Bhendi Bazaar (2 page)

TWO
2007

Mumbai, India

Like an unsure adolescent who cannot decide if she's a girl or a woman, the third hour after midnight — most people would concur — cannot decide if it's night or day. It is one of those agonising hours of the twenty-four hour period that should never have been put on the clock by its inventor. And, as though it wasn't already taxing enough, some clown had got himself murdered at that zany hour. Okay, he was murdered a little earlier in the night; the body, however, was discovered at three.

When she had gone to bed the night before, Deputy Commissioner of Police Rita Ferreira had no premonition she would beat her alarm clock to the wake-up race. Her official, ex-directory, phone rang — piercing the night or day — like a bagpipe blowing straight into her ear to wake her. To make matters worse, her ex-boyfriend Karan’s fiancée, Sheila, had come in to collect his stuff from Rita’s residence and left only at midnight. Karan had moved to New York after breaking up four years ago; he was only getting married now. After Sheila had left, Rita drank Jim Beam till midnight reminiscing old times till she had snoozed off.

The ominous ring was strident at three and roused Rita out of bed; tired and groggy, she picked up the receiver and arduously muttered, 'DCP Ferreira.'

Homicide. Male. Dead for at least a few hours. Further details weren't required; the
who
and
how
would hardly have stopped Rita saying goodbye to the warm bed. She envied her alarm clock that had the luxury of another few hours’ sleep.

Rita wasn't drunk, but she did not trust her driving skills, especially after the night before; it would also mean breaking the law. Her official driver being unavailable at this hour, she asked for a patrol car to pick her up in twenty minutes.

Rita was not beautiful, not in her eyes, nor in the eyes of any beholder. Her tawny- coloured body, however, was toned in fantastic shape. Not an ounce of fat. Narrow waist. Not well-endowed, but curvaceous nevertheless; as curvaceous as one could be on a size eight frame. And a zillion-dollar arse. The body was remarkable enough for a third or fourth glance. If one were to describe Rita in a word, the word would be “sensual”. As she showered, she looked at herself: still only thirty-
something
, attractive. Tall by Indian standards: five feet six. She flexed her little biceps that Karan had adored. Suddenly, like someone had turned the page, her thoughts moved to the corpse. Dead for a few hours: the body wasn't going anywhere, and the soul — if everyone had a soul and the fable had any truth in it — had already departed for the next world, so what was the rush?

Rita put on her trusted Smith & Wesson .38 in the holster. It had finally stopped raining after twelve hours, but the asphalt was still sodden when she came out of her apartment block in Bandra, a strong black coffee — a wake-up demitasse, as she called it — and a couple of aspirins later. The patrol car – a
Maruti Suzuki Gypsy
— was waiting with the reticent PC driver who doffed his cap and seeing her into the nearside seat, put the car in gear.

Another phlegmy morning in the life of a homicide detective, Rita smiled, knowing her opposite number in the uniformed wing got the same pay and, possibly allowances, but was hardly ever woken up at this hour. Who would wake up a DCP at this unearthly hour if a bicycle was stolen in Mumbai? Then again, what would be the excitement or satisfaction in catching a bicycle thief and, thereby, applying only a fraction of the brain? To be fair to providence, she'd recently been asked to head a private detective agency, offering gold, in New Delhi, but it wasn't something her conscience — which hardly ever stopped her from other minor vices — would have ever permitted. A private-eye gathering evidence on adulterous spouses to assist divorce payouts? A bounty hunter? Not in this life. Not for any amount of money. No way. Not her. Not Rita Ferreira, she told herself. She'd be disgruntled in a day. There was little point in playing a game if the thought of winning it wasn't exhilarating. As for the money, her parents had made plenty and bequeathed it to their only child. She had leased one of the large inherited properties to a hotel chain in Goa, sold off a couple and kept the beach-front family home locked in anticipation of vacation.

Her wandering thoughts returned to Karan. They had been together for two years, cohabiting for almost a year before he got an offer from one of the
Big Four
in NY. He had insisted Rita quit her job or take a sabbatical and join him, but she was equally insistent on staying back.

“You can't leave India, that's brain drain,”
she had argued.

