by Susan Dunlap
Still, knowing the man was a fraud didn’t tell us why he was murdered.
To Pereira, I said, “I want to see each of the suspects separately. Scout up where they are and then keep an eye on Braga when I’m done with him.”
She nodded and, leaving word with the dispatcher, we headed for the temple.
“Who was he, Braga?” I demanded.
The Penlops had been taken upstairs. Braga stood at his office door and stared over my head. I could imagine the weighing of alternatives going on. Finally, with a sigh, he said, “Paul Lee.”
“Paul Lee?”
“Yeah. I chose him for his face. He was perfect for the part. Goddamned kid, why the hell couldn’t he just go along and play out his role? I could have gotten Orientals in L.A. who could have done the job, and they would have understood what they were doing. Dammit! I should have known better than to take on an amateur.”
“Where did you find him?”
“Seattle. He was a student. He worked part-time in a Chinese restaurant.”
Suddenly, I began to laugh. It was all so ludicrous. Pulling myself together, I asked, “And Chupa-da?”
“Paul’s brother. Joe.”
“Was he a waiter, too?”
“No. Goddamned kid, why’d he have to go and get himself killed?”
“That’s what I was about to ask you.”
Braga glared.
“Before he was killed, that night, he said, ‘I will go.’ What did he mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think.” I settled atop the desk as he began pacing the small room. “You’re in a lot of trouble. I wouldn’t want to consider the number of laws you’ve broken or the civil suits you’ll be open to. Your best move is to be as cooperative as you can, about everything I ask you.” He stopped, and I said, “You understand that, don’t you, Mr. Braga?”
“Yeah,” he said disgustedly.
“About this ‘I will go’?”
“The damned kid was planning to leave. He would have done it months ago, but I kept babying him along, telling him about his responsibility to the Penlops and the rest of us. It would work for a while, and then he’d decide he wanted to leave again. Every goddamn week I’d have to spend an hour or two hours or sometimes a whole goddamn night going at him. He was like a spoiled kid, like some goddamn teenager who just wants to split.”
“Why? Why did he want to go?”
He threw up his hands. “Who knows. He always was a quiet kid. Maybe he was bored, maybe he wanted a piece of ass, who knows?” He looked directly at me. “What more can a nineteen-year-old kid want than to be guru to hundreds of people? Jesus!”
I slid off the desk. “It seems to me, Mr. Braga, that you are a lot better off with him dead than with having him leave.”
I had expected outrage, but Braga merely nodded. “Yeah, it didn’t take me long to figure that out.”
“It’ll go easier if you confess, you know.”
Now I got the outrage. Braga’s face reddened, his hands knotted to fists. “Listen, lady, I been straight with you. I’ll admit that the kid was a pain in the ass, but I didn’t kill him.” He grabbed my arm. “I could have jollied him along for a couple of weeks more, maybe a month or two. I could have gotten another kid, a professional, to replace him. I could have told the house that he’d been called back to Bhutan and some new kid had been sent to be guru. I didn’t have to kill him.”
“Braga didn’t have any choice.” Joe Lee, a.k.a. Chupa-da, sat in the desk chair under the skylight in his attic room. He’d already tried to dissociate himself from Padmasvana. He’d come from a different monastery; he’d only met Padmasvana over here; he’d had his suspicions about him. A discussion of birth certificates, fingerprints and Braga’s statement brought the change.
He had flopped in the chair and said, in unaccented English, “Damn!”
“What do you mean, Braga didn’t have any choice?”
“Braga’s a fool, but he’s not a moron. He didn’t understand Paul. He didn’t bother to try. But even if he had tried, I don’t know if it could be done. Paul was a dreamer, a soft kid. He was the baby. He always had things easy. I mean, there he was in college. He didn’t work as hard as I did, but I never got to go to college. I graduated from high school and got this job pushing papers in an office downtown. Their token Chinese. But Paul, no, that wasn’t good enough for him. My parents gave him the money they’d saved. They decided he was the bright one, the one who should have the college education. He was the one who would carry the family name to success. He was the one they gave all the opportunities. And then they told me I should help him!”
