The First Rule of Ten (15 page)

Late as it was, I popped open a can of Mixed Grill, and added a liberal squeeze of fragrant tuna water.

Even so, Tank gave me a long, suspicious look before he lowered his head to his dish. I wouldn’t be surprised if he smelled Julie’s jasmine kisses on me, and was trying to assess the extent of the disaster.

“Don’t worry,” I mumbled. “She’s nothing like Charlotte.”

I staggered into my bedroom and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

C
HAPTER
15

I’m lying face down on a concrete floor. I look around. A man watches me from the shadows in the corner. My father. His face is stern, judgmental. What does he want from me?

I step outside. The ocean is right at my doorstep. Waves roll in, one after the other, crashing into foam at my feet. A pair of white seabirds, pelicans, with broad wingspans and long, sword-shaped bills, fly low over the sea. I want to body-surf, but I don’t know how to get out there, where the waves are breaking. Then I realize I can fly, like the birds. I open my arms and barely skim the water, then joyously ride a wave in. As I land, I see that the concrete building where my father still stands is shaped like an X. I turn to face the waves, and take off, flying low, when it dawns on me I cannot really fly. That I am dreaming. That this must be a lucid dream. I look at my hands, and they sprout green tendrils, which bud and blossom into pink blooms.

“Tell me what you want me to know,” I say. And I am standing at the base of a tall watchtower. It is dark inside. I know all my enemies are within. I look at the winding staircase leading upward. It wants me to climb the stairs.

“I can’t,” I say. “It is too soon,” and I am back laying on cold cement, my father scowling from the corner, my cheek pressed against the floor. A body lies down on top of mine, heavy but comforting. A low voice speaks into my ear. It is neutral, neither male nor female.

“Don’t you know that you can find freedom, just with your heart?” it says.

I feel afraid. I look at my wrists, and see that they are in shackles.

“Is this prison?” I ask.

The room fills with the gentle arpeggios of a distant harp.

“No,” the voice says. “This is paradise….”

Harp notes invaded my brain, rolling up and down in relentless repetition.

I grabbed for my phone, knocking a full glass of water sideways onto the floor. The glass shattered, creating a dripping mess of broken shards.

“Shit!”

Tank leapt from the base of the bed, landed on the floor with a thump, and sped out the door, my dream slithering away behind him.

The harp sounded another round of dulcet notes, making me want to smash something else, this time on purpose.

“Hello,” I croaked into the phone. I checked the time. I’d been asleep maybe five hours.

“Mr. Norbu?” The voice was high-pitched and panicky. “This is Wesley Harris, Freda’s husband. She’s in a coma. I didn’t know who else to call.”

I took the Mustang. Freda was in Glendale, at Providence Saint Joseph, and I didn’t want to waste any time.

As I sped along Pacific Coast Highway, the dawn sky scalloped with pinks and blues, I tried to retrieve my dream as best I could. Something about my father, and a tower.

A sentence floated up:
Don’t you know that you can find freedom, just with your heart?
I glanced at the ocean, and more came drifting back. Pelicans. I was close to knowing something, but not close enough.

A chorus of crickets erupted in my pocket—I had changed my ringtone from celestial strumming to nature’s jaunty fiddlers, much more my style—and I fumbled to attach the little white earbuds that would keep me legal. Mike’s goofball grin beamed from my screen.

“You’re up late,” I said to Mike.

“You’re up early,” he replied.

Then I swear I heard soft laughter. Female laughter.

“Are you with a girl?” I said.

“Not ‘a’ girl, ‘my’ girl,” he said. More giggles.

Well, that explained the ear-to-ear grin.

“I’ve got some answers for you, boss,” he went on.

“First things first,” I answered. “Your girl. I need some who, what, and when’s, please.”

“Tricia, a grad student studying cultural anthropology at UCLA, and we met at my rave the other night. She’s practically moved in.”

“To your house?” My voice was more of a bleat. Was he out of his mind? “Are you out of your mind?”

“Hey, it’s cool, Ten. With our crazy schedules, it’s the only way we’ll see each other. Anyway, what’s it to you?”

I felt like reaching through the phone and knocking Mike’s block off, but he had a point. What was it to me? Apparently, I didn’t like the ease, the warp-speed with which these two were moving ahead together. I filed that thought under “Later.”

