Chapter One

Richard Garcia had arranged to meet the old guy Monday morning at nine in the Volunteer Park Conservatory orchid room. On the phone, the man identified himself as Charles Colt II. He said that he needed a journalist who knew how to investigate discreetly. He said he had a story that would agitate some people. The voice was old; weary and shaky.

Garcia did some checking. He recognized the name, of course. Who in Seattle didn't? Colt Industries has the same cachet as Boeing or Microsoft. Big money, really big money. Colt Industries has its fingers in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, transportation, real estate, and God knows what else. The Colt Foundation donates mega-sums to the theatre, symphony, education, and sports. Colt, himself, made the headlines recently when he was dumped as CEO and then got kicked off every board he sat on, including the ones that didn't pay.

"How do I know you're not some crank?" Garcia had asked.

"Meet me. Bring a photo if you need it."

A photo wouldn't be needed. Everybody knows what Colt looks like. Some faces are like that.

It was raining that morning, something it does a lot of in Seattle, especially in November, but not as much as outsiders think. He parked in the asphalt lot between two pot holes, either of which could have swallowed a VW bug. Garcia's feet crunched on gravel as he walked up the path to the glass house, a miniature Kew Gardens.

A cardboard "Welcome" sign was masking taped to the front door of the greenhouse. Like the walls, the door was made of thick 18" square glass embedded with lead into a metal frame. Even in the muted Seattle light Garcia could see the purple and blue hues that old glass picks up after 100 years. He turned left, passed through another door, and entered a different world.

Inside the orchid room, Garcia got the same claustrophobic feeling he always experienced in small damp places. Add some athlete's foot and it could double as a locker room. The tropical plants were creepy. He never liked orchids. They're too purple or pink, too bizarre in shape, and their texture puts them straight out of a wax museum. The damn things grew close together, thick and sticky like Rio Grande mud. The large shrubby plants were potted in humongous clay containers with slender variations on the orchid theme being stuck into 1 quart-sized pots. Their blossoms leaned over the aisles forming a broken canopy. Epiphytic varieties dangled from little moss-filled wicker baskets suspended from the ceiling. Outside it was Seattle but in here it was Southeast Asia, Brazil, and Borneo.

Garcia tried to pierce the curtain of Madame Trousseau's wax museum. Somewhere in here should be Charles Colt, currently promoted within social circles as occupying the king's roost next to the other birds in the looney bin. But Colt sounded lucid enough on the phone yesterday and, Garcia reasoned, there might be a story in this somewhere. A guy with a suitcase full of money and influence doesn't get booted out of his own corporation so ingloriously unless he's done something really bad. As a journalist, Garcia felt it was his duty to meet the old man and look into his story. His editor at the Seattle Reporter agreed.

"Richard Garcia," a voice announced from behind. "You don't look Mexican." Garcia turned to the voice that sounded like a mother scolding a young child caught in a lie. He looked into the withered features of a plum left too long in the sun. The shriveled fruit was dressed, head to toe, in a khaki gardeners outfit. Somewhere within all the wrinkles must be a mouth and eyes, Garcia figured, but all that was immediately obvious was a slender nose and some stringy hair combed to cover a bald spot that extended from one ear to the next.

Garcia ran his hand over his own bald head as if to squeegee off some of Seattle's liquid sunshine and pretended to consider the comment. He heard it almost as often as a fellow with a broken leg hears, "Have a nice trip?"

"My family emigrated to the pueblo of Los Angeles, from Spain, in 1802, and in true aristocratic style never interbred with any of the natives," Garcia explained, in the manner of a professor who has taught the same course for too many years. "That is, no ancestor ever recognized any bastard children," he continued. "We men maintained our pedigree, name, fair skin, and chrome domes into my generation." He paused. "Why? Does it matter?"

"All I care about is if you know how to investigate."

"Ah, so," Garcia said, trying on his best "Mr. Moto," and sounding more like a caricature than Peter Lorre. "Appearances can be deceiving." He slipped back into his own manner of speaking, part smart-ass and part professor. He came by the former from years of experience in the latter: Richard Garcia, Ph.D., Professor of English, Los Angeles University. "For example," he waved in the general direction of the old man, "you don't dress like a man worth millions but my guess is you're Charles Colt."

