Stein Stung Read online

  The hunter held the braces of birds out at arm’s length and yelled something that without an amplification system came out like a pantomime of defiance.

  “That’s the game warden,” Hollister said. He was looking at a magnified image of the man on the console monitor.

  “The game warden is poaching geese? Does everyone else not find that hilarious?”

  Hollister had a faraway look in his eye. Like he was about to do something bigger than his own normal life would have predicted.

  “He’s the one,” said Hollister. “He’s the one who’s been stealing everyone’s bees.”

  A small break in the pine forest two hundred rugged yards away revealed a clearing. In the clearing stood a ramshackle barn. Outside the barn was a pickup truck. Alongside the truck was a forklift. On the forklift was a pallet of bee boxes. The barn doors were open and even from this altitude Stein could see it was a warehouse.

  “I think perhaps we found what we’re looking for,” Wilson deadpanned. He began to descend into the very tiny opening between the stands of monumental trees. Down to treetop level, the huge rotors came within inches of the extended evergreen arms. No one spoke or breathed until the wheels touched the planet. Then the release of nervous laughter. “You’ve done this before,” Stein hoped.

  “Venezuela, we were landing between a booby-trapped helipad and the edge of a cliff.”

  “Weren’t the Sandinistas in Nicaragua?” Hollister asked.

  “People like to think so,” Wilson answered darkly. They hit ground, bounced just a little and nestled. Wilson cut the engines and jumped down.

  “I should point out,” Stein said, “that we’re not a paramilitary operation. We’re just three guys.”

  Wilson ordered silence, and duck-walked commando style toward the barn. After three steps he got a terrible cramp in his left quad. Hollister helped him up and rotated his leg to shake it out.

  “That’s better. Thanks.”

  “You weren’t in El Salvador,” Hollister suggested.

  “Desk job in Tacoma.”

  “I’m afraid to ask if you have a pilot’s license,” Stein added.

  “Hey. Did I get you here?” Wilson commando’d ahead to the warehouse and pounded a closed fist on the partially open door. “I’ve got a warrantless search order to investigate the premises. Any objection to my coming in?”

  Before an answer could be given, even if there were someone within earshot to give it, Major S. Wilson, now retired, moved through the open door and stood gaping at the contents of the warehouse. There was every kind of beekeeping equipment imaginable, and not psychotically scattered like Butch and Burleigh’s backyard, but psychotically organized. Row by row there were hanging bee suits arranged by size, honey-extracting equipment, pail heaters, five- and ten-gallon jugs. There were unassembled parts for making hives: foundations, supering tops, frames.

  And the jackpot. Stacks of boxes. Some so visibly branded the marking could be seen from the doorway. Even Stein’s untrained eye recognized a dozen different etched, embossed, or painted markers.

  “Those are mine that he stole from me last month,” Hollister exclaimed, and made a beeline for his stolen equipment. Stein did not immediately see any of Karma Moonblossom’s familiar brand. Wilson snapped his cell phone open and raised a finger for silence.

  “Yeah, this is me. Listen. Take down these coordinates.” He rattled off latitudes and longitudes in degrees and minutes and was pleased at the response of the person on the other end. “That’s right. That’s exactly the spot. Call them in to our friend the reporter at the Fresno Bee. The one we can trust. You know who I mean. Then call Sheriff Slodaney.”

  Hollister whispered to Stein, “He doesn’t have to tell the sheriff how to get here. Granger is his brother-in-law.”

  “The ranger’s name is Granger? Ranger Granger? Really?”

  ***

  When Game Warden Granger emerged into the clearing and saw the warship alighted in his pasture his first response was the power play. He charged at Wilson, threatening horrendous retribution for their trespass. In less than a jiu-jitsu second, the unfortunate ranger was whirled around, inverted head to ground, handcuffed into a full Nelson, set down into a cross-legged squat against the trunk of a white oak tree, and gagged with duct tape.

