Night Work Read online

  “Boiling oil,” she said with relish. “Very boiling.”

  “I see. Well, thank you, Mrs. Mehta. We may want to speak with you again tomorrow, but we'll let you get on with your work.”

  Rani dried her hands on a towel and accompanied them to the front door—less, Kate thought, as a polite gesture than to ensure they did not poke into things on their way out. They thanked her again, and heard the lock turn behind them as they went down the front steps.

  Boyle had driven, and would drop Kate home. As he put the car into forward, he said, “That woman is really something.”

  “She must have hated Pramilla the minute she set eyes on her. And to have the girl under the same roof as her husband. She might be a great cook and the mother of his children, but she was never a beauty.”

  “But Laxman loved the girl. Temper or no, he loved her.”

  Kate agreed; that bedroom shouted aloud the man's devotion, heaping beauteous objects on his wife. Yes, Laxman's extravagant grief had been real enough. However, love went hand in hand with violence, as anyone who worked a domestic homicide could testify, and especially with the jealous knowledge of Pramilla's illicit conversations with other men riding in his mind. Grief in and of itself was no proof that Laxman's had not been the hand that knocked the girl down, any more than his disgust at her charred body could prove that he had not in rage or confusion or childish petulance splashed her with kerosene and set her alight.

  No proof at all.

  It is the time of burning, hate exposed.

  We shall have to live with only Kali near.

  She comes in her fury, early or late, disposed

  To tantrums we have earned and must endure.

  In the days that followed, Jimmy Larsen and Matty Banderas rode squarely in the center of Kate's sight, with Pramilla Mehta—who was, after all, Boyle's case—firmly pushed slightly off to one side, while on the periphery of her vision lurked all the other still-open cases, haunting the corners of her mind like so many cobwebbed gargoyles. A call from Janice Popper revealed that Matthew Banderas had made a pass at the manager of a software store, and when she had canceled their purchase contract, he had threatened to tell everyone that she was a lesbian. She just laughed and told him to go ahead, since it happened that she was. The woman also told Popper that she had been receiving an unusual number of wrong-number, dark-of-the-night phone calls and two whispered obscenities on her answering machine. None, incidentally, since Matthew Banderas had died.

  One high point was a phone call from Martina Wiley, sounding like a cat at the cream. She practically purred as she told Kate that a rather firm interview with Melanie Gilbert had given them some prime hints not only about the Banderas sex life, which had been far kinkier than Gilbert had been willing to admit at first, but also led to a storage locker in Novato. It was currently being gone over with the finest-toothed combs in the Crime Scene repertoire, but it looked to be where Matty had stashed his rape souvenirs. His victims, and the police departments across the Bay Area, would begin to sleep more soundly.

  On the Larsen homicide, a follow-up series of interviews at the airport turned up a fellow baggage handler who had run across Jimmy Larsen in a bar, and remembered Larsen mentioning sleep problems due to a strange woman calling in the middle of the night to hassle him. About what, he hadn't said, just that he was tired and fed up, but didn't want to leave the phone off the hook in case Emily phoned (his wife, he had hastened to tell his co-worker, was just off visiting her father, and would be home soon).

  Kate worked long hours over the weekend, trekking south to the airport to question airport personnel, north of the bridge to talk to computer programmers, and closer to home to listen to the bereft and guilt-plagued Amanda Bonner.

  On Monday, Kate had scheduled a few hours off to go with Lee, Roz, and Maj to see Song. They were to meet Jon there, and after the performance they would finally meet Sione, and have a late dinner together. However, the day's lack of any real progress meant a reluctance to call it quits, and at six o'clock Kate was still at her desk. When the phone rang, she knew who it would be before she picked it up, and indeed, Lee's voice came strongly over the line, demanding to know when Kate was planning to appear.

  “I'm leaving in two minutes, honest,” Kate pleaded, scribbling her signature on one report and reaching for the next.

  “No, you're not. You are leaving right now.”

