Stein Stung Read online

  “Stein! I didn’t mean that—”

  “You’re absolutely right. I took you for granted. I had no right. She’s my daughter, she’s my responsibility, not yours. I will be home as soon as humanly possible.”

  “Stein. It’s fine. Do what you need to do. Everything is fine.”

  “You said before there was some weird stuff.”

  “It’s just about those bones.” She was gesturing disappointedly for Mercedes to take the food out of the microwave and put it back in the fridge. Mercedes narrowed her eyes at the cause of this disruption, the man on the phone. Lila gestured back at her that she had benevolent feelings to this man. “They found a body in my pool.”

  “A body?”

  “I didn’t mean a body.” His being upset flustered her. “A skeleton.”

  “I already know that. They think they found a wooly mammoth.”

  “Okay, well. It turns out it’s not an elephant. It’s a person.”

  “Jesus. What are you doing down there?”

  “It’s not my fault it’s not an elephant. I’m going to need to sandblast the whole patio.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Look. Tell her I don’t want her going near that pool. I will be back as soon as I possibly can. Lila, you’re really great.”

  “I know.”

  “They really found a person?”

  ***

  “This is my mom. Mom, this is Angie Stein.” Judy Cooperman was five feet seven inches tall, 106 pounds. If at her morning weigh-in she was 106 and a half she did an immediate herbal colonic cleanse. She spent three hours each day with her personal trainer, spinning, Tae Bo, power yoga; forty-five minutes at the tanning salon; one day each week at the cosmetician where layers of dead skin were exfoliated and new layers were infused with jojoba and aloe vera oils. She had had the lining of her vagina replaced after the birth of her second child. When she climaxed, which took an inexplicably long grueling time now even with the vibrator turned to high, she squirted like a busted shower nozzle.

  She knew somebody that had something to do with the financing or the advertising campaign of the movie Hidden, Slouching Something, hence she had invited (read coerced) Matthew to a private screening of a rough cut. She was not gigantically pleased to see that her son had brought his little friend along, even less so when she understood the friend was the spawn of the man who was now the new boyfriend of the woman who (in her mind) had destroyed her life.

  After the third aerial fight scene Angie pleaded altitude sickness, not to mention character deprivation, and scooted herself past the rapt investors and crew people and made her escape. She waited in the lobby for Matthew, who soon joined her there.

  “My mother is not going to be happy about this,” he warned.

  “Your mother is not going to be happy about anything.”

  He had never heard it put that succinctly but he had to concede the point. They found refuge at a nearby Johnny Rockets, pretty confident they would not likely bump into Matthew’s mother here in a fifties retro diner. He looked so easily delicious in anything he wore. He had on a loose-fitting white shirt with a dark sport jacket over it. His sandy blond hair that fell over his forehead when he leaned down toward her could be flicked back into shape by the smallest movement of his neck.

  The waiter whose nametag said RAY RAY could not take his eyes off Matthew and nearly sliced his finger cutting a piece of apple pie. The waitress spilled coffee. Johnny Mathis crooned “Chances Are” on the juke. Angie twirled her scarf twice around her neck to avoid dunking the fringe in fruit filling. “So what are we?” she ventured. “Friends? Archaeological paleontologists on a break?”

  “You and me? Isn’t it obvious?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We’re stepbrother and stepsister.”

  “We are?”

  “Yeah. Aren’t we? In a kind of way. Our fathers are both Lila’s lovers.”

  She hadn’t thought of it in that way. Her mood plunged through five levels of emotional geology, from bemused to embarrassed to sadly ironic.

  “It’s a little weird, don’t you think? If your dad hadn’t died, my dad would never have met her. We wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if we’d be here anyway.”

  “You mean Fate?”

  “Or who knows if they would have stayed together. My dad wasn’t the most—”

  “Yeah, neither is mine.”

  “I was going to say dependable,” said Matt.

  “I was going to say a fan of commitment.”

