“Tell me what you want me to know,” I say. And I am standing at the base of a tall watchtower. It is dark inside. I know all my enemies are within. I look at the winding staircase leading upward. It wants me to climb the stairs.
“I can’t,” I say. “It is too soon,” and I am back laying on cold cement, my father scowling from the corner, my cheek pressed against the floor. A body lies down on top of mine, heavy but comforting. A low voice speaks into my ear. It is neutral, neither male nor female.
“Don’t you know that you can find freedom, just with your heart?” it says.
I feel afraid. I look at my wrists, and see that they are in shackles.
“Is this prison?” I ask.
The room fills with the gentle arpeggios of a distant harp.
“No,” the voice says. “This is paradise….”
Harp notes invaded my brain, rolling up and down in relentless repetition.
I grabbed for my phone, knocking a full glass of water sideways onto the floor. The glass shattered, creating a dripping mess of broken shards.
“Shit!”
Tank leapt from the base of the bed, landed on the floor with a thump, and sped out the door, my dream slithering away behind him.
The harp sounded another round of dulcet notes, making me want to smash something else, this time on purpose.
“Hello,” I croaked into the phone. I checked the time. I’d been asleep maybe five hours.
“Mr. Norbu?” The voice was high-pitched and panicky. “This is Wesley Harris, Freda’s husband. She’s in a coma. I didn’t know who else to call.”
I took the Mustang. Freda was in Glendale, at Providence Saint Joseph, and I didn’t want to waste any time.
As I sped along Pacific Coast Highway, the dawn sky scalloped with pinks and blues, I tried to retrieve my dream as best I could. Something about my father, and a tower.
A sentence floated up: Don’t you know that you can find freedom, just with your heart? I glanced at the ocean, and more came drifting back. Pelicans. I was close to knowing something, but not close enough.
A chorus of crickets erupted in my pocket—I had changed my ringtone from celestial strumming to nature’s jaunty fiddlers, much more my style—and I fumbled to attach the little white earbuds that would keep me legal. Mike’s goofball grin beamed from my screen.
“You’re up late,” I said to Mike.
“You’re up early,” he replied.
Then I swear I heard soft laughter. Female laughter.
“Are you with a girl?” I said.
“Not ‘a’ girl, ‘my’ girl,” he said. More giggles.
Well, that explained the ear-to-ear grin.
“I’ve got some answers for you, boss,” he went on.
“First things first,” I answered. “Your girl. I need some who, what, and when’s, please.”
“Tricia, a grad student studying cultural anthropology at UCLA, and we met at my rave the other night. She’s practically moved in.”
“To your house?” My voice was more of a bleat. Was he out of his mind? “Are you out of your mind?”
“Hey, it’s cool, Ten. With our crazy schedules, it’s the only way we’ll see each other. Anyway, what’s it to you?”
I felt like reaching through the phone and knocking Mike’s block off, but he had a point. What was it to me? Apparently, I didn’t like the ease, the warp-speed with which these two were moving ahead together. I filed that thought under “Later.”
“So Ten, I called because I found a few more policies with TFJ.”
“Go on.”
“I’ll send you the links, but basically I was able to find three more contracts, each one for two million bucks.”
“All old-time musicians?”
“Two of them. The other was a retired character actor, Jeremiah Cook, did a lot of television back in the day. Best known for a recurring role on Star Trek, where he played some crazy Russian author or something. He made a second career for himself signing memorabilia at Trekkie conventions.”
“Florio has no doubt got him believing he’s owed a bunch of unpaid royalties on that stuff.”
“Yeah, well you can put that in the past tense,” Mike said.
“He’s dead?”
“Yep.”
“How?”
“Cancer, they say, though—get this—his wife, Camille, claimed he’d been in remission since he went to Mexico for some kind of hoodoo, new age treatments. Insisted his collapse came out of nowhere. Sound familiar?”
“How old?”
“Eighty-two.”
“Let me guess. No autopsy.”
