Karma (8 page)

He took a breath. “We pay for our light, our heat, for the water we drink, for what we eat and for our robes. And we pay a large amount for the land and buildings.”

“You’re buying the land?”

“Not I. Not Padmasvana. Mr. Braga.”

“Rexford Braga’s using the temple’s money to buy the land?”

Chupa-da nodded slowly. “It is the foolishness of the Western mind. In Bhutan we know that it is foolish to think that a little man can possess the earth. The earth and the rivers are like the air and the rain. But here men play a game with each other; they pretend they can possess the earth; they trade it back and forth, like children with trinkets.”

Before I could speak, Chupa-da added, “This land is a sought-after trinket. Mr. Braga has been forced to evict the realtor seeking it. Mr. Braga ordered him to stay away.”

We’d been over this ground before. I nodded. “And did he? Stay away, I mean.”

“At first, no. Each time the man came, a Penlop found Mr. Braga and Mr. Braga had the Penlops remove him. The realtor was always in the temple or inside the ashram. He was not hard to find.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“I do not know. I know him only to see him.”

Glancing back at the desk, I said, “About those papers…”

“Wait. I will think. He was part of a company. Will that help?”

“It might.”

“He is the age of Mr. Braga. He is not tall. He has little hair left. He has a very large nose and stomach.”

“His company?”

“It is called Comfort.”

“Okay, I’ll check him out.”

It was getting toward dusk as I drove across town. If I had been higher in the hills, I might have caught a glimpse of sunlight on the Bay; if I’d been in San Francisco, I could have seen the sun set over the Pacific. That thought always made me smile. When Nat and I had first come to Berkeley, he wanted to take me across the Bay of the Cliff House to see the sun set. Blasé, I’d asked why we should make a special effort when he had grown up on the East Coast and could have watched the sun set over the Atlantic anytime. Nat had been appalled when he’d realized I believed the sun set in the east.

But now, as dusk neared, my thoughts were on Comfort Realty. I hoped the offending realtor was an eager beaver and didn’t close shop at five. Another missing witness I didn’t need.

But Comfort Realty was an establishment even Lt. Davis would have approved of. Though the stores around were closing, it was brightly lit and, through the picture window, I could see the paunchy, balding realtor of Chupa-da’s description.

The man’s movements as he hurried to unlock the door belied his comfortable appearance. They were the nervous gestures of a nail biter. “Can I help you? Residential property?” He stared. “Oh, a policewoman. Nothing wrong, I hope?”

I followed him inside. The room was warm and the air stale. “I’m Officer Smith. I’m investigating the death of Padmasvana, the guru over by Telegraph.”

“That son of a bitch.” The realtor sunk into his chair and, grabbing a pen, began flicking the ballpoint in and out.

“Do you mean Padmasvana or Rexford Braga?”

“The whole lot of them. Pack of frauds, trapping kids with their mumbo jumbo.”

“I understand you were kept off the premises.”

“Yeah, can you believe it? That Braga thinks he’s big stuff, but he’s got no head for business.”

I waited.

“Well, lady, I’ll tell you what went down. See, that’s a good parcel of land there. There ain’t but one or two unimproved lots in all Berkeley. I could knock down that temple and the house in a couple of days. Cheap.”

“And build.”

A smile flickered briefly on the realtor’s face and departed as if unsure of its welcome. He riffled through a drawer and smacked a paper on the desk in front of me. On it was an artist’s conception of a ten-story apartment house with picture windows and wrought-iron railings, but essentially the shape of a refrigerator box. The sketch was complete, to the suggestion of plants in the upper units and lettering on the windows of the first floor.

One of Berkeley’s great charms was its old houses: Victorians; brown-shingles tucked under live oak trees. Even less-antique frame cottages, painted salmon and rust or brown and violet, had their appeal. I shuddered as I imagined this monstrosity in place of the ashram. It could wreck the entire neighborhood.

“See,” the realtor said, “we could all make a killing. Now look, lady, I’ve pulled no punches with these people. I told that fool Braga I’d pay him the market value for that lot. A hundred and twenty thousand is nothing to sneeze at. The guy’s a fool.”

“Did you talk to Padmasvana?”

