Death in Mumbai (24 page)

After making Maria wait, Inspector Raorane called her in with all the warmth of an apologetic host. She came across as composed, confident, and willing to answer all questions. While Richard and Veronica waited outside, stressed about the elapsing hours, Maria and Inspector Raorane chatted away about her likes and dislikes, her life, her career, her ambitions. He found her rather well read. Like Emile she favoured books on Christianity, and also crime thrillers. He let her move around the room, answer phone calls. ‘Her body language suggested over-confidence—she would stroll around the place as if she was in command. At no point did I believe what she said, but I never let it show. It wasn't anything like an interrogation,' said the investigator. Since he had no evidence against her they let her go home. This would become a pattern over the next eight days.

Simultaneously Unit IX and the Malad police began to verify the nature of Maria's relationship with Neeraj, her past, as also her statements to the police. Choreographer Deepak Singh told them how she had come to stay at his house but spent all her nights with Neeraj. The Coffee House Nomads confirmed their public display of intimacy at the party at D'Ultimate, and Neeraj's roommate Haresh Sondarva told the police that Neeraj and Maria slept together. Her ex-boyfriends were scrutinized. Manish was questioned on the phone, Inspector Raorane debated summoning the well-known actor she had been involved with, and called Rakesh Maria for advice. ‘Does he have a direct bearing with Neeraj Grover's disappearance?' the senior officer asked.

‘At this point I am not sure, sir,' said Raorane.

‘In that case, let it be. The media will needlessly get something to chase. Let's instead focus on the other facts of the case.'

‘From everything we gathered about her, all that boys' talk about women with dark circles seemed to be true,' Inspector Raorane said grinning snarkily, briefly letting his guard down.

‘What about women with dark circles? You mean they should be using eye cream?' I responded flippantly.

‘That they are highly sexed.' He seemed genuinely puzzled as I looked at him incredulously. ‘Don't you women too have theories about men?'

When it was her turn to be questioned, Nisha Borilkar denied having called Neeraj over to Nishant Lal's place as Maria had claimed in her first statement. She'd spoken to Neeraj on the night of May 6, Nisha admitted, but it was to check his whereabouts and find out how he was doing. She also complained about Emile browbeating her at Malad police station where they had all gone to record their statement on May 8. ‘He kept telling me to stop lying and accept that I had called Neeraj over, that I had told him naya maal aaya hai,' she told Inspector Raorane. ‘Nothing of the sort had happened.'

Each night, the Unit IX boys got together over dinner to discuss the day's proceedings, relishing the prospects of a complex case. It was to become their daily ritual, analysing, summing up, planning the next day's strategy. They were not entirely sure about Maria's involvement in Neeraj's disappearance, but of the available people she seemed the
most promising. It was a game of wearing her down: she would come with Richard and Veronica, be made to wait, sometimes for hours, before being called in for the cat-and-mouse questioning. Only the persistence with which Inspector Raorane questioned her belied his conversational tone, reminding her that this was no drawing room conversation. But while Maria kept her nerve—‘she was a tough cookie,' admitted Rakesh Maria—Richard was beginning to lose his.

‘They would call us at nine in the morning, letting us go only past midnight,' he told me, still harrowed by the memory of those nine days. ‘They kept asking my sister Roni and I what we knew of Moni's life in Mumbai. I remember getting angry, it was just a missing complaint after all and with what authority were they interrogating us and to this extent!

‘The cops kept telling us that if Monica knew something she should reveal it fast and that we should convince her to do so, and we kept asking her why the police was hounding her, but all she kept saying was, “If there was anything, I would have told you.” We thought an evil eye had befallen our family and we told ourselves, let us go through this with grace.'

When I told Inspector Raorane what Richard had said about being in the dark, he let out a cynical laugh. ‘You believe him, that the family did not know what had happened, hanh?' His trademark ‘hanh' conveyed a multitude of emotions.

Inspector Raorane, taking his cue from the Susairaj family's strong Christian ties, changed tack, often leading
his discussion with Maria to a religious plane, talking to her about the afterlife and doomsday. ‘To be able to speak on all this I must say I am grateful for my education,' he said. ‘Daily main use apna cassette sunaata tha.'

‘Why do Christians go for confession?' Inspector Raorane would ask Maria. ‘So we can go to the Almighty with open hands and hearts. But we're pawns on a chessboard, the Almighty makes us commit things, doesn't he?'

She responded to that with a serene smile. And the last thing he said to her on the night before he let her go, ‘Maria, we all have to die and face God, think of yourself as a human being who is a part of God.'

‘Good night, sir.'

Lieutenant Vasanth Kumar was in deep trouble. Against his better judgement, he had dropped his roommate Emile to the airport in the middle of the night so he could fly out to Mumbai. Emile had not taken permission to leave the base, and despite Vasanth's repeated pleas had not called his course officer the next day to let him know of his absence. ‘Just tell him that I am SIQ [sick in quarantine],' Emile had casually tossed the instruction over his shoulder as he ran into the airport to board the 3.45 am Air India flight 691 to Mumbai. ‘You better call him before he asks me, otherwise I'll be jacked,' Vasanth shouted back as the automatic doors to the airport closed on Emile's receding back.

He had tried to make himself invisible in class the next morning, a difficult task in a large room with a handful of men. ‘Where's Lieutenant Emile Jerome?' The absence had not escaped course officer Vishal Singh's hawk eye. Vasanth Kumar had no option but to lie. Emile was SIQ, he said.

‘With whose permission? Please summon him from the room.'

