Night Work

by Laurie R. King

  Four backless benches of polished oak had been arranged in an open square in the center of the room, facing the four walls. The Virgin Mary's shrine wall was to the right of the door; the wall with the door in it bore only a plain wooden cross with a tall candle in front, dignified and simple to the point of starkness. The left-hand wall, across the room from the Virgin, was mounted with a deep wooden shelf about six feet wide, roughly three feet off the floor. On the shelf was propped a painting done on cheap canvas-board, a crudely done landscape of hills, trees, and river, with an angel flying in the clouds over it. The angel did not appear aerodynamic nor the landscape very probable, but there were half a dozen other pictures leaning against the wall to choose from, and Kate put her empty cup down on one of the benches and went to flip through them. They included an intricate mandala, a Star of David, the enlarged photograph of a tropical island, and three framed prints: a Berthe Morisot mother and child, an old-fashioned painting of children splashing in a river, and a famous Eva Vaughn study of three children, the original of which Kate had actually seen in the artist's studio. She greeted it like a friend and thought about putting it up in place of the nonaerodynamic angel, but resisted the temptation.

  This left the fourth wall, which was completely concealed by a heavy, dark red velvet curtain that stretched from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. She pulled the left edge away from the wall, saw that there did indeed seem to be something other than blank wall behind it, and found a curtain pull. She tugged at the cords, the drapes obediently parted, and then Kate was stumbling back, badly startled.

  For a brief but intense moment, she thought that she was being attacked by a wild woman with blood on her teeth. She could almost smell the blood, splashed around the woman in a pool, and then the hallucination faded, leaving her to gaze in mingled amazement and horror at the image before her.

  The painting on the wall was enough to give a man nightmares. It showed a woman of sorts, but this was a woman who would have caused a playboy to shrivel, would have given pause to the most ardent feminist, would have had a Freudian rapidly retracting that plaintive, worn, masculine query concerning what women wanted.

  For what this lady wanted was blood.

  And had it, as Kate could well see. The deep blue, larger-than-life female was wading through a lake of the stuff, splashing it around, looking drunk with it. Kate recognized her instantly as the subject of Roz's thesis, Kali with the necklace of skulls and the belt of human hands, laughing her terrible pleasure at the decapitated head she held up in one of her four arms, a bearded face with blue eyes and a mole next to his nose, which seemed oddly familiar to Kate. Gentle Jesus meek and mild would be eaten alive by the goddess, and Kate could understand why the curtain normally hid her from view.

  There were not as many prayers and thanks offerings in the two bowls attached to her wall, either, clear indication that Kali was a bit strong for most of the women who came here to free themselves from a battering relationship. It would take most women some time to get in touch with this degree of anger.

  But if that was so, then whose slips of paper were these? They read only Thank you Kali Ma and Be with us, and were for the most part printed anonymously. Marigolds lay in Kali's thanks bowl, mixed with a few still-fragrant narcissus, a child-sized glass bracelet, a gold wedding band, and a Polaroid snapshot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  And right at the bottom, uprooted by Kate's curious forefinger, a lump of cellophane-wrapped butterscotch.

  Help us to be the always hopeful

  Gardeners of the spirit

  Who know that without darkness

  Nothing comes to birth

  As without light

  Nothing flowers.

  Kate snatched her hand out of the bowl as if she'd been burned, but she scarcely had time to contemplate the awful implications of contaminated evidence before a noise came from behind her back. She whirled around, her hand plunging of its own accord toward the butt of her gun, but she froze when she saw the cluster of women in the doorway.

  Diana Lomax stood just inside the room, taken aback at Kate's sudden reaction. Behind her stood Crystal Navarro and a couple of the other residents, with two young children. Crystal and the children had quite obviously never seen the painting of Kali, because all three were gaping at it, bug-eyed.

  “Blessed Jesus!” Crystal blurted out. “I didn't know them curtains had anything—”

  “Who did this?” Kate demanded of the shelter director.

  “Did what?” Diana asked in confusion.

