The rest of the week was uneventful. I didn’t receive any more disturbing calls from Nick Nickels Sr., though I was sure I hadn’t heard the last of him. I made no headway with Sara. The few conversations we did have were lackluster and short. I made my way through the interviews with most of the remaining family members on Maggie’s side, realizing they didn’t seem to have the same issues with Marco that I guessed their patriarch did. In fact, by the time I was done, I began to question my own instincts. Not a hint of negativity about Marco. Maggie’s mother, her brother and sister-in-law, and even her nephew all seemed to like Marco and think the marriage was a wonderful godsend for the Vespuccis and the Balduccis. I also interviewed several aunts and uncles and cousins, getting the same story from all of them. They thought it very romantic, considering that Maggie and Marco were childhood friends. Maggie’s friends—Vanessa and Sonia—considered Marco to be a true catch, handsome as the devil and charming. But I was surprised by the short list of friends Maggie gave me to interview. She was more of a loner than I would have initially thought. I saved Marco’s side for the next trip, wondering if I would get the positive attitude toward Maggie that Marco got from her relatives.
I was able to pay my respects to the Jefferson’s at their penthouse in Manhattan. Judith and Cranston served me dinner. Cranston didn’t mention his earlier warning to me, and I didn’t ask. But before I left, Judith asked me how it was going with the Vespuccis. I told her it was coming along fine. “You just take care of yourself, you hear?” she advised me, and sent me on my way with a kiss on the cheek.
Vespucci had sent Joey to take me to the airport, and after four full days of interviews and not getting anything that supported my feelings about Marco, I figured I’d ask Joey about him. Joey wasn’t on my interview list, but I was sure he had an opinion about Marco and Maggie’s upcoming nuptials. It took most of the drive for me to summon up the nerve to ask the question I wanted to ask. I saw the signs indicating the final approach to JFK and gathered up the courage.
“Joey, can I ask you something?”
Joey looked in the rearview. We hadn’t spoken much on the drive.
I took a deep breath. “Why did Mr. Vespucci hire me?” We were at a red light as the words tumbled out of my mouth. I looked up to see his eyes boring into me from the rearview mirror.
“What kind of a question is that? He wants to make his daughter happy.” The light turned green and the car jumped forward, Joey’s eyes back on the road.
Since I’d already opened the door, I figured I might as well walk through it. “It’s just, I don’t know. I don’t think Mr. Vespucci likes Marco very much. That’s all.”
Joey hit the brakes and jerked the car over to the side of the road. My heart rate doubled. Clearly, I was onto something, but now I wasn’t sure if I would make it to the airport. Joey stared at me in the rearview. It was very disconcerting to talk to his back. “Why do you say that?”
I weighed my answer, realizing I didn’t really have any hard facts. “Just a hunch, I guess.”
Joey considered my answer a moment before responding. “Let me make a recommendation to you, kid. Do your job. Keep your hunches to yourself. Understand?”
I nodded, my heart rate slowly returning to normal when I was sure Joey wasn’t going to do anything else. Suddenly, we were back on the highway, rolling into the airport drop-off moments later. I climbed out, my overnight bag in tow. I stood there as Joey pulled away. I watched his Town Car disappear into the traffic, Joey’s warning ringing in my ears and leading to two thoughts. First, I would be best served to follow his advice, as I’d originally intended. Second, his reaction led me to believe my instincts were right on target. I was onto something. But at what cost if I pursued them? Not wanting to answer that question, I turned my brain off as best I could, picked up my bag, and headed into the terminal.
7 Early November – Los Angeles
As Izzy wiped the sweat off her brow, I opened my door and climbed out.
“Jon Fixx. We’ve been looking forward to the day you would snap out of it. Luci’s in back. Can you stay for lunch?”
“What do you think I’m doing here?”
I crossed the street into the front yard. Izzy stepped away from her flower garden, taking off her gardening gloves as she bent over to give me a peck on the cheek. She froze midway when she spotted the damage on my face. “Jon, what happened?”
“Just a misunderstanding,” I said, trying to pass off the bruising on my forehead and face as nothing worth discussing.
“Looks like more than that.” She took a step back and stared at me, her green eyes scanning my face. Always tactful, she didn’t push the issue. Instead, she smiled and said, “I’m really happy to see you!”
“Thanks, Izzy.”