“You could have said no.”
“It’s useless trying to talk to you white people! You’re all alike. You know nothing about Chinese culture. Look, in a Chinese family you don’t say you’re not going to help educate your brother. It’s your duty. You say you’re not going to help, and you’re disgraced. The whole community looks at you like you’re a leper.”
“Okay, so you helped your brother through school. He had a job, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, so he worked a little. Big deal. So he had a boring job a few hours a week for a few months. My job was forty hours a week for forever.”
“I think we’re getting off the track. You were explaining why Rexford Braga had no choice but to kill him.”
“Yes, well, you can see how spoiled Paul was. He didn’t plan any of this. Braga and I did all the spadework. Paul didn’t bother learning about Buddhism. I had to dredge up all the doctrine. Wouldn’t you know it—the one thing my family could have been useful for, and they had to be Methodists!” He glanced at me and, getting no encouragement, said, “Everything went fine for a while. We set up headquarters three years ago, and within a month we had followers and money.”
I sat down on the daybed.
“Then Braga came up with the tea thing. We didn’t make a fortune on it, but it kept the Penlops out of our hair. Before that, the damned kids were underfoot all day, demanding to be taught, to pray and to be blessed every time we turned around. With the tea job, they were out on the streets by eight and good and tired when they got back.”
In any case, I thought, they’d doubtless made enough to cover the loss of not being tax-exempt. I asked, “Didn’t anyone from Seattle or the college ever turn up and recognize Paul?”
“No. I guess we were lucky. I touched up the pictures, changed his hair, added the Buddhist robes. But still, it could have been a problem.” He stood up, his embroidered robe hanging from his shoulders. “Paul, though, he didn’t worry. All this time he never bothered himself with any of the problems. He didn’t do any of the work here. Then suddenly he starts to get interested in Buddhism. I could see it coming. It was like the time he got hooked on spacemen when he was a kid. All of a sudden he was spending all his time in his room reading about Buddhism. He was going around being a guru—not just pretending, but really getting into it. And then he decides he wants the real thing. He wants to go away to a real monastery and be a real monk. He wants to just up and go!”
“And?”
“And? I talked to him. Braga talked to him. We kept him under control for a while, but I knew Paul. He was a spoiled kid. If he wanted to go, sooner or later he’d go.”
“So why didn’t you just let him?”
“I told Braga that. I told him I could take over. After all, I was the one who knew the stuff. But no, Braga wanted Paul’s face. I told him about Paul.” Leaning forward, he said, “The thing with Paul was that you could never trust him. Paul was like a child. He could have agreed to go away and let Braga bring in a replacement, but there was nothing to say that a month from now he wouldn’t decide that wasn’t ethical. Then he would have blown the whistle. Braga could never have been sure.”
“Nor could you.”
He froze, then shook his head slowly. “There’s no point in talking. You’ll never understand Chinese families. A Chinese man does not kill his brother.”
“You seem Westernized enough.”
Chapter 17
“IT TOOK YOU FOREVER to find out.” Heather sat in the tepee, brushing her long sandy hair. It floated from the bristles of the brush onto the shoulders of her beige lace negligee. The lacy gown-and-robe set was the type of thing I, as a teenager, had assumed I would wear on my twenty-first birthday. As Heather did now, I’d sit in front of a makeup table in the leisurely hours of the morning (though it was now 10:30 p.m.) and dab my fingers into the bottles that would make me instantly beautiful. Somehow, for me, that state of adulthood had never arrived. Now, at nearly thirty, not only did I not have a makeup table or a lacy negligee, I didn’t even have a bed.
Turning my mind back to Heather’s smug observation, I said, “You could have told me.”
“Why?”
“Heather, this isn’t a game. Padmasvana—Paul—is dead.”
