Stein,stoned s-1

by Hal Ackerman

  Moments earlier Stein had thought he was done with shampoo but now it looked like Mattingly and Michael Esposito had been right, that Paul Vane had been knocking them off. But why was Vane showing him? His shell cracked with barely a tap. Lila was crashing off the high and getting cranky. “Stein, can we go? I’m hungry.”

  An 11”?14” photo hung on the wall above one of the sinks that struck Stein with a vague sense of familiarity. It was Nicholette Bradley cavorting on a beach with another girl. Stein noticed the photographer’s logo under the photo-an aperture opening like a flower petal. He remembered the envelope he had found in Nicholette’s bedroom with that same logo. Weird things began to snap together.

  “Is David Hart an acquaintance of yours?” Stein asked.

  It was Paul Vane’s turn to be surprised. “How would you have known that?”

  And then a voice emanated from the recesses of the room that said, “I was waiting for someone to introduce us.” A figure materialized. Stein thought at first it was a hallucination. The person standing in the doorway was the image of young Michael Espos-ito. Punk-blond hair, snakelike curl of the lips.

  “Speak of the devil,” Vane said. Meet David Hart in person.”

  “I’ve been listening to the conversation,” David said. “We are not amused.” On that, he abruptly strode from the room. And Paul Vane did what any man would do who feared that he had lost thelast person on earth allotted for him to love.

  He gave chase.

  ELEVEN

  Argumentative voices rose up through the grates of the elevator cage that carried the spatting couple to the lower level. Even a foreigner who didn’t speak the language could follow the story of the opera. The timbre of one voice was strident and unyielding, designed to hurt without remorse. The other was tinged with a depth of sadness that comes of knowing that more is about to be lost than merely an argument. Still on the floor above them, Stein looked rapidly around for a staircase.

  “Leave them alone,” Lila said. “They have enough problems.”

  “I wish I could.”

  In her reluctantly assumed role as helpmate, Lila pointed out the stairway door. Stein yanked it open and raced down ahead of her. “Don’t wait for me, or anything,” she admonished, and began a careful, wobbly, banister holding descent

  Vane and Hart were so deep in their argument that they did not immediately step out of the elevator when it reached the basement. Only in the ghastly aftermath of a particularly savage comment was there a moment’s silence, during which David Hart emerged from the elevator, with his suppliant in futile pursuit. Both were surprised to see Stein already there, taking in the sight. The walls were well stocked with Espe New Millennium shampoo bottles. Perhaps a thousand of them. Stein hated being lied to by people he liked and he liked Paul Vane. “So this is ‘just barely enough’ to satisfy your few loyal customers?”

  Vane dropped his countenance in shame. Hart did not. He turned upon Stein the full unleashed power of the Post-Reagan disdain for anyone who thought that guilty executives should face consequences. “Whose lackey are you?” he spat. “That bitch cunt Espe?”

  “Please, David. You’re being rude,” Vane said quietly.

  “I’m being rude? That little whore stole your life’s work. I’d think you’d care, if not for your own sad self then for me. You’d think I’d count for something.”

  “You count,” Vane said, his voice disappearing into the stale canyons of old arguments. “David has nothing to do with this,” he confessed to Stein. “It was all my doing.”

  “And of course I believe you, since you’ve never lied to me.”

  “Come,” Paul Vane beckoned them. “All will be revealed.”

  He led them back up the flight of stairs to the main level where Lila was still waiting, then through the double door that opened into a large, sunny white-walled room with high windows and a beautifully redone blond wood floor. There were rolled backdrops and reflective umbrellas. Stationary lights were mounted on aluminum poles and a 35mm camera on a tripod. A pair of handcuffs and a silk top hat were left on the sofa, props from a recent photo shoot. At least Stein hoped they were props. But what arrested his attention was the life-size, three-dimensional cutout of the Espe bottle; the same icon he had seen that morning in Milli-cent Pope-Lassiter’s office.

  “You’re David Hart, the photographer,” Stein declared. “I’ve seen your work.”

  Hart replied a suspicious but flattered, “Really?”

  “You shot the Espe box?”

