Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions (18 page)

“Oh, I think you’ll like what I’ve got planned. Throw on your runners and some work-out clothes,” he told me.

“Aw,” I groaned.

“No complaints,” he ordered. Jay scooped me up from the chair, carried me into the bedroom and plopped me on the bed. “Hustle up, young lady. Sweats, work-out bra, runners. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

I gave in to Jay ordering me around. It was nice for a change to have someone else take charge and make the decisions.

Forty-five minutes later we came up the stairs from the subway onto Canal Street. The crowds were thick and tourists filled the small shops full of knock-off designer handbags and perfume. It reminded me of the Chinatown area in Toronto.

It was clear Jay knew where we were going and although he had so far refused to tell me what we were up to, I was glad that I wasn’t sweating and gasping for air. So far.

He told me the neighbourhood was called Soho, short for south of Houston, one of the main streets running west to east in lower Manhattan. We climbed the stairs to the second floor of a building on one of the streets off Canal and Jay rapped on the door.

The sign on the door read “Jeet Kune Do, Keepers of the Flame”. Under the sign was a picture of Bruce Lee and someone else I didn’t recognize.

That someone else opened the door and welcomed Jay and I. He introduced himself as Frank Sanchez, and led us into a large, nearly empty room. There were a few racks against one wall with boxing gloves and some other equipment I didn’t recognize, and up against the walls were several wooden structures with rounded, short poles sticking out of them. Frank saw me eyeing them and explained that they were called wooden dummies. Really.

By now I had figured out what we were doing, and I smiled at Jay.

“After dinner last night I called Jason in Toronto. He recommended Frank,” he told me. “So I called last night and explained the situation. Frank agreed to see us this morning and give us some private lessons in the art of Jeet Kune Do, or JKD.” Jay pronounced it
jeet coon dough
.

“Thanks for seeing us on such short notice, Frank,” Jay said.

Frank was a middle-aged man, about five foot ten. His face had some interesting wrinkles and his hair was black sprinkled with grey. He was wearing black Nike pants with a tucked-in black t-shirt. The t-shirt had a round, orange and yellow logo on the left breast. Frank looked like everyone’s father but somehow, I intuitively knew, his appearance was probably deceiving.

“So, Kate,” Frank said, “tell me why you’re here.”

“I want to learn to defend myself. More than a few times in the past six months I’ve found myself in situations where I ended up on the wrong end of a fist.”

“Jay mentioned that last night when we were talking. So let’s start with some basics.”

We spent the first hour learning some basics of JKD. We practised our footwork in our “ready stance”. One foot in front of the other with the heel of our back foot slightly elevated in order to allow quick movement. Frank told us our ready stance was our power base. It was too much information for me. I was concentrating so hard on what my feet were doing, that I missed some of what he was saying. We held our fists up, out and away from our body and practised our footwork while Frank stood behind us and knocked two small bamboo sticks together. Every time we heard the loud knock of the sticks, we were to move in the position that Frank had told us. We practised moving forward, backwards, to the side. Frank told us to focus on the feet and not worry about anything else. My legs started to ache after a few minutes, and my lower back was screaming. A glance at Jay told me that he wasn’t aching. At the end of the foot drills he was still bouncing on the balls of his feet, and miraculously, the aches in my legs and back had gone away. My body was tuning in and my feet were responding to the rhythm of the bamboo sticks.

When we finished the footwork drills, Frank transitioned us quickly into punching. With our feet in the proper position and our elbows tucked in, he showed us how to hold our fists and then he taught us how to punch with our front fist at an imaginary face. Frank’s fists and demonstrations punches were fast, and so powerful. I watched and quickly figured out that the power behind his punches was coming from his whole body, although he barely moved as he jabbed in the air. His forearms bulged and looked like Popeye’s. We practiced and tried to imitate Frank’s powerful punches.

He stopped us after several minutes and offered us each a bottle of water. My shoulders were aching.

“How do you make the punches look so simple but so powerful?” I asked my new teacher.

