Hungry Ghosts (18 page)

“Lori Okira,” Stallworth was saying to me. “She brought me here.”

I looked at her: she seemed sulky.

I began to get the picture. No business has sugar daddies like the movies. He must be on the producing team and clearly, he hadn't been ladling out enough of that sugar. But our movie was young; there was still time to find her a small part. Now she glowered at me, too.

“You're pretty banged up. I guess that's what happens when you've shot a stunt to hell.”

“Wha—”

“You looked like a sack of potatoes rolling down the stairs, right, Benton?”

“Hey! What do you know about that? Were you there?”

“No!” she said, sounding petulant, as if watching a gag in the pre-dawn cold was a treat denied.

I wanted to smack her. But I did the right thing, swallowed my outrage, and asked, “What did you hear about it?”

“You screwed up the setup, insisted the crew stay away and—”

“I insisted? Who told you I insisted?”

“Oh, puh-lease!”

“Ladies!” Benton Stallworth grabbed her arm and turned, virtually lifting her off the ground as he moved her out the door.

In the moment that his bulky body blocked the doorway, I started after the two of them, heard John and Korematsu arguing outside, remembered that I needed to check the hall closet. I could grab Lori Okira and demand an answer, or I could see if the duplicate knife was in the altar box. Threat to me in the stair fall? Threat to Leo from the detectives? I had to choose.

I slipped into the hall closet, held the door open long enough to see the box, an open four-by-eight cardboard affair. The ash sifter was there, and the tweezers used to grab the ends of stick incense that had burned down into the ash. Scissors, flattened tablespoon with handle bent 90 degrees to even out the ash—there, too. But no knife. Both knives belonged in this box. One had been used to kill Tia. Why was the other one gone? To incriminate Leo?

Leo and the knife were both gone.

I considered telling Korematsu about the missing knife, briefly, very briefly. Instead, I waited till I heard the big police V-8s pull away. Then I walked down the street toward Renzo's Caffè. I needed to figure out why Lori Okira believed I'd sabotaged the stunt myself and who the hell she was, anyway. What did the missing knife portend? And what was going on with Leo? I was too tired. I needed to sleep, but I couldn't go back to the zendo, and I couldn't go to Mom's house. Korematsu or John would find me either place. If either of them got me, they'd grill me for hours and I'd end up revealing something. Even if I watched my mouth much more carefully than someone who right now couldn't remember the beginning of her sentences, I'd give myself away with a gesture or a sigh.

I stepped into the Caffè and saw the first good thing of the morning: Renzo holding out two cups of espresso and nodding toward a window table. “How did you know?”

“I saw you on the sidewalk. Like walking with your mind, you know? Coffee, that's the thing. Coffee's always the thing.
My
coffee.”

The coffee was dead black against the white cup.

“Milk?”

I laughed.

Renzo smiled. “We will be friends.”

I took a sip of his espresso. “Believe it.” The post-dawn hour that belongs to the zendo was over. No longer did flocks of birds sing just for us in the last moments of city silence. It was early commute time now. On Columbus Avenue, twenty feet away, cars, buses, delivery trucks spurted from traffic lights. But this block of Pacific is a civilized street. Architects might be drawing by eight, but lawyers rolled in around ten, and antique shop owners would be wasting their time unlocking portals much before noon. The only pedestrians were drivers who'd managed to snag street parking and were rushing off to jobs or meetings elsewhere.

Here in the empty Caffè, on the empty street, it was like sitting in a dream. I took another swallow of espresso, too big a one for a devotee. I could feel the spreading heat, the jolt of alertness, and see the opportunity sitting in front of me. But before I could phrase my question about Tia's accident, Renzo put down his cup and said, “You knew Tia in high school?”

I nodded and sipped. When could he have learned that? “How—?”

He smiled, a sly curl of the lips on a long narrow face. “Eamon,” he said. “Eamon always knows first. It's a hobby with him. Cute.”

“Cute?”

“Yeah, cute. A grammar school girl thing. Little hand with a pink bracelet popping up first.”

I sipped coffee.

“Didn't mean to offend. I know Eamon's close with your family.”

“Did he tell you that, too?”

“Yeah, but I could have figured. I've seen some of them around. Gary used to have offices a couple of blocks away. He considered a live/work space on the other side of Broadway before he moved to Romain Street. Then I saw you—you're peas in a pod, you and Eamon.”

I started to take another sip of coffee and realized the cup was empty. It was a little cup, but even so I had made fast work of it. The top of my head felt like it was attached to one of those billed caps with a propeller.

Renzo nodded in approval. “Another?”

“Please. How about a pastry, too? I've been up for hours. Thanks.”

“Doing the stunt.” So he, too, had known I was there. Regardless of what he said about Eamon Lafferty, Renzo was the collector of facts, and he made me feel distinctly queasy. Like cops, collectors don't give away parts of their collections for nothing.

Renzo set down a black plate holding a round flaky pastry topped with
glazed pear, redolent with the scent of almond. He smiled proprietarily, leaning back in his flimsy chair as if it were the guard post to his collection of gossip, and he was preparing to deal. What was he after? What could he think I had discovered in my day and a bit back in the city? The sweet scent of the tart made me ravenous; it took all my strength not to dig right in, but it was food or information. “Renzo, you were at Tia's accident. How did that happen?”

Eyes that a moment ago had been assessing me now were cast down. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Did you know her before?”

