Night Work Page 13

  “Parents, yes.”

  “Sorry—I'm talking too fast, aren't I? Can you understand my English?”

  “Understand, yes. I do not speak good. I hear the television, when they talk slow.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Seven, eight month.”

  “Is that all? Did you know any English when you came?” Amanda asked, sounding surprised.

  “Some little. Hallo, goodbye, Tom Cruise, Superman.” Pramilla shrugged her narrow shoulders gracefully.

  “Well, I wouldn't have thought TV could have much to offer, but it obviously works for you. Do you watch the soaps?”

  Pramilla knew that word from Peter's disparaging remarks. “Yes, and cooking shows, news, cartoons. Game shows are too fast. They make me tired.”

  Amanda laughed, showing a lot of white teeth. “They make me tired, too, and I was born here. Your English is very good, though. You must practice.”

  Pramilla grimaced. “I have to. No one will speak anything else.” Laxman knew little Hindi, Peter pretended he knew none, and Rani treated the language as something only an Untouchable would speak. It was English or go hungry.

  “Immersion English, huh?” Amanda said and, seeing Pramilla's confusion, changed it to, “We have a saying: Sink or swim.”

  “I know,” said Pramilla a touch grimly. “I know.”

  Help us to bring darkness into the light,

  To lift out the pain, the anger,

  Where it can be seen for what it is—

  The balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.

  “You got all this from Amanda—what's her name?— Bonner?” Kate asked, since Roz seemed to have come to a pausing place.

  “Most of it. Some of it I asked Pramilla herself.”

  “You met her, then?”

  “I did. On Thursday night, in fact, the day after I mentioned her to you. Sweet little thing, looked about twelve years old, but quite bright and nobody's fool. Amanda thought she might listen to a woman who was also a priest.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “Advice. Amanda thought the girl—I ought to call her ‘young woman,’ but it's hard to think of such a child that way. Amanda thought she was being abused by her husband and his family, and she wanted me to encourage Pramilla to get out before she found herself with a broken arm, or worse. When I heard the details of the story, I thought the ‘or worse’ all too likely. That file on bride burning is something I've been compiling for years, and when I saw the situation—a young bride far from her own support group, married over a year and not pregnant, with signs of escalating violence like the bruises on her arm where someone had grabbed her, hard—I became extremely concerned. I was right, but I wasn't concerned enough. I should have dragged her out of that house. Or gone there and made a stink to let them know someone was watching. I will never forgive myself that I did not.”

  “Roz, there's a mountain of guilt out there if you want to crawl under it. And you're not even sure it wasn't an accident, are you? Those damn garments they wear, I should think they're massively dangerous around open flame, all that loose silk waiting to catch on fire.”

  An odd expression took over Roz's features, memory wrestling with an unwillingness to relinquish the self-blame. “She didn't like cooking over electricity. She told us that. They had to buy her a little kerosene stove because it was closer to what she was used to. She could cook squatting on the floor.”

  Kate said nothing, merely meeting Roz's eyes and nodding. The door behind them opened briefly and shut again; she became aware that the temporary silence in the outer office had given way again to voices and movement. The church members had returned from their dinner and were awaiting the next commands of their beloved leader.

  She closed her notebook and clipped the pen over the cover. “I'll make some calls, let whoever caught the case know that there's some question about it. And I'll try to have a look at the autopsy report myself.”

  Roz opened her mouth—to object, Kate knew, to the proposed noncommittal investigation—but was cut short by the door again, this time with a voice asking if Roz was nearly finished, because if so, that call that Roz had been waiting for …

  Kate took advantage of the interruption to make her escape, but she was followed out the door by Roz's voice, calling, “Talk to Amanda, Kate. Hey, Jory? Give Kate Amanda Bonner's phone number, would you? I'll talk to you tomorrow, Kate—and thanks.”

  Roz obviously intended for Kate to leap right onto the case's back, may even have intended for Kate to phone Amanda Bonner from the office, but Kate was tired and hungry, so she went home.

