Last Ferry Home

by Kent Harrington

  “She killed him. I tried to stop it once it was obvious he was unconscious. But she wouldn’t stop beating him with the baton,” Michael said.

  Schneider looked at him. His world was so strange to her that he could tell she was incapable of understanding how someone could be so violent— a woman, especially. In the doctor’s world, women didn’t kill people. In her world, everyone got along. In her world, everyone was safe, and treated with respect. In her world, everyone mowed their lawns. Her world had more in common with the bullshit glossy magazines, with their photos of perfect beaches and swell couples. There was no such place, he thought, looking at her. Or at least, not for people like him and Madrone.

  “This young woman you’d gone out with — this was a date?” Schneider asked.

  “Yes. I tried to stop her, but she — she was out of control. He had a gun. He was going to shoot me. She’d gone to pee. And he must have missed her. The door to the bathroom was half open, but he walked right by her. She sat there peeing and heard him breaking into the apartment. She had a baton stashed in the hall by the front door for protection. I think she wanted him to break in. She must have heard him hacking the front door — she’s a cop. But I think she — I think she let him walk right by her so she could —”

  “You did what you could,” the doctor said.

  “Yes. But she wasn’t having it. I was yelling at her to stop. She beat his brains out.”

  “You’re upset,” the doctor said, looking at him carefully.

  It was true, and it was obvious. But it had taken the doctor saying it for him to realize just how upset he was. It was as if her words had woken him from a dream. The office carpet, the walls, the artwork, all came into focus. He’d run here, after leaving Madrone’s apartment, the scene of the crime already taped off, the crime scene log book being constructed by patrol, the early-morning passersby curious to watch the cops work. It was all so familiar to him. Like a boy running home, he’d come here, almost instinctively.

  “Look, I came to tell you that you have to tell my superiors that I’m okay. That there’s nothing wrong with me. They’re going to contact you. They have access to my medical records. But now — after this morning —”

  “I don’t understand,” the doctor said.

  “You have to tell SFPD that I’m fit for duty. I have to work. They might think I’m crazy.”

  They looked at each other. Her face had an expression he’d never seen before. It was the face not of a clinician, in control, but rather of a frightened young woman before someone she was afraid of. She was staring at his shirt cuff, which was soaked in blood. He’d brushed against the blood on the floor of Madrone’s cramped apartment as he’d hurried to dress, the police knocking furiously at the door while the dead man’s skull leaked into a dirty carpet.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t say I understand your world,” the doctor said. It was not a professional remark.

  Something was frightening, he realized, about the way he was sitting there — his shirt soiled, without a tie, the look on his face communicating the awful violence he’d witnessed. A woman had beaten someone to death in the most brutal fashion. It was all taking on a ferocious reality that the doctor wanted no part of. She was repulsed, he realized. In her world, women didn’t beat people to death with steel batons.

  “Will you tell them I’m okay, fit for duty?”

  “You can’t just show up here, you understand that?” the doctor said, trying to get her bearings and perhaps her authority back.

  “Yes. I’m sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I need your help.”

  “You mean you want what you want. I agree, you’re ready to be back at work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you were trying to be normal. Isn’t that what we talked about last session? You were attracted to someone, and you acted on it. That’s called normal behavior where I come from. The violence has nothing to do with that. You took a step. And it’s the one you should take. It’s life, with all its warts.”

  “Okay?” He’d misjudged all of her looks. She wasn’t disgusted with him. She’d only been trying to appreciate what had happened to him, and been taking it in. The fact that she thought his sexual adventure had been positive shocked him. He’d wanted to be censured.

  “I think that’s a good sign,” she said. “You’re trying. It means we’re making progress.”

  “It didn’t go as intended.”

  “No. It didn’t,” she said.

  “My daughter wants to come home. She called and left a message. She’s worried about me.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I’m not ready to take on a teenager. Not right now.”

  “Have you told your daughter how you feel?” the doctor asked.

  “No. I’ve been busy.” He gave her a thin smile. “Trying to get better and all.”

  “I’ve got to go,” the doctor said. “I have an appointment.”

  “You’ll tell SFPD I’m okay, then?”

  “I’m going to tell them that you are fit for work, Detective. Okay?”

  “It’s all I have now. Work. Thank you.”

  “What about your daughter? You have her. She needs you.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “To whom? I think you’re trying to get better. I believe that’s true. But you can’t shut your daughter out of your life because she’s not convenient. Now you have to leave, Michael.” It was one of the few times she’d called him by his first name.

  “Okay,” he said.

  A young woman stood in the doorway, maybe twenty, if that, her hair shaved on her right side. A laptop bristling with stickers was in her hands. She was looking at them as if she’d caught them at something intimate.

  “Should I —?” the attractive young woman said. She started to turn away.

  “No, come in,” the doctor said. “Come in, Karen.”

  O’Higgins left, walking past the dark-haired freaky girl, who was looking at him. He realized the girl might not be a patient. It occurred to him, as he walked toward the elevator, that his psychiatrist might be a lesbian. It took him by surprise.

