My Lady of the Bog (10 page)

I followed her inside to Jai’s study. What greeted us were flies. They orbited the room like a miniature, gleaming belt of asteroids. On the floor lay Jai, wounded beyond description.
Cut down
, I remember thinking.
Slain
! For the violence done unto him cried out somehow for archaic language to describe it.

I didn’t check his vital signs. It would have served no end. Death was proclaimed by the stillness of his corpse. It looked bereft, its spirit fled. Jai’s eyes were half-open, their blind whites half-showing beneath their lids like in portraits of
yogis
in
sam
ā
dhi
. A pool of blood on his chest had dried at its edges, congealing like gravy. Everywhere was splatter: on the walls, rug, desk, ceiling. Hundreds of flies were clustered on Jai’s face, drinking from his nose and eyes, so that it seemed as if his face were moving. I remember for an instant clinging to the notion that he had died naturally—fallen, perhaps, and cut himself on broken glass—and then in the next instant, admitting he’d been slaughtered.

“Would you care for some coffee?”

I looked at Vidya. She wasn’t staring at the body but at some meaningless juncture of the floor and wall.

“Coffee?” And only then did I realize she was in shock. Her eyes were glazed, and as she turned and passed into the living room, she performed a series of meaningless rituals: fluffing pillows, straightening chairs, brushing nonexistent dust from the arm of the couch.

I turned back to Jai’s corpse. He lay atop a shattered lamp, surrounded by the wooden splinters and spindles of the chair in which he’d apparently been sitting. A
shatoosh
shawl was wound around his throat.

The ancient book lay open on the rug before him. I recognized its vellum cover inset with semiprecious stones. Two drops of Jai’s blood were drying on its leather, as though hardening into jewels themselves. Reflexively, I picked it up. I called to Vidya, “Did you phone the police?”

“Police?” she repeated, in a tone that clearly said she hadn’t.

And so, I dialed 999. While it rang, I stared at the body of my mentor and dear, dear friend, and waited for something, a thud in my heart—but there was as yet only a smoke-filled vacuum.

“How may I help you?” an operator answered.

“Send the police. There’s been a murder.” I hung up. The 999 system logs the caller’s address and I wasn’t about to stay on the line to answer questions. I looked down once more at Jai, then backed out and shut the study door. For dying—like sleep, like making love—is something one does behind closed doors.

Vidya was in the kitchen, watching a coffee filter drip. I looked into her face—so beautiful and exotic—though marred now by a flicker of something like static electricity around her eyes.

Discovering I had the book in my hands, I placed it on the table. Vidya looked at it, but said nothing. “What happened?”

She shivered. “I . . . just found him . . . like that . . . when I came home.”

“When?”

“Oh,” she said fretfully. “Three thirty, four.”

“In the
morning
?”

She looked about her, and I followed her eyes. The kitchen was extremely neat, except for a pile of torn circulars and magazines on the counter.

I looked at the clock. It was just after six. “And what have you been doing since?”

“Oh,” she said stupidly. “Straightening up.”

Jai’s death had clearly pushed her over the edge.

Perhaps it had pushed me over it, too, for as our eyes next met, I was shocked to discover a palpable sexual tension between us.

I stood motionless. The material of her sari shivered. I don’t suppose it was composed of anything so western as crinoline, and yet it made a noise like it as she shifted her thin and elegant limbs.

She looked at me. Then she sighed and surrendered herself, inviting me to her then and there. I cannot describe how she did this, other than to say she lifted and exposed her throat, tossing back her thick jet hair with a noise that is not in any syllabary, East or West, but is, indubitably, the syllable of desire. I don’t recall approaching; I do remember crushing her to me, the sound her sari made in protest, and the sudden hot
wuhhhh
of her breath in my ear as it rushed from the delicate cage of her ribs. I opened her lips; her tongue was wet silk, so soft and indescribably thrilling that the fleshy petals of some exotic flower blossoomed in my belly and a suffocating intoxication made me nearly ill.

“This is . . .
mad
,” I said and pushed her back. We looked at each other in disbelief, both amazed, I think, by the outrageous act. Our embrace so violated both our standards that it was, in the end, freeing. It had all the hallmarks of possession: the sense of being seized by some greater power that laughs in the face of all one’s scruples, resolutions, ethics, plans.

