The Third Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery Read online

  “Thank you, Big Foot,” I recited obediently.

  I heard twin shrieks in the background.

  “Gotta go,” Bill said. “Lola has Maude in a headlock.”

  I traded the blazer for a dark blue windbreaker and retrieved my .38 from its nylon gun bag, locked in the safe in my closet. I had cleaned the Wilson only yesterday, and the stainless steel barrel and walnut handle gleamed. I hefted the weapon once or twice in my hand. It felt snug there, at home. Other cops preferred bigger guns, but most of them had bigger hands. I pulled out the Jackass Rig shoulder holster as well.

  “I’m off,” I said to Tank. “Wish me luck.”

  Tank blinked. That counted, I guess.

  I activated the Guard-on deities yet again. They were armed for action, and so was I.

  I switched to my beater Toyota, entered the address in my phone, and called upon MapQuest to get me there—so much easier than trying to decode the microscopic squiggles of the Thomas Guide while driving. Not that I’m complaining—Sherlock didn’t even have that. Sunday afternoon traffic had started to build, and well over an hour later I was finally parked on Serrano Avenue, just around the corner from a massive church topped by multiple golden, onion-shaped domes that rivaled the Taj Mahal’s.

  Assuming Clara Fuentes’s phone wasn’t shopping in the Food 4 Less, there was only one building that made sense within my 328-foot radius of possibilities. The peeling three-story apartment house was a dingy rectangle, its faded tan the color of regret. A makeshift square of poured concrete out front housed a rusting pickup, canted to one side. Several swarthy old men, gray hair sprouting from beneath their undershirts, sat hunched on plastic lawn chairs dragged onto narrow balconies. They aimed rings of cigarette smoke at the pavement below. A baby was crying inconsolably, and a woman’s voice shouted in frustration.

  Across the street, graffiti disfigured the cement wall bordering the Food 4 Less, and a pile of blankets fenced in by overturned shopping carts indicated a homeless person had claimed one small piece of sidewalk real estate as his own. The whole block was derelict, the gleaming church around the corner a serious misplacement of priorities.

  I holstered my gun under my windbreaker and got out of the car. I strolled up to the building’s entrance, a metal gate meshed with chain-link, pushed it open, and walked to the front door of the apartment. The back of my neck prickled. I could feel the eyes of the old men following my every move, like silent prison guards.

  The front door was not quite closed, a piece of luck. I stepped inside and studied a directory of names and apartment numbers hanging over a metal case of mailboxes. Half the handwritten names were too faded to read, and the other half were illegible. That meant a door-to-door. Three floors, six apartments per floor. I began at the beginning. The first two apartments were empty, or else no one was answering my knock. At the third door, I got a response, but the tiny, wrinkled woman, her walnut face bound in a flowered scarf tied tightly under her chin, spoke no English. I moved on.

  Finally, upstairs on the second floor, in the second apartment, I got lucky again. A young Latino man not only opened the door but spoke English, and he used that English to invite me inside, once I told him why I was there.

  “Sure,” he said. “I know Clara. Best refried black beans in the city. She’s Sofia’s cousin, right? She visits here a lot.”

  “You know Sofia?”

  “Not well enough.” He grinned. “But that may have just changed.” He pointed to a cage in the corner, half-covered with a striped beach towel. “Sorry about the towel. The bird wouldn’t shut up.”

  He crossed the room and pulled off the towel. A gray parrot sporting a crown of yellow feathers and two orange spots for cheeks pinned us with a beady-eyed stare. “Cockatiel,” the young man said.

  SQUAWK!

  He covered the cage quickly. “See what I mean? Harsh.”

  He indicated a lumpy sofa, and we sat. The apartment consisted of a 12-by-12-foot square that housed a twin bed; a desk and chair; a small sofa; a tiny kitchen area, including a wooden tray-table set up to eat on; one window; a bathroom the size of a postage stamp, and a cockatiel in a cage. No balcony.

  “I’m bird-sitting,” he explained. “Sofia came by earlier today in a big rush and asked me if I’d watch it for her. She loves that bird. No joke.”

  “When was that?”

  “Let me think. Maybe two, three hours ago? She seemed pretty stressed.”

  “And Clara?”

  “I haven’t seen her for a few days. I’m Carlos, by the way.”

