Crashed jb-1

by Timothy Hallinan

  It was too dim in there, so I turned on the second lamp and looked around. The place couldn’t have been more anonymous if she’d only been there an hour. There was absolutely nothing in the room to indicate who she was or who she had been. No photos, no albums, no clippings-nothing to suggest that the young woman who lived here had been the most famous twelve-year-old in the country. In the absence of a chest of drawers, some waxy cardboard produce cartons had been lined up against one wall. They still stank of cabbage and broccoli, and I realized that was what I had smelled when we came through the front door. A stack of journals almost filled one of the boxes, identical hardcover books of blue-lined paper, bound in a faded sky blue, cheap, and probably purchased in a university student bookstore. There was nothing on the front covers except dates, and there seemed to be a new one every two or three months, so she was writing a lot. Or maybe drawing, or cutting out pages to create abstract origami, or diagramming the neural pathways blazed by illegal chemicals. Another box was filled with all the stuff no one knows where to keep: eyeglasses; old, empty cases for eyeglasses; keys; flashlights and loose batteries; candles; two unmatched shoes; a few paperback books. The title of the book on top was Finding the True You, and that discouraged me so much I didn’t look at the others. The books triggered a train of thought that straightened me up for a moment, and I took a short walk through the rooms to see whether I’d missed it, but I hadn’t; there was no television set in the apartment.

  Back in the bedroom, I dug into the third box and managed to find a couple of clean T-shirts and one pair of jeans that didn’t look like it could walk by itself, and I folded the items over my left arm. I was turning to go when I saw something pink wedged between the mattress and the wall.

  It was a small box, about three inches square and an inch deep. A bright yellow bow, amateurishly made from cheap gift-wrap ribbon, had been glued to the top, along with some sparkly stuff, the kind of glitter that bad magicians scatter in the air to distract the audience. Someone had written FOR THISTLE WITH LOVE on the top in metallic gold ink. The “i” in Thistle was dotted with a heart.

  I opened it and found myself looking at six rectangular tablets, olive-green in color. When I picked one up, I saw a number incised into the flat surface: 542. The tablets had been laid on a fluffy piece of cotton, pristine white. The bow, the heart, the cotton: It all looked so harmless.

  I went into the living room and listened. No screams, no water running.

  “You both alive in there?”

  “More or less,” Doc called. “Don’t open the door. She’s drying her hair.”

  “Tell me about green tablets with 542 written on them.”

  “Rohypnol,” Doc said. “Roofies. The ever-popular date rape drug. Where’d you find them?”

  I told him, and he opened the door a crack and stuck out a hand. I handed the box through, and I heard Thistle say, “Mine.”

  “You’ll get it back, sweetie,” Doc said. “How many did you take?”

  “Don’t know.” She sounded sullen, but the words weren’t too badly slurred.

  “Look, it’s a present. Got a pretty bow and everything. Who gave it to you?”

  “Don’t know,” she said again. “Sommuddy nodded, uh, knocked on my … my door. You know? And when I went to, uh, to look, those were there.”

  “Last night?”

  “Ummmm … maybe.”

  “And you have no idea who would have left them?”

  “Uh-uh. Gimme one.”

  “Not yet. Do you always take stuff, even when you don’t know where it came from?”

  A pause as Thistle processed the question, as if looking for a trap somewhere. Then she said, “Sure.”

  “It’s a miracle you’re not dead. Honey, if you’re going to take stuff like this, you’ve got to tell me, and I won’t give you all that other stuff.”

  “But I like it,” she said. She sounded ten years old.

  “And I like to give it to you.” A certain amount of exasperation was peeking through Doc’s Milburn Stone affability. “But I need to know what else you’re taking.”

  “I won’t, any more,” she said. “Can I have it now?”

  “Tell you what,” Doc said. “We’ll leave them right here, and you can take some when you get home tonight, okay?”

  “No.” I heard a slapping sound that might have been a wet bare foot being stamped.

  “Well, that’s what we’re doing. I’ll put them in this drawer before we leave, and tonight you can have a party, all by yourself.”

  “I want it now.”

  “Junior,” Doc called through the door. “Can you get Thistle some clothes?”

  “Get my own clothes,” Thistle said.

  “Here,” I said, and I reached through with the arm that had the clothes folded over it.

  “Don’t want,” Thistle said.

  “Young lady,” Doc said. “You’re going to shut up and put these clothes on, and then we’ll see about some medicine for you. But I’m telling you, until you’re dressed and ready to go, you are going to meet the world as God made you, with no help at all. Not a shot, not a pill, not even a pair of sunglasses. So right now I’m going to leave you here to get dressed, and I’ll take this little box with me, and then we’ll talk about it when you come out. Got it?”

  The door opened, and Doc came through it. He was soaking wet. He had the gift box in his hand, clenched hard enough to buckle the sides. “Get used to it,” he said. “This is what it’s going to be like until we’re finished. If we ever finish.”

  “What about the pills? How bad could it have been?”

