He bowed as he approached the altar but found his morning ritual disturbed by the presence of more strands of hair and a pair of scissors on the platform. He grumbled under his breath. Members of the Sangha knew better than to leave their garbage behind. He would have to talk to them at the next meeting. He inhaled and exhaled, focusing his thoughts back on the task at hand. Be mindful of each movement, he recollected his Roshi saying, be mindful whether you are walking, working, or drinking tea—it is all meditation.
He heard the door to the zendo open. Two of the members were in the foyer removing their shoes as he came out of the sitting room. They bowed to him, then went inside, and by the time he had returned from dumping the dustpan full of hair they were quietly sitting zazen, facing the walls of the old barn. Normally, he sat at the front of the room to the right of the altar, and that was where he belonged, but today Hans was Jikido. When the room had filled—only six people today, precisely at seven a.m.—he bowed and slowly hit the singing bowl three times. Its bass timbre rang through the room and promised peace and stillness. Hans shut his eyes partway.
Thirty seconds later his eyes popped open. Someone was missing. She was always at the morning sit, albeit today was a holiday; still, she had made a point of telling him she would be here. She had wanted to speak to him about something.
The clock by his right knee clicked by the seconds. He breathed deeply and tried to reach samadhi by contemplating his koan, but instead began pondering the koan he had given Beka Imamura:
A monk takes a vow of silence to remain in a tree at the fork in a road until he reaches enlightenment. However, a traveler does not know which direction to take, and asks the monk for directions. In order to fulfill his dharma the monk must tell the man which direction to take, but to tell the man which way to go means instantaneous death.
“What if the traveler is someone I know?” Beka had asked. “I might die for someone I know, but not for a stranger.”
“Meditate,” he told her. “Don’t think.”
Despite his seniority, he fidgeted beneath his robes. Minutes dragged on for what seemed hours, and his mind wandered as much as a novice’s as the dawn ticked away. Where was Beka?
CHAPTER SIX
What is the Blown Hair Sword?
The tip of each branch of coral supports the moon.
—HARYO OSHO
The dark clung like residue to her skin—night didn’t seem to be anywhere close to ending. Every time she checked the horizon it seemed darker than before; even the peach-colored glow over the Sag Harbor dump had disappeared as the fog rolled in. Fog always followed snow out on the East End and it was going to ruin any further outside searches—for instance, if Beka had called 911 and then killed herself, where was the phone? They had looked in the area closest to the body—nothing.
It was the longest night of her life. Reporters lingered along the outskirts of the taped-off area like vampires unable to pass the sign of the cross, as if the yellow police line could hold them at bay. They paced back and forth along the perimeter hungry for the blood of a story and headlines.
Frank and Devon made their last trip to the van. She unhooked her waist-pack and dumped it in the front seat.
“Devon Halsey, fifth-grade long-jump champion.” The voice was familiar and taunting, like that of a boy pulling her pigtails in elementary school, and that’s exactly who he was.
“Tom Hurley.” They’d seen each other off and on for years. Sag Harbor was a difficult town to get lost in even if one worked hard at remaining anonymous.
“Your first-grade boyfriend.” He was obviously enjoying catching her off guard.
“One kiss under the monkey bars does not make you my first boyfriend,” she retorted. “And since I wiped it off and called ‘cooties,’ it doesn’t count.”
Her eyes casually scanned his body for credentials.
He scanned her body less professionally, then flicked his press badge toward her inquisitive eyes. “So, you’re a cop?”
“Detective.”
“My how things develop.” His eyes had rested where most men’s did.
“We’re not in the school yard, Tom. What do you want?”
He snapped his fingers—a gesture she felt was in poor taste. “To congratulate you. The Long Island Times—first female Crime Scene detective in Suffolk County. About time Suffolk joined the twentieth century … No, wait! It’s the twenty-first! How come you decided to come back home after all that private schooling and ‘New Yorking’?”
