“Nevertheless,” Ghote said, not loosening his grip by the least amount, “there is the saying ‘No smoke without fire.’ What was the fire that made that smoke? Tell me.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” the boy answered, in something near a wail. “There—there was a girl. Patsy Warren. She left.”
Suddenly he pushed back his rich orange chair and got to his feet. He turned, clumsily in his heavy green rubber boots, and addressed the far wall of the circular room.
“As a matter of fact,” he banged out, “she left just as soon as she’d seen what happened to me yesterday afternoon. I guess she was ready to quit anyhow, and what she saw seemed to be the last straw for her. She got it all wrong. She thought it would happen to her, and—and, from what some of the guys said, she added that on to what Swami had done with her already. Done to her. Done to her, if you want.”
Ghote made a guess.
“She was a girl who wore a white pullover? A white roll-neck pullover not altogether clean?”
“Yeah. That sounds like her all right.”
“And you say she left? Yesterday afternoon?”
A thought had come into his head. Here was somebody, somebody at last, who plainly detested the all-loved Swami With No Name. Could it be …?
“Yes, she left. As a matter of fact, I took her to where the Greyhound bus stops. She was heading back for New York, where she came from. Said she never wanted to see California again.”
A small disappointment. Back to the situation as before.
Ghote sighed.
“You saw her entering the bus—that is a long-distance bus, isn’t it?” he asked, as a last formality.
“Yeah. We were only just in time. I helped her on with her cases. She didn’t even wave goodbye.”
“But she had told people here, definitely, that Swami had ravished her?” Ghote asked, ignoring the pathos.
“I don’t know if she exactly said that. But there were guys happy to make out that that was what had happened. Some people are purely malicious.”
“In spite of hearing Swami every day? In spite of all that he was teaching?”
Ghote had put the questions only because, to his secret pleasure, the discovery of purely malicious disciples at the ashram had reinforced his own views about the swami, views he had not always found it easy to go on believing.
Brad turned to face him now, shaking his head.
“You can’t expect a guru to jell with everyone who chances to come by,” he said. “Not even the highest yogi going could do that. But I tell you this again: for me Swamiji was the most mind-whammy thing that’s ever happened. For me he was.”
Ghote noted the fact of the boy’s sincerity. Yes, the swami had had some powers. Despite the malice that lingered in others of his followers.
“But however mind-whammy the swami was being for you,” he said, unable to keep a little bitterness out of his voice, “he still could not take away—what was it you said to him in the Meditation Hall?—that lump of greed in you. Come, tell me the truth, you are still in the grip of that greed, isn’t it?”
And, to himself he added: You are still capable of helping your father make his extra million by buying the ashram land, and capable perhaps of lashing out with some weapon—what weapon?—if your betrayal of Swami had come to a head somehow.
“I don’t know. I tell you I just don’t know.”
Standing there, a really rather ridiculous figure in his orange T-shirt, floppy orange trousers and lumpy green rubber boots, Brad flung out the words in evident desperation.
If only the boy were not wearing those damned boots. If only his feet were visible, and his toes. Those give-away, curling-up toes. Then when the questions came raining down on him, so thick and fast his mind could not grapple with them, then that tell-tale sign might be there.
And the answer to what had happened to that knife not far behind.
But, feet visible or not, he must do what he could to break this breakable creature in front of him.
He began.
“Your father, you told your father what they were saying about the Swami and girls. Isn’t it?”
For lack of toes he was keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the boy’s Adam’s apple. Many men were unable to prevent a tell-tale jerking there when they had important lies to put over. But Brad’s throat showed no betraying sign, and his voice when he answered seemed to be filled only with surprise.
“My father? What’s my father got to do with all this? I don’t understand.”
“Your father is very much wanting the land the ashram has,” Ghote said. “I think you are knowing that. And knowing also that Swami refused the offer your father made. So, if your father could create a big enough scandal, he could force Swami to leave.”
“But that’s ridic—”
The boy stopped suddenly.
“Emily,” he said slowly. “Was that why she left Dad’s office and … But, no, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.”
“Yes,” Ghote said, pile-driving the word in. “That was why your Emily came here. But then she started to believe in Swami, and she stopped sending your father the information he was wanting. So then when your father heard that she had written to you about Swami, he sent you out here as his spy. That is so, isn’t it? Yes? Yes? Isn’t it?”
“No,” Brad shouted, eyes rolling wide like a trapped horse’s. “No, no, no! You don’t understand. You don’t understand at all. My father—my father’s the complete opposite of everything I am. He—he never thinks of anything except the money he can make, and the smart deals, and the next million.”
“And you? Don’t you ever think of those millions also? All this talk about liking the life of the ashram. You can afford to like it. You know that whenever you want you can go back to your father and his millions and the comforts and the luxuries he can offer.”
“But I don’t. I—”
“No wonder you were ready to help him make yet one more million out of the land here. No wonder.”
“No!”
The boy’s cry rang through the circular room.
Ghote acknowledged in silence that it truly seemed a genuine cry of horror at his suggestion. Yet if the boy had in fact killed Swami, would he not lie and lie and lie again about it?
