On Location Page 5

  "Leland came to me, oh, last year, with a proposal for an investment. Yet more diversification! In Asia, you realize, you've got the man on the street thirsting for more American-style prosperity, and in lieu of that, if they can't get it because of corruption and so forth, the black markets keep them pacified with American culture, you know, bits of it, what they can afford today." She sipped her coffee, hands steady. A handsome woman, thought Rowe, with a hell of a head of hair: damn-the-torpedoes gray, and down past her shoulders, but it didn't look wild. Dramatic.

  "A hotel in Bangkok was Leland's proposal. Now Bangkok is a world city, but still it's the Wild West when it comes to regulation. This hotel, well, Silver Coast would be a silent partner—it'd be a luxury hotel to rival the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. Which already I have a hard time with because of the demographics if nothing else. I mean, moneyed people travel through Bangkok, but it's no Dubai. Why not Dubai in the first place, I ask, if we're talking hotel investment. 'Well, not all opportunities are equal,' he said, and I understood that. Those woman-stoning Arabs make me queasy anyway.

  "So he painted a pretty picture, and we flew there so I could view the site and meet the other principals. They were almost finished with the demolition, an entire city block. One of the others I already knew, he'd been a broker in exotic woods back when we were dabbling in that, so I was comfortable with him. Oh," she interrupted herself. "My report, wait a minute." She reached for her little radio and turned up the volume. They listened to a network quoting commodities prices at the close. "OK," she said, "they'll break for the local news; then they'll come back with—" She stopped, listening.

  "...the dead hiker was identified as Theodore Watkins, thirty-seven, of Tacoma. Watkins had been reported missing on October twenty-seventh when he failed to show up for work as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. According to a Quilmash County Sheriff's Department source, the body was discovered in the Harkett River gorge, on private timberland bordering the river. Deputies said it is unclear whether the death was—"

  "Oh, I hate it when people trespass on our property," remarked Mrs. de Sauvenard.

  "...are searching for a man seen in the area around the time Watkins went missing. The man is described as white, medium build, with a prominent dark mark on the left side of his face, possibly a birthmark or scar. He was last seen wearing a brown jacket. Deputies stressed that the man is not a suspect at this—"

  "How do you know it was your property?" Rowe asked.

  "Private timberland bordering the Harkett River—that's a Silver Coast holding."

  "Weren't Lance and Gina supposed to go to the Harkett area after seeing you?"

  "Oh, I suppose so. Yes, I think Lance said something about it, having to do with Kenner's movie? The Harkett wilderness is a big place. But maybe Lance'll meet up with that man with the mark on his face and hold him for the police! Ha!"

  She drummed her perfect fingernails on the fake-alabaster inset on the tabletop, back to thinking about the hotel in Bangkok. "I tell you, the deal was good, you know—if we put in twenty million and guarantee backing for another ten, we own twenty-five percent of the place. I mean, that's huge, and I had our real estate guys go over it. Everybody thumbsed it up. Every objection I made, Leland met them, one by one, like a good salesman. By the way, Leland oversees the boys' trusts, and he's proved himself to be nothing if not scrupulous. You know..." She paused, thinking. "His head is shaped like an eggplant, Leland's is. It's oblong and jowly, with this little crown of hair on top. I suppose he was bullied in school, if his head was shaped like that from the beginning. Maybe his mother had a difficult delivery."

  Rowe laughed softly. Mrs. de Sauvenard smiled at her weird thought.

  He said, "And you let him handle the deal even though you still had misgivings?"

  "Mr. Rowe, I'm not like my late husband. Big Kenner was totally data driven; he never followed a hunch in his life. And he built up this successful company! He might have foreseen the impact the environmental people were about to have on us, just from, you know, the Zeitgeist, but he didn't. No data.

  "Me, on the other hand, I look at the data, OK, you've got to keep track of your prices and so on"—she gestured at the radio—"but I have to tell you, I steer by the seat of my pants. I get a feel for something, I go for it. My gut never felt right on this one, but Leland was so persuasive, and I thought, 'Bertrice, you know, Big Kenner would go for this deal. It's diversification; the numbers look good; what's up your tail?' So I signed. That was, let's see, eight months ago."

