“I have my share. But that’s what being in business is about, I guess. You want to make money, and wanting that’s what makes the world go round. So you hit on some way you can do it. And then you worry about doing it more and better. That’s okay: The worrying makes you work harder than the other guy.”
“And now you are worrying whether you will be able to buy the ashram land?”
But the realtor did not seem put out by the question as he had been when it had first been shot at him down in his huge office.
“I guess you know that that guy, that swami, if that’s what you call him, was holding out on me for a better price?” he asked.
“Yes, I know that.”
“And the lieutenant from the Sheriff’s Department, he’s interested in that fact too?”
“Yes,” Ghote said with firmness. “He is thinking it is a matter that should be very much looked into.”
One of the heavy water-jets sent him willy-nilly close up to the long-faced realtor. He made frantic movements of his outstretched hands to propel himself back.
“Well, you tell him whatever I tell you. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Ghote found a footing on the redwood bottom of the little pool and kept pushing till he was at a reasonable distance from the subject of his extraordinary interview. How had he allowed himself to be trapped by the Californian way of life like this?
“You have nothing to hide?” he asked. “Not Miss Emily Kanin even?”
The eyebrows in the realtor’s long face rose in acknowledgement of a hit. But it was the merest acknowledgement only.
“Was it you or was it the lieutenant got on to that?” he asked, after the briefest of pauses.
Fred Hoskins, plunging forward and sending a whale-like wave of steaming water slopping over the edge of the tub, took it on himself to answer.
“I am happy to inform you that it was my distinguished colleague here who, with myself, made that discovery,” he said.
The sweat-dripping leathery face in front of Ghote did not turn away.
“Okay, yeah. I put the girl in there. I wanted to see what she could find out about the set-up. Maybe I hoped she could prod that guy in the right direction.”
“To prod him?” Ghote said. “Perhaps to prod him to death? Isn’t it?”
He had never banged out the tough question to a suspect in circumstances so absurdly wrong. But he judged that the moment had come, and he made his voice as unyielding as if he were back at Crawford Market headquarters and had some bemused wife-murderer in front of him at maximum disadvantage.
The long, sweat-shiny face backed away a few inches.
“No, sir. You’re wrong there. Business is business and, damn it, I’ll go to the very edge of what’s legal to win on a deal, and cheerfully too. But to murder a guy to get hold of some land, even one hell of a lot of land worth a bundle? You must be crazy.”
“But your son,” Ghote pursued, sensing that for all the man’s denial he himself still held the advantage, “would your son seek to increase the family wealth, which could still become his, by resorting to murder?”
Two long, leathery hands appeared above the surface of the steaming water and beat at it.
“I’ve told you, sir, and I’ve told that boy often enough. Not one red cent of mine will he get till I see he’s ready to make some honest money.”
“But, Mr. Lansing,” Ghote, thinking of young Brad kneeling in front of Swami taking his slaps, felt obliged to say, “your son is not an anti-social. He is by no means any sort of miscreant.”
“I guess he’s not. But he’s doing no good to himself or anybody else the way he’s been acting these last five years. No, sir, a man has got to do more in this world than moan about how bad it is. A man’s got to work. He’s got to make himself some money. To build something that wasn’t there before.”
“By getting hold of valuable land by means of underhand methods, Mr. Lansing, must he do that?”
Let him have the naked truth, Ghote thought. He has tricked me into this naked confrontation, so let him have the worst of it as well as the best.
But the long, sweat-beaded face in front of him showed no sign of being disconcerted.
“Underhand methods, Inspector? Well, I just don’t know what you mean by that. You can’t mean I’ve done anything illegal because Lansing Realty has taken damn good care never to go one step beyond what the law allows. You can examine the books any time you want. But if you mean tough methods, well, I make no apology for using those. It’s a tough world, Inspector, and if you don’t stand up to it and fight it, you go under. But if you can take the world on its own terms, then you stand to come out of that fight with a few dollars in your pocket, and what’s more you leave the world a better place to be in. You’ve made something, and you can be proud of that. No, sir, I’ve got nothing to apologise for, and don’t you forget it.”
Inspector Ghote took one quick breath and plunged his whole head under the scalding water of the Jacuzzi.
FIFTEEN
Back in Fred Hoskins’ monstrous green car, Ghote admitted to himself that at least he felt a good deal the better physically. He felt comfortable in every inch. Freed, too, of all minor cares.
But this latter was a state that lasted only until Fred Hoskins had started the car’s deep-throbbing engine and had begun to pull out into the heavier-than-ever evening traffic.
“Okay, Gan boy, we’re hot on the trail now,” he said, his voice bouncing back at Ghote from the roof overhead, the wide windscreen in front of him. “Let me tell you I wasn’t impressed with your theory that a take-over of the ashram land had any direct bearing on the case. A simple business transaction doesn’t lead to first-degree murder, Gan boy. Maybe in Bombay, India, where they have a different attitude about money, these things may happen daily. But let me assure you in the Golden State our business ethic prevents those sneaky tactics. No, Gan, it’s that Britisher in the orange you’ve got to concentrate on from here on. How did he use the mysterious ways of the East to make the murder weapon disappear? That’s what I’m counting on you, Gan, with your know-how, to make one hundred percent clear.”
