Killers Are My Meat

by Stephen Marlowe

  “What are you talking about?” she said, the spots of color burning more brightly on her cheeks.

  “You don’t have to worry about it,” I told her. “He’s a member of your staff, isn’t he? He’s got diplomatic immunity. The law can’t touch him for what he’s done. Maybe if they find out about it they’ll be able to suspend his driving license.”

  “How dare you speak to me like that! If Rukmini did anything wrong, we’ll waive immunity. He’ll answer to the law for it.” She went on without a pause for breath. “Do you realize who you’re talking to? Who are you?”

  “Which is it going to be?” I said. “Do we waive Rukmini’s immunity now, or do you read the riot act to me?”

  She clenched her small fists. “I’m going to report you to Air France,” she said.

  That reminded me of the two men out front. My once crisp white jacket was smudged, grease-stained, and torn at both elbows. I went out into the courtyard and along the driveway. It cost me another ten spot before I could square things. They drove away without thanking me for the money.

  When I returned to the rear of the house the woman in the red sari was coming across the courtyard, the silk of her garment catching the sun and clinging to her firm body. She almost seemed surprised to see me. She wasn’t mad now, or wasn’t showing it.

  “I see you’re no messenger boy,” she said. “Would you like to talk about it over a drink?”

  I said breakfast would be better, so we went inside to a dining room big enough to feed all the private dicks in Washington. Servants brought me sausages and scrambled eggs on fancy plates under tin helmets. She watched me eat and had a cup of tea to keep me company. When I finished I leaned back with a cigarette and thought the best way to play it with her was to play it straight.

  “Drum’s the name,” I said. “Your name is Sumitra Mojindar, you’re the wife of the First Secretary here at the Embassy, and you figure in a case I’m working on.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I left the house before breakfast, something I almost never do, because I thought someone else was on her way over here and wanted to head her off.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “That would be a woman named Sprayregan whose husband was run down and killed by your chauffeur. But I already told you about that.”

  “Really, Mr. Drum, if you insist on this wild story, I don’t think we have anything more to say to each other.”

  I shrugged. There was nothing to lose, but probably nothing to gain. They were protected four ways from Sunday by diplomatic immunity, the law couldn’t touch them no matter what they did, they were leaving the country in a day or so, and all I wanted at the moment was a reaction. I said:

  “Sprayregan was a pepper who thought he had something big and tried to blackmail you with it. If you’re telling the truth, he never got to you with it.”

  “No?” She seemed both amused and angry. “To whom did he get—and with what?”

  I leaned across the table and looked into her amber eyes. I said, “The poor sap thought he had dynamite. He didn’t have a damn thing all of Washington doesn’t know, Mrs. Mojindar. Do I have to tell you what it is?”

  She stood up. I stood up. “You had better go, Mr. Drum,” she said. The pupils of her amber eyes were very small. Yellow flecks danced in the amber. I leaned across the corner of the big table which separated us and leered at her. It was the kind of suggestive leer that could draw only one response from her. She slapped my face without passion, came around the table and said, “I’ll show you to the door, Mr. Drum.”

  “I know,” I said with false brightness. “Maybe instead of telling you I ought to tell Mr. Mojindar.”

  “Maybe I ought to call Rukmini and have him finish what he started.”

  “Could he, Mrs. Mojindar?”

  “I—I didn’t mean that. If there’s something you want …”

  I held out my hand and rubbed the thumb along the index and middle fingers, palm up. She gave me a look which said, Dirty peeper with your dirty mind. Then she turned and walked ahead of me out of the dining room and through the hall to an enormous high-ceilinged living room which had probably once been two floors in the old brownstone house.

  “Very well,” she said as we reached the front door. “How much do you want?”

  I walked back to the center of the living room. If I named a figure, that would be that. I took my time looking around the room. I didn’t meet her eyes. There was an open staircase on one wall which didn’t fit the oppressively heavy Victorian decor and had been built there as an afterthought. I studied the wood of the stairs. It was teak.

  “Well?” she said impatiently. “How much?”

