Chasing the Dime (2002) Read online

  "I'll think about it."

  He waved and returned to the door. Behind him he heard the woman telling Curt that he shouldn't make paying customers wait.

  In the car Pierce put the business card in his shirt pocket and checked his watch. It was almost noon. He had to get back to his apartment to meet Monica Purl, his assistant.

  She'd agreed to wait at his apartment for the shipment of furniture he had ordered. The delivery window was noon until four and Pierce had decided Friday morning that he'd rather pay someone else to wait while he used the time in the lab preparing the next week's presentation for Goddard. Now he doubted he was going to go to the lab, but he would still use Monica to wait for the delivery. He also now had another plan for her as well.

  When he got to the Sands he found her waiting in the lobby. The security officer on the door would not let her go up to the twelfth floor without approval of the resident she was going to visit.

  "Sorry about that," Pierce said. "Were you waiting long?"

  She was carrying a stack of magazines for reading while she waited for the delivery.

  "Just a few minutes," Monica said.

  They went into the elevator alcove and had to wait. Monica Purl was a tall, thin blonde with the kind of skin that was so pale that just touching it might leave a mark. She was about twenty-five and had been with the company since she was twenty. She had been Pierce's personal assistant for only six months, getting the promotion from Charlie Condon for her five years of service. In that time Pierce had learned that the aura of fragility her build and coloring projected was false. Monica was organized and opinionated and got things done.

  The elevator opened and they got on. Pierce hit the twelve button and they started to ascend, the elevator moving quickly.

  "You sure you want to be in this place when the big one hits?" Monica asked.

  "This building was engineered to take an eight point oh," he replied. "I checked before I rented. I trust the science."

  "Because you're a scientist?"

  "I guess."

  "But do you trust the builders who carry out the science?"

  It was a good point. He didn't have anything to say to that. The door slid open on twelve and they walked down the hall to his apartment.

  "Where am I going to tell them to put everything?" Monica asked. "Do you have like a design plan or a layout in mind?"

  "Not really. Just tell them to put stuff where you think it will look good. I also need you to do a favor for me before I leave."

  He opened the door.

  "What kind of favor?" Monica said suspiciously.

  Pierce realized that she thought he might be making a move on her. Now that he and Nicole were no more. He had a theory that all attractive women thought that all men were out to make a move on them. He almost laughed but didn't.

  "Just a phone call. I'll write it down."

  In the living room he picked up the phone. There was a broken dial tone and when he checked messages there was only one and it was for Lilly. But it was not from Curt at All American Mail. It was just another potential client checking on her availability. He erased the message and tried to figure it out, finally deciding that Lilly had put down her cell phone number on the mailbox application forms. Curt had called her cell phone.

  It wouldn't change his plan.

  He brought the phone to the couch and sat down and wrote the name Lilly Quinlan on a fresh page of his notebook. He then pulled the business card out of his pocket.

  "I want you to call this number and say you are Lilly Quinlan. Ask for Curt and tell him you got his message. Tell him his call was the first you'd heard about your payment being overdue and ask him why they didn't send you a notice in the mail. Okay?"

  "Why —what is this for?"

  "I can't explain it all to you but it's important."

  "I don't know if I want to impersonate somebody. It's not —"

  "What you are doing is totally harmless. It's what hackers call social engineering. What Curt is going to tell you is that he did send you a notice. Then you say, 'Oh, really? What address did you send it to?' When he gives you the address write it down. That's what I need. The address. As soon as you get it you can get off the call. Just tell him you'll come by as soon as you can to pay, and hang up. I just need that address."

  She looked at him in a way she had never looked at him before during the six months she had worked directly for him.

  "Come on, Monica, it's no big deal. It's not harming anyone. And it might actually be helping someone. In fact, I think it will."

  He put the notebook and pen on her lap.

  "Are you ready? I'll dial the number."

  "Dr. Pierce, this doesn't seem —"

  "Don't call me Dr. Pierce. You never call me Dr. Pierce."

  "Then Henry. I don't want to do this. Not without knowing what I am doing."

  "All right then, I'll tell you. You know the new phone number you got me?"

  She nodded.

  "Well, it belonged previously to a woman who has disappeared, or something has happened to her. I'm getting her calls and I'm trying to figure out what happened to her.

  You see? And this call I want you to make might get me an address where she lives.

  That's all I want. I want to go there and see if she's okay. Nothing else. Now, will you make the call?"

  She shook her head as if warding off too much information. Her face looked as if Pierce had just told her he'd been taken aboard a spaceship and sodomized by an alien.

