He nodded. “We’re both after the same information, Tenzing.”
I took the envelope, peeked inside, and sealed the deal with a firm handshake.
Immobilized in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way home, I opened the envelope and took a second look. I rolled down my window and stuck my head outside.
“Woo-hoo,” I yelled to the startled driver to my left.
I called Mike and gave him the good news. With ten thousand more in my account, I could finally pay him for his time.
“So, Mike, can you do a detailed, due-diligence report on Thomas Florio Senior, please?”
“Planning to bite the hand that feeds you?”
“More like quietly run its prints. It’s always good to be cautious,” I said, thinking of Florio’s reading material. “Also, I need an in-depth background check on Norman Murphy, John D’s son.”
“Will do. When do you want me to install your new equipment?”
“Now, baby. Now.”
I made a quick side trip to the bank and got there just before closing time. I deposited Florio’s check, less $600 in cash. I liked the feel of the folded Franklins in my back pocket.
I’d just doubled my fee as a private investigator, not to mention tripled my monthly pay at the LAPD, in under two weeks. Everything is impermanent, subject to change, and guess what? That goes for poverty, too. The pleasurable tickle in my belly migrated lower. Apparently, earning big bucks was an aphrodisiac. I pictured Julie, probably hip-chopping something astonishing in my kitchen. I called Mike back.
“Uh, Mike? About installing the office? Let’s make that a job for tomorrow.”
I pressed hard on the accelerator and rode my magic carpet home.
CHAPTER 25
My turn to cook for the chef. I had made a quick early-morning run to the local market and now was sawing off thick slabs of freshly baked sourdough boule. The frittata was in the oven, the coffee was brewing, and Julie was sitting across from me in my button-down shirt, and nothing else.
Her tousled hair spilled over one shoulder in a tangle of rich brunette curls. To me, even sleepy, she looked like a movie star. In Los Angeles, that’s saying a lot.
“So how does a gentleman like Florio end up with a son like Tommy?” Julie said. “It doesn’t compute.”
“I know,” I said. “This is why the notion of having children scares me. I feel like I’m surrounded by sons disappointing fathers, and vice versa.”
Julie opened her mouth then shut it again.
“Listen, I get it,” I said. “I’m probably hyper-aware of this stuff because of my father and me.”
“Like when Martha couldn’t get pregnant,” Julie said.” She’d call me in tears, swearing the entire city was made up of expectant women about to pop.”
I served Julie a wedge of frittata and two pieces of hot buttered toast. My eye happened to catch a shadowed womanly curve, just inside the unbuttoned part of the button-down shirt.
Julie stood. Our mouths met.
We backed into the bedroom, stumbling and laughing and kissing and never once detaching. We fell onto the bed, and the air exploded around me, and inside me, and Julie was right there beside me, with me all the way.
We lay entangled in the sheets and each other.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. That was pretty amazing.”
Julie rolled on top of me, pinning my arms to my sides.
“Pretty amazing? Pretty amazing? I’ll give you pretty amazing,” and she tickled me until I promised to reveal my deepest, darkest secret.
So I told her about Apa and Valerie. How I was a mistake, the accidental result of a Tibetan Buddhist monk’s midlife folly with an ethereal American girl trekking around India in search of enlightenment.
“Well, it is kind of romantic,” Julie said.
“Not really. He was almost forty,” I said, “and she was twenty, going on fifteen. For reasons that were never clear to me, they ended up falling in love. Or falling in something, anyway. Whatever it was, they fell out of it just as quickly.”
“Hate when that happens,” Julie said.
“He insisted on a quick marriage. She insisted on a quicker divorce.”
Julie had moved closer to me, and her freckled skin glowed in the morning light. Her hair had devolved from tangled to totally disheveled. Irresistible.
I reached over for a curl. I tugged it into a long, straight lock, then released. It bounced back to a tight spiral. Change is hard.