  “I’d rather discuss it elsewhere,” I stalled. I was wondering what she would do if she knew I was more interested in her reactions than her money, when the doorbell rang.

  She looked at me. She didn’t make a move to answer the door although if was less than twenty feet away. Some women have been trained like that, but they’re not the type I do my drinking with. She said: “What with getting ready to move the Embassy back to its permanent quarters and packing to leave for India and the Benares Conference, I’m afraid I won’t have time to meet you elsewhere.”

  I didn’t answer her. The butler came down the hall and went to the door without looking at us. We stood there, suddenly awkward, like strangers in an elevator. The butler opened the door and immediately backed into the room.

  Gloria Sprayregan came after him. She wore the same black suit and held the same .38 in her hand. From where we stood it looked as if she wanted to put the muzzle in the butler’s mouth. Then she waved the gun and stood still. He kept going back. Her eyes were glassy with liquor, which explained the delay. They stared at me, unblinking. Then they focused on Sumitra Mojindar and the gun muzzle came up.

  “Take it easy, Gloria,” I said, and took a step toward her.

  The .38 jerked in my direction. “The dedicated Mr. Drum,” she said. Her eyes were bleak and bitter. “You’re dedicated, all right. You don’t even wait till the body gets cold to cash in on what he died for. You’re dedicated to yourself.”

  Gloria’s bitter eyes snapped at Sumitra Mojindar. I took another step toward her. Only about a dozen feet separated us now. The butler, who stood between us and off to the left, was trembling. He was an elderly man with a wrinkled monkey-face, and you could actually see his legs shaking in the formal trousers he wore.

  Gloria said, “You thought killing him would get you out of it, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  I’ll say this for Sumitra Mojindar: she never dropped the veil of inscrutability which she’d put on as soon as Gloria came through the door with her .38. That surprised me, because she’d been excited and angry by turns before. She said, “If you are referring to the man Mr. Drum claims was run down and killed by my chauffeur, I have been aware of the accusation for only a matter of minutes. I can assure you, though, as I have assured Mr. Drum, that the chauffeur’s diplomatic immunity will be waived if he has any crimes to answer for.”

  Gloria’s answer was a burst of laughter. The unexpected sound made the butler sob. His head was shaking as if he had the palsy.

  “Wouldn’t that be convenient for you?” Gloria said. “Wouldn’t that be dandy if you had a patsy to take the blame? You think I came here to sell you my husband’s reports for that?”

  “What reports would you be referring to?”

  At first Gloria didn’t say anything. She laughed again, but her eyes were bright with unspilled tears. And she said, “Why don’t you guess, Lady Mojindar?”

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t possibly,” Sumitra said coolly. She was either as innocent as September Morn or the best actress I had ever seen. “But,” she went on, “if you have come here to threaten blackmail so crudely, I must warn you that Ayyangar and Mr. Drum have heard every word spoken. Surely you must realize that.”

  “Maybe I came here to kill you.”

  Even that didn�
�t upset Sumitra. She said, “Then it’s taken you a great deal of time to screw up your courage.”

  There was a long silence. It stretched out over a pit with black death at the bottom, and crossed over. Gloria wasn’t going to kill anyone.

  I took another step. I had covered half the distance between us. Gloria waved the .38 in my direction, but only halfheartedly. Her eyes were about ready to overflow. I thought she would be glad if I grabbed the gun and took her off the spot she’d put herself on. In another second I’d have done it.

  But just then two shots rang out, and they didn’t come from Gloria’s gun. Gloria’s mouth flew open and she swung around to face Ayyanger the butler. But Ayyangar hadn’t done anything. He made a croaking sound and as if it were a command Gloria obediently dropped the .38, pawed at the glossy stain blossoming on the lapel of her black suit-jacket, and fell almost at Ayyangar’s feet. The old man swayed but remained standing.

  Sumitra reached Gloria before I did. That was because I turned around and looked up at the teakwood staircase. Ambedkar was standing near the top of it. He wasn’t wearing the tennis sweater. He had on an open-necked sport shirt and a pair of contrasting slacks. He looked as deadly as a page boy in the Library of Congress, except for the gun in his hand. It was a small and fancy .25 automatic, a woman’s gun. The muzzle velocity hadn’t even been enough to knock Gloria off her feet. She hadn’t fallen down until her heart stopped beating.