  “That … thing on the wall. Who painted it?”

  “That? It is a bit strong, isn't it? One of our volunteers asked if we—”

  “Who. Painted. It.” Kate leaned forward, and Diana took a step back.

  “Phoebe Weatherman. Carla's secretary?”

  “We've met,” Kate told her, not entirely accurately. “When did she paint it?”

  “Not very long ago. January, maybe? Yes, it must have been just after the first of the year, because her daughter-in-law Tamara was killed by her second husband just before Christmas. Phoebe loved Tamara like a daughter, far more than she loved her own son.”

  “Tamara.” A woman of that name had appeared somewhere in the history of this convoluted case. Who …?

  “Yes. Tamara Pickford. A lovely, lovely person. She was one of our first residents, nearly seven years ago. That's when Phoebe began to get involved,” she added.

  “Phoebe,” Kate repeated, and revelation opened in her mind like a flower. Phoebe Weatherman, a physically strong woman with a figurine of Kali the Destroyer on her desk, who four months ago had been handed a whole world of pain, cause enough to hate the entire male sex. Phoebe Weatherman, always in the background—how did the Womyn Web site put it?— cloaked in invisibility? Who was more invisible than a dowdy secretary? What better disguise for a vengeful goddess to assume?

  And that bearded head … “What was Tamara's husband's name?” Kate asked sharply. She became aware of Agent Marcowitz looking over the heads of the women, alert but not knowing yet what had happened.

  Diana thought for a minute before shaking her head. “It was her second husband and I don't remember …” Then she turned to crane her head at the hallway, looking past the women at a figure who stood just out of Kate's line of vision, near the front vestibule. “Carla?” she called. “What was the name of Tamara's second husband?”

  An instant of silence fell over the gathering, and then came a voice, clear and pregnant with meaning.

  “His name was Lawrence Goff,” Carla Lomax said, and took a step forward so she could meet Kate's eyes.

  That was why the face on Kali's decapitated head looked familiar: Larry Goff, the December victim, killed in a Sacramento hotel by a woman dressed as a prostitute.

  “Marcowitz,” Kate began to shout, Stop her, Marcowitz, but she got no further than his name before the knot at the door flew apart in several directions at once. Crystal Navarro had abruptly realized that the two young children were staring in fascination at the naked, brutal, blood-soaked painting on the wall, and over their loud protests she seized their shoulders to force them out of the room. A split second later, Carla Lomax grabbed a couple of the women, shoved them hard at Marcowitz, and ordered, “Keep him here.”

  And then the lawyer turned and fled.

  The women rose up in fierce obedience against the agent, protecting their advocate against this unknown male oppressor in the suit, just as Crystal's two small charges came smack between them, and the hallway burst instantly into a welter of struggling, shouting man, women, and children. Kate lunged for Carla, came face-to-face with her cousin instead, and spent five critical seconds wrestling with Diana before need overcame caution and she flipped the director hard into the pile of shrieking, outraged women (Marcowitz ending up on the floor beneath them all) and waded through legs and over backs and out of the chapel doorway. The front door had opened and slammed shut again before Kate had made it into clear hallway;
Carla's back was disappearing around the corner by the time Kate worked the automatic door latches and flung herself into the shelter's front yard.

  Kate scrambled after the lawyer, who had kicked off her heeled shoes to sprint along the pavement in her stocking feet. It quickly became apparent that Lomax had spent more hours running the hills of the city than Kate, and many more than Marcowitz, somewhere in the rear. Kate wasted no breath in shouting; she merely ran, chin down and arms pumping, gaining slowly and painfully, risking cars' bumpers at crowded street corners, dodging kids with basketballs and homeless women with shopping carts, pounding along the sidewalks to the shouts of protest and anger and the encouragement of a pair of enthusiastic prostitutes on their way to work who whooped and shouted, “You go, girl!” as the two women flew past.

  Where the hell was a cop when you needed one? she cursed silently. Or the goddamn FBI? And why would good citizens ring 911 when the neighbors had a loud party but not when a plainclothes cop was trying her damnedest to run down a suspect?

