Gladyss of the Hunt (6 page)

“I feel it,” he finally said to me one day.

“Feel what?”

“Your cynicism, radiating like heat. If you chose to leave it at home just once and give us a chance, the Kundalini will be there waiting for you.”

“Thanks, but I really just need the workout.”

“Kundalini is arguably an evolutionary step for peoplekind. Using mental focus you can gradually learn to unleash the limitless powers of your chakras.”

I asked him if he could explain this alleged power again. I never really got a straight answer before.

“You will become a better person in every sense of the word; More courageous, more attuned. You will have access to things that elude most people.”

“What things?”

“You'll see people more clearly than they can see themselves.”

But it was my neighbor Maggie who really sold it. One day soon afterward, she saw me carrying my sexy rolled-up mat to the little studio across the street and got excited. She said an old friend from acting school had studied Kundalini out in LA and it had really given her the edge in her career.

“What kind of edge?”

She speed-dialed a number on her cell and handed it to me. Like a living infomercial, her friend Jeanine told me how her life had been transformed since she started practicing. Her thoughts were clearer, her perception crisper.

“But it was more than that,” she said. “It's as though I'm able to will things to happen.”

Now she was getting work consistently. She'd been in a pilot for a sitcom called
Resplendent
, which she was just waiting to get picked up. She knew what casting directors wanted without them even having to ask.

“The real strength of Kundalini is in detecting hidden things,” she said.

“I work with criminals who are habitual liars,” I explained. “Do you think it could help me there?”

“Faith is always rewarded,” she replied simply. “What have you got to lose?”

It still sounded flaky to me, but I figured that since I was paying for the classes anyway, what would it hurt if for once I left the cynicism at home?

After my next yoga class, I waited until all left and asked the Renunciate what exactly I had to do to release my Kundalini.

“Focus on breathing and meditation.”

Before my next class, though, I had an encounter with Maggie that undermined my faith in anything she and her loopy actress friend might recommend. She invited me over for some tea, and inevitably we wound up talking about the latest man in her life. When all the tea turned into pee, she ran off to the toilet. Alone at her dining table, I saw a half-written letter sitting off to the side. Glancing at it, I saw it was addressed to the film actor Viggo Mortensen, who'd recently starred in
Lord of the Rings
. Of course I had to read it.

Dear Viggo
,

       
Like you, I too am a thespian, so this isn't so much a fan letter as an epistolary salute from one colleague to another. When I first saw you in Indian Runner and later GI Jane, I felt an immediate connection
. . .”

Under it I discovered more letters, addressed to other box office stars, including Noel Holden.

By the time Maggie returned, I had put the letters back in place, but her slightly paranoid mind immediately grasped that I had read them.

“I kind of have a correspondence with Viggo,” she said slowly and softly, “as well as several other actors I've met along the way.”

“Do any of them ever write you back?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But when everyone else forgets them, then they'll write me back.”

After watching the crime scene all day, I let loose in class that night. I was trying to remain open to the mystical possibilities of Kundalini, but I was definitely getting a workout. Rolling my abs like a belly dancer I breathed deeply and audibly, sounding like an old vacuum cleaner. I went home bathed in sweat, showered, and prepared myself some dinner, tricolored bow ties in light pesto sauce, with a green salad. While I ate it, I watched a copumentary show called
Case File
, which I preferred to the usual TV cop shows because they covered
actual cases.

Three deep low moans and one female gasp came through the wall Maggie's apartment shared with mine.

When I heard her door open a while later, I couldn't resist looking through my peephole at her latest lover. Some hottie I didn't recognize. It was a good sign—reality was slowly weaning her away from her Hollywood fantasy lovers. Ten minutes passed, during which I could envision Maggie washing, dressing, and reapplying makeup—then came her knock at my door.

“So how'd your . . . date go?” I asked, pretending not to have heard a thing. It was like she was getting laid enough for the both of us.

“I hope I wasn't . . . dating too loud.” Her face had a post-coital glow.

“Not at all.”

“That was Ricky.”

I remembered the name. He was a chiseled actor she'd met on the catering circuit, an itinerant bartender. According to Maggie, he wanted to have a relationship with her, but she'd politely told him this went against two of her cardinal rules: She didn't date men who were younger than her, and she definitely didn't date actors—unless they were stars. Fortunately, she found a loophole in her rules: she skipped the dating and just started having sex with him.

“How was your day?” she asked, grabbing my salad fork and picking just the red bow ties off the side of my plate.

“Want some?” I tried to sound sarcastic.

“No, I'm off food for good. Change the subject quick.” She kept downing my pasta.

“I guarded a murder scene today.”

“Re-e-e-ally?”

The last time I had guarded something it was a public school gym that doubled as a polling station.

“I shouldn't tell you this, but the victim had her head lopped off, and her limbs were all taped together.”

“Oh God!” Maggie finally put down the fork.

“And guess who I almost ticketed!”

“Conan O'Brien?”

“Noel Holden.”

She froze in disbelief.

“And he was so sexy!”

“Please tell me it was for public urination!” She swore she once saw Richard Gere pee in public.

“Smoking inside DiCarlo's.”

She asked me a zillion questions: What was he wearing? How tall was he? How much did he weigh? How did he smell?