  ***

  Asha lay in the hospital bed, not knowing where she would go. The news that her daughters were being flown back to India, without her being able to see them, seemed impossible. Surreal, like the rest of the last 48 hours.

  She looked around her. They’d brought another woman, very elderly, into her hospital room. The woman was asleep and seemed barely alive. Asha stared at the old woman, envying her unconsciousness.

  Her cell phone rang, on her lap. She saw it was Nirad.

  “I’m taking the girls to India, to our house in Delhi, Asha. They’ll leave today. They’ll be safe in India,” Nirad said over the phone.

  “I don’t understand,” Asha said. “Can’t I go, too?”

  “I’m afraid not. The police are asking us both to stay and help with their investigation here.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t allow it.”

  “It’s decided,” her father-in-law said.

  “I would like to talk to the girls. Put them on please, Nirad,” she said.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible. They’re en route to the plane now.” He fell silent, and she wasn’t sure he’d not hung up on her.

  “Why are you doing this?” she said.

  “I’m doing it for the girls’ protection. This could be political, the murders,” Nirad said. “How are you feeling?” She could tell he was angry with her, and didn’t mean it.

  “I’d like to go home. To — the house. Can you send someone for me? I came in an ambulance. I’ve no car. I’m not even sure exactly where I am,” she said, and it was true.

  “I’m afraid they’ve not
released the house. Yet. I’ve the lawyers on it,” her father-in-law said.

  She realized with horror that he’d not answered her question about someone coming to fetch her.

  “Perhaps it’s best if you stay at the hospital,” he said. “You need to prepare yourself — you know what you must do.”

  “What happened to Rishi? Who would do such a thing?”

  He’d hung up. She held the phone in both her hands. You know what you must do. She knew what he meant, and it frightened her. Sati.

  She was sure that everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours was a nightmare. At any moment she would wake from it, roll over and feel her husband’s sleeping body. A guru, a good friend of her mother’s and a much respected pandit, had once told her that her sattva guna, one of the three fundamental life forces, was dominant. This sattva guna force would make her prone to complex dreaming, which could carry her away. He told her that she might even have “God-realization” in a dream and be forever changed by it.

  The sweet moment where she touched her husband’s shoulder, felt his body, didn’t arrive. Instead the morning lingered in a horribly prolonged way, with only random visits from nurses and the pedestrian sounds of busy hospital corridors.

  The doctor on the ward, the old kind one who had been so angry with the detectives for upsetting her again, showed her a Western-style breathing technique designed to alleviate panic attacks. He’d come in and held her hand and told her everything would be all right. She’d rung the call bell and asked to see a doctor after speaking to her father-in-law on the phone. She felt a renewed sense of helplessness and panic, made worse with the realization that she was completely alone, and in a strange country without any family.

  And now her father-in-law wanted her to commit suicide, because that was what good Hindu widows were supposed to do.

  As soon as the old doctor left her room she pronounced the AUM mantra, without thinking about it consciously. It took shape in her throat first, then on her lips. She sat on the edge of the bed waiting to be told she could leave, repeating it and repeating it. She began to hear music on top of the sound of her mantra; it was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. She could see her mother playing it in the living room of their family home in India. Suddenly she was there, standing behind her mother as she played the piece.

  “I’ve lost my husband.”

  Her mother stopped playing and looked up from the keyboard. “I know,” she said.

  “I’m alone.”

  “I know, my child.”

  “Help me, Mother!”

  Her mother began to play the piece that she so loved when she was a child. “Listen,” her mother said. The volume increased, and it was as if Asha had her ears up against the piano. She heard the notes with exquisite distinction —the sound of the piano’s hammers tapping the wires, sounds within sounds, all of them at once: Beethoven, the AUM mantra, her mother’s humming, the sounds of the keys, the sounds of the hospital ward, the sounds of her heart, the sounds of her children playing with Bharti upstairs in the new house. She heard peals of laughter that at moments became, and matched in intensity, the sound of her mother’s playing.

  But the piece, the piece she knew so well, was going to end. It was going to end in a way she hated, and in a way that even as a child she dreaded. It had Beethoven’s awful definition of finality. End. A shapeless black ending sent across all time— twice, a kind of signal, mortality’s sigh. One note repeated in the most awful yet starkly beautiful way. The way of all genius is to destroy us, a professor at Cambridge had once said to her.

  She looked up at the ceiling and screamed as Beethoven’s final two notes of the sonata—so famous—were played by her mother’s educated brown fingers pressing on the keyboard, three thousand miles away. Twice in harmony, the last chord with all endings and all beginnings written in time forever. To destroy us and make us whole all at once.

  She screamed, thinking it would stop the music, but she continued to hear it, and finally the second chord fell and she was looking at her husband’s body lying in the elevator. She heard the motor. The elevator that she’d never liked, soundless. It took Rishi away. The door closed and she was with her mother again, her mother’s back to her. The sonata’s last moment hung in the air as her mother played, as if her mother were an Indian goddess. Her hands pressed into the keys. The entire universe, all things known and unknown, spoken and unspoken, left to cotton and wire touching.

