Hungry Ghosts

by Susan Dunlap

  “You—” He gulped back the accusation.

  “Listen to me! Safety is your job. How could you let someone rip off the padding? There was five minutes between the time I glued that padding and the start of the gag. In those five minutes someone ripped off the padding and sprayed water on the landing. They could do that because it’s dark down there, because, Robin, you had no security, no crew down there. If I’d been maimed, I could sue this company into bankruptcy and everyone in the business would be pointing the finger at you. So, tell me, how did this happen, huh? Who did it?” I yelled.

  He shrank back, looking over my shoulder for help.

  I grabbed his arms. “Who, Robin?”

  “The police?”

  What was he talking about? Out of the corner of my eye I saw Korematsu.

  I let go of Sparto and faced the detective. “Yes?” I snapped.

  “I need to talk to you. When you’re finished here.”

  “About?”

  “When you’re finished.”

  I turned back. But I was finished. Sparto was a couple of yards away, surrounded by people and moving away fast.

  “Hey!” I yelled after. Yelling at him was my first mistake. Sparto picked up his pace. Malice or incompetence, he wasn’t about to tell me which. I glared back at Korematsu and made my second mistake. “Obviously, I’m finished! So what is it you can’t wait for?”

  He pulled a picture out of an envelope. “Do you recognize this knife?”

  “Yes. We use it to trim the candles on the altar. The blade’s a little long for that, but . . .” My whole body went cold. “Omigod! Is that what killed Tia?”

  “When did you last see it?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I just got here, to the city. I’ve only been to one sitting and I didn’t do the candle afterwards. We don’t trim them after every sitting,” I said, trying to remember when I had seen that knife with the green and black handle that Leo liked so much. “I don’t think I’ve seen it here at all.”

  “But you’ve used it to trim candles?”

  “No, I’ve seen the people assigned to care for the altar using it.”

  “But not here?”

  “No,” I said with relief. “Not here.”

  “Then you haven’t seen it since you were with Leo Garson in the monastery up north a couple of months ago? But you saw it there?”

  Oh, shit!

  CHAPTER 16

  KOREMATSU OFFERED ME a ride to the zendo. I declined. Bad enough I’d let him question me when I was still shaken from the stair fall sabotage and riding my fury at Robin Sparto. At least I had the sense not to let him get me alone in a police car. I’d already incriminated Leo—and me—plenty.

  Leo! I needed to warn him. The zendo wasn’t far. I slipped into the wardrobe wagon. As I changed back into my own clothes—sweater, loose pants, good leather belt, thick black nubby vest—reality slapped me. Furious as I’d been with Robin Sparto, the full import of what had happened hadn’t struck till now. Someone had tried to kill me! Or close to it! It was only because of luck, or skill, that I wasn’t lying at the bottom of the staircase with my brain all over the sidewalk.

  Who? Who even knew I was going to be here? Who had I told? The film crew sure wasn’t friendly or careful, but kill? That was a huge leap.

  If not them, who? And how? But that part was easy. In the dark there’d been plenty of time for someone to come up from the bottom of the staircase, pull off the padding, and splash a thermos of water.

  Suddenly the bruises on my shoulders, back, hips, arms, and legs throbbed and I felt woozy all over. I had never been panicked in a stunt. Even after stunts that went bad, there was always technique to focus on, the next shoot to worry about. But now, with nothing to distract me from the cold truth that someone didn’t want me alive, I stood and shivered.

  I knew I should check the staircase for evidence, though I also knew there wouldn’t be any. Anyway, there wasn’t time. Korematsu could already be knocking on the zendo door. Leo wouldn’t fall into the trap I did—answering questions in the heat of emotion. Leo would tell the truth without considering the consequences. He’d look at the photograph of the altar knife and say, yes, that was his. One of a set of two he liked, not just because of the smart green and black pattern on the handle, but because knives used to trim candle wax tend to get dull, and the blades on these held their sharpness. He’d tell Korematsu what he’d told me: “They cut better than any knife I’ve had.”

