Chasing the Dime

31

Charlie Condon poked his head into the office. He was beaming. His smile was as wide and hard as the concrete bed of the L.A. River.

"You did it, man. You fucking did it!"

Pierce swallowed and tried to separate himself from the feelings the phone call had left.

"We all did it," he said. "Where is Goddard?"

Condon stepped all the way in and closed the door. Pierce noticed he had loosened his tie after all the champagne.

"He's in my office, talking to his lawyer on the phone."

"I thought Just Bitchy was his lawyer."

"She's a lawyer but not a lawyer lawyer, if you know what I mean."

Pierce was finding it difficult to listen to Condon because thoughts about the call from Langwiser kept intruding.

"You want to hear his opening offer?"

Pierce looked up at Condon and nodded.

"He wants to buy in for twenty over four years. He wants twelve points and he wants to be chairman of the board."

Pierce forced the image of Renner out of his mind and concentrated on Condon's smiling face. The offer from Goddard was good. Not quite there, but good.

"That's not bad, Charlie."

"Not bad? It's great!"

Condon sounded like Tony the Tiger, accenting the last word too loudly. He'd drunk too much champagne.

"Well, it's only an opener. It's got to get better."

"I know. It will. I wanted to check with you on a couple things. First, the chair. Do you care about that?"

"Not if you don't."

Condon was currently the chairman of the company's board of directors. But it wasn't a board with any real power, because Pierce still controlled the company. Condon held 10 percent, they had chipped out another 8 percent to prior investors -no one in the Maurice Goddard class -and employee compensation accounted for another 10. The rest -72 percent of the company -still belonged to Pierce. So giving Goddard the chair of a largely ceremonial advisory board didn't seem to be giving away much of anything.

"I say give it to him, make him happy," Condon said. "Now, what about the points? If I can get him to go to twenty million over three years, will you give him the points?"

Pierce shook his head.

"No. The difference between ten and twelve points could end up being a couple hundred million dollars. I'm keeping the points. And if you get the twenty over three years, great.

But he's got to give us a minimum of eighteen million over three, or send him back to New York."

"It's a tall order."

"Look, we've been over this. Our burn rate right now as we speak is three million a year.

If we want to expand and keep ahead of the pack, we're going to need double that. Six million a year is the threshold. Go work it out."

"You're only giving me the chair to work with."

"No, I only gave you the invention of the decade to work with. Charlie, did you see that guy's eyes after we put the lights back on? He's not only hooked. He's gutted and already in the frying pan. You're only nailing down details now. So go close the deal and get the first check into escrow. No extra points and get the six a year. We need it to do the work.

If he wants to ride with us, that's the price of the ticket."

"Okay, I'll get it. But you ought to come do it yourself. You're a better closer than me."

"Not likely."

Condon left the room then and Pierce was alone with his thoughts again. Once more he reviewed everything Langwiser had told him. Renner was going to search his homes and car. Search the car again. Officially and legally this time. Probably to search for small evidence, evidence likely left behind during the transport of a body.

"Jesus," he said out loud.

He decided to analyze his situation in the same way he would analyze an experiment in the lab. From the bottom up. Look at it one way and then turn it and look at it another way. Grind it to powder and then look at it under the glass.

Believe nothing about it at the start.

He got out his notebook and wrote down the key elements of his conversation with Langwiser on a fresh page.

Search: apartment Amalfi Car -second time -material evidence Office/Lab?

Search warrant return: fingerprints Everywhere -perfume He stared at the page but no answers and no new questions came to him. Finally, he tore the page out, crumpled it and threw it toward the trash can in the corner of the room. He missed.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. He knew he had to call Nicole to prepare her for the inevitable. The police would come and search through everything: hers, his, it didn't matter. Nicole was a very private person. The invasion would be hugely damaging to her and the explanation for it catastrophic to his hopes of reconciliation.

"Oh man," he said as he got up.

He came around the desk and picked up the crumpled ball of paper. Rather than drop it into the trash can, he took it back with him to his seat. He opened the paper and tried to smooth it out on the desk.

"Believe nothing," he said.

The words on the wrinkled page defied him. They meant nothing. In a sweeping move of his arm he grabbed the page and balled it in his hand again. He cocked his elbow, ready to make the basket on the retry, when he realized something. He brought his hand down and unwrapped the page again. He looked at one line he had written.

Car -second time -material evidence Believe nothing. That meant not believing the police had searched the car the first time.

A spark of energy exploded inside. He thought he might have something. What if the police had not searched his car? Then who had?

The next jump became obvious. How did he know the car had been searched at all? The truth was he didn't. He only knew one thing: someone had been inside his car while it had been parked in the alley. The dome light had been switched. But had the car actually been searched?

He realized that he had jumped the gun in assuming that the police -in the form of Renner -had searched his car. He actually had no proof or even any indication of this.

He only knew one thing: someone had been in the car. This conclusion could support a variety of secondary assumptions. Police search was only one of them. A search by a second party was another. The idea that someone had entered the car to take something was also another.

