discarded remnants from Angie’s bedroom that Hillary had been removing. Her bulletin board sat propped on the living room floor against her stereo and TV. Sweaters and notebooks were scattered on the staircase, left there when Angie had bolted and Hillary had given brief, futile chase.
He wondered why he didn’t hear any barking.
“Wats?”
He checked the kitchen, the hall. His heart sank out of its cavity.
“Watson?”
He slowly climbed the stairs. Angie’s bedroom door was ajar. Stein had never entered Angie’s room without permission even when she wasn’t with him. He knocked now out of habit before stepping across the rubicon uninvited. He felt like he was entering the royal chamber of the queen. This was not the room of a child. Sexy rock and roll posters were tacked and taped to the walls. Her shelves were cluttered with beauty products: lip gloss, eye-shades, skin exfoliants, hair tints, hair conditioners. Her bed frame was taken apart. The mattress stripped and turned half on its side. He remembered carrying all of it up these stairs, assembling the frame and headboard, a routine job for someone with minimal mechanical abilities, for him a sixteen-hour epic.
“Wats?”
He tiptoed into his own bedroom. He whistled softly and clapped his hands and called his dog’s name again. A whimper began to form itself in his throat at the prospect of finding his soulmate lying lifeless and small under a piece furniture. Then Penelope Kim’s wind chime voice sang out across the courtyard. “Stein. You’re back! Come see your dog dance the tarantella.”
Stein looked out the window to see Penelope standing on her front steps wearing a silk jacket zippered half way up and a halter-top underneath. Watson was alongside her, and when she hopped down the steps, so did Watson. Stein gaped like one of those people at a religious revival.
“What did you DO?” He lumbered down his own stairs into the living room and out the front door.
“I knew you’d be happy. My friend Lin Pei does canine acupressure. His energy was way too yin.”
Stein embraced Watson’s frail body and nuzzled his cold wet nose. “I owe you gigantically for this, and I’ll tell you everything about Amsterdam for Klein.”
“Klein?” Penelope giggled as if he had brought something up from the 1920’s.
“Your detective. Or did you change his name again?”
“Oh, I dropped the whole thing.”
“You dropped it?”
“Too linear.”
A pink-and-orange-haired Asian woman wearing a sarong and a brocade songket waddled out of the back room. She carried a cluster of smoldering blue sage in her right hand waving it before her priestess style.
“If you’re Lin Pei, thank you,” Stein gushed.
“Cool dog. Have many more years.”
“You know this?”
“Believe me, if she says it she knows it.” Penelope chimed in.
Lin Pei looked closely at Stein. He waited a beat for her to extend the polite prophecy of long life to him.
“Hmm,” she said.
“Hmmm?”
“Could go either way,” she said, as though she had seen the outcomes of both amusing possibilities.
It truly was a miracle that Watson’s arthritis was gone. They trotted across the courtyard to Stein’s apartment. Watson stopped to raise his leg to pee, then bounded to the top step in one Jordanesque elevation. Stein flipped on the TV. All of the local channels were carrying live feeds from the Mortuary of the Eternal Flame where Nicholette Bradley was going to be cremated, intercutting with clips of celebrity friends expressing their shock and grief and recounting beautiful memories of her.
It occurred to Stein that Hillary might not know Angie was safe. Angie most likely had not called her. Stein had punched in the first six digits of Hillary’s cell phone when he saw Paul Vane in an interview “RECORDED EARLIER” being interviewed on TV. Stein believed the pain behind his soulful eyes. He had truly loved Nicholette. The figure lurking behind him was David Hart. At least that was how it first registered to Stein because he expected it to be David Hart. But as he looked more closely Stein was bewildered to realize that it was not David Hart, it was Michael Esposito. How in the hell could that be? How could Paul Vane and the lover who had jilted him be in the same frame together?
In that moment of not trying, the sealed membrane of his Amsterdam vision popped open into his conscious mind. He remembered the two buds. And getting high. And the Doctrine of Depletion, which did not sound as profound in daylight. He remembered priests and monkeys and smoke and lather. And he remembered that Michael Esposito had killed Nicholette Bradley. And that he had done it with Paul Vane’s help. In the moment of stunning revelation, in the bittersweet thrill of having solved the mystery of Nicholette’s murder, came the ghastly realization that the pair of killers had lured Lila to have lunch with her today.
And that Lila had said she was taking Angie.
Holy Kryptonite.
SEVENTEEN
Stein never wanted to hear anyone’s voice as much as he wanted to hear Lila answer her phone. It rang two, three, four times before her recorded OGM meticulously described the possible contingencies (not home or on another call) followed by a detailed litany of information describing how to wait for a beep and leave a message and what would happen next, as if nobody had ever done this before.
Finally the beep came and Stein yelled loudly into the phone so that his voice would resonate through her home and that if she and Angie had not yet left he could head them off. But no one picked up. There was no screech of electronic feedback that came when someone tried to talk with the recording still going. He would have welcomed the sound like the sweetest chorale. But the waiting was in vain. He had to move. “Call me if you hear this. I’m going to look for you at the restaurant.”
He dashed out of the house, with the revitalized Watson at his heels. He opened the driver’s side door and Watson vaulted in, skittered across the seats and found his rickety equilibrium. It was just like the old days. Zooming down the highway with Watson’s face stuck outside the window Except that Watson’s fur was gray and the VW bus was history and he wished he had listened to Angie and gotten a cell phone.
He sped through a red light at the corner of La Brea, and cut wildly between cars driving west on Beverly. He would have been frightened of himself if he had seen the expression on his face. It was not until he reached the intersection at La Cienega, where he had to decide whether to go straight or take the left turn arrow, that rational thought penetrated into the control center of his brain. He had no idea where The Ivy was.
He pulled over into a pod mall and looked for a public phone. He called 411 and got the bad news that there were two The Ivys; one in town, one at the beach. He got no help at all from the hostess who answered the phone at the city location. He could picture her perfectly from her voice. Tall, classy looking. Mid maybe late twenties. Suntan. Something slightly wolfen in her gray predatory eyes. She would neither confirm nor deny that a reservation had been made under the name Michael Esposito. Privacy issues, she explained, to protect their high-profile clientele from unwanted attention. “What about protecting a murderer,” Stein blurted, “Does that fit into your privacy issues?” He heard the word whacko either directed to him or about him and then the connection ended.
He took a deep Buddhist breath before calling The Ivy at the beach. Smooth as an oil slick, Stein gave his name and apologized that he was running late for his lunch with Michael Esposito, and could she please page him, or if he had not yet arrived, to deliver the message as soon as he did. Apparently Stein had not been the first person to try that ploy, for it was easily deflected. He did at least manage to get the restaurants’ addresses.
He hit the joint in town first. He expected something large and mirrored like the Krasnapolsky. He was surprised at the white picket fence and the open patio and country cottage look of the place. The eight-dollar valet parking was more what he expected. He gave the valet five to hold it and said he be back in a second. Leaving Watson to guard the car, he sailed past the maitre d’ into the dining room. He ignored an anxious progression of,