“Valerie used to say, after a few too many glasses of Bordeaux, that she knew they were going to break up before they’d even gotten together.”
“You called your mother Valerie?”
“She was adamant. She said ‘Mom’ made her feel too old. She shrugged off motherhood instantly, just like she shrugged off my father.”
Pulled another curl straight. Released it.
“Ten?”
I looked up. Julie’s eyes were serious.
“It doesn’t always have to be like that.”
“I know,” I said. “I know it doesn’t.” But I didn’t know any such thing.
Mike showed up in a small U-Haul at noon, with dark circles under his eyes, and an ergonomically correct office chair, a laptop, a computer table, a combination printer-fax-scanner, an external hard drive, a wireless mouse, a docking station, an extra monitor, a work lamp with an adjustable arm, a surge protector, and enough cables to choke a small city.
I’m handy with guns and cars, but digital electronics make me weep with frustration, so I made über-strong coffee and stayed out of the way. After everything was unpacked, Mike downed one last swallow of caffeine, planted his empty mug on the kitchen table, and surveyed my designated office space.
“Southeast corner. Very feng-shui, boss,”
“Very only-spot-available-that-works,” I replied.
He placed the computer table catty-corner facing the front door, and got busy with the transformation.
Mike is a mutterer—he talks nonstop under his breath while he works. I decided to go for a run. I needed to clear my head, and I needed not to stuff a sock in Mike’s mouth.
By the time I got back, the office was up and running, and Mike had news.
“So. Norman Murphy. I got something.” Mike pushed away from the computer table, stepped aside, and offered me a seat with a bow and a flourish.
I sat in my new chair and wheeled up to my new monitor. It felt good, almost official. I scanned the short article on the screen in front of me. It was from the Antelope Valley Press again: Lancaster’s go-to place for news, but this time dated four years ago. The item stated that an employee of the Department of Public Works, Norman Murphy, had been disciplined by the County, suspended for one month without pay, and ordered to pay $500 restitution, for using department resources on an off-hours personal project. The story concluded with a brief but recognizably self-pitying statement from Norman, who said he was unfairly targeted, outraged by the accusations, and totally innocent of all charges.
“Good work, Mike,” I said. “And my office is fantastic.” I dug my checkbook out of the kitchen junk-drawer, wrote him a check, and put the checkbook in my new, empty office drawer. Life was good.
“Thanks,” Mike said. “Can I go now? I have a brilliant hottie waiting for me to get home. Living together is awesome. You should try it sometime.” Great. Madly in love for ten days, and now he’s an expert in relationships.
I made a few calls, and finally tracked down Deputy Sheriff Dardon on his cell phone. He didn’t sound too thrilled to hear from me.
“What is it, Detective? You sending more bad news my way?”
“Not exactly. Norman Murphy got in some trouble a while back, got suspended without pay from the DPW. I’m wondering what you know about it.”
Dardon made an unhappy rumbling sound in his throat. “You’re like a dog with a bone, aren’t you, Norbu?”
“I’m very engaged with this case, Deputy Dardon.”
“What makes you
think I can add anything?”
“Because it takes a good investigator to know one.”
He sighed, and I knew I had him. “Most of what I know comes from bits and pieces out of the guys at Waterworks. Seems that Norman took home a computer and some other equipment over the weekend, for personal use.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“I’m trying to remember. Some sort of sonar thing, I think, for surveying and such. Anyway, it was expensive—Public Works said it cost the county over twenty thousand, new. That’s why they got their knickers in such a twist when he borrowed it.”
“What happened?”
“Norman messed up the machine somehow while he was out there prospecting. Then he put it back broke.”
“How’d they connect it to Norman?”
Dardon permitted himself a small laugh. “You’re going to love this. Come Monday morning, he let it slip he knew the thing was busted. When his boss confronted him, Norman broke down, cried real tears. Of course he denied everything when they suspended him.”
