Stein Stung Read online

  The girl was nineteen, blonde, wearing a short skirt, a silk blouse, and an expensive gold necklace, and was taking pictures of the damage on her brand-new gadget that was a cell phone and also a camera, and making sure that Stein heard her telling whoever she was talking to, “Why do they let old people on the road? Shouldn’t there be special handicap lanes for them so they don’t have to drive where regular people go?”

  Stein had thought this species had been confined to the Beverly Hills/Brentwood/Encino corridor, but seeing her so far north, he feared the spore had breached containment. Stein told her cordially after she hung up that it wasn’t his transmission.

  She backed off like old age was contagious. “Your car doesn’t have a transmission. There is a transmission on the road.”

  “Crazy coincidence.”

  “We’ll see what he says.” She gestured to the local deputy sheriff, who was now arriving on the scene.

  Deputy Gresham was a strapping varsity athlete, three years out of high school. He took their information with meticulous care to be objective. He asked the victim to estimate the extent of the damage, and when she had no idea, he subtly guided her toward an astronomical number. “Those cars have special paint and they have to take the whole side panel off to strip it down.” To Stein he said, “I hope you have good insurance.” He had one final pro forma question for her to complete the paperwork. “When you made contact with the obstacle in the road, ma’am, was it at rest or in motion?”

  With the deputy’s back to him, Stein caught the girl’s eye, and in an obsequious gesture implored her to say the thing was moving.

  “It was still,” the girl said.

  The officer’s pen froze above his pad. “You’re sure about that?”

  Stein again cajoled her in pantomime to say it was moving.

  “Yes,” she said. “Absolutely still.” She signed the statement imagining it was a scalpel and the paper was Stein’s forehead.

  “That’s … very honest of you to admit,” the officer said. “If it was moving, technically it would still be part of the car and the driver would be responsible. Once it stops, it’s road hazard and he’s not at fault.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” She bent over to pick her cell phone off the grass, flashing Deputy Gresham a tidbit of what he had squandered.

  ***

  Sig Kroll, the surgeon general of the auto repair shop where Stein’s car had been towed, wore scrubs over his striped mechanic’s jumpsuit. He carried a clipboard in hand and bore a device around his neck that resembled a stethoscope. His bedside manner sucked. When Stein asked him what the verdict was, Kroll asked him if he’d ever seen a man’s kidneys and liver and heart go out all at once. “That’s what you’ve got here. Timing belt, water pump, and trannie. The grand trifecta.”

  The tow truck driver still had Stein’s Camry on the hoist and asked what he should do with it. Kroll gestured for the kid to set it down. “But what you should do with it is drive it off a pier. Buy American,” he lectured Stein, “they last forever, not like these foreign pieces of shit.”

  The local car rental place was caught in an inventory pinch and all they had was a new brand just arrived from Korea. Which is why, three hours later, Stein pulled into the parking lot of the Las Verdes Hospice Care Center behind the wheel of a generically copied lightweight piece of aluminum and composite plastic called a Kia Sephia. The rental guy had joked about its name, that it came from IKEA and that there was “some assembly required.”

  The rehab center was a two-story building with some landscaping out front that probably looked exactly like the watercolor drawing the architect had first made. The nurse at reception was cordial to begin with, and when Stein told her he was there to see Ned Peering, her eyes absolutely lit. “Isn’t his recovery a wonder?” she gushed. “Isn’t God just the greatest thing?”

  “Unrivaled,” Stein agreed.

  She provided Stein with instructions for finding room 207 that included locating the elevator (within eyeshot) and noting several times that this floor was considered the first floor, not the ground floor, so two was just one floor above them. If she had been cuter, Stein would have asked if she missed her high school baton twirling days, making her blush when she realized she’d been gyrating her pencil over and under the three fingers of her free hand, a habit none of the men she had slept with had ever noticed.

