His confused brain told him these officers were monsters. They obliged by responding monstrously.
Here’s the thing. As I sit here on my deck, watching the sky darken, I understand. I understand how those officers got caught up in the moment. How the flood of adrenaline swept aside reason and fellow-feeling. How the twitch of an outstretched limb could seem as threatening as a cocked trigger. I want to believe that I am incapable of that kind of delusion, but I know better. As do you, my dear Yeshe and Lobsang, who know the deceptive capabilities, the hidden mines, of the mind better than most.
Lately I’ve been seeing more clearly how I use my false beliefs to deceive myself. I’ll notice self-critical thoughts running through my mind, labeling me as incapable of discipline, when suddenly I’ll realize it was my father who’d always labeled me lazy. Or I’ll look at a beautiful woman and assume she is needy, then suddenly realize it’s my mother’s neediness I’m seeing. It happens in my work, too: I found a missing 16-year-old I was searching for—found her pushed against a wall by a man twice her age, and assumed she was being raped. Nothing could have been further from the truth, but my unconscious assumptions kept me from seeing reality as it was.
So, I’m making a new rule for myself—a reminder, really, of a truth I tend to forget: From now on, I’m going to be on the lookout for unconscious beliefs, the kind I hold so closely I mistake them for reality. As familiar as they are, as safe as they make me feel, too often these convictions serve as blinders. They prevent me from understanding what is actually happening in my life. I’m taking a new vow, to challenge my old, limited models of thinking. To be willing to release them. Their job may be to protect, but more often than not they mislead, and in some cases even endanger. In the split second it takes you to figure out the difference between your perception of reality and reality itself, a lot of bad things can happen. In my chosen line of work, that split second can mean the difference between living and dying.
The lost-and-found teenager, Harper Rudolph, was my latest such lesson in humility. I’m not complaining. The job paid well enough to see me through several lunar months, and I can now report that I am more than holding my own as a private investigator. I’m grateful for that. And I guess you could say I closed the case successfully, though Harper didn’t see it that way. She may have been missing in her father’s eyes, but the last thing she wanted was to be found.
After maybe three minutes of face time with Marv Rudolph, I felt like heading for the hills myself.
But that’s another story for another day. The air grows cool and moist against my skin. An eyelash of moon has just materialized, low on the horizon. Can you see it as well? I like to think so.
I miss you, my friends, even as I hold you close in my heart. Not a limiting assumption. Reality.
Ten
CHAPTER 1
I flipped the envelope over, rechecking the address in Dharamshala, making sure I had it right. But of course I did. How many letters, over how many weeks and months and years, had I mailed to my friends in just this way?
The original postmark was still there, stamped and dated months earlier. Yeshe’s and Lobsang’s names were x–ed out. Return to sender! blared across the envelope in black ink, with a slash of arrow pointing to my Topanga Canyon address.
I recognized the handwriting. I had grown up with it, the jagged letters gouged into small index cards summoning me to the monastery headquarters once or twice a week, so that my father, or should I say my father the Senior Abbot, could chastise me for yet another infraction. His stiff, angry scrawl was permanently etched in my brain. I would know it anywhere.
I refolded the letter and slipped it back inside its paper pocket. A low sigh escaped, originating deep in my chest. Now that I knew Yeshe and Lobsang hadn’t received my latest letter, I felt a little lonelier than before. Nothing had changed, yet everything felt different. The sweet feeling of clarity I had been savoring, the one that often lingers after a deep afternoon meditation, was clouded now by a sense of loss.
I allowed it in.
In the distance, the ocean was quiet and majestic, the lights of distant boats just beginning to twinkle in the fading dusk. I took a sip of green tea. It had cooled in its cup as I sifted through my mail, turning tepid as I mulled over this unexpectedly returned letter. I cast my mind back.
Marvin Rudolph and his daughter Harper. What a pair.
I felt my lips purse with taut disapproval, and I forced myself to relax into a half-smile. Whenever my mouth tightens in judgment like that, I look a lot like my father. That tells me I’m thinking like him, too.
