Night Work Page 15

  “What case is that?”

  “It's something I'm helping Boyle with, while Sammy's out.” And as their lunch arrived and they both dug in, Kate told her partner the sad story of Pramilla Mehta, concluding, “It's probably just an accident, her silk skirt brushing against the kerosene stove. Like that woman in the camper van last winter.” One of San Francisco's sizable population of transients, this one not strictly homeless although the roof over her head was attached to wheels, had been cooking up what investigators had originally suspected was a batch of drugs but had turned out to be supper, when either the stove malfunctioned or she had stumbled into it. The woman did not die, but she had spent many weeks in the burn unit wishing she had.

  “And this is Boyle's case?”

  “He caught the call. I had a word with him this morning, told him I'd make a few phone calls for him.”

  Hawkin knew his partner too well to be fooled by her casual tone. He fixed her with a stony eye. “How are those headaches of yours?”

  “They're fine, Al. No problem.”

  He did not believe her. “See if you can get someone else to give Boyle a hand. You're going to be too busy to do it justice.”

  “I'm kind of committed, Al. And, I promised Roz Hall I'd look into it.”

  “Roz Hall? What's that woman got to do with the case?”

  “That's just it: I'd rather she didn't have anything to do with it. She's convinced that Pramilla's death is a case of bride burning. I thought if I stepped in, it'd keep her from going on a crusade with the papers.”

  “Martinelli, you only have so many hours in the day.”

  “If things get too crazy, I'll ask you to explain that to Roz.”

  “Want me to write her an excuse slip, like I do for Jules?”

  “Let's not go overboard on this fatherhood thing, okay, Al?”

  She comes to purge the altars in her way,

  And at her altar we shall have to pray.

  “Homicide,” the pathologist said to Kate, peering happily up at a set of X rays. “No doubt. See all that stuff just behind her right ear? Compression fracture. Made by something long and thick, like a piece of half-inch metal pipe or a fireplace poker, but not the sharp edge of the masonry hearth she was found next to. Nope, no way. Wrong angle, too. She'd have had to fall out of the sky onto it—with her arms at her sides—to get that angle of blow. She was hit, arranged, and set alight.” “Homicide,” the arson expert declared, tapping lugubriously on the precise lines of his sketch. “The evidence is consistent with a scenario whereby the victim was rendered unconscious, the kerosene stove was raised and propelled across her supine form, then set alight. Note the path of the accelerant: Had she fallen directly into the stove, one would expect to see the deepest burns nearest the area onto which the kerosene spilled—the arm and upper torso had she hit the stove that way, along with a fan along the path of the spill. However, instead of that we see the body lying at approximately a right angle to the spill, and underneath it. In other words,” he said, relenting, “she went down, then the stove went down but perpendicular to her fall. And before you ask, yes, she could conceivably have moved after the fire began, and repositioned herself, but considering the head injury I would say she was unconscious when the fire started.”

  “Murder,” Kate said to Al, tossing the file temptingly onto the car seat next to him. “Somebody whacked her, laid her out to make it look like she'd hit her head on some bricks, and then kicked the stove over to burn the place down. Actual cause of death was smoke inhalation, but she'd have died of the burns or the head injury.”

  “Murder,” repeated Hawkin, putting away the photographs they had picked up from the lab and taking up the file portrait of the victim, angling it to catch the fading light. “A pretty little thing. She doesn't look much older than Jules.”

  “She wasn't. That's the photo her father had taken back in India when Peter Mehta's inquiry letter first arrived. She was about fourteen.”

  “Mail-order brides, in this day and age. So who did it?”

  “The husband sounds borderline retarded with a temper that's had the police out twice, the sister-in-law's a stone bitch, and Peter Mehta himself is a businessman who looks for results. And the girl wasn't pregnant a year after he'd bought her for his brother.”

  Hawkin shook his head, dropped the photo back into the file, and slipped his half-glasses into his breast pocket. “You still want to get involved with this?”

