Civil Twilight (8 page)

When I could trust my voice, I asked, “Were you involved with her?”

I thought he’d shake me off now, but he was listening to his own thoughts. “I’m the guy who’s always got things planned and double-checked,
the guy who’d run a make on his own mother. Things are falling apart faster than I can chase after them. I don’t know who I am.”

I wanted to pull over and just take him in my arms. But the only reason he could speak at all was the solitude of the dark car in the dark and empty street and me driving on. So I said nothing. Not at first, anyway. Then I thought of something, a question I needed to pose.

“There’s a koan that says: a master makes a magnificent cart. If he removes the wheels and the axel and the cart box and all the parts, then what is it? John, what is Karen Johnson now?”

“What was she before?”

I started. That wasn’t a bad question: what was the cart before it was built? But John wasn’t asking about carts, or about Karen Johnson’s essential being.

“Before she stole your car? Don’t you know?”

“There are things I know, or things I thought I knew. But nothing I knew or imagined or guessed wrong about explains why she’d do what she did. It’s crazy. Like a sci-fi novel where you step into another dimension and everything looks normal until you realize the laws of nature don’t hold.”

“What do you know? John? John! How’d you ever get involved with Karen in the first place?”

“Gary.”

“What did Gary say?”

“Gary, dammit! Where the hell is he?” John flipped open his phone, then closed it again. There was no one he dared call. If you spend your life being a police detective and suddenly your connections, your status, and your power to demand answers are taken away, then what are you?

“Gary got you involved? How? Why?”

“Later. Things’re going to close in on us, real soon. Where
is
he, dammit?”

“We’re going to have to split up, John. You check his house, Mom’s, wherever.”

“Those are the first places they’ll look.”

“Then we need to move fast.”

“And you? What are you going to do?”

“Drop me at the zendo.”

“You’re going to
meditate?
”

“No. I merely want you to be able to be honest about one thing.”

He made a gurgling noise I took for a half-swallowed laugh, a grudging admission that I had more street smarts than he’d imagined. Then when I pulled up at the corner of Pacific he squeezed my shoulder. “Be careful—more careful than you ever think you should be. Put your phone on vibrate. Time’s 12:02. I’ll call you in an hour.”

“Yeah,” I said, for want of a more appropriate word. How could I not be tongue-tied? Twenty-four hours ago, I’d never have believed I’d be conspiring with him to withhold evidence and stay out of the clutches of the SFPD, his once sacrosanct employer. It was as if the entire fabric of the known universe had turned inside out.

I started toward the zendo. Everything on the block was dark. Even Renzo’s Café on the corner was closed. Only the zendo might be unlocked. Once in the zendo I might be able—just for a moment—to step back from everything, to see it all as merely thoughts and sensations, to take away the axle and the wheels of it and sit there in the dark with what it would be.

But I knew Leo, Garson-roshi, would be upstairs. There was no way I could involve him. So I turned back toward Columbus, heading for Gary’s office. At the corner I picked up my pace, relieved when I crossed into North Beach by the normalcy of people still eating in trattorias and drinking coffee at outside tables. I was glad to be in a place where tragedy was a burnt pizza crust.

The last time I’d been here—what, two hours ago?—I’d been greeted by a “body” behind the desk. I let myself in.

The room was darker than before. Now the single streetlamp shone mutedly through the fog. I stood beside the door, letting my eyes adjust, straining to catch any sound of breathing through the snore of the fog-horn. I couldn’t resist checking under the desk first thing, but of course no one was there now. I stood against the wall, as I’d done earlier, looking across the tundra of case folders. Karen Johnson’s file could be anywhere, bunched with others by any rationale, alphabetical being the least of the possibilities.

I plopped in his chair. It was a high-backed leather swivel. The dim light flowed from the cupola windows behind. Odd that Gary would choose a place like this for its charm and view, then sit with his back to it. But then, I realized, it made perfect sense. His clients sitting nervously on the other side of his desk eyed the view; Gary eyed them.

If I were Gary . . .
I pictured Karen Johnson facing him. She’d cross one leg over the other as he shifted the stack of folders he’d scooped up to clear a place for her. She’d be amused by the office, just as I’d been the first time I met Gary here. He’d have put the stack where? I concentrated, channeling my brother’s habits of mind, trying to re-create his routines.

