by Harker Moore
Normally he felt refreshed after even the most strenuous kata practice, but this morning was different. He looked up to where the sky showed cloudless between buildings, a budding blue that seemed nevertheless dusty and dispirited. The city looked worn. As worn as he felt. Not an auspicious beginning for what was going to be another long day.
The traffic moved relatively quickly, and he reached headquarters in good time, driving down the ramp to the underground garage, catching an already crowded elevator to the eleventh floor. He walked down the hall to Major Case, stopping in the Operations Room for some early morning face time with the officers who were hanging around before the daily briefing.
In his office, he brewed tea, starting the water boiling for a pot of gyokuro. The word translated as pearl dew and had to do with the special practice of shading the leaves to increase chlorophyll and reduce the tannin. His grandmother had prized the tea for the delicacy of its flavor, and always made it properly, sitting ceremoniously on the tatami floor, her best lacquer tray set with cups, teapot, and cooler.
He could not observe such niceties, but he let the boiling water cool for a while before pouring it into the pot and sitting back to savor the aroma. The scent of gyokuro never failed in its power to send him back to his boyhood on Hokkaido. What he remembered today was a foggy morning when he was seven, not long after his father’s visit had ended with the announcement that he had taken an American wife and would be staying in the United States to practice medicine.
The boy Akira had retreated on that morning of mist, as he often did then, to the beach near his grandfather’s farm. He had sat on a rocky shelf, hugging his thin knees, staring out toward the veiled swell of ocean. His grandfather had found him there, and they had sat together in silence, listening as the waves broke themselves against the faithless rocks.
“My father is a bad son,” he had spoken at last, turning to look at his grandfather, the words seeming to form themselves without will from his mouth.
“Isao believes that he is following his true path, and only he can be the true judge of that.” His grandfather remained staring ahead. “I have taught him always to follow the Tao. So I say that Isao is a good son.”
“But Grandmother believes that this second wife has deceived him.” He was stubborn. “She says that my father has been fooled into abandoning his family.”
Still his grandfather did not turn to him. “Ah,” he spoke, “but perhaps Isao knows better than the grief of a mother’s heart that to be deceived by this woman is his path.”
He had said nothing to that, pretending to himself that he did not understand.
He reached for the pot now, and poured a cup of tea. He held it in both hands, letting the thin porcelain conduct the heat to his fingers. Karma was cause and effect, but its lines of force were subtle. Did he not believe now, as Isao had then, that he walked his true path? What other life would he desire? And how else would this life have been possible without his father and his father’s decisions? Yin and yang. Pleasure and pain. The resolution of opposites.
His grandfather’s sorrow at Isao’s departure had been as great as his own. But his wisdom had been greater. This was the way of things with youth and age. But as he must keep reminding himself, he was no longer that boy, Akira. He should pick up the phone and call his father.
“Sir . . .”
He looked up to see Walt Talbot standing in the doorway.
“I thought you’d want to see these.” Talbot came forward with a stack of photographs in his hand. “The surveillance shots from the Olsen wake and funeral,” he explained.
“Who’d we get?”
“Nobody.” Talbot was clearly hesitating. “. . . Not anyone we believe is a suspect.”
He picked up the photos from where the detective had placed them on his desk. “Anything else, Walt?”
“No, sir.” Talbot seemed glad to escape.
The photo of interest was buried midway through an endless parade of strangers. Despite the fact that he’d guessed, it was still a jolt to see her. He made a conscious effort to focus away from his anger, to concentrate on how beautiful his wife looked in her gray dress and coat. How the camera had captured her confidence.
Like her tiny one-room apartment, Lisa Hennessy was a mess. Spiky hair flattened. Rings of makeup beneath her eyes. She greeted Talbot and Rozelli in pink fuzzy slippers, faded flannel pull-ons, and a sweatshirt. She’d gotten in from the airport after 3 A.M., she explained. Talbot’s phone call earlier this morning had interrupted her few hours of sleep.