“Was he with Venezia?”

“Later. She and Crispin Marachino picked him up.”

After five minutes of frantic chitchat, Maggie suddenly checked her watch. She had to see her favorite rope-a-dope reality show—
A Most Singular Man
. I wished her good night and she was gone.

CHAPTER THREE

Early the next morning I awoke to the chirp of my cell phone.

“Tell me again why you think he's a murderer?” a sandpapery male voice asked.

For an instant I thought it was my brother, talking about Saddam. “Who is this?”

“It's Eddie,” O'Ryan said. He sounded like he had been up all night.

“Oh, you were probably right.” I said tiredly. “I just thought it was weird that he was standing across the street from the crime scene hours later. You know how murderers do that sometimes.”

“Did you ask him what he was doing there?”

“Yeah. He said he'd just gone to an ATM machine, and he showed me the receipt.”

“So why did it strike you that he could be the killer?”

I couldn't tell anyone about my possibly Kundalini-assisted intuition, so I said: “First I saw him that morning with you outside the restaurant. The body had only just been found a half block away, so he could've killed her just before. And he was having lunch at ten in the morning in an empty restaurant—that struck me as odd, particularly 'cause he mentioned later that he only ate when he felt guilty.”

“And what would be his motive for killing the Jane Doe?”

“That I don't know yet. Maybe he's a thrill killer. When we spoke, he couldn't stop talking about the Green Tea murderer.”

“The Green
River
murderer,” he corrected me.

“Yeah, right. He was totally awestruck by the guy. I mean, he really seemed envious.”

“How do you know it was envy? Maybe it was disgust.”

“You had to be there. The body language, the tone of his voice . . .
He seemed particularly bewildered by the fact that the guy had simply been able to abruptly stop murdering.”

“You mean, he stopped stabbing some girl in the middle of a murder?”

“No, he thought the killer had stopped just before he reached fifty victims.”

“Maybe Holden just has a fixation on the guy. Maybe he has OCD.”

“No, I'm the one with OCD. He's nuts.”

“Did you ask him for an alibi?” O'Ryan said, apparently growing weary of the discussion.

“Actually I did,” I replied. “He said he was on a flight back from Barcelona after a film shoot. I wrote down the information somewhere.”

“What time do you have to report today?”

“Ten a.m., same as you. Why?”

“Maybe he is the killer,” he said. “I mean that would definitely be a career boost.”

“How would his being a killer boost his career?”

“No,
our
careers. Businesses will be open at nine, so we have an hour to go to the airline office and check if he was on the flight.”

“Why don't we just do it over the phone?”

“Even with a subpoena it's difficult. But if we go to the airline in person, show our shields and use the right balance of charm and grit, we might get lucky.”

I sensed he was doing this to get back in my good graces while casting Noel as a villain, but I was okay with that. I still had hopes for O'Ryan. And if displaying jealousy for the movie actor was the closest I could get to a show of affection from him, so be it.

Within an hour, I was showered, dressed and had my contacts in. O'Ryan rang my downstairs bell just as I was ready to go. I Starbucked a cup of chai, and roughly thirty minutes later we walked up to the counter of Iberian Airlines in Rockefeller Center just as they opened. O'Ryan's sanctimonious manner created a stronger impact, so I let him lead. He asked the clerk if they'd had reservations in the name of Noel Holden on an incoming flight from Barcelona a few days earlier. The clerk took us over to his supervisor. Again we showed our shields and O'Ryan explained our request.

The supervisor clicked his mouse for a moment until the right screen came up, then he said, “We have a first class reservation for a Noel Holden on a red eye flight from Madrid dated two days ago. And it says that he used the ticket.”

“I thought you said Barcelona?” O'Ryan said. I shrugged.

“Do you know Mr. Holden?” I asked Mr. Rodriguez.

“The Hollywood actor?”

“Yes.”

“I'm wondering if any staff member can confirm that they actually saw him on the plane or leaving the airport that morning?”

He sighed and said the home numbers of airline personnel were confidential.

“This is a murder investigation,” O'Ryan said sternly.

“It would just take a simple phone call to ask one of the flight attendants if they remembered seeing him on the plane,” I said delicately. “We don't want to have to bring anyone downtown for interrogation.”

The supervisor ran his mouse around its black pad until a list of phone numbers appeared. He dialed a number, then listened a minute, hung up, and dialed a second number. I figured he was getting voicemails. After he dialed the third number, I heard him speak softly in Spanish, then he handed me the phone.

“Hola señora,” I began in my awful high school Spanish.

“Alicia speaks fluent English,” he assured me.

I introduced myself and asked if she remembered yesterday's redeye from Madrid to New York.

“What about it?”

“Did you handle first class?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Do you remember Noel Holden being on the plane?”

“Who?”

“You know, the actor Noel Holden?”

“I don't really follow actors,” she said softly.

“Who was the last celebrity you do remember serving?” I asked testing to see if she was deliberately withholding information.

“Officer, I've been up for nearly forty hours over the last two days. I have to be ready in two hours to do a six-hour flight, so unless you have any questions that I
can
answer, I'd really like to get
back to sleep.”

I thanked her and handed the phone back to the supervisor. We thanked him and made it back to the precinct just in time for roll call.