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The Weeping Buddha

Page 17

by Heather Dune Macadam


  Devon was thinking about his choice of words. He had just let Katiti know that she hadn’t been invited to Beka’s summer event in as unsubtle a manner as any Hamptons socialite might. He had also just gotten a dig in at her, for the party in question was the party Beka and she had fought at, and Devon had a sneaking suspicion Godwyn knew that. She wondered where he had learned to wield such deadly skill.

  “Remember how she would dance for hours all alone in the center of the room?” He began to reminisce, and Devon found herself unwillingly touched by his sentiments. “We were lucky to know her. Lucky to be the ones she performed solo for.” A tear fell from Godwyn’s right eye.

  Devon caught Alex watching her watching them; a quizzical look passed across her brow then vanished as a cart passed within striking distance. “Waiter!” Alex shouted like a Hollywood producer on a movie set at the almost-empty cart of food that seemed destined for the kitchen. “I have low blood sugar and have to eat.” She snatched two plates of cold-looking fried dumplings. No one else seemed eager to imbibe, but Alexandra ravenously devoured three in a row, then sighed with relief as the conversation veered away from Beka and Gabe and drifted into the still waters of Todd’s disappearance.

  “Isn’t it strange that Beka and Gabe should die on the anniversary of Todd’s death?” Maddie leaned forward on the table like a carnival fortune-teller.

  “Death?” Josh asked.

  “Well, you can’t believe he just disappeared anymore, can you? He’d have come back by now.” She looked at him disbelievingly.

  “Is it a coincidence, Devon?” Alex asked abruptly.

  Devon did not answer.

  “Remember when they brought the dogs to sniff for Todd?” Godwyn asked, sniffing a dumpling and making a face.

  It was almost as if Todd’s file were still open on Freesia’s desk as the loftmates, with very little prompting on Devon’s part, pulled out old items from the past and rehashed them out loud directly before her eyes. It was better than reading transcripts—it was virtual reality without the CD-ROM.

  “I’ll never forget the way he lunged at you.” Alex recalled how Josh had run upstairs and practically crashed right into the nose of the German shepherd.

  “I’ll never forget the way he growled at your crotch!”

  “The damn cops started laughing!” Josh reminded Godwyn.

  She was intrigued. “What breed?”

  “I think one had pointy ears and one was floppy-eared.” Maddie was obviously not a dog person.

  “A shepherd and a bloodhound.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We use them in Suffolk, too, Mad Dog.” Devon exhumed Maddie’s old nickname from the 1980s’ grave of misplaced anamnesis.

  “I haven’t been called that in years!” Maddie did not look pleased. In fact, she looked remarkably like a rabid mongrel when she was upset, thus the name.

  “Maddie ‘the Mad Dog’ Fong,” Godwyn mocked.

  “What’d you have in your pocket, Josh?” Devon asked.

  “I dunno. Keys?” Maddie and Alex looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

  “Well, if you can’t remember I can’t tell you what I know about police dogs.” Devon held her cup close to her lips and shut her eyes as the steaming tea softened her face.

  “I know what you had,” Maddie said.

  “I don’t care what you know, Mad Dog,” Josh’s voice threatened.

  “Maybe Detective Halsey does.”

  Devon listened to their exchange while breathing in the fragrance of green tea. “Maybe Detective Halsey already knows,” she said calmly. Her eyes opened. They were all looking at her, stunned.“Shepherds sniff for drugs. Bloodhounds, bodies. I’m assuming you didn’t have any body parts on you.” Josh shook his head.

  “We didn’t do drugs,” Maddie said.

  “Cut the crap.”

  “Just recreational drugs,” Josh justified.

  “There are no recreational drugs, only illegal drugs.”

  “It was harmless,” Maddie agreed with Josh.

  “So harmless that Todd Daniels ran around the block and never came back?” Devon put her cup of tea down and looked at their faces.

