Last Ferry Home

by Kent Harrington

  “This guy Chaundhry is a somebody,” Marvin said. “And I got a guy in a turban downstairs from the Indian Consulate saying he wants to come up and secure some items of ‘national importance’ to the state of India. He’s on the phone with the State Department right now.”

  “We’ve stepped into it,” O’Higgins said.

  “You think? This guy is one of the richest men in India. Case comes complete with batteries and a butt plug,” Marvin said.

  “What did you tell him? The Consulate guy.”

  “I told him no. No one comes in except Homicide or criminalists. Period. He didn’t like it. Guy’s got a turban on, man — really, a turban. Shit. And he’s about six four. Big motherfucker.”

  “Sikh?” Michael said.

  “Whatever, he’s an asshole. Turban-wearing asshole.”

  O’Higgins could see his partner was rattled. Marvin had grown up in the projects, and was uncomfortable away from where he knew the streets. The wealthy had an effect on him regardless of their color, as if he were trying to imagine another dimension. He was keyed up. They were in strange deep waters where careers ran aground, and they knew it. They had no doubt of it now.

  Billionaire. Fuck. DA. Consulate, O’Higgins thought.

  “There’s a safe.” O’Higgins pointed toward the closet. “Untouched. Brand new, by the looks of it. Not even a scratch.”

  Marvin turned and looked at it.

  “I think he was here working at his desk. He had a view of the front door and foyer from his computer’s security camera hook-up, if he wanted it. So he would have seen who was at the door? Maybe I’m wrong, and we have to look at the wife.” It was a stupid thing to have said, he realized, because of course she was a suspect.

  “Did you find his goddamn phone yet?” Marvin said, nodding. “We need that phone, man.”

  “No. My guess is that it’s in his pocket if it’s not here on his desk. Back pants pocket, maybe? That’s what I do with mine at home. The nanny’s phone must be in her room. We’ll find it. I’ll go up and look again. She had to have one, too.”

  “They’ll blame us if we miss one fucking thing. Fuck up one thing,” Marvin said, talking to himself.

  “Yeah,” O’Higgins said. They looked at each other.

  “Welcome back to work,” Marvin said. “How is it feel so far? Enjoying it?”

  “Rene is here,” O’Higgins said. “She’s getting her stuff out of her car, she just called. She said Woo is on her way too. Let’s have her shoot the bathroom first. Then we’ll do the elevator and the hallway. The elevator is going to be tricky. So the killer came through the front door?”

  “Looks that way. The garage door is locked from the inside. You need an electronic key to get in, or a control,” Marvin said. “I just walked down and checked from the driveway. They have security cameras across the street by the way. I saw them. Pointed this way. ”

  The desk phone rang, a land line. They let it ring; they couldn’t hear who was calling, or if they even left a message.

  “We should have patrol canvass the neighborhood right away see if anyone saw anything unusual, or has video of the street,” Marvin said.

  “I’ve already told patrol to check,” Michael said.

  “Rich people will have some high-end security,” Marvin said. “The guy with the turban has our names, by the way. He knew who I was.”

  “How did he get our names already?” O’Higgins glanced at his watch. They’d been at the scene for less than three hours.

  “How the hell should I know? I’ll go see where blood from the victim in the elevator may have gone. It looked like a lot had to have gone down the elevator shaft,” Marvin said.

  They both saw Rene Fields, SFPD’s criminalist, come through the front door lugging her gear on Chaundhry’s computer screen.

  CHAPTER 6

  In her dream Asha Chaundhry was standing in the grand foyer of her family’s new home. The street outside was chaotic and appeared to be a street in Mumbai, not San Francisco’s

  Pacific Heights. It was an addled dreamscape. The street scene looked like a piece of color 70s-era stock film footage of Mumbai with its fantastic pulse: teeming humanity-filled streets punctuated by wandering white Brahman bulls, scruffy scooters with whole families on board, father intently leaning, a sari-clad young wife holding on, everything from marigold sellers to white-gloved policeman directing chaotic traffic.

