Vish Puri 02; The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

by Tarquin Hall

  “I threw down some pieces of mutton on the ground,” answered Peter. “They attracted the dogs and the crows. Eventually they all got gobbled up.”

  ♦

  Puri watched the tape again. As he did so, nothing in his demeanor indicated that he had noticed something significant.

  “Heartiest congratulations all round,” he said when he was finished. “There can be no doubt Dr. Jha was proud of each and every one of you. The operation was most remarkable in every respect. Ms. Ruchi, allow me to compliment your acting skills, also. Vish Puri is not easily fooled. But such a perfect performance you gave.”

  “Sir, if it’s any consolation, Dr. Jha felt terrible about knocking you out. He mistook you for a burglar. And what is more, he was worried you would crack the case before long. He said there wasn’t anything you didn’t miss.”

  Puri swelled with pride. “Most kind of you, Ms. Ruchi. And now I better be going.”

  He made his way back through the reception, but stopped short of the front door.

  “Actually one final thing is there,” he said, turning around. “Concerning Professor Pandey. Why he stayed at Maharaj Swami’s ashram last month?”

  “How could you possibly know that, sir?” asked Ms. Ruchi.

  “I, too, have secrets, no,” replied the detective. “Fact is it has come to my attention Professor Pandey made one donation for fifty thousand bucks.”

  “Yes, sir, he has been to the ashram on several occasions, posing as a devotee of Maharaj Swami. He made the donation in order to attend a private seance.”

  “Why exactly?”

  “Sir, Godmen, like magicians, are constantly coming up with new tricks for their acts. We have to keep abreast of the latest ones. Now and again, Professor Pandey visited ashrams and temples on our behalf in his capacity as an engineer to try to figure out how certain illusions and miracles were being performed. Then we would publish his findings and expose the truth. In this case, he went to see how Maharaj Swami was conjuring the spirit with which he claims to be able to commune.”

  “He got it figured out, is it?”

  “I believe it was the professor’s conclusion that the God-man was using mirrors reflected off one another. But he had not yet written up his findings.”

  The detective gave a satisfied smile.

  “Ms. Ruchi, once the case is getting over, I will introduce you to a certain individual who will explain precisely and exactly how it is done,” he promised.

  ∨ The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing ∧

  Twenty-Three

  Back in his Ambassador, Puri called Professor Pandey’s sister, offered his condolences and stressed how important it was that they meet. Although in mourning and busy making preparations for the funeral, she invited the detective to her residence at six PM.

  Next, he phoned Ved Karat and asked to see him immediately – “a matter of some great urgency, actually.”

  The speechwriter was at home, working on the prime minister’s Independence Day address, but said to come straight over.

  Puri immediately set out for New Rajendra Nagar. En route, he rang Inspector Singh.

  “Haan ji, haan ji. So what progress is there?”

  “Everything’s going to plan, sir,” Singh reported. “In two hours we will announce that Professor Pandey’s driver has survived the shooting and is expected to make a full recovery. I’ve arranged for a private room at St. Stephens. It’s on a busy corridor where people come and go all the time.”

  “Tip-top. My man will be there in one hour,” said Puri, referring to Tubelight. “My guess is the murderer will do the needful after dark. Therefore I will reach St. Stephens at seven-thirty. You will be present also, is it?”

  “Yes, sir. Are you sure the murderer will come?”

  “Has to, Inspector. He cannot and will not take the chance Dr. Jha could identify him. It is not a question of whether the plan will work, only a question of who it will work against.”

  “What if he sends someone else – a hired killer?”

  “Let us cross that bridge should it rise up.”

  “Speaking of which, sir, I am reliably informed that Ma-haraj Swami was in Delhi last night,” said Singh.

  “He touched down at Safdarjung Airport at 12:07 yesterday. Then this morning he reverted to Haridwar. That was in the wee hours,” said Puri.

  “You’re having him followed?”

  “Unfortunately, that is not possible. He travels WIP with security escort. I came to know by checking the airport log only.”

  “You think he’s our man, sir?”

