by Hal Ackerman
“Uncle Richard. I thought you had gone to Atlanta.”
“I was called back. And so I ask you again. What is your business with J. J. Bancroft?”
“I don’t have any business with him,” Matthew replied.
Richard presented a photograph taken at Pershing Square the previous afternoon of Matthew at the Bancroft limo, and asked his nephew what he had said to Commodore Bancroft.
“Why would anyone take this picture of me?” was Matt’s first question. Followed with even more amazement by, “And why do you have it?”
“I like the way your mind works,” Richard said. “Very inquisitive. Very logical. What did you say to Commodore Bancroft?”
“I didn’t say anything. Angie wanted to talk to Mrs. Bancroft.” He said this in no way to deflect guilt, but as testimony to how trivial the encounter had been and how mistaken anybody would have been to think otherwise. He began to carefully replace the items in their folders.
“I’ll look after that,” Richard said. He noted that a particular envelope, one stamped with caveats of privacy, had not been violated. “Let’s go outside.”
Richard allowed Matthew to precede him out of the dining room through the kitchen and to the patio. Richard stopped outside the dining room and pulled the rarely used set of double doors closed. He spoke briefly in well-accented Spanish to Mercedes before rejoining Matthew on the patio.
“Sit down,” he said to Matt, who had waited for him standing. They occupied a low, backless bench. Matthew faced the house, his back to the pool.
“Did you have something you wanted to say to me?”
“Yes. I do,” Matthew said.
“Now would be a good time.”
“I think you should cool it with Aunt Lila while she’s somebody else’s girlfriend.”
The boy made Richard smile. “I meant about the documents. But that took a lot of courage to say to me. I respect that. It was manly. It was direct. It was respectful both to me and to Lila, and also to yourself. And to answer you, it may seem untoward. It may indeed be untoward. There is obviously something valuable we both derive. And when she says we’re done, that is all she’ll have to say. Do you understand?”
Matt let out a hard breath.
“I didn’t ask if you were happy. I asked if you understood.”
Matt nodded yes, that he understood.
“Good. When I came in a little while ago, I noticed that you were going through private papers.”
“Yes,” Matt said.
With a sudden motion Richard cracked Matt across the face with his open hand. Matt’s neck snapped. His ears rang. It was the first time Richard had ever struck him. The first time Matthew had ever been struck.
“Don’t do it again,” Richard said. He beckoned Matthew to come closer. He put his arm around the boy and whispered something in his ear. Matt nodded that yeah, he knew. They both went into the dining room. Mercedes had already reordered the papers. “I was wrong for nosing into your and Aunt Lila’s business, Uncle Richard. I apologize.”
“I need to know what you said to J. J. Bancroft.” Richard had not noticed that something had changed in the boy through that moment of impact. The slap in the face had set into place the last missing block of manhood.
“Whatever I said to Bancroft is my business,” Matt said. He spoke without haste, without rancor, without disrespect, and without youthful fear. He turned and kept walking.
***
Once the boy was out of the room, Richard made sure the envelope containing the water bank documents had not been compromised. He made a call on his cell; he did not need to identify himself to the receiver. He said that the boy wasn’t up to anything that would cause a problem. That he was only there because of the girl in the picture. Given all that, Richard expressed the strong desire to recuse himself from any further involvement.
A rasping voice on the other end reminded him that was not how it worked and to repeat the name of the girl.
“Her name is Angie Stein. S-t-e-i-n. But I’m quite certain there’s no cause for concern.”
The connection was already broken.
***
Matty? Matthew grinned.
Angie was blushing.
“It’s sweet that you care about my eye.”
“I didn’t say I cared, I just asked how it happened.”
And then she could tease no more. Matthew had taken a box out of the trunk of his car. And Angie was looking down at the face of Sunny Cataluna. It was beyond anything she’d imagined. There was a soul in his piercing gentle brown eyes. There was pain, there was longing. “He’s gorgeous,” she whispered. “How could she not fall in love with him?”
“You’re welcome,” said Matt.
