Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

A Boy Named Tzu by Ken Lester

Hildegarde Beauregarde was an anile retentive. That is, she was an old miser. Her golden years she hoarded no less tightly than her gold, enjoying each day in the mansion where she had been born, a central Florida cracker within sound of Lake Wales’s carillon bells, savoring her parochial tintinnabulation much as a cockney his Bow Bells of London.

Grandson Jack was a penal implant. That is, he was a jailbird. Had been. Only briefly, really. For of his two-to-six at Eglin Federal Prison Camp for securities violations he had served only ninety days, and that as tennis groundskeeper. It was some technical foul sort of thing about junk bonds. Grandma thought he had vacationed in the Bahamas. A sunlamp reinforced Jack’s tan and his story.

Jack needed money bad. True, in his present digs he could watch the sun rise over the Atlantic and set in the Gulf, but the solar transit vaulted eponymous gas stations. He lived up over a candy store. What’s worse, he played his tennis on rundown sandy courts with raggedy nets. He even had to bring his own center strap.

Jack needed money bad enough to need Hildegarde dead.

Not that he wanted her dead. He really liked the old girl. But money and dead were synonyms in Jack’s lexicon. For Jack was the sole surviving heir to the Beauregarde millions.

No blood kin of Hildegarde, Jack was her step-grandson. She had raised him ever since the day the St. Elmo’s headmaster had haled him out of geography class to tell him his father and his stepmother — Hildegarde’s daughter — had lost an argument with wind shear on the final at pre-Doppler Tampa International.

“When I go, Jack,” said Hildegarde, “you will be a very wealthy man.”

“Thank you, Grandmother,” said Jack.

What Jack did not say was, “I would rather be a very wealthy young man than a very wealthy old man.” But this preference had set Jack to thinking just how and when he might get his druthers.

Enter a boy named Tzu. Jack’s classmate at Eglin Federal Prison Camp had borrowed his name from quaint sixth century B.C. philosopher Lao Tzu, the good old boy who urged mankind to go with the flow.

“Tzu sounds better than Irving in my business,” said Tzu.

Tzu sold charisma. As one hawks tomatoes from a road-stand, Tzu flogged charisma from an ashram.

“I sock these marks a thousand a week to attend my Carolina retreat, Low Tor. For this they get to mop the johns and lie on the floor moaning through one nostril. They love it.”

And they loved Tzu. Which amour was not actionable per se. But when Tzu’s Rolls-Royces outnumbered his parishioners, the friendly folks at the Internal Revenue Service opined that a tax exempt religion Tzu was not, and how about chipping in for this fiscal year and that one, and the one — millions! Which of course by now were one with the snows of yesteryear.

“I run a clean operation,” said Tzu.

“True,” agreed the IRS, running its finger along Tzu’s immaculate second set of books. No dust. But in the Examiner’s Treasury of the World’s Greatest Audits, cleanliness was still second best to godliness. The slammer it was. Two to six. Time off for good.

Tzu and Jack had emerged blinking into the blinding sun of Florida freedom hand in hand.

And mind in mind about murder.

“What will it take?” said Jack. “The dead thing.” He had tended to thing-talk like that ever since President Bush.

“Time, my son,” said Tzu. Younger than Jack, Tzu affected a full beard and granny glasses that gave him an unearned gravitas. Tzu could read the telephone directory soft and slow, and people would nod sagely.

Tzu knew more about the subtle seduction of ideas when he was three years old than Jack would know in all his life. Tzu just knew.

He knew exactly who would pay good money for no-guilt-be-cause-no-sin. Who would flee from the black-or-white of Aristotle’s binary assumptions to the comforting greys of fuzzy logic. Tzu brewed cream-of-faith stew, and the devout lapped it up.

“I must meet this granny,” said Tzu.

“What the hell for?” said Jack. “We’re talking homicide here.”

“Would you expect a doctor to cure a patient he had never seen?”

“You’ve got a point,” said Jack.

“Besides, I could use a good meal,” said Tzu. “The IRS...”

“You’re telling me!” said Jack.

They made it to Grandmother’s house just in time for angst-giving dinner.

