Stein Stung Read online

  “We think it’s a tusk!” Angie said as she slogged toward her father.

  “We?”

  A full baritone voice sang out of the adjacent garage to the second story, asking Lila where she kept kerosene. Following some metallic clanging, the same voice called out again, “Never mind. I found it.” Lila’s stepson emerged from the pool house, a gallon can metronoming from his dangling right arm. He was shirtless, wearing a pair of brightly colored surfer shorts, sunglasses pushed up over his dark spiky hair and darker gypsy eyes, where both immortality and the specter of early death lay visible.

  “Hello, Mr. Stein. Good to see you again.” Matthew offered his hand, but quickly withdrew it when he saw it was still covered in oily residue. The lad’s show of respect was mitigated somewhat when Stein perceived the print of that same hand lithographed on the right shoulder of Angie’s shirt. The boy beckoned to Angie to give him the tusk. Their offhand familiarity made it seem like they had known each other forever.

  “You’re going to get tetanus,” Stein mothered. “Get out of there.”

  On the patio just adjacent to the pool Matt had spread newspapers out and was dousing rags in kerosene, vigorously scouring the petrochemical glop off their find. It did not take long for the tapered end to reveal the glinting, ivory tip of an elephant’s tusk. Their exultant voices braided around each like strands of DNA. Lila came out to see what all the hubbub was about and Matt told her she might have a prehistoric mastodon buried in her yard.

  “That’s no way to talk about Angie’s father,” Lila cracked.

  Matt turned quickly to Stein. “I wasn’t talking about you, sir.”

  “Thanks for thinking you had to clear that up.”

  Angie summarily dismissed the notion of the tusk belonging to a prehistoric mastodon, declaring it was too small.

  “And you know this,” Matt said, “from your junior high school biology?”

  “I’m a junior in high school. Not in junior high.”

  “Oh, well then. You’ve studied paleontology in great depth.”

  “It doesn’t take a doctor to know when something’s too small.”

  “You girls are so into size,” Matt muttered, but it was loud enough for Stein to hear, upon which he summarily stepped in like a referee ending a bout.

  “Dad, we’re having a serious paleontological disagreement. Matt thinks that it’s a prehistoric mammoth and I say it is not.”

  “What I’m saying,” Matt said, contrasting her agitation with his own cool self-control, “is that none of us really knows what it is.”

  “That doesn’t stop one of us,” she exaggerated his pontifical syntax, “from being sure that it is.”

  “Or some other of us from being sure that it isn’t.”

  “This may be one of those times where people have to agree to disagree.” Stein said. “Angie, I think you should go inside now and—”

  Lila emitted an involuntary shriek of horror at those tarry feet headed for her Italian tile kitchen floor. She wheeled Angie around by the shoulders, back to where Matt was crouched on his haunches cleaning the tusk. She plunked Angie down on a beach chair and extended one of her tarry soles in Matt’s direction. Angie sat perfectly still, affecting an expression of ecstatic detachment as Matthew poured the kerosene over her feet and ran the cloth back and forth through the notches of her toes. A bubble of methane gurgled up from the depths of the pool and popped into the surface.

  “Earth fart,” Angie called out. Stein was grateful to see the twelve-year-old still briefly alive inside her.

  Lila recalled that she had brought her third-grade classes to the La Brea Tar Pits, and that they had scientists there who identified bones people brought in.

  “Perfect,” said Angie and withdrew her leg with exquisite control. “The truth shall set us free.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Stein called after them. “We can make it an outing.”

  “You ought to spend more time with Lila, Dad. She’s chafing.”

  ***

  The Wilshire Boulevard Miracle Mile was an unlikely place for a relic of the Pleistocene Age. Especially in Los Angeles, where a historical monument meant that it had been there since last week. The La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum were set on well-kept grassy knolls with paved walkways for lunch-hour strolling and benches for reading and flirting. The focal point was the Lake Pit, which appeared to be a lake, two hundred feet long and forty feet wide. A tall fence protected onlookers from meeting the same fate that befell the mammoths and mastodons, depicted in life-sized statues watching with terrified awe, their mates being sucked down into the depths.

