Night Work Page 20

  A muscle in the line of Mehta's jaw jumped, once, and he picked up the pen again as if thinking deeply.

  “He did inherit, didn't he?” Al prompted.

  “No! For heaven's sake, Inspector, Laxman was already twenty-two when our father died. There was no question of his inheriting. Unless,” Mehta continued in a slow and reluctant voice, “circumstances changed.”

  “Those circumstances being …?”

  “Our father was trying to be fair, especially to any children Laxman may have had. The doctors told him that any children Laxman might have would be normal, that his mental condition would not be passed on.”

  “So Laxman would have inherited if Pramilla had children?”

  “Not Laxman. Our father knew he couldn't manage more than a few dollars on his own.”

  “Mr. Mehta,” Al said, his voice showing impatience for the first time, “if you are refusing to tell us what financial arrangements your father made concerning your brother, then say so. Don't assume I won't find out the details on my own. With a homicide like this one, I can easily get a warrant, and your lawyer will be required to tell me. Everything.”

  That final threat got to Mehta. He exhaled, and put down the pen. “My brother had inherited the money the day he married. I was still a signator on the account, and I had planned on using some of it as a down payment on the house down the street for him and his wife. I did not tell Laxman at the time, because it would have confused him.”

  “And Pramilla?” Kate asked coldly.

  “What about her?”

  “Did she know that her husband was in himself a wealthy man, not just a person living off his brother? Or did you not want to confuse her, either?”

  “You make all this sound so sinister,” Mehta complained. “The girl was a peasant. She could barely read, couldn't speak a word of English when she came here. I wanted to give her a chance to grow up, to learn about her position and her responsibility. Tell me what you would have done, Inspector. Would you have told a fifteen-year-old, virtually illiterate village girl that by writing her name on a piece of paper, she could have anything she wanted? Any clothing in the shops, any flashy car, a house she couldn't begin to care for? Would you?”

  Al and Kate just looked at Mehta, and Al asked if they might speak with his wife.

  Today Rani Mehta was squeezed into a hot pink sari with a blue and pink underblouse, and she stood quivering with barely suppressed outrage at the invasion of her home. Her husband stood at her shoulder while she was being interviewed, asserting that her English was not good enough to have her interviewed on her own. Even without the language problem she was not a helpful witness. She resented their presence in her house almost as much as she had resented the presence of her childish brother-in-law and his increasingly difficult (and undeniably pretty) young wife, and her answers through her husband's translation were brusque and unhelpful. Eventually they let her go and told Mehta that they were ready to see Laxman's apartment.

  The ornate rooms, in the absence of the people who had created them, looked merely tawdry. The boy-and-buffalo figurine stood on the mantelpiece over an electric fireplace, in poignant juxtaposition with an ornately framed photograph of Pramilla and Laxman in their wedding finery, both of them looking very young and rigid with terror. Kate contemplated the arrangement for a long time, and found herself wondering what on earth the village girl had made of this glowing electric imitation fire, the thick off-white carpet, the man to whom she had given over her future.

  They found nothing in the apartment. Aside from a sunken patch of wallboard behind a hanging, which Mehta told them was where Laxman had driven his fist in a tantrum, there was no sign that any act of violence had taken place in the rooms, no bloodstains, no sign of dragging on the carpets, not even any disarray. They could find no indication of why Laxman had left the house that night, no telephone numbers scribbled on pads by the phone or balled-up messages in the waste-baskets. The redial button on the only telephone in the rooms connected with an answering machine and a woman's voice announcing, “Hi, this is Amanda's machine,” which Kate recognized as that of Amanda Bonner. As Bonner had suspected, she had been Pramilla Mehta's last call. Kate broke the connection before the tone could sound.

  They finished the search, thanked Peter Mehta, and went back out into the rain. Outside the house, the press had thinned out somewhat, and the three placard-wielding women had moved their demonstration over in front of the Mehta house. The two detectives nodded to the uniformed police on guard, told the reporters that they had no comment, and strode briskly down the block to where they had left the car.

