Night work (17 page)

"Two and a half weeks, I think. Jon wants to know what night we want tickets for."

"You want to go?"

"Sure. It sounds wild."

"Okay. Well, the first part of the week should be safe, I'm not on call nights until Wednesday."

"Monday or Tuesday, then. Would you mind if we made a group of
it and asked Roz and Maj? I mentioned it to Roz the other day and she
said she could easily have someone take her group session at the
shelter, if it needs to be Monday. Or do you think we've seen too
much of them lately?"

"Never too much, they're good people," said Kate
easily. She did, in truth, think that they'd been seeing an awful
lot of them recently, between one thing and another, but if it made Lee
happy she could put up with it. She put the full glasses next to
Lee's spoon rest and stood behind her lover, wrapping her arms
again around Lee's waist. "What about dinner before, or
after? There's that good Chinese place not too far from
there."

"Great. You want garlic bread?"

"With Chinese?"

"With this minestrone, you fool. Tonight."

"I'd rather have you."

Lee turned in Kate's arms and said, half purring, "You can have both, you know."

"Not at the same time. Too messy. Beans and stuff all over the place."

Lee drew back and pursed her lips in thought. "We could work on it."

"I don't want to work on anything, I'm taking the night off. When is Jon coming home?"

"Any minute," Lee murmured regretfully into Kate's hair.

"Then the garlic bread now," Kate said briskly, and disentangled herself to go and set the table.

Jon did indeed come in a few minutes later, humming a tune Kate
remembered from the long-ago summer her periods began--positively
modern by Jon's standards. At least he wasn't singing out
loud.

Still, she braced herself for the other symptom of Jon's love
life, which was an inability to talk about anything without dragging
The One's name into it. A complaint about the garbage cans would
trigger the observation that "Bryce was into recycling before
curbside bins came"; a comment about kung pao chicken would bring
forth the information that "Jacksen's allergic to
chilis."

So when Lee said to Jon that they were going to try for
Song
on Monday or Tuesday, Kate braced herself for Sione's name in
some form, but it didn't come. Jon merely nodded and said that
would be great, he was sure they'd love the show.

She looked at him closely, but could see no sign that the affair had
run its course already. He seemed pleased with the soup, happy to talk
about anything or nothing--indeed, he seemed content, a word that
had never before applied to Jon Sampson, who, though he was not
clinically bipolar, tended to the extremes in his moods. Finally Kate
couldn't stand it.

"So, Lee tells me you have a thing with one of the
Song
dancers."

He beamed at her, a simple, uncomplicated look of delight.
"Sione Kalefu. He's so great. He's talented,
intelligent, he even has a sense of humor. And he's flat-out,
drop-dead gorgeous--like a young Polynesian Mick Jagger, if you
can picture it." Kate tried, and failed. "In fact, when I
told him that, he said that yeah, he'd often thought that when he
retired he'd run a gay bar and call it Memphis."

Kate looked at him blankly, waiting for the explanation. Punch line, rather, judging by the expectant sparkle in his eyes.

"All right," she said. "I give. Why 'Memphis'?"

"What's the first line of 'Honky-Tonk Women'?"

Kate thought about it for a minute, and then felt her lips twitch.
Jon threw back his head and laughed and Lee, who had heard this before,
nonetheless snorted. "Oh, God, Jon, that's terrible,"
Kate protested, then began to laugh as well.

He cleared the dishes away, doing a bump-and-grind to the
accompaniment of the nine-syllable phrase Jagger made out of
"honky-tonk women," then he grabbed up his coat and took
himself and his suggestive lyrics out the door to his Polynesian
paramour.

"Well," pronounced Kate in the ensuing silence.
"At least it's a change from 'Mrs. Brown you've
got a loverly daughter' in bad Cockney."

"Or 'It's my party and I'll cry if I want to' a la Lesley Gore."

"Remember the time Bryce bought him those Timberland hiking shoes and we heard Nancy Sinatra for a week?"

"Oh, please don't remind me. They're all the sorts
of songs that lodge in the back of your brain and circle around and
around at three in the morning."

"Haw-aw-aw-aw-aw-nky-tonk women," Kate brayed.