  Wilson allowed him to dwell with that experience for the full forty minutes until the cordon of vehicles lumbered up the narrow road. The TV truck and local radio got there first. Not long after they had established their positions, the law arrived in the persons of county Sheriff Wilfred Slodaney and Highway Patrol Captain Anthony Caravaggio, traveling under full siren and sail. Wilson ceremoniously unfettered the now-humbled miscreant and shoved him forward. “There’s your man, Sheriff.”

  “I understand you two are acquainted,” Stein volunteered, to be helpful.

  Caravaggio smiled at Stein in contemplation of grand retribution to come. “We are going to tangle, boy.”

  “How can you say that? We’re on the same side.”

  “Not even when Satan needs an overcoat.”

  Sheriff Slodaney went through the charade of propriety, pointed a Dreyfusian finger at Wilson’s attack craft and accusing it of being parked illegally. Phrases like “warrant” and “illegal search and seizure” tumbled from his mouth.

  Stein stepped into the fray with his old flamboyance. Nobody knew how to play to the media like he did. He extended his arm toward the warehouse like Moses over the Red Sea. “Ladies and gentlemen of the free press, you can see without stepping over the threshold of private property that there is a treasure trove here of stolen property.”

  “And who’s to say it’s stolen?” Slodaney challenged.

  “I see all my stuff right there in front,” a small voice said. It was Hollister’s.

  “You sold me those boxes,” said Ranger Granger.

  “You lifted them in the night.”

  “Seems we have a clear case of he said she said,” Slodaney shrugged. “And with no evidence of wrongdoing, there’s nothing more I can do.” He turned to go back to his car.

  A shot rang out. Everyone hit the deck and drew. Spade Wilson stood in the center of the clearing like Rambo, Granger’s shotgun cradled in his muscular arms. He dispossessed Granger of his halo of geese and ceremoniously tossed them at the lawmen. “There’s your evidence of wrongdoing,” he said.

  Stein bowed down to Wilson and genuflected. “I love you.”

  Stein could barely contain his glee at the prospect of watching two men in law enforcement uniforms arrest a third. He flashed Caravaggio a joyful peace sign. How amazing for this miracle to happen. The guilty had been punished. Karmic justice had prevailed. He felt so fucking young and alive, he could die.

  Chapter Eight

  Hail the conquering hero!

  It had been ages since Stein had been paraded metaphorically through the streets of Rome, crowned with the olive crest, garlanded with rose petals. He liked to affect an aura of offhand indifference to the adulation, but he needed the adulation in order to affect his indifference to it. And here it would be. Yes, he relished the prospect of Millicent Pope-Lassiter shaking her head in submission, saying Okay you crusty old bastard, you did it again.

  Hollister had volunteered to drive the Kia the two hundred miles back to the rental place while Spade Wilson airlifted Stein to Sig Kroll’s repair shop in under an hour. There, more good news awaited him. The automobile surgeon had done a meticulous three-way organ transplant on Stein’s Camry for a remarkably nonexorbitant price. It ran better than it ever had, and at barely past the stroke of three Stein strolled into Millicent Pope-Lassiter’s office like Marco Polo bearing gifts of silk and penne pasta.

  As Shmooie the Buddhist used to say when he was alive, euphoria fades fast. Millicent Pope-Lassiter appeared neither charmed nor amused nor pleased to see him. She did not pull down her bodice, thrust her still magnificent breasts at him, and invite him to partake. Stein was sure she was doing the basebal
l thing, when a rookie hits his first major league home run and the team acts completely blasé when he returns to the bench. Then a few minutes later they all pound him on the back and welcome him to the team. There was no back pounding here. No patting on the rump. She glanced up from her desk at a spot somewhere between Stein and the door, exhaled a lungful of exasperation and went back to her paperwork.

  “What?” Stein proclaimed.

  “You’re a housecat who’s dropped a diseased pigeon on the doorstep and thinks it’s a gift.”

  “You sent me to do a job and I did it.”

  “No. I sent you to do one thing and you did something else.”

  “Things were wrong and I made them right.”

  “No. Things were one thing and you made them something else.”

  “I got several of Karma Moonblossom’s bee boxes back.”

  “Well, won’t that look great on your college resume.”

  “I did everything you asked me to do and more! What is the problem?”

