The Third Rule Of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (7 page)

I drove straight to Langer’s Delicatessen, at Seventh and Alvarado. I didn’t care if the entire LAPD force was there to bear witness—after years of watching Bill inhale pastrami across the booth from me, I was finally going to have a number 19 all to myself.

Langer’s was closed. I hit the steering wheel in frustration. By now, I was so hungry I couldn’t think in a straight line, so I drove home on autopilot and had my mouth full of raw almonds before I had even set the keys down on the kitchen counter.

After two very unsatisfying bowls of cereal—I usually shopped on Sundays, and there weren’t too many choices in my cupboards—I gargled with tap water and poured myself a Belgian Chimay. Time to do my part in supporting those busy little Trappist monk-brewers. The first sip was a perfect meditation, all on its own. By the third, I was finally myself.

I pulled out Clara’s cell phone, still wrapped in my handkerchief, and used a corner of cotton to carefully swipe it on. This was a bare-bones iPhone: no e-mail activated and only the basic apps that came with the phone. I pulled up her most recent telephone activity. There were maybe 20 outgoing and incoming calls displayed on the screen, but only 3 sources. The majority of the calls were to or from either a 661 area code or a 213, identified as
Señora Bets
and
Sofia
, respectively. The third number was recent and unidentified. Bets and Sofia were also the only two stored contacts. I went back to the current calls.

True to her word, Bets McMurtry had called Clara over a dozen times since Friday. The most recent outgoing call, dated last Thursday, was to a long string of numbers, recipient unknown
.
I jotted down the date and time of the call in my notebook—the last indication that Clara Fuentes was still alive. I was tempted to call the number myself, but good sense prevailed. Instead, I texted the digits to Mike. With any luck, he’d be awake soon.
PLEASE VERIFY THE SOURCE OF THIS NUMBER, ASAP
, I added.

What else, what else? My eyes lit on the 661 area code.
Lancaster.
Right. I scrolled my own contact list for John D. Murphy. I pressed.

“Hello! Hello!”

I grinned with pleasure. John D always answered his phone as if half-convinced no one would actually be on the other end.

“John D,” I said. “It’s Ten.”

“No kidding! It’s been a coon’s age. Thought you must have taken another vow of silence. How the hell are you?”

“I’m still standing,” I said. “Sorry it’s been so long. I was in India. My father died.”

I felt rather than heard John D’s heart quicken with sympathy. “You okay?”

My own heart softened at the old man’s concern. “Yes, I’m okay. But what about you?”

“Well, you know, the legs aren’t working too good, but good enough to chase after my granddaughter. Ashley’s two-and-a-half years old already, and an absolute peach. Talkin’ up a storm. That child hangs the moon as far as her mother and I are concerned.”

I had been somewhat instrumental in reuniting John D with his pregnant daughter-in-law, right after his estranged son, Norman, was murdered. I was glad the new little family was still intact.

“And you’re healthy?”

“Still breathing, Ten, still breathing. I’m finally done with chemo, and it did its job shrinking the basketball in my gut down to a manageable size. Now we’re at a geezer’s standoff. Tumor’s growing at about the same rate as I’m moving. I guess being older than God has its advantages. And the joints help.” He chuckled. “Joints for my joints. I do still love my medicinal weed.”

We shared a chuckle. John D wasn’t just my first client as a private detective—he was still my favorite. We’d shared a single but memorable smoke, many moons ago.

“So what can I do you for?” John D asked. “Or is this call purely personal?”

“It’s professional and highly confidential,” I said.

“Understood.”

I knew I could trust John D to keep our conversation to himself. I laid out the case as succinctly as I could. “Anything you can add to what I already know about your representative?” I asked. I liked to learn as much as I could about the people I was in business with. Google was fine, but there’s nothing better than verifying facts with trusted friends.

“Not much.” John D grunted. “McMurtry’s a hard-line, anti-immigration, anti-drug, pro-life, Tea Party windbag. Can’t stand her—can you tell? Thing is, she prances around in those tight skirts, acting all high and mighty, but she was in my son Norman’s class in high school, and that girl was a hell-raiser, for sure. There wasn’t a drug she didn’t like, or a boy she didn’t try to seduce. Then she found Jesus, like they do, got married, and made a fortune selling Christian beauty products, door-to-door at first and then at parties, like they did with that Tupperware stuff. My wife got invited to one of them wingdings once. I remember, because it was right before Charlie got blowed up in Iraq. After that she stopped going out.”

