back in, dried it off and looked at it more carefully. Stein understood now why “Miss Espe” had been so certain the card had been Vane’s. It carried the scent that he would have known so well, his New Millennium shampoo. It would have confirmed his suspicion that Vane was concocting a rip-off batch of his own.
But! Uh oh. A mental light bulb way down at the far end of a tunnel snapped on. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. When Esposito saw that the card was Nicholette’s, it had shocked him. It had not registered to Stein at the time that it happened, but now in the backlight of Nicholette’s death, that strong reaction was significant. He would have known that there was no reason for Nicholette to have the scent of his new shampoo upon her. She was no longer the Espe girl and would have no access to it.
Stein put himself into the dark corkscrew mind of Michael Es-posito. He would have come to the irrefutable conclusion that Nicholette had formed an alliance with his former lover/mentor, Paul Vane. Vane and Nicholette were linked by what they had lost. She had lost her identity as the Espe girl and possibly lost Goodpasture. Vane had lost the product he had created and his protege-lover.
Stein’s other inner voice elbowed his way through the waves of verbiage and met the errant train of thought head-on: All of this is marginally interesting but it has nothing to do with Nicholette’s being killed.
There was a moment of empty air. Then. His other internal voice answered. What about the extortion notes? “Blow the lid off.” “Fall of the house of Espe.” Somebody was threatening to bring Espe down.
That’s all been settled. Morty Green and his partner dude and Paul Vane and David Hart…
Let’s just go slow here. Maybe there’s something we didn’t notice. We know that only three people knew that the original Espe box had been re-shot after David Hart screwed up the negatives. David, because he shot it. Alex because she was in it. Paul Vane, because he made the hairpiece, the fall, out of Alex’s hair that he had just shaved to the skull. Mattingly never knew. Of course he never knows anything except for how many squares of toilet paper are missing. Who else? Even Ray Ramos, the photographer who had shot the layout, didn’t know.
Who cares about the fucking shampoo?
We may have a priests/monkeys thing here. We made the wrong picture out of the fragments. We thought she died for smoke. But maybe it was lather.
What are you saying?
Listen, Espe and Mattingly are getting extortion notes. They figure it’s from Paul Vane. We go there. Confront him. He’s cool about confiding that he’s making the product for his regular clients. We find all the missing bottles. Turns out he’s making a little bit more than he let on. Ok, maybe a lot more. He and his new partner have their own private little distribution company going on. David Hart wants to be taken care of “in perpetuity.” But you saw Vane’s reaction to the extortion notes. He knew nothing about them. This was David’s side deal off the side deal. Why stop at one little golden egg when you get the whole goose?
You just want it to be Paul Vane.
His voices were getting quite roiled at each other.
You won’t let it be Paul Vane and it’s making you blind. Here’s the scenario: Michael Esposito finds Nikki’s card in our shirt pocket. He sees that she is Vane’s ally. He goes to her place to confront her. He’s known her for years, so she’d certainly let him in with no struggle. He wants her to confess to the notes. She refuses. Maybe she wrote them, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she got the shampoo from Paul Vane, maybe she got it from her friend Alex. But “Miss Espe” drowns her before he finds out.
No! It’s about the weed. Look at the note pad from her night table. Something about a “lid of.”
What if it’s “lid off ”? Blow the lid off!
Oh, fuck! Oh Shit. You might be right.
This is what I’m saying.
All right, but. Wait a minute.
Stein’s heart raced. Trouble breathing. “Moonlight Sonata.”
Espe couldn’t have killed her alone. He had to have help.
Mattingly?
Mattingly would never be that daring. Think. Who would do anything in the world for him? Who is more vulnerable but a discarded lover who sees the last person put on this earth who might ever love him leaving his solar system forever.
Not Paul Vane.
Yes, Paul Vane.
No. Why was her place ransacked? They were looking for something.
Or maybe planting something they wanted to be sure was found. Like the fall. The fall of the house of Espe.
We could have prevented it.
It’s worse than that. Her card in our shirt pocket put them on her trail. We killed her. We killed the thing we loved.
Stein threw his head back against the mattress in despair. The trouble with searching for the truth is that we sometimes find it. We’re hoping for priests, and get monkeys. He pictured a beach with smooth wet sand and wrote in it with a pointed stick the solution to the murder.
The one force that had been sustaining him was now abruptly gone. Sleep beckoned him to escape once again, caressed his eyelids, massaged his forehead. And as there was nothing left to discover, he yielded without struggle. Ocean waves rolled over the shore. Now the waves filled in the crevasses, smoothed away every indentation, left the surface shiny and with no hint anyone had ever walked there. He should’ve written it down.
Hours later there was a soft knock on the door and a voice spoke his name. When there was no response, a passkey was inserted into the lock. The door opened slowly. A figure advanced furtively toward the bed where Stein lay. A hand reached down and grasped the phone cord leading to the receiver under the pillow beneath Stein’s head.
“Mr. Stein,” the voice uttered.
Stein awoke with a start. A man in hotel livery was standing above him telling him they had gotten the plane flight he requested. That they had been calling all morning to tell him but his receiver was off the hook.
Object by object, Stein began to reorient himself. He saw the bong with the residue of weed on the nightstand, the sofa rearranged, the lamp wire pulled apart. He remembered now that he had gotten high. He had the impression that he had entertained some interesting thoughts. Something about the nature of God… Something about who might have killed Nicholette… But if someone had asked him what any of those thoughts were, he could not have remembered if his life depended on it.
SIXTEEN
From his window seat at three thousand feet Stein watched the speedboats cut tic-tac-toe figures across the Santa Monica Bay. Trim and tanned men and women played beach volleyball, rode bicycles, roller bladed, all with a perverse joy and myopic disregard for the world outside of this Wizard Ozian bubble of make believe. Winter was not supposed to be this easy. Its Darwinian purpose was to weed out the infirm, kill the weak, cull the herd. But the winters in Los Angeles were like a joke. Four drops of rain, or even the threat of rain, was enough to dispatch breathless teams of “ Storm Watch ” TV news crews to street corners if there had been rumors of some wind.
In nature, if a wild pig gets eaten by a crocodile while trying to cross the Orinoco, he doesn’t get the yams on the other side. In L.A. everything survived. There were too many crosswalks. It softened resolve, forgave indolence, rewarded mediocrity, created the need to explain Natural Selection by false exaggeration. Stein had always favored New York street rules, the continuation rule applied and taxi drivers trying to knock down a pedestrian were allowed to pursue him up to the third floor.
And yet. Stein could not quash the feeling that he was glad- maybe ‘glad’ was too strong a word-but certainly not displeased, to be home. Home. That was the weird word. For all these twenty years he always thought of himself as just happening to be here, not living here. The thought made him cringe that he was becoming one of them, an Angeleno.
The Stewardess reminded him with a bored smile to bring his seatback to its upright position in preparation