“We’ve had chicken fricassee with dumplings at this table every Sunday since I was a girl,” said Hildegarde. Past brunch, it was a three-ish lunch-dinner.

“Dumplings, Mr. Tzu?”

“I’ve had two.”

“Three,” corrected Jack.

“I’m sorry you missed services at my little church,” said Hildegarde. “We are small, but...”

“Wherever two or three shall gather,” said Tzu, counting his blessings and parishioners more accurately than his dumplings.

“And your congregation, Mr. Tzu?”

“Pope John Paul II is the spiritual leader of about a billion souls, give or take a sinner,” said Tzu. “Which leaves the rest of us to compete for market share of the remaining four billion.”

“But how do you fund your mission?”

“Not by Mother’s Day flower sales, car-window washes, nor yet ham raffles.”

“I see,” said Hildegarde. She always saw more than you might think. Especially to look at her. Birdlike, but no hummingbird, no peacock, she was a sturdy little jenny wren, not given to the megrims, vapors, or fantods.

“I like certainty in life,” she would muse. “Mr. Beauregarde wore both suspenders and a belt.”

Hildegarde particularly disliked perfumed pullouts in her reading matter. “I like Vanity Fair well enough,” she would sniff. “But if dear Mr. Conde Nast were alive today, I would tell him I’m damned if I’ll read a magazine that smells better than I do.”

Hildegarde chose that moment to slip a sliver of white meat to the cuddly shih tzu puppy at her feet. It was then, too, that a cascade of sounding brass brought baroque order to Hildegarde and her flock of two.

“On cue,” said Hildegarde.

Fifty-seven Bok Tower Carillon bells assured Polk County taxpayers that “Sheep May Safely Graze”; not, however, in their citrus groves, thank you, no matter what Johann Sebastian Bach may have had in mind.

“Towers lift up the eyes, bells lift up the heart,” said Jack, grazing safely on the words of some long dead carilloneur.

“I am a founding Friend of Bok Tower Gardens,” said Hildegarde.

“Any perks?” asked Tzu.

“Oh yes,” said Hildegarde. “I use the library, the studio, the elevator...”

“... with what you pay them, Grandmother, they ought to let you stand on top of the tower like a muezzin and summon the faithful to prayer.”

“I do that, too,” said Hildegarde. “I climb the ladder all the way to the top. Nobody knows but Salazar.”

“Salazar?” said Tzu.

“The old Spanish gentleman, the custodian, I guess, over here from a long line of grandees back in Castile.”

“He’s not a Castilian; he doesn’t lisp,” said Jack.

“Salazar stopped assibilating his c’s and z’s into interdental th’s the day he came to America,” said Hildegarde. “When in Rome.”

“He’s still a wetback from Chihuahua, dodging la migra,” said Jack.

“He’s getting his green work card,” said Hildegarde. “Besides, he is most kind to me. And that’s that.”

“Mustn’t teach grandmother how to suck eggs,” murmured Tzu.

“Tell me more of your work at the ashram, Mr. Tzu.”

And tell her he did, in spades and with gestures, that Sunday and several more, until Jack became restive.

“Dammit, Tzu, she’s got the hots for you!”

“Tepids, Jack. Old persons get the tepids.”

“Whatever!”

“She’s really into meditation, Jack. Of course, a good mantra is hard to find, but I’ve got her chanting ‘Om Shanti’ in her search for peace.”

“She should live so long. Yin me no yangs, Tzu. We’ve got work to do, remember?”

“Lighten up, Jack,” said Tzu. “You’re too young to have a midlife crisis.”

“So I got a head start. Get on the stick, Tzu. We’re just killing time.”

There was never a question of who would do what. That had been negotiated back in the slammer.

Tzu was no good with his mitts. He was the kind of guy who, if he played the French horn, would get his fist stuck in it just at the crescendo.

Jack, on the other hand, was tactile as all get out. He instinctively felt the serrations on dimes and quarters unseen in his change pocket, never, never confusing them with unmilled pennies and nickels. Not that he thought about these things. He just fingered things that way automatically, like turning a screw cap softly to its detent, then backing it off and torquing tight as he pleased, but only just. For the Air Force he had lifted his aircraft off the runway as Saint-Exupéry had bid, “... like culling a flower.”