He looked down in rage at the lumpy green rubber boots.
THIRTEEN
Outside, when Ghote had exhausted the remainder of his rain of bouncingly useless questions, he told Fred Hoskins that he wanted as soon as possible, this very afternoon if time would allow, to see Bradfield Lansing, Senior.
“The kid’s father?” Fred Hoskins at once objected. “Now, listen to me, Gan boy, that’s not the way this crime is going to be solved. It’s going to be solved by you proving to Lieutenant Foster just how that knife mysteriously disappeared from the swami’s house. And let me tell you this: You’re going to do that only by pinning the murder on that guy Johna-whatsit.”
Ghote saw an immense steep hill rising up in front of him. He felt a dragging weariness. Until a sudden inspiration banished in an instant both the ever-rising hill and all fatigue.
“A process of elimination, Fred,” he said. “You yourself were telling me that a process of elimination is the modus operandi of the Los Angeles Police Department. I wish to see Mr. Bradfield Lansing, Senior, in order finally to eliminate his son from the inquiry.”
“Right on, Gan boy.”
Ghote received a tremendous slap on his left shoulder. With stoical calm.
“You see, Fred,” he went on, nervously explaining a little more than he need have done. “I was not at all able to decide whether young Brad was telling the truth. If he was not—and I am certain that he is still feeling the sensation of greed within himself—then it is certainly not impossible that the swami was murdered because of this land deal.”
“But, Gan boy, if it’s just a matter of deciding whether the kid was lying, there’s a real easy way of telling.”
“No, I do not think so
, Fred. Yes, you can look always for signs of tension that a person does not know he is making. But it is difficult to know that when a person is a good liar. Sometimes the most honest person can lie very, very much better than a thorough miscreant. It is a question of how much they are feeling justified.”
“No, sir. I got to tell you that you’re way off base.”
What was this? What had the fellow got into his head now?
“Well, I shall hear what you have got to say, Fred, with much interest.”
“It’s just this, Gan. We here in California have eliminated once and for all the question of lying and truth-telling.”
Ghote wanted to say: I don’t believe you. Instead he remained silent.
“There are many police forces in the world, as I understand it,” Fred Hoskins declared, “who don’t take advantage of the polygraph. And I’ll bet that the Bombay force is one of those institutions.”
“Well, yes, Fred, it is. It must be. But, please, what is this polygraph?”
“The polygraph, known familiarly to us in the L.A.P.D. as the poly, is an electronic device which shows, by monitoring the witness’s blood pressure, whether or not they are telling the truth. It’s as simple as that.”
A boiling fury at once filled Ghote’s head. Such an infallible machine could not exist. It must not exist. Something that took away from human beings their sacred ability to tell lies was not to be thought of.
In his anger he could scarcely sort out exactly why it was that the thought of this—this polygraph so outraged him. But he was certain that it did. It seemed to him—only surely Fred Hoskins must be lying himself, or at least have got the details of the device all wrong—that to have such a mechanical way of dealing with the whole many-sided part of life that truth-telling and lying, half-lying, white-lying, and black-lying constituted would be to deny a whole aspect of man’s will. Let alone taking a lot of the joy out of crime detection.
For several seconds he could think of nothing to say. He stood there in the sunshine outside the Visitors’ Centre looking straight to the front, to just the point where Fred Hoskins’ boldly coloured plaid shirt was open at the neck to reveal the top of a chest pelt of jackal-red hair, and he let the rage run and run in his head.
At last he managed to get calm enough to say a few cautious words.
“That is most—most interesting, Fred. Very, very interesting indeed. But—but I am wondering …”
“You have every right to wonder, Gan.”
Ghote drew in a long breath.
“Well, what it is I am wondering, Fred, is this: Why, if such a marvellous machine exists, why hasn’t Lieutenant Foster been making use of it throughout this case?”
His question did seem to set the hulking private eye back a little.
“I—I guess the good lieutenant has his own reasons,” he said at last. “I’m not the man, Gan, to cast doubt on the methods an officer of Lieutenant Foster’s standing decides to employ. That’s something each and every officer must decide for himself. And now I think you better go to the L.A. headquarters of the Lansing Realty Corporation, a building I’m naturally familiar with.”
“Yes, Fred.”
The drive back to Los Angeles in Fred Hoskins’ huge green car was, to Ghote’s mind, like sitting watching a film he had already seen being run through again backwards. And, since they were anxious to reach Bradfield Lansing’s office before he left at the end of the day, much faster.
The same out-of-this world freeways swept and swooped through the country. The same extraordinary procession of vehicles came thundering towards them or were overtaken by Fred Hoskins’ aggressive driving. There were the same extraordinary halves of houses being transported entire, coloured curtains flapping at their windows. There were great open trucks filled to the brim, six, eight, or ten feet deep, with tomatoes or with grapes. There were the same mind-deadening road-signs, Speed Checked By Aircraft, Eat All You Want.
It was the repetition of a nightmare. Only this time there was one difference. For some reason Fred Hoskins seemed to have run out of talk. The monologue about the beauties and magnificence of California, which on the way out to the ashram it had been possible to muffle only by pretending to be asleep, was no longer on offer.