“You have blood on you,” I said at last, rather thickly.

“Oh,” she said, holding up her hands. She looked at my shirt. “You do, too.”

The doorbell rang and both of us started. Then I remembered I had called the police.

Chapter 14

T
wo plainclothes cops were standing in the hallway. I swear, they grow them for the job. Either that or promotion to homicide dick excites a gland that emits a hormone that turns your face into an Easter ham. “Someone here reported a murder.”

“
I
did,” I said, stepping back from the door.

“Lootenant Mick Houlihan,” the first one pronounced in flawless Brooklynese. “And this here’s Detective Sergeant Lee Raposo.”

“You’re
American
,” I told Houlihan.

He looked at me mirthlessly. “So’re you.”

They entered. Houlihan had a presence about him: a looming, raw-boned menace to his movements that made one instinctively back out of his way. His one saving grace was a pair of crystalline eyes, pale as rain on the Irish Sea. They were at once outraged and wistful-looking, as if they’d seen more mayhem than any living soul has the right to endure but still hoped, against all hope, for a vision of the Virgin.

The one from the Yard was slim and dim. He had almond eyes and elephant ears from which depended long, Buddhistic lobes, like those mournful heads that lean from the sand on Easter Island. He was probably Italian. So why did the word Samoan come to mind?

Big as they were, filling the small foyer, they had a wonderful air of detachment about them, as if they were in the apartment, yes, but not of it; investigating a murder, yea, but not besmirched by it in any way.

I closed the door and led them down the hall to the study. I had expected them to be inured, but at the sight of Jai’s body, Raposo sucked a breath as though slapped. The flies, aroused, boiled up from the corpse and began careening around the room, like numberless tiny black bats out of Hell. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Raposo said.

For his part, the New York Celt just stared at Jai for the longest time, then plucked and squished a fly from his cheek, adding, almost mournfully, “Better call the M.E.”

“Who was he?”

“Dr. Jai Prasad.”

Houlihan drew a notepad from his pocket. “What kinda name is that?” he wondered.

“Indian,” I said. And so there’d be no confusion: “From India.”

“You the wife?” the one from the Yard—Raposo—asked.

Vidya nodded.

He continued: “Two of you
gank
him?”

I didn’t understand him. Neither, apparently, did Vidya, for she said, “I don’t know. I just found him like that. When I came home.”

“From where?” Houlihan interrupted.

“. . . the theater.”

“When was that?” Raposo wondered.

“Oh, around . . . four.”

“In the
morning?
That what time the theater quits?”

“No. I stopped off . . . for a drink.”

“Uh huh. And where was this?”

“At an ‘after hours’ . . . I don’t know which . . .”

“There’s hundreds . . .” I added.

“You were with her?” Raposo asked.

“No.”

Then shut the fuck up, he told me with his eyes.

“You alone? Friends?” Houlihan wondered.

“Alone,” Vidya said.

“How long?”

“What? Oh, was I there? . . . some hours.”

“Yeah?” Houlihan nodded. “And then what?”

“I came home. Found Jai . . . lying there. I called . . . Xan.”

“Why him, not us?” Raposo asked, sounding almost hurt.

“I don’t know,” she said, quietly, in a way that would have melted any decent person’s heart. “I . . . needed help.”

The four eyes shifted in my direction.

“And you are . . . ?”

“Xander Donne.”

“Relation to deceased?”

“Former student. Friend.”

“Hey, you do this one together?” Raposo wondered, just like that.

“This one
what
?” I asked.

“Lee,” the lieutenant begged, “go easy.”

Lee just shrugged.

“Excuse me,” I told Houlihan. “I’d like to have a word with you.” And I stepped into the hall. The flies, disturbed, poured from the study and began to circulate the rooms.

Sighing with the effort, Houlihan got up from the arm of the couch, and followed me out.

I turned on him. “What in hell’s the NYPD doing here?”

He gave me that flat, blank, gunmetal glare that cops reserve for just such questions: “Leeayzing.”

“Great,” I said. “Liaise all you want. But don’t tell me you think that . . . that
girl
in there had something to do . . . with
this.”
I waved in the direction of Jai’s body.

Houlihan appeared transcendentally unmoved. “Lemme ask ya. You wouldn’t be screwing Mrs. Vidya?”

