Indigo Slam

CHAPTER 21

I drove down the backside of Laurel Canyon into Studio City the next morning, going maybe fifteen miles out of my way to avoid detection. If I couldn't slip the Russians and the feds by slick driving, maybe I could wear them out with LA's morning rush-hour traffic.

The condo Pike had found for a safe house sat in the rear of a quiet, two-level garden building just off Coldwater Canyon near the Studio City Park. It was a classic ranch-style building of the kind constructed in the late fifties, all dark-stained wood and used brick, with mature pine trees lining the sidewalk and a parking lot for residents in the rear. Just the kind of place where unsuspecting inhabitants would never dream that the new people in the corner apartment were being stalked by homicidal maniacs from Seattle.

I parked at the curb, gathered the catalogs I'd taken from Clark 's duffel bag, then wandered through the garden courtyard until I found the right door. I rang the bell at ten minutes after nine. Charles's muffled voice came from behind the door as if he'd been waiting there. 'Go away.'

I said, 'Charles.' What a way to start your morning.

The door opened and Pike was there, tall and expressionless. I gave the big grin. 'Well, Joseph, bet you had a fun evening.'

Charles eyed me from the safety of the kitchen. 'It was a joke.'

Pike's head swiveled toward him and Charles ducked out of the kitchen and into the living room. Fun evening, all right.

The entry led past the kitchen to a dining area and the living room beyond, stairs climbing one wall of the living room to open to the second floor. The condo was large and spacious and fully furnished, as if whoever owned the place was away on a short trip. Thriving green plants dotted the room, and the plants were healthy and firm and devoid of yellow. Maybe I should ask whoever owned them for lessons. I nodded at Pike. 'Nice. Better than the Airstream.'

Pike shrugged. Guess it didn't matter to him either way.

Teri and Winona were at the dining room table, and Charles had assumed a position in front of the television. Watching one of those morning exercise shows on ESPN. Kiana Tom doing ab work. Winona said, 'Did you find our daddy yet?' Everyone was dressed and clean and ready to start their day of waiting for the detective to find their father.

'Not yet, hon. But I'm hot on his trail.' Hope is everything.

Teri said, 'Would you like breakfast? Joe and I made cottage cheese pancakes.'

'No, thanks. I ate before I left home.'

She looked disappointed. 'There's fresh coffee.'

I let her pour a cup, sipped some, then nodded. 'Good.'

Teri smiled and seemed pleased.

Joe said, 'We can talk upstairs.'

I followed Pike up with the coffee into one of the three bedrooms. It had been made up as a home office with desk and telephone and fax machine, but there was nothing around to indicate the owner's identity. Maybe Pike owned the place. For all I knew, Pike owned most of Los Angeles. He said, 'What'd you find?'

'Twenty thousand bucks in counterfeit hundreds and these.' I showed him the catalogs. Several pages were dog-eared, and quite a few items had been marked on the dog-eared pages, including two different grades of offset plate blanks from a firm in Finland, a high-end Hitachi digital scanner from a discount mail-order house in New York, a four-thousand-dollar Power Mac from a mail order firm in Los Angeles with a commercial graphics software platform that cost almost as much as the computer, something called a dual-side regulator from a commercial printing firm in London, a high-volume paper shear from the same company, and sixty liters each of indigo #7 and canyon orange #9A oil-based ink, as well as lesser amounts of forest green #2, classic red #42, black, kiss blue #12, and yellow AB1, all of which came from three different ink manufacturers, two in Europe and one in Maryland. Pike said, 'He's printing, all right.'

'Yeah, but what?' Hundred-dollar bills are green and black. 'Why would he need indigo and orange?'

Pike took out his wallet and pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. Walking around money. 'Maybe you have to mix them to get the different shades of black. Maybe he uses them to reproduce the security fibers.'

'Maybe if we just took all this stuff to your pal Marsha Fields she could tell us.'

Pike put his hundred away. 'The new hundreds are too hard to copy. If he's making hundreds, he'll make the older series.'

'If?'

Pike flipped back through the catalogs. 'This is almost forty thousand dollars' worth of material. Wonder where he's getting the money to pay for it.'

I was wondering that, too. He almost certainly wasn't sending counterfeit cash through the mail, and he knew better than to try to buy money orders or certified checks at a bank or at American Express. I said, 'If he ordered this stuff, it had to be delivered. Maybe Clark 's wherever that is.'

Most of the companies had an 800 number for phone orders, so I took a flyer and called the Los Angeles computer wholesaler first. A young woman with a Hispanic accent answered, 'Good morning from Cyber-World! What would you like to order?' Bright and cheery and wanting to help.

'I placed an order a couple of days ago and the machine hasn't arrived.' Just another customer on just another day.

'Why, let me track down that bad boy!' Wanting to make my phone shopping experience a happy one. 'Your name, please.'