  “Inspector, allow me to assure you, by hook or crook His Holiness Maharaj Swami will face arrest,” said Puri. “Please have your handcuffs on standby.”

  ♦

  Ved Karat worked in longhand on legal pads; the floor surrounding his desk was strewn with screwed-up pieces of yellow paper.

  “I could not sleep last night after hearing about Professor Pandey’s murder,” he said as Puri took the basket chair in his office. The story had made the morning news. “What is the world coming to? The TV said he was shot in his own house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Terrible!” exclaimed Karat. “What has happened to our Dilli? There was a time when my front door was open twenty-four/seven. People dropped in whenever they liked. No need for security persons. But now? Only recently some of my neighbors were murdered. Husband and wife and one fourteen-year-old boy. Perhaps you read about it in the papers? These terrible crimes occur every day. In this instance, some Bawarias broke in and clubbed them to death. And for what? Some jewelry and a couple of lakhs they kept under the mattress. Animals! Worse than!”

  A servant brought cups of tea and pinnis.

  “I have rarely met such a warm, kindly and giving person,” continued Karat, referring to the late professor. “Did you know that when I had my heart attack last year, he visited my bedside each and every day? And he always came with a joke to cheer me up. Such a jolly fellow. A few of us are organizing a memorial on Rajpath this evening. We plan to light some candles, tell some jokes and have a thoroughly good laugh. It’s what he would have wanted. I understand even as he lay dying he was chuckling to himself.”

  “Yes, sir, I was the one to witness his last moments, actually.”

  “You, Mr. Puri? What were you doing there?”

  “I’ve been investigating Dr. Jha’s death.”

  “The two are connected in some way?”

  “Undoubtedly! That is the reason I am here, actually. I wanted to ask you about this Shivraj Sharma. Seems to me you know him, is it?”

  “Naturally; we were neighbors for many years, his family and mine.”

  “You faced any problems with him?”

  “Personally, no, but…” Ved Karat lowered his voice, as if someone might overhear them. “He’s not the most tolerant of gentlemen. He often complained about the types moving into the colony. He took particular exception to a Muslim family living here. Tried to start a campaign to get them out. When it didn’t work he sold up and left. Now I understand he lives in one of those new colonies where minorities aren’t openly banned, but if your surname happens to be Khan, you get the brush-off.”

  “You were surprised to see him that morning. Is that not so?”

  “Very surprised. He’s not the type to join a laughing club.”

  “He’s not one for doing laughter,” suggested Puri.

  “Exactly. Takes life too seriously.”

  “You’re one hundred percent certain it was his intention to join, is it?”

  Ved Karat thought for a moment. “Well, now you come to mention it, Mr. Puri…”

  ♦

  As Puri suspected from having watched the DIRE footage, Ved Karat had spotted Mr. Sharma two minutes after Dr. Jha had reached the Laughing Club.

  The speechwriter had first stared and squinted; then his expression had turned to one of recognition.

  “Finally you waved to him, isn’t it?” asked Puri
.

  “Yes, I believe I did,” replied Karat. “You’ve certainly done a thorough job at re-creating the scene.”

  “What all he was doing? Walking toward you?”

  “Yes, but slowly. In fact, now that I think about it, he had stopped next to one of the trees and was watching us.”

  “Then you walked toward him and what?”

  “I greeted him, naturally, and then asked him to join us.”

  “He agreed?”

  Again Ved Karat had to think hard and then concluded: “Seems to me he was reluctant. I believe he said something about having to get back home. But I insisted.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought that of all people he could do with some laughter.”

  “He was enjoying?” asked Puri, remembering Sharma’s pained expression during the exercises.

  “Not at all. He looked uncomfortable throughout.”

  The detective nodded. “He said anything to you after?”

  “Nothing,” said Karat. “He was as shocked as all of us.”

  There was a pause.

  “Now I have a question,” said Karat. “Why all the suspicion?”

  “Most probably it is nothing,” replied Puri. “Just I am trying to clarify everybody’s movements. In my profession, no stone should go unturned. Sharma being an archaeologist, that is one thing we share in common.”