“Thank you,” she remembered, and threw her arms around him. “This is going to be so good!”
When they came back into the courthouse the girl behind the desk beckoned to her. She was sorry to report that there were no other registered land sales to Boysenberry Pi Corporation. Angie thanked her and apologized for the cell phone.
“Yeah,” the girl said brightly. “I’m surprised he left a message for you with me instead of calling your phone.”
“My father called?”
The librarian read off her message pad. “He said he was a little delayed. But everything was cool. And to meet him back at—” She squinted at her writing. “I’m not sure I got this right. I think he was talking in code. The brick house? He said you’d know what that meant.” The girl folded the note and handed it to Angie. “Your father sounds like an odd and interesting man,” she said. “I see where you get it.”
“Freak,” said Angie.
***
Stein had made the call to the courthouse from Renn Moody’s desk at the morgue, where Officer Caravaggio had conducted him. Jarlene Moody had made an interesting discovery in the course of preparing Henny Spector’s body for the coffin. She had been working to adjust the insincere curve of his lips to an expression that projected a more honest demeanor when she noticed that the hole in the back of Henny Spector’s skull was not connected to the thrust that punctured his left eyeball.
In excising the puncture, she had encountered an obstacle, an obstruction. When she probed it with her sewing needle and magnifying glass she discovered, and subsequently extracted with her husband’s help, a three-inch-long steely talon. The one-thrust theory placed the point of entry at the back of the neck. However, the talon in Henny’s eye had its blunt end facing out, meaning it had been thrust into the eye. And from there it broke through the vitreous gel, gashed the retina, pierced the optic nerve, and penetrated into the frontal lobe of his brain.
The initial point of entry behind the neck had presented a wound of a slightly larger diameter and a proportionally deeper penetration, severing the spinal cord, fracturing two cervical vertebrae and imbedding itself deep into the occipital lobe. No part of that implement had been recovered, though there was residue of microscopic white fibrous material, consistent with Henny’s having been attacked from behind while wearing his bee suit, as Stein had alleged.
Renn was abundantly pleased with his wife’s finding. He rolled the deadly spike in his hand. It was a good three inches long, perfectly round at its shaft, which was greenish gray, tapering to a long, black lethal tip. Its source became the subject of speculation. Some kind of hawk perhaps? A peregrine falcon? Condor? Eagle? Baboon? No, all those nails had curvatures. This was straight as a golf tee. A porcupine quill? No, this was thicker, harder. A sea urchin?
The instant Stein saw that murderous tip he knew where it had come from. It always recalled the worst day of his life, the afternoon seven years ago when Stein and Hillary had informed Angie they were getting divorced. Angie had bolted out of the house into the untamed back hillside of their home in the Hollywood Hills. They heard the scream a moment later and nearly decapitated each other to reach her first.
The maguey, also called a century plant, grew long, broad shafts three feet in length an
d slightly curled in the center with jagged edges meant to protect the reservoir of sweet liquid down in its heart, called agua miel, honey water. It is the long-horned lethal tip, though, that can pierce to the bone. That spear had penetrated Angie’s big toe—and Henny Spector’s brain.
Looking down at him, Stein had no trouble visualizing the assassin stealing up from behind and pile-driving the point into the back of Henny’s unsuspecting head. He could see Henny struggling to pull the head protector off, his last act in life, and watching the point of a second spear penetrate his eye socket. Perhaps by the same hand, likely by an accomplice.
Stein remembered exactly where he had seen a wall of maguey plants growing. He knew who his guardian angels were and who had murdered Henny Spector. He would take care of that little matter first, then pick up his daughter at Barry Brickman’s party and get the hell out of Dodge; leave the beekeeping to the beekeepers and the nuts to the nutters.
Chapter Seventeen
Stein’s Camry was no longer in the parking lot, so Angie presumed the fat cop had let her father drive himself to wherever they were going. She had heard him use the word “morgue,” but she had let that bounce off the trampoline of her mind, as she did with most matters that concerned the lives of her parents. Matthew opened the passenger door for her as he always did. She had never seen the space-age display activated atop his dashboard, which now laid out a route for them in a series of electronic breadcrumbs.
