The Mystery of the Vanished Victim (5 page)

Balbir’s cry made them both turn. His blue turban bobbed up and out of the black limousine. “Here it is!” He was waving a small black notebook with the gilt-stamped words, DRIVING LOG, on its cover.

Gully seized it and eagerly scanned its pages. It was evident that Balbir’s father was a meticulous man. He had neatly written down the mileage reading before and after each use of the official car, together with the date and other pertinent facts. Gully thumbed through the log, tensing as the dates neared the fateful day.

“Oh-oh,” he said suddenly. “Dirty work at the crossroads. Look at this.”

“What’s wrong, Gully?” Prema demanded.

“The page we want to see is gone. Ripped out!”

Where the entry should have been, there was only a jagged fringe of paper down the center of the logbook.

“W
HY
,” Prema wanted to know, “would someone have ripped that page out of the log?”

“Because,” Gully said, “whoever it was didn’t want a record left of where Balbir’s father drove before he was taken away from this building. That means it’s
important
.”

“But who could have done that? If I could but find him!” Balbir stormed.

“If we could find him, Balbir, we’d probably find your father.” Gully was studying an entry on the next leaf of the log. It was dated that very day and the sprawling scrawl was different from the neat handwriting of Shamshir Singh. “The new chauffeur—what’s his name?—Srigar—probably wrote this. I wonder,” Gully said thoughtfully, “if Srigar knows anything about the missing page.”

Balbir said grimly, “Let’s go find out. He and the new guard, Dhavata, are quartered in the next apartment to ours.” He led the way back to the basement employees’ quarters and stopped one door away from his father’s suite. Balbir’s fist on the panel brought a quick response.

“Enter!” growled the voice of the guard.

The three young people found themselves in a fair-sized bedroom with twin studio beds. Gully’s jaw dropped at the sight of Srigar. The thin wiry little chauffeur was standing on his head, his back braced against the wall, his feet together and sticking straight up, his arms folded across his chest, and his eyes closed.

“Yoga exercises,” Prema said in a low voice, as she noticed Gully’s stare. “It’s a way of controlling the body and the mind, so that the soul can merge with the Hindu Supreme Soul.”

Gully was about to ask a question when he became aware of Dhavata looming over him.

“Yes?” the big Jalpuri rumbled. “What is it you wish?”

Prema pointed to the little black book in Gully’s hand. “There’s a page missing from the car log,” she said.

“And so?” demanded the new guard.

“It might have told us where Balbir’s father had been just before he disappeared,” Gully said.

“And so?” repeated Dhavata, an edge to his voice.

“We thought—” Gully began.

“Gully thought,” Prema said, her eyes quite as cold as the man’s, “that you or Srigar might know how the page came to be ripped from the notebook.”

Dhavata’s great hand shot out. The thick fingers closed on the front of Gully’s jacket and to his horror Gully felt himself swept off his feet and raised to the level of the Jalpuri’s angry face.

Balbir rushed forward in Gully’s defense, but Dhavata held him off with his free hand.

“Put him down!” cried Prema, stamping her little foot.

“You accuse Srigar and me—” the big man growled, paying no attention.

“Put him down this instant,” Prema said in a very quiet voice, “or I shall tell my father.”

The Jalpuri blinked. His powerful hand lowered Gully carefully to the floor, and he released Balbir.

“How dare you put your hands on my friends?” Prema’s eyes were throwing off sparks.

“I crave your pardon,” Dhavata said to Gully. “When Srigar and I learned that Ambassador Jind’s chauffeur-bodyguard had vanished, we quickly applied for employment. We are poor men, and it is not easy for men of our race to find employment in this city. I thought we were being accused of an act of wrongdoing that would cause Dr. Jind to discharge us, in spite of our references in previous employment here and abroad. We ripped no pages out of the little book.”

Prema was listening critically, as if she were not altogether convinced by the man’s humble tone. Gully thought it a good time to use some of Ambassador Jind’s diplomatic tactics, so he said smoothly, “No one was accusing you, Mr. Dhavata. We were just wondering if you had any idea how it happened.”

“I am sorry,” Dhavata began, “but—”

They all turned at a light sound. Srigar, who throughout the excitement had remained upside down at the wall, had suddenly unfolded his arms, set his fingertips to the floor, and somersaulted lightly to his feet.

