Chasing the Dime (24 page)

Pierce nodded. His head didn't go through the fishbowl effect this time. Vertical movement was okay. It was the horizontal moves that caused the problem.

‘What else?' Renner said, still pushing.

‘She shares that apartment in the Marina with a woman named Cleo. She's supposedly on the same site, though I never checked. Maybe you talk to Cleo and get a line on her.'

‘Maybe, maybe not. That it?'

‘Last thing, I saw her get into a green and yellow taxi on Speedway on Saturday night. Maybe you can trace it to her place.'

Renner shook his head slightly.

‘Works in movies. Not too often in real life. Besides, she probably went back to the fuck pad. Saturdays are busy nights.'

The door to the room opened and Monica Purl stepped in. She saw Renner and stopped in the threshold.

‘Oh, sorry. Am I — '

‘Yes, you are,' Renner said. ‘Police business. Could you wait outside, please?'

‘I'll just come back.'

Monica looked at Pierce, her face reacting in horror to what she saw. Pierce tried to smile and raised his left hand and waved.

‘I'll call you,' Monica said, and then she went back through the door and was gone.

‘Who was that? Another girlfriend?'

‘No, my assistant.'

‘So you want to talk about what happened on that balcony Sunday? Was it Wentz?'

Pierce didn't say anything for a long time as he thought about the consequences of answering the question. A large part of him wanted to name Wentz and file charges against him. Pierce felt deeply humiliated by what Wentz and his giant had done to him. Even if the surgery on his face was successful and no physical scars were left behind, he knew without a doubt that the attack was going to be hard to live with, always to have in his memory. There would be scars nonetheless.

But still, the threat Wentz had made lodged in his mind as something very real — to himself, to Robin, even to Nicole. If Wentz was able to find him and invade his home so easily, then he would be able to find Nicole.

He finally spoke.

‘It's a Santa Monica case, what do you care?'

‘It's all one case and you know it.'

‘I don't want to talk about it. I don't even remember what happened. I remember I was carrying groceries up to my apartment and then I woke up when the paramedics were working on me.'

‘The mind is a tricky thing, isn't it? The way it blocks out the bad things.'

The tone was sarcastic and Pierce could tell by the look on Renner's face that he did not believe his memory loss. The two men stared at each other for a long moment, then the detective reached into his jacket.

‘How about this, jog anything loose?'

He pulled out a folded 8 x 10 photo and showed it to Pierce. It was a grainy blowup of the Sands apartment tower taken from a long distance. From the beach. He pulled the photo closer and saw the small images of people on one of the upper balconies. He knew it was the twelfth floor. He knew it was him and Wentz and his muscle man, Six-Eight. Pierce was being held off the balcony by his ankles. The figures in the photo were too small to be recognizable. He handed it back.

‘No. Nothing.'

‘Right now it's the best we got. But once they put it on the news that we're looking for photos, videos, whatever, we might come up with something decent. A lot of people were out there. Somebody probably got a good shot.'

‘Good luck.'

Renner was silent, studying Pierce for a long while before he spoke again.

‘Look, if he threatened you, we can protect you.'

‘I told you, I don't remember what happened. I don't remember anything at all.'

Renner nodded.

‘Sure, sure. Okay, then let's forget the balcony. Let me ask you something else. Tell me, where did you hide Lilly's body?'

Pierce's eyes widened. Renner had used misdirection to hit him with the sucker punch.

‘What? Are you — '

‘Where is it, Pierce? What did you do with her? And what did you do with Lucy LaPorte?'

A cold feeling of fear began to rise in Pierce's chest. He looked at Renner and knew the detective was deadly serious. And he knew suddenly that he wasn't
a
suspect. He was
the
suspect.

‘Are you fucking kidding me? You wouldn't even know about this if I hadn't called you people. I was the only one who cared about it.'