“It’s that satellite thing I told you about. My uncle Richard says this is going to be standard consumer equipment in a couple of years.”
“The less I hear about your uncle’s equipment the better.”
He nodded in agreement. “I talked to him about Lila.”
“I see he took it well.”
***
The men in the dark Buick sedan following Matt and Angie had professional-grade versions of the primitive technology that Matt’s car sported, enabling them to lock on to the vapor trail of exhaust particulates and follow them at an undetectable distance. The electronic file they had studied on Angeline Koufax Stein was virtually empty but for the basics: DOB 5-8-85. M: Hillary Stein (nee Stevens); F: Harry Stein. Her current grades and teachers’ reports at The Academy, the upscale private school that Hillary had insisted Angie attend, which Stein referred to as Club Ed. Her medical records, and recent credit card purchases: A sweater at May Company for $37.00. Catcher in the Rye at Book Soup.
An asterisk in the file next to the name Harry Stein linked to a far lengthier dossier. He was cross-referenced under Peacenik, Potnik, Pain-In-The Ass-nik. He was described as an advocate of social anarchy. A threat to society. A subversive and miscreant. Many of his legendary antics were chronicled and supported by firsthand accounts or newspaper photos. The parade of transvestites he organized to enter the Marine recruitment station. The Pot-In-Every-Chicken dinner for Nixon’s henchmen. The Victory Gardens he planted at Police headquarters. Under the dense litany of events of that era there was a long empty gap down to the current notation:
*NO LONGER CONSIDERED AN ACTIVE THREAT.
***
Matthew’s routing device brought them unerringly to the gates of the Brickman estate. There were two guards on each side of the entryway scrupulously checking invites and IDs.
“What’s our cover story?” Matthew smiled.
“He kind of sort of invited me.”
“Strong.”
As they reached the gate, Angie geared up to go into a
performance-level explanation of why they should both be admitted. Before she got her first syllable out, the guard waved them through, having received the directive to do so in his earpiece. Angie was more irked at being shut up than pleased at being let in.
“What the hell was that,” she groused. “Some security system.”
Inside the gate, guides were dressed as carnival clowns. A Raggedy Andy flopped into the path alongside Matt’s car, squirted them with a fake seltzer bottle, and welcomed them to “the Carnival of Carnivals.” A voice in the tiny speaker hidden inside the half-ping-pong ball clown’s ear instructed him to give them party bracelets. Raggedy Andy fastened a blue plastic bracelet around each of their wrists.
“VIPs,” said Angie, quite impressed with herself.
Behind their tinted windows, Agent Cortelyou munched raw carrot sticks and watched Angie and Matt on feeds from closed-circuit security cameras mounted above the gate. As the bracelets were clasped, two new screens activated on their dashboard, transmitting live video feed from the bracelets.
“Gottem,” Agent Lefferts spoke into the hidden mic. “Well done.”
The valet parking attendant drove Matt’s car into the garage. Raggedy Andy executed a clownish bow to Angie and directed them a short distance up the hill where newly arriving guests were boarding the open cars of a model railroad train. Each of the six cars seated two adult human passengers. The white-haired engineer, dressed in classic striped overalls and hat, straddled the locomotive, tooted the whistle and opened the throttle. Angie and Matt dashed hand-in-hand the twenty yards up the hill. Matt in his sport jacket and trousers, Angie in Alyssa’s boots and blazer and flowing burgundy cape, looked like a pair of elegant young sophisticates late for a party at Gatsby’s. They clambered into the last car.
As the train serpented slowly around the estate, a new microenvironment sprung up around each successive quadrant. Here, two mounted Arthurian knights in full medieval armor thundered across the lea at each other with lances drawn. Around the next bend, a sloop, the Lucky Lucy, carried passengers around a tropic lagoon. Behind that, a three-dimensional replica of contemporary Los Angeles was displayed in perfect detail, with all twenty-six Bancroft Buildings in light.