  "And now?"

  "And now I think: Could this whole thing be a con? A big giant con with me as the mark? As of two months ago, construction supposedly began, meaning management ought to be in place, meaning the deal should have hit some international news organ by now. But it hasn't. The first three million dollars of Silver Coast money went out in April, April sixteenth, I believe. Now we're not talking hundreds of millions of dollars here. I can absorb a loss of a few million, OK? But the core issue is, if Leland has actually turned crooked, then this is either the tip of the iceberg, or he's just getting started. I can't feel safe until I know. This is shitty coffee, isn't it?"

  "Yes," Rowe agreed. "But I'm a bit of a coffee whore, myself."

  "Ha!"

  "What else aroused your suspicions?"

  "It was one thing, just one little thing. I caught him in an inconsistency: in a conversation we had in my office, he referred to the Ratchaprasong district as the one where our hotel will be, but I clearly remembered it's the Ratchathewi." The words rolled from her worldly tongue. "I pointed this out, and instead of just saying, 'Oh, right, I misspoke,' he got rattled, almost angry at me for pointing out his mistake. Very unlike him. He started to sweat; he actually stammered.

  "Now, the Ratchaprasong district, which is really part of Pathum Wan, borders the other district, Ratchathewi. And they're both in the central, upscale shopping-and-hotels part of town. But they are two different places. I don't know if Leland thought one jumble of Thai syllables is the same as another, or whether there's something else going on across the canal from this building site, or what. But when I was a girl, I traveled the world with my little suitcase—nobody carried backpacks then, except fur trappers, but I would have if they'd been in vogue—and heck, Bangkok was great! Met some wild Europeans there! And I made friends with this great gal who ran a fabric shop.

  "If, today, I were to go over there myself and start snooping around and asking questions, well, the other business partners would get nervous; it just wouldn't work. Besides, what would I do? How could I find out whether this deal is real?"

  "Sounds like you're already pretty sure it isn't."

  "Maybe I was taken to—my gosh, a phony job site."

  "It's possible."

  "Mr. Rowe, I have to have something to go on. Yes, I could simply tell Leland to back us out of this, but then what? I need to know if he's being honest. That's the key."

  "And you're not into getting one of your other lawyers, or accountants, to look into it in case there's a conspiracy?"

  "That's also why, of course, I didn't want to receive you in my home." She fingered her brow, distressed. "I hate to think ill of Leland, just hate to. You know, he took Kenner under his wing when Kenner came in to do that school project—I believe he took him out to lunch, everything. Big Kenner and I were grateful to him."

  She shook her head. "I think Big Kenner never should have given Kenner that video camera. He forgot all about business and went insane with that camera right from the start, and then we had to go and send the boys to visit their cousins in Los Angeles. When he came back, all he wanted to do was move to California and make movies. Both boys were crazy for California at that point. Eventually they found their way there, doing one thing and another. Kenner got involved with some environmental causes; he tries to keep a low profile on that with me. But I don't care what he does as long as he's happy. Now this movie bug seems to've gotten hold of him again. Bi
g Kenner could never say no to him."

  Her voice brisked up. "Enough reminiscing. So what do you think, Mr. Rowe? Am I being paranoid?"

  "It's never paranoid to double-check a major business deal."

  "Whenever you depend on people, they can develop an advantage over you."

  "I guess so." Rowe cleared his throat. "Do you pay Harris enough?"

  "Oh hell, yes, for a sub-billion-dollar private company? His base salary, let's see, it was five seventy-five last year, I believe, plus he got one-fifty as a bonus for engineering the acquisition deal with Kolko Silica. A mom-and-pop mining company in Nevada, actually turned out very well for us. So that's what, seven and a quarter, besides his expense account and all the other perks guys at that level slobber after."

  "OK. Given the distances and the variety of partners, it might take some time to thoroughly check out the hotel deal, but—"

  "You'd begin by going to Thailand, then?"

  "Let's think this through. The deal could be phony, but Harris could still be honest."

  "As in, he could've been duped, and me along with him?"

  "Yes, possibly. He could really believe in the deal, in which case he's being stupid with your money but not guilty of chicanery."

