Kate knew her well enough to see that there would be no rational explanations until her passion had subsided—at which time there would probably be more rational explanation than Kate actually wanted. Still, Roz was a pleasure to watch, and her excitement was contagious.
Then the pager in Kate’s pocket began to throw itself about furiously, if silently. Lee heard her exclamation of disgust, turned to look at her, and diagnosed the problem in an instant.
“You’re being buzzed?”
In answer Kate fished the little thing out and shut it off. The number it displayed was that of Al and Jani, and she could only squeeze Lee’s hand in apology, turn her over to Jon yet again, and (because she was not on call and Lee had pointedly refused to bring her own cell phone) go searching for a pay phone. She stood in the lobby with one finger pushed against her free ear and the receiver jammed up to the other, half shouting to be heard above the departing audience.
“Is that Jules? Oh, Jani—hi. Al paged me. What? I can’t— He’s where? Hold on just a second.” She fished out a pen and a scrap of paper. “What was that address again? Okay. Right. But we’re not on call, did he tell you why they called us? It’s who? Oh, Christ. God damn it. Oh, I’m sorry, Jani. Thanks for the message, I’ll probably get there before he does. Say hi to Jules for me.”
Kate hung up and stood for a long moment with her hand still tight around the receiver, her eyes shut. Fury and confusion and dread all pushed at her, and useless self-criticism, but above all came sorrow, for the loss of such a thing of beauty.
Laxman Mehta had been found in an alley behind a bar in the Castro.
Dead.
Strangled.
And wearing handcuffs.
Chapter 13
THE FADING COLORS AND images of the dance she had just seen jostled in her mind with the reality of what Kate was seeing. It was night here, too, the alley dark and filled up with flitting, shifting shadows, and there were the uniformed guards of the city’s peace, moving about the alley as if it was a narrow stage depicting gritty, urban life. Her imaginary song of the city was as ominous as any of the oboe’s notes, and the setting considerably uglier. All it needed was a bloody knife sticking out of the alleyway.
Kate shook her head to clear it of fantasy. No knife here, no theological speculation about virgin goddesses, no costumes and beautiful sets. Just brutal death, and a crowd of people. The ops center seemed to have pulled out all the stops on this one, and called in everyone from foot patrol to the lieutenant. Most of the personnel were standing around with nothing to do, since a scene had to be worked in sequence. Press photographers snapped away at the teams leaning against the wall and laughing, and she sent a uniform over to have the technicians take their waiting out of sight. Then Kate went forward to look at the body.
A person would never know that this had been a beautiful male creature. (“Black am I, and beautiful” echoed in Kate’s ears in painful contrast to the swollen-tongued, dark-faced figure at her feet.) Between the distortion and suffusion of the strangulation and the postmortem trauma of being (apparently) dragged and kicked, the only thing Laxman Mehta looked like was dead.
She did not even bother to pull back the remains of his shirt to look for a taser burn. It was possible that an experienced pathologist in a brightly lit morgue would be able to pick out the difference between one slightly red area and another, but Kate couldn’t, and certainly not in a dark alley.
The flash of cameras and a raised chorus of voices from the street made her look around to see Al Hawkin letting himself through the screens Kate had ordered put up. Nothing like a body behind a Castro district leather bar to pique the interest of readers over their morning coffee.
“You must’ve driven like a maniac,” she greeted Al.
“Got lucky with traffic. Was the press here when you arrived?”
“Yeah, but the foot patrol had them under control. No scene contamination except for the guys who found him.”
“Talked to them yet?”
“They’re inside with the patrol. I told him to get them some coffee. Kitagawa caught this one. I guess he’s the one who called you?”
With the possibility of a serial killer on their hands, word had been spread throughout the Bay Area that any dead male who had been strangled, showed taser marks, or had a history of abuse against women should be brought to their attention. She and Al had decided to keep the tenuous link of candy in the victims’ pockets to themselves for the moment. Leaks were all too common, and it was good to sit on one mark of the killer—if mark it was.
