The Weeping Buddha

by Heather Dune Macadam

  Gabriel Montebello grabbed Devon and shouted over the din. “She’s radiant!” It was a statement of fact. Watching Beka dance was like soaring without moving a muscle, and the party’s energy seemed to swirl into a maelstrom of her making. “Why is she wasting her energy on Mr. Klutz though?”

  “If you can’t beat them, dance with them!” Devon grabbed Gabe’s hand and dragged him as close to the eye of the storm as was physically possible.

  Todd looked as if he were laughing but no sound emanated from his open mouth. Beka smiled at them, grabbed Gabe’s hand, and twirled first around him, then Todd. The room spun. Above their heads the lights that had been draped across the ceiling seemed to create a vortex, and Devon felt as if they were outside dancing under the stars. Beka leapt off the ground, twisting in midair as her leg swung over Todd’s head. The camera flashed in their faces.

  Todd’s face flushed pink and Devon had the impression that he was falling toward Beka, whirling into her like water down a drain. “I can’t keep up with you!” he yelled over the music.

  One, two, three. Spots blinded Devon’s eyes and Todd stumbled off the floor away from the tempest, unable to see. Beka, far more familiar with the indiscretions of cameras, kept moving.

  Devon blinked. The flashes had been rude, uncalled-for. She followed Todd, leaving Gabe and Beka to tear up the dance floor together. Everything was out of focus—the old yellow Toy Factory sign with Chinese symbols on either side, the neon sign flashing over the stairwell, the faces of the people around her. It took a moment for the yellow and black spots to clear from her eyes, and when they did she could see Todd Daniels leaning against the loft’s black banister as if it were the deck of a foundering ship. His face was faintly green, but it was hard to tell if it was him or the neon Kosher Meat sign that was tinting his flesh a ghostly ill color.

  Devon looked across the room. Godwyn was winding his film. He winked at her and shrugged his shoulders; she pointed to her eyes and flipped him the bird. He kissed the air and shot her picture again. More spots. And when she looked back he was gone, his blue-black skin covered by true black clothes making him one with the dark of the room.

  He knew how Beka felt about picture-taking when she was dancing, but he also enjoyed messing with her, ever since she had dumped him for somebody else. Who that someone was, Devon couldn’t remember—just one in a long line of tossed-off lovers that Beka went through like toe shoes: wear them once to break them in, twice and they’re broken.

  “Sorry, love. Didn’t mean to blind you, but you know, a pic’s a pic.” Godwyn’s lips brushed Devon’s ear as he apologized in his sexy English accent. She was about to tell him to stop when he planted his mouth on hers and nearly sucked the breath from her lungs. It was the most erotic kiss of her young life. “Happy New Year, Devon Halsey.” Her mouth was tingling and numb, and by the time she could form words again, he had disappeared, swallowed up by the crowd.

  She headed toward where Todd was still tottering, half-clinging to the banister. “Are you all right?” she yelled over the noise. He looked as if he was trying to nod his head, but instead it swayed from side to side. He started down the stairs.

  His older brother came over to them. “Where you goin’, buddy?” Sam’s voice cut through the clamor.

  “Gotta clear my head.” He tripped on his shoe, righted himself, and continued downward with Sam and Devon following.

  “Don’t go Mount St. Helens on us!” Sam warned.

  Todd tried to laugh, then raised his hand to his mouth and quickly ran down the remaining flights of stairs to the street, with Sam and Devon close behind.

  “You okay, sport?”

  Todd answered by puking into the gutter. Sam watched his brother but didn’t try to help. Slowly, Todd stood up, leaned against the subway entrance railings, and wiped his mouth. “Beka makes me dizzy.” His boyish smile was disarming and still remarkably innocent.

  “She has that effect on people.” Sam slapped him on the back and for a moment their eyes locked in merriment. “Just don’t get hung up on her.” Devon couldn’t have agreed more, but kept her mouth shut.

  “She’s great.” Todd staggered a little.