  “Ten,” I answered.

  “Ten?”

  “Ten.”

  “Cool. So what, Clara’s in some kind of trouble? Hard to believe.”

  I explained that an employer of hers was concerned and had hired me to look into her absence. “Can you show me Sofia’s apartment?”

  “Sure. Two doors down,” Carlos said. I followed him into the hallway. The corridor was poorly lit, the linoleum underfoot sticky. A strong scent of stewing meat wafted from under one doorway, and I remembered I was starving.

  “We’re the only Latinos in the building,” he said over his shoulder. “So, you know, we kind of got to know each other by default. Still, it’s all good. My neighbors leave me alone, the rent’s cheap, and I can catch the Red Line at Western and Hollywood to go downtown. I work two jobs, and at night I go to LACC. I’m studying to be a teacher. “

  I found myself liking Carlos more and more.

  “Here you go,” he said. “Whoa. Shit, man. That’s not good.”

  We stared at the wooden door frame. The jamb was splintered, as if the door had been jimmied open. I motioned Carlos behind me and slipped my right hand inside my windbreaker, curling my palm around the Wilson’s wooden handle.

  “Hello?” I said. “Sofia? Clara?” I nudged at the door with my foot. It swung open, revealing a one-room boxy studio identical to Carlos’s. Either Sofia was the worst housekeeper in the world or someone had ransacked the place. A pullout futon lay in pieces, the mattress and pillows shredded, the wooden slats broken. A small coffee table was overturned, and torn clothing and broken dishes littered the floor. An entire sack of birdseed had been dumped onto a woven throw rug.

  “Did Sofia leave you a key, by any chance?” I said.

  “Um.”

  “Because if she did, technically, you’re in charge of her place while she’s gone.”

  Carlos was a bright boy. “In that case, I’m sure she did.”

  “Care to invite me in?”

  “Por favor.” He walked through the door.

  I followed him in. I executed a quick visual search for signs of a violent altercation or hasty departure. No visible bodies. No bloodstains. No half-eaten plates of abandoned food. Most especially, no cell phone in sight.

  “How many electrical outlets in your place?” I asked.

  “Five,” he said. “No, sorry, six. Three in the main room, two in the kitchen area, and one in the bathroom, stuck behind the toilet for some reason. I have to use an extension cord to charge my shaver and toothbrush.”

  I was in the bathroom in three steps. I got down on all fours. Sure enough, an iPhone was charging, resting on its back on the stained linoleum behind the toilet. I had forgotten to bring any latex gloves, but I had a handkerchief in my back pocket. I used it to recover the phone and charger.

  I made a second assessment of the apartment, this time slowly and by foot. There was a small stack of unopened mail—mostly flyers, it looked like—on the kitchen counter, but I left it alone. Private mail, unlike phones, was not to be touched by private investigators, not under any circumstances. The same goes for garbage, unless it’s been moved to the curb, and after the alleged break-in, the whole apartment qualified as trash. Nothing else jumped out at me, and I was fine with that. One, this was Sofia’s place, not Clara’s, and two, I had a feeling all the answers I needed were already wrapped inside my handkerchief.

  I gave Carlos a business card
. “Call me if either Sofia or Clara shows up, okay?”

  “You think I should let the cops know, in case Sofia’s missing, too?”

  “Definitely report the break-in. As far as Sofia goes, it’s up to you,” I said. “But unless she’s a minor or has Alzheimer’s, you can’t even file a missing person’s report until she’s been gone for twenty-four hours. Hopefully she’ll be back by then.”

  Carlos stowed my card in his wallet. He fished a pen from his other pocket and put out his hand. “Got another one?”

  I did.

  He scribbled his name and phone number on the back and returned it to me. “Let me know, man, if you need me for anything. That Clara’s a nice lady. She reminds me of my abuela, my granny, you know?” He frowned at the upended room. “I don’t have a good feeling about this,” he said.

  I didn’t either, but I wasn’t ready to say it out loud.

  As I walked outside, I debated asking the Armenian death squad if they had seen or heard anything suspicious. I looked up at the balconies. The old men, with their impassive, smoke-wreathed stares, were as promising as a row of cement blocks. I took a step in their direction anyway, and as one, they seemed to melt back into their apartments. I was too hungry to pursue them further.

  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.