  From the looks of the tableaux in Room 207, Stein had gotten there just in time. Ned was sitting on the edge of his bed, looking vacant and spiffy in a blue and white seersucker sport jacket, his overnight satchel sitting packed and ready for departure. Barbara Peering was on the other side of the room, one hand resting composedly atop the backrest of the Naugahyde visitor’s chair, looking toward her husband but not specifically at him. Skip had gone for a soda. Sabrina was at the window, her back to her parents, impenetrable as a screensaver, gazing out at the bland agricultural non-scape.

  All the car drama had taken up so much of Stein’s mental energy that he hadn’t given much thought or planning to how he would question a man just emerging from a coma. That was fine, though. He didn’t want to break the spontaneity by over-preparing. He had skimmed the material Millicent had foisted upon him to register the names and faces of the Peering family, and to grasp the basic details of their encounter with the overturned truck and its driver, which were practically nonexistent.

  Stein introduced himself and attempted to break the ice by telling a self-deprecating tale of his own apian misadventure. His ex-wife had given him a pair of Rollerblades for his fortieth birthday. He had never bladed and found himself going down a steep hill. He didn’t know how to stop or turn so he threw himself onto a lawn and landed face first on a cluster of clover. He was immediately stung on the upper lip—the bee got stuck in his mustache and kept pumping more and more venom until his whole face blew up to the size of a cabbage. The emergency room doctor took one look at him and blurted out the three words you never want to hear a doctor say: “Oh, my God.”

  Stein turned theatrically toward Ned. “And this man gets stung a thousand times and walks away. Amazing.”

  “He wasn’t stung,” Barbara Peering informed him. “Ned was covered with males. Drones have no stingers. Or so our son tells us, and he’s rarely misinformed. The coma was from suffocation.”

  “Well.” Stein tried to keep the artificially inflated revelry going. “Aren’t we glad males are harmless? It’s our most endearing trait.”

  He was bombing. Sabrina leaned back against the window frame. “What is he doing here?” she asked.

  “Sabrina,” her mother reprimanded, though she was wondering the same thing.

  “No, it’s a legitimate question,” Stein encouraged her. “I appreciate the trauma you’ve all gone through. The report says none of you spoke to him—the driver of the semi. But sometimes an image imprints on your retina that’s too brilliant to see it right away. If you can remember any trivial detail it might help.”

  Ned Peering’s throat was still quivery with the damage it had incurred. But his statement was definitive. “He was dead when we got there. Nobody saw or heard him say anything.” He looked toward his daughter, then his wife for corroboration. There was no disagreement.

  “Just one more question and I’ll be out of your hair. Do you remember anything about the white bee boxes that were strewn on the road? Any particular brand you might have seen etched into the sides. Circles inside triangle inside circles?”

  Barbara Peering practically sprang at him. “My husband saved his family and was swarmed by murderous insects. Do you think anyone gave a thought to anything else?” Stein apologized once again for the intrusion and was two-thirds out the door when Skip returned with an armload of cold soda cans pressed to his breasty chest.

  “Ah, young master Sanford. I presume that the truck driver never spoke to you either?”

  “He gave me money and told me to play E-9. The Bellamy Brothers. ‘If I Said You Have a Beautiful Body Wou
ld You Hold It Against Me?’ Then he slow-danced with my mother.” Skip handed out the sodas in cheerful oblivion. “Of course they stole the line from the Marx Brothers, but everybody knows that.”

  A Social Service nurse bustled in from the hall with a sheaf of discharge papers to be signed, and intricate instructions for aftercare. Stein beckoned Barbara Peering to step outside the room with him.

  The hallway was neat, a little musty. White Spanish stucco. Something out of 1930s Hemingway.

  “Yes,” she said, “I danced with him.”

  “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I’m just trying to put together the circumstances around this truck driver’s death.”

  “You don’t have to call him ‘this truck driver.’ He has a name. His name is Frank.”

  “Actually, it was Aloysius,” Stein said.

  “He told me to call him Frank.”

