Go West, Inspector Ghote

by H. R. F. Keating

  “No, Fred, I will not.”

  Ghote contrived to state his refusal so firmly that for once Fred Hoskins heard what had been said.

  “Whaddya mean no?”

  Ghote straightened his bonily thin shoulders.

  “I mean that I do not intend to question Johnananda,” he said. “I do not believe he is the type of man to kill in cold blood for gain, and even if I did, I do not believe that, whatever orange garments he wraps himself up in, he is capable of performing the feat of bi-location.”

  “Bi-loca—what?”

  “Bi-location. It is the feat of removing the body in an instant of time from one place to another. It is well known to take place in India. But it is not, I repeat not, something that that Englishman could ever perform. And for that reason I have no intention whatsoever of going to him and accusing.”

  He watched fascinated as into Fred Hoskins’ beef-red face so much extra blood came thundering up that within moments it took on the dark purplish hue of meat too long exposed to the air.

  It was several seconds before words came to relieve the pressure. But when they came they arrived in torrents.

  “The hell you’re not. Now listen to me. It’s plain that that guy killed the swami. He killed him for one very simple reason. So as to take over. He could see what a sweet racket the swami was on to, and he wanted in. Anyone would have. It’s as simple as that. I’m telling you, Gan, that guy is the killer, and the only thing still to find out is just how he used these Hindu methods to commit his crime. Now that is a subject on which you, as a Hindu and a police officer, are in a position to catch him out. And you are going to do it. You’re my boy, Inspector Goat, and you’re the one who’s going to crack this case wide open.”

  Ghote took breath to say no again. But the mere look on his face was evidently enough for the enormous private eye.

  “And if you’re not going to do your plain duty, Inspector, then, by God, Fred Hoskins is going to do it for you. Maybe I don’t have your understanding of Hindu tricks, but I know how to make a witness talk when he’s holding back on me, and I’m going to do that right now.”

  Fury swooshed into Ghote’s head.

  “You will not,” he said. “You will keep out of this, Mr. Hoskins.”

  “Just you try and stop me.”

  And Fred Hoskins, grain-sack belly whirling, swung round and charged out of the flapping double doors of the house.

  SEVENTEEN

  Ghote, with one brief despairing hankering for the spell of quiet thought he had been about to have, set off at a run after the hulking private eye. He was not far behind by the time the fellow entered the administration building and a moment later he heard that motor-horn voice demanding from anybody who could hear—and nobody could have failed to do that—where John-whatsit was.

  As in his turn he ran up the steps into the building he became aware of a change in the atmosphere there. The deputy on duty in the central corridor was no longer standing smartly upright. He was instead slouched against the wall. And the door of the office Lieutenant Foster had taken over had not opened swiftly at the sound of the rumpus outside.

  “The lieutenant?” he asked sharply. “Where is he?”

  “Gone down the hill to get himself a bite to eat,” the deputy replied.

  Then from an office farther along Ghote heard Fred Hoskins’ bellow again.

  “Meditating? Meditating? And where the hell’s Look-out Point?”

  The answer was inaudible, but it must have included directions because the next moment there came the crash of a door and Fred Hoskins came thundering down the corridor.

  Ghote considered for an instant interposing his own slight frame between the fellow and his way out. But, though he reckoned he would be able to stop him, he doubted if he would succeed in detaining him for any length of time by argument or reasoning.

  Better to follow and try to intervene when he had found Johnananda.

  But, trotting after the enormous private eye through the dusk back across the inner circle of the ashram, Ghote found he had made a miscalculation. Ahead of him, Fred Hoskins had gone for his wide, green monster of a car, slammed into its driving seat and shot off into the dark.

  Ghote came to a halt and cursed.

  How could he follow now? And what damage would the fellow have done before he managed to secure transport and catch up with him?

  Then, in the last of the light, his eye caught a glimpse of the old bicycle that still rested in the passageway between Swami’s house and the dining-hall. Shooting down the hill on that, he might not be so far behind.

