It was with this point that Ghote began.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said. “I have been going over your answers to Inspector Dandekar, and there is one small thing I cannot understand. You wanted a sum to start up a business. But it is not at all clear what is the business.”
The boy sat down on the hard chair in front of Ghote’s table and with deliberate casualness put one leg over the other.
“You are not catching me that way, bhai,” he said, “All along I am denying and denying I asked for money.”
Ghote sighed.
“But we have a statement from a neighbour to whom you yourself complained,” he said. “Two others also heard loud quarrelling.”
“Lies,” Raju answered contemptuously.
Ghote did not let himself be discomposed. But for all the calmness with which he went back to the point and for all the reasonableness of every other question he asked in the next two hours, he got, it seemed, nowhere. Some of the hard and shiny contempt left the boy’s voice and the two of them eventually might have been friendly acquaintances, but the answers, though different in tone, were never one whit helpful. So when a constable came in with a chit saying Inspector Dandekar had returned Ghote felt decidedly relieved. He had not really hoped for success where Dandekar had failed, but a small gleam in him had licked at the possibility. And now he knew it would not be.
Dandekar he found equally gloomy.
“Nothing,” he said in answer to a query about his luck with the informers. “Not a whisper. Of course there may be something still, you know. When the newspapers get on to a case people hold out. But I did not get one word.”
And if you did not, Ghote thought, no one else could.
“The boy is also the same as ever,” he said. “I talked and cajoled and urged but he did not give one thing, except to stop back-answering.”
“That little rat. I am going to have him, Ghote. I am going to get him talking if it is the last thing I do. I am going now.”
And, all solidly compact determination, he marched out.
Ghote sat where he was on the small chair beside Dandekar’s desk. He felt he could not face the waiting British author. He had used every atom of his patience with young Raju. He leant forward, banged the brass bell on the desk and when the peon came ordered tea.
He took his time sipping at the hot milky liquid and had not quite finished when suddenly the batwing doors clapped back with a noise like a pair of quick-following pistol shots and Dandekar came striding in again.
But now his face was alight with a dark joy.
“Got him,” he said. “Got him. I knew I would, and by God I did.”
Ghote’s first feeling – he tried to overcome it – was chagrin. He had had Raju all morning and had ended up where he began: Dandekar had had him for scarcely twenty minutes and had broken him. But, never mind who had done it, the boy had talked.
“He confessed everything?” he asked Dandekar. “Faking the ropes, planning it all with Louzado and that Budhoo?”
“Everything. Thanks to you, Ghote.”
“To me?”
“Oh yes. When I heard you had taken that soft line I thought that perhaps now one good hard push would do it. And it did. They did not set out to murder, of course. But when that Budhoo found not one lakh of jewellery but four or five rings only he went mad. That accounts for all those wounds.”
“Shabash, Inspector, shabash,” Ghote said, a rush of warmth swirling through him.
But Dandekar, slumping down into his chair, opening a drawer and pulling out a towel to dab his sweaty face, had begun to look less triumphant.
“It is all right, Ghote,” he said. “But you know as well as I do that when it comes to court, as likely as not, young Raju will shamelessly deny every word.”
“Yes,” Ghote said. “We need Budhoo, though we would be lucky ever to find that one. Or we need John Louzado.”
He began recounting how that trail had ended. But in a minute a look of wide-eyed staring came on Dandekar’s hook-nosed face. Slowly Ghote turned, though he knew almost for a certainty what he would see.
And there it was, looming over the top of the doors like a bristling hairy moon, the face of the Noted British Author.
Resignedly Ghote pushed himself to his feet.
“Mr. Reymond,” he said, his voice ringing with brightness. “I was just coming to tell you. We have broken the case.”
But congratulations did not come as freely as he felt they should. Indeed, as out in the sunshine his story progressed, the bushy beard gaped wide more than once with hardly restrained interjections.
Loose-ends, Ghote thought. Lacunas. Significant variations. Surely there could not be more.