The old man grinned. A throaty chuckle that began in the depths of a pinched chest worked its way into life. Colt cocked his head back as if to crow and let his eyes travel to the top of his cranium, revealing nothing but the pasty whiteness of an old man's sclera. He slapped the side of his dirty khaki pants and a cloud of dust arose. It carried the definite odor of steer manure.

Garcia looked around the room, embarrassed by Colt's curious display. The man was as crazy as the rumors made him out to be.

Suddenly, Colt's voice was canny. "My grandkids love to race around in sports cars but I still drive a '66 Buick. When they ask me why, I tell 'em, 'My Grandpa ain't no millionaire.'" Lucidity returned with the comment and settled for a moment.

"My family indulges my eccentricities because they expect to inherit a lot of money some day." Colt's voice had a definite squeak to it, as if the opening between his lungs and his mouth needed boring out. "And," he shrugged, "the Parks Department allows me to help maintain their collection of little lovelies." He smiled beatifically. "Friendship pays dividends."

"That's nice," Garcia replied, non-committal.

"I've seen your articles in the Seattle Reporter. Quite good." Colt turned from the conversation, picked up a garden trowel and began to putter in the dirt around a particularly loathsome-looking collection of blooms. Arising from a tiny tuft of leaves in a clay pot, some two dozen spider-like stems, each clustered with tiny pinkish flowers, stretched out into the room. "I liked what you did with those militia groups last year. Investigative reporting pays well, does it?"

"Only if you don't like to eat."

Colt hummed a little tune to himself, absorbed in his shovel and dirt. Garcia stared at the man and caught Colt glancing at him from the corner of those eyes buried in the shriveled flesh. "Still, you must be good at finding things." When Garcia didn't reply, Colt turned abruptly and stopped playing around. His back straightened and any trace of freakish behavior evaporated. Suddenly he was Charles Llewellyn Colt II, President and CEO of several Pacific Northwest manufacturing companies, President of the board of trustees for the Seattle Symphony, member of the President of the United States National Task Force on Health Care Reform, and God knows what else.

"You've heard of Dendrobium, have you?"

With a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders and an indifferent look around the room, Garcia said, "An orchid I assume." With another shrug of his shoulders he stepped out of his rain parka and let it drop to the floor. That felt much better, cooler. Garcia could still feel the heat working its way into his bones. Condensed water vapor ran down in streams across the orchid room glass panes. The water dripped audibly like a faucet badly in need of repair.

"Very good, Mr. Garcia. Very good." Business-like, Colt continued, lecturing him like the student he wasn't. "Orchids were made for kings. In 1893, Frederick Boyle wrote in his book, About Orchids, 'The plant was expressly designed to comfort the elect of human beings in this age.' Individual species, spirited from their native tropical habitats were cultivated under glass throughout Europe during that time, some commanding the astronomical price of £1000! Each! Do you know what that is in today's currency?"

Garcia said he didn't.

"Nine-tee-five hun-dred dol-lars." Colt enunciated each syllable. "For a single plant, mind you. These are not pansies for sale, three for a dollar, in some supermarket parking lot that I'm talking about."

Garcia gave the expected whistle of amazement. As a writer, he had learned early that an interview went smoother if he paid attention to being properly impressed at the proper time. Besides, Colt had become more interesting ever since he dropped his idiosyncratic affectations. Garcia removed a scrap of paper from his jacket pocket and prepared to take notes.

"One particular specimen, Dendrobium schroederi, was sold at a London auction house and the place was packed. Do you want to know why? I'll tell you why." The developing intensity in Colt's voice carried intrigue. "There was a condition for the sale," he said breathlessly. "In order to mollify the native people from whom the plant collector bought the plant, it had to be sold in its original container: a human skull!" Colt's face had lost its dried fruit appearance. The exhilaration of his story shed years from the man. "Can you imagine such a thing today?" he demanded. "Bah!" he shouted with disgust. "Can't sit on the pot without upsetting someone and hearing from their lawyer."

