Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) (6 page)

Sarge decided that someday, when he was old and writing his memoirs, he would write a special chapter for private detectives. And the first tip he would give would be: have a television set in the office and keep it turned on.

Since Friday, the retired New York City police sergeant had been working on Angelo Alcetta’s wife. The first time Tracy had seen her, he had realized that neither Alcetta nor the photograph he had gotten of her lied. She was a breathtakingly beautiful woman. That was the good news. The bad news seemed to be that she was as straight as a tight clothesline.

Every morning, she went from her apartment to some Indian cult place called the House of Love down in the East Village. Sarge had thought that she was just some dippy follower, but that wasn’t true. She was some kind of official there, in charge of membership and training. Angelo Alcetta apparently hadn’t known that, but anyone who wanted to join up had to talk to Angelo’s wife first.

The woman was at the headquarters all day every day and at night she called a cab and went to her West Side apartment and stayed there all night.

When he had first seen the name “The House of Love,” Sarge had expected that the woman would be a little crazy, some bored housewife with hot pants and a cold husband, but that hadn’t checked out. Everyone he had talked to who knew her had only kind words to say about her.

From the doorman of her apartment building, whose thirst was stronger than his sense of discretion, Sarge learned that Mrs. Alcetta didn’t call herself Mrs. Alcetta anymore; she was now Gloria Charterman. She had no male visitors and only occasional female visitors, and as far as the doorman knew, no one ever spent the night and no one shared the apartment with Mrs. Alcetta-Charterman. Its rent was eleven hundred dollars a month and it was always paid on time.

Sarge hadn’t ventured into the House of Love itself, but he had seen Angelo’s wife a number of times as she went in and out of the health-food store next to the headquarters. She looked happy and smart, as well as beautiful, and not as if she were grieving for her lost love with her husband. And who, in her right mind, would? Sarge wondered.

As far as he could tell after only a day and a half on the job, she was what she appeared to be: an ex-housewife who had had a religious experience, left her boring stupid husband—and who wouldn’t?—and was now ass over tea kettle in love with some swami’s cult.

The swami was a different matter. Sarge didn’t have much to report to Angelo Alcetta that he might care about, so he thought he would pad his report. He considered going to the New York City Public Library, but instead he stopped in at this dentist’s office where every copy of
Time
and
Newsweek
for the past two years were kept and he looked through their indexes for anything on the Swami Salamanda.

There was plenty, and as he read the stories, Sarge had a growing sense of annoyance with himself, a feeling that he hadn’t kept himself up to date with what was going on in the world. Was that a sign of getting old? he wondered. When you cut down on the number of things you paid attention to and stayed interested in?

Salamanda was called the Guru of Sex. As best as anyone could tell, he was forty-five years old and had come to the United States from India about two years earlier. His message, which had made an immediate hit, was simple: “More sex, with more people, is the way to break the psychic bonds that trap us in lives of misery. One will only be truly fulfilled and enlightened when he makes himself as one with the greatest pleasure the great creator has given all of us—sex.” The swami went on to say, “There is no unwholesome sex, just unwholesome attitudes on the part of people who are afraid of sex.”

Salamanda had toured the United States preaching his message, and the converts came by the hundreds.
Newsweek
pointed out that it would be easy to think these converts were kids, teenagers rebelling at their home life and the restrictions placed on them by their parents. But, the magazine said, while it was true that the Salamanda movement had a full complement of pimply-faced nerds who joined up hoping to score sex, the real core of Salamanda’s strength was older people—the parents, not the children—which led the magazine to believe that there were a lot of unhappy people out there.

“And only one of them married to Hilda,” Sarge mumbled under his breath, thinking of his wife and her damned stupid surprise plan to take him on a boat cruise.

As for the rest of his message, Swami Salamanda didn’t seem to have one. He talked about a couple of breathing tricks, meditation, hyperventilation, what
Time
magazine called “the same mixed bag of take-a-deep-breath-and-smile philosophical techniques.” The core of everything was sex. It was the be-all and end-all of Salamanda’s movement.

Both magazines indicated there was no way to tell if Salamanda was getting rich on his movement. He stayed in hotels when he traveled, and when he was in New York, he lived in a small apartment in the same building as his House of Love headquarters. But he was building. Near the small town of Butler, Pennsylvania, Salamanda was building a commune that would be called the City of Love. The area was sealed off and not open for inspection, but a couple of flyovers in a rented helicopter had convinced
Newsweek
that this would be the commune to end all communes, with a central mansion with minarets, swimming pools, tennis courts, stables, a private air landing strip, a warehouse-size garage that already held seven Rolls-Royces, and small apartment units that looked as if they could house more than a thousand people.

Who would live there?
Time
pointed out that many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had already pledged to turn over all their worldly goods to the People of Love, as Salamanda’s movement was known, and take up residence in the new city devoted to pleasure.

