Go West, Inspector Ghote

by H. R. F. Keating

  But Swami With No Name had not accepted their offer. Johnananda had let slip precisely this fact. It had been only in two hastily bitten-off words, but there could be no doubting their implication. Apparently, Johnananda had said, the area can be used now to build a senior citizens’ community on, only Swamiji—and then that abrupt halt.

  However, that sentence could hardly be completed other than with some such words as: only Swamiji had not agreed to the offer made.

  But if the swami had been holding out, whether for a better price or for some other reason, was it not possible, likely even, that people keen to acquire this suddenly available area of land would send some sort of a spy into the enemy camp? And what better spy than a bright, efficient young woman with high secretarial skills? She would only have to put herself and her abilities in Swami’s way, and he would be almost bound to make use of her. She had even admitted that this was what had happened. In the Meditation Hall when he had first seen her after Fred Hoskins had broken up the meeting with his piece, she had said that Swami had “just found out” that she had pretty good shorthand.

  Just found out, indeed. Had had her shorthand skill thrust under his nose no doubt.

  So, once established by Swami’s side, she would be in a first-class position to discover his intentions about the ashram’s land. She might even be able to influence him in favour of selling. And, if she had found she could not do that by a little subtle persuasion, then she would be in a position to see that foul means might work where fair had failed. That, for instance, a few carefully spread rumours about what Swami did with under-age girls could end by getting him out of the ashram in a hurry.

  But, whatever Emily had had in mind in her early days at the ashram, once she had been close to Swami for a little time she had plainly fallen under his spell. What he himself had seen of Emily when Swami had told his lie about the car brochures, and later what he had heard from her, made that altogether plain. She had trusted Swami. She had pledged herself to him. That was why his lies and his greed had so distressed her.

  Distressed? She had been more than that. She had been struck to the heart.

  So could it be that in her appalled disillusion she had at last tackled her idol, had gone to see him in his house earlier than the time he had requested her and had tried to persuade him back to the path he had shown her himself? And then a quarrel? And a snatched up weapon?

  But how to discover if this was what had in fact happened?

  Eventually, they tracked Emily back to where they had first looked for her, in the little makeshift cottage with a fat black power-cable snaking up to its sloping wooden side that was her accommodation at the ashram.

  Ghote knocked again at its roughly-made plank door. There was a moment’s silence, and then Emily’s voice called out a bright, “Come in, whoever you are.”

  He pushed open the door—it had not even been properly closed, just resting against the door-post—and entered, Fred Hoskins ducking well down under the low lintel to follow.

  The cottage was scarcely more than one large room divided in two by a pair of untidily crammed bookcases. In the back smaller half Ghote saw a bed, old and sagging, with a couple of plaid rugs on it. In the front half the impression he got was more of an office than a living-room, despite a pair of cooking rings standing on the small, food-splashed table underneath the gingham-curtained window. On a larger table in the middle there was an electric typewriter—yet another—and several stacks of brightly coloured plastic-covered files. The books in the bookcase, he saw as he completed his quick survey, were all works devoted to aspects of Hindu spirituality. He shied away from them.

  And as he did so he realised something else that he had seen without immediately taking in. Emily was sitting in the room’s only armchair—it had one arm broken in the middle—and on her lap there was a book. But it was lying at not quite the right angle for her to have been reading it when they had knocked.

  It had been snatched, he was sure now, from the bookcase beside her. He stored the thought away.

  “You’re the visitor from Bombay,” Emily greeted him. “The one who wanted to see Swami.”

  “Yes, yes. And this is Mr. Hoskins, Mr. Fred Hoskins.”

  “The guy with the gun.”

  Yet the teasing, pleasant, oral-hygiene smile she gave them both as she said this seemed to Ghote to lack the confident radiance he had seen in her before. He was glad. If the girl felt troubled, she might be made to crack.

  If there actually was anything for her to crack over.

  “Miss Emily,” he said, putting a note of aggressiveness into his voice that would, he reflected, at least please Fred Hoskins. “Miss Emily, I and my colleague here also, as you may know, came to the ashram on behalf of Mr. Ranjee Shahani, of Shahani Enterprises, Bombay. Since Mr. Shahani’s daughter became a resident at the ashram she has failed to communicate with her father and she has drawn out also the whole of a very large sum that was in a joint account at the State Bank of India, 707 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Mr. Shahani sent me to investigate the bona fides of the late swami.”

  While he had been speaking, banging out the words as if he was dealing with some pickpocket on the streets of Bombay, Emily’s face had from moment to moment taken on a deeper and deeper look of distress. Now she broke out.

  “Listen, yesterday you told me you thought Swami had been lying when he said to Mrs. Russell Walters he knew nothing about cars. I don’t know how you got on to that, but I agreed then that he had. I agreed he wasn’t what he ought to have been. But—well, but—oh, I just don’t know.”

  Ghote made himself ignore her evident unhappiness, an unhappiness asking to be comforted all the more because of the contrast it made with her overwhelming healthiness, plain in every inch of her tennis-player’s body.