Colt returned obsequiously to the orchids and aged back into his face. A drop of sweat fell from Garcia's nose onto the blank paper in his hand. The heat had penetrated his body, oozing through his pores and into his muscles and joints, eating into his organs. Garcia began to understand life in an oven, an hour before turkey dinner on Christmas. He became aware of being soaked with sweat. No wonder they call them "hothouses." Garcia waited a respectful amount of time, waited for Colt to continue, and would still be waiting, if he hadn't said something.

"You called me at the Reporter and requested I meet you here. That you had a story. Is that it? I could, maybe, fit it into an ITEMS page..." and his voice trailed off. Now that he was here, he couldn't see any reason for being here. Pursuing leads is like that; what seems intriguing or newsworthy on the surface evaporates like water in a desert playa when you actually meet the source. Colt was serving to further Garcia's impression that the rich have inane ideas of what belongs in print. Especially the filthy crazy rich.

Since finishing his story, Colt had ignored Garcia and continued with his orchid housekeeping. Abruptly, he began again. "I made a lot of money when I was young," he squeaked. "After two wives and three children, I first fell in love during the last war. The OSS had me stationed in England and I walked into the Kew Gardens and saw these." For a moment his arm swept the room to include all the hideous blooms in sight. "More lovely, and," his voice dropped into a deep conspiratorial whisper, "more responsive, than any woman I've ever known." He sighed. "Odontoglossums, Peristerias, Cattleyas, and others.

"One, Dendrobium bonitum, was more lovely than all the rest. An epiphyte growing, but gaining no sustenance, on tropical trees." He sighed again as if someone had died. "When I first met her, she was in decline. Only four known specimens in all the world's greenhouses. I devoted a fortune to saving her but she only weakened further, never responding to treatment. One by one, like the stars at dawn, they disappeared. They didn't seem to have any interest in surviving.

"So, I financed an expedition to Malaysia to collect more. Even went myself. But by then, no one could remember where the original plants had been found. Oh, some collectors said it was in the Putticymbrad Valley, so we looked there. The records at Kew said something about the first plants being brought in by John Mauldaur and that he collected in the highlands of Renanthera. So, we went there too.

"For two years I looked on the trunk of every tree in Malaysia for that little lovely. Finally, I found her. For nearly 50 years she grew in her own private home on my estate. Oh! But how I lavished attention on her. No one could see her, feel her, taste her, without my permission." Colt pouted like a little boy. The pouting quickly turned to anger. "But last year someone took her and I thought she was gone forever. That is, until several months ago. I saw a photograph, in Time Magazine of all places, of the State dinner Bill Clinton gave during the United Pacific Nations Conference talks right here in Seattle. A woman in the picture had on a corsage." Again he sighed, like someone had died. "It was her."

Colt turned to Garcia with tears in his eyes. "Do you know what it's like to lose a lover, believe she is lost to you forever, and then see her again?"

Colt paid no mind to Garcia's mumbled reply. Instead, Colt handed him a tear sheet from Time, enclosed in a sealed plastic sleeve. "I've had someone looking into the theft, but his hands are tied by a conflict of interest." Someone had boldly written "February 14th" on a self-adhesive label attached to the sleeve. In one photo, the President of the United States was prominently displayed standing head and shoulders above several distinguished Asian gentlemen. In another, an attractive Caucasian woman, breasts pushing out the material of a form-fitting, floor-length, black gown, stood beside one of the same Asians, a man of about 60 or so, identified as a government official for the country of Singapore. The woman's auburn hair was tied back tightly giving her face a very severe look and accentuating a long, angular nose. A cluster of heavy flowers rested high up her chest. Even in the small photograph it was easy to see the corsage was made of two blood-red orchids, each with a yellow starburst radiating from the center.

From their body language, Garcia could tell the woman knew the man intimately. From his old days of writing about smut for a Los Angeles weekly, he would have said the couple knew each other biblically, and marveled at what gets past the editors at Time. You don't expect to see photos of call girls standing next to diplomats in a national magazine.

"Find her," Colt said. The urgency in his voice was frightening.

"I'm a journalist, Mr. Colt, not a detective. I write magazine and newspaper stories. Give me one good reason that I should be interested in your little orchid."

Colt's coyness returned long enough for him to answer, "You like a good story, don't you?"

"Who doesn't?"