“Nah. Wasn’t for lack of trying. Believe me. I tried to get those red-robed page boys to let me in to see him. Once, I buttonholed the other monk. But everybody kept the big boy covered.”

The phone rang. Nodding abruptly at me, he picked it up. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course I’m still interested. I haven’t been calling to talk weather. So what’s what? No, I got to have more. Ninety or nothing. Look, if I could swing an eighty-percent loan, you think I’d be dealing with you? You’re not as reliable as Bank of America, you know!” He listened a minute, sweat beading his brow. He glared at the tightly closed transom as if it were the person on the phone. “So check, already. You can tell them Vern Felcher told you to ask.” He slammed down the phone.

“Vern Felcher!”

“Yeah, lady, Vernon P. Felcher. Who’d you think you were talking to?”

Was I losing my touch? What else had I neglected to ask? “Are you any relation to Bobby Felcher?”

Felcher’s hands were still for the first time.

“Yeah, Bobby was my son. My only son. And if you’re going to ask how I feel about Paddy-what-sis getting his, I only wish I could have been the one who did it.”

“Is that why you kept going there?”

“To kill him? Make sense, wouldn’t it? But no. What I told you about the land is true. I want that land. I have a right to it. My son died there. He died because of them. I want to get that land and wipe out any trace of that bunch.” Felcher’s broad knuckles were white against the ruddiness of his hands. Sweat rolled down the side of his face, but he made no move to open the transom.

“Mr. Felcher, you said they were responsible for Bobby’s death.”

“Yeah. Those vultures. They lured him in there.”

“How?”

“I don’t know what they told him.”

“He lived with you?”

“Only about a couple of months. I’m divorced. His mother had him before he came to me. She took him to her hometown—Visalia—in the San Joaquin Valley. We’d lived there when Bobby was small. He liked the town, he said. But as soon as he got there, he went wild. And she was too damned weak and woolly-headed to keep on him. By the time I got him, he was already up to his ass in drugs.”

“What happened to Bobby after he came to stay with you?”

Felcher’s fingers tapped on the edge of the desk. “Like I said, Bobby was in no great shape when he came back. We’d all lived in Berkeley before the divorce, so he knew all sorts of no-goods up on Telegraph already. I tried to keep tabs on him, but that isn’t easy when you work the hours I do. And then he spent every other weekend with his mother, and she let him lie around and pop pills and God knows what.”

“So Bobby spent a good deal of time on Telegraph?” That supported what the Bobby Felcher file had said.

“Probably. He got home late. He slept late. I don’t know what he did while I was working. Supporting him and paying alimony wasn’t easy.” Felcher leaned toward me, his heavy features stiffening as he waited for my nod. “I kept after him to do something constructive. Not school or anything as out of reach as that. Jesus, is it too much for a man to hope his only son would think about going to college? I work my ass off in this realty company. Bobby could have walked in here. He could have made forty thousand a year working part-time. You think … No. Not real estate. Not college. The kid couldn’t even get through high school.”

“You said you’d pressed him to…”

“Anything. Anything constructive. I tried to get him to work out, go to a gym like I used to do”—he glanced down at his stomach—“when I was thinner. It wasn’t so long ago. I was built like Bobby—lanky. I exercised; I kept in shape. He did nothing but sit and stare and take pills.”

“And so he went to Self-Over?”

Felcher froze.

“I’ve already interviewed Garrett Kleinfeld.”

“Oh, yeah, well, he’s no prize, either. But at least there, with him, Bobby was getting some kind of exercise and he was associating with a decent class of people.”

“Oh?”

“You wonder how I know about Kleinfeld’s setup, huh? I followed Bobby. I promised him twenty bucks a week if he did something. Vern Felcher don’t spend money for nothing.”

“And did it help?”

“Maybe a little; who knows. Maybe it would have, but about that time, he got involved with those damned Chinks.”

“How’d he meet them?”

Felcher’s face tightened. “Who knows? They’re all over. What difference does it make?”

“So then…”

“Then he started going over there, and next thing he’s living there, and then he’s dead.” He slumped back in his chair.

“Do you feel they were responsible for his death?” I asked more softly, hoping my question would converge with his thoughts.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know everyone said he brought in the drugs. He probably did. But what kind of place allows that? What about that housemother, what was she doing?”

