Crashed (27 page)

“Tell me,” I said.

“Well, she got through with her makeup and then put on the costume for the scene, just a kind of nothing dress, a little evening dress, black with—”

“I don’t need to know about the dress. And?”

“And she hadn’t said anything for five or ten minutes. It was like she was miles away, or memorizing something. You know what I mean? Just not there. Anyway, she asked for a few minutes alone. So I told everyone to leave the room, and then we, I mean Ellie and I, we went to the cafeteria and got a couple cups of coffee. Just, you know, giving Thistle some time to pull herself together. Then we went back and knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer, and when we opened it, she was gone.”

Ellie came up from behind me, putting the phone away. “Not on the sound stage,” she said to Tatiana.

“How long was she alone?” I asked.

“Fifteen minutes?” Ellie said, aiming the question at Tatiana.

“Maybe twenty,” Tatiana said.

“Say twenty,” I said. “Enough time for anything.”

“Anything?” Tatiana said. Her fingers flew to her mouth. “Oh. Oh, my God. You said it, if they’re really serious about shutting this thing down, it’s Thistle they’ll target.”

“Let’s not go there yet. Did you both go into the room?”

“Yes,” Ellie said hesitantly. “I went first.”

‘How long ago?”

“Oh, gosh, hard to—I’ve been so upset.”

“Eight, ten minutes,” Tatiana said. “And I didn’t actually go into the room.”

“Okay, when
you
went into the room,” I said to Ellie, “was the dress in there?”

“The dress—”

“The
costume
dress. The one she had on. Did you see it in the room Thistle had been in?”

The two women looked at each other, and Ellie said, “No.”

“The clothes she arrived in. Were they in there?”

“Yes,” Ellie said.

“Okay,” I said to Tatiana. “
Now
you can tell me about the dress.”

“Little basic black number, sort of tarty,” Tatiana said. “Cut to bare one shoulder—”

“The left,” Ellie said.

Tatiana frowned. “Are you sure?”

I said, “It doesn’t matter. There’s no way Thistle would leave the lot wearing a dress like that. If she’s got that on, she’s here somewhere. Tatiana, get six or eight good people and divide up the lot. I want everyplace searched by at least two people. Clear?”

“Sure. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see whether I’m wrong.”

There were three
ways in and out of the studio. The gate we’d come in through was used mainly by vehicles, and it consisted of an eight-foot section of chain link that had to be opened and closed by the guy in the guard shack. He hadn’t opened it for anyone on foot in hours, although he’d let a few cars out in the past fifteen minutes. The only car he recognized was Trey’s chauffeured, bulletproof limo, which had pulled out five or ten minutes earlier.

It was also possible to walk out through the gatehouse, but it was only about four feet square, and anyone who left that way would practically have to bump into the guard. He said no one had come through on foot.

“Do you check the cars that leave?”

His brow furrowed beneath his imitation cop’s hat. “Check them?”

“You know, look inside, open the trunk, anything like that.”

“Geez,” he said, “this ain’t Checkpoint Charlie.”

It wasn’t Checkpoint Charlie in the Palomar Studios lobby, either. Two weight lifters in rental uniforms sat behind the desk, one of them wearing mirrored sunglasses that made me dislike him instantly.

“Has a young woman in a black dress gone past you guys in the past ten, fifteen minutes?”

“Who’s asking?” said Sunglasses.

“Good to know you’re awake,” I said. “Hard to tell with those Top Gun way-cools sitting on your big fat nose.”

“Hey,” he said, getting up.

“Think about it,” I said. “Somebody as rude as I am is probably eager to kill you. Can you think of another reason?”

“Um,” he said, but the other guy said, “No, nobody like that. I mean, one woman, but she works here. We see her every day.”

“Thanks,” I said. To the other guy, I said, “Any time. Just take a swing at me any time. It’ll be a pleasure.”

The third gate was at the back of the lot, and it opened onto a narrow, eucalyptus-lined street that bordered the wide, white concrete trench of the Los Angeles River. There was no guard, just a metal gate with a handle that anyone could open from the inside. To re-enter from the outside, you needed to punch a numeric code into a keypad. It was the logical place for Thistle to have chosen if she’d known about it, but I doubted she did. As far as I knew, she hadn’t worked at Palomar before.

I stood there, looking at the gate, at the tall rows of eucalyptus
bending slightly in a breeze I couldn’t feel, and kicked myself. Despite the little black dress, despite the fact that no one had seen her leave, I didn’t think Thistle was still on the lot. She’d either gotten out on her own somehow, or someone had spirited her away. And there were a lot of potential someones. I remembered my question about all the things that had gone wrong before I got involved. I had said,
Who has access like that?

And Craig-Robert had answered:
Sweetie
. All
of us
.

I jogged back toward the main building.

“Somebody saw her,”
Tatiana said the moment she spotted me. “Just about five minutes ago.”

“Who? Where?”

“Eddie and Lorraine. They’re grips. They went into Studio A, the one we’re not using, to get some lighting clamps, and she ran out of the studio and into the administration building.”

“They’re sure it was her?”

“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.

“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.