  I yanked on my shoes, jumped down from the wardrobe wagon, and raced full out for the zendo. My knees shrieked, my shoulders screamed, and everything between hurt. Sweat ran down my face, covered my body. I crossed Broadway once again—was it just yesterday afternoon that Tia was still alive?—and ran downhill the two blocks to Pacific, expecting to find Korematsu’s car dead in front of the zendo.

  But it wasn’t. No car, no light anywhere. “Leo!” I called as I took the steps two at a time. No reply. No Garson-roshi. Where was he?

  It was naïve to assume the cops would have cleaned up: there was still black powder all over the doorjambs, and Tia’s blood, maroon now and caking on the floor of Leo’s room, shocked me. Was she so unimportant that her blood was left for us to walk on? Poor Tia, she deserved better than this. And Leo, who’d only been in this beautiful zendo a couple of days and had only met Tia yesterday: he deserved better, too. But their disregard was his good fortune. Of course he hadn’t slept here. Was he at one of the other Zen centers in the city? Or did he still have friends here? Maybe he was with his luncheon date?

  I grabbed a rag and bucket and started cleaning. Despite my bruises it felt good to be doing something finite, ordinary, and useful. I tackled it as if it were a work period task in a sesshin, focusing on wringing out the cloth, wiping up a swath of soot, wringing out the cloth, noting my thoughts, letting them go.

  At 6:30—ten minutes before zazen—the downstairs door creaked open. Leo was cutting it close. I sighed with such relief that I dropped the towel. I hadn’t realized how worried I was. Or how tired. I hurried down to tell him I would be lying low for a while.

  But the figure in the vestibule wasn’t Leo. It was the grizzled guy who’d been here yesterday morning, the one who squirmed so much I’d decided he was just keeping warm in the zendo until he could find a place for coffee. Where was Leo? For the first time it struck me that I had no idea how long he’d been gone. Did he even know Tia was dead? Or did he know only too well by now?

  “Are you Darcy?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I have a message for you. The priest here, Leo Garson, left it on the machine at the Caffè.” He must have seen my confusion. “Renzo’s. I’m Renzo.”

  “Oh. Thanks. But why didn’t he call my cell?”

  Renzo shrugged. “What he said was, Ask Darcy to lead the morning sitting. Ask her to mention the Hungry Ghosts Ceremony.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dunno. Somewhere noisy.” He glanced into the zendo. “Not like here.” When I didn’t respond, he asked, “Is there going to be zazen this morning? I mean, can there be without Leo?”

  “Of course. Zazen is just sitting, in this case sitting together. Having the priest sit in the zendo with you is very nice, but it’s not necessary. We’ll start in five minutes.” I caught his eye, glanced around the empty zendo, and smiled at him. “Sit anywhere.”

  Where was Leo? Did he even know about his knife? And what about its duplicate? Was it still in the box of altar-cleaning supplies in the hall closet where anyone could snatch it? It was too late to look now. Now I had to hit the wooden clappers to call people to zazen, and decide how to explain the Ceremony of Feeding the Hungry Ghosts. Like Day of the Dead ceremonies and memorials, the Hungry Ghost Ceremony deals with honoring those who died during the year, but its focus is on letting them go. Hungry ghosts are ravenous, yet they can never get enough. They are consumed with wanting, with insatiable greed. The ceremony itself— But I realized I didn’t know
just how Leo would do the ceremony.

  When I walked back into the zendo, Renzo had been joined by three other people I’d seen at the reception: the lithe Asian woman, the blonde I’d taken to be a lawyer, and Benton Stallworth, the one I’d thought of as the archetypal thug. I nodded to them as if they were old hands here and walked into the dawn-dark zendo. Everything was as it must have been after the evening zazen last night: black zabuton mats lined up on the floor, four along each wall, folding chairs by the door, waiting for the stiff-hipped or those who had already blown out their knees.

  On the altar the Buddha sat cross-legged with his hands in the teaching position, one on his lap and the other on his right knee, fingertips touching the earth or, in this case, his stand. In front of the altar was a thick kneeling mat. I stood at the end as Leo would have, bowed to the altar, stepped around to the other end, between it and the altar, bowed again, lit the candle and the incense, aware with every move of Leo’s absence. I moved to the seat opposite where Leo should have been sitting and bowed to it, and when I turned to bow to the room, the crowd had doubled. I sat, adjusted myself on my cushion, giving them time to do the same, then rang the bell. The soft, sweet sound floated across the room and for an instant seemed to connect everyone in it.

