by Hal Ackerman
“Follow the truck,” Stein said quietly.
“Forget the truck. The truck is going to my place. Your Lexus went the other way.”
“I don’t need the Lexus anymore.”
“What about your daughter’s phone number?”
“I don’t need my daughter’s phone number. That car behind the truck was my Camry. The girl behind the wheel was my daughter.”
Chapter Fifteen
After a few rounds of What are you doing here? No, what are you doing here? Stein came down on her. “You’re an underaged, uninsured, unlicensed driver in a stolen car. What in the hell were you thinking?”
“Stolen,” Angie scoffed.
“Do you understand if you had had an accident—? If, God forbid, you injured someone? Or worse? Do you realize what a monumentally stupid thing you did?” He could feel blood surging through his brain. “Hand over the keys.”
She balked for a second.
“Now.”
She handed over a pink keychain.
“What the hell is this?”
“My set.”
“Yours?”
“I made a copy in like seventh grade. I’ve taken it out bunches of times.”
He stuffed the keys away. “You still haven’t told me what the hell you’re doing here.”
As a penance, Angie told her father everything. Anyway, a strategically redacted version of everything. She did not mention seeing Lila coming out of the bathroom naked with Richard. In its place she caulked in the gaps with the exciting narrative of what she and Matt had discovered and surmised about J. J. Bancroft’s ill-gotten financial empire. How at first she’d been sure that Bancroft murdered Sunny Cataluna out of greed, to get his hands on the oil. But when Matt found the old newspaper documents she realized it was a love triangle and that Bancroft wanted to get his hands on Lucy. And that Matthew was bringing the head of Sunny Cataluna up with him from the forensic paleontologist and they were going to expose Bancroft at the party and bring down the Bancroft empire.
When she finished he just looked at her like someone seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
“Why are you gaping, old man? Your Fixodent is showing.”
“Sometimes in spite of raising my blood pressure and decreasing my life expectancy, you blow me away.”
“Whatever.” Since she had now given him “full disclosure,” she demanded the same. Which he gave her. Redacting the minor detail about nearly being murdered. And that the person who had tried to kill him had himself been killed. What he was left with was a limp, “Still trying to figure out that bee wrestling thing.”
“That’s why you disappear and nobody hears from you?”
“I’m still not used to this cell phone thing.”
“And what happened to your face? Are you getting Botox injections?”
Stein ruefully admitted that he had gotten careless out in the field and a bee had stung him. He diverted her with a few salacious tidbits about the truck driver who was stung to death (he left it at that) and his many wives and mistress. He thought she’d enjoy the gossip, but the story made her unaccountably angry. People were fucked, she said, and didn’t want to hear any more about it.
Brickman’s XKE blew back into the scene. Angie had no idea who he was except that he had nearly driven her off the road, for which she had let loose a tirade of curses, given him the finger, and had been on the verge of opening her shirt and flashing him when her father emerged from the passenger side and called out her name.
“I found your girlfriend’s car,” Brickman said, vaulting out of his own. “But whoever was driving it was gone, so we still don’t know who your guardian angel is.”
Angie asked what this person was talking about.
Stein introduced Angie to Barry Brickman. Upon hearing Brickman’s name, Angie’s demeanor went from briefly confused to overly starstruck. “Not the Barry Brickman who owns Family Farms?” she whispered in awe.
“That’s a lot nicer greeting than a middle finger. Thank you.”
“Oh, my God. I’ve been wanting to meet you like forever!”
“You have?”
“You have?” Stein echoed, but with many more question marks.
“For school we have to do reports on self-made millionaires. You’re the one I picked.”
“I’m stupendously flattered,” Brickman said. “Unfortunately for you I’m not a millionaire.”
“You’re not?” Angie asked.
“You’re not?” Stein echoed.
A well-timed pause before he delivered the punch line, “I’m a billionaire.”
“Good one,” Angie applauded. “You had me.”
He was charmed by her sophisticated sense of humor and invited Angie to be a guest at his party.
“Is that the Bancroft’s seventy-fifth anniversary party?” Angie asked, with apparent stars in her eyes.
“I see your dad has been filling you in,” he said.
Stein had no idea what they were talking about but agreed.
Brickman gave Stein meticulous directions to where Lila’s car was situated before leaving them to tend to the thousand party details.
“I like your friend a lot,” Angie said.
“How do you know about this party?”
She didn’t answer. Stein made a U-turn onto the two-lane and started to drive in the direction Brickman had described. “There’s something else,” he said. “I had a very strange phone conversation with Lila. Is everything okay with you two?”
Angie muttered something gruff and unintelligible that Stein didn’t catch.
“I said Lila’s a bitch,” she repeated.
He turned sharply toward her. She continued looking straight ahead.
“Where is this coming from?”
She refused further comment.
“Does this have something to do with Matthew?”
“That’s it, Dad. You nailed it exactly.”
“Did he try—?”
“Do you want to hear every detail of my sex life?”
Stein blanched.
