Crashed (16 page)

As Rina had said, it was called “Once a Witch,” and it seemed to be on all the time.

I hadn’t known anything about Thistle’s show when I watched those bits of it at the Snor-Mor, that one long scene and the end credits. By midnight, I was an expert.

Thistle played a character called Wanda, which I thought was a little on the cute side, since Wanda was a witch and had an actual wand. In a cosmic mix-up among dimensions, she’d been swapped with a normal baby, leaving her to wreak innocent havoc in the middle-class (read: all-white and all non-witch) suburb into which she’d been mistakenly dropped. A parallel plot line, following the normal little girl who’d been accidentally given to a family of witches, had been filmed but was dropped at the end of the first season, by which time it was apparent that the only reason anyone was watching was Thistle.

The other little girl—who was adorable but, compared to Thistle, lumpen—was apparently allowed to return to normal toddlerhood obscurity, where the odds were good she’d grow up nursing a lifelong grudge against Thistle Downing. Or might have, if things hadn’t gone so spectacularly wrong in Thistle’s life.

By twelve o’clock I’d seen four shows and three actors playing Wanda’s father, all of whom might as well have been
furniture. It wasn’t fair, because when Thistle’s spells went awry, they often required some expert physical comedy on old Dad’s part, and at least two of the Dads were equal to it. But, unfortunately for them, Thistle was usually onscreen when their best bits came up, and it just wasn’t possible to take your eyes off her. When these scenes were written, they had been about the father’s dilemma, but when they were filmed they became about Thistle’s
reaction
to the father’s dilemma. It really wasn’t fair. Here’s Dad, trying to play ping-pong while hanging upside down with his shoes stuck to the ceiling, and Thistle’s just standing there, and you
still
looked at her. And the Dads weren’t helped by the fact that, by season three, there was almost never a shot in which Thistle didn’t figure.

The actress playing Mom learned early to give the screen away with a kind of ego-free good humor that put her on the audience’s side. Her attitude seemed to be saying to the viewer,
I’m with you. Let me get out of the way here, so you can sit back and see what she comes up with
. Dads had come and gone, but Mom had lasted through the show’s entire eight-year run.

By the beginning of the fourth show I watched, I had distanced myself far enough to begin to wonder how Thistle could be destitute, no matter how much dope she was gobbling. The residuals from the show had to be substantial. Five or six episodes daily were fed into the maw of the cable channels. Her take had to be hundreds of thousands a year.

I wondered who would know why she wasn’t getting any of it.

The shows I saw were apparently chosen at random by some programming computer. There was no attempt to stick with any single season or even cluster of seasons. As a result, I saw Thistle at eight and ten, then at eight again, and then at fifteen. It was amazing that she could hold me for two straight hours of uninspired sitcom machinations, ninety percent of which was filmed in that eternal, unchanging living room with the same damned bouquet of flowers on the table in
front of the couch. She just outshone the material so strongly that everything else faded away. It was like seeing a diamond in a pile of manure.

But Rina had been right. As Thistle aged, she changed. At eight, she was all energy and uncanny instincts; she barely seemed to know the cameras were there. When she was ten, she still had the energy although the instincts weren’t as clearly visible, and she had learned some technique that allowed her to build the jokes gradually and then ride them until the audience was helpless. There was, as far as I could tell, no electronic enhancement of the laughs she drew. They all sounded messy, spontaneous, and ragged, just like the laughs a real audience would create.

At fifteen, she didn’t have so much energy. She was working hard,
trying
for the first time. Her technical skill had grown, but there didn’t seem to be much of herself behind it. And she looked tired. Caught at certain angles, she had circles under her eyes. In one or two especially unfortunate shots, possibly preserved by an editor whom she’d treated badly, she looked exhausted. At fifteen, there were moments when Thistle Downing looked thirty.

And sad.

I turned off the television and booted my laptop, logged onto Google, and read what I could. Family life was unremarkable, at least from the outside, but then the Borgias probably looked normal from the outside. Father died when Thistle was little, mother had the kind of big-toothed smile that said she could probably bite a Chevy in half, and there was a brother, Robert, just an amorphous, pudgy, resolutely ordinary kid a couple of years older than Thistle. The kind of kid you could meet twenty times with no memory of him. In fact, I had to look back after I’d navigated away from the page to check his name again. Robert. His name was Robert.

The biggest story in Thistle’s relatively recent past broke after
she sold her residual rights two days after she turned eighteen, saying she didn’t want to be looking over the studio’s shoulder all the time. The deal made headlines for two reasons. First, Thistle was paid one hundred and forty million dollars. Second, her mother, whom she had fired as her manager the day she turned eighteen, sued for a big chunk of it.

And won.

Noting that Mrs. Downing’s guidance had made Thistle one of the ten highest-paid people in television for three years running and that her brother, Robert, had contributed emotional support in spite of looking as emotional as a dinner roll, a superior court judge awarded Mom twenty-eight million, or twenty percent. The case made headlines again when Thistle hired three moving trucks, each jammed full of one-dollar bills, to deliver the money. As crews from practically every television network in the world filmed frantically and Robert ran around flapping his hands, a bunch of guys in coveralls used pitchforks to toss money from the backs of the trucks into the Downings’ front yard for several hours and then drove off. Armed guards surrounded the yard for a day and a half until the money could be counted, stacked, and carted safely away.