“Best pay in the country after Beverly Hills.”
“No shit.”
“And I have a house here.”
“That’s right, I heard your grandmother died. Sorry.”
“Thanks for your concern. It was eight years ago.”
She spied the memo pad hiding in his hand. “You working for the Press or the Star, now?”
“Newsday.”
He’d been promoted, too. She winced at her faux pas.
“Didn’t I used to see you and Beka at art openings together, back when I worked for Aunt Mona at the Star?”
Devon didn’t blink. “You have your statement from Detective Brennen and Sergeant Houck.” She reached into the van in order to look busy.
“I’d much rather have a statement from you. Come on, just a little tidbit for old time’s sake?”
“Detective Halsey has work to do and I wouldn’t want you to report that the taxpayers pay her to reminisce.” Loch’s voice disrupted Hurley’s queries.
He shoved his notepad into his pocket. “I was just interested in the Halseys of Southampton angle. You know, why would the department allow a close personal friend of a suspect onto the scene of a crime? Unless you didn’t know that Detective Halsey knew the suspect? She did tell you, didn’t she?”
“Detective Halsey, we need you and Landal up at the barn.”
“You’ll excuse us, Tom,” she addressed the reporter sternly.
“What’s happened in the barn? Is it a crime scene? I thought she killed him in the house!” Hurley was jotting something down in his pad as she began to walk away. “Are you going to try and prove your best friend’s innocence?”
“I can’t prove innocence if we don’t know who’s guilty!” Devon replied angrily. Loch’s eyes flashed a warning at her.
“I believe you have our statement on record and know that we haven’t named any suspects at this point,” Loch stated calmly. “Now we have about twenty-four more hours of work to do. Why don’t you report that?”
“Jesus, Devon, how’s that make you feel?” Hurley yelled after her. “Your best friend murdering her husband and then offing herself? If you don’t give me more than that, you know what I’ll print!”
As soon as they were out of hearing distance, Devon turned on Loch, fuming. “Why didn’t you tell him you knew Beka was my friend!”
“You know as well as I do there was nothing we could say that he wasn’t going to turn into a soundbite. If I so much as used her name he could have quoted me, probably out of context, and who knows where that would have ended.”
She sucked the air under her tongue. Her eyelids seemed to have gained weight in the last few minutes and she had to blink a few times to make sure the sky was actually beginning to grow pale and it wasn’t her imagination. “Do you think there’s going to be a problem with me working the scene?”
“There’d be more trouble if you didn’t. Sergeant Houck’s behind you and so am I. We’re counting on you and Frank to put it together like you always do.”
“I have a bad feeling about this. If the press decides to make something of my presence at the scene I’m going to get fried.”
“Why? Because you’re a woman?”
“Possibly.” Devon tried to keep her voice noncommittal on the emotional issue of gender bias, which no man, not even Loch, seemed to comprehend entirely.
“Give it a rest, Dev. Everything that happens in the department does not come down to sexism.” He stopped and looked
at her merrily. “It comes down to having sex.” She did not argue.
Dawn finally broke through the overcast horizon—it was not a splendid sunrise. The clouds merely went from black to dark gray to light gray. There was a purplish tint around the puffy edges, but that only made it seem darker as another flurry of flakes began to drift down upon their heads.
“Which way is the ocean?” Loch asked.
She shook her head, disbelieving. “You grew up on Long Island and you still don’t your way around? Pitiful.”
“I’m from Brooklyn; technically that’s a separate universe.”
She pointed toward an anvil-shaped bank of clouds just beginning to blush with morning light. “Right over that hill and a few dunes.” The brisk salt air scrubbed at her lungs and she had to blink back the water as the wind brought tears to her eyes.
They heard Frank breathing heavily as he made his way up the hill toward them. “I tell you what, this body is too old for these hours.”
“We just need your professional eye to glance over the art studio. Then you can go home.”