“Any guess what he was looking for?”
“Hell if I know. Nobody ever said, but I haven’t heard rumors of any buried treasure in these parts. If there was, I’d be out there digging for it myself.”
I spent an hour playing with my new toys, organizing, rearranging, and testing the equipment. Everything worked. Mike had spent a quick morning executing what would have, one, taken me at least a week of frustrated finagling; two, included many more four-letter words than Tank was accustomed to hearing; and three, culminated in an emergency call to Mike to come out and save me from tearing out my already-too-short hair.
I’ve learned the hard way it’s better to just skip directly to three.
Time to make it mine.
I took a scavenging stroll outside and returned with a sprig of hummingbird sage, a coffee scoop’s worth of sandy soil, and five very small stones of varying shapes and colors. My best find was a polished gray oval, narrow and flat like a guitar pick.
I placed the sage by my new laptop, where it could remind me that a world of hawk and deer and wildflowers waited right outside my office door.
I scoured my cabinets and came up with a shallow ceramic dish for olive oil dipping. Sorry, friend, you’ve got a new job. I filled it with the sand. Using the polished oval stone like a tiny hoe, I smoothed the surface. Then I positioned all five stones in the sand, choosing spots that felt just right for that moment. Et voilà. Instant Zen garden.
I called John D and let him know I was headed his way.
“I need your help with something,” I told him. I didn’t tell him I probably could have gotten my answers over the phone, but I wanted to check on how he was healing.
“You’re coming out here so often, you oughta consider running for mayor,” he said.
Ninety minutes later I arrived with a quart of fresh fruit salad, a loaf of cracked wheat bread, a wedge of sharp cheddar cheese, and my growing affection.
He seemed delighted with all four.
“Are you sure you’re up for this tour?” I asked.
“I’m a farmer,” he said. “We’re tough.”
He did look amazingly spry for a man with a tumor who was recently mugged.
As we hiked slowly around his property, I gave him a rundown on what I’d learned from Dardon.
“Norman never said one word to me about any of that,” John D said. He scraped at the earth with one work boot. “What you gotta know about Norman is, he’s always got some kind of scheme going. Always has, prolly always will.” A small smile crossed John D’s face. “One summer, when he was just a kid, he set up a farm stand selling fruit, only the fruit came from our own kitchen bowl.”
“Does Norman have kids?”
“Not that I know of. No, Norman is all that’s left of the Murphy gene pool.” John D shrugged. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”
I said nothing as we reached the end of a row of dying almond trees. John D parted the branches of one, and plucked a bruised black leaf from a smattering of green ones.
“Look here, Ten. This is what’s been happening.” His forefinger traced the bright yellow streaks striating the blackened surface. “Within a year, this tree will have only black leaves. Then it won’t have any. It’ll be dead, just like all the others.”
“And nobody could ever tell you why?”
He shook his head. “They said maybe acid rain, but nobody seemed to care much, one way or the other. Eighty acres is small potatoes.”
He pointed. “Over there, that’s what you’ll be wanting to see.” John D led me over to an old wooden well. He drew up a bucket of water.
He dipped in a forefinger and touched it to his tongue. “Tastes okay to me.” He offered me the bucket.
I did the same. And spat reflexively. There was no mistaking the faint but familiar residue left on my tongue: bitterness, metal, and death.
John D was peering at me. “Boy, that’s some look came over your face right then. You okay?”
I told him about the taste that had paid a visit two days earlier, a foreshadowing of this moment with him.
John D squinted. “Hunh. Seems like your inner dowser’s been working overtime.”
Something was niggling at me.
“John D, didn’t you say you asked Norman to look into something for you, having to do with your land?”
John D nodded. “Yeah. I told Norman about the trees dying when I first noticed it. Asked if his department could do what they do, you know, analyze the well water I use for irrigation. He came out and took some samples, but then, who knows, I prolly made him mad about some dang thing or other, because he never got back to me.”
