“It’s a strange world, isn’t it?” Timuroff said finally.
“Ghastly stuff that used to be safely embalmed in dirty limericks being taken seriously as the cultural harbinger of a Great New Age. My Uncle Cedric used to talk about these far-out Sakti worshipers—never, of course, when there were ladies present. The Icaulas were the most extreme of all. I don’t recall whether they went in for decapitating their blood sacrifices or not, but they were very nasty generally. I wonder how Mr. Stitchgrove happened on them, and what his academic sponsors—I understand he’s lectured at U.C.—would think if they could witness the real thing.”
“Hey! You don’t think he could’ve been mixed up in either of our murders, do you?”
“I doubt it. Even though’ Sakti also appears as Kali the Destroyer, I’m sure she’d have preferred a nice fat goat or water buffalo to either Munrooney or van Zaam. Let’s hope he’s a better witness than he is a suspect.”
“Well, we’ll soon find out.” Pete slapped his notebook. “Look at that—all we’ve picked up so far is Dun and Bradstreet stuff, pretty much common knowledge—and damn near all the gossip’s about Munrooney’s friends. Miranda Gardner has fun with gigolos. Socrates Voukos likes fat women—not boys—or so they say. Also the word is out that ever since Hemmet and his wife split up, his sex life’s been getting kinkier and kinkier—no homo stuff, but girls who’re real kooks. About Munrooney’s enemies, there’s nothing, though everybody knows he was a sort of Johnny Appleseed where murder motives were concerned. All right, whether or not his friends, or some of them, did become his enemies, how does our phantom fit into all this?”
“He fits in very nicely,” said Timuroff. “Remember what I said about the khanjar being all wrong? Now we quite safely can assume that our phantom stole it, or had it stolen, for the express purpose of substituting it for another weapon, and thereby spoiling a very tidy plot to pin the mayor’s murder on Heck and Hanson. As we know, he didn’t spoil it completely, but he certainly made things tougher for whoever planned it.”
“What does that tell us?”
“First, that he was no friend of Munrooney’s; he made no effort to prevent the killing. Next, that he either was a party to the plot betraying his co-plotters, or that he found out all about it some other way. Thirdly, he may have been somebody’s hired hand.”
“If he was working from outside, how would he even have caught on?”
“Perhaps he wasn’t completely an outsider. He may have known what motivated whom. A shrewd guess could have put him on to it, or simply accident. He may have been prying into something for profit or revenge or political advantage. Munrooney’s murderers must be his enemies—otherwise why bother? Why take the risk?”
“You mean he could be almost anybody who’s been connected with Munrooney—whether we’ve heard of him or not?”
“No, it’s much more likely that he’s tied in directly with Munrooney’s close associates, especially with the people at the party. That makes him one of half a dozen, at the most eight or ten. And by this time, the killers know that he’s after them, which means the pressure on them has increased. They may do something ill-considered and betray themselves. But best of all”—he smiled grimly—“he knows who they are, and eventually we’ll have him. Then, if we play our cards right, we’ll get the answer.”
“If he comes back,” Pete said.
“If he doesn’t, perhaps we can induce him to.”
“It’s a damn shame we can’t just call Jake and the boys in—but if we do, we’ve had it. Kielty’d tell the press, and then our phantom would be spooked for sure. The next step would be to say Grimwood was the phantom, playing tricks to get the law off his tail.”
“Exactly. And we’re going to have to be completely sure it’s in the bag before we tell the world about it. When the news breaks, it’s going to have to clobber Kielty and his friends—not strengthen whatever case they’re building against Heck.”
Presently, Timuroff found a horrifyingly purple Porsche to tag behind; the Mazda moved even more swiftly than before; the miles rolled out behind them and disappeared. Then suddenly, just south of St. Helena, they were at their turning.
“Hey, watch it!” Pete exclaimed. “Malvoisie Lane—that’s ours!”
Timuroff braked, backed on the shoulder, and made the left. Malvoisie Lane was a road of vineyards being turned willy-nilly into suburbs. Where there had once been acres of well-tended grapes there were rows of unkempt vines which, though they furnished a thin excuse for the “California ranch-type” houses erected in their midst, could neither have paid for nor supported them. Among these, a few serious vineyards, large and small, bravely held their temporary own.
