Culver City was depressing even on days you weren’t changing decades. Railroad tracks sprang up out of nowhere and disappeared under chain link fences that concealed small factories and warehouses, whose alphanumeric names gave no hint of what they made or did. It reminded Stin of the surly east coast towns you’d have to drive through with your parents on the way to the beach, populated by sullen teenagers who looked like they could beat up your father. Stein leaned his arm out the window. He didn’t like air conditioning. He had changed out of his faded New York Giants sweats into the uniform he wore every day, Levis and a blue work shirt. Stein used his card key to open the steel gate allowing him to enter the inner parking lot of Espe Warehouse #23, the five-story structure he had hoped never again to see.
Technically, Stein did not have a boss. Technically he was an independent contractor retained by the product liability firm of Lassiter amp; Frank, overseen by its CEO, a contemporary incarnation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell. Mrs. Millicent Pope-Lassiter. Therein, through an intricate contortion of leasebacks and loan outs, Stein’s services were dealt to a succession of their clients, of which Espe Cosmetics was the most recent. Sadly, counting a warehouse full of shampoo bottles was not the worst he’d endured. In the wake of the 1994 earthquake, he had been assigned to catalogue the missing limbs of a display yard full of Plaster of Paris statues of Napoleon. He had hand-tested the comparative tensile strengths of ten different brands of dental floss. He had verified the symmetry of a shipment of staples. But he drew the line at doing the same thing twice. He had hurried but not rushed to get this job done before midnight last night. He wanted the business of the first fifty years done. He didn’t want anything hanging over.
The atmosphere inside the warehouse was thin with already-breathed air. It made Stein light-headed. From the ground floor looking up it was a gigantic beehive. The walls were honeycombed with hundreds of thousands of compartments, each holding one octagonal shaped bottle that would soon be filled with 12.6 ounces of Espe “New Millennium” Shampoo, the most highly publicized, gigantically hyped liquid since Classic Coke.
Stein took the elevator up to the third floor where the executive offices were housed. “Thank God you’re here,” Mattingly gushed. “I have such a headache I’m giving birth to my brains.” He herded Stein into his office and sat him in the good chair alongside his Lucite kidney slab desk. A cluster of uniformly sharpened pencils stood at attention inside a silver cup alongside his telephone. If there were any justice, Mattingly should look wasted and decrepit for all his fretting. But his skin was smooth and his sandy brown hair was combed into a high school pompadour. He looked easily fifteen years younger than Stein, though they had to be roughly the same age. Their daughters were classmates at The Academy, the annoyingly smug private school that Hillary had insisted upon Angie attending.
Mattingly had struck gold as the result of two blind acts of luck. The first was the arrest and conviction of his erstwhile employer, Mister Rudy Esposito, founder of the Esposito Home Cleaning and Laundering Service. Mattingly had been so naive, he believed that when he had made the rounds “picking up laundry” he had actually been picking up laundry. When Esposito fell prey to a rare form of pancreatic cancer, ironically induced by the vats of cleaning solvents that were kept on the premises for show, Mattingly, who was the only unindicted employee, was left in charge of a factory that produced no goods and a distribution system with neither outlets nor customers. In this rare moment of karmic equilibrium his abilities were perfectly matched to their responsibilities
The second chime tolled for him in the person of a flamboyant, twenty-three-year-old hairdresser named Michael Esposito. Michael was the distant cousin of the self same Rudy Esposito. He had quit his most recent job as a stylist at Pavane, the trendy Palm Springs beauty salon, after a nasty breakup with his older lover-mentor, Paul Vane, who was also the shop’s proprietor. Michael Esposito had brought with him the secret formula for the hair and skin products that had made Pavane famous, and which Paul Vane, either out of generosity or desperation, had conferred upon him as his divorce settlement.
