“Daaaad.” Angie bent the word into three long syllables of dismay. “It was a surprise party. For you! Where were you! Everyone you ever knew was here!”
“Yes, the entire ‘Who’s Not Who’ of Hollywood,” Hillary sniped.
“Mom.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve never heard of anyone missing his own party.”
“Mom.”
Stein was touched that his daughter defended him. “If I knew about a party of course I would have been here.” His voice playing an emotional duet, to mollify Hillary’s disdain and reweave the cocoon of intimacy around Angie.
“Yes, well, it being a surprise party, there was the element of surprise.”
“Mom.”
Angie threw open the rectangular cardboard box sitting in the center of the dining room table to reveal a birthday cake with fifty candles arranged around a now deteriorated portrait in icing of John Lennon, Jerry Garcia, Dylan, Janis Joplin and Stein. “Happy birthday.”
Stein’s heart slid down his chest wall. “I’m really sorry, baby. I thought everyone had forgotten and I felt so sorry for myself that I stayed at the warehouse counting their stupid shampoo bottles all night.”
“You’re such a loser,” she wailed.
Stein hated that Angie so easily believed he would be so pathetic, though not as much as he hated lying to her. Hillary gaveled matters to a close, telling Angie to gather up her things, that they were going.
“I guess I’ll go, too,” Lila said, acknowledging that no one had noticed or cared that she was there. Stein walked her to the door and whispered in her ear, “thanks for having my back.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“You didn’t tell them I wasn’t at the warehouse.”
Angie clomped upstairs to her room and returned, weighed down by two backpacks and her book bag. Stein tried to find a clear place to hug her. “We’ll do something special for my birthday when you come back.”
“Whatever.”
She stooped to nuzzle Watson’s face against hers. “Bye, Watsie.”
His heart always ached when she left. His little refugee. But today he could not indulge his sentimentality. He wondered if she wouldn’t be happier living at one residence, and if the joint custody deal was more to assuage his guilt than for her benefit.
It was amazing how quickly after his daughter’s departure that a profound silence settled into the apartment. As if Angie were its soul and Stein were merely some organ kept nominally alive while the body was in coma. Plopped down on the futon, he idly stroked Watson’s head as his mind began to shrink itself around the problem of Nicholette’s murder.
His mind slogged earthbound at the snail’s pace speed of sound instead of soaring at the speed of light. What did he have? He knew that Nicholette was dead and her place had been ransacked. He knew that Goodpasture was missing, or apparently missing, and that Nicholette had had some inkling hours before her death that Goodpasture was in danger. Stein knew, or believed he knew, that someone had stolen a crop of Goodpasture’s orchids that had been grown for the terminally ill patients at Dr. Schwimmer’s hospice. Was there anything else he knew? Or was this little rabbit turd size pellet of information all that he had? Where would he start? What was his plan? Did he even have a plan? Or was it just another promise that he would fail to keep?
He had to take a first step in some direction. What was that going to be? In the days of Watergate, Deep Throat had advised Woodward and Bernstein to “follow the money.” Stein had no money to follow but he did have the trail of smoke. Goodpasture’s “orchids” were apparently so good that people were killing people to get their hands on them. Weed that tasty had to be going for a tasty price. He had to find out who in town was paying top dollar. In the old days he would have known everybody. Even better-they would have had to know him. But these days were not those days. He had been out of circulation so long he didn’t know who the buyers were any more.
But he did know the one person who would know. Yes. He grabbed the newspaper and opened to the entertainment section, a sudden move that startled Watson. He settled the old boy down and thumbed through the ads for clubs and concerts and saw that The Ravens Family Four and Friends were playing tonight at McKarus’s Folk City. Stein knew that was where he would find mister Vincent Van Goze. And wouldn’t that be a tender Hallmark moment for him and Stein to reconnect? Two road dogs who had not spoken for years. Simon and Garfunkel. John and Paul. Stein and Van Goze.
He flicked the TV on to see if the media had gotten the story yet about Nicholette Bradley’s murder. And good God, had they! TV news reporters were becoming worse whores than the people they covered. Sticking microphones in peoples’ faces. Asking their inane questions. And police were learning from the military how to manage news. They had telegenic spin-doctors delivering carefully prepared statements. “The authorities were processing information,” others were “sifting through clues, formulating directions of investigation.”
In other words, Stein concluded, they didn’t know jack shit about who did it or why.
This thought was confirmed when they showed the head of the operation, Chief Jack Bayliss, who ran the Malibu sub-station assuring the public that a suspect would soon be apprehended. He and Stein had an adversarial history that spanned two decades. Somehow, many of Stein’s legendary escapades had come at his expense. Stein flicked the TV off. His eyes burned and his Inner Negotiator cajoled him for just one quick cycle of REM. But he knew if he gave in to weakness the day would be lost. He jumped in for a quick shower, threw the same Levis on and a different blue work shirt and dragged his ass outside. He’d find an open diner and grab some coffee until the banks opened. He’d need to cash out a thousand bucks of his recent deposit for seed money. Then find Vincent. He hoped. Then who knew?
A white limo of astonishing length was idling alongside Stein’s parked Camry making it impossible for him to pull out. He recognized the driver-Millicent Pope-Lassiter’s always impeccably dressed Chinese secretary.
“Andrew? Is that you?”
“Yes sir, that’s right.”
Stein wondered why Andrew didn’t find the coincidence as amusing as he did. “Are you picking somebody up here?”
Yes sir I am.
“Did you know that I lived on this street too?”
“Yes sir, I did.”
Stein rummaged for his keys. “You’ll have to undock that boat.”
“No need for you to find your keys, Mister Stein. I’ll drive.”
It took Stein a few moments to register the obvious. “Are you here to pick me up?”
Andrew affirmed that he was.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Sir, I know six different ways to kill a man.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No sir, I don’t. Mrs. Pope-Lassiter instructed me to say that.”
“What does she want?”
“To be obeyed.”
After giving Andrew assurances that he would not try any slick tricks and would drive obediently to the corporate offices in Century City, and after Andrew assured Stein that the limo had twice the horsepower and maneuverability of Stein’s Camry and that he would take any perceived detour from the agreed route as an attempted escape, he allowed Stein to drive there under his own power.
“Ten minutes is all I’m giving her,” Stein declared.
“My business is getting you there.”
With Andrew in the Class II nuclear destroyer staying a car length behind him, Stein drove west on Little Santa Monica Boulevard and turned into the underground parking lot of one of the Century City office towers. Andrew conducted Stein through the ground floor atrium to the private elevator that rose to the penthouse suite occupied by the product liability firm of Lassiter and Frank. Stein was leery about going to the upper offices of these local skyscrapers. The main occupation of the construction industry in Los Angeles was building facades for movie sets, where an erection only had to look like it could stand.