  The end came in a flash, more than half a mile from where it began. Carla chose a street thick with commute-hour crowds, where she lost ground breaking through the pedestrians as surely as if she had been breaking trail through deep snow. She felt Kate closing behind her, shot a glance behind and saw her pursuer too close, and shot to the right to risk a desperate leap in front of a moving bus that would have cut Kate off had Carla made it.

  She did not. The bus was traveling slowly, but the inexorable force of it hurled the lawyer into the air to smash against the side of a parked car. She lay draped across the hood for a moment, then melted down onto the ground and lay still.

  Twenty minutes later, Kate's breath had almost returned to normal, Marcowitz had summoned uniformed cops from all over the city, the paramedics had forced their way into the center of the chaos, and Carla Lomax was still alive. Unconscious, and so she remained. Kate stayed with her until the lawyer was taken through the doors of the operating room, and then she paced up and down in the sterile corridor while the surgeons worked.

  The corridor was where Hawkin finally caught up with her. They'd spoken a number of times in the four hours since Kate had found herself standing over Carla Lomax's still form, and she was quite aware of the case going on in her absence, but the dull meaty thud of the bus hitting Carla's body, the inarticulate cry and the uncoordinated flail of limbs had dominated every intervening moment.

  “How is she?” were Hawkin's first words.

  “Broken bones, her spine is okay, but there's cranial swelling. They're trying to relieve it—she's been in there a couple of hours. No idea what damage there might be, probably won't know for a day or two.” She ran a hand through her short hair, feeling suddenly as if taking a step, even speaking, would be more effort than she could face. Hawkin saw it and pushed her into a nearby plastic chair. She shook her head in despair. “If I'd just up and shot her she might be in better shape.”

  “If you up and shot her, she might be dead,” he pointed out. “How's your blood sugar?”

  “What?”

  “Food. Lee told me to tell you that lunch was a long time ago.”

  She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “I want to crawl onto that gurney and go to sleep. Have somebody put a sign on me so they don't roll me into the OR and cut something off, would you?”

  Instead, he bullied her to the hospital cafeteria, a place that dispensed calories and caffeine around the clock. When she was looking less gray, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheaf of at least fifteen message slips. She groaned.

  “I've been through them,” Hawkin hastened to say. “I made some of the calls while I was waiting to see the Man in Black. Most of them are routine, though you might like to know that Miriam Mkele phoned, to tell you that she might've handled a bag of spilled candies at the register the first week of February, a Wednesday or Thursday. What that tells us I don't know. The only thing I couldn't deal with were the ten calls from Peter Mehta. I phoned him back but he didn't want to talk to me, so I said you'd get to him when you could. He said any time no matter how late, but since that was a couple of hours ago he's probably left half a dozen more messages by now.”

  “You get what it was about?”

  “Roz Hall.”

  “Shit.”

  “She's called a news conference tomorrow morning, told Mehta that she intends to tell the world that he and his whole community burn brides.”

  Kate put her aching head in her hands, feeling the dry sandwich she'd just eaten turning to stone in her stomach, and feeling the world begin to whirl slowly around. While she'd been busy stamping out one flare-up, behind her back a volcano had begun to swell. “Shit,” she said again. “Lee must be going nuts. Do you want me to call Mehta? What time is it, anyway? Midnight?”

  “Not quite. It's eleven-fifteen.”

  “I was sure my watch had stopped. I want to stay around until she comes out of surgery.”

  “Do you need to wait here? Or we could go see Mehta, then come back and check on her? He said he'd be up late.”

  “Oh hell, there's nothing I can do here. Let's go. But look, what did Crime Scene find at the shelter?”

  “No prints on the candy, sorry to say, except the edge of your finger. But the Kali painting was definitely done by Carla's assistant, Phoebe Weatherman. And Weatherman's house is full of the same kind of pictures.”