  “Madam,” he said, “you were very, very devoted to Swami, isn’t it? But already before yesterday when I informed you that he had just told a most downright lie you were becoming doubtful, I am thinking. You knew in your heart he was not the seeker after truth you had believed. That is so, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  The word forced itself from lips that looked suddenly as if they had never been parted in a smile radiant with oral hygiene.

  The girl looked up at him as he stood over her in the low, broken-armed armchair.

  “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said exhaustedly. “I don’t. I really don’t. You know I came here, never mind why, determined that Swami wasn’t going to have any influence over me. I didn’t believe he could. I thought I really knew where I was in the world and what I wanted out of it. And—and then in one way or another I got pretty close to him. I mean, he got to know I could take pretty fast dictation, and he wanted to use me for writing his book. And after that just being with him was enough. I was hooked, but hooked.”

  She jumped to her feet and stood face to face with Ghote under the low ceiling of the little cottage.

  “You can’t tell me,” she said, her voice rising almost to a shout, “that Swamiji didn’t have some power, a power that people here in the West just can’t attain. Or not unless they’re like Johnananda and have been to India. But when Swamiji talked, when he dictated thoughts for his book, when he just sat there even, he took me with him into another world. You know, afterwards there’d be nights maybe when I was transcribing the things he’d said, typing up the actual words, and I’d look at them and think, what’s it all mean? It’s just words, I’d say, words. Peace. Flowers. Action through inaction. Words, words, words. But when Swamiji was saying those words, then, damn it, I saw. I saw a whole new world behind this grey, money-grubbing one. A world that would last for ever, a world that floated above everything.”

  She turned away and looked down at the table with its bright plastic files and its sleek electric typewriter.

  “Richer than rubies,” she said. “It may sound just stupid, but that’s what I felt. He showed me there was another world, richer th
an rubies.”

  “And then you began to see signs of money-grubbing in him?” Ghote said. “Of lies perhaps also? And at last came yesterday when he told such a lie that you could not any more refuse to believe he had said it.”

  Slowly she turned back until she was directly facing him again.

  “Yes,” she said. “At that moment. And it hurt. It hurt then like someone was pressing a red-hot piece of iron into me.”

  “Yes, I saw that,” Ghote said. “But what afterwards, Miss Emily? Did you, when you knew Swami would be alone in his house, go there and punish him for that red-hot disappointment?”

  He hoped for some violent reaction. He would have scarcely minded if it had been a screamed-out denial rather than a blubbered confession. The first might have meant as much as the second.

  But he got neither.

  Instead Emily dropped back sideways into her broken armchair slowly shaking her head.

  “No,” she said, her voice muffled. “No, it wasn’t that way at all. I almost wish it had been.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  Ghote felt offended by the seeming contradiction in what she had said almost as much as if she had spat at him from between her pearly, even, oral-hygiene teeth.

  She looked up now, though her eyes were still clouded with doubts.

  “If it had been that,” she said, “if it had just been that I’d been carried away by a lot of talk and then had seen he was really only a greedy, power-seeking grabber and I’d upped and killed him out of sheer rage, why, then the situation would be something I could have at least understood. But it isn’t. It isn’t.”

  “It isn’t? What isn’t?”

  The eyes looking up at him smouldered abruptly with exasperated rage.

  “Oh, can’t you see? That knife. The weapon that cut his throat. It disappeared, didn’t it? That lieutenant tried to fudge it when he was questioning me, but he couldn’t. The knife that killed Swami wasn’t there from almost the moment he died, and there was no way it could have been taken out of his house. So Swamiji is right back where he started from. The lies don’t matter anymore, if they ever did. He could do anything, couldn’t he? Do anything?”

  The rage died away, and the doubts returned.

  “Only the lies do matter,” she whispered. “They’re still there too. Swami was not a good man. He behaved in a way that someone who was what he ought to have been could never have behaved. But … but even if he took his life for some reason or other, the way that he did it still means he was …”

  What she believed the Swami With No Name still was, despite his lies and his hunger for the most expensive car California could provide, she left unsaid. Ghote did not need it spelt out for him. If that knife had been removed from the scene of Swami’s death by means other than those that were to be found in the ordinary, material world, then the swami was indeed a yogi far advanced along the path, and the manner of his death would remain for ever a mystery. And he himself sooner or later would have to return to Bombay leaving Nirmala Shahani behind, convinced.

  “Well,” he said cautiously, “I myself am still not certain that the knife was spirited away by supernatural means. Yes, I will admit that events occur in India that cannot be explained in logical, scientific terms. But I do not believe that Swami, whatever powers he might have possessed, was capable of achieving a feat of that kind. I am not certain even that he took his own life.”

  Behind him, as he produced these decidedly unforceful and unaggressive thoughts, he could sense the bulky, looming form of Fred Hoskins making little, jerky movements as if small buried volcanoes were on the point of erupting from him.

  If only the fellow would hold his tongue …

  Emily smiled now. It was the palest replica of that flashing, pearly-teethed, cheerfulness-radiating smile that was her everyday self. But it was a mark of the sympathy that had begun to be established between them.

