Authors: Laurie R. King
"Would you like a hand with this one?"
"I could use it," he admitted. "But I
wouldn't have thought that you need to go around drumming up
business."
"I've got the two actives, a handful of cold ones, and
I'd be happy to give you a couple of hours' follow-up on
this one."
"Right, then. I have to be in court all day--do you want
to give the ME and the arson investigator a call this afternoon, see
what they have? You might even go see them, if you have the
time." It being a recognized fact of life that the physical
presence of an investigator was harder to ignore than a voice on the
phone.
"I'll stop by if I can, pick up their reports. Anything
to keep Reverend Hall off the chief's back," she told him.
The machine on the counter had stopped gurgling, so Kate poured them
each a cup of coffee and they went back to their desks.
One of those jobs came to her, saving her trekking across the city.
Amanda Bonner phoned and said that Roz Hall (at the very mention of
whose name Kate was beginning to develop a wince) had told her to call
and tell Kate what she knew. Kate hesitated, decided that Boyle would
be happy enough to hand the preliminary interview over to her, and told
Bonner to come down. She was there within half an hour.
Kate could well imagine that a teenager out of village India would
find Amanda Bonner an impressive figure. She herself found Bonner
impressive. Six feet tall, a hundred sixty pounds of very solid bone
and muscle, she made Kate feel short, pale, flabby, and ineffectual.
Her hand was dry and callused when she shook Kate's office worker
palm, and she shed her jacket in the warmth of the small interview room
to reveal sculpted muscles beneath a tank top. Kate might have tagged
her as a bodybuilder, but Bonner just dropped into a chair with no hint
of arrangement or posing except that when she leaned forward to talk
with Kate, the top of her shirt fell away from her chest, giving Kate a
glimpse of unfettered breasts that were surprisingly generous, with a
sprinkling of freckles and a tan that appeared to go all the way down.
Kate averted her eyes and sat down firmly in her own chair, pulling up
a businesslike notebook and pen to take the woman's statement.
As Roz had told Kate, Bonner had met Pramilla Mehta over a head of
purple kale in the supermarket. She had seen the Indian girl numerous
times before that, since Amanda's aging parents lived on the same
block as the Mehtas and Amanda stopped in almost every day to shop and
cook and generally check up on them.
"It's a pretty ritzy area, you know. The Mehtas are
about the only ethnic people there--aside from the gardeners and
cooks. A beautiful young girl wearing a
salwar kameez
and a dozen silver bracelets sticks out."
"What was your relationship with Pramilla Mehta?" Kate asked.
"Friendship, basically. Older sister stuff. If you're
asking if I slept with her, the answer is no. Frankly, she wasn't
my kind. For one thing, she was straight--or at least, she was too
young and confused to think about being anything else. Personally, I
prefer the strong, confident type. Don't you?"
Now Kate was certain that the gaping shirt had been no accident,
though she kept her face as straight as Pramilla's orientation.
It happened often enough, women flirting with her, since everyone in
the city who read a paper or watched the news knew who and what Kate
Martinelli was. All she could do was ignore it, as she had a dozen
times before. No different, really, from a straight male cop with a
female witness coming on to him. Amusing, but she mustn't show
that; a smile would either offend or be taken as an encouragement.
"How did you communicate with the girl?" Kate asked. "I thought she didn't speak much English."
"I've traveled all over the world, and had a lot of
experience in talking to people whose language I don't speak.
It's mostly a matter of not being embarrassed about making a fool
of yourself with sign language and asking for words. And besides,
Pramilla understood a lot, and as soon as she realized that I
wasn't going to make fun of her like her family did, she relaxed
and could speak a lot better than when she was worried about getting it
right."
"But I would expect that a lot of what you understood about her life was reading between the lines," Kate suggested.
"That's true. And I'm sure I read some of the more
subtle things wrong. But then, that happens even between people who
speak the same language, doesn't it?"
"Did she tell you that her husband hit her? In so many words?"