Malvoisie Lane thinned a little as it approached the foothills. Its houses became poorer, scruffier, and their viticultural justification even less plausible. Broken-down fences, tangles of barbed wire, weeds, strewn rubbish, and the corpses of dead automobiles hinted at shiftless and unsuccessful subsistence farming.
“It seems we have arrived,” Pete remarked, as they slowed down beside a psychedelically daubed mailbox with a peace symbol, a large four-letter word, and STITCHGROVE scrawled on it, and a crude arrow saying ASHRAM pointing to the right. “Sort of looks like Dogpatch, doesn’t it?”
Timuroff turned off, following a pitted washboard track to an untidy congeries of buildings clustered among dry, dead, and dying vines. The main house was a scabrous bungalow of pink stucco, in what Los Angeles had once believed was Mission style; it was stained and flaking, and was surrounded by a half-ruined barn, by tumbledown lean-tos, sheds, shanties, hog troughs, henhouses. A variety of domestic animals and fowl wandered at their ease, much like sacred cows on the streets of Mother India.
“It smells like Dogpatch, too,” Pete said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Hairless Joe and Lonesome Polecat showed up and offered to take us through the Skunk Factory.”
Timuroff killed his engine, and they got out.
“Could that be Moonbeam McSwine?” he asked, pointing at a young woman garbed in ragged jeans, huaraches, dirty long brown hair, and nothing else, who on the front porch was happily pretending to fight off the advances of a large dog who appeared to be part Boxer, part Airedale, and part happenstance. Next to her sat a long thin young man similarly attired but wearing also a double necklace of small plastic skulls, from which a long and gaily painted lingam was suspended. Clearly a person of some sanctity, he wore his hair and beard loosely braided, and smeared with a substance that Timuroff suspected was a mixture of ghee and cow dung. He was reading aloud from an open book, apparently to the farmyard creatures in his vicinity: a few ducks and geese and chickens, a moulting turkey, two bleary-eyed young pigs, and an aged spaniel bitch wearily suckling three mongrel puppies. The girl appeared to be sixteen or seventeen, the young man about twenty.
At Pete and Timuroff’s approach, they stopped what they were doing and looked up, still with suspicion and hostility. The young man put the book face downward on the broken boards, revealing that its author had been Herbert Marcuse. The girl stared at them strangely out of vast dilated pupils, caressed the dog, and giggled softly to herself. Simultaneously, half a dozen of their co-religionists appeared abruptly from behind buildings and out of nooks and crannies. Male and female, they were very much of a type and of an age, upper-middle-class children somehow deprived of a real world and trying to contrive their own out of an ancient culture’s dregs. All but one. Six or eight years older and several inches taller than the rest, he was magnificently muscled, hairy chested, with an almost Afro head of yellow hair. Except for his broad-brimmed floppy hat, he was naked, his body smeared vertically with clay, the Brahmin thread about his neck, his genitals in a foul cotton bag tied with a piece of string around his waist. In one hand, he carried a curved, broad-bladed sword, of the type manufactured by the thousands for the tourist trade and of wr
etched steel, but sharpened now to razor keenness. He said no word. He glared, and his mouth worked silently as he regarded them.
Timuroli and Pete, each sensing the sudden tension in the other, pretended to ignore him. No matter how accustomed one became to the counterculture’s wild displays of kinkiness, it always came up with surprises—which sometimes could be dangerous.
“Like, you mothers lose your way?” the thin young man demanded with a sneer; and his companions snickered and growled appreciatively. A huge gray wolfish dog came up and circled, bristling, as though he too was troubled by clean clothing and the smell of soap.
“On the contrary,” Timuroli answered cheerfully. “We’ve found our way. Mr. Cominazzo here phoned not long ago, and we were invited to come up this afternoon. So here we are.”
There was a hint of general relaxation. The girl with the dilated pupils and the amorous hound said Shit! very rapidly several times, but obviously she was not addressing the remark to anyone.
