Robert Crais - Indigo Slam

You hope for the obvious: a sleeping bag and pillows on the couch, a suitcase, a note stuck to the fridge saying 'meet Clark at 5,' anything that might indicate an out-of-town guest, or the location of same. Nada. A case of beer cooled in the fridge and the cabinets were filled with enough booze for a booksellers' convention, but that didn't mean Brownell had company. Maybe he was just a lush. The magazines turned out to be trade catalogs for commercial printing equipment and industry magazines with dog-eared pages and supply brochures. The marked pages all noted paper and ink suppliers in Europe and Asia. Four of the catalogs still had their mailing labels, and all of the labels were addressed to Wilson Brownell. A hot topic in most of the magazines seemed to be Digital Micro-scanning Architecture for Zero Generation Loss. Whatever that meant. I guess if you're a printer, you like to read about printing.

I took a quick peek in the bath, then went to the bedroom. Clark Haines wasn't there either. A neatly made double bed sat against the wall, along with a chest and a dresser and a drafting table. I glanced into the closet. One bed, one toothbrush, one set of toiletries, one used towel, no luggage or alternative bedding. More photographs of the same woman sat upon the chest and the dresser, only some of these showed a smiling African-American man. Wilson Brownell. An in-progress drawing was tacked down onto the drafting table, pen and ink, done with very fine lines, showing an almost photographic reproduction of the Seattle skyline. Wilson Brownell might be a lush, but he was also a gifted artist and I wondered if it was he who had trained Clark. Maybe Clark had come up here for art lessons.

I went through the nightstand and the chest, and was working through the dresser when I noticed a small Kodak snapshot wedged along the bottom edge of the dresser's mirror, half hidden behind yet more photographs of the woman. It was a color shot of two couples standing on a fishing pier, one of the couples Brownell and the woman, the other a much younger Caucasian couple. The Caucasian woman had dark wavy hair, pale skin, and glasses. She looked exactly like an older, adult version of Teresa Haines. She was smiling at the camera, and holding hands with a thin guy whose hairline was already starting to recede. I took down the picture and turned it over. On the back, someone had written: Me and Edna, Clark and Rachel Hewitt, 1986. I looked at the picture again. The Caucasian woman had to be Teri's mother, and the man had to be Clark, only the name wasn't Haines, it was Hewitt.

I put the picture in my pocket, made sure everything else was like I had found it, then let myself out the window, walked around to the street, and once more climbed the stairs. The C-Span Lady's door was still open, and she was still shaking her remote at her television. Guess if I watched Congress all day I'd want to shake something, too.

I said, 'One more thing.'

Her eyes narrowed, and she muted the sound.

I held out the picture, and this time I didn't bother to smile. 'Is this one of the people who come and go?'

She looked at the picture, then she looked back at me. 'He owe you money, too?'

'Everybody owes me money. I have a generous nature.'

She held out her hand and brushed her thumb across her fingers. 'How about extendin' some'a that generosity my way?'

I gave her a crisp new twenty.

'He showed up a week ago, Thursday. Stayed a couple of days, then left. You shoulda heard all the carryin' on.'

'What do you mean?'

She made a sour face and waved the remote. 'Moanin' and cryin', moanin' and cryin'. I don't know what all was goin' on in there.' She made a little shudder, like she didn't want to know. 'I ain't seen him since.'

'Appreciate the help.'

She turned back to the C-Span and made the twenty disappear, 'Don't mention it.'

Sooner or later it always gets down to money.

New World Printing was east of the Duwamish Waterway between Georgetown and Boeing Field in a tract of older industrial buildings that were built when red bricks and ironwork were cheap. The front of the building contained a fancy glass entrance and a receptionist who would pick up her phone and tell Mr. Brownell that a Mr. Cole wanted to see him. Considering Mr. Brownell's uncooperative response when I phoned, it was likely that Brownell would (at worst) refuse to see me, or (at best) be warned of my approach and therefore prepared to stonewall. This was not good. I have found that if you can surprise people in their workplace, they are often concerned with avoiding an embarrassing scene, and you can jam them into cooperating. This is advanced detective work at its finest.

I parked at the curb and walked around to the loading dock on the side of the building where two men were wrestling a dolly stacked with about ten thousand pounds of boxed paper into a six-wheel truck. 'You guys know where I can find Wilson Brownell?'

One of the men was younger, with a thick mustache and a hoop earring and a red bandana tied over his head like a skullcap. 'Yeah.' He pointed inside. 'Down the aisle, past the desk, and through the swinging door. You'll see him.'

'Thanks.'

I followed an endless aisle past shipping flats stacked with boxes of brochures and magazines and pamphlets. I picked up two boxes and carried them with what I hoped was a purposeful expression, just another worker bee lugging paper through the hive.

A balding guy with a potbelly and tiny, mean eyes was sitting at the desk, talking to a younger guy with a prominent Adam's apple. The balding guy was thin in the arms and chest and neck, but his belly poked out beneath his belt-line as if someone had slipped a bowling ball in his pants. He squinted at me the way people do when they're trying to remember who you are, but then I was past him and through the swinging door and into a cavernous room filled with whirring, kachunking, humming machines and the men and women who operated them. A woman pushed a dolly past me and I smiled. 'Wilson Brownell?'

She pointed and I saw him across the room, standing at a large machine with two other people, one a kid in a KURT LIVES T-shirt, and the other a middle-aged guy in a suit. A large plate had been removed from the side of the machine so that they could see inside.

Wilson Brownell was in his early sixties, and taller than he looked in the pictures at his home. He was dressed in khaki slacks and a simple plaid shirt, with short hair more gray than not and black horn-rimmed glasses. Professorial. He was using a pen to point at something inside the machine. The guy in the suit was standing with his arms crossed, not liking what he heard. Brownell finally stopped pointing, and the suit walked away, still with crossed arms. Brownell said something to the younger guy, and the younger guy got down on the floor and began working his way into the machine. I walked over and said, 'Mr. Brownell?'

'Yes?' Brownell looked at me with damp, hazel eyes.

You could smell the booze on him, faint and far away. It was probably always with him.

I positioned myself with my back to the kid so that only Wilson Brownell would hear. 'My name is Elvis Cole. I've phoned you twice trying to find a man named Clark Haines.'

Brownell shook his head. 'I don't know anyone by that name.'

'How about Clark Hewitt?'

Brownell glanced at the kid, then wet his lips. 'You're not supposed to be here.' He looked past me. 'Did they let you in?'

'Come on, Mr. Brownell. I know that Clark phoned you six times from Los Angeles because I've seen his phone record. I know that he's been at your apartment.' He wasn't just stonewalling; he was scared. 'I'm not here to make trouble for you or for Clark. He walked out on his kids eleven days ago, and they need him. If he isn't coming home, someone has to deal with that.' Elvis Cole, detective for the nineties, the detective who can feel your pain.