"I told you; I've read your work." Colt smirked. "Not great, but we don't expect literature from our journalists." Colt paused to let the insult sink in. "You try to hide it, but you have a political agenda in all your stories. You might find something in Dendrobium that fits your bent." He gave an overextended shrug and added, "Or not."

He resented Colt's insult. That and exasperation made Garcia blurt out, "Missing plants are not my thing. Besides, you can pay a pro to find this, this..." and he waved his hand vaguely in the air.

Colt lost his composure and fell to his knees before an epiphyte-crowded barber pole. "I need her," he blubbered and sobs racked his frame.

Garcia stood there like all people do when confronted by adult tears. With children, you embrace them and tell them everything will be O.K. Grown ups know better. "Get up off the ground. I'll see what I can do," he said to turn off the faucet of tears. As the words issued from his mouth Garcia wanted to kick himself. His biggest fault, he knew, was taking on jobs that could be better done by someone who knew what they were doing. His wife, Sarah, thought it was cute, how Garcia liked to help people in need, but she had only dealt with the fallout from three years. And besides, Sarah liked to call herself "terminally helpful." After all, she did run a homeless shelter.

Colt slowly lifted himself upright. The tears had made tracks through the dust on his face, further accentuating the downward fissures. He grabbed Garcia's hand and pumped it, full of gratitude.

"Did your investigators turn up anything specific on the flower?" Garcia asked.

"No," Colt replied, acting the old codger again.

"And I suppose your contacts couldn't find out anything about the woman?" Garcia tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

Colt briefly held back his answer. "The dignitary she's photographed with only knew her passingly."

"An understatement, I'm sure. And the orchid? I don't suppose he gave it to her?" Colt shook his head. "I didn't think so.

"They say they have leads," Colt offered.

"They always do."

"But you think the only lead they have is to my money?" He was back to being obsequious. Garcia couldn't figure the old geezer out. One moment he was lucid and the next he acted like a child. Was Colt crazy like the pipeline said, or eccentric like he claimed? Would an eccentric person know they were that way?

Garcia took the magazine page and Colt's private phone number along with information about Ferguson Investigations, the company Colt had hired.

"If you find her," he said, as Garcia left the tropics to re-enter the real world, "I can assure you of a tidy reward."

"I'll be happy if I get a story out of it," Garcia replied.

"There's one last thing you should know." The hesitancy in Colt's warning sounded phoney. It carried that same tonal quality found in used car salesmen who want you to sign on the dotted line before the bumper falls off the car.

"Yeah?"

"My partner. He's someone to avoid, if you know what's good for you."

This veiled warning actually sounded real and Garcia turned up the volume on his internal alert system. "Yeah?" he said with genuine interest. "And what's his name?"

Back to being coy, Colt maddeningly replied, "You'll find out soon enough. You don't want me to make this too easy for you right away, do you? After all, you must investigate to appreciate the complete story."

Not wanting to hear anymore, Garcia charged out of the greenhouse.

"Don't slam the door," he heard behind him. "It's glass."

As he had told Colt, investigative reporting doesn't even begin to pay the bills. A professional writer's time is worth at least $30 an hour but they're lucky to get 10% of that after research and field time is factored in. What makes that kind of salary bearable is the chance you might stumble across something interesting. Look at Woodward and Bernstein. Colt knew the facts and he was good at pushing Garcia's buttons. Colt knew how to dangle an interesting story in the same way he could lead a board of directors down some primrose path.

Fortunately for Garcia, he had a wife who worked for a living and was willing to indulge his excesses as long as he helped take care of Sally, their six month-old daughter, and lent a hand at the Mission where they were always short handed. Sarah inherited the Good Shepard from her first husband. Shep was a punster and named the place by inverting his name. That's where they lived, helping the homeless in downtown Seattle by providing shelter and three, almost square, meals a day. After moving in from Los Angeles, Garcia had fixed up an apartment for Sarah and himself on the top floor, bought a computer, and landed a job for the Seattle Reporter. For these three years he had done well, even if it couldn't be measured monetarily.

