Hungry Ghosts (10 page)

“Because, Darcy, that's what liars do. I know. Liars are—”

“—your bread and butter? What can I say to the great authority on human misbehavior?”

He peered in the doorway.

“She thought you were cute, John.”

He stopped still, then turned, a look of disgust pinching his face. “She was sixteen!”

“Teenage girls thinks guys are cute, John. They even discuss those guys with their friends.” I had forgotten how great was the temptation to tease John.

“Yeah, well, she didn't discuss Mike with anyone on the list of friends she gave me.”

“You checked up on
her?
Did you figure she was that central to Mike's disappearance?”

“No.”

It was an un-John-like no, a word that wavered rather than hammering. “Not central, but you thought she knew something she wasn't telling you, right?”

“Everybody keeps secrets. Question is: is it
your
secret?”

“Was it?”

He glanced back inside the house as if checking for eavesdroppers. It was another minute or two before he admitted, “I don't know.”

“Then you're not through with her, are you?” The battle wasn't over; merely a setback would have been sustained.

“I am.”

“You figured she had a lead to Mike and you let her keep quiet?”

“I'm a police officer. We don't harass witnesses.”

“But—”

“We don't harass witnesses—”

“John, what did you assume she knew?”
Was that what she invited me here to discuss?

“I don't have all day. I only came out here as a favor to you. I was in the middle of an important report. A hostess walking out on her guest is not a crime. But I'm here. I'll check around . . . as a favor to you.”

“What? You'll keep looking through the front door? John, she's not here. You don't need to look. You need to have cops out there,” I said, waving both arms toward the surrounding streets.

“Don't tell me my business.” He peered in through the door, pulled it shut, and headed down the stairs. “I'll let you know if I hear anything.”

“Like you have all these years, about Mike?”

“Darcy, don't—”

“Forget it!” I so wanted to stalk off, but he was in the way. I could manage only a weak “Just forget it,” as I watched him get to do the stalking to his car and tire-squeal off.

John was going to do zip. So be it. I would find her myself. I was dressed for a run anyway, in my “dress sweats.”
Don't assume
. Maybe she wasn't really gone. Maybe she circled back inside while I was in the garage and
didn't want to deal with John. Strange, but hardly stranger than vanishing. I felt foolish, but I knocked. Of course, there was no answer.

I loped along Broadway, glancing into apartment lobbies, up stairs of flats, into narrow courtyards. At Octavia Street I turned uphill, then east on Pacific toward Van Ness, the thoroughfare where the dynamiting had finally stopped the fire after the great earthquake of 1906. Ahead was downtown and the mixed neighborhoods of Polk Gulch, Russian Hill, North Beach, Chinatown, and the Barbary Coast, behind were the great Victorians and mansions of Pacific Heights.

Van Ness is a crowded, traffic-clogged, four-lane thoroughfare with bus stops at corners and as good a chance of hailing a cab as a pedestrian has in this city. I ran two blocks in either direction, but there was no sign of Tia. I checked a couple of blocks of Polk Street east, peering past fringed lampshades into antique shops, through the tinted windows of cafés. Two blocks farther down I spotted a woman with short, light brown hair sipping from a paper cup in a coffeehouse and was halfway across the room before I knew she wasn't Tia.

When I emerged, the California Street cable car rattled by a couple of blocks away. If Tia'd gotten on it, she'd already be at the Ferry Building. Like New York City, San Francisco nurtures pedestrians. There were a dozen ways she could have gone. Giving up, I headed back to her apartment, but when I got there the door was still locked and everything looked unnervingly normal.

I wanted to scream.

Instead, I ran. As I jogged in place at the red light back on Van Ness I wondered how Leo, Garson-roshi, the teacher with whom I came back here to study, would tell me to handle this. He might go for the traditional: all is impermanence, and this interlude is part of that impermanence.

I crossed and headed along Broadway toward the little tunnel that sucked cars out of the staidness of Russian Hill and spit them into the bright red and gold of Chinatown. As had my old teacher, Leo's mentor, Yamana-roshi, Leo might say, “We see through our own eyes.” He would mean I was looking at Tia as if she existed wholly in connection with me, with Mike, with my family. He would be telling me to stop viewing her as the ghost of my own hopes and assumptions. He would advise me to see her as she really is.

As I looped up around the tunnel, I wondered if Leo . . . Then I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. “Leo, it's Darcy.”

“Are you sick?”

“No, I'm running,” I panted.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I have a question, I mean for you, as my teacher.”

“You're calling me from the street, while you're jogging, for a
dokusan
question?”

“Well, yeah,” I said before I could quite tell whether Leo was seriously appalled at the way I'd transmuted the centuries-old traditional private interview in which the student comes to the teacher in a room where a candle is lit and incense burns, and asks a dharma—teaching—question.

“Be aware!”

Zen is a practice of awareness of everything. But I suspected Leo meant the traffic. I plunged in with the tale of this afternoon. “We were putting lunch on the table. She went downstairs to get me a diary she wrote when we were in high school. And she never came back. You don't just walk out on your guest. You don't leave with the food on the table.”

“You don't know her as well—”

“As you do after a few minutes in a reception?” He sounded just like John.

“As well as you think.” His voice held none of the frustration of mine. He was merely clarifying.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you like that.” I came down harder on my front leg, pushed off faster. “Oh, okay, ‘don't assume.' Listen, I'm not just assuming.” I stopped. Stopped speaking, stopped running. Stood panting. “Leo, I'm not assuming about lunch. I'm not even assuming that she looked at me and resented my walking on two legs without a cane.”

