The Fourth Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (A Tenzing Norbu Mystery series Book 4) (27 page)

En route, I had a sudden urge to check up on Sasha. I still had his number on my cell.

“
Da?
”

“Sasha, it’s Tenzing Norbu. Are you awake?”

“Oh. Hello.” His voice sounded deflated.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Okay, I guess. Audrey’s gone back to England for a few days. Maybe longer.”

That must be the pain I was hearing.

“How’s your mother?”

“Fine. She’s all worried about my grandmother again, though. Hasn’t heard from her. Can’t reach her anywhere. You know Mom.”

“I’m sure Irena’s fine.” My next sentence came out of nowhere, and landed before I could reel it in. “Sasha, did your research ever turn up anything about a place called Agvan Supply?”

I listened to his breathing, how it altered slightly. “No. Why?”

An alarm went off in my head. What was I doing? “No reason. Never mind. Just glad to know you’re okay.”

“Ten?”

“Yes?”

“Say hello to my father for me.”

What on earth had prompted me to ask him that?

There are no accidents.

By the time I reached Moorpark, where the 23 narrowed into Los Angeles Avenue, it was after midnight. I started gas station hopping.

First I hit a Chevron. I filled up, using my ATM card, and went inside to trawl for information. The kid behind the cash register was a slight, nervous-looking Hispanic, barely out of puberty. Small, red pimples crawled across his forehead like a column of ants.

“I’m a detective,” I said, and flashed him my P.I. license. He snapped to attention, which told me there was no need to also flash money. “Were you on duty last night as well?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir. Every night.”

“Did you happen to notice a yellow school bus driving by?”

His blank look told me all I needed to know. I headed for the next station. A Shell. Different cashier, same drill. Same result.

But the third, a generic gas and mini-mart combination, produced a mini-jackpot, after I’d fed the female slot machine.

This cashier was ghost-pale, with hair like shredded wheat. She displayed no reaction at all when I showed her my P.I. license, but the mention of a school bus got an immediate response.

“Yep,” she said. “Bus come here about 5
A.M.
I remember, because he put in close to a hundred gallons of diesel.” She pulled out a package of gum.

“Gum?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

She shrugged, and loaded in a stick, working her jaws around it.

“He’s gassed up here before.” Her eyes took on an avid gleam. “He in trouble?”

“Probably not. Anything else you can tell me?”

Chew. Chew. Chew. She studied her nails. Chew, chew.

I passed over a 20, and she opened the register, shuffled through some credit card receipts, and dealt me one.

“Give it back. I need it for my boss.”

“No problem.”

The name on the card’s imprint was V. Stankic, the signature an undecipherable scrawl. I shuddered to think what Stankic’s forbearers did.

“Can you describe him for me?”

“White guy, lotta chin.”

“Long hair? Short hair? Age?”

“Real short hair. Black,” she squinted, “like yours. Late-thirties. Five foot ten or eleven.” She was good.

“Accent?”

“Only said a couple words, when he bought smokes. I never noticed an accent.”

“Brand?” You never knew. Bill had tracked down a murderer once because he still smoked Lucky Strikes.

Chew, chew. My meter had run out. I parted with another 20.

“Marlboros,” she said.

“One last question: Which way did the bus go, after it fueled up?”

She thought it over. “Came and went from thataway.” She pointed north on Los Angeles Avenue, which would soon run straight past my gravel road.

I kept driving, and was soon officially in unknown territory, at the mercy of the hovering satellite gods of my GPS. Apparently, I would eventually reach the town of Fillmore. I headed toward civilization, until I found the next available gas station to ask another round of school bus questions.

Private detective work is often comprised of just such a series of inane shots in the dark.

This time, I hit pay dirt on the first try, another generic mart with a couple of rusting pumps outside.

“You’re kidding, right?” this guy said. Bad Mohawk, worse teeth, and a snake tattoo that wrapped around his neck before slithering southward. Little pick-marks dotted his forearms: a meth head, sadly destined to stay right where he was, or worse, if he didn’t clean up his act.

“Why do you think I’m kidding, Bennie?” I wasn’t trying to name names—it was stitched on his shirt.

