Stein,stoned s-1

by Hal Ackerman

  “Do you have a problem with the name I’ve given my son?”

  “Morty Greene is your son?”

  She looked at him the way only a black woman can look at a white man while wondering how they have managed to rule the world. “Why the hell else would I be cleaning his apartment?”

  Stein turned around, walked down a step and turned back. “Can we start over, Mrs. Greene? My name is Harry Stein. Forgive the intrusion. Is your son at home?”

  Her life expanded in front of her in one long exhalation. “Is my son in trouble, Mister Stein?”

  “I really don’t think so, Mrs. Greene.

  “You may call me Edna.”

  He bowed slightly.

  “Children make us strangers to our own lives,” she said.

  “I know. I used to have one. Then she turned into a teenage girl.”

  He sensed her accept him as a kindred spirit. “You want to find Morty, he’ll be at the Santa Anita race track. He’ll be down by the finish line. You can’t miss him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Anyway, most people wouldn’t.”

  He started down the stairs.

  “Incidentally, the name I gave him wasn’t Morty. It was Duluth.”

  He stopped and looked back up at her. “See now, Duluth I would have guessed was a black man.”

  “Then I predict you’ll go far in your trade.”

  Before he went he had to ask. “How do you get the nickname Morty from Duluth?”

  “You don’t. It’s short for what everyone calls him.”

  “Which is what?”

  “The Mortician,” she said, with exactly the right mixture of irony, warning and resignation.

  The horses were coming onto the track for the second race as Stein drove into the vast parking lot of the Santa Anita racetrack. He’d have to do this fast. Park. Find Morty. Verify his signature. Drive the twenty-five miles back to the West Side to pick Angie up at school by three-thirty.

  Santa Anita was a beautiful place to lose money. Nestled in the valley a few miles east of Pasadena, it had for its backdrop the San Gabriel Mountains. This time of year the snow level was down to five thousand feet and an ermine mantle of white crested the shoulders of Mount Wilson and its lesser peaks. Flocks of seagulls circled the parking lot and settled on the roof of the 1930’s era grandstand. Stein found this curious. What were seagulls doing miles from the ocean. But as he watched the throng of players hurrying to get their bets down-men with bellies waddling at heart attack pace, women carrying bridge chairs, Mexican families with chains of kids, UPS guys on lunch break-he understood. They smelled fish.

  A big, cheery voice with a Brooklyn accent boomed out as Stein approached the turnstile. “Mister Stein. Tell me that’s not you.” Stein didn’t have to look to know that voice. Woody Avariccio was the purveyor of the tout sheet called “Woody’s Winners.” Woody had the face of an artichoke, and when he smiled it was like an artichoke smiling.

  “Long fuckin’ time no fuckin’ see, Mister Stein. You find some alternate source of income?”

  “I wanted to leave some for the other guys. How are you, Elwood?”

  “Every day in every way younger and wiser. You come out to celebrate your birthday?”

  “How the hell do you remember my birthday?”

  “Am I just another pretty face or do I know numbers?”

  Three Japanese businessmen in identical business suits approached Woody’s stand. One of them handed Woody a hundred-dollar bill for a sheet. Woody made change from a huge roll in his pocket. Then the second tourist did the same, and the third. Woody changed all three hundreds without flinching.

  “People actually buy these things?”

  Woody moved Stein half a step over where they could speak privately. “If you’ve come here to enhance your investment portfolio, I have some information I know you’ll find profitable.”

  “Just for me and your five thousand closest friends?”

  “Don’t hurt my feelings.” He jabbed his index finger at the program. “This one’s private. You wanna go home a happy man, you bet your hotdog money on the seven horse.”

  Stein glanced down at the program. “Dario’s Dancer? Are you kidding? This guy hasn’t won since radio.”

  “That’s why he’s 38-1.”

  “And will no doubt run like it.”

  “So the uninformed might think.”

  “I’m actually more looking for a biped, today. A two-legger name of Morty Greene. Any help there?”

  Woody’s expression turned serious. “Morty Greene is not your type of work, Mister Stein.”

