The Second Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (Dharma Detective: Tenzing Norbu Mystery) by Gay Hendricks Read Free Book Online Page A

side of the doorframe. The door opened a crack and then swung wide as a dark-suited man in a black yarmulke stepped outside. He peered into our faces, his own expression grave.
    “Is there news?” he said. “I’m their Rabbi, Rabbi Aaron Fishbein. The body, is it available for burial yet?”
    “Not yet, sir,” Bill answered.
    Fishbein nodded. “Please, be gentle with her. She is in shock.” He kissed his fingertips, transferred the kiss to the brass object, and hurried across the street. I watched as he continued down the sidewalk to the intersection and turned toward Beverly Glen, still on foot. The door started to close again.
    “Mrs. Rudolph?” Bill said.
    “Go away. Please.” The voice quavered with quiet emotion.
    Bill flipped open his badge-case and held it up to the crack in the door. “I’m Detective Bohannon. We spoke briefly this morning.” He nodded in my direction. “My colleague Tenzing Norbu is here with me. Can we come in?” After a moment, the door opened. On an impulse, I glanced behind me, across the street. The Impala was driving past again. I followed Bill inside.
    The house was much larger than it appeared from the outside. A grand foyer opened into an even grander living-room area to the right. The formal dining room on the left boasted an antique table that could easily seat 20, and a huge hinged mahogany door that led into what I assumed must be the kitchen. A curved staircase led up to an equally spacious second floor. All the doorways had similar small, rectangular boxes, tilted at an angle.
    The rooms were spotless but decorated with a somewhat jarring mix of modern and traditional. As I trained my eyes on Mrs. Rudolph, my first impression was that she and her husband were an odd study in contrasts. From my own experience, coupled with everything I’d read, Marv was an explosive person, prone to arm-waving bursts of rage. He had stormed through life like a blustering monsoon, destroying anyone in his path. The woman before me was meek, thin, and unassuming; she seemed almost to disappear into herself. Her brown wavy hair was threaded with silver, and it stopped just short of her hunched shoulders. A deep worry line was etched vertically between her eyebrows, and her mouth was pinched with pain. But her oval face and dark eyes hinted at an earlier beauty, and I flashed on her daughter’s fragile appeal. I was looking at the 55-year-old, worn-out version. Mrs. Rudolph wore black slacks, a gray cardigan, and a pair of dark flats embroidered with a muted Moroccan design. Her face bore the stark, flattened expression I had seen again and again on relatives of homicide victims. She led us into the living room. A few silver-framed photographs, some of a younger, happier Harper, some of Marv and her, dotted the tables. A large, ornate mirror hung over a fireplace mantel. The rest of the walls were covered with framed posters of past Marv Rudolph films.
    As Bill and I sank into a pair of modern, overstuffed leather armchairs, I found myself wondering, as I often did with married couples, What did they see in each other? For some reason, this time a possible answer popped into my head: Something they couldn’t find in themselves. Marv probably needed her quality of hardly-there-ness to balance out his quality of here-the-fuck-I-am-and-you-better-get-used-to-it-ness. As for what she saw in him, I guessed it had something to do with survival—she who mates with the biggest gorilla in the jungle gets the most bananas, or something like that.
    Not that I’m an expert on this subject. I was taught to view females, and, it follows, sex with females, as harmful, if not disastrous, distractions on the road to enlightenment. One of the creation myths drummed into us in the monastery even claimed that Tibetans were descended from a wise monkey and a wily, rock-dwelling demoness.
    Now that I’d read Darwin, I had to admire the fact that my Tibetan ancestors at least got the monkey part