Night work (40 page)

"Thank God for small favors."

"That doesn't mean she isn't in there somewhere," he warned.

"Oh, she's involved somewhere, even if it's only
planting the idea of a vengeful goddess into Phoebe's mind. Or
Carla's. And she knows it, or suspects it. I wonder if
that's why she's gone after the Mehtas with such a passion.
Denial and guilt and the feeling that if she wasn't involved, she
should have been? God knows. I'll have to ask Lee," she
said, completely unaware of her identification of Lee with the Almighty.

"You stay here," Hawkin told her. "I'll
round up a uniform to babysit Lomax if she comes out of surgery before
we get back."

"Expecting a confession, Al?" Her voice was bitter; he glanced at her sharply, but said nothing.

Considering Carla Lomax's condition, the uniformed guard was
probably a waste of the taxpayers' money, but she was there as
much to keep camera lenses out as to keep Lomax from escaping, and Kate
suspected she would earn her pay. They gave her their various numbers,
she promised to pass the information on to any replacement guard, and
Kate and Al left her to it. Halfway to the elevators, the two
detectives came to a dead halt. Diana Lomax was emerging from the steel
doors, deep in conversation with several supporters, among them Maj
Freiling. Kate could see the coming confrontation, and she quailed.

"I can't face them, Al," Kate told him in something close to despair.

"So don't," he said simply, and took her arm to
steer her back down the other way, up and down a lot of stairs, and
eventually through the still-crowded emergency room (more dormitory for
the area's homeless at this hour than it was hospital) to the
parking lot.

"Where the hell did I leave my car, anyway?" Kate asked
Al. "Oh yeah, Marcowitz drove to the shelter, so it's still
at the lot. You'll have to drive me by so I can fetch it. Ah,
hell; what am I thinking about? The hospital doesn't need me to
watch over Carla Lomax. Let's go and pat Mehta's hand, and
then you can take me home and I'll see if I can get Lee to talk
Roz out of her news conference, and then we'll all get twelve
hours' sleep and live happily ever after."

"If that was an offer of your guest bed," Al said,
"thanks, but I think that tonight I need to be in my own. I can
drop you by your house, or the lot."

"The lot, thanks. Is there any reason to go by the shelter, or the two women's houses?"

"Marcowitz has his teeth into those."

A vivid and surreal image floated through Kate's tired mind,
of the strong, shiny teeth of the Man in Black sunk deep into the front
corner of a trim little cottage. She shook her head to clear it.

"Did he say anything to you about what happened at the shelter?"

"Not much, just enough so it was obvious he feels he screwed up."

"He did. We both did." And Carla Lomax was paying the price.

Kate half hoped they would find the Mehta house dark and silent,
allowing them to pass by to their waiting beds, but such was not to be.
All the outside lights were glaring and the downstairs windows were lit
up, including Mehta's front study. The two detectives sighed
simultaneously, and got out of the car.

The moment they set foot on the walkway, the front door flew open,
revealing an unshaven, uncombed Peter Mehta, dressed in a dark jogging
suit and carrying a heavy stick in his right hand. They froze.

Hawkin cleared his throat. "Mr. Mehta, would you please put down your club?"

The man in the doorway looked at the object in his hand and reached
down to prop it in the corner. The two detectives resumed their journey
up the walk and into the house. Mehta began speaking rapidly before the
door was shut.

"That madwoman! You must do something about her. This is
America--she has no right to torment my family. I will buy a gun
to protect my wife and children! You have to make her stop."

Kate put a hand on his arm, which surprised him into sudden silence.
Wondering vaguely if she'd violated some cultural taboo, she
removed her hand and used it to gesture toward the man's study.
"Shall we talk, Mr. Mehta?" she asked in a calm voice, and
when they were all settled, she took out her notebook, although she
doubted she would be writing anything in it--or if she did, that
she would be able to decipher it in the morning.

"Now, Mr. Mehta, can you tell us what this is about?"

"She threatened me, my family."

"Who threatened you?"