  Muriel Rabinowitz was eighty-eight years old, still as strong-willed and charismatic as she had been during her fifty years teaching in the New York City school system. A troop of fifteen wide-eyed Brownies pressed up against the observation platform that overlooked the Lake Pit, all caught up in her magnetic spiel. She made slow, mesmerizing eye contact.

  “I want you to picture how this all looked forty thousand years ago. There were no tall buildings. No streets. No traffic lights. No cars. All around you was a teeming jungle. Wild wolves and saber-toothed tigers roared at every turn. Gigantic birds of prey flocked down and grabbed up animals even bigger than you are in their talons. Was there a fence around the lake to protect them?”

  “No,” they chanted in unison.

  “That’s right. Now imagine with me that it’s early one morning. A wooly mammoth comes out for a drink. He looks around warily to be sure there are no predators.” Her body took on the ponderous, swaying gait of the wooly mammoth. Even Matt and Angie, who came striding through the main gate filled with a single shared purpose, were diverted by the power of Muriel’s presentation.

  “Suddenly from the trees, a saber-toothed tiger leaps on its back.” Her body dramatically changed from lumbering Loxodonta to ferocious feline. The children gasped and recoiled.

  “They struggle fiercely. The tiger snarls and sinks its fangs into the unprotected underside of the mammoth’s body. The beast rises up, bellowing in pain and in fury and fear. It lowers its head and thrusts its massive tusks. It hurls the tiger backwards into a boulder. The tiger is wounded. Its shoulder has been broken. And now he is the victim. But he doesn’t run. No! He hurls himself at the charging mammoth and latches onto its face, going for his eyes. The mammoth bats him away with his powerful trunk. But the tiger holds on. His flesh is impaled by the razor-sharp tusks, while his own saber teeth are imbedded in the mastodon. They stumble this way and that, knee deep in the lake. But it isn’t a lake, is it girls? Is it?”

  “No!” they chanted. All of them scared to death.

  “What is it?”

  “Tarrrr.”

  “Yes, it’s tar. But they don’t know that. They are fighting so ferociously they don’t even realize until it’s too late. They struggle to break free but the pull of the tar is too strong. Down they go under their own weight. But wait! As they’re going down a vulture in the sky sees a meal.”

  Muriel’s body shape-shifted to a flying creature.

  “It swoops down from the sky and lands on the mammoth’s head. Ha ha, the vulture thinks. Those two fools were fighting for their life, and they both lose. I win! And she gets into position to rip the flesh off the dying animals. But what happens? The tips of her wings get caught in the tar. She tries to flap the tar off, but once it’s on you it’s on you. Her wings are too heavy to fly. And she gets sucked down into the lake too.”

  Muriel locked into the eye sockets of each little girl. “Predator, prey, or scavenger, the justice of the pits makes no distinction.” When she had brought them half a gasp away from fainting, she called out, “Okay, lunch.”

  Angie and Matt headed across the promenade to the low-slung, white, circular building that was the Page Museum. Matthew strode with strong unhurried purpose, tossing and catching the tusk confidently behind his back. Angie made a stink at the entrance gate at having to pay to get inside. The guard was about to t
oss them when Matthew pulled out his Amex Gold card and paid for the tickets.

  “Was that supposed to impress me?”

  “You know what makes you such good company? You don’t even take yes for an answer.”

  Inside, the museum walls were covered with mural-sized displays chronicling the evolution of Los Angeles from a sleepy campo, through its mad conversion into an oil town in the 1920s, to its contemporary incarnation. None of this interested them now. Their target was the glass partition in the center of the lobby, behind which white-coated paleontologists worked with intent concentration, meticulously cleaning and cataloguing finds from ongoing excavations in the pits.

  Dr. Brian Watanabe was a thin, impatient man in his forties with a bristly brush cut and severe spectacles. He would rather be doing just about anything else. “What have we here?” he said as the tusk was placed on the viewing table before him.

  “I was hoping that’s what you would tell us,” Angie said.

  He muttered a phrase in Japanese to a nearby colleague that roughly translated as: Another smartass American. How refreshing.

