Murder at the Grand Raj Palace

by Vaseem Khan

  “I have a pretty good idea,” said Taylor, archly.

  THE GREEN FANDANGO

  Chopra found Ronald Loomis in the Grand Raj’s world-famous bar, the Green Fandango.

  The Fandango was steeped in history. As the first bar in Mumbai to hold a liquor licence, it had, for the better part of the last century, served as the smoky haunt of movie stars, gangsters, shady businessmen and the city’s subterranean movers and shakers. Recently redecorated in a bold art deco style, it harkened back to an earlier, simpler time at the Grand Raj, a time when the bar represented a shadowy oasis outside society’s normal rules.

  Loomis, a rakishly handsome young man with a sandy widow’s peak, round-rimmed tortoiseshell spectacles and a red bow tie, was slumped at the bar, staring out into the harbour.

  Saddlebags of sweat were prominent under his arms, in spite of the air conditioning.

  In response to Chopra’s query, he merely stared glassy-eyed at Ganesha, then looked back down into his drink, a Green Fandango Special, made to a recipe that had been around since the end of the Prohibition era and was an institution in its own right.

  “I’ve been with Mr. Burbank for a decade,” said Loomis woodenly, in a nasal American accent. “He plucked me right out of Princeton. Gave me a career, a purpose. He was a brilliant businessman. I got to see him in action, up close. Yes, he could be ruthless, but you show me a successful businessman who isn’t. He was a tough boss. Demanding. Expected the highest standards, and didn’t tolerate stupidity. I learned a lot from him. Everything, in fact.”

  Chopra allowed Loomis’s rambling monologue to wind down. He could see that the young man was upset by his boss’s death, and possibly a little worse for the time he’d spent in the Fandango. “I am told that you discovered the body,” he finally said.

  “I did.”

  “What time was this?”

  “About six-thirty a.m.”

  “What were you doing in Burbank’s room at six-thirty in the morning?”

  “Mr. Burbank is—was—an early riser. He liked to go over the day’s schedule at precisely six-thirty every morning.”

  “So you knocked on his door. Presumably, he didn’t open it. What happened next?”

  “I dialled Mr. Burbank’s phone, but he didn’t answer. In fact, I heard it ringing from inside the room. He has a very loud and distinctive ringtone. ‘The Ride of the Valkyries.’ Wagner. I became worried and so I called the front desk. They sent someone to open the room. When we got inside I saw that his phone was on the table. And then we went to the master bedroom.” Loomis halted, then continued. “It was horrible. He was just lying there, staring up at the ceiling with glassy eyes, that… that knife sticking out of his chest.”

  “Is there anything else you recall about that moment? Immediate impressions? Anything you felt was out of place?”

  Loomis looked at Chopra as if he had gone mad. “You mean other than the dead body of my boss?”

  Chopra waited. Finally, Loomis said, “No. Nothing.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I called the hotel’s general manager. He called in the authorities.”

  “And it was the police who decided that Burbank had taken his own life?”

  Loomis looked up sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Exactly what I said, Mr. Loomis. The police concluded that Hollis Burbank had committed suicide… That is correct, yes?”

  “Well, what else could it have been? Haven’t you seen the writing in the bathroom?”

  “I have. What do you think that means?”

  Loomis gave Chopra another long look. “Are you sure you’re an investigator? When a man scrawls ‘I am sorry’ on a wall, then stabs himself in the chest, it’s pretty much obvious what he means.”

  “So you believe Burbank killed himself?”

  Loomis hesitated. Something strange passed over his face. “The truth? I find it difficult to reconcile the idea of suicide with the man that I knew. It’s just that that policeman, Gunaji, was so adamant. He practically put the words in my mouth.”

  “Did Mr. Burbank have enemies?”

  Loomis snorted. “Of course he did. Plenty of them. He’s a man who doesn’t take prisoners. But it’s hard to believe someone killed him out here. We’re in a five-star hotel in the middle of India, not some back alley in Queens. He certainly wasn’t mugged by some lowlife looking for his wallet.”

  “What if I told you that you are not the only one who thinks Burbank wasn’t the type of man to commit suicide.”