“Luci’s working out. I’ll finish up here, and then you can tell us what happened to your eye.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” She gave me a gentle push toward the house. I walked up the three steps leading onto the porch and pulled the screen door open. The house was a refurbished five-room Colonial Craftsman circa 1919. Luci and Izzy had bought the house not long after they arrived in Los Angeles and had slowly brought it back to life. I crossed the threshold, stepping onto the original wood floors which Luci had resurfaced himself on his hands and knees one square foot at time. A Batchelder-tiled fireplace anchored the room, built as the focal point at the center of the living room wall, off to my left. Two large foursquare wood-framed windows were placed equidistant on either side of the fireplace, two more again at the front of the house, filling the room with daylight. To my right, directly across from the fireplace, there was an entrance to the hallway leading to the bathroom centered between two equally sized bedrooms. I could see the retro, original matching white-tiled floor and counters in the bathroom. An open doorframe led from the living room into the kitchen bordering the back of the house. There was no television visible in the living room. They didn’t have one. A futon couch rested against the front wall. A waist-high bookshelf ran the length of the back wall filled with esoteric books about world religions, metaphysics, spirituality, history, and medicine. Two armchairs offset the fireplace, a small end table between them. Izzy and Luci were true minimalists. The home was sparsely furnished and free of any clutter, clean and humble and simple, like its owners.
I paused in the living room, slowly glancing around at the walls. The living room appeared schizophrenic because of the strange, ill-matched color scheme Luci had created. Each of the four walls was painted a different color: A deep red covered the wall with the fireplace; a light brown took up the wall directly opposite; a deep purple drew attention to the back wall bordering the kitchen; and a light mauve spread across the surface of the front wall.
As I crossed toward the kitchen on my way to the backyard, I noted the black light installed above the bookshelf at the intersection of wall and ceiling, perfectly centered midway. I looked around to see identical lights on each of the other three walls. These black lights were part of Luci’s living room art piece. When he had first shown me the color scheme of his living room walls, I made a joke about the mismatch. Luci responded with a smile, “Just wait.”
A couple of months later, he invited me over for dinner and a show. It was sometime in the summer, and we had eaten on the front porch as the sunlight slowly faded. When night lazily settled in around us, Luci stood up and led me into the living room, indicating I should sit on the couch against the front wall. Izzy sat down beside me, the look on her face telling me she knew what was coming. As I soon discovered, Luci had installed blackout curtains over each of the windows to make the room extra dark. He turned off the overhead lights and the room was enveloped in black. I raised my hand in front of my face but I couldn’t see it. I heard the sound of a switch and the room was filled with the blue glow of black light. I looked up and around, spotting the black-light frames. Then my eyes dropped
from the light sources to the back wall below. At first I was so taken with what I was seeing that the images didn’t register.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted. The back wall was filled with images of horses and buffalos and Native American Indians engaged in the hunt, galloping, hair streaming in the wind, bows and arrows held at the ready. The images were so lifelike I thought they were actually moving, the glow of the black light playing tricks on my mind. Over to the left side of the mural, a group of hunters were astride their horses, one with his hair pulled back tight in a long ponytail, the wind from the speed of his horse whipping against his cheeks. Another hunter had left his hair loose and long and black, flying free as his pinto horse took the lead in the chase. Most of the men on horseback were bare chested, small loincloths covering their groins. Lean and lithe, they laid out low over their horses as they galloped onward, the horses’ muscles straining with their flight, clearly pushing the limits of their abilities. I counted over twenty Native Americans spread out on this side of the tableau, working hard to gain ground on the buffalo stampeding away from them.
My eyes traversed the pictorial in a slow scan, noting too many buffalo to count at first, many of them about to run right off the wall into the kitchen. Closest to the floor, the scene was bound by a deep blue river, the water gushing into the distance. A large mountain range covered the top of the wall, the highest peaks nipping the ceiling. A lone black panther with green eyes stood guard over the scene unfolding below him, but he was not watching the hunt. He was staring directly at me, his gaze unnerving. I looked away for a second to get my bearings, noticing Luci was watching me, a satisfied grin on his face, his white teeth glowing in the black-light. I looked back to the panther, his hard gaze still upon me. I got up from the sofa and walked over to the wall, looking up at the panther seated on the mountain two feet above me. No matter what my vantage point, he was staring at me, alone, watching, studying, waiting.
“He’s our guardian, watching over us.”
Without turning around, I nodded. That he would.
Luci’s maternal grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee. Growing up, he had spent many summers on the reservations of different Native American tribes throughout the Southwest. His Native American roots had influenced Luci, shaping his personality and conscience. Of his grandparents, he’d been closest to Grandma Peshlaki, as I knew her, and I assumed this was a tribute to her. Since the time he first showed me his black-light art, he had covered three of the four walls with Native American themed murals, floor to ceiling. Every so often, I’d take a joint to their place, and Luci and Izzy and I would turn the lights out and smoke, watching the murals come to life before us. I made the mistake of taking Sara over there one night after we’d been dating for about eight months. Afterwards, she said she didn’t get the point of the murals. I tried to explain to her it wasn’t about a point, but that was too illogical for her. Izzy and Luci were not fans of my ex-girlfriend. They were not going to miss her.
I crossed the living room doorway into the kitchen and took the few steps I needed to reach the back door. Through the screen, I could see Luci in the small backyard going through one of his martial arts routines, wearing his ubiquitous free flowing white gi, his feet bare. The gi was his outfit of choice most days now. Since moving to California, his cross-dressing days were a thing of the past, something he left back in Pennsylvania. He swept an invisible foe’s legs out from under him, followed instantly with a round kick to the face, then finished with a jump and a 360-degree turn in the air, his other leg whipping around to take his opponent’s head off. Luci landed on both feet, took a breath, and turned around.
