Stein Stung Read online

  The elevator took them from the underground parking lot to the third floor. “We need a cover story,” Stein said as they got out.

  “Dad. Do not.” She recognized the warning signs, the Peter Paniacal bounce in his stride, the impish look that he still thought people found contagious.

  Matt innocently asked why they needed a cover story.

  “Oh, God. Please do not indulge him.”

  “You don’t just walk into the LA Times and announce you’re investigating an unsolved murder. You need a little subtle misdirection.” He skated in front of Angie to the information desk, where Miss Gibson’s desk plate identified her as Senior Research Archivist. Her face looked like parchment from which the print had faded, and where the stories it held hadn’t been that interesting in the first place.

  Before they could say anything else, Stein presented Angie and Matt as foreign exchange students, she from Denmark, he from Hungary, doing a research project on American history. Angie rolled her eyes halfway to San Diego.

  “This is why other countries are so far ahead of us,” Miss Gibson declared. “Try to find an American student who cares about history. All they care about is video games and getting high.”

  “Not these kids. They’re particularly interested in Los Angeles in the 1920s.”

  “It’s gratifying to see a teacher so involved in his students’ work.”

  “Well, I’m … glad to gratify you.”

  “Dad,” Angie sang in falsetto.

  They were directed to a cluster of tables where ancient Moviolas were mounted. Shortly thereafter a young man with a bow tie and a short-sleeved white shirt strode out of the storage bin carrying three smallish boxes. “Your microfiche,” he said, and dropped the boxes on the table as if they were porn he was being forced to disseminate.

  Stein called after him in his wake, wondering how they expected a person to know how to operate the machine. Stein turned to the kids to echo his outrage. They were already loading their rolls.

  Matt showed Stein how easy it was, and they all began to scroll through a decade of archived Los Angeles Times. With each rotation of the crank handle, first one of them, then another exclaimed cries of amazement.

  “There’s an ad for tincture of cocaine to calm the nerves and focus the mind.”

  “Roast beef. Thirty-nine cents a pound.”

  “The world’s first motel opened in San Louis Obispo.”

  The tempo slowed as they became encased in the hypnotic narratives. The vivid pictorial displays and the bold writing style presented 1920s Los Angeles as a gun-slinging, land-grabbing, con-artist Wild West show. All of it was triggered by the internal combustion engine, and the realization that the wet goopy stuff they were throwing away was a fuck of a lot more valuable than the tar they were mining for.

  LA was an oil boomtown. There were astonishing pictures of derricks packed together as far as the eye could see. Down main streets. In front yards. Alongside churches. Tour buses rolled in, disgorging out-of-town suckers into the grasp of hucksters pitching real estate schemes, scam artists selling shares of nonexistent oil companies, pitchmen offering lunch with Barbara Stanwyck and full sets of Encyclopedia Britannica.

  The rich got richer and the poor waited for their luck to change. Silver Rolls-Royces drove past people pushing empty wheelbarrows. Epic barroom brawls erupted—one covered three city blocks. There were knife fights. Gun fights. There was one sensational story about a farmer from Iowa who had bought a parcel of acreage and drilled eleven wells, all of them dry holes. He got the bright idea to drill diagonally into the next parcel, where the sons of bitches had seventeen working rigs pumping hundreds of barrels every day. There had been a gun battle, a court battle, and a huge oil fire that raged for six days.

  An hour later, the three explorers left the archive room dazed and more confused. “Forget about one unsolved murder,” Matthew marveled. “What about a hundred?” But they had found nothing about an unsolved tusking or anything that seemed even tangentially related. Still, Stein proclaimed the venture great fun and the kind of thing the three of them should do again. Only Angie remained unsatisfied. She had a new plan. They had to go through the property records and see who had previously owned the land under Lila’s house, and then through the obituaries to see which of them had died close to the time the tusk was buried.