Salamanda’s own city, built with the donations of the faithful. This raised some eyebrows, but the swami was not reluctant to defend himself. He appeared on one popular morning talk show whose moderator had a reputation for being a tough interviewer, and wound up tying the moderator in knots. Where the moderator was smirking and smarmy, the swami was direct, caustic, and unfazed.

“Don’t you find the emphasis on sex in your love-is-all movement…well, unhealthy and unreligious?” the emcee asked, rolling his eyes as if sharing a deep secret with the members of his audience.

Salamanda, wearing a white robe and sitting on a cushion on stage, said, “The greatest expression of physical pleasure given to us by God is the sexual act. We see nothing wrong in partaking of God’s provided pleasure through that act. We pity all those who are so repressed, so dried up of body, soul, and mind that they cannot so participate. And we pity them even more because in their frustration, they try to stop others—those who can believe and can practice that love is all—these ineffectuals try to prevent others from believing and practicing, and we pity them and we pray for them to the great god who gave us all, including the act of love.” He paused and looked at the emcee. “We pray for you too. And for your wife.”

“You mentioned God. Who is God?” the emcee asked.

“Who would you want him to be?” Salamanda said.

Smugly, the emcee said. “There are many views of God in our Judeo-Christian world. Jesus, Jehovah, Brahma, Buddha. Which is your god?”

“You omitted some,” Salamanda said. Then, for five minutes, he recited the names of other gods, as if to underscore the ignorance of the TV-show host. When he was done, he looked up and smiled.

“Whichever of these names you choose to give to God, that name is pleasing to us. But know you this: that each of these gods has followers and that, we think, must please that god. But for a god’s followers to carry on, a god’s followers must procreate. Therefore, does it not mean that all these gods approve of the sexual act, and of sexual congress? Because if they did not, they would be saying to the man who follows them: no more, stop, cease, stop living, be gone and be dead. That is not a living god who speaks to living people. We share with everyone’s view of god the idea that god is love and his people are love and he has made them to love. And we practice what god preaches.”

According to the magazines, it was no contest. The talk-show host was reduced to falling back on the fear of spreading AIDS to discredit Salamanda.
Time
’s television critic pointed out that in Swami Salamanda America was seeing a new kind of guru. In the past, he said, the gurus who had come to America to shill their wares—most of them from India—were a decidedly foreign commodity. They looked funny. Most were bearded, short, and squat. They spoke funny, some of them with such heavily accented English that it couldn’t be understood by anyone but Peter Sellers. Salamanda looked like the start of the second wave. His English—which had an Indian accent only when he chose to use one—was better than most Americans’, and instead of looking like a foreigner, he looked like a handsome British actor wearing tea stain and doing a remake of
Four Feathers
. This was a guru who used television for his own ends instead of being victimized by it the way most were.

A final paragraph in one story wondered about Salamanda’s own sex life and a reporter was able to ask him about it in a written question. He got a written reply: “I have always held that we should do sex, not talk about it,” Salamanda wrote. The reporter conceded that there was not even a hint of sex scandal about Salamanda personally but pointed out that if the urge ever hit him, there was certainly no shortage of beautiful, willing female disciples standing by.

Sarge borrowed the copies of
Time
and
Newsweek
and took them to the stationery store on the corner, where he photocopied the stories about Salamanda for twenty-five cents a page. He had found out in life that good reports weren’t really as important as thick reports.

Sunday morning, he had followed Gloria Alcetta from her apartment to the House of Love, where a sign was posted on the front door: CLOSED MEETING TODAY.

He had returned to his office over Bogie’s Restaurant and had called the Salamanda headquarters and asked to speak to Gloria.

“You mean Sister Glorious?” a male voice asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. She is working today with new members. She will not be available until late this evening.”

“Thank you.” Sarge hung up, feeling sure that Gloria Alcetta wouldn’t be leaving the House of Love, and started to typewrite—with two fingers—a report for Alcetta. He doubted that the young moron would ask him to keep following his wife when he had obviously found nothing of any worth. But who knew? Maybe all the talk about the Swami of Sex might get Alcetta mad enough to pay Sarge some more good money to follow his wife from apartment to office and back to apartment again.

One thing he suspected. The fact that Gloria was now using the name “Charterman,” instead of Alcetta, would make him furious. He made that one of the cornerstones of his report.

He finished it up with a few large questions:

Does Salamanda approve of bizarre sex practices as has often been alleged?

Does the woman who now calls herself Charterman participate in these dangerous practices?

Are there other criminal activities under way at the Salamanda headquarters, and if so, does the woman who now chooses to call herself Charterman know anything about them? Or is she just a dupe?

It is impossible to answer these questions at this time. More surveillance work might, however, produce the answers.

Sarge snapped the manila folder shut, after rereading, with a certain literary pride, his last couple of sentences. If that didn’t get Alcetta to say continue the investigation, he didn’t know what would.

