Night work (6 page)

Lee had known Rosalyn Hall for years, since grad school at UC
Berkeley, in fact, where Roz was doing a master's degree and Lee
a Ph.D., both in psychology. The two had worked together, discovered a
shared passion for Eastern religion, and had taken off to India and
Nepal for six weeks, during which trip they had been, briefly, lovers.
Two such dominant personalities were not a comfortable match, however,
and they had parted--as friends, although from what Lee did not
say about that parting, and her manner when she did not say it, Kate
had the impression that some dark happening lay at the parting's
roots. Roz was not all cleverness and light.

Long years later, when Kate came across the cleric and Lee was still
struggling against the bullet's shattering effects, Kate,
thinking only that a minor resumption of Lee's counseling work
might be therapeutic, had all unknowing encouraged Roz to reach out to
the injured woman. By the time Lee told her of the old relationship
with Roz, Kate (who was not a detective for nothing) was not too
surprised. Nor was she too worried, since she could also read the signs
that the affair was long over.

Besides, everyone she knew was in love with Roz, even those who were
not in lust with her. Even straight people--hell, even those who
hated Roz loved her. She was not only charismatic, she was even good to
look at; although she was hardly fashionably slim, her tall, voluptuous
shape and wide shoulders gave the impression of a serious swimmer gone
slightly to seed (actually, she had never been much of a swimmer). Her
shiny brown hair had just enough wave in it to overcome Maj's
amateur haircuts, her dark eyes were large and long-lashed enough to
compensate for her habitual avoidance of makeup. Increasingly in recent
months, when television broadcasts needed a spokesperson for a gay
perspective, they had begun to call on Roz; when the papers printed a
shot of the opening of a center for gay, lesbian, and bisexual
teenagers or the ground breaking of a crisis center, Roz's face
looked out at the reader; when the governor put together a task force
on lesbian and gay parenting, Roz was on it. That the mayor of San
Francisco had appeared at Mina's school play was no mere
happenstance.

So no, Kate was not jealous--or rather, she was honest.
Jealous, yes, a little. But hell, if Roz Hall had asked her to bed,
she'd probably have gone too.

Roz had not asked. Instead, when Kate had been injured during a case
the previous winter, while Lee and Jon were both away, it was
Roz's concerned face Kate saw from her hospital bed, Roz's
red Jeep that drove her home at her release, and Roz's longtime
partner, Maj, who brought Kate food and comfort and just the right
amount of companionship to keep her going. The two women were now
family, closer to Kate than any of her blood relatives, and if Kate
sometimes felt like a poor relation bobbing in the wake of a glamorous
star, well, Roz had a way of making one feel that even poor relations
were good things to be. After all, even presidents had blue-collar
cousins.

Kate relaxed back against the soft sofa pillows, looking with
affection at their guests. The talk had circled back to Mina and her
seven-weeks-to-go sister-to-be, and half of her attention was on that.
The other half drifted back to the Larsen murder, which seemed to be
progressing on as straightforward a path as investigations ever did,
but which nonetheless niggled at the back of her mind.

One of the things she had to find out, she decided, was what Larsen
was doing in the Presidio parklands at that hour. Emily had not been
able to think of anything that would have taken her husband there, and
neither could Kate. A trap, maybe. Perhaps Crime Scene'll come up
with something in the Larsen house, she thought, and then woke to the
fact that Roz was talking to her.

"Sorry," she said, sitting upright to demonstrate her attentiveness. "I was miles away."

"Difficult case?"

"Puzzling," she conceded. Good manners required that she
answer, but she could hardly go into the details of an active case.
This was a problem she'd faced countless times over the years,
however, and she had become skilled at the diversionary side-step in
conversation. "I was thinking about this interview I had today
with an abused woman. I just... it continually amazes me, what
women will put up with for the sake of security."

"Oh, that's not fair," Lee protested.
"It's not even true, to call it security. They often live
in a constant state of fear."

"So why do it? Because the known, however awful, is better than the great unknown?"

