by Susan Dunlap
“But suppose Paul had exposed the fraud?”
“Oh, he wouldn’t have done that.”
The baby opened an eye, stretched, half whimpered and Leah picked him up, cooing at him again.
“Leah,” I said, “if Paul Lee had exposed the operation here, if the whole operation had gone under, how much of a financial loss do you think that would have been for Rexford Braga?”
She concentrated a moment on adjusting the baby on her hip. “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t think about finances above what it takes to feed and keep the boys. And I knew Padma would never have done anything like that.”
I made no reply. Leah didn’t want to hear anything negative about one of her boys. Up until now I had enjoyed talking to her. I had assumed her observations to be shrewd, but now I wondered how clear her vision was. I wondered if she saw the real world or one skewed to fit her wishes.
“Officer Smith.” A rookie whose name I couldn’t remember stood in the doorway.
“Yes.”
“The warrant you wanted. It’s here.”
Chapter 18
I HURRIED ACROSS THE courtyard, followed by the rookie—Olson was his name—and down the steps into the basement room.
There everything was as I’d left it. Braga was pacing, and despite the presence of the Penlops, he was smoking. Crushed butts lay on the floor like buoys marking his path. Beside the metal strongbox stood the backup men who had replaced me and, beside them, the two Penlops. The one with his eyes half closed was slumped back against the pile of tea boxes; the other, blond, alert, looked almost eager. I wondered how long it would be before word of Padmasvana’s fraud spread to the Penlops. And, when Leah realized how thoroughly they had been used, what form their retribution would take.
I held out the warrant, but Braga shook his head. Silently, he extended a key. The blond Penlop holding the box stepped forward impatiently.
I took the box. It was light, much lighter than I’d expected. Could it be, after all this, empty?
The key turned easily. The Penlop leaned forward as I pulled up the top.
Inside was a sheet of paper, folded once. I lifted it gingerly, trying to touch only its edges and, much to the consternation of the blond Penlop, walked into Braga’s office and shut the door.
I admit to killing Bobby Felcher. I let him have some downers, then I injected him with heroin so it would look like he had overdosed. I did it by myself. No one asked me to. I decided to do it because I found out Bobby had been watching me and saw me reading English and figured out that I was a fake.
It was dated six months ago and signed Paul Cheung Lee.
So Paul Lee had killed Bobby Felcher.
We would run the normal check on the note, of course … I replaced it in the box and called Rexford Braga in.
“How did you make Paul write this, if indeed it is Paul’s writing?”
Braga slumped into his desk chair. “It’s his writing. The paper must be covered with his fingerprints. They all saw him write it and put it in the strongbox—Joe and Heather and Leah. I called them together, had them watch, so Paul couldn’t deny that note later. You ask them.”
“Okay, I’m assuming it’s real. How’d get you him to do it?”
“We struck a deal. I suspected Paul had killed Bobby. Paul wanted out. I wanted to be sure he wouldn’t blow the whistle.”
“How do I know you didn’t first make him kill Bobby?”
Braga looked up, a genuine expression of amazement on his face. “Come on, Officer. If I couldn’t convince Paul to stay here, in a perfect setup for a nineteen-year-old, do you really think I could have talked him into murder? I wish I had that much power.” He let his head sag, not bothering to wait for my reaction.
Giving him the usual warning about not leaving the area, I walked out and headed for the station.
I glanced quickly through Pereira’s reports in my in box, and caught Howard as he was leaving. Together we entered Lt. Davis’s office.
I placed the strongbox on his desk. Pereira’s report lay on the near corner. So the lieutenant already knew that Padmasvana was a fraud.
“Paul Lee killed Bobby Felcher. He gave him an overdose.” I sat on one of the hard wooden chairs and recounted the whole series of interviews.
Carefully, lifting the confession note by one edge, Lt. Davis examined it. Finally he said, “So what have we got here?”
“First, Paul Lee killed Bobby,” Howard said.
“But did anyone besides Braga know that?” the lieutenant asked.
