Stein,stoned s-1

by Hal Ackerman

  “You’d give Van Gogh a spray can.”

  Mattingly’s voice came over the machine in a panic. Morty Greene had called in and quit his job. This was enough proof for Mattingly that the bottles had been stolen and he was going to swear out a warrant for Morty’s arrest. Stein grabbed the receiver, shouting “Do not!” He didn’t know why he would so adamantly defend Morty Greene. It probably had something to do with Edna and that whatever Mattingly thought was right, Stein wanted to be wrong.

  Mattingly whispered into the phone. “Something new has come up.”

  “Do not swear out any warrants. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Penelope had unzipped her legging and was curled into the shape of Infinity writing rapidly down the inside of her left calf. “Stein you are so amazing. You flushed him out! How are you going to bust him?”

  “Flushed who out? What are you talking about?”

  “Morty Greene?”

  “You sure you don’t want to change his name to something more visual?”

  “Don’t condescend to me. I’m vulnerable.”

  “Then don’t jump from one random thought to another and think it’s logic.”

  She watched him resume his search for a proper hiding place.

  “Do you know if the bottles have the Espe New Millennium logo embossed on them?” Penelope asked.

  “What difference could that possibly make?”

  “I know people who were paying three dollars apiece for the old New Radiance bottles. New Millennium’s would be worth a fortune.”

  “Ah!” Stein dropped so abruptly to his knees that Penelope might have thought her insight had given him a stroke. He grasped the bottom shelf of the wall unit that housed his stereo equipment-his turntable, cassette tapes, and two hundred albums. “Give me a hand with this.”

  “I can’t believe you still have vinyl,” she giggled. “The last living owner of a turntable.”

  She grasped the sides of the unit, bent her body like a willow, and tugged mightily. The unit creaked toward her, away from the wall. Stein slithered into the space, reached down through the twistings of speaker wire and puffs of Jurassic dust motes. His hand found the mesh door of the unused air-conditioning duct. He opened the gate and reached in. His fingers rooted blindly in the space. He touched something cold and smooth and leaped back, pulling his hand out.

  “What!” Penelope screamed.

  “It felt like a termite queen.”

  “You can’t have termites in a metal air duct. Let me in there.”

  She changed places with him, pulled her long black hair back and pushed her lithe, slender body into the narrow space.

  “It’s like up and behind,” Stein guided her.

  “I have it. It’s not a termite queen.”

  Penelope withdrew a crumpled cellophane bag. Inside that was another sandwich bag, and inside that a ball of silver foil, and inside that a green, seedy, nickel bag of high-school weed.

  “Then I think we can presume your daughter knows about this hiding place,” Penelope smiled.

  “I’m gonna kill her.”

  “Like father like daughter.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  The phone rang again. Stein grabbed the receiver off the hook as if he were grabbing Mattingly’s throat. “No warrants! I will BE there!”

  “Was that school?” Penelope asked, with her deadpan smile.

  FIVE

  All the way up Sunset into Bel Air Stein carried on a ferocious inner monologue with Angie: Stein as the biblical God of Vengeance hurling bolts of lightning at the offending nickel bag. Stein as the wounded single parent who had given his daughter trust and respect and been deceived in return. She needed discipline of course, but when he trawled back through his own childhood memories for clues of how to dispense it, he came back empty. His own father had been generally tolerant of him from a safe distance, but had never waded through the waters of adolescent fury or attempted to run the gauntlet that led to the heart. Stein senior had been recalled by the cosmic manufacturer with a defective fuel pump after just forty-nine thousand miles. Maybe that was why it felt so weird to Stein, turning fifty. Outdistancing his ancestor made him feel ancient and unprotected with no one out in front blocking the wind.

