Last Ferry Home

by Kent Harrington

  “I lost my wife,” he said. “I know what it feels like.”

  She went to a kind of wet bar and plugged in her phone, which she had held in her hands the entire way over. The phone’s charging cord looped around the wrist of her left hand. The cord, her phone and her purse, which he’d brought her from the scene, were the only things she had left from her former life.

  “It’s almost a year ago now,” he said.

  She turned and looked at him. She seemed tiny, her face drawn. She had no makeup on and her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, looked oily. Her long black hair was the first thing he had noticed about her that day on the ferry, how beautiful it was, how luxurious it seemed.

  “You must do puja, Detective. We can do it together,” she said. Her tone was earnest but had a frayed, tired quality from the sedatives. She put down her cell phone, making sure it was plugged in. It seemed, looking at her, that everything depended on her phone charging. Her entire future hung in the balance, as if she would get news that her husband were alive and that the last 48 hours had been just a horrible nightmare. Rishi would call her any minute to reassure her.

  O’Higgins too sometimes felt as if someone would wake him, perhaps Jennifer herself, and tell him he’d overslept. She would slide into the bed and lie next to him and his nightmare would be over.

  “What’s that — puja?” he asked.

  “Prayer. You must pray and I must pray,” she said. “There are gods. Do you believe in God, Detective?”

  “I should go. I will have to —”

  “No — please! Don’t leave me alone,” she said. She said it quickly and spontaneously, as if she realized she might spend the rest of her life alone. “My mother is to call me. She’s gone to see the guru. He will have a mantra for me.” She walked toward him. “I will ask her to tell the guru you need a mantra, too. For your suffering. Please, stay.”

  “I — okay. A little while.”

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door, leaving him standing in the suite’s living room. The hotel suite was like an apartment; it was that big. When she came out she had a vermillion colored spot drawn on the center of her forehead, just above her eyebrows.

  “What is that, the mark? What’s it mean?” he asked. He was still standing, feeling like someone waiting for a plane to arrive. He felt he held a ticket to somewhere important, and he was ready to leave everyone and everything behind to start his life over.

  “It’s a bindi. Mother said I was to wear it immediately. It will help me, she said, with what’s coming.”

  “Help?”

  “Yes. It will help strengthen the power of my third eye. I will need my third eye. I’ll watch my girls with it. And they too will feel my power. It’s the power you feel when you look at the moon. The energy.”

  “What’s coming? I don’t understand.”

  “Madness. Madness will come to test me. Test my strength. But you’ve come to help me. You are the god Ganesh, and will help me. My mother too will help me through the test,” she said. “We’re not alone, Detective.”

  “I’m not — I’m not a god. You need a doctor, Asha — Mrs. Chaundhry. You need a psychiatrist. It helps. It helped me. I know how you feel. It hurts, I know. You get — confused. Afraid. I was afraid. It’s a kind of fear.” It was the first time he was able to articulate what he felt since his wife’s death. Before it had been a pain that he couldn’t explain even to himself.

  “Yes. Yes, you are. I can tell. It’s coming from your face. You want to be kind to me and you want to love me. I can see it. You were sent to help me and to help my girls.”

  He didn’t know what to say. It occurred to him that Asha Chaundhry had gone mad in some classic sense of the word, lost touch with reality. But something about her eyes seemed sane and very brave. He’d seen the look in Iraq and recognized it as the look of a warrior going into battle. They might die, but they were tired of being bullied by the fear of death.

  “Did you kill your husband?” he asked.

  He didn’t want to feel this debt to her, or whatever he was feeling. She’d done something to him that day on the ferry. Her kindness had been special. Something had flowed through her and touched him, the moment she’d laid a hand on his shoulder. Her touch had helped him stop feeling the pain, if only for an instant. In that brief moment he’d been able to gather up his strength for the first time, to feel the undamaged inner self that jumped, alive, when she’d touched him. I need to repay that debt.

  “No. Of course not. I loved my husband.”

  “Do you know who might have wanted to kill him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know he was involved with the American government?”