Frank looked at his partner. “Don’t you love how he refers to the office as home? Be afraid, be very afraid of a man who thinks his desk is a pillow.”
“Since Brennen never sleeps,” Devon reminded her partner, “that’s not a problem.”
The barn looked different with the faint light of morning coming through the picture windows. “Gabe loved to paint in here around this time,” Devon recalled. “Beka would go to the zendo to meditate while he painted, then they’d meet up around eight-thirty for breakfast.”
“Almost sounds romantic, in a pseudo, kind of intellectual way,” Gary said, stomping his feet in an effort to warm them.
She walked through the studio she had visited a number of times over the years and made one blanket statement. “Looks clean.”
“Too clean?” Loch dragged his foot along the cement floor for her to see that nothing came up on his shoes.
“Someone comes in. Once a month, I think.”
Gary opened the locker with the Tyvek suits in it. “What about these?”
She touched them with her gloved hand. “He used them to keep his clothes clean, like we do.”
“Do you know where he got them?”
“No, but he got the idea from me.” She looked inside one of them and wrinkled her nose. “He must not change them as often as we have to.” She held onto the suit, trying to remember something that was nagging at her brain, but she couldn’t place the fragment of thought.
“You have something?” Gary asked.
“Yeah, short-term memory loss.” She walked to the end of the studio and back. “It doesn’t look like a crime scene to me. Frank, what’s your read?”
“No signs of struggle. A little too organized for an artist’s studio, but maybe he was your anal-retentive-type artist.”
“Definitely,” Devon affirmed. “Have you called Jenny O’Doherty yet?”
Lochwood looked at his notes. “The secretary?”
“Yeah, she could tell you when the maid came last and whether she did the studio or not.”
“We’re heading over to see her in a few minutes.”
“Something was swept up recently.” Frank pointed to the stripes along the cement floor.
Devon peered into the trashcan. “It looks like something broke. They’ve dumped the trash, though. Gabe does a lot of plaster casts before he pours the final bronze. Sometimes he breaks—broke—them for fun. He liked smashing imperfection.” She tried to smile fondly over the memory etched in her mind—how she had watched Gabe mold plaster directly onto Beka’s body—but the attempt to smile failed. Beka had hated the feel of plaster on her skin, and questioned whether his use of molds detracted from true art. There had been too much active creation in the studio for such destruction to now echo between its walls.
The four detectives walked back out the barn door and down the hill in the ashen dawn. “Houck says he tried but the labs are going to remain closed today,” Loch told his team.
Gary snorted. “That just blows.”
“Well, at least we’ve been approved for overtime.”
Devon knew Loch was trying to lighten their mood, but there was nothing worse than being stalled in an investigation.
“Money, that’s what’s really important,” Frank replied mockingly.
“Since it doesn’t look like we have a murderer running around loose, we won’t have any help until after the holiday,” Lochwood reminded them.
Frank tapped his partner on the shoulder. “Come on, Dev. I’ll drive back.”
Loch wanted to drive her back, but it would look out of the ordinary. “See you around two at Jo’s Place?” he asked. That was what they called the morgue—it gave an endearing diner quality to the cold reality of corpses on ice. Devon’s nod was imperceptible.
They had just pulled onto Sunrise Highway when Devon’s beeper began to vibrate on her belt. She quickly unsnapped it and looked at the number. 999-999-9999—it was Loch’s way of telling her what he so often had trouble saying out loud. Warmth seeped through her chest as she craned her head to look in the side-view mirror at his car. I love you, too, she thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Now the party’s over, I’m so tired …
—BRYAN FERRY, “Avalon”
The bleak January roads, gray as the sky above them, ran beneath the tires, and little swirls of dry snow dusted the roadside along the pine barrens. Frank shifted the van into the left lane as Devon’s thoughts sifted through the events of the night. Her toes were beginning to thaw as the van’s stale heat blasted across them. Her hair was damp and heavy on her neck, and she tried fluffing it by the vent before giving up and tuning into one of the few local stations. As the crackling static stilled, she heard Bryan Ferry’s hypnotic voice.