  Unlike yesterday, people sat facing the wall, as is traditional. Renzo’s long narrow face, half-closed brown eyes, and ponytailed brown hair, thin on top, gave him the look of a coffeehouse San Franciscan with time to ponder, hold forth, and bob in each wave of change that washed across the city. One thing he’d changed was his clothes. In place of yesterday’s rumpled jacket and slacks were new jeans and a black fleece jacket so new the tag was still on the back.

  I sat in front, facing them, eight in all, and wondering how many were here to sit zazen, how many to check out a murder scene.

  The shadow of the altar flowers danced on the wall, like a tall couple too in love to move their feet, swaying minutely as the last chords died. Like thoughts dissipating into the air. I let my own float off too and just sat, listening to the sounds of breathing, the crackle of wax, the swish of cloth, feeling every new pain from the aching in my shoulders to the excruciating soreness in my tailbone. And when the forty minutes were over, I rang the bell and said, not what Leo had instructed about the Hungry Ghost Ceremony, but this: “Today’s service will be a memorial to Tia Dru, who was my friend. Please feel comfortable saying something about her. Then we will offer incense and chant the Heart Sutra.”

  Usually at memorial services one or two people speak briefly. Usually one of those people is the one who asked for the service. I stood, fluffed my cushion, turned to the group and took a deep breath. But before I could start, Benton Stallworth said, “I hoped she would return to films. She could have, despite her limp. Couldn’t convince her, though. Pity.” He shook his head. “Pity.”

  I found myself staring at him, amazed that he had known Tia since before her accident.

  “Had hoped,” he said softly as if the words were escaping through a barely open window of his heart. They hung in the midst of us and seemed to echo the others’ feelings.

  “I had hoped, I really thought, that she would be okay,” Renzo said. “I was there at her accident. That’s how I know her. I thought she was going to die, mangled as she was, blood all over, skin hanging off her. I thought . . . But then, you know, I hoped, I wanted to see her like she was before, and I believed—yeah, it wasn’t just hope, I really believed—she would walk out of the hospital without a cane. There was just something about Tia that shouldn’t have been tethered, you know?” Renzo inhaled sharply and swallowed. He looked like a man who was looking beneath what he had assumed. “I didn’t see her often. But it was always like we’d just talked yesterday. I told her about this place, the property, I mean. I told her. And now . . .” He pulled out a handkerchief and blotted his eyes. It was gray, looked as if it had been meant to peek out of a pocket of a tailored suit, and yet it didn’t seem odd now for it to have been in his jeans pocket.

  “She . . . Tia . . .” the blonde woman cleared her throat and tried again, “Tia . . . was the most . . .” she swallowed. Her hands were shaking. I was two seats away from her, too far to offer a hand of comfort. But now I saw that her face didn’t have that stunned look of grief but was pinched in nervousness, as if what was constricting her was not Tia, but fear of what she intended to say. “Tia,” she said softly, “was the most daring woman, no, daring person, I ever met.”

  Benton Stallworth jolted forward, toward her, then caught himself.

  Renzo made no pretense of eyes-down. He was staring at both the blonde woman and Stallworth. And the woman herself had gone dead pale.

  We all waited, but she said no more. The silence of the room seemed to close in around her. Her words hung, as if daring had a meaning beyond what we knew.

  Renzo blew his nose—

  But it wasn’t him blowing his nose; that squeak was coming from behind him, from the doorway. The door to the vestibule was open only an inch. Leo? I was holding my breath.

  The door didn’t move. Not Leo. Someone else out there. The idea of someone standing out there, listening to us, to Renzo’s remorse, infuriated me, and it scared me. The blonde woman looked terrified, as if the eavesdropper were here because of her.

  I breathed in as I had learned in acting classes and said as calmly as I could, “Please come in. It’s not too late to join the service.”