  “All of that stuff would be in the Hall of Records.” Stein made it sound like a bit of an ordeal, which Angie was quick to absolve him of enduring.

  “If you’re not into it you don’t have to stick around. We can get back.”

  “Okay. But you know where the Hall of Records is, right?”

  “I would assume it’s all around here, right? Wouldn’t that make the most logical sense?”

  ***

  They drove away from downtown, passing through painful melanomas of used car lots and junkyards, with Angie grousing from the back seat that you’d think they would have the County Recorder’s office and the Hall of Records near something else.

  “Where the hell are we?” A victimized road sign gave her the answer. “NO WALK? We’re in the city of No Walk?”

  “Norwalk,” Stein clarified.

  Every tributary of society drained into the Hall of Records. There were formally dressed wedding parties in advanced stages of pregnancy. There were people looking for the office dispensing Fictitious Business Licenses. Grade-school classes were on excursion tours. Lawyers in sweat-stained seersucker suits chased down lawyers with bad haircuts. Bereaved families filed death certificates.

  The elevator cranked and gnashed them up to the fifth floor where the room with the materials they needed was overseen by a woman wearing a caftan and a pair of long, silver Incan earrings that chimed like timbales when she moved. Angie jumped ahead of any antics her father might be contemplating.

  “We want to find out who lived at a certain address in the 1920s,” Angie said. “You want to do a title search?” the clerk interpreted.

  “If that’s what you call it.”

  “I need to have your deed number.”

  “My what?”

  “The number on your deed. You want to do a title search, you need to have your deed number.” The timbales gave her voice a dancing rhythm.

  “Are you saying we can’t do a title search without a deed number?”

  “I could find it if you have the lot number.”

  “Are you kidding me? Who in their right minds knows their lot number?” She turned to Matthew for help.

  “I know her address,” he said.

  “Address will work,” the clerk said.

  Angie went apoplectic. “Why didn’t you ask for the address in the first place?”

  “I do it the way the county tells me.”

  Her earrings cha-chinged as she led them through a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling open shelves stacked with Dickensian-sized, ancient ledger books. She lifted a tome from a shelf and set it down on a small table for them. “These are public records. Don’t spill anything on them.”

  “What am I going to spill?”

  It was enlightening to discover how much private information was available in the public records for anyone to see. Birth date, address, phone number, military history, weddings, divorces, property ownership, bankruptcies. Lila’s Beverly Hills address was easily accessed once they figured out the organizing principles that guided the bookkeeping system. It was pretty cool. There were maps of the original land grants from the King of Spain back when it was El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles and land was parceled out to friends and nobles in vast haciendas:

  “The Alcalde de Los Angeles cedes the land from the asphalt pits for the distance a speedy horse can run in five minutes in the direction of the ocean into which the sun sets; and in breadth, half the distance to the hills lying north and south.”

  Stein was quietly impressed at the size of the most recent tax valuation of Lila’s property. He knew it was worth plenty. So it would not look like he was making a
land grab, he had hoped the value would be less than seven figures. It was north.

  Matthew’s jaw was clenched. It took Stein a moment to realize the boy was fighting back tears. He looked down and saw the book open to a photocopy of the deed of purchase executed by Walter T. Cooperman. Matthew’s father’s name was typed out in block letters, and above it was his signature. An act performed with his living hand while it was an appendage of his living body.

  The biography of the property unfolded page by page in a cavalcade of changing ownership: through purchase and sale, death and bequeathal, division and subdivision. Leagues changed to acres. Acres changed to parcels. What would one day become Lila’s address at 351 South La Cuesta Drive, Beverly Hills 90212 was lost in bankruptcy, taken over by the bank of Los Angeles, leased to Meridian Oil Exploration, awarded to Ascunsion Cataluna in a settlement dating back to a thirty-year-old dispute that had gone against Cataluna in the lower court, and then overturned on appeal. It was purchased from Ascunsion “Sunny” Cataluna on February 13 of 1926 by J. J. Bancroft for the sum of one thousand dollars.

