Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [44]
Kiki, the waitress I was closest to, scowled as she hurried past our table with a tray of margaritas. Get the slob to buy expensive cocktails or get back to your station. I flashed Kiki inscrutability.
“Remember that night at Vito’s?” Fred asked.
“The night of the beginning of your misery?”
“Remember what I said that night?”
“You said a lot of things. We both did. We spilled our guts, we philosophized about black holes and peripheries—”
He stopped me. “About gumshoeing.”
I didn’t remember.
“Facts are facts.” He tapped the edge of the table with the envelope. “Accuracy doesn’t mean shit. You have to ask the right questions.”
“And you’ve asked them?” I held my hand out for the envelope. I had a right to know.
“Cops and hacks ask, What does it mean, where’s the payoff?”
“And what does the smart-ass PI ask?”
“Fred Pointer’s smart, not smart-ass. Fred doesn’t solve mysteries; he unsolves them. Every fucking case is a moral quest.”
I snatched the envelope—a thing, as Larry’d say—from Fred. Larry’s vision was like a plague, and I’d caught it. We were both thing-dodgers now. We’d be lost without things.
The sender of this thing had used a manual typewriter. The individual letters in the words didn’t quite line up right. Some keys had been hit harder than others. The F for “Fred” and the V for “Vulture” for instance, were darker than the P and the o in “Pointer.” The only manual typewriters I’d ever seen were on reruns of sitcoms Mama’d watched. It wasn’t about detection and deduction. I was taking my own advice to Fred from that Vito’s night, and working the peripheries. The center’s a sinkhole.
In the envelope was more dirt the Bombay investigator had dug up and euphemistically titled: Report of Continuing Investigation.
Subsequent to the unauthorized examination of the orphanage files, a thorough search was conducted into court documents of Jaipur, Rajasthan State, India, of the period 1968 through 1977, specifically into those documents that pertained to the adjudication of criminal cases involving Caucasian tourists of the female sex. A further narrowing of this category was made in terms of location of crime. Only two apprehended Caucasian females were found to have been convicted of, or indicted for, unlawful activities in Ranipur, Laxmipur and Panagad villages. These villages are situated within a morning’s bus ride from Devigaon, that site to which reference was made by Hari, chowkidar.
Speculation has no place in this report. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that a top-level inquiry is presently being mounted by the opposition party in the Lok Sabha house of the Indian Parliament regarding the death in prison last month of the Eurasian male felon against whom the said Caucasian female had deposed in court and which deposition had led to the conviction and the sentencing of the deceased.
“I’m sorry to bring lousy news,” Fred mumbled.
I said, “I didn’t know him, Fred. I don’t have a right to be upset.”
Bio-Dad had no liens on my heart. The strangler’s palms caressed my throat, fingers tightened and twisted. Dry coughs and cries escaped.
“How did he die? Does your man in Bombay say anything about what he died of?”
Fred buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”
“He was my father, Fred. I’m not mourning him. He didn’t earn the right to be mourned.”
True despair has halogen wattage. Fred’s face could have lit up Doomsday. “The two Caucasian females in the report? One of them’s someone I know.”
A redhead in a sequined vintage prom dress veered wide of Fred’s Guccis on her way to the restroom. The redhead had perfected the Marilyn Monroe hip swivel. I watched her vanish into the men’s room.
“What! You know my mother?”
“There’s a fifty-fifty chance that I know your mother.”
“Okay. Who is she?”
“Devi—or whatever your name is—you’re just an upstate girl who got in over her head. And you’re dragging us all into it …” He let it drop. Then, just as suddenly after clearing his throat, he became all business. I sat primly, all client.
“Your mother could be Jess DuPree