They set the dishwasher going and went to bed early that night.

And were awakened when Jon came in at two in the morning, singing
quietly to himself a half-familiar tune, the chorus of which came into
Kate's mind as she was drifting off again: "Goodness
gracious, great balls of fire." She fell asleep with a smile on
her face.

IN THE DARK OF the night, while Kate had slept the sleep of the just
and the overworked and Jon found joy in a pair of brown arms, the
Ladies struck again. Kate sat and read all about it in the morning
Chronicle.
This time their attack involved the torching of the shiny, new,
phallic-shaped car of a man who had been seen slapping his wife around
in the park across the street. She had gone across to fetch their son
from an afternoon soccer game, become involved in a conversation with
the other mothers, and not been at her place in the kitchen when he
arrived home from work. He went looking for her and literally dragged
her home. The note the fire department found duct-taped to the fence
near the burnt-out wreck read:

YOUTOUCHHER,WE TORCHYOU.

--
the Ladies

The reporter did not think much of the theory that the second verb
was a typographical error. Kate folded the paper and threw it on the
floor, thinking that it was time she just stopped reading anything that
came before the comics.

"I went to see Roz yesterday," she told Lee, taking a
bagel from the toaster and reaching for the jar of Maj's
blackberry jam. "Just in case I wasn't busy enough, she
called me and thought I'd like to look into another suspicious
death."

"The Indian girl?"

"You know about her?" Kate asked in surprise.

"Maj called to warn me that Roz was setting off on another Campaign. I figured she'd drag you into it."

"I don't know how draggable I am at the moment. These last two cases are going to eat up a lot of hours."

"Kate, if Roz wants you to do this, you know you're
going to end up doing it. Easier to admit it now and get on with
it."

"I thought the woman was supposed to be writing her doctoral
thesis," Kate complained. "Why isn't she doing that,
or painting the baby's room, or starting a bookmobile service for
the homeless, or something?"

"She's probably doing all of them," Lee said, adding darkly, "I used to have that kind of energy."

"You never had that kind of energy. You just never slept."

"That's true. Not like now."

"God no, you do nothing but snooze. Must be up to, what--six hours a day? Lazy pig."

Lee stuck out a purple, crumb-covered tongue, a childish gesture
that pleased Kate inordinately because there had been so few of them in
the two years since Kate's job had cost Lee so dearly. The two
women sat across the table from each other grinning like a pair of
schoolgirls, and Kate's heart swelled in joy and pride and the
precious nature of what they had and she picked up Lee's hand and
kissed the palm.

"Sweetheart?"

"Yes, my Kate?"

"Back in..." No, not
Back in the had time,
although that was how Kate thought of it. "Last year, you said
you wanted to have a baby. I... overreacted, because I
didn't think you were ready. Physically. I mean, you were barely
walking. And more than that, because I wasn't ready. I just want
to say that if you still feel the same way, and if the doctors think
you won't, I don't know, blow any fuses, then I'm
willing to go into it with you."

Lee's head was drooped so far that Kate couldn't see her
face, so she had no warning when Lee's shoulders began to heave
silently. Kate's hand tightened on Lee's in distress.

"Lee, love, what is it? Don't cry, I only meant--"

Lee's head shot back and her free hand slapped down hard on
the table, and Kate realized belatedly that her lover was laughing
uncontrollably.

"What?" she demanded.
"What?"

Lee shook her head and spluttered, " 'Blow any
fuses'? Oh God, Kate, the technical language. The subtle grasp of
medical terminology you've picked up--"

Both relieved and affronted, Kate retrieved her hand and her dignity.

"I can't seem to do anything right," she said
plaintively, which made Lee laugh even harder. So Kate took herself
back to the relatively simple business of tracking down killers.

Chapter 10

BEFORE SHE BUCKLED DOWN to her own caseload, however, Kate dutifully
dug up the detective in charge of investigating Pramilla Mehta's
death. Tommy Boyle had caught the call, so Kate left a message to have
him phone her, and went back to her report.

Or she tried to go back to her report. She became increasingly aware
of a small, dark woman, little more than a child, standing quietly in
the corner of her vision, waiting with the self-effacing patience that
had characterized her whole short life, and may have led to her death.
Try as Kate might, she could not ignore the girl, and when Boyle came
into the Homicide room with a question on his face, she abandoned the
paperwork with even more gratitude than such an interruption usually
earned.

