Pirate Vishnu (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery)

by Pandian, Gigi

“After what Tamarind and I discovered today, I definitely need to go back.”

  “They know about you.” His dark eyes creased down at the edges. “I don’t want anything to happen to—wait. What did you say? You discovered something?”

  “Yeah, it looks like it might be a treasure originally from India, and—”

  “Never mind,” Sanjay said, cutting me off. “I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t need to know. You don’t need to know either. I don’t want to encourage you about this thing and doing something stupid.”

  “When have I ever done anything stupid?”

  “Do I need to remind you about what happened earlier this summer? You didn’t tell me what was going on, and look at the mess you got yourself into.”

  “I don’t have to tell you everything I do. You’re not my dad. You’re not even my boyfriend.”

  Sanjay turned bright red. “Of course not. I just meant—”

  “I didn’t do anything stupid there,” I said, “and I’m not going to do anything stupid now.”

  “Right.” Sanjay paused to pick up the deck of cards he’d spilled on the floor. “In that case, I suppose you should tell me what you found out at the library.”

  I still had the pirate flag sticker in my back pocket. I handed it to Sanjay.

  “Tamil pirates?” he asked.

  I stared at Sanjay. “How did you know?”

  “It’s just one of those things one picks up.”

  “About my Uncle Anand, the pirate?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sanjay asked. “I was talking about this flag. You said you’d learned something about an Indian treasure and showed me this.”

  “So you don’t know about Pirate Vishnu?”

  “Who’s Pirate Vishnu? I was talking about the Jolly Roger pirate flag.”

  “I thought the flag was English. Or at least European of some sort.”

  “Yeah, but one of the theories of where the name of the pirate flag came from is that it was named after the Tamil pirate Ali Raja. You know the English with their nicknames. They called him and his flag Ally Roger or something, which evolved into the Jolly Roger. You don’t know this? Jaya, you really are the worst Indian ever.”

  “You know too much random Indian trivia.”

  “What does the pirate flag have to do with Anand?”

  “Tamarind and I discovered why he would have needed to draw a treasure map—he was a pirate in the San Francisco Bay a hundred years ago.”

  “A real pirate who commandeered boats and made people walk the plank?”

  “As far as the newspapers reported, he didn’t make anyone walk the plank. But the year he attacked ships was the same year of Anand’s letters home that Steven Healy was after.”

  “Listen,” Sanjay said after scowling at his phone, “are you really all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then I should go. I have to stop by the benefit theater before our music set tonight to check on something. But if you’d rather not be alone, you could come with me to get familiar with the stage.”

  “Why would I need to do that?”

  “You agreed to be my assistant tomorrow.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. Jaya, it’s just this once. Grace is gone. I can’t do it alone.”

  “Can’t you do card tricks like the one you were practicing?”

  “Don’t you want to help the orphans?”

  “Orphans?”

  “Well, it’s not only orphans. It’s a homeless benefit, like I told you. I’m sure many of them were formerly orphans. It’s a good cause.”

  I felt my will caving. I was now ridiculously behind on my research paper, had to get a new computer and phone, needed to find out how my family history could have been so wrong, and on top of it all I had to be careful in case a murderer was after me. But how could I say no to such a request from my best friend?

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  Sanjay grinned. “Show up at the Folsom Street Theater at noon tomorrow and I’ll show you. Bring some shoes that make less noise than your usual heels.”

  A flower appeared in his hand out of nowhere. He handed it to me and was out the door.

  After closing the door and making sure it was firmly locked, I pulled at the petals on the flower. The flower wasn’t plastic or silk, but was a real daisy. Sanjay was good. It reminded me of the first time we ever met.

  It had been on the first day I moved to San Francisco a year before. I was moving into the apartment above Nadia’s house. My clunky old car had been double-parked in front of the Victorian. It was before I inherited my roadster from my dad’s friend. I’d been bouncing around for so long that I hadn’t acquired any furniture, so all of my earthly possessions, aside from my books, fit in my car. I’d just carried a box of clothes inside. I walked back outside and found Sanjay sitting on the back bumper of my car.

  Of course I didn’t know his name at the time. What I saw was a fashionably dressed South Asian man with meticulously styled hair, somewhere around my age, holding a bowler hat in his hands.

  “This your tabla?” he asked in a California accent.

  My tabla drum case sat nestled lovingly between a duvet and a bag of sweaters.

  “If you’re the owner of a local live music venue, the answer is yes.”

  Sanjay smiled the broadest of smiles, revealing the whitest of white teeth. Out of nowhere, a bouquet of flowers popped into his hand.

  “Almost as good,” he said, handing me the flowers.

  I sniffed two fragrant red roses and looked up at him in surprise. “These are real.”

  “But of course.”

  “How did you—?”

