Stein Stung Page 14

  “Doc was grooming Hollister to take over all his colonies.”

  “I could see that.”

  “He taught him better than to do what he did.”

  “If you could just explain to me a little bit more about what Hollister did—”

  Another voice summoned her by name. Dr. Cartesian swung in through the entrance and ordered her to mash up a banana.

  Jarlene sprang to action. Her fingers, now having purpose, flew to their task and enabled her to speak without looking at Stein. “Hollister took a deal with Henry Spector for a hundred and seventy-

  five dollars for weak four-frame colonies while everyone else is getting one fifty for healthy eight-frame boxes.”

  Stein grasped her wrist for a moment. Her bones felt hollow as a songbird’s. Her skin was remarkably smooth. Not baby smooth, but the last layer of filo. “Could you just explain to me why somebody would rent depleted colonies?”

  “Ask Hollister,” she said. “Maybe he can explain it to you.”

  She gathered herself to give her ailing husband the vision of a strong, hopeful woman coming through the doorway.

  ***

  Stein got completely bollixed trying to replicate the route that Hollister’s wife Ruth Ann had driven the night of the beekeepers’ convention. Landmarks he might have passed at night were of no use in daylight. Farmland stretched in every direction. Not all of it was planted with almond groves; some was still given over to the traditional agricultural staples: cotton, asparagus, livestock—the latter causing it to reek to high heaven.

  The vertical road came to a road that went horizontal. Stein looked to the right. To the right there was farmland. He looked to the left. To the left was farmland. Ah, but in the distance he noted an absurd familiar object. With barely a breeze blowing, the bright colored buntings that were meant to convey the excitement of owning a condo here hung like wallflowers at a prom. Stein parked behind the only other vehicle, Ruth Ann’s Bronco pickup. There were still no takers, no lookiloos, no prospective buyers or renters at the site of Hilltop Vista, save one unsavory-looking person lurking on the third faux flagstone step to the entrance. He was coyote thin with a scraggly four-day growth, wearing a Western-style shirt that had probably been white at one time, or anyway, whiter. His teeth looked like a long-abandoned movie marquee, a few letters missing, the others hanging on lopsided.

  Ruth Ann had seen Stein arrive from the window of the model apartment, and when he came in arose from behind her desk as though she were meeting a prospective client. Her business getup was a 1950s Radcliff look. Hair in a ponytail. Freckles and glasses. Plaid skirt, blazer, and loafers.

  “Pretend to be a buyer,” she said through a pasted smile. She shook his hand with professional gusto and made the scripted introduction to the amenities of Hilltop Vista. She asked, in a voice just a little too loud, how large his family was so she could select the unit that would best suit his needs. “Five,” she echoed with gusto. “Well, aren’t you the fertility clinic.” She ran her index finger down the ledger of available properties, selected a key from the wall-hanging hooks and escorted Stein out along the exterior breezeway toward unit number seventeen and conducted him inside.

  Unlike the model they had just come from, this space was unfurnished. The walls were bare, the floor rough concrete. “Picture it with a nice green shag carpet wall-to-wall,” she said. “It’ll warm the place up immeasurably.”

  “Ruth Ann, I don’t think the room is bugged.”

  She looked around as a cautionary measure. “Did you see anyone outside?”

  “Just a refugee from The Grapes of Wrath.”

  “That’s my boss. He owns the place.”

  “No.”

  “The man is a visionary.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Of course I’m shitting you,” she whispered conspiratorially. “He’s a pig farmer. He leases the manure-reeking piece of slag you just drove past. How could you believe me?”

  “I tend to believe people I like.”

  “Big mistake. They’re the ones you have to look out for.”

  “I mean this in the nicest way, Ruth Ann, but does your husband have any idea who he’s married to?”

  “Does anyone?

  It could have been accidental that her body was inches from his. But when she did not move away it became clear that the proximity was with intent. “Hollister is a sweet boy, and I love him to death. But there’s something about an older man.”

  “Ruth Ann …” Stein took a long, careful step back.

