Fifteen

Hillary was on tilt. Stein tried to calm himself enough to be able to calm Hillary enough to get enough accurate information.

“You’re just loving this, aren’t you Harry? It must give you such a sense of validation that your daughter hates me as much as she hates you.”

“Oh yes. I’m adoring that our daughter is missing.”

“And whose fault is that?” Hillary snapped.

“No one is assigning blame.”

“I am. I blame you.”

“Me?” He invoked Shmooie the Buddhist’s trick of moving one finger at a time as though he were practicing a scale on the piano.

“Where have you looked? Who have you called?”

“If she ran away from me, she’s not going to advertise where she is!”

“Are you telling me she ran away from you?”

“Yes. Do you want me to say it? Yes, she ran away from me.”

“Damn it, Hillary. I’m trying to find out what happened so I can help!”

“That’s how you help. You go to Amsterdam to get high with your pathetic loser friends.”

He played “Moonlight Sonata” on his scalp in a slow tempo. “Which of her friends have you called, Hillary?”

“I’m calling you. You’re her father.”

“Are you saying you haven’t called anybody else?” He tried hard to mask his astonishment, not make it sound like an indictment, make it feel like he was petting her. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“I was moving her things out of your apartment. She said I was a controlling bitch and took off.”

“You were doing what?” “Moonlight Sonata” was playing at the speed of the Minute Waltz. “Hillary. Listen to me. I’m going to get on the first flight out of here and I will be home as soon as humanly possible. I’m sure she’s fine. “

Stein cradled the receiver and expelled a long geyser of breath. He was sure she was fine. Where had he heard himself say that before? If it was the 1950’s and they were living in some sweet wholesome Norman Rockwell suburbia, sure it would be fine for Angie to run off. Blow off some steam. Hide from your parents. But the Los Angeles night scene chewed up kids like Angie for breakfast. Every demonic creature that Stein had tried to implant into Angie’s imagination as a warning, Angie had imbued with her father’s traits so that she could easily outwit him; and thus she thought herself far too clever and ruthless for any danger to befall her.

He instinctively called Lila. He didn’t bother trying to wrangle his brain enough to attempt the time zone conversion. It picked on the fifth ring. “I’m glad you’re there,” Stein said, when her groggy voice said hello.

“Where did you think I’d be at five in the morning?”

“I really need a favor.” He waited for a reply and panicked when he got none. He was sure that she had dropped the receiver into her quilt and faded off back so sleep. “Lila?”

“I just went to turn on the lights.”

“I assume Hillary called you to find out my whereabouts.”

“I’m sorry. She’s Angie’s mother. I couldn’t not tell her.”

“No. You did the right thing.”

Lila assured Stein that Angie was probably perfectly fine. He heard echoes of his own voice making the same assurances.

“Lyle. You’ve got to do something very important for me. You know in that packet I gave you that has my will and everything? There’s an address book. On the back page I have the phone numbers of Angie’s friends. I need you to call them. Tell them to pass the word to Angie to call me, just to say she’s ok. Give them this number. Tell her to call collect.”

There was a short silence where Stein could hear the sounds of a drawer and a metal box opening. Then Lila’s voice. “Yes,” she said. “It’s all here.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“You know,” Lila said, “there’s a word for something that a woman usually gets before she helps raise a man’s children.”

“You have my house key.”

“I was referring to engaged.”

He smiled at the phone. “You’re one‑in‑a million,” Stein said.

“I’m sure once I look through your phonebook, I’ll know that’s true.”

Stein dressed and went down to the concierge’s desk. There he peeled off a few bills from Goodpasture’s wad and told him to get him on the first flight back to Los Angeles. “Get me anywhere close to Los Angeles.” He suddenly felt very ugly American, and added quietly, “Please. It’s my kid.”

As he came off the elevator he heard the phone ringing in his room and dashed in. “Yes! What do you have?”

The voice on the other end was far more belligerent than the concierge. “Where the hell are you?” it demanded.

“Angie?”

Relief and gratitude filled those two syllables.

“I’m not going back to her. I’ll live on the street.”

She felt as unstable as moonlight on water. “Where are you, Sweetie?”

“What are you doing in Amsterdam? Did you go to that hippie pot festival?”

A little anger, he thought. That was good. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t drunk. She wasn’t high. She wasn’t kidnapped.

“I came to score a lid for you,” he deadpanned.

“That’s ok. I have plenty.”

Ok. Humor. That was a good sign. “I appreciate your calling me. That’s very mature of you.” He thought he heard a male voice in the background. He was relieved that she was not alone. He didn’t want to ask directly yet. “If you tell me where you are I can call you back. I don’t want this costing somebody a lot of money.”

