Three Bedrooms, Two Baths, One Very Dead Corpse
Page 13
Like all games my mother played, this cat-and-mouse version would only end in a tragic explosion, the ground littered with shattered bodies and ambulances wailing.
“Baptist?” she said with a calculatedly perceptible moue of disgust.
“No,” Alex replied with a little chuckle, trying to keep my mother at bay.
“You’re not Jewish, are you?” she offered, scanning his shaved head to see if there was any sign of dark hair and reevaluating the size of his nose. People who live in glass houses, Mother.
“No, I’m not Jewish.”
My mother stabbed a piece of perfectly squared filet mignon, delivered it daintily into her mouth, then chewed and swallowed. Now she was ready. She let loose her final volley.
“You do go to church, don’t you?”
Alex, who was the perfect diplomat up to this point, decided to throw his cards on the table. Alex was very tolerant of fools, but when people challenged his beliefs—or his right not to have any where religion was concerned—he wasn’t about to back down.
“Mrs. Kazulekis . . .”
“Mildred.”
“Mildred, I don’t believe in God.”
“You don’t believe in God?” Mildred countered. “Then what do you believe in?”
“Myself. Understanding myself and family, being kind and helpful to others, exploring this great planet.”
“That sounds like a summer program at Outward Bound, Alex. What about your plans for eternity?”
“Mildred, I plan to spend it with my ashes spread across the Torres del Paine mountain peaks in Chile. And after four billion years when the Sun expands and incinerates the Earth, I, like everything left on what’s left of Earth, will probably drift into space until we coalesce into another gas cloud that will condense into a star, and we’ll start the whole process over again, until the universe expands and tears itself apart in what cosmologists think will ultimately happen in an event called the Big Rip.”
This shut my mother up, mostly because she had only a vague idea of what Alex said, though she knew it had somehow been sarcastic—and definitely something to which the Pope wouldn’t agree because it made people think. My father, always living in the shadow of his own life, stepped into the light with his own stalemate breaker.
“You know, this filet is really quite good, but I can grill a pretty decent steak myself on my own charcoal grill, after, of course, I have properly tended the coals using my homemade charcoal chimney, made from a coffee can. Yes siree, a coffee can. Isn’t that right, Mildred?” he cajoled my mother, nudging her in the arm in a lost effort to upright the conversation.
But, as usual, my mother was done with the subject. If her son-in-law was going to be an atheist and her daughter was completely uninterested in religion, then maybe there was hope for the grandson . . . and it would be a grandson . . . Boys always counted for more in Lithuanian families: They could clean stables, bring in the harvest, and fight off Cossacks—even though we lived in Michigan.
“So what about your children?”
“Mom, don’t you think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself with—” I tried to squeeze in.
“Shush,” she said, holding up her hand to set the stage for what Alex was going to say.
“I don’t have any.”
“No, but when you do,” Mom countered.
“What about them?” Alex toyed with her.
“What religion would you bring them up in?”
“I would let them choose, Mrs. Kazulekis. The way I see it, I think that if you have a child, it’s better to let them make their own decisions once they’re smart enough to make them. To bring a child up in a religion just because a parent wants them to be brought up that way seems dictator-ish. It’s like telling a child you will think my way, feel the way I do. Like Thomas Jefferson, I believe in the inherent rights of man.”
Alex had her there. Mildred was very firm in her Catholicism, but it was hard to argue with a Founding Father. Even if she knew no more than the fact that Thomas Jefferson ran around in what she considered drag and lived somewhere in Virginia, you didn’t mess with core American values . . . whatever they were.
Alex, already running rings around Mildred, turned to my father in order to change the conversation.
“So, Mr. Kazulekis, tell me about this charcoal chimney you designed.”
And that, as they say, was that.
I put the photograph that I had been reminiscing about down on a shelf and shut the door to the closet, leaving all those memories lying there for another day, another time.
The next morning, I stood outside the death house, waiting for Coyote Woman, er, Barbara, to arrive. When she pulled up in a Dodge minivan that was encrusted with the dirt of countless centuries, I was somewhat surprised. I half expected her to be driving a Volkswagen beetle with a huge daisy painted on the side. Or maybe a panel van with dragon murals airbrushed onto the doors, just something other than a vehicle more associated with ferrying kids to and from school and Little League games. Her car ground to a halt on brake pads that were probably as thin as a politician’s alibi and the grinding squeal was so high-pitched, it opened a clogged sinus. The driver’s side door opened with a haunted-house creaking, rebounded from the hinge’s farthest reach, then slammed again on her flowing dress, the crystals sewn to the hem tinkling against the van’s running board. Where did this woman get a dress like that? Was there some kind of Psychic Dress for Less store? I was paying how much for this?
“It’s one of those days,” Coyote Woman said as she finally emerged from her Indiana Jones Soccer Mom vehicle. “I had a premonition last night that this was going to be a rough day.”
She approached me, cupping my outstretched hand in her hands as if she were trying to incubate it. No shaking of hands for this woman—it would probably disturb the healing powers in it. She turned back to her car and opened the back hatch of her wagon, the hinges creaking even worse than the driver’s side door, perhaps forcing a pod of whales in California to beach themselves. (“Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that?!” they said in Whalese as they threw themselves on the sand in confusion.)
