Jane watched her turn away and motion to the fellow with the tool belt. In that same moment, Miles lowered his tired body into his Buick and surreptitiously removed a flask from the inside pocket of his jacket.
“Oh, Jesus, Miles,” Jane whispered. It wasn’t a derision of judgment; it was more about a code of ethics. Even though Jane could drink Miles under the table, she’d always waited until 5:00 P.M. to do it. This guy needs to hang up his shield and soon.
Miles drove away and Jane was just about to follow when she saw a flicker of body language between the mournful widow Bashir and the workman. It suggested a more familiar than professional relationship. The way she tilted her head, and the way he relaxed, leaning his taut body toward hers. But it didn’t take a body language expert to read between the lines when she threw her head back laughing, and he pulled her to his chest and passionately kissed her.
Okay, Jane thought, the woman’s husband had just suicided three days earlier, butt naked and surrounded by his secret stash of kiddie porn. Shit, it just didn’t get more shameful and disturbing than that. But instead of showing a certain amount of appropriate emotion, the widow chose to play tonsil hockey with her blue-collar toy.
3
As Jane pulled back into the parking garage at Headquarters, she realized that the blonde widow had no clue that anyone had been watching her aroused antics once Detective Miles had beat feet. Up to that point, she’d played her role with the exact degree of tempered sadness. Did Devinder learn of this illicit affair and was that what drove him to OD? Did Devinder’s lust for child porn drive his widow into another man’s arms? Do these two questions sound like bad daytime drama schlock? Jane’s head swirled with the various scenarios, as she headed upstairs to homicide.
She got off the elevator on the third floor and saw Detective Miles walking away from the vice division. Jane made a split-second decision and headed straight for Miles’ cubicle. Once there, she scanned his disheveled desk for any sign of plastic-covered evidence materials or photos of Devinder’s suicide. Under a stack of files, she found the color photos she was looking for. There he was, sprawled naked across his bed amidst a myriad of magazines and photographs, nude children posed in sexually compromising positions. Jane quickly looked at the establishing shot
of the scene before turning her attention to the close up of his left hand holding the handwritten suicide note. Jane could clearly make out the short, three-sentence note:
My secret haunts me.
I can no longer hide from it.
I have shamed my family name and now I must die for my mortal sins.
Jane looked back at the establishing shot of the death scene. Something wasn’t right. The pornography was not as much scattered as it appeared. In fact, it looked almost like…
“Jane?”
She was so deep in thought, she didn’t hear Miles return, fresh coffee in hand.
Miles looked perplexed. “Can I help you with something?” he asked, an undercurrent of irritation bleeding through.
Jane put down the photo. “You know, uh…” She stalled. “I thought I knew this guy. Bashir? Uh, an old case from way back. A perp… ” Jane realized she was babbling. Miles regarded her with a suspicious eye. “But, it’s not the same guy.” She ducked out of his cubicle and turned down the hall toward homicide, wondering whether she looked as crazy as she felt right then.
4
Chris Crawley, Jane’s partner—both on and off the job—wanted to come over that night, but Jane told him that she was meeting her brother. Chris bought the lie, although he fumed like a peevish schoolboy for an hour because he couldn’t get what he really wanted. Jane wasn’t in the mood to deal with Chris, knowing that his main objective was to get laid and then pass out half drunk somewhere between her couch and the bed. Chris had always been a boor, but his behavior in and out of the bedroom had become gradually more aggressive. The sex had gone from moderately rough to excessively rough, depending on the amount of booze each of them had consumed. Right now, Jane wanted to be alone with her weary mind and notch another night with no anomalous dreams.
After a dinner of microwave macaroni and cheese and a can of peas, Jane finished her sixth Corona and still felt on edge. She poured a shot of Jack Daniels and then another shot. She sought that sweet spot of numbness, and it took two more shots of Jack to travel there. She fell back onto her bed, free-floating in the comforting haze. Reaching the center point between all of the past pain and all of
the trauma that was yet to unfold, she allowed the booze to dictate her descent into the stillness where she could forget who she was and all she would never become. It was so quiet and peaceful that she didn’t even feel herself slide under the thin veil that shielded this world from the next.