  “I told Boyle I'd give him a few hours, like this business of getting the reports while he's in court, and I'll go along with him to the Mehta house this evening. I know we've got Larsen and Banderas, but that's it at the moment. That gangbanger case is solved, we're just waiting for him to show his face again, and there's not a hell of a lot more I can do on last month's drug dump. It's dead.” This was closer to outright lie than exaggeration: a homicide detective was never without work. Still, the urgency of open cases varied considerably, and in recognition of this unhappy fact of life, Hawkin did not challenge her.

  “Just don't let that Hall woman give you a hard time about it, okay?”

  “She'd give me a harder time if I ducked out of it.”

  “Are you saying the girl was murdered, Inspector Boyle?” Peter Mehta asked in disbelief. It was an hour later, and he reached over and turned on the desk lamp as if to throw light on more than their faces. The window in his study fell instantly black.

  Mehta was not what Kate had expected of a man who bought his brother an underaged wife from an Indian village. She wasn't quite sure what exactly she had expected, but it wasn't someone so very … American. His features were Indian, yes, and his clothes slightly more formal than she imagined the usual Californian executive wore at home. And the house itself was somehow ineffably foreign—the air scented with exotic spices instead of the usual stale coffee and air freshener, the furniture larger and ever-so-slightly more opulent, the colors more intense. Like the difference between a plain black dress on a skinny woman and a designer dress on a fashion model; hard to say where the difference came in, but it was clearly there.

  Even Mehta's voice was faintly foreign as he addressed Tommy Boyle and, at his side as silent partner, Kate. Not so much an accent, she decided, as the feeling that his parents might have had accents. A rhythm, perhaps, that became more pronounced under stress. Such as now.

  “Is that what you are telling me, Inspector? That the death of my brother's wife was a murder?”

  “It looks that way, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle told him.

  “My God. And in my own home. Who would want to do something like that?”

  “Did you have any visitors during the day, that you know of?”

  “I am certain my wife would have told me. She is not in the habit of letting strangers into the house while I am away.”

  “But friends?”

  “Women friends, sometimes, yes. But hers, not the girl's. She was allowed only to invite friends while I was home. We had a small problem once with Laxman becoming disturbed by one of her visitors, and so she saw her friends in the evenings and weekends, or out of the house.”

  “And you were not at home that day, Mr. Mehta?”

  “It was this time of evening—no, a little earlier. We had not yet eaten dinner, but yes, I was home. Having a drink here in my study while my wife cooked.”

  “And your brother?”

  “Upstairs in his room. At least, he came down from there when … I saw him come down the stairs when I came through the house to show the fire department where to go.”

  “And the children?”

  “The younger ones were in their rooms, watching television. My son Rajiv was at the kitchen table doing his homework. He was the first to see the fire, and he shouted at my wife. She ran in here to get me, and I telephoned 911. But I told all this to a dozen people the other night.”

  “We're just confirming our notes, Mr. Mehta. Do you mind if we take a look at the place where Pramilla died?”

  �
�Yes, certainly. You were here the other day, were you not?” he asked, looking from Boyle to Kate and back again. “Forgive me, there were so many people here, the police and the fire department …”

  “I was here, yes. Inspector Martinelli was not.”

  “Of course. Please, come this way.”

  Mehta led them out of the office, which was just inside the front door, and back through the house, past a formal dining room and an adjoining closed door that gave off the fragrance of exotic spices and the mundane sounds of running water and dishes clattering. Mehta paused to switch on the lights, and a garden sprang into view. They stepped out of a sliding glass door onto a brick patio surrounded by a patch of lawn and some unimaginative shrubs. Patio and lawn were scattered with heavy cast-iron garden furniture, a child's tricycle, several dismembered dolls, and a soccer ball. A door with a curtained window in its upper half stood to their right, an entranceway to the breakfast area and the kitchen beyond.