I again felt, rather than heard, John D revisit an old sorrow inside.

“Anyhoo, my wife came home with a stick of free lipstick and reported that those women told the dirtiest jokes she’d ever heard, in between paintin’ each other’s faces ’til they looked like you-know-whats.”

“Wow,” I said.

“After she was saved, McMurtry turned into a mover and a shaker, I’ll give her that. Her husband passed pretty early on, but that gal didn’t miss a beat. She started a born-again school up here so her two kids could avoid learning about dinosaurs and monkeys, and the dang thing is still going strong. Don’t worry. We’re sending Ashley to one of them Montessori places.”

I heard a door slam.

“Uh-oh, the light of my life’s home from a birthday party, and she’s going to need a scraper to get that icing offa her face.” John D chuckled. “Better go. Nice talkin’ to you, Ten. ’Bye now.”

John D sounded as happy as I’d ever heard him. I fed Tank and cleaned his litter box with a light step, then rewarded myself with a second beer. I settled on the deck outside to savor it. But sometimes my spirit refuses to float above the clouds for long, and my inner hijacker soon intervened.

I haven’t heard from Heather since breakfast.
The nosedive was swift—and swiftly made worse by my fishing the Post-it from my pocket. I frowned at the little hand-drawn daisy. Heather adored daisies and had taught me a favorite girlhood game early on in our courtship. Now I tried to decipher from the daintily sketched petals if we loved each other or loved each other not.

Tank brushed against my ankles. I reached down to stroke his back, and he arched slightly. No daisy petals necessary to read my feelings for him. Tank slipped from underneath my palm and ambled inside. I leaned back in my chair. The canyon sky was blue-black, and empty of stars. I finished my beer and followed my cat’s lead.

As I was getting ready for bed my phone buzzed. It was a text from Heather:
U STILL UP
?

The obvious answer was yes, because yes, technically, I was up. But the question was, did I want to talk to her? That answer was no, but
no
hooked into an immediate and contradictory
you should
, and then it was on:
ignore the text and go to bed
was swiftly elbowed aside by
you read the text, so you owe her a reply.
They multiplied into so many dueling versions of
don’t want to
and
you have to
that I had an entire courtyard of arguing monks in my head, just like the debating sessions of my Tibetan Buddhist youth. I knew what came next, and sure enough, I was soon visited by shame, the same shame that was so brilliantly instilled in me by my teachers years ago.

Shame was a big motivator at Dorje Yidam, its hot body crawl more feared than any of the stick-swats or ear-twists handed out. Whenever Yeshe, Lobsang, and I were caught misbehaving, we were informed that we had not only disappointed our teachers but had let down the entire Dharma, the lineage of teachings that stretched back to the Buddha. That’s 2,600 years’ worth of disappointment.

I shuddered, remembering the grave, pained look on the face of my tutor, Lama Sonam, or the angry look on my father’s when I had broken yet another rule. It was a look nobody could ever fake, communicating something like, “Your behavior makes me question whether my whole life as a teacher has been a waste. Your behavior causes me to wonder if I’ve betrayed the Dharma and will be reborn as a horny toad.”

I can testify that a shaming look is a very strong deterrent to most people. I must have been about six the first time I experienced it at Dorje Yidam. My gut froze, as if a giant hand was gripping my entrails. A split-second later, fire bloomed in my calves and spread up through my thighs to meet the ice deep in my belly. The collision of these two—shame and fear—triggered an awful alchemy, sending toxicity throughout the body.

Right now, looking at Heather’s text, my blood was streaming with it.

Breath is the only thing that will clear the taint of that particular poison. As I mutely stared at the text, I breathed deeply and slowly, in and out, until the toxin began to disperse. After about ten breaths, the disharmony was more or less resolved. But I still didn’t know what to do.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Lama Sonam’s gentle voice: “Whenever possible, Lama Tenzing, do the thing you’re most hoping to avoid.”

I had promised myself today would be different. I found her name and pressed it. Her phone rang in my ear.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi back.”

