John Irving - A Son of the Circus

As for the surveillance officer, the subinspector who was watching the Dogars’ house, he might as well have slept through the night, too. He swore that Mrs. Dogar had never left her house; only Mr . Dogar had left. The subinspector, whom the deputy commissioner would later reassign to something harmless, like answering letters of complaint, declared that he knew it was Mr. Dogar because of the old man’s characteristic shuffle; also, the figure was stooped. Then there was the matter of the baggy suit, which was gray. It was a man’s suit of an exceedingly loose fit—not what Mr. Dogar had worn to the New Year’s Eve party at the Duckworth Club—and with it Mr. Dogar wore a white shirt, open at the throat. The old man climbed into a taxi at about 2:00 A.M.; he returned to his house, in another taxi, at 3:45 A.M. The surveillance officer (whom the deputy commissioner would also later demote from subinspector to constable) had smugly assumed that Mr. Dogar was visiting either a mistress or a prostitute.

Definitely a prostitute, thought Detective Patel. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been Mr . Dogar.

The madam at the questionably better brothel in Kamathipura told the deputy commissioner that it was her brothel’s policy to turn out the lights at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., depending on the volume of customers or the lack thereof. After the lights were out, she accepted only all-night visitors; to spend the night with one of her girls, the madam charged from 100 rupees on up. The “old man” who’d arrived after 2:00 A.M., when the brothel was dark, had offered 300 rupees for the madam’s smallest girl.

Detective Patel first thought the madam must have meant her youngest girl, but the madam said she was sure that the gentleman had requested her “smallest”; in any case, that’s what he got. Asha was a very small, delicate girl—about 15, the madam declared. About 13, the deputy commissioner guessed.

Because the lights were out and there were no other girls in the hallway, no one but the madam and Asha saw the alleged old man—he wasn’t that old, the madam believed. He wasn’t at all stooped, either, the madam recalled, but (like the soon-to-be-demoted surveillance officer) she noted how loosely the suit fit him and that it was gray. “He” was very clean-shaven, except for a thin mustache—the latter was false, Detective Patel assumed—and an unusual hairdo… here the madam held her hands high above her forehead and said, “But it was cut short in the back, and over the ears.”

“Yes, I know—a pompadour,” Patel said. He knew that the hair would not have been silver, streaked with white, but he asked the question anyway.

“No, it was black, streaked with silver,” the madam said.

And no one had seen the “old man” leave. The madam had been awakened by the presence of a nun. She’d heard what she thought was someone trying to open the door from the street; when she went to see, there was a nun outside the door—it must have been about 3:00 in the morning.

“Do you see a lot of nuns in this district at that hour?” the deputy commissioner asked her.

“Of course not!” the madam cried. She’d asked the nun what she wanted, and the nun had replied that she was searching for a Christian girl from Kerala; the madam responded that she had no Kerala Christians in her house.

“And what color was the nun’s habit?” Patel asked, although he knew the answer would be “gray,” which it was. It wasn’t an unusual color for a habit of tropical weight, but it was also something that could have been fashioned from the same gray suit that Mrs. Dogar had worn when she came to the brothel. The baggy suit had probably fitted over the habit; then, in turn, the habit fit over the suit, or parts of the habit and the suit were one and the same—at least the same fabric. The white shirt could have various uses; maybe it was rolled, like a high collar, or else it could cover the head, like a kind of cowl. The detective presumed that the alleged nun didn’t have a mustache. (“Of course not!” the madam declared.) And because the nun had covered her head, the madam wouldn’t have noticed the pompadour.

The only reason the madam had found the dead girl so soon was that she’d been unable to fall back asleep; first, one of the all-night customers was shouting, and then, when it was finally quiet, the madam had heard the sound of water boiling, although it wasn’t time for tea. In the dead girl’s cubicle, a pot of water had come to a boil on a heating coil; that was how the madam discovered the body. Otherwise, it might have been 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning before the other prostitutes would have noticed that tiny Asha wasn’t up and about.

The deputy commissioner asked the madam about the sound of someone trying to open the door from the street—the sound that had awakened her. Wouldn’t the door have made the same sound if it had been opened from the inside , and then closed behind the departing nun? The madam admitted that this would have made the same sound; in short, if the madam hadn’t heard the door, she never would have seen the nun. And by the time Mrs. Dogar took a taxi home, she was no longer a nun at all.

Detective Patel was exceedingly polite in asking the madam a most obvious question: “Would you consider the idea that the not-so-old man and the nun were in fact the same person?” The madam shrugged; she doubted she could identify either of them. When the deputy commissioner pressed her on this point, all the madam would add was that she’d been sleepy; both the not-so-old man and the nun had woken her up.

Nancy was still not awake when Detective Patel returned to his flat; he’d already typed a scathing report, demoting the surveillance officer and consigning him to the mailroom of Grime Branch Headquarters. The deputy commissioner wanted to be home when his wife woke up; he also didn’t want to call Inspector Dhar and Dr. Daruwalla from the police station. Detective Patel thought he’d let them all sleep a little longer.

The deputy commissioner determined that Asha’s neck had been broken so cleanly for two reasons. One, she was small; two, she’d been completely relaxed. Rahul must have coaxed her over onto her stomach, as if to prepare her for sex in that position. But of course there’d been no sex. The deep fingerprint bruises in the prostitute’s eye sockets—and on her throat, just below her jaw—suggested that Mrs. Dogar had grabbed Asha’s face from behind; she’d wrenched the small girl’s head back and to one side, until Asha’s neck snapped.

Then Rahul had rolled Asha onto her back in order to make the drawing on her belly. Although the drawing was of the usual kind, it was of less than the usual quality; it suggested undue haste, which was strange—there was no urgency for Mrs. Dogar to leave the brothel. Yet something had compelled Rahul to hurry. As for the fearsome “new twist” to this killing, it sickened Detective Patel. The dead girl’s lower lip was bitten clean through. Asha could not have been bitten so savagely while she was alive; her screams would have awakened the entire brothel. No; the bite had occurred after the murder and after the drawing. The minimal amount of bleeding indicated that Asha had been bitten after her heart had stopped. It was the idea of biting the girl that had made Mrs. Dogar hurry, the policeman thought. She couldn’t wait to finish the drawing because Asha’s lower lip was so tempting to her.

Even such slight bleeding had made a mess, which was uncharacteristic of Rahul. It must have been Mrs. Dogar who put the pot of water on the heating coil; her own face, at least her mouth, must have been marked with the prostitute’s blood. When the water was warm, Rahul dipped some of the dead girl’s clothes in the pot and used them to wash the blood off herself. Then she left—as a nun—forgetting that the heating coil was on. The boiling water had brought the madam. Although the nun had been a smart idea, this had otherwise been a sloppy job.