"One day she had a bad bruise on her cheek. I asked if Laxman had done it, and she nodded."
"Nodded, or shrugged?"
"That sort of Indian wag of the head. It means, "Oh yes, but never mind." "
It could mean any number of things, thought Kate to herself.
"And the other abuses? You told Roz that Peter's wife,
Rani, pinched her."
"And slapped her a couple of times. It's fairly
traditional in families like that to find a younger relative imported
as a servant--or an older one, which the Mehtas have as well.
Slave is more like it, because they aren't usually paid wages,
just given a bed and food. Pramilla at least had Laxman's
allowance."
"Have you met Laxman?"
"Not directly. I've seen him a couple of times, once
with her in the market telling her what to buy, and once when they were
getting off a bus. He was carrying this tiny parcel, a pie or something
in a bakery box, and he got off first; she was behind him with this
great armload of string bags of vegetables and two grocery bags, and
she stumbled coming down the steps and nearly dropped the lot. He just
shouted at her--in Hindi so I couldn't understand the words,
but it was obvious that he was giving her hell. Then he walked away
leaving her to carry the rest."
"What did you do?"
"What did I do? Nothing." Bitterness crept into
Bonner's voice. "Pramilla had made it clear that it only
made more problems for her when I tried to interfere. If I'd seen
Laxman actually hit her, I would have stepped in, called the police,
the whole nine yards. But since I didn't, I thought it would be
better for her if she made the decision to leave him. She had my
number, she knew I would come to her any time of the day or night. I
even gave her a hot-line number, in case she wanted to talk to someone
who understood better than I."
"Understood... ?"
"Her situation and her language. But as far as I know, she never called. Not then, anyway."
Kate lifted her eyebrows in a question. After a minute, Bonner
reluctantly dredged up the rest of it. "I think she may have
tried to call me, just before she was killed. I was out shopping for my
parents, and when I got home there was a hang-up message on the
answering machine. Nobody there, and when I tried to do that star
sixty-nine thing to call back, it wouldn't go through. And then
that afternoon when I went to take the groceries to my folks, there
were all these police cars down the street. I can't help but
wonder..."
"Yes," Kate said. "Well."
Had Pramilla Mehta been religious? Kate wondered as she walked
Amanda Bonner to the elevator. Would she have said that fate--
karma--kept her friend Amanda from being there when she needed
her? And what about her death; would a fifteen-year-old girl agree that
death was nothing, reincarnation all? Or was that a Buddhist conceit,
not a Hindu one?
Assuming, of course, that the hang-up call was from Pramilla. The
Mehta phone records would tell, although it would not be a kindness to
confirm Amanda's fears. Maybe she'd just let it go.
JUST AFTER MIDDAY, Kate and Al drove up to talk with Matthew
Banderas's boss, Janice Popper. The software company was in an
uninspired strip of businesses just off the freeway, clean and tidily
landscaped and working hard to appear both cutting-edge (a modern
tangle of sculpture out front) and reassuringly stable (thick carpeting
in the entrance foyer). They identified themselves to the receptionist,
who picked up the phone and announced their arrival. Popper came out of
the back and greeted them, ushering them back to her office with a
declaration that Kate had heard dozens of times before in similar
circumstances, although she freely admitted that very occasionally it
was true.
"I don't think I can help you much," Popper told them. "I didn't really know the man."
"That's fine," Hawkin said, settling into his
chair across the desk from her and presenting her with a genial smile.
"We just need to be thorough. Let's see. You've only
had this job a few months, is that right? Did you work for the company
before that, or were you hired from outside?"
"Nine weeks now, and I was headhunted. Brought in from
outside. That may have been one of the problems, with Matthew, that is.
He applied for this position, although he wasn't really
qualified. His experience was almost exclusively in sales, not general
administration."
