Hungry Ghosts (14 page)

“It was weird,” he said, as if he'd been waiting for me to get to this. “She wanted to see me. That wasn't the weird part. But she suggested meeting at the old Letterman Hospital, in the Presidio, even though she loathed the changes they made when the Park Service took over from the Army and tore down the high-rise part.”

“I thought everyone was ecstatic about the Park Service getting the land, and especially nabbing Lucas Films to be in there. As for Letterman, it was an ugly old building. Wasn't it there during the First World War? It looked like a place you'd have expired in during the flu epidemic of 1918.”

“I didn't have time to drive across town, wander through the grounds, and then hunt up a restaurant out there. So I left a message telling her to meet me at Tadish's. I have no idea why she wanted to meet at the Letterman site. You're right, it was pre–World War I, old and bland. But to Tia it was vile.”

“Vile! I love it. Jeez, I'm going to miss her. Not merely pedestrian, or ugly, but vile! If the Park Service could only hear that. Vile! Gary, did she give you any clue what she wanted?”

“Not really. The thing is, Darce, I haven't talked to her in a while, so I could be wro—no, I'm not! There was a touch of desperation in her voice. I mean, I was pleased and I was insulted that it took that kind of crisis to make her call. Still, I know how much she hated driving downtown and hassling with parking, and I figured if she was willing to come to the heart of the Fnancial District, she really needed to see me—”

“About?”

“I assumed she'd tell me at dinner.”

I nodded resignedly, not that Gary was likely to notice in the dark. We had passed the Castro District and were going up the steep part of 17th Street now, over Twin Peaks. Even Gary's moose of a car was panting its way up. Had it been daylight on a rare day when there was no fog at all,
we could have seen all the way to the end of the avenues, across the Great Highway to the Pacific, or at least imagined we could.

As it was, I headed down into the thicker fog, watching our cones of light extending less and less far from the grill and listening to what I took for foghorns, and realized was Gary snoring. I was very glad to be away from the zendo, the crime scene, going home. I was even more glad that Mom was still gone and I wouldn't have to tell her about Tia. I knew I was numb—that tomorrow Tia's death would hit me again, harder—but now I noted fuzzy red and green lights in the fog, found myself compulsively checking both sides of the street for pedestrians bursting from between cars, motorcyclists cutting me off, squad cars squealing in front of me. As always, my left foot was poised on the brake.

Soon I'd be sitting in the kitchen sipping a bit of Powers, wishing I had room for some of the stew that Grace was heating up. Soon everything would be all right.

I pulled up in front of the house, poked Gary awake, and got out. The house was dark. The only light inside was above the note board in the hall, where messages had been tacked as long as I could remember. Now it held a single sheet with my name. I unfolded it:

           
Darcy,

           
1. Call Jeffrey Hagstrom.

           
2. Robin Sparto wants you for a stair fall at 5:00
A.M
. Grant & Francisco. He said to be on the set at 4:00! Eamon can take you then—no earlier. I told Sparto you'd be there at 4:30 and he should be thankful!

           
3. I called Jeffrey Hagstrom, left message that you had a pre-dawn gig and you would have to get back to him later. Okay?

I laughed. And then remembered laughing with Tia.

I reread the note.
Eamon
could take me at four in the morning? Did he live near here? Was he staying
here?
The ride downtown would take about twenty minutes. Good thing, because I had plenty to ask him about the zendo building and about his drive home with Tia.

Something had shifted in me. For the first time I had thought about Eamon not as Mike, but as our landlord, as, perhaps, the last person Tia had trusted.

C
HAPTER
13

L
EO HAD RACED
out too fast to bother with a jacket. Now the cold bit into his skin. He was alone, but that wouldn't last. This was just a respite before the barrage began again.

He closed his eyes and listened to the tight flow of his breath, to the whir of the air, felt the cold metal on his spine. He should plan his next move, consider his options. He smiled, almost laughed. That wouldn't take long. But no, he would not do that.

He recalled a night colder than this one, foggier, in which he had felt more desperate. In Japan, at the monastery, when he couldn't make the grade and couldn't go home to America, couldn't . . .

It was Yamana, his mentor, who had told him the story.

           
A monk came to see the roshi in dokusan. “Roshi,” he said, “it is time that I leave and study with another teacher, as is our custom.”

           
“Go with my approval,” the roshi said. “But first I will give you a gift.”

Leo remembered the surge of excitement he had felt at the idea of a special farewell gift chosen by the exalted head of the great monastery for this young monk.

           
The roshi picked up a pair of tongs, plucked a hot coal from his fire, and held it out to the monk.

               
The monk stared at the red-hot coal. Then he jumped up and ran out.

               
But he couldn't leave the monastery, not without the roshi's blessing. So he sat in meditation for a full week. He tried to figure out the meaning of what had just happened. How had his teacher expected him to react? How could he have accepted his teacher's strange gift and still managed not to burn his hands? What did the whole thing mean?

               
At the end of the week, he marshaled his courage and came back to dokusan.

               
“Roshi,” he said, “it is time that I leave and study with another teacher, as is our custom.”

               
Again, the roshi picked up a pair of tongs, plucked a hot coal from his fire, and held it out to the monk.

               
The monk stared at the red-hot coal. It hissed with steam. He trembled all over. Sweat ran down his face. He looked over his shoulder to the door, which he could open and run through again. He looked back at the roshi, trying to see the lesson for which this skin-searing coal was a symbol. He knew better than to put gloves between himself and his teacher's gift. There was no way to stall long enough for the coal to cool. No way to get the blessing without the burn.