Mother and daughter were not reputed to be on good terms.

And that was only the beginning. Thistle’s money had been a banquet for the harpies to swoop down on. Her first manager, the guy who got her the part in “Once a Witch,” sued and won a few million. Her own lawyer, having lost the case, sued her for seven million and won. Her business manager, who was supposed to manage the money that was left, discovered cocaine and bolted the country with another sixteen million. Thistle ran over a paparazzi’s foot, and that cost a million and a half. She drove a car into someone’s living room, and the settlement was apparently substantial, even though the amount was undisclosed.

It was a familiar cautionary tale, celebrity downhill skiing,
leaving a trail of unflattering photographs, nightmare encounters, and thousand-dollar bills. And then, beginning about three years ago, pretty much nothing. Two stories that she’d been arrested for drug possession but released without going to trial. The mug shots had not been released, which was probably a mercy.

At midnight I started to shut down and then decided instead to Google Rabbits Stennet.

Not much there, and nothing that would lead you to believe that Robert R. Stennet was in the habit of feeding business associates to his Rottweilers. He was pleasant—even intelligent—looking, with a long collie face and a tame flop of silvery hair over a high, Sherlock Holmes brow. The overall effect was that of a college professor in some placid backwater of the Humanities rather than a ranking thug with a rep for brutality. He was active in community affairs, which I’ve always thought is kind of a dicey phrase, and there were a couple of pictures of him and the Missus at events. One of the shots, of the two of them on the red carpet to the Grammy Awards, with her glittering at the camera like a Christmas tree ornament in the diamonds I’d boosted plus a lot more, stopped me cold.

I’d forgotten that Bunny Stennet had looked familiar when I’d seen the photos on the bedroom wall. But there was no question about it. I had seen Bunny Stennet before. I couldn’t pull it out of the snarl of yarn in my head—the end of the strand broke off every time I located it and tugged. But she was familiar, and what’s more, she was familiar in a
recent
way. Whenever I’d seen her, it hadn’t been long ago.

I couldn’t remember meeting anyone new—anyone who looked like Bunny Stennet, that is—in months. And months.

I turned off the computer, climbed into bed, and set my cell phone to bleat at me around seven, since I was supposed to meet Doc at 7:45. I closed my eyes and settled into the pillow, tried to bring Bunny’s features to mind again, and the phone rang.

I picked it up and flipped it open.

“Ummm,” Jimmy Dean said. “Something’s, um—maybe you’d better.
Oh
. Oh.
Wait
!”

A gunshot punched a hole in my eardrum.

The Porsche was
at the curb, five cars north of the Camelot Arms. I passed it without slowing, went halfway around the block and parked, and then hiked back. I could see him when I was ten feet away.

Li Bai Chen, aka Ji Ming Ding, aka Jimmy Dean, had been shot once through the throat. The bullet had entered the left side of his neck, obviously fired through the open driver’s window, and plowed into the back of the passenger seat. A spray of blood and brains had spattered across the window on the passenger side. Powder burns stippled Jimmy’s cheek. He’d let whoever it was get close.

I smelled scorched cloth. Jimmy’s cigarette had dropped from his mouth onto the thigh of his jeans, where it had burned through the denim to the skin. His right hand rested in his lap, palm up. His left was extended, the wrist caught in an opening in the steering wheel.

I followed the left arm and the hand with my eyes. In his own blood, on the inside of the windshield, Jimmy had drawn what looked like an uneven “greater than” character:

He had come fifteen thousand miles, drawn by Hollywood’s vision of a young man who died in a Porsche, and here he was, a young man in Hollywood, dead in a Porsche. I closed my eyes for a moment and said goodbye, then begged his pardon as I slipped a hand inside his jacket and rifled his shirt pocket. Luck
was with me, and I found it in the first place I looked: the face Trey had cut from the painting.

Jimmy’s gun was holstered under his left shoulder. The jacket hadn’t even been unbuttoned. The buttons were snaps so he could open them almost instantly, but they were still closed, not all the way because the evening hadn’t been cool enough, but high enough to make it awkward to get to the gun.

And I couldn’t find his cell phone.

I did everything I dared: leaned in as far as I could, checked the backseat, peered through the windows. Then I did what I didn’t want to do—I opened the driver’s door, turning on the interior light, which seemed very bright, and spent fifteen extremely anxious seconds looking for the phone. Not on the floor, not under the seat, not trapped beneath Jimmy’s thighs. I closed the door and did a quick survey of the street. As far as I could tell, I was unobserved.

Other than trying to find that phone, there was no reason to stay here and many reasons to leave. Cops would probably arrive very soon, and I couldn’t be anywhere around. There was nothing I could do about Thistle. If she was in her apartment, there was no point in knocking, and if she wasn’t, there was no way I could find her now. Moving quickly, I wiped the driver’s door where I had touched it, then went around to the Porsche’s passenger side and wiped the door handle and the top of the door, then, after looking around again, I opened the door and wiped the inside, smearing some of Jimmy’s blood in the process. No cell phone on the passenger side, either. Then I wadded up the handkerchief, stuffed it in my pocket, put my head down, and walked off, briskly but not hurriedly. As I got to my car and climbed in, I heard the sirens.

Coming for Jimmy.