And at last he ran out of words and had to face the author’s objections.
“Inspector, I feel bound to point out a few things. You and Inspector Dandekar have been most kind to me. I can see that as soon as I get home I shall write a story called Mr. Peduncle and the Indian Inspector. And it would be nothing short of a betrayal if I kept silent.”
“Most kind. But I assure—”
“No, Inspector, it is the least I can do. First then, let me say that I know young Raju well. He and I often had long, long talks when he came to phone friends in Delhi and other places. And I promise you, Inspector, he is not the chap to set criminals on to rob his own benefactors. There’s a simple discrepancy between what the boy is and what you say he did. But that’s not all.”
“No?” Ghote said.
“No. You see, there’s one piece of the puzzle which still doesn’t fit. And time and again my Mr. Peduncle has said to Inspector Sugden ‘You’ve got to fit in every bit, my dear fellow, every bit of the puzzle’.”
“But—”
“No, Inspector, hear me out. I know this can’t be easy to take, but you can’t get away from pure logic. What you heard from Fariqua this morning simply didn’t add up. You’ve only to think about it. And if he’s lying there can be only one reason. Young Raju wasn’t the third man: Fariqua was.”
Ghote stood there fuming. Who was this detective-story writer to come telling them what was and was not so? Him and his logic and his lacunas.
But, even as he encouraged the rage to squirt and bubble inside him, he also felt a streak of cold doubt.
Logic. Well, logic was logic. And suspects had been known to confess under pressure to crimes they had not committed, even to murder. And Dandekar, first-class though he was, certainly could put pressure on.
Was it possible that, despite what seemed plain facts, that story of Fariqua’s, seemingly unlikely but perfectly in accord with the way things happened, was just a story?
One thing was certain. The shame, the ridiculousness, of having an author of detective books get to the right answer first must not make them ignore that answer. If only they were not relying wholly on that confession but had Louzado and Budhoo in a cell too. If only the trail of addresses had not—
And then, like a last monsoon storm coming winding rapidly in across the sea long after the monsoon ought to have ended, bringing a last welcome sudden coolness, an idea came winding and leaping into his mind.
“Sir, sir,” he said. “Come with me straightaway, sir, if you please.”
And without giving the author a chance to reply he bundled him into the car and set off into the darting traffic.
They made it to the Shivaji Park flat in record time. There, still begging for patience, Ghote took one fast look round the sitting-room – couches spread with cotton counterpanes, bookshelves, two tables, and, yes, the telephone.
And next to it “the little book” in which, so the Noted British Author had told him soon after they met, people from nearby looked things up. His mention just now of Raju telephoning distant friends had at last brought it to the front of his mind. He flicked at the indexed pages with sweat
-slippery fingers. L for Louzado. And yes. Yes, yes, yes. There it was. The address.
He seized the phone, dialled furiously, shouted instructions for a Lightning Call and miraculously was speaking to the Goa police in Panjim in minutes. And got splendid co-operation. They knew the place, they would find the man, no doubt they would find his share of the missing rings. The fellow would be behind bars in half an hour.
It was almost as if he was putting a hand on his shoulder himself.
He turned from the telephone and looked the bursting-bearded British author full in the face.
“Let me tell one thing, sir,” he said, savouring the irony to the last drop. “Let me tell one thing: never to neglect a loose-end.”
The Perfect Alibi
Paula Gosling
“Two beers, Charley.”
It was a corner bar not too many steps from the precinct station, and the sergeant and the rookie, coming off an arduous tour, were in need of a little restorative refreshment. They carried their glasses to a booth and settled in with a sigh each, one tenor and brief, the other long, low and grateful.
“Gets worse every day,” said the sergeant.
“You said that yesterday, Sarge.”
“Yeah, and I’ll probably say it tomorrow, smart-ass. So? I got my rituals, you got yours.” The sergeant’s voice was filled with the gravelly sediment of many years’ service, and the rookie grinned.