  “Yes,” David replied, puffing up.

  “And no,” Vane added.

  “But mostly yes,” David insisted. “Uncredited and unheralded. And of course unpaid.”

  Lila poked Stein in the neck. “I’m still here by the way. In case you were wondering.”

  Paul Vane told an extraordinary tale, the gist of it being that marketing strategy for “New Millennium” would feature a new face, one who would replace Nicholette Bradley. Of course that created a tremendous buzz. Thousands of girls were interviewed. And finally-

  “Don’t tell me,” Stein interjected. “Is her name Alex?”

  Lila hooted at him, “Stein, you don’t know anything about that.”

  “How did you know?” Vane marveled.

  “You mean he’s right? ” Lila spent the next ten minutes wondering how that could possibly be.

  Vane went on. “They tried to keep it hush hush. They began shooting the national ad campaign last summer. Print ads. Billboards. TV spots. But of course no secret is safe in the ad business. Once it leaked that Alex was the next big thing, clients were lining up to hire her after her exclusive with Espe expired. Twin Peaks, the sports bra company, won the bidding. They paid her a million dollars, and the deal was she had to shave her head.”

  Stein remembered he had seen those pictures. His mind, which did strange things like this, presented the proof sheet he had seen in Nicholette’s bedroom. “So she must have known she was being replaced.

  “Nikki’s a darling. She helped find Alex.”

  “She wasn’t irked about being replaced?”

  “It’s show biz. Everyone replaces somebody.”

  “Do you think you can get to the part about me before the dinner break?” David Hart pouted.

  Vane smiled at his lover, who did not smile back. “Alex’s last contractual obligation to Espe was for the shoot that would create the package. Ray Ramos was the photographer. It was there that I set eyes on Ray Ramos’s magnificent, young, overworked, under-appreciated assistant for the first time.” Here Vane bowed in David Hart’s direction.

  “At last.” Hart fumed.

  “It was the assistant’s job to do everything. Make coffee. Load cameras. Set the lights. Process the film. After the last shot was done, Alex came to my salon. She had agreed to the deal with Twin Peaks and wanted her head shaved immediately because if she let herself think about it too long she knew she’d back out. I had just finished doing her when my darling David (of course he wasn’t my darling yet!) came bursting in. His face was the color of blanched mushrooms. He had screwed up all fifteen rolls of film that Ray Ramos had shot. The negatives were ruined. There was no shot for the box, nor for the billboard. It was a disaster of global proportion.

  “David’s plan was that he would reshoot the Ray Ramos session and substitute his film for Ramos’s without anyone knowing. He knew the entire lighting setup and all the lenses and angles that Ramos had used. He had never shot before but he was sure he could do it. All I had to do was to get the world’s new top model to agree to work with an unknown photographer when all that was at stake was her entire career and the success of a ten million dollar ad campaign.

  “He swore he would do anything for me in return which was a very tempting offer. And then he saw my wicker basket filled with her shorn auburn hair. I thought he was going to stroke out on the spot. His jaw froze. His eyes fluttered. He lost the power of speech. He grabbed me around the neck and begged me to perform a
miracle, to make a wig out of Alex’s hair.”

  “Don’t embellish,” David complained. “You always embellish.”

  “My darling, I am nothing but embellishment.”

  Stein stepped in to short-circuit the domestic spat. “So you made a wig for Alex out of her own hair that you had just cut off her? Is that what happened?”

  “It’s technically called a fall, not a wig, because it’s her own hair, but yes. And David did the reshoot and it came out brilliantly.” Vane bowed to his protege. “More brilliantly than the original, I’m sure.”

  “And then everyone started proclaiming Ray Ramos a photographic genius,” David sulked.

  “Yes,” Paul Vane commiserated. “The injustice.”

  The picture began to coalesce in Stein’s mind. “So you gents decided to start your own underground distribution arm? You whipped up your own private batch? You enlisted the girl at the warehouse to distract Morty Greene and diverted a few shipments of Espe bottles… How am I doing so far?”

  “Stein, all this talk is getting me hungry,” Lila pouted.

  “We’re done here in a second. As soon as they tell me which of them wrote the extortion letters.”