  Matthew nodded a thoughtful yes and took a sip of his coffee.

  “Are you saying yes, you can see that my dad is not a fan of commitment?”

  “No. Just that it’s hard.”

  They drifted into private nostalgic thoughts for a moment.

  “Why can’t people just find the person they’re meant to be with and stay with them forever?” Angie complained. “That would make life so much easier.”

  “I think it has something to do with mortality.”

  “It was a rhetorical question. You didn’t have to answer.”

  “Anybody ever mention that you weren’t easy?”

  “So?”

  “That was also a rhetorical question.”

  He picked up the check, which Angie allowed him to do with minimal protest. She did get a little irked though when he opened the car door for her. “I’m capable, you know.”

  “It’s just a courtesy.”

  “Fine.” She went around to the driver’s side and opened his.

  Okay, he thought, this was going to be interesting. They agreed on one major point, though, during the drive back to Lila’s. Mortality completely sucked. It made them wonder about whose body it was that had floated up into Lila’s pool.

  Lila was gone to her O’Reilly book club when they got back to the house. Angie asked Matt to give her a hand removing the tarp cover from the pool. He put the outside lights on and they scanned the surface. “Are you hoping to find his wallet and driver’s license?” he asked her.

  “Maybe.”

  The pits had yielded up no new secrets. She beckoned him to the garage where she had stowed their trove of findings. They carried everything to the patio and rebuilt the skeleton. He was nearly complete. Most of his spine, both legs, parts of both arms, ribs, hips, skull. Not everything, but enough to see what they had, which was a six-foot-two-inch male. They figured maybe there was a cemetery somewhere nearby and the tar had eroded the coffin. Or maybe some not-too-bright tourist had fallen into the lake pit and his body had been carried along in the sludgy subterranean current. The vexing question was not about the pieces that were missing, but about the one extra piece. How in hell did a tusk fit in?

  None of their brilliant ideas stood up under scrutiny. Matt thought maybe there was a whole elephant still down there that hadn’t come up. They speculated about gravity and surface tensile strength, and various other topics of which they knew next to nothing. Or maybe someone was riding the elephant and they both fell in and he grabbed the tusk to hold on and … the idea trailed away.

  They heard Lila’s car arrive.

  “I guess I’ll say goodbye to her and take off,” Matt said.

  “You’re not going to stay?”

  “My mother expects me to stay at her place when I come down.”

  As Angie jumped up from kneeling alongside the skeleton, the fringe of her long, Indian scarf caught on a jagged edge of one of the bones. She had to stop and kneel and carefully unhook the delicate material from the snag it had caught on. Something about the snag arrested her attention. She bent close to the rib bone and smoothed away a bit of residual dirt. There was a V-shaped wedge in the bottom half of the middle rib bone on the left side of the chest.

  As she carefully extracted the delicate fabric, she noticed a matching gash in the top half of the rib bone just below it. Her scalp began to tingle.

  “Matt!” She was breathless. “Hand me the tusk.”


  He did. She held it in her two hands and slowly inserted its pointed end into the space between the two ribs. She pressed the ivory deeper into the chest cavity. It encountered no resistance until it was fully imbedded down to the hilt. Only then did the twin notches in the ribs form a perfect seal. The point of the tusk was buried deep into the body’s hollow infrastructure, right where his heart would be, if he still had one.

  She turned around and looked up into her stepbrother’s face. “Matt, this dude didn’t just die. I think he was stabbed to death with this tusk. I think he was murdered.”

  At that moment, Lila came back. She was delighted to see them. “Your dad called,” she chirped. “He’ll be home tomorrow. He wants you to stay away from the pool.”

  ***

  “No, Harry, I will absolutely not authorize you to rent a helicopter.”

  “And a pilot.”

  “This conversation is concluded.”

  Despite all the grandiose schemes of Stein’s that Millicent Pope-Lassiter had shot down over the years, he was still surprised when she said no to this one without giving it a moment’s serious consideration.