“No autopsy.”
It was looking more and more like Florio was either playing with marked cards or on intimate terms with the Grim Reaper. First Buster, then Jeremiah Star Trek, and now Freda was in a coma. He must be ahead $4 million, at least. That’s a lot of ostrich loafers. I had no doubt Mike would dredge up even more payouts before he was finished.
“Okay,” I said. “While we’re on the subject of Florio, there’s something else I want you to do.”
“Shoot.”
“This is probably a long shot, but could you see if there’s any connection between Tommy Florio and a guy named Vince Barsotti?”
He whistled. “That’s too fucking weird, man.”
My attention pricked, like a hunting dog on point. Mike was about to flush something from the bushes.
“Here’s what else I found. TFJ and Associates is a Nevada corporation, registered a few years ago by Thomas Florio Junior and two other dudes. Guess who one of them is?”
“Vincent Barsotti,” I said.
“Bingo.”
“Who’s the third guy?”
“Dude called Liam O’Flaherty.”
“Florio, Barsotti, and O’Flaherty. Sounds diverse,” I said.
“Yeah, well, guess what career path O’Flaherty was on for a good thirty years?”
“I can’t wait to find out.”
“Same path as me, probably, if you hadn’t turned my head around. He did a series of stretches in prison—Irish prison, to be exact. He could con beans out of a can, this guy. Then he took a little break before he became a legal crook over here. He’s thought to be affiliated with the Irish Mob.”
The Mob again.
“What about Florio and Barsotti? Have they done time as well?”
“Nothing on Florio yet. I’m just beginning to work on Barsotti. There’s a big pile of Vincent Barsottis out there.”
“Maybe I can help you with that.” I ran down what I had learned in my two days of old-fashioned door-to-door snooping.
“Nice work.” Mike said. “For someone who’s technically challenged, you’re a pretty good spy. I’ll call you when I find out more. Oh, and Tricia thinks your name is cute.” He hung up before I could respond.
The new pieces of information shifted and re-formed with what I already knew, but the kaleidoscope remained too abstract to decipher. What did Florio and Barsotti have in common, besides Italian last names? One of them was running a scam on older celebrities, and the other owned pigs and luxury cars. How did they end up in business together? And what was their connection to O’Flaherty? To the Mafia? To the Children of Paradise?
I pulled into the hospital parking lot none the wiser. As I headed for the ICU, I had a sinking feeling any answers it might hold were locked deep in Freda Wilson’s comatose mind.
Freda lay still, a felled animal in a nest of tubes and fluids. Wesley sat by her, stroking one swollen hand. Their son stood at the foot of the bed. Gone was the swagger, the sullen, rebellious stance. He looked like what he was, a scared boy whose mother’s survival was at the mercy of machinery, or maybe a miracle. My heart hurt as I took in this tableau of family grief. Human life is so very fragile. My years of Buddhist training underscored an awareness that death can come at any moment, but the sight of Freda made this awareness all too real, and painful.
The steady beeping of mechanical pumps and
dispensers told me Freda’s body could no longer function without technological help. How much inner life was still there, I did not know. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and tried to reach her heart with mine. I felt no corresponding warmth. I did the next best thing, surrounding her with a peaceful light. If she was meant to recover, I hoped it would speed her healing. If not, maybe it would help create more ease for her passage to the next realm.
I left her, and went to the visitor’s lounge to wait. Wesley soon joined me. He looked a decade older than the last time I saw him.
“I’m so very sorry,” I said. He nodded, and his eyes filled. He sat down next to me, and hunched over. His raw pain was palpable.
I reached back to my time in the monastery, all those hours of sitting, practicing loving-kindness toward myself and others. I closed my eyes, and located a powerful droplet of condensed compassion, lodged deep in my chest. I invited the caring to expand, fill my body, spill over. May you enjoy happiness…. It spread like bittersweet syrup. May you be free from suffering. … I tried to direct it to the source of Wesley’s grief, coat it with comfort, or at least leach away some of the soreness. May you rejoice in the well-being of others…. May you live in peace, free from anger, hatred, and attachment…
Wesley lifted his head from his hands.
