Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

“Luckily you’re connected,” Stein said.

“One would think.” The sigh that Paul Vane let out could have changed the atmosphere of Jupiter.

Stein perked up, catching a glimmer of the unspoken truth. “Are you saying he didn’t choose you?”

“C’est la guerre. C’est l’amour.”

“The dirty little rat,” Lila shot.

“I bet it was that other place we passed,” Stein remembered the long lines. “They seemed to be doing a land office business.”

“Not all of us are in land,” said Vane.

“It must have hurt you not getting the franchise.”

“Why would I be hurt? Just because I took the little trollop in? Gave him a home, gave him love, made him a reasonably civilized human being, taught him the business, taught him all of my secrets, and as a reward he left me and marketed the things I gave him freely? Why would that hurt?”

“I only meant financially,” Stein murmured.

“Of course. I forget that straight men can make the distinction.”

Time had worn thin some of the zeal that Vane had once possessed in defending his lover’s transgressions. Only a frayed inner grace still remained. “Young men don’t know what love is,” Vane said. “If any of us ever do. Yes, he hurt me, but that’s what people do who are inexperienced in the world. It’s up to those of us who know better not to hurt back.”

“That’s very evolved of you.”

“When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’re lucky if the worst thing that happens to you is that a lover leaves. At least the little shit is enjoying himself.”

“I’d make him suffer,” said Lila.

“I love this woman.”

Stein declined having his glass topped off. Lila accepted. “You knew Nicholette Bradley pretty well,” Stein ventured.

“God yes. The poor angel. Can you imagine?”

Vane nodded toward the gallery of photographs on his wall of celebrity clients. Prominent among them were several of her Vogue covers and layouts for the old New Radiance shampoo ads.

“Do you have any idea who could have done it?” Stein asked.

“It’s too ghastly to think.”

“No enemies? No rivals?”

“You couldn’t do anything but love her.”

Stein nodded ruefully. “True.”

“You didn’t know her,” Lila scolded.

It was a long shot that Vane would supply something helpful. He was just a bystander, like Stein, a victim of collateral damage. Stein felt the irrational desire to hug him. “We’ll be out of your hair in a minute he said. No pun intended. I just need to hear you say, so I can tell my boss, that you are not hijacking any shampoo.”

Lila had become Vane’s staunch defender. “Stein, that’s rude and ridiculous.”

Vane was feeling wicked himself, or flirting, or showing off. “Why would I steal what I can make right here in my sink?”

Stein had a bad premonition. “What are you saying?”

Vane extended his arms to them both like an ambidextrous courtier. “Would you like to see the plant?” He conducted them into a smaller room that was painted white and furnished with laboratory sinks and copper tubing. Shelves and cabinets were lined with retort jars containing all manner of exotic ingredients: dried and freshly preserved orchids, berries, buds and small twigs.

“Anybody can make what is essentially Espe New Millennium shampoo. It’s not the formula that’s copyrighted; it’s the name and the packaging. Ninety per cent of the products on the market have the same ingredients.”

Stein marveled when reality outflanked irony. “Are you saying that anyone could brew up a vat of Espe shampoo but they couldn’t call it Espe because Espe doesn’t exist outside its packaging?”

“That is the million dollar secret.”

“More like twenty million,” Stein observed.

“Probably closer to four hundred million worldwide. But I just make the bare necessity to satisfy my regulars.”

Moments earlier Stein had thought he was done with shampoo but now it looked like Mattingly and Michael Esposito had been right, that Paul Vane had been knocking them off. But why was Vane showing him? His shell cracked with barely a tap. Lila was crashing off the high and getting cranky. “Stein, can we go? I’m hungry.”

An 11”?14” photo hung on the wall above one of the sinks that struck Stein with a vague sense of familiarity. It was Nicholette Bradley cavorting on a beach with another girl. Stein noticed the photographer’s logo under the photo-an aperture opening like a flower petal. He remembered the envelope he had found in Nicholette’s bedroom with that same logo. Weird things began to snap together.

“Is David Hart an acquaintance of yours?” Stein asked.

It was Paul Vane’s turn to be surprised. “How would you have known that?”

And then a voice emanated from the recesses of the room that said, “I was waiting for someone to introduce us.” A figure materialized. Stein thought at first it was a hallucination. The person standing in the doorway was the image of young Michael Espos-ito. Punk-blond hair, snakelike curl of the lips.

“Speak of the devil,” Vane said. Meet David Hart in person.”

“I’ve been listening to the conversation,” David said. “We are not amused.” On that, he abruptly strode from the room. And Paul Vane did what any man would do who feared that he had lost thelast person on earth allotted for him to love.

He gave chase.

Argumentative voices rose up through the grates of the elevator cage that carried the spatting couple to the lower level. Even a foreigner who didn’t speak the language could follow the story of the opera. The timbre of one voice was strident and unyielding, designed to hurt without remorse. The other was tinged with a depth of sadness that comes of knowing that more is about to be lost than merely an argument. Still on the floor above them, Stein looked rapidly around for a staircase.

“Leave them alone,” Lila said. “They have enough problems.”

“I wish I could.”

In her reluctantly assumed role as helpmate, Lila pointed out the stairway door. Stein yanked it open and raced down ahead of her. “Don’t wait for me, or anything,” she admonished, and began a careful, wobbly, banister holding descent

Vane and Hart were so deep in their argument that they did not immediately step out of the elevator when it reached the basement. Only in the ghastly aftermath of a particularly savage comment was there a moment’s silence, during which David Hart emerged from the elevator, with his suppliant in futile pursuit. Both were surprised to see Stein already there, taking in the sight. The walls were well stocked with Espe New Millennium shampoo bottles. Perhaps a thousand of them. Stein hated being lied to by people he liked and he liked Paul Vane. “So this is ‘just barely enough’ to satisfy your few loyal customers?”

Vane dropped his countenance in shame. Hart did not. He turned upon Stein the full unleashed power of the Post-Reagan disdain for anyone who thought that guilty executives should face consequences. “Whose lackey are you?” he spat. “That bitch cunt Espe?”

“Please, David. You’re being rude,” Vane said quietly.

“I’m being rude? That little whore stole your life’s work. I’d think you’d care, if not for your own sad self then for me. You’d think I’d count for something.”

“You count,” Vane said, his voice disappearing into the stale canyons of old arguments. “David has nothing to do with this,” he confessed to Stein. “It was all my doing.”

“And of course I believe you, since you’ve never lied to me.”

“Come,” Paul Vane beckoned them. “All will be revealed.”

He led them back up the flight of stairs to the main level where Lila was still waiting, then through the double door that opened into a large, sunny white-walled room with high windows and a beautifully redone blond wood floor. There were rolled backdrops and reflective umbrellas. Stationary lights were mounted on aluminum poles and a 35mm camera on a tripod. A pair of handcuffs and a silk top hat were left on the sofa, props from a recent photo shoot. At least Stein hoped they were props. But what arrested his attention was the life-size, three-dimensional cutout of the Espe bottle; the same icon he had seen that morning in Milli-cent Pope-Lassiter’s office.