  8.

  AMBEDKAR’S story was that he’d put two bullets in Gloria’s chest because she had threatened Lady Mojindar’s life, was obviously high strung, nervous and under the influence of alcohol, had a gun in her hand and might have decided to use it at any moment. He stuck to his story and made himself look good sticking to it. He surrendered the .25, mother-of-pearl-handled automatic to me without a fight. He broke down and sobbed when Sumitra looked up and told us Gloria was dead. Her arm, he said. I only wanted to hit her arm. But when I went back downstairs and looked at Gloria, I saw the bullet holes. They had entered her upper chest on an angle from above within an inch of each other. At that range with a small hand gun with a low muzzle velocity that made the heart the only absolutely certain target of instant death, Ambedkar’s story didn’t look so good to me.

  I extracted the magazine from the little automatic. It held three more soft-nosed .25 bullets. That made it look more like murder because Gloria’s skull might have deflected the soft-nosed bullets or caused them to break apart without entering, so if Ambedkar wanted to shoot her down with the certainty of death there was only one place to aim for, and he had hit it.

  The way it was set up, though, you’d never get the case inside a courtroom. Assuming Ambedkar, who had absolute diplomatic immunity as a member of a foreign legation to the United States, allowed it to go any further than a quiet coroner’s inquest.

  “Go ahead and tell me you didn’t know I was about to take the gun away from her,” I told Ambedkar.

  He didn’t bat an eyelash. The look of contrition and horror in his eyes stayed right where it was. In a broken voice he said, “But how could I be sure? How could anyone be sure? You heard her threaten the Lady Mojindar. I only wanted to shoot her in the arm.”

  “You waiving immunity on that one too?” I asked Sumitra.

  “Don’t be childish, Mr. Drum. What happened is regrettable, but no court of law in this or any country could possibly hold Ranjit Ambedkar responsible.”

  Nobody said anything for a while. Ayyangar the butler went over to the sofa and sat down with his knees spread and his head hanging down between his legs. He sobbed once, then the quiet, and the burden, of a mausoleum settled on the large room. I wondered why the Embassy staff hadn’t rushed in from the working wing of the building to investigate the two shots, then realized it was Saturday and the Embassy staff was home sleeping in bed or out walking in Rock Creek Park or taking a drive into the Virginia hills.

  Then I heard footsteps. We all heard them, and even Ayyangar’s head came up. They were not heavy footsteps. They came down the hall from the dining room and a tall, very thin man wearing a silk-shot jacket which buttoned all the way up and didn’t look a foot across at the shoulders and hung down to his knees over a pair of gray jodhpurs paused in the archway.

  This was my first look at Gaganvihari Mojindar, the First Secretary of the Indian Embassy to the United States. He was six feet tall and probably weighed a hundred thirty pounds in his winter coat. He looked eighty or ageless or twenty-five, depending on whether you noticed, respectively, the wrinkled skin and the wild shock of white hair under the Gandhi cap, the sad, wise Oriental eyes when they were seeing almost anything, or the same eyes when they were seeing Sumitra Mojindar.

  He came into the room, but not very far into it. His Asian eyes became warm and youthful when they settled on Sumitra, and he said in a startlingly rich baritone voice, “My dear, I thought I heard—” Then he saw what was on the floor and his voice didn’t trail off, it stopped dead. His hand came up slowly as if it had all the weight of the world to lift and his sad, wise eyes for a moment seemed to mirror the world’s grief before going blank. I reached him before he fell. I carried him to the sofa. He was incredibly light and felt almost fleshless, like a bundle of stiffly starched clothes without anyone inside.

  When I put him down on the sofa, Sumitra came over and said, “All right. All right, just leave him alone. Leave him alone. He’s a disciple of the Mahatma. He cannot stand violence in any form. He will be all right.”

  I leaned over him. If he was breathing, it wasn’t in any way you could see. Sumitra loosened his collar and took off his shoes. He made a little sound in his throat. One of his hands moved.

