Go West, Inspector Ghote

by H. R. F. Keating

  He drew in one long deep breath, tensed himself, darted forward, jerked round the handle of the bathroom door, stepped back and with his right foot gave the door a thudding full-soled kick.

  It swung wide. The light from the big room behind him flooded in.

  He jumped back, crouched and waited for the onrush.

  One long second. Another.

  “Freeze, fella. Get ’em up.”

  The shouted words had come not from the bathroom in front of him but from behind. He obeyed the command, even though he had only half-understood it. He raised both his hands clear into the air above his head.

  Then he slowly turned round.

  A huge burly man in a blue uniform had burst into the room and was standing, legs well apart, knees slightly bent, holding in two big bony hands a short-barrelled, pump-action shotgun.

  “Okav, dude,” he said. “You coming quietly, or am I going to have to shoot your legs off?”

  SEVEN

  For a moment Inspector Ghote thought he was going to find himself arrested by a fellow police officer on a charge of murdering the man he had come to California to challenge. Then common sense reasserted itself.

  “Good evening,” he said. “I am most glad you have arrived upon the scene. I myself had only just entered this room and found this body in the condition in which you see it. I very much welcome your arrival.”

  But even as he said the words it occurred to him that, in fact, the arrival of the California police at this exact moment was altogether extraordinary. The swami had been killed little more than ten minutes before. No one else but himself knew. So how was it that the police were here already?

  And hard on the heels of that thought came another.

  Where was the swami’s murderer? In the few instants between the time he himself had flung back the door of the bathroom and the moment he had turned to face this big man with the shotgun he had seen right into the little cubicle. And it had been as bare as the bedroom beside it. There was a shower with its glass door pushed right back. There was a wash-basin. There was a lavatory-bowl, western-style. And nothing else. There was nowhere that anyone, however small, however crouched, could possibly have hidden.

  So where was the person who had killed Swami? And where was the knife he had used?

  “You trying something?” the man at the door asked, heavy with suspicion.

  “No, no. Please allow me to explain. I have only just come into this building. When I opened the door where you are now standing I saw there on the floor the body of the man they are calling Swami With No Name. I saw too that he had only just been killed. His blood was still liquid, you know. And I thought that whoever had done the deed was very, very likely to be concealed in one of these two little rooms here because I had seen no one come out, you know. I was carrying out an investigation when you entered.”

  “You sure are trying something.”

  The cop—Ghote thought suddenly that this was what he ought to be calling the fellow—shouted out to someone in the lobby behind him, his shotgun not wavering by as much as a whisker.

  “Hey, come on in here. We got some sorta kook.”

  In at the door came a second cop, as big, as raw-boned, as fresh-faced.

  Ghote decided that he must dispel as quickly as possible the idea that he was a kook. Whatever exactly a kook was.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, with all the confidence he could muster, “perhaps I had better introduce myself. I am Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police. I am here making private inquiries on behalf of a very, very influential Bombay citizen. In the course of those inquiries I had occasion to enter this room some few minutes ago only, and here, as I have stated, I discovered the body of the Swami With No Name.”

  “Well, we saw him go in so he ain’t fooling about that,” the second of the two cops said, though he sounded distinctly doubtful.

  “Yeah, I guess. But …”

  The cop with the shotgun, still held rock-steady, was more dubious.

  “Inspector?” said his companion. “You got any ID?”

  “Idee? That is idea?” Ghote asked eagerly. “But I must tell you, gentlemen, I have not got any idea at all. You see, it is altogether most strange. I am coming in here, as I have told. I am seeing the body, with the throat cut and the blood flowing still. I saw that with my own eyes. So he cannot have been dead for more than a few minutes, not more than ten at most. That you must be knowing. But, gentlemen, where is the weapon that cut his throat? I am able–”

  “ID he said, fella,” the cop with the gun growled. “ID. You know what ID is?”

  “No,” Ghote said.

  The shotgun did turn away a little now. The cop holding it was evidently so exasperated by this appalling ignorance that he had to look at his companion to see his reaction.

