Changes (8 page)

She looked down at the picture again and said, "Yeah.  I’m sure of it.  It’s her."

"You know her?"

"Well, not
know
know, but she came to the club like a week ago.  Dressed to the nines, y’know?  I’m not the best with faces, but she bought a virgin Pina Colada, an eight dollar drink, with a hundred dollar bill and told me to keep the change… I’d remember anybody that treated me that well."

"You’re sure she’s the girl in the picture?" I said.

She held it up and said, "Look at her, she’s gorgeous.  More so in person.  And breathing.  And not blue."

I picked up the phone and dialed Knox’s cell.  When he answered, I said, "I think we’ve got something on your girl."

I asked Tracy for the name and address of the club and relayed it to him, saying we’d meet him there in twenty minutes.  I hung up, grabbed Tracy, and kissed her hard on the lips.

On the way to the club, Tracy asked how Mei Ling was killed.

I told her.

"That’s why we went to that idiot’s school," I said.  "Whoever murdered Mei Ling, he knows what he’s doing."

"How do you know?" Tracy said.

"Not just anybody can do that… it’s not about muscular strength.  This guy is adept at one of the internal styles, maybe even Tai Chi Chuan."

"You just lost me."  Tracy said.

"In Chinese martial arts," I said, "there are literally thousands of different styles, but they can be divided into two main types – internal and external.  External is the designation given to styles like Shaolin, Wing Chun… the stuff an untrained person might generically call ‘Kung Fu’ or ‘Karate’.  External styles, to a great degree, rely on outer strength.  In a fight, typically the bigger, stronger, faster guy wins. 

"Internal styles, on the other hand, cultivate internal energy and whole-body coordination.  Tai Chi Chuan is probably the most well known internal art, but there are others, like  Pakua Chuan and Hsing I Chuan.  The strikes in internal arts aren’t designed to cause surface level damage or even to break bones, necessarily; the kinetic energy is meant to sort of bounce around on the inside, tearing up organs, things like that. 

"In Mei Ling’s case… what we’re talking about is a two hand palm strike to the rib cage.  A good external stylist would have no problem breaking ribs or causing organ damage, but the extent of damage to her organs, combined with the relative lack of damage to her body superficially, that’s the classic trademark of an internal stylist."

"So you went to the school looking for someone good enough to have killed her."

"Yeah."

"And that dude wasn’t it, huh?"

"He could barely stand up on his own without assistance."  I said.

"Where are you gonna look next?"

"Well, that’s the tricky part.  The other teachers that I know of in town won’t take outsiders.  They teach only to family and to personally chosen students, so it’s tough to tell the good guys from the bad guys when they’re all basically hiding."

"What kind of bullshit is that?" she said.

I shrugged. 

After a minute or so, she said, "What happens if you find the guy?"

"The killer?" I said.

"Yeah," Tracy said, brushing a strand of purple hair from her eyes.  "What do you do if you find him?"

"To be honest, I really haven’t thought that far ahead."

17

Knox muttered an unsavory word to himself as we watched the security tape.  The Outer Limit had cameras over its back door, and, when Mei Ling left, she ran out the back.

We watched it again.

It was her, alright.  For all the good that did.  Knox swore again; a different word this time, at least. 

"You don’t seem happy." I said.

"It’s just another dead end.  I‘m glad your little girlfriend spotted her, but this doesn‘t mean a fucking thing."

"The glass is always half-empty to you, isn’t it?" I said.  "You know she was here, at least."

"Yeah.  Which means exactly dick.  She’s got no record, we know that already.  So we get to see what she was like when she was up and walking around.  Whoopee-shit." 

"Hey," I said, "every piece of information is one more piece of the puzzle."

"Thank you, Charlie-fucking-Chan," he said.

"You’re grumpy." I said.  "See if I call you next time I find a witness to one of your damned crimes."

He was not amused. 

After Knox took down all of Tracy’s information, we left.

When we were outside, I said, "Do you have a pen?"

She checked her purse and found one.

I didn’t have a piece of paper, so I scribbled a few notes to myself on the skin of my inner forearm.  Just in case.

I looked up from my arm to see Tracy watching me curiously.