  “What letters?” Vane blurted before he could stop himself.

  It became clear in a flash that the extortion letters had not been part of the plan the two had agreed upon and that David Hart had written them without Vane’s approval or knowledge. The Fall of the House of Espe. Stein got the joke now. Hart knew that the hair on the label was not real. The truth-in-advertising laws were very clear now that beauty products had to be accurately represented. The notes were thinly veiled threats that Hart would blow the lid off the campaign. The lid of the Espe box was where the false hair fell. Of course David Hart knew that. He had shot the damn thing.

  “Oh my God,” Paul Vane cried. “We’re going to jail and I look ghastly in orange.”

  “Nobody is going to jail,” Stein assured him. “If you do exactly what I tell you to do.” Stein’s patience was losing its patience. “You’re going to pay for a truck and return all their bottles along with an apology. And then you are going to leave Espe Shampoo alone. Is that cool with everybody?”

  It was so cool with Paul Vane that he practically fell into Stein’s arms. Hart was a line drawing of disappointment. “Why don’t you just roll me over and fuck me missionary style,” he groused. “What do I get?”

  “How about for openers you get not to go to jail,” Stein said, “And your partner gets not to go to jail.”

  “He promised to take care of me,” David wheedled. “In perpetuity.”

  Stein envisioned how he would take care of the little weasel in perpetuity. It involved carpet tacks and his eyeballs. He addressed Paul. “Last question and I’m done with you. How did you get the bottles here?” At that moment the sound of the service elevator clanged to life. Summoned from above, it began its labored ascent. “Ah. Perhaps this is the answer to my question,” Stein observed. He began his own laborious climb to the surface.

  “Stein, wait.” Lila pulled her shoe on and hurried after him.

  In the hour they had spent indoors, winter evening had fallen and life on the street had undergone a radical transformation. The main strip through town, which earlier had been about as lively as a doily, now had become a teeming, volcanic landscape of college students on winter break. Boys leaned out of their cars, hooting mating calls at the constellations of girls, whose every movement of torso and limb released crackling trails of pheromones. The flash of an incongruous image on the far side of the road caught Stein’s eye-a truck carrying a load of hay. It was only a glimpse but its afterglow remained printed on his retina as it moved through the parting crowd of pedestrians, and disappeared. He was certain that it was Morty Greene’s truck or a reasonably close hallucination. “Wait here,” he instructed Lila.

  “Stop saying that.”

  She clutched his arm and together they serpentined through the moving maze of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. “I hope you appreciate that I’m running,” Lila gasped. “The only thing I ever ran for is secretary of my stock club.” They crossed on a long diagonal to the other side. An unbroken protoplasm of humanity flowed along the sidewalk. Stein stopped for a moment to scan the terrain. But the red pickup truck was nowhere in sight.

  “I see a sign for hot food. Is that what we’re looking for?”

  The blind alley appeared out of nowhere. The angle at which it met the street concealed it from view until he came upon it. The red pickup was parked catty-corner to the side of the brick building, tailgate open, directly alongside an open elevator shaft. Stein sidled up to the entrance and peered down. He could see the tops of a load of wooden crates descending into the sub-basement. He muttered to himself as he thought of Morty lying to his face. All he’d been trying to do was keep him out of trouble.

  The elevator’s gears clanked, and the car began to ascend. Stein’s mind raced through a dozen possible next moves. The one he chose probably wasn’t the best of them. He grabbed Lila around the waist and hoisted her up onto the hood of the truck and told her to sit there and look serious.

  “It’s actually kind of nice. The metal is still warm.” She adjusted her legs around the hood ornament.

  “A little bit more serious.”

  “Is something bad about to happen?”

  “Define bad.”

  The wide purple brim of the felt hat first emerged, then the face of Morty Greene’s partner dude, Roland Dupuis. He had seemed diminutive alongside Morty Greene, but here alone he looked full-size.

  “The fuck?”

  Roland thrust the iron gates powerfully aside. The tomato slug on his face seemed to crawl closer to his eye as his expression assumed full battle alert. He was dressed elegantly for driving a truck: a white silk shirt and purple silk trousers. “I know you. The man who doesn’t take good advice from his friends.”

