by Hal Ackerman
He was struck with the brilliant idea to call Lila. He’d tell her to call his house on her cell phone and say that they’d stopped somewhere for a birthday drink and had a flat or engine trouble and that he’d be home soon. He couldn’t think of one at this very moment, but he was confident he could concoct for Lila a vaguely plausible reason for her number to have been called. He held the receiver carefully in his handkerchief and used a pencil eraser to tap the numbers on the keypad. Lila’s phone rang four times and then her voicemail picked up.
He debated for a moment leaving a message and decided not to. He pressed the eraser against the disconnect button and contemplated his next move. There was nothing more he could do here. He knew that the perpetrators had come in search of something that they had not found. (Yes, plural. It seemed incontrovertible that this had been the work of two.) Surely it had to do with the full crop Goodpasture’s orchids. In all the news reports around the explosion, there had been no mention of a stash of marijuana being discovered. If they had not found what they were looking for at Goodpasture’s, their Plan B was evidently to extract the information from Nicholette by force: Where the stash was or the stasher. Her death told Stein that she had been more loyal and stubborn than smart.
Stein knew he needed to return to Goodpasture’s. But he could not leave Nicholette’s exquisite corpse here to rot. He carefully lifted the receiver in his handkerchief again and tapped in 9-1-1. When the operator answered, Stein gave her minimal information: the address he was calling from and the circumstances of the crime. He did not identify himself when asked to, nor did he stay on the line as requested. He depressed the disconnect key with the eraser. In the very next moment, while the key was still being held down and while the receiver was clutched in his hand, the telephone rang. Stein stared down at the instrument in horror as if he were holding a live hand grenade.
It rang again. His anxiety caused the pencil eraser to slip off the disconnect button, in effect completing the connection, answering the call. Stein’s breath caught in his throat. His first instinct was to hang it up and run like hell. But what if it was Goodpasture calling Nicholette after hearing all of her phone messages? He would be alarmed at the hang-up. He’d call again. Getting no answer he could drive over here, just in time for the police to find him and arrest him as the prime suspect. Stein could not do that to him. He needed to break the news to the young man himself. He owed him at least that much.
He remained absolutely silent, except for his heartbeat, which felt like a hollow oil drum rolling down a flight of metal stairs. He hoped that the caller would speak first and give him the advantage. After a few moments he tapped the mouthpiece with a pencil, as if that would approximate some vague mechanical difficulty. But the ploy had no effect. His next idea was to say hello using a Chinese accent. Which is what he actually did.
A police dispatcher was on the other end. She asked if a 9-1-1 call had been made from this number. Stein muttered an indistinct response. She said that a patrol car had been dispatched and for him to remain where he was until the police arrived. Stein hung up without speaking. The phone rang back immediately, but he did not answer it. It rang incessantly as he knelt alongside Nicholette, adjusted her kimono for modesty, and swore to her again that he would find her killers and punish them. Stein drove quickly away from Lilac Elevation.
The canyon road passed through a section of uninhabited land. 12:03. It was tomorrow, no longer his birthday. He was on the downward slide from fifty now. The amusement park hammer had propelled the little disc as far up the pole as it would go. Probably up to NICE TRY, SUCKER. It would hover here for a moment and then begin its long slow descent to plaid pants, ear hair and “pop, you’re drooling.” He dreaded the recessional. If the next fifty years were a repetition in reverse of the first fifty? Looking backward, what would he have to look forward to? Seven years of divorce followed by fourteen years of marriage during which Hillary and he would become closer every day, more in love, more optimistic, accumulating acts of good will and good faith, refilling his soul each day with that forgotten sense of pure fun, leading up to the first moment he saw her, which would be the last moment, which was the best moment, at the peak of her beauty emerging topless out of the surf on the Greek island of Ios. And then his other life, which would not be bad at all to re-live, when Stein and his subversive cronies were the disturbers of the peaceful, vanquishers of the vain. When he fantasized traveling back in time and never getting together with Hillary, he always got stopped at the realization that it would mean that Angie would not exist, and that ended all rewriting of history.