She opened her eyes and found herself back on the same white-planked porch, sitting in the same wicker chair within the same scene as before. Devinder was leaning on the same railing. He looked within her. That familiar signature scent of sandalwood perfumed the air around him, causing Jane to feel a strange sense of calm and protection. The only difference between this scene and the last was the appearance of many more people in the general area, both on the porch and around the extensive grassy landscape that seemingly swept for miles. The heaviness of Jane’s body returned like an anchor weighting down her soul.
“How did I get back here?” she asked Devinder, each word an effort.
“When you drink, you detach from your physical body which leaves you open to any number of unwelcome journeys,” Devinder stated in his lilting eastern tongue. “Although I don’t like the fuel it took to get you here, I am glad you came back.” He smiled, warmly and genuinely. It was as if he knew how difficult it was for Jane to speak. “It’ll be easier if you just think what you wish to say. I’ll hear you much better.”
Jane’s first thought was that Devinder was half-cocked. Then suddenly, she clearly heard his voice without seeing his lips moving.
“If I’m half-cocked,” he said, grinning, “then what does that make you?”
“Shit,” Jane uttered, with no heaviness attached to it and without any timbre coming from her vocal chords. “I can hear you.” Jane noticed that she could move her hands off the wicker chair more easily and that a modicum of lightness enveloped her. “Is this a dream?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that in a dream when you look into someone’s eyes, they’re flat with no past, present or future behind them.”
“And now, when you look into my eyes, are they flat?”
Jane saw the three-dimensional pulse behind Devinder’s eyes. “No.”
“So, given your criteria, this is no dream.”
“And given the fact that your name is on the board at Headquarters…” Jane felt her heart sink.
Devinder moved from the railing to a wicker chair beside Jane that seemed to appear out of nowhere. He turned the chair, so he was facing her. “You’re not supposed to be here, Jane. Your light is too bright.” Devinder gestured with his left hand to the back of Jane’s neck, pulling her hair away and revealing a pinpoint shaft of brilliant white light that shone like a precise radar beam. “Mine is much less,” he offered, turning down his shirt collar. A dimmer beacon of light jetted from his neck. “It’s the last connection we have with the physical reality that we leave behind. The closer we get to the next level of transformation, the
weaker the light becomes. When we accept that we are dead, we are truly free and homeward bound.”
Jane looked out at the people milling on the porch and lawn. To her, it looked like a disjointed Bergman film. The divergent assortment of souls was evident—everyone from a farmer in overalls and a pinstripe-suited executive to a toddler playing with a beach ball and a rough-looking biker. Each had the same pinpoint of light emanating from the back of their neck, with varying degrees of illumination.
Devinder explained to her that a soul only comes to this place when a person dies suddenly, violently, or isn’t ready to accept his or her demise. “We have a ninety-eight-year-old woman upstairs who still can’t believe she’s dead,” he said, shrugging of his shoulders. Jane noticed that the little girl with the beach ball had the least amount of light coming from her neck. Devinder read her thoughts. “She’s almost ready to transition to the next level. Pretty soon, we’ll look over there and she’ll be gone.”
Jane ran her fingers through her hair. “So what in the hell am I doing here?”
“Perhaps…so you can help me?”
“Help you what?”
“Remove the shame of my death.”
Jane felt a jolt of judgment. “Hey, I can’t change history. You’re the one who chose to get naked, cover yourself in kiddie porn and chase three bottles of drugs with a bottle of whiskey.”
Devinder held Jane’s hand tightly in his left hand. “You know I didn’t do that, Jane.”
