Night Work

“Just a minute, Rajiv,” Boyle said as the boy obediently began to gather his books. “You were here, weren’t you, that night?”

Rajiv nodded.

“Right here?”

Another nod.

“You were the first one to see the fire?”

Nod.

Kate walked over to glance out of the window beside the boy. From where he was seated, only the back half of the garden shed was visible— the fire would have been well and truly under way before he had seen it.

“Did you see anyone near your aunt’s cook shed a little while before you saw the fire?”

“I was working,” Rajiv told them. Having seen the boy’s powers of concentration, Kate could well believe that a troop of mounted police could have ridden through the backyard without disturbing the scholar from his books.

“Go now, Rajiv,” his mother said firmly, and waited while all three children left the room before she drew herself up to face the invading police.

Rani Mehta was a formidable woman, not tall but with rolls of brown flesh at the edges of her brilliant orange sari and its short flowered underblouse. She wore her hair in a heavy bun on the back of her head and had a dozen solid silver bracelets on her wrists like shackles. The red marriage mark on her forehead looked like a bleeding sore. Her features were heavy, her teeth strong and white, and she had a black mole on her face next to her nose. Not for the first time, Kate speculated about the attraction that the lithe young Pramilla might have had for her brother- in-law.

They discovered that the woman’s understanding of their questions was pretty close to complete, and Kate recalled from someone’s statement that Pramilla was accustomed to having the television on all day. Probably Rani did as well, which might also explain the paradox of her relatively clear understanding coupled with the difficulty she demonstrated in putting together an English sentence: A person does not generally carry on a two-way conversation with the TV.

“Mrs. Mehta,” Boyle went on, “could you tell us please what you were doing that afternoon?”

“I cook,” she said, looking down her slightly upturned nose at Kate as if understanding that this was a woman who neither cooked nor cared for children. “I made mutter panir and dhal and kaju kari and brinjal and two chatnis, and I was cooking the parathas when I heard Rajiv shout. I ran to get my husband in his room. He went to look, and then he call the fire.”

“Do you know what Pramilla was doing in the cooking shed?”

The fat rolls shrugged. “Cooking. She take panir—cheese—to make pakharas. I say leave some for the mutter panir, she leave small piece. I think, oh well.”

The colloquial expression sounded odd in the heavy accent, but neither detective smiled.

“What do you think happened, Mrs. Mehta?”

The woman pushed out her lower lip and gave a small eyebrow shrug. “I think she spill the hot oil into the fire. Pakharas is not for foolish girls to make.”

“The, um, pakharas are cooked in hot oil?”

“Boiling oil,” she said with relish. “Very boiling.”

“I see. Well, thank you, Mrs. Mehta. We may want to speak with you again tomorrow, but we’ll let you get on with your work.”

Rani dried her hands on a towel and accompanied them to the front door—less, Kate thought, as a polite gesture than to ensure they did not poke into things on their way out. They thanked her again, and heard the lock turn behind them as they went down the front steps.

Boyle had driven, and would drop Kate home. As he put the car into forward, he said, “That woman is really something.”

“She must have hated Pramilla the minute she set eyes on her. And to have the girl under the same roof as her husband. She might be a great cook and the mother of his children, but she was never a beauty.”

“But Laxman loved the girl. Temper or no, he loved her.”

Kate agreed; that bedroom shouted aloud the man’s devotion, heaping beauteous objects on his wife. Yes, Laxman’s extravagant grief had been real enough. However, love went hand in hand with violence, as anyone who worked a domestic homicide could testify, and especially with the jealous knowledge of Pramilla’s illicit conversations with other men riding in his mind. Grief in and of itself was no proof that Laxman’s had not been the hand that knocked the girl down, any more than his disgust at her charred body could prove that he had not in rage or confusion or childish petulance splashed her with kerosene and set her alight.

No proof at all.

Chapter 12

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Jimmy Larsen and Matty Banderas rode squarely in the center of Kate’s sight, with Pramilla Mehta—who was, after all, Boyle’s case—firmly pushed slightly off to one side, while on the periphery of her vision lurked all the other still-open cases, haunting the corners of her mind like so many cobwebbed gargoyles. A call from Janice Popper revealed that Matthew Banderas had made a pass at the manager of a software store, and when she had canceled their purchase contract, he had threatened to tell everyone that she was a lesbian. She just laughed and told him to go ahead, since it happened that she was. The woman also told Popper that she had been receiving an unusual number of wrong-number, dark-of-the-night phone calls and two whispered obscenities on her answering machine. None, incidentally, since Matthew Banderas had died.

One high point was a phone call from Martina Wiley, sounding like a cat at the cream. She practically purred as she told Kate that a rather firm interview with Melanie Gilbert had given them some prime hints not only about the Banderas sex life, which had been far kinkier than Gilbert had been willing to admit at first, but also led to a storage locker in Novate It was currently being gone over with the finest-toothed combs in the Crime Scene repertoire, but it looked to be where Matty had stashed his rape souvenirs. His victims, and the police departments across the Bay Area, would begin to sleep more soundly.

On the Larsen homicide, a follow-up series of interviews at the airport turned up a fellow baggage handler who had run across Jimmy Larsen in a bar, and remembered Larsen mentioning sleep problems due to a strange woman calling in the middle of the night to hassle him. About what, he hadn’t said, just that he was tired and fed up, but didn’t want to leave the phone off the hook in case Emily phoned (his wife, he had hastened to tell his co- worker, was just off visiting her father, and would be home soon).

Kate worked long hours over the weekend, trekking south to the airport to question airport personnel, north of the bridge to talk to computer programmers, and closer to home to listen to the bereft and guilt-plagued Amanda Bonner.

On Monday, Kate had scheduled a few hours off to go with Lee, Roz, and Maj to see Song. They were to meet Jon there, and after the performance they would finally meet Sione, and have a late dinner together. However, the day’s lack of any real progress meant a reluctance to call it quits, and at six o’clock Kate was still at her desk. When the phone rang, she knew who it would be before she picked it up, and indeed, Lee’s voice came strongly over the line, demanding to know when Kate was planning to appear.

“I’m leaving in two minutes, honest,” Kate pleaded, scribbling her signature on one report and reaching for the next.

“No, you’re not. You are leaving right now.”

“Yes, right now. As soon as I finish the—”

“Kate.”

“Okay. I’m leaving. That’s the sound of my desk drawer you hear. It’s closing. I’m out the door.”

“Now.”

In three minutes Kate actually was heading out the door when she was greeted by the startling sight of a slim woman being viciously assaulted by a burly man in the hallway right outside the homicide division, while a group of police officers, uniformed and plainclothes, looked on in nodding approval. Kate came to a sharp halt, then realized that the woman was actually a cop, and the man as well, and that the hard blows they were practicing