Driving alone down Topanga, Stein was filled with an urge to blend into the darkness. He switched off his headlights, put the car in neutral and surrendered completely to the forces of gravity and centrifugal force. Freed of the engine’s drag, the car picked up speed through the downhill slalom. Stein whipped the car through its turns by the light of the moon. Only able to see yards ahead, the thrill of possible disaster excited him. The road swung to the leeward side of the mountain. The moon was eclipsed from view. He sped downhill in total darkness. The blast of a horn and the glare of oncoming headlights catapulted him back into reality. He glided to a stop at the side of the road. His shirt was still damp from where Nicholette had fallen against him. Her scent still seemed to emanate from it. Was he inhaling particles of Nicholette?
The street sign for Eden Rock Road was carved into the shape of an oaken arrow and almost completely obscured by foliage. The fire engines and news trucks were long gone, since the suspicion of foul play had been downgraded to foolish accident. Thus Stein was able to drive unimpeded into the cul de sac. There was no point in going home anymore. By now Hillary would have to have taken Angie back to her place and he’d have to deal with that unpleasantness tomorrow. Tonight he had work to do.
He parked under an overhang of cypress boughs. His gaze went up, up, up the hill until he saw Goodpasture’s house. Adrenaline lubricated Stein’s knee joints as he climbed the stone staircase. He reached the first landing without losing his breath and stopped for a moment to look over the parapet. Galaxies of electric lights cut mystical patterns through the San Fernando Valley below. Civilization’s accomplishment in ten thousand years had been bringing the stars down to earth.
The pathway alongside the retaining wall took him around to the back of the house where the explosion had occurred. Broken plaster and glass gave the patio a newsworthy look of disaster, but the structure of the house wasn’t as badly devastated as the reports had made it seem. The celebrated barbecue grill was built into the red brick patio wall, ten feet long and four feet wide. There was a pile of dirt alongside that had given the experts all the evidence they needed for their faulty conclusions. But as Stein had correctly intuited, nobody had been throwing any shrimps onto this barbee. It was all laid out in Stein’s book: In the controlled environment of indoor marijuana cultivation, there are no natural predators. No bird to eat a fly, to eat a spore. So even one unnoticed white fly egg, one mold spore could multiply into the equivalent of a locust swarm and infest an entire harvest. Goodpasture had been using the fire to sterilize his soil.
Stein knelt low to the ground and circled his open palm along the base of the retaining wall. He knew what he was searching for and his fingers found the subtle crease under the ivy that concealed the doorway tucked unobtrusively into the concrete wall. It did not look disturbed. He was satisfied that no one else had found it. The hinges were well oiled and the door opened silently. Stein ducked inside. The door shut behind him and the catch snapped crisply into place. A staircase descended into a cavern dug into the granite bedrock of the hillside. Low-wattage light bulbs were screwed into sockets at five-step intervals. They cast wavering shadows the way wax tapers would in the dungeon of a castle. Grotesquely shaped white ginsengy globs protruded into the staircase through the outer walls. The ivy’s roots. As the staircase spiraled downward, the lights behind Stein went out and those below him turned on. He
resisted the desire to stop, for fear that he would become out of synch with the timer and be left in the dark.
Suddenly the entire staircase shuddered. The words, “Earthquake. Trapped!” spun up into his brain and he clutched the wall for support. After a few moments the vibration steadied into a subtle hum and so did his heart rate. Yes, it was the compressor for the air conditioner. He liked Goodpasture’s style. The boy was meticulous. The stair ended fifteen feet down into the canyon at a low door. Stein ducked his head and entered.
