Chasing the Dime

14

Pierce looked up when Detective Renner walked in. He tried to keep his anger in check, knowing that the cooler he played this, the faster he would get out and get home. Still, over two hours in an eight-by-eight room with nothing but a five-day-old sports page to read had left him with little patience. He had already given a statement twice. Once to the patrol cops who responded to Wainwright's call, and then to Renner and his partner when they had arrived on the scene. One of the patrol cops had then taken him to the Pacific Division station and locked him in the interview room.

Renner had a file in his hand. He sat down at the table across from Pierce and opened it.

Pierce could see some sort of police form with handwriting in all the boxes. Renner stared at the form for an inordinate amount of time and then cleared his throat. He looked like a cop who'd been around more crime scenes than most. Early fifties and still solid, he reminded Pierce of Clyde Vernon in his taciturn way.

"You're thirty-four years old?"

"Yes."

"Your address is Twenty-eight hundred Ocean Way, apartment twelve oh one."

"Yes."

This time exasperation crept into his voice. Renner's eyes came up momentarily to his and then went back to the form.

"But that is not the address on your driver's license."

"No, I just moved. Ocean is where I live now. Amalfi Drive is where I used to live. Look, it's after midnight. Did you really keep me sitting in here all this time so you could ask me these obvious questions? I already gave you my statement. What else do you want?"

Renner leaned back and looked sternly at Pierce.

"No, Mr. Pierce, I kept you here because we needed to conduct a thorough investigation of what appears to be a crime scene. I am sure you don't begrudge us that."

"I don't begrudge that. I do begrudge being kept in here like a suspect. I tried that door. It was locked. I knocked and nobody came."

"I'm sorry about that. There was no one in the detective bureau. It's the middle of the night. But the patrol officer should not have locked the door, because you are not under arrest. If you want to make a personnel complaint against him or me, I'll go get you the necessary forms to fill out."

"I don't want to make a complaint, okay? No forms. Can we just get on with this so I can get out of here? Is it her blood?"

"What blood?"

"On the bed."

"How do you know it is blood?"

"I'm assuming. What else could it be?"

"You tell me."

"What? What is that supposed to mean?"

"It was a question."

"Wait a minute, you just said I was not a suspect."

"I said you are not under arrest."

"So you're saying I am not under arrest but I am a suspect in this?"

"I am not saying anything, Mr. Pierce. I am simply asking questions, trying to figure out what happened in that apartment and what is happening now."

Pierce pulled back his growing anger. He didn't say anything. Renner referred to his form and spoke without looking up.

"Now in the statement you gave earlier, you say that your new telephone number on Ocean Way belonged at one time to the woman whose apartment you went to this evening."

"Exactly. That's why I was there. To find out if something happened to her."

"Do you know this woman, Lilly Quinlan?"

"No, never met her before."

"Never?"

"Never in my life."

"Then why did you do this? Go to her apartment, go to the trouble. Why didn't you just change your number? Why did you care?"

"I'll tell you, for the last two hours I've been asking myself the same thing. I mean, you try to check on somebody and maybe do something good and what do you get? Locked in a room for two hours by the cops."

Renner didn't say anything. He let Pierce rant.

"What does it matter why I cared or whether or not I had a reason to do what I did?

Shouldn't you care about what happened to her? Why are you asking me the questions?

Why isn't Billy Wentz sitting in this room instead of me? I told you about him."

"We'll deal with Billy Wentz, Mr. Pierce. Don't worry. But right now I am talking to you."

Renner was then quiet a moment while he scratched his forehead with two fingers.

"Tell me again how you knew about that apartment in the first place."

Pierce's earlier statements had been replete with shadings of the truth designed to cover any illegalities he had committed. But the story he had told about finding the apartment had been a complete lie designed to keep Robin out of the investigation. He had made good on his promise not to reveal her as a source of information. Of everything that he had said over the last four hours, it was the only thing he felt good about.

"As soon as I plugged in my phone I started getting calls from men who wanted Lilly. A few of them were former clients who wanted to see her again. I tried to engage these men in conversation, to see what I could find out about her. One man today told me about the apartment and where it was. So I went over."

"I see, and what was this former client's name?"

"I don't know. He didn't give it."

"You have caller ID on your new phone?"

"Yes, but he was calling from a hotel. All it said was that it was coming from the RitzCarlton. There are a lot of rooms there. I guess he was in one of them."

Renner nodded.

"And Mr. Wainwright said you called him earlier today to ask about Miss Quinlan and another property she rented from him."

"Yes. A house on Altair. She lived there and worked in the apartment off Speedway. The apartment was where she met her clients. Once I told him she was missing, he went and cleared out her property."

"Had you ever been to that apartment before?"

"No. Never. I told you that."

"How about the house on Altair? Have you been there?"

Pierce chose his words like he was choosing his steps through a minefield.

"I went there and nobody answered the door. That's why I called Wainwright."

He hoped Renner wouldn't notice the change in his voice. The detective was asking far more questions than during the initial statement. Pierce knew he was on treacherous ground. The less he said, the better chance he had of getting through unscathed.