  “And therein you have answered your own question. From here on you shall consider your working relationship with Lassiter and Frank terminated.”

  The whole ride down to the subterranean garage and the walk to his car, Stein expected the Candid Camera crew to jump out of the shadows, for the ruse to be confessed, to be taken back up the elevator where champagne and caviar would now be in abundance. They did not. Nor were they waiting for him at Lila’s when he parked in front of her house and displayed his Visitor’s Monthly Parking permit on his dash.

  “Dad!” Angie’s voice rang out. It was amazing the recuperative powers contained in that one sung syllable. She flew out to greet him and tugged him by the forearm in through the arched doorway and slate vestibule in over the living room’s plush Persian rug past the glassy dining room into the kitchen, where Mercedes was making sardine and pepper omelets. At each juncture Stein expected her to stop, having found the perfect, private spot to tell him how proud she was of her old man. But she continued out through the kitchen door to the patio, and stopped breathless in her tracks.

  “Look what me and Matthew found!”

  They had attached the found bones to a seven-foot mounting board and stood the skeleton upright. The saws and hammers and putty guns that had been used for the job were still strewn about.

  Stein had to restrain himself from raising his voice. “You were told to clean this up,” he said.

  “Dad, I know. But look what we found!”

  “I am interested in your learning to listen to me and to Lila when you are explicitly told—”

  “We’ll clean it. Dad, she knows. She said it’s okay.”

  Matthew, wearing funky khakis and a sleeveless sweatshirt, came out from the pool house. “Hey, Mr. Stein. Pretty amazing, huh. Did she tell you?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  There is probably no phrase that can freeze the blood of the father more than that one. So when they announced to Stein that they had discovered a murder, he was so relieved that he gushed, “Thank God.” Still, he called for a private conference and conducted Angie back inside to the kitchen.

  “What is going on with you?” he demanded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Deliberately countermanding my orders.” He heard how absurd he sounded but couldn’t stop.

  “Countermanding?”

  “Cavorting around with this Matthew. We know nothing about him.”

  “I’m countermanding and cavorting? He’s your girlfriend’s stepson.”

  “All this”—he groped for the word and found it—“unsupervised contact.”

  “Thank you, Warden Dad.”

  “You are sixteen years old. I do not want—”

  “Dad.” Her voice was laced with pain at having to reveal the obvious. “He’s gay.”

  The revelation hit him like a glass door in the face. So he tried to sound matter-of-fact. “Oh.”

  “Can we let him back into the house his father bought now? It’s getting kind of weird.”

  “I’m just trying to be protective.”

  “Protecting me from somebody who doesn’t want me. Thanks.”

  Stein glanced out at the boy, his long supple musculature moving so easily as he completed the cleanup of the patio. Stein now radiated magnanimous empathy.

  Lila returned. Hairdressed, legs waxed, nails and facial at Nordstrom’s. She looked stupendous and whispered coyly in Stein’s ear that she had another beauty surprise for him that he’d discover later that night if he played his cards right.

  Matt popped his head in the kitchen and asked what was for dinner.

  “Mercedes, what am I making for dinner?” Lila called.

  It was Chicken Marsala with a mango and goat cheese salad and homemade bread. Stein kissed Lila on the cheek. “Honey, you’ve really outdone yourself. A hard day at the beauty salon and still time to make dinner. What a woman.”

  Matthew had freed himself from filial indenture, telling his mother he was headed back to Berkeley. The four of them held a spirited discussion around Lila’s dinner table about who the corpse might have been, all of them interrupting and laughing like a real family. Because the paleontologist had told them the tusk was around seventy-five years old, Angie and Matt reasoned that if it was really a murder weapon there might be a story about an unsolved killing in the newspaper archives, and the plan was floated to go downtown in the morning to the LA Times.

  Angie and Matthew were excited at the prospect of investigating. It killed Stein to puncture the balloon, but tomorrow was changeover day, when Angie returned to Hillary.

  “No,” Angie reminded him. “I told you Mom’s going to the Caribbean for five days. She got a commercial.”

  “You never told me that. When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. I guess while you were away. God, don’t look so devastated. If you don’t want me here I can stay at Mom’s by myself.”

