Such a Perfect Family, page 17
“That was rage, what went on in that house,” I said. “I don’t feel strongly about any of the family except for Diya! They’re just people to me, people I tried to get along with for her sake, but people I didn’t really know. Why the fuck would I stab my sister-in-law? Shumi was nice to me!”
“On that subject,” my lawyer interjected, “have you located Bobby Prasad’s remains?”
“The scene is still under forensic investigation.”
A faint smile from Ngata. “So it’s possible the younger Prasad committed this crime, then walked out to start a new life. I assume you’re keeping an eye on his bank and phone accounts for signs of life?”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, Mr. Ngata, and I won’t tell you how to do yours.”
“I want to go see Diya now.” I got to my feet.
Ackerson didn’t argue, and I walked out with my lawyer. Who sighed once we were out on the sidewalk, under the bright green leaves of some tree I couldn’t identify. “You’re supposed to let me speak. Anand assured me you know how to keep your mouth shut.”
There was little traffic on the road just then, and what looked to be pale orange poppies—interspersed with small white flowers I couldn’t name—bobbed their heads in the plantings on the median. A woman pushed a stroller on the opposite sidewalk, while an elderly man stepped out of a café with a take-out cup in hand.
As I watched, he unhooked the lead of a scruffy brown dog from an outdoor chair, and the dog sat up, tail waving.
People carrying on with their lives as if mine hadn’t gone up in flames only days past.
“I know, I know,” I said to Ngata. “Sorry, but she’s so focused on me that she’s missing the giant elephant in the room.”
“You got away with it this time, but don’t do it again.” He squeezed my shoulder. “And be careful what you say to her. She puts on the thick tunnel-visioned cop act, but that woman has a top-tier closing rate—and her cases are winners for the prosecution, so she isn’t just about closing cases; she gets the evidence, locks her suspects down tight.”
“I’ll remember,” I said, shaken.
I’d fallen for the idiot cop act, had come close to treating her with the very contempt my father had warned me about.
“You have to be extra clean at this point.” Ngata’s gaze was suddenly as hard as granite. “Your identity hasn’t leaked to the media yet—not in terms of your past in the States—so keep a low profile and stay away from Ackerson. The instant she approaches you again, you call me. No more cozy little chats. Got it?”
“Absolutely.”
I stewed on the possibility of media exposure on my cab ride back to the airport to pick up my car from the parking lot. My history made for damn good newspaper inches—and if it had been bad in the metropolis of LA, how much worse would it be in this small city inside a small nation where the Lake Tarawera deaths were still headline news?
A sudden whiff of sulfur on the wind, a reminder that Rotorua was a place where the earth boiled…the land itself on fire deep below the surface.
Chapter 38
Private notes: Detective Callum Baxter (LAPD)
Date: Jan 28
Time: 15:07
Finally pinned down that two-year gap in Tavish Advani’s love résumé. Man wasn’t dating. At all. Grief from Jocelyn Wai’s death? Possible—though from all appearances, they didn’t seem to have a true-love type of deal. Not like he apparently had with Susanne Winthorpe.
I just got off the phone with her best friend, one Cecilia “Cici” Summers.
She couldn’t say enough good things about Tavish. “I teased her about dating someone so young, but when it came down to it, Sue was right—he made her final months so happy. She loved being with him, though in the end she was sorry for ever having come into his life. He took it so hard, you see. Was broken up about her loss. She’d started it all as a lark, a little hot fling, as she’d say, but she ended up becoming his first real love.”
I didn’t know how to bring up how quickly he’d moved on, but I didn’t have to. Cici did it herself. “That terrible relationship he was in with Jocelyn Wai? All the partying and drinking? Grief, that’s what it was. He was looking for Susanne in her, poor boy—had no idea that Jocelyn was a piranha. We didn’t run in the same circles, but I heard through the grapevine what she was like—a hard, hard woman, that one, taking young lovers and using them up, then throwing them away.”
Never thought of Tavish Advani as the victim; Cici is right about Jocelyn’s track record. Her boyfriend before Advani was a B-list actor in his twenties who died of a cocaine overdose during their relationship (though she was out of the country at the time). That type of toxic relationship, though, it can lead to violence.
Gina’s a good cop—if she thinks Advani had something to do with Wai’s death, I believe her. Knowing something and being able to prove it in court are two different things—especially if you have a DA who doesn’t like to file anything but slam dunks.
Cici states that Advani always comes to the memorial dinner she holds for her friend at a “glitzy place Sue would’ve loved.” She also has no qualms about Susanne’s final days. “Sue died as she lived—on her terms. Never doubt that, Detective.”
Susanne’s niece—Grace Green—had nothing bad to say about Tavish, either, and she was in the thick of it during Susanne’s decline, literally lived in a self-contained suite in the same apartment.
She was also adamant that Tavish never made any moves on her. I’m not sure I believe her. I might pay her a visit in person, see if she’ll open up further.
Chapter 39
The first thing I did when I got to the hospital late that afternoon—after stopping at the motel to shower off the long journey home—was kiss my wife on the cheek, then sit with my hand on hers for a long, long time. Willing her to wake, to look at me with those eyes that saw me, loved me.