She didn’t reply.
“When did you find out he wasn’t a Bhutanese?”
She glanced at the various garments hanging from the clothesline next to her. “A long time ago.”
“When?”
Pulling out a long ruffled skirt, she held the material across her chest and looked appraisingly in the mirror. “I don’t remember exactly.” She picked up a plastic container, unscrewed the top and wiped her finger across the red paste in it. With precise strokes, she formed a triangle on one cheek, then the other.
“When was it in relation to the time you met Paul Lee?”
She smoothed in the color and held up the skirt again, smiling.
“Heather!” I grabbed her shoulder and spun her around. “Put the skirt down and pay attention!” I waited while she pursed her lips, considered and then, with a scowl, obeyed. “Now, tell me exactly what happened when you met Paul Lee and how you came to find out about him.”
“I suppose this means there’s not going to be anything for Preston.” Her scowl deepened. “It’s not fair! It isn’t! Look at all I’ve done, and now he’ll get nothing. It’s Paul’s fault, damn him!”
“When did you find out about the hoax?”
“About six months before Preston was born.”
“And what did you do?”
“Hell, what should I have done? Had an abortion?”
“What did you do?”
“I told them—both of them—that they better take care of me and my baby. They owed me that.”
“And then you moved in?”
Heather shook her head. “They said it wouldn’t look right. Prigs. I wasn’t about to get some crummy room in some dive. I told them. I told them good, and they believed me. So they let me use the yard.”
“And you set up your tepee?”
“Yeah.”
“Heather,” I said, realizing the question I was about to ask had no bearing on the case, “how did you come to have a tepee?”
“What? Oh, I bought it at school. I was thinking about becoming a Native American Studies major.”
“Did you?”
“No. There was too much weird stuff. I never got around to declaring a real major. I was thinking about Bus. Ad.”
The thought of Heather studying business administration temporarily silenced me. In the pause that followed, Heather stood up, dropped the robe to the floor and pulled her nightgown over her head. She replaced it with a striped caftan and grabbed for the hairbrush.
As she brushed, I said, “Paul Lee said he was ‘going.’ What did you think about that?”
“Lee was a bastard!”
I waited.
“A selfish bastard. How could he think about going off and leaving me and Preston here? What would that leave for Preston? I told him what a rotten louse he was.”
“And how did he react?”
“Like a bastard. He gave me some gobbledy-gook about a higher way. Something he had to do. Some garbage about how he had to make things right. That he felt responsible because that Penlop overdosed. He was full of it. You know what happened to him? I’ll tell you. I took this acting class in school. I played this character, like Camille, only it wasn’t Camille. But the character was sick. She coughed. She was always weak. And after I did it for a couple of weeks, I really thought I was sick. You see?”
“You mean Paul Lee got carried away and really thought he was a guru?”
“Yeah. He got swell-headed. He didn’t care about anyone. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do. He didn’t even give Preston a thought.”
“So what did you do when you realized he planned to leave?”
“I told you. I yelled at him.” She was yelling at me.
“What—besides telling him what a bastard he was—did you say?”
“When he said he didn’t care about Preston, I told him I would expose him. But he laughed. He said it didn’t matter; something about him already being exposed where it counted. He said I could do what I wanted, but making a fuss would only disrupt the setup here. I told him I was going to do it, anyway.”
“But you didn’t, did you?”
“Chupa-da—Joe—told me not to. It would only have hurt Preston.”
It would have removed any chance that Heather, Preston or Joe could cash in.
“Did you believe Paul wouldn’t tell anyone later?”
“I don’t know. The crummy bastard. He probably would have.”
“So what are you going to do now, Heather?”
“Now? I’m just going to live here in my tepee and take care of my child. Maybe I’ll see Chattanooga Charlie Spotts again. I saw him last night; I really turned him on.”
I stood up. “Well, don’t leave Berkeley without talking to me, not with Chattanooga Charlie or anyone else.”