  It was nine o’clock in the morning. Stein was standing in the office of the one helicopter rental place within thirty miles of Las Viejes, convinced once again that if he could summon just the right words he could penetrate to the marrow of an unreachable woman. Indeed, using the company phone to make this call.

  “Millie, let me explain to you what you are not grasping.”

  “Harry, I have grasped your proposal around the neck and choked the life out of it. You want to scour an area of rough country at an altitude of twenty-five hundred feet, where you are certain you will find a hoard of stolen merchandise, some of which belongs to Karma Moonblossom. The rental fee with pilot is two thousand dollars for half a day. Have I missed any of the salient details?”

  “Plus how important it is to me.”

  “Of course, Harry. Whatever is important to you is always of paramount importance to me.”

  “You wanted collateral for your derivatives. For two thousand bucks I’m going to find it.”

  There was the half a moment’s lethal break in rhythm that is always followed by unexpected bad news. “We’ve divested our holding in those financial instruments. We no longer risk exposure.”

  Stein subtly turned his back for a little privacy. The proprietor of the establishment and owner of the neat and manly desk was Major S. Wilson (Ret.). He was a black man with a trim military body, youthful eyes, and just a hint of grey at the temples. He could have been forty or seventy. The office was as tidy and robust, clear-eyed and direct as the man.

  “Okay, but I think I can get some of Karma Moonblossom’s bee boxes back for him.” There was dead air. “Millie?” He plunked the phone down disgustedly back into its cradle.

  “Sounds like you convinced her,” Wilson said.

  Framed photographs of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, and of huge industrial farm equipment, all hung at eye level, equidistant from each other, creating a feeling of perfect confidence.

  “God, I mean, some people. You just can’t budge them with a crowbar and dynamite.”

  “I see her side of it. The cost of recovery exceeds the recovery value. The economics make no sense.”

  “Really. I thought you’d see it differently,” Stein said.

  “Because I’m black? Power to the people and all?” He gave a sarcastic closed-fist salute.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, except have you met any people lately you’d want to give power to?”

  “I keep expecting them to change back.”

  “Into what?”

  “When people cared about people.”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t make it to Woodstock. I was flying F-16s over Hanoi.”

  Something in the cadence of the man’s voice clicked. “The Africanized bee comment the other night. That was you.”

  “And look how proud you are it only took you ten minutes. I had you the moment you walked in.”

  “I’m distinctive. What can I say?”

  Wilson chuckled and offered his hand. “Spade Wilson. U.S. Air Force wing commander. Retired.”

  “Spade?”

  “My mother had a thing about farm equipment. She called my sister Hoe.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “No … she didn’t. I don’t have a sister.”

  “So you’re a beekeeper?”

  “Not like they are. I train bees for the military.”

  “Bee bombs?

  “Bees are inherently peaceful creatures. They don’t attack unless provoked. We use them to detect land mines.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Wilson smiled enigmatically.

  “You are either one weird guy or an amazing bullshitter.” Stein waved a parting salute that impishly turned into a peace sign as he cruised out the door. In the same motion he wheeled around and one-eightied back in. “I just have to ask you about those pictures.” He gestured to the array of photographs on the wall of huge pieces of farm machinery. The one closest to Stein looked like a crouching demon from hell: a tractor of sorts with four vise-like extensions.

  “That’s a shaker,” said Wilson.

  Stein awaited further information.

  “You think almonds are handpicked?”

  “I never really …”

  “Of course you didn’t. You city boys think oranges grow in crates. These babies grab on to a trunk and shake the bejeezus out of them.” His arms suddenly tensed and assumed the ferocious strength of the machine. Stein was sure he felt the entire room vibrate.

  “Seems a little mechanized.”

  “If you want to feed the world, you need a big shovel. Now tell me. Why are you so interested in retrieving this Karma Draftdodger’s honeybees?”