Esposito offered Mattingly an equal partnership in the product he would develop in exchange for use of the dormant facility in which he would manufacture, store and distribute it. Mattingly nearly had turned the offer down, but his pretty blonde wife knew Paul Vane’s name from some of her friends whose husbands were on the fringes of show business, and prevailed upon her husband to accept. The new company was born under the single-word name by which Michael Esposito now called himself: “ESPE.”
Within two years, the Espe flagship product, “New Radiance” shampoo had grabbed a gigantic thirty percent share of the market. At first Mattingly had been properly embarrassed at his vast unearned success, but when he was declared a marketing genius by Business Week and when Entrepreneurs Today called him a visionary, he traded in his Ford for something beige and German, he moved his family out of Sherman Oaks into Brentwood, and he became a person who, when eighty dollars worth of empty plastic shampoo bottles were missing, felt that a profound injustice had been done him.
No dramatic gesture would make Stein happier than to walk directly to a corner of the room, lift up a blanket concealing the “missing” thousand cases, and leave without ever changing pace or speaking a word. Instead, he did the second best thing. In a grandiose flourish that only can come when spending someone else’s money, Stein authorized full replacement value for a thousand cases of missing bottles, he added in shipping and handling and bookkeeping expenses, thus bringing the total to a whopping three hundred dollars, then threw in a sarcastic wear and tear bonus for Mattingly’s injured psyche, and tore off a check on the Lassiter and Frank account for fifteen hundred dollars.
“Okay? Are we happy now?” he said, and spread the check before him. “Is there harmony in nature?” He made for the door.
Mattingly sulked. “I need the bottles back.”
“Tell me you’re not serious.”
“They’re valuable.”
“Health is valuable. A sense of humor is valuable.”
“They have the Espe logo on them.”
“They’re empty!”
“You’re missing the point.”
“You can’t make a point by rubbing two bad ideas together.”
“People can fill them with anything and sell it as Espe.”
“It’s shampoo! It’s soapy water. Who gives a flying fuck?”
A thin, oboey voice emerged out of the shadows. “It’s not just shampoo. It’s a commitment to planetary responsibility.”
Stein turned to see a young man in his twenties with a slight, almost furtive, build emerge from the shadows. He cocked his hip and gave Stein the long once-over through his smoky dark eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “That I’m just an opportunistic little whore who fucked Paul Vane and took his formulas.”
Stein regarded him with polite disregard. “Perhaps if I knew you better.”
“This is Michael Esposito,” Mattingly clarified. “Espe himself. The inventor of New Millennium shampoo.”
“Ah, the boy-genius,” said Stein, with irony whose teeth left no impression. “First of all, the new millennium doesn’t start until next year. 2001. The first year was not called Zero.” He was weary trying to convince people and let it drop.
Paul Vane’s protege was a back-alley boy who still had some bends in his soul, the kind who never would be happy with anything honestly come by. “You think because he was older than me and established that I had nothing to do with developing the formulas,” Espe pouted. “That’s what everyone thinks. But you’re wrong. I was his inspiration. He made them to attract me. Now he regrets giving it all to me in our divorce and wants some of it back. He wants me back. That’s why he stole the bottles.”
Stein called Mattingly by his first name as though they were friends, a condition Mattingly desperately desired. “John” he said. “I’ll go to two thousand but you’re way out on a limb.”
“I’m sorry. I have to have the bottles.”
“You’re really going to make me look for them?” He restrained himself from putting into words what his tone clearly implied-You anal compulsive little fuck. When I find those bottles, and I will, I’m going to shove every one of them up your ass. “Go get me your paperwork,” he said meaning it as a punishment.
Mattingly smiled at the word paperwork, and Stein had the instant feeling of dread that he had said the wrong word to the wrong person. Mattingly had hard-copy documentation of every step of each bottle’s life cycle; from bulk plastic to molding to labeling to embossing; from factory to warehouse. He had purchase orders, bills of lading, quality control numbers, computer codes all in sequence. He recalculated his own totals and checked them against Mattingly’s.