  “I don’t think so.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

  —DOGEN

  The last client was just putting on his street clothes as Loch and Gary entered the Pilates studio for the second time that day. “You came back!” the woman who had asked them to return later greeted them.“I’m not Edilio, but maybe I can answer any questions you have. My name is Pam. Did you read the brochure?”

  “Actually, we’re with Suffolk County Homicide.”

  “Oh,” she gasped, and turned one shade off of sea-foam green.

  “Thank you for not saying that earlier. It could have been very awkward.” She sat down and motioned for them to have a seat on the only two normal-looking pieces of furniture in the studio. “Dana, can you stay a few minutes? These gentlemen probably need to speak to everyone who works here.”

  “Sure.” Dana picked up two yellow rubber balls and a metal ring with knee pads somehow stuck on the side and came over to sit on the floor with her legs spread wide open. She smiled at Loch, then laid her chest flat on the floor. The sound of bones popping sprung from her body. “Ah, that felt good. My hips are so tight.” Loch didn’t think they looked tight at all, but he didn’t say anything.

  “All of our clients want to know what happened, but we’re not saying much,” Pam began. “We have a couple of clients who are reporters.”

  “They called first thing this morning to see if we could squeeze them in. As if we didn’t know what they really wanted.” Dana stopped and looked at Pam, as if for permission to continue.

  “We’re trying to keep the press out of this as much as possible as well,” Gary assured them.

  “Well, good luck. That man who just left works for People.”

  “We understand there was a fight between Edilio and Beka sometime before Christmas.”

  “I don’t know why Edilio put up with her,” Dana said softly.

  “They were lovers?” Gary asked.

  “I thought they were,” Dana piped in.

  “No, they weren’t,” Pam said quickly. “They acted like it but that’s all.”

  “I overheard him on the phone one night and I know it was her, because the number was on the phone screen.” She jumped up and hit a few numbers. “See! If I punch in a number it shows up on the screen.”

  “And you recognized Beka’s number?” Gary inquired.

  “I know it by heart,” Dana said proudly.

  “What did you overhear?” Lochwood wrote down what she was saying as inconspicuously as possible.

  “Love talk. You know, ‘I can’t stand not seeing you tonight …’

  blah, blah, blah, ‘… but I’m supposed to be here until seven o’clock.’

  He asked me if I’d stay and close for him.”

  “How long had this been going on?” Loch wondered out loud.

  “If it was ever going on,” Pam reminded them.

  “I don’t think it ever ended,” Dana said. “They were touted as modern dance’s answer to Fonteyn and Nureyev, Barishnikov and Kirkland.”

  “Who?” Loch and Gary asked at once.

  She shrugged her angular shoulders as if their lack of dance knowledge was truly tragic. “Never mind, I think they just kept the flame. She married Gabe for security but it was an open relationship.”

  “Open?”

  “You know, you can sleep with other people if you want. Open!”

  “Thank you for enlightening us.” Gary stood up and began looking around the studio.

  “Do you think she would have closed him out of this studio?”

  Loch asked.

  Pam coughed. Both detectives looked at her. “He said everything had been worked out.”

  “How much money
are we talking?”

  “We’re just hourly employees, we don’t do the books, but the ledger’s right there.”

  “You want to take a look?” Dana jumped up off the floor and ran to the desk.

  Loch smiled encouragingly. “That’d be very helpful.” He and Gary eyeballed the numbers for the past month. It was a good business from what Loch could tell; steady, but they weren’t getting Hamptons-rich. Still, they charged a lot for private sessions and only paid out about fifteen percent to their staff. With four clients an hour, Loch surmised they were pulling in lawyer’s rates.

  “Where was he heading for vacation?” Gary asked, while Loch flipped through the numbers.

  “Tahiti via Hawaii first.”

  “He and Beka were talking about opening a studio in Honolulu,”

  Pam added.

  Lochwood caught Gary’s eye—the U.S. can’t extradite from Tahiti. “You’ve both been very helpful.” They wrote down their phone numbers and said good night.