  Stein gestured toward Lila. “She’s Federal. You got yourself into some deep shit.”

  Roland took one cursory glance at her and scoffed. “She’s no damn FBI.” He came toward Stein, who raised neither his hands nor his voice.

  “She could be a crossing guard and you’d still be looking at five years if those bottles cross a state line. You ever hear of the Federal Racketeering act?”

  Roland lost a bit of his bravado. “Nobody said anything about state lines.”

  “Of course nobody said anything. The fall guy is for taking the fall.” It was important not to break eye contact with Roland. But Lila, trying to scooch herself down off the truck, caught her heel on the hood ornament and was stuck with her legs splayed apart.

  “Stein, would you get me down off this thing? It’s toasting my buns.”

  He removed her shoe and lifted her down. “Thanks that was excellent timing,” he whispered.

  “My foot got caught.”

  He set her down and turned back to Roland in time for Roland’s fist, traveling toward Stein’s body at great velocity, to make impact with the unmuscled pit of his solar plexus. All the air blew out of his system in one huge “OOOF” and he folded like a slab of melting cheese. Roland vaulted into the cab of Morty Greene’s truck, proclaiming that he was not taking the fall for anyone. Its eight-cylinder engine roared to a start. Other people nearby gasped and screamed and held their faces the way witnesses do in the aftermath of sudden violence. Most kept doing what they had been doing.

  Lila bent over Stein’s body and kept repeating, “Are you all right? Is there anything I can do?”

  TWELVE

  Everything about the Hotel Mirador was picture-postcard perfect. The hacienda-style main house was built harmoniously into the rolling rugged desert hills. The landscaping design consisted solely of desert blooms-coral aloe, Natal plum, Chinese lantern-except that the plants were not indigenous, they came from Africa- and the hills never existed in nature. They had been manufactured to fit a computer-generated artist’s concept of western/rugged. Six hundred
thousand cubic yards of limestone had been shipped in by companies located in Yuma, Arizona from East Meadow, New York and twelve thousand miles away from Yokohama, Japan.

  Millicent Pope-Lassiter had been so ecstatic when Stein called her with the news that the bottles had been found and would be returned that she had upgraded Stein’s accommodation at the Mirador from a room to a suite. He made sure that she understood that Roland had borrowed Morty Greene’s truck without Morty’s knowledge of what its purpose would be. All he wanted from her was the assurance that the charges against Morty would be dropped and for this whole horrifically trivial episode to be stamped CLOSED AND DONE. He was not naive enough to believe Morty had not signed on for a little taste, but Stein was was less interested in criminal justice (that grand oxymoron) than he was in karmic harmony. And if he would make Edna Greene’s life a little less complicated, that would be a day worth living.

  In one of the two separate bathrooms in their suite at the Mirador, the cascading shower massage bathed Stein in a hot monsoon of melancholy. He had called home and checked his phone messages as soon as he and Lila arrived. There was nothing from Schwimmer, nothing from Goodpasture, nothing from Winston’s old lady.

  He had called Police Chief Jack Bayliss’s office, but they had not called back either. He was exhausted by minutia and wanted to crawl under the covers and wake up thirty years ago.

  Lila was blow-drying her hair when Stein came out the shower. He was wearing the boxer shorts he had purchased at the hotel gift shop that were a size too small and decorated with pictorial representations of local attractions. Lila displayed her thoughtfully packed overnight bag that contained a nightgown, slippers, and travel-size portions of nine different items of makeup and toiletries.

  “I always keep one packed in the car,” she chirped. “Just in case something like this happens.”

  “And does that happen fairly often?”

  “Do you want to hear about the solar plexus?” Lila had purchased a pamphlet on the Chakras from the hotel’s New Age bookstore. “The third chakra is your emotional power center that projects love and light into the world. When one is pure and at peace with others all conflicts are stopped, facilitating learning instead of fighting. This is a good part for you. ‘If one stands humbly to solve the conflict, love is expressed. A resolution will eventually find itself thus the chakras of both parties remain balanced.’”