  Asha danced into the foyer, whirling, sitar music playing. She wore heavy Indian-style bracelets on her ankles. She was barefoot in a diaphanous red sari, naked under it. She stopped dancing and looked at the Piazzoni landscape painting. She stood in front of it, squaring off, as if to challenge its existence. Her pretty face showed an I-dare-you expression. She whirled provocatively in front of it, calling on it to produce the Painter-God who’d created it. She called to Rishi to come admire the painting with her in a loud voice. But he didn’t answer.

  She realized she was panting from her dance, the room airless and warm. She touched her flat midriff, slick with sweat; it felt as if it were a hundred degrees inside the house. She glanced around her. Everything seemed to be in its place, yet everything seemed queer and wrong, slightly askew. The loud Indian music, a morning raga, stopped.

  “Rishi? Rishi, answer me!”

  She wanted to confess that she was in love with the painter and explain to her husband why. She ran in a panic. The sitar music, with a wild tabla accompaniment, started up again and was very loud. She ran down the long hallway toward Rishi’s office, the heavy brass ankle bracelets clanging rhythmically. Ting-ring … ting-ring… ting.

  Would Rishi understand? Could he forgive her for her immoral, lascivious thoughts? She remembered that she was going to be a mother again, and the idea frightened her. Why? What had changed? Something had changed. Rishi’s office door was locked. She tried frantically to open it.

  Asha had found the large landscape painting online in a gallery in New York, and her husband had bought it for her without blinking. He was that kind of husband, and she loved him for it. He’d not hesitated when hearing the price, either: seventy-five-thousand dollars. It was shipped from New York the day she found it. She’d hung it in the foyer on Broadway.

  This Piazzoni was even more dramatic and enthralling than one she had originally thought of buying at the Thomas Gallery. This landscape, by the famous California painter, was of Bolinas’s Duxbury Reef during a storm. It was a large painting and commanded the entire foyer. You couldn’t miss it.

  All their guests had remarked on it when they walked into the house. You could tell people loved its raucousness and its depth of expression, its feeling of the crashing sea. The stirring, moody seascape had set the tone for the rest of the magnificent house. They had decided on a mix of Western and Indian art, all chosen by Asha and Rishi. And it worked, the blending of two cultures representing their generation’s place and time. New Indian and 19th Century America, ironic and effective. It was them: tradition in love with modernity.

  Because the landscape was seen as “old school,” as one young Indian woman called it at a party Asha had given for the Indian ambassador’s wife, it felt even more impressive and substantial. It “spoke” to people, who said how wonderful it was.

  Some guests, especially the very young American tech executives, found the painting queer, even off-putting because it wasn’t abstract, cynical or child-like. It was lost on young tech types, completely. Asha realized they had no method for seeing it. Their eyes were blind to nature’s beauty, to nature itself, and their ears were deaf to everything it might say to them. They hated the painting and the emotional honesty it stood for. She’d overheard their silly remarks. Their reaction was unexpected and even frightening to her. She wasn’t surprised when one of the young men told her very seriously that “eating was a waste of time,” and that he drank most of his meals for the sake of effic
iency. People at the party were flocking to hear about how he’d managed this breakthrough.

  Asha woke with a start, snapping out of her drug-induced sleep. Her first instinct was to get up and find Rishi as if she were still at home. The bizarre dream had upset her. Cheating on her husband was impossible for her even to contemplate. In the dream, though, she had cheated, if only emotionally.

  She upset the hospital tray in front of her. She pushed it aside and sat up in the bed, trying to get her bearings. Where am I? Where is Rishi? Where are the girls?

  They had sedated her shortly after she’d arrived at Mont Zion’s ER. She’d been more than just loudly hysterical when she arrived at the emergency room. She was on the point of harming herself. The young ER doctor, watching two security guards struggle with her, decided that she would have to be sedated. Her screaming was disruptive, even unbearable to those around her. She was given a powerful tranquilizer, in the Diazepam family, without her permission. It put her to sleep for seven dream-filled hours. The doctors moved her to a private room after they learned from the ambulance drivers what had happened to her husband. Everyone working in the ER felt badly for her, but they were equally glad that her hysteria had been “closed down.”