There had been a rush of business just before they’d come off duty, to say nothing of a fist-fight breaking out between a man and wife, and a visit from Granny, who had been reporting the same B and E for fifteen years – lost, one diamond tiara (she was the real Princess Anastasia). The sergeant had a special report sheet he pulled out for her, like clockwork, and wrote everything down with a leadless pencil, going over the old words so many times that they were wearing thin in places. It was, he said, her only entertainment and it allowed them to keep an eye on her, for she was frail, and lived alone.
There were a lot of people in this slum precinct that the sergeant kept an eye on. Currently, one of them was the rookie, who showed promise, but was inclined to be swept away by the excitement of it all. As far as he was concerned the sergeant was the font of all wisdom, and he was always ready to listen to another story. The sergeant was flattered by this, naturally, being a childless widower and lonely, but he saw it as his duty to select incidents that would instruct rather than amuse. One day this freckle-faced bundle of energy would be in charge of a case, and he didn’t want to see it go down the toilet just because the kid forgot the basics. In some ways, the young man’s good looks would be useful – nothing disarms a female suspect quite as much as a handsome arresting officer. The sergeant didn’t have that advantage, being thick in the middle and thin on top. However, the evening stretched ahead, and for some reason, the boy was in the mood for more learning.
Many steps, the sergeant always told him, many careful steps make a case.
He was telling it to him again today.
“Take, for instance, the line-up,” he said. The rookie frowned with frustration. They’d had a line-up that morning, in an attempt to identify a mugger and, as happened so often, the witness hadn’t been certain enough to make an identification.
“Waste of everybody’s time,” the rookie complained.
The sergeant shrugged. “People don’t like to make mistakes, don’t like to take responsibility. They see all them scowling faces, they get confused. But sometimes that works for us, too.”
“I don’t see how,” the rookie said. “A lawyer can really milk a failure to ID.”
“Sure. But I’m not talking about failure, here, I’m talking about a wrong ID altogether, see? Take, for instance, the Excelsior diamond robbery in ’56,” the sergeant continued. The rookie, smiling, leaned back to listen. This was History. He hadn’t even been born in ’56, for crying out loud.
“Torn down now, the old Excelsior Building. Was over on Third and Oakland, I think. Or was it Third and Elm?” the sergeant mused. “Anyway, it had a lot of… Fourth and Oakland, that was it. Fourth and Oakland.”
“Where the McDonald’s is,” the rookie said, encouragingly. He knew the location, he was on the ball.
“Yeah, yeah, where the McDonald’s is,” the sergeant agreed. The rookie nodded.
“The Excelsior Building,” he repeated, as if taking notes.
The sergeant looked gratified. “Yeah. Right. Well, it had a lot of jewellery wholesalers and diamond merchants in it, the Excelsior, and one morning we get a call that one of the biggest, called the Excelsior Diamond Exchange, had been ripped off. So, over we goes, and the place is like an anthill, people running around and yelling, everybody scared to death and like that. See, the minute they come in and hear the Excelsior has been ripped off, they figure they been ripped off, too, so we got to go from office to office, the whole damn building this is, looking, checking, and like that, OK?”
“Yeah, I get the picture.” The rookie could see it, he really could, a wave of blue surging through the corridors, and the plainclothes dicks in those hats with the big brims they wore in the Fifties, taking notes, talking out of the side of their mouths, the whole bit. Two years in the Academy and two years on the beat had not dimmed the rookie’s childhood images. Now was now, now was a bitch, but then, then, cops were cops. The sergeant was rolling on.
“So we do our thing, and we get to this little guy named Samuels, his name I remember to the day I die, and he says to us he was working late planning to cut a big diamond – did you know they take weeks to figure out how to do it? – and he maybe sees the thief. Gives us a description. Right away we’re lucky, because this description, it had to be Buddy Canoli. He had him cold, down to a scar on the back of his left hand, which he saw as Canoli was on his way up the stairs.”
