Indigo Slam: An Elvis Cole Novel (10 page)

Richard Chenier walked out of my office without looking back. Epps stared at me, then grinned and turned away, too.

“Hey, Epps.”

He looked back, still grinning.

“That’s some cat, huh?”

Epps dropped the smile, walked out, and closed the door. Hard.

I stared at the door for a very long time, and then I shook my head.

“Pleased to meet you, Richard.”

I watched Richard and Epps drive away, then went back to my desk and stared at the Mickey phone and thought about calling Lucy, but what would I say?
Your ex-husband dropped by and told me he loved you?
Nope.
Richard hired some guy to break into my house
. It sounded like tattling.

I looked at the Pinocchio clock, and gave it Stan Laurel. “Isn’t this a fine development?”

Pinocchio’s eyes went from side to side, but he didn’t say anything. He never does.

I tried to think about Markov. I took out the two one-hundred-dollar bills, looked at them again, but I kept seeing Richard on the bills instead of Ben Franklin. “For chrissakes, Cole, get over it. You’re onto something with Clark. Follow up your lead.”

What kind of guy hires someone to break into his ex-wife’s boyfriend’s house?

Would you stop?!

I knew from Lucy that Richard Chenier was an attorney with the firm of Benton, Meyers & Dane, and I knew he had graduated from law school at LSU, where Lucy had been an undergraduate, but that was all I knew, and I had never given him much thought. Now he had entered my home and my office in a belligerent and threatening manner, which I could handle, but he had also indicated that he had no intention of allowing Lucy to leave Baton Rouge, which I didn’t like at all. Whatever that meant.

I decided that if I couldn’t stop thinking about Lucy’s ex-husband, the smart thing would be to deal with it. I had met Lucy when I worked a case in Louisiana last year, and while I was there I had made friends with a couple of people on the Louisiana State Police and the Baton Rouge PD. Now I called them, told them what I knew about Richard and Epps, and asked if they could give me a fast background check. They told me that they’d get back to me as soon as possible.

While they were working on that, I called Joe Pike. “Clark went to Seattle to see a man named Wilson Brownell. Brownell is a master counterfeiter. He taught Clark how to print, and I’m thinking that Clark went back to Brownell because he’s getting back in the trade.”

“You think he’s printing money?”

“I’ve got two one-hundred-dollar bills that I’m wondering about, and maybe this explains why Clark won’t go to Jasper. If he’s setting something up, it might be coming together and he wants to see it through.”

Pike didn’t say anything for a moment, like maybe he was thinking. “There’s a woman named Marsha Fields at the Treasury office downtown. I could call her tonight, see if you can drop by with the bills tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

Then he said, “What?” Like he could hear something in my voice.

“The guy who broke into my house is named Epps. He’s the same guy in the LeBaron, and he works for Lucy’s ex-husband. They just left my office.”

More silence. “Want me to do anything?”

“I don’t think we need to kill him just yet.”

“Maybe later.” Pike hung up. Sometimes the silence says it all.

I stared at the phone some more, then called the LSU Alumni Office. A little bit after that I phoned Benton, Meyers & Dane, pretending to be a prospective client, and six minutes after that the first of my cop friends called back. One hour and twenty-seven minutes after Richard Chenier walked out of my office, I knew that he had been a second-string cornerback for the LSU frosh team until a blown knee ended his collegiate career. He had dallied in campus politics, graduated summa cum laude, was an unsuccessful Rhodes candidate, and had never been arrested. Impressive. I also knew that he was a full partner at BM&D, a firm specializing in corporate law for international oil concerns, but was currently out of the office (yeah, he was in mine!) and not scheduled to return until next week. Lawrence Epps was a former Louisiana state trooper who had left the job and who now worked as an investigator for BM&D. He had been arrested four times, three of those for assault, and had been convicted one time for misdemeanor battery. One of those arrests was for beating his first wife. Sweet.

All in all, I was feeling better about things when I went home. I still wasn’t liking Richard very much, but he seemed like a square guy, and if I tried real hard I thought that I might be going a little crazy, too, thinking that I might lose my child. After all, Lucy had married the guy, and that said something. Of course, she had also divorced him, but that didn’t dawn on me until later.

When I got home that evening the cat was sitting by his bowl in the kitchen. I talked it over with him while I was making dinner, and said, “What would you do?”

The cat blinked, then bent over and licked his anus. Cats lead simple lives.