  “Yes. I knew. He told me. My brother told me. My brother told me it was dangerous, what Rishi was doing for the Americans. That he would have powerful enemies. That they were his father’s enemies, too.”

  “You knew? Was your husband a spy?”

  “I think so. Yes. He never said, exactly,” she said. “We must do puja now, Detective.”

  She’d had him stop at an Indian market, explaining that she needed something. She got out and came back to the car on Turk Street with a paper bag. It was incense. “We burn it,” she said, “while we do puja.”

  She motioned for him to sit by her on the floor. He wanted to leave. The whole thing was bizarre: the incense, her calling him a god, her acceptance of suffering as if it were some kind of disease she could fight off.

  “You must do puja with me, Detective.” She lit the incense stick and placed it in a small brass holder she’d bought, placing the holder on the coffee table in front of them. A tail of smoke lifted from the lit brown stick of incense.

  “Where’s your phone?” he asked.

  “On the counter. Why?”

  “I want to turn it off.”

  “No. My mother is going to call me. She went to speak to the guru, Pandit Tata. He’s known me since I was a child.”

  “Who is the carrier?” he asked. “Your phone? Who provides service?”

  “BSNL, I think. I would imagine. It’s an Indian company,” she said. “The family is a major stockholder. My husband said we get the service for free. They gave us phones before we came to the States.”

  “And your nanny’s phone?”

  “All of the family’s phones are BSNL phones. Bharti’s phone, too. That was all arranged by my husband back in India, before we came to the States.”

  “Bharti Kumar is dead,” he said. “She was murdered by the same person, or persons, who murdered your husband.”

  “Bharti? Yes. I understand.” Asha’s phone buzzed as a text hit it. He looked across to the stark white marble counter. She rushed to the phone and read the text.

  “It’s my mother. She loves me, Detective. We must do puja. Please, sit down, next to me. We must do it together, you and I.”

  He started to smell the Blue Pearl incense, sweet and cloying. Asha sat on the rug and started to mumble a mantra, looking at some point in the distance. It was a well-known Hindu mantra, but it sounded like nonsense to him, and frightening. Gibberish.

  “Mrs. Chaundhry. Asha. I need your help! Do you understand? Stop it. It won’t help. None of this — bullshit. Not incense, not God. Nothing will bring them back. Nothing. They’re dead, do you understand? Your husband and Bharti Kumar are dead.”

  She glanced up at him, but continued to mumble her mantra.

  The bindi on her forehead was crude looking. It had been done with lipstick, he realized. It looked absurd. Why did she believe anything could help her? Had he gotten any real help for his suffering? Even his visits to the psychiatrist, had they really made him feel better? Had they stopped the pain of existence, or his feelings of guilt?

  He went across the suite’s living room to her iPhone and looked at the message. The text message she’d ju
st received was in Hindi, unintelligible to him. He ran through her contacts, found Bharti Kumar’s cell number and punched it into his iPhone. He found Asha’s number in Settings and dialed it into his contacts. He put the phone down, angry and frustrated. He wanted to take her phone with him, but he couldn’t, not without her permission. He had no desire to be cruel to her, or to anyone. The calculated cruelty he’d summoned in war, as a Marine officer doing his duty, was unimaginable to him now. He put her phone down.

  He left, walking out into the hallway and toward the elevator, past an alcove burdened with Room Service carts and maids’ trolleys piled with fresh towels, all of the activity having appeared since they came down the hall. For some inexplicable reason he began to trot, as if he were running away from something that was pursuing him—the fear that, like Asha Chaundhry, he was going mad. That the madness was closing in on him and he would soon be just a hollow shell, unrecognizable, killed off—left just a soulless, violent idiot.

  ***

  “Nirad Chaundhry will be here soon. We have to return the house to the family. That’s an order,” Marvin said.

  “Why did the Gilberts change their story, Marvin, huh?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know, man. I want to interview Asha Chaundhry,” Marvin said. “Today. It’s time to lock her into a story.”