  It was the detective’s voice that broke over the disharmony of sounds moving in her head, swamping her mind, her screaming at her mother. A new sound/voice fought with the sound of her scream.

  “Mrs. Chaundhry? Mrs. Chaundhry. It’s Detective O’Higgins.”

  She threw her arms around him, thinking he was her father. She’d seen her father come into their living room. Frightened, she was sure it was him. Her father would make it all right again, as he had when she was a child. Everything would be all right. She would wake up. It would be all right. But it was, she realized finally, only the policeman.

  CHAPTER 14

  O’Higgins drove Asha Chaundhry to the Clift Hotel on Geary Street, not wanting her to have to take a taxi alone from the hospital. She told him in the car that the Clift was where she, Rishi and her girls had stayed when they’d first arrived in San Francisco. She didn’t know where else to go, if she couldn’t go home.

  Geary Street’s sidewalks were chock-a-block with pedestrians. He realized, pulling up to the Clift Hotel’s doors, that he had a strong urge to protect Asha Chaundhry. She slipped out of the car without saying anything. He knew he should just pull away and leave her there, and not heed the incredible attraction, as if she was some larger planet pulling him into her orbit. He sat and watched her enter the expensive hotel. She looked so fragile, he thought. People seemed like giants on the street in comparison. He watched her disappear.

  He’d intended to interview Asha Chaundhry at the hospital, a second time, with Marvin, but it seemed too cruel to interview her when she was having what seemed to be a psychological breakdown. It was something he understood all too well.

  He’d texted Marvin that he was postponing the interview and that Asha Chaundhry had been discharged from the hospital.

  Marvin texted him back immediately: WHY WAIT?

  His phone rang after he didn’t answer the text. It was Marvin.

  “What the hell is going on, Mike?”

  He told Marvin that he’d been attacked, and that the nanny’s phone had been wiped clean.

  “Someone was willing to kill me, and Madrone, to get that phone,” he said.

  “A kill signal? Didn’t you have the damn airplane mode on?”

  “Yes. But he managed to turn the phone on.”

  “So they sent someone to get the phone. They tracked the phone with the airplane mode on? Maybe they used the IMEI number,” Marvin said, trying to make sense of what had happened. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Someone got to it, that’s what’s going on.”

  “They tried to kill you? Jesus,” Marvin said. “Who is doing this shit? They could have used the IMEI number, but they’d still need a carrier’s help. And they needed to know Kumar’s IMEI number. I couldn’t find one, and I’m the police. This is some Big Brother shit.”

  “Well, it’s someone who hires killers, someone sophisticated enough to track cell phones when they’re turned off,” O’Higgins said. “Sounds like a government to me.”

  “That would have to be a carrier. It’s the only way, if the airplane mode was on. And they needed a police report saying the phone had been stolen — from the person who owned the damn phone,” Marvin said.

  “Yeah. Like I said, a government. Spooks could do it. Who knows what they can do,” O’Higgins said, not wanting to talk on the phone about it. “I don’t think we should talk about it like this — you understand?”r />
  “Okay. But you’ve got to bring Asha Chaundhry in for an interview, Mike.”

  “Okay. I will, just not immediately. She’s in a bad way, Marvin.”

  “Are you listening to me, Mike? We need to question her. We need to tie her to a story.”

  “Yeah. I know. We will.”

  “Today,” Marvin said.

  “Okay. Okay. Later today, then. Tonight.”

  “Are you okay, man? Were you hurt last night?”

  “No. I’m fine. The other guy has a serious condition, though.” It was their running joke, referring to death as a “serious condition.” Marvin didn’t laugh. “I’m fine, man.”

  “Tonight,” Marvin repeated.

  “Okay, tonight.”

  He parked the car in a red zone and followed Asha into the hotel, drawn to her not as a policeman, but as something else that he couldn’t quite explain. Had it been simply a sexual attraction, as it was with Madrone, he could easily have left her there. It was something else, something more powerful, and something that he couldn’t explain. He’d never felt anything like it before. It was as if he were being drawn toward a light in a dark room.

  He walked up behind her as Asha explained to a well-dressed young woman at the hotel’s desk, who remembered her, that she wanted to take the same suite her husband and she had before. The attractive Asian clerk asked her about her daughters. Asha said nothing. She explained that she would have her luggage sent along soon. The clerk at the desk looked at Asha, and then at O’Higgins, who stood beside Asha. The clerk realized, without being told anything, that something was terribly wrong.

  O’Higgins thought he would leave her at the elevator doors, but didn’t. Instead he rode with her to the top floor and followed her down the hallway to the grand suite of rooms.

  “Do you want me to come in?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said without turning around, slipping a white room card into the door’s electronic lock and opening it.

  He walked in behind her, apprehensive about his motives. It was a huge suite with views of the City that were just now clearing, white bits of cloud-scud flying like flags over the teal colored bay and a metal-grey downtown, all of it saying “Big West Coast city.”