Stein Stung Page 6

  Jarlene curtsied back. “Doc’s my biggest fan.”

  The woman had a gift for neorealism. Also a capacity for white wine. She poured herself a flagon of the local Chardonnay, clearly not her first of the day, judging from the redolent aroma of fermented grape seeping from her pores. And yet there was something in the dead man’s face that could not be eradicated. Some residual echo of terror that resided in the ganglia of nerve cells.

  Doc Moody was as proud of his medical degree today as he was the day he earned it in 1964. He handed Stein a copy of his toxicology report, which after a game attempt at deciphering, Stein set aside. “I’m guessing it says he died of multiple bee stings,” Stein ventured.

  “And that would be a helluva good first guess,” said Moody. “Obviously the first thing we tested was levels of apitoxin in his system.” He waited a polite moment for a gleam of recognition from his listener, then filled in the blank. “That’s the venom from a bee’s stinger.”

  “You’re describing my nightmare death,” Stein said. “I’m allergic as hell.”

  “You’ve been stung?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Ask him if he swelled up,” Jarlene chimed in from the corner of the office where she was putting away her brushes and paints.

  “Like a Pillsbury doughboy,” Stein answered her.

  Jarlene grinned a knowing smile at her husband. “Tell him he’s not allergic.”

  “You aren’t allergic,” Doc corroborated.

  “What would I have to do to prove it to you? Die?” Stein gestured toward the corpse for emphasis.

  “He wasn’t allergic either,” said Doc Moody.

  “He looks about as dead as I ever want to be.”

  “Oh, he’s dead all right,” Doc agreed.

  “Only not of a bee sting,” Jarlene added. It was hard to tell if she thought her husband had run out of ideas or run out of breath.

  Stein was sure he had read that Monahan had died of multiple bee stings.

  “I sense some incredulity on his part,” said Jarlene. “Do you sense incredulity?”

  Renn opened his own neatly typed report, replaced one pair of glasses for another and read through the results to corroborate. “Nope. No indication of anaphylaxis. And barely a trace of apitoxin in his blood.”

  “That means his breathing passages were open,” Jarlene footnoted.

  “I know what anaphylaxis is.”

  “The other anomaly,” Moody continued, “is that if a person were morbidly allergic, he’d swell up a whole lot less than our boy here did. It’s a good sign when a body swells. That person almost never dies. So it wasn’t the bees that killed him.”

  “Then what was the cause of death?”

  “He sounds miffed,” Jarlene giggled.

  “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She’s grown to have more affection for the dead than the living.”

  “Not a single corpse ever concealed the truth of himself from me. Can you say that about the living?”

  “She’s got a point there.” Renn glowed whenever he spoke about Jarlene. “It’s his heart valve that was shut. Cause of death was morbid atherosclerosis. Eighty-five percent occluded arteries. Any stimulation could have triggered it. Methamphetamine usually, but I didn’t find any. Blood alcohol content point-O-six.”

  “Lightweight,” Jarlene scoffed.

  “Maybe he found a truck stop that offered some female stimulation,” Moody discretely suggested. “There was recent ejaculate in his shorts. And then of course there’s this.” He lifted Frank’s left arm and indicated bruising around a sizable puncture mark.

  “Did he get stung by a queen bee?”

  Both of the Moodys chuckled. “A bite that size she’d have to be the queen of Russia,” said Jarlene.

  “With a stinger the size of a hypodermic needle,” Renn concluded, “capable of injecting a one-milliliter dose of epinephrine. Something kind of like this.” He pulled from the evidence bag a single-

  use needle. He could see Stein was having trouble keeping up. “Suppose you were driving a truck with two million bees, and you’re pretty sure you’re allergic. And let’s say you get stung. Maybe by one of the bees you were carrying. Maybe one just passing through. You feel yourself swelling up. You fear it might shut your breathing down. Your chest gets tight. Your heart races. That’s what anxiety does.”

  Stein felt his own chest tightening, his heart starting to race.

  “Of course you’d carry an anti-venom kit. You reach in. You find the syringe.” Renn clenched his right fist as if it were grasping a needle and jammed it powerfully into his left arm. “But instead of alleviating the problem, you’ve exacerbated it. Your heart races faster. Your calcified arteries can’t handle the load. Pop goes the weasel.”