“Heather, Joe and Leah—they saw him write the confession. And Paul, as Padmasvana, did say he was responsible for the death of the Penlop. He said it at several ceremonies. That would be enough to confirm anyone’s suspicion.”
“It gives Vernon Felcher a nearly peerless motive,” Howard put in.
“And Kleinfeld, his partner?” the lieutenant prodded.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Paul Lee’s death didn’t affect their dealings with Braga substantially. If Felcher killed him, it was mainly a personal vendetta.”
The lieutenant rubbed two fingers over his mustache. “And the suspects at the temple?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “None of them would have killed Paul to avenge Bobby. On the contrary. If one of them murdered him, it had to be to prevent his leaving.”
“Which, unless we’ve missed something, leaves us where we were before you found the box, Jill.”
I stared at Howard, feeling as deflated as Braga had looked half an hour ago. “Yeah.”
Lt. Davis sat back, his eyes half closed, his unspoken demand for thinking space dominating the room. “Let us speculate on what would have happened if the operation had been exposed.”
“Braga’d have gone to jail,” I said.
“And when he got out, he’d be a felon, an aging felon, with no chance of doing anything big again,” Howard said. “He’d be lucky to pull off anything small, after that. Bad for the old male ego.” He nodded knowingly at me.
“And dangerous if he couldn’t pay his debts,” I added.
“I think we’ve established sufficient motive for Braga,” the lieutenant said.
I jotted down the names of the other suspects. “Okay, the ashram would fold. Leah deVeau would probably have to apply for welfare. She might get a foster-care license to keep children, but she’d have to have a place to do that in, and I don’t know if she could swing it. In any case, she wouldn’t be able to keep the same type of setup as she has at the ashram.”
The lieutenant did not look impressed.
“Her position there is important to her. She seems to care a lot about the Penlops.”
“Yet and still, Smith, it’s not like having loan sharks at your throat.”
I couldn’t dismiss Leah’s loss that way, but there seemed little point in pressing the issue. “Joe Lee would be in jail. He voiced a lot of resentment about his younger brother this afternoon—‘My brother got everything.’ I could see him getting into a rage at the idea of his brother undercutting the operation he helped set up.”
“Particularly if he was planning on being the next guru,” Howard said. There was no hint of a smile on his face now; it was all concentration. “Look, here’s Joe Lee’s choice—Paul blows the whistle and lands him in jail, or Paul dies and Joe becomes guru. There was no reason for him to suspect that he wouldn’t make it as guru. For motive, that’s got everything that Braga’s does.”
“Right. Who does that leave, Smith?” the lieutenant asked.
“Heather Lee, Paul’s wife or mistress.”
“What happens to her?”
“Well, right now I think she’s hoping to take off with Chattanooga Charlie Spotts, the country singer. Before that she was planning on being regent till her baby became old enough to become guru.”
Lt. Davis checked the sheet before him. “The child is not a year old. That’s quite long-range planning.”
“Plans aren’t too clear in Heather’s mind.
If she wants something enough, it seems to her that she should have it. I’m sure she never considered the work or the politics involved in protecting the child’s position for twenty years. She’s only twenty years old herself.”
“What I’m asking, Smith, is how she felt it would affect her future if Paul Lee revealed the fraud.” His fingers began tapping.
I ran my tongue over my lower lip. It was hard to think of Heather having such clearly defined thoughts. Still, she knew how to look out for her interests. She had got Paul Lee to allow her to set up her tepee in the courtyard, where it had to have caused comment and potential dissension. She had maintained a position within the ashram community while apparently doing nothing to aid the movement. No, Heather was not the laid-back young woman she appeared.
“I’d say her motive was as good as Braga’s,” I said. “Either Paul keeps his role and she becomes Mother Divine, or he tells all and, if she avoids jail, she goes back home in disgrace, or she gets a job as a cocktail waitress and spends her off-hours changing diapers.”