“But,” Ghote had just time to reply before the jackal-haired private eye reached for the button that set off his quadraphonic loudspeakers, “but, Fred, there is the question of Nirmala Shahani still. She also knew that Swami would be alone in his house, remember.”
And, he added to himself as the first blast of music struck his eardrums, Nirmala Shahani is all now that stands between me and admitting that Swami took his own life and was alone responsible for the disappearance of the weapon. Because the interview with Bradfield Lansing, Senior, if it had done nothing else, had cleared his son of the last vestiges of any reasonable suspicion. The young man would not inherit his father’s wealth, had no interest in that wealth, and well knew how matters stood. And, equally, it had been clear ever since their encounter in the Visitors’ Centre that the boy in no way resented Swami’s brutal handling.
So Brad was out. And so was Emily. For one thing, if Lansing Realty was not prepared to step one inch outside the law to attain its ends, and the offer to open the books for inspection would seem to validate that, then Emily could never have got into a situation where she might have been accused of spying or worse—and then have lashed out and killed Swami. But neither had she killed him for another reason. She had gone to the ashram in the first place as a spy, though no more than a simple spy. Then Swami, with that gift he undoubtedly had had for winning people over, had claimed her. Until she had begun catching him out in lies. From then on she had been of two minds about him, even after that final lie up on the Meditation Hall platform. And no one of two minds, he said to himself, has crude will enough to kill.
Which left, of the four who had known where to find Swami at the crucial time, only Nirmala and Johnananda. And Johnananda, Fred Hoskins’ choice, was just not the man for murder.
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The hectoring, four-fold voice, almost as mind-deadeningly burdensome as Fred Hoskins’ own, broke in on his thoughts. He tried to get back to the train of logic that he believed he had begun on. But now he could no longer resist the thump-thump-thump of the battering music as the fantastic eight-lane freeway began to reel out in front of them.
What is gin? Gin is a state of mind. Only Bombay Gin imported from England …
Bombay gin? Had that really been what that arrogantly confident smooth voice had just thundered out at him? And if it was Bombay gin—oh, what would he not give to be bumping along a mere four-lane road out of Bombay at this instant—then why did it have to be imported here from England? He would never understand this place. Never.
And, besides, had he not known all along that the answer to the riddle of that missing knife would not come at the end of any logical process beginning with the elimination of young Brad and of Emily? It was in his head already.
But how to give it out? How? How?
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No. No. No. No.
“A journey time of under one hour thirty-six minutes, and if that crazy woman in that toy-car Volks with the Oregon plates hadn’t cruised along in the middle of the highway at fifty miles per hour, I would’ve beat my best time.”
“Yes, Fred.”
The central circle of the ashram buildings was there again, the big white dome of the Meditation Hall, the extraordinary spiralling roof of Swami’s house. And the mystery as unsolved as ever.
But there was still something to be done, still part of the logical process not gone through.
He pushed open the great green car’s fat door and set his feet on the firm, reddish earth. Then he addressed Fred Hoskins over the huge width of the car’s hood.
“Fred, Lieutenant Foster has been good enough to ask me for whatever assistance I can render. And I am going to give him that assistance, my own assistance. I shall go now and find Miss Nirmala Shahani, and when I have done so I shall interrogate her in a certain way. I do not altogether want to do this. But I must. And I will.”
He had, tucked away in a corner of his mind, a tiny hope that such a declaration would send the towering private eye off away in an almighty rage. Not to have that insistent presence looming over him. Not to hear that yammer-yammer-yammer about the Californian way of life. Or, worse, about the Hindu way of life. Not to have, even when the fellow was silent, the feeling that at any instant there would come a geyser-burst of words spattering out at him till every sense was numbed. Not to have to carry this giant one single inch farther upon his shoulders.
To be able to think.
“Gan boy, I have to tell you that you’re failing to take into account one very important factor.”
That Johnananda is the killer. Yes, Fred. For the good and sufficient reason that he is both a Britisher and a mysterious Hindu at one and the same time. Yes, Fred.
“Oh, yes, Fred? And, please, what factor is that?”
“You’ve failed, Gan, to take into account the activities of Lieutenant Foster and the vast resources of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. In our absence, Gan, it’s very possible that the case has been solved.”
“Yes, Fred,” Ghote said, coming thumpingly down to earth, “you are right.”
He hoped the fellow was indeed right and the answer to the intolerable mystery known. Or, he discovered analysing that hope, he knew that this was what he ought to be feeling. Nothing but satisfaction that those huge mechanical and electronic resources had done their job. But, because there at the bottom of his mind was the belief that he himself had known what that answer was before even they had left for their zooming, speeding trip to Los Angeles, he had wanted the pleasure of producing the answer, of flourishing it even, first of all. He wanted to have been the one who had proved that this was not an impenetrable mystery, but something simply subject to the laws of science and logic as everybody understood them.
But if the lieutenant had found the answer, then good luck to him after all.