  “Yes, right now. As soon as I finish the—”

  “Kate.”

  “Okay. I'm leaving. That's the sound of my desk drawer you hear. It's closing. I'm out the door.”

  “Now.”

  In three minutes Kate actually was heading out the door when she was greeted by the startling sight of a slim woman being viciously assaulted by a burly man in the hallway right outside the homicide division, while a group of police officers, uniformed and plainclothes, looked on in nodding approval. Kate came to a sharp halt, then realized that the woman was actually a cop, and the man as well, and that the hard blows they were practicing were more noise than contact.

  “What's this?” she asked a vice detective she had worked with on a couple of cases.

  “Decoys. They're going to troll the parks tonight, see if we can get a bite from the LOPD when he starts slapping her around.”

  “Nice,” she said. The woman of the antagonistic couple she now recognized as a patrol officer who had been twice commended for bravery, who had a black belt in some arcane form of martial art, spent her free time producing intricate oil paintings that sold for a small fortune, and loved life on the streets so much she refused to take the exams that she feared would move her up and behind a desk. At the moment, she looked remarkably like a suburban housewife.

  “Makes for a change from playing a dealer or a hooker,” the man from vice commented. Kate had to agree.

  On the way home, however, she had time to reflect on the assumptions behind the scene she had witnessed. Without a doubt, fear was growing among the men of the city—ironic, that those normally most secure in the streets at night were those who were feeling an unaccustomed discomfort in the hours of darkness. The City's night life was suffering, its all-important tourist trade threatened, and if the quiet night streets made life easier for those responsible for patrolling them, the economic dip added to the fears felt by half the population meant that the pressure was on. At times like these, Kate was very glad she was not one of the brass.

  Kate came through her front door at a trot, shedding equipment and clothing as she went, aware of Lee's disapproval floating up the stairs and following her into the shower. Kate's clothes were laid out for her, black silk pants and blouse with an elaborately embroidered vest to go on top. The shoes were as close to heels as she would wear, her hair was too short to worry about, and she even took thirty seconds to swipe some makeup across her eyelids. All terribly civilized, Kate thought, trotting down the stairs again and out to the street, where Lee waited in the passenger seat of Kate's car, pointedly studying her watch.

  “You look delicious,” Kate told her, kissed her, and turned the key in the ignition.

  Mollified, either by the compliment or by the speed with which Kate had dressed, Lee's irritation subsided. They were going out for the evening, and Kate could feel Lee decide that she'd be damned if she would let even her own righteous indignation get in the way of pleasure.

  Lee did look delicious in a shimmering gold blouse and loose white crepe pants. Jon wore velvet, Maj looked as majestic as a sailing ship, and Roz, though she swept in late, puffing and apologetic, was dressed in festive formality rather than a power suit and minister's collar.

  The night before, Kate had braved Lee's study to refresh her memory of the Song of Songs, that Old Testament book attributed to Solomon (he of the many wives) that she remembered as being endearingly erotic, filled with odd descriptions of breasts like gazelles and cheeks like pomegranates. Lee had apparently had the same idea, because the Bible lay open on her desk. Kate sat down to read.
Ten minutes later she closed the soft leather covers, vaguely disquieted. Erotic, yes, but some of the passages were also puzzling, others almost troubling. Perhaps, she thought, Roz was right, that more than the words had changed when the Bible was rendered into English. Certainly a reader was left with the distinct impression of various translators along the way tidying up and applying generous quantities of whitewash, and that underneath their quaint images lay a fairly explicit picture of ancient sex.

  In Song, the whitewash had been pretty thoroughly scrubbed away.

  When the women entered the small theater to take their seats beside Jon, the lights were dim, the buzz of anticipation damped down under the sensation that the performance was already beginning—as indeed it was, for on a platform raised up over the right side of the stage sat three figures dressed in white. They perched there motionless, their heads bent, but the audience was very aware of them and incomers took to their seats with hushed conversation and wary glances upward. Kate looked at the program and saw that the two main characters would be “Lover,” played by someone called Kamsin Neale, and “Beloved,” the part played by Sione Kalefu.