  “Think I could call one of those girls up for a date?” Gary asked, once they were back on Long Wharf.

  “You’re such a slut, Gary.”

  As usual Devon had hit her mark. Detective Freesia had been right in assuming the loft was involved with the downtown drug scene, but what, if anything, did that have to do with Todd or the present? Beka had started doing cocaine shortly after Todd disappeared—or so Devon had been told. Had her habit started sooner?

  “There’s Sam. Let’s not talk about Todd or Beka anymore,” Katiti suggested in a hoarse whisper. “Let’s just make the rest of the day fun.”

  Devon snorted through her nose. Fun? How much fun could they have when topics like Todd, Beka, and Gabe stood larger than pink elephants in the center of every room they entered?

  Sam looked wrung out. His eyes were red-rimmed and his cheeks puffy. “Sorry I’m late.” He walked straight over to Devon. “I just can’t get over it.” She stood up and hugged him. “You’re the real reason I came today,” he told her, while looking directly into her eyes. “How are you?”

  “I’m dealing with it as best I can.” He nodded understandingly, in the way Lochwood might have when he tried to comfort someone who had suffered a loss. His manner was almost professional, as if he were her therapist, not a friend who was going through the same mixed array of emotions surrounding death.

  Josh came over and began pumping his hand up and down and hugging him in a pounding-male sort of way; their exchange exactly the opposite to what she had just experienced.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call each of you and let you know about Beka and Gabe,” Devon apologized to the group.

  “No one expected that of you,” Alex assured her.

  “I’ve been so busy trying to figure out what happened that there hasn’t been time for anything else.”

  “It’s okay, Dev. Sit down, Sam.” Maddie poured him a cup of tea.

  Sam’s arrival once more eclipsed the arrival of food at the table, so after everyone had finished hugging him and settled back to their chairs, the group still sat with nothing but cups of tea, Alex’s cold, unappetizing dumplings, and awkward silence. Dissatisfied with the lack of fare, Alex looked hungrily around again, but it seemed as if all the carts had abandoned them, migrating to the far side of the room.

  Loch dialed Devon’s cellphone from the car but got an out-of-range message. “That’s funny, I wonder if my phone’s working?”

  “You think Edilio could’ve killed them?” Gary asked.

  “What’s the motive?” Loch tried her number again, got the same message, and hung up. “He was going to start a studio in Oahu. Why kill his connection to that town and his backer?”

  “What if she left the studio to him?”

  “That doesn’t explain the affair. Why kill her if he’s having an affair with her?”

  They headed back down the driveway to Lochwood’s car and got inside. “For a small town things sure move fast,” Gary quipped.

  “That’s because everybody knows everybody else’s business.Listen, Devon’s house is just down the street, what do you say we pop in before heading back to the precinct? I need directions to Rysam Street and can use her phone to see if mine is working.”

  “Sounds good to me, will that cute dog-walker be there?”

  “Why do you think we’re really going?”

  “Oh, so you’re trying to set me up with Aileen and solve this case at the same time? Don’t you do anything simply, Brennen?”

  “No.” Loch started the engine and hung a left onto Bay Street.

  All of them except Katiti were what she would call observers, but it had been Beka whom everyone watched. She had never thought of it that way before: Sam was a therapist who specialized in art and dance therapy; movie producer Alex had started shooting and selling videos of Beka’s performances; Godwyn had been the first one to document Beka in black and white, just as Gabe had used bronze and oils. It always came back to Beka. It was as if she were orchestrating their reunion from the beyond, still the center of the group, holding their attention even though she had just taken her final curtain call. Everyone was staring at everyone else but no one was saying a word, and the dumplings in the center of the table looked as greasy and unappetizing as the past they had been discussing.

  Godwyn pulled his camera out and slowly aimed it around the table, quietly clicking the shudder. Devon knew his reputation, but she still couldn’t help feeling like the group was part of one of his life studies that she would rather be left out of completely. She could also tell that Godwyn was just as uncomfortable being observed as she was. She didn’t need a camera to study a person, just her mind, and she turned her focus on him.