  ♦

  Puri was hungry – it was almost two. Finding it hard to think clearly on an empty stomach and knowing that Rumpi had packed his tiffin with kale channe, one of his favorites, he returned to the office.

  Door Stop, the tea boy, heated the food and brought it to him at his desk. He ate on his own in silence with a napkin tucked into the top of his safari suit jacket.

  Only after he was finished and had washed his hands, cleared his nasal passages and sat back at his desk drinking a cup of chai did he give the day’s developments any further consideration.

  What had Sharma been doing on Rajpath at six in the morning, apparently spying on the Laughing Club members? he wondered.

  Puri reached for the file he had started on the Jha murder case and took out the photocopies of the death threats Ms. Ruchi had provided him.

  Had Sharma sent them to Dr. Jha? Had he been planning to kill him?

  For the archaeologist to be the murderer, he would have to have known that the Guru Buster had faked his own death and then traced him to Professor Pandey’s house.

  Puri found it hard to picture the bespectacled, oh-so-respectable Brahmin scaling the wall and shooting down men in cold blood.

  On the other hand, when it came to fanatics and psychopaths, there was no telling.

  Puri reached for his mobile; called Tubelight, who was just reaching the hospital; and asked him to assign Shashi and Zia to tail Sharma.

  “Tell them to get hold his garbage, also. Let’s see what all he is into,” instructed the detective.

  ♦

  Puri’s sister had phoned twice this morning, but he had ignored her calls. He was dreading having to hear more about Bagga-ji’s latest mess. But when she called him again at three o’clock, he felt compelled to answer.

  “Chubby, thank God!”

  Preeti was at home in Ludhiana. She sounded panicked.

  “You’ve got to help me. He’s planning to put up the house against a loan of one crore with some lowborn moneylender!”

  “What is that bugger up to exactly?”

  “He won’t tell me, Chubby. He’s so blinded by the profit he says is to be made. But a crore! And the high interest to pay! It can be our ruin.”

  Puri sighed. There was nothing for it; he could not stand by and watch his sister lose everything.

  “What is his current location exactly?”

  “He’s up in Delhi.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” the detective promised.

  ♦

  “Sir-ji! Kaha-hain?”

  “Haa! Mr. Sherluck! Kidd-an?”

  “Very fine, sir-ji! I want to see you. Something urgent.”

  “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

  “Sir-ji, where are you? Hello? Hello?”

  “Haa!” Bagga Uncle was somewhere noisy – a background din of laughter and raised voices.

  “Sir-ji?”

  “Haa!”

  “You’ve been drinking or what?”

  “Haa!”

  The detective felt like he was about to explode but managed to contain his fury. He said in sharp, staccato Punjabi: “Baaga-ji, tell me where you are!”

  “Mr. Sherluck? Hello? You’re asking me?”

  “Of course I’m asking you!” He refrained from adding: “Saala!”

  “I’m at the adda. What do you want?”

  “Adda’ translated as ‘joint.” Puri knew the place: Bagga-ji’s favorite haunt in Delhi, a carrom-board and illegal-drinking den in Punjabi Bagh.

  “I’ll be reaching in forty minutes.”

  “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

  ♦

  Puri had mixed feelings about Punjabi Bagh. It was the neighborhood where he had grown up, and every street, every corner, held a memory for him.

  Returning there, as he did from time to time to visit near or dear, always stirred strong feelings of nostalgia – especially for Papa-ji, who had built his house in the Moti Nagar subsection in the early 1960s. But nowadays the detective found the old neighborhood a stifling place. Although he always told everyone he had moved to Gurgaon to escape the noise and pollution, the truth was that he had also sought to distance himself from Punjabi Bagh’s boisterous inhabitants.

  He was, after all, India’s Most Private Investigator. And when everyone was constantly coming in and out of your house at all hours, asking for favors and the odd loan of a thousand rupees for some uncle’s heart medicine, it was impossible to keep your affairs confidential and not become embroiled in everyone else’s problems.

  Punjabi Bagh was not an especially noteworthy address, either. Not for a member of the Gymkhana Club and the son-in-law of a retired army colonel with a penchant for oxford shoes. Gurgaon fitted the bill better – although, admittedly, for the son of a local police officer there was no competing with the old elite.