  The door creaked slowly, as if things had shifted to slow motion. In our group no one turned around, but eyes moved. The door opened and Korematsu stepped in. He was wearing the same dark jacket and blue shirt he had had on an hour ago on the set. To me he reeked of cop, but to anyone else he must have looked like a guy nervously pushing away a thick swath of hair that hadn’t quite fallen onto his forehead, so he could get himself together enough to speak. In my peripheral vision I saw a hand start to reach out to him. He looked like a guy who could have dated Tia.

  But he was a cop, the investigator on this case, and I knew damn well what he was doing, lurking around the memorial, vulturing for suspects, as if it were some sort of mob funeral. Dammit, he was taking advantage of the grief of these people in our zendo. I’d been sitting in the front seat, the only seat that faces into the room; it had been my job to watch their backs during zazen, literally and figuratively, and I was not about to let any one of them be emotionally mugged now.

  I took a breath, stared him in the eye, and said, “We have been speaking of Tia, as you heard. Now that you’re here at her memorial service, what is your remembrance of her?”

  CHAPTER 17

  I NEVER THOUGHT Korematsu would answer my question. I had just wanted to make him as uncomfortable as Renzo would be when he realized his emotional comments had been overheard by a cop and now would become part of the investigation report. But Korematsu stood as thoughtfully as the others had. The only difference was that when he spoke he watched their reactions, and mine. “I didn’t know Tia. Mostly I read about her. I only”—he paused, eyes looking up as if searching right behind the skin of his forehead for the words he needed—“came into contact with her twice. The first time was at the accident scene. I was on patrol; I took the call.”

  The blonde woman jolted back as if she’d been slapped. Benton Stallworth shifted his bulk to face Korematsu and looked him over as if the police officer had suddenly become worthy of his attention. The lithe woman glanced at her watch, and Renzo had no reaction. He, of course, had been around last night and must have noted Korematsu on the scene then. Renzo was taking in my surprise. I should have been impressed at Korematsu’s honesty, but I remembered John saying over and over as I grew up: look for the secondary motive. A good cop always has a hidden reason. What did this one have to gain now?

  If Korematsu was staging his comments for us, he was doing an Oscar-worthy job. His gaze was to the floor now, his head slightly bowed. He thrust his hands in his pockets as if to get them out of sight. “I thought she was dead. Lik
e you did. Her back . . . very bad. I was sure she wouldn’t make it.” He inhaled slowly. “But she did. It was a testament to her, to medicine, but really to her. I always read the blurbs in the paper about her, I cheered for her, you know, like I was a proud parent.” He inhaled again, more slowly. The rasping sound of his breath cut the silence. He said, “The second time I was with her was last night.”

  It was hard to disbelieve that level of sincerity. But Benton Stallworth had managed. He didn’t harrumph, but his muffled cough gave the same message. I wondered if he saw something I’d missed.

  The Asian woman glanced at her watch again.

  The vestibule door opened. My brother John glared in. What was he doing here?

  Before he could speak, I reached for the bell. “Normally we each offer incense, but this morning we will just end with the chanting of the Heart Sutra. I’ll pass out cards with the words.”

  Chanting always begins raggedly in a Zen center where few have been trained. Zen attracts individualists, and nowhere is that clearer than in the chanting of sutras. For the voices to mesh, women would have to go an octave higher than the men; women are not about to do so, perhaps not anywhere, definitely not in San Francisco. Men could go lower. They don’t. They have their reasons, too. Hearing the first lines of the Heart Sutra chanted is an invitation to experience the gap between desire and reality.

  I chanted the title: Prajna Paramita Hridaya Heart Sutra and was poised to motion people to start when Benton Stallworth’s full baritone rang out. For a minute he rang forth into stunned silence, then one by one voices joined his, their shakiness covered by the rich certainty of his. By the time we reached Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form, the words seemed to encompass us and Tia Dru, life and death. At least to me, and I didn’t look up from them to observe anyone else. John would be glaring at Korematsu. Korematsu would be ready for him. They’d both be eager to get to or from me whatever it was they wanted at the location set. I didn’t dare look up. This might be as much of a memorial service as Tia got. I wanted to prolong the moment for her.