Stein,stoned s-1

by Hal Ackerman

  “I just thought I would tell you, the guy you’ve got handcuffed out there isn’t Nicholette Bradley’s killer.”

  “And you would know this, how?”

  “Trust me.”

  The hoarse gust of wind that wheezed out of Bayliss’s throat approximated an ironic laugh. Bayliss glared before speaking. The temperature in his eyes rising to the melting point of tungsten.

  “I was up at the victim’s house the night she was killed. It was me who made the 9-1-1 call.”

  “What in hell were you doing in that house, Howard?” Did you kill her?”

  “Yes, coach, I did. You’ve busted this case wide open. Shall we call a press conference?”

  “You think you’re so goddamn clever. Do you know how long I can put you away and not have to tell anybody why?”

  “I’m coming to you as an ally.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way. But were you always this Jewish?”

  “How could I take that the wrong way?”

  Bayliss eyes half-lidded into a smile of savage mirth. “I know exactly what kind of athlete you were, Howard. Eleventh man on a nine-man team. Splashing oil on the base paths and thinking it’s funny to see other people fall. That’s what you are, Howard. You’re a disrupter.”

  “I appreciate where you’re coming from. If I were you looking at me I’d think the same thing. But I am sincerely here because I know who killed Nicholette Bradley. She came to me earlier that day. She thought her friend was in danger.”

  “She thought her friend was in danger and she came to you? How did that work out for her?”

  Stein took the cheap shot and did not return fire, which quelled some of the chief’s animosity, though he remained healthily wary. “If you are fucking with me, Howard, I will have your Sammie’s tacked up to that bulletin board.”

  “I’m here. Why would you think I’m fucking with you?”

  “Because a prick can only do two things and you’re not pissing.”

  “Why are you holding Morty Greene? He didn’t kill her.”

  “You’re so sure of that?”

  “Yes I’m sure of it.”

  “His truck was stopped under suspicious circumstances.”

  “Carrying a load of designer shampoo bottles?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know that?”

  “This is what I’m saying.”

  “In the course of a legal search, the deceased’s name was found written on a piece of paper in the glove compartment of Duluth Greene’s truck.”

  “Give me a fucking break. By that logic I killed Chiquita Banana and Jennie Craig.”

  “Nobody’s charging him with any crime yet. We want to talk to him.”

  “And that’s why he’s handcuffed?”

  “You see the size of that boy?”

  “Coach, I’m going to repay you for every bad thing I ever did. You’re going to be a national hero.”

  Stein gave Bayliss the streamlined version of the connection between Morty and the counterfeit shampoo bottles, and what had happened that gruesome night when Michael Esposito and Paul Vane had killed Nicholette. It choked Stein to mention Paul Vane’s name in connection with the event, but in the spirit of full disclosure he did. The only minor detail he omitted was that he had come to his revelation stoned on Goodpasture’s orchids.

  The funeral cortege played on Bayliss’s TV in the background. His office was sparsely furnished with the impersonal essentials, desk, metal chairs, file cabinets, a phone with six buttons, a computer- highlighting the chief’s tenuous interim status. Celebrities and common people alike pronounced eulogies for the slain woman. From PETA, from the pope, from parents of children with anorexia. It was a revelation to Stein that she was so much more than just a pretty face.

  The desk sergeant who was not O’Bladovich blew into Bayliss’s office, all red-faced and puffing. “Chief, there’s a civilian loose in the building.” Then he noticed Stein standing there before him. He put two and two together at the speed of a battleship trying to change direction. He finally came up with, “Oh,” and reckoning that his work had been effectively done, he hitched his pants up over his belly and exited.

  Bayliss had never taken his eyes off Stein. “Why are you telling me this, Howard? Maybe to set me up to arrest the wrong people in the biggest case of my life?”

  “Not this time, chief.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “The people who killed Nicholette have my daughter.”

  Stein saw the two movies running alongside each other in the chief’s internal Cineplex. In Theater 1 he is a decorated hero, parades in open cars, fear and respect in the eyes of the world and the interim tag is removed. In Theater 2 Stein is pointing at him and laughing hysterically.