  In sharp contrast to the fragrant kitchen, the garden stank of smoke and wet ashes and a faint trace of burning flesh, a smell which no one who had worked with a charred corpse ever forgot. Yellow crime scene tape was festooned around the shrubs, everything in sight had a thick coating of gray ash, and one whole half of the garden looked as if it had been through a hurricane, the plants flattened, smaller flowers uprooted by the force of the fire hoses. Kate circled around a chaise longue with mildewing cushions and stepped down from the bricks onto a concrete driveway that ended abruptly at the source of all this devastation, the remnants of the burnt-out shed where the child-bride Pramilla Mehta had died.

  It looked to have been a shoddy structure compared to the substantial bulk of the house, and it had burned fast and hot—judging by the heavy charring on the wooden fence ten feet away that had nearly gone up as well. A pan that looked like a shallow wok lay buried under the fallen roof, and a set of three metal kitchen canisters lay flattened, either by heat or under the boots of the firemen. Preservation of a crime scene was never high on the fire department's list of priorities.

  “This was a sort of outdoor kitchen, as I understand it?” Kate asked Mehta.

  “I had it built for her,” he answered. “Two women in a kitchen is not always easy, and my wife, Rani, complained that the girl was becoming difficult. Always underfoot, wanting to use the stove to cook her own food—although she was not a good cook and it was not necessary, as the family eats together. In the interest of harmony, we needed a separate area for the girl.”

  “Why didn't you build a proper structure? Why a plywood shed with a kerosene cook stove?”

  Mehta sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I must have been asked that question fifty times in the last few days, to the point that I now ask it of myself. The insurance people are the most insistent, and the building inspectors. I can only say that it seemed a logical idea at the time, to put up a strictly temporary structure—it was a kit, from a gardening supply shop—and furnish it the way the girl was used to. She came from a very poor background, the sort who cooks over a cow dung fire and dreams of the day when she could have a kerosene cook stove and a refrigerator proudly displayed in the living room with a doily across the top. I wasn't about to have an open fire out here, and I didn't want to run electricity into a shed, but I thought the stove a safe compromise. The entire project was my brother's suggestion, in fact, and it did serve to calm the waters. Until this.”

  “We'd like to speak with your brother, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle told him.

  The man sighed again, more deeply than before, and turned back to the house. “Are you finished out here, Inspectors? Because I need to talk to you about my brother before you see him.”

  Kate cast a last glance at the collapsed walls and the black, flattened shrubbery that surrounded them, rendered even more unearthly by the strange shadows cast by the garden spotlights. She and Boyle turned to follow Mehta back inside. The curtain on the kitchen door fell back, but not before she had caught a glimpse of a plump woman in a garish orange sari, watching them. Peter's wife, Rani, no doubt.

  Back in the study Mehta sat again behind his broad mahogany desk, leaving them to choose between the two uncomfortable chairs on the other side, chairs whose seats were slightly lower than Mehta's. Boyle sat down, but Kate chose instead to stand, leaning up against the window frame with the light behind her and in a place that required Mehta to crane his neck around to see her. Two could play the one-upmanship game, and Kate had taken a dislike to Mehta, particularly the way he kept referring to Pramilla not by name, but as merely “the girl.”

  “What do you have to tell us, Mr. Mehta?” Tommy Boyle asked. He and Kate had talked over everything Roz and Amanda had told her, and she had in turn been given the details of his preliminary interview with Mehta the night of Pramilla's death. Now it was time to get down to details.

  “My brother was too upset the other night to talk to you,” Mehta began. “I made him take his sleeping pill early to calm him down, and he is still most disturbed. The doctor is quite concerned, in fact. I want to stress that interviewing him is not … how shall I say this? Not like interviewing other men.”

  “Are you telling me there's something wrong with your brother, Mr. Mehta?” Boyle asked bluntly. Roz had said there was, but it was best to hear it from the source.

