by Hal Ackerman
“How do you know that?” She was freaking. “It’s supposed to be secret.”
“Is that your real hair?”
The girl flared. “Who sent you?”
“I did.” Goodpasture was delighted as a child with a new piece of Mylar at Stein’s display.
Stein was engulfed in Alex’s tantalizing fragrance. “You smell just like she did.” Alexandra did not draw back. She was not a woman intimidated by men, Stein touched her hair and sniffed her hand, recognizing what had arrested him. “Oh yes,” she said. “It’s haunting, isn’t it?”
“They gave you a few bottles in advance for doing the shoot?”
She nodded. That was what Stein had smelled on Nicholette. It was not her inherent scent, it was Paul Vane’s intoxicating creation, being marketed as Espé New Millennium shampoo. It disquieted him to understand that his strongest memory of Nicholette wasn’t Nicholette at all. It left him with nothing tangible of her to hold.
“I’m sorry about Nicholette. You were close friends?”
“She was like a big older step sister.”
“Don’t get all choked up about it.”
“What I reveal to the camera is for me to decide.”
“Am I the camera?”
“Aren’t you?
Goodpasture was not used to waiting in the background. “Harry. Your message said you found something.”
Stein’s mind zigged away from Wylie and Phibbs and zagged to the pair of beautiful people standing before him. Who knew what went on in the souls of the privileged? The lives of beautiful people were so different from the rest of the world. They were always the sought after, never knowing the pain of the supplicant. They held an instinctive proprietary right to everything they saw. No barriers for them between want and have. And if they wanted something Nicholette had? They had access, they had Nicholette’s trust. Maybe the missing weed was a smoke screen for the oldest story in the book—two women in love with the same man. Alex, the new young thing, ousting Nicholette, the old young thing, not only as the Espé girl, but also as Goodpasture’s number one gal pal? Steam billowed out from the open bathroom door. Stein used it as a distraction to get time alone. He had to hide these thoughts.
“Look,” he said, “I’m half naked here. The sight of it is probably destroying this poor girl’s sex drive for life. Let me take a quick shower and I’ll pop by to your room and we’ll talk.”
He escorted them to the door and once they were gone, enclosed himself inside the bathroom and held onto the sink while the horrendous scenario resumed its display in his mind. What if Nicholette did not surrender the New Millennium crown as easily as Paul Vane said she did? Maybe it had to be wrested from her grasp. Not to mention losing her friend-boy to her ambitious little younger figure-skating protégé?
If Alex and Goodpasture had come to Nicholette’s late at night, she would certainly have let them in. Stein recalled seeing no broken windows or kicked-in doors, no forced entry of any kind on his way to discovering her lifeless body. But what motive could there have been? What was he missing? If there had been any ill feeling it would have emanated from Nikki, not from Alex. She was the only one losing anything. Ditto the boy friend. Stein could possibly visualize Alex, with her model’s detachment, watching Nicholette squirm and die. But not Brian. Whatever shortcomings of youth his character possessed, murder was not one of them. He refused to believe he could be that wrong about a person. And if he was, if he was misjudging Goodpasture’s character so profoundly, then he deserved whatever consequences came to him.
No. He ruled them out. It had to be Wylie and Phibbs. Stein could see them doing those awful things to her. It made him sick to his stomach to visualize that scene, and he forced it to be projected on his mental screen from a distance.
In the shower, he let the torrent of hot water permeate his bones and felt his own weariness. He soaped himself down with the hotel’s complimentary lotion. He lathered his hair and rinsed as per the directions on the shampoo tube. Wet hair thoroughly. Lather. Rinse. Repeat if desired. Should he repeat, he mused? Was he desired? He was sleeping standing up. His mind was going into dream mode. He girded himself and cut the hot water, letting a blast of cold shock him back into linear.