"Still want to catch that movie?" I said.

Tracy reminded me that she was still wearing an old pair of my practice pants, cinched and held with safety pins, and my trusty black t-shirt.  She asked if we could swing by her place first so she could change.

She lived in a loft in Soulard, ten or fifteen minutes from the club.  I parked the car, and we hiked up the four flights of stairs to her apartment.  Neither of us huffed or puffed, probably due to all the cardiovascular exercise we’d gotten lately. 

She’d painted the huge windows with a translucent paint to mimic stained glass.  One scene depicted a group of happy skeletons dancing in a cemetery.  Another showed impossibly thin vampires in capes and party masks at some sort of ball.  Still another showed a pumpkin patch in a full moon, but all the pumpkins were leering jack-o-lanterns. 

She must’ve seen me staring.   She said, "I did those for Halloween a couple years ago, but they turned out so good I decided to keep them."

"They’re pretty amazing," I said.

"Thanks," she said.

She flitted off to the bedroom to change, and told me to feel free to look around.

Framed prints of Edward Gorey’s Alphabet hung here and there, in no discernable order, along with other prints by Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.

She had more CD’s than most music stores I’ve been to, and they filled numerous racks throughout the apartment and spilled over onto the nearest available flat surfaces.  The dining table and chairs stood out, painted as they were to match the night sky.  The stars, arranged into constellations, were done in glow in the dark paint.

I heard a rasping snuffle noise and turned to see a horribly ugly creature staring at me.

"Jesus Christ," I said.

The thing was perched atop a cinder-block-and-two-by-four bookshelf like a wrinkly miniature gargoyle and glared down at me with yellow eyes.  Tracy appeared at my side, wearing a black tank top and baggy black cargo pants.  I felt a sorrowful twinge that those legs were covered, but I’d get over it. 

Eventually.

"It’s alright, baby.  He’s a friend.  C’mon," she said, patting her chest.  The horrific greyish thing jumped down onto her shoulder and situated itself.  It never stopped glaring at me.

"Will you be offended if I ask you what the hell that thing is?"  I said.

She gave a playful glare and said, "Randall, this is Titus Andronicus, Tito for short.  Tito, baby, forgive Randall, for he knows not what he says."

She kissed the thing on its nose.

Ew.

"Okay, but what
is
it?" I asked.

"Randall!  You’re going to hurt his feelings.  Tito is a cat, silly."  I could tell that on some level she was enjoying this.

"Cats are hairy.  Where is Tito’s hair?" I said.

"He’s a sphynx.  They’re a hairless breed."

"Of course they are." I said.

I normally had no problem with cats, but this thing looked like Satan.

Tracy cocked her head, narrowed her eyes, and said with a grin, "If you want to spend any time with me, you’re going to have to get along with Tito… he’s my schmoopikens."

"Isn’t he just everybody’s?" I said, reaching out to pet him.

Tito inclined his head slightly, as if he had deemed me worthy to touch him.  I scratched the top of his head lightly; he felt like a warm, dry peach.

Funky.

18

We went to a local pub for dinner.  Burgers and beer – maybe not the most romantic of meals, but it was alright.  Given our track record with food, maybe romantic wasn’t what we needed.

"So, when we last left off, I believe young Randall was learning how to stand around for hours?  What happened next?"

"A bunch of stuff that eventually brought us together here.  I believe we’re supposed to… what was your phrase?  ‘Live in the now?’  So what difference does it make?" I said.

"It makes a difference because we don’t really know each other."

"I think we know plenty."

"Ahem, ‘every piece of information is another piece of the puzzle’.  Sound familiar?"

"What kind of asshole talks like that?" I said, biting into a fry.

"C’mon, man, talk!"

I took a swig of beer and said, "Alright.  So the standing practice provides a foundation.  When you stand in a posture, over and over, after awhile your body learns to relax into it.  Once Master Wu was confident that I could stand, he taught me to move.  From each standing posture to the next. 
Tai Chi Chuan."

"Like the guy at the school we visited." she said.

"No, nothing at all like that guy." I said.

"But still, it’s like the stuff the old people practice in the park, right?"

