The Zen Man (2 page)

“I’m sorry she and Mellow showed up.” She brushed a light kiss against my cheek. “Didn’t you say a few days ago that the world is ruled by letting things take their course?”

“Stole that line from Lao-Tzu, who obviously never had Wicked steamrolling toward
his
front door.”

Laura smiled knowingly. “This weekend will be okay. Trust me.”

Anxiety did a mean little tap-dance on my nerves. I might quote the cool dudes, but I’m a worrier at heart.

The doorbell rang.

Our Rottweiler Mavis, named after Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers, ran helter-skelter into the kitchen, her nails scrabbling against the linoleum floor, barking and snarling. If looks could kill, Mavis would be a serial murderer, but she was actually the biggest wuss I’d ever met, human or canine.

“We can’t have Mavis greeting all our guests like that,” Laura murmured, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“No, just select ones.”

Mavis continued the vicious-beast act as all three of us headed into the adjoining room, the foyer of the B&B where people checked in. Laura had decorated this entrance-way with a dinosaur motif—Jurassic foliage wallpaper, dinosaur foot stools, even a 3D T-Rex coming out of the wall. Within the opening of its mouth she’d inserted a red-covered table which looked liked the dino’s tongue, on which she’d laid brochures and giveaways for guests. In somebody else’s hands, this could’ve looked like
Jurassic Park on Crack
, but ever-capable Laura had managed to give it, as well as the guest rooms and cabins, a classy prehistoric ambiance.

I plastered on my best smile and opened the door.

Winter breezes swirled through the doorway, carrying scents of pine and Sam’s pricey cologne, an oriental cedar number I recalled from our shared law-office days. I’d never needed to ask our receptionist where Sam was because that scent had always announced his comings and goings.

He towered over us at six-three, maybe four. But then when you’re five-eight, anything over six foot is gratuitous. He wore a designer look that screamed I’m hip and make big bucks, which meant Sam had come straight from court. He’d always had the tall, dark, handsome angle going for him, although if I wasn’t mistaken he’d started dying his thinning hair. Made me feel smug about the thick, curly mass on my head, even if it was prematurely gray.

“Hey, Zen Man.” Sam smiled sheepishly as he put his arm around Wicked’s shoulders.

She wore cream-colored slacks that didn’t match her beige sweater, which was too low cut and clingy for court so I guessed she’d gussied up for her date, tryst, whatever was going on with Sam. I almost felt sad seeing the bloat in her face and the watery red in her eyes. Drinking too much again, chased with a favorite pill or three. Used to be one of our favorite pastimes, getting plastered as an antidote to the stress of trying tough cases and managing demanding clients. Or so we’d told ourselves.

“Zen Man?” asked Laura, a funny smile on her face.

I shrugged. “You know how I sometimes toss off Zen quotes.” Hadn’t been called the nickname in so long, I’d almost forgotten about it.

“But it wasn’t just the quotes, it was the
je ne sais quoi
you gave them that made you the Zen Man.” Sam’s wide mouth elongated into a smile. “Remember?”

“Sort of.”

“Oh.” The smile leveled out. “I guess you were too…”

“Yeah. Probably.”

I watched Mavis sniff the pocket of Sam’s jacket as he introduced Wicked to Laura, explaining how it was a last-minute decision for her to attend the conference, she’d be staying in his cabin, blah-dy blah-dy.

“Nice to meet you,” Wicked cooed, extending a red-nailed hand to shake Laura’s. A stack of bracelets on her wrists jangled, reminding me how she’d always worn too much jewelry, as though to show the world how successful or loved she was. When our gazes snagged, I swore I caught a frightened look in her eyes. Took me by surprise. Couldn’t recall ever seeing Wicked frightened of something, except the possibility of missing a shoe sale at Nordstrom. But the look quickly disappeared, like the flash of a shark’s fin in deep waters.

“Merry Christmas, Rick.”

“Thanks, but I’m still Jewish.”

Wicked hic-cupped a laugh. “Sorry. Silly of me. Happy Chanukah.”

“Yes, right, Happy Chanukah, old chap.” Sam clapped me on my shoulder. “Cheers.”

“Since when’d you go Franco-Brit, dude? Thought you were a Colorado native.” I could handle a lot of weird, but this little meet-and-greet had taken a U-turn at the Milky Way and was warp-speeding to a distant planet. Plus, I was still pissed off they’d driven up here in MLO YLO.