  Angie sat back with her eyes wide, waiting for Matthew and her father to join her at the same stunning conclusion. “The guy we dug up was one of these two people. J. J. Bancroft or Ascunsion Cataluna.”

  “Or the mailman,” said Stein. “Or the guy reading the gas meter. Or anybody who happened to have been on the property.”

  A plan hatched in the devious portion of Angie’s mindscape. She listened for the sound of the timbales, estimated their distance, then furtively told Matt to sneeze.

  “What?”

  “Give me a good one.”

  Her fingers were poised on the top of the page containing the title deed, ready to rip it out. Stein saw what was about to happen and lunged to prevent it, too late. Under cover of Matt’s diversionary sound, Angie ripped the document from the ledger. Except not quite. A corner of the page remained attached like the last gum strand holding a baby tooth.

  A clarion voice emanated from just around the row of shelves, with its accompanying ch-ching of earrings. “What is all the commotion?”

  Angie sneezed herself, a high pitched CHOOO, hastily rolled up the amputated document and rammed it down Matthew’s surfer shorts. She slammed the ledger shut just as the caftan-clad clerk filled their frame.

  “What is all the noise?”

  “Asthma,” Angie complained. “All the dust.”

  The clerk turned to the adult for verification.

  “Something really ought to be done about it,” Stein said. “It’s a million-dollar lawsuit waiting to happen. And who do you think they’ll lay off to pay for it?”

  He herded the kids single file to the elevators, keeping Matt’s enhanced posterior concealed from observation. They burst out of the elevator looking as normal as the Marx Brothers. Matt feigned a stiff-legged limp along the way across the mall to a bench far from other possible prying eyes, then did a little comic riff at not being able to dislodge the parchment from his shorts.

  “It’s wedged against a massive obstacle.”

  “You keep your ego in your shorts?”

  “Okay, okay.” Stein waltzed between them. “I’ll take that.”

  Matthew handed him the rolled-up stolen document. “I wonder if I could ask you, sir, why do you think your daughter induced me to commit a felony?”

  “The question is why did you do it.”

  “She’s very persuasive.”

  “Well, that’s true.”

  Angie had taken the document out of her father’s hands and unrolled it on a wooden bench that bordered a rectangular display of small privet hedges. “I wanted to look at it without that woman hovering over … Oh, my God!” One corner of the page, perhaps because of the perspiration on Matthew’s thigh, had curled and the top ply of the parchment had separated. She pulled the corners very carefully, and they continued to cleave. There was print on both layers, as though the ink had bled through. With one brittle end pinched between two fingers of each hand, she separated the delicate layers of skin into two distinct entities.

  Upon initial scrutiny both documents were identical. “The copy must have gotten stuck to the original,” was the diagnosis. All the information was the exact same. J. J. Bancroft the purchaser, Ascunsion “Sunny” Cataluna the seller. Price, one thousand dollars. Date, February 13, 1926. It was Matthew who caught the tiny aberration and asked if the date on the top was a thirteen or an eighteen.

  Angie whisked it out of his hands and held it to the sun. “Oh, my God,” she shrieked. “Oh, my God. You’re right.” Her fingers trembled.

  “I just asked a question.”

  “The date has been doctored. The eight was changed to a three.”

  And now they noticed the larger difference. The parameters of the property lines were different. On the original the diagram of the parcel described a small little pocket of land. But on the second one, a long, narrow swath was delineated.

  “The parcel goes from mid-city to the ocean. The entire Wilshire Corridor! One of these bastards stole the most expensive piece of property in America not owned by the Catholic Church.”

  “Angie, I don’t think so.” Stein had to laugh at her. It felt odd to be the voice of reason. But she was blasting through all the yellow lights as though they were green. Angie whirled to Matt to break the deadlock. He refused to take sides.