"I'm trying to get the chain of events correct," Renner said. "You told us you went to this place ECU in Hollywood first. You get the name Lilly Quinlan and address for a mail drop in Santa Monica. You go there and use this thing you call social engagement to -"

"Engineering. Social engineering."

"Whatever. You engineer the address to the house out of the guy at the mail drop, right?

You go to the house first, then you call Wainwright, and then you run into him at the apartment. Do I have all of this straight?"

"Yes."

"Now you have said in both your statements so far tonight that you knocked and found no one home and so you left. That true?"

"Yes, true."

"Between the time you knocked and found no one home and when you left the premises, did you go into the house on Altair, Mr. Pierce?"

There it was. The question. It required a yes or a no. It required a true answer or a lie which could easily be found out. He had to assume he had left fingerprints in the house.

He remembered specifically the knobs on the rolltop desk. The mail he had looked through.

He had given them the Altair address more than two hours ago. For all he knew, they had already been there and already had his fingerprints. The whole question might be a trap set to snare him.

"The door was unlocked," Pierce said. "I went in to make sure she wasn't in there.

Needing help or something."

Renner was leaning slightly forward across the table. His eyes came up to Pierce's and held. Pierce could see the line of white below his green irises.

"You were inside that house?"

"That's right."

"Why didn't you tell us that before?"

"I don't know. I didn't think it was necessary. I was trying to be brief. I didn't want to take up anyone's time, I guess."

"Well, thanks for thinking of us. Which door was unlocked?"

Pierce hesitated but knew he had to answer.

"The back."

He said it like a criminal in court pleading guilty. His head was down, his voice low.

"Excuse me?"

"The back door."

"Is it your custom to go in the back door of the home of a perfect stranger?"

"No, but that was the door that was unlocked. The front wasn't. I told you, I wanted to see if something was wrong."

"That's right. You wanted to be a rescuer. A hero."

"It's not that. I just -"

"What did you find in the house?"

"Not a lot. Spoiled food, a giant pile of mail. I could tell she hadn't been there in a long while."

"Did you take anything?"

"No."

He said it without hesitation, without blinking.

"What did you touch?"

Pierce shrugged.

"I don't know. Some of the mail. There's a desk. I opened some drawers."

"Were you expecting to find Miss Quinlan in a desk drawer?"

"No. I just…"

He didn't finish. He reminded himself that he was walking on a ledge. He had to keep his answers as short as possible.

Renner changed his posture, leaning back in his seat now, and changed questioning tacks as well.

"Tell me something," he said. "How did you know to call Wainwright?"

"Because he's the landlord."

"Yes, but how did you know that?"

Pierce froze. He knew he could not give an answer that referred in any way to the phone book or mail he had taken from the house. He thought of the phone book hidden behind the stacks of paper in the office's copy room. For the first time he felt a cold sweat forming along his scalp.

"Um, I think… no, yeah, it was written down somewhere on the desk in her house. Like a note."

"You mean like a note that was out in the open?"

"Yeah, I think so. I…"

Again he stopped himself before he gave Renner something else with which the detective could club him. Pierce lowered his eyes to the table. He was being walked into a trap and had to figure a way out. Making up the note was a mistake. But now he could not backtrack.

"Mr. Pierce, I just came from that house over on Altair and I looked all through that desk.

I didn't see any note."

Pierce nodded like he agreed, even though he had just said the opposite.

"You know what it was, it was my own note I was picturing. I wrote it after I talked to Vivian. She was the one who told me about Wainwright."

"Vivian? Who is Vivian?"

"Lilly's mother. In Tampa, Florida. When she asked me to look for Lilly she gave me some names and contacts. I just remembered, that's where I got Wainwright's name."

Renner's eyebrows peaked halfway up his forehead as he registered his surprise again.

"This is all new information, Mr. Pierce. You are now saying that Lilly Quinlan's mother asked you to look for her daughter?"

"Yes. She said the cops weren't doing anything. She asked me to do what I could."

Pierce felt good. The answer was true, or at least truer than most of the things he was saying. He thought he might be able to survive this.

"And her mother in Tampa had the name of her daughter's landlord?"

"Well, I think she got a bunch of names and contacts from a private detective she had previously hired to look for Lilly."

"A private detective."

Renner looked down at the statement in front of him as if it had personally let him down for not including mention of the private investigator.

"Do you have his name?"

"Philip Glass. I have his number written down in a notebook that is in my car. Take me back to the apartment -my car's there -and I can get it for you."

"Thank you, but I happen to know Mr. Glass and how to reach him. Have you talked to him?"

"No. I left a message and didn't hear back. But from what Vivian told me, he hadn't had much success in finding Lilly. I wasn't expecting much. I never knew if he was good or just ripping her off, you know?"

It was an opportunity for Renner to tell him what he knew about Glass but the detective didn't take it.

"What about Vivian?" he asked instead.

"I have her number in the car, too. I'll give you everything I've got as soon as I can get out of here."

"No, I mean what about Vivian in Florida? How did you know to contact her there?"

Pierce coughed. It was like he had been kicked in the gut. Renner had trapped him again.

The phone book again. He could not mention it. His respect for the taciturn detective was rising at the same time he felt his mind sagging under the weight of his own lies and obfuscation. He now saw only one way out.