“If this guy was in his office, how could he see somebody going up the stairs?” the rookie interrupted.
“He left the door open to get a breeze, it was hot, OK?”
“OK.”
“It was August.”
“OK! Summer, diamonds, Buddy Canoli. I got it.”
“Right. So we pull in Canoli. He’s got spit for an alibi, so we put him in a line-up with some guys we pull in from the street plus a few cops for flavour, and what do you think?”
“Samuels identifies a cop?”
“No. No.” The sergeant looks disappointed in his protégé. “He identifies one of the guys we pull in from the street, name of Whitney. Don’t forget that name, either. Walter Whitney. Anyways, this guy is like Buddy Canoli, I give you that, tall and thin and a lot of dark curly hair, plus on the back of his left hand, he has a birthmark. Not a scar, but close enough, maybe for a nitwit like Samuels, who swears this is the guy he sees going up the stairs the night before.”
“Swell,” sympathised the rookie.
“Yeah, right. Well, there we were, we had Canoli cold, we knew he did it, and he knew we knew, and he walks out laughing. I was burned. To add to which, you know the regulations, I got to check this poor guy Whitney’s alibi out, right?”
“What regulations?” the rookie asked, nervously. Another one he must have missed.
“The one which states if a person is identified on a line-up, we got to check them out, is which one,” the sergeant told him, impatiently.
“Oh yeah, that one,” the rookie said, vaguely, trying to pin it down in his mind.
“Right. Well, obviously, this Whitney is pretty boiled about the thing himself, respectable guy and all that. It makes him nervous, it would make anybody nervous, but I get him calmed down. You know, have a coffee, stuff like that.”
“Yeah, sure,” the rookie agreed. Stuff like that he could do standing on his head.
“So, Whitney tells me he was home alone like ten million other people. He’s separated from his wife, who’s gone back to her mother in Chicago, he lead
s a quiet life, all that. Fine, I don’t argue, I got no reason to doubt him, do I? He goes on his way, I pick up a phone, call the caretaker of his particular apartment building which I happen to know personally, ask is this Whitney on the up and up, very casual, and the caretaker, what do you think he says?”
“Whitney is a nutny?” the rookie suggested.
“Nah. But Whitney is not being a truthful person. Like he says, he lives alone, all that. Only Whitney wasn’t home that night because the caretaker has to go up there about the air-conditioning which Whitney told him was broken, and when he goes up he gets no reply. Goes up twice, too.”
“Maybe Whitney was asleep.”
“Caretaker has a passkey. Went in, fixed the air-conditioner, no Whitney.” The sergeant looked triumphant.
“Jeez. So why was he lying?”
“Exactly what I want to know.”
“Yeah, right!”
“So, I go down to where this Whitney has an office, he’s some kind of accountant, and I say, look, friend, you weren’t home on the night in question, anything to say about that, and he gets very nervous again and he closes the door and asks me to sit down. Turns out he’s shagging his secretary on the night in question, but he doesn’t want to put it on the record because his wife is on the look-out for anything she can get on him for a divorce, which would ruin him financially. He points to a picture of the wife on his desk, and she is one mean-looking old broad, that’s for sure. One of those thin hard mouths, you know, the kind that bites and hangs on for keeps?” The rookie nodded. They’d picked up a hooker the other day who’d had a mouth like that and had done exactly what the sergeant said. The marks were still on his arm. He looked at the sergeant warily, to see if he was kidding him about that, but the old man’s eyes were misty with remembering, so he let it go.
The sergeant was continuing. “Well, Mr. Whitney, I says to him, we can be discreet. If you’d said that to me right away and explained, I could have saved some shoe leather. He apologises, asks me if I want to speak to his secretary and confirm it, and I say, well, OK, if you insist, and so he calls in this little redhead from the outer office and says tell this man about last night.”
Vintage Crime Page 14