I tried to recall the case, which had turned equally tepid in my mind after all this time. I closed my eyes and opened my other senses. Sometimes I have to let them do the remembering for me.
An acrid scent filled my nostrils.
Bad breath and potholes, that’s how it started….
“Find her. She’s just a kid.” Marvin Rudolph leaned close, wheezing from the effort of walking the ten yards from his car to my living room. I wanted to recoil from the fetid combination of sushi and cigar smoke. My feline housemate, Tank, darted under the couch, probably for the same reason.
“Don’t you mean, find her again?”
“Whatever.”
Marv had already filled me in on his elusive daughter Harper—at 16, a newly converted connoisseur of the seedy and the derelict. Six months earlier she’d made her first escape, bolting the family mansion to savor the dark side, in this case Adams Boulevard, near Skid Row. He’d discovered his daughter hunkered in a downtown loft with a drug dealer named Bronco Portreras.
Marv handed over a photograph. I studied it. Harper must have gotten her looks from her mother. Dark wavy hair framed a heart-shaped face dominated by huge gray eyes.
“How did you know where to find her?”
Marv settled back in his chair. His belly billowed over his jeans, encased in a black linen shirt one size too small.
“Good story. We were open-casting for a dope dealer when in saunters Portreras. Think early Banderas meets Robert Pattinson, plus tats, minus the fangs.”
I must have looked as baffled as I felt.
“Hot,” he clarified. “I’m just sayin’. He nailed the reading, too. Anyway, the insurance company balked, because it turns out it wasn’t an act. He really was dealing dope. Everybody wants to be a star, know what I mean? A week later, when Harper didn’t come home from school, I logged on to her Facebook page. Bingo. She’d put a link to Bronco’s audition on her wall, posted it on YouTube, too. He’d already gotten like twenty thousand hits….” Marv’s voice grew wistful, probably envisioning yet another gilded statuette that got away.
“So you tracked her down?” I prompted. It was almost ten o’clock at night. Way past Tank’s bedtime.
“Yeah. He’d given his contact information to the casting agent. A crack dealer, leaving his digits on file. Dumber than a stick, right? I found Harper and him in his loft downtown, high as kites on weed, coke, maybe a little E. I threw a coupla grand at Bronco to shut him up, dragged her sorry ass home, and cut off her allowance until further notice.”
It seemed to me that Marv was better equipped to deal with his daughter than I was, and I told him so.
“Not anymore,” he said. “She’s blocked me. Fuckin’ privacy settings. My wife and I can’t get on her page. And she won’t answer her phone.”
Marv’s mouth twisted, and for a flash I saw the ruthless producer whose reputation for intimidation, especially when crossed, was legendary, even in an industry known for bullies. Then it was gone. His face sagged. With his grizzled day-old beard and loose jowls, he looked like a disappointed mastiff.
“Please,” he said. “She needs to come home.”
“Why not go to the cops?”
“Are you on crack? This whole thing would go viral before the cops even left the building.”
I had one last question.
“How did you get my name?”
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sp; “I talked to one of your buddies down at police headquarters.”
I immediately thought of my ex-partner, Bill. He was always worrying about my finances.
“Bill Bohannon?”
“Who? Nah,” Marv said. “The Captain. Told him I needed a private detective, someone discreet. He told me you’re more than discreet. You’re some kind of Buddhist monk. Tight with the Dalai Lama and all. That right?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“So, you into poverty, then?” Marv’s expression grew shrewd.
“Five grand a day, three day minimum,” I said. “Plus expenses.”
He wrote me a check then and there. Three days, prepaid.
With that kind of discretionary income, you’d think he could afford mouthwash.
Whump! Tank—all 18 Persian pounds of him—thudded onto my lap, startling me out of my reverie. He draped his chunky body across my lap. I scratched under his chin, and he made a deep, gentle prrrttt sound. He tilted his head and eyed me, lids half closed, as if to say, “Don’t let me stop you.”
“Where was I?” I asked Tank. He flicked his tail like a whip.
“Right. Potholes.”