So guess who got elected to do the dirty work? Tzu.

Jack was to provide the means, not yet chosen.

“What do I do? Walk into Brooks Brothers Tampa and say, ‘I’d like something tasteful in Kevlar for my SWAT team. Perhaps a nipped-in tattersall vest...’ ”

“... you’re watching too much TV...”

“... and the gun? How do I get that? ‘If you have touchtone, push 2. If you want a Magnum, push 357-BANG. Have your credit card handy, and our bonded uniformed messenger will...’ Tzu, it isn’t gonna be easy!”

“No guns,” said Tzu. “And stop quoting John Wayne.”

“How about a sure-fire investment?”

“No arson,” said Tzu.

Jack parked his Jeep on a side street near Jackson’s Giant Mall. Red and green neon said, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”

“How do I kill thee? Let me count the ways,” said Jack.

Blunt instrument.

Ace Hardware. Is there an Ace Software? Hammer. Two, for good measure. I’m always losing tools. Worse, I lend them. Like my leafblower to Willie next door that time. Where the hell else could he blow his leaves but back on me? Better make those ball peen hammers. Both ends blunt instruments. That’s twenty-six seventy plus six percent Florida sales tax, sir. Visa? No, that’s cash, thank you.

Poison.

Walgreen Drug. The pharmacist has a clip-on bow tie and acne, but he’s no dummy. Percodan? Sorry, sir, that’s by prescription only. Yes, even if your personal physician is Jack Kevorkian. Regroup. What do I know about poppy and mandragora and all the drowsy syrups of the world? Think. So what if I can’t buy a little deadly? How about a lot of real sick? That’s it! Let’s hear it for OD; she’ll overdose on sleeping pills. OD and DOA. Murder by acronym, as told to Agatha Christie. Dependent? No way. Accident? Yes. But, a hundred five-grain caplets? Who’s counting. Better make that two bottles, please. Miles to go before I sleep. No, I won’t be needing that discount coupon entitling me to... Thank you, sir.

Sharp object.

Schrecker Cutlery. Can this be the lovely and talented Miss Schrecker herself who caveat emptors, ‘Stainless can be hard to sharpen and may not hold an edge.’ Wonder when she gets off work. Later, later. I couldn’t care less about edge. Point is what I have in mind. This twelve-inch chefs knife looks like a winner. Yes, I see it has a full tang and three rivets in that cocobolo handle. Imported, you say? Solingen, Sabatier, Damascus and Company. Cold steel, warm heart. En garde, Hildegarde! What’s that again? A rocking motion for dicing? I see. Well, that’s certainly grist for the mill, Miss Schrecker, but I really don’t plan to do all that much rocking and dicing. What kind of man does she think I am? I mean, really! On sale this week. Lucky me. Thirty-three sixty including tax? Thank you, ma’am.

Rope.

Shop till she drops. Scrub that last transmission.

Hackenfuss Hiking. Climbing gear for your discriminating mountaineer. And for not a few of your upscale homicides, I’m guessing. This same specification nylon climbed with Hillary and Tenzing on Everest? Support your neighborhood Sherpa. Will I be needing pitons and carabiners to go with that? No, I’m not with the Sierra Club’s impending assault on K2, but how flattering of you to think so. Frankly, I have something more local in mind. Would she believe a Louix XIV rock-crystal chandelier suitable for hanging? Ah yes, your little booklet on knots, Miss Hackenfuss. Like the name of the rose, my knot merit badge is all that remains of Boy Scout Troop Sixteen: the running bowline, sheepshank, the whole nine yards. Bet she’d leap out of her L’eggs if she knew I spiritually swap lowcalorie, foolproof noose recipes with hanging Judge Roy Bean, the law west of the Pecos. Yes, your standard hundred-foot hank will do. And I’ll have more than enough left over to jump double Dutch.

“All yours, Tzu.” Jack dumped his knapsackful of deadly intent on Tzu’s bamboo glasstop.

“So much?”

“Clausewitz learned it at Waterloo.”