  "This is crazy. How did you ever get caught up in this? Did you know this woman? How do you know she disappeared?"

  "No, I don't know her. It was purely random. Because I got the wrong number. But now I know enough to know I have to find out what happened or make sure she's okay. Will you please do this for me, Monica?"

  "Why don't you just change your number?"

  "I will. First thing Monday I want you to change it."

  "And meantime, just call the police."

  "I don't have enough information yet to call the police. What would I tell them? They'll think I'm a nut."

  "And they might be right."

  "Look, will you do this or not?"

  She nodded in resignation.

  "If it will make you happy and it will keep my job."

  "Whoa. Wait a minute. I'm not threatening you about your job. If you don't want to do it, fine, I'll get somebody else. It's got nothing to do with your job. Are we clear on that?"

  "Yes, clear. But don't worry, I'll do it. Let's just get it over with."

  He went over the call with her once more and then dialed the number of All American Mail and handed the phone to Monica. She asked for Curt and then pulled off the call as planned, with only a few moments of bad acting and confusion. Pierce watched as she wrote down an address on the notepad. He was ecstatic but didn't show it. When she hung up she handed him the pad and the phone.

  Pierce checked the address —it was in Venice —then tore the page off the pad, folded it and put it in his pocket.

  "Curt seemed like a nice guy," Monica said. "I feel bad about lying to him."

  "You could always go visit him and ask him out for a date. I've seen him. Believe me, one date with you would make him happy the rest of his life."

  "You've seen him? Were you the one he was talking about? He said a guy was in there and wanted my mailbox. I mean, Lilly Quinlan's mailbox."

  "Yeah, that was me. That's how I —"

  The phone rang and he answered it. But the caller hung up. Pierce looked at the caller ID directory. The call had come from the Ritz-Carlton in the Marina.

  "Look," he said, "you need to leave the phone plugged in so when the furniture comes, security can call up here for approval to let them up. But meantime, you're probably going to get a lot of calls for Lilly. Since you're a woman, they're going to think you're her. So you might want to say something right off like 'This isn't Lilly, you've got the wrong number.' Something like that. Otherwise �
�"

  "Well, maybe I should pretend I'm her so I can get more information for you."

  "No, you don't want to do that."

  He opened his backpack and pulled out the printout of the photo from Lilly's web page.

  "That's Lilly. I don't think you want to pretend you're her with these callers."

  "Oh my God!" Monica exclaimed as she looked at the photo. "Is she like a prostitute or something?"

  "I think so."

  "Then what are you doing trying to find this prostitute when you should be —"

  She stopped abruptly. Pierce looked at her and waited for her to finish. She didn't.

  "What?" he said. "I should be what?"

  "Nothing. It's not my business."

  "Did you talk with Nicki about her and me?"

  "No. Look, it's nothing. I don't know what I was going to say. I just think it's strange that you're running around trying to find out if this prostitute is all right. It's weird."

  Pierce sat back down on the couch. He knew she was lying about Nicole. They had gotten close and used to go to lunch together all the times Pierce couldn't get out of the lab — which was almost every day. Why would it end now that Nicki was gone? They were probably still talking every day, exchanging stories about him.

  He also knew that she was right about what he was doing. But he was too far down the road and around the bend. His life and career had been built on following his curiosity. In his last year at Stanford he sat in on a lecture about the next generation of microchips.

  The professor spoke of nanochips so small that the supercomputers of the day could and would be built to the size of a dime. Pierce became hooked and had been pursuing his curiosity —chasing the dime —ever since.

  "I'm just going to go over to Venice," he told Monica. "I'm just going to check things out and leave it at that."

  "You promise?"

  "Yes. You can call me at the lab after the furniture gets here and you're leaving."

  He stood up and slung his backpack over his shoulder.

  "If you talk to Nicki, don't mention anything about this, okay?"

  "Sure, Henry. I won't."

  He knew he couldn't count on that but it would have to do for the moment. He headed to the apartment door and left. As he went down the hall to the elevator he thought about what Monica had said and considered the difference between private investigation and private obsession. Somewhere there was a line between them. But he wasn't sure where it was.

  8

  There was something wrong about the address, something that didn't fit. But Pierce couldn't place it. He worried over it as he drove into Venice but it didn't open up to him.

  It was like something hidden behind a shower curtain. It was blurred but it was there.

  The address Lilly Quinlan had given as a contact address to All American Mail was a bungalow on Altair Place

  , a block off the stretch of stylish antiques stores and restaurants on Abbot Kinney Boulevard

  . It was a small white house with gray trim that somehow made Pierce think of a seagull. There was a fat royal palm squatting in the front yard.