  “Sit down, man.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” He tried to punch his big brother, but his feet were too unsteady. “I’m not a kid!”

  “You’re wasted.” Sam held him at arm’s length until Todd stopped flailing at the air and laughed again.

  “Yes, I am.” Their guffaws caught between the buildings and bounced back and forth like pinballs between the gently falling flakes of snow.

  “Sit down.”

  “No. And you can’t change my mind.” He swayed to and fro, steadied only by Sam’s hand on his elbow.

  “I’m your big brother; I’m supposed to tell you what to do. It’s in my contract.”

  Todd seemed to snap awake suddenly. “I love you, man.” Todd hugged him heartily with one arm tossed around Sam’s neck.

  “Don’t puke on me, asshole.” They laughed again, and Devon thought she should go inside.

  “I’m goin’ for a run.” His words slurred.

  “You sure?” his brother asked.

  “Sure I’m sure.” Todd brushed him away. They feigned a few more punches, then hugged drunkenly, pounding each other on the back as if they were stamping out fires.

  “You know your way?” Sam ruffled his curly chestnut hair.

  “Goin’ around the block.” Someone came out the door behind them and rounded the corner onto Lafayette Street. Todd waved, then started to jog down Canal Street. He stumbled once, righted himself, and kept going. Firecracker red dye from shredded pieces of tissue paper oozed into the freshly fallen snow of Canal Street as if a battle, not a celebration, had just taken place.

  Sam watched him waver and started to yell some kind of warning, but kept quiet. Devon could see it in his face as she held the door open for him. His mouth hung open with the words still on his tongue, stuck as if they wouldn’t come off until he’d committed them verbally to the night. She blocked his entrance. “Just say it, Sam.”

  He turned around fully prepared to shout, “Be careful.” Todd was nowhere to be seen.

  Focus, Devon thought, while dabbing the corner of her left eye with her gloved hand. She felt removed from the circumstances glaring in her face and yet in the same instant all too present. Focus. She let the camera hang from her neck and searched the corpse as if Gabriel Montebello were still alive and simply hiding behind vacant eyes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  We must remove the body.

  Touch it not, dungeon miscreants …

  Leave his remains to those who know to honor them.

  —LORD BYRON, The Two Foscari

  It had always fascinated Lochwood how Dr. Pankow could walk through a scene oblivious to everything but corpses. He, on the other hand, was fascinated by all the complexities of information left behind. They had finished with Beka rather quickly—Jo did not like to be cold—and now he and Gary led her up the front stairs and to the left of the foyer. As usual, Jo walked straight into the house without paying any attention to the trail of blood that the Crime Scene Unit was chronicling. When it came to a body though, she didn’t miss a mark.

  “What’s that?” The question surprised both him and his partner. She was pointing at the closet door. “Just Do It.” She raised a curious eyebrow at the bumper sticker of a once-popular slogan on the door over the corpse’s head. “Not exactly the action the advertisers were hoping for, but to the point.”

  “According to Halsey, it was a joke in the house,” Loch explained. “His wife used to change her clothes five and six times a day until the bed was piled high with costume changes.” Halfway through his explanation he realized he was using the past tense; the words slapped him like spitting snow.

  “How theatrical.” Jo yawned. She held out her thermometer in the air and checked her watch. It was two in the morning. “Devon knowing them should make your job e
asier.”

  “Halsey’s good.” He paused.

  Jo pressed her tape recorder and spoke into it. “Second body: male, Caucasian. Age: between forty-five and fifty; looks to be about five foot eleven inches. Room temperature: sixty-eight degrees.” She pressed her finger into his flesh and pulled it back. A white spot appeared, then faded. “No fixed lividity.”

  She pulled out her ear thermometer and pressed a button. “I love modern technology. You know where I used to have to stick this?” She placed the cone-shaped instrument into the corpse’s ear and waited for a beep. “95.8.” She picked up the right arm and let it drop with a thud to the floor. “Rigor not set. And in this stable atmosphere, with the body losing approximately 1.5 degrees per hour, I’d say he’s been dead two hours. It could be less if there was much of a struggle. Loss of ATP could speed up rigor. If rigor has set in by the time we get him back to the morgue, I’m right. If it’s later than that we could be looking at a half-hour adjustment to that time.”