  “You say you’ll do something, you try to do it. Wouldn’t you do the same?”

  “Don’t try to get into my head, son. That’s not a place you want to be. Give me one good reason why I should accept the deal you proposed.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said, or at least I thought I heard you say, you’d give me all the money you had in your pocket right now to take you up in my helicopter and find your friend’s equipment.”

  Stein caught on that Wilson was making an offer. He dug into the righthand pocket of his Levis and put his full wad on the table. It came to about ninety. “A little under,” he said.

  “Dang,” he said. “You Jewish peoples are hard bargainers.”

  ***

  Two hours later, liftoff was smooth as a dish of frozen yogurt. The Wing Commander knew what he was doing at the stick. Stein had once flown in a police helicopter, an impressive bird that held seven or eight. But this was like a flying warehouse. It could swallow a dozen of those plastic bubbles the TV weather guys get. It was all high-tech, with radar and something Wilson called GPS that displayed the terrain below them on a monitor and made it look like they were right there.

  “How’s your gas mileage on this baby?” Stein asked.

  “Better than on your Toyota Camry.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Doesn’t use gas. Atomic pellets, baby.”

  “Bullshit. Really?”

  “We’re at thirty-one hundred feet looking down,” Wilson said as they crossed into the pine belt and looked down on third-growth conifers. “What are we looking for?”

  “That’s why I brought Hollister.”

  “And that would be the gentleman curled into the corner in the fetal position turning white in catatonic shock?”

  “How ya doin’ there, Hollister?” Stein gave him an encouraging grin.

  “I shouldn’t have had bacon and eggs this morning.”

  “You shouldn’t have bacon and eggs ever,” Wilson ordained. “You’re injecting plaque right into your ventricle.” Wilson spoke in declarative sentences with no mitigation. He told Hollister he’d feel a lot better coming up t
here alongside him.

  “Moving doesn’t seem like too good an idea.”

  “You’ve chucked your cheese twice sitting still,” Stein pointed out. “Moving can’t be worse.”

  Wilson swiveled around to the quivering mass. “Son. You’re needed here.” Hollister pushed himself up and staggered to the co-pilot’s chair. He kept his hands over his eyes, and resisted when Wilson tried to pry them off. “Your eyes will get used to the motion if you let them. And your kishkas will fall right in line.”

  “Where did you learn about kishkas?” Stein laughed.

  “You don’t think there are Jews in the CIA?”

  “I didn’t. No.”

  “Well, good. That’s one secret we kept.”

  For the next forty-five minutes they skimmed along the wood line, dipped down into gullies and coverts, rifts and ravines. The detail of imagery that the surveillance equipment produced was shocking to anyone who believed in the First and Fourth Amendments. Wilson could bring up a cow’s eyelashes when she blinked.

  Stein sensed that he was getting impatient when the first shots were fired.

  Branches ripped out of the green carpet below them. Wilson instinctively veered their bird into an angular attitude to the ground. He vectored his heat-seeking infrared camera and GPS and made visual contact with the course of the gunfire. “Meat!” he roared, and spiraled up high out of range, training his guns. “We caught a regiment of Sandinistas out in the open like this, washing out their coffee pots in a little stream after breakfast. Ugliest-looking naked bodies you ever saw!”

  The quarry below them now was wearing camouflage gear. A brace of geese was slung over his shoulder.

  The helicopter hovered over the break in the trees. The wind from the whirling blades crushed the foliage below it. The hunter took an offensive supine position on the ground and steadied his gun on a rock. Wilson lined him up in his sights. “This was El Salvador, he’d be liquefied.”

  “Don’t you mean vaporized?” Stein asked.

  “We didn’t have the technology yet to vaporize. All we could do was liquefy.”

  On the ground, the emboldened hunter rose to his knees and took aim with his shotgun. Wilson flipped on the external broadcast mode and bellowed down to him. “Make my day, sucker.”