Chasing the Dime

by Michael Connelly

"I know," Pierce said. "I came from the Westside and I thought there'd be more traffic."

  He followed her in. There was a waiting area with a raised reception counter in front of a partition that guarded an entrance to a rear hallway. To the right and unguarded was a closed door with the word PRIVATE on it. Pierce watched as the woman walked behind the counter and threw her purse into a drawer.

  "You'll have to wait a couple minutes until I get set up. I'm the only one here today."

  "Slow on Saturdays?"

  "Most of the time."

  "Well, who is watching the machines if you're the only one here?"

  "Oh, well, there's always somebody back there. I just meant I'm by myself up front today."

  She slid into a chair behind the counter. The silver ring protruding from her stomach caught Pierce's eye and reminded him of Nicole. She had worked at Amedeo for more than a year before he happened upon her in a coffee shop on Main Street

  on a Sunday afternoon. She had just come from a workout and was dressed in gray sweatpants and a sports bra, exposing a gold ring piercing her navel. It was like discovering a secret about someone of longtime acquaintance. She had always been a beautifully attractive woman in his eyes but everything changed after that moment in the coffee shop. Nicole became erotic to him and he went after her, wanting to check for hidden tattoos and to know all of her secrets.

  Pierce wandered around the confines of the waiting room while the woman behind the counter did whatever it was she had to do to get set up. He heard a computer start booting up and some drawers opening and closing. He noticed on one wall an arrangement of logos of various websites operated through Entrepreneurial Concepts. He saw L.A.

  Darlings and several others. Most of them were pornography sites, where a $19.95-amonth subscription bought access to thousands of downloadable photos of your favorite sex acts and fetishes. It was all presented on the wall in complete, unashamed legitimacy.

  The PinkMink.com banner could have been the same as an advertisement for acne ointment.

  Next to the wall of banners was the door marked PRIVATE. Pierce glanced back at the woman behind the counter and saw that she was preoccupied with something on her computer screen. He turned back and tried the doorknob. It was unlocked and he opened the door. It led to an unlit hallway with three sets of double doors spaced twenty feet apart on the left side.

  "Um, excuse me," the woman said from behind him. "You can't go in there."

  Signs hanging on thin chains from the ceiling in front of the doors marked them as studio A, studio B and studio C.

  Pierce backed out and closed the door. He returned to the counter. He saw that she was now wearing a pin with her name on it.

  "I thought it was the rest rooms. What is that back there?"

  "Those are the photo studios. We don't have public facilities here. They're down in the building's lobby."

  "I can wait."

  "What can I do for you?"

  He leaned his elbows on the counter.

  "I've sort of got a problem, Wendy. One of the advertisers with a page on L.A. Darlings dot com has my phone number. Calls that should be going to her are going to me instead.

  And I think if I were to show up at somebody's hotel room door, there'd be some disappointment involved."

  He smiled but she apparently didn't appreciate his attempt at humor.

  "A misprint?" she said. "I can fix that."

  "It's not exactly a misprint."

  He told his story of getting a new phone number, only to learn that it was the same line on the web page ad for the woman named Lilly.

  She was sitting behind the counter. She looked up at him with suspicious eyes.

  "If you just got the number, why don't you just get another?"

  "Because I didn't realize I had this problem and I already had change-of-address cards with the number on it printed and mailed out. It would be very expensive and timeconsuming to do that all over again with a new number. I'm sure if you told me how to contact this woman, she'd agree to alter her page. I mean, she's not getting any business off it if all her calls are going to me anyway, right?"

  Wendy shook her head like his explanation and reasoning were beyond her.

  "All right, let me see something."

  She turned to the computer and went to the L.A. Darlings site and into the Brunette escorts list. She clicked on the picture of Lilly and then scrolled down to the phone number.

  "You're saying this is your number, not hers, but it used to be hers."

  "Exactly."

  "Then if she changed her number, why wouldn't she change it with us, too?"

  "I don't know. That's why I'm here. Would you have another way of contacting her?"

  "Not that I can give you. Our client information is confidential."

  Pierce nodded. He had expected that.

  "That's fine. But can you see if there is another contact number and then you could call her and tell her about this problem?"

  "What about this cell number?"

  "I tried it. It takes voice mail. I've left three messages for her explaining all of this but she hasn't called back. I don't think she's getting the messages."

  Wendy scrolled up and looked at the photo of Lilly.

  "She's hot," she said. "I bet you're getting a lot of calls."

  "I've only had the phone a day and it's driving me nuts."

