Riga’s office building was frigid and Pen could see her own breath as she slunk down its dimly lit halls, her shoes squeaking on the linoleum. She unlocked her aunt’s office and flipped on the lights, making more noise than necessary. Pen felt awkward in the empty office, as if she didn’t belong and it didn’t want her there. But Riga had given her a key, she reminded herself, conveniently forgetting the key had been lent so she could clean over one weekend, several months ago.
Pen went straight to Riga’s whiteboard. She looked a long time at the photo of Helen’s body upon the staircase, feeling she should be shocked or disturbed by it but she wasn’t. Was she insensitive? Then she understood why – the photo didn’t seem real. It looked posed.
Pen turned her attention to the haiku, and rejected it as a bad attempt at poetry. However, the Tarot cards Riga had placed in the whiteboard montage interested her – the Hanged Man and the Magician. Pen made the same connection Riga had: the Hanged Man was upside down and one leg was bent like a number four, just like Helen’s body. But she was stumped by the Magician.
Pen took a photo of the whiteboard, then glanced over Riga’s desk. There were lots of odd scribbles on the blotter, including some sort of chart with time on the X axis and dimensions on the Y. Pen shrugged and riffled through the books on Tarot on Riga’s bookshelf. She sat cross-legged upon the floor and began to read.
Chapter 8: Tarot and Tai Chi
Riga was awakened by sunlight. She stirred, stretched, enjoying the feel of the crisp cotton bed sheets against her bare skin. There was a new smell in the room. She frowned, keeping her eyes closed, trying to identify it. The sheets rustled and her eyelids flew open.
Slowly, so as not to make a noise, she turned her head to the left. Donovan lay beside her, his chiseled countenance relaxed in sleep. She looked up at the white ceiling. Oh, God. What had she done? She thought back to the night before. They had finished the bottle – of course. One didn’t leave a bottle like that one. And then… had there been another? A third? Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She’d been drunk before, but not for years, and never like this. She clutched the sheets to her chest. Had they – ? She couldn’t remember. She’d never had a memory loss, not even during her days in the wild east, doing vodka shots with aging nomads and corrupt cops.
Was this what she had sunk to? Unable to open herself to a real relationship, she’d allowed herself to get drunk and fall into a lonely, one-night stand? Pathetic.
She slithered out of bed, careful not to wake him. By all rights she should have felt like death after drinking that much. But she felt okay – no headache, no dry mouth, no queasy stomach. In fact, she felt terrific, unusual since she was not a morning person. So she hadn’t been drugged, at least. The after-effects of that were unmistakable.
She grabbed clothes at random from her closet and headed to the guest bathroom, wanting to be naked as far from Donovan as her condo would permit. Riga needn’t have bothered, he was still sound asleep when she returned to get a pair of boots from her bedroom, his bare chest rising and falling steadily with each breath.
How late had it been when they’d finally returned home? She blanched, wondering if he had noticed her affliction. He had to have seen, unless he’d been too drunk to notice.
Riga toasted sourdough bread and smeared orange marmalade on it, considering what the hell was wrong with her and what to do about him. Should she wake him up? Throw him out? She took a bite and wandered to the sliding glass door to her balcony, and the view of the bridge. A coil of fog twined around the top of one of the bridge towers, but it would burn off soon. The sun sparkled off the water and Riga felt her mood lift.
She frowned. What had happened last night was inexplicable and out of character and wrong. If she could shrug off her guilt this easily, something was seriously off. And yet today, the world seemed ineffably beautiful and she felt lucky to be a part of it, particularly this little jewel-like corner.
Something was seriously wrong.
The wine last night had been intoxicating from the moment it touched her lips, but it was a kind of intoxication she had never known before, heightening her senses rather than dulling them, lifting her spirit rather than drowning it. Some of that feeling still lingered. The wine had expanded her, as if the boundary of her skin had fallen away and she was a part of it all. And there was something else, something that was and was not her. Her mind groped for it, but it slipped away. The door closed, it was gone.