Vasanth left the classroom and tried to call Emile in Mumbai. His phone was switched off. Bloody hell. It was just past nine on May 7 when he got through to Maria and spoke to Emile. ‘You didn't call the course officer as I told you to. He's asking me about you now.'

‘Yaar,' Emile was cool, ‘I tried to; his phone was unreachable.'

‘What are you doing? Please call him now, I told you I'll be jacked otherwise,' Vasanth recalled his words before the police.

But Emile did not call the course officer that day or the next, and Vasanth Kumar was asked to give a written explanation for making a false statement to his superior. An enquiry was initiated into his and Emile's conduct, and an adverse note sent to his personal file. To add to Vasanth's woes Emile's father arrived unexpectedly in Kochi on the evening of May 8 demanding to see his son. Emile should have been back on base that day, but had still not returned. He called to say that he had missed his flight. Vasanth had to spend an entire evening placating Jerome Joseph.

Really, even by navy standards, there were limits to what a course mate could do, Vasanth thought, as he went back into his room on the morning of May 9 only to find Emile sprawled on the bed in his shorts, sleeping like the
dead. From that day till the 21st of the month—the day Sub-Inspector Mahesh Tawade reached Kochi to arrest him—Emile displayed no untoward behaviour, said his superiors and course mates. ‘If anything he seemed calmer and relaxed,' Vasanth Kumar told the police. ‘When I asked him the reason for that, he said, “My problems with my girlfriend have been resolved. I've decided that by year end we will get married, regardless of what my parents have to say.”' Back in Mumbai, Maria too was displaying the same steeliness under interrogation.

Emile focused in class and on his swimming, he ate well, and spoke to Maria in hushed tones for long durations, several times a day. Lovebirds! Vasanth Kumar watched Emile, feeling somewhat forlorn as he thought of his own long-distance relationship with his wife. There was just one inexplicable change Vasanth Kumar noticed in his roommate after he returned from Mumbai. Emile had taken to getting up at 4.30 every morning to read the Bible.

After four days of continuous mind games, Maria was beginning to trip up. Inspector Raorane had been using his favourite ploy, one that had served him well during an earlier investigation into the murder of a businessman called Pradeep Jain at Dahisar. His suspect and eventual culprit had been the murdered man's wife's lover. ‘I'd call him to my office every day and ask him to help me with the probe. ‘What do you think happened?' I kept asking. It was the same with Maria. I asked her to draw up possible
scenarios of what could have happened to Neeraj. She kept saying, “I don't know. I know nothing.” But if you keep asking the same questions time after time without letting up you may get a clue. The frustration builds up, not just for the interrogator but also for the other person and they can slip up. Pradeep Jain's wife's lover eventually confessed to killing him and even in this case, I began to get a sense that apart from her someone else was also involved in Neeraj's disappearance.'

Like fast bowlers, good investigators too hunt in pairs. Inspector Raorane pulled in his colleague, Sub-Inspector Sagar Shivalkar, into the interrogation sessions. Shivalkar, a tall man with a pleasant, impassive face has the enviable knack for saurian stillness. He could be in a room and be totally unobtrusive. He had a mild-mannered style of questioning, as if he just wanted to hear some stories, but he never missed a note. It also helped that Shivalkar had worked with the Economic Offences Wing, where he had dealt with white-collar suspects. ‘Once they [the suspects] secure themselves against a third degree, you can't run a pandu investigation on them, hanh. So how do you overcome that? By being equally intelligent, equally patient, and equally crooked,' said Inspector Raorane, elaborating on Shivalkar's qualities.

Together they played good cop, bad cop with Maria. She had told them that on May 7 she had called up Nishant Lal around noon to tell him that Neeraj had left his phone behind. Later she and Emile had taken a taxi to Dadar at 4–4.30 pm to go shopping and romancing. A basic check on her statement, says Inspector Raorane, threw up many discrepancies.

The first breakthrough in the case came from the phone records, when the police traced the one call that was answered from Neeraj's sister Shikha's phone between 4 and 5 pm on the day he went missing. It was the only one of the hundred and thirty calls that the Grovers had made to Neeraj that day which was answered. The call was traced to Andheri, whereas Maria had said at that time she and Emile were at Dadar. A text message from scriptwriter Sumit Arora to Neeraj, received at 7.36 pm, showed the phone location at Dahisar. Neeraj had commissioned some work from Arora, a freelancer, and he had texted him back to say that the assignment was complete.

‘So this was our strategy. I would be sitting and chatting with her, and Sagar would just pop his head into the room to say, a call on Neeraj's phone has been traced to Andheri, and he would leave right after while I would continue talking as before.' Inspector Raorane recounted with relish their efforts to spook Maria into telling the truth. Maria and Emile were actually at Kiran Shreyans's house in Andheri to borrow his car at the time, but she had told the police they were in Dadar. That's why Neeraj's sister's call location had showed up in Andheri.

Maria's second slip-up was when she told the police that she and Emile had travelled to Dadar in a taxi. For Dheeraj Solitaire watchman Satish Kumar Singh distinctly remembered the blue-grey Santro parked in the compound that evening. ‘I had just come back from a tea break and I saw a car parked that was not from our building, so I walked up towards it and saw the new tenant in 201 come down with a man, and put two suitcases in the boot of the
car. The two of them went up again and returned with a huge plastic bag which they both were holding from the sides and which they struggled to put in the back seat,' he told the police. ‘Maria madam saw me watching them and asked me how I was doing as she got into the driver's seat. She then introduced me to the man sitting in the passenger's seat in the front.'