  “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

  “One of the roses is a little squished.” I prodded a limp red petal.

  “Really?” He got up from the bumper of my car to inspect the petals more carefully. “Damn. I thought I’d solved that.”

  “You were telling me how you were going to give me a moonlighting job.”

  “I can’t give you one myself, but I can get you one.”

  The next night I brought my Indian drums to the Tandoori Palace, and the rest is history.

  A knock on my door startled me from the memory. I reached for the doorknob without looking through the peep hole, figuring Sanjay had forgotten something.

  Instead, an unsmiling man with an unruly head of black hair stood in my doorway. Maybe Sanjay was right and I was in over my head. I was about to slam the door and hope for the best when the dark-haired man held up a badge in his hand.

  “Inspector Valdez,” he said. “Homicide.”

  I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not.

  “You Jaya Jones?”

  “That’s me.”

  “You want to tell us why a murder victim gave you a handwritten receipt for a valuable object hours before he was killed?”

  Chapter 17

  “You’re talking about Steven Healy,” I said to the detective standing in my doorway.

  He nodded but didn’t speak. Was he waiting for me to say something else? He watched me for a few seconds.

  “May I come in?” he asked after I didn’t continue.

  I stepped aside.

  Valdez took his time stepping inside. He walked slowly, looking around as he did so. Had I just given him permission to search my apartment by letting him in?

  He could have been anywhere between forty and sixty. His tan face had the weathered look of either a long life or a hard one. His black hair showed only the faintest touches of gray. A close-cropped beard covered his face.

  “What’s your connection to Steven Healy?” he asked.

  “I’m a history
professor,” I said. “He came to see me for help with some historical research. That’s why he looked me up and left an old historical document with me, so I could conduct further research.”

  The inspector nodded but didn’t speak.

  To fill the awkward silence, I had the urge to keep talking. But I didn’t.

  “You know him for long?” he asked once it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything else.

  “I met him for the first time yesterday.”

  “I tried to reach you at your office,” Valdez said, “as well as on your phone. You’re a tough woman to find. This apartment of yours doesn’t exist.”

  “My phone was stolen when I was mugged earlier today,” I said, hoping television shows were right that homicide detectives didn’t care about illegal apartment dwellings.

  His face registered surprise.

  “You didn’t know I was mugged today?” I asked.

  He frowned as he pulled a phone out of his scruffy jacket pocket and scrolled through his messages. His clothes and the stance of his body said to the world that he wasn’t really trying. But his eyes told another story.

  “Where was this?” he asked, looking up from the phone.

  “Outside my university library,” I said. “A few hours ago. Midafternoon today. The mugger stole the map Steven Healy gave to me yesterday.”

  “You gave a description of your attacker?”

  “I couldn’t see his face. He had a stocking over it.”

  “What else was stolen?”

  “He also got my laptop and phone.”

  “The receipt we found said the map he loaned you was valuable.”

  “Maybe. I was helping him figure that out.”

  “You two were close?” Valdez asked. He scratched his beard and glanced around my apartment, seemingly uninterested in the conversation. I had a feeling he wanted me to think he wasn’t nearly as sharp as his observations indicated.

  “I told you, I only met him yesterday.”

  “Oh, right.” He looked back at me. “You mentioned that.”

  “Look, Detective—”

  “It’s Inspector,” Valdez said.

  “He needed help with some historical research.” I paused. I knew I should tell him everything and let the police take care of it, but I didn’t know how to convince him that a treasure map from a century ago had the relevance to today that I knew it had.

  “You were going to say something else,” Valdez said.

  “He thought,” I said, “that the map led to a treasure. That’s why someone must have stolen the map.”

  “A treasure? What kind of treasure?”

  “He didn’t tell me.”

  Valdez scratched his beard again. “Didn’t that seem odd to you?”

  “Of course it seemed odd,” I said. “This whole thing is odd.”

  “What seems strangest to me,” Valdez said, “is that a man who had lost everything would loan out something so valuable.”

  “I didn’t know that about him when he came to see me.”

  “Why did he come to you?” Valdez asked. “I know, I know, you’re a historian. I get it. But there are a lot of you guys around. Wouldn’t he have gone to someone with more experience?”

  “You mean someone older?” I said. “He thinks—thought—an ancestor of mine was the one who drew the map.”

  “His son and a good friend of his say this was something big he was looking into. Did he have a partner?”

  “The mugger?”

  “Or maybe you,” Valdez suggested.

  I stared at him. I suddenly felt my heart beating in my throat. “You don’t think that I had anything to do with—”

  “You say this mysterious treasure is what got Steven Healy killed, and that he just handed a valuable treasure map over to you. Seems awfully strange for someone he’d only met a few hours beforehand, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not really.” Was my voice shaking? But surely anyone who’d been accused of something would be nervous. “He couldn’t find the treasure without help, and he thought I could help.”