  “I’m going to call the cops,” I said. “Do you want me to stick around?”

  Surprise made Sumitra’s amber eyes grow big as she looked up at me. “No,” she said. “Of course not. It would be—embarrassing. But you—”

  “Then I’ll call them and take off. Or why don’t we let Ayyangar call them?”

  The surprise was still in her eyes. “Ayyangar,” she said, “call the police and tell them a woman has been killed here.” Ayyangar walked unsteadily from the room. It was so quiet I could hear a phone being dialed in another part of the house.

  “Why are you doing this?” Sumitra asked me.

  I said, “How are you going to explain Mrs. Sprayregan?”

  Her slim shoulders moved under the red silk sari.

  “You’d have even more trouble with me,” I said. “I can still talk.”

  I went through the archway and down the hall past the dining room. Ayyangar was just coming back. If he was surprised to see me leaving, he didn’t show it. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “But you could have used the front door.”

  I shook my head and told him I knew my place. He didn’t offer to show me out the back door but went into the living room with a blanket for Mojindar.

  When I reached the back door I opened it and took a breath of the clear spring air in the courtyard. Then I slammed the door and took off my shoes, leaving them there. When I got back to my side of the archway, Sumitra was saying:

  “You fool! You fool, you didn’t have to shoot her.”

  Ambedkar answered in his Oxford accents and with none of the respect a houseboy would show for the lady of the house. “Talk about your fools, you didn’t have to tell Ayyangar to ring up the police.”

  “I didn’t call anyone,” Ayyangar said.

  There was the sound of someone walking across the room.

  “How is he?” Ambedkar asked after a while.

  “You know these seizures, Ranjit. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about? He saw her, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, and he must have seen the blood and he saw the gun in Mr. Drum’s hand, but he can’t be sure she was dead. Especially if she’s gone by the time he revives.”

  “Just remember this,” Ambedkar said. “I had to kill her. You know I had to kill her.”


  “Did you run her husband down as Mr. Drum said? Who was he? Why did you kill him?”

  “He wanted twenty thousand dollars. He’d been following you for weeks.”

  Ayyangar made a nasal sound. Sumitra didn’t say anything. Then Ayyangar said, “But even if he learned about Lady Mojindar’s—shall we say, weakness—even if he learned about it … Oh, I see. You feared he might tell Sir Gaganvihari.”

  “That isn’t it at all,” Ambedkar said. “He followed Sumitra. And saw us together.” He grunted and went on, “Somebody give me that blanket. I don’t want to get her blood on me.”

  He began to move heavily. I figured he was carrying the body. I tiptoed down the hall, got my shoes and ran out into the courtyard with them. I went in through the side door of the garage and waited behind one of the sedans. Pretty soon Ambedkar came in, carrying Gloria Sprayregan’s body wrapped in the blanket. He put it down on the floor and opened the tail gate of the Merc station wagon. Then he put the body inside. He scratched his head and made a face, then went to one of the other sedans and opened the trunk. He took the body from the station wagon and wrestled it into the trunk. He pulled down the lid, banging it shut. He displayed as much emotion as a door-to-door salesman loading his samples.

  Lighting a cigarette, he went to the foot of the stairs and called Rukmini. The big chauffeur came to the head of the stairs and said, “Well?” in a happy, faraway voice. He swayed up there on the landing. I thought he was going to fall. I knew he was doped to the ears.

  “Keep away from that stuff the rest of the day,” Ambedkar said. “You have some driving to do tonight.”

  Rukmini nodded and lurched back to his rooms and his dreams. Ambedkar left the garage.

  I waited half an hour. It was a long wait and I had only my thoughts for company. They were some crew. Not Mojindar—not the First Secretary himself. I had heard a great deal about Gaganvihari Mojindar, as anyone in Washington would have. He was one of the leading statesmen of the Asian world and a sincere follower of his beloved Mahatma. His seizure might seem peculiar by Western standards, but Western standards aren’t Asian standards and Gaganvihari Mojindar was a great man. How great, I was to learn later.