  Wendy pushed her chair back and stood up.

  "I'm going to check something. I'll be right back."

  She went around the partition behind the counter and disappeared into the back hallway, the slapping sound of her sandals receding as she went. Pierce waited a moment and then leaned over the counter and scanned all surfaces. His guess was that Wendy was not the only one who worked at the counter. It was probably a job shared by two or three minimum-wage employees. Employees who might need help remembering passwords to the system.

  He looked for Post-its on the computer and the back of the counter's facade but saw nothing. He reached down and lifted the blotter but there was nothing under it but a dollar bill. He dug his finger around in a dish of paper clips but found nothing. He reached further across the counter to see if there was a pencil drawer. There wasn't.

  Just as he thought of something, he heard the sound of her sandals. She was coming back.

  He quickly reached into his pocket, found a dollar and then reached back over the counter. He lifted the blotter, put down the dollar and grabbed the one that was there. He put it in his pocket without looking at it. His hand was still there when she came around the partition, holding a thin file, and sat down.

  "Well, I figured out one part of the problem," she said.

  "What's that?"

  "This girl stopped paying her bill."

  "When was that?"

  "In June she paid up through August. Then she didn't pay for September."

  "Then why's her page still on the site?"

  "Because sometimes it takes a while to clean out the deadbeats. Especially when they look like this chick."

  She gestured to the computer screen with the file and then put it down on the counter.

  "I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Wentz wanted to keep her on there even though she didn't pay. Guys see girls like that on the site and they'll keep coming back."

  Pierce nodded.

  "And the number of hits on the site is how they determine the rates for the ads, right?"

  "You got it."

  Pierce looked at the screen. In a way, Lilly was still working. If not for herself, then for Entrepreneurial Concepts Unlimited. He looked back at Wendy.

  "Is Mr. Wentz back there? I'd like to speak to him."

  "No, it's Saturday. You'd be lucky even to catch him here during the week, but I've never seen him on a Saturday."

  "Well, what can be done about this? My phone's ringing off the hook."

  "Well, I can take notes and then maybe on Monday somebody could —"

  "Look, Wendy, I don't want to wait until Monda
y. I have a problem now. If Mr. Wentz isn't here, then go get the guy baby-sitting the servers. There has to be somebody who can go into the server and take her page down. It's a simple process."

  "There's one guy back there but I don't think he's authorized to do anything. Besides, he was sort of asleep when I looked in there."

  Pierce leaned over the counter and put a forceful tone into his voice.

  "Lilly —I mean, Wendy, listen to me. I insist that you go back there and wake him up and bring him out here. You have to understand something here. You are in a legally precarious position. I have informed you that your website has my phone number on it.

  Because of this error I am repeatedly receiving phone calls of what I consider to be an offensive and embarrassing nature. So much so that I was here at your place of business this morning before you even opened. I want this fixed. If you put it off until Monday, then I am going to sue you, this company, Mr. Wentz and anybody else I can find associated with this place. Do you understand?"

  "You can't sue me. I just work here."

  "Wendy, you can sue anybody you want to in this world."

  She stood up, an angry look in her eyes, and pirouetted around the partition without a word. Pierce didn't care if she was angry. What he cared about was that she had left the file on the counter. As soon as the sound of her sandals was gone he bent over and flipped open the file. There was a copy of the photo of Lilly, along with a printout of her ad copy and an advertiser's information form. This was what Pierce wanted. He felt a surge of adrenaline zing through him as he read the sheet and tried to commit everything to memory.

  Her name was Lilly Quinlan. Her contact number was the same cell phone number she had put on her web page. On the address line she had put a Santa Monica address and apartment number. Pierce quickly read it silently three times and then put everything back in the file just as he heard the sandals and another pair of shoes approaching from the other side of the partition.

  7

  The first thing Pierce did when he got back to the car was grab a pen from the ashtray and write Lilly Quinlan's address on an old valet parking stub. After that he pulled the dollar bill out of his pocket and examined it. It had been face down under the blotter. He now studied it and found the words Arbadac Arba written across George Washington's forehead on the front of the bill.

  "Abra Cadabra," he said, reading each word backwards.

  He thought there was a good chance that the words were a user name and password for entering the Entrepreneurial Concepts computer system. While he was pleased with the moves he'd made in getting the words, he was unsure how useful they would be now that he had gotten Lilly Quinlan's name and address out of the hard-copy file.