She found herself longing for more.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Riga found her keys on the kitchen counter. She didn’t want to face Donovan, and wasn’t sure if this stemmed from shame or an unwillingness to break the spell. Her car was parked in its space on the street, she was relieved to see. She hadn’t abandoned it at the restaurant.
Riga passed it by, preferring the walk to her office. It was warmer today, but she was glad she’d worn her suede jacket. Her heels clicked on the steep pavement, knees groaning in protest at the angle of the hill.
A homeless man raved on a corner, his gray beard matted. He clenched his fists, raised them in the air. “She’s coming! It’s the end! The end of all things!”
She kept him in her peripheral vision as she passed, wary, avoiding eye contact, and continued the few blocks to her office.
The door was unlocked. She pushed it open, her mood shifting to fear-fueled anger, and stalked inside. Pen sat behind her desk, an open book and a legal pad in front of her.
Pen gave Riga a long look. “Are you going to a hoedown?”
“Casual Fridays,” Riga said. Her haphazard grab for clothing had resulted in blue jeans, cowboy boots, a white blouse, and her suede safari jacket. In comparison, Pen looked well put together in her anti-Che Guevara t-shirt, Che’s face enclosed by a red circle with a diagonal bar through it.
“Your parents told you not to come back here,” Riga said.
“Technically, they told me to stop working for you. I’m working for myself.”
Riga opened her mouth to speak but Pen continued, cutting her off. “I was doing some reading on that Tarot card you put next to the photo of Helen’s body – the Hanged Man. She’s positioned just like him, upside down with one leg bent, hands overhead… It says here that the card represents Odin, sacrificing himself on the World Tree in order to attain the Runes. Odin was a psychopomp, a walker between the worlds of the living and dead, which may have been why he’s associated with the god, Hermes, who's the founder of Hermeticism and a hermaphrodite...?” Pen waggled her brows. “But another meaning of the Hanged Man is traitor – traitors were hung upside down in Renaissance Italy. So was she a sacrifice or a traitor? What do you think?”
Riga walked to the desk and closed the book. “I think you should forget about it.”
Pen thrust her jaw out mulishly. “Why?”
“What’s the second law?”
Pen rolled her eyes. “The observer of a metaphysical event is a part of the metaphysical event.”
“That’s why.” Riga returned the book to its place on the shelf. “Someone’s dead. Your parents don’t want you involved, and neither do I.”
“Aunt Riga, I can help! Research, leg work, I want to help.”
“No.”
Pen leapt to her feet, grabbed the legal pad and pushed past Riga. “That’s not fair! You treat me like a little kid and I’m not! You’re just like everyone else!”
Riga stopped Pen with a touch on her arm. “I’ll take the office key.”
Pen breathed heavily, the color high in her cheeks, but she dug in the pocket of her cammo pants, pulled out the key, and slammed it on the desk. “There! Are you satisfied?” she shouted.
“The legal pad too.”
Pen backhanded it, slapping Riga lightly in the chest. “Here!” Her eyes glittered with tears. “Take it!” She grabbed her backpack, which lay upon the ground next to the desk, and stormed from the office.
Riga heard the front door slam. He
ll, the whole floor probably heard it. She fell into the chair behind her desk and looked at the notepad. Pen had drawn an upside down stick figure of the Hanged Man, or Helen, in the center of the paper with a circle around it, and then spokes and bubbles of connected ideas: the stick figure to Odin to Hermes, and Hermes to Hecate, Thoth, St. Michael, Gabriel, and Morpheus. They were all psychopomps, guides to the realm of the dead. Hecate had been underlined twice, and Pen had drawn another spoke to the word, “moon.”
Riga frowned and went to stand in front of the bulletin board. The haiku about the freezing moon had a certain Hecate sound to it; Hecate was a triple goddess, and associated with the moon’s phases. But that was the problem with Hecate: she had so many associations – from childbirth to crossroads to canines. It was easy to see her everywhere one looked. Hecate was worse than that trickster, Hermes, so ubiquitous no one really knew her.