  “Who sent the kill signal to Bharti Kumar’s phone, Marvin?”

  “Who shot JFK, Mike, huh? I don’t know who sent the kill signal, all right?”

  “What’s the rush with turning over the scene, Marvin?”

  “Stop it, Mike. You know why as well as I do. Nirad Chaundhry is a billionaire. He has a big-time law firm calling the DA twice a day, hounding him for a decision. They’re tired of the calls. The bodies are gone and the criminalists have done their work. End of story. They get the house back.”

  “She thinks I’m Ganesh,” O’Higgins said. “Asha Chaundhry.”

  “Who?”

  “Some kind of Indian elephant god.” Curious, he’d downloaded a picture of Ganesh on his phone. He showed it to Marvin.

  “Looks like you, all right. Especially the ears.”

  “Very funny. You think she’s our girl. You think Asha Chaundhry came in here and killed her husband and nanny in a jealous rage? That’s what you think happened?”

  “No robbery. Where’s the forced entry? The place was locked up when patrol cleared the house. They checked. We checked. There is no forced entry. They have an expensive alarm system. No alarm went off.”

  “So what? Someone could have had a key.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  “Probably a lot of people. Contractors, for one. They just did a big project. Think of all the workers who might have had access to this place.” He saw the coroner’s number flash on his cell phone and took the call.

  “Kumar was pregnant, Mike,” Millikin, the coroner’s investigator, said. “I just heard from the medical officer. She thought you should know. She’s still working on her.”

  Michael ended the call and told Marvin the news.

  “Okay, now you have a good reason for Asha Chaundhry to commit murder,” Marvin said.

  “I want to pretend that Kumar’s phone wasn’t wiped clean,” Michael said.

  “Why?”

  “Just a feeling. If someone was willing to kill me to make sure the phone’s memory was deleted, we should find out why.”

  “So, book Kumar’s phone into evidence,” Marvin said.

  A limousine pulled up out front. They could see it from the foyer where they were standing.

  “I said they could have the house back at four,” Marvin said. “And they’re right on time.”

  “Meet me at the Clift Hotel at six, tonight,” Michael said. “Now leave. I want to speak to Nirad—informally.”

  “What do you mean, informally?” Marvin said.

  “I want to worry him.”

  “Worry him?”

  “Yeah. Get under his skin,” O’Higgins said.

  “You have to give him the house back, Mike.”

  “I will. We are. You’re leaving. I had something I left upstairs.”

  “Yeah. Really? Have you lost your fucking mind?” Marvin slipped on his raincoat and watched O’Higgins walk up the elegant oriental carpeted stairway. He thought of stopping him, but he felt angry that Kumar had been pregnant, and that a baby who’d never known the world had also lost its life so horribly.

  Fuck Nirad Chaundhry, he thought, and left.

  “I understood that the house was being returned to us,” Nirad said. An attractive young Indian woman, well-dressed, was with him. They both walked into Rishi’s office. Nirad was wearing a grey suit and looked very elegant, his hair cut since they’d met. The young woman was in a pants suit. She was pretty and thin, not too different, Michael thought, from Kumar.

  “Yes. I was just looking for my raincoat. I left it here, somewhere,” O’Higgins said.

  Nirad looked back at the girl and said something in Hindi. She initiated a call on her phone and walked out into the hallway with a rock-hard look on her pretty face.

  “If you don’t mind, Detective, we’ve work to do. It’s been over two days since we could access my son’s office.” Chaundhry leaned on his cane with both hands.

  “We found Bharti Kumar’s iPhone,” O’Higgins said.

  “I see. I’m sure it will be useful,” Chaundhry said.

  He had been watching Chaundhry’s face intently since he’d stepped into the office, and saw in his sideways glance a micro expression that connoted fear, which he had been hoping to see.

  “We have a remarkable crime lab. The people working there are experts at cloning phones. Retrieving data. Kumar’s password was her birthdate. Apparently they’ve already gotten into her phone. It’s common for people to use weak passwords,” O’Higgins said.