  Loomis picked up his glass, took a long gulp of his drink, then set it down again carefully on a coaster. “Look, I’ve worked with Mr. Burbank every day for ten years. And I tell you, even I never knew what he was thinking. He was inscrutable. Never revealed what was going on inside him. Never talked about himself, his past. The only emotion I ever saw him express was anger. He always let people know when they irritated him.” He flashed a grim smile.

  “Can you think of any reason why Burbank would commit suicide?”

  “I’ve been asking myself the same thing, and the answer is no.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Loomis grimaced. “He’d been stressed lately, but that was just business. He’d started taking Valium. Not that he had a prescription for them. I have no idea where he got hold of them. He didn’t want anyone to know he needed them, I suppose. Not even me.”

  “Any personal problems? Family matters that had upset him recently?”

  “Mr. Burbank is divorced. Has been for years. His ex-wife lives out in Colorado somewhere; she got custody of their only child, a daughter. Turns out she’s all grown up, and recently got married. I think he felt bad about that, about being estranged from her. But nothing to suggest he was thinking of killing himself.”

  Chopra considered this.

  As Loomis suggested, it seemed a tenuous reason upon which to hang a man’s suicide. Then again, he’d seen men die for lesser reasons—both by their own hand and at the hands of others. In his younger days, he had believed in the concept of certainty. It had been a chastening experience to feel the sand being sucked from under the shoes of that belief. The human condition was truly inscrutable, he now knew, the sewage wallowing at the bottom of a man’s soul dark and turgid.

  Another thought occurred to him. “There is also the question of why he would kill himself after buying a painting he had apparently been chasing for a very long time.”

  “Exactly,” agreed Loomis. “Though for Mr. Burbank it was never the attainment of a goal that was the key. It was the hunt. He loved the battle; he loved crushing his rivals.” The PA’s face darkened. “Look, if you’re really serious about looking at something other than suicide, then the person you should be talking to is Agnihotri.”

  Chopra mentally flicked through his notes. “The man Burbank outbid for The Scourge of Goa?”

  Loomis nodded. “The pair of them were at each other’s throats the whole evening. Agnihotri’s been in the press sounding off about how he’d make sure that painting never leaves India. And then Mr. Burbank came along and just blew him out of the water.”

  “Did they exchange words?”

  Loomis snorted. “They exchanged more than words. A little while after the auction I was in a private toilet with Mr. Burbank—”

  “I’m sorry,” interrupted Chopra, “but did you just say that you were in the toilet with Burbank?”

  “He wanted me to take some notes. Dictated them while he sat on the bowl. Look, do you want to hear this or not?” Loomis’s eyes flashed with irritation.

  “Please, continue,” muttered Chopra. Perhaps it was true, he thought, privately. The rich did do things differently.

  “So, while we’re in the middle of this, I got a call from our head office. I stepped outside to take it. When I walk back in I see Agnihotri in there. He’s got Mr. Burbank by the lapels, shoved up against a wall. Agnihotri’s a big guy. He’s red with anger, shouting at the top of his voice, c
alling Mr. Burbank a cheat, a rogue, all sorts of things. The man was out of his mind, totally out of control.” Loomis drained his drink, then banged the counter for another.

  Chopra considered what the PA had told him.

  He felt sure that Loomis was not lying, yet it was still hard to picture. Two of the world’s wealthiest men fighting like street kids inside a toilet at India’s most prestigious hotel. What a story that would make!

  “What happens to Burbank’s estate?” he finally asked. “Who will inherit his enormous wealth?”

  “Good question,” said Loomis. “I’ve been in touch with his lawyers, and they’re reviewing his will. Short answer: I don’t know. It was never something Mr. Burbank discussed with me.”

  “And the company? Who runs—” Chopra checked his notes “—Westland Industries now?”

  “I suppose control will pass to Donnie,” said Loomis, as if he had only just thought of this. “That’s Donald Cassidy. He’s the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Sits over in our California HQ. Wears black turtlenecks and Gucci loafers. Eats that protein mush all day, spouting Foucault.”

