Karma (14 page)

I looked directly at the Penlops. One was like all the others I’d seen—bleary eyed, slow moving. But the other, the blond Penlop who had spoken to Leah deVeau the day I’d met her, had a hint of life in his eyes, a look of skepticism. I wondered why he was involved with the temple. And I wondered which of the two would be more dangerous.

The light glittered off the cellophane wrappers of the tea boxes, giving the odd illusion that the Ho-Sun yellow dragons were dancing against their blue-and-red backgrounds. With all those tiny boxes it was like looking through a kaleidoscope.

Taking a breath, I turned back to Braga. “The tea boxes?”

“Very well, Officer. Here.” He walked toward the back wall. “Shall we start here?”

“No, I’ll take one from this side.” I moved to the wall opposite the office door.

Braga hesitated, then nodded. The Penlops stepped behind me.

“Move them back,” I demanded. “I don’t need them breathing on my shoulders.”

Braga signaled the red-robed boys with a tight movement of his head. They backed off. Braga stood straighter. He reached for one of the top boxes, but I shook my head and grabbed one near the bottom, balancing the boxes above it precariously as I pulled it free.

“I presume the police department is going to pay for this,” Braga said.

“Bill us.”

The cardboard top pulled out easily. I removed one of the bags and sniffed. It smelled like tea. Was there nothing but tea here? Hard as it was to imagine the tea as a cover for smuggling, it was even more difficult to think that it served no purpose at all. I moved to the other end of the wall and pointed to a box in the middle.

Braga hesitated again, then followed and pulled out the box.

It, too, held nothing but tea.

By the office door, the Penlops stood, hands hidden in the pouches of their robes.

I turned toward that wall, glancing up and down the rows of boxes.

“Officer, how many are you going to open? This is taking time.” Braga’s voice was choppy.

“As many as I need to. You’ll get paid for them; you shouldn’t care. It’ll save the boys the effort of selling them. Start here.” I pointed to one midway down the third row from the corner.

Braga extricated it and opened it. Just tea.

I indicated another nearer the office door. It, too, held only tea. I tried one near the bottom of the row by the door, one midway up on the opposite side of the office, one nearer the back door. More tea.

“Officer,” Braga said triumphantly, “this is merely wasting time.”

“We’ll see.” I stepped back. There had to be something here. I squatted down, running my eyes slowly, carefully, up one row and down the other, looking for something different about one group of boxes.

“Officer, I have to insist.”

The Penlops took a step in my direction.

I continued examining the rows, checking the Chinese characters, the bright blue, red and yellow on the wrappers, looking for cellophane that had been opened and re-sealed.

“Officer, if you want to continue this, you’ll have to get a warrant.”

“Here!” I pointed to the bottom of the row, three from the office door. Stepping forward, I pulled it out. It looked like four boxes of tea; the wrappers were like all the others. But it was one box, a metal strongbox, covered in tea wrappers carefully taped down to look like four boxes side by side.

Braga grabbed it and thrust it into the hands of the blond Penlop.

“Mr. Braga—”

“No. It’s private.”

“Nothing’s private in a murder investigation.” I seemed to be voicing that concept frequently today.

Braga stepped between me and the box. “Mr. Braga, I insist on seeing that box.”

“No.” His hands were pressed against his thighs.

“Do I have to get a warrant?”

He said nothing. His face was white, his lips pressed tightly together.

“Very well, I can get a warrant. It’s a waste of time, but—” I headed for the phone in Braga’s office. The blond Penlop edged toward the back door.

“Come here!” I said. “You and that box stay in my sight till the warrant gets here.”

He stopped, looking not at me but at Braga.

Braga seemed to be considering his options.

“Get him back in here,” I demanded.

Braga hesitated, then nodded, and the Penlop stepped away from the door.

I went to the phone and dialed the station. “This is Smith. Give me Lt. Davis,” I told the clerk.

“He’s in conference,” she said. “But Pereira’s left a message that you should talk to her the minute you called or came in.”

“Okay. Put me through to her first.” From where I stood I could see Braga and the blond Penlop. Their eyes were not contacting one another. Braga appeared caught up in thought. The Penlop looked alert and wary.

“Jill?”

“Yes, Connie.”

“Listen, something really big has happened with the case. How fast can you get in here?”

“What?”

“There’s no point in talking about it on the phone. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not as important as this.”

“Listen, I need a warrant to open a strongbox here at the temple. I can’t leave until I get it.”

“Jill, I’m not exaggerating. Nothing in that box could be as important as this.”

“Then tell me!”

“Jill…”

I made a quick decision. “Okay. Get the warrant procedure going for me. Send a couple of men down here to relieve me, and I’ll be there as soon as I can. But your news had better be as big as you say it is.”

“Believe me, Jill, it is.”

T
HE BACKUP MEN ARRIVED
in fifteen minutes. The warrant would take much longer.

I drove as quickly as I dared across town. The rain was coming down hard and steadily. The accidents I had foreseen earlier were now realities. Crinkled bumpers and dented fenders marked the busier intersections, and pulsar lights from patrol cars seemed to slide along the wet streets around them.

When I arrived at the station, the squad room was resounding with the insistent ringing of phones.

“Wait,” Pereira said into the receiver as I approached. “She’s just arrived. Put them on hold.” She beckoned me to hurry. “You’ve got two calls on hold. One from your husband.”

“Ex-husband,” I said mechanically.

“Whatever. And one from an Elizabeth deVeau.”

“Okay. Thanks, sort of. But what about this big breakthrough that’s so urgent?”