“Fred,” he said, “we must ask. We must ask at once.”
He set off for the log-built administration block at a run.
Yet he hardly needed to get inside and knock at the door of the office Lieutenant Foster was using to know that whatever had happened in the swami’s spiral-roofed house at around midnight was still baffling the best resources of Californian crime science. The very deputy on guard in the central corridor of the building, a bored, resigned figure, told him everything.
“Come in,” the lieutenant called.
He was sitting at the desk in the office, an impressively wide affair made of stainless steel, and the mere sight of the piles of papers on it confirmed to Ghote that the case was no further forward. He had found himself at the same stage of affairs often enough back in Bombay—that time in the progress of a difficult case when fact upon fact upon fact had been discovered, committed to bureaucratic paper, and dumped in front of the investigating officer. Sometimes by diligently going through every such recorded item it was possible to come across a discrepancy or something small but significant that had been overlooked in the first excitement. Then, sometimes, an answer might emerge. More often, though, all the labour was in vain, the many accumulated facts said nothing, any discrepancies meant nothing.
But the job had to be done, and he felt a sense of warm comradeship now to see that the grey-eyed lieutenant had been methodically working from one stacked pile of papers to another.
“There is nothing new?” he asked him.
“There’s one hell of a lot new, Inspector, but not a darn thing that helps so far as I can see.”
“Yes. I am sorry to say that so far I also have discovered nothing that is helpful.”
The lieutenant looked up at him. His unsmiling tanned face was drawn with fatigue.
“Tell you one thing maybe you hadn’t thought of,” he said.
“Yes? What is that, please?”
“Haemophilia, Inspector.”
For an instant Ghote could not think what on earth the syllables meant. Then it came back to him, from one short aside in a Police College lecture of long ago. That curious disease—it had had something to do with Victoria, Queen Empress—in which the blood does not clot.
Good God, had Swami suffered from that and …?
“Didn’t have it,” the lieutenant said laconically. “They checked at the Lab in Sacramento.”
And you asked, Ghote thought with admiration. You asked.
But Lieutenant Foster only pulled down his mouth resignedly.
“No, its the weapon,” he said. “There’s just no getting away from that.”
Ghote almost burst out then with his belief that there was a rational solution to that mystery, and that he knew the answer. That it was somewhere in his head.
But he stopped himself. What use would it be to say he knew the answer if he then would have to add that he could not lay his finger on it. It would be very, very unprofessional.
Lieutenant Foster sighed.
“By the way,” he said, “at least we know now what the weapon was.”
Hope sprang up in Ghote like a wavering, delusive flame of marsh-fire.
“What?” he said. “What is it? How did you …”
“A razor,” the lieutenant answered wearily. “An old-fashioned razor, the kind they call a cut-throat. The criminologists at Sacramento have been looking at the photographs. They’re sure. And I’m not about to question their findings.”
“No. No, if that is the scientific answer I am happy also to accept it. An old-fashioned razor? Well, I suppose it is very likely that the swami had such a thing in his bathroom. I did not see anything of the sort when I was there, but I saw the bathroom for a few seconds only.”
“You were right, though.
There was no razor there. But that guy Johnananda confirms that the swami had that kind of razor. Apparently he often got to shave the guy with it himself. Mark of respect from disciple to guru, he told me.”
“Yes, yes. That would be so. But, Lieutenant …”
“Yeah?”
“It seems to me, I must say, that knowing just what the weapon was does not actually advance us at all.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” Lieutenant Foster said.
“You’re wrong, it does.”
Fred Hoskins’ jutting grain-sack of a belly was protruding through the open doorway.
He stepped farther in.
“No, Gan boy,” he continued, booming like a loud-hailer, “I gotta inform you you’re making a real boner there. The weapon that killed the swami was a razor, right?”
“Yes, you have just heard.”
“And the man who used that razor on the swami’s cheeks, who was he, Gan boy?”
“You have heard also,” Ghote said with exasperation. “It was Johnananda. But—”
“But nothing, Gan. I’ve mentioned the name of that guy in an negative connection before, and what I’ve just heard confirms my instinct that there is the perpetrator of this crime.”
“You’ve talked with Johnananda, Inspector?” Lieutenant Foster said.
“Yes, I have. And while I cannot state beyond doubt that he was not responsible for the death of the swami, I do not find it easy to believe he killed him simply in order to inherit his position.”
“That makes two of us, I guess,” the lieutenant said.
Emboldened by this definite support, Ghote put a question he had wanted to ask the lieutenant since just before their dash to Los Angeles.
“But, please, tell me, Lieutenant, did you when you questioned Johnananda make use of a device that is called, I believe, the polygraph?”
A tiny smile lifted a corner of the lieutenant’s weary mouth.
“It has its uses,” he said. “But don’t get to thinking it’s the only answer. A pathological liar won’t show up on it—not that I think Johnananda’s one of those. And there are guys who can beat the machine without thinking about it. Guys with their blood pressure under control, I guess. And maybe that description does fit our friend.”
Go West, Inspector Ghote Page 17