  “The guy ain’t no Inspector, that’s for sure,” he said. “If you ask me, he’s some sorta wetback, come straight over the Mex border.”

  “Nah, he ain’t no Mexican.”

  Ghote broke in before the argument could go any further.

  “Gentlemen, I can assure you I am exactly as stated. Please, will you allow me to put down my hands and take from my wallet my card?”

  “ID,” said the cop with the gun. “Now you got ID.”

  “Okay, fella, go ahead,” said his companion. “But watch it.”

  Ghote, making an effort to show himself completely calm, lowered his hands, took his wallet from his inner pocket, extracted one of his cards—how strange the familiar pasteboard he so often had occasion to hand to people back at home looked now—and held it out at arm’s length in front of him.

  The second cop, taking good care not to go between Ghote and his companion with the shotgun, came over, plucked the card from his outstretched fingers and read it aloud.

  “Inspector G. V. Goat, Detection of Crime Branch, Bombay.”

  The shotgun at last was lowered.

  “We’d better get some brass out here fast,” the cop with it said. “This is just crazy.”

  The other cop went over to the white telephone, hunkered down beside it and punched out a number on its buttons.

  “Put me through to the lieutenant,” he said after a few moments. “Lieutenant? Deputy Barnes here, sir. At that place, the ashram. We have a DB, sir. Yes, sir. With his throat cut and—and, well, sir, no weapon visible and—and, I guess, no way for any killer to have gotten away, sir. So will you—Yes, sir. Be glad to see you, sir. And, sir, one other thing. Well, sir, we have a witness here, practically an eyeball witness to the killing, sir, but—but, sir, it seems he’s a cop, a cop from Bombay, India. And, sir, he’s real top brass. An Inspector, no less. So, if you’d—Yes, sir. Right away, Lieutenant, sir.”

  He put down the receiver and stood up with a little grunt of effort.

  “Says to say Welcome Aboard, Inspector, sir,” he said.

  Ghote, who had worked out during the latter part of the call that police ranks in America must differ from those in India and that he had thus been placed a good deal higher up the tree than was his right, decided to say nothing for the time being. The two cops had had quite enough to take in already.

  Instead he suggested that they ought to verify his own findings before any more time had passed. He very much wanted them to do so. What he had discovered seemed impossible to believe.

  He went over to Swami’s yellow silk-covered cushion throne while they began their exploration, feeling abruptly exhausted by all that had happened in the last few minutes. For a moment, just as he was about to sink down on to the mattress, a sudden absurdly fanciful idea assailed him. What if he was to flop down right on to the killer concealed somehow among the cushions?

  But even before he had lifted the mattress and given each yellow-covered cushion a savage prod he knew that really it would have been out of the question for anyone to have rearranged the throne so neatly within the very short time between the moment the swami’s throat must have been cut and his own entry.

 
So where was the killer? And where was the weapon he had used? Even that was not hidden anywhere in the throne. His probing had made sure of that.

  He sank down on to the mattress and put his head between his two hands, only looking up when after a considerable interval the two cops emerged, one from the bedroom, the other from the bathroom. As they did so they paused and looked at each other. Their wide shoulders rose in two huge shrugs.

  ‘Well, Inspector, sir,” said the one who had named himself on the telephone as Deputy Barnes, “I guess you’re one hundred percent right. There’s no one in this whole crazy building. There’s no way either that anyone could have gotten out. And there’s no weapon in here. I guess it’s … well, I guess I’m glad the lieutenant’s on his way.”

  Ater this the three of them waited in an embarrassed silence. Each from time to time cast a surreptitious glance round the big square room as if trying to imagine somewhere in its bareness where a man, or even a woman, could still somehow be hidden.

  Or where something as small as a knife, a knife with a razor-thin cutting edge, might be concealed.

  But none of them, as the minutes crawled by, hit on even enough of a wild supposition to make it worth suggesting aloud.

  At last there came the distant sound of a car climbing the track up the hill in low gear.

  “Guess I’d better show,” said the cop with the shotgun.

  He stomped over to the door and went out, relief at being able to depart plain on his wind-tanned ruddy face.