  “He told the state of California something else.” Stein showed her a Xerox of a driver’s license, part of the packet of information Millicent Pope-Lassiter had supplied. He watched her study the face on the photograph. He was surprised she made a point of humanizing the man. But when was the last time he knew anything about women?

  “I don’t want to bring up any uncomfortable memories, Mrs. Peering. It’s just that the people I work for think it’s very important to know…. Did he say anything else? Anything at all about where he was going? Who he was delivering his cargo to? Where he loaded on? Anything like that?”

  “Is that what you talk about when you dance with a woman?”

  He replied with care. “I wasn’t under the impression it was a reciprocal arrangement.”

  This would be the moment in a forties film when Veronica Lake’s perfectly coiffed hair would fall over one eye. She would reach into her purse for a silver cigarette case and light one in her long manicured fingers, exhaling a semaphore of skywriting through her nostrils.

  “He sang to me,” Barbara Peering said, barely above a whisper.

  “He sang to you.”

  “In my ear. To the song.” Her upper lip twitched but her chin stayed high. “At first I knew, I knew he was dancing with me to humiliate my husband. Ned thinks strangers take to him more than they do. But something else happened. Something changed in the way he was holding me. It stopped being for display. He lifted me up. He pushed my shoes off with his toes and set me down on the tops of his boots.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He held me so softly I thought I’d grown wings. He covered my ear with his ear and said he was listening to my thoughts. It was like a curtain came down around us. We were invisible. I had no husband. No children. No will of my own. Then the song ended. He lifted me off his boots and placed me back on the floor. Everyone in the entire café was looking at us. Except for Ned. Of course. I couldn’t bear the weight of his shame. I locked myself in the ladies’ room until I heard the sound of his truck pulling away.”

  She would have taken another drag off a cigarette if she had one.

  “The next time I saw him his truck was overturned. He was bloated and dead. Do you have any idea what I felt?”

  “Relief?” Stein guessed.

  It was not at all what she meant. But upon further consideration, she admitted, “Maybe.”

  An orderly clattered down the hallway pushing a wheelchair to Ned’s room. Stein and Barbara Peering jumped apart as if they’d been caught naked. Inside the room, Ned had signed all the forms and now rebelled against being pushed out in a wheelchair. The orderly, whose nametag read KINSHASA, had heard it all before and assured Ned, “The oniest way peoples leave here is sitting on they butts or flat on they backs.”

  “Please, Mrs. Peering.” Stein detained her one more second before she went back into her husband’s room. “You wanted someone to know that something important happened to you. You’ve told me, and it stays our secret. Is there anything else? Anything else at all you can tell me?”

  The way she balked, he was sure there was. The look of bittersweet resignation in her eyes as she went in to rejoin her family gave Stein the crazy impulse to kiss her, which he resisted.

  ***

  It took one well-placed phone call to Ben Tagasunta, Stein’s effetely gay racetrack cohort and recently promoted vice president at the Bank of Hank, to have faxed to him the records of Aloysius (Frank) Monahan’s credit card activity for the past three months. Frank used a lot of gas. That was no surprise. He lost money at several Internet gambling sites. That was interesting. On the road, he stayed at inexpensive motels. Not particularly stunning. One of them was the Sleep ’n’ Stay just fifteen miles from Ojai on the day before Karma’s bees were reported stolen. That was electrifying. From Ojai, he drove a circuitous route two thousand miles north and east through Vegas (where he made three cash withdrawals), Salt Lake, Bozeman, and Billings, out into the Little Missouri National Grasslands of North Dakota, where he stayed overnight in the towns of Batteneau and Williston. He drove on to Meaguery, Wishek, and Gackle, before heading back down to California by way of Rapid City and Reno (where he gambled, and lost, again), through the Angeles National Forest and into Groveland, where the overturn occurred and where Stein would be headed once he grabbed some lunch.

