“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.
“Would you like a hand with this one?”
“I could use it,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t have thought that you need to go around drumming up business.”
“I’ve got the two actives, a handful of cold ones, and I’d be happy to give you a couple of hours’ follow-up on this one.”
“Right, then. I have to be in court all day—do you want to give the ME and the arson investigator a call this afternoon, see what they have? You might even go see them, if you have the time.” It being a recognized fact of life that the physical presence of an investigator was harder to ignore than a voice on the phone.
“I’ll stop by if I can, pick up their reports. Anything to keep Reverend Hall off the chief’s back,” she told him. The machine on the counter had stopped gurgling, so Kate poured them each a cup of coffee and they went back to their desks.
One of those jobs came to her, saving her trekking across the city. Amanda Bonner phoned and said that Roz Hall (at the very mention of whose name Kate was beginning to develop a wince) had told her to call and tell Kate what she knew. Kate hesitated, decided that Boyle would be happy enough to hand the preliminary interview over to her, and told Bonner to come down. She was there within half an hour.
Kate could well imagine that a teenager out of village India would find Amanda Bonner an impressive figure. She herself found Bonner impressive. Six feet tall, a hundred sixty pounds of very solid bone and muscle, she made Kate feel short, pale, flabby, and ineffectual. Her hand was dry and callused when she shook Kate’s office worker palm, and she shed her jacket in the warmth of the small interview room to reveal sculpted muscles beneath a tank top. Kate might have tagged her as a bodybuilder, but Bonner just dropped into a chair with no hint of arrangement or posing except that when she leaned forward to talk with Kate, the top of her shirt fell away from her chest, giving Kate a glimpse of unfettered breasts that were surprisingly generous, with a sprinkling of freckles and a tan that appeared to go all the way down. Kate averted her eyes and sat down firmly in her own chair, pulling up a businesslike notebook and pen to take the woman’s statement.
As Roz had told Kate, Bonner had met Pramilla Mehta over a head of purple kale in the supermarket. She had seen the Indian girl numerous times before that, since Amanda’s aging parents lived on the same block as the Mehtas and Amanda stopped in almost every day to shop and cook and generally check up on them.
“It’s a pretty ritzy area, you know. The Mehtas are about the only ethnic people there—aside from the gardeners and cooks. A beautiful young girl wearing a
“What was your relationship with Pramilla Mehta?” Kate asked.
“Friendship, basically. Older sister stuff. If you’re asking if I slept with her, the answer is no. Frankly, she wasn’t my kind. For one thing, she was straight—or at least, she was too young and confused to think about being anything else. Personally, I prefer the strong, confident type. Don’t you?”
Now Kate was certain that the gaping shirt had been no accident, though she kept her face as straight as Pramilla’s orientation. It happened often enough, women flirting with her, since everyone in the city who read a paper or watched the news knew who and what Kate Martinelli was. All she could do was ignore it, as she had a dozen times before. No different, really, from a straight male cop with a female witness coming on to him. Amusing, but she mustn’t show that; a smile would either offend or be taken as an encouragement.
“How did you communicate with the girl?” Kate asked. “I thought she didn’t speak much English.”
“I’ve traveled all over the world, and had a lot of experience in talking to people whose language I don’t speak. It’s mostly a matter of not being embarrassed about making a fool of yourself with sign language and asking for words. And besides, Pramilla understood a lot, and as soon as she realized that I wasn’t going to make fun of her like her family did, she relaxed and could speak a lot better than when she was worried about getting it right.”
“But I would expect that a lot of what you understood about her life was reading between the lines,” Kate suggested.
“That’s true. And I’m sure I read some of the more subtle things wrong. But then, that happens even between people who speak the same language, doesn’t it?”
“Did she tell you that her husband hit her? In so many words?”
“One day she had a bad bruise on her cheek. I asked if Laxman had done it, and she nodded.”
“Nodded, or shrugged?”
“That sort of Indian wag of the head. It means, ”Oh yes, but never mind.“ ”
It could mean any number of things, thought Kate to herself. “And the other abuses? You told Roz that Peter’s wife, Rani, pinched her.”
“And slapped her a couple of times. It’s fairly traditional in families like that to find a younger relative imported as a servant—or an older one, which the Mehtas have as well. Slave is more like it, because they aren’t usually paid wages, just given a bed and food. Pramilla at least had Laxman’s allowance.”
“Have you met Laxman?”
“Not directly. I’ve seen him a couple of times, once with her in the market telling her what to buy, and once when they were getting off a bus. He was carrying this tiny parcel, a pie or something in a bakery box, and he got off first; she was behind him with this great armload of string bags of vegetables and two grocery bags, and she stumbled coming down the steps and nearly dropped the lot. He just shouted at her—in Hindi so I couldn’t understand the words, but it was obvious that he was giving her hell. Then he walked away leaving her to carry the rest.”
“What did you do?”
“What did I do? Nothing.” Bitterness crept into Bonner’s voice. “Pramilla had made it clear that it only made more problems for her when I tried to interfere. If I’d seen Laxman actually hit her, I would have stepped in, called the police, the whole nine yards. But since I didn’t, I thought it would be better for her if she made the decision to leave him. She had my number, she knew I would come to her any time of the day or night. I even gave her a hot- line number, in case she wanted to talk to someone who understood better than I.”
“Understood… ?”
“Her situation and her language. But as far as I know, she never called. Not then, anyway.”
Kate lifted her eyebrows in a question. After a minute, Bonner reluctantly dredged up the rest of it. “I think she may have tried to call me, just before she was killed. I was out shopping for my parents, and when I got home there was a hang-up message on the answering machine. Nobody there, and when I tried to do that star sixty-nine thing to call back, it wouldn’t go through. And then that afternoon when I went to take the groceries to my folks, there were all these police cars down the street. I can’t help but wonder…”