  It was in this agitated frame of mind that Stein drove up the circular driveway of the bastion of smug privilege called The Academy. The white stucco archways, the rolling hillsides of well-mown lawns, the sixteen-year-old kids in their forty thousand-dollar convertibles, the nannies waiting in their employers’ Range Rovers, as though their employers ever roved a range-it was like going to a resort. “Club Ed,” Stein called it, when he and Hillary argued. He half expected to see an old Negro waiter in a red jacket and white gloves come bustling over the hillside with a rum drink on a tray.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  Angie and her two girlfriends sauntered over. Elyssa, tall, rail-thin, a dancer, and Megan, a vivacious redhead who knew every 18-year-old boy on the West Side. And Angie, her genetics still locked too tightly in the divorce wars for Stein to see her clearly. He recognized too much of himself in her sharp, protective sense of humor, in the ways she contrived not to be an outsider. He wondered if his own desperate needs were so inadequately camouflaged.

  “Get in,” Stein said, making no attempt to be cordial. He heard one of her friends say “uh-oh,” but Angie would not give him the satisfaction of hurrying. She hugged each of her friends, made plans for later, deliberately extending the moment before finally climbing into the back seat, leaving Stein to drive like a chauffeur.

  “That was rude,” she said.

  “What about sitting in the back? Is that rude?”

  She mouthed something unintelligible.

  “We’ll have plenty to talk about it when we get home. I promise you that.”

  “Whatever.”

  They drove in silence. Stein occasionally glanced into the rearview mirror to see the effects of his siege. But she had her earphones plugged in, and was no more affected by his feeble sanctions than a sand crab is by the fluctuations of light on Jupiter.

  Penelope Kim’s door flew open the moment she saw Stein and Angie walking up the courtyard. “I solved it,” she exclaimed. “Do you want to hear?”

  “Not right now, ok?” He tried not to break stride.

  “I changed the Morty Greene character to a woman. But everything else is the same.”

  “She’s a six foot nine inch woman?”

  “You are so linear. Do you want to know why the bottles get stolen?”

  “Yes, but later.”

  He fumbled to find the right key.

  “The shampoo is just incidental. It’s the bottles! This is the packaging generation. As long as people think they have Espe, that’s all that matters.”

  He got the door open and pointedly prevented Penelope from coming in. “Later, ok?”

  Angie dumped her backpack and jacket over Stein’s desk and tromped into the kitchen. “How come there’s never any food here?” she peered disdainfully into the refrigerator.

  “There’s cheese, there’s apples. I got Fujis, the kind you like. There’s bread. There’s pasta. We have to talk.”

  “I like Galas, not Fujis.”

  “Last time I got Galas; you told me you wanted Fujis.”

  “No. Last time you got Fujis.”

  “What’s the difference? They all taste good when you have the munchies.”

  Everything stopped for a moment. He had taken her by surprise. And himself even more. There was no retreating now.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked with hostile nonchalance.

  “It means I found your stash.”

  Her face went through the gamut of adolescent response. From shock through denial and outrage, to defiant attack. “That’s a real invasion of privacy. Going through my things.”

  “The air duct is not your things.”

  “It’s not even mine anyway. I’m holding it for someone.�
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  “Oh, that’s original.”

  “Believe what you want.”

  “What I want is the truth.”

  “No, what you want is some kind of parental fantasy.”

  “How’d you even get it in there? That shelf weighs a ton.”

  “You see? That proves it’s not mine. And what were you doing anyway, prowling around the-?”

  The phone rang. “Leave it,” Stein ordered. He was too late.

  “Hello? Yes, he’s right here.” She handed Stein the phone. “It’s Ma.”

  Stein held the receiver against his shirt. “We’re not through talking about this.”

  Angie took the stairs three at a time. Stein uncovered the receiver and said hello in his talking-to-Hillary voice. He was annoyed to hear Penelope Kim on the other end, and irked at Angie for tricking him. “You’re being a pain in the ass now, Penelope. I will call you when I can.”

  “I’ll let that go because I’m large of spirit and you’d regret saying something so unkind to me. I’m calling to tell you that the most beautiful woman in the world is about to knock on your door.”

  “Don’t, Penelope.”