She locked the peeling door and rehooked two safety chains, despite the fact she’d just let in the police. Pushing rumpled blankets to the end of the sagging couch, she invited the men to sit, slouching herself in a wounded mismatched chair.
“We been trying to reach you since we found your number in Sarah Laraby’s diary.” Rozelli pulled out a notebook.
“I was back in Boise,” Hennessy explained. “Lost my job and needed to hit the parents up for cash.” A crooked smile softened the words, making her face momentarily appealing.
“But you heard Sarah’s body had been found,” Talbot spoke. They had gone over some of this on the phone.
Hennessy nodded, her body slightly rocking in the chair. “It was weird,” she said, “seeing Selkie’s . . . Sarah’s picture all over the TV at home. I had to blab that I knew her back here in New York. The parents were totally freaking.”
“But you had known she was missing,” Talbot prompted.
“Sure.” The head was still going, like one of those dashboard dolls. “I just thought she’d turn up all right.”
“Why’d you think that?” Rozelli asked.
The head had stopped, as if concentration required it. “Selkie had a real life. A decent job and all.” The mouth scrunched sideways. “She was just playing at being rad.”
“Radical?” Talbot asked for confirmation.
“I don’t mean politically,” Hennessy explained. “Just, you know . . . wild.”
“She take drugs?” Rozelli picked it up.
“Sure. But not the hard stuff. X . . . stuff like that sometimes.”
“How else was she wild, Lisa?”
“The way she dressed and shit.”
“And shit? You mean sex?”
“Selkie Girl was no virgin.” It was meant to sound offhanded, but didn’t.
Rozelli pressed. “We’ll have to have a list of the guys she was sleeping with.”
The open face shut down, head now moving sideways. “I’m no snitch,” Hennessy complained.
“Know who Randy Lancaster is?” Talbot cut through her protest.
Rozelli shot him a look. It was clear from Hennessy’s body language that the question had hit home. “Randy Lancaster?” he spoke again to prod her.
“You mean the Shaman.” Her hostile expression caved, but the bedroom eyes had lost their sleepiness, the makeup rings making them look hard rather than vulnerable.
“The Shaman, yes,” Rozelli repeated her words, “you know him?”
“We’re not friends.” The voice hard as the eyes now. “But I know who he is. A lot of kids do.”
“And Sarah knew him?” Talbot said.
Hennessy turned to him, as if suddenly eager. “She was obsessed with him.”
“And was Mr. Lancaster aware of that?”
“Aware? That was the way he liked it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s part of his trip. Like he’s some kind of god up there. Some girls really buy into it.” Hennessy’s voice dripped scorn.
“We need to be clear with this, Lisa,” Talbot said. “Are you saying Randy Lancaster was having sex with Sarah Laraby?”
“That’s a nice way to put it,” said Hennessy, hinting at knowledge that had just guaranteed her a formal statement downtown.
Evening, and her husband had come home full of anger. Hanae could feel it. Could smell it on his skin. Could hear it in the soft chomp of his stockinged feet
. But in the same moment she could sense that he was seeking to conceal his anger. So that now, as Jimmy settled by her side on the tatami, she could count the breaths between his words. And his words were restrained, speaking of seeing her in a surveillance photo that had been taken at the wake of Robin Olsen. Like soft clinks of glass against glass came the sound of his words. And as he spoke, she heard in her mind the monk Saigyo’s poem, reminding her of who and what she was, so that she might wisely answer him:
loneliness without which
living would be unpleasant
She was no monk, but a monk’s life in many ways Hanae had lived. A simple monk’s passage in some manner she had followed. Her solitary life, chiseled from blindness, had almost from the first been more than an accepted aloneness, more than an exceptional existence. Her sightlessness had become in time a welcomed bliss. A world filled with a blind woman’s smells, a blind woman’s touches. A blind woman’s hearing and taste. A blind woman’s instincts.