“Knowing about Paul Lee’s fraud clears up very little,” Lt. Davis said. “Well then, Smith, what about Garrett Kleinfeld and Vernon Felcher?”
“Felcher stands to save about thirty thousand dollars on the property now that Padmasvana’s dead. And, of course, he is convinced someone in the temple murdered his son.”
“Right,” Lt. Davis said. “So much for his motive. What about Kleinfeld?”
“Kleinfeld. Well, knowing about the fraud might have given him material for blackmail or, more probably, he would just have turned in Braga and the crew. He has a pretty strong dislike for them. But he’s under control. I can’t see why he would have killed Padmasvana, and let…”
“Smith?”
“Well, lieutenant, there’s something going on with Garrett Kleinfeld that I can’t quite figure out.” I took a breath, deciding what was the best way to phrase my suspicions. “At the time Paul Lee was murdered, Kleinfeld says he was with a married woman whose name he can’t reveal.”
“You haven’t pressed him, Smith!” The lieutenant’s fingers hit the desk.
“Well, no sir.”
His fingers lifted and poised tight above the desk. “You think you could do that, Smith?”
“Yessir.”
“What about the weapon?”
“Nothing new,” I said. “It’s a cheap knife. No chance of tracing it. As for the insignia, or whatever, on it—the markings that look like a box with lines extended down and to the right—Pereira couldn’t find anything in the library. You’ve got her report. I’ve asked Braga and Joe Lee if it was some Bhutanese symbol, and they both said no.”
“I think, Smith,” the lieutenant said, making an ill-concealed effort to control his irritation, “that we can assume Braga and Joe Lee would have no more familiarity with a Bhutanese symbol than we would. No one connected with the temple would.”
He was right. Was I losing my grip? Or was I merely tired after a grueling day? “Of course,” I said, half to myself. “Now that we know the temple has no real link with either Bhutan or Buddhism, doesn’t that make it even more likely that the markings are not a Bhutanese symbol?”
“Check it out yourself, Smith. You can start your day tomorrow with that.”
Chapter 19
“JESUS CHRIST. I’M LUCKY to be still on the case, much less in charge.” I glared at Howard, who was waiting in my desk chair, legs extended across the aisle. I’d spent the night—too worried to sleep—surrounded by questions that either defied solution or whose answers only increased my anxiety. Why hadn’t I checked out the knife with real Buddhists in the first place? And when I learned Padmasvana was a phony, why hadn’t I seen immediately that that raised more questions about the markings on the knife? And the whole temple fraud and Paul Lee’s confession—what leads did they give me?
Now it was Saturday afternoon. Lt. Davis’s Sunday deadline was closing in. The sleepless night had taken its toll; I felt like I was running on coffee alone.
I sat atop the desk, looking down at Howard.
“I didn’t pressure Kleinfeld,” I said. “Even a rookie would have.”
“Jill—”
“I spend ages waiting for Berkeley’s slowest judge to get off his duff and issue the warrant, and then the box gives us not a thing…”
“That’s not exactly true, Jill.”
I waved off his palliative. “And then there’s the knife.” I shoved the picture of that under his nose. “And who knows what, if anything, the scratchings on it mean?”
Howard pulled the picture from my hand. It had come within inches of his nose. He looked down, making a show of studying the photo.
I found myself staring at his expression, again wondering about his interest in my case. Nat, whom I had trusted, had lied, affirming a love that no longer existed for months before I had let myself realize it. And when I did, my cache of trust had dried to a hard lump. Now I begrudged parting with the tiniest portion of that lump. I demanded that my friends and colleagues repeatedly prove their honesty, integrity and loyalty. They were paying for Nat’s betrayal. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop doubting.
My attention had been pulled inward, but when I refocused I realized my eyes were still on Howard and he was staring back.
“You need any help?” he asked.
“Obviously I need all the help I can get.”
“So what can I do?”
“You can give me any ideas you have on that symbol or whatever it is on the knife. Otherwise you know what’s in store.”