“May I see the little book?” the new chauffeur asked politely.

Gully handed the chauffeur the log. Quickly, Srigar turned its pages.

“Yes. This is just as I found it. Here, you can see my entry. My first driving assignment was to the All-India Restaurant, today. I was myself surprised to find that a page had been torn from the book.”

A buzzer sounded twice. Srigar picked up his chauffeur’s cap.

“The ambassador wishes the car. We are taking him to the United Nations now. Excuse us, please.”

The two new employees hurried out, Dhavata pausing to hold the door open for the three teenagers. Then he and Srigar ran to the garage and disappeared. Gully had stopped in the hall, his pencil busy on a fresh page of his red notebook.

“Now what are you writing, Gully?”

“The figures, Prema.”

“What figures?”

“The mileage figures Srigar wrote down when he started his first trip today.”

“How can they help us?” Balbir demanded.

“Do you have a map of New York City?” Gully asked mysteriously.

“There is one in my father’s room.”

“May I see it, Balbir?”

The instant they entered Balbir’s room, the mynah bird greeted Gully.

“’Tective! ’Tective!”

“He sure knows you, Gully,” Prema said, smiling, as Balbir started looking for the map. Gully nodded absently, studying his notes.

“The last speedometer reading before the missing page was 12,803.9 miles,” Gully murmured, half to himself. “The next entry starts with a reading of 12,805.7. Between those two entries, the car traveled—”

“One and eight-tenths miles,” Prema said at once.

“That’s not very far,” Gully muttered. “There probably wasn’t more than one trip recorded on that page.”

Balbir slammed a drawer, triumphantly waving a map. Gully unfolded it and spread it on a coffee table.

“Here,” Gully said, his pencil tapping on the map. “This is where we are now. Balbir’s father drove the car for one and eight-tenths miles. Assuming they were done on one trip, that means he couldn’t have gone further in one direction than half that distance, or nine-tenths of a mile …” He checked the map’s scale of miles to inches. “We need a compass. Or a piece of string will do, Balbir. I want to make a circle with a radius of nine-tenths of a mile, from this house as the center of the circle.”

Before Balbir could turn to his desk, Prema pulled a bobby pin from her glossy black hair and offered it to Gully. Setting one prong of the bobby pin at the zero end of the map scale, Gully spread the pin until the other prong touched the nine-tenths-of-a-mile mark. Then, placing a point of the pin at the location of the embassy residence, he swiveled the pin so that its other point described a circle on the map.

“Nine-tenths of a mile certainly covers a lot of ground in Manhattan,” Prema remarked.

“It sure does,” Gully said disconsolately. “Reaches to Broadway, the East River, takes in Radio City, part of Central Park—”

Gully broke off and snapped his fingers.

“The chess area! We know your father played chess in Central Park that day, Balbir. Look for yourself. From this house to where your father must have parked near the chess area it’s practically nine-tenths of a mile on the nose!”

Gully began to pace the room again under the awed eyes of the girl in the
sari
and the boy in the turban.

“Mr. Singh drove from here to the park, played chess with that friend of his we met in the All-India Restaurant, then drove back here,” Gully summed up. “Here somebody entered his bedroom, your father resisted—and he was taken away by force. So now the question becomes: Who was that somebody?”

“Those somebodies,” Balbir said grimly. “No one man would be able to overcome my father, Gully.”

“My mistake, Balbir. Of course—there must have been more than one. But who could they have been? People he met in the chess area of the park after his friend left?”

“Why don’t we go to the park,” Prema said calmly, “and try to find out?”

“But Prema,” Balbir said, “your father told you not to leave the house.”

“Balbir’s right,” Gully nodded. “He and I will go—”

“I didn’t actually
promise
Father,” Prema said. “And anyway, if there
is
something to be learned at the park, my father would agree that three of us are more likely to discover it than two.”

With this doubtful logic disposed of, Prema made for the door. Balbir spread his hands, and Gully shook his head, and the two boys followed her out.

