Night work (24 page)

The sound of running water stopped, followed by a soft pop followed
by a slick rubbing noise. Dimitri came 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
what?"

"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
if
he was making a joke or if he meant it.

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.

"I don't know. Jani worries."

"Send her an e-mail, or fax." This too had been done before, to let Jani know where he was without waking her.

"Yeah, I guess I could. Thanks."

He followed her across town to the silent house on Russian Hill,
joined her in a sandwich and some unfocused and low-voiced conversation
in the kitchen, and then they both fell into their beds for the luxury
of five unbroken hours of sleep.

The two detectives dressed with care in the morning, checking
shirt-fronts for old stains and hair for stray tufts. They walked into
a room which held one lieutenant, one captain, one secretary,
Detectives Boyle and Kitagawa from Homicide and Deaver from the LOPD
task force, a large pot of fresh coffee, a plate of doughnuts, and an
unknown figure whose reputation preceded him, the local FBI agent
Benjamin Marcowitz. He was known as Marc to his very few friends, Benny
to his numerous enemies, and the Man in Black to most of the people who
worked with and for him, both for his habitual choice of dark suit and
for his resemblance to a slimmer, younger Tommy Lee Jones in the movie
of that name.

Kate had never seen an FBI agent who more precisely resembled thecaricaturestraight-faced,straitlaced,clean-cut malein thesuit.

All he needed was a coil of wire emerging from his ear to complete
the picture. Marcowitz's handshake was the least expressive touch
of flesh she had ever experienced: It might have been a leather glove
filled with sand.

Despite first impressions, however, he was not as bad as he might
have been. At this point, he made clear, he was prepared to run a more
or less parallel operation, concentrating on the national search for
similar killings and on providing manpower, backup, and coordination
for the SFPD. He was, in a word, altogether too reasonable, and the
locals eyed him warily.

To Kate's astonishment, a brief smile appeared on his face,
then vanished. "In the past," he told the room, "the
Bureau has generated a lot of ill will by its tendency to take over
cases that might be better handled by the local police departments.
We're actually better used in assistance, on regional cases. I
don't want to get grabby, and I'll do my best to give you
anything we come up with. I hope that works the other way, as
well."

Eyebrows were raised at this innovation of an FBI running interference instead of carrying the ball, but it was a nice thought.

In a short time, decisions were made and responsibilities divided
up. Having three teams of detectives related to this one case meant
tying up practically the entire SFPD homicide detail, and once the
tasers brought in the Ladies task force as well, it was clearly time to
sort things out. Kitagawa had taken the Laxman Mehta call, but
Pramilla's death-- which was Boyle's case--was
clearly a consideration, and over them all was the possible link with
Al and Kate's serial. At the end of the meeting it had been
agreed that, in order to streamline matters, Al and Kate would be the
primaries on this one, with Kitagawa and Boyle feeding them information
so as not to do everything twice and with Marcowitz kept up-to-date so
that, if the time came for the feds to take what he called "a
more active role," there would be no delay. The FBI, in the
meantime, would turn its mighty mind to the problem of the Ladies,
although whether it would give them what it found was anyone's
guess. Kitagawa, on the other hand, was the very essence of
cooperation, having printed off multiple copies of his notes from the
night before (typically enough, typed neatly and thoroughly legible),
including the brief preliminary interview with Peter Mehta.
Laxman's rooms on the upper floor had been sealed off for them,
and for the crime scene team, if necessary.

The morning was fairly thoroughly gone by the time Kate and Al drove
off through a light rain to interview Peter Mehta. Speaking over the
rhythm of the windshield wipers and the blowing defogger, Al said,
"You've met Mehta; how do you want to handle him?"

"He's definitely a man's man. You'd better
start on the questions, I'll jump in when it's time to make
him uncomfortable."

"Thought of anything else I should know?" They had spent
a couple of hours, not only that morning but the night before,
reviewing what Kate knew of the case and its chronology. She thought
about what she had already told him, and what she had not.

"Did I mention the thought that there could have been
something between Peter and Pramilla? Not that I have anything
concrete, just my naturally suspicious mind. She was very pretty and
he's very full of himself. At the very least, he found her
attractive."

"Jealous of Laxman, you think?"

"Who in turn may have picked up on it, and bashed his wife.
Just something to keep in mind. Of course, there's also the fact
that Laxman resented his wife's talking to men on one of her
outings. It was the cause of one of his beatings. It could have led to
him doing her in."

"Which would make it very likely that Laxman was one of our
Ladies' serials. Was there anyone in particular that she was
'talking to'?"

"It's on my list of things to find out. I thought I'd give Amanda Bonner a call later today."