But when Jimmy had come, with the offer of his heart, leading her beyond the boundaries of her unconventional though well-ordered world, she had willingly crossed over. With her husband, in the new island city, she had stretched her separateness, not falling into an alien dark, but rather into another kind of light. Her path remaining ever constant, but greater its distance and wider its breadth.
Her husband speaking . . . “I am trying to understand what it is you want, Hanae.”
She wished she did not have to speak, that he could but read her thoughts. “I want you to return what it was you gave when first we became husband and wife.”
“And what is that, Wife? Please tell me. I do not want to deny you.”
So difficult this was. She stood, moving to one of the cages that held her finches. “A childless wife has a most insecure position. . . . But then Mama gave birth. To a girl, small and soft, laid inside the new bed, covered with new quilts. And it was with great difficulty that Mama waited out the traditional year before her girl could come to her bed, sleep in her arms, warm and safe under the covers.
“I do not know when it was Mama discovered her baby girl was blind. I think she kept it secret from Papa for a while. But she would learn that it did not matter. Papa cared not that his girl was not perfect in the eyes of others. She was perfect in his eyes.”
She turned and smiled. “Like all good Japanese mothers, Mama took her baby girl to a Shinto shrine after the first month, strapped and clinging like a kitten to her back. Then the girl learned to ride the rhythms of Mama-san’s shoulders and spine. A mere bundle no longer. She was now in the world. Though it was to be a different world for her.”
She walked away from the birds, sat back down beside him on the tatami rug. She found Taiko, placed his head in her lap. “He is a good dog.”
“Yes, and better than mine is his understanding.”
This time she laughed, tugging gently at the shepherd’s ears, then again finding her husband’s eyes. “The first color I ever felt was red. The bright red dresses Mama put me in. I jumped and tumbled in those red dresses, a leaf blown from a maple, feeling the impatient energy of the color against my skin. Mama laughed and told me to enjoy my red dresses, since according to custom, I would not wear red again until I was sixty. . . . Do you remember your grandmother wearing red, Jimmy?”
He shook his head.
“I was spoiled beyond my years, Husband. Because I was greatly loved. And because of the blindness. Though never did I feel shame or sorrow from my parents’ hearts. Only joy.”
“Hanae . . .” He moved. Touched the sleeve of her kimono. Brushed the tips of her fingers.
She pulled back. “Please, Husband, I must make you understand. You must not allow your heart to come between. It is not comfort I seek, but understanding.”
“I am listening.”
“My aunt was ogamisama. One who sees not with eyes, but with the constant stirrings of the heart. But the days of such women were past when I came as a blind child to my parents. And though to be blind is not what one would wish, I was never bitter. I was content in the making of my own way. My vision was both gift and burden.”
She took his face into her hands. “I cannot be blind to who you are, to what you do. I cannot wish for the man you are not. That man would not be the James Sakura I love.” She kissed his mouth softly. “And you must not wish for the woman I am not. Could you love such a woman, Husband?”
Her hands fell into her lap, her head bowing a little. “It is too late to deny the forces that made our two paths one. And I cannot break my bond, darken my vision, fail to seek what truth there may be.” She looked up now. “I only wish to have returned what once you freely gave. Do not make of me a caged bird, my husband.”
Always, in his more reflective moods, he wondered if the smell had finally forced Mother, and Daddy reluctantly, to come to the decision that the boarding school run by the good brothers on the Gulf Coast was the solution. Of course, Mother had always been seeking solutions. If she had had keener instincts at seventeen, she would have arrived at the ultimate solution and undergone an abortion, flushing the festering mess out of her uterus once and for all. Even her Roman Catholicism would not have eclipsed her will if her mind had been more agile. But she was young then, and with the passing years she became more perceptive.
Of course, her instincts were less than wisdom, but something more akin to the quick lively fires he started at the age of seven between the pine and tupelo behind the big house. And she had been full of fire that year when she had Didon Petit pull up the floorboards in the bedroom and haul out his prized collections. Left-brain had warned that such things should be buried.
