Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [31]
“Get you a tea?”
“How about we walk around some and you fill me in. I’m not saying yes yet. As Ham told you, I don’t take missing-persons cases.”
“It’s a mission, not a case,” I shot back.
He gave me a strange look. “Maybe you need a shrink more than you need me.”
“Ready?” I left my dirty dishes on the table, and led the man from Vulture out of the café.
We walked; I talked. Of Mama and Pappy, of Celia, of Wyatt, of Mr. Bullock and his silly assignments. I kept talking. I couldn’t stop talking. It became as easy as breathing. I described the smell of lye in an outhouse, the furry touch of spiders crawling over my legs, the pooling of sap-white blood of roaches I swatted dead, I tasted stony grit in orphanage gruel, I felt panic as fingers closed around my throat. I hadn’t remembered any of it, not until that moment. We kept walking. Away from the Haight.
Fred Pointer dug fast and dug deep. He called me back in less than a week. “What I have isn’t necessarily pretty.”
I arranged for him to meet me at Steep Steps as I came off my Friday-night-Saturday-morning shift. “Want to call off the dogs?” And when I didn’t say yes or no, he added, “No guarantees except that it’ll be expensive.”
I said I wanted to know what he knew before I decided whether to stay in or quit.
We went in our separate cars to an all-night diner in the Tenderloin. There was only one other patron, a slick fifty-something Eurasian man in leather pants and Elvis hair on a stool at the counter. The man was sipping water out of a highball glass. It may have been gin or vodka in the glass. A khaki duffel bag and cheap vinyl carry-on were on the floor by his booted feet. He was chatting up the waiter, probably Vietnamese, in some Asian language and making the stool seat spin half turns. The waiter kept his head down and wet-mopped around the bags.
Fred picked his way to the table farthest from the counter. “Can we get some service?”
The waiter looked up but didn’t stop mopping. “Yeah?” he said.
Fred Pointer ordered hot water and a slice of lemon. “What’ll you have?” he asked me. “You’re paying.”
I ordered a Coke. “So lay the good news/bad news on me,” I begged.
“Pepsi,” the waiter said.
“Okay, Pepsi.”
Fred said, “You’re pretty special, Devi.”
“I knew that,” I snapped.
The waiter propped the handle of the wet mop against the table next to ours, and went off for the Pepsi.
“No, I mean different special.”
“How different?”
“Two continents went into your making. That means you’re one up on Kurtz, Devi.”
Kurtz was probably a mixed-race local rock star. I’d ask Ham to get me a freebie to a Kurtz concert. “Well, not that special,” I countered. “There’s the late Klaus Nomi, and—”
Fred said, “Shut up, okay. Let me do the talking.”
“Go ahead,” I pouted.
“I’ve exchanged a couple of faxes with a fellow in Bombay. I worked on a case with this fellow must have been five years ago. He didn’t recognize the name you gave, but he said he remembered there’d been juicy stuff in all the papers about a sex-guru serial killer and his harem of white hippies, he thought way back in the seventies. He’s checking it out.”
“How do you know this man’s reliable? Have you met him?”
“Who? Rajeev Raj? He’d kill if he had to. When we had him work on the case I mentioned, it was the usual post-custody-hearing kidnapping thing, he tracked the kid and his dad down to a beachfront hotel in Goa, broke into the room, beat up the dad and kidnapped back the kid. He’s efficient.”
“So what’re you saying? There’s a possibility that my mother was in that harem?”
“The years fit. The region fits. Who knows, maybe you have half brothers and sisters roaming the world. He’s supposed to have fucked all the members of his happy hippie family. A lot of those gals didn’t make it back. White slave traffic, Saudi sheikhs, jaundice, cholera, want me to go on?”
“My mother came back to California.” Pappy’d paid her airfare back, but I didn’t get into the money