“If I recall,” countered Sam, “you used to end every conversation with ‘Ciao, baby’ and you’d never set foot in Italy.”

I opened my mouth to say something decidedly un-Zen, but save-the-day Laura cut me off with some pleasantry about Sam’s hand-painted silk tie, which didn’t hold a thread to any of Jerry’s, whose J. Garcia brand was still a seller. Sam thanked her, offered a return compliment about the dinosaur motif, made a lame joke about a girl on her Triassic period. Laura laughed politely. I barely held back a grimace, wondering how many dino jokes I was doomed to hear over the coming years.

Little did I know, I was doomed to hear far worse over the coming hours.

“Stuff that’s hidden and murky and ambiguous is scary because you don’t know what it does.”
—Jerry Garcia

B
y eight-thirty that evening, the Dinosaur Foot dining hall had morphed into a disco, awash in booze and music from the seventies that was putting a crimp in my belief of a divine force governing the universe. Not that I’m totally anti-seventies tunes—hey, I’m a Deadhead—but it’s one thing to listen to a thought-provoking
China Cat Sunflower
by the Dead and another to watch a bunch of inebriated, megalomaniac sharks gyrate to
Venus
by The Shocking Blue.

I’d had hours to adjust to Wicked being here, and I suppose I might’ve done a better job adjusting if I hadn’t seen her doing the head-to-head thing with various CrimDefs, obviously sharing dark, tawdry details about my worthless self based on the furtive, wide-eyed looks in my direction. Therefore, I’d decided pitching my services was better done at another time, like months after this retreat ended. In the meanwhile I’d hang, play host, and set a living example of how I’d transcended my reputation

Honey-lavender tinged the air. Laura had sidled up next to me, wrapped her arm through mine. She batted those Grace Slick eyes, and suddenly the seventies didn’t seem so bad.

“Hey,” she said, raising her voice to compete with the music.

“Hey.”

“Pitching your services?”

“Yes.” I smiled tightly. “No.”

I hated lying to Laura. Plus she always knew when I was, so why bother?

She bobbed her head in time to the music as she perused the room. A mirrored ball spun slowly overhead, splattering the gloom with sparkles of light. But even in this bad-flashback lighting, I caught the concerned look in her eyes. Probably wondering if she’d done the right thing by forcing me to hob-nob with people who, for the most part, wished me dead or at least severely maimed.

When the music stopped, she leaned close to my ear and whispered, “We could use more hors d’oeuvres.”

There was a flash of light to our left. A guy with a digital camera was taking pictures of several drunk female CrimDefs lesbo-kissing. I’d call it real lesbo if they looked as though they were into it, but considering their butts were sticking out as though some other body part might accidentally touch, it was definitely pretend lesbo. Wonderful. The retreat was devolving into a warmed-over Studio One 70s bi-experience. Only thing missing was a gay guy in Liza drag. Time for the Zen Man to chop veggies.

“I’m on it.”

With great relief, I crossed into the foyer, exhaling a pent-up breath as I exited the seventies and re-entered the present through the room that doubled as our kitchen and den.

The left side of the room was your basic kitchen, with a nod to being green with its recycled glass countertop. The colors varied from the warm amber of beer bottles to the cobalt of my former favorite vodka bottle. Next to the counter was a door to the outside, which we preferred to use over the more formal entrance in the foyer.

In the center of the room sat a sturdy oak table over which hung an assortment of pots and pans. This was where we cooked—or Laura cooked and I occasionally chopped. Thanks to her culinary skills, this could truly be a bed and breakfast. Left up to me, it’d be a bed and beer nuts.

The rest of the room was more like a den with comfortable chairs, one of which was my worn leather recliner that Mavis had claim-jumped the first week after we brought her home from the rescue. Set in the far wall was an impressive rock fireplace, in front of which sat a small, portable wet bar where Laura concocted her nightly martini. The pièce de résistance was an entertainment center that boasted a forty-eight inch flat-screen TV that Laura thought was overkill and I thought should be bigger. Which said a lot about our different views on life—she dug the details while I grooved on the big picture.

