“Have you come to hear Brianna’s lecture?”
“Maybe not exactly. More to see you.”
“I know,” she smiled. “Winston called.”
Word came that Brianna had just called from her car phone to say she was stuck in airport traffic and she’d be late. Stein waited to hear a burst of irony that she was driving here in a stretch limo to give a talk on. But zealots are short on perspective. “You see?” squat Alan Ginsberg said with a ferocious shudder of his raid forest head. “Too damn many cars.”
She guided him through the assembly room and out the French doors to the community garden. It was beautifully planned and well tended. Healthy vines of winter squash crawled like infantry across the hillocks. There were clusters of late corn, pole beans and delicate tendrils of Chinese snow peas climbing wire trellises.
“Did Winston tell you why I wanted to see you?”
“He told me you might be carrying something.”
“He said I was carrying?”
“Don’t be coy. I’ve never tasted real Goodpasture.”
“God, you people are like the Russian mafia. Graft. Bribe.” He nipped off a little taste for her. “Tell me. Don’t you think it’s at all ironic that you sustain a low end community center by selling high end weed?”
“Life is a carousel old chum.” She took an approving whiff of the bud.
“Did he tell you what else?
She started to say something, held back.
“What?”
“Are you really back in the world?”
“You read about that model up in Topanga?”
“Tragic.
“I owe her a favor.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
She appraised his response. Decided he was on the ups. “There are these two guys. I don’t like them much. One called Wylie, one called Phibbs. Do you know them?”
Stein gestured that he didn’t.
“One is like a lawyer-rock promoter-wannabe mogul. Wears cartoon character t-shirts. His friend looks like a marine or a CIA pilot. Buzzcut. Lethal empty expression. I occasionally deal with them if I need generic run-of-the- mill smoke.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Let a girl finish. You know how you get a sense when people are showing off for you? A week or so ago these guys were talking about bringing home some end-of the-world weed from Amsterdam.”
“No, this would be local.”
“Sorry. She took another whiff of the bud “I look forward to this.”
“So how’s it like living in the antique world?”
“All men are merely weak surrogates for him, Stein.” She made him almost think she really meant it.
A TV was playing as Stein made his way back through the house to the exit. The “Supermodel Slaying” was all over the news. Local reporters were buttonholing anyone who might have known or worked with Nicholette Bradley, shoving mikes in their faces, asking their imbecilic questions. “How does it make you feel…?” The one person in the whole circus who looked like he truly loved and missed the girl was a hairdresser who said he had known her for years and, according to the crawl, had done her hair for all the Espe ads. He was gay and bald and had eyes that even in grief danced like hummingbirds. His name flashed on the screen. Paul Vane. Stein had heard that name before. It took just a few moments for it to roll into the right pachinko hole in Stein’s brain to start the bells ringing.
Paul Vane.
The former lover/mentor of Michael Esposito. The man accused of stealing the Espe bottles. The man Mrs. Pope Lassiter wanted him to talk to. Stein could not imagine what a soulful, compassionate person like Vane had in common with a furtive little tramp like Miss Espe, Michael Esposito. Maybe the thirty-year age difference had something to do with it. Groucho’s line about a man being as old as the woman he feels, transcended gender preference.
With Goodpasture gone AWOL, Paul Vane was Stein’s only direct link to Nicholette Bradley. He had reason now to drive out to Palm Springs and it had nothing to do with shampoo. It registered somewhere on the spectrum of his hard drive how curious it was that Nicholette was a focal point in both of his current preoccupations. He called his answering machine from the phone booth outside the center. He winced when the mechanized voice informed him he had eight messages. He skipped past the five from Mrs. Higgit without listening. There was a message from Ben at the bank that was so cryptic he had to play it twice to understand. Ben had traced the Stop Payment to a name that sounded so phony he was sure it was bogus. One Alton Schwimmer. The confirmation of Stein’s suspicion made him growl and wish he had left the doctor to fend for himself last night instead of driving him back to his hotel.
The last message was from a woman with a perky voice that Stein did not recognize, telling a rambling tale about a dress that she had sent to the dry cleaners. It was the longest, wackiest wrong number in telephonic history, but she finally circled back to the point of her story, which was that she and Stein had met two months ago in the produce section looking at a vegetable that was half cauliflower and half broccoli, and that Stein had called her Broccolflower and given her his phone number, but she had stuck the napkin in the bra strap of the lining of the dress that she had just now gotten back from the dry cleaners which was why she hadn’t called him until now, but if he remembered her and if he had not met the woman of his dreams yet, she hoped he would call her back.
Stein absolutely remembered her. Redhead. Flaky as filo dough. Just as she began to give her phone number, there was a horrible squeak, and the tape went dead. Stein gasped, “Oh no!” But a moment later her voice came back laughing. “Can you believe I can actually make the sound of a tape disintegrating? One of the joys of having eight huge protective brothers. Just kidding about the huge protective part. And the eight. Anyway, call me. I thought you were cute.”
He called her back immediately.
“Broccolflower. It’s Stein.”
“Yes?” Her voice contained no glow of recognition.
“Stein.
“Yes. Hello?”
“You just left a message for me?” He waited for the exultant, oh of course, but there was nothing. “Broccolflower?”
“I don’t think this is going to work,” she said, and hung up.
When he called Millicent Pope-Lassiter to say that he would go to Palm Springs after all, it pissed him off that she was not at all surprised. She had apparently brushed off Stein’s entire act of rebellion as a non-event. The trip, she thought, would be an excellent second prong in the attack, in conjunction with the warrant that had been issued for the arrest of the inside man at the warehouse. She rummaged through her papers for the name, “A Mister Duluth Greene.” Stein roared from someplace deep in his digestive tract and was still volcanic when he called Mattingly’s office and Mrs. Higgit put him through.
“I told you not to do that. Didn’t I specifically tell you not to do that? Do you people fucking listen? I’m going out to Palm Springs in an hour. You call the dogs off Morty Greene until you get further notice. Do you understand that?”
His blood pressure was ripping at his eyeballs. He needed Lila’s sane, calming influence to take the ride out there with him. Plus she’d love getting her hair done by Paul Vane. He heard the water lapping in the backyard pool of her Beverly Hills home when she picked up her cell phone. He pictured her basking on the chair float listening to her Italian lesson on earphones.
“Do you feel like going to Palm Springs?” he asked.
He heard her sit up and adjust the halter-top of her bikini. “But Stein, you hate Palm Springs.”
“That’s why I need you to go with me. Something good to compensate for something I hate.”
“My God, that was almost sweet. When were you thinking of going?”
