Indigo Slam: An Elvis Cole Novel Read Free Page A

back at me. “Mr. Cole, my name is Teresa Haines. This is my brother, Charles, and our sister, Winona. Our father has been missing for eleven days, and we’d like you to find him.”
    I stared at her. I thought it might be a joke, but she didn’t look as if she was joking. I looked at the boy, and then at the younger girl, but they didn’t appear to be joking either. The boy was watching me from the corner of his eye, and there was a kind of expectancy under the attitude. Winona was all big saucer eyes and unabashed hope. No, they weren’t kidding. I went behind my desk, then thought better of it and came around to sit in one of the leather director’s chairs opposite the couch. Mr. Informal. Mr. Unthreatening. “How old are you, Ms. Haines?”
    “I’m fifteen, but I’ll be sixteen in two months. Charles is twelve, and Winona is nine. Our father travels often, so we’re used to being on our own, but he’s never been gone this long before, and we’re concerned.”
    Charles made the coughing sound again, and this time he said, “Prick.” Only this time he wasn’t talking about me.
    I nodded. “What does your father do?”
    “He’s in the printing business.”
    “Unh-hunh. And where’s your mother?”
    “She died five and a half years ago in an automobile accident.”
    Charles said, “A friggin’ drunk driver.” He was scowling at the picture of Lucy Chenier on my file cabinet, and he didn’t bother to look over at me when he said it. He drifted from Lucy back to the desk, and now he was sniffing around the Mickey Mouse phone.
    I said, “So your father’s been gone for eleven days, he hasn’t called, and you don’t know when he’s coming back.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Do you know where he went?”
    Charles smirked. “If we knew that, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”
    I looked at him, but this time I didn’t say anything. “Tell me, Ms. Haines. How did you happen to choose me?”
    “You worked on the Teddy Martin murder.” Theodore Martin was a rich man who had murdered his wife. I was hired by his defense attorneys to work on his behalf, but it hadn’t gone quite the way Teddy had hoped. I’d been on local television and in the
Times
because of it. “I looked up the newspapers in the library and read about you, and then I found your ad in the Yellow Pages.”
    “Resourceful.” My friend Patty Bell was a licensed social worker with the county. I was thinking that I could call her.
    Teri Haines took a plain legal envelope from her back pocket and showed it to me. “I wrote down his birth date and a description and some things like that.” She put it on the coffee table between us. “Will you find him for us?”
    I looked at the envelope, but did not touch it. It was two-fifteen on a weekday afternoon, but these kids weren’t in school. Maybe I would call a lieutenant I know with the LAPD Juvenile Division. Maybe he would know what to do.
    Teresa Haines leaned toward me and suddenly looked thirty years old. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that we’re just kids, but we have the money to pay you.” She pulled a cheap red wallet from her front pocket, then fanned a deck of twenties and fifties and hundreds that was thick enough to stop a 9mm Para-bellum. There had to be two thousand dollars. Maybe three. “You see? All you have to do is name your price.”
    Charles said, “Jeezis Christ, Teri, don’t tell’m that! He’ll clean us out!” Charles had moved from the Mickey phone and now he was fingering the Jiminys again. Maybe I could handcuff him to the couch.
    Teri was looking at me. “Well?”
    “Where’d you get the money?”
    Her right eye flickered, but she did not look away. “Daddy leaves it for us. It’s what we live on.”
    Teresa Haines’s hair hung loosely below her shoulders and appeared clean and well kept. Her face was heart-shaped, and a couple of pimples had sprouted on her chin, but she didn’t seem self-conscious about them. She