  Deputy Barnes gave Ghote a half-rueful look.

  “Lieutenant Foster’ll be here in a coupla minutes, I guess,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ghote answered.

  Then abruptly a question he had meant to ask earlier came back to him.

  “But, please,” he said, “How was it that the two of you came upon the scene with such rapidity? I have not at all understood that.”

  “Yeah,” said Deputy Barnes. “Well, I guess if you’re an Inspector, it’ll be okay to tell you.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ghote said, drawing himself up a little on the swami’s yellow throne. “Quite all right, quite all right.”

  “Well, it’s like this, Inspector. This—this swami guy, he was due to be interviewed by the lieutenant tonight. Lieutenant had wanted to see him this evening, but the guy said he had some sorta prayer meeting he had to hold. Something that’d go on till past midnight. I dunno how they do that sorta thing out here. So could the lieutenant come out late tonight? Well, I guess the lieutenant wanted to play it cool. It was religion an’ all, and the swami guy had a lotta friends too, you know.”

  “Yes, yes. It is the same in Bombay, I assure you.”

  “That so? Yeah. Well. Well, all the same the lieutenant didn’t wanna risk the guy high-tailing it. So he sends the two of us out here. Park the unit outa sight down the bottom of the hill, come up on foot and survey the place.”

  “And you saw nothing? No one coming out of here?”

  “All we saw was you, Inspector. You kinda creeping up on this cabin. And, well, sir, I guess we didn’t know …”

  “Yes, yes. You did quite right. A person behaving in a suspicious manner. You did quite right.”

  “Thank you, sir. Here’s the lieutenant now, I guess.”

  The sound of an exchange of conversation in low voices had been audible. Ghote got to his feet and waited for the newcomer.

  The man who came in with the burly, shotgun-toting cop was a little shorter than the majority of tall Americans Ghote had so far seen. He was dressed in a quiet grey lightweight suit with a plain white shirt. He wore a tie, a dark blue one with a thin white stripe in it. But what chiefly struck Ghote was his eyes. They were grey and cold-looking in his tanned face. And from the moment he had come in they had been making assessments, calmly moying from the swami’s dead body with its cascade of curling black locks and gaping throat to the cushion-piled yellow throne, from Deputy Barnes to himself.

  And all this in the few instants between his stepping through the doorway and his walking over with hand out-thrust.

  “Lieutenant Foster, Inspector. Pleased to meet you. I guess rankwise you and I are pretty well on a par in our respective forces.”

  “Yes,” Ghote answered, at once glad he no longer had to pretend to be more important than he was. “And I am most glad also to meet you, Lieutenant.”

  He had pronounced lieutenant in the American way and not in the British or in its simplified Hindi equivalent. He felt that by doing so he had really put himself on equal terms.

  “So I’d be glad to know just what you’re doing here,” Lieutenant Foster said.

  Bleakly.

  Ghote swallowed.

  “I am here in a private capacity only,” he answered, unable now to add a lieutenant. “I am acting on behalf of Mr. Ranjee Shahani, a very, very influential Bombay businessman. It is at the request of our State Minister for Police Affairs. Mr. Shahani’s daughter has become what we are calling a chela at the ashram here, and her father believes she is being detained against her will. I am investigating the matter.”

  “On your own?” Lieutenant Foster asked, his grey eyes homing in once again.

  Ghote hesitated.

  Should he mention that Fred Hoskins had also been retained by Mr. Shahani, at rupees 2,000 a day plus expenses? Or ought he to conceal that confidential fact? If he mentioned the private eye—and was this the real reason for his reluctance to do so?—would not Fred Hoskins, as soon as he had been contacted, convey to the lieutenant his own low opinion of himself? Of a man, a cop, who failed to carry a piece? Who was so short in stature? Who was unfit to meet his ex-colleagues of the L.A.P.D.? And he very much wanted, he found suddenly, to gain the good opinion of this quiet, watchful man.

  He decided to gloss over Fred Hoskins’ part in his inquiry. But then something in those grey, reasoning eyes looking at him so intently made him abruptly change his mind.