“She didn’t want to keep me up,” he said. “She started coughing, it was the middle of the night, and she didn’t want to keep me up.”
He turned to me.
“Why didn’t I tell her to stay in bed with me?”
The story spilled out of him now, how she’d been fighting the remnants of the flu for weeks. How last night she ran out of cough drops, couldn’t stop coughing, and finally put on her robe and went to the kitchen, to make a hot toddy.
How he woke up with a start several hours later and stumbled out of the bedroom and found her lying on the living room floor. “I thought she was asleep,” he said. “Her cheeks were so rosy and pink.”
He turned to me, his eyes haggard. “They say her lungs are full of fluid. That her heart is failing. That her … her brain is … that she may never come back.” His voice cracked. “Why didn’t I tell her to stay in bed?”
“Wesley, listen to me,” I said. “It’s not your fault. It may not be anybody’s, but it’s definitely not yours.”
He looked at me. “What do you mean by that?”
I decided to give him the truth.
“Look, I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s something odd going on, something related to Florio. At least two other people he signed contracts with have died under suspicious circumstances. This may be related.”
Wesley shook his head, as if trying to wake himself up. “You saying this isn’t the flu?”
“I’m not sure what I’m saying,” I admitted, “but things aren’t adding up here. Freda may have been the victim of foul play.”
Wesley’s face darkened as he absorbed this new information. He grabbed my wrist, his grip strong.
“You find out anything more, you tell me, understand? Bastards!”
“I will,” I said.
He stood. “I’ve got to get back to Freda.” His body swayed. I jumped up and took his arm to steady him.
“Mr. Norbu, thank you for telling me this,” he said. “I was carrying more weight than I knew.”
I walked him back to the ICU and left him there, holding Freda’s hand. I couldn’t undo what had happened, but I was glad to at least bring him some small relief from his unfounded guilt.
I saw Bill had phoned. No message. I called him back from the parking lot.
“Yo,” he answered. “I got something for you.”
“You up for some lunch?”
“As long as pastrami’s involved.”
I arrived at Langer’s a few minutes early and grabbed a booth by the window. My favorite waitress, Jean, came at me like a heat-seeking missile. She filled my coffee cup without asking.
“Ten-zing,” she sang, in her distinctive Arizona drawl. “I’ve missed you!”
“Likewise,” I said, bowing and kissing her hand. Jean is in her 60s, tall and thin, with a quirky, if careworn, beauty and a bobbed haircut straight out of the roaring ’20s. She’s been waiting on cops at Langer’s for over two decades, with the brashness and bunions to prove it.
“I hear you quit the force,” she said. “Good for you. I wish I could quit.”
“What’s stopping you?” I said.
“I still owe the Scientologists a hundred thousand dollars,” she said.
We shared a laugh. Jean had, in fact, been a devoted member of the Church of Scientology for 16 years, signing up with them in her early 20s. She was one of the few people who quit and lived to tell the tale: “They told me I was totally clear. I told them, ‘I’m not totally clear, I’m totally broke, thanks to you guys, so fuck you very much, and good-bye.’”
Jean gave me a stern glare over her coffeepot. “You look tired, Ten-zing. Are you all right?”
I admitted I was working pretty hard, for an un-employed person.
“And how’s the bad news doing?”
“Ruling the household, as always.”
Jean has called Tank “the bad news” ever since the time she harangued me about my lack of a love life. I told her she was wrong, I had all the intimacy a man could want.
“The good news is, I’ve been in a long-term, committed relationship for four years,” I’d said.
“What’s the bad news?”
“It’s with a cat.”
Bill slid into the booth across from me, and Jean jotted down our orders: pastrami and Swiss for him, a grilled cheese sandwich and a side of slaw for me.
