head shaved immediately because if she let herself think about it too long she knew she’d back out. I had just finished doing her when my darling David (of course he wasn’t my darling yet!) came bursting in. His face was the color of blanched mushrooms. He had screwed up all fifteen rolls of film that Ray Ramos had shot. The negatives were ruined. There was no shot for the box, nor for the billboard. It was a disaster of global proportion.
“David’s plan was that he would reshoot the Ray Ramos session and substitute his film for Ramos’s without anyone knowing. He knew the entire lighting setup and all the lenses and angles that Ramos had used. He had never shot before but he was sure he could do it. All I had to do was to get the world’s new top model to agree to work with an unknown photographer when all that was at stake was her entire career and the success of a ten million dollar ad campaign.
“He swore he would do anything for me in return which was a very tempting offer. And then he saw my wicker basket filled with her shorn auburn hair. I thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. His jaw froze. His eyes fluttered. He lost the power of speech. He grabbed me around the neck and begged me to perform a miracle, to make a wig out of Alex’s hair.”
“Don’t embellish,” David complained. “You always embellish.”
“My darling, I am nothing but embellishment.”
Stein stepped in to short-circuit the domestic spat. “So you made a wig for Alex out of her own hair that you had just cut off her? Is that what happened?”
“It’s technically called a fall, not a wig, because it’s her own hair, but yes. And David did the reshoot and it came out brilliantly.” Vane bowed to his protege. “More brilliantly than the original, I’m sure.”
“And then everyone started proclaiming Ray Ramos a photographic genius,” David sulked.
“Yes,” Paul Vane commiserated. “The injustice.”
The picture began to coalesce in Stein’s mind. “So you gents decided to start your own underground distribution arm? You whipped up your own private batch? You enlisted the girl at the warehouse to distract Morty Greene and diverted a few shipments of Espe bottles… How am I doing so far?”
“Stein, all this talk is getting me hungry,” Lila pouted.
“We’re done here in a second. As soon as they tell me which of them wrote the extortion letters.”
“What letters?” Vane blurted before he could stop himself.
It became clear in a flash that the extortion letters had not been part of the plan the two had agreed upon and that David Hart had written them without Vane’s approval or knowledge. The Fall of the House of Espe. Stein got the joke now. Hart knew that the hair on the label was not real. The truth-in-advertising laws were very clear now that beauty products had to be accurately represented. The notes were thinly veiled threats that Hart would blow the lid off the campaign. The lid of the Espe box was where the false hair fell. Of course David Hart knew that. He had shot the damn thing.
“Oh my God,” Paul Vane cried. “We’re going to jail and I look ghastly in orange.”
“Nobody is going to jail,” Stein assured him. “If you do exactly what I tell you to do.” Stein’s patience was losing its patience. “You’re going to pay for a truck and return all their bottles along with an apology. And then you are going to leave Espe Shampoo alone. Is that cool with everybody?”
It was so cool with Paul Vane that he practically fell into Stein’s arms. Hart was a line drawing of disappointment. “Why don’t you just roll me over and fuck me missionary style,” he groused. “What do I get?”
“How about for openers you get not to go to jail,” Stein said, “And your partner gets not to go to jail.”
“He promised to take care of me,” David wheedled. “In perpetuity.”
Stein envisioned how he would take care of the little weasel in perpetuity. It involved carpet tacks and his eyeballs. He addressed Paul. “Last question and I’m done with you. How did you get the bottles here?” At that moment the sound of the service elevator clanged to life. Summoned from above, it began its labored ascent. “Ah. Perhaps this is the answer to my question,” Stein observed. He began his own laborious climb to the surface.
“Stein, wait.” Lila pulled her shoe on and hurried after him.
In the hour they had spent indoors, winter evening had fallen and life on the street had undergone a radical transformation. The main strip through town, which earlier had been about as lively as a doily, now had become a teeming, volcanic landscape of college students on winter break. Boys leaned out of their cars, hooting mating calls at the constellations of girls, whose every movement of torso and limb released crackling trails of pheromones. The flash of an incongruous image on the far side of the road caught Stein’s eye-a truck carrying a load of hay. It was only a glimpse but its afterglow remained printed on his retina as it moved through the parting crowd of pedestrians, and disappeared. He was certain that it was Morty Greene’s truck or a reasonably close hallucination. “Wait here,” he instructed Lila.
“Stop saying that.”
She clutched his arm and together they serpentined through the moving maze of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. “I hope you appreciate that I’m running,” Lila gasped. “The only thing I ever ran for is secretary of my stock club.” They crossed on a long diagonal to the other side. An unbroken protoplasm of humanity flowed along the sidewalk. Stein stopped for a moment to scan the terrain. But the red pickup truck was nowhere in sight.
“I see a sign for hot food. Is that what we’re looking for?”
The blind alley appeared out of nowhere. The angle at which it met the street concealed it from view until he came upon it. The red pickup was parked catty-corner to the side of the brick building, tailgate open, directly alongside an open elevator shaft. Stein sidled up to the entrance and peered down. He could see the tops of a load of wooden crates descending into the sub-basement. He muttered to himself as he thought of Morty lying to his face. All he’d been trying to do was keep him out of trouble.
The elevator’s gears clanked, and the car began to ascend. Stein’s mind raced through a dozen possible next moves. The one he chose probably wasn’t the best of them. He grabbed Lila around the waist and hoisted her up onto the hood of the truck and told her to sit there and look serious.
“It’s actually kind of nice. The metal is still warm.” She adjusted her legs around the hood ornament.
“A little bit more serious.”
“Is something bad about to happen?”
“Define bad.”
The wide purple brim of the felt hat first emerged, then the face of Morty Greene’s partner dude, Roland Dupuis. He had seemed diminutive alongside Morty Greene, but here alone he looked full-size.
“The fuck?”
Roland thrust the iron gates powerfully aside. The tomato slug on his face seemed to crawl closer to his eye as his expression assumed full battle alert. He was dressed elegantly for driving a truck: a white silk shirt and purple silk trousers. “I know you. The man who doesn’t take good advice from his friends.”
Stein gestured toward Lila. “She’s Federal. You got yourself into some deep shit.”
Roland took one cursory glance at her and scoffed. “She’s no damn FBI.” He came toward Stein, who raised neither his hands nor his voice.
“She could be a crossing guard and you’d still be looking at five years if those bottles cross a state line. You ever hear of the Federal Racketeering act?”
Roland lost a bit of his bravado. “Nobody said anything about state lines.”
“Of course nobody said anything. The fall guy is for taking the fall.” It was important not to break eye contact with Roland. But Lila, trying to scooch herself down off the truck, caught her heel on the hood ornament and was stuck with her legs splayed apart.
“Stein, would you get me down off this thing? It’s toasting my buns.”
He removed her shoe and lifted her down. “Thanks that was excellent timing,” he whispered.
“My foot got caught.”
He set her down and turned back to Roland in time for Roland’s fist, traveling toward Stein’s body at great velocity, to make impact with the unmuscled pit of his solar plexus. All the air blew out of his system in one huge “OOOF” and he folded like a slab of melting cheese. Roland vaulted into the cab of Morty Greene’s truck, proclaiming that he was not taking the fall for anyone. Its eight-cylinder engine roared to a start. Other people nearby gasped and screamed and held their faces the way witnesses do in the aftermath of sudden violence. Most kept doing what they had been doing.
Lila bent over Stein’s body and kept repeating, “Are you all right? Is there anything I can do?”