Devouring contraband mysteries every night, hiding under the covers of my monastic pallet in Dharamshala, I tended to romanticize the life of a detective. I’d open Raymond Chandler, read “Down these mean streets a man must go,” and picture dark, smoky alleys with music drifting out of open windows, and beautiful women leaning in doorways, their long legs toned, their eyes glinting at me. I say “me,” but in my mind I wasn’t a skinny Tibetan teenager living in a Buddhist monastery, with a shaved head, maroon robe, and sandals. I wasn’t Lama Tenzing Norbu. In this fantasy version of me, I lived in a big city. I solved crimes. I was armed, and I was dangerously good at what I did. Fedoras were involved, as well as a sexy car and sexier gun. My street handle was “Ten.”
A lot like my current life, come to think of it, though I don’t own a fedora.
Yet.
Anyway, the mean streets in my imagination didn’t have potholes the size of garbage cans threatening to break my Toyota’s axle and hijack one of my kidneys, like the ones en route to finding Harper Rudolph that night.
After Marv left, my first and only call had been to Mike Koenigs. It was late, close to midnight, so he’d be having breakfast right about then. Mike is my personal “information security contractor”—according to Mike the word “hacker” is now considered passé, if not slightly insulting. I helped him out some years back, keeping him out of federal prison for dabbling with someone else’s data. In return, he was my go-to man for digital matters, big and small.
“Can you get past Facebook blockades?” I asked.
“Boss, where’s the love? Where’s the respect?” he replied. “Name?”
I gave him Harper’s name.
Pause.
“Okay, I’m on.”
I waited.
“Hunh. She’s posting as we speak. Whoa. Some serious partying pictures.” Mike let out a long, low whistle. “Is that Keith Connor?”
“Keith who?”
“Ten, even you must have heard of the guy. Ex-rocker-turned-actor? Bad-boy heartthrob? Daily fodder for TMZ?”
Oh.
“She says, and I quote, ‘Keith’s place is off the hook.’”
I heard light tapping.
“Yeah, and guess what? He’s about to start work on a film produced by Harper’s daddy, Marvin. Seven-digit salary. No wonder he’s gigging it up.”
Half the time I have no idea what Mike is actually saying.
“Can you give me his address?”
“Give me a mo’. Celebrity cribs are tricky.”
In Mike-time, a mo’ usually equals two breaths in and out. Sure enough …
“Okay, here it is. Hartley Crest. One-five-five-two. Beverly Hills. I’m also sending you a link to Keith’s IMDB page.”
In another moment, my iPhone screen was filled with a Caucasian male, late 20s, light brown hair, hazel eyes, and a reddish sexy demi-beard that looked like he’d “forgotten” to shave for exactly the right number of days. He was gazing to his left, scowling slightly. He may have been going for a bad-boy heartthrob effect, but to me he just looked silly.
I sent Marv a text: LOCATED HARPER AT PARTY IN BEVERLY HILLS. ON MY WAY THERE. STAY PUT.
I grabbed my Wilson Supergrade from the gun safe in my closet and headed out.
First decision: which set of wheels to use? I quickly settled on my faithful workhorse, the Toyota-that-would-not-die, but not without regret. I hated leaving my real car, the thoroughbred, stabled at home, but a bright yellow ’65 Shelby Mustang lends itself to surveillance about as well as a maroon monk’s robe would.
There wasn’t much traffic at that hour. Soon I was lurching along Wilshire Boulevard, traversing my way into Beverly Hills. I would be at Keith’s soon, if the drive didn’t put me in traction first.
I know. Beverly Hills and cracked pavements don’t seem to mix. And in fact, if you take Sunset Boulevard, the minute you enter Beverly Hills proper, the pavement magically loses its pockmarks as a thick profusion of multicolored flowers suddenly bursts into bloom along the medians. Like an A-list actress, that area of Beverly Hills wouldn’t be caught dead in public without makeup and blond streaks. But drop south of there and it’s one big bad hair and acne day.