  In defense against her stare, he raised his camera and aimed. She shoved a dumpling in her mouth and made a face like a chipmunk.He clicked.

  With a voice as flat as the sea at low tide, Sam began to speak about the years of searching for Todd. Loss of affect, Devon surmised.That’s what psychologists called it when someone was so separated from their pain that they sounded cold and unfeeling. Across the table Godwyn was now focused on Sam’s stricken face and clicked.

  One, two, three. The only thing that was missing was the flash.Devon blinked at the memory of orange and red spots dancing in front of her eyes, blinding her and Todd and Beka and Gabe, Edilio … One, two, three. She stared across the table at Godwyn, the emerging realization only just beginning to seep through her consciousness—of the five people dancing in the center of the room when he snapped their picture in 1984, Devon and Edilio were the only ones left alive. “Why’d you take it?”

  “Take that?” Godwyn pointed at Sam’s still frozen face. “A study on surviving tragedy. Time/Life loves those kinds of pics.” Had Godwyn really become as cold and commercial as he sounded?

  “Are you still at T.K. Psychiatric?” Josh was asking Sam from across the table.

  “Yep, after living with you guys, working with the mentally insane seemed a natural progression.” Sam forced a laugh that surprised her.It sounded too unnatural and contrived for someone of his psychological reputation to succumb to, but then Sam was as human as the next person—just because he could treat people did not mean he could deal with his own circumstances.

  She looked back at Godwyn. “The picture at the New Year’s party.Why’d you take it? You knew Beka hated flashes while she was dancing.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Get off it,” she shot back in a hushed tone.

  “I was pissed. Flirting with him right in front of me.” He began to rewind his film.

  “She’d broken up with you,” Devon reminded him.

  “Yeah, well, just cause a bird breaks it off don’t mean you’re over her.” His cockney accent matched step with his ire.

  “You made Todd sick from the flashes!”

  “I didn’t know that, did I?” He maneuvered his camera back under his arm uncomfortably.

  “Can we not talk about this?” Katiti interjec
ted vehemently. What had been a quiet spat between the two of them suddenly came to the attention of the entire table.

  “Go on, God,” Devon continued her interrogation, “tell us why you not only took those photos but why you sold them to the Post.”

  “You took those fucking pictures?” Sam’s voice was raw with rage.

  “I can’t believe you did that to me and my family!”

  “I was broke. I needed the money!” Godwyn retorted angrily.

  “You made Todd look like a drunk monkey.”

  “I thought he looked happy,” Alex defended Godwyn.

  “Of course he looked happy! Beka had her leg next to his ear!”

  “It’s not like your family wasn’t already making Page Six,” Maddie reminded him. “For god’s sake, your father had just purchased the largest parcel of land on the East End to develop into a golf course, or was it a subdivision?”

  Devon looked at them calmly. The emotions around her escalated and their voices grew louder. Everyone was yelling about their own agenda and perspective on the solitary event that had changed their young lives.

  Maddie was saying to Alex, “You don’t know everything,” who in turn reminded Maddie, “You slept with him, too!” Devon wasn’t sure who they were referring to and wasn’t sure it mattered.

  “I can’t believe you sold Beka and me out!” Sam glared at Godwyn.“Hell, you’d sell us all out for a buck!”

  Across the table, Katiti seemed to be enjoying the bedlam. Her arms were folded and she watched the ensuing argument with a glint in her golden eyes as Josh, unaware of his wife’s joy, just kept repeating, “We didn’t know what was going to happen! We just didn’t know …”

  “Drugs were fun, not dangerous,” Maddie was saying.

  At the other end of the room the electric piano began to chime in with “Yesterday” as a Chinese woman sang Lennon’s words in her twangy nasal voice—a Cantonese version of the Beatles classic.

 

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