“Total war was before my time.”

“Overkill — the only way to go.”

“But which?”

“Your call. I’m off.”

“Oh?”

“My week with the Flying Club’s Cessna.” Jack flipped Tzu a scrap of paper scribbled with a telephone 292 prefix code: Key West.

“So call me,” said Jack, and would not stay for an answer.

Jack was doing the Stingray Shuffle when the call came through.

“Jack! Larga distancia. Un hombre.”

What a rack on that callipygian Carlotta! And what a way to have passed the week.

“Coming, Carlotta.”

Stingrays fear you more than you fear them. But if you step on one, flat there and sand-buried, he’ll get you every time. So you shuffle when you walk in the surf. That way the stingray knows you’re coming and scoots.

Jack paused at the lapping water’s edge, facing the scraggly sea grape and sea oats that anchored the sand. Here I am, he smiled, one foot arguably in the Gulf of Mexico, the other in the Florida Straits arm of the Atlantic, bestriding the peninsula like a cut-rate Colossus. Nor was the salty ambivalence lost on him, of wishing his cash cow dead but unable to pull a trigger or guide a blade himself. He shrugged and trotted into the tin-roofed lanai, hopping hard on his left heel to clear his telephone ear.

“Gracias.” Jack took the phone from Carlotta, pinched her rump, and eyebrowed her out of the room.

“Yes, Tzu.”

“Mutatis mutandis.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Damned if I know, Jack. But my guru used to say Mutatis mutandis whenever we had a done deal.”

“Hildegarde. She’s...?”

“She’s,” said Tzu.

The Cessna hopscotched up the eighty-second meridian, her compass bracketing zero like a coursing hound as Jack flat-hatted the Gulf for the first eighty miles.

Jack squinted at the salt spray on the Plexiglass windscreen and saw himself through the misty scrim of years. He remembered his mother saying, “His hair is so fine — like silk,” and guests would smile and nod. Upon which Jack would do the only thing any human could do. He would try to grow more, finer hair right there at that very instant, feeling that if what he already had brought him such distinction, more of that same cash crop would corner the market in adulation. And he had been trying to please and feel good ever since, but had wised up to the fact that hair no longer did it for him.

“Money,” said Jack as he clipped a mangrove and goosed the Cessna up to thirty-five hundred over the looming scrubby land. “Money answereth all things,” assured Ecclesiastes.

Naples and Fort Myers sliding past the left wing. Look out for the Air Force boys from MacDill on their low-level runs. They still do that? Hell of a thing to mess up now. Off to the right, who but a farmer would name a town Frostproof? Time to find the strip and start down. There. Dead ahead. Thoughtfully provided by the tony Chalet Suzanne for its ritzy clientele. Now power down, and straight in on the skimpy strip. Windsock limp, ignoring little puffs from the north. Big orange sun cutting the horizon under the left wing like a slice of orange on an old-fashioned. Back, back on the wheel. This old tail-dragger keeps you honest; stall it in. Men from the boys.

Jack greased it on and taxied over to the faithful, waiting Tzu.

“Don’t tell me yet,” yelled Jack as he killed the engine.

Tzu helped Jack put the plane to bed, chocks and tiedowns. Then they strode in silence across the lawn and basket-weave brick patio to the Chalet Suzanne, Jack a step ahead.

“No, not the bar,” said Jack.

A wrought-iron glass-topped table overlooked the pond from an alcove. No big-eared bartender. The waitress brought the scotch and left.

“Tell me.”

“Damndest thing,” said Tzu.

“How?”

“She bought it this morning. From the Bok Tower.”

“Jesus, that’s a big first step!”

“Two hundred feet, at last count.”

“She flew farther than Orville Wright at Kill Devil.”

“And without the usual mechanical aids,” said Tzu.

“Why would she do a thing like that?”

“She thought she could make it.”

“Come on!”

“On the wings of a small spineless cactus, native to the Rio Grande valley.”

“Peyote!”

“The magic buttons of Chihuahua,” said Tzu.

“Then she was happy?”

“All smiles.”

“I’m glad. I liked Hildegarde.”