Between the beat cops that Sarah knew through her business, and the boys downtown that Garcia had met, he was pretty well connected with politics, the law and order establishment, and everybody's dirty laundry. Finding the woman in the photo shouldn't be too difficult, given her profession. He didn't understand why Colt's investigator hadn't done so already. Looking into Colt's business would be different, especially if he was to stay away from the partner.

On his way home Garcia stopped in at the University of Washington. He parked under the expansive brick courtyard the students call "Red Square" and took the world's second slowest elevator to the Suzzello Library lobby. He plopped down in front of the computerized card catalog, tapped in "Dendrobium plant exploration," punched the "search" button and had the machine print out the short bibliography that flashed across the screen. He had the system give him everything it had on Charles Llewellyn Colt II and his family. Surprisingly, that amounted to one magazine profile, a few years old, in the New Yorker. Given Colt's background, it should have been more. Then he called home, left a message on the answering machine telling Sarah he loved her, and plunged into the stacks.

As a former University Professor of American Literature, this part of a job was always his favorite. Opening up a new subject for research gave Garcia the same pleasure that popping a fresh can of suds has for football fans. Despite Garcia's feelings for the waxy genus of tropical plants, Colt told an intriguing story about the orchid. So, he spent the remaining rainy morning hours reading about the orchid family and plant collectors.

Garcia zeroed in on what little he could dig up on the man who had introduced Dendrobium bonitum into cultivation. In a brief entry in, History of the Plant Collectors, Garcia discovered that the final accomplishment of plant explorer John Mauldaur's life came in late 1887 when he brought Dendrobium bonitum to Kew Botanical Gardens. An Englishman, he demonstrated the attitude of Victorian times, displaying the mixture of chauvinism and arrogance that we associate with those stiff upper lip days. It stood him in good stead until the spring of 1888, in some piece of jungle, where his apparent effrontery to the natives cost Mauldaur his life.

Reading further, Garcia found that plant collecting in those days was not for the faint of heart. For the promise of introducing a new plant to cultivation, these ardent horticulturalists earned very little and suffered greatly. A cheerful indifference to discomfort was a prerequisite of the job. Plant hunters could expect extremes of heat and cold, hunger and thirst, tropical fevers, shipwreck, diseases, and as Mauldaur discovered, sudden death. That they cheerfully wandered off to unexplored regions of the globe before Thomas Cook, American Express, and guaranteed reservations at four star hotels, all the while dressed in tweeds and carrying nothing for protection except attitude, made a positive impression on Richard Garcia. The orchid mystery began to take on a life of its own.

The plants the collectors shipped back to their botanical patrons fairly swam in blood, sweat, and tears. Once they reached their new homes though, it took a group of equally dedicated people to grow tropical plants in such cold, damp, places as England. The survival of any transplant thus represented the hard work and sacrifice of many people. Knowing this, and for beauty so transient as that of a flower, Garcia could easily understand the rapture felt by flower lovers such as Colt.

But Garcia couldn't help being cynical and he wondered what deeper motivation drove Colt and his quest.

On the reference shelf, an old copy of Who's Who in the Pacific Northwest gave him the basics on Colt's family and the fluff piece in the New Yorker filled in the blanks covering his professional life. Born February 12, 1914. Father, Charles Llewellyn Colt, mother, Margaret Douglas: both long deceased. Self-made millionaire in pharmaceuticals, 1939. Enlisted in U.S. Army December 8, 1941; quick to make up his mind when the country's in trouble. Captain, later Major, in Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 1941-47, Pacific Theater. Active in World Health Organization, promoted exploration of Malay Peninsula, Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded 1974, head of several multinational corporations; listed. Member, volunteer, of numerous organizations; listed. Orchid grower. Married twice, former Jean Brand, 1934: divorced 1935; former Rachel Lindsey, 1938: deceased 1947. Three children by Rachel, two deceased, drug overdose. Four grandchildren from Joseph Colt and wife Denice Brower: Charles Llewellyn III, born 1961, died 1979: drug overdose; Burton Waldo Colt, born 1962; Elizabeth Ann Colt, born 1964; Karen Colt, born 1966; all unmarried.

What piqued interest in Garcia was the number of drug overdoses in a family founded on pharmaceuticals. What were they doing, taking home free samples? And why would they choose to advertise their transgressions in Who's Who?

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