  The young Indian woman came back into the room. “Someone would like to speak to you, Detective,” she said, and handed O’Higgins her cell phone.

  “Detective, this is Kathy Price, one of Mr. Chaundhry’s lawyers. I understood the police would be out of the house by 4:00 p.m. That was our agreement with the District Attorney’s office. Any further intrusion would be seen as harassment of my client, Mr. Chaundhry.”

  “Of course. I’ve misplaced my coat,” O’Higgins said. “Simply trying to find it. The house is his.” He handed the phone back to the girl. Something about her was soldier-like, he realized. Spook?

  “It may be in the nanny’s room.” He saw Chaundhry roll his eyes. “I’ll see. Could have been. I’ve been in there, criminalists too, all morning. Hair is what we found. Everyone drops hair. It’s crazy how much we shed every day,” O’Higgins said. He walked out of the office and went up the stairs toward the third floor.

  He walked into Bharti Kumar’s bedroom. It was chilling, still, as if he might see the girl’s body in the shower stall. He heard Chaundhry come down the hall, his cane making a distinctive sound.

  Chaundhry walked into the room behind him, without his assistant. “She was from the Punjab. A nice girl. Very simple girl, really. I find girls like that delightful. Don’t you, Detective? Untouched by pretenses. It’s too bad what happened. I’ve told her parents. I sent them some money. They’re poor village people. They were very grateful. It’s the least we could do. I promised them if they had other daughters, they could send them to me and we would put them to work. A job can change a person’s life, in India.”

  O’Higgins turned around to face Chaundhry. Suspects always wanted to know more. That was the interview technique he used to pull them out of their protective shell. He’d offer to tell them what he knew and they wanted to believe him, even if it was a lie. They desperately wanted to know what he knew. Rich or poor, stupid or Berkeley PhDs, they all wanted to know what he knew.

  “The scene tells a story. Did you
know that? To the trained eye,” O’Higgins said. “The truth is just waiting for us to reveal it. To print it. To capture it and bring it to the lab. And there it will sit until someone pulls up a chair and looks at it under a microscope. Truth. ‘This is what happened.’

  “Cast off? That’s blood that flies from the weapon. I have some on my shoe — it’s from another scene. Someone tried to kill me. Tried to get a piece of evidence. But we were lucky. He wasn’t. He was beaten to death. It was horrible, face obliterated,” O’Higgins said. “I’m guessing he was a professional.”

  “I don’t see your coat, Detective. Perhaps you left it downstairs? You really must let us get to our work now.”

  “Maybe I left it in there. In the bathroom? I might have. People are careless, aren’t they? Leave things. In a hurry, and they just aren’t thinking straight. I’ll look and see. It might be in there.”

  O’Higgins walked into the bathroom. The shower stall’s glass walls were dirty and dry, showing the fingerprint powder’s residue.

  “It’s right here. My coat. I left it here. What do you think happened, Nirad?”

  “I’ve no idea. I suppose Asha came in and confronted the girl about the affair.”

  “She brought a knife, I suppose? Went to the downstairs closet and took it out of the box?” O’Higgins reached for the shower door and opened it. “She walked in here, you think, and confronted Ms. Kumar in the shower?” He turned around and looked at Chaundhry, who was standing in the bathroom doorway.

  “I suppose,” Nirad said. “Yes.”

  “She was pregnant, did you know that? Ms. Kumar.”

  “No. Of course not. How would I know that?”

  “Yes. We just heard. Well, I’ve found my coat. House is officially yours, then,” O’Higgins said, and left.

  CHAPTER 15

  18 months before the murders

  It was five in the morning. The Bay’s waters glistened and shimmered as the dawn seemed to come up from beneath it, sent up from the depths. It was so lovely that O’Higgins was transfixed by the scene: the Berkeley hills, the distant stark megalopolis called Oakland to the southeast, the Bay creeping along the Marin coastline, the midnight blue sky unifying it all, making it a whole landscape that was part of his DNA.