“So Ten, I called because I found a few more policies with TFJ.”

“Go on.”

“I’ll send you the links, but basically I was able to find three more contracts, each one for two million bucks.”

“All old-time musicians?”

“Two of them. The other was a retired character actor, Jeremiah Cook, did a lot of television back in the day. Best known for a recurring role on
Star Trek
, where he played some crazy Russian author or something. He made a second career for himself signing memorabilia at Trekkie conventions.”

“Florio has no doubt got him believing he’s owed a bunch of unpaid royalties on that stuff.”

“Yeah, well you can put that in the past tense,” Mike said.

“He’s dead?”

“Yep.”

“How?”

“Cancer, they say, though—get this—his wife, Camille, claimed he’d been in remission since he went to Mexico for some kind of hoodoo, new age treatments. Insisted his collapse came out of nowhere. Sound familiar?”

“How old?”

“Eighty-two.”

“Let me guess. No autopsy.”

“No autopsy.”

It was looking more and more like Florio was either playing with marked cards or on intimate terms with the Grim Reaper. First Buster, then Jeremiah Star Trek, and now Freda was in a coma. He must be ahead $4 million, at least. That’s a lot of ostrich loafers. I had no doubt Mike would dredge up even more payouts before he was finished.

“Okay,” I said. “While we’re on the subject of Florio, there’s something else I want you to do.”

“Shoot.”

“This is probably a long shot, but could you see if there’s any connection between Tommy Florio and a guy named Vince Barsotti?”

He whistled. “That’s too fucking weird, man.”

My attention pricked, like a hunting dog on point. Mike was about to flush something from the bushes.

“Here’s what else I found. TFJ and Associates is a Nevada corporation, registered a few years ago by Thomas Florio Junior and two other dudes. Guess who one of them is?”

“Vincent Barsotti,” I said.

“Bingo.”

“Who’s the third guy?”

“Dude called Liam O’Flaherty.”

“Florio, Barsotti, and O’Flaherty. Sounds diverse,” I said.

“Yeah, well, guess what career path O’Flaherty was on for a good thirty years?”

“I can’t wait to find out.”

“Same path as me, probably, if you hadn’t turned my head around. He did a series of stretches in prison—Irish prison, to be exact. He could con beans out of a can, this guy. Then he took a little break before he became a legal crook over here. He’s thought to be affiliated with the Irish Mob.”

The Mob again.

“What about Florio and Barsotti? Have they done time as well?”

“Nothing on Florio yet. I’m just beginning to work on Barsotti. There’s a big pile of Vincent Barsottis out there.”

“Maybe I can help you with that.” I ran down what I had learned in my two days of old-fashioned door-to-door snooping.

“Nice work.” Mike said. “For someone who’s technically challenged, you’re a pretty good spy. I’ll call you when I find out more. Oh, and Tricia thinks your name is cute.” He hung up before I could respond.

The new pieces of information shifted and re-formed with what I already knew, but the kaleidoscope remained too abstract to decipher. What did Florio and Barsotti have in common, besides Italian last names? One of them was running a scam on older celebrities, and the other owned pigs and luxury cars. How did they end up in business together? And what was their connection to O’Flaherty? To the Mafia? To the Children of Paradise?

I pulled into the hospital parking lot none the wiser. As I headed for the ICU, I had a sinking feeling any answers it might hold were locked deep in Freda Wilson’s comatose mind.

Freda lay still, a felled animal in a nest of tubes and fluids. Wesley sat by her, stroking one swollen hand. Their son stood at the foot of the bed. Gone was the swagger, the sullen, rebellious stance. He looked like what he was, a scared boy whose mother’s survival was at the mercy of machinery, or maybe a miracle. My heart hurt as I took in this tableau of family grief. Human life is so very fragile. My years of Buddhist training underscored an awareness that death can come at any moment, but the sight of Freda made this awareness all too real, and painful.

The steady beeping of mechanical pumps and dispensers told me Freda’s body could no longer function without technological help. How much inner life was still there, I did not know. I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and tried to reach her heart with mine. I felt no corresponding warmth. I did the next best thing, surrounding her with a peaceful light. If she was meant to recover, I hoped it would speed her healing. If not, maybe it would help create more ease for her passage to the next realm.