  “Really. And you say this because-?”

  “If that’s your level of questioning, it should indicate that you have not handicapped this event sufficiently. And you remember what we call people who chase sucker bets.”

  “Is he here today, Wood?”

  “Let me give you a two-part exacta. One: bet the seven horse. Two: stay away from Morty Greene.”

  Stein strode through the grandstand lobby toward the finish line where Edna Greene had suggested Morty would be sitting. He happened to glance up at the TV screen at the coincident moment that the horse being led to the gate was the seven horse, Dario’s Dancer. His odds had jumped up to 43-1, the longest shot on the board. Stein didn’t believe in omens, exactly, although one thing was sure and that was that the universe worked in mysterious ways. Stein thought, not really seriously, about Goodpasture’s check in his shirt pocket. He tried to multiply twenty thousand by forty-three-to-one odds but got lost in the zeros.

  A year ago, in one of the very few interesting assignments he had gotten through Lassiter and Frank, they had been engaged by the Racing Association to crack a cyberspace betting scheme where a ring of Cal Tech math majors had hacked into the pari-mutuel system and were printing out bogus winning tickets after the races had been run. Stein’s instinct was that they were not racing fans and were getting the results online. He concocted a plan of posting fake results on the web page they were using as reference. When they came in to cash what they thought were winning tickets the stewards were waiting for them. A grateful management established a line of credit for Stein.

  An invisible umbilical cord seemed to be drawing him toward the Large Transaction window. The teller was a blonde in her forties whose nametag said “Brenda.” Stein smiled at her affably. “Just for curiosity’s sake, I once had a house account here. I wonder if it’s still open.”

  “Of course, Mister Stein.”

  “You know me?”

  “I’m Wanda.” She said it like she expected him to remember.

  “Why does your badge say Brenda?”

  “Don’t ask.” A pleasant chime sounded. Brenda or Wanda touched his sleeve with a long false nail. “They’re at the post, Mister Stein. Did you wish to place a wager?”

  Two films ran side-by-side on the inner eyelids of Stein’s mental Cineplex. In WHAT IF IT WINS? bales of thousand dollar bills fall on him from above. He buys a real house, Angie grows up problem-free, the sixties return, and Stein, at long last, finds true love. In WHAT IF IT LOSES? Stein watches in shame and horror as a team of burly moving men load Angie’s furniture out of his apartment and she turns to him with a look that will define him for the rest of his life that says, “ I always hoped Mom was wrong about you.”

  He snapped back into sanity. “No bet. I just came by to say hello.”

  “I still have the same phone number.”

  An instant later, the buzzer sounded locking down the betting windows and releasing the starting gate. Twelve superbly conditioned thoroughbred athletes exploded from the gate in a perfect line. Actually, eleven exploded forward. The twelfth stumbled badly and was only saved from a terrible spill by a heads-up move by its jockey. But he was left eight lengths behind the rest of the field before he had run a step. It was the seven horse. Dario’s Dancer. Stein thanked the universe for bestowing the wisdom upon him to resist temptation. He resumed his search for Morty
Greene.

  As the horses strung out along the back stretch, people all around him were standing on benches, exhorting their horses in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese. Unburdened by a stake in the outcome, Stein passed through these magnetic fields as unaffected as a neutron sailing through the Van Allen Radiation belt. His radar was locked in on the large, rectangular object the size of a drive-in movie screen that he intuitively knew was Morty Greene’s back.

  The pitch and timbre of the track announcer’s voice rose chromatically at each furlong. As the leaders came out of the far turn into the stretch, he was hitting C-sharp. “Missed The Boat is holding on gamely. Then comes Couldawouldashoulda. Smart Move is third. But from the back of the pack here comes Dario’s Dancer. Charging like an express train. They’re stride for stride in the last eighty yards. Missed The Boat. Dario’s Dancer. Missed The Boat, Dario’s Dancer. At the wire… it’s too close to call.”