  Kate's brain began sluggishly to move. “She was also active in the shelter—she was there for a while the night James Larsen was killed. And she fits the description of Traynor's bigger attacker. And even the woman who rented the car—with a black wig and glasses …”

  “Anyway, she's skipped—I've just come from her place, Crime Scene's taking it apart now. There's a warrant out for her. Her daughter-in-law, name of Tamara Pickford, wasn't actually killed by her ex-husband. She died of—”

  “An accidental overdose of pain pills, after her husband violated a restraining order and left her with a broken arm and a smashed jaw. I remember from the report on Goff. Damn it all, anyway. Phoebe Weatherman,” Kate said. “Set off by her daughter-in-law's death. Why the hell didn't her name come up in the Goff investigation reports?”

  “A very convoluted set of name changes—Weatherman is the woman's third name since she gave birth to the child who was first husband of Tamara Goff-formerly-Pickford-formerly-Lopes.”

  “It wasn't Roz, then, after all.” She did not know how she felt about that, probably wouldn't know for some time, but even then she was aware that the relief she felt was heavily colored with shame, and that she would not be able to look at Roz Hall for a long time without being aware of it.

  “Certainly she wasn't directly involved in Traynor's attack,” Al confirmed. “She's been far too visible the last few days.”

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  “That doesn't mean she isn't in there somewhere,” he warned.

  “Oh, she's involved somewhere, even if it's only planting the idea of a vengeful goddess into Phoebe's mind. Or Carla's. And she knows it, or suspects it. I wonder if that's why she's gone after the Mehtas with such a passion. Denial and guilt and the feeling that if she wasn't involved, she should have been? God knows. I'll have to ask Lee,” she said, completely unaware of her identification of Lee with the Almighty.

  “You stay here,” Hawkin told her. “I'll round up a uniform to baby-sit Lomax if she comes out of surgery before we get back.”

  “Expecting a confession, Al?” Her voice was bitter; he glanced at her sharply, but said nothing.

  Considering Carla Lomax's condition, the uniformed guard was probably a waste of the taxpayers' money, but she was there as much to keep camera lenses out as to keep Lomax from escaping, and Kate suspected she would earn her pay. They gave her their various numbers, she promised to pass the information on to any replacement guard, and Kate and Al left her to it. Halfway to the elevators, the two detectives came to a dead halt. Diana Lomax
was emerging from the steel doors, deep in conversation with several supporters, among them Maj Freiling. Kate could see the coming confrontation, and she quailed.

  “I can't face them, Al,” Kate told him in something close to despair.

  “So don't,” he said simply, and took her arm to steer her back down the other way, up and down a lot of stairs, and eventually through the still-crowded emergency room (more dormitory for the area's homeless at this hour than it was hospital) to the parking lot.

  “Where the hell did I leave my car, anyway?” Kate asked Al. “Oh yeah, Marcowitz drove to the shelter, so it's still at the lot. You'll have to drive me by so I can fetch it. Ah, hell; what am I thinking about? The hospital doesn't need me to watch over Carla Lomax. Let's go and pat Mehta's hand, and then you can take me home and I'll see if I can get Lee to talk Roz out of her news conference, and then we'll all get twelve hours' sleep and live happily ever after.”

  “If that was an offer of your guest bed,” Al said, “thanks, but I think that tonight I need to be in my own. I can drop you by your house, or the lot.”

  “The lot, thanks. Is there any reason to go by the shelter, or the two women's houses?”

  “Marcowitz has his teeth into those.”

  A vivid and surreal image floated through Kate's tired mind, of the strong, shiny teeth of the Man in Black sunk deep into the front corner of a trim little cottage. She shook her head to clear it.

  “Did he say anything to you about what happened at the shelter?”

  “Not much, just enough so it was obvious he feels he screwed up.”

  “He did. We both did.” And Carla Lomax was paying the price.

  Kate half hoped they would find the Mehta house dark and silent, allowing them to pass by to their waiting beds, but such was not to be. All the outside lights were glaring and the downstairs windows were lit up, including Mehta's front study. The two detectives sighed simultaneously, and got out of the car.