She went to the window and raised it. It stuck about two inches up. She smacked the bottom of it with her hand. It gave another inch and drove a long splinter into her palm. “Brigitte?”
There was a scrabbling sound from outside. “You sly boots,” Brigitte said. “So how was trouble?”
Riga picked at the splinter. “I don’t know. I can’t remember much after I arrived at the Cliff House. Did you see us return?”
There was a long silence.
“Brigitte?” Riga prompted.
“You understand, I am not a peeping tom. I want you to have love, yes, but I respect your privacy.”
“Brigitte…” she said warningly.
“I saw you get out of ze car with him. You looked happy – two lovers returning to the nest. But I did not spy into your quarters.”
The splinter broke in two, leaving a short piece deep beneath her skin. “Darn.”
Riga started calling the numbers from Helen’s cell phone. Two of the three M’s refused to speak with her. Marta, however, agreed to meet her over coffee that afternoon.
She sorted the mail – an envelope for Mr. Chen. There was no escaping it, so dutifully she walked down the hall to his studio. The door popped open as she raised her hand to knock. They looked at each other, the surprised expression on his wizened face mirroring her own. He smoothed the front of his pale blue, quilted jacket. The light from above glinted off his smooth, balding head. He’d combed a few long wisps of gray across it.
“I brought your mail, sir,” Riga said, extending the envelope.
“Thank you. You haven’t been to practice lately.”
She winced.
“Have you been practicing your Tai Chi?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Come in. Show me.”
Riga hung her head and followed him into the studio, toeing off her shoes. He put her through her paces on the thick red and blue gym mats, adjusting an arm here, footwork there. She hadn’t forgotten it though, and he was satisfied enough to teach her half of the next move.
“Come,” he said, “I was making tea.”
She followed him to a card table, where he’d placed a hotpot. An American flag hung high on the wall above it. She watched while he poured, his movements sure and precise.
“So.” He raised the hotpot high for the final pour, tilting it back with a flourish. “How is your case?”
She took a sip from her chipped mug and made a face. The tea tasted like dishwater. “Bad.”
“As long as your client isn’t dead, you’re okay.”
Riga sighed.
He paused, blinking, tea cup hovering before his mouth. “I’m sorry. What was the cause?”
“I don’t know. It could have been an accident, but the timing… It’s just too much of a coincidence.”
“Coincidences do happen, Riga.”
“Not to me.”
“No,” he agreed sadly.
Chapter 9: What Comes in Three’s
She checked her watch. Her appointment with Marta was still hours away, so she spent the intervening time learning what she could about Herman and his death. There was a short article in an online paper from the Peninsula about the car crash. The accident had happened in Hillsborough, an upscale community south of San Francisco, around eleven at night. A photo was included with the article; the Honda hadn’t stood a chance. It must have been moving fast for that sort of damage and Riga wondered what Herman had been doing there so late and alone.
A follow up article decrying drunk driving mentioned the crash. The accident had occurred after Herman had left a local bar called the Hanged Man. The coincidences were coming thick and fast. A third article, published a week later, made no mention of alcohol as the cause of the crash, however.
Herman’s obituary provided no enlightenment. It did answer one question though: he had no family aside from Helen. She went to the Apollo Group’s website; Apollo was based in South San Francisco and specialized in “green and sustainable” development. Its website was discreet to the point of useless. More interesting were the other web posts about the company. Riga clicked on the file: APOLLO GROUP IS A POWERFUL, SCHEMING LAND COMPANY:
“The Apollo Group is a powerful, scheming land company. They are leaving a path of destruction in our state and countless numbers of victims along the way. They are very smart, very cunning. They zeroed in on the new high speed rail corridor because they saw large parcels of land in populated areas. Under the guise of “green” and “sustainable” development, they are building residential communities along the rail tracks. But it is a ruse.