               
The monk did the only thing he could. He bowed, put out his hands, and accepted his teacher's gift.

               
Leo, Garson-roshi, put out his hands and prepared to face the hot coal of what came next.

C
HAPTER
14

THURSDAY

I
ROLLED OUT
of bed at three forty-five, brushed my teeth, pulled on clothes, and was downstairs before four. In our kitchen, coffee waited hot in the pot—it always did—but I'd get brew three times stronger from the lunch wagon on the set. Instead, I dialed the zendo. I'd wake Leo, and he wouldn't be pleased. But he was a priest; he'd pick up any call, particularly one in the middle of the night when it could be from someone desperate—like me.

Leo didn't answer.

Suddenly I was more awake than if I'd swallowed a quart of on-set coffee. Where
was
Leo? He wouldn't have just wandered off. Panic squeezed me. Had he been killed, too? Could he have . . . No, I couldn't let myself go diffuse with speculation. I forced myself to focus the way I did at the brink of a new gag, looking out over a fifty-foot blind drop or eyeing a junker I was about to roll. I exhaled, felt the tightness. Usually there was a crack.

Through that crack came a new set of thoughts. Of course, Leo couldn't sleep in his room—it was the crime scene. He wouldn't have slept in the only other bedroom, mine, lest I came back. So, he was probably curled up in the zendo. Traditionally monks have slept in the zendo, on their mats. Leo wouldn't think twice about it. And the zendo was too far for him to
hear the phone. Leo would be at morning zazen in a couple of hours; we'd talk then. I was so relieved, I headed for a cup of coffee on principle. And so distracted, I almost walked into Eamon Lafferty putting his cup down.

“What are—?”

“Sorry. I must have shocked you. I've got a key.”

“For driving me at this appalling hour, you should have a medal,” I said. But it did shock me, him standing in the kitchen like Mike, his having a key.

I followed him outside. Unlike Gary's mobile parlor, Eamon's ride was a two-bucket muscle car. I'd barely snapped in the seatbelt when the car leapt away from the curb. At four in the morning, the street was empty. Streetlights seemed to flash on Eamon's face, sometimes revealing a tired-looking stranger, but at instants showing him so like Mike I had to turn away.

I stared through the windshield and the memories of last night—of seeing Tia dead—flooded in. “All that blood! I just can't believe it.”

“I know. God, I still can't believe she's dead.” His voice was taut and ragged. “This time yesterday morning I was sprawled in bed dreaming of her. I woke up smiling, figuring I'd call her for dinner.” He looked over at me. “Darcy, how can she be dead?”

I had to jam my teeth together for a moment before I could even speak. “The way she died; so vicious. So personal. Who could have done that?”

He shook his head. “You were around the zendo before, right? Down in the tunnel with the movie people?”

“Yes?”

“Did you see Jeffrey?”

“Jeffrey? Why him? You don't think that Jeffrey killed her?” I asked, shocked.

“No! I was just trying to figure who knew her best, who'd have a bead on her friends or anyone who had it in for her.” He hung a left on Geary
and as soon as he was on the boulevard, glanced over at me and added, “I'm not pointing the finger—Jeff's my friend—but Tia really roller-coastered him that night by the tunnel.”

“Yeah, what was that all about?”

“I heard you saw him afterwards. What did he say?”

I sat, feeling the heat on my shins, staring out at the dark shop and restaurant façades. “He wasn't angry, at least not at Tia. Really, he was more emotional about how his father treated him and how pissed his father'd be to know he was using his inheritance to sell weird chairs. I guess his thinking of using that revolting tunnel under the zendo to store his father's things says it all.”

“He told you that!”

“About the stuff, yeah.”

Eamon shook his head. “That's Jeff in a nutshell. He hates the old man, but still he can't bring himself to toss his stuff. I knew his father when he was a civilian in the military lab. He wasn't running on all cylinders even then. He was sure they were out to cheat him. I don't think he ever came up with anything he could patent, but he totally believed if he did, the military would grab the rights. You know how that kind of man is, full of excuses for his own failure: ‘I could have been Pasteur or Salk, but what's the point? They'll only snatch the profits!'”

“You worked for him, right?”

He nodded. “The thing is, he wasn't that far wrong about the military in general. They never cared about anyone's potential. Even I could see it, and I was barely out of college. There were some brilliant scientists, with lots of ideas, chomping at the bit to exploit them, just waiting for someone to open the right channels. It was such a waste. What they needed was someone—Sorry. You'll be thinking I'm not so close to sane either. So, Jeff seemed okay? Not upset, unnerved?”

“Not enough to keep him from making me coffee and heating up
focaccia. But what about Tia? I mean when you drove her home. What'd she say?”

“Nothing I can—”

“Eamon, something happened before you two left the zendo. She made a point of inviting me to lunch yesterday. There was something she was going to tell me. She'd kept a diary the year my brother, Mike, disappeared. She was going to get it. And then she disappeared.”

“Yesterday? She was going to tell you something yesterday?”

“Yes. She went downstairs and never came back. Lunch was still on the table. But my point is, she asked me over there to tell me something and now I have no clue what it was. Did she say anything,
anything
, to you? Even if it seemed insignificant.”

He raked his lip with his upper teeth. After a string of green lights and then yellows, we were finally coming to a light I thought he couldn't make. But he hit the gas and shot through as it turned red.