  He shook his head. “There’s only one real question, and that’s whether whoever left them knew they could kill her. What I don’t understand is why there are any left. That’s not like her. All I can figure is that she passed out before she could take them all, which was a break for us. If she’d gotten them all down, she’d be on her way to the morgue.”

  “What else is she going to need when we leave?” I asked.

  “Other than a good friend and a complete blood change, nothing except what’s in my bag,” he said. “Unless you saw a purse in there. Women always want their purse.”

  “I’ll look.” As I started to turn, the bathroom door opened and Thistle came out. Her walk was hesitant but acceptable. The pale wet hair had been combed back from her face, exposing the fine, undamaged bone structure. The sore everyone had been talking about was on her lower lip. Her eyes went to Doc. “I’m out,” she said. “I got dressed, see? Give me something.” Then she brought the green eyes toward me and squinted as though I was reflecting too much light.

  “Who the hell are you?” she said.

  21

  Mr.Question man

  For the first five or six minutes, she might as well have been a pile of leaves. She sat slumped over, her forehead practically touching the dashboard. Every now and then she let out a syllable or two, but nothing I could translate into words.

  This was a surprise, because she’d been almost lively, at least relatively speaking, when Doc had driven the two of us into the parking lot of the Hillsider so I could get my car. I’d climbed out of Doc’s car and started to close the door, but a squeal had stopped me, and I’d turned to see Thistle with one leg on the asphalt, holding the door open with an extended hand.

  “Jeez,” she’d said, wincing in the sunlight. “Careful, you know?”

  “Where are you going?” Doc had asked her.

  “Wanna … wanna ride with him,” she said. “Tired of you.”

  “Aww,” Doc said. “You’re going to break my heart.”

  Thistle snickered. “Your heart? Don’t think so. Hard. Your heart, it’s hard.” And then she’d pulled herself out of Doc’s car, steadied herself with both hands, and said to me, “Where?”

  “The white one,” I said. “Right there.”

  “ ‘Kay,” she said, and she lowered her head, leaned in the direction of the car, and staggered in its general
direction until she bumped into it. “See?” she said, leaning all her weight against it, “I’m fine.”

  I’d opened the door for her and prevented her from bumping her head when she got in. I glanced back over at Doc, and he rubbed thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for money and shook his head. A moment later, both cars managed the left onto Highland and slammed straight into rush hour.

  Thistle remained bent forward.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  She said, “Uuuuhhhh.”

  “Good,” I said. “Good to hear it. Let me know if there’s a turn for the worse.”

  We picked up speed a little, heading for the onramp to the Hollywood Freeway.

  “Here we go.” She put out a hand and pushed herself away from the dashboard. “Okay,” she said, sitting a little straighter. “Okay, okay, okay.”

  “Something’s okay?” I asked.

  “Here it comes,” she said. “Whoooooooo, that took a long time.” She shook her head sharply, opened her mouth as though she were going to yawn, and then changed her mind, brought both hands up, and massaged her face. “Did I bring my sunglasses?”

  “I don’t know. Your purse is on the seat.”

  “Boy, oh boy,” she said, making no move for the purse. “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “About what?”

  “That shot. It should have hit ten minutes ago. I didn’t know whether, whether-”

  “Whether.”

  “Whether he’d shot me with water, or whether I was dead.”

  “You’re not dead,” I said. “No thanks to you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Must have been those pills. You know? The ones in the box.”

  “How many did you take?”

  “Six? Seven? Who knows. I was already loaded from what Doc gave me. Oh my golly, here comes some more.” And she sat up straighter and looked over at me.

  “I remember you now,” she said. Her eyes were darting back and forth between me and the road ahead, and her words were only slightly slurred. “You’re the one who talked about Claudette Colbert.”

  We were on the freeway by now, but not moving so fast that it was dangerous for me to glance over at Thistle. Her transformation was nothing short of miraculous, even if it was pharmaceutically induced: a shot of amphetamine, a couple of Percocets, fifteen minutes for her system to re-tune itself, and she was a new woman. Chemically elevated, then sedated to give her enough mass to keep her from detaching and floating away, she looked fit, alert, and ready for the balance beam. Feeling my gaze, she gave me a wary look and reached into her purse, bringing out the biggest, blackest pair of shades I’d ever seen. They were so big it looked like they should have a nose and mustache attached to them. When she put them on, they dwarfed her face. She turned away from me, looking over her far shoulder at where we’d been.

  “You like Claudette Colbert?” I asked. “I’m surprised you even know who she was.”

  There was an interval, perhaps a good, slow count of five, during which I thought she wouldn’t answer. But then she looked back over at me. She lowered her shades with an index finger and continued to stare at me, long enough to make me uncomfortable. Then she pushed the sunglasses back up, turned back to the windshield, and cleared her throat. It didn’t sound like anything significant, just somebody getting her voice ready.

  “I used to love her,” she said. “I watched all her movies. Her and Carole Lombard and Katharine Hepburn.”

  “Pretty old for you.”

  “Actresses,” she said. “I watched actresses. I used to be an actress.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I wanted to be good,” she said. “So I watched good ones. Bette Davis, too, but she didn’t like to be funny. She believed she wasn’t beautiful is what I think, and she thought people only took her seriously when she was being dramatic, so she was afraid to be funny. I liked the ones who weren’t afraid to be funny.”

