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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