“That punch you were doing was called the jab. Jeet Kune Do or JKD translates as the ‘Way of the Intercepting Fist’,” he told us. “We try to intercept what our opponent is doing quickly and efficiently, and with as few movements as possible. Simple, right? All of my power is at the end of my fist and my hand moves before my body. And that’s one of the basics of JKD. Bruce Lee was the father of Jeet Kune Do and its philosophy. As we go along we’ll learn about the four guiding principles.”

Frank continued as be counted off on his fingers, “Simplicity. Economy of motion. Longest weapon to the nearest target. And no passive moves. Jeet Kune Do is all about skill, not how many forms or katas you know, or how many techniques you have. JKD is simple yes, but not easy. Bruce Lee used simplicity to define his art of Jeet Kune Do - to intercept your opponent’s intentions quickly and efficiently, with as few moves as possible.”

Frank told us that he learned the art from his teacher, Jerry Poteet, who lived in California and who was one of Bruce Lee’s original students.

“Jerry often uses an analogy to illustrate the point of simplicity and economy of motion. If you want to leave your house, would you crawl out a window, shimmy down the drain pipe, jump down two stories, and hope to land in a tree? Or would you simply walk out the front door? Wouldn’t that be more efficient, simple and non-complicated?” Frank smiled as he used this example.

Simple and efficient worked for me. We spent some more time on our jab and understanding the core of our power before Frank called a halt.

“Kate,” he said. “Jay told me that you were attacked recently. What we’ve learned here today will help you in the future if you’re ever attacked again, but it takes months of practice and years of commitment to be a martial artist. What I’d like to do to help you is understand the situations you were in when you were attacked, teach you some basics in understanding your reactions while you were under attack, and how to deal with them. How does that sound?”

I nodded mutely, not really wanting to re-live those moments. We walked over to the side of the room and sat side by side on a long, low bench. It helped that I didn’t have to look directly at Frank or Jay as I tried to describe the attacks.

My voice was not more than a whisper as I started the re-telling. “The first time, I was asleep in my bed in my apartment. I woke up and someone was straddling my body and had his hand over my mouth. The second time, I was grabbed by the back of my blouse, and he put his arm around my neck from behind, and dragged me.” I stopped for a moment and took a long drink of water, trying to make the metallic taste in my mouth go away. The sweat pouring down my back and between my breasts wasn’t just from working hard on my jab. This was cold sweat, the type that smelled like fear. I blew out a few breaths and continued.

“That second time I did manage to land a punch on the side of his head, but he was a lot bigger than me. And it didn’t help anyway in the end. He smacked me on the side of my head with the butt of a gun and it knocked me out.” Jay’s hand was lightly massaging my upper back and his touch gave me strength. I stood up, chugged the rest of the water in my bottle and turned around and faced Frank and Jay.

“The most recent attack was here in New York. Whoever it was came up behind me, pushed me down on the floor. When I turned around to face them, they grabbed the front of my jacket and hit me on the side of the head so hard it knocked me out. Again.”

I took several deep breaths and then smiled a little at Frank.

“And, I’m here to tell you that I’m not taking that kind of shit anymore. Next time someone wants to mess with me, they’re going to suffer too!”

“Well,” Frank said. “You’ve got one of the critical elements of self-defense going for you. Attitude.”

“Oh yeah,” Jay agreed with him. “There’s plenty of that!”

Frank stood up and looked straight at me. His hands were clasped in front of him and he respected my space and didn’t crowd me. “Kate, you did the best you could to defend yourself in those circumstances,” he told me quietly. “The first thing I want to do is teach you how to be cognizant of your surroundings. How to put your internal antenna on constant alert. Then we’ll talk about how your body and mind react when you’re attacked and how to deal with that.”

He exuded confidence without coming across as cocky or pumped up. I liked him.

When we finished that first day, my arms were rubbery from the punching, my feet were aching from the footwork, and I had a new appreciation for my surroundings. Overall, I was spent, and hardly had the strength to make it to the subway.

chapter twenty-six

Working my way through the files on Tommy’s computer was not an easy job. There were thousands of them in different formats. Excel files, Word files, pdf files, pictures, videos. Everything was organized methodically and the file system on the computer matched the system in the file cabinets. Alphabetical files with numbers. Which made it a total pain in the ass to randomly search and call up a file based on its name. And the pain in my ass was exacerbated by my stiff muscles and my total lack of understanding of what I was searching for. I gave up, disgusted at myself for not having the attention span to work through it all.

