by Hal Ackerman
He rummaged for something to write on. He found scraps of paper in his pocket. He breathed in the last remnants of Nicholette’s scent. It was practically gone now, and even though he knew that it was not purely Nicholette, he felt the loss of something irreplaceable. Nicholette’s card was still in his breast pocket. The scent had faded from there, too. But he vividly recalled Michael Esposito plucking that card from his pocket, certain that it had been Paul Vane’s. He heard his whiney voice in his mind: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
That moment had been so weird and Halloweeny that Stein had jettisoned it overboard. But now he hoisted it back in, dried it off and looked at it more carefully. Stein understood now why “Miss Espe” had been so certain the card had been Vane’s. It carried the scent that he would have known so well, his New Millennium shampoo. It would have confirmed his suspicion that Vane was concocting a rip-off batch of his own.
But! Uh oh. A mental light bulb way down at the far end of a tunnel snapped on. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. When Esposito saw that the card was Nicholette’s, it had shocked him. It had not registered to Stein at the time that it happened, but now in the backlight of Nicholette’s death, that strong reaction was significant. He would have known that there was no reason for Nicholette to have the scent of his new shampoo upon her. She was no longer the Espe girl and would have no access to it.
Stein put himself into the dark corkscrew mind of Michael Es-posito. He would have come to the irrefutable conclusion that Nicholette had formed an alliance with his former lover/mentor, Paul Vane. Vane and Nicholette were linked by what they had lost. She had lost her identity as the Espe girl and possibly lost Goodpasture. Vane had lost the product he had created and his protege-lover.
Stein’s other inner voice elbowed his way through the waves of verbiage and met the errant train of thought head-on: All of this is marginally interesting but it has nothing to do with Nicholette’s being killed.
There was a moment of empty air. Then. His other internal voice answered. What about the extortion notes? “Blow the lid off.” “Fall of the house of Espe.” Somebody was threatening to bring Espe down.
That’s all been settled. Morty Green and his partner dude and Paul Vane and David Hart…
Let’s just go slow here. Maybe there’s something we didn’t notice. We know that only three people knew that the original Espe box had been re-shot after David Hart screwed up the negatives. David, because he shot it. Alex because she was in it. Paul Vane, because he made the hairpiece, the fall, out of Alex’s hair that he had just shaved to the skull. Mattingly never knew. Of course he never knows anything except for how many squares of toilet paper are missing. Who else? Even Ray Ramos, the photographer who had shot the layout, didn’t know.
Who cares about the fucking shampoo?
We may have a priests/monkeys thing here. We made the wrong picture out of the fragments. We thought she died for smoke. But maybe it was lather.
What are you saying?
Listen, Espe and Mattingly are getting extortion notes. They figure it’s from Paul Vane. We go there. Confront him. He’s cool about confiding that he’s making the product for his regular clients. We find all the missing bottles. Turns out he’s making a little bit more than he let on. Ok, maybe a lot more. He and his new partner have their own private little distribution company going on. David Hart wants to be taken care of “in perpetuity.” But you saw Vane’s reaction to the extortion notes. He knew nothing about them. This was David’s side deal off the side deal. Why stop at one little golden egg when you get the whole goose?
You just want it to be Paul Vane.
His voices were getting quite roiled at each other.
You won’t let it be Paul Vane and it’s making you blind. Here’s the scenario: Michael Esposito finds Nikki’s card in our shirt pocket. He sees that she is Vane’s ally. He goes to her place to confront her. He’s known her for years, so she’d certainly let him in with no struggle. He wants her to confess to the notes. She refuses. Maybe she wrote them, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she got the shampoo from Paul Vane, maybe she got it from her friend Alex. But “Miss Espe” drowns her before he finds out.
No! It’s about the weed. Look at the note pad from her night table. Something about a “lid of.”
What if it’s “lid off ”? Blow the lid off!
Oh, fuck! Oh Shit. You might be right.
This is what I’m saying.
All right, but. Wait a minute.
Stein’s heart raced. Trouble breathing. “Moonlight Sonata.”
Espe couldn’t have killed her alone. He had to have help.
Mattingly?
Mattingly would never be that daring. Think. Who would do anything in the world for him? Who is more vulnerable but a discarded lover who sees the last person put on this earth who might ever love him leaving his solar system forever.
Not Paul Vane.
Yes, Paul Vane.
No. Why was her place ransacked? They were looking for something.
Or maybe planting something they wanted to be sure was found. Like the fall. The fall of the house of Espe.
We could have prevented it.
It’s worse than that. Her card in our shirt pocket put them on her trail. We killed her. We killed the thing we loved.
Stein threw his head back against the mattress in despair. The trouble with searching for the truth is that we sometimes find it. We’re hoping for priests, and get monkeys. He pictured a beach with smooth wet sand and wrote in it with a pointed stick the solution to the murder.
The one force that had been sustaining him was now abruptly gone. Sleep beckoned him to escape once again, caressed his eyelids, massaged his forehead. And as there was nothing left to discover, he yielded without struggle. Ocean waves rolled over the shore. Now the waves filled in the crevasses, smoothed away every indentation, left the surface shiny and with no hint anyone had ever walked there. He should’ve written it down.
