He turned away from her. How could he? It was music he didn’t want to hear.
“Yes. Yes, very pretty,” Michael said. He got out simple words without muffing them, and he was proud of it.
One of the couple’s daughters came running up and said something in Hindi and then English. She turned, looked at him and smiled. He smiled back. Second smile, he realized in the space of a few moments. Life was smacking him in the face, and on a boat on the water, of all places.
“Do you have children, Michael?” the husband asked.
“I — I — I — ” he tried to answer. He was going to say yes, he had a daughter. Although it seemed like a thousand years since she’d been with him. Was he dreaming this? This whole thing, now on the ferry, was it a dream? He would wake up. The digital clock by his nightstand would read 6:00 a.m. He would roll over and look across at the Valium vial and at the water glass he kept on his wife’s side of the bed where he slept. Yes, I’ll wake up. Not a bad dream.
He looked directly out at the bay, at the open water. He could feel the rumble of the ferry’s twin diesel engines come up through the thick steel bench, the cold sun on his face as they headed east toward the green island.
“I — I — ye — yes.”
The wife turned and looked at her husband. Their daughter was afraid of him now. She rolled further into her mother’s arms, seeking protection.
“Yes, well. It won’t be long and we’ll be there,” the husband said. He was looking at Michael more carefully.
Michael had stopped trying to make words. It was useless. The connection between his mouth and his brain seemed to be severed. He just nodded and smiled, making sure he didn’t glance toward the open water again. He glanced again at the mother and daughter, who were looking at him with a kind of pity. It was a pity people displayed for the mentally slow, or the homeless.
They think I’m slow.
“We love San Francisco,” the man’s wife said, talking really more to herself, trying to keep the awkward conversation going — for his sake? Or hers? “The girls love it too. We love Italian food. We can’t get good Italian food at home. I had it while in England in school.”
The three of them were looking at him, the wife’s look clinical. She was trying to categorize his problem: mentally deficient, drunk, head injury?
“What do you do?” The husband seemed to want to soldier on with conversation, thinking it would help pave over the awkwardness of his stuttering.
Most people would have just dropped him by now. He’d been through this before with strangers. It wasn’t the first time people thought him slow — “touched” was the word someone had used, thinking he couldn’t understand English.
The wife turned toward her husband and shook her head slightly. She’d decided it was time to leave the poor man alone.
“Po — po —”
“Policeman!” her husband exclaimed, filling the rest of the word in for him. “Cops and robbers!”
“Yes,” he answered, smiling again for the third time in almost a year, and not realizing it this time.
The little girl wiggled out of her mother’s arms, bored with the big white man’s stuttering.
“Go with her, Rishi. I’m afraid she’ll fall in,” the mother said.
Michael stood bolt upright, as if he’d been shot. He towered over them. They noticed how tall he was. He seemed a giant to them.
“Yes, go with her,” O’Higgins said. The words came out perfectly, as if nothing was wrong with him at all. The tone was the old tone he’d used on the streets when talking to civilians, full of cop authority.
The father looked at him, shocked by both his tone and his having stood up so quickly, as if there was some great emergency.
“Accidents happen,” Michael said. He sat down again, realizing that he was scaring the couple.
“Yes. Of course,” the husband said. He and his wife exchanged a look, and the father took his daughter’s hand. The wife stood up, looking for her other daughter, and saw her by the railing. She was taking pictures with their father’s iPad of random sailboats leaving from the Tiburon Yacht Club.
Michael watched the wind catch the mother’s jacket as she stood, and whip it. She grabbed at it. He could see the outline of her slender body, the outline of her breasts. Something about her was startlingly beautiful, something perfect that he would always remember: the wind, the dance of her long thick black hair being blown about, the sight of her slender brown arm against the bright orange of her blouse. He stared at her, afraid he would see the open water again but risking it. He leaned into the seat and felt more of the reassuring vibrations from the boat’s engine move along the steel at his back. When he stood up, he’d gotten the whole picture of Raccoon Strait.
The only noise was the heavy sound of ferry’s big diesel engines. The young mother sat down. Perhaps she was afraid of him? Certainly caution had moved in. He closed his eyes and heard the sound of gulls and the sound of people’s voices over the engines. He let himself sink into the sounds.
He opened his eyes with the intention of rescuing the conversation. I need to talk to people, he realized. I’ll call Marvin when I get home. I will call Marvin when I get home. I love Marvin. He knows me. I love my daughter. She knows me. He turned toward the wife.
At that instant a man came around the corner and sat on the other side of her. Something about him was off, some vibe. His cop senses went off. The man was white and about forty, but could have been younger. It was hard to tell as he pulled a black hoodie over his head. He’d given them a quick but deliberate look.
The man turned and glanced again at the mother, who was looking at Michael and smiling. The man didn’t smile or show any emotion. It was a glance of appraisal. Then, without warning, the man glanced his way. It was a flat look he’d seen before in the streets. The man’s eyes narrowed, atavistic and threatening. He had the eyes of a shark, cold and if not exactly dead, without life’s brightness either.
