Karma (20 page)

Looking up at the benevolent expression in the picture, I wondered what I expected it to tell me. What did I think I would find in this phony temple? Had the knife been in here all along?

Bobby Felcher had died more than a year ago. After his death, the department had turned the temple and ashram inside out looking for drugs. If the knife had been here, it would have been found. It would have been mentioned in the report, along with the gun Braga kept downstairs in his desk drawer.

Then had Bobby taken the knife to his mother’s? He’d spent every other weekend with her. Should I contact the Visalia police—have them check out Elizabeth Felcher? Would she still live in Visalia? Would she remember what her son had kept in his room nearly two years ago? Whatever, it was certainly going to take the case well past the Sunday morning deadline set by Lt. Davis.

I slumped back on the seat. Felcher—the key had to be Vernon Felcher. Any of them could have killed Paul Lee, but why kill Felcher?

I came up with no new answers. Padmasvana’s picture smiled down at me.

Three murders—Bobby Felcher, Paul Lee, Vernon Felcher. Leah, Joe and Heather witnessed Paul placing his confession in the strongbox. Vern—and therefore Kleinfeld if he were interested—was sure Paul killed Bobby. So they were all sure Paul killed Bobby, killed him competently, almost in a businesslike manner, just as he himself was killed. Bobby and Paul, disposed of.

But Vern Felcher was different. This death was a crime of vengeance.

Who hated him enough to smash a lamp into his head again and again, till it caved in his skull? Who—The candles went out. The room was black. “Who’s there? What are you doing?” I looked at the stage, but I could make out nothing.

“Who are you? How did you get up there?”

No answer. But there was only one way anyone could have got there without my noticing—through the trapdoor. Someone had come into the basement, moved quietly past Braga’s office and come up through the trapdoor under the altar.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

Footsteps broke the silence. Instinctively, I crouched down. Only a faint light from the windows diminished the blackness. I could barely see two rows in front of me.

Feet smacked to the floor. Whoever it was had jumped from the stage. He—or she—was down here with me.

“Who are you?”

In the silence, I heard a click—the gun Braga kept in his drawer?

“Is that you, Braga?”

Still, the silence. Stooping, I slithered between the rows of seats, moving slowly, trying to keep my leather shoes from squeaking on the cement floor. I thought longingly of the doors—the one to the basement and the main one—but once I opened either, any light behind them would outline me. I would make an easy target for the killer.

My mind raced: the knife, Felcher’s allergy; the phone call and Felcher’s exasperation as he said, “Don’t give me that self-sacrificing crap again.” The exasperation that comes from years of… self-sacrifice.

Taking a breath, I said, “I know who you are. I know why you killed them.”

Feet shuffled, feet in rubber-soled shoes. They had moved down the aisle, halfway to the door.

“You called Felcher tonight. You got him to the tepee and smashed his head in.”

I waited. Silence.

“You hit him again and again. You paid him back for his greed, his neglect.”

The footsteps moved toward me. I slid farther down between the seats. “You planted the story about Felcher being in the temple when Paul was killed.”

I waited, aware that I was pinpointing my location with my voice. More softly I said, “There were a couple of things wrong with that story. Felcher wouldn’t have been familiar with Padmasvana’s routine. He wouldn’t have known when Padmasvana faced the altar. He wouldn’t have known when to be there. And Felcher wasn’t on our list of people in the audience. But you knew Padmasvana’s routine. You had seen the ceremonies, time and time again.”

Footsteps came from the direction of the altar. My hand jerked to my holster, poised. I couldn’t talk and listen, too. But I needed to have the killer make a move.

“As soon as he learned from me that you were the housemother, Felcher began to suspect you’d killed Paul because of Bobby. That’s why he turned up and all but accused you at that memorial ceremony. And once he realized what the murder weapon was, he was sure…

The breeze tickled my neck. The prayer wheels swished in the forced air. There were no more footsteps.

“Paul killed Bobby, and then he was ready to abandon the temple. Felcher sent Bobby here to be killed and then he planned to wipe out the temple—to destroy the only thing that remained in your life.”

The footsteps moved in. They were about five rows away, close enough for even a bad shot to hit me.

“Felcher, who you told me was allergic—”

The gun fired.

The bang resounded. The flash lit the room.

I ran, leaped on the squatting body, pushing it down. I hit out against the arms. The gun clattered to the floor. Panting, I said, “Okay, Leah.”

H
ANDCUFFING
L
EAH TO THE
leg of the altar table and leaving her to consider the rights I had just read her, I called the station. I could have questioned her there, but somehow the end had to come here, in the temple.

Leah appeared quite calm when I got back. I adjusted the handcuffs and sat across from her on a pillow. Above us the giant picture of Padmasvana fluttered in the breeze from the fans. Oblivious of human concerns, the prayer wheels rotated.

“Leah, I know you are Elizabeth deVeau.”

She looked up, surprised.

“You slipped and left that name when you called me at the station. And I know you’re also Elizabeth Felcher, Vernon’s ex-wife, Bobby’s mother. Was deVeau your maiden name?”

She nodded.

“You pretended not to know Felcher, but you were the one who told me about his allergies. You described your ex-husband well enough for me to see the connection to the man with terrible hay fever whose sneezing made so much noise.

She nodded again but made no move to speak. “Bobby brought the knife to your house in Visalia, the place he thought of as home. Did you bring it here to kill Paul?”

“No!” She shuddered, as if startled by the sound of her own voice. “Well, not specifically. I guess unconsciously I did plan to use it. But I didn’t even know Paul was the killer. I wasn’t sure until I saw him put the confession in the strongbox.” She pushed a shock of gray hair out of her face. “Oh, I knew Bobby had been murdered. I knew it wasn’t a simple overdose because of his fear of needles, but I didn’t consciously come here to kill.”