  “Don’t be afraid. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  “That’s what frightens the hell out of me.” He retreated another step.

  Her voice twinkled with humor. The moment popped back into reality. “Don’t agonize. You never had a shot. I had to see how committed you were to getting Hollister out of trouble.”

  Stein marveled at this little hellion. “Suppose I had gone along?”

  “I meant a good deal of what I said,” she purred.

  “Really?”

  “No!” Her laugh reverberated. “Give a girl some credit.” Then quick as quicksilver she was down to business. She wanted Stein to understand that Hollister had not initiated the deal. He had not haggled. He had been approached with a proposition and agreed to it. “Is it weird that someone wants to pay above market price for below market quality?” she asked and answered, “Yes, it is. Is it the weirdest thing I’ve heard all week? No, it is not.”

  “You’re just your own little catechism, aren’t you?”

  “Did I leave anything vital out?”

  “How about, was it the right thing to do?” Stein asked.

  “Do you turn yourself in every time you speed? When your meter is expired and you didn’t get a ticket do you throw money in for the time you used? Do you see what I mean? Morality is a fluid substance.”

  “I need to talk to Hollister. Do you know where I can find him?

  Ruth Ann glanced at her watch and was surprised at the time. “He should be in court.” Striding with purpose to the parking area she indicated the white Lexus parked behind her pickup.

  “Yours?” she asked.

  He nodded a provisional yes.

  “Improvement.”

  ***

  The Calvin Coolidge Courthouse was a granite edifice built in the 1930s. Consistent with its namesake, it was flinty, puritanical, and spare. The original air-conditioning system was still in place, meaning paper fans. When a faucet leaked in one of the restrooms it was repaired with a partially used washer, the ethos being to extract the last molecule of utility from a resource. Those same prohibitions against squander, subsidy, and favoritism were not so fastidiously enforced by the officials the public elected to administer justice in the Calvin Coolidge Courthouse.

  The gallery was built to hold two hundred people. Today there was one spectator, so it was not difficult to pinpoint Hollister Greenway. The case was called and the sheriff brought the accused to the dock. Sheriff Slodaney was all brush cut and ironed lapels. He looked like a soloist in the Treblinka Boy Choir. The low opinion that Spade Wilson had earlier rendered was seconded almost verbatim by Ruth Ann, that if he didn’t have a badge, he’d have a number. Now as the accused removed his hat and faced the court Stein understood why Hollister was here. It was Ranger Granger’s trial.

  Justice Benjamin Crowder’s day job was coaching football at the junior high. But he had standards, and was a stickler for their being maintained. When he saw the defendant toothpicking a chunk of bacon lodged between two molars he took umbrage.

  “I don’t recall seeing bacon on my jail’s breakfast menu.”

  “Please the court,” Slodaney responded, “what with the overcrowding in the jails, and with the approval of the County DA, the prisoner was remanded to house arrest.”

  “Your office approved this?” The question was directed to the ADA, Bonnie Banks. A graduate of Case Western’s excellent law program, she served today as
the state’s prosecutor.

  “Of course they approved it,” Ruth Ann hissed in Stein’s ear. “They’re dating.”

  “Who?”

  “Ranger Granger and the assistant DA.”

  “Good God. Don’t let them have children.”

  ADA Banks forthrightly reported that due to lack of concrete evidence the charges had been reduced from felony possession of stolen property to misdemeanor goose hunting out of season. Barely had those words cleared her lips when Judge Crowder asked how the defendant pleaded. Ranger Granger’s response came simultaneously to the question being put to him, and within a heartbeat Judge Crowder had levied a fine of fifty dollars and had his gavel poised to pound the case closed.

  “Hold on there, Chief.” Stein Errol Flynned himself over the waist-high balustrade and miraculously struck the landing. “There was enough ‘concrete evidence’ in that warehouse to pave a highway.”

  Judge Crowder’s gavel froze in mid-air. He demanded to know who this man was.