The thin young man made a gesture of dismissal. “They’re a couple pi—uh, cops up to see Guru-ji,” he declared, “the ones he said knew about his poetry and talked all right, not like that prick we had up here this morning.”
“Somebody been bothering you?” Pete asked solicitously.
“He tried to bug us with a mess of questions—a squinty, red-faced little guy with a great big one sort of guarding him.”
Pete glanced at Timuroff.
“We said the Master’d gone off to a sensitivity get-together down at S.F. State, and after maybe half an hour he gave up. I had him figured for an SPCA bigot, but he was big-city fuzz.”
Mr. Stitchgrove’s followers began to wander off. The naked sadhu spat into the dirt and strode away, waving his blade and scratching at his cotton bag. Somebody else obligingly picked up a broken rake and belabored the gray dog until it fled, yelping and limping slightly.
“Now I shall take you to the Master,” the young man announced formally. “He is meditating in the henhouse, where he has been for several hours, but he has ordered that you be brought in to him immediately. Believe me, it’s not something he’d do for just anybody.”
“Thank you,” said Timuroff, bowing slightly. He was fascinated by the lingam suspended around the young man’s neck. Not only was it extremely lifelike—it was enclosed in what was without doubt a condom. Very politely, he inquired why.
At once, a look of profound awe and reverence passed over his guide’s ascetic countenance. “You won’t understand, but I’ll tell you anyhow,” he answered. “I’m the Master’s lingam-bearer. This is the lingam of the Lord Siva, sacred to our Goddess Sakti. It must be kept for her alone. It is infinitely potent, infinitely fertile. Guru-ji says if we don’t keep it in this gizmo here, there’s no telling what’d happen. Hell, we can’t give the Pill to every sheep and turkey on the place, can we?”
Timuroff agreed that it would be impractical; and they set off. The henhouse was a long, low, badly sagging shed between an old three-holer and the barn. It had been patched with broken plyboard and rusty tin. At its door, the young man stepped aside. “Go on in,” he said. “He awaits you. You may address him either as Master or as Guru-ji.”
Very few smells are less refreshing than those of a neglected henhouse, on a balmy day especially; and Timuroff, entering through the hinge-sprung door, wondered for a moment if the poet had not staged the interview as an exercise in one-upmanship, for it is difficult to decide whether to breathe and perish or hold one’s breath and perish anyhow. On one side were arranged the perches, some cracked and broken, one or two supporting ailing fowl. The other side was given over to shelves for laying, and on one of these, on matted, musty feathers and other souvenirs of long habitation, sat Elia Stitchgrove. Surprisingly, he did look like a Hindu holy man, one of those who cluster wherever poor and frightened pilgrims flock in their multitudes. His attitude was a traditional one, feet resting on his thighs, hands folded at his loinclothed crotch, eyes lowered to perceive his navel. His biceps and pectoral muscles were almost nonexistent; his flaccid flesh fell in pale moist folds; his round, soft face wore a mysterious smile; and his tranquillity was in no way disturbed by the brown hen who, having established herself on his right shoulder, which she had adorned copiously with droppings, was seeking something edible in his tangled hair. He had painted his forehead with vermilion, and from his necklace of Benares bells hung an Egyptian aukh.
“We are here, Guru-ji,” announced Timuroli respectfully. “This is Inspector Cominazzo, and I am Timuroli’, his friend.”
The poet’s eyes remained on his navel. He raised a hand. “Peace!” he replied a little shrilly. “Om mani padme hum! You need information, and I shall give it to you. But first we’ve got to, uh, communicate.”
“Yeah, sure,” Pete agreed. “We’ll jibe vibes.”
“Some people might put it in those terms”—the poet nodded graciously—“but I prefer to say that we must reach an understanding. I have achieved a cultural and religious breakthrough. It’s like the first man landing on the moon, only a lot more so. No one before has penetrated the true meaning of the Kaulopanishad—”
Timuroli and Pete had lowered themselves gingerly to the thin edge of a feed bin, and now they sat there quietly, tried to sort out the smells—which included those not only of chickens, rats, and decaying vegetables but of mystic incense and mind-blowing pot—and let him speak his piece. Some people, he informed them, claimed the Kaulopanishad was false. That was because they didn’t understand its message regarding man and what the materialistic West called the lower animals. It all went back to a Brahminical misunderstanding. When the Lord Krishna, as a boy, had disported himself among the cowherds, it had been neither their wives nor the milkmaids to whom he had been sexually attracted, but the cows themselves. That was the real reason cows were sacred. This revelation had come to him during an especially lovely trip, and the sequence of poems resulting from it—privately printed under the title Cowla—had received such a splendid accolade in the underground and academic press that Professor Marrow, the famous intuitional psychologist, had given him the vineyard and all its appurtenances for his ashram.