“I’ll always be there for you, baby,” I told this fragile candle flame of a woman who owned my heart. “Doing that…being there for you…it saves me.” She filled up the well of emptiness inside me with her need, and I was more than okay with that.
“It’s all about Ani, isn’t it?” Diya’s moods, her need for medication, her endless need for love. “What did your family do to you?” Because this was what I’d realized in Fiji—me and Diya, we’d been drawn together because we mirrored each other’s scars, each other’s damaged psyches.
The machines beeped, the ventilator breathed rhythmically, and the nurses walked past on soft-soled shoes. But from my wife, the woman I loved to my core, there was only a wordless silence.
Swallowing, I released her hand to reach into the duffel I’d put beside the bed. I was careful in how I handled the statuette. “I got this from your mother’s prayer alcove.” After unwrapping it, I placed it on a small table beside her bed, where it wouldn’t be in the staff’s way.
“You weren’t the one who did anything wrong, Diya. I know.” I brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. “I believe you.” If there was even a chance she could hear me, then I needed her to know that she wasn’t alone any longer; I was in her corner in this fight, wasn’t going to allow anyone to ever again blame her for Ani’s brutal death.
A stir at the foot of the bed, in the space I’d left uncurtained so the staff could monitor Diya from the nurses’ station.
I glanced up to see Ajay.
“Hey, I wondered if you were back.” Shumi’s brother walked to the other side of the bed, his expression drawn as he looked at my wife. “Hi, Diya. It’s Ajay. Just came to chill with Tavish.”
Lowering his voice afterward, as if he didn’t want Diya to hear, he said, “My sister’s the same. It’s so hard to see her that way. I’ve always been a homebody, but she was out and about all the time—she joined so many clubs in high school that I barely saw her all week. She used to come home after dark.”
Shumi hadn’t struck me as that socially active, but then, I’d only known her through the lens of her relationship with the Prasad family. Just because she’d been a stay-at-home wife didn’t mean she actually stayed at home the entire day. But what did it say if she had? If that involved and busy girl had become confined to her home?
Everywhere I turned, there was so much I didn’t know. But Ajay might be able to answer at least some of my questions. “You want to get a coffee?” I asked. “I need something to eat, too.”
He glanced down the hallway. “I should ask my father if he needs anything.”
“Sure. Your mom resting?”
A quick nod, his eyes not meeting mine. “She’s finding it hard to see Shumi in that condition.”
“Yeah.” It went a way toward explaining how little time she seemed to spend at the hospital—though truth was, I didn’t understand how avoidance was any better. Wasn’t she haunted by thoughts of her daughter while alone in an unfamiliar motel room? Better, to my mind, to be surrounded by her family in the busy environs of the hospital.
“Dad’s tougher,” Ajay added. “Or he puts on a good front, anyway.”
We arrived in the ICU overflow unit to find Shumi’s father on his laptop in one corner of her spacious curtained area, phone to his ear as he dealt with some issue at his workplace. His voice was a discreet murmur.
When Ajay mouthed the word “coffee,” he shook his head and waved us off.
I waited until we were near the elevator to say, “Must be hard for him to have to handle work even when he’s so worried.” The other man hadn’t actually looked worried to my eyes, but I knew a certain age and personality of male tended to shove all emotions down deep. Even more so in a patriarchal culture like my father’s.
Still, there seemed something…not quite right about Shumi’s family. Another case of one favored child, one ignored one?
If so, Ajay was a lot more likable than Raja.
Or I was projecting my own issues onto the Kumars. Might be Shumi just wasn’t close to her family, far preferring to nest in with the Prasads as another way to make herself the perfect wife for Bobby.
“Dad’s so senior.” Ajay pushed the button for the elevator. “They rely on him and I think he feels guilty not being available even at this time.” He rubbed his face. “The immigrant work ethic is sometimes the immigrant sense of guilt at being forever grateful for the opportunities afforded us. Your dad the same?”
“Yeah, he’s a workaholic, but I think he’s just wired that way,” I said, thinking of how happy my father had always looked tucked away in his office. “I’m third-generation. It was my grandparents that immigrated from India—so I’m now the slacker Westernized grandson.”
Ajay’s smile was startled. “Trust me, if you’re in finance, you’re no slacker.”
So, Shumi had spoken enough to her brother that she’d told him about me. “Actually,” I said, “do you mind if we walk to the café? I’d like to stretch my legs.”
“Sure.”
We were already descending the stairs by the time the elevator dinged to announce it had arrived.
“What’s it like, having such a famous mother?” Ajay asked, his tone a little hesitant. “If you want to talk about it,” he added in a rush. “I mean, people must ask you about it all the time.”
“It’s definitely…interesting,” I said with a practiced laugh. “Especially when I was eleven and she was doing the action movies where she was in a string bikini half the time?” During those peak years, she’d been one of the few actresses who could command serious award-winning roles alongside those of a sex bomb. “I could not go into the bedrooms of my friends without needing eye bleach. They all had posters of her on the walls.”