  The constant gridlock had been another reason for leaving. Some bloody Charlie was forever stopping his Tempo in the middle of one of the narrow streets and off-loading a consignment of live chickens, thereby turning the entire neighborhood into a solid, honking traffic jam.

  Today was no different. But instead of live chickens, it was rusty barrels with skull-and-crossbones stickers plastered all over them.

  The fact that they were being carried into someone’s house by a gang of laborers who looked as if they had tuberculosis did not strike Puri as odd. Suspicious, perhaps, but by Punjabi Bagh standards, definitely not odd.

  The detective decided to abandon the car and told Handbrake to park as close as he could to Bagga-ji’s adda.

  “I’ll give you ‘missed call’ when I’m in position, Boss,” said the driver in a combination of Hindi and English.

  Feeling the heat rush at him like the thermal radiation of a forest fire, Puri stepped out of the Ambassador, narrowly avoiding a cowpat underfoot.

  He kept to the shady side of the street, making his way along a busy pavement where children played hopscotch and carpenters sawed, sanded and hammered made-to-measure mango-wood furniture for one of the residents of the kothis. A door-to-door salesman of mops, brooms and dusters passed down the middle of the street on a bicycle bristling with his wares. It looked like a kind of punk porcupine. “Jharu, ponche! Saste! Brooms, mops, cheap!”

  Puri turned the next corner, looking up at all the brightly colored laundry hanging overhead and the paper kites up in the hazy sky, and almost ran straight into an old school chum whom everyone knew as Mintoo.

  “Oi! Chubby! Kisteran?”

  They chatted for a couple of minutes and then Puri made his excuses and hurried on. Farther down the street, he met Billa, a former
next-door neighbor who owned a shop selling galvanized-steel buckets in Jawala Heri. Master-ji, the local tailor, waved and called out greetings from his shop, which had once been four times the size, but thanks to family property disputes was now little more than a cubicle. And inevitably, Bhartia Auntie (who had bad hips and walked with her feet splayed like a circus clown) appeared and reminded him, as she always did, how, at the age of six, he had burned his lip eating some of her homemade gulab jamuns.

  “You couldn’t wait and just shoved it in your mouth!” she cackled, pinching his cheek. “Greedy little bacha!”

  Bagga-ji’s adda was housed in the basement of a doctor’s private clinic, Dr. Darshan being the owner and a regular himself.

  The entrance was down the side of the building behind a door with a notice on it that read CLINIC IN SESSION.

  In the poorly lit room beyond, through a haze of cigarette smoke, Puri counted nine tables with carrom boards. Around each sat four men with chalky fingers.

  The sight of the boards and the sound of the strikers hitting the pucks and ricocheting off the buffers immediately aroused in Puri a desire to join in. As a teenager, he had been a carrom fanatic; to the detriment of his homework, he had played for hours on end. But it was rare that he got in a game these days, chess and bridge being more the Gymkhana’s speed.

  Indeed, when he located Bagga-ji at one of the boards in the middle of the room – “Mr. Sherluck, what you’re doing here?” – and one of the players offered to give up his seat, Puri could not resist.

  “I’m drinking Aristocrat.” Bagga-ji grinned. “Aristocrat’ came out ‘aa-rist-row-krAAt.”

  “Instant relief! You want?”

  “Most certainly, sir-ji!” declared Puri. “How often I get to drink with my favorite brother-in-law, huh?”

  Bagga Uncle was too drunk to be suspicious of the detective’s disingenuous chumminess and poured him a large glass from the bottle he had under the table. Then he called to the eleven-year-old boy who fetched packets of cigarettes and fresh paan from the stand across the road and plates of murg saharabi tikka and ‘chutney sandwitch’ from the local restaurant.

  “Oi! Soda bottle laow!”

  The black and white pucks and the red queen were arranged in the middle of the lacquered board. One of the other two players at the table flicked the puck with his index finger, sending it crashing into the pack. A black shot into one of the corner pockets.