And the idea that someone had entered the car to put something in it was yet another.

Pierce got up and quickly left his office. In the hallway he punched the elevator button but immediately decided not to wait. He charged into the stairwell and quickly took the steps to the first floor. He went through the lobby without acknowledging the security man and into the adjoining parking garage.

He started with the trunk of the BMW. He pulled up the lining, looked under the spare, opened the disc changer and the tool pouch. He noticed nothing added, nothing taken. He moved to the passenger compartment, spending nearly ten minutes conducting the same kind of search and inventory. Nothing added, nothing taken.

The engine compartment was last and quickest. Nothing added, nothing taken.

That left his backpack. He relocked the car and returned to the Amedeo building, choosing the stairs again over a wait for an elevator. As he passed by Monica's desk on his way back to his office he noticed her looking at him strangely.

"What?"

"Nothing. You're just acting… weird."

"It's not an act."

He closed and locked his office door. The backpack was on his desk. Still standing, he grabbed it and started unzipping and looking through its many compartments. It had a cushioned storage section for a laptop computer, a divided section for paperwork and files, and three different zippered compartments for carrying smaller items such as pens and notebooks and cell phone or PDA.

Pierce found nothing out of order until he reached the front section, which contained a compartment within a compartment. It was a small zippered pouch big enough to hold a passport and possibly a fold of currency. It wasn't a secret compartment but it could easily be hidden behind a book or a folded newspaper while traveling. He opened the zipper and reached in.

His fingers touched what felt like a credit card. He thought maybe it was an old one, a card he had put in the pocket while traveling and then forgotten about. But when he pulled it out he was looking at a black plastic scramble card. There was a magnetic strip on one side. On the other side it had a company logo that said U-STORE-IT. Pierce was sure he had never seen it before. It was not his.

He put the card down on his desk and stared at it for a long moment. He knew that UStore-It was a nationwide company that rented trucks and storage spaces in warehouses normally siding freeways. He could think of two U-Store-It locations visible from the 405

Freeway in L.A. alone.

A foreboding sense of dread fell over him. Whoever had been in his car on Saturday night had planted the scramble card in his backpack. Pierce knew he was in the middle of something he was not controlling. He was being used, set up for something he knew nothing about.

He tried to shake it off. He knew fear bred inertia and he could not afford to be standing still. He had to move. He had to do something.

He reached down to the cabinet beneath the computer monitor and pulled up the heavy Yellow Pages. He opened it and quickly found the pages offering listings and advertisements for self-storage facilities. U-Store-It had a half-page ad that listed eight different facilities in the Los Angeles area. Pierce started with the location closest to Santa Monica. He picked up the phone and called the U-Store-It location in Culver City.

The call was answered by a young man's voice. Pierce envisioned Curt, the acne-scarred kid from All American Mail.

"This is going to sound strange," Pierce said. "But I think I rented a storage unit there but I can't remember. I know it was U-Store-It but now I can't remember which place it was I rented it at."

"Name?"

The kid acted like it was a routine call and request.

"Henry Pierce."

He heard the information tapped onto a keyboard.

"Nope, not here."

"Does that connect with your other locations? Can you tell where -"

"No, just here. We're not connected. It's a franchise."

Pierce did not see why that would disqualify a centrally connected computer network but didn't bother asking. He thanked the voice, hung up and called the next geographically closest franchise listed in the Yellow Pages.

He got a computer hit on his third call. The U-Store-It franchise in Van Nuys. The woman who answered his call told him he had rented a twelve-by-ten storage room at the Victory Boulevard facility six weeks earlier. She told him the room was climatecontrolled, had electric power and was alarm-protected. He had twenty-four-hour-a-day access to it.

"What address do you have for me on your records?"

"I can't give that out, sir. If you want to give me your address, I can check it against the computer."

Six weeks earlier Pierce had not even begun the apartment search that would eventually put him into the Sands. So he gave the Amalfi Drive address.

"That's it."

Pierce said nothing. He stared at the black plastic card on the desk.

"What is the unit number?" he finally asked.

"I can only give you that if I see a photo ID, sir. Come in before six and show me your driver's license and I can remind you what space you have."

"I don't understand. I thought you said I had twenty-four-hour service."

"You do. But the office is only open nine till six."

"Oh, okay."

He tried to think of what else he should ask but he drew a blank. He thanked the woman and hung up.

He sat still, then slowly he picked up the scramble card and slid it into his shirt pocket.

He put his hand on the phone again but didn't lift it.

Pierce knew he could call Langwiser but he didn't need her cool and calm professional manner, and he didn't want to hear her tell him to leave it alone. He knew he could call Nicole but that would only lead to raised voices and an argument. He knew he would get that anyway when he told her about the impending police search.

And he knew he could call Cody Zeller but didn't think he could take the sarcasm.

For a fleeting moment the thought of calling Lucy LaPorte entered his mind. He quickly dismissed the idea but not the thought of what it said about him. Here he was, in the most desperate situation of his life, and who could he call for help and advice?

The answer was no one. And the answer made him feel cold from the inside out.