the ceiling-turned, and ran. The smaller of the two girls from the white car.

I barreled after her, grabbing the table and tossing it aside to get the door open, but by the time I hit the hallway she was already rabbiting down the stairs. As fast as I could move, she was a lot faster, and even though I took the stairs practically head first, essentially in a perilously controlled fall, she was through the door to the street before I made the landing, and when I threw open the door, still swinging from her exit, she was clambering into the back of that dented, beat-up Chevy. The girl at the wheel pushed the accelerator most of the way through the floor, and they took off in an eye-stinging, lung-searing trail of dark smoke.

My car was two blocks away.

31

Mom number one

Luella Downing had left the Valley far behind.

The house was in the flats, but it was still in Beverly Hills, set back from the street by thirty or forty feet of green lawn, bordered by azaleas in a pink so pure it looked like the first time God had tried out the color, before it got diluted with overuse.

The basic theme was used brick: the house was used brick. The driveway and the walkway to the door were used brick. The bricks had been painted different colors in their previous lives and then acid-scrubbed or sandblasted back into a semblance of brickiness. It might have looked like a quaint economy to someone who didn’t know that used bricks were a lot more expensive than new bricks.

But, of course, the house hadn’t been designed to impress people like that.

The guy who answered the door was pale and puffy enough to have solidified from the billows of cigarette smoke that accompanied him. He glanced down at my coveralls and said, “Pool’s around back.”

“How long since you checked the pH level?” I asked.

He blinked heavily and screwed up his left eye in complete incomprehension. He was drunk. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”

“You’d be brother Robert,” I said. “Still living at home, I see.”

Robert said, “Uhh, the pool?”

“I’ll just take a short cut,” I said, and pushed him out of the way.

“Hey,” he said. “Wait.”

I went down a short, dim entry hall with the walls covered in those mirrored squares with gold veins running through them that I’ve always seen as an attempt to recapture some age of grandeur when the grand had really bad taste. Two marbletop tables, amateurishly antiqued, sported big, slightly dusty arrangements of silk flowers. The place smelled like Rush Limbaugh’s pillow.

A turn to the left took me into the living room, which ran half the width of the house and culminated at the far end in what were probably sliding glass doors to the back yard. The doors were heavily curtained in some light- repellent fabric. It was bright outside but dim in here. The only illumination came from a brass fixture hanging over the green felt-covered card table at the near end of the room. Four chairs circled the table. The empty one probably belonged to pasty old Robert. Three people turned to look at me from the other chairs.

One was a woman in her early fifties, working hard to look seventy. Her face was lined and bloated, a cigarette dangled from her lips, and she’d combed her hair very carefully, probably no more than four or five days ago. The other two were men, and I recognized both of them. The one nearer to me I had seen trying to get dinner platters off his hands on TV. He was older and heavier now but had maintained the residual undercurrent of cluelessness I’d spotted on the small screen. The man in the middle was a third-rank, lounge-level comic whose catchline, “Do I look like that kind of guy?” was always answered with a resounding Yes by the wandering members of the mysteriously idle class who show up at game show tapings, inhabit bars in the daytime, and go to Vegas for the Muscular Dystrophy telethon.

The men had cigars, and not, to judge from the mountains in the ashtrays, the first of the day. Each of them seemed to be nursing a glass of amber liquid that was probably bourbon on the rocks. The cards on the table were arrayed in a classic Texas Hold’em configuration: two face-down in front of each player and four face-up in the center of the table. The guy who had played Thistle’s father on TV picked up his hole cards and checked them for a second, as though he’d forgotten what they were, then replaced them.

“He’s the pool guy,” Robert said from behind me.

“Honey,” Luella Downing said to me around the cigarette, “The pool is outside. How many houses you go to, where they got the pool in the living room?”

“None,” I said, “but that’s probably because I’m not the pool guy. Do you know where Thistle is?”

Luella Downing said, “Ahhhh, shit.” She pushed her chair back to look at me better. “She’s disappeared, right? What day of the week is it?”

“Tuesday,” said Thistle’s fictional father.

“I’m asking him,” Luella Downing said.

“Tuesday,” I said.

“Then she’s on schedule. She usually disappears for the first time every week on Tuesday. She’s busy on Monday, getting loaded enough not to be able to find her way home. She’ll wander in on Thursday and disappear again on Friday.”

“This is different,” I said.

“They’re all different,” Luella Downing said. “Every single one is a unique little human tragedy. You’re what? The latest masked man to ride down from the hills to try to rescue her, right? Well, let me give you some advice, masked man. Put that horse in reverse and leave her wherever the hell she is. Edith is like trouble in a concentrate, you know? Add a few drops to some water, you got gallons of it.”

“Edith?” I said.

“That’s her name. Edith. That’s the name me and her father gave her. I never heard the name Thistle until she tried out for that show. ‘What’s your name, sweetie?’ the casting guy said, and Edith said, ‘Thistle.’ Didn’t even look at me. What was I supposed to do, contradict her? Anyway, it’s her name, right? If she wants to call herself Clyde, she’s Clyde.”

“So you don’t know where she is.”

“What’s the current hot dope street in Hollywood? That’s where she is. Has to be cut-rate, though. She’s run through the money pretty good.”

“I notice you haven’t,” I said, just because she made me feel nasty.

“Honey, I earned every nickel of it. I know you probably think she’s the poster girl for victims everywhere, but let me tell you, she’s a fucking nightmare, and she’s been like that since she was thirteen. If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t have been a show. Who do you think got her out of the house every morning and onto the set? Who went and found her every time they needed her and dragged her out of her trailer? Who had to watch her go through a