A nagging thought tugged at him. How would Wylie and Phibbs have gained access to Nicholette’s home? She didn’t know them. He’d return to that thought in a moment. The phone was ringing as he came back into the bedroom.
“Is she there with you,” the female voice demanded. It was a familiar voice but he couldn’t quite place it out of context. “Harry, I swear if she is there I will castrate and kill you.”
He felt his blood chill.
“Hillary. What’s happened? Tell me. What’s happened?”
FIFTEEN
HILLARY WAS ON TILT. Stein tried to calm himself enough to be able to calm Hillary enough to get enough accurate information.
“You’re just loving this, aren’t you Harry? It must give you such a sense of validation that your daughter hates me as much as she hates you.”
“Oh yes. I’m adoring that our daughter is missing.”
“And whose fault is that?” Hillary snapped.
“No one is assigning blame.”
“I am. I blame you.”
“Me?” He invoked Shmooie the Buddhist’s trick of moving one finger at a time as though he were practicing a scale on the piano.
“Where have you looked? Who have you called?”
“If she ran away from me, she’s not going to advertise where she is!”
“Are you telling me she ran away from you?”
“Yes. Do you want me to say it? Yes, she ran away from me.”
“Damn it, Hillary. I’m trying to find out what happened so I can help!”
“That’s how you help. You go to Amsterdam to get high with your pathetic loser friends.”
He played “Moonlight Sonata” on his scalp in a slow tempo. “Which of her friends have you called, Hillary?”
“I’m calling you. You’re her father.”
“Are you saying you haven’t called anybody else?” He tried hard to mask his astonishment, not make it sound like an indictment, make it feel like he was petting her. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“I was moving her things out of your apartment. She said I was a controlling bitch and took off.”
“You were doing what?” “Moonlight Sonata” was playing at the speed of the Minute Waltz. “Hillary. Listen to me. I’m going to get on the first flight out of here and I will be home as soon as humanly possible. I’m sure she’s fine. “
Stein cradled the receiver and expelled a long geyser of breath. He was sure she was fine. Where had he heard himself say that before? If it was the 1950’s and they were living in some sweet wholesome Norman Rockwell suburbia, sure it would be fine for Angie to run off. Blow off some steam. Hide from your parents. But the Los Angeles night scene chewed up kids like Angie for breakfast. Every demonic creature that Stein had tried to implant into Angie’s imagination as a warning, Angie had imbued with her father’s traits so that she could easily outwit him; and thus she thought herself far too clever and ruthless for any danger to befall her.
He instinctively called Lila. He didn’t bother trying to wrangle his brain enough to attempt the time zone conversion. It picked on the fifth ring. “I’m glad you’re there,” Stein said, when her groggy voice said hello.
“Where did you think I’d be at five in the morning?”
“I really need a favor.” He waited for a reply and panicked when he got none. He was sure that she had dropped the receiver into her quilt and faded off back so sleep. “Lila?”
“I just went to turn on the lights.”
“I assume Hillary called you to find out my whereabouts.”
“I’m sorry. She’s Angie’s mother. I couldn’t not tell her.”
“No. You did the right thing.”
Lila assured Stein that Angie was probably perfectly fine. He he
ard echoes of his own voice making the same assurances.
“Lyle. You’ve got to do something very important for me. You know in that packet I gave you that has my will and everything? There’s an address book. On the back page I have the phone numbers of Angie’s friends. I need you to call them. Tell them to pass the word to Angie to call me, just to say she’s ok. Give them this number. Tell her to call collect.”
There was a short silence where Stein could hear the sounds of a drawer and a metal box opening. Then Lila’s voice. “Yes,” she said. “It’s all here.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“You know,” Lila said, “there’s a word for something that a woman usually gets before she helps raise a man’s children.”
“You have my house key.”
“I was referring to engaged.”
He smiled at the phone. “You’re one-in-a million,” Stein said.
“I’m sure once I look through your phonebook, I’ll know that’s true.”