I said nothing. John D took a moment, but he put it together.
“Oh, Norman,” he said.
Norman’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac, one of the worst places for any kind of covert surveillance, so I had little choice but to go overt. I had come equipped, in the form of a direct-mail postcard of a hollow-eyed missing child.
I made my way down the street toward Norman’s place, ringing doorbells, flashing my postcard, and getting blank looks and head-shakes in return. Too bad. I could have addressed two wrongs with one right action.
Norman’s driveway was like a play yard for a giant toddler. A gleaming new speedboat, hitched to a trailer, sat next to a bright red motorcycle with three fat wheels, just an oversized kid’s trike.
I didn’t see any SUV, though, official or otherwise, so I rang Norman’s doorbell. A few moments later the door opened and I had my first look at Mrs. Norman Murphy, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. I blinked. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was pulled off her face with two clips. Pink cheeks. Hazel eyes, a little watery. A nice figure, kind of regular, not too skinny, not too plump. She wore stretchy pants and one of those short-sleeved shirts with a tiny embroidered alligator on it. She looked … nice.
“Yes?” she said.
I showed her my postcard and asked if she’d seen the little boy. She glanced at it, then back at me.
“I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him. Poor little thing.”
I was astonished to see her eyes brimmed over with tears.
“Ma’am?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m … really emotional these days.” She started to close the door, so I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You’re Mrs. Murphy, aren’t you? Norman’s wife?”
“Yes. I’m Becky Murphy,” she nodded, her forehead furrowing.
“I used to work for the city,” I explained. “I’ve met Norman. He’s quite a character.”
“He is, isn’t he?” Her smile was amused, yet slightly apologetic, like that of an indulgent parent. It occurred to me she might actually love Norman, which meant some part of Norman was actually lovable.
“I notice Norman’s a boater,” I said.
Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened as tiny beads of sweat formed on her upper lip. She swallowed twice, and shuddered.
&
nbsp; “Unh,” she said, and all the pink drained out of her face, leaving it the color of putty. “I have to go. I’m going to be ill,” she whispered. She covered her mouth and closed the door.
Maybe just the thought of Norman’s boat made her seasick.
CHAPTER 26
I reached Mike just as I hit the 170. I told him what I needed. New office equipment or not, this particular piece of research was way beyond my skill set.
He called back as I was chugging up the hill to my house.
“You hacked into Public Works already?”
“Didn’t have to. I found a pdf of their annual report on employee suspensions, which gave me the personnel codes I needed. From there, it was a hop, skip, and a jump into Norman’s office computer. It took a few minutes to break into his files, but once I got inside, it was like driving a go-cart, boss.”
“Were the reports there?”
“Yeah. John D’s place, the pig farm. The whole area tests clean as a whistle. Maybe I should move out there.”
“Hunh.”
“Then again, maybe not. Ever heard of neptunium-237? … Me neither. It’s a by-product of uranium tailings. Also comes from spent nuclear rods. Norman had a bunch of encrypted information on it.”
Acid started to pool in the back of my throat and I almost gagged. “Toxic?”
“Highly. And it’s got a half-life of two million years. They just found some buried in Utah.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“It means if you visit Utah four million years from now, some of the neptunium-237 might be gone.”
“But everything tested clean?”
“That’s what Norman wrote.”
I was inside my house, opening a can of tuna for Tank, when I got a follow-up text message: NM BOUGHT BOAT ON EBAY 2 MO AGO 88K CASH.
As a public servant, Norman took home about $5,000 a month, if he was lucky. Now he had the cash to buy new boats? Love or money: I picked door two. Norman was into some dirty money, and he didn’t seem too concerned about flaunting it. I thought about Mrs. Murphy, and wondered if she knew about Norman’s latest scam, or if his secret lay buried deep inside their marriage, slowly but surely poisoning the well.
The First Rule of Ten Page 21