  Yet something about this find, not the usual leg of a pet cat or discarded barbecue spare rib, interested him slightly. “Where you find?”

  Matt stepped in. “In my aunt Lila’s swimming pool.”

  “Where?” The doctor was dissatisfied by the stupidity of the answer, and thrust a detailed map of the Los Angeles basin onto the table. Matt made a circle with his index finger around the area where Lila lived. Watanabe shook his head knowledgeably. He placed atop that map a transparent plastic sheet of the exact same size, a geological map of the intricate underground system of faults and crevasses. From the Lake pit, where many wide and narrow tributaries branched out—rivers and veins that flowed out from the lake’s auricles and ventricles—a significant artery went right under Lila’s abode.

  “Connected,” Watanabe explained. “Bones from here….” He made a flowing motion with his right arm. “Go there.”

  “So this is a tusk from a prehistoric mastodon?” Matt managed to constrain 80 percent of his glee. With the other 20, he looked around toward Angie. She had conveniently glided away to the wall display of saber-toothed tiger skulls, feigning indifference to their conversation.

  “How old is it?”

  “Hard to say absolutely. Neighborhood of seventy-five. Perhaps eighty.”

  “Eighty thousand years!”

  “Not thousand. Eighty years. From the 1920s. Maybe a circus animal.”

  Angie waltzed back in, having heard it all, not saying a word, just grinning as bright as a comet.

  ***

  She asked Matthew when he dropped her back off at Lila’s why he called his stepmother Aunt Lila when she always called him her stepson.

  “It’s complicated. My mother is a little bit—”

  “Crazy? Yeah, I heard.”

  “I was going to say possessive.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It was hard enough when my father left her. And then died. She didn’t want to lose the title.”

  Angie laid a sweet goofy understanding smile on him and punched his shoulder lightly.

  “I’ll try to get back later on if I can,” he said.

  It was uncharacteristically quiet at Chez Lila. Angie called out to her dad, to Lila, peered in through the unlocked kitchen door and called “Hello?” Her voice echoed across the tile and stucco interior. She went up to her room, which was down the hall from the master bedroom. A thought too distasteful to bear made her body recoil. She listened with dread for the sounds of intercourse. Thank God there were none.

  She returned to the patio after she had changed into grunge clothes, resigned to do her good deed for the day and clean up the mess. She doused a rag in turpentine, knelt and scrubbed a blotch of tar from colorful tile. It did not come up easily. She had to put all her weight to it. A loud belch of methane startled her. An object caught her eye that seemed to be floating at the spot where the methane bubble had erupted. Not so much floating as protruding through the surface. It was large. She could see that. The protruding end was as wide as her fist. She did not feature wading into the muck to fish it out. It was out of reach, though, even if she were to lie out on the side of the pool and stretch as far as she could.

  She went into the pool house looking for an implement. It was haphazardly loaded with all the junk Lila had no use for inside. A chandelier. A microwave oven still in the box someone had probably given her as a gift. There was a net on a long aluminum pole that was likely used for skimming leaves out of the pool in summer. She tucked the pole under her armpit and looked like a jouster coming back to the yard. The object had risen a few inches higher out of the ooze. She was able to lie along the edge of the pool and net the thing like a butterfly. She turned it carefully to gain a grip and then tugged. The tar held tight. She lost her balance and had to plunge her hand down to catch herself. Her fingers slid off the top step and her body weight followed. The side of her face was an inch above the sludge. With the hypnotic voice of the docent in her ear describing the predator and prey and scavenger being pulled down into the pits, Angie strained and tugged to keep herself elevated. Her body bent like a birch but her slim, strong trunk held firm. Her quarry rose from the deep: a long, straight, solid bone.

  ***

  When Lila returned from shopping, recostumed in a pink sleeveless blouse, toreador pants, gold earrings, and a silk scarf, Angie was so immersed in her finds that she did not hear the car pull into the driveway, or the back gate, or even Lila’s voice calling out Angie and Matt’s names. When Lila saw tar dripping all over the Italian tile tessellated patio, it took all her years of training not to grab Angie by the throat and scream, What have you done? Instead she forced a smile and said, “Well, I see you’ve been busy.”