“Bystanders report she chanted, ‘Om Shanti’ all the way down.”

“Just twice, I’m guessing, in three seconds.”

“Not, however, slowly and reverently as I taught her.”

“You’ll live it down.”

“She landed on a roseate spoonbill, just missing the moat that might have saved her. But her copilot survived.”

“Copilot?”

“Hildegarde clutched her shih tzu puppy right up to touchdown.”

“Any landing you walk away from is a good landing.”

“The shih tzu made a good landing — on Hildegarde.”

“So did you, Tzu.”

“But I never laid a glove on her!”

“Nevertheless...”

“I wasn’t even there.”

“No matter.” Jack was already feeling his oats. Several million oats. “It happened on your watch. Even with an assist from the Hemlock Society, you’ll still get yours.”

“Thanks.”

“Read any good wills lately?” muttered Jack as the waitress brought refills to the quietly smiling couple.

The twelve-year-old-scotch drinkers drank twelve-hour-old toasts.

“To the quick,” said Jack.

“And the dead,” said Tzu.

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick cleared his throat. With his sense of the dramatic, that could have been an all-day job. Since attorneys are officers of the court, so was he now of Polk County Surrogate, no less for being in his own sunny, wood-paneled office with Jack and several legal cronies. He then spoke in that plummy, back-of-the-throat, button-down voice you often hear in travelogues describing glacier-trapped woolly mammoths.

“ ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.’ ”

“Amen,” said Jack. Leave it to old Bostwick to class things up with a little King Lear in a regimental striped tie.

A common housefly droned comfortingly about the pleasant room practicing touch-and-go landings on various of the personnel, and Jack flew with it, musing what to do with his loot.

... a little pied-a-terre in Monaco, the Cote d’Azur and all that... so central... so tax-free... hobnob with the Grimaldis... ski lodge a must... not Aspen — passe... perhaps Whitefish, Montana... the old Chet Huntley ranch... And, hey, for the theater and museums in New York, a bachelor pad at Central Park West not too far from Lincoln Center... can be small, but must be chic... maybe the Dakota if you can live with the Lennon thing... First off, get your ass out of that dump over the candy store... move into Hildegarde’s old place, spruce it up, a pool, tennis courts...

“Hildegarde was sadly ill,” said Attorney Hamilton Bostwick.

“How sadly?” said Jack.

“Terminal.”

“News to me,” said Jack.

“News to her.”

“When did she know?” Jack felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. Most hominids do not keep in day-to-day touch with their erectile napes.

“The day she saw Doc Forbush,” said Attorney Hamilton Bostwick.

“And that was?”

“The same day last week she visited me in this office,” Attorney Hamilton Bostwick waved a fond proprietary hand at the corpus juris lining his walls, “and dictated this will.”

Jack smoothed the back of his neck with his left hand.

“ ‘I, Hildegarde Beauregarde, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, and considering the uncertainty of this life...’ ”

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick garrumphed at “uncertainty.”

Jack liked the sound of “disposing.”

“ ‘... do make, publish, and declare this to be my last will and testament as follows, hereby revoking all other former wills by me at any time made.’ ”

Jack went into free fall at “revoking.” This was no codicil. This was a whole new ball game!

“Long story short...” wheezed Attorney Hamilton Bostwick.

That’s a first, thought Jack.

“... Hildegarde left almost everything to a charity...”

Jack closed his eyes just in time to catch the world premiere of coming attractions on the wide screen of his retinas. A life flashed before him — not his own, but that of Hildegarde’s favorite, St. Francis of Assisi. But surely Jack would star! “Roll the credits.” No joy. A sympathetic cameo role of an impoverished brother monk. “Coming soon to a theater near you.”

“... a group doing business as The Irving Foundation...”

A.k.a. Judas Iscariot, thought Jack. There goes the Côte d’Azur and ski lodge.

“... still trying to reach them in North Carolina...”

Even the roof over my head, much less the Dakota pad, thought Jack. There has to be something...

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick garrumphed and fiddled and jabbed one last item with his glasses.

