Indigo Slam

'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 RimWeekly 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.