  “Yes,” Mehta said with equal frankness. “There is something wrong with my brother. Laxman is more or less retarded. I have been told it was due to our mother's advanced age when she was pregnant with him, although it may have been a brief problem during the birth that affected him, but in either case he was starved of oxygen during a vital time, and it damaged his brain. He functions, he communicates, he can even read and write and do basic math, but he will never hold more than a low-scale job, and on his own he would never marry a woman with more wit than a ten-year-old.

  “In India, caring for people like my brother would be easier. There may be fewer facilities, but more … flexibility, shall we say, and people willing to work for a pittance. But Laxman and I are both American citizens. We were born here, have lived here all our lives. Our mother was a pretty traditional Indian woman in some ways, and always dressed in a sari, but she made certain we spoke only English in the home, and she raised us, as well as she could, as Americans.

  “She died six years ago, when Laxman was twenty-three. He missed her enormously—still does; he's never really gotten over her death. So Rani and I decided that the best solution was to bring him a kind of substitute mother, you might say: a wife. Their children … any children Laxman fathers will be normal, you understand; we were not being irresponsible. And from the wife's point of view, a village girl, even a bright one, wouldn't have the same expectations of a husband as someone who had grown up in a city. The girl we found was ideal. A little young by American standards, I realize, but not by Indian ones.

  “And it seemed to work well at the beginning. Oh, the very beginning was a little rocky, but as soon as we got back here they settled in nicely. The girl was so quiet you hardly knew she was here, and Laxman seemed very fond of her. He found her soothing, began speaking a little more Hindi to her, dressing in kurta pajamas instead of jeans. I was very pleased, and God knows things went smoother, both here and at work, where Laxman had been trying to do jobs he couldn't possibly handle and creating untold difficulties for me. If only she'd gotten pregnant.”

  “That created a problem? They hadn't been married all that long.”

  “I didn't care one way or another. I have two sons and two daughters, so the family as a whole didn't need Laxman's sons. Frankly, I've had enough of babies and unsettled nights, and I knew that if they had children, the burden would end up on Rani's back, and mine.

  “But my wife is more traditional, and thought it was unfortunate that the girl didn't catch.

  “Understand, Inspector, that there was nothing wrong with my brother physically. His brain may not be too hot, but once he understood what the equipment between his legs was for, he wen
t at it with an enthusiasm that other men would envy. I had to speak with him about the need to keep a closed door between them and others, especially the children.”

  Boyle's face gave away nothing, but Kate wondered why the apparently urbane Mehta felt the need to flaunt his brother's skills in such detail, verging on crudeness. Perhaps they were meant to think that he shared his brother's prowess? She had the urge to match his crudeness and ask whether Laxman and Pramilla had gone around fucking like rabbits, just to see how he reacted, but before she could say anything, Boyle mildly noted, “A man can be virile but sterile, Mr. Mehta. Although I'm sure you know that.”

  “Of course,” he admitted, though not looking pleased. “I merely tell you because you need to understand what the girl was to Laxman. He was very fond of her, but she also changed. When she first came she was all sweetness and docility, giving her husband and his family the proper respect, but later, and especially recently, she became more difficult. She was learning English, and was very arrogant about it. She showed it off in front of Laxman and Rani—she would correct her husband and sister-in-law when they made a mistake, as if to point out how clever she was. She made inappropriate friendships with women in the neighborhood—”

  “How were they inappropriate?”

  “The women … they were not Hindu, to begin with, not even Indian, and one of them was divorced. Not the sort of friendships a proper young girl, a girl with family responsibilities, ought to cultivate. There was, for one thing, no supervision when men were present, which upset my brother greatly when he found out. I realize this is a part of the American custom, but it is unacceptable to a good Indian family.”

  “She was becoming American?” Boyle suggested.

  “She was becoming irresponsible, neglecting her husband and her household duties to Rani. The outdoor kitchen was a way of encouraging her to be an independent woman, a wife and future mother, while at the same time strengthening her ties to her own past and her people.”