Go West, Inspector Ghote

by H. R. F. Keating

  “If that knife did not disappear by means of extraordinary powers,” he said, feeling each word sound like a hollow drumbeat within himself. “If Swami made it disappear by some trick only, what then, Miss Shahani? Would you come with me back to Bombay then?”

  “You want to clean the sky with a broom?” Nirmala said scornfully.

  “If Swami did take his own life, then he has hidden the weapon by common cheating,” Ghote answered. “I swear that to you, and I will prove it to you.”

  He had known he was going to make that promise, a promise a hundred times harder to keep than his pledge to show that Swami had lied over the car brochures. But as he heard the words come out of his mouth he felt a plunging sense of appalled dismay. What had he undertaken to do?

  NINE

  It took Inspector Ghote a long time before he was able to put to Lieutenant Foster the request to have a full share in his investigation of the swami’s death that he felt he must make. He had seen how inescapable that would be within minutes of his pledge to Nirmala Shahani. Without the lieutenant’s co-operation he would never get anywhere.

  So he had stationed himself where in the darkness of the starlit night he had a good view of the entrance to the ashram’s administration block, and he had watched patiently for a moment when the lieutenant should be free.

  In any gap in the series of interviews the lieutenant was conducting, or if he should happen to step outside for a breath of air, he felt he could go over to him and put his request. But what he was certain he should not do was to crash in on him without ceremony. The chances of meeting with a rebuff were in any case so great—he himself if this investigation were taking place in Bombay would send off any visiting American wanting to poke his nose in pretty damn quick—that the least he could do was to judge the moment to put himself forward with the maximum care.

  Besides, he did not deep-down want to make the request at all. It would mean pretending to the lieutenant that after all he did believe that there was an element of the supernatural in the case. Because the only way his request would stand a chance, he had decided, was if he said that he had now changed his mind about the way in which the weapon had disappeared. He was going to have to put himself forward as Fred Hoskins’ expert—heaven help him—in Hindu magic.

  Certainly, were he to go around putting questions to people purely on his own account, word would soon get back to the lieutenant, and then he would very likely find himself charge-sheeted, under whatever was the Californian equivalent of Indian Penal Code Section 186, obstructing a public servant in the discharge of his public functions.

  No, there was only one way of proving to that little fool Nirmala Shahani—that little fool he would have liked to have been his own daughter—that the swami she so much venerated was a common fake. And that was to convince that cool, grey-eyed man in the administration block at this moment that there was a real possibility that powers beyond the ordinary had played a part in the swami’s death.

  But perhaps, even yet, one of the computers at the lieutenant’s command would whirr and whirl and somehow produce an entirely logical hiding-place for the missing murder weapon to be. Perhaps it was just a matter of using the right status signals.

  Time went slowly by.

  But there was no sign in the single brightly lit window of the administration block that Lieutenant Foster was ever disengaged. From time to time Ghote heard him call an order to the deputy who stood on the block’s wooden entrance steps. “Tell that Johnananda guy I’d like another word, please” or “Go across and see if there’s any progress over there, goddammit.” But orders to fetch anyone always came when someone else was already shut in the office with the lieutenant, and the deputy, who went across to the swami’s house at the double, always came back again within minutes.

  It began to grow distinctly cold.

  Ghote held his watch up to catch the distant light from Lieutenant Foster’s window to see what time it was and guess whether sunrise was near. But the damn thing still seemed to be registering the time for somewhere between Bombay and Los Angeles, wherever it had been that he had last remembered to adjust it.

  Then, through the tall redwoods at last, he caught a glimpse of a faint line of white on the horizon. Dawn. The start of a new day. What would it bring? How could it produce a solution to that absurd problem of the throat cut without any trace of the weapon that had cut it?

  Time and again he had felt his mind bang hard up against that unyielding blank, as if it was, he thought, a sodden article of washing being battered and battered by a dhobi on to a flat unbreakable area of stone. How can a man be killed and the instrument that killed him disappear from a windowless room of which the sole exit had been under constant observation?

  He shook himself.

  Before long all the ashram disciples would be up and about. Their presence was certain to affect the lieutenant. Either he would come out to them, perhaps to tell them all assembled what had happened and what he and his men were doing about it, or more likely, he would decide to move the centre of operations out of the ashram to somewhere where his every move would not be watched. So the moment for making that difficult request could not be far off. The moment when he would have to go back on the firm assertion he had made that the crime was, whatever appearances might indicate, a simple matter of logic. The moment when he would have to admit—an admission all the more bitter for being, ironically, untrue—that perhaps after all he did believe that mysterious powers had been at work.

  “Gan boy, there you are. Where the hell did you get to? I’ve been looking all over for you. I wanted to let you know that your great opportunity is here.”

  Ghote, who had hoped that at some time since he had left Fred Hoskins’ side to go and talk to Nirmala the belly-swaggering private eye had taken himself off to bed, turned with a sigh to confront that looming figure once more.

  “Good morning, Fred,” he offered.