Stein dressed and went down to the concierge’s desk. There he peeled off a few bills from Goodpasture’s wad and told him to get him on the first flight back to Los Angeles. “Get me anywhere close to Los Angeles.” He suddenly felt very ugly American, and added quietly, “Please. It’s my kid.”
As he came off the elevator he heard the phone ringing in his room and dashed in. “Yes! What do you have?”
The voice on the other end was far more belligerent than the concierge. “Where the hell are you?” it demanded.
“Angie?”
Relief and gratitude filled those two syllables.
“I’m not going back to her. I’ll live on the street.”
She felt as unstable as moonlight on water. “Where are you, Sweetie?”
“What are you doing in Amsterdam? Did you go to that hippie pot festival?”
A little anger, he thought. That was good. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t drunk. She wasn’t high. She wasn’t kidnapped.
“I came to score a lid for you,” he deadpanned.
“That’s ok. I have plenty.”
Ok. Humor. That was a good sign. “I appreciate your calling me. That’s very mature of you.” He thought he heard a male voice in the background. He was relieved that she was not alone. He didn’t want to ask directly yet. “If you tell me where you are I can call you back. I don’t want this costing somebody a lot of money.”
“It’s not. I called on your credit card.”
He heard a rustling on Angie’s end and a muffled conversation.
“Are you at a friend’s house?”
“I’m fine.”
“I don’t want you running around unsupervised.”
“Un-supervised? What am I, eleven?”
“You don’t know how dangerous Los Angeles is.”
“You don’t know how dangerous Los Angeles is.”
He feared that they both were right.
“What happened today? What—?”
“First she pillages your apartment. Then she throws a fit and tries to ground me, pretending she thought I was expelled, when she knows very well I was only suspended.”
“Are you talking about school?”
“No, the Air National Guard.”
“Why were you suspended from school, Angie?” He heard his voice getting shrill.
“Because they’re a bunch of morons.”
“But specifically.”
“I answered a question on my civics test about what kind of government we had, and I said a Mediocracy. And they marked it wrong. And I said that proved that I was right. So they sent me home.”
“You called it a Mediocracy?” In spite of everything, he couldn’t help smiling. She was his daughter. Stein heard a familiar-sounding dog bark. “Was that Watson? Angie, are you at our place?”
The phone was covered again. There was muffled struggle or horseplay. “Stop it,” Stein heard Angie whisper. Though not to Stein.
“Who’s there? Angie, I want you to go to Lila’s.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Just go there, will you please?”
There was an interminable silence. “Fine,” she said at last. He felt his body relax. “But not tonight.” The line went dead in his hand.
His first impulse was to call her back. Angie was obviously there with a boy, but what could he do about it? He had never demanded the obedience from her that a lot parents did. It didn’t seem like a trait, that if well learned, would serve her as an adult. Instead, he had encouraged her to question authority, and foolishly presumed he’d be granted immunity. Another responsible choice would be to call Hillary. That tactic might preserve Angie’s virginity for one more night, if indeed it still existed to be spared. But it would be at the cost of losing Angie’s trust permanently.
When Angie was first born, Stein had harbored so many romantic projections of the way they would share all of her milestones, how he would have a knack for saying the exact right thing at the occasion. Instead, he’d always been two turns of the road behind what she had already done, trying to play catch-up. Edna Greene had said it right: Children make us strangers to our own lives. He thought about calling Penelope. But the concepts of Penelope and Chaperone did not quite merge. She’d more likely go over and make it a threesome.
He felt an irresistible tug on his male umbilical to get home. To be there. To fix what was wrong. To plug the leak. But there was nothing he could do. He could not Mighty Mouse himself there at the speed of light. That umbilical was cut. Maybe it had been cut for a long time and he was just now accepting it. She was there. He was here. And he had to do finish what he came to do.
