Leave It to Me (19 page)

The lumpy, quilted envelope addressed to Jess arrived at the agency office eleven days after the death of Beth and Hairless Salome. I cope with the incident in Lafayette because I am careful about how I describe what happened.
They died
. Not
They were killed
. Not
Larry picked them off the way he must have Cong peasants
.

The envelope was delivered by Troy Tran, our stud mailman who sometimes took me karaokeing at the Mint.

“One cent postage due on this baby,” Troy announced. “Don’t you love it that the post office makes the sender pay these days?”

He has a radio announcer’s voice. With his looks and his shoulders, he should be a TV anchorman, but he’s taking acting lessons. It’s the Flash’s fault. The Flash is legend.

“So how come this package got through?”

“Come on, we’re talking one lousy penny. And no sender’s address.”

“You want to collect the lousy penny, Troy?”

“How about a glass of Gatorade instead?”

I was the only one in that morning. Jess was chauffeuring an astronomer with a surprise hit book on his hands,
I Winked, the Stars Wobbled
. Otherwise it was a slow week even for late January, which I know from Jess is recoup
time after the seasonal frenzy of coffee-table books, cookbooks, how-to books for Christmas and Hanukkah gift giving. I had to field a couple of calls before I could get Troy a cup of iced water.

“The Unabomber’s locked up, but I still wouldn’t be in a hurry to open this one.” Troy handed me the heavy package. “The grease stains don’t do much for my confidence.”

At least no wires stuck out. I checked the postmark. Oakland.

“But no return address,” the mailman reminded.

“If you hear a loud bang on your way out, call 911.”

“Well, have a great one.”

My karma conspired with coincidence
. I see that now. If my author-for-the-day, a woman named Rosie Rune who wrote feminist fables for children, hadn’t been stuck in Chicago with a serious case of food poisoning, some other temp would have been in the office that afternoon. If Troy hadn’t joked about letter bombs, I’d probably have weighed Jess’s privacy against my curiosity, and dropped the envelope on Jess’s desk for her to open. But that day my skull-brain didn’t speculate on destiny and chance. My gut-brain dictated I grip the pull tab. My teeth did the gripping, and the ripping open. My face wasn’t blown off by any bomb.

The sender was a joker. Packed in the envelope that I wasn’t meant to open was a thin, poorly xeroxed stack of court transcripts about a murder trial, a couple of sheets of lined notepaper with diary-style entries handwritten in black ink, two syringes—the old-fashioned glass kind that
Flash used to shoot up the enemy with deadly serums—tiny wooden matches in a box that had a picture of an elephant-headed man with a Buddha-like paunch, and a Post-It with the greeting:
You are the fox, my love for you the bloodhound
.

A poetry teacher like Mr. Bullock or a sicko loco like … Larry died, okay? I didn’t kill him … well, Mr. Bullock might have sensed connections; I didn’t. Which was why I scanned the transcript pages at random; which was how I discovered a part of Berkeley Ham had kept hidden.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: You admit that you are an unmarried woman?

APPROVER
: Fuck your institutions, man! I pick who and when I want to ball.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: In addition, you admit, do you not, that you are an unmarried woman who is, however, not a virgin?

APPROVER
: I’m a free spirit. I don’t have your bourgeois hangups.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Uh-huh! So you confess that you have carnal acquaintanceship of many men?

APPROVER
: What kind of trip are you on, man?

JUDGE
: You will answer to the point, please.

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: I take the witness’s answer to mean that she is soliciting my esteemed colleague, the PP?

APPROVER
: Dream on, buster!

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Did you have intercourse with the deceased male?

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: Please to specify per name and descriptive physical identification which deceased male since the witness has had many carnal satisfactions with many males.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Did you have intercourse with one Marcel Fallon, deceased tourist from Brussels?

APPROVER
: I shared a cot with a Marcel Fallon in a Delhi youth hostel. I didn’t sleep with him.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Have you had intercourse with many males?

APPROVER
: Many guys at one time? As in a love-in? Or do you mean orgies, porno films …?

JUDGE
: It is a well-known fact that youths in America consume large quantities of drugs and alcohol, and engage in pre-marital sex. The point that the PP wishes to establish needs no further corroboration for establishment.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Thank you, Your Honour.

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: But an unwitting corollary to that same point, Your Honour, is that my client, Sri Romeo Hawk, is only partially Western in origin. The more significant part of Sri Hawk is immersed in Eastern philosophy and ancient wisdoms. The PP is confirming what I have been arguing all along. The Accomplice-turned-Approver perpetrated sexual enjoyment on my client in order to coerce him into participating in her plot.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Your Honour, the evidence will show that Mr. Hawk, having in-born knowledge of the sexual appetites and proclivities of Western men and women, exploited that knowledge in order to despatch her to the late Monsieur Fallon’s room.

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: I submit that my client, Sri Hawk, did not coerce this witness to perform sexual high-jinks on the deceased Belgian. In addition, I submit that the original transliteration of my client’s surname was H-a-q, which Your Honour will confirm is a familiar Muslim nomenclature. H-a-w-k was the invention of Catholic nuns in Saigon. My client’s mother, an illiterate Eurasian lady of the night with expensive addictions—”

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Objection! She was no lady, she was a prostitute. Also, in the absence of birth certificates of mother and son, questions of race, ethnicity, et cetera, are lacking evidentiary confirmation.

JUDGE
: Objection overruled. Clarification noted, however.

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: Mr. Hawk’s mother took the infant Mr. Hawk to the orphanage with a cock and bull story about having found him under the bar counter. Therefore, I submit, Your Honour, that the East has played a greater part than the West in the life and character formation of Romeo Hawk. The witness was the temptress. She lured her victim, this Fallon fellow, into her hostel room and provided him with fatal enjoyment.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: But the witness visited the victim in the
victim’s
room. The victim did not enter, I repeat the victim did not enter, the witness’s room. The wretched truth is, Your Honour, the witness was a hippie from foreign, and not having sufficient funds to pay for food and lodging, she resorted to underhand—please amend that to
underbody
—methods of bill payment.

