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 applied 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.

“Wats?”

He checked the kitchen, the hall. His heart sank out of its cavity.

“Watson?”

He slowly climbed the stairs. Angie’s bedroom door was ajar. Stein had never entered Angie’s room without permission even when she wasn’t with him. He knocked now out of habit before stepping across the rubicon uninvited. He felt like he was entering the royal chamber of the queen. This was not the room of a child. Sexy rock and roll posters were tacked and taped to the walls. Her shelves were cluttered with beauty products: lip gloss, eye‑shades, skin exfoliants, hair tints, hair conditioners. Her bed frame was taken apart. The mattress stripped and turned half on its side. He remembered carrying all of it up these stairs, assembling the frame and headboard, a routine job for someone with minimal mechanical abilities, for him a sixteen‑hour epic.

“Wats?”

He tiptoed into his own bedroom. He whistled softly and clapped his hands and called his dog’s name again. A whimper began to form itself in his throat at the prospect of finding his soulmate lying lifeless and small under a piece furniture. Then Penelope Kim’s wind chime voice sang out across the courtyard. “Stein. You’re back! Come see your dog dance the tarantella.”

Stein looked out the window to see Penelope standing on her front steps wearing a silk jacket zippered half way up and a halter‑top underneath. Watson was alongside her, and when she hopped down the steps, so did Watson. Stein gaped like one of those people at a religious revival.

“What did you DO?” He lumbered down his own stairs into the living room and out the front door.

“I knew you’d be happy. My friend Lin Pei does canine acupressure. His energy was way too yin.”

Stein embraced Watson’s frail body and nuzzled his cold wet nose. “I owe you gigantically for this, and I’ll tell you everything about Amsterdam for Klein.”

“Klein?” Penelope giggled as if he had brought something up from the 1920’s.

“Your detective. Or did you change his name again?”

“Oh, I dropped the whole thing.”

“You dropped it?”

“Too linear.”

A pink‑and‑orange‑haired Asian woman wearing a sarong and a brocade songket waddled out of the back room. She carried a cluster of smoldering blue sage in her right hand waving it before her priestess style.

“If you’re Lin Pei, thank you,” Stein gushed.

“Cool dog. Have many more years.”

“You know this?”

“Believe me, if she says it she knows it.” Penelope chimed in.

Lin Pei looked closely at Stein. He waited a beat for her to extend the polite prophecy of long life to him.

“Hmm,” she said.

“Hmmm?”

“Could go either way,” she said, as though she had seen the outcomes of both amusing possibilities.

It truly was a miracle that Watson’s arthritis was gone. They trotted across the courtyard to Stein’s apartment. Watson stopped to raise his leg to pee, then bounded to the top step in one Jordanesque elevation. Stein flipped on the TV. All of the local channels were carrying live feeds from the Mortuary of the Eternal Flame where Nicholette Bradley was going to be cremated, intercutting with clips of celebrity friends expressing their shock and grief and recounting beautiful memories of her.

It occurred to Stein that Hillary might not know Angie was safe. Angie most likely had not called her. Stein had punched in the first six digits of Hillary’s cell phone when he saw Paul Vane in an interview “RECORDED EARLIER” being interviewed on TV. Stein believed the pain behind his soulful eyes. He had truly loved Nicholette. The figure lurking behind him was David Hart. At least that was how it first registered to Stein because he expected it to be David Hart. But as he looked more closely Stein was bewildered to realize that it was not David Hart, it was Michael Esposito. How in the hell could that be? How could Paul Vane and the lover who had jilted him be in the same frame together?

In that moment of not trying, the sealed membrane of his Amsterdam vision popped open into his conscious mind. He remembered the two buds. And getting high. And the Doctrine of Depletion, which did not sound as profound in daylight. He remembered priests and monkeys and smoke and lather. And he remembered that Michael Esposito had killed Nicholette Bradley. And that he had done it with Paul Vane’s help. In the moment of stunning revelation, in the bittersweet thrill of having solved the mystery of Nicholette’s murder, came the ghastly realization that the pair of killers had lured Lila to have lunch with her today.

And that Lila had said she was taking Angie.

Holy Kryptonite.