Still, he had enjoyed those souvenirs he could smell and hold anytime he wanted. At least until the real rot took hold. And he’d thought a great deal about skin then, skin that was created to hold everything together, as he’d sat crouched on the floor, the boards gapping between his legs like a toothless grin. Left-brain was always on alert during those times, listening for footfalls on the stairwell that would spell doom and bring down the Kingdom.
But the Kingdom did come tumbling down, and it was the smell that had finally been his undoing, that sweet odor of fresh decay that gave him even harder erections than sniffing his fingers after he’d felt up one of Bessie’s nieces, who hung around the back porch like stray cats during the long hot summer.
He had thought as he rode the Sunset Limited down the tracks from New Orleans toward Biloxi, gazing through the double-wide window at the green kudzu that had overtaken everything, that in time Mother’s plan would fail—flushing out the big house, like it was her seventeen-year-old womb. He had closed his eyes, letting the chug-a-lug of the train become his heartbeat, and fallen to sleep, his hand resting against his chest and the cloth pouch safeguarding the one dried remnant from his collection that Didon Petit had not taken away.
It had been the rape of another student that had finally wrecked Mother’s plan. Though Left-brain had contemplated the idea like a calculus problem, had campaigned for a safer hole to plug, some inconsequential nobody off campus, it had been Right-brain who had pushed Amos Gainsford into the dark and ravaged his tight hairy anus.
He had been considerably more naive then, ready to pull down his trousers for the paddling from Brother Clarence he half-enjoyed. But he read another message in the disciplinarian’s eyes. He was going home. And was lucky, according to Brother Alphonsus, that he wasn’t going to jail.
So he went home on the same train that had delivered him, with his hand over his heart, and the voice of Left-brain screaming in his head that he should have listened. And Mother was waiting, ready to bring down the Kingdom so that its resurrection would never again be possible.
Put the bad boy away. For good. Lock the beastie in a cage. Hole him up in a sanitarium. With papers, of course. A formal commitment underwritten by Dr. Jasper Lovell, a true Southern gentleman and faithful family retainer.
But he never saw the inside of the fancy
loony bin that was Mother’s solution. She died before his bags could be packed. A fire burned down the big house and everything in it, the flesh steaming and simmering, an arrogant aroma, unlike the passive stink which had risen from the floorboards of his room and set the clock in motion.
CHAPTER
17
Sakura stood alone behind the one-way glass, observing the man who slouched in a chair at the scarred table in the interview room. Randy Lancaster, the deejay known as Shaman, had lied to Talbot and Rozelli when they’d talked to him at the club; for one thing, he’d given a false address. But his cell phone number had been accurate. And when contacted this morning, he had agreed to come in.
He was wearing a fringed suede jacket and jeans that were frayed at the knees, which gave the impression that he was physically at ease. But beneath it, he seemed nervous. A fact that was in his favor. It was the real criminals who were totally relaxed while waiting to be questioned. Lancaster kept glancing around, his gaze coming back to the mirrored wall, as if he guessed he was being watched. Sakura tried imagining him holding a plastic bag over a victim’s face, and found it wasn’t hard. “Too jumpy to be guilty” wasn’t much of a rule, and the Shaman might be new to serial murder.
“Ready?” Delia was waiting for him.
Sakura nodded and picked up a folder, following her next door.
Lancaster looked up as they approached. His deep-set eyes were very dark, the irises so nearly black they seemed to absorb the pupils. The contrast with white even teeth was both sensual and sinister. And the energy he projected was palpable this close. Not fear, but an animal magnetism.
“This is Officer Adelia Johnson. I’m Lieutenant James Sakura,” he said, sitting down across from the deejay.
“And I’m here . . . why?” The blunt question did not erase the smile.
“A few questions,” Sakura answered.
Lancaster’s eyes went to Adelia, sitting next to the mounted camera. “Maybe I need a lawyer,” he said.