Putt-putting toward the Hotel Laguna in the van, he asks himself a difficult question: If what you’re doing doesn’t work, if you’ve looked everywhere and don’t find what you’re looking for, what do you do?
One, he thinks, you look again.
Two, look somewhere else.
Three, learn to see in a different way.
Mahajad Om had said something like that at the end of the Evolution ceremony. How exactly do you see in a different way?
Luckily, Ernie is working tonight.
Matt sits in the folding chair, hidden from management between the walk-in and the shelves of foodstuffs. His stomach growls and churns. Ernie delivers half a prime rib that may be the best thing Matt has eaten in his life. The horseradish stings his sinuses and brings tears to his eyes. Also on the plate are two halves of two different potatoes, one drenched in sour cream and the other in butter. And a slab of chocolate cake the shape and size of a peaked SS cap, which Matt suspects is a non-leftover Ernie has lifted from the desert rack.
Ernie sits. “No Jazz?”
“Eight nights.”
Matt tells Ernie about Jazz running down Third Street Tuesday night after the Leary show at Mystic Arts, the guys in the green VW van with peace-sign curtains, grabbing her out of the fog and stuffing her into the vehicle like she was a doll. He knows he’s not supposed to talk details like this, but the idea that the Laguna cops aren’t doing their best for Jazz comes jumping up at him again, like an ugly little jack popping out of its box.
“I made out with Laurel,” he says.
“Woah, that’s been coming on awhile.”
“Like forever.”
“How was it?”
“She’s choice. I really like her.”
Matt goes to work on the cake.
“I read the Bonnie Stratmeyer article in the News-Post today,” says Ernie. “Now they say she could have been murdered.”
Matt thinks of big-eyed Detective McAdam briefing the reporters the previous morning. “Yeah, I heard.”
Ernie gets an unusual look, shaking his head. “Unbelievable that a guy can have the total hots for a girl at school and she gets murdered. Out of all the girls. Out of all the girls in all the high schools in the world, and Bonnie gets murdered. And the article said the FBI still hasn’t figured out what drugs were in her. And how they got there. And she drowned but not there at Thalia. Not in salt water. The cops say the contusion cracked her skull.”
“Suicide is still a maybe,” says Matt.
“Bash your own head in?”
“Right. No.”
“A weird thing is, I saw her months before she died, and I had this really strong emotion to talk to her. Even though she was out of my league, by a lot. And now I realize that if I had just gone up and talked to her, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
“I don’t get that.”
“Well, just think. Say she was murdered. That means someone had to come across Bonnie at just the right time to get away with it. The right time to hit her, or shoot drugs into her, or drown her. But if I had just talked to her for even one minute, months earlier, that would have changed the timing of everything that followed. Meaning that whoever killed her might not have met up with her at all because of the one minute she talked to me. Get it?”
“I do,” Matt says. “Even just a few seconds could mean a whole different reality.”
Like Mahajad Om talked about, he thinks.
“Exactly,” says Ernie.
Matt finishes the cake. He never knew Ernie was so keen on Bonnie. “Where was she that last time, when you could have talked to her but didn’t?”
“March. I was at the Vortex for Sal Proetto’s Evolver graduation. And she was one of them. An Evolver.”
Like Sara, Matt thinks, who had seen Jasmine at the Vortex. Or was pretty sure she had.
Bonnie, Jazz, and Sara. LA Moves. The Vortex of Purity.
Now comes that rushing in Matt’s ears again, his early warning system, his oracle. He has two important questions for Mahajad Om.
26
Matt is surprised to see the Vortex of Purity auditorium bustling this late. The marquee still has the beguiling golden Hamsa flickering in its center, but the message is different now:
Matt pauses at the marquee, just as he did before, drawn to the eye in the middle of the hand — the Hand of the Goddess, he remembers — which glitters gold and crimson, like the robe of Mahajad Om.
Inside, both the lobby and the auditorium proper have been set up for the feast, with food-heavy tables up front and scores of folding chairs set up before the stage from which the swami had delivered his Evolver welcome. The air is heavy with the smell of curry and rice, sautéed mushrooms and bamboo shoots, and of course incense. Having walked all of downtown delivering invites to the Summer of Eternal Love Experience, and having finished the prime rib, potatoes, and the immense piece of cake well over thirty minutes ago, Matt suddenly feels hungry again.
No sign of Mahajad now, just an auditorium of hippies and other young people eating and chanting between swallows as the same sitarist plays her shimmering notes.
He slides on his backpack, loads up a plate, and goes outside. Sits and eats and watches, as he did before. Hears the generators humming. It’s a different crowd tonight, not the eagerly beautiful young people but a more streetwise hippie bunch, many of them stoned, who seem more drawn to the feast than the spirit, but he can’t blame them for that.
He demolishes dinner, gets the sketchbook from his pack. Touches up his sketches of McAdam and Johnny Grail and another new one of Laurel as Laurel — not part of the Gauguin — just a dark-haired girl in a faded flannel, tilting her head as she kissed him on her porch that night.
Time warps when he draws. When he looks up again the last of the feasters appear to have left, and the women in the lobby are rolling dish-laden carts toward a Vortex walkway.
“Matt Anthony.”
Startled, Matt turns around to see that the swami has arrived from the darkness behind him on silent bare feet. Again he wears his crimson robe with the upswept shoulders, and his usual unidentifiable expression, almost buried in his gray-black hair and gray-white beard and mustache: amusement, curiosity, eagerness?
Matt stands quickly, the sketchbook in hand. “Swami Om. You surprised me.”
“It is I who am surprised. Are you okay? Is your sister okay? Why are you here?”
“She is not okay.” He blurts to Om what happened on Tuesday night in the fog, right outside their Third Street home. “Now, I have two questions. One, are you sure you never saw my sister Jasmine here at the Vortex?”
“I am sure!”
Matt detects no falsehood on the swami’s face, just astonishment.
“They placed her in a van and drove away with her? While you pursued on foot?”
“The police don’t believe me.”
“I will speak to them.”
“They won’t listen to you, either. My second question is, do you know that criminals who run a tabloid called LA Moves are publishing suggestive pictures of Bonnie Stratmeyer and Sara and others who follow you?”
“My Evolvers? My Enlightened and Ecstatic?”
“I’m sorry but, yes.”
“Walk with me. Tell me more.”
Matt follows the slow padded steps of the swami down a walkway. Tells him about Detective McAdam, and the three men who run the Laguna Beach photo shoots. And that McAdam is now calling Bonnie’s death suicide or murder.