  “You were good,” I said. “I’ve seen you.”

  She waved the remark away. “That line you liked? About the hat? That was from Midnight. I saw that about fifty times. I used to be able to get anything I wanted, you know? When I was on the show, I mean. Anything. I’d just ask somebody for it and they’d get it for me. I didn’t even have to say please. So I asked one of those people, the ones who were always around then, for those old movies, and I got a lot of them. I used to watch them at night, when I got home, when I was through being Thistle.”

  “What did you like about her? About Colbert, I mean.” We inched toward the onramp for the Hollywood Freeway.

  She twisted a strand of the pulled-back hair to see how wet it was and then folded her hands in her lap. It was an odd posture, demure and too young for her. “She was having so much fun. More fun than anybody. Everybody else was working really hard, knitting their brows and clenching their jaws and trying to look like they were used to wearing their costumes and everything. You know, you can always tell when an actor feels silly in his costume, like they don’t know where their pockets are or they wish they were wearing socks. So everybody else is all wrapped up in a sheet and feeling dumb but pretending to be Julius Caesar or whoever, really putting their backs into it, you know? And she was thinking, I’m a big movie star and this is just like fatally cool. There was always this glee in her eyes. You know glee?”

  “I have a nodding acquaintance with it.” The morning sun was dazzling on the roofs of the cars, and I envied Thistle her sunglasses.

  “People don’t talk about glee much any more. Why?” She turned to me, the hands still folded in her lap. It seemed to be a serious question. “Do you know? Do you know why are there so many more ways to say you’re unhappy than there are to say you’re happy? Maybe that’s why nobody’s happy any more.”

  “What’s why?”

  “The language” she said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You know, English. It doesn’t give happiness equal time, does it? It’s like the hundred words for snow everybody talks about with the Eskimos, except we’ve got it for complaint. We’ve got it for misery and boredom and too cool to smile. And so you’ve got all these drips dressed in black and imitating each other, talking about how beamed it is to be down all the time. Talking about irony and black comedy. Starting fan clubs for serial killers. Making fun of happy endings. Like the world is just cinders and tin cans and there’s nothing to be happy about.”

  “Are you happy?”

  She pushed past the question without a glance in its direction. “If there was no word for sky,” she said, “I wonder whether anybody would look up.”

  “Are you happy?”

  She had been facing me, but now she shifted to give me her profile and look through the windshield. She put her feet up on the dash so her knees were practically at her chest. Then, making herself even smaller, she crossed her arms. After a full minute, she said, “When I’ve got what I want.”

  “And what do you want?”

  “Who made you Mister Question Man?” Her voice had scaled up slightly into the thinner, more querulous register I’d heard when she was talking to Doc in the bathroom. “We were having a good time talking about, umm, Claudette Colbert, and all of a sudden I’m in therapy.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Jesus. I was feeling okay, too. Just drive the car, isn’t that your job?”

  “You can feel good again.”

  “Yeah?” It was a challenge. “You got anything?”

  “You can feel good on your own.”

  “Uh-oh. Quick, somebody. Make a poster. You can feel good on your own. With a picture of the Olsen Twins, maybe. Put it next to the one that says I won’t come in your mouth.” She started picking at the sore on her lower lip.

  “Don’t do that. It’ll get infected.”

  “Yeah, and it’ll swell up and then my head will fall off. Leave me alone.”

  “My daughter says you were sad when you were a little girl.”

  “She did, huh? Where’d s
he get that insight? Some blog about ragged-out former celebrities? Snort.com, or something?”

  “She got it from watching you. The show. She watches you all the time.”

  “She should go out and play. Stop watching junk. Do kids still go out and play? Did kids ever go out and play?”

  “Was she right?”

  “Oh, who knows?” She drummed her fingers on one of the jack-knifed legs. “She was watching Thistle, not me. Maybe she was sad some of the time. Seems like she was. If she’d been happy, she wouldn’t-” She broke off and looked out the passenger side window.

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  Her face was averted. “You got anything or not?”

  “No.”

  She shifted onto her right haunch, turned three-quarters away from me and touched her forehead to the window. “Then leave me alone.”

  I said, “It’s a long drive.”

  “Go away.”

  “You want some music?”

  “There’s no such thing as music.”

  “Fine.”

  The traffic had picked up its pace, especially in the left lanes, and Doc turned on his indicator. I prepared to follow.

  “He’s got something,” Thistle said, looking forward again. “Get him to pull over and give it to me.”

  “You’ve got a long day ahead of you.”

  “Yeah, and I just can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it. Honk your horn at him.”

  “Forget it,” I said. And then she reached across me and leaned on the horn.

  The car swerved and I grabbed her arm and threw it back at her, and she banged her elbow on something, maybe the central console. She let out a wordless wail, rubbing her elbow hard enough to polish it.

  I said, “I’ll sympathize in a minute, after I change lanes.”

  “You hurt me. I didn’t do anything to you, and you hurt me.”