  Lee was in the kitchen making tantalizing smells to the sound of a classical guitar CD. Kate slipped up behind the cook's back and put her arms around Lee, just holding her, until Lee remembered that something on the stove was about to become inedible (if not burst into flames) and she unwrapped Kate's encircling arms, gently but firmly.

  “Jon's out again?” Kate asked, going to the cupboard for a couple of wineglasses.

  “In and out. Sione has the night off, so they're going to a movie.”

  “Sione being …?”

  “The dancer. From Song. Kate, you have been home this last week, you have heard about this.”

  “The dancer, right.” The cause of Jon's falsetto renditions of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” and other gems of the fifties and sixties. “How much longer is Song running?” she asked. It seemed a safe question, and relevant as well, particularly if it was a traveling show and the current love of Jon's life was going off with it.

  “Two and a half weeks, I think. Jon wants to know what night we want tickets for.”

  “You want to go?”

  “Sure. It sounds wild.”

  “Okay. Well, the first part of the week should be safe, I'm not on call nights until Wednesday.”

  “Monday or Tuesday, then. Would you mind if we made a group of it and asked Roz and Maj? I mentioned it to Roz the other day and she said she could easily have someone take her group session at the shelter, if it needs to be Monday. Or do you think we've seen too much of them lately?”

  “Never too much, they're good people,” said Kate easily. She did, in truth, think that they'd been seeing an awful lot of them recently, between one thing and another, but if it made Lee happy she could put up with it. She put the full glasses next to Lee's spoon rest and stood behind her lover, wrapping her arms again around Lee's waist. “What about dinner before, or after? There's that good Chinese place not too far from there.”

  “Great. You want garlic bread?”

  “With Chinese?”

  “With this minestrone, you fool. Tonight.”

  “I'd rather have you.”

  Lee turned in Kate's arms and said, half purring, “You can have both, you know.”

  “Not at the same time. Too messy. Beans and stuff all over the place.”

  Lee drew back and pursed her lips in thought. “We could work on it.”

  “I don't want to work on anything, I'm taking the night off. When is Jon coming home?”

  “Any minute,” Lee murmured regretfully into Kate's hair.

  “Then the garlic bread now,” Kate said briskly, and disentangled herself to go and set the table.

  Jon did indeed come in a few minutes later, humming a tune Kate remembered from the long-ago summer her periods began—positively modern by Jon's standards. At least he wasn't singing out loud.

  Still, she braced herself for the other symptom of Jon's love life, which was an inability to talk about anything without dragging The One's name into it. A complaint about the garbage cans would trigger the observation that “Bryce was into recycling before curbside bins came”; a comment about kung pao chicken would bring forth the information that “Jacksen's allergic to chilis.”

  So when Lee said to Jon that they were going to try for Song on Monday or Tuesday, Kate braced herself for Sione's name in some form, but it didn't come. Jon merely nodded and said that wo
uld be great, he was sure they'd love the show.

  She looked at him closely, but could see no sign that the affair had run its course already. He seemed pleased with the soup, happy to talk about anything or nothing—indeed, he seemed content, a word that had never before applied to Jon Sampson, who, though he was not clinically bipolar, tended to the extremes in his moods. Finally Kate couldn't stand it.

  “So, Lee tells me you have a thing with one of the Song dancers.”

  He beamed at her, a simple, uncomplicated look of delight. “Sione Kalefu. He's so great. He's talented, intelligent, he even has a sense of humor. And he's flat-out, drop-dead gorgeous—like a young Polynesian Mick Jagger, if you can picture it.” Kate tried, and failed. “In fact, when I told him that, he said that yeah, he'd often thought that when he retired he'd run a gay bar and call it Memphis.”

  Kate looked at him blankly, waiting for the explanation. Punch line, rather, judging by the expectant sparkle in his eyes.

  “All right,” she said. “I give. Why ‘Memphis’?”