"That Hall woman who calls herself a minister and her minion,
the--what is the word?--dyke who led little Pramilla astray.
Amanda something, and some other woman, and my God, the press! But
mostly the Hall woman. She said she would burn us as little Pramilla
was burned." It was "little Pramilla" now, Kate
noted, not "the girl." The belated affection soured her
stomach even further.

"That's a very serious charge, Mr. Mehta," Al said.

"It was in the newspaper. They did not name her, but it was
what the voice told me on the telephone, that she would do to us what
happened to Pramilla. Look," he demanded, "I have lost my
sister-in-law, and then my own brother. Killed by those--those
harridans, I have no doubt. Do I need to arm myself--or even take
my whole family back to India, to escape their wrath? You must protect
us."

It was difficult to separate Mehta's honest distress from his
dramatic excesses and the unfortunate humor his increasingly singsong
accent brought along; still, they had no choice but to take him at face
value, at least for the moment. Kate asked if she could borrow his
telephone to make the necessary arrangements.

"We'll have the house watched tonight and during the day
tomorrow. Ms. Hall is due to speak with the press in the morning, but
I'll see if we can reach her before then, ask her to tone down
her remarks until we've had a chance to look into her
accusations. Now," Kate said firmly, holding her hand up to stem
his protest, "we can't stop her from speaking to reporters,
any more than we tried to stop you. If I try to force her, it will only
make matters worse." Mehta subsided, grumbling to himself at the
innate unfairness of the American system, protecting the criminals and
leaving a man to protect his family alone.

Kate felt suddenly flattened by exhaustion, and she snapped,
"Mr. Mehta, we've just spent a very long day cleaning up
after a bunch of vigilantes who thought the same thing. If we hear
you've gone out and bought a gun, I for one am going to be really
unhappy."

"No, no, I did not mean that. I do not want a gun--what
do I know of guns but that children find them and shoot each other? I
will let your officer do his work, and hope only that you will talk
some sense into the madwoman."

Kate winced at the description of a woman she still thought of as a
friend, but she didn't argue with it. She didn't want to
argue with anyone else, wanted only to tumble over onto Mehta's
sofa and pass out, but she had to stay rational until they could turn
him over to the uniformed officer.

While Al and Mehta walked around the house and checked the doors and
windows, Kate used Mehta's phone a second time to call the
hospital. Carla was out of surgery, her condition critical but stable,
whatever that meant. She hung up and wandered around the office,
suspecting that if she sat down she'd fall asleep. The books on
Mehta's shelves looked unread, there because a man's study
needed a lot of hardcover spines. Many of them were in some squiggly
alphabet, and some of them were on India and Indian art. That reminded
Kate of a question she'd carried around for days now, so when
Mehta came back she asked him.

"Does your family..." How did one ask this? Kate
wondered. "Do you worship the goddess Kali, Mr. Mehta?"

"Of course not," he said, sounding affronted. "Only the... lower castes worship Kali. And tribals."

The outcasts and the marginalized. The invisible ones again.

"Well, do you know anything about her worship?"

"Only in general. I have never been to one of her temples, if
that's what you mean, never witnessed a sacrifice."

"Sacrifice? What, like animals?"

"Goats most usually, smaller animals and birds for the poorer people."

"Do you by any chance know if they're strangled?"

"What, the animals?" Mehta said, his voice rising in protest at the question.

"Yes, the goats and such."

He took a deep breath, and said primly, "I believe their throats are cut.

"But I thought Hindus were vegetarians?"

"They don't
eat
the animals." Mehta was
now frankly appalled, even more offended than he had been at the idea
of his family worshiping this dark goddess. Kate just looked at him,
wondering if his answers would have made sense if she weren't so
damned groggy, and then doggedly backtracked to where she had begun.

"I just asked about her worship because I was wondering if candy was a usual offering to Kali."

"Candy?"

She was beginning to regret that she'd asked. "Yes,
pieces of candy. Chocolate, hard sweets, that kind of thing."