I took in Bill’s coat and tie, and shifted a little in my seat. I was still in the rumpled jeans and T-shirt I’d pulled on in the dark this morning.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” Bill answered. He reached under his coat and pulled out a manila envelope.
“You wanted to know the autopsy results from the woman who got killed over your way.”
“Barbara Maxey.”
“Right, Maxey. Well.” He pushed the envelope across the wood.
I slid out the report and found myself staring down at the photograph of Barbara’s ashen cadaver. Her warm smile flashed in front of me, then was gone. I skimmed over the details: “petechial hemorrhaging” and “laryngeal abrasions,” cold, clinical terms, belying the violence of her death.
Then my breath caught.
“Did you see this?” I asked, pointing to the bottom of the last page.
“I saw it,” he said, his voice grim.
“Her voice box was crushed after she was strangled to death?”
“Yep. Looks like somebody was making a point.”
Don’t talk, I thought.
Jean delivered our plates. Bill leaned over and inhaled the aroma. “Mmm-mmm. I’m telling you, Ten, you have no idea what you’re missing.”
Jean, still hovering, snorted. “Shame on you, Bill. He can’t eat cows on account of they’re sacred to him. Right, Ten-zing?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that would be the Hindus. As Jean zoomed off to another table, I slipped the autopsy report back in the envelope and set it aside.
Don’t talk. But about what? What had Barbara known that demanded such a brutal message?
CHAPTER 16
Bill, being a working man, had to eat and run. I sat in the parking lot for a few moments, digesting, and testing my emotional insides. They were tender, sensitive to my mental prodding, like a canker sore. Reading the details of Barbara’s autopsy had walloped me, delivered a brutal gut-blow matching the fist-smash to her own jugular. What was I doing to help her? I had no money coming in, and was no closer to figuring this stuff out than I was to earning a salary.
I looked at my clenched fists, resting on the steering wheel. Loosened them, finger by finger. Self-recrimination was going to get me absolutely nowhere. There were too many questions swirling like loo
se sediment in my psyche. I had to find a quiet zone to sit, let the silt settle. See what I actually knew.
I drove north on Alameda, turned right on Third, and again on San Pedro. I circled the block to look for street parking, and then thought better of it. A bright yellow Mustang might prove irresistible to gangbangers and car thieves. I grudgingly parked underground at Five Star and walked the two blocks to the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center. I tried to leave my resentment over public parking outside the gates of my secret downtown refuge, an authentic Japanese stroll garden.
I had stumbled onto the garden early on in my police training. I’d gone into Little Tokyo for takeout and was looking for a quiet place to eat. Something drew me to the Cultural Center, and I’d soon spotted a small side gate. I pushed it open, and was rewarded with my first glimpse of the Seiryu-en, the Garden of the Clear Stream. It turned out food wasn’t allowed, but ever since, I’d visited this garden many times to partake of my other necessary sustenance, the spiritual kind.
I looked around. I was alone. Good. I stood still, letting the melodious sound of water cascading over rock soothe me. The azalea bushes were glossy green, with tight buds hinting at the spring bloom ahead. The delicate foliage of the heavenly bamboo still showed traces of the bright crimson it wore through the winter months, but I could picture the clusters of creamy white blossoms to come. The same with the Japanese wisteria—its green leaves held their secret close, but within a few months the vines would be draped with flowering lilac clusters, smelling of grape and possibility.
My eyes traced the tumbling waterfall as it forked into two streams near its head, splitting around a small island, then slowing and reuniting in a shallow, quiet pond.
I stepped onto the walking path, and let my attention rest on the sensation of my upright body, my arms hanging by my sides, my hands lightly clasping each other. I let my eyes rest on the ground, a few feet ahead of me. Lift, move, press. Lift, move, press. I paused, breathing in and out, feeling my lungs bellow and compress. Lift, move, press. Feet touching the ground, the space between each step, the feeling of stopping and starting. The mental silt began to settle, the inner chatter to fade away. Lift, move, press.
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