Hours later there was a soft knock on the door and a voice spoke his name. When there was no response, a passkey was inserted into the lock. The door opened slowly. A figure advanced furtively toward the bed where Stein lay. A hand reached down and grasped the phone cord leading to the receiver under the pillow beneath Stein’s head.
“Mr. Stein,” the voice uttered.
Stein awoke with a start. A man in hotel livery was standing above him telling him they had gotten the plane flight he requested. That they had been calling all morning to tell him but his receiver was off the hook.
Object by object, Stein began to reorient himself. He saw the bong with the residue of weed on the nightstand, the sofa rearranged, the lamp wire pulled apart. He remembered now that he had gotten high. He had the impression that he had entertained some interesting thoughts. Something about the nature of God… Something about who might have killed Nicholette… But if someone had asked him what any of those thoughts were, he could not have remembered if his life depended on it.
SIXTEEN
From his window seat at three thousand feet Stein watched the speedboats cut tic-tac-toe figures across the Santa Monica Bay. Trim and tanned men and women played beach volleyball, rode bicycles, roller bladed, all with a perverse joy and myopic disregard for the world outside of this Wizard Ozian bubble of make believe. Winter was not supposed to be this easy. Its Darwinian purpose was to weed out the infirm, kill the weak, cull the herd. But the winters in Los Angeles were like a joke. Four drops of rain, or even the threat of rain, was enough to dispatch breathless teams of “ Storm Watch ” TV news crews to street corners if there had been rumors of some wind.
In nature, if a wild pig gets eaten by a crocodile while trying to cross the Orinoco, he doesn’t get the yams on the other side. In L.A. everything survived. There were too many crosswalks. It softened resolve, forgave indolence, rewarded mediocrity, created the need to explain Natural Selection by false exaggeration. Stein had always favored New York street rules, the continuation rule appl
ied and taxi drivers trying to knock down a pedestrian were allowed to pursue him up to the third floor.
And yet. Stein could not quash the feeling that he was glad- maybe ‘glad’ was too strong a word-but certainly not displeased, to be home. Home. That was the weird word. For all these twenty years he always thought of himself as just happening to be here, not living here. The thought made him cringe that he was becoming one of them, an Angeleno.
The Stewardess reminded him with a bored smile to bring his seatback to its upright position in preparation for landing. He mirrored her smile with just enough exaggeration to make it ironic, which she either ignored or didn’t get. Or maybe did get and thought he was a prick but didn’t give enough of a crap about to bother telling him. The bottom line was that he was coming home a failure. Not even a failure. Worse. A minor success, the equivalent of winning Miss Iowa High Fructose Corn Syrup Second Runner-up.
Before he had boarded the retirn flight from Amstgerdam he had swooped down like an angry pterodactyl upon Crewcut and Yosemite Sam, accusing and exposing the two frauds for what they were. How theatrically he demonstrated with all his old eloquence and panache the congruence between the weed they were alleging to be theirs and the sample of the stolen crop of Goodpasture’s Orchids, and exposed their crooked business plan to commercialize their success, by selling the seeds they would derive for thousands of dollars, and reproducing the strain for their financial aggrandizement. The guilty parties were shamed and shunned and exiled from the Garden, banned for life by the Cannabis Cup authorities (if that wasn’t a gigantic enough oxymoron).
But what he had not done was solve Nicholette’s murder. For when he had them indicted and bound and pilloried in the public spotlight and then accused them of the more serious crime, they were able to slide easily from his grasp. Their passport stamps proved without equivocation that they had left the country five days before the night of his murder. Goodpasture had only discovered that his crop was missing on the day he came to Stein. The pilferage had occurred a week prior.
Stein took a certain small pleasure in returning Goodpasture’s pilfered orchids to their intended destiny, restoring Schwimmer’s people appetite and remission from some of their pain. But he was no closer to keeping his pledge to Nicholette than he had been before he left. His accomplishment was on a par with England defeating Argentina over the Falklands. There would be very little kissing in the streets.
The whole episode had left him with a sour taste. Amsterdam had changed along with the rest of the world. Stein could never think of that city again as a place he’d wish to return. The repository of his youth had aged. He felt very much alone in the world. He knew that feeling was in large part generated by the prospect of losing custody of Angie. It was hard to gauge how far Hillary would go to punish him. The question was not so much about her sense of fairness or equilibrium but whether she’d get enough short-term pleasure in hurting him to mitigate the long term inconvenience of taking on the extra responsibility.
He felt a compulsion to write Angie a letter so she’d know who her father really was. Or at least who he hoped he was. He rummaged through his pockets for a pen and some paper. The slips of Hotel Krasnapolsky memo paper that he found folded in his pocket were already written on. He had to laugh. They looked like they had been written blindfolded. Words were scribbled on top of other words, and disappeared off the paper. He could kind of make out: God… Deplete. That sounded provocative but he had no idea what it meant. It swam just outside the orbit of his memory and each time he reached in for it, it darted away like moonbeams on water.