‘Yeah, and maybe by calling us and traipsing all over that scene and the house, what you were setting up was a nice little defense. And maybe the job you had Wentz or one of your other pals do on your face was part of the defense. Poor guy gets his nose smashed for sticking it in the wrong place. It doesn't get my sympathy vote, Mr. Pierce.'

Pierce stared at him, speechless. Everything that he had done or that had been done to him was being perceived by Renner from a completely opposite angle.

‘Let me tell you a quick little story,' Renner said. ‘I used to work up in the Valley and one time we had a missing girl. She was twelve years old, from a good home, and we knew she wasn't a runaway. Sometimes you just know. So we organized the neighbors and volunteers into a search party in the Encino Hills. And lo and behold, one of the neighbor boys finds her. Raped and strangled and stuffed into a culvert. It was a bad one. And you know what, turned out that the boy who found her was the one who did the deed. Took us a while to circle back around to him but we did and he confessed. Being the one who found her like that? That's called the Good Samaritan complex. He who smelled it dealt it. Happens all the time. The doer likes getting close to the cops, likes helping out, makes him feel better than them and better about what he did.'

Pierce was having difficulty even fathoming how everything had turned on him.

‘You're wrong,' he said quietly, his voice shaking. ‘I didn't do it.'

‘Yeah? Am I wrong? Well, let me tell you what I've got. I've got a missing woman and blood on the bed. I've got a bunch of your lies and a bunch of your fingerprints all over the woman's house and fuck pad.'

Pierce closed his eyes. He thought about the apartment off Speedway and the seagull house on Altair. He knew he had touched everything. He'd put his hands on everything. Her perfume, her closets, her mail.

‘No ...'

It was all he could think to say.

‘No, what?'

‘This is all a mistake. All I did ... I mean ... I got her number. I just wanted to see ... I wanted to help her ... You see, it was my fault ... and I thought if I ... '

He didn't finish. The past and present were too close together. They were morphing together, one confusing the other. One moving in front of the other like an eclipse. He opened his eyes and looked at Renner.

‘You thought what?' the detective asked.

‘What?'

‘Finish the line. You thought what?'

‘I don't know. I don't want to talk about it.'

‘Come on, kid. You started down the road. Finish the ride. It's good to unburden. Good for the soul. It's your fault Lilly's dead. What did you mean by that? It was an accident? Tell me how it happened. Maybe I can live with that and we can go tell the DA together, work something out.'

Pierce felt fear and danger flooding his mind now. He could almost smell it coming off his skin. As if they were chemicals — compound elements sharing common molecules — rising to the surface to escape.

‘What are you talking about? Lilly? It's not my fault. I didn't even know her. I tried to help her.'

‘By strangling her? Cutting her throat? Or did you do the Jack the Ripper number on her? I think they say the Ripper was a scientist. A doctor or something. You the new Ripper, Pierce? Is that your bag?'

‘Get out of here. You're crazy.'

‘I don't think I'm the crazy one. Why was it your fault?'

‘What?'

‘You said she was all your fault. Why? What did she do? Insult your manhood? You got a little pecker, Pierce? Is that it?'

Pierce shook his head emphatically, touching off a bout of dizziness. He closed his eyes.

‘I didn't say that. It's not my fault.'

‘You said it. I heard it.'

‘No. You're putting words into my mouth. It's not my fault. I had nothing to do with it.'

He opened his eyes to see Renner reach into his coat pocket and pull out a tape recorder. The red light was on. Pierce realized that it was a different recorder from the one that had been placed earlier on the food tray and then turned off. The detective had taped the whole conversation.

Renner clicked the rewind button for a few seconds and then jockeyed around with the recording until he found what he wanted and replayed what Pierce had said moments before.

‘This is all a mistake. All I did ... I mean ... I got her number. I just wanted to see ... I wanted to help her ... You see, it was my fault ... and I thought if I ... '

The detective clicked off the recorder and looked at Pierce with a smug smile on his face. Renner had him cornered. He had been tricked. All his legal instincts, as limited as they were, told him to not speak another word. But Pierce couldn't stop.