Janice Popper was a small, thin woman with a number of nervous
habits involving her fingers, which made Kate wonder if she'd
recently given up smoking and had to find something to do with her
hands. Right now she was tugging irritably at the sleek dark brown hair
that fell along her jawline, trying to tuck it behind her
ear--without success, as it was about half an inch too short to
stay tucked--and adjusting her titanium-framed designer glasses as
if they were bothering the bridge of her nose.
"When did you find out about his criminal record?" Al asked her.
"My second week here. I never had a proper handover because
the guy who did this job before me had a heart attack and wasn't
up to briefing me, and personnel records were secondary to active
contracts and ongoing negotiations. It took me a week or so to get my
feet under me, begin to get a handle on the shape of the company. After
that I started taking appointments with personnel, people with problems
or urgent suggestions, wanting transfers or raises, that kind of thing.
Most of them, of course, just wanting a chance to size up the new boss
and make an impression. Banderas came in around the middle of that
week, maybe Thursday. I always have my secretary give me a file on an
appointment so I know something about them--single or five kids,
war veteran or university graduate, anything like that. Nothing
confidential you know, just background. So I open the file for my ten
o'clock or whatever it was and see that Matthew Banderas was on
record as a sex offender. I left the door wide open during that
appointment, I can tell you."
"You said you had decided to fire him?" Hawkin asked.
"Not for that," she quickly said. "I'd have
no right to fire him for a past offense, either legally or ethically,
no matter how uncomfortable it made me feel. No, he was falling down on
his job. The sales numbers just weren't coming in, and numbers
are the bottom line. We work by salary plus commission, and we
couldn't afford to pay somebody who wasn't bringing it
in."
"But he'd been okay before you came?"
"Not really. He'd been slipping for some months."
She paused, choosing her words. "I ran an analysis on his sales,
trying to track it down, thinking I might help him out. I found that
almost all of his successful sales contacts were men." She shook
her head. "There's just too many women in charge of buying
to write off that whole side of the market."
"He alienated women buyers, then?"
"Somehow, yes."
"Any way of finding out how?"
"I wouldn't want to ask them directly, if that's
what you're saying. It's hardly a great sales technique, to
remind buyers that you had a rep who was not only a prick but a rapist
to boot, who on top of that managed to get himself murdered."
"On the other hand," Kate suggested, "it might
clear the air if one of your female sales reps had a few woman-to-woman
talks with people who turned Banderas down. Might get across the
message that it wasn't going to happen again."
Popper sat still for a moment, staring at Kate and thinking. Her
right hand came up to tuck the uncooperative lock behind her ear, and
she nodded.
"You may be right. We'll run a trial, and tell you
what--if I find anything out about Matthew, I'll pass it on
to you."
"One other thing," Hawkin said, interrupting the forward
shift in her body's position that presaged their dismissal.
"Who else knew about Banderas's history?"
"I have no idea. No, really--I don't," she
insisted. "I would guess that either everybody knew, or nobody.
It's the sort of thing that tends to spread, but I haven't
been here long enough to develop my own network within the company, and
I've been too damn busy to ask around about him. Why don't
you talk to my secretary--she's been here forever."
Both times Popper had said the phrase "my secretary,"
she had looked as if she were biting into something unpleasant, leading
Kate to suspect that the secretary had been inherited with the job, and
that Popper was none too pleased about it. She was probably temporarily
dependent on the woman--and the woman's own
"network" of knowledge and contacts--but somehow Kate
thought that would not continue for long.
The woman in the outer office was pale, slow-moving, spoke with a
trace of Texas in her voice, and was at least a decade older than her
thin new boss with the nervous fingers.
"Oh, indeed," she told them. "Everybody knew.
Everybody that mattered, that is. I made sure the new girls all heard,
just so they wouldn't accept rides from Mr. Banderas, if you see
what I mean. Not that he ever seemed to look close to home--as far
as I know he never gave any of the girls here so much as a
glance--but I thought it was good to be careful."
"Did you tell anyone outside of work?"
"I may have mentioned it to two or three friends," she
replied stiffly, "but I wouldn't have told them his
name."