  “That's a fair amount of money involved,” Kate noted as she pulled away from the curb.

  “Even with those troublesome market swings. You think it was only a million?”

  “Not for a minute.” Any interrogator recognized instantly the look of open candor that accompanied an outright lie.

  Kate made a mental note to dig out the truth of the Mehta finances. It was never good to assume that, with the family of a victim, the first interview was anything more than reconnaissance. They would return after Laxman's autopsy results and preliminary lab work were in.

  “We also need to know if Laxman might have got ahold of some money on his own. Sold a statue, pawned a wristwatch, something of that sort. He understood money enough to know that you can buy or sell things, and if he watched a lot of TV it's the kind of thing he might've seen and copied. Even if he was thick as two bricks.”

  “We also need those phone records.”

  “Ask Peter and his wife separately if Laxman had any mail. Postman might remember, too.” Al was thinking out loud. “Even the kids in the house. But the big question here is, if this is the work of the serial, how'd the killer find out that Laxman hit his wife sometimes, that he may have been responsible for her death?”

  Kate took a deep breath. “Roz Hall knew. Amanda Bonner told her, and if Roz knew, anyone in the city could have known.”

  “That doesn't narrow things down much.”

  “God,” she said, “if you'd planned it, you couldn't have come up with three more different victims.”

  “James Larsen, Matthew Banderas, and Laxman Mehta. Affirmative action murders,” Al said with heavy irony. “The United Nations of victims.”

  “Taking political correctness to an extreme,” she agreed.

  “You'd think there would be a few chronic husband-beaters available as well, hiding in the woodwork. Balance things out a little.”

  Black humor was one thing; this was becoming bleak. Kate asked, dropping the joke, “You'd say this is definitely a woman thing, then? Standing up for her— or their—downtrodden sisters, revenging their mistreatment and, in Pramilla's case, death?”

  “Taking back the night in a big way,” Al commented dryly. “I can't see any other link, can you? Nothing but the history of the victims and their violence toward women. I think we've got a vigilante. Or a group of them.”

  “The Ladies?”

  “I just don't know. Might be them, but it feels different—someone inspired by them, a sort of copycat. What do you think?”

  “I agree—it doesn't have at all the same flavor. But then it's pretty hard to inject duct-tape humor into a murder.”

  In a different voice, Al said, “The press is going to have a field day with this.” He was, Kate knew, repeating his offer to let her step quietly out of the way.

  “Well,” she said, having none of it, “we'll just have to keep one step ahead of them, won't we?”

  What we have pushed aside and tried to bury

  Lives with a staggering thrust we cannot parry.

  It was Jon, oddly enough and in a roundabout way, who gave them the break they needed.

  After the morning drizzle, the sky cleared and the weather took one of those odd warm turns that spring sometimes comes up with in San Francisco, to fool the gray city's inhabitants into thinking they live in sunny California. Late Wednesday afternoon, af
ter a day spent in a stuffy building with pathology reports and the interviews of a couple dozen of Dimitri's clientele, in endless phone calls and meetings with a dozen stripes of law enforcement, the migraine that had been lurking in the back of Kate's skull all week finally found an opening, flowering in the long, irregular hours and the stress of the entangled cases. She spent a solid half hour on the telephone with Amanda Bonner, who could think of no possible male object of Pramilla's affections, or even fantasies, although she spun out the potential candidates, all the men Pramilla had met in Amanda's presence, until Kate felt like telling the woman that a simple no would have done it and slamming the phone down. Instead, she was polite, and thanked her, and hung up softly. Unfortunately, Hawkin came in just as Kate was tipping the tablets out into her palm.

  “You told me the headaches were okay,” he accused.

  “They were. Are. This is just a normal one, not like before.”

  “Sure. Go home, Martinelli.”

  “I'm fine, Al.”