  “Are you saying that’s what killed him?”

  “Fear of death is often the cause of death,” Jarlene said in a singsong voice. “And now, if you boys are done gabbing, we’ve got a long drive over the mountain.”

  “Please. Just one more quick question. Do you know if there was any equipment found from the deceased’s truck branded with a circle inside a triangle?” He tried to say “equipment” like he’d been using the term for years. “A friend of mine had some colonies stolen.”

  Jarlene was already at the front door. “Tell him if he’s interested in hearing stories about stolen bees he should come to the meeting tonight in Las Viejas.”

  Renn slung his arm around his wife’s ample shoulder. They walked to the door like a two-headed squid, with Stein swimming behind them through a dark pool of ink.

  Chapter Five

  New clusters of bones had been plopping to the surface of the pool all day. While the dredging machine had failed to clear the Jacuzzi line, it had succeeded in puncturing a previously obstructed subterranean artery, a geological aneurysm, through which the buried remains were flowing. With cloth and brush, turpentine and rags, Matthew and Angie had become bone-cleaning machines. They had covered the patio with a secondhand bed sheet from a garage sale and were attempting to form the skeletal shape of an elephant with each new bone they processed.

  Lila could barely look without getting severe stomach cramps. Unruliness upset her. She had no license, no authority to discipline Angie. Of course Matthew was a co-conspirator, but the enterprise was Angie’s initiative. Boys were easier. Men accommodate more readily to dominant and submissive roles. Maybe because they’re bred to run in packs. With women, there could only be one queen to a hive.

  The problem the kids were having was there were too many bones of one length and not enough of others to make anything that plausibly resembled an elephant. He’d place a bone, she’d pull it away. “Something big can’t come out of something small,” she growled at him. It fueled her frustration that she was no closer than Matt to cracking the code. She studied the mélange from all angles but could not find its organizing principle.

  Angie idly picked up an armload of bones they had designated as elephant toes and moved them, setting them down in the thoracic area as opposing ribs. They actually looked pretty good in that alignment. Matt brought a few more from a pile of as yet unplaced bones. Their shape and dimensions matched. The work took over and the two labored in silent tandem. Bones were doused in kerosene, wiped clean, handed over, placed. They worked smoothly at it. The skeletal outline of a mammalian chest began to manifest.

  “This may not be an elephant.” Matthew said.

  She had begun to think the same thing.

  Matthew realigned a chain of bones from their four-legged position and tried to make arms out of them. “How many bones are in an arm?” He cocked his left arm into a weightlifter’s flex under her chin. Angie was not prepared for the sensual assault of sweat and turpentine and whatever oil he used on his skin.

  ***

  Stein had written down Renn and Jarlene’s driving directions in his crappy shorthand that he always thought he’d be able to read afterward and never could. They had each given Stein slig
htly different landmarks and places to turn in order to find the meeting hall in Las Viejas, so he was on the lookout for everything. Plus trying to digest the new information that Frank Monahan had died from cardiac arrest and not anaphylactic shock. This seemed gigantically significant and Stein expected the revelation should generate an avalanche of eurekas and ahaaas, but no such fireworks of enlightenment exploded. Monahan was dead. That didn’t change. Whatever he knew about the stolen bees went with him. Had he stolen them himself? Was he an unwitting accomplice? Where was he taking all those bees? Was there a buyer? A receiver? And what the hell was a derivative? In his state of mental preoccupation, Stein whipped past the turnoff he meant to take onto Route 53.

