Chasing the Dime (27 page)

‘Henry, am I in trouble?'

‘Not at all, Monica. He's investigating her disappearance. And he's investigating me. Not you. He's just backtracking on what I did. So if he calls you, just tell him the truth and everything will be fine.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes, I'm sure. Don't worry about it. I should go now.' They hung up. Pierce got a fresh dial tone and called Lucy LaPorte's number, knowing it now by heart. Once again he got her voice mail but the greeting was now different. It was her voice but the message was that she was taking a vacation and would not be accepting clients until mid-November.

More than a month, Pierce thought. He felt his insides constrict as he thought about what Renner had intimated and about Wentz and his goon and what they could've done to her. He left a message regardless of what she had said in her greeting.

‘Lucy, it's Henry Pierce. It's important. Call me back. I don't care what happened or what they did to you, call me. I can help you. I've got a new number now, so write it down.'

He read the number off his wrist and then hung up. He held the phone on his lap for a few moments, half expecting, half hoping she would immediately call back. She didn't. After a while he got up and left the bedroom.

In the kitchen Pierce found the empty laundry basket on the counter. He remembered he had been using it to carry grocery bags up from the car when he first encountered Wentz and Six-Eight by the elevator. He remembered dropping the laundry basket when he was pushed out of the elevator. Now the basket was here. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Everything he had been carrying up — except the eggs, which had probably broken — had been placed inside. He wondered who had done this. Nicole? The police? A neighbor he did not even know?

The question made him think of Detective Renner's statement about the Good Samaritan complex. If such a theory and complex were true, then Pierce felt sorry for all the true do-gooders and volunteers out there in the world. The idea that their efforts might be viewed cynically by members of law enforcement depressed him.

Pierce remembered that he still had several bags of groceries in the trunk of his BMW. He picked up the laundry basket and decided to go get them because he was hungry and the pretzels and sodas and other snacks he had bought were in the trunk.

Still feeling weak from the assault and surgery, he did not overload the basket once he went down to the garage. He decided on two trips and after he got back into the apartment with the second basketful he checked the phone again and learned he had missed a call. He had a message.

Pierce cursed himself for missing the call and then quickly went through the process of setting up a voice mail access code again. Soon he was listening to the message. It was from Lucy LaPorte.

‘Help me? You already helped me enough, Henry. They hurt me. I'm all black and blue and nobody can see me like this. I want you to stop calling me and wanting to help me. I'm not talking to you again after this. Stop calling here, you understand?'

The message clicked off. Pierce continued to hold the phone to his ear, his mind repeating parts of the message like a scratched old record.
They hurt me. I'm all black and blue.
He felt himself getting light-headed and reached out to the wall for balance. He then turned his back into the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, the phone on his lap again.

He did not move for several seconds and then raised the receiver and started calling her number. Halfway through, he stopped and hung up.

‘Okay,' he said out loud.

He closed his eyes. He thought about calling Janis Langwiser to tell her that he had received a message from Lucy, that at the very least she was alive. He could then ask her if she had learned anything new since their meeting at the hospital that morning.

Before he could act on the idea, the phone rang while he was still holding it. He answered immediately. He thought it might be Lucy again — who else had the new number? — and his hello was tinged with a tone of hurried desperation.

But it wasn't Lucy. It was Monica.

‘I forgot to tell you, between Monday and Tuesday your friend Cody Zeller left three messages for you on your private line. I guess he really wants you to call him.'

‘Thank you, Monica.'

Pierce could not call Zeller back directly. His friend accepted no direct calls. To contact him, Pierce had to call his pager and put in a return number. If Zeller was familiar with the number, he would return the call. Because Pierce had a new number that Zeller would not recognize, he added a prefix of three sevens, which was a code that let Zeller know it was a friend or associate who was attempting to contact him from an unfamiliar number. It was a sometimes cumbersome and always annoying way to conduct life and business but Zeller was a paranoid's paranoid and Pierce had to play it his way.

He settled in to wait for the callback but his page was promptly returned. Unusual for Zeller.

‘Jesus, man, when are you going to get a cell phone? I've been trying to reach you for three days.'

‘I don't like cell phones. What's up?'

‘You can get them with a scramble chip, you know.'

‘I know. What's up?'

‘What's up is that on Saturday you sure wanted this stuff in a goddamn hurry. Then you don't call me back for three days. I was starting to think you — '

‘Code, I've been in the hospital. I just got out.'

‘The hospital?'

‘I had a little trouble with some guys.'

‘Not guys from Entrepreneurial Concepts?'

‘I don't know. Did you find out about them?'

‘Full scan as requested. These are bad dudes you're dancing with, Hank.'

‘I'm getting that idea. You want to tell me about them now?'

‘Actually, I'm in the middle of something right now and don't like doing this by phone anyway. But I did drop it all in a FedEx yesterday — when I didn't hear from you. Should've gotten there by this morning. You didn't get it?'

Pierce checked his watch. It was two o'clock. The FedEx run came at about ten every morning. He didn't like the idea of the envelope from Zeller sitting on his desk all this time.

‘I haven't been to the office. But I'll go get it now. You have anything else for me?'

‘Can't think of anything that's not in the package.'

‘Okay, man. I'll call you after I look at everything. Meantime, let me ask you something. I need to track somebody to a location, an address, and all I have is her name and her cell number. But the bill for the cell doesn't go to where she lives and that's what I want.'

‘Then it's worthless.'

‘Anything else I can do?'

‘That's a tough one but it can be done. Is she registered to vote?'