  He set off again at a run.

  But before he had even reached the ancient machine he remembered in what a state of disrepair it had been when he had last noticed it, and when he got to it he found it in no better condition. The front wheel still had its tyre dangling loosely round the metal rim, and there was no sign as far as he could see even of the orange inner-tube.

  But then he noticed in which direction Fred Hoskins’ monster car—its headlamps were blazing out now—had gone.

  It was not heading down the hill towards the Visitors’ Centre and the whole of California spread out in its network of mighty roads beyond, but up towards the tree-covered ridge above the ashram. Look-out Point. Of course, that must be at the crest of the ridge somewhere. And that should not be so far away.

  He began to run again, setting himself now a steady pace that he hoped to keep up all the way to the top of the ridge. But even running it took him a full ten minutes, peering into the deeper darkness under the great upsweeping redwoods, to reach the crest.

  Before he quite got there, however, he saw Fred Hoskins’ car. It seemed to have been pulled off the dirt track and was pointing along the ridge to the left. Its headlights were still blazing out, so much stronger and more fiercely white than the lamps of the Fiats and Ambassadors of night-time Bombay.

  He got to the car, panting like a dog, and saw that it was empty, the driver’s door swung fully open.

  Where had that madman gone?

  Then over the sound of his own puffing breath he caught a distant, familiar noise. A yammer-yammer-yammering.

  It was coming from the direction the big green car’s headlights were pointing in, and he set out once more, running again and on the soft reddish earth silent.

  The yammering grew moment by moment louder.

  Oddly, in these alien surroundings, there came into his head as he pushed himself towards the sound, a fleeting memory of his own earliest childhood. The village. The reedy pond at its edge where boys less high in the scale than the schoolmaster’s son took the buffaloes to wallow. And the noise of the small flotilla of ducks that made the muddy pond their home. A never-ending, honking quacking.

  But to hell with childhood memories. What was that man doing to Johnananda?

  Now he could begin to make out the words.

  “… take it just once more … that you plotted and planned … Don’t tell me the ashram isn’t a classy operation … I tell you that you were eaten up with envy for the man they call the Swami With No Name, and I further—”

  “Fred.”

  Ghote shouted as loudly as his panting breath would let him.

  By the faint light still coming from those powerful headlamps behind him he had been able to make out in front of the hugely tall private eye the orange-clad form of Johnananda. He was kneeling, actually kneeling, on the hard surface of a big all-but-buried rock, a picture of abjectness.

  And Fred Hoskins was holding his gun on him.

  Ghote staggered up over the last few paces that separated them.

  “Fred,” he said. “Fred.”

  “Ah, it’s you, Gan boy. It’ll be a pleasure for you to witness the final confirmation of your theories on the case. The man I have in front of me, by name John-something-or-other, is spilling, Gan. He’s spilling his guts out.”

  “Spilling?” Ghote puffed out. “You mean he is confessing?”

  He drew
in a deep, painful breath.

  “Fred,” he said, “you have been with him for a good time, for ten minutes at least, isn’t it?”

  The immense private eye gave a swift glance at the watch on his wrist, still keeping his gun menacingly pointed at the kneeling form of Johnananda in front of him.

  “Yes, Gan. As a former officer of the L.A.P.D. I naturally consuited my wristwatch at the moment of apprehending the alleged perpetrator before me.”

  “Yes, Fred. And you have been asking questions for all that time then. So, tell me, please, how did he get himself and that razor out of Swami’s house? Has he told you that?”

  “In the course of my interrogation,” Fred Hoskins answered, “the suspect has acknowledged he was the legal heir and successor to the deceased.”

  “But, damn it, has he told you how he got out of that house when myself and two deputies also were watching the only possible exit?”

  Peering towards Johnananda, as if perhaps he would provide the answer which the belly-jutting private eye was so stubbornly not giving, Ghote thought that in the dim light of the distant powerful headlights he could detect on those fleshless, sunken cheeks gleaming streaks that could only be tears.