  Chopra got the impression that Loomis did not approve of Donnie Cassidy.

  “Once the circumstances of Mr. Burbank’s death are settled, the board will meet and elect a new chairman,” continued the PA. “And I guess that’s when I’ll decide whether I want to work for my new boss, or throw a drink in his face and quit.” He gave a high-pitched, slightly hysterical laugh.

  “I understand Burbank has business interests here,” said Chopra.

  “Yes. A few years ago, he decided there was a fortune to be made in India.”

  “So Westland Industries have a base here?”

  “A subsidiary company,” affirmed Loomis. “But it’s not called Westland Industries. Mr. Burbank wanted an Indian name. He finally plumped for Shakti Holdings Ltd. I suppose you know Shakti means ‘power,’ the primordial energy of the cosmos?” Loomis smiled ironically.

  “Where is it based?”

  “Right here, in Mumbai. They have offices in midtown. Area called Powai, by the lake.”

  “Who runs it?”

  “Indian chap by the name of Gavaskar.”

  “Did Burbank visit the offices while he was here?”

  “No. But Gavaskar was scheduled to see him tomorrow. Here at the hotel.”

  “I’d like to talk to him. Can you arrange that?”

  Loomis grunted. “Why not? What does it matter now, anyway?”

  The barman placed another tumbler under his nose. Loomis picked it up, waved it at Ganesha—who was staring at him owl-eyed—and said: “Here’s mud in your eye, Dumbo.” He took a long pull, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then slipped off his stool. “I should have done more. I should have seen this coming.” He glared blearily at Chopra. “I’ll be in my room if you need me. Getting drunk.”

  Chopra watched him stagger away.

  A RECKONING AT THE RESTAURANT

  As he drove back north through the city, Chopra’s thoughts lingered on the day’s events.

  Following his meeting with Ronald Loomis he had interviewed a number of the hotel staff, all those with access to the Khumbatta suite prior to Burbank’s death. The interviews had revealed little of use. He now knew that Burbank had entered his suite for the final time at 11:53 p.m. on the night of his death. That was when the businessman’s own keycard had been logged in. The data was all stored on a computer, and had been simple enough to check. Five minutes later Burbank had placed a call to room service. The order had been delivered thirty minutes after that.

  And that was the last time anyone had seen Burbank alive.

  Chopra had next attempted to interview the Indian businessman Avinash Agnihotri, but had found himself confronted by a brick wall. A visit to Agnihotri’s suite had proved fruitless. Undaunted, Chopra had obtained the mogul’s phone number from the hotel’s general manager. Calling it, he had found himself redirected to Agnihotri’s personal assistant, a stern, older woman whose iron-cast admonishments reminded Chopra of Mrs. Subramanium, the tyrannical president of the managing committee at the building complex in which he and Poppy lived.

  Having weathered the fiery gatekeeper’s wrath, he had finally extracted a grudging admission that Agnihotri would be in the hotel tomorrow around lunchtime. Chopra could try his luck then.

  And herein lay the essential problem.

  Although he had been brought onto the case by Tripathi, the fact was that Chopra had little official authority to compel anyone to cooperate.

  And yet his initial impressions had left him more than intrigued.

  Hollis Burbank had clearly been a man few would miss. His enormous wealth had isolated him from a world that he appeared to hold in some measure of contempt. He was, by all accounts, a ruthless individual with little in the way of charm or warmth. And yet he had inspired the loyalty of Ronald Loomis and the admiration of Lisa Taylor. He had built a global business empire, and had managed to do so while keeping his private life exactly that.

  Private.

  All of which meant that Chopra’s search for the truth was going to be… complicated.

  From the rear of the specially converted van Ganesha looked out at the snarling Mumbai traffic.

  The little elephant could sense that his guardian was preoccupied, so focused instead on the streams of people moving along the side of the road in the early evening. Many were barefoot, either because they owned no shoes or because they were making the weekly pilgrimage from all corners of the city to the gold-roofed Siddhivinayak temple in midtown Mumbai. A Jain holy man swept the street before him, unwilling to crush even insects in his zeal to protect life. A fruit-seller juggled an enormous pyramid of watermelons on a handcart.

