out, drying his face in a towel and smelling of deodorant. Kate made the introductions, she and Al both shook the man’s nice clean hand, and then he dropped into a chair, swiveling it around to open a tiny refrigerator at his knee. He pulled out a bottle of mineral water, offered them a drink (which both refused), and unscrewed the cap to empty half the bottle down his throat in a series of muscular gulps.
“Sorry,” he said when he came up again for air. “Gets hot in there. What can I do for you?”
“Do you know the man who was found in the alley?”
“I didn’t go look at him, just saw him for a second from the kitchen door before I was shoved back inside, but he didn’t look familiar. Do you know who it was?”
“His name was Laxman Mehta.”
“Indian? No, I think I would’ve noticed an Indian. We don’t get too many in here—they tend to be a little… conservative.”
“You’d certainly have noticed this one. Five six, slim, soft brown skin, long eyelashes, high cheekbones. Like a doe on two legs. Looked about sixteen, was actually in his late twenties.”
Dimitri raised his eyebrows. “I couldn’t have missed the effect he would have had on the place.”
“You don’t think he was in here, then?”
“Was he into the leather scene?”
“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t even think he was gay.”
“A waste,” Dimitri commented.
“Are you the owner here, Mr… ?” Hawkin spoke up, trying for the Russian’s surname, but defeated before he began. A massive arm waved away the attempt.
“Nobody can say my last name. That’s why I chose it—I was born Travers. Call me Dimitri. And yes, I’m the owner—or, me and the bank anyway.”
“Are you here most of the time?”
“Six days a week, opening to closing. We’re shut Sundays. Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.”
Hawkin peered at the man to see if he was serious, and decided he was joking, but Kate vaguely remembered that Dimitri had been a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hawkin continued. “And you didn’t hear anything in the alleyway? Sounds of a fight, say, or a car engine?”
“I was out there earlier, dumping the garbage, and after that things got busy. And before you ask, no, he wasn’t there when I went out.”
“When would that have been?”
“Let’s see. Definitely after six ‘cause the news I watch was over, but before six-fifteen. Can’t get closer than that.”
Kate checked her notes: The first call to 911 had come in at 8:42. She’d been buzzed about forty-five minutes later, and it was now nearly tomorrow.
“Do you get many women in here?” Kate asked without much hope. Whether they were LOPD Ladies or simply women, a female would stand out in Dimitri’s.
“Did you see many? Oh, we get a few, mostly they drop in on a dare, sometimes they come in with friends. They don’t stay. And I don’t remember any tonight.”
“Can you give us a list of your customers’ names, Dimitri? Anyone who would have been here between six and eight-thirty?”
“God, you don’t ask for much, do you? You know, the best thing would be to come back tomorrow night and ask them yourselves. Weekdays like this, my guys tend to be regulars, especially that early in the evening. Then I could give you some names, they could give you others, you’d get a more complete list.”
“You don’t mind having your… patrons questioned?” Al asked him.
“I stopped your partner flashing her badge because this time of night’s an entirely different crowd, and they won’t have heard about the killing yet. By tomorrow they’ll all know, and even if your man wasn’t gay, he sounds pretty enough that a passing gay-basher would have assumed he was. You’ll find my customers’ll be willing to help, especially the early crowd. They’re more, I suppose you could call it family-oriented.”
“ ‘Family-oriented,” “ Al repeated.
“Do you have a problem with my place of business?” demanded the big man, his eyebrows coming together. “Because if so, maybe it’d be better if Martinelli came back alone.”
“Problem? No, I don’t have any problems with your bar or its clientele. It just seems so…” Al paused to consider his word, while Dimitri’s shoulders bulged menacingly and Kate prepared to duck. “So old-fashioned.”
Dimitri’s muscles deflated comically. “So
“Quaint, I suppose. I mean, you almost expect to be issued a towel at the door.”
He blinked blandly at Dimitri, who finally decided that his leg was being pulled, and gave a great bellow of laughter. He slapped Al affectionately on the shoulder, nearly shooting him off the chair.
“ ‘Old-fashioned,” “ he said, chuckling. ”I like that. But yeah, you know, a place like this really is about as close to the old bathhouse energy as you’re going to get in this day and age. You could say I’m helping my people find their roots.“ He laughed again, hugely amused, and Kate and Al left him to a contemplation of his quaint and old-fashioned leather-bound and metal-studded customers.
The two detectives paused on the bar’s back step to look over the taped-off alley, waiting for the light of day to search for its forensic secrets. After a minute Kate snorted.
“God, Al, I thought you were going to insult that guy and I’d have to peel you off the wall. ”Quaint,“ yet.”
“Well, sure. Places like this are so nineteenth-century, they’re positively archaic. Wealthy male aristocrats with a taste for being spanked go to private clubs where they can dress up in uncomfortable clothing and masks for a bit of anonymous fun and then go home to their regular lives. Hell, the Victorians even invented the nipple ring.”
Looking at the side of his face in the half-light spilling into the alleyway, Kate could not tell
In either case, it was an interpretation of leather bars that had never before occurred to Kate, and she made a mental note to try it out on Lee. And Jon.
Chapter 14
DIMITRI’s TWO CUSTOMERS HAD seen nothing and no one when they set off on their shortcut through the alley, except for Laxman’s body, which they nearly stepped on. The men were a longtime couple, a month past their tenth anniversary, and the younger one, the one gripping the asthma inhaler as a talisman, had never seen anything like it before. His older partner seemed more resigned, certainly less shocked, which made sense when he told them that he had spent two years as a medic in Vietnam.
They had not noticed anyone out of the ordinary in the hour or so they had been in Dimitri’s, and certainly no women. The older man thought he had seen a car drive out of the end of the alley, something boxy and light in color, but he couldn’t swear to it because just then his partner had stumbled and screamed at what lay at his feet. When asked, they worked out a list of who had been there at the same time. Many of the names were less than helpful, since they consisted of nicknames like Studly and Dragon (for metalwork and a tattoo, respectively), but Dimitri would no doubt be able to translate them, and the task cheered the asthmatic up considerably.
Kitagawa called them to say that Peter Mehta was too upset to talk to them that night and that his wife had already taken her sleeping pill and gone to bed. Kitagawa had reluctantly agreed to return the next day, and wondered if Kate and Al considered a watch on the house necessary. They decided it was not. In the meantime, Kitagawa would take the photograph of Laxman he had gotten from Peter and leave it to be copied overnight, to help their neighborhood canvass.
When they got back to Dimitri’s they found that even the media had packed up their cameras and returned to their beds, leaving the Castro to its family-oriented residents and the few late-night denizens whose voices echoed down the thinly populated streets as they walked off beneath the street lamps, leaving behind that remnant of a free-and-easy, pre-AIDS past called Dimitri’s.
“You want a bed?” Kate asked her partner, who was looking at a forty-minute drive home. Plus, with the Laxman killing, it was time to upgrade the task force: an early-morning meeting had been called, a long-overdue gathering of all the disparate law enforcement individuals concentrating on the series of killings, including the feds. Al would want to be alert for that, and had taken her up on such offers a number of times before, since marrying Jani and giving up his apartment in San Francisco. He even kept a clean shirt and a razor in the guest room.