I left her, and went to the visitor’s lounge to wait. Wesley soon joined me. He looked a decade older than the last time I saw him.

“I’m so very sorry,” I said. He nodded, and his eyes filled. He sat down next to me, and hunched over. His raw pain was palpable.

I reached back to my time in the monastery, all those hours of sitting, practicing loving-kindness toward myself and others. I closed my eyes, and located a powerful droplet of condensed compassion, lodged deep in my chest. I invited the caring to expand, fill my body, spill over.
May you enjoy happiness….
It spread like bittersweet syrup.
May you be free from suffering.
… I tried to direct it to the source of Wesley’s grief, coat it with comfort, or at least leach away some of the soreness
. May you rejoice in the well-being of others…. May you live in peace, free from anger, hatred, and attachment
…

Wesley lifted his head from his hands.

“She didn’t want to keep me up,” he said. “She started coughing, it was the middle of the night, and she didn’t want to keep me up.”

He turned to me.

“Why didn’t I tell her to stay in bed with me?”

The story spilled out of him now, how she’d been fighting the remnants of the flu for weeks. How last night she ran out of cough drops, couldn’t stop coughing, and finally put on her robe and went to the kitchen, to make a hot toddy.

How he woke up with a start several hours later and stumbled out of the bedroom and found her lying on the living room floor. “I thought she was asleep,” he said. “Her cheeks were so rosy and pink.”

He turned to me, his eyes haggard. “They say her lungs are full of fluid. That her heart is failing. That her … her brain is … that she may never come back.” His voice cracked. “Why didn’t I tell her to stay in bed?”

“Wesley, listen to me,” I said. “It’s not your fault. It may not be anybody’s, but it’s definitely not yours.”

He looked at me. “What do you mean by that?”

I decided to give him the truth.

“Look, I don’t want to alarm you, but there’s something odd going on, something related to Florio. At least two other people he signed contracts with have died under suspicious circumstances. This may be related.”

Wesley shook his head, as if trying to wake himself up. “You saying this isn’t the flu?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying,” I admitted, “but things aren’t adding up here. Freda may have been the victim of foul play.”

Wesley’s face darkened as he absorbed this new information. He grabbed my wrist, his grip strong.

“You find out anything more, you tell me, understand? Bastards!”

“I will,” I said.

He stood. “I’ve got to get back to Freda.” His body swayed. I jumped up and took his arm to steady him.

“Mr. Norbu, thank you for telling me this,” he said. “I was carrying more weight than I knew.”

I walked him back to the ICU and left him there, holding Freda’s hand. I couldn’t undo what had happened, but I was glad to at least bring him some small relief from his unfounded guilt.

I saw Bill had phoned. No message. I called him back from the parking lot.

“Yo,” he answered. “I got something for you.”

“You up for some lunch?”

“As long as pastrami’s involved.”

I arrived at Langer’s a few minutes early and grabbed a booth by the window. My favorite waitress, Jean, came at me like a heat-seeking missile. She filled my coffee cup without asking.

“Ten-zing,” she sang, in her distinctive Arizona drawl. “I’ve missed you!”

“Likewise,” I said, bowing and kissing her hand. Jean is in her 60s, tall and thin, with a quirky, if careworn, beauty and a bobbed haircut straight out of the roaring ’20s. She’s been waiting on cops at Langer’s for over two decades, with the brashness and bunions to prove it.

“I hear you quit the force,” she said. “Good for you. I wish I could quit.”

“What’s stopping you?” I said.

“I still owe the Scientologists a hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

We shared a laugh. Jean had, in fact, been a devoted member of the Church of Scientology for 16 years, signing up with them in her early 20s. She was one of the few people who quit and lived to tell the tale: “They told me I was totally clear. I told them, ‘I’m not totally clear, I’m totally broke, thanks to you guys, so fuck you very much, and good-bye.’”

Jean gave me a stern glare over her coffeepot. “You look tired, Ten-zing. Are you all right?”

I admitted I was working pretty hard, for an un-employed person.

“And how’s the bad news doing?”

“Ruling the household, as always.”

Jean has called Tank “the bad news” ever since the time she harangued me about my lack of a love life. I told her she was wrong, I had all the intimacy a man could want.