That night I dreamed of Tommy but when I woke the dreams eluded me. I felt sad and think it was because I was still mourning for him. It had been eleven days since he was murdered, and although there had been a funeral and memorial service, I didn’t feel the closure that’s supposed to happen when we say our public good-byes. Sure he was dead, but how had he died? Why hadn’t the police found his killer? Why had he died? Who shot him? I felt sure that somehow and somewhere I had the key to unlocking the answers to some of these questions. So where the fuck was the key?

I didn’t have a lot of time to ponder these questions because I was due in the office early for meetings. Ah, the life of a chief executive officer.

In the coffee room at the office I was surprised to see a few early birds like myself. I longed to sit with them at the small round tables and have a good chit-chat but held myself back. Instead I shook their hands, introduced myself, and asked them a few questions about their jobs. Bit by bit I was recognizing faces and getting to know the employees.

Three coffees later, I was up-to-date on emails and determined to get through the snail mail which filled the in-basket. Most of it was garbage so I left a note telling Carrie to feel free to throw out anything that was junk. There were several envelopes addressed to Tommy from the First City Bank of Manhattan and I wondered who should open them. I knew that technically everything that Tommy had was mine now, but I also knew that it wasn’t mine until mammoth legal hurdles were overcome.

Dennis Hillary was his typically nervous self when I got him on the phone. “Dennis, I can’t remember if you told me who will be the executor of Tommy’s estate?” I asked him.

“I am,” he squeaked. I heard him suck air through his teeth.

“So I should be sending any bank statements and stuff like that your way?”

“Yes, and anything else that you’re not sure of,” he offered.

I remembered the key we found in the strong box at Tommy’s apartment. “Dennis do you know if Tommy had a safety deposit box at the bank?”

“No, but let me call them and find out. Did you find a key?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure what it’s for, and it has no identifiable markings on it.”

Ten minutes later Dennis called back and confirmed that Tommy had a safety deposit box at First City Bank.

“And if you like,” he told me, “you can go over there at any time during business hours to open it. Would you like me to accompany you?”

I declined his offer, and he gave me the bank manager’s name and the branch address. The bank was closer to the Phoenix offices than to Tommy’s apartment so I asked Carrie to make an appointment for me to meet the bank manager and to have Lou drive me over. I crossed my fingers that the key I had would fit the safety deposit box.

Sara Williston was the person in charge at First City Bank and she defied all preconceived notions of bank managers. She was tall, elegant, beautiful, and soft-spoken. I vaguely remembered seeing her at Tommy’s memorial service. She clasped my hand in both of hers and without feeling like she was patronizing me or being overly sympathetic, she told me that she was going to miss Tom Connaught as a customer but she was looking forward to serving me and Phoenix.

“What can I help you with today?” she asked me. We were sitting in her office which was on the mezzanine floor of the bank.

“Is this a key for the safety deposit boxes here at your bank?” I held up the mystery key. It was very old-fashioned looking, very thin and longer than a normal key. The number 330 was engraved on the stem. The key manufacturer’s name (Chubb) and logo were engraved on the other side. Other than those two things, there was nothing to identify it as a key to the safety deposit boxes at First City Bank.

“It sure looks like it,” she said and held out her hand. I gave her the key. “Looks like one of ours, but lots of banks buy their safety deposit boxes and the keys from Chubb.” She turned to her computer which was placed on the corner of her desk and started keying in some information.

“Here it is.” She turned the monitor around so I could see it and pointed to a line of information. “Right there. Three thirty. That was the number of Mr. Connaught’s safety deposit box.” She smiled gently. “Mystery solved. Anything else?” she offered. “Do you want to access the box? Mr. Hillary from Scapelli, Marks & Wilson sent over a letter by fax a little while ago telling us that you were Mr. Connaught’s heir and that we were to give you access to the safety deposit box and any information you needed.”