tongue. Perhaps a black sheep, Kate thought, noticing Maj’s disapproving glance at the animal’s damp and sandy feet. How did one train a dog to wipe his feet at the door?
“He’s very nice,” she said obediently, though she’d never been much for dogs. “How long have you had him?”
“Couple of months. He belongs to a friend who moved back to England. She couldn’t stand the thought of locking him up for their six-month quarantine, so we sort of inherited him, unless she decides to come back. Mina adores him, and Maj approves of the way he forces me to get some exercise. Want a cup of coffee?”
“Love one.”
“Are you in a hurry?” Roz asked over her shoulder, her key in the lock. “If you’re not, I’ll jump in and out of the shower first so we don’t have to leave all the windows open. Mutt doesn’t mind my delicate fragrance, but human noses tend to twitch.”
“Shower ahead, there’s no rush.”
Mutt did have the manners to shake himself before entering the house, and he pounded up the stairs on Roz’s heels. Maj shook her head affectionately and led Kate back into the large, spotless, very Scandinavian-looking kitchen to put on a pot of coffee for Roz and Kate and a cup of herbal tea for herself and the baby. She moved more heavily these days, balancing against the weight in front, and Kate reflected that on the way over this morning she had seen four other pregnant women, at various places along the streets. Either half the city was pregnant, or she had babies on the brain.
“The smell of coffee doesn’t bother you?” Kate asked. Giving up coffee for nine months if Lee got pregnant was not an appealing thought.
“No,” Maj replied. “Should it?”
“My partner Al’s
“Coffee doesn’t affect me. It’s odd things like chicken and celery that get to me.” She shrugged. “Who knows?”
“How’s my step-goddaughter? Over her monkey phase yet?”
“I wish. She found a book on Jane Goodall last week. Now she wants to go to Africa and live with the chimpanzees.”
“And you? Getting any work done?” A person tended to forget that Maj Freiling had a life out from the shadow of Roz Hall and the family structure, but that was partly due to the general uncertainty about what Maj’s job was. It was neither psychology nor brain surgery, but existed somewhere between the two, and seemed to consist of conversations with researchers on how people thought. She was, Kate knew, working on and off writing a book, which Lee had explained as having to do with sex-linked characteristics and gender role expectations, but that too was made up of apparently unrelated fragments rather than a unifying thesis. Today’s conversation was typical.
“Oh, yes,” Maj answered. “I came across an interesting man at San Francisco State who is looking at the complexity of our perception of a person’s voice, how we can judge sex and age, education and authority just by a few words over the telephone. He is working from an evolutionary viewpoint, the question of why a person’s voice perception is so capable of reading subtle clues, almost as much as visual perception. I am more interested in the consequences, but I am thinking of adding a chapter, or at any rate a
They drank their hot drinks and talked about this and that, and then Roz came back in, her hair wet and Mutt’s nearly dry, to pour herself some coffee and a bowl of cereal.
“Want anything to eat?” she asked Kate, who declined the offer. “Well, let me fill up your cup again and we’ll get out from under Maj’s feet.”
Roz’s office was as untidy as the kitchen was neat, bookshelves sagging, a door-on-sawhorses set up at a right angle to a sturdy oak desk, both entirely buried in books and files and computer printouts. Roz walked around to the niche surrounded by desks and shelves and balanced her bowl and cup on top of a stack of folders. She waved Kate to the chair across from her and began to spoon up her breakfast.
“What have you found about Pramilla Mehta?” she asked around a mouthful of granola. “Can you prove yet that her husband killed her?”
“The investigation is, as they say, ongoing.”
Roz peered at her over the laden desk. “You can’t talk about it.”
Kate pulled a face. “It’s difficult. He was clearly mentally deficient, and possibly mentally disturbed. We’re having a profile put together, to see if he had a potential for violent outbursts followed by careful planning. I mean, we know he could be violent, but the cover-up is the question. I personally don’t think he did, but then I only met him once, and he wasn’t in very good shape at the time.” If Roz was either surprised or suspicious at Kate’s willingness to share information, she did not show it, but Kate knew that there would be no forthcoming information from Roz if Kate did not at least give the appearance of openness. And she had actually not given Roz anything that wasn’t in the papers.
Roz chewed for a minute and washed it down with a swallow of coffee. “I’ve had a word with the mayor and your chief of police last night, suggesting that the murder of Pramilla Mehta may need closer examination. It’s going to be a touchy subject—the Indian community is not going to be thrilled to be accused of the barbaric act of burning young brides—but at the same time we can’t ignore it. This’ll be a political hot potato.”
Kate gaped at her, unwilling to believe what she had just heard, but unable to put any other interpretation on it. “Roz, what the hell did you do that for? How do you expect us to carry out an investigation with a bunch of politicians sitting on our shoulders?”
“Are you angry?” Roz sounded puzzled, and Kate for a moment thought it might be an honest reaction. But no—it had to be an act; no one as well versed in the workings of the city as Roz Hall could fail to grasp consequences so innocently.
“Of course I’m angry. You shove the case into my hands and then, when two days go by without an arrest, you snatch it away and say that nothing’s being done. For Christ sake, Roz, I’ve got the FBI and a hundred reporters to deal with and now—you might have warned me you were about to drop City Hall on me as well.”
“I thought you could use the additional manpower,” Roz protested. “I told them you were doing the best you—”
“Christ, Roz, you know full well what this’ll involve. A string of meetings holding hands and explaining how we have to do it, hours and hours eaten up that could be better spent—” Kate realized that Roz was not paying any attention to her words, but was looking past her at the door. Kate turned in her chair and saw Maj’s apologetic face looking in.
“It’s Jory on the phone,” she said to Roz. “There’s a problem with the information packets for the meeting this afternoon. Something about copyright questions and the copy shop?”
Roz rubbed at her face in irritation and stood up. “I’m sorry Kate, I have to deal with this. I’ll be back in a minute.” She followed Maj out of the room, although there was a telephone on the desk, and closed the door. Kate too got to her feet and paced up and down the crowded room. She paused at Roz’s desk to glance at the books Roz was reading now, and found her usual wild assortment of titles:
Roz was probably only trying to help, in her own heavy-handed way, Kate told herself. It was a pain, but not a disaster; hell, it might even mean she and Hawkin got some help with the scut work and typing.
Kate realized that the object on the desk in front of her was a bound copy of Roz’s thesis, firmly described on the front page as a “first draft.” It was titled “Women’s Rage and Men’s Dishonor: Manifestations of the Violent Goddess in the Hebrew Bible.” She opened it curiously to glance over what Roz was doing.
The brief introduction was relatively intelligible, as academic writing went. Roz seemed to be looking at ways in which the warrior-goddesses of the ancient Near East (Ishtar and Asherah Kate had heard of, though not Anat or Hathor), their stories, songs, and characteristics, welled up in the tales and ideas of the Old Testament. After a general introduction, however, the writing seemed to become more technical and heavily footnoted, sprinkled with