I said nothing, and I could tell from her eyes that she was moving into herself, speaking for the relief it brought. I was fading into the background for her.

“I came to Berkeley to see where Bobby died, really, just to see. I needed that, to grieve for that portion of his life I’d had no part in. Or that’s what I thought. I was fooling myself; I know that, now.” She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. Despite her gray hair and that face that could never have been pretty, she looked, in the pale light of the altar, like a young girl talking about things she only half understood.

“I knew Bobby hadn’t overdosed—because of the needle. I wanted to go to the police, but Vern convinced me—he always convinced me—it would do no good. He convinced me I would just look like a hysterical middle-aged woman.

“So I came to Berkeley. I realized that the person who murdered Bobby had to be someone in the temple. The Penlops’ lives were too circumscribed for an outsider to be able to wander in, give a boy some drug, wait for it to work and then…” Her voice quavered, but she forced the words out. “And then push a needle in his arm. I realized that, but still, I probably would have gone back to Visalia, certain there was nothing I could do.

“But then, my first night in Berkeley, I saw an ad. The temple was looking for a housemother. For some reason, when I applied I gave my maiden name.” She half shrugged and leaned back against the altar, as if the rest were obvious.

I said, “But you were here quite a while before you killed Paul.”

She looked up, surprised; she had nearly forgotten I was here. “At first I wanted revenge right away, but I didn’t know which of them killed Bobby. I considered killing them all, but—she stared directly at me as if soliciting reassurance—“I’m not a ghoul. I’m not crazy. So I waited, gathering evidence. But I wasn’t sure it was Paul till he wrote that confession he put in the strongbox. He just slapped it in there. I could barely keep silent! He put it in there and they watched. Bobby didn’t matter to any of them! He was no more than a piece of paper they could use to control each other.”

“And?”

“Then I had to decide on the time and the place.”

“And you killed Vernon because he sent Bobby here?”

“Yes.” The word was barely audible.

For a motive, it was plenty, but somehow not enough. “Leah,” I said, “other people have had sons killed and not killed in return. You don’t seem like a violent person. You don’t live by ‘an eye for an eye…’ ”

She looked up with an expression of gratitude. “No. It wasn’t just for Bobby. It was for me, too. It’s funny. Being housemother was something I was good at. It’s the first real job I’ve had. I’ve been through bad times—when Vernon left, when I learned of Bobby’s death. I’ve had nothing, no family, barely enough to live on, nothing to hope for. I thought about suicide—many times—and then I took this job. I succeeded here. I was needed. I was doing something important.”

“And then Paul was going to leave and take all that away.”

“Yes, and then Vernon. He sent Bobby here to die, and then because he could make money, he was going to toss the other boys onto the street. And me with them.”

“And?”

“Well, after I’d killed Paul, killing wasn’t foreign to me. It’s rather like having your first auto accident.” She smiled wanly. “I called Vern—he tried to put me off—but I told him, definitely, like I’d never done before, to meet me in the tepee—and he came. He knew I’d killed Paul, of course, because of Bobby’s knife, but Paul’s death suited him, so he kept quiet. He was closer to getting the property.” She laughed. “I guess Vern figured the city wouldn’t like his getting rich because his ex-wife killed someone.

“Anyway, he stomped into the tepee like he already owned the property. He demanded—like he’d done all those years! He’d taken my youth, my son, and now what little I’d been able to scrape together to pass as a life he was ready to kick aside without even seeing it. I picked up the lamp and brought those years down on his head.” She hesitated, then said softly, “You see, don’t you, why it was so much easier to kill him.”

I stood up, looking away from the eyes that beseeched me to understand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She was staring at my forehead, at the bruise. “Not about them, about that. But I did have to hit you, to keep you from searching Mr. Braga’s office and finding the box with Padma’s note. I saw Padma write that note, but I never knew where Mr. Braga kept the strongbox. I just assumed it would be in his office. And if you found the note and started making connections…” Her voice trailed off.

Then, looking up, she added, “I did leave the light on, so you wouldn’t be lying on Mr. Braga’s floor in the dark.”

There’d been the usual—photographs, fingerprints, Leah deVeau’s formal statement. And there’d been the press, the report to Lt. Davis, the questions from the other beat men: no one goes home at 11:00 p.m. when a murder is cleared up; everyone wants the word first hand. And normally I would have been delighted to give it.

But now I just felt tired. And sad.

When the others had cleared out and the nightshift men had torn themselves away to cruise their beats, Howard was still in my chair.

“You’re beginning to look like a fixture there,” I said.

He grinned. “Maybe you won’t be needing it now. This has been a big case to break. Like I told you, it’ll look good on your record. It was good experience.”

Thinking of Leah and of Vern Felcher and of Paul Lee lying in front of the altar, I said, “Maybe, but it’s not a pleasant way to climb.”

“Still…”

Looking down at Howard, at the abnormal seriousness of his face, I realized it was a sacrifice for him to discuss the advantage I had gained while I made little of it. I lopped off a chunk from my lump of trust and said, “Thanks. Buy you a drink?”

Now the grin returned. “Just one?”

“No, not just one.”

He stood up. “And tomorrow, after you’ve read the newspaper reports of your derring-do, Officer Smith, what are you going to do to celebrate?”

I glanced down at my stack of unanswered phone messages. “The first thing is to go to Cost Plus and buy a set of their best stainless.”

Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book,
Karma
(1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published
Pious Deception
, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.