  “What are you, the Swiss ambassador?” she railed at him. “Somebody kills somebody and gets rich and that doesn’t bother you?” She cauterized Matt with a withering look and turned on her heel. “Death certificates are on the third floor. Anyone want to bet I’ll find one dated February 13, 1926, for Ascunsion Cataluna or J. J. Bancroft?” Matthew started to walk with her but she froze him. “Skeptics remain here.” She never looked back.

  “Strong-willed girl,” said Matt.

  “Tell me about it,” said Stein.

  Twenty minutes later she returned at a slower pace bearing a perplexed look. “There’s no death certificate for either one of them. No Bancroft. No Cataluna.”

  “What about lunch?” Stein suggested.

  “Go if you need to.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t mind a little something,” Matt confessed. “I’m kind of starving.”

  “Oh. On that you have an opinion.”

  ***

  Back through town and up the heart of the Miracle Mile, Angie continued to obsess that the body they found had to be either J. J. Bancroft or Sunny Cataluna, until Matt declared that he was going to take a stand and declare that the dead man was Cataluna.

  “And pray tell where does this supposition come from?”

  “One of them seems to have done pretty well.” Matt gestured toward the glass and steel edifice they were passing, above whose entranceway the name Bancroft was spelled out in twenty-foot-high letters.

  “Then we’ve got it. Bancroft killed him.”

  “Excellent. Case closed!” Stein thumped his hand against the wheel with finality. Simultaneously he saw a sign out of the corner of his eye, and veered to the right into the Valet Parking lane of La Chine Belle.

  “Here?” Angie’s voice rode in a glissando of distaste.

  La Chine Belle was the pretentious darling of the foodie set, where the menus changed every day according to the head chef’s artistic whims and the prices were written out in words: Broiled Peruvian Antelope Heart served in a reduction of wasp wings garnished with taproot of free-range cilantro … Seventy-Seven dollars.

  The husband of one of Lila’s trust fund girlfriends was part owner. When someone had posted bogus bad reviews on the Internet, Lila had suggested that Stein might help. Stein knew squat about the web but he was conversant with jealousy, greed, and small-minded vindictiveness. It took all of eleven seconds to nail the cyberperp who, surprise surprise, turned out to be the jilted lover of one of the sous chefs. As recompense from a grateful ownership, Stein had been given an “anytime” invitation, and as it happened to have caught his eye, this
seemed to be the time.

  When the proprietor, Claude Cezanne, was told Stein was lunching there, he led a parade of personnel to the table: the head chef and three sous all in their crisp whites, the salad chef, the meat and game aficionado, the sommelier, and of course le créateur des desserts. Cezanne sported a French name, an Italian suit, a German haircut, a Caribbean tan, and Beverly Hills teeth. A pageant of gratitude was lavished upon Stein. Complimentary specialties, the best wine. When at last the entourage withdrew, Stein found Angie fixing him with a long, intent Jack Benny stare, and with impeccable timing asked, “What was that?”

  “People like me. What can I say?”

  Angie gasped. Her face fell into fire alarm mode. The source of her concern approached their table. Though approached inadequately described the force with which Angie’s mother, Stein’s ex-wife Hillary, bore down upon them. Everyone who knew them knew of the infamous “no actions deleterious to the well-being of the child” clause she had included in their joint custody agreement. She dangled it over his head like the sword of Damocles as a way of controlling his behavior.

  “Harry?” Her voice rolled like distant warning thunder.

  “Hillary?” Stein’s was more of a reality check. He was frequently bamboozled in restaurants, mistaking a mirror’s reflection for another room.

  If he was perplexed at seeing Hillary, she was livid at seeing him. “This is the major vacation plan you hold our daughter hostage for?”

  “Me? You’re the one who’s out of the country.”

  “Angie told me you were going to Maui.”

  “She told me you were going to the Caribbean.”

  All eyes turned to Angie like that moment in a Lucy comedy.