  “That isn’t what I want and you know it. I’m annoyed because Mom and I have had this conversation a thousand times that she and I should talk directly. It’s not your job to be the adult.”

  She patted her father’s fevered brow. “Yes, Daddy. Mom’s a bitch.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” But maybe it kind of was.

  ***

  Lila was already in bed when Stein came into their room. Very unsubtly he had waited around until the two teenagers departed to their separate quarters. He didn’t want to tell her, but he didn’t like Lila’s bed. It was too high. Mounting it was like climbing onto a pedestal. He couldn’t just lean back and plop himself down. He liked plopping more than he liked climbing. To plop into this bed you had to do the Fosbury Flop or else the mattress would hit you mid-spine. But Stein had to be careful about complaining. He knew she would replace it—and that would have implied a major agreement he was not ready to make.

  He was too distracted for sex. When he rolled out of bed the third time for no reason, Lila had had it.

  “Do you want me to tell him he can’t stay here?”

  “No, of course not.” Meaning Yes, but I know it’s impossible. “Anyway, he’s gay, right?”

  Lila laughed robustly. “I didn’t think so.”

  Five expressions crossed Stein’s face in quick succession. Lila grabbed his arm. “Stein. You have a bright girl there with a head on her shoulders, whom you’ve instilled with a good, healthy self-respect.

  “My friends have daughters who’ve done it in bathrooms of clubs, in cars of course, at parties in the hot tub with boys they didn’t care about. You’re not going to stand in the way of the strongest force in the universe. I’m not saying it’s going to happen. But if it did, he’s a nice boy. It’s a safe place.”

  She threw the covers back, revealing the clingy satin night thing she was wearing, “You’re a fifty-one-year-old man with a receding hairline and a paunch. A beautiful woman is inviting you into her bed. Do you think it can possibly get any better for you?”


  The curve of her torso made space for him, coaxed him into surrender, which he fought against and then gave in. So he did not hear the two muffled voices from the room at the end of the hall:

  “You told your father I was gay?”

  “He believed it.”

  “Of course he believed it. I didn’t know that you knew.”

  “Very cute.”

  “Seriously. How did you know?”

  ***

  The negotiation around seating arrangements in the Camry the following morning made an amusing little gavotte. If Lila had come it would have been two and two. But she had to meet Richard, her deceased husband’s best friend, who popped into LA every few months and was the principal trustee for the estate. Angie held the passenger side door open and pushed the front seat forward so that Matt could get in. Stein’s alarm sensor foresaw them both getting into the back seat as their subtle protest for Stein’s imposing himself on their private adventure.

  Stein pre-empted the move by placing a restraining hand on Matt’s shoulder as he bent his six-foot frame to duck into the back. “Actually, Matt would probably be more comfortable up front.”

  Angie took the displacement with outrage. “I’m being relegated to the back?”

  “Not relegated. Matt has long legs.”

  “Tell me about it,” she murmured.

  It was a spirited drive. Stein related with great gusto the saga of busting Ranger Granger. Matt propped his elbow on the backrest so that he made an equilateral triangle between Stein and Angie. Every effortless gesture of his came to rest in a magazine cover pose. He was completely taken with Stein’s escapade and asked questions. Stein found it impossible not to like the kid. He had a sweet disposition and did not force you to earn every parceled moment of concord, as Angie did. He was like a sun whose only verb was to shine, and he did so on anything he encountered.

  Downtown Los Angeles jutted out before them like a skyline of baby teeth. A few shiny objects but nothing with any bite. A movie set. Frontage with no backage. The foreplay of a lover because he’s read he’s supposed to. The one sentimental exception for Stein was the Los Angeles Times building. He negotiated a few arbitrarily designated one-way streets and approached the building from the angle seen in Superman, where it doubled for the Daily Planet building. He looked around expectantly for Angie’s burst of recognition. But of course she had never seen the TV show. She was leaning forward with her chin nestled in the crook between Matt’s neck and left shoulder. It gave Stein a little pang of desire to have a partner in crime. Someone he could have a history with.