‘No,' he said. ‘I wasn't talking about her. About Lilly Quinlan. I was talking about my sister. I was — '

‘We were talking about Lilly Quinlan and you said, “It was my fault.” That is an admission, my friend.'

‘No, I told you, I — '

‘I know what you told me. It was a nice story.'

‘It's no story.'

‘Well, you know what? Story, no story, I figure as soon as I find the body I'll have the real story to tell. I'll have you in the bag and be home free.'

Renner leaned over the bed until his face was only inches from Pierce's.

‘Where is she, Pierce? You know this is inevitable. We're going to find her. So let's get this over with now. Tell me what you did with her.'

Their eyes were locked. Pierce heard the click of the tape recorder being turned back on.

‘Get out.'

‘You'd better talk to me. You're running out of time. Once I take this in and it gets to the lawyers, I can't help you anymore. Talk to me, Henry. Come on. Unburden yourself.'

‘I said get out. I want a lawyer.'

Renner straightened up and smiled in a knowing way. In an exaggerated fashion he held the tape recorder up and clicked it off.

‘Of course you want a lawyer,' he said. ‘And you're going to need one. I'm going to the DA, Pierce. I know I've already got you on obstruction and breaking and entering, for starters. Got you there cold. But all of that's bullshit. I want the big one.'

He proffered the tape recorder as though the words he had captured with it were the Holy Grail.

‘As soon as that body turns up, it's game over.'

Pierce wasn't really listening anymore. He turned away from Renner and began staring into space, thinking about what was going to happen. All at once he realized he would lose everything. The company — everything. In a split second all the dominoes fell in his imagination, the last one being Goddard pulling out and taking his investment dollars somewhere else, to Bronson Tech or Midas Molecular or one of the other competitors. Goddard would pull out and nobody would be willing to pull in. Not under the glare of a criminal investigation and possible trial. It would be over. He would be out of the race for good.

He looked back at Renner.

‘I said I'm not talking to you anymore. I want you to leave. I want a lawyer.'

Renner nodded.

‘My advice to you is, make it a good one.'

He reached over to a counter where medical supplies were displayed and picked up a hat Pierce hadn't seen before. It was a brown porkpie hat with the brim cocked down. Pierce thought nobody wore hats like that in L.A. anymore. Nobody. Renner left the room without another word.

Pierce sat still for a moment, thinking about his predicament. He wondered how much of what Renner had said about going to the DA had been threat and how much of it was reality. He shook free of the thoughts and looked around to see if the room had a phone. There was nothing on the side table but the bed had side railings with all manner of electronic buttons for positioning the mattress and controlling the television mounted on the opposite wall. He found a phone that snapped out of the right railing. In a plastic pocket next to it he also found a small hand mirror. He held it up and looked at his face for the first time.

He was expecting worse. When he had felt the wound with his fingers in the moments after the assault, it had seemed to him that his face had been split open wide and that wide scarring would be unavoidable. At the time this didn't bother him, because he was happy just to be left alive. Now he was a little more concerned. Looking at his face, he saw the swelling was way down. He was a little puffy around the corners of his eyes and the lower part of his nose. Both nostrils were packed with cotton gauze. Both eyes had dark swatches of purple beneath them. The cornea of his left eye was flooded with blood on one side of the iris. And across his nose were the very fine trails of microstitching.

The stitching formed a K pattern with one line going up the bridge of his nose, and the arms of the K curving below his left eye and above it into his eyebrow. Half of his left eyebrow had been shaved to accommodate the surgery and Pierce thought that might be the oddest thing about the whole face he saw in the mirror.

He put the mirror down and he realized he was smiling. His face was almost destroyed. He had an LAPD cop who was trying to put him in jail for a crime he had uncovered but did not commit. He had a digital pimp with a pet monster out there who was a live and real threat to him and others close to him. Yet he was sitting in bed, smiling.