Bennie slouched from behind the counter and opened the door. He pointed up the road. A few hundred yards away, a blaze of security lights lit up a chain-link corral of yellow school buses, about two dozen of them.

“Maintenance yard for the district,” Bennie said. “School buses coming and going all the time.”

“Right.” My stomach rumbled, loud enough for us both to hear. “Anywhere to eat nearby?”

“Fillmore IHOP’s open. Or Micky Dee’s.”

I returned to my car to think. Something was bothering me, but it hadn’t quite risen to the level of conscious thought. I needed a closer look at the maintenance yard and some caffeine.

I pulled alongside the yard. A stark, black-on-white sign read:

YARD HOURS 5 A.M.–5 P.M.
NO EARLY ARRIVALS PLEASE!

I checked the time: almost one in the morning.

I was too early, or too late.

I continued on into Fillmore and found the IHOP. The coffee was hot, the pancakes as big as river rafts. The worrying thought solidified, and broke into three concerns.

I paid a return visit to Bennie. “Couple more questions.”

“Sure, man.”

“It’s July. Aren’t schools closed?”

“Year-round system,” he said. “Plus, summer camps use the buses. Sometimes on weekends, too.”

“Okay. Second question. Do you always work this shift?”

“Nah, I mostly work days. I been double-shifting this week so the other dude could see his old lady in Orange County.”

“So, when you said you saw buses coming and going all the time, you were referring to daytime, right?”

He scratched his arm. “Yeah. Daytime.”

“What about last night? Or tonight, for that matter? Any school buses?”

He moved to his neck, scratching and picking. “Yeah! Both nights, a bus left the yard, around midnight. Last night, it came back maybe four hours later.”

“Did you happen to see the driver?”

“Not really. White, I think. Crew cut.”

“Has he ever fueled up here?”

“You’re kidding, right?” he said again.

I pasted an expectant look on my face.

“They got their own diesel pumps! Right inside the yard!”

“Brilliant,” I said, as if he were some kind of genius, and he beamed. Let him find his joy where he could.

Still, that was interesting. Why would a district-owned school bus stop to fuel at an obscure mini-pump up the road? It was beginning to look like a rogue driver was doing a little moonlighting on the side, transporting human contraband.

There was a certain evil genius to this. Who would ever think to pull over a school bus? It was hard to imagine a less threatening vehicle.

I was in the mood for action, not a couple of hours of old-fashioned, butt-numbing surveillance. A low buzz hummed in my bloodstream, like a hunting dog catching a scent. I told the dog to lie down, and pulled onto a side road parallel to the stable of buses. I focused my binoculars on the well-lit yard.

The joke in the squad room back in the day was there should only be one question on the detective exam: Can you sit on your ass for long periods of time without needing to pee?

I made it three hours before irrigating a small, defenseless bush. I checked on Clancy.

“Anything?”

“Nothing. Don’t even see any cars in the lot here. How about you?”

“Nothing yet.”

More sitting and watching, until my personal witching hour, 3:43
A.M.
, brought a school bus along with it. The engine gears ground as the bus downshifted. It halted, brakes squealing, at the front gate. The gate slid open, and the bus pulled into the yard. Moments later, the driver hurried back through the gate. He was middle-aged, a bit thin in the hair department, a bit thick in the torso, and carried a bicycle helmet under one arm. He unlocked a multigeared bike from the opposite end of the chain-link fence and clambered on.

I kept my lights off and rolled to the road. Moments later, he rode past, hunched over his handles, pedaling along the level bike lane at a pretty good clip. I switched on my headlights and pulled onto the road, accelerated past my target, then eased up enough to keep him in my rearview mirror.

We were approaching the thick of town, such as it was, and several more cars joined us. It wasn’t too hard to jockey into a safe position while keeping him in sight.

He stuck his arm up like an L
,
turned right onto a side street, and right again. He pedaled more slowly into a scruffy-looking complex, a two-story U-shaped building wrapped around a small swimming pool. He dismounted, puffing from the exertion, lugged his bike up some metal stairs to the second floor, and wheeled it to an apartment door, midway along the outside corridor. After fumbling for a key and unlocking the door, he and his bike disappeared inside.