“It's better than brain in the drain, Rita.”

Their two-year relationship culminated in the next three months; the time it took for his visa to be stamped. Nothing acrimonious, it ended without any emotional outbursts.

Saturday. There were no signs of the day coming to life and the sun, it seemed, wouldn’t even make an attempt to be visible for the next four to five hours, perhaps not till noon. This was Mumbai monsoon, not some random showers. The rain had only taken a break; it didn't seem to suggest it was finishing off any time soon.

It was surprising to see, at this hour — four in the morning — a few hardcore club patrons returning from their wanton endeavours in Juhu or Bandra, but the red flashing lights on the hoods of police vehicles, visible in the distance through the windscreen of the patrol jeep, were there to pull down curtains on the just-finished noir; their sirens had been silenced to let the neighbours enjoy a few more hours of sleep, which no one on duty would have minded either. Rita got down from the car the moment it stopped to a welcome of, at least, half-a-dozen salutes by uniformed officers who were always the first to arrive at the scene of crime. Rita responded with a series of nods, her ponytail moving like it was really attached at the back of a working horse. She may not have been beautiful but was incredibly feminine, nevertheless. A woman in what had traditionally, worldwide, been a man's role in this male chauvinist society where men still expected women to give up their day jobs and accompany them to far-off places.
Come to New York?
She was well aware of the stares she received, comments caught in the men's throats, but which never found a voice. Men would always be men, education could sophisticate them, but the natural instincts always crawled back. Her juniors, however, acknowledged that Rita was a sharp, equable officer with a voice that never betrayed her emotions; her coffee-brown eyes were known to be as quick to capture as a high- speed camera shutter. With a wide-angled lens.

Wearing a camel-coloured trench coat she had wrapped around to fight the light rheumy chill, she stood there for a few minutes taking in the details.

Versova. Mangal Nagar. There had been wide spaces left between the concrete apartment blocks by the builder when the complex had been built, and only a handful of people owned cars, bought with their savings. But since the banks had mindlessly started disbursing loans for vehicles in the mid-Nineties, like a drug peddler distributing free samples, the haphazardly parked overabundance of cars everywhere left only a narrow part in between to walk through. The apartments, only a few shipshape, others derelict — depending on the current owner’s prosperity — en bloc stood in the dark like blind spectators watching a mime artist. Rita's mind returned to the murder she had been pulled out of bed to investigate this morning. Shaking her head pejoratively, she walked up to the second block of apartments and took the stairs up to the third floor. 30X.

'Anyone from the crime branch?' Rita asked an inspector in uniform who met her at the door.

The house, with police and medics, conveyed that death had been in the vicinity earlier. The immutable police procedures had started. Women and men in paper-suits were collecting everything that they could, from the body and the house, to take it to the lab. There was some lingering smell of cordite in the house, but not enough to sweep over the foul odour of death. Nothing could ever annihilate the strange smell of death; it wasn't rancid, and it wasn't something you smelt, it was the quietness in the air that you felt.

There was another faint scent in the air, Rita discerned. Unmistakably floral, unmistakably feminine.

'Inspector Vikram arrived twenty minutes ago.'

'Good.' She took the white gloves offered by the uniformed officer.

Vikram must have heard his boss. He turned around to acknowledge her presence. 'Good morning ma'am.'

Senior Inspector Vikram Patil, in his mid-thirties, was Rita's next in command.

Coming from the state cadre of police, he had put in a greater number of years in the force than her. If all went well — and he looked promising — he would soon be Assistant Superintendent. He was a good seven inches taller than Rita, and having lost a whopping thirty kilos from his globe-shaped torso, he was fit as the proverbial fiddle. A medium-oak coloured man, who definitely had his eyes set to take over when Rita got transferred, he believed his active grey cells were capable enough to lead crime investigations. Earlier, his weight had been a problem, but he was now agile too.

'Good morning. Were you here before anything was touched or removed?’ ‘Yes, ma'am’

‘Fill me on it.' Rita did a quick ocular inspection of the place. A compact 600 square feet, two-bedroom apartment. Neat and clean. Basic furniture. Unassuming lifestyle.