Across the lawn, a line of trained elephants was dancing, trunk to tail, kicking their back right legs out in pachydermian synchronicity. The train stopped at the top of the mesa where the main house was situated. Two large white circus tents had been erected, each with two hundred white folding chairs. Magicians and jugglers and mimes engaged the guests.
Angie grouched at all the excess. “What I wouldn’t give for a small, tactical nuclear device.”
“You think you’re so noir,” Matthew goaded. “You’re barely twilight.”
“Look who’s talking. Mr. sweetness and light.”
He suddenly smacked his head. “I’m an idiot.”
“Okay, that I buy.”
“The thing! Sunny’s head! We left it in the car.”
They realized they were both empty-handed. “I’ll get it,” Matt said. “No need for us both of us to go.”
“Are you sure?” She wasn’t fighting too hard to refuse, since she had spied Ashton Kutcher twenty feet away, writing his name on the forearms of a gaggle of thirteen-year-old girls.
The agents had driven onto the grounds. Their car was parked alongside the gate. Cortelyou took notice of the teens’ separation on their surveillance screens but it triggered no alarm.
The girls getting their arms signed were all papery-legged and giggly. Angie felt old at sixteen. She also noticed that their long, bare, skinny arms did not have bracelets at their wrists.
She wondered if her father was here yet and if he was on the VIP list. She assumed that probably he wasn’t. She had a little feeling that Brickman was hitting on her. Finding Brickman, she figured, would be her best way of finding her dad. The edifice before her looked like Versailles on acid. There were waist-high poles with red velvet restraining ropes across the entrance not very subtly saying DO NOT ENTER. Or, as Angie’s brain interpreted the message: Angie Stein, please enter.
Wearing Alyssa’s boots made her feel three inches taller and as dangerous as an Israeli commando. She bunched the sleeves of her blazer up around her forearms. One snagged on her bracelet. She tried to loosen it but it was on tight.
Down in the agent’s car, all the jiggling was causing a blur on their screen. “Pretty savvy for a couple of kids,” Agent Cortelyou had to admit. “Splittin
g up. Creating interference.”
“What are you saying?” Church asked warily. Church had seniority and called the shots, between the two of them anyway. But he knew Cortelyou was smarter.
“I’m not saying anything,” Cortelyou said, because he knew what Church was asking and he wasn’t going to take the heat for any decision where he couldn’t get credit. “I’m just saying.”
“Saying what?”
“Nothing. Just that we have a situation where the boy is one place, and the girl is possibly creating a diversion.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m just saying what I said.”
“You’re saying we have a situation?”
“Do you hear me saying that?”
“Yes, I think I do.” Church carefully probed his partner’s reaction.
“I’m just saying what I say. I can’t stop a person from thinking what they think,” Cortelyou said.
Angie had walked through several rooms without being able to tell what they were used for. They were large. They were bright. They had waxed and polished hardwood floors. The only object in the first room was a rowing machine, fully assembled, and wheeled into a corner near the door. A tall ficus was growing out of the floor of the second room. A large, square chunk of flooring had been excavated from which the tree rose toward a skylight.
“Dad?” she called hopefully. No answer.
Three wooden steps led up to an oak door that opened into a room that was much smaller and crammed full. There were no identifying signs on the door. The room was an old-fashioned library. The walls were book shelved, floor-to-ceiling, filled not with books but with comedy albums. She browsed the titles. People Angie had vaguely or never heard of. Bob Newhart. Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The Two Thousand-Year-Old Man. Weird.
Upon a desk a three-dimensional scale model of a city had been erected as part of a remarkably accurate bird’s eye view of the greater Los Angeles megatropolis. At first glance the network of residential communities radiating outward from the cluster of high-rise buildings seemed to be downtown Los Angeles and its satellite suburbs. But upon closer examination, she saw that a new development was tucked between Bakersfield and the mountains. Below it, in the flatlands, was a huge aquifer. The original words had been struck over and replaced with BOYSENBERRY PI WATER BANK.