‘I kind of doubt it.'

‘Well, there are utility hookups and credit cards. How common's her name?'

‘Lucy LaPorte of Louisiana.'

Pierce reminded himself that she had told him to stop calling her. She hadn't said anything about not finding her.

‘Got that alliteration thing going, huh?' Zeller said. ‘Well, I can try some things, see what pops.'

‘Thanks, Code.'

‘And I suppose you want it yesterday.'

‘That's right.'

‘Of course.'

‘I gotta go.'

Pierce went into the kitchen and looked through the bags he had dumped on the counter for the bread and peanut butter. He quickly made a sandwich and left the apartment, being sure to put on the Moles hat and pull the brim down low on his forehead. He ate the sandwich while waiting for the elevator. The bread tasted stale. It had been in the car trunk since Sunday.

On the ride down to the garage the elevator stopped on six and a woman got on. As was the custom with elevator riders, she avoided looking at Pierce. After they started descending she surreptitiously checked out his reflection in the polished chrome trim on the door. Pierce saw her do a frightened double take.

‘Oh my God!' she cried out. ‘You're the one everybody's talking about.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘You're the one who got hung off the balcony, right?' Pierce looked at her for a long moment. And in that moment he knew that no matter what happened with Nicole, he wouldn't be able to stay in the apartment building. He was moving.

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘Are you all right? What did they do to you?'

‘They didn't do anything. I don't know what you are talking about.'

‘You're not the guy who just moved in up on twelve?'

‘No. I'm on eight. I'm staying with a friend on eight while I heal.'

‘Then what happened?'

‘Deviated septum.'

She looked at him suspiciously. The door finally opened on the garage level. Pierce didn't wait for her to get out first. He moved quickly out of the elevator and around the corner toward the door to the building's garage. He glanced back to see the woman staring at him as she came out of the elevator.

Just as he looked forward again he almost walked into the door to the storage area, which had come open as a man and woman were walking their bikes out. Pierce lowered his chin, pulled the brim of his hat down further and held the door and waited until they were out of the way. They both said thank you but didn't mention anything about his being the guy who was hung off the balcony.

The first thing Pierce did when he got inside his car was put on the pair of sunglasses he carried in the glove box.

The FedEx envelope was on his desk when Pierce walked into his office. It had been a battle to get there. Almost every step of the way he'd had to fend off looks and inquiries about his face. By the time he got to the office section of the third floor, he was giving one-word answers to all questions — ‘Accident.'

‘Lights,' he said as he swung around behind his desk.

But the lights didn't come on and Pierce realized that his voice was different because of the swelling of his nasal passages. He got up and turned on the lights manually and then went back to the desk. He took off his sunglasses and put them on top of his computer monitor.

He picked up the envelope and checked the return address. Cody Zeller pulled a painful smile out of him. In the return address Zeller had put the name Eugene Briggs, the Stanford department head the Doomsters had targeted many years before. The prank that had changed their lives.

The smile dropped off his face when Pierce turned over the envelope to open it. The pull tab had already been torn — the envelope was open. He looked inside it and saw a white business envelope. He took this out and found that it had been opened as well. The outside of the envelope said
Henry Pierce, personal and confidential.
There was a folded sheaf of documents inside. He couldn't tell if they had been pulled out or not.

He got up and went out his door to the corral where the assistants had their pods. He went to Monica's desk. He held up the FedEx envelope and the torn envelope that had been inside it.

‘Monica, who opened this?'

She looked up at him.

‘I did. Why?'

‘How come you opened it?'

‘I open all your mail. You don't like to deal with it. Remember? I open it so I can tell you what is important and what isn't. If you don't want me to do it that way anymore, just tell me. I won't mind, just less work.'

Pierce calmed. She was right.

‘No, that's all right. Did you read this stuff?'

‘Not really. I saw the picture of the girl who had your phone number and decided I did
not
want to look at that stuff. Remember what we agreed to on Saturday?'

Pierce nodded.

‘Yes, that's good. Thanks.'

He turned to go back to his office.

‘Do you want me to tell Charlie you are here?'

‘No, I'm only staying a few minutes.'

When he got to the door he looked back at Monica and saw her staring at him with that look of hers. Like she was judging him guilty of something, some crime he knew nothing about.

He closed the door and went behind the desk. He opened the envelope and pulled out the sheaf of printouts from Zeller.

The photo Monica mentioned was not the same photo of Lilly Quinlan from her web page. It was a mug shot taken in Las Vegas three years before, when she had been arrested in a prostitution sting. In the photo she did not look nearly as breathtaking as she did in the website photo. She looked tired and angry and a bit scared all at once.

Zeller's report on Lilly Quinlan was short. He had traced her from Tampa to Dallas to Vegas and then L.A. She was actually twenty-eight years old, not the twenty-three she promised in her web page ad copy. She had a record of two arrests for solicitation in Dallas and the one arrest in Vegas. After each arrest she had spent a few days in jail and was then released for time served. She had come to L.A. three years earlier, according to utilities records. She had avoided arrest and notice of the police until now.

That was it. Pierce looked at the photo again and felt depressed. The mug shot was the reality. The photo he had downloaded from the website and looked at so often over the weekend was the fantasy. Her trail from Tampa to Dallas to Las Vegas to Los Angeles had ended on that bed in the Venice townhouse. There was a killer out there somewhere. And meantime, the cops were focusing on him.

He put the sheaf of printouts down on the desk and picked up the phone. After digging her card out of his wallet, he called Janis Langwiser to check in. He was on hold a good five minutes before she picked up.