'
Au naturel
, male stiff. Approximate age forty-five to fifty. Dead for at least six hours. Life clipped by a shot between the eyes. Close range. The skin is singed but there are several knife wounds in the groin, like a butcher’s been in. No signs of knife or gun. No burglary, no plunder, no combing. The killer, decidedly, had no larcenous intentions.'

'Knife wounds?' Rita had a closer look. The man’s genitalia had been razed; his flaccid member was dangling, attached to the body with a fine thread of skin. 'Anything else?’

‘There is that crystal tumbler by his bedside. Only one…he was possibly drinking alone—’

‘Or the perpetrator was smart enough to remove the other one.' She bent down to smell the empty tumbler. Alcohol. Scotch?

Vikram smiled in acquiescence.

‘Any idea about the time of death?'

'Given the light curing of the body, between four to six hours.’

Rita nodded. Not even the greatest pathologist in the world could nail the precise time of death: not
in situ
, not on the dissection table. The Crime Scene photographer had done his shooting and was packing up. The forensic team was scouting every square inch of the room, and other parts of the house for any prints, hairs, fluids, anything.

Adit Lele lay peacefully now; his dark slate grey eyes, from which all life had escaped a while ago, were open. To say he was dead was like saying the sky was blue. The blank look suggested that his veins had been dry for a few hours at least. A faint smile remaining on his lifeless mouth indicated he had been happy when death came. Or happy seconds before it came calling, which didn't require waking up the grey cells to detect. A guy in his mid-forties — maybe even older as Vikram had mentioned — naked in bed with, presumably, a female had happiness written all over his face. Was he expecting a shag and death came calling instead? Why else would he be naked? Then, maybe, some parley between man and woman that did not conclude well. Tryst gone wrong? Such things happened. More than one was disposed to, or would have liked to believe. Unlikely, unusual demand declined. Accusation. Fracas. Threats. And it ended in one dead. Someone carried a gun. You were dead if you argued with a gun; you died if you didn't argue with a gun. Anything was possible.

Possibilities might be a start, a rung on the investigation ladder, but not a landing simply because not many things are impossible. The girl or the man — too early and awfully sparse information to make that call — with no better morality than a dog or this horny middle-aged man himself, had shot Lele point blank. The bullet was, apparently, fired at such close range it needn't have required a qualified pathologist to confirm the trajectory. Entry from the forehead, but they hadn't yet turned him around to see if the bullet had exited or it was still lodged somewhere in the brain. Lele’s head lay in a pool of congealed blood, the corpuscles having been dead for quite a while; the pillow newly dyed with red, dark metallic red. The bed resembled a miniature makeshift abattoir. Rita could imagine the back of the man's head would have been blown off with the impact of the slug. Surprisingly, though, the face hadn't taken much of a wallop.

I'd rather die in bed from a stroke, prayed Rita. Then again, if people could decide when and how they died, everyone would want to live forever. That, therefore, wasn't a perquisite of humans. Rita could see
rigor mortis
had started. Four to five hours minimum, she estimated, which indicated that death might have happened between 10 p.m. and midnight.

'Your view, ma'am?' Vikram's words brought Rita's brooding mind back into the room.

'Let’s see what prints the forensics have dusted.' All views, she knew, based merely on the tableau they witnessed would be premature. 'Can you smell something floral, Vikram?'

'It's some female perfume.'

‘Yes.'

'With him naked in bed, the killer might well be a woman. However, if that was the case, why didn't this large man defend himself? He doesn't appear to be incapacitated in any way. He seemed to have taken the stabs and gunshot willingly.'

'Exactly what I was thinking, Vikram. There are no signs of a struggle. The pathologist should tell us if the stab wounds were ante or post-mortem.'

The gobbledygook of the morbid pathology wasn't going to give any clue as to
who
the murderer was, but it would certainly explicate how the victim died. How important was that in reaching to the hands that killed?

'You mean did he suffer before his death?'

'Yes. The gun, unquestionably, had a silencer. There is another apartment on this floor.

The shot should have been heard by neighbours even if they were asleep. Please ensure the team asks everyone on this floor, in this block, and the entire complex when they wake up.' Rita glanced at her watch: 5 a.m. 'Someone must have seen or heard something.'