  Chopra suddenly thumped the horn and cursed loudly, startling the elephant. Ganesha’s ears flapped rapidly, like a hummingbird’s wings, as he stared out of the windscreen.

  A rickshaw had stopped in the middle of the road, beside a white Tata Nano. The car—billed as the world’s cheapest—had, in line with the company’s promises, transformed the average Mumbaiker’s life. In fact, by adding immeasurably to the chaos on the city’s over-congested roads, it had transformed the average Mumbaiker’s life into a living hell.

  Chopra ground his teeth as he watched the rick driver and the owner of the Tata Nano arguing bitterly, in that particular fashion that only Indians were capable of, gesticulating wildly at the sky, the ground, the very air, shouting at the top of their lungs, without—and this was the key to all such altercations—anyone actually advancing the matter towards resolution. The argument could go on indefinitely. It mattered not that half the city was piling up in the traffic jam behind them. It mattered not that both protagonists had other, more pressing business to attend to. The argument was all that mattered; it was a living, breathing thing in and of itself. The argument was India, its very essence; gloriously infuriating, perpetually maddening, argumentum ad ridiculum, essential in a way that only gods and madmen could truly comprehend.

  By the time he reached the restaurant it was almost nine.

  Chopra parked the van on the congested Guru Rabindranath Tagore Road, let his ward out, then followed the little elephant as he trotted down the alley that ran by the side of the restaurant to the courtyard at the rear.

  Inside the courtyard Ganesha found Irfan waiting for him with his evening meal, a mass of pulped fruit and green shoots, followed by a bucket of milk laced with the Dairy Milk chocolate to which he was addicted.

  Chopra watched the pair of them happily at play beneath the mango tree.

  He left them there and walked into the restaurant through the back.

  In the kitchen he paused, watching for a moment, as the sous chef Romesh Goel and the assistant chef Rosie Pinto whirled about the narrow space like a pair of dervishes. Though it was late in the evening the restaurant was packed, and would remain so until close to midnight. The fact that it was crammed largely with policemen was something
that filled Chopra with a quiet sense of satisfaction.

  He recalled his devastation following the heart attack that had forced him into retirement. He had heard of the expression “having the rug pulled out from under you.” After thirty years in the service he had felt that not only had the rug been pulled from under him, but he had then been wrapped up in it and dropped off a cliff. The restaurant had been a means for him to keep himself occupied, to stay in touch with his old colleagues on the force.

  Its success was merely a bonus.

  Yet it was that very success that had afforded him the time to devote to the second venture he had embarked upon, one that he had not planned, but that now provided him with a much-needed sense of mission—the detective agency that had sprung up after Ganesha’s arrival, following Chopra’s investigation into the murder of a local boy.

  Since then Chopra’s fledging agency had found itself approached by a steady stream of clients, his reputation growing by the day. Lately, he had been invited to work with the same police force that had summarily ejected him from its ranks.

  If he derived a quiet pleasure from this, he kept it to himself.

  Gloating had never been one of Chopra’s traits.

  He suddenly realised that there was a booming absence in the kitchen.

  “Where’s the chef?” he asked.

  Romesh froze, a half-sliced aubergine in his hand. Chopra was suddenly aware of the mouth-watering smells wafting about the kitchen, a melange of spice and nose-tingling warmth.

  His stomach gave an eager rumble.

  “Chef is in Lucknow, sir,” said Romesh.

  Chopra remembered that the chef had told him about his trip last week. He was visiting his home state to pay his final respects to a dying aunt. He could hardly have begrudged the man his leave. Azeem Lucknowwallah—once a renowned chef—had come out of retirement to work at Poppy’s, simply because it was run by a former policeman. Lucknowwallah’s own father had worn the khaki, before being killed in a tragic accident involving a bullock. The man was temperamental, and a prima donna about his food, but Chopra considered him a friend. The chef was responsible for the restaurant’s success and, what’s more, had recently gone above and beyond the call of duty when Chopra had found himself in serious trouble during an investigation.