  “Midnight, then.”

  “More or less.”

  “Love you, Jo.” Brennen had always found Jo’s accuracy with time of death impeccable.

  “Honey, you say that to all the girls who cut up cadavers for a living.” The words sounded like syrup dripping off her tongue.

  “What about the wounds, Jo?” Gary DeBritzi asked.

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious that the fatal wound was this hole in the stomach. From what I can see right here, the initial stab wounds were bleeders, but nothing vital was hit. I count eighteen stab wounds including the stomach. Then we have these marks. She pointed to the chest where crisscrossing lines had been carved into the flesh. “These were an afterthought. See the coagulation? He was already dead.”

  Gary peered at the marks. “Looks like chicken scratch or sanskirt.”

  “That’s Sanskrit, DeBritzi,” Jo corrected him, then continued her summation without pause. “The instruments used to stab the victim and inflict the stomach wound were different.”

  Loch jotted down her findings. “What about wounds versus these lines?”

  She pulled out a ruler. “Insertion width is consistent. It could be the same knife.”

  “And the stab wounds?” Gary asked.

  “Most of them are downward strokes, while this one,” she pointed at the stomach, “was a thrust in and up. I’ll know more once we get him up on the slab.” Her mouth ticked off facts like the New York Stock Exchange. “The eighteen other wounds were most likely made with a blade about four to five inches long with a hilt about one and a half inches wide.”

  “The exact length of the one Beka was holding.”

  “I just tell you what happened, Brennen, you figure out how.” Jo checked the fatal wound, going deeper this time. “This was a thrust with a wicked turn.”

  “Like a samurai warrior’s hara-kiri stroke?” Gary tapped his pen on his notepad to get the ink flowing.

  “Well, I haven’t had the chance to look at many of those wounds in my practice, but from what I’ve heard this could be similar. Samurais knew what they were doing.” Jo and the detectives moved out of the bedroom and down the hall where Devon was waiting. “Devon.” Jo stopped to greet her friend and colleague. “We’re done in there. If you’re finished they can take him out. You coming for the autopsy?”

  “I don’t know yet, Jo.” Devon clenched and unclenched her teeth.

  “It might help to follow through like you usually do. You wouldn’t miss an autopsy, under normal circumstances.” Jo took the younger woman’s hand. “Two o’clock tomorrow, in case you change your mind. I got you covered in my prayers.”

  Detectives Brennen and DeBritzi walked Jo the rest of the way out of the scene and watched as she reversed down the drive. “I’m going back up the hill to see how Landal’s doing and oversee the morgue guys,” Lochwood told his partner.

  “I’ll make sure they get the other body out okay,” Gary said.

  “Good. Then meet me up at the artist’s studio.”

  “You think we need Crime Scene up there?”

  “Let’s take a look and decide.”

  Gary returned to the house as Loch tramped back up the hill.

  The morgue attendants waited patiently in the doorway of the bedroom where Gabriel Montebello still lay. Devon looked up from her work. “DeBritzi.” She acknowledged Lochwood’s partner, but put no effort into small talk.

  “If you’re done.” Gary shifted from one foot to the other.

  “He’s ready to go.” She stood up too quickly and felt the blood rush from her head. Gary stepped toward her, but she waved him away and moved out the door.

  “Just need some air.” She headed outside. Cold snow pricked her skin but her cheeks burned hot and the dizziness didn’t stop. There was something else she needed out of the van, but she couldn’t recall what. This was not like her—she had to get a grip. Leaning on the outside of the vehicle she peered into its dark interior and tried to steady her breathing; when that didn’t work she turned around to face the outer dark.

  Frank was talking with Lochwood up the hill, next to the body—Beka’s body. They were speaking about Beka, her best friend, in the past tense, and trying to figure out what had made her past tense. Flakes scurried through the spotlight beam from Frank’s video camera and cut a bright path through the dark.