A few minutes later the trio was advancing across the rolling walk that curves and winds through the hilly, tree-lined section of Central Park called the Ramble. Through the leafy branches to their left, they saw occasional flashes of water from the lake, and heard the splash of oars and the playful cries of the boaters. Then the path swung up a small hill to a flat place on top of a wide rock-ledge. There, at several stone tables, men sat bent over checkers and chess games. The players and the little knot of spectators standing behind each table were too absorbed in the game to notice Prema’s bright
sari
.

“You can see how popular chess is among us,” Prema whispered, nodding toward two Jalpuri men studying the black and white chess pieces on the stone board.

“They must be just learning,” Gully whispered back. “They don’t know the positions too well. This man’s white queen is on the wrong square. The queen belongs on her color. His queen shouldn’t be on a black square.”

Balbir corrected him. “That is how chess is played in India and Jaipur, Gully. The king is always on the player’s left, the queen on his right.”

A little embarrassed by his mistake, Gully turned away and looked around him. Tall scraggy bushes surrounded the top of the hillock. The tables were all several yards apart.

“Perfect place for a secret meeting,” he said in a low voice. “No one could possibly sneak up on you without being spotted. No one could overhear you talk from another table.”

“You think my father might have had an appointment here after his chess game?”

“I don’t know, Balbir. That’d be just a guess. But if you did want to meet somebody for a confidential talk, this would make an awfully good place—”

Prema’s gasp cut him short. “Look!” She was pointing to a chess table at the other end of the area. The boys gasped, too. Facing them was the unmistakable bulk of Dr. Jind’s new bodyguard!

Dhavata was seated at a table with a man in a dark suit who was half turned away from them. Gully could just make out, below the pulled-down brim of the soft black hat, the pale shadowy cheek of a skeleton-thin man with a thick mustache. Something about the man’s thinness, his ghostly complexion, the hunch of his shoulders—as if he were ready to spring—sent a shiver down Gully’s spine.

At that moment Dhavata looked up. He said something to his companion and immediately rose and strode toward them. The stranger swung about, and his eyes—piercing gray eyes—flicked over Gully. Then he turned away.

“So,” Dhavata said to Prema respectfully, bowing. “You have seen me.”

“What are you doing here?” Prema demanded. “I thought you went with my father to the UN, to guard him.”

“I did. But there he said he had no further need for me. He instructed me to return and look after you.”

“So you’ve been following me!”

“Only to see that nothing happens to you, on the ambassador’s orders. First I hid in the bushes,” Dhavata said with a shrug, “but I am, alas, too tall and broad. A lady who was walking her dog stared at me as if she were about to summon the police. So I seated myself at the chess table with that stranger, hoping you would not see me.”

Gully quickly looked over at the far table. The thin stranger was gone.

“And now that I have seen you, Dhavata?” Prema asked icily.

“I must suggest that we return to the embassy residence,” the big man said with another bow. There was something in his deep voice that discouraged thoughts of rebellion. “It is the wish of your father.”

At the embassy car Gully took leave of his friends. Prema got in, furious, and they all drove away.

Gully walked home thoughtfully.

That evening Inspector Queen said into the phone, “Just a moment, please,” and called out, “Gulliver! Telephone!”

Getting no answer, the inspector sighed and went to his grandson’s room. There, on his head, stood Gulliver Queen, back flat against the wall, arms folded across his chest, and his legs straight up.

“Telephone,” Inspector Queen managed to say.

Gully came down with a crash, scrambled to his feet, and faced his grandfather. “It’s what a yogi does—”

“Telephone, Gulliver.”

“It’s an exercise—”

“Are you going to keep the young lady waiting?”

“Who?”
Gully dashed into the other room.

“Hello! Prema?”

“Gully, listen. I think I’m on to something
important
,” Prema’s voice said cautiously in Gully’s ear. “I questioned my father, and he told me he absolutely did
not
order Dhavata to follow me! Why did Dhavata lie?”

A
S SOON
as Gully put down the receiver, he took out his notebook and entered the latest fact. Then he sat back in his uncle’s chair, reviewing Prema’s message. Then Gully crossed out the notation he had just made.

He got up from Ellery Queen’s desk, confident of his decision. He was sure that Dr. Jind, in denying that he had ordered Dhavata to follow Prema, had engaged in a slight diplomatic falsehood, to avoid alarming her further.