"Sometimes it is," Roz broke in. "Especially when
there are children, and no other family or friend to lean on.
We're a terribly solitary culture, you know. It's not easy
to find a support network in modern society, especially if you're
a woman who already feels humiliated by being someone's punching
bag. Self-respect is a luxury, and sometimes all these women can afford
is pride, that they won't admit failure."

There was nothing in Roz's face or voice to show that her
words were anything but general; nonetheless, Kate eyed her with the
uneasy sensation that there was some underlying message there for her
alone. Roz's next words confirmed it, and the evenness of her
gaze.

"We all do this, to some degree, even if we're not in an
actively abusive relationship. We let ourselves be shoved into a
corner, humiliated, used, and abandoned, and then when our partner
turns back to us, in the joy of reunion we forgive."

A memory swept into the room, so vivid in the space between Roz and Kate that it seemed to quiver visibly in the air.

It was a scene from the previous December, a few days after
Kate's release from the hospital to her cold and empty house. The
morning had been taken up by one of her blinding headaches, legacy of a
suspect's eighteen-inch length of galvanized pipe. In the
afternoon Kate had wakened from a drugged sleep, stumbled into the
bedroom she and Lee had shared until Lee's cruel and abrupt
departure in August, and at the sight of the antique Wedding Rings
patchwork quilt on the bed, she was seized by a rage so powerful it
felt as if the spasm of migraine had finally invaded her mind.

She had not heard Roz letting herself in downstairs. She only became
aware of her visitor when Roz was standing in the doorway, looking down
at Kate where she sat on the floor, surrounded by the ten thousand
shreds of faded cotton fabric and cotton batting that had been a quilt.
Kate paused in her methodical and heavily symbolic destruction, saw in
Roz's face the full, calm knowledge of precisely what she was
doing, and then erupted into tears, wracked by hard, painful sobs of
fury and despair that were wrenched out of her abandonment and
betrayal. Her headache reawoke and her eyes and throat were seared raw,
but Roz held her and rocked her, more maternal and comforting than Kate
would have imagined possible.

They had never spoken of it after that day, and Kate had
occasionally wondered if Roz had told Lee, but at that moment, sitting
in front of the fireplace with their coffee cups and their partners,
Kate saw that Roz had said nothing to anyone about the depths of the
despair that Lee's leaving had visited on Kate. The sanctity of
confession held, Roz's eyes said, even for the pastor of a church
without confessionals.

The memory, and the knowledge, flashed between them in the blink of
an eye, an instant of complete communication that Kate had only ever
known in the intimacy of an interrogation room, with a suspect on the
edge of a very different sort of confession, or a bare handful of times
with Lee. The memory puffed away and vanished, leaving Kate
disconcerted, and depressingly aware that she was even more deeply
indebted to Roz Hall than she had thought. She cleared her throat and
reached back urgently for the tag end of the conversation they had been
having.

"Forgive, sure," she said. "But only so many
times. These women, though, their forgiveness is pathological."

Roz, still holding Kate's eyes, nodded. "True. We are
told to turn the other cheek in offering up our humility. We are not
told to go on doing it indefinitely."

"Or told to put a club into the hand that slaps us. There was
this picture on the wall in one of the law offices, that showed a woman
who'd had the crap beaten out of her, all black-and-blue and
bandages, with the caption 'But he loves me." And you know,
that's exactly what the woman I was interviewing said, that the
husband who'd been beating her for years and years was, I quote,
"a good man' who 'loved us." " To
Kate's relief, Roz's attention finally shifted.

"Love and rage," Roz said thoughtfully. "They're never that far apart, are they?"

This time, the brief reaction that shot through the room reached
across the other diagonal: Lee and Maj both twitched, almost
imperceptibly. A faintly ironic smile played briefly over Maj's
mouth before she wiped it away with a sip of her tea. Roz did not seem
to notice anything, since she was now exploring an idea, a frown of
thought between her eyebrows.

"That's more or less what I've been doing in the
thesis, looking at how in the Old Testament you see God as creator,
nurturer, loving mother/father, and protector, yet also as judge and
executioner, enraged at a wayward people and on the verge of destroying
them completely."