If this were her first appointment, he’d make notes on a yellow pad and put them in a folder with her name written on a sticky. By her next visit her file would have a typed label and be waiting on his desk. Even after he’d sent her off to meet me, it would have sat there until he heard my call, or something else sent him racing out of here.

Holding my hand over the flashlight I checked the desk. “Oh, shit!”

Someone had been in here! Someone had been rooting around on his desk. With the insane mess of clutter no one, not even Gary, would realize
the place had been searched—no one but me. But I’d been perched on the corner of the desk when I’d been talking to John there, and now that space was piled high. What was going on here? I made for the door.

Halfway there, I stopped. Whoever was here had looked through the cases; he was hardly coming back.

Unless he was still here.

Common sense said: clear the building pronto. It said: call John. But I didn’t have time to deal with him telling me to get out quick.
Be careful, more careful than you think you should.

I walked back to the desk. The concession I made to carefulness was that I knelt on the floor, head just about desk level so I could scan the room as I examined documents. If anyone moved I’d . . . do something.

No luck. I found nothing, and no Karen Johnson–related notes or file usefully presented themselves. But I couldn’t leave empty. I surveyed the floor. Folded open was the
Las Vegas Sun.
Dammit, had Gary gone to Las Vegas? Was that where he was hiding out? Or . . . or had he advised Karen to go there to get her divorce? Or for some other reason? Or was Vegas just a neon herring?

I stood. My knees screamed. Gary needed thicker carpeting.

A clock chimed. I panicked, then forced myself to smile. He needed a quieter clock.

It chimed again. Two o’clock. How had it gotten so late? It’d been between eleven and midnight when we left the site, midnight when John dropped me off—when he said he’d call in an hour! He would never, ever be unreliable, especially now. I tried his cell. This number is not accepting calls, the automated voice buffed me.

John, I wanted to yell, where are you? What happened? Why isn’t your phone working?

I RACED OUT of Gary’s office. And found myself standing on the sidewalk, in the fog-thick middle of the night without a clue what to do next. I had three brothers and at this moment they were all missing. My anguish over Mike remained at the center of my life. In the two decades before I gave up my exile and braved the city again, it had been possible to have days when I didn’t flash on his taking me on my first trip to the notorious Haight-Ashbury or cutting under the fence to climb around the ruins of the Sutro Baths, and whole weeks when disasters on the news didn’t spark new fears about what might’ve happened to him. Back at home now, as I was, every block held memories of us kids dangling our feet on the cable car’s outside benches, pushing through crowds to the edge of the Bay to watch the fireworks explode overhead. But last night, worry about Gary’d eclipsed all that.

And now the crisis was John.

I’d liked Karen. Obviously, John had liked her, too. But she’d grabbed his car and left him to twist in . . . in his own stupidity and whatever else he wasn’t telling me. Then she turned up dead! I didn’t know what to think—or feel—anymore.

Without conscious decision I found myself walking back toward the zendo. North Beach prides itself on its night life, but there’s a limit and
2:00 A.M. on a cold soggy night blew through it. The only things moving on Columbus were sheets of yesterday’s papers skittering toward the financial district. I picked up my pace. By the time I crossed Broadway into the Barbary Coast I was admitting to myself that being cold, exhausted, without plan or car was no way to begin a search. Silently as possible, I went in and padded upstairs to my room.

I am the abbot’s assistant. He—Leo Garson—is understanding about my work taking me away. But when I am here I make a point of fulfilling my duties. My alarm blasted at 6:30 and at ten to 7:00 I was in the courtyard striking the clappers—polished wooden blocks—three times to announce the morning sitting. Inside the zendo oil lamps glowed but cast no shadows. The large, brick-walled room was cold and the black cushions—
zafus
—on black mats—
zabutons
—lined either side in an unmoving procession toward the altar. I bowed to the altar, lit the candle and broke a stick of incense in two to set in the ash near the sides of the bowl. Waiting sticks, the two stubs were called.