Still, the missing bottles could not be accounted for.
Additionally, Mattingly had assembled the foremen and shipping managers whose signatures had appeared on each color-coded copy and had them verify that they had indeed received or sent every order that bore their name. All were present with the exception of a loading-dock foreman named Morty Greene. Today was Morty’s day off, but a call had gone out for him to report. Mattingly gave Stein a slip of paper with Morty Greene’s address and phone number and Stein staggered out of the warehouse looking like the sole survivor of a horrendous mining explosion.
In the parking lot, hot chalky sun assaulted Stein’s senses. A well-dressed man in his early thirties was standing alongside Stein’s Camry. He had a swimmer’s build and his even white teeth sparkled with a sincere greeting. “Do I have the good fortune of speaking with Harry Stein?”
“I don’t know about the pleasure part, but I am Harry Stein.” His mental picture of Morty Greene had been more in the squat, Jewish accountant mold. Mattingly’s minions had apparently reached him. “How did you know I was here?”
“I followed you,” the tanned smile brazenly admitted. “After the birthday gift I left at your door I hoped you’d be glad to see me.”
“What are you talking about? You’re not Morty Greene?”
The young man reached out a suntanned, blond-haired arm, at the end of which was a robust, respectful, genuinely pleased handshake. “My name is Brian Goodpasture. Could you spare me twenty minutes of your life?” He placed a check into Stein’s hands in the amount twenty thousand dollars and nodded toward the vintage Mercedes convertible that was parked alongside Stein’s Camry.
“A thousand a minute. Yeah, that’s about my usual rate.”
Early acoustic Dylan blasted out of Goodpasture’s quadraphonic speakers as they motored through pre-Christmas Beverly Hills. The interior upholstery was creamy leather. The seat back adapted to Stein’s contour, and a subtle mechanism massaged his acupressure points. “Nice wheels,” Stein said.
“Of course it’s not a ‘69 green-and-white Volkswagen bus with tinted windows and a special air-conditioning system that filtered cannabis smoke clean in seconds, and a steering wheel made from the neck of a guitar busted on stage by Pete Townsend.”
Stein regarded the young man warily. Flattery was flattering, but he was uncomfortable with people knowing more about him than he did about them. And Goodpasture was, apparently, a Stein archivist. He fondly recounted the tales of Stein’s legendary youthful antics; the cannabis “Victory Gardens” he had planted on the grounds of LA police stations, the “Pot-in-every-Chicken” dinners he had perpetrated on the state legislature, and of course the time he had saved the asses of two icons of British rock and roll by taking the kilo of Afghanistani hash that someone had planted in their guitar cases and molding it into a pair of skis that he carried under the noses of the alerted Swiss customs agents at Zermatt.
Stein had to hand it to the kid. He had done his homework. “It wasn’t actually the Liverpool Lads,” Stein confessed. “But it tells better that way.” A display of Santa’s sleigh pulled by eight flying smog deer hung over Wilshire Boulevard, tethered on either side to palm trees. Russian hookers pressed their noses against the windows of Cartier and Armani showrooms. “Beverly Hills Christmas dreams,” Goodpasture said.
Stein glanced at the time. “Was there a particular place we were going?”
“I thought anywhere away from the warehouse would be a step up.”
“True that.”
“It just so blows my mind to be driving with you. I feel like Dylan when he met Woody Guthrie.”
“Guthrie was on his deathbed.”
“Well, except for that part.”
“And he told Dylan to go to hell.”
“I hope except for that part too.”
They pulled into the elongated parking ramp that lay parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard and waited for a woman in a Lexus to finish a phone call, a manicure and a cafe latte before vacating the parking place. The eye makeup she could do while driving. Goodpasture shut the engine off and swiveled in his seat to face Stein squarely.
“I lost something valuable. All the people I talk to say you’re the man to help get it back.”
“People?”