  “What's the first line of ‘Honky-Tonk Women’?”

  Kate thought about it for a minute, and then felt her lips twitch. Jon threw back his head and laughed and Lee, who had heard this before, nonetheless snorted. “Oh, God, Jon, that's terrible,” Kate protested, then began to laugh as well.

  He cleared the dishes away, doing a bump-and-grind to the accompaniment of the nine-syllable phrase Jagger made out of “honky-tonk women,” then he grabbed up his coat and took himself and his suggestive lyrics out the door to his Polynesian paramour.

  “Well,” pronounced Kate in the ensuing silence. “At least it's a change from ‘Mrs. Brown you've got a loverly daughter’ in bad Cockney.”

  “Or ‘It's my party and I'll cry if I want to’ à la Lesley Gore.”

  “Remember the time Bryce bought him those Timberland hiking shoes and we heard Nancy Sinatra for a week?”

  “Oh, please don't remind me. They're all the sorts of songs that lodge in the back of your brain and circle around and around at three in the morning.” “Haw-aw-aw-aw-aw-nky-tonk women,” Kate brayed.

  They set the dishwasher going and went to bed early that night.

  And were awakened when Jon came in at two in the morning, singing quietly to himself a half-familiar tune, the chorus of which came into Kate's mind as she was drifting off again: “Goodness gracious, great balls of fire.” She fell asleep with a smile on her face.

  In the dark of the night, while Kate had slept the sleep of the just and the overworked and Jon found joy in a pair of brown arms, the Ladies struck again. Kate sat and read all about it in the morning Chronicle. This time their attack involved the torching of the shiny, new, phallic-shaped car of a man who had been seen slapping his wife around in the park across the street. She had gone across to fetch their son from an afternoon soccer game, become involved in a conversation with the other mothers, and not been at her place in the kitchen when he arrived home from work. He went looking for her and literally dragged her home. The note the fire department found duct-taped to the fence near the burnt-out wreck read:

  YOU TOUCH HER, WE TORCH YOU.

  —the Ladies

  The reporter did not think much of the theory that the second verb was a typographical error. Kate folded the paper and threw it on the floor, thinking that it was time she just stopped reading anything that came before the comics.

  “I went to see Roz yesterday,” she told Lee, taking a bagel from the toaster and reaching for the jar of Maj's blackberry jam. “Just in case I wasn't busy enough, she called me and thought I'd like to look into another suspicious death.”

  “The Indian girl?”

  “You know about her?” Kate asked in surprise.

  “Maj called to warn me that Roz was setting off on another Campaign. I figured she'd drag you into it.”

  “I don't know how draggable I am at the moment. These last two cases are going to eat up a lot of hours.”

  “Kate, if Roz wants you to do this, you know you're going to end up doing it. Easier to admit it now and get on with it.”

  “I thought the woman was supposed to be writing her doctoral thesis,” Kate complained. “Why isn't she doing that, or painting the baby's room, or starting a bookmobile service for the homeless, or something?”

  “She's probably doing all of them,” Lee said, adding darkly, “I used to have that kind of energy.”

  “You never had that kind of energy. You just never slept.”

  “That's true. Not like now.”

  “God no, you do nothing but snooze. Must be up to, what—six hours a day? Lazy pig.”

  Lee stuck out a purple, crumb-covered tongue, a childish gesture that pleased Kate inordinately because there had been so few of them in the two years since Kate's job had cost Lee so dearly. The two women sat across the table from each other grinning like a pair of schoolgirls, and Kate's heart swelled in joy and pride and the precious nature of what they had and she picked up Lee's hand and kissed the palm.

  “Sweetheart?”

  “Yes, my Kate?”

  “Back in …” No, not Back in the bad time, although that was how Kate thought of it. “Last year, you said you wanted to have a baby. I … overreacted, because I didn't think you were ready. Physically. I mean, you were barely walking. And more than that, because I wasn't ready. I just want to say that if you still feel the same way, and if the doctors think you won't, I don't know, blow any fuses, then I'm willing to go into it with you.”