  Awake, she took stock of her surroundings, realizing she was in the hospital but not sure why. Have I been in a car accident?

  The awful image of her husband’s body lying so grotesquely on the floor of the elevator came back to her. She had managed to block it out. She screamed. Her ululation was piercing and horrible. Doctors and patients on the hospital’s sixth floor heard it and were startled. It was truly blood-freezing in its intensity. It was one long cry for help.

  A Filipino nurse rushed into Asha’s room. Unable to get Asha to stop screaming, she slapped her across the face. The slap, shockingly unprofessional, had been instinctual. It worked. Asha stopped screaming. Another nurse, a young African-American, came into the room right after the slap. The first nurse left, realizing what she’d done. If reported, she could lose her job.

  “Where am I?” Asha asked, her cheek red from the slap.

  “In the hospital, Mount Zion,” the young nurse said, realizing what had happened to her.

  “Where’s my husband? Where’s Rishi? Where are my girls?”

  She’d not accepted, even standing in the hallway and looking down at the body, that her husband was really dead. She’d seen a body, but it couldn’t be Rishi. Her husband was fine. She’d just spoken to him, less than an hour before. It was impossible. It had to be some impostor, trying to terrify her. A horrible prank, she’d thought while staring into the elevator, holding its door open, looking at what could not be real.

  “Can I get you anything?” the young nurse asked. Asha had not realized that she’d been slapped, not really.

  “I want to see my husband,” Asha said, trying to sound calm.

  The nurse didn’t answer her. Instead she nervously tidied up the hospital tray with its uneaten meal. An un-touched red Jell-O cup was turned on its side, and the nurse righted it. She could see the mark of the other nurse’s hand on Asha’s cheek, and it unnerved her. Angry, she decided she would report it.

  “The police are coming at one o’clock to speak to you. A detective — O’Higgins, I believe his name is. He was here earlier, but he didn’t want to wake you. You were asleep,” the nurse said.

  “Where are my daughters?” Asha asked again. Her tone was frightened, as if she knew the answer. “Where are my girls? I demand to know where they are.” She’d raised her voice again, pushing the sheet away. She realized she was wearing a hospital gown, and could feel the cold on her naked back.

  “I don’t know,” the nurse said. “The detective said he would be able to answer a lot of your questions. I’m sorry.” The nurse wanted to retreat, but felt she couldn’t.

  Asha stared at the young woman and began to cry. The tears slid down her cheeks one after the other and fell onto her starchy hospital gown. The nurse watched her cry. She took Asha’s hand and held it, not knowing what else to do.

  “Rishi is dead?” Asha said. “Oh my God. Rishi is dead, isn’t he?”

  She’d gone to the Safeway on Marina Boulevard to pick up some things she’d forgotten. She was making Indian food for dinner, an eggplant dish Rishi loved. He’d been on his computer, working on some dreadful-looking spreadsheet in his office. The twins had a play date and were across the street at the neighbor’s—the Gilberts, who had a daughter the twins’ age—until dinner.

  Bharti, the nanny Asha’s mother-in-law had found for them when the twins were born, was tidying up the children’s playroom. Bharti Kumar had been with them since she was fifteen, and Asha considered the girl to be like another daughter.

  She went down the hall from the kitchen into her husband’s office and explained that she was going to run to the market and would be right back. He hadn’t spoken a word, but nodded in his gentle way signaling that he was busy.

  “I love you,” she’d said. “You over-worked man.”

  “I told you we should have brought our cook, Asha,” Rishi said, without looking up from the computer screen. It was the last time she would see her husband alive.

  ***

  Det. Marvin Lee stepped into Asha’s hospital room and stood behind O’Higgins. They’d brought Asha’s password-locked iPhone to the hospital with them, having found it in her purse in the kitchen.

  “You’re the policeman — the man from the ferry?” Asha said, looking at O’Higgins.