  He saw she hadn't thought of that.

  "That doesn't necessarily explain his getting flustered about the names of the neighborhoods in Bangkok," he added.

  "Well." Mrs. de Sauvenard looked cautiously relieved; then she thought some more. "Mightn't it be, also, that in the process of trying to deceive me, he's also being duped? Both possibilities true?"

  Rowe smiled. He liked dealing with smart people.

  "Well, hell." She gazed again to the window, through which filtered the mother-of-pearl light typical of an overcast day north of the forty-fifth parallel. "I suppose you and I ought to talk terms, then."

  Chapter 6 – Jurassic Nature

  Civilization kept thinning out. All Monday we drove ever deeper into the forested Northwest and the rain lashed harder as we neared the coast, and we saw storm damage—branches down, sprays of bright yellow chips across the highway where a tree had been sawn up and shoved to the shoulder.

  The radio intermittently told that the Harkett and Quilmash rivers were rising fast. Evidently this volume of rain was unusual even for here. Late Monday afternoon the announcer read a report about a fishing boat missing off the coast, and a bad highway wreck. Daniel and I exchanged grim glances.

  Needless to say, all the while in that car, at the rest stops, in the toilets, my psychic orientation was toward my cell phone, which remained distressingly inert.

  Petey was stoked to be going camping to maybe join up with Aunt Gina and Lance, rain or no rain. Having him along prevented me from dwelling aloud on my worries, a fact I'm sure Daniel appreciated.

  We were in just about the farthest reaches of the Pacific Northwest, a place and time, I realized, not all that removed from Lewis and Clark. I mean, really—granted we were driving this outlandish vehicle on a modern road, but two feet off the shoulder the wilderness pressed in with the aggressiveness of unchecked growth.

  And that was the main impression you received in these parts: growth.

  At one rest break I stood in a picnic zone beneath a maple tree whose yellow, falling, plastering leaves ranged from normal size to over a foot in diameter. A fantasy tree, a Jurassic tree. Then I looked around and realized all the trees were like this—we were surrounded by them. They loomed into the road, growing toward the greater sunlight afforded by the road clearing itself. A few other trees were interspersed. "Some of these are hemlocks," Daniel commented, fingering a spray of flat needles.

  Kicking a lump of leaf litter, my driving moccasin sank in, then uncovered the frighteningly rapid decomposition going on just below the surface of the fresh-fallen leaves. The leaves on top were dead, brown, and intact, but just below them aggressive decay was occurring. The leaves in the next layer were thinner, slicker, maroonish in color, and dotted with oily-looking gray slugs, fingernail length. Some of the leaves were whitened, skeletal. Then the next layer below that was black, squishy, wet. Finally below that was loamy stuff, where the worms and such-likes were working hard.

  "What's going on?" asked Petey, cantering up to see what was holding my attention.

  We'd kill for dirt like this in Los Angeles. The word fecundity occurred to me, not that I'd ever used it before. Was that the right word to describe this? I could take home bales of this dirt and sell it out of my trunk.

  I'd paid attention to dirt in my life, having grown up in farm country, central Wisconsin.

  "Soil in the making," I told my boy. We watched the pattering rain wash the new earth from my extended loafer.

  Living in L.A., I definitely missed the autumns of Wisconsin, the glorious crisper-drawer afternoons, the gold and red woods between farms, the stone outcroppings in the higher country, everybody's apples and squashes coming in like mad, neighbors thrusting jars of applesauce into your hands every five minutes.

  "Man, this is fall in spades," commented Daniel, who'd grown up in North Carolina, with its deciduous forests and rucked mountain ranges.

  We stayed that night in a motel about ten miles from the town of Harkett. Daniel worked to keep my spirits up; he insisted we go out to the pizzeria across the road for dinner, where Petey discovered garlic bread. He ate three huge slabs of it before I cut him off, fearing asphyxiation from the fumes in our room that night.

  ——

  It was mid-morning Tuesday when we spotted the Quilmash County Sheriff's Office on the highway just south of Harkett. Stubby gray building, five-storey radio antenna.