Joe Pike called me at nine the next morning, telling me that Special Agent Marsha Fields of the U.S. Secret Service was expecting me. I made boiled eggs and English muffins for breakfast, then took my time showering and dressing before winding my way across town to the Treasury Department.

The Treasury has its offices on the seventeenth floor of the Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, between the LAPD’s Parker Center on one side and the Los Angeles Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center on the other. Cops feel safer when they cluster.

I parked in the basement, then took an elevator to the lobby where I went through a metal detector and gave my name to a guy who looked like he ate a Pontiac for breakfast. Then I took another elevator up to seventeen.

When I stepped off the elevator, a tall, athletic-looking woman with short red hair in a navy pantsuit was waiting. She said, “Mr. Cole? I’m Marsha Fields. Joe Pike asked me to examine some currency for you.” She took my hand with a firm grip and smiled nicely.

“That’s right.” I smiled nicely, too, and tried to get my hand back. She didn’t let go.

“Mm-hm. And how did you get these bills?” She kept the hand and I was thinking that maybe she wouldn’t let go, as if the bills were funny or my answer was wrong she’d slap the cuffs on me and whisk me away to Secret Service Land.

“I cashed a check at a market in Hollywood.”

She kept the hand and the smile a little bit longer and then she dropped both. “Well, come with me and let’s see what we have.”

I followed her along a nondescript hall, past men and women who wouldn’t make eye contact. All the better to keep secrets. She said, “Joe says that you and he work together.”

“That’s right. Joe owns the agency with me.”

“Joe’s a very interesting man.”

“Mm-hm.”

“We met when Joe was on LAPD. We got to be friends.”

I nodded. She seemed interested.

“We were close.”

I looked at her. “Joe speaks well of you.”

She brightened and didn’t look so suspicious anymore. “I imagine he’s married by now.” I guess love was in the air. Or at least lust.

“Not yet. But there’s always hope.”

She blushed and we went into a small lab that looked not unlike a doctor’s office and smelled of naphtha. A black Formica counter ran along one wall with a shelf of little bottles above it and three light trays. A single steel sink was sunk into the counter, with a binocular microscope on one side of it and a large magnifying glass on a gooseneck stand on the other. Modern crime fighting at its cutting-edge finest.

Someone had taped cutout pictures of the president, the vice president, and the speaker of the house above the counter and used a Marks-A-Lot to label them Manny, Moe, and Curley. Someone else had drawn a bozo face on the president and written
Would YOU take a bullet for this clown?
These Secret Service agents are a riot, aren’t they?

Marsha Fields said, “May I see the bills?”

I gave her both hundreds. She put one down and worked with the other. She examined both sides, then folded the bill and rubbed it together, then looked at the face again. She put it on one of the light boxes, then pulled over the magnifying glass and inspected first the front face, then the back. She made a clucking sound. “These babies are righteous fakes.”

“Funny money.” Clark. You doofus.

“You bet. But not schlock. This is good stuff.”

“How can you tell?”

She held the bill under the big magnifier for me to see and pointed with a Uniball pen. “Look at the scrollwork around the edge of the bill. You see the vertical lines behind the portrait of Ben Franklin and the spokes in the Treasury seal? All of these lines should be clean and unbroken.”

I looked where she was indicating and I could see that the lines weren’t clean and unbroken. The parallel lines were smudged together in some places and in other places were broken or separated. “Yeah. I see.”

“Real money is made from engraved plates, so all of these lines are clearly resolved and separate. These bills were made from offset plates. The counterfeiter takes a picture of real money, then makes a plate from the picture, only you lose a little resolution with each step so the lines become smudged. Understand?”

She was looking at me expectantly, so I nodded. “Sure.” If you can at least look smart, people will assume that you are smart.

“The other giveaway is the paper. Real money is printed on a cotton blend made by the Crane Paper Mill in Dalton, Massachusetts. You see these little red and blue lines?”

She showed me the little red and blue filaments we’ve all seen in money. There were little red and blue lines in this bill, too. “Sure. I thought counterfeit money didn’t have those lines.”

She nodded, pleased not only with me, but with the funny money. “It doesn’t and neither does this.”

“I’m looking at it.”

“Nope, you only think you’re seeing it.” She put a drop of something from one of the little bottles on the bill and nothing happened. She frowned, selected another bottle, and put a different drop on another red fiber. This time the fiber dissolved and she smiled. “The red and blue marks in real money are rayon fibers that are mixed in the cotton and linen mash when Crane makes the paper.” She tore the edge of the bill and looked at the fibers. “This is a pretty good linen fiber, probably from a European mill, but the red and blue marks were printed on top of the paper in two separate processes.” She was smiling broadly now. She was beaming. “This isn’t schlock work. Someone went to a lot of trouble and they did a good job.” I guess she could appreciate the counterfeiter’s art.