  Fred Hoskins, the gun in his huge fist pointing directly at Johnananda’s head still, continued to remain silent.

  “Has he told you how?” Ghote repeated stormingly. “Has he? Has he?”

  “The suspect has admitted his crime.”

  Fred Hoskins’ uncompromising statement, for all that it failed to give the answer to the tormenting riddle of Swami’s house, brought home thumpingly to Ghote just what the talk of the suspect “spilling but good” had really meant. It had meant that the huge incubus had been right all along. It meant that his own judgment of Johnananda must have been totally wrong. It meant that Hoskins had triumphed.

  “He has told you that he killed Swami?” he blurted out, unable to provide any more logical response to the private eye’s assertion.

  Fred Hoskins, gun unwavering, repeated exactly the words he had used before.

  “The suspect has admitted his crime. I suggest you pay attention, Inspector. There has been a full confession, and it now only remains for me to escort the suspect to the proper authorities, namely Lieutenant Foster of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department, for him there to repeat his statement.”

  “But Lieutenant Foster is not at the ashram.”

  It was the best Ghote could find to say.

  “Then it will be your duty to guard the prisoner while I take him to the Hall of Justice in L.A.”

  “But the lieutenant has gone to get something to eat only,” Ghote found himself saying. “He would be back in a short time.”

  He felt a bubbling fury with himself that he had somehow got involved in absurd argument over a pure incidental.

  “In that case,” Fred Hoskins yammered in answer, “I will hand over to you, Inspector, my piece, since you are unfortunate enough not to be packing, and we’ll escort the prisoner back to the ashram where I will requisition some place of safety where he may be kept locked up until such time as the lieutenant returns.”

  Oh, why can’t he stop, Ghote thought.

  And at the same time he heard his own voice, inanely, continuing the ridiculous discussion.

  “I do not think, Fred, there is such a place of safety in the ashram. You may not have observed it, but they do not anywhere use locks.”

  “That fact has naturally come under my observation,” the huge private eye went relentlessly on. “I will however take the necessary steps to locate a place in the ashram where some standards of security exist.”

  Liar, thought Ghote. You observed nothing, and you can think of nowhere down there safe enough.

  And, all the while that the pointless wrangling had been going on, he had been aware that the man it concerned was kneeling beside them on the rocky ground, menaced by a gun, his face wet with tears.

  He wanted to turn aside, go over to him, put a hand on his shoulder and offer a word of reassurance. But the sheer baldness of Fred Hoskins’ claim stopped him. The fellow had said that Johnananda had confessed to killing the swami. It could not have been stated more clearly. And if that was so, then it would be quite wrong for him to offer any comfort.

  Then, suddenly, a thought made itself apparent in his head. A wicked, malicious thought. And an irresistible one.

  “Fred,” he said, “there is one building at the ashram that is altogether secure although it has no lock.”

  “Good man,” the private eye boomed out. “I knew I could rely on you. Where do we take him?”

  “To Swami’s house,” Ghote replied.

  “But—but—”

  Fred Hoskins turned right away from Johnananda. His gun was pointing now, if anywhere, at Ghote’s right foot.

  “But,” Ghote said, “you were going to ask, what if he uses his magical power to get out of there just as he must have used it after he had killed Swami.”

  “Yeah. Well, hell, Gan …”

  Ghote played his trump card then.

  “If he does that, Fred,” he said, “you would have proved and proved that you were right all along concerning the identity of the culprit.”

  Would the fellow rise to the bait? Perhaps it had better be dangled yet more obviously. After all, if there was any doubt about the confession he had claimed to have extracted, then if Johnananda could be protected from the threat of that gun perhaps the truth would eventually come out.

  “You would be proved right, Fred,” he said persuasively. “And the rest of us would be proved wrong.”

  “Gan boy, I think you’ve come up with the answer. We’ll incarcerate this guy in the swami’s house, and we’ll maintain a strict guard over the sole means of exit therefrom.”