The man turned away. He got up quickly and slipped into the crowd standing at the railings, moving off through it and finally disappearing. Michael thought he noticed the outline of a side arm’s profile on the man’s right hip.
“Are you okay, Michael?” the wife asked him. He nodded yes.
***
“I want to come back to work,” Michael said.
“Are you sure you’re ready, Mike?” Marvin said. He tucked into his bowl of chili. He’d smashed saltines onto the top of the chili, which Michael had seen him do a hundred times before. He liked seeing it again. Seeing Marvin’s big hands crush the white crackers was reassuring, familiar. Marvin Lee was one part of his old life that he wanted back. Normalcy. It was two days before he was scheduled to go back to work at SFPD.
“You haven’t asked me anything about what happened,” Michael said.
“No, I haven’t,” Marvin said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to know,” Marvin said. “Selfish on my part, really. But I don’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know exactly. Too painful. Too much. I’m too old. I don’t know,” Marvin said. “I had a rough time thinking about you and Rebecca without Jennifer.”
“Rough is right,” Michael said, trying to sum it all up, the last nine months.
“Yeah. I still sometimes think — I don’t know, that it didn’t happen. It’s crazy,” Marvin said.
“You can ask me,” Michael said. “Maybe I want you to ask me about it.”
“No, you don’t. I can tell.”
“I’ve got another weapon. It’s at the house. I’ve tried to use it on myself, but can’t,” Michael said.
Marvin stopped eating. “Okay. What happened out there?” Marvin was looking directly at him.
“I’m not sure. A wave. Rogue wave. The tiller busted, so we went sideways into a trough.
Jennifer was in the galley. It was calm. July is safe. Calm seas. Nothing. It was always calm in July. I remember there was a red sky the night before, as I was driving to the store. Red sky at night, sailors’ delight — I don’t know if I can make it,” Michael said. “I’m seeing a doctor, but I don’t know if I can make it.”
“But you want to come back,” Marvin said.
“Yes. I think so.”
“You don’t have to, not yet. You can extend it, the leave,” Marvin said.
“I want to come back, or I’m never going to come back. I want you to be my partner again. I can’t deal with anyone else. No rookies. No kids with something to prove. No burnt-out drunks I have to watch out for.”
“Okay. Okay,” Marvin said.
“I don’t want to die and I do want to die. Does that surprise you?”
“Stop that bullshit. You got a daughter to live for. I don’t want to hear any more of that silly shit.” Marvin tucked back into his bowl of chili. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mike. Cut it out.”
“Will you really have me as a full-on partner, or are you going to be afraid I’m a nut job? I need to know. I don’t want to be treated like there’s something wrong with me. I want to be treated like before this all happened. I don’t want you walking on eggshells. I don’t want you to look at me like I’m crazy. And there’s something else — I’m afraid of open water. It’s some kind of reaction. It’s like vertigo. I get sick when I see open water. Can’t even talk right.” He’d not spoken so much in months to anyone but the doctor.
“I don’t care. We’re not in the navy.” Marvin smiled at him.
“What if we have to go near the water, Marvin?”
“I said, I — don’t — give — a — fuck. Do you still understand English?”
“Yes, I understand English,” he said.
“Good. That’s a start, then. Come back. I’ve been working with a twenty-five year old kid who just stares at his phone all the fucking time. He makes me feel old, besides. You Irish dick.”
CHAPTER 12
It had begun to rain, one of those surprisingly violent rains that come to the Bay Area in the beginning of March and leave the sky swept clean and blue afterwards, laying the groundwork for spring.
He had been staring at the huge landscape painting in the Chaundhrys’ foyer. It was a place he recognized, Duxbury Reef. He could hear the rain hitting the mansion and realized that it was striking the windows along the living room. A lone black-and-white patrol car sat in the Chaundhrys’ driveway, protecting the scene of the crimes. The number on the patrol car’s roof was just visible from where he was standing in the foyer.
The painting fascinated him. It covered the whole wall. It had a silent feel and was intensely dramatic. It felt as if you were standing with the artist, watching the waves crash along the reef. It was captivating.
Because it was of the ocean, he’d been almost afraid to appreciate it. The first time he’d seen it he’d turned away but now, alone in the house for the first time, he took it in. Something about it told of the ocean’s brutality, what he knew so well about it. Something in the painting said that brutality was basic to nature and fundamental to life. He had a funny impulse to steal the painting and bring it home so he could better understand what the artist was trying to say. Perhaps studying it, he could find out what was wrong with him. Had he become brutish because of the tragedy? Yes, he thought, and it frightened him. His anger he recognized as brutish and terrifying.
He knew the place: Bolinas’ Duxbury reef. It was a spot he knew well as his brother, the surgeon, had a place overlooking it. When he’d first bought his sailboat, he’d sailed by the reef many times on the way to Tomales Bay. He’d seen the famous reef from both the ocean and the land, in summer and in winter.
He heard the front door open and saw Marvin walk in. He was wearing a grey raincoat, the shoulders stained dark, proof that it was still raining hard.
“What’s up, buttercup?” Marvin asked.
“Waiting for you.”