At 7:00 when Garson-roshi entered, I handed him a full stick to place in the middle of the bowl. The pungent aroma ribboned into the room as I took my seat, turned toward the wall and placed my hands in a
mudra,
left hand resting in the bed of the right palm. They say one reason monks traditionally sat in full lotus was so they could fall asleep and not fall over. I’ve attained this in half lotus. My head drooped; I snapped awake. I’d been dreaming of Gary’s enigmatic phone call, me curious but not worried. Again I woke, remembering Karen Johnson. Something about her hadn’t been in sync. What? Again I woke, this time with no picture, only the echo of feeling she’d understood the urgency of my search for Mike.

I badly wanted to talk to Leo, to have him brush away my clutter of extraneous thoughts, but to tell him too much would open him to police focus; that would be terrible for him and worse for me. The problem
with Leo was his proclivity for answering questions truthfully. Tell him and I might as well cut out the middle man and just call Korematsu for a chat.

I wasn’t sitting zazen at all! I was thinking! I might as well be in an armchair with a latte!
I inhaled, focused on my breath, noted my pale shadow on the wall, the sounds of breathing behind me, the wind, the rush of traffic, a stomach gurgling. I’d complained to Leo once about my thinking:
I think I’m sitting zazen, but then without noticing I realize I’ve just been sitting here thinking.
Leo had smiled and said,
Just keep bringing your attention back. That’s the practice. Thoughts are illusion. Goals are illusion. Everything changes.
Once again I brought my attention back to my breathing. When the bell rang to end the period. I turned and was surprised to see six people in the room.

Ten minutes later, after I’d put out the candle and sifted the ash so the altar was ready for evening zazen, I caught Leo upstairs. “Roshi, you have a moment?”

“Always.” He grinned. Life in this very moment is a basic concept of Zen. Life
is
this moment—this moment—this moment, nothing more. Of course he had a moment. “Sit.”

I stepped into his room, a narrow cell like my own, with low Japanese dresser and chair, also low. He settled on his futon and crossed his legs. Instead of the robes in which he’d led the service he now wore black drawstring pants and a T-shirt. The sweater he’d added would be too warm in an hour.

I wasn’t about to reveal too much, but there was one question that would cause no problems. “Roshi, how do you proceed off a hundred-foot pole?”

“Forget you asked.”

“But—”

Again he smiled. His features were too big for his face; when he smiled it looked like they were about to leap off of it. “Let’s take a few steps down that pole. Why, all of a sudden, are you asking?”

“I mentioned the koan to a woman who doesn’t sit zazen and she knew the answer . . . well, an answer. She said: You step off.”

“Why did you mention it?”

Why had I? We’d been heading to Coit Tower, which I’d mistakenly said was a hundred feet high. But why had I made such a silly error? “I was trying to figure out who she was.”

“Because?”

“I thought Gary was . . . I don’t know what I thought. It all happened so quickly. I thought . . . I thought he was involved in something secret . . . but maybe for a good reason. Though John instantly assumed he was setting up some prank.”

“We see through our own eyes.” He glanced up at me. “Things are as they are.”

Things are as they are
was a deceptively obvious-seeming teaching of his.

“You saw through your eyes, Darcy. You didn’t just see your brother, but this woman, and what you took to be their relationship.”

“I saw her as a friend. Then as crazy. Then as a woman who’d played my brother. Maybe more than one brother. Then suddenly, she was dead. I don’t know what to think.”

“Don’t.”

He was right, I knew. Thoughts would just stumble over each other in my head. But I couldn’t help it. “She said she was going through a divorce, but, you know, that wasn’t the vibe I got. She was in too good a shape. She was”—I suddenly realized—“someone I could picture Gary dating.”
Gary dating! Was that what John pictured?
“She’d plugged into
that sudden fascination Gary emits when he’s utterly focused on something outside himself. It’s a seductive quality, particularly when the object is yourself.” I paused, hoping for an observation from Leo but he offered none, waiting for me to go on. “I felt like there was a big exciting secret they shared, not like she was a client Gary was representing but more like they were doing something together. Something that was going to happen fast, because, when we talked about going to dinner she said she wanted it to be somewhere special.”