Night Work

“I am certain my wife would have told me. She is not in the habit of letting strangers into the house while I am away.”

“But friends?”

“Women friends, sometimes, yes. But hers, not the girl’s. She was allowed only to invite friends while I was home. We had a small problem once with Laxman becoming disturbed by one of her visitors, and so she saw her friends in the evenings and weekends, or out of the house.”

“And you were not at home that day, Mr. Mehta?”

“It was this time of evening—no, a little earlier. We had not yet eaten dinner, but yes, I was home. Having a drink here in my study while my wife cooked.”

“And your brother?”

“Upstairs in his room. At least, he came down from there when… I saw him come down the stairs when I came through the house to show the fire department where to go.”

“And the children?”

“The younger ones were in their rooms, watching television. My son Rajiv was at the kitchen table doing his homework. He was the first to see the fire, and he shouted at my wife. She ran in here to get me, and I telephoned 911. But I told all this to a dozen people the other night.”

“We’re just confirming our notes, Mr. Mehta. Do you mind if we take a look at the place where Pramilla died?”

“Yes, certainly. You were here the other day, were you not?” he asked, looking from Boyle to Kate and back again. “Forgive me, there were so many people here, the police and the fire department…”

“I was here, yes. Inspector Martinelli was not.”

“Of course. Please, come this way.”

Mehta led them out of the office, which was just inside the front door, and back through the house, past a formal dining room and an adjoining closed door that gave off the fragrance of exotic spices and the mundane sounds of running water and dishes clattering. Mehta paused to switch on the lights, and a garden sprang into view. They stepped out of a sliding glass door onto a brick patio surrounded by a patch of lawn and some unimaginative shrubs. Patio and lawn were scattered with heavy cast-iron garden furniture, a child’s tricycle, several dismembered dolls, and a soccer ball. A door with a curtained window in its upper half stood to their right, an entranceway to the breakfast area and the kitchen beyond.

In sharp contrast to the fragrant kitchen, the garden stank of smoke and wet ashes and a faint trace of burning flesh, a smell which no one who had worked with a charred corpse ever forgot. Yellow crime scene tape was festooned around the shrubs, everything in sight had a thick coating of gray ash, and one whole half of the garden looked as if it had been through a hurricane, the plants flattened, smaller flowers uprooted by the force of the fire hoses. Kate circled around a chaise lounge with mildewing cushions and stepped down from the bricks onto a concrete driveway that ended abruptly at the source of all this devastation, the remnants of the burnt-out shed where the child-bride Pramilla Mehta had died.

It looked to have been a shoddy structure compared to the substantial bulk of the house, and it had burned fast and hot—judging by the heavy charring on the wooden fence ten feet away that had nearly gone up as well. A pan that looked like a shallow wok lay buried under the fallen roof, and a set of three metal kitchen canisters lay flattened, either by heat or under the boots of the firemen. Preservation of a crime scene was never high on the fire department’s list of priorities.

“This was a sort of outdoor kitchen, as I understand it?” Kate asked Mehta.

“I had it built for her,” he answered. “Two women in a kitchen is not always easy, and my wife, Rani, complained that the girl was becoming difficult. Always underfoot, wanting to use the stove to cook her own food —although she was not a good cook and it was not necessary, as the family eats together. In the interest of harmony, we needed a separate area for the girl.”

“Why didn’t you build a proper structure? Why a plywood shed with a kerosene cook stove?”

Mehta sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I must have been asked that question fifty times in the last few days, to the point that I now ask it of myself. The insurance people are the most insistent, and the building inspectors. I can only say that it seemed a logical idea at the time, to put up a strictly temporary structure—it was a kit, from a gardening supply shop—and furnish it the way the girl was used to. She came from a very poor background, the sort who cooks over a cow dung fire and dreams of the day when she could have a kerosene cook stove and a refrigerator proudly displayed in the living room with a doily across the top. I wasn’t about to have an open fire out here, and I didn’t want to run electricity into a shed, but I thought the stove a safe compromise. The entire project was my brother’s suggestion, in fact, and it did serve to calm the waters. Until this.”

“We’d like to speak with your brother, Mr. Mehta,” Boyle told him.

The man sighed again, more deeply than before, and turned back to the house. “Are you finished out here, Inspectors? Because I need to talk to you about my brother before you see him.”

Kate cast a last glance at the collapsed walls and the black, flattened shrubbery that surrounded them, rendered even more unearthly by the strange shadows cast by the garden spotlights. She and Boyle turned to follow Mehta back inside. The curtain on the kitchen door fell back, but not before she had caught a glimpse of a plump woman in a garish orange sari, watching them. Peter’s wife, Rani, no doubt.

Back in the study Mehta sat again behind his broad mahogany desk, leaving them to choose between the two uncomfortable chairs on the other side, chairs whose seats were slightly lower than Mehta’s. Boyle sat down, but Kate chose instead to stand, leaning up against the window frame with the light behind her and in a place that required Mehta to crane his neck around to see her. Two could play the one-upmanship game, and Kate had taken a dislike to Mehta, particularly the way he kept referring to Pramilla not by name, but as merely “the girl.

“What do you have to tell us, Mr. Mehta?” Tommy Boyle asked. He and Kate had talked over everything Roz and Amanda had told her, and she had in turn been given the details of his preliminary interview with Mehta the night of Pramilla’s death. Now it was time to get down to details.

“My brother was too upset the other night to talk to you,” Mehta began. “I made him take his sleeping pill early to calm him down, and he is still most disturbed. The doctor is quite concerned, in fact. I want to stress that interviewing him is not… how shall I say this? Not like interviewing other men.”

“Are you telling me there’s something wrong with your brother, Mr. Mehta?” Boyle asked bluntly. Roz had said there was, but it was best to hear it from the source.

“Yes,” Mehta said with equal frankness. “There is something wrong with my brother. Laxman is more or less retarded. I have been told it was due to our mother’s advanced age when she was pregnant with him, although it may have been a brief problem during the birth that affected him, but in either case he was starved of oxygen during a vital time, and it damaged his brain. He functions, he communicates, he can even read and write and do basic math, but he will never hold more than a low-scale job, and on his own he would never marry a woman with more wit than a ten-year-old.

“In India, caring for people like my brother would be easier. There may be fewer facilities, but more… flexibility, shall we say, and people willing to work for a pittance. But Laxman and I are both American citizens. We were born here, have lived here all our lives. Our mother was a pretty traditional Indian woman in some ways, and always dressed in a sari, but she made certain we spoke only English in the home, and she raised us, as well as she could, as Americans.

“She died six years ago, when Laxman was twenty-three. He missed her enormously—still does; he’s never really gotten over her death. So Rani and I decided that the best solution was to bring him a kind of substitute mother, you might say: a wife. Their children… any children Laxman fathers will be normal, you understand; we were not being irresponsible. And from the wife’s point of view, a village girl, even a bright one, wouldn’t have the same expectations of a husband as someone who had grown up in a city. The girl we found was ideal. A little young by American standards, I realize, but not by Indian ones.

“And it seemed to work well at the beginning. Oh, the very beginning was a little rocky, but as soon as we got back here they settled in nicely. The girl was so quiet you hardly knew she was here, and Laxman seemed very fond of her. He found her soothing, began speaking a little more Hindi to her, dressing in kurta pajamas instead of jeans. I was very pleased, and God knows things went smoother, both here and at work, where Laxman had been trying to do jobs he couldn’t possibly handle and creating untold difficulties for me. If only she’d gotten pregnant.”

“That created a problem? They hadn’t been married all that long.”