  Oblivious to the excitement of the photo finish, Stein tapped the back shoulder of the drive-in movie screen in front of him and asked pleasantly if he might be Morty Greene. The gentleman whose shoulder had been tapped rose slowly but continuously from his seat. He was sharply dressed in a tan sports jacket and slacks, hand-painted silk tie, and shoes that wouldn’t have left much unused alligator. As he turned around, Stein could see Edna Greene’s strength clearly displayed in his eyes. Her other qualities of wisdom and understanding, if present in her son, were far better concealed. Stein greeted him with his charming non-combative smile. He felt a cell memory of the old rhythm returning. It was good to be back in the game.

  “How’re you doing? My name is Harry Stein.”

  “I know who you are,” Morty Greene said.

  “You do?” Then he noted the cell phone on the seat alongside. “Ah. She told you I was coming.” His voice sounded rueful.

  “Of course she told me. She’s my mother. You Jewish boys expect everyone’s mother to love you the best.”

  “Anyway, then you know why I’m here.” Stein unfolded the yellow copy of the shipping invoice that Mattingly had provided. Another voice interposed before Stein could ask his first question.

  “What are you pushing paper at my man? Are you out of your fucking mind?” The source of the second voice stood up. But not very far; He came to the middle of Morty Greene’s chest. Standing next to each other they looked like a bar graph depicting the US/Japanese trade deficit. The shorter man had on a blue sports jacket over a tight-fitting silk shirt. His skin was black and smooth, and he had a large bubbling yellow scar on his left cheek that looked like a tomato grub crawling toward his eye.

  “This will take all of one second. I just need you to look at this signature and tell me if it’s yours. One word, yes/no, and I’m gone.”

  Morty’s full attention was at the giant screen tote board, where the finish of the race was being replayed, and the words PHOTO FINISH flashing repeatedly. “Nope,” Morty said.

  “No, it’s not your signature?” Stein’s heart began to race. Had his name been forged? Was there really something going on with these shampoo bottles?

  “No, I’m not doing company business on my day off.”

  “This isn’t corporate. It’s just you and me.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear my man over the crowd noise.” The smaller man pressed up very close to Stein’s ear. He did so by pulling on Stein’s arm with such sudden and considerable force that the rest of Stein’s body followed in close proximity. “My friend said no.”

  “I get that it’s his day off. I could authorize the company’s paying him right now for an hour’s overtime.”

  A roar went up from the crowd as the result of the photo was posted up on the board.

  “There’s my overtime,” Morty said. He pounded his fist into his open palm. The gesture carried the weight of a falling oak. “Damn if that artichoke-face muthafucker didn’t have it. Five hundred. Right on his nose!”

  Stein looked with disbelief at the tote board. “A friend of mine told me to bet that horse.” Stein lamented.

  “You should listen to the good advice of your friends,” the short man observed. He and Morty high and low fived at their good fortune.

  “Morty! You just hit a fifty-to-one shot. Are you really not going to tell me whether you signed this?”

  “Forty-five to-one. And yeah. I’m not gonna tell you if I signed it.”

  The overhead sun drove Stein’s shadow straight down into the yielding asphalt as he made the long walk back through the parking lot to his car. He berated himself at every step. He had blundered up to Morty Greene without a strategy, without giving himself a way to win. Woody was right. There was a word for people like him. The word was. He had gained nothing, learned nothing, accomplished nothing. It was right that he should have to go back to counting shampoo bottles. That was his level. A man at the top of his game would have gotten what he came here to get.

  He leaned for a moment against the polished green hood of a Mercedes Benz. He was startled by the sudden appearance of a man right in front of him, and instinctively catalogued his opponent’s weaknesses: What he saw was a man in middle age, looking paunchy and soft, glib but without the bite to back up the bark, speckles of gray in his hair, soft conciliatory body, a man who could be taken. This all registered in a moment, before he realized that he was looking at his own reflection. A mechanized voice ordered him to take three steps back, which he did, and walked rapidly away.