“People who know these things.”
“Things?”
“Things agricultural.”
“Ah.”
Stein felt a nostalgic glow for those elliptical conversations you had when you were worried about being bugged by the FBI. “You must have old information,” Stein said. “I don’t know those people anymore.”
“They still know you.”
“If they did, they’d know better than to ask.”
Goodpasture went on discreetly. “I’m aware of your family responsibilities. There’d be absolutely no danger involved. You would not be abrogating any preexisting covenants.”
“What do you know about my preexisting covenants?” Stein felt like his low sperm count had been posted on a billboard.
“No actions deleterious to the well being of the child.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“A lot of my clients are attorneys,” Goodpasture confessed. “One of them negotiated your divorce.”
“My lawyer or hers?”
“You didn’t have one.”
Stein was getting ready to pop this kid. Except that he was so damn engaging. “I’m good people, Harry. Sorry. I know you don’t like to be called Harry. But I don’t know you well enough to call you Stein, and Mister Stein sounds so, you know. Dr. Alton Schwimmer will vouch for me.”
Stein took a step back and surveyed the kid intently. Invoking the name of the legendary Alton Schwimmer carried gravitas. Stein had never met the medical vigilante, but you had to admire anyone who had the balls to bring a little dignity to the dying.
“The crop I grew was earmarked for his hospice,” Goodpasture went on. The people who stole it intend to exploit it for commercial purposes. That’s wrong. Don’t you agree?”
Stein gave a cautious, non-verbal yes
“I’m pretty sure I know where to find it. When I do, all I’d want is for you to authenticate that it comes from the same crop as the orchid I gave you.”
“I see. Kind of like an art expert.”
“Exactly! With your reputation your word would be law.” He wrung Stein’s hand. “They all thought you had gotten too old, lost the spark. I told them they were wrong.” He clenched his fist and quoted Stein’s motto that was the ethos of the sixties. “Give ’till it feels good.”
He had gauged Stein’s response incorrectly.
“You make this hard for me. If I had a son who was a dope dealer I’d want him to be exactly like you. But I have to say no.”
Goodpasture persisted with restraint. “Once again, you have my complete assurance that this will be purely an insulated, isolated occurrence.”
Stein nodded toward the digital clock on the dash. “You said twenty minutes. Are you a man of your word?”
Goodpasture accepted disappointment with grace. They drove back to the warehouse in not unpleasant silence, and arrived on the stroke of the twentieth minute. Stein handed back the check as he got out of the car. Goodpasture refused to take it. “The deal was your time, not your agreement.”
Stein appreciated the gesture. He liked the kid. “It would be interesting to see what happened if I tried to cash it.”
“You’d see I’m a man of my word.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
It was deliciously tempting. He again tried to return the check. Again Goodpasture refused.
“When I’m old I’ll be able to tell my grandkids that Harry Stein is walking around with an uncashed check of mine.”
“I’m sure they’ll be impressed. You better take this, too.” Stein handed the bud back to him through the driver’s side window, still in its plastic seal.
“You didn’t open it?”
The next motion happened more quickly than the eye could register. Goodpasture tore open the plastic seal and brought the bud up under Stein’s nose. “Tell me what you smell,” he exhorted. “Tell me its life story.”
It was reflex. Stein inhaled deeply and the genetic secrets of Goodpasture’s orchid manifested to him. “Humboldt Super Skunk on the maternal side. Crossed with Shiva Shanti. Grown in a hydroponic mixture of nitrates and organic phosphorus.”
“I grew them from heirloom seeds of your Heavenly Hillary,” Goodpasture exulted. “Then cloned them. These are your grandchildren!” He pushed the bud back into Stein’s hand and hit the accelerator.
Stein ran a few steps after him in pursuit. “What am I going to do with this?”
“You’ll think of something,” Goodpasture sang back. As if they had been friends for years. As if he knew they were already partners. “Happy Birthday.”