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: Is that not further proof, Your Honour, of the witness’s promiscuity? She cannot pay for roof over her head, so she sells sexual favors and pleasures for fiduciary gain.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Objection! Sexual exuberance is an illness, not a commodity for barter. My client suffers from the disease of sexual exuberance.

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: If that is an ailment, I thank God that it is an ailment that has not spread its contagion to this subcontinent. I shall not waste more of the court’s time on the West’s moral cancers. The rest of that night’s scenario can be reconstructed by any simpleton. Like most Western youths, the witness is a frequent, if not habitual, consumer of contraband drugs. She was found to be in personal possession of sundry drugs for artificially inducing states of euphoria, aphrodisia and melancholia. I submit that she, the Witness-turned-Approver, slipped a large dosage of sleep-inducive medication, namely Man-drax, into the victim’s alcoholic beverage. Then she executed
her carnal designs on the victim’s person. And when the drugged victim was rendered sufficiently drowsy by Mandrax, she garroted him.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: But how could such a slip of a young lady garrot an adult male with the athletic physique of this Mister Fallon?

BARRISTER FOR DEFENDANT
: With her hair ribbon, no less.

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR
: Objection! The marks on the victim’s neck were made by human digits. They were not made by satin strings with which pretty ladies bind their tresses. We draw attention to the autopsy report completed on the deceased tourist from Belgium. The autopsy report indicates that severe pressure was applied to victim’s neck and throat by means of exceptionally strong human fingers.

My mother’d committed follies on the other side of the moon, and now a lover or blackmailer was hounding her. It could be any flower child’s story. Ma Jess had seen herself as a missionary; she’d made self-improvement her mission. Ben Franklin, turn over in your grave. She was the perfect daughter of her times: morality an “opinion call,” idealism a means to an end.

All of it made crazy sense to them. None of it made sense to me. Their Asia was excess. My Asia was oppositions in perfect balance.

I felt inspired by Jess.
It doesn’t have to be adversarial, Mother. You cracked under pressure; I won’t. That’s where we’re different
.

I prowled the office, reaching into backs of drawers I rarely opened. The transcripts didn’t have to be my only heirlooms. You never know: that’s the American way. Discovery,
it wouldn’t matter how trivial, would enhance my self-inventions. Look and you might find. Anyway, what did I have to lose?

In the bottom drawer of one of the two filing cabinets that had
INACTIVE/STORAGE
labels on them, I came across an accordion letter file. In the
C
compartment of that letter file, bound together with twine and topped with a note in Ham’s handwriting,
Tricia and I tied the knot in Vegas last night. Thought you might want these back, Love As Always
, were postcards Jess’d mailed Ham from places with pretty names. Surakarta, Seremban, Chiang Mai, Mandalay, Tabrīz, Ranpur.

My sweetest, dearest friend, If you could see my aura now, you’d understand why I had to leave …

and

This place is magic and I’m seeing in a new spectrum of colors, I’m feeling with a whole new velocity …

and

Today’s lesson had to do with western attitudes to disease. R. is my lover and more, he is my guru, my teacher, my prince. He’s taught me that illness is punishment for a past life’s sins. Malaria, cholera, leprosy: they’re our just deserts …

and

At R.’s command, I’m giving out herbal pills and potions to tourists so that their bodies and souls may be purified without their knowing it …

Stuck in the back of Ham’s folder was a photograph of Jess in a peacock-feather tutu and of Ham in a penis
sheath and nothing else. In the background, dancing around an oak, were other wood sprites in gourd-straps and forest nymphs in bird-feathers. I recognized the woman who had shaved her head for Ham. She had a thick, frizzy halo of red-gold hair. The hair could pass for a wig. Hats looked better on her. I slipped the photo in my pocketbook.

I should have been content just finding those postcards. It’s wondrous, the self’s capacity for growth and change. But Jess wanted me to find more. She hadn’t destroyed any of it; she
wanted
someone—me—to come along. I scoured the files, dug into shoeboxes discarded on closet shelves, unlocked the petty-cash drawer, sprung the safe-deposit box Jess kept behind a sofa. And then I sat at Jess’s workstation with the antique scribe’s lap desk from India, trying to think like Jess, doodle like Jess, tap a nervous knuckle against the desk leg like Jess, and there it was, a secret compartment glided open in the antique desk. Inside that long, shallow space was a single snapshot. A mother and her just-born. Mothers look radiant, always; the just-born wriggly, helpless, uglier than garden slugs. My eyes were slits, hair long and black, plastered by heat, by afterbirth, to my forehead. It must have been
him
who took the picture.

Late that exhilarating afternoon, I dialed her number. “Jess, tell me what I can do.”

“You’ve done enough,” she snapped. “You show up and three friends are dead! ‘Dying! Dying in the night! / Won’t
somebody bring in the light / So I can see which way to go / Into the everlasting snow?’ ”

One of Emily’s, I assumed. When I made the call, I hadn’t been thinking Suicide Hot Line.

“You don’t get it, Devi. I loved Fred.”

“I’m coming over, Jess. Don’t do anything stupid before I get there.”

“Someone has me in his crosshairs,” she said. Her voice was mean and guarded this time. “Call him off, Devi.”

“I would if I could, Jess. I want to.”

“I’ve still got friends, you know. I’ll be staying at Ham’s, Fred expected it could happen, he was in the business, he said one day he’d turn over the wrong rock … but Beth’s and Sandy’s murders, I can’t get over …”