  Had he been more familiar with the territory he might have acted with more aplomb. But he didn’t know how far it was to the next exit or whether he could get back on in the opposite direction. As Stein’s role model, Tom Paine, prophetically wrote, “Desperate times require desperate measures.” He eased over to the left lane, studying the flat, level fifteen-foot median that separated the two directions of vehicular traffic. He scanned the rearview mirror. Traffic was light. As if anticipating his bad intentions, prominently placed signs read DO NOT CROSS DOUBLE YELLOW LINES. While to some people these directions would leave little room for interpretation, Stein rationalized that local traffic regulations were pitched to the driving acumen of the local inhabitants. Farmers. Country people. Whereas a cosmopolite like himself, one with a more highly developed skill level and sense of judgment …

  The maneuver was so outrageously blatant that Highway Patrol Captain Anthony Caravaggio, observing the action take place right in front of his nose, did not pull its perpetrator over immediately, but rather trailed along behind him to see what other antics he might perform. The big man had been in law enforcement twenty-two years and had been disappointed of late in the poverty of imagination most miscreants displayed. The typical violations fell within the boring parameters of speeding, expired tags, and the occasional FOR SALE sign displayed in a nonmoving vehicle parked more than two hundred feet from its registered address, a misdemeanor. But this looked like fun.

  The exceptionally mild February weather had continued to prevail, and as Stein was now headed west into the sun, the car became unpleasantly warm. He cranked his window down. He had always disdained air-conditioning as an indulgence of the rich to glide through life in perfect comfort. Power windows were another peeve. Was the effort so burdensome to rotate one’s entire wrist that the operation had to be reduced to the use of one finger? What was next? TV in the car? Automatic pilot? Was the ultimate goal to make ourselves extraneous to our own lives?

  Gusts of wind buffeted the lightweight Kia. Stein vaguely recalled seeing a warning about GUSTY WINDS but he had immediately filed it in the category of gratuitous information you can do nothing about. Like BEWARE OF LOW FLYING PLANES. What precautions can a person take against a low-flying plane? Drive at a different altitude? Jesus!

  He leaned across the seat to crank the passenger side window down, to give the incoming wind a place to exit. For the moment that he was stretched across the front seat he lost peripheral vision on his left side, and was startled by the blast of an air horn from a sixteen-wheeler that blew past him. He instinctively shot back to upright and grabbed the wheel in both hands, a reflex that proved to be life saving. The powerful wake generated by the truck propelled him nearly off the road into the shoulder. Once unleashed, the full repertoire of Newton’s Laws of Motion and Aerodynamics got to perform. A partial vacuum was created in the volume of space that the truck had just vacated, and into that emptiness, Stein’s plastic and carbon composite vehicle was pulled; all the way across from right shoulder to the left lane before Stein regained control and was able to swerve back into the right lane where he had started.

  The wind currents through the front seat billowed the driving instructions tucked into a crease in the passenger’s seat. He flailed at the elusive butterflies with his right hand, keeping a tight grasp on the wheel with his left. The papers flew to the open space above the partially lowered window. He lunged for them, the motion causing the car to swerve nearly off the road once again.

  Up to this point Captain Caravaggio had been fascinated more than disturbed by the unorthodox driving patterns. He had even radioed in to see if such a brand name as Kia truly existed. But now, as he observed the driver’s head dart down and out of sight, he had seen enough. He flashed his lights, sounded the siren, revved his four hundred horses till he was right on the Kia’s tail, and jerked his thumb to the right.

  Stein pulled off onto the shoulder, fumbled to find the ignition switch and shut off the engine. The specter of the three-hundred-pound body in uniform bearing down on Stein threw him into a bit of a sweat. He saw an outcropping of soft flesh that overhung yet a second helping of pulchritude, which thrust upward under the pressure of his brown equipment belt. It reminded him of a time right after the “Sergeant Pepper” album had come out and he was walking in Greenwich Village wearing a full-dress West Point jacket with tails over his jeans and T-shirt and a cop who looked like this one threw him against a wall with his fat mug in Stein’s face and said, “Where’s your fuckin’ drum?”

  Now he was indecisive about whether to remain in the car or to make the more hospitable gesture of greeting. Only a few area codes from home, he felt like he was in a foreign land whose customs he had read about but never yet practiced. He decided that a show of goodwill would be appreciated and stepped jauntily out to offer a hello.

  “I need you to get back into your vehicle.”

  The strength of Caravaggio’s unamplified voice was startling and Stein retreated like he had hit an invisible electronic fence. The officer’s bulk filled his side window. “Registration and pilot’s license please.”

  “Pilot’s license?”

