Night work (26 page)

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
wastebaskets. 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?"

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, after 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.

"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.