'Clark Haines.' I waited a couple of seconds, then said, 'Oh, you know, my secretary placed the order and she might've used our company name, Clark Hewitt. Heh-heh.' Lame, but what can you do?

The young woman said, 'Gee, we're not showing an order to either of those names. Could she have made the order in another name?'

I thanked her and hung up.

I called three more companies, and none of them had or was processing an order for Haines or Hewitt either. When I put down the phone, I said, 'Hell.'

Pike said, 'Maybe he hasn't ordered yet. Maybe he's going to.'

'Maybe.'

I thought about Clark phoning Wilson Brownell, and how they had spoken often, and how Clark was willing to risk the Russians to go see Brownell. I called the electronics wholesaler in New York and told him exactly what I had told the other four companies, only I told him that my name was Wilson Brownell. He came back on the line almost at once and said, 'Oh yes, Mr. Brownell, here it is.'

I gave Pike a thumbs-up.

The order clerk said, 'Mm, your scanner won't go out until tomorrow. Isn't that what you requested?'

'I wanted it today.'

'I'm sorry, sir. Whoever took the order must've made a mistake.'

'Well, as long as you're on the phone let's double-check the destination. I'd hate to think it was going to the wrong place.'

'Yes sir. We show the airbill addressed to Pacific Rim Weekly Journal, hold for airport pickup, on United flight five, direct to LAX.'

I wrote it down. 'And that's tomorrow?'

'Yes sir. It's right here on the form.'

I hung up, then dialed Los Angeles information and asked for the number of the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal. The information operator said, 'I'm sorry, sir. We have no listing in that name.'

'Try the valley.'

'Sorry, sir. Still no listing.'

I thought about Tre Michaels. 'Try Long Beach.'

She said, 'Here we go.' She gave me the address and phone, and I said, 'Touchdown.'

'Pardon me?'

'Nothing, Operator. Thanks.'

I dialed the number, and a woman answered with a heavy Asian accent. 'Journal.'

'May I speak with Clark, please.'

She hung up without another word, and I looked at Pike. 'I think we may be onto something.'

Pike stayed with the Hewitt children, and I took the long drive south to Long Beach, following the Hollywood Freeway to the Harbor Freeway, then dropping straight south for almost an hour before picking up the San Diego Freeway east to the 710 and turning south again to parallel the Los Angeles River all the way to the ocean. Downtown Long Beach is a core of redeveloped modern high rises surrounded by an older landscape of two-story stucco bars and craftsman homes and traffic dividers dotted with palm trees that lend a small-town waterfront feel. It would've been a fine place to bring Teri and Charles and Winona for ice-cream cones and a walk in the sun around Belmont Pier to watch the boats coming and going to Catalina Island, only sun walking and boat watching often lose their appeal when you're thinking that your father might've been tortured to death by a steam iron. Maybe another time.

I followed Ocean Boulevard east along the water, then turned north along Redondo Avenue, watching the landscape evolve from small-town waterfront to middle-class residential to lower-class urban, the signs gradually changing from English to Spanish and finally to Asian as the faces changed with them. The Pacific Rim Weekly Journal sat two blocks off Redondo in a small three-story commercial building between a tiny Vietnamese restaurant and a coin-operated laundry filled with tiny Asian women who were probably Vietnamese or Cambodian.

I cruised the building twice, then parked one block south and walked up past the Journal to the restaurant. I glimpsed two people in the Journal office, but neither was Clark Hewitt.

It was still before eleven, and the restaurant was empty except for an ancient Vietnamese woman wrapping forks and spoons in white cloth napkins. Preparing for the lunch-hour rush. I smiled at her. 'Do you have a take-out menu?'

She gave me a green take-out menu. 'You early.'

'Too early to order?'

She shook her head. 'Oh no. We serve.'

I ordered squid fried rice with honey, and told her that I would wait out front on the sidewalk. She said that would be fine.

I stood around out front with the little menu and tried to look as if I had nothing on my mind except food, and snuck glances in the Journal office next door. An Asian woman in her early sixties sat at a wooden desk, talking on the phone. Behind her, the walls were lined with corkboard and about a million little bits of paper and photographs and what looked like posters for community events had been pinned to the board. A couple of ratty chairs were at the front of the office, and another desk sat opposite the woman's, this one occupied by a young Asian guy who looked to be in his twenties. He wore a Cal Tech sweatshirt and tiger stripe field utilities and Top-Siders without socks. He was leaning back, the Top-Siders up on the desk, reading a paperback. A half wall split the space into a front and a back, only you couldn't see the back from here in the front. Maybe Clark was in the back. Maybe I could whip out my gun, charge through the front into the back, and shout, 'Gotcha!' Be impressive as hell if he was really there.

The young guy saw me looking. I smiled and took a copy of the Journal from a wire rack bolted to the front of the building, just another bored guy killing time while he waited for his food. It was a tabloid-sized Vietnamese-language newspaper filled with articles I couldn't read and pictures of Vietnamese people that I took to be from the local community. The printing was cheesy and smudged, and I wondered if maybe Clark had been hired to give them a more professional look. 'Do you read Vietnamese?'