  “Weren’t you trying to do loop-the-loops back there?”

  Stein was buoyed by the deadpan humor. So when Caravaggio said, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” Stein was tempted to quip that he hoped it wasn’t about that bank robbery in Chowchilla the other day. But he wisely sensed that would be pushing it.

  “I know it must have looked like I was weaving across lanes,” Stein volunteered.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking so. The truth is—”

  “You were bending over that seat. Do you mind if I look what you’ve got down there?”

  “Would it matter if I minded?”

  “Not the slightest little bit.”

  Caravaggio betrayed only small disappointment at finding nothing more incriminating than of a bag of roasted almonds and a jar of flavored iced tea that Stein had purchased an hour earlier at a roadside fruit stand.

  “I was trying to open the window.”

  “I’m going to ask you to stop talking and to breathe into this.” He held the nozzle of the Breathalyzer toward Stein’s face.

  “I absolutely will,” Stein said. “Just let me say this is a rental car. It’s the first time I ever traversed this road and I was not prepared for how gusty it was through the pass. The car I usually drive hugs the road.”

  “Traversed?” Caravaggio repeated. “This was the first time you ever traversed this road?”

  “I’m sorry. I just meant it was the first time I’ve ever driven here and I’m unfamiliar with—”

  “I know what the word means.” Calories burned into heat at an alarming rate behind Caravaggio’s eyes.

  “I’ll show you what I was looking for. It’s nothing dire.” He reached into the front seat of his car.

  “Freeze!” Caravaggio’s weapon was drawn and pointed at the back of Stein’s head.

  “Oh, come on. You know I’m not going to hurt anyone.” Still bent across the front seat, Stein extended his arm back toward Caravaggio like a crippled crab. Caravaggio took the paper from Stein as if he were using calipers to extract a hair from a bar of soap. Then he noticed the name
and address imprinted at the top of the memo paper. “You know Doc Moody? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Can I stand up?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Caravaggio stepped back and allowed Stein to return to upright. He continued to scowl at the illegible scrawling. “I can’t read a goddamn word of this. You write Greek?”

  “I know. I have crappy handwriting. I’m trying to get to a meeting of the Central Valley Beekeepers Association in a town called Las Viejas.”

  Caravaggio scrutinized him in a new more benign way. “You one of the eastern professors doing the research on colony collapse?”

  “No …” Stein tried to recall where he had heard that term used before. Colony collapse.

  “I know you’re not a beekeeper. You’re too soft and indoorsy.”

  “Thank you for noticing.”

  “You want to get to Las Viejas?” He pointed Stein in the direction he’d been going before he had pulled him over, as if he were now doing him a big favor. There was an exit 4.6 miles down this road that would take him onto the road that would bring him down to the 202, and that would get him close enough where it would be obvious.

  Stein thanked him, both for the directions and for sticking a gun in his face. “That hardly happens often enough.”

  “Don’t forget this,” Caravaggio said before Stein closed his car door. He handed Stein the ticket for multiple lane violations.

  “This still stands?”

  “Have I given you any reason to doubt it?”

  ***

  Four point six miles later, Stein came uneventfully down off Route 53 onto the turnoff Caravaggio had instructed him to take. The long narrow road ran along the perimeter of fields that were plowed or ready to be plowed or already growing a winter crop. It made him just a little bit nostalgic for the horticultural time of his life, when he had been the Johnny Appleseed of hemp. The Burpee of boo. The maestro of Mary Jane. Some of his heirloom hybrids were still in cultivation today.

  Heavy-bladed guillotines of agricultural machinery lay idle on the sides of the road like resting Panzer Divisions. Cattle plopped down on hillocks of muddy cow shit. Flat out in the middle of nowhere, also plopped down at a completely arbitrary locale, was some misguided soul’s brilliantly wrong idea: a condo development. It was like a meteorite had fallen out of nowhere into nowhere. A gravel road led up to a cluster of brand-new urban boxy structures from which GRAND OPENING buntings snapped noisily in the breeze. Not an occupant or a prospective occupant’s car was parked anywhere nearby. And then there was farmland again for three more miles before the town of Las Viejas appeared.