  It had been snowing then, too; in the ’80s it was always snowing inside and out. It had fallen through the hole in the ceiling and into the New Year’s Eve party with lacy elegance, melting into rain before it had drifted halfway into the room.

  Devon watched Alexandra Parnel capture the flakes through the zoom lens of her video camera and then pan out to include the whole room. Whatever the camera’s eye saw was displayed simultaneously on a sextet of TV screens against the far wall. Godwyn and a punk rocker with safety-pinned earlobes and dragon tattoos were contemplating the party via the camera’s point of view, as if the party existed only on the screens, not around them.

  “Nice!” Godwyn approved of the snowflake shot. “Now do the reverse, and pan in to a close-up of the sky-hole.” Alexandra did what he suggested, but a foot coming down from the roof ruined the shot.

  Watching Alex work made Devon think maybe she should get into video, too. She had to do something with her life. Everyone else seemed to have made it, or had at least decided how they were going to make it; Devon only knew that she didn’t want to be a commercial illustrator and didn’t have the temperament, like Gabriel Montebello, to be a fine artist.

  Alex combed her fingers through her buzzed-off hair. She had lines along the side of her head where the hair had been cut down to the flesh with a razor blade—it was a weird do, but not as weird as when Alex had shaved her head entirely so she could look like a Buddhist monk.

  Alex, one of Beka’s three roommates, had been videotaping their parties for posterity ever since they’d first started throwing them in 1981. The loftmates often kidded each other about the footage she had recorded and how someday she could blackmail them and retire on the money (if they ever made any money). After sweeping the room, her camera seemed to gravitate toward the center of the throng where Beka was still dancing—always dancing.

  Josh, one of the other loftmates, was dancing with a creamyskinned black woman. Katiti—Devon thought that was her name—had come on strong to Josh as soon as she found out he was pre-med. It was one of his favorite lines to pick up girls; Devon knew because he had practiced on her earlier that evening. “Which works better, Devon?” he had asked. “If I say I’m OB-GYN or Ear, Nose, and Throat?”

  “I don’t know, Josh.” Devon laughed. “I’m not in the market for a doctor.”

  “Well,” he told her, “you wouldn’t believe how quick you get laid when you’re looking at a six-figure income in three years.”

  Back on the dance floor, Katiti tousled the curls on his head with her manicured fingernails, then grabbed Josh around the hips and sidled up to him. She could dance, too; her extension
s weren’t as high as Beka’s, but she could spin like a top, and between the two dancers a kind of silent competition erupted as each tried to one-up the other’s technique. Katiti bumped into Beka, and Devon was pretty sure it was not a mistake. Beka pretended not to notice, but Devon knew what would happen next, and Alex must have, too, because she had already moved from the snow falling to Beka’s silent fury. It was a safe assumption; one could be relatively certain that if there was an audience, Beka Imamura would make a stage.

  “Focus,” Alex hissed as she pressed the automatic lens adjustheather ment. Beka’s movements were becoming grander, as if she knew that she was on camera. She moved in wider and wider concentric circles and any second, Devon knew, Beka’s energy would start to push people, especially Katiti, away from her until she was the sole dancer in the room. It was a phenomenon that existed among performing artists and something only they understood—bystanders could watch but they could never partake.

  Devon wished that Alex had an image-resonance camera to document the energy field—the vortex Beka created around herself. To capture the actual presence of what some called charisma, now that would be something worth recording. The music changed from Sheila Chandra’s exotic East Indian rhythms to Bryan Ferry’s throaty voice singing “Avalon.” A solo siren swaying in the falling snow, Beka’s spirit encompassed the room. She kept moving even after Sam came upstairs and abruptly turned the music off. Looking puzzled, she kept swaying as the rest of the room grew still. Beka had never understood that regular people didn’t have symphonies and bands playing backup in their heads. Devon looked at her watch. It was four a.m. and Sam had obviously decided the party was over.