Night Work

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.

“One of the books she took up was the Bible. But the more she read, the angrier it made her, what she called ‘man’s inhumanity to woman.” The story of the man entertaining important visitors who gives his concubine to a drunken mob to abuse and kill, so as to save his guests. Or Tamar, the young widow who dresses up as a prostitute and seduces her own father-in-law to force her husband’s family to undertake their responsibilities toward her.