“Are these new bills?” I was thinking that if Clark was printing again, this is what he was printing.

“Oh no. I’d say these were eight, ten years old, at least.” She snapped off the light tray, but didn’t offer the money back to me. “Looks like you’re out two hundred bucks.”

“That’s the way it goes.”

She crossed her arms and nodded. “You want to tell me where you really picked up this money?”

“I did.”

She smiled again, and stood. “Sure.”

“You keep the money?”

“That’s the way it works. You can file a claim for reimbursement through this office or any bank.”

“Thanks.”

“Tell Joe to call me sometime.”

I went out through security, down to my car, and started back toward my office. So Clark and his kids were living on counterfeit money. That’s why they paid for everything in cash. If they tried to deposit their money into a savings or checking account, they’d risk being discovered. The few hundred bucks they had in checking was probably the only real money they had, but Teri probably didn’t know that, just as she didn’t know that her father was a counterfeiter.

Of course, knowing that they were living on counterfeit money didn’t mean Clark was currently printing it or intending to. This stuff was probably the money he’d skimmed from Markov.

I nosed up onto Temple, then left toward the Hollywood Freeway. The downtown traffic combined with Caltrans construction projects was slowing the streets. I had gone three slow blocks and had just squeaked past a red light when about four thousand horns started blowing behind me. I looked in my rearview and saw the reason for all the noise: A nice new metallic tan Camaro had jumped into the oncoming lane to muscle its way through the intersection against the traffic. A blond guy with a buzz cut was driving, and a man who looked like the Incredible Hulk was filling the passenger seat.

Alexei Dobcek and Dmitri Sautin.

For the first time since Richard Chenier had walked into my office, it was easy to stop thinking about him. The Russians had arrived.

It was just before lunch in downtown Los Angeles, and maybe eighty thousand people were jamming the sidewalks and streets around us, flooding through the crosswalks against the
DON’T WALK
lights. In New York that would get you killed, but in LA where pedestrians have the right of way, cars collect in turn lanes like debris in a drain cover. Dobcek wasn’t used to that; people in Seattle obey the crosswalk signs.

They didn’t close the gap between us; they just tried to keep me in sight. Probably picked me up at my office. Probably hoping that I’d lead them to Clark.

I drove with the traffic flow, letting Dobcek stay with me, and turned north under the freeway to Sunset Boulevard, then into a strip mall. Mr. Nonchalant. Mr. Taking-Care-of-a-Little-Errand. Dobcek and Sautin pulled to the curb in front of a menudo shop a block behind and tried to look inconspicuous. Hard to do when you weigh three hundred pounds.

I called Joe Pike from a pay phone outside a florist. “Dobcek and Sautin are sitting in a tan Camaro fifty yards away, watching me.”

“Shoot them.” Life is simple for Pike. Like with the cat.

“I was thinking more along the lines of delaying them. They probably picked me up at my office, and they’re probably hoping I’ll lead them to Clark.”

Pike grunted. “Or they’re hoping for another chance to beat it out of you.”

“Well, there’s that, too.” I told him where I was, and what I wanted.

Pike said, “Try to stay alive until I get there.”

Always the encouraging word.

I pretended to talk for another five minutes, went into the florist to kill more time, then climbed back into my car and continued north along Sunset, making sure that Dobcek and Sautin made every light with me.

When I reached Elysian Park Avenue I turned toward Dodger Stadium, and wound my way up past small residential homes through the mountains to Chavez Ravine. Traffic thinned, and I thought that Dobcek might break off the tail, but he didn’t.

Chavez Ravine is a broad flat bowl surrounded by low mountains that wall the stadium from the city. Dodger Stadium sits in the center of the bowl, surrounded by black tarmac parking lots like some kind of alien spacecraft resting alone on its launching pad. All you’d need was a big shiny robot, and you’d think Michael Rennie had come back to Earth.

An hour before game time on a cool spring evening and there’d be fifty thousand people driving past. Noontime on a day when the Dodgers were out of town, and the place was deserted. An ideal place for a conversation or a murder.