  “Yes sir. The good lieutenant will soon be emerging. When he does—unless I am very much mistaken—he will finally have come to the conclusion that this is a matter involving Hindu magical powers. He will now be ready to ask for your co-operation, and I’ll be happy to take the opportunity to inform him of that fact.”

  Inspector Ghote found he was standing, with unexpected suddenness, on the edge of a deep pool of troubled boiling bubbling mud. Stood for an instant. Plunged.

  “Fred, I would be very happy for you to tell the lieutenant that I will use my knowledge of Hindu mystical powers to assist him in any way I can.”

  He saw, with faint far-off pleasure, Fred Hoskins jolt back with surprise.

  And at that very moment a broad bar of light streamed out from the administration block doorway into the scarcely dawn-touched darkness. In it, yawning and stretching with cat-neat movements, stood Lieutenant Foster.

  “Lieutenant, Lieutenant,” Fred Hoskins promptly hollered, “I’ve got great news for you. Great news.”

  He went striding across to where the lieutenant stood, suddenly alert. Ghote followed him, wishing hard he was going in exactly the opposite direction.

  “Lieutenant, I have just pressured my very good friend, Inspector Goat, top expert in Hindu magical practices, into volunteering his assistance to you.”

  The lieutenant did not snap out the curt dismissal Ghote had expected, and secretly half-hoped for even, though it would reduce almost to nothing his chances of proving to Nirmala Shahani that the swami’s death involved no miracle. Instead he stood on the lowest step of the administration block entrance looking impenetrably into the middle distance.

  Then he turned to Ghote.

  “Inspector,” he said, “you might as well know just what’s been produced by one hell of a lot of hard work ever since we arrived here. Zilch. Precisely zilch. We have no explanation whatever of where the murder weapon is. My men have gone over every inch of the walls there, every inch of that floor. They’re solid. They’ve ripped the plumbing apart. They’ve dismantled the t
elephone. They’ve checked that statue out in the lobby to prove it’s solid, just like the pillar it stands on. There’s no way a knife could have been taken, or thrown, out of there. And you weren’t the only one to have those doors under observation. My two deputies had them in full sight for longer than you did. They confirm the fact that exactly no one and nothing came out of them.”

  He came to a halt. A yet bleaker expression appeared on his face.

  “Inspector,” he said, “if you’re willing to hang around, well, I guess I’m not going to offer any objections.”

  Ghote felt for him. The very obliqueness of his appeal made it all the clearer how hard it must have been for him to make it. To admit that here in California, in America, there might have been committed a crime that could not be solved except by admitting that supernatural powers existed.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “it seems that Miss Shahani is not yet quite ready to return to Bombay, so I shall be staying here a little longer. If during that time I may be permitted to observe the procedures of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, I would be very, very grateful.”

  “Be glad to show you around,” Lieutenant Foster answered, his tones clipped to curtness. “Very glad.”

  “But, hell, Lieutenant,” Fred Hoskins burst in, “you oughta take full advantage of—”

  “Mr. Hoskins,” Ghote said sharply, “I expect Lieutenant Foster will allow you also to come with us. But we must not in any way hinder his work.”

  Somewhat to his surprise the towering private eye fell into a dead silence.

  “Lieutenant,” Ghote said, “when you told that you had learnt—was it?—zilch in all you have done, was there nothing at all that you discovered?”

  The lieutenant sighed.

  “Oh, hell, yes,” he said. “I learnt a lot about this place and the way it’s run. Stuff I’d have been pretty glad to have found out twenty-four hours ago. But not one thing that helped over that damned problem.”

  Into Ghote’s mind there flashed once again, for the hundredth time, for the five hundredth, the dimensions of the damned problem. The big, bare room. Swami’s body lying almost at its centre, the luxuriant black curls of his hair spread out on the close-fitting boards of the floor. That floor extending, clean-swept, to the bare walls all round. The yellow cushion-throne that was the sole object of any size in the room.

  “Well, what did you learn in particular about the ashram?” he asked.

  “I found information that would have been useful if this had been a straight investigation,” Lieutenant Foster said. “There were just four people who knew that the swami was not going to be in the Meditation Hall all night. First of all, there was the swami’s Number Two, Johnananda. The swami told him just before he began his meditation at six P.M. that he would go back to his own house at around eleven-thirty P.M. That must have been so he could be ready to meet me, though apparently he didn’t tell Johnananda that. But I had made my appointment with him around five-thirty. All he said to Johnananda was he would be leaving the hall and wanted to see a girl called Emily Kanin, who acts as his secretary, half an hour after midnight. It seems he expected her full attention at whatever hour of the day or night he called for it. He was writing a book.”

  “Yes,” Ghote said. “I have met Miss Kanin, who prefers, she tells me, to be called Emily only. From her I have heard about that book, and from Miss Shahani also. It seems Swami expected very, very great things from it.”

  Lieutenant Foster puffed out a sharp sigh into the surrounding air, minute by minute turning from dark to pale light. It was a sigh expressing a pretty sharp opinion of the swami’s book. An opinion that Ghote felt much inclined to endorse. But he persisted with the more prosaic matter in hand.

  “There were four people altogether who knew of this intention to leave the Meditation Hall?” he asked.