The shock of glaring brightness made him cover his eyes until they could adjust. Even then it seemed like he must be hallucinating. He was in a room twenty feet square with an eight-foot-high ceiling. High-powered fluorescent lights were suspended by adjustable chains above four long rows of cafeteria tables. On each table were three neatly spaced rows of sprouting pots, twenty-four to a row. And in each pot there was a marijuana seedling, three inches tall. By rudimentary guess, Stein calculated roughly a thousand little sproutlings in the nursery.
A valve hissed and a large green metal tank in the center of the nursery blew out a long breath of carbon dioxide over the two thousand cribs. At each end of the room a large oscillating fan had been placed on the floor to circulate the air and dissipate the heat generated by the grow lights. The air was vented out the chimney by periodic bursts of this fan. There was another door at the opposite end. It conducted him into another dormitory room organized in the same way, with grow lights suspended above four cafeteria tables.
The plants here were in a second stage of development. Standing eighteen inches high, their slender shoots reached out like the limbs of young ballerinas in stage light. They stood on point; their bare roots nestled not in resin or topsoil, but in plastic containers filled with liquid solutions interconnected by a winding intestine of plastic tubing that carried to them all the carefully apportioned nutrients that they would ever need.
Even in his heyday Stein had never envisioned growing-chambers of this scope. And he hadn’t yet reached the grownups’ bedroom. A door at the end of the room opened into yet a larger chamber. Plants stood four feet tall with leaves as large as palm fronds. There were occasional breaks in the ranks; and empty pots. These, he knew, had housed plants that had become male and had been uprooted lest they satisfy their insatiable thirst to procreate, to fertilize the females and create seeds. The beauty of sinsemilla is that all that procreative energy is harnessed within the untouched female colas.
He felt another rumbling still deeper below him. He descended into the final chamber, and he knew how the first human being must have felt upon beholding a forest of Giant Sequoias. Two hundred mature female plants, five feet tall and Reubenesque, stood before him in full blossom. The air was thick with their perfume. Mint and burnt sugar. It’s Paradise, he thought. I’m in the Garden of Weeden.
He realized that breathing this air was giving him a terrific contact high and that he’d better get out of here while he could think straight. Logic told him that a door would be near the four large green canisters of carbon dioxide. He located the door, ingeniously built into the granite wall. It did not lead directly outside as he thought it would, but into a small anteroom equipped with a sink and a refrigerator and a TV that had been left on and was playing a mindless drama in black-and- white. The man on screen was prowling around a parked car. Stein had a vague sense that he had seen this show before. And then he realized it was not a show but a surveillance camera, and that the car looked familiar because it was his car. And a man in a brown suit was peering into it.
Stein opened the door cautiously and returned to the outside world. He was night-blind for a few moments until his pupils readjusted. But he was turned around. He expected uphill to be to his right; it was to his left. The road was not where it was supposed to be and his car was gone. When he looked up behind him, Goodpasture’s entire house had disappeared. And now he realized that the tunnel had gone underneath the street, and that he had emerged on the other side. His car was parked directly below him. The man in the brown suit was using it as cover, glancing up at Goodpasture’s house. But as Stein was now behind him, he had a clear path to the intruder’s back. The man had a small build, trim but not athletic—the type who would row sixty miles on a machine but never go near the water.
Stein unconsciously grabbed his own flabby midriff in his hand. He calculated his advantages. He had the higher ground, logistically and morally. He could walk brazenly up to the man and say, “Yes, can I help you?” But that didn’t seem like the most prudent idea if this was the man who had killed Nicholette. There was no way to get back into Goodpasture’s house and he knew he couldn’t stay pressed against this wall very much longer. His leg was getting numb and he had to pee something fierce.