“No. Just happened to be walking by. Heard the brakes, people screaming. Then I heard the crack—you think when someone falls like that it'd be with a thud, but this was a crack. Like a rifle shot. She snapped her pelvis: that was the crack. And the other bones. I thought she was dead. I was frantic to call the police, but you know that saying about never a cop when you need one? Not true this time. They were right there, I mean,
right
there. That brother of yours, he must have heard the brakes and all, too. He came running, panting up the street. And then the other guy, the one who was here today—”

“Korematsu?”

“Yeah, him. He was there in a couple of minutes. Took charge of the scene, or as much as your brother would let him. I gotta give it to John, he double-checked everything, even though it wasn't his scene.”

“John was first at the scene? Came running up?” I asked, horrified.

Renzo nodded and reached down for his cup that he had already taken to the sink. “The accident was terrible, just terrible. Tia got a big settlement, really big. No one thought MUNI would ever pay out like that. Even she was surprised. Good thing for her.”

Suddenly, out the window I saw the blonde from the zendo crossing
Columbus. She looked as disoriented as I had felt, like she'd raced out so fast she'd gone the wrong way and was retracing her steps.

“Gotta go, Renzo. I owe you!”

C
HAPTER
18

I
CAUGHT SIGHT
of her half a block from the Caffè. “Wait! Hey, wait, don't run. I'm Darcy, from the zendo.”

She cut north, up Columbus. Bad move. Downtown with its plethora of cabs, trolleys, buses, and the rapid transit station was to the south. North leads to Broadway, with strip joints, closed at this hour, and North Beach with cafés, also closed. I swung around the corner and started north.

The woman had vanished.

I ran past the architectural bookstore. It wasn't open, of course. I stopped, peered inside—dark—and kept moving.

I almost overran the alley.

She was pressed against the wall.

“What are you doing, running away from me?”

She looked at me, her face scrunched in fear—or something else? She wasn't a natural blonde and her complexion was too dark for the hair color, giving her a hard look at odds with her protectively hunched shoulders.

“Come on back to Renzo's—”

“No, not there.”

“Okay!” That had seemed the most comforting setting for talk, but from her reaction I might have been suggesting the downtown lockup. “Here's fine, then. Tell me about Tia.”

“I shouldn't have said—”

“But you did. There's no going back. When you called her daring, just what did you mean?”

“I shouldn't have—”

I grabbed her arm. “She's dead! The time for squeamishness is gone.”

She gasped, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into those annoying tears that create a protective wall. I shook her. “Tell . . . me . . . now!”

“It was . . .” She swallowed. “It was just a game, a kid's game. I only played once. I would have more . . . but . . . I wasn't good enough, not like her. She was the . . . fearless one.”

“Truth or dare,” I said, so disappointed and disgusted that I dropped her arm, and she stood there staring at me. She looked insulted.

“It wasn't what you think. Not the party game. Not ‘I dare you to ask Bobby Higgins to the party.'” Her hands rested on the ledge of the big black leather purse hanging from her shoulders. It was the closest to hands on hips she could manage, but it carried little defiance.

If I hadn't been so furious, I would have laughed. “What was it, then, this big, terrifying game of yours?”

“Not mine, I
said
it wasn't mine. I was just a tryout, a washout.”

“So?”

“Maybe it started as the party game years ago, but by the time I knew Tia she was an adult, and so were the others. It wasn't about sex, per se, or humiliation, per se. It was about bearding fear: do you have guts enough to face the most frightening thing?”

“Like?”

“I don't know. I wasn't there but that once—”

I sighed. I could have throttled her. “But you do know. You didn't say, ‘Tia once did something brave.' You said, ‘She was the most daring person
I know.' That means you know more than one thing she did, and you know what others did. So, tell me.”

“I can't.”

“You're afraid to tell me?” I asked, swallowing my anger and trying to look sympathetic.

She didn't answer, which was as good as an answer.

“You're scared? Listen, this is your chance to face that fear—an easy way. So, take the chance. Come on.”

She remained silent, trying to decide if I was sufficiently sympathetic, trustworthy. Clearly, a hard decision.

“You're probably thinking I don't understand what it's like to have a fear that straightjackets you, right?”

Hesitantly, she nodded.

“I was terrified of trees. Trees, for heaven's sakes! Trees are everywhere! I couldn't leave the city, couldn't visit friends in the country, couldn't even drive to another town. Driving through Golden Gate Park almost made me throw up.”

She was nodding.

“So, see. I've got my demons, too.”

She hesitated. “Okay, I guess. But we can't go to the Caffè; we have to talk here.”

“Here is fine. Tell me about the group.”

Something in her subtly shifted, and decision in itself seemed to calm her. “I did my thing, or, rather, didn't. I mean I got halfway—I can't bear to tell you what I wanted to face.”

“I used to be afraid of large wooden objects with leaves on them. So, unless you think that fireplug's gunning for you, whatever you're dealing with can't possibly be more humiliating. Spit it out, Sister!”

She almost laughed. “Snakes. I'm terrified of snakes. It's so prosaic,
so
Freudian; everybody tells me that, especially guys. They love telling me. I see snakes everywhere, twigs on the sidewalk, pipes. Every time I hear stories about them coming out of the sink, the toilet, I'm terrified. I can't—”

“That's okay. I understand. What was your dare? Did they lock you in a room with snakes?”

It was so soft, I could barely make out her answer. “Yes.”

“And?”

“They told me the room was a cabin, a one-room cabin, in the Sierras. They blindfolded me, stuffed earplugs in my ears, put me in the front seat of a van, and drove for hours. Then they marched me to the room. They left me alone, with the blindfold and the snakes.”