  Stein had forgotten where he had parked his car and scoured Aisle D for twenty minutes before he found it in Aisle E. He opened his door and was practically driven to his knees by the rush of aroma that cascaded out. Goodpasture’s bud must have come out of its plastic bag when Stein had swept it under the seat, and the sun beating down on the roof for the last hour had turned the car into an oven. Passersby in the next row craned their heads in search of the source. A young boy asked his parents in a loud voice what that smell was. They pretended not to know, but his fifteen-year-old brother looked back at Stein and flashed him the peace sign.

  It would mean an extra hour and twenty extra miles, but he had to go home first to air out the car and his clothing. He could not go to Angie’s school with the car smelling like this. He could just picture himself getting yanked out of the seat by Sergeant Henley, the 300-pound parking enforcement officer who stood guard at the gate of The Academy, and being dragged by the scruff of the neck to the principal’s office.

  Weeks later, when he would relate this story and people asked him why didn’t he just throw the bud away, he had no better answer than to say he couldn’t. It was too beautiful.

  Penelope Kim, Stein’s tall, slender, twenty-year-old Korean bisexual neighbor, was in the courtyard wearing her blue Spandex yoga togs, bent into her downward-facing dog when Stein arrived home and tried to hurry past her to his apartment.

  “Stein!” She called through her legs. “I’ve been looking for you. I have to pick your brain.”

  She sprang from her pose and bounded at his heels like a Doberman puppy. Penelope had been an Olympic diving champion at fifteen, and a Paris high-fashion model at sixteen, where under the name “Cambodia” she had posed nude for the famous calendar featuring old and new farm equipment. She had climbed K-2 and had her fortune told by the Dalai Lama. She had been declared clinically dead on two separate occasions, slept with the male and female costars of three major motion pictures and their sequels; and since all that was merely her life, the exotic protagonist of the screenplay she was writing was a middle-aged Jewish insurance investigator, who in her script she called Klein.

  “So did you write your five pages today?” Stein asked her.

  “No, today’s been a thinking day.”

  “You write and think on different days?”

  “They’re separate functions. I can’t explain it. I need to find out more about what you did at the factory,” Penelope said as she followed Stein into his apartment.

  “It’s a warehouse.”

  “
I changed it to a factory. It’s more visual. I can’t explain it.” Watson was asleep in a shaft of sunlight on the living-room rug. He raised an eyelid, grumbled, and went back to sleep. “Maybe I’ll give Klein an old dog. Make the audience worry that he’ll die.”

  “Klein or the dog?”

  She giggled. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She grabbed a ballpoint off his desk and scribbled shorthand notes across the taut pliable skin of her forearm. “Stein, this place looks like a garage sale. Your feng shui is all for shit. I’m going to get my friend Fiona to do a complete energy rebalancing for you.” Stein looked distractedly from the hand-grouted coffee table to the overstuffed sofa to the fifties pole lamp. “I hate it when you ignore me,” Penelope pouted. “I’m too much of a narcissist to take the rejection.”

  “I’m looking for a place to hide this.” He displayed the contents of the plastic wrapping that he had resealed.

  “Stein, that’s marijuana!”

  “I’m aware of that. And now, so is everyone else in the zip code.” He explored and rejected several hiding places-under the base of the pole lamp, in the pinball machine, his file cabinet- while giving her an offhand synopsis of the morning’s activities.

  She looked at him with reverence. “Stein, you pretend to live this boring normal life, but you’re out making dope deals, betting horses. Reality so kicks fiction’s ass.”

  “Ah!”

  He strode triumphantly to the hall closet and tucked the packet in among the helter-skelter shelves of blankets and bed linens.

  “No good,” said Penelope. “Not enough ventilation. It’ll stink up the house.”

  “It won’t stink up the house.”

  “I vote for the file cabinet.”

  “It’s not a referendum.” Her chin and her eyes dropped. “I’m sorry. Penelope, I didn’t mean to snap at you.” As a penance he admitted, “I can’t hide it in my file cabinet. She snoops there.”

  The phone rang. Stein let the machine pick up.

  “I can’t believe you still use a landline. Even Klein has a pager.”