  ***

  He wasn’t sure how he’d locate the precise accident site. As he got closer he asked some locals if they knew where it happened, though as it turned out, he could have found it with Braille. There was a gash in the side of the road where a copse of trees had been flattened. Ruts and skid marks and debris still remained. A volunteer from the local highway maintenance branch of the Kiwanis Club was stationed there to keep gawkers away.

  Stein flashed some bogus piece of paper that allegedly identified him as someone who belonged. Clay Potter was all gangle and belt buckle. He was wearing a shirt that read, “My Lover is Gay But I’m Not.” He looked like Huck Finn’s less sophisticated cousin. Stein had never seen such phenomenal range of neck motion outside of a parrot. He could swivel his head nearly all the way around. “One hell of a royal mess, let me tell you,” Clay indemnified.

  “I can see that,” said Stein.

  “You’re looking at the wrong side of the road. The whole load got throwed off that way.” Clay pointed around 180 degrees to the other side. “Bees flying around overhead like a million bad ideas.”

  “Sounds like a lot of bees.”

  “Picture an oil spill,” Clay said. “But up.”

  “I’m wondering about those wooden boxes. Do you know if any of them had a design burned into them?”

  “You’d have to ask the bee boys about that.”

  “The bee boys?”

  “Whenever something like this happens, we call the local beekeeper’s association and they put the word out to their people.” Clay beckoned Stein to the other side of the road, where it dropped off down toward the valley. There were signs of fire. A cleared-out patch with the remnants of charred wood, a lot of it.

  “Did the truck catch fire?” Stein asked.

  “You’re not following. Truck goes one way. Hives go t’other. The bee boys came in and set the unbroken boxes upright, load them onto their flatbeds. Bees fly in calm as their mama had called them in for dinner. If I didn’t see something like it a couple of times every year I’d say I never saw anything like it. The boxes that was too broke to fix they piled up and burned. That’s what you’re looking at.”

  “So if I wanted to talk to one person? Who’s the head bee boy?”

  “Doc Moody’s the medical examiner. He keeps some bees too. He might could tell you something.”

  Stein jotted the name down.

  “Likely be at the morgue. Be a piece of work trying to make that driver look human. Ain’t nuthin’ nice what those bees did to him.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad don’t begin to tell it.”

  ***

  Stein wasn’t queasy about death. He had been to the LA County morgue where they hung bodies from meat hooks and scrubbed them down like plate gla
ss windows. The scrubbers laughed and joked, smoked cigarettes and feigned performing lewd acts on them, the more disfigured and maimed the corpse, the better. They had nicknames for the different types of death. Crispy critters for the burn victims. Road kill for the gangland drive-bys left dead on the street.

  The Groveland morgue was different. Stein was met at the door and conducted inside by Doc Renn Moody and his wife, Jarlene. By the looks of them, they had run the place since the end of the Civil War. Forty-seven years of close proximity had eroded them into looking like littermates. Doc’s full mop of white hair was straight and combed to the right; Jarlene’s was thick and coarse. Both wore dark framed glasses and white smocks with their name stitched across the breast pockets. Their bodies looked like sections of a stone fence that had remained standing where nearby pieces had crumbled.

  Stein looked down at Aloysius Frank Monahan, resting eternally on the metal slab. He searched the dead eyes for any remnant of what had mesmerized Ned Peering’s wife. Whatever people call it—soul essence, life force—the place where memories and pain transformed into character, a look in the eye, a key to the heart. Whatever it was it was all gone. He remembered when he had taken Watson to that last sad visit to the vet from which there was no return. He remembered asking as the needle went in how long it would take to work, and from the vet’s expression, realizing that it already had. As Shmooie the Buddhist used to say, what a short a distance it was from just barely here to just barely not.

  Stein gave kudos to the embalmer’s skills. The swelling and horrendous distortion that Clay Potter had so graphically described had been eradicated. “Thanks to Jarlene for that.” Renn bowed to his bride with surprising agility. “She does all the cosmetics.”