Timuroff recalled that there’d been something of a scandal while Dr. Marrow was at Berkeley. He had bought the vineyard in the vain hope that wine of his own making might, at imaginative bacchanals, not only stiffen his own flagging libido but overcome the apathy of certain of his lusher students. Before he’d chucked the whole thing as a bad job, he had blundered by inviting up a singularly vulgar columnist, who had made the most of the occasion, on the spot and in print afterwards. Subsequently, after the Academic Senate had formally denounced the governor and the Board of Regents, he had been promoted and transferred to the new, multimillion-dollar Barstow campus.
For some minutes, while the hen watched his listeners with a suspicious eye, Elia Stitchgrove spoke of his progress and his problems; of the gratifying interest shown by the general public (even an aged sheepherder in Montana had asked to be converted); of an inquiry recently received from Penthouse regarding a possible feature article with color shots of Kaula rituals; and of what he called the Kali hang-up—the failure of so many Westerners to appreciate the dual nature of the goddess and the deeply spiritual nature of sacrifices. Finally he sighed. “I know you’ll never really understand,” he said, “but I do hope we’re communicating.”
“Master, I understand!” Leaning forward, Pete stared at him intently. “I was an Indian in my last incarnation. I was a sergeant in the Central Provinces Police, used by my British masters to oppress my brothers.”
Guru-ji looked up so abruptly that the hen, with an excited squawk, abandoned him. “And you remember it?”
“Every bit of it,” Pete assured him. “That is, the important parts.”
“What caste did you belong to?”
Pete hesitated, and Timurof
f, who had kept a straight face, saw that he’d have to get him off the hook. “He was a Rajput and a Kshatriya,” he put in smoothly. “He was beaten to death by his officers for refusing to arrest a great sanyasi—a saint who preached against Queen Victoria’s tyranny.”
“I sensed it!” Mr. Stitchgrove cried. “Instantly, when I heard your voice over the phone, I knew that we had formed an astral bridge! Look, man, tonight we’re having a real chakrapuja. Why don’t you stay? Maybe in that life you were pretty orthodox and never got asked in on one, but you’ve advanced by now!”
“I’m sorry, Guru,” Pete answered dismally, “but it’s my karma. Because of what I did back then, I’ve got to be a pig in this life too, at least till we get this murder of Munrooney solved.”
“Munrooney was an ancient soul. He befriended the poor and humble and oppressed. He listened to me with great interest when I told him ail about my doctrine at the party.”
“Okay, so what was it you saw at Grimwood’s, Guruji?”
Surprisingly, the poet giggled. For a moment, he lost his sacerdotal dignity. “At Grimwood’s? I didn’t see a thing at Grimwood’s, man! That was just something I cooked up for fun!”
“Just something you cooked up for fun?” Pete almost shouted. “For Chrissake why?”
“To put your pig lieutenant off the track. He spoke to me as if I was some sort of criminal or, well, charlatan. His kind of fuzz are always trying to freak you; they’re the shitty-gritty kind. What I really saw was the geek who got killed afterwards—van Zaam, the papers said his name was. I knew him right away, even though it’d been more than a year.”
“You mean you’d seen him previously?” said Timuroff. “It was just alter I beheld the True Inwardness of everything, before I got this ashram going here. We had this pad in Berkeley, in a big old dump on Grove Street. Its door was on a kind of alley out in back—you know, two little porches right together. The other one was Leda Minden’s. I used to tell her with a name like that she’d be a natural for us Kaula cats, but she just wouldn’t groove—she was too jacked up with her horse.”
The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack Page 61