again he got her voice mail but the greeting was now different. It was her voice but the message was that she was taking a vacation and would not be accepting clients until mid-November.
More than a month, Pierce thought. He felt his insides constrict as he thought about what Renner had intimated and about Wentz and his goon and what they could've done to her.
He left a message regardless of what she had said in her greeting.
'Lucy, it's Henry Pierce. It's important. Call me back. I don't care what happened or what they did to you, call me. I can help you. I've got a new number now, so write it down.'
He read the number off his wrist and then hung up. He held the phone on his lap for a few moments, half expecting, half hoping she would immediately call back. She didn't. After a while he got up and left the bedroom.
In the kitchen Pierce found the empty laundry basket on the counter. He remembered he had been using it to carry grocery bags up from the car when he first encountered Wentz and Six-Eight by the elevator. He remembered dropping the laundry basket when he was pushed out of the elevator. Now the basket was here. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Everything he had been carrying up -except the eggs, which had probably broken -had been placed inside. He wondered who had done this. Nicole? The police? A neighbor he did not even know?
The question made him think of Detective Renner's statement about the Good Samaritan complex. If such a theory and complex were true, then Pierce felt sorry for all the true dogooders and volunteers out there in the world. The idea that their efforts might be viewed cynically by members of law enforcement depressed him.
Pierce remembered that he still had several bags of groceries in the trunk of his BMW.
He picked up the laundry basket and decided to go get them because he was hungry and the pretzels and sodas and other snacks he had bought were in the trunk.
Still feeling weak from the assault and surgery, he did not overload the basket once he went down to the garage. He decided on two trips and after he got back into the apartment with the second basketful he checked the phone again and learned he had missed a call. He had a message.
Pierce cursed himself for missing the call and then quickly went through the process of setting up a voice mail access code again. Soon he was listening to the message. It was from Lucy LaPorte.
'Help me? You already helped me enough, Henry. They hurt me. I'm all black and blue and nobody can see me like this. I want you to stop calling me and wanting to help me.
I'm not talking to you again after this. Stop calling here, you understand?'
The message clicked off. Pierce continued to hold the phone to his ear, his mind repeating parts of the message like a scratched old record. They hurt me. I'm all black and blue. He felt himself getting light-headed and reached out to the wall for balance. He then turned his back into the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the floor, the phone on his lap again.
He did not move for several seconds and then raised the receiver and started calling her number. Halfway through, he stopped and hung up.
'Okay,' he said out loud.
He closed his eyes. He thought about calling Janis Langwiser to tell her that he had received a message from Lucy, that at the very least she was alive. He could then ask her if she had learned anything new since their meeting at the hospital that morning.
Before he could act on the idea, the phone rang while he was still holding it. He answered immediately. He thought it might be Lucy again -who else had the new number? -and his hello was tinged with a tone of hurried desperation.
But it wasn't Lucy. It was Monica.
'I forgot to tell you, between Monday and Tuesday your friend Cody Zeller left three messages for you on your private line. I guess he really wants you to call him.'
'Thank you, Monica.'
Pierce could not call Zeller back directly. His friend accepted no direct calls. To contact him, Pierce had to call his pager and put in a return number. If Zeller was familiar with the number, he would return the call. Because Pierce had a new number that Zeller would not recognize, he added a prefix of three sevens, which was a code that let Zeller know it was a friend or associate who was attempting to contact him from an unfamiliar number.
It was a sometimes cumbersome and always annoying way to conduct life and business but Zeller was a paranoid's paranoid and Pierce had to play it his way.
He settled in to wait for the callback but his page was promptly returned. Unusual for Zeller.
'Jesus, man, when are you going to get a cell phone? I've been trying to reach you for three days.'
'I don't like cell phones. What's up?'
'You can get them with a scramble chip, you know.'
'I know. What's up?'
'What's up is that on Saturday you sure wanted this stuff in a goddamn hurry. Then you don't call me back for three days. I was starting to think you -'
'Code, I've been in the hospital. I just got out.'
'The hospital?'
'I had a little trouble with some guys.'
'Not guys from Entrepreneurial Concepts?'
'I don't know. Did you find out about them?'
'Full scan as requested. These are bad dudes you're dancing with, Hank.'
'I'm getting that idea. You want to tell me about them now?'
'Actually, I'm in the middle of something right now and don't like doing this by phone anyway. But I did drop it all in a FedEx yesterday -when I didn't hear from you.
Should've gotten there by this morning. You didn't get it?'
Pierce checked his watch. It was two o'clock. The FedEx run came at about ten every morning. He didn't like the idea of the envelope from Zeller sitting on his desk all this time.
'I haven't been to the office. But I'll go get it now. You have anything else for me?'
'Can't think of anything that's not in the package.'
'Okay, man. I'll call you after I look at everything. Meantime, let me ask you something.
I need to track somebody to a location, an address, and all I have is her name and her cell number. But the bill for the cell doesn't go to where she lives and that's what I want.'
'Then it's worthless.'
'Anything else I can do?'
'That's a tough one but it can be done. Is she registered to vote?'
'I kind of doubt it.'
'Well, there are utility hookups and credit cards. How common's her name?'
'Lucy LaPorte of Louisiana.'
Pierce reminded himself that she had told him to stop calling her. She hadn't said anything about not finding her.
'Got that alliteration thing going, huh?' Zeller said. 'Well, I can try some things, see what pops.'
'Thanks, Code.'
'And I suppose you want it yesterday.'
'That's right.'
'Of course.'
'I gotta go.'
Pierce went into the kitchen and looked through the bags he had dumped on the counter for the bread and peanut butter. He quickly made a sandwich and left the apartment, being sure to put on the Moles hat and pull the brim down low on his forehead. He ate the sandwich while waiting for the elevator. The bread tasted stale. It had been in the car trunk since Sunday.
On the ride down to the garage the elevator stopped on six and a woman got on. As was the custom with elevator riders, she avoided looking at Pierce. After they started descending she surreptitiously checked out his reflection in the polished chrome trim on the door. Pierce saw her do a frightened double take.