"I have never heard of that, although I suppose one could offer anything to a god, and foodstuffs are commonly used.
Ghee
--melted
butter--is often used to anoint... objects of spiritual
energy. But I have never heard of pieces of candy." Kate started
to tell him thanks and it was not important, but he was not through.
"Now if you'd asked me about
Candi,"
he
said, giving it a different pronunciation, "that I could help you
with. Candi is another name for the goddess Kali, what you might call
another manifestation of the primary goddess Durga. Hindu mythology is
a little complicated," he said, sounding apologetic.

"Yes," murmured Kate. "So I understand."

"Do Indians eat candy, Mr. Mehta?" Al asked.

Mehta looked puzzled at this bizarre conversation, but he answered
readily enough. "Yes, we eat candy--at least, the children
do, when their mother lets them. In India there is little chocolate,
because of the heat, you know, but we have many sweetmeats made from
milk and nuts, and using fruits and vegetables. Very rich, but actually
not bad for you. Would you like to try some? My wife buys it in
Berkeley."

Kate would have demurred, but Hawkin said yes, he would be
interested, and there seemed to be nothing else to do while they waited
for the patrol officer, so Mehta, polite if uncomprehending, led them
back to the kitchen and took out several clear plastic deli boxes
filled with soft squares, white, orange, and a bilious pink color.

"Burfi,"
he said, offering them a square of mealy and cloyingly sweet white stuff that tasted like perfume. "Carrot
halwa,
and almond
burfi.
And there are also
gulab jaman
and
jelabis,
which my wife makes sometimes, but I would call those desserts or pastries, not candy."

Kate was having trouble with the substance in her mouth, but Hawkin
swallowed hard and said thickly, "What about those little
assorted seeds and stuff?"

"Seeds? You mean
saumf?
Not candy, no. You might call
it a snack, I suppose, though I'd say it's more a breath
freshener." He rummaged through another shelf and came out with a
packet of loose seed mix with colored specks, apparently identical to
the little bag of seeds Laxman had carried in his pocket.
"Americans don't tend to chew things, other than gum, but
we chew
betal,
which makes one spit, or
saumf,
which doesn't. Chewing or not chewing is a cultural difference."

"But it's not candy?"

"Not by any stretch of the imagination, Inspector."

Their strange questions had woken his curiosity, but they did not
choose to enlighten him. The patrolman arrived a minute later, and they
left, reassuring Mehta, hit by a sudden return of anxiety, that they
would do their best to deflect Roz Hall. They turned the house over to
the uniform and settled into their car, with Hawkin behind the wheel.

Kate, oddly, felt less tired than she had. That
burfi
or
whatever it was had been sweet enough to raise the blood sugar of a
corpse; maybe the department should lay in a supply for those long
night shifts.

"So the candy is a pun," she mused, "an offering
of Kali to Kali. And that was very interesting about the seedy stuff
not being candy, to his mind anyway."

"But would Carla and Phoebe have known it wasn't an Indian kind of candy?"

"They know about Kali."

"That doesn't mean they know Indian culture."

"True," she agreed, and sat motionless in the moving
car. Outside the windows, the city's night song came to
Kate's ears, muted and atonal, unpleasant and as jangled as her
nerves. After a few blocks, she said, "I'll ask Lee to call
Roz first thing in the morning, see if she can persuade her to lay off
Mehta. If there's anyone she'll listen to, it's
Lee."

"It'd be nice to be able to stop her without having to
put a gun to her head," Hawkin said. Kate was not sure he was
actually joking.

At the parking lot beneath the perpetually laden freeway,
Kate's car started immediately, to her relief, and it seemed to
drive itself up the silent streets to die old house on Russian Hill.
The house was still and quiescent when she let herself in, the entrance
and hallway lights the only bulbs left burning. She phoned the hospital
again, which gave her no changes, and then, hating the world, the city,
and her job in that order, Kate set the alarm for six A.M., less than
four hours away, stripped her clothes off into a heap on the floor, and
crept into the blessed shelter of the bed.

Lee woke up and turned over, nuzzling into Kate with a questioning noise in the back of her throat and then an actual question.

"Is everything okay?"

Kate, realizing that she could trade a few minutes now for a longer
sleep in the morning, shifted around to put an arm around Lee.