“Sir, excuse me sir, can I help you?” and scanned the hoi polloi of Hollywood elite, lunching on their thirty dollar spaghetti bowls, forty dollar salads and fifty dollar glasses of port wine.
There was no sign of Angie or Lila, and he was confident he’d made enough of a scene that they would have noticed him if they were there. He strode back through the gauntlet of the maitre d’s disapproving eyes, his expression announcing very clearly that Stein would never be seated on his watch. Stein reached into his pocket and pulled out the first bill his fingers found. A Goodpasture hundred. Nice. He had forgotten Goodpasture had wadded him with cash. He was also amused at the change of expression the host’s face underwent when he saw the money in Stein’s hand coming closer. So it gave him even more pleasure when he slipped the Ben Franklin right past his greedy face and instead pressed it into the parking dude’s hand. There wouldn’t be a lot more pleasure coming his way for a while.
He headed out toward the ocean and Ivy by the Sea. All along the way, workers on cherry pickers were putting new billboards in place, whose content was scrupulously covered except for the message “COMING SOON. ESPE NEW MILLENNIUM SHAMPOO.” It oppressed Stein’s heart to imagine Paul Vane as an accomplice to violence upon anyone, much less upon Nicholette Bradley, much less Lila. Much less Angie. What could Esposito possibly want with her? It didn’t hold together. The pieces of the mosaic still shifted when Stein tried to make a complete picture.
As he headed west he realized he was approaching the Espe warehouse. Somewhere in Lila’s excited rant she had mentioned that she was being brought there for pictures. He made an impulsive quick series of right turns and circled down around the rectum of Culver City to the artery that led to the gate. He stuck his card out the window at the electric eye. There was the sound of a faint electronic burp but the gate did not nod and rise. He tried again and got the same result. His access code must have been disabled, he thought. Of all times for a system to run efficiently.
A sixteen-wheeler chugged in behind Stein and air-horned him. Stein made a series of vague gestures meant to communicate something about his card and the gate. The driver jerked his thumb in a return gesture that left no ambiguity. Stein held his hands over his ears to muffle the throbbing diesel, and yelled up to the driver. “I need to follow you in.” He waited a moment until he had gotten what he thought was a nod of assent or at least recognition, then got back into his car and backed off the road into the weedy, rutted debris strewn apron that bordered the entry.
The truck’s gears ground, the air brakes hissed, the barrier gate rose and the leviathan truck squeezed through the narrow opening with inches to spare on either side. Stein was impressed with the driver’s skill. He revved his tinny sounding engine and attempted to ride in after him. The robotic arm came moments after the caboose of the truck had cleared, and Stein was shut out again. He tooted his horn to get the driver’s attention, but it made no noticeable impression. He had never realized how similar his horn sounded to a detesticled kazoo.
He abandoned his car and marched past the gate following the truck as it lumbered up to the shipping dock. It found its place in a mandala of other trucks that were already parked, their tail gates open wide, filling their holds with an endless supply of cartons being disgorged from the warehouse. They resembled maggots suckling at a termite queen. Stein was intercepted halfway across the yard by a woman wearing a hardhat and carrying a clipboard stuffed with shipping records. She informed him he had to vacate the premises.
“I’m not trespassing. I used to work here.”
Her long, white lab coat was splayed open to reveal a tank top and jeans when she waved her arms at him in the international gesture that meant go no further. He tried to show her his non-functioning card.
“I’m not looking at anything. And I wish you’d do the same.”
He had to smile to himself. Morty had described her well. The avodado breasts, the twin eggplant buttocks. Her voice as creamy as sweet ranch dressing. “You’re Delores.”
“Yes?” She regarded him warily.
“I need to see the boss. Is Mister Esposito in?”
“I wouldn’t know any of that. I work supply.”
“It’s very important. Could you please open the gate so I can drive around to the executive side?”
“How do you know my name?”
“A friend of mine did a favor for you.”
“Is that right.”
“Yes, Delores, that’s right.” He felt himself getting stronger. “And neither he nor I have any interest in implicating you in certain disappearances. That’s all been put to rest.”
She took him a step aside into the shadows. “Are you talking about who I think?”
“I don’t have time to dance.” He raised his hand a foot above his head to Morty Greene’s height.
“Shit. You the police?”
“Much worse.”
She became fiercely defensive. “I just brought him around the side like someone told me a coupla times. But I’m not down for killing shit!”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know how you people work. You think everyone he ever talked to had something to do with it.”
“With what? Had something to do with what?”
“You telling me you don’t know?”
“Look at this fifty year old Jewish face. Does it look like it knows anything?”
She gave him a slow steady scan and agreed with his assessment. “It looks like Morty Greene comes by his name ‘The Mortician’ legitimately. He got taken in for killing that girl.”
“Killing what girl?”
Delores nodded toward the warehouse where at that moment a thirty-by-fifty foot billboard was being carried out proclaiming the arrival of Espe New Millennium shampoo. “That one,” she said.
The billboard had not yet been covered. The girl on the bottle and the package was not Alex, as it had been in the prototype. No.
The Espe New Millennium girl was Nicholette.
Bradley. He took a moment to wonder how every thing he was sure of was wrong. And for how long that had been true.
EIGHTEEN
Stein careened into the Malibu substation and parked in the restricted spot right behind Chief Bayliss’s Cutlass Sierra. He left the windows cracked open for Watson and hurried inside. Every police station Stein had ever been inside of-and during his activist days he had been inside quite a few-reeked of the same musty stench of arrogance and petty abuse of power that dispirits everything it touches.
It wasn’t the tear gas and truncheons that cops used to break up anti-war demonstrations that turned Stein into an activist. It wasn’t for any bleeding heart liberal outrage at their excessive violence against violent criminals. They had a dangerous job. Some of them snap. Ok, so do timing belts on Mercedes. It happens. What ultimately galvanized Stein against them was their attitude toward ordinary citizens. How they made people feel like criminals. How they made inefficiency the rule, taking the greatest number of steps possible to perform the simplest request. As if before they could make a phone call for you they had to first invent electricity.
The desk sergeant was typing a report on a stolen car. After each keystroke that he thumped in with a heavy index finger, he picked up the Driver’s License, changed glasses, found the next number, changed glasses, typed it, changed glasses and fumbled to pick up the license for the next letter. All the time ignoring Stein, who stood eighteen inches from him and made several futile efforts to impose himself in the sergeant’s line of sight. The name under the ON DUTY sign said Sgt. O’Bladovich.
“Sergeant O’Bladovich. I need to see Chief Bayliss.”
“O’Bladovich got transferred downtown.”
He continued his ritual, typing another letter, undoing it and correcting it. That was it. Stein strode past his post, barged through the door clearly indicated FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY into a vestibule outside the private office of Stein’s longtime foil and adversary, Deputy Interim Precinct Commander Jack Bayliss.