“It’s not. I called on your credit card.”

He heard a rustling on Angie’s end and a muffled conversation.

“Are you at a friend’s house?”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t want you running around unsupervised.”

“Un‑ supervised? What am I, eleven?”

“You don’t know how dangerous Los Angeles is.”

“ You don’t know how dangerous Los Angeles is.”

He feared that they both were right.

“What happened today? What‑?”

“First she pillages your apartment. Then she throws a fit and tries to ground me, pretending she thought I was expelled, when she knows very well I was only suspended.”

“Are you talking about school?”

“No, the Air National Guard.”

“Why were you suspended from school, Angie?” He heard his voice getting shrill.

“Because they’re a bunch of morons.”

“But specifically.”

“I answered a question on my civics test about what kind of government we had, and I said a Mediocracy. And they marked it wrong. And I said that proved that I was right. So they sent me home.”

“You called it a Mediocracy?” In spite of everything, he couldn’t help smiling. She was his daughter. Stein heard a familiar‑sounding dog bark. “Was that Watson? Angie, are you at our place?”

The phone was covered again. There was muffled struggle or horseplay. “Stop it,” Stein heard Angie whisper. Though not to Stein.

“Who’s there? Angie, I want you to go to Lila’s.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Just go there, will you please?”

There was an interminable silence. “Fine,” she said at last. He felt his body relax. “But not tonight.” The line went dead in his hand.

His first impulse was to call her back. Angie was obviously there with a boy, but what could he do about it? He had never demanded the obedience from her that a lot parents did. It didn’t seem like a trait, that if well learned, would serve her as an adult. Instead, he had encouraged her to question authority, and foolishly presumed he’d be granted immunity. Another responsible choice would be to call Hillary. That tactic might preserve Angie’s virginity for one more night, if indeed it still existed to be spared. But it would be at the cost of losing Angie’s trust permanently.

When Angie was first born, Stein had harbored so many romantic projections of the way they would share all of her milestones, how he would have a knack for saying the exact right thing at the occasion. Instead, he’d always been two turns of the road behind what she had already done, trying to play catch‑up. Edna Greene had said it right: Children make us strangers to our own lives. He thought about calling Penelope. But the concepts of Penelope and Chaperone did not quite merge. She’d more likely go over and make it a threesome.

He felt an irresistible tug on his male umbilical to get home. To be there. To fix what was wrong. To plug the leak. But there was nothing he could do. He could not Mighty Mouse himself there at the speed of light. That umbilical was cut. Maybe it had been cut for a long time and he was just now accepting it. She was there. He was here. And he had to do finish what he came to do.

He placed both buds out on the coffee table and studied them one last time. Stein had not gotten high for six years three months and a few days, give or take. Men hate to break streaks. Men like to elongate. One of the countless numbers of women he had met in his excursion through the Single Scene‑her name might have been Brenda‑who had called herself a Feminist Behavioralist, attributed the male linear orientation to the absence of a menstrual cycle. The only people who were surprised when Columbus discovered the world was round were men.

He took a bottle of Courvoisier from the minibar and poured it into a snifter. He covered the glass with a piece of aluminum foil from the stem of his complimentary rose and pulled it taut across the rim of the glass. He tapped delicately on the foil with the needle from his sewing kit, making a cluster of tiny holes against the rim of the snifter. Directly opposite, he cut out a small mouth hole. He snipped a small sliver of Goodpasture’s orchid and carefully pared it into shards. These he placed over the mesh holes he had tapped into his improvised bong. He had the sensation that he was watching himself from above.

He lit a match and placed his lips on the opening he had cut in the foil. The sweet smoke billowed down into the snifter, met resistance at the level of the brandy, and was drawn up and out of the glass into the wind tunnel down into Stein’s alveoli. Clusters of nearly atrophied neuro‑receptors in Stein’s cerebellum sprang to life. The last crescent of sun radiated a shaft of orange light that shot across the room from the window to the sofa and Stein was astonished to see that it was filled with atoms. Trillions of them. Jumping and dancing through the air like a hatching of mayflies.

He smiled as he visualized the indulgent looks on people’s faces if he told them he could see atoms. They would explain that he was seeing particles of dust in suspension being carried about by tiny vectors of air currents. What a laugh, Stein thought. As though atoms and dust particles were remotely alike. Dust flecks were clunky, sluggish dirigibles; fish tank diving bells that could rise or sink slowly. Stein was seeing clouds of minnows, sunlit quicksilver darts of energy.