He grinned. “Yeah—interviews with every Buddhist in Berkeley, and Lt. Davis might waver and let you delegate that research to me. Okay.” He stared down at the picture of the knife. “Suppose we assume for a moment that it is not a Buddhist symbol?”
“Suppose we do.”
“It looks like a block drawing of a house, a Cape Cod house with the first-floor roof. What it looks like is a Chinese character representing a Cape Cod house.”
“Howard!”
He tried, not very successfully, to swallow his grin. “Okay, okay. I’m serious now. No Cape Cods.” He continued to focus on the picture, his smile fading. His waves of red hair hung forward, nearly obscuring his face. “When I was a kid, I went through a period of marking things, put hearts on tree trunks, that sort of thing. I etched my initials on everything I owned and a good bit of stuff I didn’t own. And one thing I learned—besides how angry my mother could get when I marked her silver bracelet with a big H—is that it’s a lot easier to make block figures, particularly on something that looks as slippery as that knife.”
“So you think they could be block letters?”
“I didn’t say that.” When I looked questioningly at him, he said, “But let me see. You have to allow for a little hand slippage. It could be A 7, if the second vertical line of the A doubles for the vertical line of the 7.”
I stared at the photo. “If that could be an A, it could also be a P or an F or even an R.”
“Right.”
“A T, P T, F T; or R T? That doesn’t help much. The only way it could be initials would be if Padmasvana had had a last name beginning with or if Rexford Braga is really Rexford Braga.”
“Or Fexford Braga. Or Pexford—”
Laughing, I said, “Enough. This is getting me nowhere.”
“Okay, let me look again. A T, P T, or is it A F? Hey, what about F?”
“A F, PF, FF, RF? Hmm. Pity it’s not VF. I don’t suppose Vern Felcher has another name?”
He didn’t have time to reply. The answer must have come to us simultaneously. R F—Robert Felcher. Bobby Felcher.
“Bobby Felcher’s knife. Someone killed Paul Lee with Bobby Felcher’s knife, Howard!”
“Which leads us right back to Vernon Felcher.”
“Or Garrett Kleinfeld,” I said. “And I have other things to find out from him.”
“Oh, my God,” Garrett Kleinfeld said. “I’ve seen that knife. B
obby Felcher’s knife. Of course.” His burst of candor was suspiciously sudden, but I decided to withhold comment.
“He had it here, during a class. He flashed it around. You see, Bobby wasn’t any prize as far as stability went. He wasn’t anywhere near in sufficient control of his own being—”
“About the knife.”
Kleinfeld stared. Clearly, he wasn’t used to being interrupted. “The knife. Well, as I said, Bobby waved it around. He obviously felt that since he was involved with his father and me he could get away with whatever he liked. I had to put a stop to that. So I told him firmly to put it away and take it home.”
“And?”
Kleinfeld looked away. It was the first time I had noticed him deliberately avoiding my gaze. “He didn’t. There was a scene. It disrupted the entire class. I told him to get out. He started to scream. Well, I screamed back, and…”
I controlled a smile. There was something amusing about the Self-Over guru’s discomfort. “And?”
“Well, I came close to hitting him. He was furious, nearly out of control. He screamed, ‘Home? I’ll take it home!’ and then he stalked out.”
“And then?”
“Well, the class was a mess. I had to do a lot of intensive work with the students—”
“About Bobby…”
“That was a Friday. Bobby usually went to the Valley on the weekends, so by the time Felcher saw him on Monday he had calmed down. Felcher bought off whatever hurt feelings he had, and the kid was back here the next week, sulking, but here.”
“And that was the last time you saw the knife?”
“Yeah. I guess Felcher must have made that point real clear to him.”
“Do you know how Felcher bought him off?”
Kleinfeld shook his head. “No. That was between them.”
“I guess I’ll see Vern Felcher, then.”
“Why?” Kleinfeld’s hands tightened.
“You said Bobby took the knife home.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. I guess you should see him.” He looked hopefully toward the door.