  Lee's head was drooped so far that Kate couldn't see her face, so she had no warning when Lee's shoulders began to heave silently. Kate's hand tightened on Lee's in distress.

  “Lee, love, what is it? Don't cry, I only meant—”

  Lee's head shot back and her free hand slapped down hard on the table, and Kate realized belatedly that her lover was laughing uncontrollably.

  “What?” she demanded. “What?”

  Lee shook her head and spluttered, “‘Blow any fuses’? Oh God, Kate, the technical language. The subtle grasp of medical terminology you've picked up—”

  Both relieved and affronted, Kate retrieved her hand and her dignity.

  “I can't seem to do anything right,” she said plaintively, which made Lee laugh even harder. So Kate took herself back to the relatively simple business of tracking down killers.

  It is time for the invocation, to atone

  For what we fear most and have not dared to face:

  Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown;

  We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place.

  Before she buckled down to her own caseload, however, Kate dutifully dug up the detective in charge of investigating Pramilla Mehta's death. Tommy Boyle had caught the call, so Kate left a message to have him phone her, and went back to her report.

  Or she tried to go back to her report. She became increasingly aware of a small, dark woman, little more than a child, standing quietly in the corner of her vision, waiting with the self-effacing patience that had characterized her whole short life, and may have led to her death. Try as Kate might, she could not ignore the girl, and when Boyle came into the Homicide room with a question on his face, she abandoned the paperwork with even more gratitude than such an interruption usually earned.

  “Want a cup of coffee?” she offered, already on her feet.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Kate had known Boyle for a couple of years, but not well, and they happened not to have actually worked a case together. He was a red-haired, green-eyed man with Hispanic features and brown skin, who had impressed Kate as a person interested mainly in getting on with his work; when in a group, he tended to be seen with his nose in a sheaf of case notes or a book on forensics. She liked him, but didn't know him well enough to know how to approach him on what could be taken as a touchy business, intruding on another's investigation. Kate spooned coffee grounds into the machine and tried to put together a question that wouldn't sound either nuts or pus
hy, and in the end gave it up.

  “It's about that burn victim you caught Tuesday night. Pramilla Mehta.”

  “What about her?”

  “You haven't written it off as an accident, have you?”

  “Of course not. Haven't even got the path report back yet.” He waited for her to tell him why she was interested.

  “You know the name Rosalyn Hall?”

  “Rosalyn—you mean Roz Hall, that minister? Oh jeez. Is she involved in this?”

  “I'm afraid so. She thinks the husband did his wife.”

  “The husband's a true flake,” he offered in agreement.

  “Thing is, Roz is convinced that this is an American incident of bride burning, which they get a lot of in India.”

  “People in India burn their brides?” he asked dubiously. “I heard of widows throwing themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, but I always thought that was old women. And isn't it illegal there now? There was something about it in a novel I once read,” he added, as if to explain away his knowledge.

  “I think that's a different thing. This is young brides. They have this complicated system in India with the bride's family giving a dowry to the groom's family— not just money, but stuff like motorbikes and kitchen appliances—and if the groom's family is greedy and demands more, and doesn't get it, they sometimes get pissed and kill the bride. Especially if there are also no babies.”

  “That sounds insane.”

  “I know. And Roz may be off her rocker and be seeing demons in the dark, but on the off chance she's on to something, I told her I'd make sure it's treated like a possible homicide, not just a domestic accident.”

  Boyle narrowed his incongruous emerald eyes at her. “It sounds like she's a friend of yours.”

  “Longtime acquaintance,” she admitted, repressing a twinge of guilt at her disloyalty. “You probably know how she works. She's a politician, she goes to someone on the inside to get things done. So she came to me, and to get her off my back I told her I'd make sure it was being done right. One thing the department does not need is Roz Hall raising a stink about due process.”