The shaft of light passing through the vase of flowers and the fruit bowl cast a perfect shadow profile of John Lennon onto the middle section of the sofa. His thin wire frame glasses. The long shoulder‑length billow of his hair. The beard. Stein reckoned that John had come to impart a secret to him. People of John’s status did not make unannounced appearances without reason. Stein rose from the bed to come closer, but in doing so his own corporeal body broke the plane of light and the effigy disappeared. Was that the message the cosmos was sending to him‑don’t get too close to people, they’ll die? Don’t stand in people’s light?

But John was leaving. Not fading, but morphing slowly into less of a likeness of himself. Now Stein saw a cow grazing in a grassy field. He flashed on that summer on Crete when the tour guide had explained how archaeologists had put together the few fragments they had unearthed of two thousand year old Minoan tiles, and had extrapolated from them what the full mosaic would have been. Art books carried pictures of those extrapolated Priest King frescoes for decades. Lately more fragments had been found which demonstrated that the experts’ projection of the whole picture had been completely wrong. The figures in the mosaic weren’t priests at all, they were monkeys.

He grokked in its fullness that the angle between earth and sun was changing and that to keep John here, he simply had to move the vase and the bowl of fruit. But no, they were so perfectly set. He would move the sofa to catch the day’s last afterglow. Ah, but to move that he would first have to move the end table. Wisdom revealed itself in layers. The truth that the lamp sitting atop the end table was plugged into the socket under the armoire was not revealed to him until he tugged the table to the left, yanking the support out from underneath the lamp.

The truth of galvanic response was next revealed to Stein as his torso instinctively lunged forward and made a shoe top catch of the bulb and saved it from shattering. The truth of the lamp cord next revealed itself, as it had pulled taut around his ankle like a bolos. The wire went under the armoire. The electric socket was centered on the wall behind it. To reach it, he would have to pull the huge mahogany closet away from the wall. He braced his body, placed his open palms on the side of the armoire and pushed. His muscles strained. Ligaments exerted to their breaking point. But nothing budged. He had reached the crossroads of The Truth of Healthy Retreat and The Truth of Never Quitting.

He tried an alternate approach. He lay on the floor and reached his arm as far as it would go under the armoire. His extended fingers could just reach the plug. He tugged on the wire. It pulled free from the wall. Or more accurately, the ancient wire pulled free of its own plug; the plug remained embedded in the socket. He sat with a live electric wire in his hand.

In his enlightened sagacity, he knew this was not a good thing. He would have to slide the frayed wire carefully out from under the three inch high clearance without the two exposed ends making contact with each other or the underside of the armoire. He imagined himself one of those steel‑nerved British explosive specialists who did the delicate work of defusing unexploded German ordinance. Slowly he drew the wires out toward his chest. What a savage bouquet, he thought.

His elbow was drawn fully in to his chest, but the hand at the end of that arm, the hand that was holding the wire, was still under the frame of the armoire. To pull it completely out he had to scoot his body backwards. However, in doing so, Newton’s third law of motion took effect, dislodging the throw rug upon which the lamp table was now precariously balanced. The lamp teetered. On impulse Stein lunged for it. As he did, the pair of uninsulated bare copper wires in his right hand made contact.

The inevitable arc of electric current did not shoot across the gap. Stein looked intently at the wires and wondered why they were disobeying the laws of physics, when he had the immense revelation that he must be seeing at faster than the speed of light. What other explanation could there be for the thing that must have happened not yet reaching his eyes?

Or, as he held the wires for a few more moments, he realized to his immense amusement that there was another, less grandiose explanation for why he had not received an electric shock. As he had pulled the wires out of the socket, there was no current running through it. He threw himself back on the easy chair, still holding the lamp. This would be a funny cartoon of God, he thought. God holding a busted lamp in one hand and a frayed wire in the other, saying “Let There Be Light.” And there being no light. He wondered for a moment what kind of easy chair God might sit on. That was certainly a provocative question. He wondered if any of the great philosophers had ever pondered that same thought or had he just framed a completely original metaphysical question.

What qualities of a chair would give God pleasure? Would God even need to experience pleasure? Could he imagine it and create it without having the experience himself? Did he even need to sit? To take a load off? Did he get lower back pain? Did he have pain at all? Or does omnipotence make him immune to the very thing he made the center point of human life? Is that why he seems indifferent to human suffering? Was Jesus his effort to try to experience pain? What did God do on his day of rest? Come to think of it, Stein thought, why would God need to rest at all? If God needed to rest, didn’t that imply weakening? Depletion? Good God, Stein thought, he had just disproved God’s omnipotence! The Doctrine of Depletion! He had to remember that.

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.