“They’re cute girls,” Marvin said. “Twins. You can’t tell them apart.” He’d gone to interview the two Chaundhry girls at the Indian Consulate after seeing Towler. He forced his way in, causing a scene. The Consulate staff had relented and allowed him to talk to the girls in person, afraid perhaps that the press would get wind of them keeping the girls locked up and away from the police.
Michael walked into the family’s grand living room. Its stained mahogany wide-plank hardwood floors were brand new. It was the kind of house his wife would have loved, he thought. It had been his wife’s dream to buy a vacation home somewhere and decorate it. He looked around, taking it all in.
The windows facing the view to the west were wet and streaked, glistening in places, the rain driven sideways by the wind. Everything was perfect: the art, the caramel-colored furniture worth tens of thousands of dollars. Even an average person would feel like a somebody sitting here. World class. He crossed the room and went to the fireplace. With a control he found on the mantle, he turned on the gas-insert. A fire sprung to life, seeding the iron “faux” logs and making them start to glow like real wood.
“This is cool.” He thought he heard his wife’s voice. It startled him. He put the fireplace control down. He knew he’d jumped, and hoped Marvin hadn’t noticed it.
“Are you okay?” Marvin said. “Getting comfortable? I wouldn’t.” He came into the room behind his partner. Marvin’s phone rang and he took the call, walking back out to the hallway while taking off his raincoat. Michael could tell Marvin was talking to his wife.
O’Higgins sat down and opened his iPad. He began to flip through the photos of the scene Rene Fields had emailed him. There were dozens. How was it they’d not found the nanny’s phone, he wondered. He studied shots of the elevator’s mechanicals, which were covered in Rishi Chaundhry’s blood. The blood had run into the gap and down the elevator’s shaft, pooling around its brand new motor. The photographs told him nothing, he thought, about who had killed his victims. He was getting frustrated.
“They’re okay, the Chaundhry kids?” Michael said, looking up from the iPad when Marvin came back into the room.
“Yeah. They want to come home. And they want to see their mother, of course. She’s talked to them on the phone. But — it’s strange. The Consulate twits said they were going to India in a few hours.”
“What time did their grandfather pick them up?” Michael asked. “Did they say?”
“They didn’t have a clue. They’re just little girls. They’re upset. They haven’t been allowed to visit their mom. They’re living with strangers, and they’re set to be taken to India. I felt sorry for them.”
“I don’t get that,” Michael said. “How can Nirad Chaundhry just take them out of the country like that?”
“The grandfather is calling the shots. He’s flying them home on a private jet. That’s what the guy in the turban said. He’s the same guy who was out here last night. He stayed with me the whole time I was in there talking to the girls.”
“He can’t leave — Chaundhry.”
“I know. We’ve told him,” Marvin said.
“He’s a flight risk,” Michael said.
“You think he did it?” Marvin said.
“I don’t know.”
“What about the neighbor? How did that go?”
“She’s lying about the time. Why she’s lying, I don’t know. She told patrol, when they interviewed her and her husband, that Nirad Chaundhry had come at 5:45.”
“How do you know that they just didn’t make a mistake, when they were first interviewed? Why would they lie to us?”
“Trust me. She’s lying. Her expressions gave her away. And she told patrol that she heard a bell and went to answer the door. Now she says her husband answered the door. Madrone—the officer who interviewed them—had 5:45 in her r
eport. The wife told Madrone the grandfather came for the girls at 5:45, not 5:15, which is what she’s saying now.”
“Towler is worried about you,” Marvin said. “I was called downtown.” He’d decided in the car on the way over that he wasn’t going to keep it from O’Higgins. He would tell his partner the truth: their boss was getting worried that the case was too important, too high-profile for Michael to handle.
“Worried? Why?”
“That you’re 5150, I guess. Really. I’m not joking, Mike.”
“Great.”
“I told Towler you’re okay. Are you okay, Mike?” Marvin said. He felt guilty asking, but he wanted to know. He sensed something was terribly wrong with his friend. He noticed a stand-off quality that had not been there before the accident, as if O’Higgins was keeping some terrible secret.
“Fine.”
“Why don’t you look at the wife, Asha Chaundhry? You saw the nanny? That was temptation there, man. She was a very beautiful girl. That’s a fact. Rishi was human. Every day he was looking at this young girl, and one day maybe he crossed the line.”
“We will look at her. I was waiting for her to be able to talk to us. And have a clear head. She was heavily sedated when we spoke with her.”
“You said ‘she couldn’t have done it.’ That’s not like you, man. You met the lady once. Come on. She’s at the top of the damn list as far as I’m concerned.”
“According to patrol there are no security camera recordings. All the neighbors have security camera systems, the five neighbors who were interviewed last night. But their systems just feed live video. No one saw anything. No strange cars, or strange people, nothing out of the ordinary,” Michael said.
“They want us to release this place,” Marvin said. “The DA is pushing for that. They’re getting pressure from the Consulate.”
“The nanny’s phone is still missing. It could be here, in the house. We shouldn’t release the house until we find it,” Michael said. He looked down at the iPad. It was automatically scrolling through the crime-scene photos. He saw a series begin of the nanny’s room.
Last Ferry Home Page 11