  The set, as Maj had said the other night at dinner, was striking. Black dominated, punctuated by draped lengths of intensely colored net fabric, gold and ruby and lapis curtains against the dark. Some were supple, drifting and changing colors with the currents of air. Others were static, rigid as frozen flames leaping up from the stage to disappear into the hidden heights. The small overhead spots picked them out as clouds of sheer color, some of which sparkled as if they had been sprinkled with finely ground rubies and emeralds and sapphires. The set was both stark and sumptuous, empty and powerful.

  The seats gradually filled, the anticipatory hush intensified, and the three figures crouched on the raised platform might have been statues. Finally came movement, as five black-clad men and women filed across the stage from the right, came down the short flight of steps on the left that led to the orchestra pit, and took up a peculiar variety of instruments: oboe, viola, drums and an assortment of bells and percussion objects, an electronic keyboard, and a sitar. They spent a few minutes tuning this unlikely chamber orchestra, the weird atonality of the notes mingling slowly until a sort of music came out, and then the instruments fell silent, and the audience slowly became aware that at some point the actors had entered the stage.

  Song was a story, much more of a narrative than what Kate had read in Lee's black Bible. The two main characters, who in the original had been heterosexual lovers, were in this production both profoundly androgynous, to the extent that it took Kate a good twenty minutes to decide that Lover, the big muscular one dressed in reds and oranges, was played by the woman Kamsin, while the slim, dark, pursued character in blue—Beloved—was actually Jon's new friend Sione.

  The viola began, to be joined a short time later by a throaty voice from the seated trio above, reciting the words of the Song of Solomon. “O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,” the voice murmured, and the two dancers began to move slowly around each other, becoming acquainted, flirting, moving apart, glancing back at each other, until finally they came together in an exploratory embrace. Lee's fingers crept into Kate's in the dark, caressing palm and wrist, playing under the silken cuff of Kate's blouse. Kate shivered at the scrape of Lee's nail, and could feel Lee beside her smiling into the dark.

  Other dancers swirled onstage and off: Beloved's disapproving brothers, Lover's friends, but each time the pair shook the others loose and returned to their increasingly passionate self-absorption. “Black am I, and beautiful,” chanted the three narrators. “Sustain me with raisin cakes, strengthen me with apples, for I am faint with love.” Beloved's brothers stormed in, angrily trying to separate them, but the two lovers slipped behind a cloud of glowing red voile, and were safely lost in each other again.

  The dancing grew more intense, the music wilder. To a quickening beat, the pair on the stage caught up lengths of crimson and cobalt gauze that swirled about them, first concealing, then revealing (and going far to explain the production's X rating). The flurry of colors came to a climax in a rush of atonal music, and then breathlessly subsided. The spotlights dimmed on the entwined figures, the voices grew to drowsy murmurs. (“When the day breathes out and the shadows grow, turn to me, my love, like a buck, like a young stag on the mountains.”)

  The lights fell further, until the stage was dark and utterly silent. The silence held for a dozen or more heartbeats, broken only by a cough from the audience, and then a faint light flickered and grew off to the right, a beam that illuminated a section of wall and a single figure, lying alone in a heap: Beloved. Sione stirred, stretched languorously, and then rose, looking around with growing agitation for Lover. The distraught figure snatched up a small lamp, using it to search the room, and then burst through an opening in the prop wall and directly into the arms of a troop of uniformed guards. The voices identified them as “guards of the city, armed and trained against the terrors of night,” but instead of protecting (and indeed, though clothed in khaki, one of them bore a startling resemblance to the burly cop Kate had seen at the Hall of Justice, preparing to “beat” his “wife” as bait for the night's avenging Ladies), the guards seized Beloved, began to laugh and pluck at the diaphanous blue garments. The voices for Beloved pleaded with the guards, asking them to say if they had seen Lover, but the guards merely laughed, and reached out, until Beloved twisted away from them and escaped.