  “Martinelli, we can't afford to have you on your back for a couple of days. You go home now and do nothing related to the case, or I'll call Lee and the department doctor, in that order.”

  Either one would be a problem, involving hours of explanation and concealment. Better to capitulate.

  “Okay. I'll go. See you in the morning.”

  “I'm going to check with Lee tonight to make sure you're not working,” he warned her.

  “Christ, Al, don't be an old woman.”

  “Now I know you're sick. You'd never use an insult like ‘old woman’ if you were in your right mind.”

  Kate laughed in spite of herself. “All right. I promise not to do any work until tomorrow morning, if you promise not to call Lee to check up on me.”

  “Deal,” Al said, and Kate switched off her computer.

  Two years ago—even six months ago—Kate would have tackled all the cases on her desk head-on, throwing herself into seventeen-hour days fueled by fast-food meals washed down with gallons of coffee, seeing everyone, doing everything, refusing help and rest as signs of weakness.

  However, there was nothing like nearly losing your lover—first her life and then her presence—and then getting your brains scrambled by a kid with a length of galvanized pipe to give you a sense of perspective. The headaches that had pounded through her skull much of the winter had indeed faded, but today was proof that they were not gone, just lurking in the synapses, a menace waiting for stress and overwork to open the door again. Al was right: If she made herself eat properly, sleep adequately, and take a few hours off now and then, she would have a better chance of lasting to the end. As Lee had said, some cops operated under the conviction that they were a victim's only hope, but those cops tended not to make it to retirement in one piece. Kate had proved herself, more than once; now it was time to settle in for the long run.

  So she went home.

  First thing in the door, Kate did something she'd been intending for what seemed like weeks: She phoned Jules. Conversation with that precocious young woman did nothing for Kate's headache, but it distracted her from business and made her feel as if she'd accomplished something with the day. After half an hour of chat about Jules's social life (i.e., boys) and a project she was doing on human psychology, they made a vague date for an outing. When she had hung up, Kate continued through the house and opened the French doors into what Lee optimistically referred to as a garden, with the thought of pulling weeds, or scrubbing mildew, or just sitting mindlessly in a folding chair, basking in the warmth of the late-afternoon sun.

  It was an unexpected hour of respite, what Roz might call a gift of grace, and Kate stood in the overgrown backyard, drawing in deep breaths of the mild, oxygen-rich April breeze and wondering why no painter ever managed to capture the colors in the skies of approaching dusk, when she decided that what she really wanted to do was pollute that sweet evening air with the smoke of charcoal briquettes. Lee made a phone call and sent Jon off to the market while Kate dug out the little barbecue grill, scraped off the accumulated gunk from the previous summer, and fired it up, first to sterilize the metal surface, and then to lay on it the marinated skirt steaks and the slabs of ahi tuna. Soon she stood with a beer in one hand and a two-foot-long turner in the other, enjoying both the fantasy of suburbia and the brief holiday from the cases. After all, everyone had to eat sometime, even homicide detectives, and ahi took less time to cook than sitting in a restaurant waiting for food. And, she realized, at some point in the last hour, her headache had shriveled up and crept away.

  Jon came out of the house onto the small brick patio, carrying two salads and some plates. He was followed by Sione, lithe and graceful even when burdened by a tray piled high with bread, drinks, and silverware, a checkered tablecloth draped over his left forearm, and a folding chair clamped under his right armpit.

  Lee retrieved the chair from under his grasping elbow and quickly draped the cloth over a small tiled table that really should have been scrubbed first. Sione politely ignored the table's gray scurf of city dirt and dried mildew and set about transferring the contents of his tray onto the cheerful cloth.

  He and Jon were talking about their afternoon, laughing easily and brushing against each other from time to time. Kate found herself smiling, and raised her gaze to the darkening bay, her thoughts going to another young couple. Laxman and Pramilla Mehta had been two individuals every bit as beautiful as Sione Kalefu, caught up in an arranged relationship that had twisted into something dark and deadly. Jon asked her something, and she blinked.