  “I’d like to think the swami I knew hadn’t possessed extraordinary powers,” she said. “I’d really like to. I’d know where I stood then. But … but you hardly saw him, did you? You couldn’t have much idea of what he could do, what he was. What it seemed he could do.”

  “Well, you yourself watched him cure me of a very, very bad headache,” Ghote answered. “And not just cure me only but see it also, my throbbing head, right across the Meditation Hall. I know what he could do.”

  “Yeah, he did that. But you still think he wasn’t really a true yogi?”

  “I am still ready to carry on as if he was not,” Ghote answered. “And perhaps you can help me to do that. For example, there is the matter of the senior citizens’ community.”

  Emily gave him a quick, startled glance.

  “You know about that?”

  “Yes, I know about that.” He took a risk. “I know all about it, Miss Emily. About what is involved and about the part you were playing also. You said just now that you came here first ‘for never mind what reason.’ But I do mind. It was to act as a spy, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded rueful agreement.

  “It all seems a long time ago now,” she said, “though it’s really hardly more than a few weeks. But it seems years back to the person I was then. A girl with a lot of ambitions, and not too choosy about the way I got to them.”

  “It was the best condo on the block, if I remember,” Ghote said. “And, please, what is a condo?”

  Emily gave him a glint of a smile.

  “A condominium,” she said. “It’s an apartment in a building owned by the people who live in it. It costs. But it means you have a pool and a gardener and a doorman, you name it. I wanted that. Once. And maybe I still want it.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, I just don’t know anymore.”

  “And you were working for the company that is wanting to make a senior citizens’ community here?” Ghote asked. “You agreed to come and pretend you were interested in Swami’s teachings and then to—what was it that you said just now—let him kind of get to know you could take very, very fast dictation?”

  “Yeah. That was it.”

  “So, Miss Emily, I have to ask you. Who are these people you worked for? And what else would they do to get hold of this land?”

  Emily looked as if she did not want to give him an answer. But at last she spoke.

  “I—I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, it’s kind of hard to believe. Okay, business is business and the real-estate world is probably as tough as any. And—and, well, the guy who runs the corporation, who is the corporation, is perfectly capable of playing rough to make a fast buck. But murder? Because that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? No, I don’t believe murder.”

  Ghote was aware once more of Fred Hoskins behind him barely suppressing a new outbreak of subterranean explosions. Hastily he challenged Emily.

  “You do not believe it? But nevertheless you sound as if you do not think it is altogether impossible. Miss Emily, who is this man who is that corporation?”

  Emily’s lips, pink and full, were compressed into a hard, thin line now over her pearly lustrous teeth. But she answered in the end.

  “He’s a Mr. Lansing,” she said. “Mr. Bradfield Lansing, Senior.”

  “But—it is the father of your boy-friend? Your boy-friend, Brad? His name is Lansing. It is one of the few I have managed to find out in America.”

  “Yeah, he’s Brad Lansing. That’s how we met, me working for his old man. But Brad’s as different from his father as anyone could be. I used to think sometimes he was too soft. Too moony. He was into astrology and macrobiotics and organic gardening, a lot of stuff like that. Then—then when I came up here and—and Swami … Well, I wrote Brad and told him, and he came out too and in no time at all was just as excited about Swami as I was.”

  “And when you began to think Swami was a liar? What then, Miss Emily?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say a word to Brad. I—I somehow didn’t want to.”

  “Yes, I can see that. And he nev
er knew? Never guessed about your doubts?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sure not. If he had, he’d have come right out with it. Brad speaks before he thinks too much, and always has.”

  “Yes,” Ghote said, “he did that in the Meditation Hall, isn’t it? He said what came into his head, and Swami humiliated him for it in front of everybody.”

  “Yeah. But that isn’t …”

  “That isn’t what, Miss Emily?”

  She looked at him with a spurt of defiance from down in her low broken chair.

  “That isn’t what you’re thinking. Brad would never have resented anything Swami said or did. However humiliating it was. Brad knew some people have to take that sort of thing from their guru. It’s the path for some people, and Brad was one of them. He didn’t go to Swami’s house last night and take it out on him. That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it?”

  “But he did know that Swami would be there,” Ghote said. “He was one of only four people who knew that. He was rebuked by Swami in a very, very brutal manner. And another thing, Miss Emily, however different he may be from his father, he is his father’s son. His son and heir, isn’t it? With that same name? So if his father makes a very, very big profit, that profit will come to the son one day. Isn’t it?”

  TWELVE

  They left Emily angry. She had reacted in rage to Ghote’s taunting hints that it might well have been Brad who had killed the swami. He had hoped that anger would cause her to blurt out something, either about Brad or herself, that would take him a step forward. But her denials had all been unsupported by any facts.

  It had not even been very easy getting from her where Brad might be found at this time. At last, pearly teeth flashing in rage, she had flung out at them that he would be on duty at the Visitors’ Centre. Ghote, manoeuvring the towering bulk of Fred Hoskins in front of him, had hurriedly left.

  Together they made their way through the ashram’s central circle towards the long dirt road leading down the hill. There were two deputies standing on guard on the steps of Swami’s extraordinary spiralling-roofed house. Their hands were resting on the butts of their pistols, and they looked not at all happy.