  “First-class idea,” Ghote said.

  They escorted Johnananda to the swami’s house in silence. Ghote sat with their prisoner in the back of the big car, holding Fred Hoskins’ gun discreetly by his side. Only as they were marching up the steps into the building did he venture to put to Johnananda the question that he had obtusely wanted to ask him directly himself ever since Fred Hoskins had announced that confession. Up till now had felt he could hardly put it to Johnananda under the private eye’s very nose, but at this last moment sheer curiosity made him throw tact to the winds.

  “Johnananda,” he said rapidly, “is it right that you took Swami’s life?”

  But without a moment of hesitation the Englishman answered in a tear-croaky voice.

  “Yes, I killed him.”

  Ghote did not dare ask for details. The three words had at once, in any case, deprived him of determination. I killed him. They had turned upside-down in an instant his own old, laboriously arrived-at belief that the swami’s death was suicide not murder. They had questioned to the core the obstinate notion he had cherished that there was a simple answer to the mystery of the missing razor and that that answer, complete in all its details, lay somewhere in the depths of his mind.

  “Gan boy, I am going to ask you something.”

  Oh, hell.

  “Yes, Fred?”

  “Gan, I am going to entrust to you the task of checking and double-checking on the interior of this building. I, in the meanwhile, will hold the prisoner at gunpoint. It will be your duty to ascertain that the conditions of security at the time of the killing still pertain in their entirety.”

  “Yes, Fred. You can rely on me for that.”

  So he went into that big, bare room again ahead of Johnananda, switching on the lights that showed every square inch of those blank surfaces. Fred Hoskins, gun in his huge fist again, waited in the little lobby with his prisoner and the statue of the Dancing Nataraj; the lifeless one all life, the alive one almost as if dead.

  He marched round the big room, though he knew there was nothing to see in it that had not been examined a hundred times. He kicked and prodded again at the yellow-covered cushion-throne. He stared down at the white dismember
ed telephone. He went into the bathroom at the far end, and noted once again that it did not contain a cut-throat razor and that there was no possible means of egress from it. He went into the little bedroom next door and once again looked at the solitary, well-sprung bed with the drawers under it that had been searched and searched again. He even riffled through the pile of bright car brochures, pulled one out and attempted to read a few words of it. Only the pages were so glossy that in the bright light that proved difficult.

  No, there was still no way that he could see how anyone could have got out of the place in the time between the instant the swami’s blood had begun to pour from his slashed throat and that moment, not ten minutes later, when he himself had seen the still-liquid scarlet.

  He went back to the lobby where Fred Hoskins and Johnananda were waiting.

  “Checked, Fred,” he said at his most clipped.

  “Okay then, bud,” the towering private eye said to Johnananda. “You cool your sweet heels in there for a while, and then you can have the pleasure of repeating to Lieutenant Foster just what you said to me.”

  Johnananda walked, head hanging, into the big room. Ghote shut its door on him, followed Fred Hoskins out into the night and then pulled the double doors of the house closed behind them.

  “Gan,” boomed Fred Hoskins, “I will now inform you of my immediate intentions.”

  Does he have to, Ghote thought, feeling battered and yet more battered.

  “Yes, Fred?”

  “Now, Gan boy, you’re going to get us some food. It may have escaped your attention, my friend, but you and I have not renewed the inner man for a good many hours.”

  “No, Fred, you are right. We have not.”

  It was true that it was a long time since they had eaten an early lunch at the motel, though he himself did not feel as if he could swallow a single mouthful of anything. The whole underlying force that had kept him going throughout the entire, dismaying affair, the belief that the swami’s death must have some rational explanation, seemed to be tumbled into ruins. Nothing mattered now.

  But, obediently, he crossed the circle, lit only by the light coming through windows here and there, and presented himself at the kitchens to beg a share in the ashram’s evening meal for himself as well as the private eye. No point in going back with only one plate. The hectoring questions that would bring down on him did not bear thinking of.