good?”
“I told you, it was a mild sprain.”
“How can you tell it’s a sprain without looking?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Don’t doctors sometimes take X-rays?”
“You want a second opinion? Ask that guy.” Schwimmer gestured toward a biker who was tearing at his meat sandwich in staccato bursts like a piranha.
“Fine,” Stein sulked. “It’s getting better by itself.”
“Oh for God’s sake, let me see it.”
Stein extended his leg under the table onto the opposite banquette. Schwimmer lifted Stein’s foot and turned it sharply to the left. “Does that hurt?”
“Aaaargh.”
“You’re right. Maybe it’s broken.”
“Don’t you people take some kind of oath?”
The drive in from Topanga had been maddening. Notwithstanding Schwimmer’s reputation for making death a dignified experience, he had the social skills of a doorknob, and that was being unkind to doorknobs. He had deflected all of Stein’s questions: What was he doing at Goodpasture’s? Was Goodpasture all right? Had he been there when it happened? Where was he now? I’m on your side. If you know where he is you have to tell me.
All Schwimmer would say was if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, and despite Stein’s ardent avowal that things had changed since he originally had declined Goodpasture’s offer, Schwimmer had turned his back to Stein and contorted his body into an impossible shell, his elbows crossed around his knees, which were also crossed. He looked like a torso that had been hastily glued together by somebody new to the job, and he sat that way until they pulled into the Munowitz parking lot.
Their waitress who came to take their order was a distressed blonde whose life had taken a wrong turn off Easy Street.
“I need a minute,” Schwimmer said.
“Order a roast beef on buttered white bread with a glass of milk,” Stein suggested. “They’ll think you’re a regular.”
Schwimmer ordered the barley bean soup, which pissed Stein off because he was going to order that himself. “Make it two,” Stein said. “But make mine better.”
Once she had departed with their orders, Stein leaned across the table to plead his case. “Do you not grasp that we are on the same side here? I know what was lost. I want to help get it back.” Schwimmer made brief expressionless eye contact. “I see why people come to your hospice,” Stein said. “You make death a pleasant alternative.” But Schwimmer was not the only one stonewalling. Stein had not revealed to him what had happened to Nicholette and was not going to gratuitously volunteer any information while Schwimmer was hoarding his.
Their waitress returned with their soups. “Who gets the barley bean?” she asked.
The rich, deep, thick brown broth with barley and lima beans and ham mellowed Stein’s soul. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he joked, as a kind of surrender.
“You weren’t my first choice.” Schwimmer informed him. The air between them turned brittle again and filled with tiny invisible flying shards of glass. “You weren’t on my list at all.”
“Apparently you were outvoted,” Stein shot back. His ego induced another ridiculous display, yanking Goodpasture’s check out of his breast pocket and brandishing it into Schwimmer’s face. He tucked it back into his shirt and made a final effort to be reasonable. “I was off the bus. I admit that. But I’m back on. Things have happened.” He let that final chord play out its overtones. Things have happened.
Schwimmer was tone deaf to whatever cantata Stein was singing. He counted out of his wallet and change purse the exact amount to cover one bowl of soup, the tax and a twelve per cent tip.
“I should let you walk,” Stein said as he unlocked the passenger side door. But grudging politeness won out, that and the nagging belief that Schwimmer would have to relent and spill all. He was staying at the hotel near the 405 freeway with the revolving restaurant. A twenty-minute ride with no traffic. Neither said a word the entire trip, except for Stein who was still trying to put the little tile fragments together into a picture he could recognize, who asked, “How did you get to Goodpasture’s?”
To which Schwimmer replied, “…”
“Thank you. That is so helpful.”
When they pulled into the circular driveway Schwimmer engaged him fully for the first time. “Let me draw you a hypothetical. You are in possession of a piece of information that is of great importance to a hostile party. And that hostile party, in order to induce you to reveal that information, manages to place your daughter into a life- threatening situation. In which direction do you suppose your loyalties would bend?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“There are the two reasons I don’t want you involved. One: Because it can happen. And two: Because you are too stubborn or blind to see that it will.”
First light was just starting to show in the eastern sky as Stein drove slowly homeward through the residential streets of Bel Air. The Japanese gardeners were already out tending the immaculate lawns upon which their owners’ feet would never tread. They were like perfect narcissistic gym bodies-great to look at but keep off the grass. Stein’s eyes burned. He realized he hadn’t slept yet since he turned fifty and that condition was not going to be remedied soon. Today was a changeover day when Angie was scheduled to go to Hillary’s. That gave him three days, three uninterrupted, non-custodial days, to find Nicholette’s killer.
He drove with purpose into the parking lot of The Bank of Henry Kneuer. He would have liked the moment to be more theatrical; to be observed with the appropriate pomp to mark the circumstance. But it was barely seven o’clock and the doors would not open for another hour.
He unfolded Goodpasture’s check, endorsed the back “for deposit”, and executed his signature in a manner congruent with the occasion. He placed the check into an envelope and sealed it, inserted his ATM card into the slot and entered his PIN number, which was the month and date of Angie’s birth. The steel security flap opened. Stein slipped the corner of the envelope into the slot.
Powerful rollers seized it from his hand. He held to it for a moment, considered what it meant if he let go. The choice he was making. The risk and its consequence He released the pressure between his thumb and forefinger. The envelope rolled down into the slot. The steel trap door slammed shut. Stein the hippie was dead. Long live Stein the warrior.
He was back on the bus.
All the cars on Stein’s street were still peacefully asleep, wrapped up to their windshields in baby blankets of dew. Only Stein’s Camry was overwrought. Its unrested hood was hot to the touch, its windows streaked with worry and grime. Stein parked across the street and tiptoed up the pathway through the courtyard to his front door. The joggers weren’t even up yet. Only the bougainvillea looked wide-awake. In the early morning light, the blossoms radiated like the eyes of visionaries hatching psychotic schemes.
He opened his front door and slid inside. At first glance he barely noticed the crepe paper streamers left strewn about the living room. Watson struggled to his feet and slalomed through the debris. His one-syllable exclamation, like the yip of the first prairie dog, aroused the next one in line. That was Lila. She rose up from the couch in a state of total disorientation.
“Stein?”
Her voice roused another female who had been asleep on the futon wrapped in Stein’s American flag blanket.
“Harry?”
“Hillary?”
“Daddy?”
“Angie?”
In her pajamas, encamped on the staircase. All three females arose and descended upon Stein, cawing at him with variations of the same question: Namely “Where have you been?” Salient details began to register in Stein’s brain. The ceilings and walls were festooned with decorations. There were hats with the number 50 glued to them. His desk was covered with a paper Happy Birthday tablecloth.
“Was there a party?” he asked