I parked across the street and settled in for another spell of surveillance.

This spell didn’t last long. Fifteen minutes later he hurried out with his bike, dressed in navy pants and shirt, as well as a neon safety vest, like traffic monitors wear. I focused on his face. His eyes were sunken, and the harsh lines across his brow and framing his mouth carved his face into a mask of worry. His hair was wet, as if he’d just showered, and slicked back. The receding hairline aged him even more. I moved my estimate up from early- to midforties. The door slammed behind him. He was halfway down the metal rungs when it flew open again. Out flew a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe and a very bad case of bed-head. Somebody woke somebody up. They exchanged yells, and I checked for wedding rings. Husband and wife.

After a final shout, he hauled his bike to the ground floor, mounted, and whizzed out of the parking lot. Such is the grip of domestic drama that he pedaled right past me, our faces not six feet apart, without noticing a thing. He couldn’t get away fast enough.

I decided to stay put. I was pretty sure he was on his way back to the bus yard, just in time for the 5
A.M.
opening—almost as sure as I was that his wife would stay angry. Angry wives are a detective’s dream. They’ll tell you just about anything you want to know about their husbands, and usually for free.

But not at five in the morning. Talking to the missus would require more waiting.

Shortly before seven, the door opened. Angry Wife had changed into a light-blue maid’s uniform. Like her husband, her worn face and thick body suggested years of hard work and unhealthy eating habits. I felt for her. Most of the cops I knew had the same issue, a direct result of long hours and fast food. She hurried down the stairs and disappeared into a door near the front office of the complex. Five minutes passed. She reappeared, pushing a cart of cleaning supplies. She maneuvered it to the rooms across the way.

Time to make my move.

I found her reenacting the fight with another uniformed maid, this one Hispanic, and exhausted by the look of it. The Hispanic maid patted Angry Wife on the shoulder before escaping with her own cart across the lot and disappearing into the supply room, as if finished for the day.

What was a cleaning maid doing ending her shift at this hour?

I purchased two cups of coffee from the vending machine and made my way to Angry Wife for a little chat.

As soon as she realized my intention, her pupils shrank, transmitting fear, but she didn’t change posture except to square her shoulders. That was telling. Frightened animals, human or otherwise, are wired to respond in four ways: fight, flee, faint, or freeze. Angry Wife may have been worn out by life, and weighed down by worry, but she was a fighter.

Of course, if you’re one of the newer, upgraded models of human, the ones who waved good-bye to their Neanderthal cousins with their puzzled grunts 50,000 years ago, you have an additional tool. Even as the ancient wiring urges you to fight or run or curl up in a ball or keel over, you have another choice. Talk. Things. Over.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Good morning.” Her eyes raked my body, as if checking for dynamite. “Can I help with something?” Her accent was heavy and very familiar.

“Excuse me for prying, but are you from Bosnia-Herzegovina?”

Her shoulders snapped back. “Why you ask this?”

“I just returned from a visit to Sarajevo.” I sipped from my coffee. It was no gourmet brew, but better than nothing. I offered her the second cup. “I’m sorry, would you like this? I usually drink two cups, but …”

She stared at me for a long moment before taking the coffee warily. “I am Croatian. There is difference.”

“I spent time in Dubrovnik as well. Amazing beaches.” At this she smiled, and took a sip. I was in.

“I am a detective, a private detective. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to know I’m not a policeman.”

“I know what private detective is. I watch television. What do you want?”

“I’m investigating some illegal activities that may be going on in these apartments.”

Her jaw hardened.

Interrogations are never about asking the perfect question, or catching the person in a lie. Bill taught me that. The answers lie in the silences, the open spaces. In this way, interrogating was similar to a practice I’d learned years before, at Dorje Yidam. They called it “right listening,” but “spacious listening” was more accurate. The practice was not unlike my fourth rule, and simple, in theory: Just let go. Of opinions, judgments, evaluations, even expectations around what the other person is saying. Let go, and listen as if suspended in space. Let the word vibrations pass through you. Let go of being a monk or a private detective or a maid or a bus driver and extend beyond the differences, to the space from which all roles emerge. Simply put, just
be.