But it was replaced by music from the car’s four-speaker stereo radio. At first Ghote had welcomed this. Under the blare of sound, he thought, he would be able to concentrate on the business of the swami and that damned knife, he would be able to tease from his mind the facts he felt convinced were layered away somewhere there. He would learn the answer.
Yet within a few minutes of Fred Hoskins reaching for the button on the car’s immense dashboard that had brought this torrent of noise upon them, he realised that it was preventing thought every bit as effectively as the huge private eye’s customary outpouring of hectoring information.
And not only was there the music, there were the frequent interruptions for advertisements as well. If anything, these were more disruptive of quiet, logical thought than the blare of strident song they interrupted.
Clean, healthy-looking skin starts here. To be really beautiful your skin must first be scrupulously clean. That’s why our Skincare Ritual includes washing with one of our special soaps. Discover the beautiful difference. Visit our specialist in your nearest great store, trained with care to understand your skin, its problems and how to solve them. Meet with her soon and begin a lifetime of clean, healthy-looking skin.
Surreptitiously Ghote stroked his left cheek and examined his palm afterwards. He had sweated a little in the brilliant sunshine. Did his face show it? Would he have clean enough, healthy-looking enough skin to face a top Californian businessman?
He tried once again to get straight in his mind just what he needed to find out from the top businessman that would fit the puzzle he sensed lying almost completed down below a level of his mind at which he could reach it.
But the thunder of the four separate sound streams from Fred Hoskins’ speakers once more battered thought into submission.
Let us plan your party the way you dreamed it would be. Start by sitting down with our professional party consultant. He’ll show you how to set the mood, create the theme. How to find the right caterer, the right florist. Party big or elite small, we have what you need to turn a common-variety party into sheer unadulterated fantasy.
Ghote screwed up his eyes in simple misery. Hadn’t he already found enough fantasy in this materialistic America?
He wondered if keeping time to the beat of the new onrush of music would help to chase away thoughts he did not want. The experiment failed.
Most of all you need a Fashion Kitchen. A kitchen the ultimate expression of your personality and life style. Find the look that is really you among our wide array of stylings from traditional period through today’s contemporary. We invite you to come browse.
Should he, before he started back for Bombay—with a wiser and sadder Nirmala Shahani? Or, alone, and sadder himself?—should he go browse there and perhaps find something, some small intimate expression of a life style, to take back to Protima? And would it, whatever it was, however much today’s contemporary, make up enough to her for that pilgrimage to Banares, promised but indefinitely postponed?
More music, blotting out everything. Other advertisements. Is your dog a picky eater? And others. Thinning hair problem? Have real hair added one strand at a time back into your own. And then the outskirts of mighty, spreading Los Angeles.
And smog again.
The bare hillsides had given way to rows of bright, staring stores, all to Ghote’s eyes in extraordinarily good states of repair. How often they must be painted and repainted, he thought to himself. And how big even the smallest of them was, at least twice the size of the narrow dark shops that crammed the streets of Bombay. And how often these Los Angeles stores must be knocked down and rebuilt to look so new. What energy there was here. What confidence. It made Bombay’s pushfulness, famed all over India, look like the m
ere excitement of a bad dose of fever.
He sat in silence beside his enormous, jutting-bellied companion intent at the wheel of the monster car, slipping easily from one traffic stream to another, only occasionally over-riding the strident continuing stream of music with a scornful comment on some other driver, a woman, or the possessor of a number-plate from outside California.
The huge, boldly-painted store names presented themselves to his battered-at mind, hung there vibrating for a moment, vanished.
Jack’s.
Pete’s.
Simon Platt.
Bill Green.
Each was enormous, high, high in the air. Proudly flaunting. And the joke names, too. They commanded you to laugh, and to buy, by the very brightness of the paint in which their huge, inflated letters were written.
Leaning Tower of Pizza.
Grime Does Not Pay.
Give a Dog a Good Mane.
Nine Billion Unsold Sandwiches.
A vision of these last, toppling mountain upon toppling mountain of bread, occupied him until he realised that they had come into a street seemingly entirely dedicated to the automobile. Stores advertising, in huge letters, mufflers (which he felt proud to recognise as silencers). Salesrooms by the dozen. Gas stations in cheek-by-jowl competition. Stores devoted to selling car insurance. Stores advertising Hot Wax that made him realise how polished almost all the cars in California looked. How different from the dust-smothered vehicles, and the carefully hand-washed ones, of Bombay. How often these Americans must clean their cars. No, have them cleaned. At the car-washes everywhere. At the Hot Waxes.
German Car Center. A whole place devoted just to selling cars from one distant country.
He closed his eyes and shook his head gently from side to side, as if he could induce this last assault on his mind to slide off without lodging there to add to his sense of being obliterated, overwhelmed.
“Our trip took exactly one hour and twenty-seven minutes. We’re in time to wrap up this elimination process, to return at maximum speed to the ashram and conduct our final interview that will result in the arrest of one Johnan-an-an-an.”
Go West, Inspector Ghote Page 15