State officials realize that high speed rail is not economically feasible. There is no high speed rail system in the world which makes a profit, or even breaks even. They all run on subsidies. There is no high speed rail system in the world which has been built on budget. California, a state which is already on the verge of bankruptcy, is being pushed over the edge by a cadre of politicians, greedy businessmen, and land developers like the Apollo Group for a losing project. Apollo Group wins, citizens and the communities which will be bifurcated and destroyed by high speed rail will lose. People are losing their property through eminent domain and low income neighborhoods are being hit the hardest. Ridership figures have been over estimated. Ticket costs, by the rail authority’s own admission, will be twice the original estimate. The “green” citizens of California have sold their soul to the Devil.”
The article had been written by a local community group and Riga shook her head. You’re never going to get one hundred percent popularity, she thought.
She called Dora, the chain smoking editor of a local paper on the Peninsula. Once the greetings were dispensed with, Riga said, “Hey, what do you know about the Apollo Group?”
“I know the CEO is a smug bastard and they’re minting money,” Dora rasped. Riga could hear her blissful exhale, and imagined smoke curling from Dora’s nostrils. “They’re well connected and I haven’t heard anything negative, though of course the folks who are losing their homes and businesses to development through eminent domain aren’t happy. There are a few angry neighborhood associations in their wake as well. Why? Is there something else I should know?”
“I’d like to write an article on the Apollo Group.”
“For me, I take it?”
“That’s why I’m calling.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end, then: “Go for it.” The line buzzed in Riga’s ear.
She locked up, thinking of food, and headed out to lunch. She caught herself on autopilot to the billiard parlor and stopped short on the sidewalk. A man with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder ran into her, cursed.
She ignored him. What if Donovan was there? What if he wasn’t? She dropped into an Indian restaurant instead, and filled up on samosas and dal, staring blankly at a pink and orange wall hanging of a two-headed god riding a ram, both his heads engulfed in flames. Ouch.
The waitress interrupted her musings, placing a cup of steaming chai before her. Riga took a sip and screwed up her face, her own head going up in flames.
S
he lingered until it was time to meet Marta. They had agreed on neutral territory – a chain coffee shop near Marta’s office on Market Street, where she worked for a realtor. Marta had brought backup with her – Marilyn and Marie – and the four settled at a cramped table, jostling elbows.
Marilyn glared suspiciously at Riga. It wasn’t hard for Riga to take their measure – Marta wanted to talk, Marilyn wanted her to shut up, and Marie was the nervous peacemaker.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Riga said, smiling. Just girl talk here, nothing to be afraid of.
Marta brushed a wisp of cropped black hair behind her ear. She was slender, with a dark, Mediterranean look to her, and restlessly tapped her cardboard cup on the table.
“We couldn’t believe it when we heard.” Marie darted glances between Marta and Marilyn. She was a mousy woman, with sloping shoulders, and a discreet tire around her middle.
“We don’t have much time,” Marilyn snapped. “We’ve got jobs.” She compressed her lips into a thin red line and swung one leg over the other. It was a neat trick in her hounds tooth pencil skirt, even if she did kick Marta in the process.
Marilyn had a stretched, predatorial look to her. Her face looked like it had been made up in a department store –perfectly swooping black brows, cat’s eye liner, and perfectly blended but a little too much foundation.
“I’ll jump right into it then,” Riga said. “Helen hired me—“
“We know,” Marilyn interrupted. “I told her she was wasting her money. This city is crawling with psychic frauds.” Her lips curled into a sneer.
“I’m not a psychic.” Riga tried for a smile, just one of the girls. But she’d never been just one of the girls.
“Are you a fraud?” Marilyn purred.
“Marilyn!” Marta protested, brushing Marilyn’s footprint from her navy slacks.
The Metaphysical Detective (A Riga Hayworth Paranormal Mystery) Page 4