  Angie heard only the trumpets and not the bassoon. She was a downed power line of writhing enthusiasm. “I think Matthew may be right,” she said. “There may be a prehistoric mastodon buried in your pool.”

  Lila was still biting hard on her tongue.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll clean it all up.”

  She patted Lila’s furrowed shoulders with the sweet affection Lila never got from her stepdaughter, Matthew’s sister Rhonda.

  “Is my dad here?” Angie was anxious to show him the new find.

  Lila was surprised Stein hadn’t called Angie to tell her. He got a call from that woman he works for. “He had to go back up to some place called Las Viejas and wrestle some more bees.”

  Chapter Four

  Stein’s second mistake was driving up in his own car. He had put a good deal of thought into the decision, weighing the comfort and dependability of Lila’s Lexus against the man-of-the-people look of his Camry. Not that he loved the Camry. The last vehicle he loved was the ’69 VW bus. He missed the road trips with Van Goze and Shmooie the Buddhist and the whole cluster of them driving off to incite some urban guerrilla theatrical event, to puncture the bubble of comfort that protected the rich and privileged, with Terrier pooch Watson leaning out the passenger-side window, his muzzle blowing in the breeze. His first mistake was going at all. Stein didn’t know who the hell Ned Peering was or why it mattered so much to Millicent Pope-Lassiter that he had emerged from his coma. She was paying Stein another nice chunk of change to drive up to the hospital where Ned was recovering to ascertain whether he or any of the family had spoken to the driver before he died or had any information regarding the source and/or destination of his cargo of bees. It was never the money that got to Stein. It was Millicent’s maddening ability of linking the money to issues that meant a great deal to Stein; in this case the possibility of retrieving the few salvaged colonies of Karma Moonshine’s pilfered bees and at least finding some sweetness to come out the adversity.

  The back-and-forth exhausted them both and in exasperation she finally asked Stein if he knew what a “derivative” was. It was less a surrender than her way of illustrating to him how much he would have to le
arn merely to reach the starting line.

  “It’s a … well, something that is essentially derived from something else.”

  “Basically they are loans backed by commodities whose value has been leveraged to fifty or a hundred times their inherent value. Think of Atlas holding up the Earth plus Jupiter, Mars, and Venus.”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  She emitted a laughter-like sound. “You don’t even come close to getting it. These loans are then bundled together as a brand-new commodity and traded as a financial instrument.”

  “Okay, so you’re selling something that doesn’t exist?”

  “No, that would be too tangible! I’m insuring the value of something that doesn’t exist. Yes, we’re out there on the cutting edge of theoretical physics. But mark my words, Harry. Derivatives will be the salvation of the global economic system in the next decade.”

  “And this relates to Ned Peering coming out of his coma how?”

  “Since the collateralizing commodities don’t actually exist, I’m a bit concerned that these missing bees could become a trigger point that could expose the entire company to significant loss. To help avert that disaster, I am asking you please, in your own inimitable, charming way, to find out everything you can about the cargo Frank Monahan’s truck was carrying, whether those colonies of bees were salvageable, if so who got them, if not, who replaced them. Can I possibly be any clearer?”

  ***

  Two hundred miles north of Los Angeles, on a straight, level road, cruising at a steady sixty-five, Stein felt a clank, then a whoosh then a gasp, then a rapid deceleration akin to a jet fighter getting netted on a carrier deck. His head thrust forward. His body accordioned at the waist. Then came a tremendous shudder and a great wrenching, as if the abdomen had been ripped out of the chassis. He sensed this was not good.

  With the power steering out, it felt like pulling a tank through deep mud to get across three lanes. Pumping the gas and brake were nothing more than aerobic exercises. Still he managed to tack and weave and ultimately pilot the disabled craft off to the shoulder. Trailing vehicles swerved to avoid the rolling hunk of aluminum that had dropped from his chassis and rolled end-over-end like a wildebeest giving birth on the run. This object was soon to be identified by the driver of the sixty-thousand-dollar BMW that it had sideswiped—chipping a wedge of paint off her left-side wheel guard—as Stein’s transmission.