  “I swear to God, Howard. If this is you being you I will see you burn.”

  Bayliss ’ S assembled task force was all in military black, adorned with gas masks and automatic weapons. Stein felt the room begin to shudder. He thought at first it was his heart but it was the police chopper revving up on the helipad. Bayliss strapped his flight helmet in place.

  “Where’s mine?” Stein asked.

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “It’s my daughter. What about our deal!”

  “We had no deal.”

  “And if she needed an appendectomy would you do it yourself? No, you leave it to the professionals.”

  Stein hurried along in their wake. Morty Greene was still handcuffed to the bench outside the office. “And let this guy out of his damn cuffs, for chrissake!”

  Bayliss nodded subtly to his sergeant and Morty was carefully uncuffed.

  “Thanks for nothing,” Morty said, and wouldn’t look at Stein.

  “Hey! I didn’t get you into this. I’m getting you out of it.”

  “Boys,” Edna mediated, “Thank you, Mister Stein.”

  Stein’s attention was arrested by the TV at the front desk. Celebrity mourners were being interviewed like it was the red carpet at the Emmy Awards and again there was the aggrieved face of Paul Vane on screen. The pain behind his soulful eyes still looked real. Was he that good an actor to feign such innocent grief? And why wasn’t he at the Ivy, which was where he was sending chief Bayliss? Stein tried to peer behind Vane in the camera’s shot to see if Angie and Lila were with him in the limo. But its windows were tinted. He yelled to the chief to wait a second, but the cordon of commandos was clattering up the stairs to the roof.

  He jumped back into Bayliss’s office and used his phone to call Mattingly at the warehouse. He was actually glad to hear the familiar nasal, wheedling tones.

  “Mrs. Higgit. This is Harry Stein.”

  “Why are you calling from the police station?”

  The caller ID thing still freaked him out but he brushed past it. “This is very important. I need to know if Michael Esposito is there.”

  “I have no dealings with that area of the company,” she said even more officiously than usual. “I work strictly with Mister Mat-tingly.”

  “I know who you work for. But I want-”

  She would not yield him conversational right-of-way but plowed straight through the verbal intersection. “Whatever goes on behind closed doors, and I’m not saying anything does, it’s not my business.”

  “Mrs. Higgit.”

  “I don’t judge. What other people choose for themselves-”

  “Stop talking!” he commanded.

  She allowed herself to be interrupted long enough to hear his question and to reply that although she had neither the time nor inclin-a-shee-on to keep tabs on anyone else’s business, she had noticed in passing that Mr. Esposito had two visitors today. She described Lila in fastidious detail and the “wild and unruly” teenage girl with her.

  Stein smarted under the indictment of his permissive child-raising. “Listen to me carefully. Your office looks down onto the visitor’s parking lot. Is there a white Acura?”

  “I don’t know brands.”

&n
bsp; “Look out your window.”

  “Is there a white car? With a sunroof?”

  “It would appear to be so, yes.”

  “Do not let them leave.”

  Watson was barking excitedly in the car when Stein ran out into the parking lot. A cordon of police had surrounded Stein’s Camry. Stein looked with disbelief at his rear tire. It had been booted.

  “Real sorry,” the fat desk sergeant said looking with ironic concern at the piece of heavy metal machinery locking the wheel in place. “I had no idea it was you.” He made a show of examining his key ring, then pronounced with great dole. “Oh I seem to have misplaced the key.”

  The chopper had lifted off and was vectoring off toward the canyon. Stein was crazed enough to grab non O’Bladovich by the shirtsleeve. “Listen to me. You’ve got to radio the chief and bring him back.” He looked deeply into his face for a sign of intelligent recognition. From the far side of the complex, Morty Greene’s red pickup truck had gotten out of impound and was heading down the driveway.

  Stein released his hold and unlocked his own car door, grabbed Watson out of the front seat and chased after Morty’s truck, which had now driven past. He waved his free arm wildly, trying to put himself into the reflection of his rearview mirror. The truck slowed by degrees, allowing Stein to catch up.