"Is it linked with the male/female imagery?" Lee asked
her. Anyone who had been in Roz's circle for more than a few days
was made quickly aware of the Bible's references to God's
femininity, the metaphors of childbirth and child rearing used to
describe the Divine. The God known by Roz Hall both begot and gave
birth, and Roz was not about to let anyone forget it. Even a certain
homicide cop was familiar with that bit of theological interpretation.

"You'd think it would be, wouldn't you?" Roz
answered. "That in the passages referring to childbirth, God
would be the loving mother, and in the God-the-father passages there
would be judgment and wrath, but it's not that simple. The two go
hand in hand, just like the ancient Near Eastern goddess figures that
switch between love and destruction at the drop of a hat. It may have
something to do with agricultural fertility-- that floods bring
destruction and life at the same time, that fruit and grain ripen at a
time of year that appears dead."

They had gone far indeed from the subject of Emily Larsen, and all
three of Roz's unwilling audience cast around desperately for a
diversion. Kate got there first.

"Still, I doubt that someone like the woman I talked to today
thinks of her husband as particularly divine. I think she's too
busy praying that he comes home in a good mood."

It took Roz precisely two seconds to pause, blink, and make the shift from academic theoretician to pastoral counselor.

"Most of what I do in the group sessions is to drive home a
dose of hard reality. I teach these women to say to themselves,
"My partner won't change; it's up to me." But I
make sure they add, "I have the support of my friends."
"

"Sounds like a mantra," Lee said. " 'Every day in every way I'm getting freer and freer."
"

"Change your mind, change your life," Roz agreed.

"If their husbands don't catch up with them first," Kate added darkly.

"There is that. And sometimes it's so obvious
they're in danger, and they're so oblivious, it's all
I can do not to take them by the collar and try and shake some sense
into them."

"You might be talking about Emily Larsen. I don't
suppose you've met a woman by that name at one of the
shelters?"

Roz reflected for a moment. "There is a client named Emily in
the one on West Small Street, but I don't know what her last name
is. We don't use surnames in group sessions, or even in
one-to-one counseling, so unless I'm involved with the paperwork,
I usually don't know their full names."

"Her husband's name was James, or Jimmy."

"Was?"

"He's dead."

"Oh dear. That's her. Black hair, glasses? She'll
be crushed, I'm afraid. She must have said his name fifty times
during the session on Monday. Classic. I must go see her."

"So you were at the shelter on Monday night?" Kate
asked, trying to sound casual but aware of Al Hawkin's sarcasm,
and of Lee at her side.

"Leading a group therapy session. I'm there two or three times a week. The director's a good friend."

Half the city was Roz's good friend. "How
late--I'm sorry, Roz, it's not very nice to ask you
for dinner and then question you, but the woman's husband was
killed on Monday and it would save me having to hunt you down tomorrow
to ask these questions. Can you tell me how late you were there?"

"I don't know. Fairly late."

"You got home at five after twelve," Maj offered with mild disapproval.

"So I must have left the shelter about eleven-forty-five. The
group session is from seven until about nine, and I stayed on to talk
with Emily for maybe an hour before I left. Are you looking for an
alibi?"

"Oh, Emily Larsen's clear," Kate told
her--the literal truth, if skipping over some of the details.
"We're just looking for information, filling in the gaps,
you know? Was she with you the whole time, then?"

"Not the whole time, no. When the session ended I had to talk
with someone who was needing advice fairly urgently for a friend, a
neighbor I think, who's in an ugly situation--the
neighbor's an Indian girl, from India, I mean, barely more than a
child by the sound of it, who was brought here in an arranged
marriage--can you believe it? In San Francisco in this day and
age? The child's in-laws disapprove of her, and it's
beginning to escalate into physical abuse. The woman who came to me is
worried, and I had to talk to her about the girl's options,
whether or not to just call the police, or to turn it over to Child
Protective Services, who would involve the school district and a dozen
other agencies. Anyway, I was with her for about half an hour,
forty-five minutes, and then I went back to Emily."