Now the party’s over,
I’m so tired,
Then I see you coming out of nowhere …
Beka seemed to be dancing through the snow snakes winding up the roadway, her waist-length dark hair sweeping across her face just a hundred yards ahead. She was dancing in Avalon, now, Devon thought to herself. Beka had finally made it.
Much communication in a motion,
Without conversation or a notion,
Avalon …
The last vibrations of music still hung in the air as Sam Daniels faced them. “It’s really cold out there. I’ve been looking for an hour and can’t find him anywhere. He didn’t even have his coat on.” His voice cracked as Devon watched the frantic grip of hysteria tighten around his throat.
“Come on, gang, let’s go find Todd,” Josh declared. He poured Sam a shot of Jack Daniel’s and then shoved the bottle into Sam’s pocket. “We’ll need this.”
“Bring the brandy!” Beka had quipped, tossing on her vintage fur coat and heading for the door. Moments later, the last stragglers of the loft’s Chinatown bash were heading down the stairs of 255 Canal Street.
When the samba takes you
Out of nowhere,
And the background’s fading
Out of focus …
Snow swept down the streets. Beka slipped her arm around Devon’s elbow and peered concernedly into her friend’s eyes as if to make sure that Todd was okay, then looked abruptly around at the faces in the group. “Where’s Gabe?”
“He went out for cigars and a nightcap at La Gamelle,” Maddie informed her.
“He’s such a snob.” Beka grabbed Godwyn so she was sandwiched between them. She was like a butterfly aflutter with every whim and change of breeze, still only when she was anchored by the presence of friends.
On the serene streets of Soho, a light new snow had begun to fall over the neighborhood. The search party headed toward Broadway, hoping they might be able to retrace Todd’s trek around the block and perhaps find him passed out in one of the many alleyways. Ahead of them, Maddie—the most vertically challenged of the party—was laughing and taking a swig from the bottle. Beka
let go of her anchors and ran ahead. She was careful not to wipe the lip and downed the Jack Daniel’s, then asked, “Where’s the brandy?”
Maddie Fong, the other Asian-American in the group, was more a stew than a melting pot. She had just enough Chinese in her to give her hair a wicked gleam and her eyes a slight almond shape, but the rest of her heritage was a mystery.
“Yes the picture’s changing, every moment … And your des heather tination, you don’t know it … Would you have me dancing out of nowhere? Avalon,” Beka sang under her breath, “Avalon.” Making sweeping movements with her arms as if conducting the snowflakes, and every so often adding a few quick steps with her feet, she kicked bits of red paper and ashes into the air.
Alexandra and Godwyn were talking animatedly, making gestures in the air that looked like camera lenses and tilting their heads to one side or the other as if exploring all the angles.
Josh and Katiti had moved from flirting to heavy-petting, and their trek through the street was slowed by constant groping. Matching black curls of hair, tousled by the wind and laced with large white flakes of snow, made them look more like siblings than lovers. Devon, the quiet watcher of the scene, thought how Sam looked like the head of their dragon. And if Sam was the head, Devon mused, she must be the tail, while the rest of them appeared to make up the torso, undulating through Chinatown, trying to chase away the evil spirits with their laughter. The soiree had simply adjourned to the street—they passed the flasks of bourbon and brandy among themselves and yelled, “Todd Daniels! All ye, all ye, all come free!”
It was all part of a game. Their voices rang out his name like good cheer until it echoed between the dark and empty buildings.
“Happy New Year!” Broadway Bob blew a noisemaker and greeted the group with a familiar wave of his hand and head. He knew the loft gang well. They had, after all, provided him with blankets on cold nights as well as booze for the three years they’d lived on his block.
The Weeping Buddha Page 5