  He started the car and headed back toward Santa Monica. The address of Lilly's apartment was on Wilshire Boulevard

  near the Third Street Promenade. As he got close and started reading the numbers on the buildings, he realized that there were no apartment complexes in the vicinity of the address she had written on the advertiser's information sheet. When he finally pulled up in front of the business with the matching address on the door, he saw that it was a private mail drop, a business called All American Mail. The apartment number Lilly Quinlan had written on the info sheet was actually a box number. Pierce parked at the curb out front but wasn't sure what he could do. It appeared that he was at a dead end. He thought for a few minutes about a plan of action and then got out.

  Pierce walked into the business and immediately went into the alcove where the mailboxes were. He was hoping the individual doors would have glass in them so he could look into Lilly Quinlan's and see if there was any mail. But the boxes all had aluminum doors with no glass. She had listed her address as apartment 333

  on the info sheet. He located box 333

  and just stared at it for a moment, as if it might give him some sort of answer. It didn't.

  Pierce eventually left the alcove and went to the counter. A young man with a swath of pimples on each cheek and a name tag that said Curt asked how he could help him.

  "This is sort of weird," Pierce said. "I need a mailbox but I want a specific number. It sort of goes with the name of my business. It's called Three Cubed Productions."

  The kid seemed confused.

  "So what number do you want?"

  "Three three three. I saw you have a box with that number. Is it available?"

  It was the best Pierce could come up with while sitting in the car. Curt reached under the counter and came back up with a blue binder, which he opened to pages listing boxes by number and their availability. His finger drew down a column of numbers and stopped.

  "Oh, this one."

  Pierce tried to read what was on the page but it was upside down and too far away.

  "What?"

  "Well, it's occupied at the moment but it might not be for long."

  "What's that mean?"

  "It means there's a person in that box, but she didn't pay this month's rent. So she's in the grace period. If she shows up and pays, she keeps the box. If she doesn't show up by the end of the month, then she's out and you're in —if you can wait that long."

  Pierce put a concerned look on his face.

  "That's kind of long. I wanted to get this set up. Do you know if there's a number or an address for this person? You know, to contact her and ask if she still wants the box."

  "I've sent out two late notices and put one in the box. We usually don't call."

  Pierce became excited but didn't show it. What Curt had said meant that there was another address for Lilly Quinlan. This excitement was immediately tempered by the fact that he had no idea how to get it from the young man who had it.

  "Well, is there a number? If you could call this woman right now and find something out, I'd be willing to rent the box right now. And I'd pay for a year up front."

  "Well, I'll have to look it up. It will take me a minute."

  "Take your time. I'd rather get all of this done now than have to come back."

  Curt went to a desk that was against the wall behind the counter and sat down. He opened a file drawer and took out a thick hanging file. He was still too far away for Pierce to be able to read any of the documents he was going through. Curt ran his finger down one page and then held it on a spot. With his other hand he picked up the phone on the desk but was interrupted before making the call by a customer who had entered the shop.

  "I need to send a fax to New York," she said.

  Curt got up and went to the counter. From underneath he pulled out a fax cover sheet and told the woman to fill it out. He returned to the desk. He put his finger back on the document and lifted the phone.

  "Am I going to be charged for faxing this cover sheet?"

  It was the other customer.

  "No, ma'am. Only the documents you need to fax."

  He said it like he had said it only a million times before.

  Finally, he punched in a number on the phone. Pierce tried to watch his finger and get the number but it was too fast. Curt waited a long time before finally speaking into the phone.

  "This is a message for Lilly Quinlan. Could you please call us at All American Mail.

  Rent on your box is overdue and we'll be re-renting it if we do not hear from you. My name is Curt. Thank you very much."

  He gave the number and hung up, then came toward Pierce at the counter. The woman with the fax shook it at him.

  "I'm in a big hurry," she said.

  "I'll be right with you, ma'am," Curt said.

  He looked at Pierce and shook his head.

  "I got her machine. There's really nothing that I can do until either I hear from her or the end of the month comes and I don't. That's the policy."

  "I understand. Thanks for trying."

  Curt started running his finger down the columns in the binder again.

  "You want to leave a number where I can reach you if I hear from her?"

  "I'll just check with you tomorrow."

>   Pierce took a business card off a plastic rack on the counter and headed toward the door.

  Curt called after him.

  "What about twenty-seven?"

  Pierce turned back.

  "What?"

  "Twenty-seven. Isn't that what three cubed is?"

  Pierce slowly nodded. Curt was smarter than he looked.

  "I've got that box open if you want it."