The roads there loop and roll around the base of the ravine, and little signs direct you toward the stadium or Elysian Park or any number of interesting places. I followed the signs past palm tree sentinels toward the ticket booth, and increased my speed enough to pull away from the Russians. Dobcek would want to stay with me, but not enough to get crazy and blow his tail. After all, he’d figure that he could always go back to my office and wait until I returned, but he would follow because for all he knew I was heading toward a safe house where I’d stashed Clark and his kids. I pressed it going up the hill to the turnoff to the ticket booth, but I didn’t turn there. I turned off the road into the grass and backed my car behind a stand of scrub oak and brush. We hadn’t had rain in weeks and the soil was hard as the pavement.

Forty seconds later the Camaro cruised past through the gate. I saw his brake lights come on, and I pulled back onto the road, and stopped in the gate, blocking their exit. Pike’s Jeep was across the road in front of them. Pike was leaning across the Jeep’s hood, pointing a twelve-gauge Beretta autoloader at them. I got out, walked up to their car, and smiled at them. “Baseball. The great American pastime.”

Dobcek’s hands were on his steering wheel. He nodded. “Nicely done.”

“Welcome to LA, boys. Now get out of the car, keeping your hands where we can see them.”

Dobcek got out first. When Dmitri Sautin climbed out, the little Camaro rocked.

I said, “Guns.”

Pike came around the Jeep, the shotgun still at his shoulder. Dobcek fingered the Glock from under his left arm and held it out. I tossed it into my Corvette. I looked at Dmitri Sautin. “Now you.”

Sautin shook his head. “No.”

Dobcek said, “Dmitri.”

Sautin said, “I think they have to take it, if they can.” He lowered his hands and grinned at Pike. Dmitri Sautin was four inches taller than Pike, and outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

Pike said, “It’s going to hurt.”

Sautin said, “Ha.”

Sautin was still grinning when Pike hit him on the side of the head with a hard fast roundhouse kick. Sautin took one step to the side and looked surprised, but he didn’t go down. Pike kicked him again, and this time Sautin staggered. His eyes filled and his lower lip quivered and he began crying. Pike said, “Gun.”

Dmitri Sautin held out the Sig. I took it and tossed it in with the Glock.

Dobcek smiled, and it was ugly and predatory. His eyes sparkled in the bright sun and stayed with Joe Pike.

I patted them down, took their wallets, and then I told them to step away from the car. They did. I went through their car and found the rental papers. They had arrived at LAX that morning. I took the keys from the ignition and found two overnight bags in the trunk. I looked through them but found nothing but clothes and toiletries. I put their bags in the Corvette, too. Dmitri Sautin wiped at his nose, and said, “But we will not have underwear.”

“A criminal’s life is an ugly one.” I looked through their wallets, didn’t learn anything new, and tossed the wallets in with the guns. I said, “Markov’s really going to be impressed when you tell him about this.”

Sautin said, “You must be stupid to think we would tell him.”

Dobcek said, “Shut up, fool.” Dobcek’s eyes never left Pike.

I said, “It’s like I told you in Seattle, I don’t know Clark Hewitt and I don’t know where he is. You guys are wasting your time.”

Dobcek said, “Da.”

“If you’re smart, you’ll go back to Seattle. If you try to tag me again, I’ll kill you.” Mr. Threat.

Dobcek made the little smile again.

Pike said, “He won’t, but I will.”

Dobcek’s smile faded.

I said, “See the little building at the bottom of the hill?”

They could see it.

“Start walking.”

Sautin started toward the ticket building, but Dobcek didn’t. Dobcek looked at Pike. “This one goes to you, but I think we see each other again, yes?”

The corner of Pike’s mouth twitched, saying here we are, saying we can take this anyplace you want, but wherever we go I will win and you will lose.

Dobcek made a small nod and followed Sautin.

We watched them for a time, and then Pike said, “You lie well. Too bad they didn’t believe you.”

“Yeah, but it’ll buy us enough time to warn Clark. I told Clark they were going to come and now they have, and he’ll have to do something. He won’t like it, but there you go.”

Pike went to his Jeep and came back with an eightinch stainless-steel hunting knife. He went around the Camaro and cut all four tires. Buy us even more time.

I said, “By the way.”

He looked at me.

“The two C-notes were counterfeit.”

Pike nodded.

“Your friend Marsha Fields kept them.”

Another nod.

“Means we’re down about five hundred now.”

Pike went back to his Jeep. “A criminal’s life is an ugly one.”

I got into my car and went to warn Clark Hewitt.