“Jon.”
I nodded hello.
Luci acknowledged my black eye with a silent stare, assessing me as he moved across the yard for a better look. “Finally crawled out of your cave. How are you feeling?”
“Getting better.”
“Been out picking fights, I see?” He leaned in, inspecting the damage. “Nice solid hit. Please tell me you didn’t get this from Sara’s new boyfriend.”
I shook my head.
“I’m assuming there’s a story behind this?”
“Sort of.”
Luci raised his eyebrows. One of the benefits of a best friend is that he understands understatement. “I just lost a bet with Izzy. I said it would be two months before you left your apartment. She said you’d be out before that.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Izzy didn’t see your place.” Luci passed me in the yard, grabbing a towel from the back of a lawn chair, wiping the beads of sweat from his brow. On his way back to the center of the yard to pick up his kon, a large wood staff, he patted me on the back. “I guess this means you’re ready to start your life again.”
“If the last twenty-four hours is any indication, my life is going to go on whether I want it to or not.”
“I wish you could remember that all the time.”
Luci carried his staff into the garage, waiting for me to explain myself further. I followed him into the garage that Luci had converted into a training space. The entire floor was covered in a one-inch thick, soft rubber, nonslip padding. A punching bag hung from a rafter in one corner, a self-standing, canvas-striking bag in another. A double-end striking ball tethered to both floor and ceiling was attached in the corner nearest the entrance. Luci used the double-end bag to increase his punching speed and agility. When he worked on it, the bag looked like it was invisibly attached to his fists with a cord, moving back and forth with the impact of blows without ever wavering off path, almost too fast for me to track. Sometimes, I would try to work the double-end bag but my semi-coordinated efforts amounted to a jumble of missed punches and always ended in profanity. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to master it. There were two benches, a flat bench and incline bench over to one side, a full rack of dumbbell pairs from five pounds all the way to one hundred pounds against the back wall. A squat rack was screwed in near the front where the garage door had been. Luci used the room for his private clients who studied under his tutelage as a kung fu master. However, as I learned in time, Luci hated to fight, and he preached pacifism as a way of life. Fighting was a last option for him. He often said the winner of the fight is the one who walks away without ever throwing a punch.
From the kitchen screen door, I heard Izzy say, “Lunch will be ready soon.”
“I’ll get cleaned up,” Luci responded.
Izzy disappeared back into the kitchen.
“I finished the mock-up for the Chicago couple. I’ve been waiting for your call to get it over to you.” Seeing the peevish look on my face, Luci said, “You’re not done with it, are you?”
“No.”
“Final copy is due in a couple of weeks.”
“I know.”
Over the years, as I tested new and better ways to improve my business, I discovered that the story alone was not enough to please the overanxious eyes of my brides-to-be so concerned with the aesthetics of a wedding. They not only wanted a fairytale storybook to describe their romance to their friends, they also wanted the finished product to be an eye-catcher. So, to give it an extra punch, I needed a more elaborate finished product, but I had no visually artistic ability to speak of. Enter Luci. I asked him to design the jacket covers and give each story a unique look that matched the couple. When Luci finally agreed to help, he did me one better and suggested that I begin asking clients for romantic mementos that I could include in the book: love letters, favorite pictures, a CD of favorite songs, a lock of hair, the menu of the first restaurant they ate at, movie stubs, and the like. Then Luci took these romantic mementos and created a unique canvas as the centerpiece for the story. The response from clients to Luci’s artistic touch was overwhelmingly positive; he took my business to a whole new level of success.
Over time, I developed a tiered pricing sheet so clients could choose how
detailed they wanted the book to be and how much money they wanted to spend. The basic package included only the story and a cover design. The most complicated, multimedia package meant Luci had to spend a great deal of time designing the layout of the story while incorporating all the different paraphernalia the couple wanted to include in the final product. Within a year of his involvement in my business, Luci had become an essential partner.
Sitting down on the weight bench, I asked, “Does the name ‘Tony Vespucci’ mean anything to you?”
He shook his head while wiping down the bench. “Great mobster name, though.”
“Funny you should say that.”
Luci looked up at me from his squatted position, my tone peaking his interest. “Really? Mob? As in Mafioso?”
“Yes.”
“Please don’t tell me he’s responsible for your black eye? If he is, you need to leave now, because you’re putting Izzy and me in danger.”
I smiled. “He’s our latest client.”
Luci stopped what he was doing. “I thought the Chicago client was your last client of the year.”
“That was the plan, but it got changed. While you were in China in September, I went to New York.”
“And you’re only telling me now?”
“By the time you got back, I wasn’t really thinking about my work because of Sara.”
“That’s your reason for not telling me?”
“Well, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get you involved in this one.”
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