“The present housemother, Leah deVeau, wasn’t there then.”

Felcher leaned forward suddenly. “What? You…”

He seemed so startled and upset that I asked, “Did you think there had been a housemother then? Surely you knew there wasn’t—”

“I don’t care whether they had a housemother or—or not,” he said. “They had no business letting my son overdose. Look, I work sixty hours a week. I’m never home, and Bobby didn’t overdose here. What kind of a place are they running? Yeah, I’d like to wipe it off the earth.”

I made a show of jotting notes, giving him time to cool down. Wiping perspiration from my brow, I asked, “Mr. Felcher, where were you last night between eight and nine?”

“At the movies.”

“Which one?”

“The California. They were showing a Charles Bronson.”

“When did it start?”

“Jesus, lady, you think I remember that!” His fists tightened, and I thought of how easily that meaty hand could have shoved the knife into Padmasvana’s unprotected chest. “It was the first show. I was home by ten-thirty.”

“Fine.” I wrote: Cal—1st sh. Bron. The California Theater had four theaters in one. Felcher would have had to come nude to be remembered. “Mr. Felcher, as a realtor, what would you guess the payments on the property would be?”

He leaned over, riffling through another drawer. “Don’t need to guess,” he said in a calmer voice. “Ain’t no payments. Just property taxes.”

“No payments?” That certainly wasn’t what Chupa-da had told me, but perhaps he had mistaken the taxes for payments. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, lady, I’m sure. You don’t make it in real estate with maybes. And believe me, I checked this place out. Some old idiot joined the group, willed them the property, then died. Before you jump, the old girl dropped dead from heart failure, brought on by years of diabetes—no funny business. Believe me, I checked. Left the whole goddamned place to them. Every penny paid.”

“What would you guess utilities run in a place like that?”

Felcher flipped through his papers. “Last year, midwinter, sixty a month, including the temple. And most of that was for water. As far as I can see, they don’t heat the house, but they can’t keep the page boys from taking a leak.”

I leaned on the desk. “You’ve given their operation a lot of thought, Mr. Felcher. If the money they take in isn’t used for mortgage payments and utilities, where do you think it’s going?”

Felcher leaned in, placing a hand on my arm. “You’d better ask that stuffed sausage of an emcee that question.”

E
AGER AS
I
WAS
to have a stab at the “stuffed sausage,” I realized it had been seven hours since my practically nonexistent breakfast, and nearly five since Garrett Kleinfeld had filled me with longing for a Danish. In that time I had crossed Berkeley as regularly as a local bus driver. Surely there must be a more efficient way of investigating.

As I headed back to the station now I tried to organize what I had learned in those seven interviews. Heather had aspired to power in the name of her baby, but Chupa-da had beaten her to it. He had thrust himself in Padmasvana’s place with what could only be viewed as unseemly haste. And he had lied about making payments for the temple lands. Or had Braga lied to him? An interesting thought. Was Braga pocketing money and telling Padmasvana’s followers he was making monthly payments?

Braga? If indeed the property was in his name, with Padmasvana dead he could sell it to Felcher and clear one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

And Felcher. For motive, he had it all: the completion of his dream, his ten-story monstrosity; a huge profit; revenge for his son’s death.

I sighed as I got out of the car. In life Padmasvana had been an appealing young man. In death he’d become merely the means to satisfying a great deal of greed. And that led me back to the question of the temple’s finances.

But now I headed inside the station to see who was interested in food.

My preference would have been Howard. My second choice would have been Connie Pereira. What awaited me would have been my last choice—Lt. Davis.

He motioned me in as I came by the glass partition of his office. As always, the cubicle was spotless, the papers on his desk in geometric piles, his red-plaid thermos aligned with the edge of the desk.

“Sit down, Smith.”

I sat, taking out my note pad.

Placing his hands on the desk, he said, “So where are you with this guru thing? It’s already Thursday night. By tomorrow the papers are going to be through milking the temple and the guru. Then they’ll start on us. ‘Why haven’t the police found the killer? Are the cops harassing the temple?’ They’ll scream prejudice against Buddhists and Bhutanese, or maybe just plain incompetence. You see what I’m saying, Smith?”