Heather peered into her mirror. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of myself.”
Doubtless she would, I thought, as I made my way across the courtyard to the ashram. I was pretty sure I would find Leah deVeau somewhere inside, taking care of Preston. For all Heather’s sureness about the future, I doubted she would find another setup like this, with her room and board taken care of, her position as consort and her on-call baby-sitter.
I looked through the house, finding Leah neither on the porch nor in her room. When I pushed open the kitchen door, she jumped and planted herself protectively in front of the stove.
“Oh, it’s just you,” she said. “I was afraid it might be Mr. Braga or Chupa-da or one of the Senior Penlops.” She turned around and resumed stirring the pot on the burner. In the corner, asleep in a wicker basket, lay Preston.
I moved closer to the stove, drawn by the hearty aroma.
“Beef stew,” she whispered. “I’m making it for tomorrow. Mr. Braga would be furious. Chupa-da would be scandalized. We’re supposed to be vegetarians, you know.”
“Surely Rexford Braga doesn’t care that much about points of doctrine?”
“No, I don’t think so.” She held out the spoon for me to taste. It needed salt. “What Mr. Braga would really object to is the price of beef. He seems to think that all there is to nutrition is being full. Really, dear, if I—”
“Leah,” I said, “I know Padmasvana was a fraud.”
She nodded.
“You knew that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is that why you called me this afternoon? To find out if I knew?”
“Partly.”
“You could have told me.” When she didn’t reply, I asked, “When did you find out?”
She moved the wooden spoon around in the pot. “I really couldn’t say when. Living here with Padmasvana so near, I saw him do things other people didn’t see. He wasn’t as careful about being ‘on’ here, if you know what I mean.”
“What types of things did he do?”
“Oh, nothing big. It was just that sometimes I’d see him sitting listening to the Penlops talk. But I could tell that he wasn’t just listening to sounds like you would if someone was speaking in a foreign language. Sometimes when they’d say something peculiar, like teenagers do, he�
��d almost laugh. And little things”—she smiled—“like carefully rolling up the end of the toothpaste tube, or squirming when he had to sit cross-legged for a long time. Or … I can’t think of any more specifics, but you see what I mean—things a Westerner would do that a person from a rural Eastern country wouldn’t.”
“But there must have been a time when the full realization hit you.”
She shook her head. “There might have been a time when it could have, but you see, it really didn’t matter. I told you, I’m not much interested in doctrine. Frankly, I think you believe whatever you want to believe and you have as much chance of attaining nirvana as anyone else. I’ve been so busy taking care of the boys and you—” She turned to coo at the sleeping baby. “The doctrine, it was just gift wrapping. Inside of the box, it’s still the same. It’ll go on being the same.”
“I doubt that.”
“Oh, no. It has to go on. This is a good place for these boys. They’d be on the streets otherwise, into drugs.”
“This place hasn’t always been drug-free,” I commented, and was immediately sorry I’d mentioned it. Leah drew back, and the expression of hurt couldn’t have been more real had she been at the ashram during the time Bobby Felcher had lived here.
“There are no drugs here now,” she said firmly. “I see to that. I take care of these boys. This is my place—watching out for these boys. Their parents don’t have to wonder about them here. Nothing’s going to happen to them.”
I decided not to pry loose Leah’s certainty about the future. She’d know soon enough that the ashram would have to be closed. Instead, I mentioned Paul Lee’s words at the last ceremony.
“He got very serious toward the end,” she said. “He began to resemble a holy man. He looked less like one of the boys. In the beginning, I think he really cared about the boys. I don’t know whether he would have left them. But he said he would, so I suppose he would have.”
“Then what would have happened?”
“Just what’s happened now. Mr. Braga would have gotten another guru. I thought for a while he’d promote Chupa-da. I never thought he’d wait around for Preston. Only Heather was that naive. But I did figure he’d move fast.”