“Then don’t ask.”
“I don’t know what is going on here. But Lila is the woman I have chosen to be with. If the three of us are going to live together we have to get along.”
Grim, mirthless laughter permeated Angie’s reply. “I promise you, the three of us will not be living together.”
“That is a decision I will make. And you will make the best of it.”
“You may live in that delusion, old man.”
***
Stein slowed down and reconnoitered. All the landmarks that Brickman had vividly described were in place: The stream on the left. The overhanging broken weeping willow tree. The rusted sign for HOWSER’S GRAPES. There was only one thing missing. Lila’s Lexus.
“Either he gave us the wrong directions or I heard them wrong.”
“Or he lied to you.”
“About what?”
“About where he saw it? About seeing it at all.”
“Why would he lie?” Stein asked.
“Because he’s a member of the human race?”
Her cell phone rang. She took a step away and turned her back subtly murmuring into the phone that she did not want to talk to about last night. “Really?” Stein heard her exclaim. And then said it again with even more amazement: “Say that name again? I think that’s it. I’ll ask him.”
She clicked the call end button and approached her father thoughtfully. “That was Matt.”
“I gathered that. I thought you two were on the outs.”
“We are. But it’s sweet that he keeps calling. He just came from the museum. He says the bust of Sunny looks amazing. Bancroft will drop dead when he sees it.”
“That should make a big hit with the party guests.”
“There was something else, though. He was snooping through his Uncle Richard’s business papers this morning and he found—”
“He was snooping through his uncle’s business papers?
”
“Everybody does it. It’s no big deal.
“You snoop through my—?”
“Dad! The point is that his uncle is counsel to a private corporation that is buying up shitloads of land. He wouldn’t have noticed except that he recognized the name of the courthouse where all the deals were. It was the same place where you went to the beekeepers’ convention.”
“In Las Viejas?”
“Don’t you find that weird?”
“I find it weird and flattering that you actually listened to something I said.”
“I said Matthew remembered.”
“Okay, that’s more believable.”
“Your turn. One of the officers of the corporation is J. J. Bancroft. And another one is …”
“Is what?”
“Is Matthew’s stepmother.”
“Lila? She’s never told me she was an officer in a corporation.”
“Funny the things people keep from each other.”
“She doesn’t pay much attention to her financial matters. Richard handles all that for her.”
She took a deep breath and let that opening pass. “The corporation had a very cute name. Boysenberry Pi. Not P-i-e. P-i.”
The severity of her father’s reaction to that name startled her. “I know we like to tease each other. And you’re better at it than I am. Where did you come up with that name?”
“That was the name he told me.”
Stein’s mind was spinning. He spoke slowly. “In high school. We had a geometry teacher named Maxine Boysen. She would sit on her desk and cross her legs….” He realized where the story was going and who he was talking to, and stopped.
“Yeah, I get it,” Angie said flatly. “Boysenberry Pi.”
“The person who made up the name and thought it was the cleverest thing any human had ever said … was Barry Brickman. It looks like Bancroft and Brickman, the two richest men in the universe are in cahoots to buy up all the orchard land in the valley.”
“Cool.”
“No. Not cool.”
“I mean cool that we found it out.”
“You up for a little search and destroy?” Stein asked.
A long black Lincoln town car shot past them headed in the opposite direction. A pretty, dark-haired young woman looked out the back window.
“Whoa,” Angie yelped. “Was that Winona Ryder?”
***
There was not a lot of activity outside the Las Viejas courthouse. A few cars were parked in desultory fashion, a pickup truck or two using the spots for other business and a highway patrol cruiser.
The girl behind the desk was as friendly as a baker passing out samples at a county fair. Stein told her they were looking for records of local land sales to the Boysenberry Pi Corporation. “How far back would you like to go?” she asked. Her answer was unexpectedly bright and knowledgeable, as though she had the entire contents of the archive room memorized.
“Let’s start with the past six months.”
“And would you like the water bank sale too?”
“Excuse me?” said Stein.
“It just came in a day ago. The sale of the Viejas County water bank to the Boysenberry Pi Corporation. Actually it went first to the Family Farm Corp, then to their subsidiary the Honeybee Farms, and then through them to Boysenberry Pi.”
“Yes, we would like to see that as well,” Angie said.
“And a map that would show their location,” Stein added.
The instant the girl went back into the stacks, Stein whispered in Angie’s ear, “It’s illegal for a private corporation to own a state resource. Something very, very underhanded is—”
The girl returned with an armload of documents and ushered them to a nearby round table. “Take all the time you need,” she said.
Stein set Angie up to begin and excused himself to the men’s room. He hadn’t gone three steps when a large bully-pulpit voice sang out, “Look who’s here. Just the man I’ve been looking for.” Caravaggio’s black boots made him look even more gigantic.
“Hey, there,” Stein said, as though he were trying to place where he knew him. He gave a surreptitious cut-off signal behind his back to Angie.