Jane looked into his eyes. She could see the truth. And in a split second, she saw the crime against Devinder manifested before her…
Devinder is relaxing on his living room couch, reading. His pretty wife with the flowing blonde hair brings him a glass of water into which she has crushed five tablets of Ambien and five tablets of Valium. He fights sleep, but finally succumbs to it, as his wife watches from the kitchen. She checks his pulse and then walks quickly to the front door, opens it and ushers in a person. The twentysomething worker appears, carrying a large bag. The two of them lift Devinder off the couch and carry him into the master bedroom. His wife exits briefly, as the young stud opens his large bag and brings out one hideous photo and magazine after another of child pornography. He strips Devinder of his clothes and then carefully arranges the collection of porn around his nude body.
The wife then reappears with a bottle of whiskey, three orange prescription bottles and a large envelope. She pours a tall glass of whiskey into a bedtime water glass and dissolves ten tablets each of Ambien, Valium and Oxycodone into the amber liquor. Once satisfied with the mixture, the young man pulls Devinder’s unconscious body up to a sitting position and pries open his mouth. The wife pours in the fatal concoction. Devinder gags but the young man manipulates his throat little by little to encourage the drugged man to swallow. Ten minutes later, the deadly brew is drained. They drop his body back onto the bed and the wife takes what is left in the whiskey bottle,
dripping it over her husband’s face and chest before laying the bottle next to his body.
She puts on a pair of latex gloves, reaches into the large envelope the young man brought, withdraws a handwritten note and slides it between the fingers on Devinder’s left hand. Reaching back into the envelope, she removes a pen and places it next to his body. The young man amends the placement by putting the pen into Devinder’s right hand. The three orange prescription bottles positioned next to his body completes the fabricated suicide.
They wait in silence, as Devinder’s body begins to spasm, and foam appears around the edges of his mouth. They hold him down, as the wife pinches off his nostrils with her red acrylic fingernails. The spasms continue in violent waves until they finally stop. She checks his pulse. “Nothing.” She stands up and pulls the young man toward her, with a look of conquest and wicked seduction. In turn, he hungrily kisses her, ripping off her shirt. They fall into the Indian rug at the foot of the bed, blinded by hedonistic rage, devouring each other like wild animals after a good kill…
Jane felt physically sick and turned away from Devinder. Looking out toward the grassy expanse, she spotted the toddler with the beach ball. The little girl stared at Jane, smiled and then dissolved into thin air.
“I can’t do that yet,” Devinder stated, acknowledging the child’s ascent.
Jane turned to Devinder. “Why did she kill you?”
“I loved Cath deeply. Cath deeply loved my money.”
Cath? Jane thought. Who the fuck calls themselves Cath?
Devinder read her thoughts. “It’s short for Catherine.”
“Not catheter, huh? What happened to divorce?”
“My family is Hindu and extremely traditional. We are devout in our beliefs. No drinking. No smoking. No divorce.”
“No fun for her,” Jane intoned. “I guess whatever drew her to you—whatever exotic allure you triggered in her—wore off.”
“My family’s import business has always been timeconsuming. I traveled a lot to India on buying trips. She used to come with me. I used to buy her the most expensive sandalwood incense on the market. It would linger in the air for hours after it was extinguished. When she told me she wasn’t interested in joining me on my trips, I told her to burn the sandalwood. That way, she could remember me when I was gone.”
“But she found something more alluring than sandalwood to occupy her time when you were away, right?”
“Yes.” He responded, without a hint of hatred.
“Why do you accept it?”
“Because I accept my karma. When I was alive, I lived with an honest heart, devoted to my family and honoring my wife. I sought my salvation through good deeds and self-control, as any good Hindu would.”
“Excuse me, Devinder, but you’re a fucking saint. If I was in your shoes, I’d be sitting up here looking for someone to cap the worthless slut.”
“Bad karma, Jane.”
So she wanted out, Jane thought. But there’s no life insurance paycheck from suicide. Devinder looked at her and she clearly understood Cath’s plan and expectations. A cultural taint. Detective Miles used that term when he first mentioned the suicide to Jane. The white woman feels constricted by the conventions of the exotic culture she probably thought was one long tantric orgy and then decides to use those conventions to her favor. Should call it a cultural shakedown.