“Tia's not one to lie. If she told you it wasn't about you, believe her. So, you can choose to assume that at the center of her accident and her pain and her sudden departure is
you
. Or you cannot assume, and see things as they are. Your choice.”

Don't assume
. I was still panting.
Don't assume
. “Okay, but . . . Leo, how do you know . . . ?” Leo had hung up. My teacher hung up on me! The zendo was a couple of blocks away. I pocketed my phone and ran. Hang up on me, indeed!

But I'd barely hit Columbus Avenue when I reconsidered. Okay, I
was
assuming some control over Tia I'd never even come near having. Just as I was assuming she'd, in fact, gone out for her diary. Had she? She'd left, but she could be sitting in a neighbor's kitchen. I had believed that she walked with a limp, but I only had her presentation.

And what about the liar issue? John insisting she was, Leo sure she wasn't. Was each of them merely seeing through his own eyes? Was John himself lying? And how did Leo get to be so sure about Tia so quickly? Luckily, in a minute I could ask him just that.

The light was green at Columbus and Broadway two blocks above the zendo. Running downhill, I moved fast. Double-parked by the zendo was a mob of police cars, light bars flashing.

C
HAPTER
10

P
ATROL CARS BLOCKED
off the street at Columbus. Their pulsing lights turned the white buildings scarlet, the brick ones to dried blood. A crowd three-deep angled to peer over the hoods, stretched to see above the car roofs, pressed into the spaces between bumpers.

Leo! Injured?

“I live here,” I puffed to the cop at the barrier.

“Driver's license.”

“I just moved in.”

“Proof?”

“I
said
I just moved in.”

“Yeah. Like I haven't heard that one before. No proof, no passage.” He was small for a cop and thin. He lifted his equipment belt; when he let go it bounced on his hip bones, cell phone, flashlight, and night stick clattering. Behind him, beyond the barrier, a small crowd waited.

“Ask Leo, the abbot of the Zen Center, in the middle of the block, he'll—”

“Anything else I can do for you? Tea while you wait?”

“Sarcasm is the kind of bullying that elicits an unnecessarily negative response to a city's police force,” I said, repeating a particularly stodgy line from recruit training I'd heard from John.

The cop stared. “No proof, no passage,
ma'am
.”

“Leeeee-ooooooooooh!”

The crowd inside the barriers turned. “Quiet!”

I recognized the voice. Demanding quiet on the set. “This is a
movie location
?”

“Well, yeah . . .
ma'am
.”

“Robin!” I called to the one person whose name I knew. “Robin, it's Darcy.” It had been pre-dawn dark when I'd met Robin Sparto yesterday. Since I was an emergency replacement for a double who'd been injured the previous day, he didn't waste time on my credentials. Once I'd assured him I'd done high falls and had an S.A.G. card, he'd moved on. I wasn't sure he'd even recognize me in daylight.

“I did the gag yesterday,” I called to him. “Remember?”

“Yeah, but we don't need—”

“I live on this street, but I don't have a wallet. Vouch me in.”

He turned back toward the crew, grumbling. “The damned consultant hasn't shown up. We've been waiting half an hour. The light's only going to hold so long, you know.”

“Hey, I live here! What do you need to know?”

“Yeah? Huh.” He nodded to the cop, who knew when he was beat and stepped aside smartly.

I was desperate to check on Leo. But, I reminded myself, there was no reason to assume anything had happened, other than his hanging up on me. The biggest danger now was from the impatient talent and the crew standing on the protected side of the vans.

Robin wore a frustrated expression. “There's a tunnel somewhere—”

“Over there. Behind the courtyard wall. That's where I live. Are you using it?”

“Probably. Final sequence: Ajiko is led into the death room with the oil
lamp and tea. We were going to do it back in L.A. Sealed room is sealed room, you know? But then I heard about this tunnel. It's like a room, right? Damp dirt walls, no exit. Who owns it?”

“The tunnel? Eamon Lafferty, I assume. The building's his.”

“Then that's okay. Keys,” he called to one of the gofers. A younger, smaller version of Robin raced over, extending a ring.

“You know him?” I asked.

“Everyone knows Eamon.”

“Really?”

He stared at me, as if he were watching a knobby brown beast transform into a woman, or vice versa. “You of all people must know that. What are you, Eamon's sister? No wonder he was so hot for you to have this job.”

“Eamon Lafferty got me the gig?”

“Oh, don't—”

“No, really—” I shut my mouth and shrugged. There's a time for truth, and a time for silence. Eamon Lafferty had gotten me this job, the same Eamon Lafferty who'd given the zendo the building. How did he even know I was a stunt double? Why would he care, much less find me work?

“Aren't you his sister?”

“That one.” I pointed to a large brass key on his ring.

“You know the key? You've been in the tunnel?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, as if Eamon and I had played there as kids.

“Take me down. Ajiko!” He was calling the female lead.

Ajiko Sakai was a star in Japan. This was her first American film, her first step to stardom here. She was black-haired, tiny, and gorgeous. She was also polite. She stood waiting at Robin Sparto's shoulder, her head barely that high. Compared to her, I was a baboon.

There's a reason stunt doubles are near-twins of the actors. Just how much pull did the universally known Eamon Lafferty have? I needed to get
him one-on-one, this guy who walked off last night with the prize of Tia Dru. I needed to figure out what was going on with him and just who he was—
if
I could ever get beyond him not being Mike. But not now. Now was for connecting with Sparto and making sure the next time he needed a stunt double he'd remember me. I took the key and unlocked and pulled up the metal door.