“I am humbled in ways I cannot describe,” Stein said.
“Why are you still here, anyway? I thought you had gone to the airport to pick up Lila.”
Stein blanched. “Is that tonight?”
“Duh..”
He rummaged through a pile of yellow Post-Its stuck to his desk calendar and found the note he was looking for. “Oh God.” He looked pleadingly at the clock, whose face was as unforgiving as Hillary’s. “She’s going to think I forgot.”
“You did forget.”
“But you know her. She’s going to think it’s because she’s not important enough to remember.” He grabbed his wallet and keys, leapt down the four steps, turned his ankle and very nearly went sprawling, recovered and waved back over his shoulder that he was ok as he stumbled toward his car.
“That’s your father,” Hillary said, “always chasing the six o’clock plane at six forty-five.”
At the curb, Stein’s neighbor was still eyeing the offending brown blotch.
Traffic on the southbound 405 was tighter than a spastic colon. Stein juked and jived between lanes making up a car length then losing it back. He visualized Lila sitting alone at Baggage Claim, watching the last unclaimed duffel make its five hundredth orbit around carousel. If wishing made it true, he would wish that he loved Lila. Angie was right. She was the perfect woman for him. Goofy and dependable, smart and practical, she had an appreciation of life’s fragility and a batty sense of humor. She had been her second husband’s second wife. They had had seven good years, then cancer. When the bad end came, it was Lila and not his first wife who changed her husband’s bandages and washed him. It was Lila holding his hand as his life ebbed from it, even when his own teenage son and daughter could not. The one deficit that negated all her strong qualities was her obvious poor judgment. She was in love with Stein.
Ninety minutes late, Stein ran raggedly into the United Airlines baggage claim area. Lila was sitting on her suitcase, wearing her red Versace business suit, reading Cosmopolitan.
“Good! You’re still here,” he gasped.
“Good I’m still here? No, it’s not good that I’m here. It’s pathetic. If I had any self-respect I would be home in a hot bath drinking a glass of Merlot.”
“You wouldn’t believe the traffic.”
“You forgot. You can admit it.”
“I absolutely did not forget! In fact, I’ve been making trial runs all week to see which was the best route.”
“I called your house. They told me you just left.”
“I’m a shit,” Stein conceded.
“But you’re an old shit and you need some pity.” She handed him a neatly wrapped little package. “Happy birthday. And thanks for coming up with a really nice lie. I still want to believe it.”
She watched hopefully as Stein opened the box. It was the soundtrack to Woodstock II. “Angie told me you’d like it.”
He nodded yes. “My girls.”
D RIVING NORTHBOUNDED on the 405, Stein was concentrating on eleven different things other than driving, so he didn’t see the sixteen-wheeler lumbering into the same lane from the left that he was entering from the right. The blast of its air horn practically lifted his car off the road. Its huge form filled his field of view like an iceberg. He lurched blindly to the right, hit the gas hard, found himself going straight at the median. Lila screamed. Stein hit the brake, skidded and jounced across the steel nubs implanted into the road. The wind draft made the Camry fishtail. The bottom corner of the MERGE LEFT sign sheared off his outside mirror. The truck never slowed. A second blast of its horn dopplered out behind it like a lingering fuck you. Heart pounding, Stein pulled to the shoulder and asked Lila if she was ok.
“Am I ok? No, I’m not ok. Look at me.” Her voice was tweeting in its upper register. She had been thrown sideways in her seat and her wide brimmed hat knocked askew along with her equilibrium. “If you have a death wish, it’s proper etiquette to let your passenger know ahead of time.”
“Sorry.”
He started up again and drove slowly on surface streets away from the freeway. He was more lightheaded than he realized from the adrenaline rush. He made a few exploratory turns that took them into dark and unfamiliar territory. Lila noticed his uncertainty. “I presume you know where you’re going,” she said.
“By presume, you mean you hope and wish?”
“Can you drive without your mirror?”
“Who needs hindsight?”
A water tower rose silently out of the darkness; it looked vaguely familiar to Stein and he realized exactly where he was. He had never approached the Espe warehouse from this direction, from the far side of the Ballona Wetlands. He remembered that he had forgotten to follow up with Mattingly about the whole Morty Greene arrest warrant thing and a bad sound emanated from his throat.
“Are we lost?”
He had nearly passed the driveway when he jerked the wheel and careened into a skidding turn.
“Jesus, Stein! Where did you learn to drive?”
“There’s a thing I have to do here. It’ll only take a second.”
“Here? Where is here?”
“Do you mind?”
“Like I have a vote.”
He punched his security code into the electronic box at the side of the gate and the wooden barrier arm rose in salute. He came to a hard stop at the glass-doored entrance.
“Do you want to wait here or come in?” He decided for her. “I’ll just be a second.”
He jumped out of the car and entered the warehouse unchallenged. The outer door was open. The security guard’s desk was unoccupied. A game show played on the portable TV alongside the four-inch monitor. It would take a real criminal mastermind to steal anything out of here, Stein thought. Down the hallway leading to the executive offices there were framed posters of the previous years’ magazine and billboard ads. The girl was clean cut and heartbreakingly beautiful. Her hair looked too perfect to be human. Except now that Stein had met Nicholette Bradley, he recognized that she was the girl in the photographs. She was the Espe New Radiance Girl.
A light was on in Mattingly’s office, and Stein had a foreboding that he was going to walk in on something horrible, like Mattingly romping naked with Mrs. Higgit. He made sure he made a lot of noise and gave ample warning for them to separate and dress. “Hello, I’m here,” he called out. “Stop doing anything disgusting.” Mattingly was sitting dolefully at his desk. Even the sight of Stein did not cheer him. He extended to Stein the handful of papers he had been clutching.
The sheaf of extortion notes was typed on old-fashioned bond paper. They were short, none more than a line or two. Each alluded to a dire consequence: One threatened to blow the lid off the Espe campaign. Another predicted the Fall of the House of Espe.
“It’s Paul Vane,” Mattingly moaned, before Stein had formulated enough interest to ask the question. “The hair dresser. Michael Esposito’s ex-whatever. You need to stop him.”
“Stop him from what?” Stein was in the dark as to how this related to Morty Greene, if any of it did.
“It’s a desperate cry for help.” The thin disembodied voice once again emerged from the recesses of the room as Michael Esposito glided out of the shadows. “He sees that he’s nothing without me. He wants me back.”
“Yes, well I’m definitely the one to settle a battle between ex-lovers. I’ve done it so well in my own life.” Stein bowed and about-faced.
Michael undulated toward him, sniffing the atmosphere around him as if trolling for pheromones, then boldly blocking his path to the door. “I believe someone has already been out to see my ex-lover,” Michael declared. “I think we will find that this is the business card of Paul Vane.” With a theatrical flourish his two long fingers swooped down and plucked the card out of Stein’s front pocket. But his yelp of triumph caught in his throat when he saw that the card was not Paul Vane’s at all. He turned red as a full-body niacin flush. “Faltez-moi,” he gasped. “Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.” He replaced Nicholette’s card into Stein’s breast pocket and smoothed his shirt.