  Immediately, Lover appeared from offstage. Beloved flung “herself” at the strong figure, who wrapped strong arms around Beloved and snatched “her” away into a room. The two lovers embraced, but the note of the oboe, which had dominated the scene with the guards, remained, quiet and disquieting, in the background of the scenes that followed.

  The reunited lovers, surrounding themselves with armed and uniformed soldiers of their own, retreated in safety and triumph to an enclosed garden, a womblike bower of shimmering green where they sang and danced and fed each other morsels of fruit until the night grew up to hide them, and silence fell.

  For a second time, lamplight flared in the dark; again the solitary figure reached for Lover, and again set out to search; and this time, too, the five guards were waiting. But unlike the first harassment, Beloved did not slip away. In utter, appalled silence the audience gaped as the khaki-clad figures brutally tossed the slim blue one back and forth between themselves, accompanied by the oboe, the sitar, and the panicky heartbeat drum of the tabla. The harsh whispers of the narrators and the inarticulate cries of Sione punctuated the texture of sound:

  The guards found me

  They who patrol the city.

  the narrators sang.

  They hit me.

  They hurt me.

  They stripped me.

  The guards.

  Over and over the last four lines were chanted, faster and faster. The guards sprouted gray and black and khaki veils, and Beloved sank down beneath a swirl of obscuring darkness; one slim blue arm emerged in protest from the huddle, and was overcome. One by one the guards detached themselves and stormed offstage, boots beating on the floorboards, leaving behind them a half-nude figure, heaped up beneath a drift of drab cloth.

  After a while, a stir came from the wings, and in washed a flock of five giggling girls wearing the brightest of colors who emerged startlingly, almost painfully from the dark. The abused figure pushed laboriously upright, and made an effort to rearrange hair, pull together clothing, and pluck away the gray and khaki shrouds. The girls came up, laughing and teasing, to inquire where Lover had gone; Beloved asked them, in a hoarse, faltering voice, if they would help look for Lover. Completely oblivious of their friend's suffering, the five colorful figures danced and primped and gossiped about Lover's charms, speculating teasingly about where Lover might have gone, and with whom. Desperately, Beloved reached up to seize an apricot-colored skirt, and cried out:

  I beg you, girls of Jerusalem,

  If
you find my love,

  What will you tell him?

  Tell him …

  (Beloved's voice drifted off, and the five girls paused, paying attention at last and waiting for their companion to continue. Finally, the distraught figure in blue climbed slowly upright, swayed, straightened, and continued.)

  Tell him … I am sick with love.

  With that phrase, in swept Lover, as heedless of Beloved's distress as the girls had been, and flung strong arms around half-bare shoulders. Beloved cried out, in pain or in pleasure, but then to cover it up, began again to praise Lover, to flirt and act the coy and lighthearted one. All the while the oboe continued to sound its plaintive note, while the audience wondered when Lover would wake up to the realization that something was desperately wrong, would find out what had taken place and rise up in fury to take revenge on the guards. Night fell again on the embracing couple, with no moment of revelation. The third lighting of lamps came, and a figure lying alone on the stage. This time, however, it was not the slim figure of Beloved who woke alone, but the strong one, Lover, waking alone in the warm and flickering light. But before Lover could do more than sit up and glance about, rubbing a sleepy eye in puzzlement, Beloved erupted back onto the stage, whirling like a dervish, like a small blue tornado, leaping and shouting over the quick beat of the music and holding up some object before her in triumph and adoration. Only when the dance brought Beloved to the very front of the stage, dropping down on both knees to face them, did the audience see clearly the object being held up: a dagger, gleaming silver and stained with blood. Beloved lifted it high, shouting in exultation, paused a moment with it in both hands, then drove the shining knife into the boards of the stage before whirling around again to face the still-seated Lover.

  You are beautiful

  said Lover, sounding a bit dubious.

  You are as lovely as Jerusalem,