In the back was a door to a small bathroom and stairs leading to the rooms on the second floor. If we could’ve crammed a bed into the kitchen-den, we’d live here twenty-four-seven. As it was, we slept in a corner room upstairs with an awesome view of the Rockies foothills.

I pulled out a tray of washed veggies and a can of root beer from the fridge—a silver, monolithic number that looked like stainless steel on steroids—and laid the tray on the oak table. After popping open the soda, I fished around in a drawer for a knife, then turned on ESPN and began chopping a carrot while watching the Patriots trounce the Saints.

“Hi Rick.”

Wicked stood in the doorway, her hip thrust out at an unflattering angle. Her face was flushed, strands of blonde stuck to her shiny forehead. She’d been working up a sweat dancing, and I guessed that glass of wine in her hand was her fourth or fifth. Back in the day, she’d go through a bottle as though it were an aperitif.

“Mad I showed up?” She was over-enunciating to compensate for the noticeable slur.

And to think I’d been relieved to escape to the kitchen.

“Let’s see,” I said, ignoring the little voice that warned me to keep my trap shut, “showing up at my place uninvited, driving the car I loved and lost, trashing me to anyone who’ll listen is kinda…oh…in your face, wouldn’t you say?”

Her chin shot up. “Who says I’m trashing you?”

I didn’t answer.

“Sam thought I should come.”

“And you offered to drive Mellow?”

She blew out a snort of disgust. “God, you and that car. What does it matter how I got here?”

According to Sam it hadn’t been his idea for her to come, but I didn’t say anything. The last thing I wanted to do was tangle with an inebriated Wicked. Been there, done that. Chop chop chop.

She moved closer. “Remember my grandmother’s diamond and ruby necklace?”

I looked up, frowned. “What?”

She repeated the question.

“No.”

I glanced past her at the door, wishing to hell the ghost of Christmas past would float in here and whisk Wicked back to the seventies.

“Thought you’d remember.” She spilled some wine on the black-and-white patterned linoleum as she gestured. “I used to wear it with that red velvet dress to our firm partish.”

Ah, our firm. Levine & Levine, LLC. I scraped the knife along the side of a carrot, recalling the blood, sweat, and even a few tears I’d poured into making that two-person firm a success. Which it might have been if more than one of us had actually worked. Her idea of being a partner had been to play dilettante lawyer doing lunches, going shopping, taking spa treatments. Not that she’d say that’s what she was doing—her M.O. was to make unexpected, critical announcements like “God, that fax machine sucks, I need to buy us a new one” or “We ran out of staples, darling, be right back” and off she’d go to la-la-pamper-me land. Oh, she had clients, but her idea of legal representation was to talk them into taking plea bargains instead of actually negotiating well or even trying their cases.

I wondered if she were trying to talk me into something right now.

“What about that necklace?”

“It’s missing.” She took a sip of wine, her eyes fighting to focus on mine over the edge of the glass. She lowered the drink. “I think you shtole it.”

Shtole. I gave my head a slow shake. “I haven’t lived with you in what—seven years?—haven’t even set foot in our former home for at least five of those seven, and you’re accusing me of stealing your jewelry?”

“You know where I keep the key.”

I had to think about that for a moment. “You keep the key in the
same
place you kept it seven years ago?”

She nodded.

“That’s crazy. Even if I’d known that, for starters that’d be the
last
place I’d break into. Even if I went temporarily insane and thought it’d be a good idea, we both know breaking and entering would set me up for four to twelve and destroy any chance of my getting relicensed as a lawyer.” I hadn’t practiced law in almost six years, but I could still rattle off penalty chart stats. Furious and agitated, I chopped the hell out of piece of carrot. “Not to mention if you just happened to be home during this hypothetical psycho adventure, you’d likely grab that Saturday night special you probably still keep in your closet and shoot me, citing the Make My Day statute.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but decided to take another sip instead.

I tossed the decimated carrot aside, grabbed a celery stalk. “Even if I had known where you kept your grandmother’s necklace, what would I have done with it? Pawned it? C’mon, you’ve handled dozens of theft cases and know the police nail fifty percent of unique, antique stolen property hawked at pawn shops, so I’d have been caught and tossed in jail.” I was clutching the celery in one hand, the knife in the other. “Now, please go back to your party because I have important chopping to finish.” I went at the celery, slicing off its green bushy head with a loud whack.