“Mrs. Prasad,” I corrected him. “And no, I wouldn’t.”

“’Cause you got her lipstick on your chin. You aware of that?” Instinctively, I reached in my pocket for a tissue. “Hankie, too,” he said, eyeing it shrewdly.

“Look,” I said, wiping my face, “the lady was . . . bereft. I . . . we embraced. It was . . . solace.”

“She’s about your age. And gentleman in the study, he’s a good deal older than the two a you.”

“What the hell does that mean? I don’t know how old Vidya—Mrs. Prasad—is.”

“. . . twenty-six, -seven, maybe. And a very sexy twenty-seven, too. I mean, look it, I wouldn’t blame you. By the way, what’s that dot on her forehead mean?”

“That . . . she’s married.”

“Well,” he sighed, “guess she’s gonna have to redo her makeup.” He sighed once more. “This Prasad. Now what kind of doctor of what was he anyway?”

“A doctor of linguistic and religious anthropology,” I said, aware I had lost control of the conversation.

“Yeah? And who’d wanna kill a guy like that? Doctor Religious Anthology and all.”

“I don’t know,” I said, pointedly. “That’s what you’re here to figure out. Remember?” I looked around. “Maybe it was a robbery.”

He looked around, too. “Anything taken?”

“Maybe the murder weapon.” I pointed to the rack of swords on the wall of the study. “Two nights ago, there were four swords there. Now there’s three.”

“Anything else?”

“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask his wife.”

“Doesn’t look like a robbery, less they knew what they wanted.”

“Look,” I said, disturbed by the general tenor of the conversation. “You’re not suggesting . . . ?”

Houlihan shrugged. “Don’t really know
who
did it. Do we?” he asked, pleasantly enough. “It’s just . . . the energy.” He seized on the word. “Daughter, Celeste, she’s always saying things to me like, ‘Daddy, I don’t like his energy,’ or ‘There’s something bad with the energy there.’
Energy
, for cryin’ out loud.” He chuckled to himself. “When I was a kid, energy was friggin’
coal
, know what I mean? Now . . . anyway, that’s the problem, least ways I see it. Something’s funny with the
energy
. I mean, guy’s dead, cut to ribbons, and you and the wife are sitting around like youse just swallowed the fucking canary.”

“Maybe we’re both in a state of shock.”

He appraised me coolly for a moment or two. “Yeah,” he nodded, “could be that.”

Some years back, in my student years, when “liberation” groups were proliferating daily, some wags got together one night on drugs and founded one called Dead Liberation. “Treated like dirt,” their manifesto read: “Can’t work, can’t vote, the most downtrodden folk on the face of the earth.”

Now, watching a small army of forensic technicians invade the apartment, I saw that what they’d said was true; at least it was for murder victims. Having been deprived of your life, you forfeited all your other rights, too: your drawers were searched, your mail opened, your wife questioned, your pockets turned inside out, your bank statements analyzed, the dirt beneath your fingernails culled and your hands sealed in Ziploc bags—even your genitals swabbed for emissions—while at the autopsy to follow, your liver and lights would be weighed in the balance, like some
bardo
procedure in
The Book of the Dead
.

I went to the kitchen and sat down beside Vidya. She squeezed my hand, and instantly, I felt better. For wretched as everything was at that moment, there was this other thing in the air between us. Whatever it was, it cast a glory light and weird, sweet beauty upon the sorry business all around us: the technicians dusting for prints, the ringing phone, the constant traffic.

Houlihan returned, requesting that we come down to the station and make a statement.

“Mrs. Prasad’s solicitor will be joining us.”

“Hey, whaddaya, whaddaya need a lawyer for?” he complained. “We just wanna axe ya couple of more questions.”

“You already did. And maybe if you and your friend from the Yard hadn’t framed them as accusations, we might be feeling differently. But you did, so we don’t. You want anything else from us, talk to our attorney.”

For their harassment was outrageous. Jai had been butchered in a frenzy by some maniac wielding a sword or machete. One of his hands was almost severed at the wrist. A great red medallion of blood, like molten metal, was pooled on the floor, hardening along its edges. I had no intention of being bullied or of allowing Jai’s widow to be victimized by New Scotland Yard and New York’s Finest, even as his body rotted in the study.