  She was oddly relieved, as she was hoping she was dreaming, that this was all a nightmare — from the moment she parked her car in the driveway, snatched her handbag up off the passenger seat of her new black Land Rover, then walked up the steps to her front door with her sack of groceries.

  The front door had a large panel of obscured glass that kept you from seeing inside. She’d punched in the code to the front door’s high-tech electronic lock and stepped inside, trying to keep her iPhone from falling out of her hand, and went straight into the kitchen with the groceries she’d bought. Her pregnancy, only a few weeks old, had given her a sense of profound wellbeing. She felt it then, walking toward the kitchen and thinking about preparing dinner. She’d refused the army of servants they had in India because she wanted to be a “real” American-style mother and wife.

  “Where are my girls? You must bring them to me, immediately. And my nanny? Where is Bharti?”

  “We want to ask you a few questions,” O’Higgins said.

  “You are the policeman? The one we met on the ferry? The policeman?” Asha asked again.

  “Yes. We met on the ferry to Angel Island,” O’Higgins said.

  “I’m dreaming, then,” Asha said and smiled. It was a smile of relief. “I’m dreaming. Thank God!”

  O’Higgins got closer to the bed. Chaundhry looked fragile. Her eye make-up was smeared and gave her a slightly crazed look. He realized he was looking at himself, in a way. He wanted to turn away and leave the room, but he steeled himself.

  “This is my partner, Detective Marvin Lee,” O’Higgins said as gently as he could. He felt the walls of the hospital room start to close in on him. He saw a white board with the words: “keep comfortable and informed” written in blue marker directly across from Asha’s bed.

  His own miserable pain had welled up bit-by-bit while the criminalists, Rene Fields and Amy Woo, did their jobs: sorting through items that would be taken in to evidence, mapping the murder scene, taking photos, dusting for prints, taking Touch DNA samples from the elevator and the bathroom. They’d left Fields and Woo at the scene.

  Both victims had bled out. Bharti Kumar had that startled look he’d seen on countless murder victim’s faces.

  O’Higgins looked at the wife. Their eyes met. He remembered Asha as she’d been on the ferry only a week before, so carefree and lovely, the epitome of the young mothe
r. He was going to spoil that forever by telling her about Kumar. He began to stammer in an awful way, unable to come out with it.

  “I … I … I need to …”

  “Mrs. Chaundhry,” Marvin said, stepping up. “We have some bad news. I’m sorry, but your daughters were taken from your home. It’s not clear who has the girls right now. Your neighbors, the Gilberts, told officers that your father-in-law came and got the girls around 5:00 p.m. and left in what they thought was an Uber taxi. But we have not been able to speak to your father-in-law to confirm.”

  Asha looked at Marvin as if he were speaking a foreign language.

  “We have your cell phone. We would like to keep it for the time being, if we could. Your husband’s cell phone is missing. We think that whoever did this took it with them, but we’re not sure. Do you know where your husband’s cell phone might be? It’s critical we find it,” Marvin said.

  “It’s impossible. Bharti would never permit it,” Asha said finally. “You’re lying.”

  Marvin heard the door open and realized that O’Higgins had walked out of the room. “We need your phone’s password. Can you give it to me?” Marvin said.

  “It’s our address, 2845,” Asha said. “Bharti knows it. Why didn’t she give it to you? Where is she? Where is Bharti? She would know if Nirad has the girls.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you that Bharti Kumar is dead,” Marvin said. “We found her body in a bathroom on the third floor of your home. She’s gone. She was killed by whoever killed your husband.”

  O’Higgins, who had slipped out of the room while Marvin had told her the news, came back into the room with an old white-haired doctor who looked annoyed and tired of the commotion coming from Asha’s room.

  “I told you not to upset her, damn it!” the doctor said peevishly. Asha was crying hysterically.

  The old doctor left the room and came back almost immediately with an injectable sedative. O’Higgins watched Asha go under. She tried to fight off two nurses and the old doctor who gave her the injection. He hoped to God he would never be treated like a wild animal, the way the doctor was treating Chaundhry. He almost said something, but stopped himself.