Stein had a bad premonition. “What are you saying?”
Vane extended his arms to them both like an ambidextrous courtier. “Would you like to see the plant?” He conducted them into a smaller room that was painted white and furnished with laboratory sinks and copper tubing. Shelves and cabinets were lined with retort jars containing all manner of exotic ingredients: dried and freshly preserved orchids, berries, buds and small twigs.
“Anybody can make what is essentially Espe New Millennium shampoo. It’s not the formula that’s copyrighted; it’s the name and the packaging. Ninety per cent of the products on the market have the same ingredients.”
Stein marveled when reality outflanked irony. “Are you saying that anyone could brew up a vat of Espe shampoo but they couldn’t call it Espe because Espe doesn’t exist outside its packaging?”
“That is the million dollar secret.”
“More like twenty million,” Stein observed.
“Probably closer to four hundred million worldwide. But I just make the bare necessity to satisfy my regulars.”
Moments earlier Stein had thought he was done with shampoo but now it looked like Mattingly and Michael Esposito had been right, that Paul Vane had been knocking them off. But why was Vane showing him? His shell cracked with barely a tap. Lila was crashing off the high and getting cranky. “Stein, can we go? I’m hungry.”
An 11”?14” photo hung on the wall above one of the sinks that struck Stein with a vague sense of familiarity. It was Nicholette Bradley cavorting on a beach with another girl. Stein noticed the photographer’s logo under the photo-an aperture opening like a flower petal. He remembered the envelope he had found in Nicholette’s bedroom with that same logo. Weird things began to snap together.
“Is David Hart an acquaintance of yours?” Stein asked.
It was Paul Vane’s turn to be surprised. “How would you have known that?”
And then a voice emanated from the recesses of the room that said, “I was waiting for someone to introduce us.” A figure materialized. Stein thought at first it was a hallucination. The person standing in the doorway was the image of young Michael Espos-ito. Punk-blond hair, snakelike curl of the lips.
“Speak of the devil,” Vane said. Meet David Hart in person.”
“I’ve been listening to the conversation,” David said. “We are not amused.” On that, he abruptly strode from the room. And Paul Vane did what any man would do who feared that he had lost thelast person on earth allotted for him to love.
He gave chase.
ELEVEN
Argumentative voices rose up through the grates of the elevator cage that carried the spatting couple to the lower level. Even a foreigner who didn’t speak the language could follow the story of the opera. The timbre of one voice was strident and unyielding, designed to hurt without remorse. The other was tinged with a depth of sadness that comes of knowing that more is about to be lost than merely an argument. Still on the floor above them, Stein looked rapidly around for a staircase.
“Leave them alone,” Lila said. “They have enough problems.”
“I wish I could.”
In her reluctantly assumed role as helpmate, Lila pointed out the stairway door. Stein yanked it open and raced down ahead of her. “Don’t wait for me, or anything,” she admonished, and began a careful, wobbly, banister holding descent
Vane and Hart were so deep in their argument that they did not immediately step out of the elevator when it reached the basement. Only in the ghastly aftermath of a particularly savage comment was there a moment’s silence, during which David Hart emerged from the elevator, with his suppliant in futile pursuit. Both were surprised to see Stein already there, taking in the sight. The walls were well stocked with Espe New Millennium shampoo bottles. Perhaps a thousand of them. Stein hated being lied to by people he liked and he liked Paul Vane. “So this is ‘just barely enough’ to satisfy your few loyal customers?”
Vane dropped his countenance in shame. Hart did not. He turned upon Stein the full unleashed power of the Post-Reagan disdain for anyone who thought that guilty executives should face consequences. “Whose lackey are you?” he spat. “That bitch cunt Espe?”
“Please, David. You’re being rude,” Vane said quietly.
“I’m being rude? That little whore stole your life’s work. I’d think you’d care, if not for your own sad self then for me. You’d think I’d count for something.”
“You count,” Vane said, his voice disappearing into the stale canyons of old arguments. “David has nothing to do with this,” he confessed to Stein. “It was all my doing.”
“And of course I believe you, since you’ve never lied to me.”
“Come,” Paul Vane beckoned them. “All will be revealed.”
He led them back up the flight of stairs to the main level where Lila was still waiting, then through the double door that opened into a large, sunny white-walled room with high windows and a beautifully redone blond wood floor. There were rolled backdrops and reflective umbrellas. Stationary lights were mounted on aluminum poles and a 35mm camera on a tripod. A pair of handcuffs and a silk top hat were left on the sofa, props from a recent photo shoot. At least Stein hoped they were props. But what arrested his attention was the life-size, three-dimensional cutout of the Espe bottle; the same icon he had seen that morning in Milli-cent Pope-Lassiter’s office.
“You’re David Hart, the photographer,” Stein declared. “I’ve seen your work.”
Hart replied a suspicious but flattered, “Really?”
“You shot the Espe box?”
“Yes,” David replied, puffing up.
“And no,” Vane added.
“But mostly yes,” David insisted. “Uncredited and unheralded. And of course unpaid.”
Lila poked Stein in the neck. “I’m still here by the way. In case you were wondering.”
Paul Vane told an extraordinary tale, the gist of it being that marketing strategy for “New Millennium” would feature a new face, one who would replace Nicholette Bradley. Of course that created a tremendous buzz. Thousands of girls were interviewed. And finally-
“Don’t tell me,” Stein interjected. “Is her name Alex?”
Lila hooted at him, “Stein, you don’t know anything about that.”
“How did you know?” Vane marveled.
“You mean he’s right? ” Lila spent the next ten minutes wondering how that could possibly be.
Vane went on. “They tried to keep it hush hush. They began shooting the national ad campaign last summer. Print ads. Billboards. TV spots. But of course no secret is safe in the ad business. Once it leaked that Alex was the next big thing, clients were lining up to hire her after her exclusive with Espe expired. Twin Peaks, the sports bra company, won the bidding. They paid her a million dollars, and the deal was she had to shave her head.”
Stein remembered he had seen those pictures. His mind, which did strange things like this, presented the proof sheet he had seen in Nicholette’s bedroom. “So she must have known she was being replaced.
“Nikki’s a darling. She helped find Alex.”
“She wasn’t irked about being replaced?”
“It’s show biz. Everyone replaces somebody.”
“Do you think you can get to the part about me before the dinner break?” David Hart pouted.
Vane smiled at his lover, who did not smile back. “Alex’s last contractual obligation to Espe was for the shoot that would create the package. Ray Ramos was the photographer. It was there that I set eyes on Ray Ramos’s magnificent, young, overworked, under-appreciated assistant for the first time.” Here Vane bowed in David Hart’s direction.
“At last.” Hart fumed.
“It was the assistant’s job to do everything. Make coffee. Load cameras. Set the lights. Process the film. After the last shot was done, Alex came to my salon. She had agreed to the deal with Twin Peaks and wanted her