  “Friend of the court. Amicus jurispendium,” Stein improvised. The dazed and puzzled looks on the grown-ups made him feel like he was twenty-two again. “I was there at the warehouse. In hoc signo vinces,” he averred, pointing his fingers at his eyes.

  Crowder pounded his gavel demanding order and decreed that until such time as a man is proven guilty, all the stolen merchandise in his warehouse shall be presumed his.

  Stein practically levitated. “You just called it stolen merchandise!”

  Crowder beckoned the court stenographer, a rail-thin woman with bunned-up hair, to read back the statement.

  “Starting where, your honor?”

  “From where I didn’t say stolen.”

  Stein used the diversion to sidle over to where Ruth Ann was now seated alongside Hollister. “I shouldn’t be fighting for you, you ungrateful son of a bitch. You broke Renn Moody’s heart.”

  “Renn Moody thinks he knows everything there is to know about bees,” Hollister sulked. “Maybe I can teach him a few things.”

  Ruth Ann didn’t like what she was hearing. “What’s going on in that head of yours, Billy Bob?”

  The judicial huddle broke. Judge Crowder, in calm and tremulous tones, overruled his previous edict and in a benevolent voice that was meant to carry the very essence of justice in its timbre, added, “While there is no suggestion of deliberate wrongdoing on the part of the defendant, men in public service need to hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior than even the letter of the law requires. For even the hint of impropriety taints us as surely as impropriety itself.”

  The sheriff tapped his wristwatch for him to get on with it.

  “And so,” Judge Crowder intoned, “it is ordered that Ranger Timothy M. Granger will pay restitution to claimant Hollister Greenway for the amount of honey lost, estimated in the amount of eighty-seven dollars, and that the three contested bee boxes for which Mr. Greenway has demonstrated ownership, shall be returned to him.”

  Hollister elevated from his seat. “Did you say three? There were a hundred other boxes that he swiped from Doc Moody that Doc was going to give to me.”

  “That’s hearsay and you can’t prove that,” Sheriff Slodaney crooned. “And what would you do with a hundred empty boxes? Renn Moody’s not going to super you a hundred new colonies.”

  “What I do with them is my business.” The triumvirate around the rostrum grinned like they knew full well what his “business” was. Granger especially. “At a hundred seventy-five dollars apiece, looks like it’ll be my business now. Me and Henny Spector’s.”

  “You can’t do that,” Hollister railed. “He made the deal with me!”

  “Oh, it’s dood,” Ranger Granger taunted.

  The gavel had fallen. The victors vacated with their spoils. Stein was confused. Did he hear Hollister suggest he was renting empty boxes? Ruth Ann was irate that her husband was dealing with Henny Spector.

  “I’m doing this for you,” he bellowed.

  Something had changed in Hollister’s makeup. Proximity to money had liberated a side of his personality. The last thing Stein heard before the Greenways went down the staircase and out of earshot was Hollister telling Ruth Ann that he’d work with whomever he damn pleased, and that from now on he would do the talking. And he didn’t want her calling him Billy Bob any more. And was that clear? Stein didn’t hear her answer but when he looked down from the second-floor window, he saw Ruth Ann getting into the Bronco alone and driving off, while Hollister walked up the street in the other direction toward a yellow Corvair convertible. The top was down. Ranger Granger and Sheriff Slodaney were leaning down on the driver’s side door talking to the man in the car. Hollister strode up to them like a rogue elephant. He pointed his finger at the lawmen while appearing more deferential to the man in the car.

  It was heartwarming for Stein to see that even in a tiny town in a peripheral industry, greed and corruption were as prevalent as they were in the high-profile snake pits of finance and politics. Whatever was said to Hollister left him infuriated. The man in the car shook hands with the two lawmen and made a U-turn. His car sported a gaudy hood ornament of a fighting hen.

  Stein stood at the window for some time: a still-life illustration of Newton’s Law that states a body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. His mind was unfocused as he ambled down the uncarpeted hallway. The door to the adjacent courtroom was open. He glanced in, barely registering what he saw. If he had been more tuned in he might have stopped for a closer look. The people were dressed in tailored business suits, salon haircuts, and five-hundred-dollar shoes.

