I could have turned the assignment down. Joe's used to my being a hardhead, and I'd earned enough points with him and Carlos that they wouldn't have been too mad at me. But somehow I took it.
Back in my office, I sat down at my computer, accessed the L.A. library and called up what the media—print, Webworks, and TV—had said about Ashkenazi's talk. The professional media had had people there of course—probably stringers and junior staff. And since the news had been dull for a while, they'd played up the Ashkenazi flap pretty big. Mostly tongue in cheek, but pretty much without ridiculing it. The syndicates had gotten hold of it then, pontificating. Then Time magazine did a feature on it, treating it straight, and Ashkenazi made the talk show circuit.
All of which had burned Pasco up, and he was using his position, and us, to try to punish Ashkenazi at pubic expense.
Usually you start a case with evidence of a crime, and that gives you something to orient on. This one was different.
Since it was almost five o'clock, I killed a few minutes, then left the office promptly at quitting time. It wasn't a workout day, and I had a date that evening, so I went straight home, showered, re-shaved, dressed semi-dressy, and picked up Tuuli. We took my car—hers is nicer, but she's considerate about things like that—and drove to Mr. Ethel's on North La Cienega. They specialize in health foods, especially low-fat foods, but the quality is excellent and the prices affordable. The waiters are a little strange, but they're at least as courteous as their customers.
Tuuli doesn't worry about fat. That's my problem. She's the same age as me, thirty, but only five feet tall and fine-boned. She probably doesn't weigh more than 85 or 90 pounds, which is 40 percent of what I weigh. About a third of what I weigh, sometimes. She's the only Lapp immigrant I know; actually half-Lapp. Her father's a Finn, same as mine was. Born in the little mining town of Tuollivaara in Swedish Lapland, she grew up partly there, and partly on a backwoods farm near Koivujoki, in Finnish Lapland. Came to America when she turned eighteen. Her story is, she decided to emigrate when someone told her that in California women could be shamans, and all the shamans were rich.
She's been psychic, she says, since she was a little kid. From what I've seen, it's easy to believe. Her great-great-grandfather had been one of the last active Lapp shamans; the state church pretty much shut shamanism down in Sweden a hundred and fifty years ago. The basic lore got passed down to Tuuli through her mother, even though they were females. How I got to know her is, she sometimes consults for police agencies and private investigation firms in greater Los Angeles. The police don't like to acknowledge it—bad for their image—and she doesn't publicize it. She just deposits their credit transfers in her bank account.
But she built her reputation through the rich and famous. There's a lot of rich people around L.A., and most of her income is from them. It doesn't hurt that Tuuli Waanila's an interesting looking woman, either. Not just tiny. She has elfin features, sandy hair, and slanty hazel eyes. It especially helps with entertainment people. Looks mean a lot to them. Also she sounds good. She's got a light accent that sounds pretty much Finnish. She's well-named, too. Her full name is Tuulikki, which in Finnish means graceful. Her dad named her that when she was born, and it turned out to fit.
Anyway, at Mr. Ethel's we got a booth in a corner, and while we waited, we drank coffee and talked. "What do you think of astrology?" I asked.
Her eyes were direct, as usual. "Astrology? I'm not very informed about it. I don't practice it. But I usually look up my horoscope in the paper, in the morning."
"Really?"
"Sure. It's good to have a source of outside information. Psychics usually see better for others than for ourselves."
I didn't leave it at that. I had to pump her a little. It goes with the profession. "But astrology!" I said. "I mean, I can imagine people getting information through the omega matrix maybe, but from the positions of the planets?"
She shrugged. "You read the papers."
"Not the horoscopes, I don't."
"Did you read about the astronomer, Ashkenazi?"
"Do you believe him?"
"Nobody seemed anxious to try proving him wrong." She paused, looking pointedly at me. "Why don't you tell me why you brought this up?"
So I did. "And now Ashkenazi's my job. Thanks to Mr. Paska. Oops, Pasco."
She tried to grin and wrinkle her nose at the same time. The nose won out. "Paska is a good name for him."
"You know Pasco?"
"In my business, he has a reputation. He hates people like me. He's California's main agitator for laws to stop us from practicing our profession." Her eyes looked thoughtfully at me. "You've heard the saying, `In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.' "
"Yeah?"
"The person who said it was mistaken. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is apt to be considered a liar and a fraud." She paused again. This time her eyes seemed to focus somewhere above and beyond my right shoulder. "You're likelier to find something criminal about Pasco that about Ashkenazi."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes I'm serious."
"What should I look for?"
Tuuli shrugged. "I don't know. If you're interested in Ashkenazi, look way back. To when he was young." She paused. "Ashkenazi's not his real name, his original name."
"How do you know?" I assumed she'd read it somewhere. "What is his real name?"
"I don't know. You should be able to find out. And it's something you really should look into. And find out about his twin. His twin brother. I'm pretty sure it's a brother."
I didn't know how to take that—whether she'd read something, or if she was being psychic. "And you say I can find something criminal about Pasco if I try?"
"I'm not sure. The feeling I get is a little confusing. It may be something he hasn't done yet."
"Huh! I'll keep that in mind," I told her. "But tomorrow I start checking on Ashkenazi."