  “I don’t mean me, but thanks.”

  A moment later Stein heard the click of approaching heels, then a brief pause followed by a tap on his door and a voice as soft as Georgia twilight speak his name. He swung the door open, on guard against whatever potential loveliness that might be waiting there to deter him from his parental task. But even Penelope’s warning did not prepare Stein for the shock to his system caused by the intimate presence of such absolute, unadorned beauty. Her eyes were green and vibrant and not afraid to meet his eyes, which fled from her gaze like a squirrel from a fire. She wore a soft white blouse open at the neck, a sixties style peasant skirt and boots. Her hair was the color of a fiery sunset. She offered her hand, which he took. Her skin had an extra dimension of life. “My name is Nicholette Bradley,” she said. “I believe you know a friend of mine.”

  Stein was in near total hypnosis. Still he managed a passable opening line. “That couldn’t be possible because if I knew a friend of yours I would know about you. And if I knew you for even ten seconds longer than I already do, I would have asked you to marry me.” He counted down without missing a beat. “Nine, eight, seven…”

  “I’m Brian Goodpasture’s friend.”

  “Ah.” The countdown aborted and he released her appendage.

  “I wonder if you’d mind making me a cup of tea.” Before he realized that meant she might want to come inside, she had stepped inside. Upstairs, Angie’s stereo amped out a Tori Amos CD, her plaintive voice tobogganing through octaves of tortured love.

  “Forgive the mess. I have a teenager.”

  Nicholette moved familiarly through the roomscape as though she had been here many times. Stein became aware of how a person who never met him would perceive the place and the person who lived in it. She found the chair in the breakfast nook where Angie had splayed her books out that morning. “Is this all right?”

  “Anywhere you’re comfortable. He bustled past her into the kitchen, there rifled through the cabinet above the counter. “I have mint, chamomile, English Breakfast, licorice.”

  “Or actually, juice would be fine if you have it.”

  “I think so.” Stein knelt at the open refrigerator door, giving Nicholette ample time to come up behind him, drape her arms languidly over his neck, press her breasts against his back, envelop him in the chrysalis of her stupendously luxuriant hair, if that had been any part of her reason for coming here.

  “Boysenberry-apple OK?”

  “That’s fine.”

  He brought the juice to the table and watched her lips engage with the glass, part slightly to allow the fortunate liquid to pass through, and followed its pilgrimage along the furrow of her tongue down through the shimmer of tiny convulsions below her chin. She put her glass down after a sip and got to her business.

  “Brian’s disappeared,” she said.

  He immediately wished that his response had been more clever than “What?”

  “He called me right after he left you this morning. We made plans to meet at noon for lunch. He never arrived.”

  “That was just a few hours ago. Why would you think he’s disappeared?”

  “He’s extremely punctual. At twelve-fifteen, when he hadn’t arrived, I called him in his car. Then at home. Then on his pager. Then at another private number. I tried them all again at ten minute intervals for an hour. I called friends who always know his whereabouts. As far as I can tell, you were the last person who saw him.”

  “Miss Bradley, I-”

  “Call me Nikki, please.” Her fingertips grazed his forearm. The feeling that went through him transcended any trivial concern about whether the act was unconscious or contrived. He would happily live forever in that state of ecstatic anticipation.

  “He’s lucky to have someone that cares so much about him,” Stein managed to say. “But I’m sure he’s fine. Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “You’re right. Nobody in the world ever died.”

  Stein carefully modulated his voice so that its amplitude would not travel upstairs. “Do you think he may have died?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Maybe you ought to go to the police.”

  “You know Brian’s business.”

  “Still. Death trumps weed.”

  “He was sure you were going to change your mind. He said if you saw a person in need you would never turn her away. Do you see a person in need here, Mister Stein?”

  All of his instincts surged forward to say yes. He could feel the tectonic grinding of his internal plates, knowing that he would have to refuse.