“I will paraphrase Hildegarde’s final instructions to me. They concern her step-grand-son whom she was always at great pains to refer to as ‘Dear Jack.’ ”

Aha! Jack’s heart leaped. Paydirt! The grandmother lode.

“Hildegarde instructed me to provide sufficient funds...” Attorney Hamilton Bostwick paused, and with his breast pocket kerchief patted the corners of his eyes. He seemed about to blot further but must have dammed the freshet upstream, for he stuffed his kerchief back into his pocket.

“She felt very strongly about this bequest, quoting from the Bible, ‘The fox has his hole, and the birds of the air their nest, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head.’ ”

Jack lowered his eyes modestly to his cordovan loafers.

“Therefore she instructed me to provide ‘Dear Jack’ sufficient funds to construct a cosy dwelling...”

Attorney Hamilton Bostwick could contain himself no longer. He blew his nose.

“... for the shih tzu puppy she hereby bequeaths to him.”

Jack saw right then that his shoes could do with a shine.

“And she gave me to understand that her taste ran to a simple post-and-lintel construction with perhaps a mansard roof, all not to exceed a ballpark figure of one hundred dollars.”

“Game,” said Jack, “set and match,” noting that he would still play tennis on public courts, not his own private Grasstex. “Thank God I saved my center strap.”

Tzu is back in business. Thanks to Hildegarde’s cash transfusion, he’s almost legit. His ashram nestles on a little hill — Low Tor — where the Piedmont Plateau gives on to the Carolina Coastal Plain.

Flowing water is one Eastern model for being. So it is that Tzu’s faithful puree their fungible hopes and fears, even as the nearby New Hope Reservoir spills into the Cape Fear River; thence to wind, as hopes and fears have ever wound, to a salty, teary sea. Even Tzu’s real estate has metaphor.

“From here you walk, Jack,” said the taxi driver, depositing him at the mouth of the gravel driveway to Low Tor. Jack tipped him extra for name recognition before remembering that some taxi drivers call everybody Jack. And an extra dollar for putting up with the shih tzu puppy.

“Heel,” said Jack.

Dotting the ashram’s lush but neat lawn — sheep may safely graze, but they crop close — Jack saw huge painted plaster statues of Siva, Moses, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others.

“Hedge your bets,” muttered Jack as he broke the electronic beam and strode through the opening gate.

“Welcome to Low Tor,” said the color-coded receptionist in golden robes and matching hair. From behind her desk smiled a hundred square feet of Kodachrome swami Tzu.

“Grainy but deductible,” said Jack.

There was no missing Tzu, known to retreating penitents as “Gurutzu,” for his image kaleidoscoped from wall to wall to computer to cash register at the reception desk.

Jack shuffled along into a glass-walled, marble-floored pavilion where hundreds of softly-chanting, shining-faced celebrants queued for an audience with Gurutzu. He sat crosslegged on a silk pillow on a Lucite throne. He wore a scarlet robe. A favored few devotees he struck with a long peacock feather as they crawled past.

Tzu said, “You bring the little shih tzu.”

“A small thing, but mine own,” said Jack, drawing himself up to full legatee stature.

The little dog wagged its tail in warm greeting of Tzu, then leaped upon the Lucite throne and established its even warmer territoriality upon the holy man’s left ankle.

“Sweets to the sweet,” said Jack.

“Blessings on you, too,” said Tzu, touching Jack’s shoulder with his peacock feather.

None could tell from Tzu’s face what he thought. In the first place, none could see through that beard, and the glasses Tzu wore were the kind that vary with light. Actually, he was mentally inventorying his Rolls-Royces, so perhaps the electrochromatic granny glasses darkened as his eyes lit up.

A swarthy figure swathed in saffron edged from behind the Lucite throne to stand at Tzu’s right hand.

“This is Salazar,” said Tzu.

“I remember Salazar,” said Jack. “He’s the Bok Tower guy.”

“Was.”

“And now?”

“Now he’s legal, with his green card and all. He does odd jobs for me.”

“I know one,” said Jack to Tzu.

But to his entire estate, which at this moment lay on his right foot in hot pursuit of a flea — an unearned increment of his legacy — Jack could say only, “Now he tells me.”