Both men lay writhing on the ground five feet apart from each other. Stein’s adversary made another wild attempt to flee. Stein pulled himself onto one leg and hopped fiercely after him. With one desperate lunge, Stein barreled his shoulder into the man’s back. His momentum carried them forward, pinning him against the side of Stein’s car.
“Don’t hit me, I’m a doctor,” the man screamed.
“Making a house call?”
“I swear it!
Stein spun the man around. He was thirty-five, balding, wore glasses, and was slightly shorter than Stein had first thought. He wrested his hand out of Stein’s grasp and groped in his jacket pocket. Stein feared the man was going for his gun. But what he thrust at him was a laminated photo ID from the Marin County Medical Board. The name on the license made Stein’s spirit soar. He released his grip on the man’s larynx. He felt like Stanley meeting Livingstone at the mouth of the Nile. “Doctor Alton Schwimmer, I presume. Say hello to Harry Stein.”
EIGHT
3:00 A.M., and Munowitz’s Deli in the Fairfax district was jumping. The line of people waiting for tables stretched past the appetizing section all the way back to the bakery. Young girls with radical hair and multiple piercings were draped over their indolent boyfriends dressed in their open fronted vests and technogrunge leather pants with codpieces, and who looked at anyone Stein’s age with a smirk that said, We are the pieces of shit who are fucking your daughters you spent all that money to raise.
“What’s good here?” Schwimmer asked, when they had been led to a booth.
“You don’t say a word the whole way in, you don’t even look at my broken ankle, and you ask me what’s good?”
“I told you, it was a mild sprain.”
“How can you tell it’s a sprain without looking?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Don’t doctors sometimes take X-rays?”
“You want a second opinion? Ask that guy.” Schwimmer gestured toward a biker who was tearing at his meat sandwich in staccato bursts like a piranha.
“Fine,” Stein sulked. “It’s getting better by itself.”
“Oh for God’s sake, let me see it.”
Stein extended his leg under the table onto the opposite banquette. Schwimmer lifted Stein’s foot and turned it sharply to the left. “Does that hurt?”
“Aaaargh.”
“You’re right. Maybe it’s broken.”
“Don’t you people take some kind of oath?”
The drive in from Topanga had been maddening. Notwithstanding Schwimmer’s reputation for making death a dignified experience, he had the social skills of a doorknob, and that was being unkind to doorknobs. He had deflected all of Stein’s questions: What was he doing at Goodpasture’s? Was Goodpasture all right? Had he been there when it happened? Where was he now? I’m on your side. If you know where he is you have to tell me.
All Schwimmer would say was if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, and despite Stein’s ardent avowal that things had changed since he originally had declined Goodpasture’s offer, Schwimmer had turned his back to Stein and contorted his body into an impossible shell, his elbows crossed around his knees, which were also crossed. He looked like a torso that had been hastily glued together by somebody new to the job, and he sat that way until they pulled into the Munowitz parking lot.
Their waitress who came to take their order was a distressed blonde whose life had taken a wrong turn off Easy Street.
“I need a minute,” Schwimmer said.
“Order a roast beef on buttered white bread with a glass of milk,” Stein suggested. “They’ll think you’re a regular.”
Schwimmer ordered the barley bean soup, which pissed Stein off because he was going to order that himself. “Make it two,” Stein said. “But make mine better.”
Once she had departed with their orders, Stein leaned across the table to plead his case. “Do you not grasp that we are on the same side here? I know what was lost. I want to help get it back.” Schwimmer made brief expressionless eye contact. “I see why people come to your hospice,” Stein said. “You make death a pleasant alternative.” But Schwimmer was not the only one stonewalling. Stein had not revealed to him what had happened to Nicholette and was not going to gratuitously volunteer any information while Schwimmer was hoarding his.
Their waitress returned with their soups. “Who gets the barley bean?” she asked.
The rich, deep, thick brown broth with barley and lima beans and ham mellowed Stein’s soul. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he joked, as a kind of surrender.
“You weren’t my first choice.” Schwimmer informed him. The air between them turned brittle again and filled with tiny invisible flying shards of glass. “You weren’t on my list at all.”
“Apparently you were outvoted,” Stein shot back. His ego induced another ridiculous display, yanking Goodpasture’s check out of his breast pocket and brandishing it into Schwimmer’s face. He tucked it back into his shirt and made a final effort to be reasonable. “I was off the bus. I admit that. But I’m back on. Things have happened.” He let that final chord play out its overtones. Things have happened.
Schwimmer was tone deaf to whatever cantata Stein was singing. He counted out of his wallet and change purse the exact amount to cover one bowl of soup, the tax and a twelve per cent tip.
“I should let you walk,” Stein said as he unlocked the passenger side door. But grudging politeness won out, that and the nagging belief that Schwimmer would have to relent and spill all. He was staying at the hotel near the 405 freeway with the revolving restaurant. A twenty-minute ride with no traffic. Neither said a word the entire trip, except for Stein who was still trying to put the little tile fragments together into a picture he could recognize, who asked, “How did you get to Goodpasture’s?”
To which Schwimmer replied, “…”
“Thank you. That is so helpful.”
When they pulled into the circular driveway Schwimmer engaged him fully for the first time. “Let me draw you a hypothetical. You are in possession of a piece of information that is of great importance to a hostile party. And that hostile party, in order to induce you to reveal that information, manages to place your daughter into a life-threatening situation. In which direction do you suppose your loyalties would bend?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“There are the two reasons I don’t want you involved. One: Because it can happen. And two: Because you are too stubborn or blind to see that it will.”
First light was just starting to show in the eastern sky as Stein drove slowly homeward through the residential streets of Bel Air. The Japanese gardeners were already out tending the immaculate lawns upon which their owners’ feet would never tread. They were like perfect narcissistic gym bodies-great to look at but keep off the grass. Stein’s eyes burned. He realized he hadn’t slept yet since he turned fifty and that condition was not going to be remedied soon. Today was a changeover day when Angie was scheduled to go to Hillary’s. That gave him three days, three uninterrupted, non-custodial days, to find Nicholette’s killer.