The young guy was standing in the door. Inside, the woman was still on the phone, but now watching me.

I shook my head and put down the paper. 'No. I'm just waiting for some food next door. I was curious.'

He grinned. 'They're free. Help yourself, if you want. They make a great birdcage liner.' Mr. Friendly.

I strolled back past the restaurant and up a short alley, looking for the rear entrance. One of the wonderful things about being so close to the water is that the temperatures are so mild that you rarely have to use air-conditioning. It was in the low seventies, so the Journal's rear door was open for the air. I peeked inside. Furtive.

No Clark.

I listened at the door, then stepped in. An Apple laser printer was humming on a little desk beside another door that led to a bathroom. Industrial metal shelves were stacked with reams of paper and office supplies and a well-used Mr. Coffee, but nothing screamed counterfeiter and I didn't see any of the things that Clark had marked in his catalogs.

I slipped out, went around to the front again, and this time I walked into the Journal office. The young guy was back with his book and the older woman looked up from her word processor. The young guy smiled, but the older woman didn't. I said, 'My name is Elvis Cole, and I'm looking for Clark Hewitt.' I put one of my cards on the young guy's desk. 'His life is in danger and I'm trying to help him. I'm also trying to help his children.' Sometimes honesty is the best policy.

The young guy's smile vanished, and the woman said something in Vietnamese. The young guy answered, also in Vietnamese.

I said, 'Sorry?'

The young guy stared at me for a couple of seconds before he shook his head. 'I don't know what you're talking about.' You could tell that he did. You could tell that he knew exactly what I was talking about, and that he did not like it that I had asked, or that I knew.

I glanced at the woman, and she turned away. Fast.

I said, 'I'm driving a 1966 Corvette convertible parked down the block. It's yellow. I'll be sitting in it.'

I went to the restaurant, paid for my food, then walked back to my car, put the top up to cut the sun, and sat. The squid fried rice was excellent, but I didn't have much of an appetite for it.

Twenty minutes later the guy in the Cal Tech sweatshirt came out to the street, looked at me, then went back inside. Sixteen minutes after that, a black 5oo-series Mercedes sedan circled the block twice, two Asian men in their mid-sixties inside. I copied their license number. Maybe eight minutes after that, a bright red Ferrari Spyder appeared from the opposite direction and eased to a stop a car length away from me. Whoever these guys were, they had money. The Ferrari was driven by a very young Asian guy, but an older man was in the shotgun seat, and, like the people in the Mercedes, both of them were nicely dressed in Italian business suits. I copied the Ferrari's plate number, too. The two men in the Ferrari stared at me for a couple of minutes, talking to each other, and then the young guy rolled down his window and eased next to me to talk. I said, 'Clark Hewitt.'

The young guy shook his head. 'Got no idea who that is.' Flawless English without a trace of an accent. Local.

'I think you do.'

The young guy looked nervous, but the older guy seemed calm. The younger guy said, 'My mother works at the paper, and you're scaring her. I'm going to ask you to leave.' I guess the paper was a family business, but it probably didn't pay for his Ferrari.

'Do you own the paper?'

'I think you should leave.'

I settled back in my seat. 'Can't leave until I see Clark Hewitt.'

The older man said something, and the younger guy shook his head. 'We never heard of the guy.'

'Fine.' I crossed my arms and made like I was going to take a nap.

The older man mumbled something else, and the younger guy said, 'Are you the police?'

' Clark knows who I am. I gave your mother a card.'

The older man leaned past the younger guy. 'If you don't leave, we'll have to call the police.'

'Go ahead. We can talk about Clark and his association with your newspaper.'

The younger guy's jaw flexed, and now he said something to the older guy. 'You're not going away?'

'No.'

The younger guy nodded. 'Big mistake.'

He dropped the Ferrari into first gear and rocketed away, tires screaming and filling the air with smoke and burning rubber. Guess he'd seen someone do that in a movie.

The Mercedes left, too.

I waited. I had found the Pacific Rim Weekly Journal, and I had found some people who clearly knew Clark Hewitt. I was making gangbuster progress, and I was feeling proud of myself. Elvis Cole, Smug Detective.

Ninety seconds after the Ferrari roared away three men came out of the alley and approached me. They weren't in Italian business suits, and they didn't look as if they would've been any more impressed by a kid peeling out than I had been. They looked hard and lean and focused with flat, expressionless faces, and all three were wearing long coats. They walked with their hands in their coat pockets, and when they reached the car the one in the middle pulled back his coat enough to reveal a stubby black Benelli combat shotgun. He said, 'Guess what you're going to do?'

'Leave?'

He nodded.

'Tell Clark I'll be back.'

I started the car and drove away.

Honesty might be the best policy, but leaving is the better part of valor.