“Yeah. I told him we’d assist. He said he’d get Crime Scene started here, then go tell the family and seal the guy’s rooms until they can get over there.” Al dropped his voice further. “You look at the pockets yet?”
“The ME did. Didn’t find any candy exactly, but he found a little plastic bag of something that looked like seeds and stuff.”
“Seeds? Like sensemilla, you mean?”
“More like caraway or something—and some little colored thingies mixed in with it. Like those sprinkles you put on top of kids’ birthday cakes, you know?”
Al shrugged his shoulders. “Doesn’t sound much like caramel chews and chocolate bars to me, but we’ll see what the lab says. Are they about finished here?”
“I think so.” Kate signaled that the body could be bagged and taken away, and walked with Al toward the kitchen entrance of the bar. “Al, one thing. You didn’t meet him, but that was one gorgeous young man when he was alive.”
“Why, Martinelli, I didn’t know you cared.”
“I’m not interested, Al, but I’m not blind. I remember thinking at the time that he’d cause a riot in a place like this.”
A stranger might be excused from thinking there was already a riot going on inside. It occurred to Kate that the insulation in the walls and windows must have cost a pretty sum; from the outside all she had heard was the muffled hum of a beehive with an underlying thudding sound of a beating heart. Inside, Al had to shout in her ear to be heard.
“Is Kitagawa still here?”
“He’s gone to notify the family,” she shouted in return. “He said he’d bring back a photo.”
The bar was just what the Christian Right had in mind when it referred to the hellfire sins of San Francisco, Sodom-by-the-Bay. Had one of their straight-ace photographers made it inside the door, he could have shot a random roll that would have scared the socks off Middle America and made them join in fervent prayer for an earthquake along the San Andreas Fault.
Kate, though, had no problems with the place. Were it not for the stink of sweaty males with booze and controlled substances oozing from their pores, she might even have enjoyed it, if for nothing more than the display (using the word in more than one sense) of black leather fashions and the impressive creativity of the human male when it came to threading sharp metal objects through parts of his anatomy. Put one of those gigantic car-lifting magnets in the ceiling and switch it on, she reflected, and half the men here would slap up against it, spread-eagled like flies on a windshield.
“What are you grinning at, Martinelli?” Al yelled in her ear. She just shook her head and pushed forward toward the bar.
There were two men working, expertly banging down full glasses and change with one hand and scooping up empties and money with the other, bantering at the top of their lungs with the customers and singing occasional snatches of music with the recorded cacophony belting out of the speakers. Kate, the only woman in the place as far as she could see, leaned against the corner of the polished wood and waited for the nearer bartender to approach. When he did, she flipped open her badge holder to identify herself and in one smooth movement the man’s hamlike hand shot out and folded the ID shut and back into her palm before anyone noticed it.
He leaned across the bar at her. “You want to shut the place, Martinelli, or you want to talk to me?”
Kate drew back to study his face and realized that she knew him—or at leas
t, she’d met him. She thought.
“Dimitri?” The man who had passed through her kitchen some months before, working on some project with Lee and Jon, had left her with the impression of a retired wrestler in a tweed jacket, not this slab of muscle glued into a garment that was more than half missing. He had also been lighter by about six ounces of surgical steel, some of which Kate had to deduce by the shapes of the hoops and bumps under the sleek leather. He grinned at her with perfect white teeth and pulled up the top of the bar to let himself out. Nodding amiably at Hawkin behind Kate’s shoulder, the bartender paused to swat a willowy figure on one half-protruding and nicely shaped buttock and, when his victim whirled around, Dimitri jerked his thumb in the direction of the huge mirror in back of the bar. The shapely man extricated himself from his companions and made for the service side of the bar, leaving Dimitri to push his way through the crowded room with Kate and Al Hawkin on his heels.