  “They booted my car,” Stein heaved, out of breath. “We’ve got to get to the warehouse.”

  “I don’t think so,” Morty said and he popped the clutch and began to accelerate.

  “Duluth. Where are your manners? You do as the man asks.”

  “Mama.”

  Morty slowed the truck down. Edna opened the passenger-side door and slid into the nest between the two front seats to make room for Stein. “No, please. I’ll sit there,” Stein insisted and climbed over her into the metal creche alongside Morty so she could have the cushioned seat. “They have my daughter,” Stein said looking straight ahead and shrinking the volume of his body so Morty would have room to drive.” They tore ass down Topanga Canyon. At Pacific Coast Highway they hit a dead stop. Nicholette’s funeral cortege, inching its way up the coast, was endless. Police scrutinized the credentials of every driver and passenger; the Paparazzi long since having learned the trick of turning on their headlights and pretending to be part of a funeral procession.

  The tinted window of a silver Mercedes sedan opened. As the glass slid down, the reflection of the helmeted CHP officer yielded to the face of the driver inside the car. Stein leaned forward and wiped away grime from the inside of the Ford’s windshield. He could not see the driver but the passenger alongside him was Michael Esposito. That took some brass balls! Coming to the funeral of the person you’d killed. He couldn’t see into the back seat and was suddenly possessed by the possibility that Angie and Lila might be tied up there.

  The woman in the Escalade directly in front of them was conducting an animated conversation on her cell phone. Stein looked desperately to the right of the Escalade. There was narrow shoulder and to the right of it, a ditch that in winter was a creek.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Morty said, preempting Stein’s next thought. “There’d be two funerals.”

  “You’re right.”

  In the moment Morty relaxed, Stein stamped his left foot down onto Morty’s colossal right boot, jamming it down onto the accelerator. The truck lurched forward. Stein yanked the wheel to the right and they darted around the big tank and careened precariously along the shoulder. The grade was too steep to pull back onto the road and the line of cars was unbroken. They could see the horrified looks on people’s faces in the other cars.

  “We’re gonna be dead like Butch and Sundance,” Morty howled.

  “And Sundance’s mother,” Edna Greene added.

  Morty threw Stein’s foot off his own, but there was nothing to do now but fly and hope that none of the six regiments of cops noticed them; and that the phalanx of sirens and motorcycles and patrol cars hot in their pursuit was a coincidence.

  “It’s ok. I know these people. Keep going.”

  “You know these people?” Edna repeated. “I feel really confident, now.”

  In the next moment the truck was enveloped by police vehicles. A voice boomed out of a bullhorn. “STOP THE VEHICLE. PUT YOUR HANDS ON THE DASH WHERE I CAN SEE THEM.” Rifles were pointed at them from every direction, including from above, where Bayliss, having observed the chase and overheard the radio transmissions, had swooped down from the sky and landed in front of them. Dressed in his fatigues, Bayliss leaped out in a Prime Time news pose. When he saw that his quarry was Stein and Morty Greene, the catch he had already thrown back, he was furious that he had been diddled again and made a fool of.

  “I swear to God you have fucked with me for the very last time in your life.”

  Up ahead, the Mercedes followed the rest of the procession up the hill and was now gone from sight. “Coach!” Stein yelled, then, humbly, “Chief. The killers are getting away.”

  With the door to freedom open, Watson sprang from Edna Greene’s arms and bolted out of the truck and up the hill. “Watson!” Stein vaulted around to the driver’s side of the truck and with the adrenaline rush of a pregnant woman, he shoved Morty to the passenger side and jumped in. He rammed the truck into gear, popped the clutch and held on. The rear wheels sprayed mud and grass and gravel, caught traction, and the truck shot forward up the hill.

  Morty wrested the wheel away. “They’re gonna kill us.”

  “They won’t even chase us. They think it’s a dead end.”

  Indeed, as Morty peered cautiously back, he saw that the police were exercising uncharacteristic restraint. The truck jounced up the rutted road, its smooth tires spinning them ass-left and ass-right as it tried to gain traction. A small turnoff to an unpaved road loomed ahead.