"There are a lot of teachers that teach a health exercise they call Tai Chi, but real Tai Chi Chuan is more than a health exercise, it is, first and foremost, a martial art.  One of the translations for Tai Chi Chuan is ‘Supreme Ultimate Boxing.’"

"The inside kind," she said.

"Internal, yes." I said.  "Wu had me practicing the form, the movements all strung together, for four to six hours a day."

"Damn."

I shrugged.  "It was fun compared to just standing.  After a few months, he started to teach me about the energetic anatomy of the body.  The meridians and acupuncture points, the ways that energy moves through the body, that sort of thing, as they related to my practice.

"When I was fifteen, my father died of a heart attack.  I didn’t really have anywhere to go, so Master Wu invited me to stay with him.  From that point on, every moment was a training of some sort.  Mornings belonged to Tai Chi Chuan, afternoons were for acupuncture and evenings meant studying Taoist texts and herbalism.

"When I was twenty-three, I was allowed to take over a portion of my teacher’s case load.  The simple ones, mostly.  When I was twenty-five, he told me he had nothing more to teach me.  So I moved to the states, opened a practice, and that’s that."

I finished my beer and went back to my burger.

Tracy was watching me.

"What?" I said.

"You know what."

"Do we really have to talk about this?" I said.  "What about you?  Tell me about yourself."

"I’m an open book.  I have no secrets." she said.  "You, however, are leaving out quite a big chunk of your life.  If you don’t want to tell me, that’s alright, but just say so.  Don’t insult my intelligence."

She put up a good front, but I could tell that I’d hurt her feelings.  And I didn’t want to keep things from her.  So I put my food down, ordered another beer when the waiter came by, and I told her.

I told her about moving to Seattle and opening a practice, about teaching Tai Chi in the park there, and about meeting and falling in love with one of my students, a Chinese-American woman named Miranda Chan.  I told her how, after a long courtship, I married Miranda on a cool September day, and how our daughter, Grace, was born eight years later, two days after our anniversary. 

Tracy looked surprised, but she kept listening, so I continued.  I wanted a drink, something stronger, or a diversion: a fire alarm, maybe, or a tornado, but nothing came.  So I dug my fingers into that old wound and found it still fresh, still ripe with infection, and the words spilled out on their own.  I listened passively and studied her eyes for that sickening pity that so many people exhibit, but, in her, there was none.  Only concern.

All she said was, "What happened?"

"We were bad parents," I said.

And it was true.  Neither of us knew how to relate to the new, innocent, utterly helpless life we'd brought into the world.  We loved her, of course, but that's not the point.  I loved the goldfish that I had as a kid, the one I starved by forgetting to feed it. 

No, we loved her more than anything, and we wanted to do what was best for her.  We tried.  I read all the books; I bought all the recommended toys and books and mobiles and cds.  Miranda nursed, even though it hurt her every time she did it.  And Grace grew, in spite of her inept parents. 

She was really something.

But my practice was taking off so I was almost never home.  I tucked her in at night.  That was our time together.  A story, a kiss, and that was that: my obligation fulfilled for one more day.  I had other things, more important things, to worry about. 

And Miranda, she would start mixing a little vodka in with her iced tea around noon, mourning her lost career, her lost life, and end up napping the afternoon away while Grace was at daycare. 

When it happened, Grace was four.  Miranda "had a headache," and I was at the office.  I was supposed to take her to the zoo that day, just the two of us, but I forgot and booked patients by mistake.  So Grace played outside, alone, because her parents couldn't be bothered with her. 

She'd been gone for hours before either of us even knew.  The police did their best, but none of the neighbors saw anything.  She could've runaway, and neither Miranda nor I would've blamed her.

A week later a patrolman found something, wrapped in plastic sheeting and wedged between some rocks, down by the harbor.  They called me, and I had to identify her body. 

The police caught him a few days later.  Steven Allan Hayes.  A registered sex offender. A monster.  He was afraid of being caught again, of going to prison.  He said that's why he did what he did. 

But he was caught, and he did go to prison.  He was there for a week before another inmate beat him to death.  After everything he did, the time he spent planning, the execution of his actions, the destruction of something so pure and innocent; it only took a fist hammering his temple, and he was dead in minutes.