Caravaggio placed a restraining mitt on Stein’s shoulder. “The coroner’s got something to show you from Henny Spector’s corpse.”
“Henny Spector’s corpse? What are you talking about?” He affected utter ignorance.
“The man who tried to kill you.” Caravaggio was not enjoying the game of stupid that Stein was playing.
“Kill me?” Stein laughed.
“Excuse me, Officer.” Angie came away from the table. “Did you say someone tried to kill this man?”
“You see that, Officer? You’re giving this poor girl bad dreams.” With subtly exaggerated expressions he was warning Angie to pretend not to know who he was and to find out what she could from those documents.
He waltzed away quickly with Caravaggio before she could ask any more questions, and announced in a loud theatrical voice, “You’ve got to bring me back here in an hour or all these people will wonder what happened to me at the … Las Viejas Coroner’s office.”
Chapter Sixteen
Angie’s cell phone buzzed under the stack of land sale documents she was perusing.
“Where are you?” Matthew’s voice lamented.
“Oh, God, I am such an idiot. I forgot to call you.”
The attendant gesticulated to Angie with great urgency that cell phones were a no-no.
“I have to go outside. Let me call you right back.”
“I’ve got you,” Matthew said. “Are you at the Las Viejas courthouse?”
“How do you know that?”
“This incredibly cool device my uncle gave me. It uses the satellites to track phone calls.”
“Sure it does.”
The young courthouse clerk swooped across the room like a pterodactyl in training. Angie clutched her stuff to her chest and scurried out of the room. She was breathless when she hit the outside and called Matthew back.
“There’s a lot going on here,” she said. She wanted to know if he was sure he’d gotten the name of that corporation right.
There was some uncomfortable silence.
“Matt?”
“You’ve got to stop doing that.”
“I don’t … What do you mean?
“Thinking I’m brain damaged. I didn’t get the name of the corporation wrong. It’s Boysenberry Pi.”
“Okay. Don’t get your drawers bunched.”
“You do it a lot.”
“I’m just saying. All the land deeds here for purchases by Boysenberry Pi Corporation were out between Bakersfield and LA. My dad said their plan was to buy up all the almond groves, so this makes no sense.”
“If you need me to be wrong about the name of the corporation for your father’s idea to be right, then his idea isn’t right.”
“I have to get inside, okay? I’m on low battery.”
“I see you. I’m here.”
“Where?”
A moment later Matt’s Mercedes pulled up alongside her. He lowered his window and said hi, breathing deeply into the already heavy air between them. She wasn’t ready for any of this. The hurt feelings, the apologizing, the giving a shit, it was all new to her and she didn’t like it. Nobody’s opinion of her had ever mattered enough to make her consider the possibility of change. She had always felt like the fixed object in space, the star around which dependent planets revolved. She didn’t like the loss of that immutability. It made her feel negotiable.
He jumped out of his car and caught up with her. “Where are you running?”
“I was getting a little cold.”
“You’re getting a little weird is what you’re getting.”
“What?”
“I only drove two hundred miles to bring you a certain object. I thought maybe you’d like to see it.”
Angie turned a succession of colors. “What is the matter with
me?”
“I’ve been asking the same question.” It was the way he smiled that did her in. As he opened the trunk Angie saw his face full front. There was an angry, colorful welt above his left eye.
“Matty, what happened to your face?” Her hand flew involuntarily to his injury. Her fingertips alighted soft as butterfly wings.
***
What happened was Matthew had stayed at Lila’s that night, despite his mother’s displeasure when he called her. He slept fitfully. He’d heard, or imagined he’d heard, Lila crying during the night. Mercedes made him pancakes for breakfast and told him Miss Leela not feeling so good.
He had never before snooped into Lila’s private papers. He knew that the trust fund his father had set up kept him and his mother and sister well taken care of, but he had balked at the regular invitations Richard had made to go over his financial prospects with him. Denial, as the saying goes, is not just a river in Egypt.
For the same psychological reasons, Lila had always thrown up her hands at the mention of money management. First her own father, then her late husband, now Richard had handled her affairs. She knew enough about money to be frugal. Certainly by Beverly Hills standards. Matthew had never seen reason to doubt her assertions, but now he just wanted to be sure.
It was sunny in the dining room where the large mahogany credenza stood against the white stucco wall. Matt sat cross-legged on the stained hardwood floor and opened the bottom glass cabinet. The files were stacked in an orderly manner. He took out the most recent one and opened it in his lap. Many of the documents were written in small type, single-spaced and in a language where the words resembled English but the sentence structure resembled wild kudzu vines overgrowing a swamp.
Matt could make out enough to see that Lila and J. J. Bancroft were investors or landholders in several newly purchased lots via the Boysenberry Pi Corporation. He was glad when he heard the footsteps approach. However, it was not Lila who stepped into the room and looked down at the open files splayed all around him. Bright morning sunlight made a blazing prairie fire out of Richard’s gray hair. His voice was measured. Serious without threat.
“What is your business with J. J. Bancroft?” he asked.