  “Take it,” Stein yelled. “Go right!”

  Together they hauled the wheel right. Thistles and hedge whapped against both sides of the chassis.

  “It’s cool. I used to take Watson here when he was a pup a million years ago, before the mortuary bought the land. There’s a back way in.”

  “Be more fun to reminisce if I had a cushion,” Edna observed.

  A quarter-mile further on, they found Watson sitting alongside a turnoff to a paved road, under a sign for the ETERNAL FLAME CRYPT AND CREMATORIUM. Orchards of young fruit trees swayed in the breeze on both sides of the road behind barbed wire fences. Morty was freaked out by the overly informational signage that described the high tech immolation units where controlled burns of ionized magnesium brought the kilns to temperatures of 4,000 degrees.

  “I don’t know about being cremated. Hate to wind up a plate of barbecued ribs.”

  “You’d be a lot less than that,” Stein said. “Be a handful of talcum powder.”

  “No more of this talk,” Edna scolded. “I thought Jewish people had issues with ovens.”

  Stein found what he was looking for, and parked under the sign that read NO ADMITTANCE. Morty and Edna passed a look between them that said it must be fun to be white and not have to obey signs. A trail led between the fences, uphill. “This path takes us to the mortuary side,” Stein said. “Anyway, it used to.”

  Edna’s hips weren’t going to make that uphill climb and Stein asked if she wouldn’t mind staying back here with Watson, which was fine with everyone. Morty’s instinct was to stay with her, but she frowned on him. “Pay your debts on time or they gather interest.” Morty followed Stein into the underbrush. The pathway made a tight double ‘S’ between two rows of tall bougainvillea, and emerged at the top of the hill into a broad, quite beautiful, sequestered dell.

  The service for Nicholette was being conducted in a small amphitheater on the level below them. The arched portal and floor of the entryway were made of marble. The walls appeared smooth until you looked more closely and saw the hundreds of little sliding vault drawers that were built in. Morty shook his head profoundly when he realized what they were. Several hund
red mourners were gathered on the grassy lawn looking up at a portly, white-whiskered Reverend Parsegian. Stein recognized him from late night cable TV. His voice was raspy with the ravages of non-filter cigarettes and Aquavit. He opened a small parcel wrapped in a lovely Indian cloth.

  “Death,” he intoned, “whatever we think it is, it’s bound to be something else.” He took a handful of what were presumably Nicholette’s remains and scattered the ashes to the winds. “Let her beauty fill the world,” he prayed.

  “Any time you want to tell me what we’re doing,” Morty hinted.

  Stein scanned the crowd below him intently. “I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think I am.”

  “That clears it all up.”

  Stein sensed peripheral movement along the ridgeline. Fifty yards away, the diminutive figures of two mourners who had separated from the main body were absconding in rapid lockstep. Paul Vane was wearing a dark suit and designer sunglasses. Michael Es-posito was in Hunter Thompson gonzo white.

  “That’s them,” Stein whispered.

  Michael was doing most of the talking. Vane listened like a child being told a harsh truth by a younger, wiser, crueler boy. Stein tried to penetrate through the pantomime. “I think they may have my daughter and my friend in their car.”

  After a brief huddle below, Vane and Michael Esposito departed in opposite directions.

  “You take the little one,” Stein ordered.

  Morty bolted out of their little culvert in the direction of Paul Vane.

  “No, the other little one,” Stein yelled, but Morty covered the ground across the open field with amazing speed and was nearly upon him.

  Michael Esposito had undulated along the back side of the marble wall and was out of sight. Stein gauged where he would emerge, and lumbered down the grassy side of the hill, still favoring his injured ankle. The grade was steeper than it appeared and the grass concealed uneven contours of the hillside. He couldn’t break his hurtling momentum and had to throw himself to the ground and roll. The impact knocked the wind out of him and he felt like he had run into a stone wall. For a moment he feared he was paralyzed. He took mental inventory, discovered nothing was broken and pulled himself up by the handles of the sliding crypts.