“Piqued your interest, huh?” Pereira grinned. “I’ll get us some coffee while you take your calls. The deVeau woman’s on line three, your ex-husband on two.”

“Okay.” I looked at the two blinking lights on the phone. What could Leah deVeau want? I started to punch line two, for Nat, then stopped. No, I
knew
what he wanted.

I pushed line three.

“This is Officer Smith.”

“This is Leah deVeau, dear. I wanted to talk to you about what’s going to happen here. The boys are getting edgy, having their future so unsettled. Of course, I’ve tried to assure them that the temple will go on as before and that everything will be normal as soon as Mr. Braga gets the successor from Bhutan, but you know how boys are. And these boys have had years of bad experiences, and with the police here all the time—”

“Leah.” I interrupted the spurt of words. Her call was clearly not urgent and I was anxious to hear Pereira’s big news. “Are you sure your concern is merely for the boys?”

“I am
very
concerned about them. No one has ever questioned that.” She sounded indignant.

“I’m sure you are. But what about yourself? Aren’t you a bit concerned for your own future?” Line number two continued to flash.

“Well, yes, I am,” she conceded, a little reluctantly. “You know, I’ve never had a job before. And I
am
good at this. It makes me feel there’s some purpose to my life. It’s important to me.” She paused. The light on the phone flashed. Its badgering annoyed me, as if Nat were sitting there tapping his finger, as impatient with me as I was with Leah. “It’s
very
important,” Leah went on. “You see, here I’m a success. I do something that matters. In the cosmic scheme of things, I’d say I do something considerably more important than the president of General Motors, for instance.”

Pereira set down the paper cups, then settled back in the chair across the aisle, making a show of twiddling her thumbs. Nat blinked on line two.

“Well, Leah, if there were anything definite I could tell you, I would. I know this is vital to all of you. But you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry. There really is nothing more I can say.” My tone was harsher than I’d intended, and Leah’s “I’m sorry; goodbye, then,” sounded small and distant.

A wave of guilt engulfed me as I put down the phone and took a breath, but by the time I pushed line two, the guilt had turned to anger.

“Look, Nat, I’m in the middle of a murder case. I don’t have time to deal with the stainless. You’ve lived for months without it, but I’ll gladly send you twenty dollars—which is about what we paid for the stuff—if I can have the pleasure of your not hounding me for it.”

In response, the dial tone hummed in my ear. I put down the receiver.

“He’d already hung up,” I said sheepishly. “Maybe it was just as well.”

Pereira shrugged. She’d heard enough of my complaints when I first separated from Nat.

“So what’s the big news that’s more important than the sealed box waiting for me at the temple?”

She took a swallow of coffee, drawing a buffed fingernail across the paper cup. Then she leaned forward.

“I will spare you the details of my trip to the Indian Consulate, but when I talked to the man who knows about Bhutan and who was interested in Padmasvana’s being killed, he’d already notified the authorities in Bhutan. And guess what?”

“What?”

“There’s no record of Padmasvana leaving Bhutan and entering the United States.”

“But—”

“And”—she’d raised her voice to cover my interruption—“they checked and found there is no such monastery and no such town.”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what was written on that paper Braga gave us?”

“Nothing. Just Sanskrit letters. They weren’t even words. The guy I talked to said they looked like someone had been practicing writing the letters—like an exercise tablet.”

“Was he sure? Couldn’t it have been some strange dialect?”

“I asked him that. He said no. There are eight major dialects in Bhutan”—I nodded, for that confirmed what Braga had told me—“but Bhutan is really a small country as far as population goes and not that many of the inhabitants are literate, so that the written word there is pretty easy to know—if you’re an Indian official. The address Braga gave us is more like a sheet of paper where someone hit the keys of a typewriter randomly.”

“But that doesn’t mean the monastery didn’t exist.”

“That’s what I told the guy. But he said no, that if there were a monastery that had sent a guru to the United States in response to Braga’s request, they would have located it by now. And remember, Padmasvana left no immigration records in either country.”

I leaned back against the desk, staring incredulously at Pereira. Finally I said, “If there was no Padmasvana from no monastery in Bhutan, then who have we got in the morgue?”

S
UDDENLY A LOT OF
things became clear. What we had here was a racket—a phony pretending he was a guru. No wonder people had not heard of Padmasvana before he started the temple in Berkeley. No wonder the money Braga had said was going to the nonexistent monastery in Bhutan exactly matched what was left over after the temple deducted its expenses.

I remembered my search of Padmasvana’s cell. I had noticed his English-Bhutanese dictionary. I had assumed he was a Bhutanese trying to learn English. But, indeed, he had been an American looking for a few Bhutanese phrases.

The more I thought about it, the clearer the whole scheme was. It was so simple. Padmasvana stood on the stage and mouthed nonsense syllables. How many people spoke Bhutanese?

In Berkeley, there were people who had been to India, people who had studied Tibetan at Buddhist centers, Indian students at the university. Braga had been clever enough to steer clear of anything connected with those countries. But, as Pereira’s research had confirmed, Bhutan was an isolated country in the Himalayas, one that was too mountainous for all but the hardiest of tourists, one that did not draw Americans.

Also according to Pereira, the Bhutanese people lived in valleys separated by mountains nearly as tall as Everest. That was why, though they numbered only about a million, they spoke in eight major dialects. So when Padmasvana (or whatever his real name was) had made his pronouncements, tossing a legitimate Bhutanese word here and there amid nonsense syllables, even a person familiar with one section of Bhutan would have assumed he spoke the dialect of a different area.

I recalled Padmasvana, his eyes that seemed to look directly at me, his compassion, his warmth. I had been taken in right along with everyone else.

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?”