  I went in while Daniel and Petey played catch with a mini football on the graveled parking apron. The rain had transmuted, for the moment, to a bone-penetrating mist. SHERIFF HAROLD P. CRAIG, read the lettering on the door.

  A uniformed female deputy sat alone with the dispatch radio.

  "They're all out," she told me, chomping a wad of gum the size, I could plainly see, of Petey's fist.

  "Yeah?" I said, the vinyl flooring creaking under my weight.

  "On calls, busy."

  I had a vague auditory déjà vu; her voice reminded me of somebody I'd recently talked to, but I couldn't place it.

  This woman, whose desk plate said: DEPUTY O. GROLECH, was butchy, but not in the lesbian sense. Here again is where my country background came in handy making sense of something.

  There are rural women who just don't look or act girly—in fact, you plunk them down in some gay women's bar, they'd probably find their way to the pool table and fit right in. At least for a while.

  Such women are distinguishable from lesbians by their clothing and accessories: When given the choice between a mustard-colored sweatshirt appliquéd with a silver unicorn versus a tweed blazer, they choose the sweatshirt. Offered a rainbow wristband or a Precious Moments pendant, they choose the Precious. Also you get your high ratio of comfort-fit jeans in rural areas, as well as the hairstyle Gina and I had decided should be called the demi-mullet: fluffy in front, razored short over the ears, with more fluffy curls spilling down the neck.

  But asked whether she'd prefer to have sex with a man or with a woman, this straight rural chick would look at you like you're crazy. Is there a choice?

  These are the country women who Get Shit Done from coast to coast.

  There is, by the way, no corollary with country men. Guys who lean toward Ralph Lauren sweaters and Judy Garland records, let alone Armani slacks and Montgomery Clift movies, get the hell out.

  I explained that I needed help finding my sister.

  As Deputy Grolech listened, she slowly shook her head. She sported the demi-mullet in kitchen-sink blond, and she wore tiny cloisonné ladybug earrings. As long as I kept talking, I wouldn't have to hear what she had to say, which obviously wasn't going to be to my liking, so I kept on for a bit longer than I would have otherwise.

  "...so you see, my sister and her—fiancé, gi
ven that I know they're in the woods someplace around here, up by the river, I guess, and the fact that they've stopped being in touch...I mean, it seems pretty certain they're in some kind of trouble, and the point is, Gina, well, she's not very experienced in the woods. Lance is, I guess, but who knows if he got hurt or something and she's—"

  The deputy gave me a flat look. "You haven't said whether they're due to have physically emerged yet."

  "Yes!" I lied, ready this time, "They were supposed to be home last week! On Thursday! It's been five days now, so I'm sure you can understand why I'm so—"

  "That's a different story than you told the first deputy you talked to the other day," she remarked ominously.

  I was stunned. "How—how do you know?"

  "Because that deputy was me!"

  Christ, that's the voice hers reminded me of. All through that first phone conversation I'd thought I was talking to a guy. Hers definitely was a sump-pump voice, but seeing her in person, I didn't connect it.

  "So now you're lying to a sheriff's deputy," she said, leaning back with satisfaction, the springs in her ratty office chair agreeing with her wholeheartedly, eeahhh, eeahhhhh!

  I dropped my hands and gathered myself to begin apologizing and pleading when the door swung open and a guy in uniform walked in. Rain dripped from his hat—I glanced out the window and saw that Daniel and Petey had retreated to the Porsche—and rain splooshed off his jacket as he stripped it off.

  He was manlier than Deputy Grolech but somehow less intimidating. His pants and shoes were smeared with mud; his hands were wet and red, his eyes glassy, as if still processing a situation twenty miles back. He wore a gold six-point star on his chest and three gold stars on his shirt collar.

  "Uh, Olive," he said, before he really saw me, "I need you to call up Mike Two Thrushes and see if his backhoe's in running order and if his trailer's OK. You know, if he got the transmission fixed. He's got a Cat 420, right, with the stabilizers and—"

  "No, his is a Kubota. Got no stabilizers. Al Henning's the one who's got the Cat out that way, and he's still laid up with the burns he got trying to fix Marlene's breaker box over at—"