We talked a lot while she stood at the open hatchback of her car, me mostly chatting about my life and, of course, Alex. Lots of Alex, who, by the way, couldn’t make it to the cleansing because of a burst water line in a house he had listed.
Coyote Woman wrestled with a plastic crate on wheels, extracting it from the womb of her car and dropping it on the pavement with a loud crash.
“There,” she said satisfyingly, turning toward the house across the street in order to sum it up like an opponent in a sumo wrestling match. She closed her eyes and began to moan. “Oh, oh . . . the aura is very disturbed by the murder. We must put things right.”
“Coyote Woman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not my listing. The murder took place in this house,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction at the structure in front of us.
“I knew that,” she said, trying to recover her mistake. “I was just commenting on the negative energy I was receiving from that house across the street.”
“Yes, I know. That color’s hideous.”
“I was talking about energy given off by the house, not bad design. Although, now that you mention it, the trim color really sucks.”
Figuring that this was only going to get sillier and sillier, I felt it was time to get down to business. I steered Coyote Woman toward the house, opened the door, and gestured to her to enter. I wanted for her to get her job done so I could pick her brain for information.
Coyote held out her hand dramatically. She fished a crystal the size of a small dove out of a pocket in her dress. She held the massive crystal in her hand and pointed it toward the house like a surface-to-air missile. She invoked a litany of words, most of which included “spirits” (fives times), “energy” (three times), “she-goddess” (two times), and “great horned toad” (?). She then closed her eyes while holding the crystal toward the
house, presumably to wait for it to launch. She returned the crystal to her dress pocket and returned to the land of the living.
I decided to play along a little. It would be amusing and help to pass the time.
“Coyote Woman, could you tell me what kind of crystal that is?”
“It’s a citrine. It’s the only crystal that doesn’t accumulate negative energy. In fact, it dissipates it.”
“Wow,” I responded with false interest. You’d think that a person with extrasensory powers could detect the disbelief even in my voice, but Barbara seemed clueless. “It must be very powerful.”
“Miss Thorne, you just expressed a common misconception about crystals . . . which is why so many people report that they don’t work.”
Maybe they don’t work because they’re just rocks, I thought.
“Crystals don’t have any power of their own. Even a lot of so-called psychics think that crystals emanate power.”
More insincerity. “They don’t?”
“No, crystals are like lenses that focus power from other sources.”
“I see dead people,” I whispered.
Coyote Woman rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Miss Thorne . . .”
“I’m sorry. I envision myself as sort of a comic.”
“Then you need amazonite.”
“Does it cure flatulence?”
“Miss Thorne!” Coyote Woman intoned like a frustrated fifth-grade teacher trying to lecture about fractions. “It clears creative blockages.”
“And . . . ?”
“Then you could put your humor down on paper and make some money and wouldn’t have to sell houses for a living.”
Ouch—a psychic bitch-slap. I started to reevaluate my opinion about Coyote Woman’s perceptiveness.
“So, as I was saying, crystals just focus energy from the elements or spirits through me and through the crystal. That’s where the power of crystals come from . . . not from the crystal itself . . . although citrine is good for curing constipation.”
I didn’t want to think about how she used citrine for curing reluctant turds. Even more importantly, I was certainly glad Coyote Woman didn’t ask me to hold that crystal. Like Harvey Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor who is said to have remarked to evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton when she shook his hand, “I’m surprised you shook it . . . You never know where it’s been.”
Coyote grabbed the handle of her rolling crate, and, like a New Age flight attendant, made for the front door of my listing with me in tow. She stopped abruptly and turned around with an outstretched hand.
“No, you must not enter while I cleanse! This can be very dangerous. The negative energy must be purged from the house completely. Unprotected, the energy could enter you.”
“Couldn’t I hold a clove of garlic or a piece of Kryptonite?”
“Miss Thorne, you shouldn’t make fun of these things. We are dealing with powers you can’t begin to understand.
I relented. “Okay, okay, I will defer to the expert. I will wait here.”
A quick nod from Coyote Woman’s head: She was ready. She faced the house, raised her hands up to the sky and took a deep breath, held it for what seemed an eternity, then exhaled with the force of a tuba player between pursed lips. There was an uncomfortable moment of silence; then Coyote Woman corralled her crate on wheels and headed bumping over doormats and thresholds into the home. Coyote Woman left the front door open, supposedly to let the door hit the bad energy in the ass (or asses) when it exited, so I struggled to get a glimpse of what this crazy bitch was doing inside, but she must have caught on to my plan and moved her crate into the kitchen where I couldn’t see her. I tried to act uninterested into her doings, but every once in a while, I would stand on my toes to peek into the windows.
