Chasing the Dime

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 before 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.

The other two doors led to bedrooms. One appeared to be the master bedroom. Both closets in this room were open and jammed with clothing on wood hangers. The music was coming from an alarm clock radio located on a night table on the right side. He checked both tables for a phone and possibly an answering machine, but there was none.

The other bedroom appeared to be used as a workout location. There was no bed. There was a stair machine and a rowing machine on a grass mat, a small television in front of them. Pierce opened the only closet and found more clothing on hangers. He was about to close it when he realized something. These clothes were different. Almost two feet of hanger space was devoted to small things -negligees and leotards. He saw something familiar and reached in for the hanger. It was the black fishnet negligee she had posed in for the website photo.

This reminded him of something. He put the hanger back in its place and went back into the other bedroom. It was the wrong bed. Not the brass railings of the photo. In that moment he realized what was wrong, what had bothered him about the Venice address.

Her ad copy. Lilly had said she met clients at a clean and safe townhouse on the Westside. This was no townhouse and that was the wrong bed. It meant there was still another address connected to Lilly Quinlan that he still had to find.

Pierce froze when he heard a noise from the front of the house. He realized as an amateur break-in artist he had made a mistake. He should have quickly scanned the whole house to make sure it was empty instead of starting at the back and moving slowly toward the front.

He waited but there was no other sound. It had been a singular banging sound followed by what sounded like something being rolled across the wood floor. He slowly moved toward the door of the bedroom and then looked down the hall. Just the pile of mail on the floor at the front door.

He stepped to the side of the hallway, where he felt the wood was probably less likely to creak, and made his way slowly to the front of the house. The hallway opened to a living room on the left and a dining room on the right. There was no one in either room. He saw nothing that would explain the sound he had heard.

The living room was kept neat. It was filled with Craftsman-style furniture that was in keeping with the house. What wasn't was the double rack of high-end electronics below the plasma television hanging on the wall. Lilly Quinlan had a home entertainment station that had probably run her twenty-five grand -a tweakhead's wet dream. It seemed out of character with everything else he had seen so far.

Pierce stepped over to the door and squatted by the pile of mail. He started looking through it. Most of it was junk mail addressed to "current resident." There were two envelopes from All American Mail -the late notices. There were credit card bills and bank statements. There was a large envelope from the University of Southern California.

He looked specifically for letters -bills -from the phone company and found none. He thought this was odd but quickly assumed her phone bills might have been sent to the box at All American Mail. He put one of the bank statements and a Visa bill into the back pocket of his jeans without a second thought -the first being that he was compounding the crime of breaking and entering with a federal mail theft rap. He decided not to pursue thoughts on this and got up.

In the dining room he found a rolltop desk against the rear wall. He turned a chair from the table to the desk, opened it and sat down. He quickly went through the drawers and determined that this was her bill paying station. There were checkbooks, stamps and pens in the center drawer. The drawers going down either side of the desk were filled with envelopes from credit card companies and utilities and other bills. He found a stack of envelopes from Entrepreneurial Concepts Unlimited, though these had been addressed to the mail drop. On each envelope Lilly had written the date the bill was paid. Again noticeably missing was a stack of old phone bills. Even if she did not receive the bills by mail at this address, it did appear she paid her bills at this desk. But there were no receipts, no envelopes with the date of payment written on them.

Pierce didn't have time to dwell on it or to go through all the bills. He wasn't sure what he would find in them that might help him determine what had happened to Lilly Quinlan anyway. He went back to the center drawer and quickly went through the registers of the checkbooks. There had been no activity in either account since the end of July. Going back quickly through one of the books, he found record of payment to the telephone company ending in June. So she did pay the phone bill with the account he held in his hand and very likely at the desk where he sat. But he could find no other record of the billing in the drawers. He couldn't even find a phone.

Feeling hurried by the situation, he gave up on the contradiction and closed the drawer.

He reached to the handle to pull the rolltop down when he saw a small book pushed far into one of the storage slots at the top of the desk. He reached in for it and found it to be a small personal phone book. He used his thumb to buzz through the pages and saw that it was filled with hand-written entries. Without another thought, he shoved the book into his back pocket along with the mail he had decided to take.

He rolled the top down, stood up and took a last survey of the two front rooms, looking for a phone and not finding one. Almost immediately he saw a shadow move behind the closed blinds of the living room window. Someone was going to the front door.

A blade of sheer panic sliced through Pierce. He didn't know whether to hide or run down the hallway and out the back door. Instead, he couldn't do anything. He stood there, unable to move his feet as he heard a footstep on the tiled stoop outside the front door.

A metallic clack made him jump. Then a small stack of mail was pushed through the slot in the door and fell to the floor on top of the other mail. Pierce closed his eyes.

"Jesus!" he whispered as he let out his breath and tried to relax.

The shadow crossed the living room blinds again, going the other way. And then it was gone.

Pierce stepped over and looked at the latest influx of mail. A few more bills but mostly junk mail. He used his foot to push the envelopes around to make sure and then he saw a small envelope addressed by hand. He bent down to pick it up. In the upper left corner of the envelope it said V. Quinlan but there was no return address to go with it. The postmark was partially smeared and he could only make out the letters pa, Fla. He turned the envelope over and checked the seal. He would have to tear the envelope to open it.

Something about opening this obviously personal piece of mail seemed more intrusive and criminal to him than anything else he had done so far. But his hesitation didn't last long. He used a fingernail to pry open the envelope and pulled out a small piece of folded paper. It was a letter dated four days earlier.

Lilly, I am worried sick about you. If you get this, please just call me to let me know you are okay. Please, honey? Since you have stopped calling me I haven't been able to think right. I am very worried about you and that job of yours. Things around here were never really the best and I know I didn't do everything right. But I don't think that you shouldn't tell me if you are all right. Please call me if and when you get this.

Love, Mom He read it twice and then refolded the page and returned it to the envelope. More than anything else in the apartment, including the rotten fruit, the letter stabbed Pierce with a sense of doom. He didn't think the letter from V. Quinlan would ever be answered by a phone call or otherwise.

He closed the envelope as best as he could and quickly buried it in the pile of mail on the floor. The intrusion of the mail carrier had served to instill in him a sense of the risk he was running by being in the house. He'd had enough. He quickly turned and headed back down the hallway to the kitchen.

He went through the back door and closed it but left it unlocked. As nonchalantly as an amateur criminal can be, he walked around the corner of the house and down the driveway toward the street.

Halfway down the side of the house he heard a loud bang from up on the roof and then a large pinecone rolled off the eave and landed in front of him. As Pierce stepped over it he realized what had made the startling noise while he had been in the house. He nodded as he put it together. At least he had solved one mystery.