He locked the file in a drawer in his desk, and to celebrate its completion, he went downstairs to Bogie’s to drink and to await the arrival of Trace and Chico from Las Vegas.

And that was when he decided he had to get a television set for his office.

Bogie’s had no television, but playing softly over the stereo system was music from one of the soft mush-music stations that abounded in New York City. At the stroke of the hour, the news came on, and the first item reported that Swami Salamanda, the controversial sex guru who had been attracting thousands of followers nationwide, was poisoned today in his East Village headquarters.

Police called the death an apparent homicide and said that Salamanda appeared to have been killed by an exotic poison that had been painted on some roses. Salamanda traditionally ate the rose petals as part of a welcoming ceremony for new members.

The news report said that Salamanda’s movement had been preparing for a nationwide rally in New York City the following Sunday. From there, as many as a thousand were expected to drive in caravans to Western Pennsylvania, where Salamanda’s new national headquarters—the City of Love—had been completed and was ready for occupancy.

Sarge cuffed down his beer and left, annoyed at himself for not having a television set so he could have heard that news bulletin earlier. How stupid would he look if he had called Alcetta and said he had completed the report on the man’s wife, and somehow forgot to mention that his wife’s guru had just been murdered.

He got into his rusty old black Ford sedan and drove downtown toward the Salamanda headquarters. With luck, he would be done and back in time to meet Chico and Trace at his office.

It was just the way Chico had feared it would be. The meal on the plane was shish-kebab, and after it was placed in front of Trace and he had examined it, he called the stewardess over.

“This is a pretty poor excuse for shish-kebab,” he said.

“It’s one of our most popular meals, sir,” she said. “Perhaps you should try it before you decide you don’t like it.” She was a statuesque blonde who had always been pretty and so had always been used to giving orders.

“I’m sure it’ll
taste
all right,” Trace said, “but…”

“Yes?”

“It only has
altinci
shishes on the kebab. I think to be a real shish-kebab, it ought to have least
yedinci
shishes on the kebab.”

The stewardess looked at the plastic dinner plate in front of Trace, then questioningly at Chico, who was busily eating.

Chico gulped and swallowed. “Turkish,” she explained. “He’s counting in Turkish for you.”

“That’s right,” Trace said. “Turkish is like my second skin, a language I’m so familiar with. What I said was that there are only six shishes on this kebab and there ought to be at least seven. That’s what it means,
altinci
and
yedinci
. When I first started flying, stewardesses knew a lot of languages. Almost every one of them knew Turkish.”

“That’s ’cause when you started flying, one of the scheduled stops was the Tower of Babel,” Chico said.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the stewardess said. “I don’t know Turkish.”

“Want to learn?” Trace asked. “It’s easy. Just repeat after me.
Birinci, ikinci, ucuncu, dorduncu, besinci
. That’ll get you up to five. Basically that’s all you need in Turkey. Except Istanbul. You have to go up to seven or eight in Istanbul. Unless you’re buying a woman. Then it’s back to five. If you pay more than
besinci
for a woman, you’ve been taken.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” the stewardess said, backing away nervously. “Let me know how you enjoy the meal.”

“On a scale of
birinci
to
onuncu
, I’d make it a
besinci
,” Trace said.

“Will you stop?” Chico said.

“All right,” Trace conceded. The stewardess left. Trace took a piece of meat from the shish-kebab, chewed it for a while, and said, “I overrated it. It’s only a
dorduncu
.”

“Good. More for me,” Chico said, and switched her empty plate with his.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m changing my whole life for you. Don’t you think you can change your eating habits for me?”

“Sure. What do you want me to change?”

“Eat less.”

“Why? Is America running out of food?”

“Any day now, if you keep going,” he said.

Chico patted his arm reassuringly. “Don’t worry about a thing. When America goes empty, we’ll just move to Turkey. With your extensive knowledge of the language, I’m sure we’ll get along. And it is the perfect language for you, Trace, because you are a real turkey. Are you sure Sarge knows we’re coming?”

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“You did. That’s why I’m asking you again.”

“Sarge knows we’re coming. He is delighted. He is doubly delighted that I may join his firm. He is triply—is triply a word? or is it triplily?—anyway, he’s delighted threefold that you may also join the firm. He says you provide the missing ingredient to our success as a detective agency.”

“Brains?” she said.

“No, money.”

“Fat chance,” Chico said, “that you two ding-dongs will ever see a penny of mine. Did he really say that?”

“No. He said you’d provide the female touch. Those little feminine wiles that disarm a suspect without ever letting him know that he’s a suspect, and then you finally have his head on your shoulder and he’s blubbering, telling you how he stove in Aunt Dilys’ head with an ax just to get his hands on her collection of stuffed mice.”

“But I get to carry a gun, right? Can I shoot the fucker?”

“Is he our client?” Trace asked.

“Yes,” Chico said.

“Did he pay his bill yet?”

“Yes.”

“Shoot the fucker,” Trace said.