  “Yes. It seems Johnananda couldn’t locate Miss Kanin—Emily—at first. But he came across her boy-friend, or her very good friend at least, a young man named Brad Lansing. And he asked him to pass on the message, in strict confidence. I’ve interviewed him, and he swore that he told no one else but Emily, and there’s no reason why, if he did talk to someone else, he wouldn’t tell me that he had. So that’s two of them, plus Johnananda himself, real name John Richards, British citizen. And finally there’s your Miss Shahani. She told me herself that the swami had told her.”

  “Yes, that is so. She informed me also. But, Lieutenant, did she tell you something else, something else about Swami?”

  “What else? What do you mean?”

  “Lieutenant, she told me she believes Swami committed suicide.”

  In the slowly flooding-in pale light Ghote was able to make out now the cool grey eyes in the lieutenant’s tanned face. They looked exceedingly thoughtful.

  “Suicide?” he said. “Well, of course, I’ve thought about that. And it could be that the guy had some reason to take his life. If the Department’s suspicions about what was going on here were correct, and if we’d been able to get evidence of his sexual interference with under-age girls, he’d have faced a long term in prison. Let alone public exposure.”

  Ghote saw the unsmiling mouth in the taut, tanned face grimace suddenly in a rictus of distaste.

  “But suicide or murder, Inspector, it makes no difference. Where’s the knife responsible? Where the hell is it?”

  It was an unanswerable question.

  But, Ghote thought, there might still be a way of perhaps getting towards an answer. If the swami had committed suicide, then it was possible, unpleasantly possible, that he had used powers to move the weapon to some distant location that were on a much higher scale than anything he himself had been prepared to credit him with. The phenomenon was not unrecorded, by any means. If this was so, then any quest for the weapon was doomed to failure. But if it was not so … if the swami had not committed suicide but had been murdered … then there must be a way of finding the weapon. Because in that case it had certainly not been made to vanish by the use of supernatural powers. In that case, there was going to be some logical explanation for its apparent disappearance. And that explanation could perhaps emerge, not by looking for the weapon, but by looking for the person who had used it.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “I would like to question Johnananda. To question him without you being present.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a distinct note of resignation in the lieutenant’s answer. It lingered in the dawn air. Until startlingly it was shattered.

  “Attaboy,” Fred Hoskins exploded. “That’s the guy. We’ll fix him but good.”

  Johananda did not make it easy for Ghote to see him. But, Ghote reasoned, there was no reason why he should. With the swami’s sudden death Johnananda must be swamped with business matters, even in the unbusinesslike ashram. And then he himself had no authority with which to demand an instant interview, unless he were to give away the fact that he was now actively co-operating with Lieutenant Foster. And that was something he was reluctant to do. It would deprive him of a valuable advantage.

  No, he had only the bare excuse that he had come to the ashram at the behest of the father of one of the disciples who was extremely anxious about her. So he was content to wait till the early afternoon for his appointment.

  Not so Fred Hoskins.

  “The guy’s gonna make a break for it,” he said to Ghote.

  “But why should he be making any break? He has not done so up to now.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because up to now he knew he was only up against a straight cop. Now he’s gonna realise he’s got a Hindu magic expert to contend with.”

  Ghote thought about trying, once again, to get it into the huge private eye’s jackal-fur head that he himself was not a Hindu magic expert. And abandoned the thought.

  “But why, in any case, would Johnananda wish to make the break?” he said.

  “First of all,” Fred Hoskins answered, ticking off the point with one beef-red finger aga
inst the beef-red thumb of his other hand, “the guy was second in command after the deceased, and so he must be able to work the same kind of Hindu magic.”

  Ghote thought of the orange-robed, shaven-headed Englishman, with his squeaky and unlistened-to reminders in the Meditation Hall. No, the man might manage to play the sitar after a fashion, but he was not someone with powers out of the ordinary.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Second of all.” The beef-red finger moved to the beef-red finger next to the thumb on the other hand. “In an investigative situation there is one question you gotta ask first. Now, what question is that, Gan boy?”

  “It is the question that Dr. Hans Gross expresses with the Latin words Cui Bono,” Ghote answered.

  “All right, I’ll tell you. It’s the question: Who gets something out of it? That’s what you gotta ask, Gan.”

  “I see,” said Ghote. “And you are thinking that since Johnananda was Swami’s deputy he will inherit his place altogether?”

  This did not seem to him a likely reason for seeing Johnananda as the murderer either. Whatever else there was to say about Swami With No Name, he had been a considerable personality. How else could he have had so many people, young girls, rich old women, boys, men devoted to him? And Johnananda—the Johnananda calling squeakily to the disciples in the Meditation Hall—was not a person with very much effective personality, if any.

  “What other reasons have you got?” he asked.

  “Third of all.”

  The hulking private eye stopped abruptly and fell into thought.

  “Well, there’s plenty of other reasons,” he said at last. “It’s just a question of breaking the guy down. And you can do it, Gan boy. With your knowledge of Hindu powers you’re bound to break down the guy’s resistance. That is if he’s still there when you finally get that appointment he’s been clever enough to delay making with you.”