  “Sorry?”

  “I wanted to know if you thought I would swagger like that if I wore a carpenter's apron.”

  “Swagger like what?”

  “Kate, hello? Where are you? I took Sione downtown to whistle at the construction workers, and he noticed how the guys with the carpenter's belts walk. I said it's just the weight of the things; he says it's attitude.”

  “Could be either. Patrol cops walk the same way.”

  “Ah,” Jon sighed. “Men in uniform.”

  They giggled together like teenaged girls. Spring is in the air, thought Kate with a sudden sour twinge in her gut. Like pollen, and love, and babies.

  Meat and fish cooked, salads and bread distributed, the quartet bent over their food in the soft evening light. Roz and Maj were coming over shortly, bringing Mina and one of Maj's luscious desserts—if Roz didn't get called away, if Kate's beeper didn't go off, if the earth didn't move beneath their feet.

  In the meantime, they would behave as if they were normal people who lived in a world where such interruptions never occurred. Kate forced herself to eat slowly, to push away the very possibility of the telephone from her mind, to make jokes as if she had all the time in the world, to listen to Lee's easy conversation with Sione about how a Polynesian boy from Tahiti came to be dancing with a New York-based troupe in San Francisco.

  As they listened to his story, told in a melodious half-French accent that even without the rest of the package would have explained Jon's infatuation, it struck Kate how different the young man was from Jon's usual lovers, who tended to be white-collar professionals with gym memberships and identity problems. Sione was as colorful and exotic as a tropical bird, and as comfortable with himself. Jon's attitude, too, was a different thing this time, affectionate rather than admiring, relaxed where he was usually so concerned with making an impression. He and Sione had only known each other a couple of weeks, but they seemed old friends. All in all, thought Kate, a very hopeful state of affairs.

  “Who wrote Song?” Lee was now asking. “That business you do with the knife, for example—that's not in the Bible. Is it?”

  “Oh, no.” Sione smiled, an expression as slow and sure as his movements or his low voice. “Song began several years ago, when I first came to New York. One of the dancers in our studio, Dina Moreli, was attacked by a man she thought she knew well. A friend, he had been. Dina trusted him, and he raped her.

&n
bsp; “She was unable to dance afterward, not just because of the injuries, but because she could not bring herself to go on stage. To trust her audience, you see? She couldn't work for a long time, two years or more. She came to the studio twice a week, but other than that she stayed inside her apartment and became a hermit. She did dance on her own, and she tried to write a journal of what had happened to her. She also spent a lot of time reading books she had always meant to read. I suppose she thought that her time away from work should not be a complete loss.

  “One of the books she took up was the Bible. But the more she read, the angrier it made her, what she called ‘man's inhumanity to woman.’ The story of the man entertaining important visitors who gives his concubine to a drunken mob to abuse and kill, so as to save his guests. Or Tamar, the young widow who dresses up as a prostitute and seduces her own father-in-law to force her husband's family to undertake their responsibilities toward her. Jephthah's daughter, nameless even as a sacrifice. And the Song of Solomon, where a young girl out looking for her lover falls into the hands of a group of soldiers, is raped, and then, when she finds her lover again, is forced by her own needs and by his assumptions to act as if nothing had happened.

  “That is not exactly how the Bible describes it, but as you probably know, interpretation depends on the eye of the reader, and the experience of being raped changed Dina's way of looking at the world. It explains why she wrote the dance the way she did, exaggerating the abuse of the guards but also giving Beloved the power to strike back, not only against her attackers, but against the need to hide her rape from Lover.”

  The doorbell punctuated his last sentence and Jon started to rise, but Kate waved him back to his seat. She took a tray of dirty plates to the kitchen, pausing to switch on the already-filled coffeemaker, then went to let in Roz, Maj, and Mina. The two adults were carrying containers, and Mina's arms were wrapped around a bunch of bananas the size of her chest. Shutting the door, Kate asked, “Will we need bowls or plates?”