The office was also heavily insulated, and a relief. He waved them to a tight circle of half a dozen chairs and continued on through a narrow door, leaving it ajar so he could talk.
“You’re here about that boy in the alley?” he called to them.
“You know anything about it, Dimitri?”
“Only that two of my customers stepped out for a breath of air and had the shock of their lives. Your nice patrolman took them home, by the way—one of them couldn’t stop crying and began to need his asthma inhaler. I have their address for you.”
The sound of running water stopped, followed by a soft pop followed by a slick rubbing noise. Dimitri came out, drying his face in a towel and smelling of deodorant. Kate made the introductions, she and Al both shook the man’s nice clean hand, and then he dropped into a chair, swiveling it around to open a tiny refrigerator at his knee. He pulled out a bottle of mineral water, offered them a drink (which both refused), and unscrewed the cap to empty half the bottle down his throat in a series of muscular gulps.
“Sorry,” he said when he came up again for air. “Gets hot in there. What can I do for you?”
“Do you know the man who was found in the alley?”
“I didn’t go look at him, just saw him for a second from the kitchen door before I was shoved back inside, but he didn’t look familiar. Do you know who it was?”
“His name was Laxman Mehta.”
“Indian? No, I think I would’ve noticed an Indian. We don’t get too many in here—they tend to be a little… conservative.”
“You’d certainly have noticed this one. Five six, slim, soft brown skin, long eyelashes, high cheekbones. Like a doe on two legs. Looked about sixteen, was actually in his late twenties.”
Dimitri raised his eyebrows. “I couldn’t have missed the effect he would have had on the place.”
“You don’t think he was in here, then?”
“Was he into the leather scene?”
“I shouldn’t think so. I don’t even think he was gay.”
“A waste,” Dimitri commented.
“Are you the owner here, Mr… ?” Hawkin spoke up, trying for the Russian’s surname, but defeated before he began. A massive arm waved away the attempt.
“Nobody can say my last name. That’s why I chose it—I was born Travers. Call me Dimitri. And yes, I’m the owner—or, me and the bank anyway.”
“Are you here most of the time?”
“Six days a week, opening to closing. We’re shut Sundays. Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy.”
Hawkin peered at the man to see if he was serious, and decided he was joking, but Kate vaguely remembered that Dimitri had been a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hawkin continued. “And you didn’t hear anything in the alleyway? Sounds of a fight, say, or a car engine?”
“I was out there earlier, dumping the garbage, and after that things got busy. And before you ask, no, he wasn’t there when I went out.”
“When would that have been?”
“Let’s see. Definitely after six ‘cause the news I watch was over, but before six-fifteen. Can’t get closer than that.”
Kate checked her notes: The first call to 911 had come in at 8:42. She’d been buzzed about forty-five minutes later, and it was now nearly tomorrow.
“Do you get many women in here?” Kate asked without much hope. Whether they were LOPD Ladies or simply women, a female would stand out in Dimitri’s.
“Did you see many? Oh, we get a few, mostly they drop in on a dare, sometimes they come in with friends. They don’t stay. And I don’t remember any tonight.”
“Can you give us a list of your customers’ names, Dimitri? Anyone who would have been here between six and eight-thirty?”
“God, you don’t ask for much, do you? You know, the best thing would be to come back tomorrow night and ask them yourselves. Weekdays like this, my guys tend to be regulars, especially that early in the evening. Then I could give you some names, they could give you others, you’d get a more complete list.”
“You don’t mind having your… patrons questioned?” Al asked him.
“I stopped your partner flashing her badge because this time of night’s an entirely different crowd, and they won’t have heard about the killing yet. By tomorrow they’ll all know, and even if your man wasn’t gay, he sounds pretty enough that a passing gay-basher would have assumed he was. You’ll find my customers’ll be willing to help, especially the early crowd. They’re more, I suppose you could call it family-oriented.”
“ ‘Family-oriented,” “ Al repeated.