According to the latest city infrastructure assessment, there are over half a million unfilled potholes in Los Angeles at any given time, and maybe a dozen patch trucks to deal with them. Once a year the Mayor announces Operation Pothole, and maintenance crews fan out across the city to patch and plug. They usually manage to repair 30,000 holes over a single weekend. That’s 30,000 down, 470,000 to go. It’s like doing battle with a wrathful Tibetan deity, the kind with never-ending multiple arms waving thunderbolts and skulls. When I was still a rookie, on traffic detail, one jaded city official put it this way: “Potholes, like diamonds, are forever, son. So you tell me, how do you stop forever?”
Welcome to my brain when I’m driving around, dodging troughs, working a case.
I checked the map on my phone, zig-zagging my way north and west, and eventually turning onto the bumpy byway known as Hartley Crest, set in the wooded hills off Benedict Canyon, where the houses are in the $4 million range. As my beater car and I labored up the steep, winding street, a dim drizzle of wet fog slimed my windshield. The Toyota had a bum wiper on the driver’s side, which I kept forgetting to replace.
I started passing high-end coupes and SUVs parked nose-to-tail along the narrow road. Maybe I should have taken the Shelby after all. I squeezed into a space between a dark blue Mercedes and a silver Infiniti. I considered grabbing the .38 out of the locked glove compartment, just in case, but thought better of it. Guns and teenagers don’t mix. I climbed out of my car and took a moment to collect myself.
A bottom-heavy hip-hop beat shook the night. Boom Boom THUD, Boom Boom THUD, Boom Boom THUD. Raucous laughter. A girl’s high-pitched bray. I had found the party.
I passed between a pair of tall wrought iron security gates, wide open and inviting any and all to enter, and picked my way up a driveway paved with antique cobble stones. Sherlock would have felt right at home. The house was a large two-story Mediterranean, stucco and red tile, with a second story turret. It looked like it had been built in the ’20s, and renovated this morning.
First things first. I tested the door to the attached garage. Unlocked. I peeked in. I was curious what an ex-rocker-turned-actor drove. I saw a gleaming black sedan I couldn’t immediately identify. I slipped inside. I had to take a look. Well, well, well. A Maybach 57 S. Maybe the most expensive car in the world. You don’t see that every day. I gave its flawless German features a respectful bow and continued on to the heavy, ornately carved front door.
The sound inside was deafening. I changed course—no one in the middle of that was about to hear the ring of a doorbell. I moved around to the manicured pool area in the
back. Light spilled out of a large kitchen window. I took a closer look.
A young couple was engaged in a prolonged mouth-to-mouth exchange of oxygen and saliva. He had her pinned against a marble kitchen island, and she had her legs gripped around his waist like a monkey. Neither one paid me any attention as I slid open a glass door and slipped inside. I passed a gleaming row of never-been-touched, top-of-the-line appliances, and moved into a large, arched entryway. To my right, a gigantic flat screen television loomed over an oak-paneled den that was bigger than my house. Several young people, glassy eyed and still, were fixated by the flickering images on the screen. To my left was a step-down living room, where more kids sprawled on leather chairs and sofas, passing around an elaborate bong. If good looks were illegal, they’d all be locked up. I caught the eye of one young temptress and she gave me a glazed once-over, followed by a dismissive smirk. I was barely 30, but already a fossilized life form to her, a curious leftover from the late Paleolithic. Ouch.
I scanned all the faces. No Harper. No Keith, for that matter. I mentally stepped into his shoes. If I were a rising hot actor about to hook up with my producer’s daughter, I’d want to do my hooking up in private. In the master bedroom, for example.
I bounded up the curved and carpeted marble staircase and was faced with three doors. Two of them were ajar. I headed for the closed double doors at the end of the hallway. I pressed my ear to the wood. Animated voices, one low, one high. Arguing? I cracked the doors open and spotted a muscular, naked man groping at a slight young woman, tearing her clothes off as she gasped and cried out. My mind screamed, “Two-six-one! Two-six-one in progress! Sexual assault!”
Adrenaline coursing, I threw open the doors and flung myself across the room. I peeled off the brute—Keith—and tossed him to the floor.
The First Rule of Ten Page 27