  Pierce parked across the street and for several minutes sat in his car, studying the house for signs of recent life.

  The yard and ornamentation were neatly trimmed. But if it was a rental, that could have been taken care of by a landlord. There was no car in the driveway or in the open garage in back and no newspapers piling up near the curb. Nothing seemed outwardly amiss.

  Pierce finally decided on the direct approach. He got out of the BMW, crossed the street and followed the walkway to the front door. There was a button for a doorbell. He pushed it and heard an innocuous chime sound from somewhere inside. He waited.

  Nothing.

  He pushed the bell again, then knocked on the door.

  He waited.

  And nothing.

  He looked around. The Venetian blinds behind the front windows were closed. He turned and nonchalantly surveyed the homes across the street while he reached a hand behind his back and tried the doorknob. It was locked.

  Not wanting the day's journey to end without his getting some piece of new information or revelation, he stepped away from the door and walked over to the driveway, which went down the left side of the house to a single stand-alone garage in the rear yard. A huge Monterey pine that dwarfed the house was buckling the driveway with its roots.

  They were headed for the house and Pierce guessed that in another five years there would be structural damage and the question would be whether to save the tree or the house.

  The garage door was open. It was made of wood that had been bowed by time and its own weight. It looked like it was permanently fixed in the open position. The garage was empty except for a collection of paint cans lined against the rear wall.

  To the right of the garage was a postage-stamp-sized yard that offered privacy because of a tall hedge that ran along the borders. Two lounge chairs sat in the grass. There was a birdbath with no water in it. Pierce looked at the lounge chairs and thought about the tan lines he had seen on Lilly's body in the web page photo.

  After hesitating for a moment in the yard, Pierce went to the rear door and knocked again.

  The door had a window cut into its upper half. Without waiting to see if someone answered, he cupped his hands against the glass and looked in. It was the kitchen. It appeared neat and clean. There was nothing on the small table pushed against the wall to the left. A newspaper was neatly folded on one of the two chairs.

  On the counter next to the toaster was a large bowl filled with dark shapes that Pierce realized were rotten pieces of fruit.

  Now he had something. Something that didn't fit, something that showed something wasn't right. He knocked sharply on the door's window, even though he knew no one was inside who could answer. He turned and looked around the yard for something to maybe break the window with. He instinctively grabbed the knob and turned it while he was pivoting.

  The door was unlocked.

  Pierce wheeled back around. The knob still in his hand, he pushed and the door opened six inches. He waited for an alarm to sound but his intrusion was greeted with only silence. And almost immediately he could smell the sickly sweet stench of the rotten fruit. Or maybe, he thought, it was something else. He took his hand off the knob and pushed the door open wider, leaned in and yelled.

  "Lilly? Lilly, it's me, Henry."

  He didn't know if he was doing it for the neighbors' sake or his own but he yelled her name two more times, expecting and getting no results. Before entering, he turned around and sat down on the stoop. He considered the decision, whether to go in or not. He thought about Monica's reaction earlier to what he was doing and what she had said: Just call the cops.

  Now was the moment to do that. Something was wrong here and he certainly had something to call about. But the truth was he wasn't ready to give this away. Not yet.

  Whatever it was, it was his still and he wanted to pursue it. His motivations, he knew, were not only in regard to Lilly Quinlan. They reached further and were entwined with the past. He knew he was trying to trade the present for the past, to do now what he hadn't been able to do back then.

  He got up off the back step and opened the door fully. He stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him.

  There was the low sound of music coming from somewhere in the house. Pierce stood still and scanned the kitchen again and found nothing wrong except for the fruit in the bowl. He opened the refrigerator and saw a carton of orange juice and a plastic bottle of low fat milk. The milk had an August 18 use-by date. The juice's was August 16. It had been well over a month since the contents of each had expired.

  Pierce went to the table and slid back the chair. On it was the Los Angeles Times edition from August 1.

  There was a hallway running off the left side of the kitchen to the front of the house. As Pierce moved into the hall he saw the pile of mail building below the slot in the front door. But b
efore he got to the front of the house he explored the three doorways that broke up the hallway. One was to a bathroom, where he found every horizontal surface crowded with perfumes and female beauty aids, all of it waiting under a fine layer of dust. He chose a small green bottle and opened it. He raised it to his nose and smelled the scent of lilac perfume. It was the same stuff Nicole used; he had recognized the bottle.

  After a moment he closed and returned the bottle to its place and then stepped back into the hallway.