"Want a cup of coffee?" she offered, already on her feet.

"Sure," he said.

Kate had known Boyle for a couple of years, but not well, and they
happened not to have actually worked a case together. He was a
red-haired, green-eyed man with Hispanic features and brown skin, who
had impressed Kate as a person interested mainly in getting on with his
work; when in a group, he tended to be seen with his nose in a sheaf of
case notes or a book on forensics. She liked him, but didn't know
him well enough to know how to approach him on what could be taken as a
touchy business, intruding on another's investigation. Kate
spooned coffee grounds into the machine and tried to put together a
question that wouldn't sound either nuts or pushy, and in the end
gave it up.

"It's about that burn victim you caught Tuesday night. Pramilla Mehta."

"What about her?"

"You haven't written it off as an accident, have you?"

"Of course not. Haven't even got the path report back
yet." He waited for her to tell him why she was interested.

"You know the name Rosalyn Hall?"

"Rosalyn--you mean Roz Hall, that minister? Oh jeez. Is she involved in this?"

"I'm afraid so. She thinks the husband did his wife."

"The husband's a true flake," he offered in agreement.

"Thing is, Roz is convinced that this is an American incident of bride burning, which they get a lot of in India."

"People in India burn their brides?" he asked dubiously.
"I heard of widows throwing themselves on their husband's
funeral pyre, but I always thought that was old women. And isn't
it illegal there now? There was something about it in a novel I once
read," he added, as if to explain away his knowledge.

"I think that's a different thing. This is young brides.
They have this complicated system in India with the bride's
family giving a dowry to the groom's family--not just money,
but stuff like motorbikes and kitchen appliances--and if the
groom's family is greedy and demands more, and doesn't get
it, they sometimes get pissed and kill the bride. Especially if there
are also no babies."

"That sounds insane."

"I know. And Roz may be off her rocker and be seeing demons in
the dark, but on the off chance she's on to something, I told her
I'd make sure it's treated like a possible homicide, not
just a domestic accident."

Boyle narrowed his incongruous emerald eyes at her. "It sounds like she's a friend of yours."

"Longtime acquaintance," she admitted, repressing a
twinge of guilt at her disloyalty. "You probably know how she
works. She's a politician, she goes to someone on the inside to
get things done. So she came to me, and to get her off my back I told
her I'd make sure it was being done right. One thing the
department does not need is Roz Hall raising a stink about due
process."

"God no. Sure, you go ahead and tell her we're handling things right.

But you might also tell her that I don't appreciate anyone telling me how to do my job."

"I'll be sure to mention it. When I saw who had caught
the case, I knew it'd be done by the book. What did the scene
look like? If you don't mind my nosiness."

"Pictures should be ready this afternoon. It was
messy--burnings always are. As to whether we're looking at a
homicide or not, I couldn't right off tell whether she fell into
the stove or the stove fell onto her, if you see what I mean. There was
accelerant in either case--it was one of those portable kerosene
cook stoves--and there wasn't a whole lot of her left to
look at. The whole house nearly went up."

"Why didn't it?"

"The family was home. The sister-in-law was working in the main kitchen, and she saw--"

"They have two kitchens? Must be a mansion."

"Oh no, it's just that they had a separate cooking area
in the garden, a shack really--no building permit, of
course--where the girl, Pramilla, was working. Sort of what my
grandmother would have called a summer kitchen, very sensible in a
climate like Fresno, or I suppose India."

"I see. Um. Have you talked with the arson investigator?"

"Not yet. I left him there with Crime Scene, taking a million
measurements. He said he'd get back to me. I've got to
leave it to him; I'm supposed to be partnered with Sammy."
Sammy Calvo, the department's most politically incorrect
detective, who suffered (along with everyone around him) from chronic
foot-in-mouth disease, was currently out with the shingles, one of
those complaints that seemed like a joke to anyone who had never lived
with it. She stifled the flip remark that it couldn't happen to a
nicer guy; Boyle presumably was friends with his partner, to some
extent at least.