significance for me.
Now, watching him deliver it, it turned out to be pretty interesting. It didn't offend me at all, but it had offended Ashkenazi's audience. He'd hardly gotten well underway when people started to leave. 'Stalked out' is the best description.
About halfway through his talk and three-quarters of the way through his audience, one of them got up and shouted that Ashkenazi should be thrown out. That what he was spieling was astrology, not astronomy. And another guy stood up then, apparently an officer of the meeting, and told the guy yelling that he'd either have to sit down and be quiet, or leave. The guy left, madder than hell, most of the remaining audience following him out in a bunch. Ashkenazi finished to a dozen listeners, probably mostly reporters, and didn't seem upset at the exodus. I suppose he wasn't surprised.
Basically what Ashkenazi was reporting was, he'd run correlations of events of one sort and another against the positions of stars and planets. Which did amount to astrology, as far as I could see. And while I'm no statistical analyst, I do know that the kind of correlation coefficients he was claiming aren't the sort of thing you get by chance. Not in the real world.
He'd done it the hard way, too, or that's how it looked. He hadn't picked a scattering of historical events that fitted his purpose. Over a period of almost thirty years he'd predicted events, supposedly from the positions of stars and planets, and published them in various newsletters put out by different astrology groups, New Age groups, and groups into psychic phenomena. And a lot of his predictions came out as forecast, his scores getting better as he improved his system. Predictions like droughts, major political shifts, uprisings, big stock market swings, major deaths . . . If the publications were real. In 1994 he'd even predicted that a then-unknown source of electrical power would be released in 1997 that would change the world. Which of course was Haugen's geogravitic power converter! That was uncanny.
I could see why astronomers might get spooky about stuff like that. But why was Pasco so upset? Even if Ashkenazi made it all up, it wasn't illegal and it wasn't commerce. Which was what the Anti-Fraud Division was supposed to be concerned with—criminal fraud in commerce. This was something the astronomers could take care of themselves if they wanted to, by kicking Ashkenazi out of their society. Which in fact they had, for misrepresenting his talk to the program committee.
From the recording of the meeting with Pasco, I could see that Joe felt uncomfortable with the job, the same as I did. Because what Pasco wanted was a fishing expedition at taxpayers' expense. We were supposed to investigate every damned thing about Arthur Ashkenazi. Everything but his finances; the California Commerce Department's Audit Division would cover that. To quote Pasco: 'Find something discreditable about this Ashkenazi, preferably something criminal.'
I asked Carlos why Joe had accepted the contract. I guess I knew, but Joe spelled it out for me: 'A fair amount of our business comes from Commerce. We're their number one contractor in southern California, and we can't afford their turning to another investigation firm.'
2
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
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