  “Exactly. He needed a partner.”

  “But I just met him,” I stammered. “Surely you can check phone records or something.”

  “This mugger,” Valdez said, “he took your whole purse? Including your wallet, like any mugger would take?”

  “Wait, now you don’t think it’s connected?”

  “This can be a dangerous city. You’re a petite young woman. Easy prey.”

  My muscles tensed. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I can tell. The way you hold yourself. I wouldn’t want to mess with you.”

  Damn. He’d elicited the reaction he meant to.

  “I’ll bet you have no trouble hitting someone hard enough to do some real damage,” Valdez continued. “As a strong woman who can take care of herself.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Where were you yesterday evening?”

  “You mean, do I have an alibi?”

  “Just getting all the facts together.”

  “I play music at the Tandoori Palace restaurant,” I said. “I was there last night.”

  “No kidding.” He smiled. “My daughter loves that place. You were there all evening after Steven Healy left your office?”

  “Oh. I had an errand to run in Berkeley first.”

  “You care to elaborate?”

  Aside from being suspected of murder, discussing my break-up was the worst thing I could think of telling a homicide inspector. I scribbled Lane’s name and contact information on a piece of notepaper.

  “I was with him,” I said.

  “Have a good evening, Miss Jones. I’ll be in touch.”

  I wasn’t arrested, but I didn’t feel at all at ease after the inspector left.

  There was no way I was going to take a nap now. A nervous tingling crept up the back of my neck. Should I have gone with Sanjay as he’d suggested? What if it hadn’t been a police officer who’d been behind the door?

  I reached for my phone to call Tamarind, but remembered I didn’t have it anymore and wouldn’t until my new credit card arrived. Without my phone or laptop, I was completely isolated from the world. What did people do before phones?

  Not wanting to be alone in my apartment, I went downstairs to see if Nadia was around. She wasn’t.

  I admit I felt a bit ridiculous driving back and forth from the university so many times that day, but I didn’t want to be alone at the house.

  When I got to the library, I didn’t see Tamarind’s blue hair at the front desk, but I knew she wasn’t due to get off work yet. I found her in the stacks.

  “Jaya!” she whispered with more enthusiasm than I thought possible for a whisper. “You are the man. Did you really go all Kung Fu on a mugger?”

  “Jiu jitsu, actually. But it didn’t work. He got my bag.”

  “I’d have been there with you if it hadn’t been for the authoritarian practices of this library,” Tamarind grumbled. “I need to raise the issue at our next staff meeting.”

  “It happened so quickly, you wouldn’t have been able to help anyway.”

  “Like hell—”

  “Tamarind,” I said, “I think it might have been the same guy who killed Steven Healy.”

  “Shut. Up.”

  “He got the map. He’s after Anand’s treasure.”

  “Did you tell the police about the connection?”

  “I tried, but I don’t think it worked. And what’s up with calling themselves inspectors rather than detectives?”

  “It’s a San Francisco thing.”

  “The police think I might have something to do with it.”

  “No way! Beca
use you’re related to a pirate? That’s totally ancestor profiling or something. What are you going to do?”

  “Find Anand’s treasure before the murderer does?” I said.

  “Awesome. I’m in.”

  I hesitated. Having someone else back me up made the plan more real. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea.

  “What else can I do?” I said, trying to convince myself more than Tamarind. “Sit back and wait for the police to figure out they shouldn’t be focusing on me and should be looking for someone else?”

  “Hell no,” Tamarind said. “How can I help?”

  “The inspector seemed like a really smart guy. He got me to say things I hadn’t meant to say. But he’s not going to focus on a theft from a hundred years ago, and that’s the key to this.”

  “Your personal librarian is at your service.”

  “There can’t have been many men with the name Anand Paravar in San Francisco around 1900,” I said. “We can look through records—”

  “He was probably the only one,” Tamarind interrupted. “But that won’t help us. Jaya, do you realize that’s the absolute worst time in San Francisco history to find records about the population? The earthquake and fire wiped out City Hall records. It was one of the great equalizers, letting people reinvent themselves—at least the people who survived. Otherwise I would already have looked.”

  “There has to be something we can find.”

  “There is.” Tamarind paused. “I did some more digging for you this afternoon. I haven’t had this much fun in months. Not since those scientist students found an obscure text about early airplanes and built their own for a fall semester final. You should have seen it—”

  “Tamarind.”

  “Right. I’m babbling because I haven’t been able to think of the best way to broach the subject. That’s why I didn’t come right out with it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re in a different kind of danger than you think,” Tamarind said slowly. “Before I tell you what I found, tell me one thing about your mugger. Then I’ll know I’m right. Did you get a look at his face?”

  “No, he had his face covered.”