He shook his leg to restart the circulation. This was his third major mistake of the evening. He lost his balance and began to slide down the hillside. He scrambled to regain his footing but his shoes had no traction. He surrendered to gravity and careened wildly down the hill screaming a banshee war cry. The man in the suit was startled and jumped backwards, pivoted awkwardly, stumbled as he started to run and fell on his ass. Stein’s plan, if he had one, was to startle the man into running away, then jump into his own car and—after that it got vague. But with the man falling, Stein could hardly delay his charge and wait for him to start running away again and still maintain an effective pretense of threat. So Stein ran at him, screaming. His quarry went into a complete panic. He rolled onto his hands and knees. His feet were so knotted that he couldn’t stand up; so he tried to crawl away. Stein veered to the right at full speed to head him off. His left foot caught in a pothole and his torso twisted ninety degrees while his ankle stayed rooted. Sickening pain shot up through Stein’s leg into his gut. He fell to the pavement.
Both men lay writhing on the ground five feet apart from each other. Stein’s adversary made another wild attempt to flee. Stein pulled himself onto one leg and hopped fiercely after him. With one desperate lunge, Stein barreled his shoulder into the man’s back. His momentum carried them forward, pinning him against the side of Stein’s car.
“Don’t hit me, I’m a doctor,” the man screamed.
“Making a house call?”
“I swear it!
Stein spun the man around. He was thirty-five, balding, wore glasses, and was slightly shorter than Stein had first thought. He wrested his hand out of Stein’s grasp and groped in his jacket pocket. Stein feared the man was going for his gun. But what he thrust at him was a laminated photo ID from the Marin County Medical Board. The name on the license made Stein’s spirit soar. He released his grip on the man’s larynx. He felt like Stanley meeting Livingstone at the mouth of the Nile. “Doctor Alton Schwimmer, I presume. Say hello to Harry Stein.”
EIGHT
3:00 A.M., and Munowitz’s Deli in the Fairfax district was jumping. The line of people waiting for tables stretched past the appetizing section all the way back to the bakery. Young girls with radical hair and multiple piercings were draped over their indolent boyfriends dressed in their open fronted vests and technogrunge leather pants with codpieces, and who looked at anyone Stein’s age with a smirk that said, We are the pieces of shit who are fucking your daughters you spent all that money to raise.
“What’s good here?” Schwimmer asked, when they had been led to a booth.
“You don’t say a word the whole way in, you don’t even look at my broken ankle, and you ask me what’s good?”
“I told you, it was a mild sprain.”
“How can you tell it’s a sprain without looking?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Don’t doctors sometimes take X-rays?”
“You want a second opinion? Ask that guy.” Schwimmer gestured toward a biker who was tearing at his meat sandwich in staccato bursts like a piranha.
“Fine,” Stein sulked. “It’s getting better by itself.”
“Oh for God’s sake, let me see it.”
Ste
in extended his leg under the table onto the opposite banquette. Schwimmer lifted Stein’s foot and turned it sharply to the left. “Does that hurt?”
“Aaaargh.”
“You’re right. Maybe it’s broken.”
“Don’t you people take some kind of oath?”
The drive in from Topanga had been maddening. Notwithstanding Schwimmer’s reputation for making death a dignified experience, he had the social skills of a doorknob, and that was being unkind to doorknobs. He had deflected all of Stein’s questions: What was he doing at Goodpasture’s? Was Goodpasture all right? Had he been there when it happened? Where was he now? I’m on your side. If you know where he is you have to tell me.
All Schwimmer would say was if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, and despite Stein’s ardent avowal that things had changed since he originally had declined Goodpasture’s offer, Schwimmer had turned his back to Stein and contorted his body into an impossible shell, his elbows crossed around his knees, which were also crossed. He looked like a torso that had been hastily glued together by somebody new to the job, and he sat that way until they pulled into the Munowitz parking lot.
Their waitress who came to take their order was a distressed blonde whose life had taken a wrong turn off Easy Street.
“I need a minute,” Schwimmer said.
“Order a roast beef on buttered white bread with a glass of milk,” Stein suggested. “They’ll think you’re a regular.”
Schwimmer ordered the barley bean soup, which pissed Stein off because he was going to order that himself. “Make it two,” Stein said. “But make mine better.”