  “The thing is, I don’t see how I could really help. I don’t know his friends or anything about him. I wouldn’t know where to look, who to call. I don’t know what I could add.”

  “If there was something very simple, very specific you could add, would you help?” He came close to touching her hand. He touched the neck of the juice glass.

  “What would that be?”

  “Would you drive with me to his house?”

  Her request was so disarmingly small, calling only for an act of the most basic chivalry and kindness. He made a lame gesture of apology citing the sounds from upstairs. “I’m sorry. I just can’t get away.”

  She took a card from her purse, wrote some numbers on the back and handed it to him. The card was a miniature cover of Vogue magazine, with an incredibly sexy photograph of her. “I hope Brian didn’t misjudge you,” she said.

  Stein stood in his open doorway breathing in the wake of aroma that trailed behind Nicholette as she runway-strode beneath the arbor of bougainvillea out of the courtyard to the street. The feeling recalled looking up at the comet Hale-Bopp the last evening it would be visible after its month-long sojourn across the western sky, and the inexplicable ache of nostalgia he had felt knowing that he would never see its light again. Nicholette had written Goodpasture’s phone numbers on the back of the card along with her address. Stein had a strong impulse to call him. But that would have to wait until after Round Two with Angie. He climbed the stairs toward her door, which was half open. Tori Amos was still playing and an I Love Lucy rerun was on TV. Angie was sprawled out on her bed amongst books and clothes, talking on the phone.

  “I thought you were supposed to be studying.”

  “I am studying.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  “Would you mind? His gesture implied that she turn off the distractions.

  “I multi-task.”

  He waited. And ultimately she hung up, logged out, turned off.

  “Tell me about the weed.”

  “Who was that woman?

  “Nobody. A friend of a friend.”

  “Are you dating her?”

  “The weed, Angie.”

  “You should marry Lila.”

  “
Lila is a friend not a girlfriend. This conversation is about you.”

  “Of course I’ve smoked it. Who hasn’t? It’s not that big a deal.”

  “It’s not that big a deal? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “If you knew what other people at school were doing.”

  “This is not about other people.”

  “But if you knew.”

  “If I knew I’d be terrified.”

  “You’d be glad all I was doing was smoking weed.”

  “I’m not just glad I’m thrilled.”

  She made that face that said how much longer into the century do you plan for this to go on?

  “As long as we’re being honest, Angie, do you smoke regularly?”

  “As long as we’re being honest, do you?”

  “Do I?”

  She was giggling at him now. “Mom showed me some of the pictures of you in your hippie days.” She grabbed her backpack from the pile of books and clothing and CD boxes on her bed, and after rummaging about in it, found the black-and-white photo she’d been hunting for. “How could you think a beard and a pony tail looked cool?” She draped her arms over his shoulders while they commiserated over the picture.

  “Thanks for the Kodak moment. But it doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Which is?

  “Do you smoke it regularly?”

  “It makes me paranoid and hungry. I don’t like it.”

  “I wish you had a stronger reason.”

  “You mean like ‘Just say no’?”

  “If you don’t like it and you don’t smoke it, why do you have it?”

  “I told you. I’m holding it for someone.”

  “And you promise that is the absolute truth?”

  She looked at him balefully.

  “Who is it? Who are you holding it for?”

  “Right. Like I’m going to tell you.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Then this conversation has come to an end.”

  “Do you understand that possession is still a crime in this state?”

  “I’ll never let them take you alive, Daddy.”

  Walking Watson helped Stein clear his head. Watson was stronger in the afternoons. He could make it down the steps unassisted. His sausage stump of a tail had been a barometer of his personality all his life, pointing straight up as though broadcasting good news to Mars. But last year he had run out into the street and been knocked unconscious by the axle of the mail truck. Though he had recovered most of his functions, he had aged from a fifteen year-old pup to an old dog whose tail was now locked in the permanent down position like it was dousing for water. Stein had always considered Watson to be a four-legged repository of his own spirit, and seeing him so depleted weighed heavily upon him.