As always, the funny anecdote made my audience laugh and relax. I never mentioned the rest of it—the posed photo op where she’d hissed at me to “fucking smile” as she kissed me on the cheek, the way she spent long hours “going over lines” with her buff male costar, the argument I’d overheard between my parents where she’d suggested I’d do better in boarding school.
It was one of the only times in my life when my father had stood up for me, but these days I wondered if Audrey had been right. At least at boarding school, I’d no longer have been an outsider inside my own house.
“How was the trip to Fiji?” Ajay asked, instead of pushing for more as most people back home tended to do—it wasn’t as bad now, Los Angeles a city obsessed with youth, but Audrey Advani still cut a sexy and striking figure even in her late fifties.
“Tough.” No point or need to hide that. “Diya always said she’d take me, show me around the family home. Going there without her felt wrong.” I paused on the stairs, a busy member of staff passing us with quick feet. “I spoke to their neighbors. A former police officer named Kamal, and his wife and son.”
Ajay frowned before snapping his fingers. “Oh yeah, Uncle Kamal. We haven’t visited since I was fifteen, but he was a crusty old man even then. Can’t imagine he’s improved.”
I chuckled at the apt description. “No, exactly the same. He mentioned that your sister’s always been fond of Bobby.” The present tense just came out, both my conscious and subconscious mind ever more convinced that Bobby was alive.
It was the only thing that made sense.
“Man, isn’t that the truth. I was about five when the Prasads moved to New Zealand, but I remember how she shut down at the thought of not seeing him again. Biggest crush I’ve ever seen, and she was only, like, eleven.”
“She must’ve been happy when your family got to come, too.”
“Oh, it was like fireworks inside her when our dad told us that our application had been accepted. But for that one year after they left and we were still in Fiji, she was a ghost, just drifting around. Wrote so many letters to both Diya and Bobby.”
The hospital café was quiet this near to closing time, but the staff hadn’t yet started cleaning their machines, so we were both able to grab coffees. I also ordered a large filled panini from the cabinet and was told they’d bring it to the table once they’d toasted it in the oven for me.
“Shumi ever date anyone else?” I asked once we’d taken our seats.
The barista started making our coffees while chatting to her coworker, who was taking my panini out of the cabinet.
“She wasn’t interested in anyone else,” Ajay said. “Happiest day of her life was when Bobby asked her out.” He took a little serving sachet of sugar from the small pot of sweeteners on the table and began to turn it around by the edges. “Before they became a couple, and after our family moved here, we all used to hang out. Me and Diya and Bobby and Shumi.
“Aunt Sarita and Uncle Rajesh were deep into studying for their local certifications, while my dad was working long hours, so Mum used to babysit us all when we weren’t in school. I think they were glad when we immigrated, too—we were familiar, you know? We even had rental houses down the road from each other.”
“One big happy family.”
“I’m sure I was there on sufferance—big age gap. But still…” His expression grew soft. “Those were good times. Diya and Bobby used to spend so many nights at our place. Bobby bunked with me, and Diya with Shumi, and everyone knew to behave even when Shumi and Bobby hit their teens and the hormones kicked in.”
Round and round went the sugar packet, the younger man’s focus on it extreme.
“Otherwise,” he said, “the hammer would’ve come down and ended the whole deal. The worst we did was sneak out of bed at night to raid the chocolate cookies or the leftover Diwali sweets.”
His smile faded. “Bobby was a great big brother to me. Patient in a way I didn’t appreciate until I was an older teenager myself.”
Yet another avatar of the boy who’d given a classmate a scar he carried to this day. “I heard a few difficult things while I was in Fiji—about him being a bully.” I twisted my lips, bit them a little, a man uncomfortable with what he was saying. “It just struck me as off. He always seemed like a good guy.”
The barista came over at that moment with our coffees, the conversation on pause until after she’d left. But Ajay didn’t say anything even then, concentrating on tearing open sachets of sugar and pouring them into his coffee.
“I’m sorry,” I began. “I didn’t mean—”
But he was shaking his head. “I hero-worshipped him, so even if he was a bully to others, he could’ve seen me as a mascot, I guess.” His hands tightened around the cup. “I could understand if he was different with other kids—his dad was tough on him.”
“Yeah?”
A small nod as he began to stir in the sugar. “Rajesh uncle expected him to be perfect. Best grades, first fifteen rugby team, top achievement certificates across all subjects. My parents were ecstatic when I pulled a B in my worst subject, but Rajesh uncle used to lose it if Bobby ever came home with less than an A in anything.”
I thought of what Kamal’s son had said about catching Bobby in tears because he’d received ninety-seven percent on a test. “Beatings?”
“No.” Ajay looked down at the table. “I don’t really know the facts. I just kind of heard my parents talking.”
“They’re all dead now, Ajay.” I made my voice gentle, suddenly piercingly aware that Ajay at twenty-one was far softer and less experienced than I’d been at the same age. “And I’m not going to spread rumors. You might as well get it out—it’s obviously on your mind.”
“Yeah. Just thinking about how we were…” He choked up, right as a member of the café staff delivered my toasted panini, with a side of fresh green salad.
After thanking her, I began to unroll my silverware from the paper towel in which it had been wrapped. Giving Shumi’s brother space.