Coyote Woman began with incantations, followed by clouds of sage that she burned and wafted around the house with what looked like the large wing of a bird, I swear to God. So much for being one with the earth. She walked from room to room, reciting strange, poetic incantations and waving huge fog banks of sage toward the front door, from which she finally emerged, standing on the front steps. She spreadeagled herself in front of the door. Oh, I got it . . . to barricade the spirits from reentering the house after she’d kicked their butts out. After holding this pose long enough for several neighbors walking their dogs to see and muse over, she reached into a pocket in her diaphanous dress and pulled out a handful of tiny rust-colored crystals, which she sprinkled liberally in front of the door.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Carnelian. It protects against fear, envy, and rage, and helps to banish sorrow from the emotional structure,” she answered, no doubt quoting dutifully from the book Using Crystals to Promote Good Energy and Healthy Bowel Movements.
I just had to ask this question: “Coyote Woman, so if you chased out the bad—”
She corrected me with a hand raised to my lips. “Negative energy.”
“Okay, negative energy, so where does it go now? Does it go into another house? Another person?”
“They wander the earth in search of new misfortunes.”
“Can I ask you another question?”
A look of fear came over Coyote Woman. “The owl wing came from a roadkill. I didn’t shoot it!” she blurted out. “I know they’re a protected species!”
“No, not that. Who do you think killed Doc?”
“Marvin Sultan . . . no doubt about it . . . and the others.”
“The others?”
“His financial backers in Orange County. And the Realtors.”
“Realtors? Be careful, I’m one of them.”
Coyote Woman gave me a reassuring smile. “You’re not one of them. I can tell, you know, I’m—”
“A psychic. Yes, I know.”
“I knew you were going to say that,” Coyote Woman laughed. “Just a little psychic humor.”
A little, I thought. No sooner than I had thought that, I worried that maybe she was even just a little psychic. She intercepted what I just thought. Shit. I searched her face for a sign of indignation. None. I was okay.
“It’s obvious. Marvin wants to build four hundred overblown tract mansions on the one of the most sacred spots in Palm Springs. And the most beautiful: the Chino Cone. One of the main roads in north Palm Springs is called Vista Chino . . . view of China.”
“Why is it called the Chino Cone. I get the cone part . . . it’s triangular in shape. What part of that area resembles China?”
“There were a lot of alcoholics here in the past, what can I say?”
“And you think the Realtors are in on this?”
“Well, someone has to be an agent for Marvin buying up all this land.”
“And do you have anyone in mind?”
“Mary Dodge.”
“You didn’t hesitate a second before you said that.”
“I didn’t have to. She’s had her manicured hand in so many deals to build on the hillsides, against the hillsides . . . anywhere she can make big bucks. And speaking of bucks . . .” she drifted off, looking innocently skyward and around me, but holding out her hand ever so slightly.
“Oh, yes, how much was it again?” I asked.
“Six hundred . . . because it was a rush.”
“Can I write you a check?”
This was met with a scowl, followed by a roll of the eyes heavenward. I knew she clearly stated she wanted cash. Okay, sue me. I wanted to write this off as a business expense and wanted a receipt. This was a legitimate deduction . . . if not just a little bit insane. I considered for a moment what tax-deductible category I would file this one under. Domicile exorcism? Psychic market-report consultation? I fished around in my purse, extracted my wallet, and started to make a check out for six hundred dollars to Barbara . . .
“Barbara?” I asked, looking up from my checkbook. “Your last name?”
“Coyote.”
“Nooooo.”
“Yes, I’m not kidding. It�
�s Coyote,” Barbara admitted with a laugh. “My husband’s name.”
“The one you shot in the ass with rock salt?”
“Yes, the very one. I kept it because it helps me in my work.”
“And do you mind if I ask what was your maiden name?”
“Not at all. Paicopodopolis.”
“Good idea sticking with Coyote. Can I ask you one more thing?” I ventured.
“I don’t have a receipt, if that’s what you were going to ask,” Coyote Woman countered.
“No, not that. Do you sense that I’m in any danger, being wrapped up in this thing?”
“You will be if you go snooping around. Several people who made trouble for Marvin have disappeared over the years.”
“So you sense that I was considering pursuing this thing a little further?”
“Listen, honey, I don’t have to be psychic to see that you invited me out here to ask questions. You could care less whether I cleansed your listing or not.”
I looked at her for a minute, surprised by her brashness. “Boy, you are good.”
“I can do better than that. You better tell your ex-husband what you’re planning to do. Something tells me he’s not going to like you getting mixed up in this.”
“He agreed to help me,” I said, confessing.
“That’s because he’s still in love with you. And you’re still in love with him. You don’t have to be a psychic to see that.”
When I pulled up in my driveway, I could see the curtains in Regina’s front windows moved aside by a hand, then fall back to their perpetually half-closed position. Before I could even take my key out of the ignition, Regina’s liver-spotted hand was excitedly knocking on my driver’s side window. Today’s T-shirt proclaimed, RIDDEN HARD AND PUT AWAY WET.
I got out of the car, wondering what Regina was so animated about.
“I have the most wonderful news!” she blurted out to me as I slid out of the car. “Doc Winters was poisoned !”
“Er, yes . . . that’s great, Regina! I’m hoping you have more tragedies to tell me?”
“Nope, that’s my big news,” she gushed.
“Did you hear this on the news?”