There was a note pad on her night table. The top page was blank but he could see the subtle imprint of messages written on previous pages. He tore the first few pages off and rubbed the top page lightly with the side of a pencil. He held it up to the table lamp and was able to make out impressions written in Nicholette’s calligraphic hand. But too many levels of intersecting words had left their mark for him to make out anything. A metaphor of the information age where the profusion of data creates the illusion of wisdom to the misinformed. He folded the paper carefully between two blank sheets and placed it in his pocket. He returned to Nicholette’s body and draped a red and white kimono over her shoulders.
His second colossal mistake was using the telephone. How stupid would he have to be to call his own home? But in the overwhelming presence of death, he had an irresistible urge to make sure Angie was all right. Of course, yes he knew he should have had a cell phone. It was absurd that he didn’t. Angie had chided him. Penelope Kim had chided him. Once again, it was all vanity. He liked his image of the low-tech throwback in the high-tech world. Eschewing air conditioning and microwaves and driving a car with crank windows.
Angie and Hillary would be back from The Nutcracker by now and no doubt miffed at his absence. Hillary would want to get going, but he knew she wouldn’t leave Angie at Stein’s alone. It had something to do with setting an exemplary standard of responsible behavior. With each passing minute she had to wait Stein could hear Hillary cataloging to Angie her father’s deficiencies of character. But he knew he could not risk calling. The number would imprint on Nicholette’s phone log and when the police made their routine investigation there would be questions. Not to mention the prospect of trying to explain to Hillary what he was doing at a murder scene in the middle of the night.
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?