  Stein had no idea he had glimpsed a meeting that would change the face of California, that a secret deal had been struck between the secretary of the interior, the chairmen of three local water districts, two congressmen, and a team of corporate lawyers. One of them was slightly built, babyfaced, sandy haired. Something about the momentary snapshot of his face stayed locked on the back of Stein’s retina for an extra half second, giving him the impression of intense déjà vu, as if he had known the man.

  Chapter Eleven

  A long, black hearse was parked out front of Renn and Jarlene Moody’s. Stein restrained himself from leaping out of his car and bursting through their front door. He collected himself, prepared for hysterics, and knocked. He was unprepared for the way the event had transformed Jarlene Moody. The weight of anxiety had evaporated from her body. She looked two decades younger. She invited Stein to come in as though she were hosting a cotillion.

  “What’s happened?” Stein ventured.

  “Bananas!”

  He would have assumed she meant she was going bananas, but she exhibited no evident signs of derangement.

  “Bananas?” Stein repeated.

  “His potassium level was low. He needed bananas.”

  Her energy swept them both into the adjacent funerary. There, to Stein’s astonishment, the miraculously recovered Renn Moody was directing workers to remove from the storage freezer, not his own corpse, but the body of Aloysius Frank Monahan. Moody motioned for the lads rolling the gurney to hold up a second. He nodded discretely to his right. “I’ll need a signature on the transfer document.”

  The widow, in classic black, stepped out from between her two fatherless children, a boy of nine, a girl of seven. She rubbed the toe tag of the deceased between her thumb and forefingers like it was a talisman, and asserted that she was Mrs. Aloysius Monahan. Her head was wrapped in a dark kerchief and she wore sunglasses. She reminded Stein of someone he couldn’t place. From the other side of the coffin, also flanked by her two young children, though in her case the older child was the girl, a second woman in widow’s weeds advanced. Like the first woman, she too was small, blond, pert. She brandished the toe tag on the deceased’s other foot and asserted that she was Mrs. Frank Monahan.

  Stein had never seen a double toe-tag before. Each set of widows and children regarded their counterparts with cobra-shrouded ey
es. One of them, he guessed Mrs. Frank, wanted her husband buried in their family plot in LaGrange, North Dakota. Mrs. Aloysius demanded he be buried where they lived in Mendocino. They dueled for propriety, each speaking only to Renn, though they stood elbow to elbow. One of them claimed primacy on the grounds of hers being the first marriage. The other countered, “Because you knew we were engaged and you tricked him into getting you pregnant.”

  “A trick you have emulated … illegitimately.”

  “My children are not illegitimate,” the wounded wife screamed. They were a spark away from conflagration. Renn tried to restore some decorum. He reminded the ladies they only had one body. Both women stood their ground. Stein stepped out of the doorway and whispered something in Renn’s ear. Renn considered the thought and not having a better idea himself, repeated the suggestion to the widows. They gazed coldly at each other, then nodded in agreement.

  “All right, then,” said Renn. “Come back in an hour. My wife will hand-paint an urn for each of you. And you will each honor your husband’s wishes in the most fitting way.”

  The two families jockeyed for position at the door and exited in a clatter. Moody saluted Stein. “Very Solomonaic.”

  “You told the widows to come back in an hour. You can’t do what you need to do in an hour.”

  Renn shrugged. “They don’t know that.”

  “You’re just going to fill their urns with … what?”

  “It’s all just carbon.”

  “I’m glad to see your sense of humor’s back. You know your boy Hollister is involved with someone named Henny Spector?”

  “That boy’s gonna give me ulcers.”

  “He’s got him renting out depleted colonies and empty bee boxes. I’d like someone to explain the economics of that to me.”

  “Spector is a man I’d like to see professionally. In my profession, if you take my meaning.”

  “Would it help if I talked to him?”

  “Wear gloves and a surgical mask.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “Under any rock.”

  “Could you be a little more specific?”