“Do you have a problem with my place of business?” demanded the big man, his eyebrows coming together. “Because if so, maybe it’d be better if Martinelli came back alone.”
“Problem? No, I don’t have any problems with your bar or its clientele. It just seems so…” Al paused to consider his word, while Dimitri’s shoulders bulged menacingly and Kate prepared to duck. “So old-fashioned.”
Dimitri’s muscles deflated comically. “So what?”
“Quaint, I suppose. I mean, you almost expect to be issued a towel at the door.”
He blinked blandly at Dimitri, who finally decided that his leg was being pulled, and gave a great bellow of laughter. He slapped Al affectionately on the shoulder, nearly shooting him off the chair.
“ ‘Old-fashioned,” “ he said, chuckling. ”I like that. But yeah, you know, a place like this really is about as close to the old bathhouse energy as you’re going to get in this day and age. You could say I’m helping my people find their roots.“ He laughed again, hugely amused, and Kate and Al left him to a contemplation of his quaint and old-fashioned leather-bound and metal-studded customers.
The two detectives paused on the bar’s back step to look over the taped-off alley, waiting for the light of day to search for its forensic secrets. After a minute Kate snorted.
“God, Al, I thought you were going to insult that guy and I’d have to peel you off the wall. ”Quaint,“ yet.”
“Well, sure. Places like this are so nineteenth-century, they’re positively archaic. Wealthy male aristocrats with a taste for being spanked go to private clubs where they can dress up in uncomfortable clothing and masks for a bit of anonymous fun and then go home to their regular lives. Hell, the Victorians even invented the nipple ring.”
Looking at the side of his face in the half-light spilling into the alleyway, Kate could not tell if he was making a joke or if he meant it.
In either case, it was an interpretation of leather bars that had never before occurred to Kate, and she made a mental note to try it out on Lee. And Jon.
Chapter 14
DIMITRI’s TWO CUSTOMERS HAD seen nothing and no one when they set off on their shortcut through the alley, except for Laxman’s body, which they nearly stepped on. The men were a longtime couple, a month past their tenth anniversary, and the younger one, the one gripping the asthma inhaler as a talisman, had never seen anything like it before. His older partner seemed more resigned, certainly less shocked, which made sense when he
told them that he had spent two years as a medic in Vietnam.
They had not noticed anyone out of the ordinary in the hour or so they had been in Dimitri’s, and certainly no women. The older man thought he had seen a car drive out of the end of the alley, something boxy and light in color, but he couldn’t swear to it because just then his partner had stumbled and screamed at what lay at his feet. When asked, they worked out a list of who had been there at the same time. Many of the names were less than helpful, since they consisted of nicknames like Studly and Dragon (for metalwork and a tattoo, respectively), but Dimitri would no doubt be able to translate them, and the task cheered the asthmatic up considerably.
Kitagawa called them to say that Peter Mehta was too upset to talk to them that night and that his wife had already taken her sleeping pill and gone to bed. Kitagawa had reluctantly agreed to return the next day, and wondered if Kate and Al considered a watch on the house necessary. They decided it was not. In the meantime, Kitagawa would take the photograph of Laxman he had gotten from Peter and leave it to be copied overnight, to help their neighborhood canvass.
When they got back to Dimitri’s they found that even the media had packed up their cameras and returned to their beds, leaving the Castro to its family-oriented residents and the few late-night denizens whose voices echoed down the thinly populated streets as they walked off beneath the street lamps, leaving behind that remnant of a free-and-easy, pre-AIDS past called Dimitri’s.
“You want a bed?” Kate asked her partner, who was looking at a forty-minute drive home. Plus, with the Laxman killing, it was time to upgrade the task force: an early-morning meeting had been called, a long-overdue gathering of all the disparate law enforcement individuals concentrating on the series of killings, including the feds. Al would want to be alert for that, and had taken her up on such offers a number of times before, since marrying Jani and giving up his apartment in San Francisco. He even kept a clean shirt and a razor in the guest room.
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