  “There is an American detective also,” he said. “What you are calling a private eye. Known by the name of Fred Hoskins.”

  “Thank you,” said Lieutenant Foster.

  He turned to the cop who had come in with him.

  “Better call Hoskins in,” he said laconically.

  A sweat-hot wave of relief swamped Ghote. How appallingly he would have been discredited in the eyes of this cool, quiet man if he had glossed over Fred Hoskins’ existence. How utterly he would have lost his status of being on a par with the Californian officer.

  Fred Hoskins came in at the door.

  “So, Gan boy,” he said loudly, “I met up with Lieutenant Foster here and I hear you’ve got yourself a Murder One.”

  But Lieutenant Foster gave Ghote no time to answer, no time even to ask just what a Murder One was.

  “Inspector,” he said, his low, level voice in strong contrast to Fred Hoskins’ twanging yammer. “What you tell me about Miss Shahani is of considerable interest to me. I won’t make any bones about it. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has received complaints about this place, complaints similar to the one you’re investigating. I was due to interview the swami tonight. At one A.M. when he said he’d be through with a meditation session. It looks as if maybe someone’s taken the law into their own hands and anticipated me.”

  “Yes. Yes, a murder for some reason of that sort,” Ghote said. “I see that. But …”

  “But what, Inspector?”

  “But how can it be, Lieutenant? When I first saw the swami’s body his blood was still liquid, still flowing from the wound. And yet I had had under my personal observation for at least ten minutes beforehand the only means of exit from this building.”

  “That so? It’s what I gathered from the deputy here, but I figured there’d been some misunderstanding.”

  The lieutenant’s serious tanned face betrayed a fleeting look of puzzlement, and Ghote guessed that it was rare for the man to allow any feelings or thoughts he might have to show themselves as openly.

  “Lieut
enant”

  Fred Hoskins’ voice splattered into the quiet of the bare room.

  Lieutenant Foster flicked his grey eyes in his direction.

  “Lieutenant, if my understanding of this situation is correct and you’re faced with a corpse with no murderer and no weapon in sight, then I’ll tell you that you’re a very lucky man.”

  “Hoskins, I’ll talk to you in good time,” Lieutenant Foster answered.

  He turned back to Ghote.

  “So, Inspector, I’d appreciate it if you would give me any co-operation I may request. It appears—”

  “But that’s just what you don’t see, Lieutenant,” came the hammer-hammer-hammer voice from behind him. “It’s just the co-operation of this distinguished visitor that makes you so lucky. He’s an Indian, Lieutenant. An Indian Indian. A Hindu. He’s the very person you’re looking for.”

  “I’m looking for the person who did that, Hoskins.”

  The lieutenant’s cold eyes indicated the swami’s sprawled body on the bare clean boards of the floor.

  “I’m looking for the killer here, and I don’t think Inspector Ghote fits the bill.”

  “You’re under a false impression, if I may say so, Lieutenant,” Fred Hoskins battered on, unabashed. “The reason you’re in a position of great strength is that it’s obvious that this is no ordinary crime. It’s no more than a perfect example of a crime committed by means of oriental magic, and right here beside you, Lieutenant, you have a top expert in oriental magic.”

  “No!”

  Ghote, outraged, exploded with the word before perhaps better counsel could prevail.

  And at once he found himself looking straight into those cold, appraising eyes.

  He felt obliged to offer an explanation.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “I would not disguise from you that in my country, and perhaps it is so also in other parts of the world, events do occur which can be called magic, events which cannot be accounted for by logical, scientific means. I was thinking not very long ago of such an incident within my own experience. In Lamington Road Goal, Bombay, we had occasion to put behind bars a fellow we suspected of an offence against Indian Penal Code Section 508, inducing a person to believe he will become the object of divine displeasure. In fact, the fellow we had nabbed was not the man who had committed that particular offence. However, there he was behind bars. There at night the officer in charge left him. There also on one occasion I myself saw him. But, Lieutenant, on each and every morning of that period when routine inspection was carried out the man was found to be sitting quietly on the outer side of those bars. This is a thing that happened. I do not know how it can be accounted for, but it took place.”