The writing on the second piece was slightly more legible. He recognized his own handwriting. It said: You must remember this. Life depends on it. Once deplaned and herded into the cavernous, third-worldish Customs Lobby, Stein again was waved through without a second glance but he was too engrossed in trying to remember what the heck that note meant to be offended that he did not set off alarms.
Outside, he searched for an unoccupied phone. American money looked unfamiliar in his hand. He had been gone only two days but he felt like a Time Traveler returning after a millennium. As it always did, Lila’s voice grounded him in the familiar. “Did Angie get in touch with you?” Stein asked without saying hello.
“Stein, don’t you check your voicemail? I left messages for you at the hotel, at home. She’s fine. She’s here.”
His body sagged and rose in relief. “You’re really the best. Put her on, ok?”
“I think she’s in the shower. Hold on.”
Stein glanced again at the memo paper. You must remember this. What did he want himself to remember? Lila came back a moment later. “Her head’s full of lather. Can she call you right back?”
“I’d really like to talk to her now.”
“All right. Come with me. I’ll take you upstairs.” Stein visualized Lila walking up her spiral staircase with the cordless phone, passing her bedroom, where he could so easily be lord of the domain. He allowed himself a moment to think of Lila as his domestic mate, barbecuing out by the pool, squiring her to black-tie charity events, Angie rooted in a stable home life. Before he got to the scenes where she would drive him batty, her voice bubbled through.
“Stein, guess what brand of shampoo she’s lathering up in? Thank you for telling everyone I was the brains behind the operation. They sent over a case of Espe New Millennium. Do you know how many bottles there are in a case?”
“Unfortunately I do.”
“I hate when you do something nice and make me take back all the bad things I’ve ever thought. Even Angie has upped her opinion of you.”
“When have you thought anything bad about me?”
“We’ll discuss that another time. Today I know you love me. It was so amazingly sweet of you to tell Michael Esposito that I helped you get all his shampoo bottles back. I’m having lunch with him today at the Ivy. I’m wearing my black Vera Wang. I look fabulous. Then he’s going to bring me back to the Espe headquarters to take pictures. Angie had her friends over all day for a shampoo party. She was the complete star, of course. I mean, the very first person in her crowd to have it! I’m taking her with me. Of course she’s pretending not to be excited, but she’s psyched out of her mind. Here she is.”
Stein heard the sound of streaming water and the shower door opening. “Hi, Dad.” Her voice resonated in the tiled echo chamber. She sounded so adult.
“I hear you’re going out to see how the pampered bourgeoisie live.”
“Cool, huh?”
“Don’t get used to it.”
Maybe it was jet lag but Angie’s unbridled enthusiasm made Stein profoundly sad. He had never taken her to The Ivy. She never had her friends over to his place for a shampoo party. Or for anything. His place was never home for her. It was joint custody.
Traffic from the airport was horrible. Stein had drawn the one law-abiding cabbie in America. He stopped at yellows. He looked carefully before changing lanes. Another annoying sensation kept biting at the fringes of Stein’s consciousness like minnows nipping at a crust of bread. You must remember this. The conversation with Lila kept jumping in on channel two. She could be so unintentionally hilarious. She sounded like a teenager herself, all excited about being taken to The Ivy with a celebrity, if that’s what Michael Esposito was.
The slight irritation that Stein felt came from his not being able to reconstruct the bridge of events by which Michael Esposito would have known that Lila had been with Stein in Palm Springs the night he had busted Roland Dupuis delivering the pilfered Espe bottles to Paul Vane and David Hart. It was great that Lila was getting to star in the moment. But how had Michael known she was there? That was where the canker gnawed.
Stein played slowly back through the archival mental footage of that night at the Hotel Mirador. The only person he had told about terminating the operation was Millicent Pope-Lassiter. He was unequivocally positive he had not said anything to her about Lila’s being with him.
Who
else would have known?
Alton Schwimmer had seen her there when he had arrived at just the moment before hanky would have become panky. But Stein could not imagine a sequence of events that would have brought Schwimmer and Michael Esposito into proximity. Who else knew? Roland Dupuis? Stein caressed his rib cage where Roland had scored. He too had seen Lila, and whether he had or hadn’t believed she was a Federal Marshall, he’d have no idea who she was and less reason or access to report that information to Michael Esposito. So how could Michael have known and been grateful enough to invite Lila to the plant?
You must remember this.
What must he remember? He held the slips of paper up against the back window of the cab. The translucency let the writing on both sides intermingle. His own handwriting looked large and deranged to him. The cab turned onto Stein’s block. He paid the driver and went inside.
There were thirteen messages on his machine. The first was from Hillary before she had found him in Amsterdam. Angry and frantic at Angie having gone missing. How long ago was that? He jumped ahead to the second and third. Hillary, Hillary. After the fourth he stopped listening. The apartment was a pentimento of his recent domestic catastrophes. Debris from his missed fiftieth birthday party was still lying about intermingled with discarded remnants from Angie’s bedroom that Hillary had been removing. Her bulletin board sat propped on the living room floor against her stereo and TV. Sweaters and notebooks were scattered on the staircase, left there when Angie had bolted and Hillary had given brief, futile chase.
He wondered why he didn’t hear any barking.