He placed both buds out on the coffee table and studied them one last time. Stein had not gotten high for six years three months and a few days, give or take. Men hate to break streaks. Men like to elongate. One of the countless numbers of women he had met in his excursion through the Single Scene—her name might have been Brenda—who had called herself a Feminist Behavioralist, attributed the male linear orientation to the absence of a menstrual cycle. The only people who were surprised when Columbus discovered the world was round were men.
He took a bottle of Courvoisier from the minibar and poured it into a snifter. He covered the glass with a piece of aluminum foil from the stem of his complimentary rose and pulled it taut across the rim of the glass. He tapped delicately on the foil with the needle from his sewing kit, making a cluster of tiny holes against the rim of the snifter. Directly opposite, he cut out a small mouth hole. He snipped a small sliver of Goodpasture’s orchid and carefully pared it into shards. These he placed over the mesh holes he had tapped into his improvised bong. He had the sensation that he was watching himself from above.
He lit a match and placed his lips on the opening he had cut in the foil. The sweet smoke billowed down into the snifter, met resistance at the level of the brandy, and was drawn up and out of the glass into the wind tunnel down into Stein’s alveoli. Clusters of nearly atrophied neuro-receptors in Stein’s cerebellum sprang to life. The last crescent of sun radiated a shaft of orange light that shot across the room from the window to the sofa and Stein was astonished to see that it was filled with atoms. Trillions of them. Jumping and dancing through the air like a hatching of mayflies.
He smiled as he visualized the indulgent looks on people’s faces if he told them he could see atoms. They would explain that he was seeing particles of dust in suspension being carried about by tiny vectors of air currents. What a laugh, Stein thought. As though atoms and dust particles were remotely alike. Dust flecks were clunky, sluggish dirigibles; fish tank diving bells that could rise or sink slowly. Stein was seeing clouds of minnows, sunlit quicksilver darts of energy.
The shaft of light passing through the vase of flowers and the fruit bowl cast a perfect shadow profile of John Lennon onto the middle section of the sofa. His thin wire frame glasses. The long shoulder-length billow of his hair. The beard. Stein reckoned that John had come to im
part a secret to him. People of John’s status did not make unannounced appearances without reason. Stein rose from the bed to come closer, but in doing so his own corporeal body broke the plane of light and the effigy disappeared. Was that the message the cosmos was sending to him—don’t get too close to people, they’ll die? Don’t stand in people’s light?
But John was leaving. Not fading, but morphing slowly into less of a likeness of himself. Now Stein saw a cow grazing in a grassy field. He flashed on that summer on Crete when the tour guide had explained how archaeologists had put together the few fragments they had unearthed of two thousand year old Minoan tiles, and had extrapolated from them what the full mosaic would have been. Art books carried pictures of those extrapolated Priest King frescoes for decades. Lately more fragments had been found which demonstrated that the experts’ projection of the whole picture had been completely wrong. The figures in the mosaic weren’t priests at all, they were monkeys.
He grokked in its fullness that the angle between earth and sun was changing and that to keep John here, he simply had to move the vase and the bowl of fruit. But no, they were so perfectly set. He would move the sofa to catch the day’s last afterglow. Ah, but to move that he would first have to move the end table. Wisdom revealed itself in layers. The truth that the lamp sitting atop the end table was plugged into the socket under the armoire was not revealed to him until he tugged the table to the left, yanking the support out from underneath the lamp.
The truth of galvanic response was next revealed to Stein as his torso instinctively lunged forward and made a shoe top catch of the bulb and saved it from shattering. The truth of the lamp cord next revealed itself, as it had pulled taut around his ankle like a bolos. The wire went under the armoire. The electric socket was centered on the wall behind it. To reach it, he would have to pull the huge mahogany closet away from the wall. He braced his body, placed his open palms on the side of the armoire and pushed. His muscles strained. Ligaments exerted to their breaking point. But nothing budged. He had reached the crossroads of The Truth of Healthy Retreat and The Truth of Never Quitting.