“You never called me back. Are you mad at me?”

A little fist of tension balled up between my shoulder blades. Part of me wanted to run my usual tactics and say, “I’m not mad at you. You’re the one who’s mad at me,” but I was way too tired to sell that one with any confidence.

“I don’t know what I am right now. It’s been a hard day. I’m ready for bed.”

“Ready because you’re tired or because you’d prefer to avoid talking to me?”

Sometimes Heather can be maddeningly insightful. I felt my mental wheels spin in place.

How about telling the truth?

“A little bit of both, I guess.” My shoulders relaxed.
Over to you, Heather.
I wondered if she was going to punish me for being honest.

To my amazement, she didn’t. “Yeah, I’m pretty tired myself. I wound up working all afternoon. Check in tomorrow?”

“Yeah, let’s do that.” We both left off the love you’s.

I activated the alarm and fell into bed. A solid
thunk
registered Tank’s daredevil leap from dresser to mattress. He tucked up against me, and I felt honored, even as the tiny part of my brain still functioning smirked at my reaction. As I drifted off, I pondered the different ways cats and dogs—not to mention their deluded owners—handle affection. If you’re a dog owner, you pay a little attention to your dog, and the dog thinks you’re doing something miraculously wonderful. It licks, wags, pants, and dances in circles. Dog owners accept everything about this deal, despite the potential for well-earned ridicule as enablers of vulgar canine toadying.

If you’re a cat owner, the reverse is true: your cat pays a little attention to you, and you think it’s doing
you
a favor. Cat owners accept everything about
this
deal, despite the potential for well-deserved ridicule as easy marks, suckered in by cunning slackers who appear, at best, amused, when not subjecting their masters to long periods of feline disregard.

Either way, everybody’s happy
.

C
HAPTER
6

I woke up rested and with a breakfast game plan—a gourmet version of what, when I first moved to Los Angeles from Dharamshala, seemed like the oddest food I’d ever tasted. The same teenagers I was introducing to Tibetan Buddhist chants introduced me to a P, B, and J. I was stunned at how good crushed peanuts and strawberry jam tasted, smeared on two slices of bread. Over the years, I continued to experiment with multiple variations on the original theme. These days, I started with handcrafted, organic, whole-grain bread from the local farmer’s market and crunchy peanut butter, ground fresh while I watched at the natural foods store down the hill. To these basics, I would add slices of organic banana, when I had bananas around, and a drizzle of raw, wildflower honey.

I dressed quickly. My mouth watered just thinking about what lay ahead: the wild jungle sweetness of banana, combined with the earthy crunch of peanut butter, the low note of crusty bread, the hint of honey providing a tantalizing jazz riff in the far distance. I found a loaf of bread in the freezer, popped two slices in the toaster, and went to the cupboard for the peanut butter. It was gone. An almost full jar, if I remembered correctly. I checked all my cupboards, the refrigerator, and then all the cupboards again, in case I was merely suffering from a severe case of sudden-onset male blindness. Twenty minutes and two burned pieces of toast later, I was breakfastless and in a foul mood. Not even fresh-brewed coffee helped. I was seriously considering going back to bed with a pint of ice cream, when Mike called.

“Yo, boss-man,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

“I can’t find my peanut butter anywhere,” I wailed into the phone. The wall of silence that greeted my words made me realize how ridiculous I sounded, and I started to laugh.

“Dude, for a minute I thought you were, like, six years old,” Mike said. “Ask Heather. The women always know. So listen, I’ve been trying to trace that number you gave me, as in trying
all night
. And, well, the thing is, I’m stumped.”

“I don’t believe it.” I had never heard the word
stumped
come out of Mike’s mouth, not in the ten years I’d known him.

“Believe it. At first I thought it was one of those rerouting scams, you know, where they route the number through a buttload of countries, so you can’t be sure where it first originated—well, I mean, most people can’t, unless they’re the FBI—but the thing is, I always can. Only this time, I couldn’t. And it gets weirder.”

“Go on,” I said, checking under the sink. I needed that sandwich more than ever.

“Ten, I don’t even recognize the network this cell phone number was using, or I should say, my algorithms don’t. And that’s not just strange. It’s impossible!”