Murder in Mumbai (15 page)

“Drive.”

“Where?”

“Doesn't matter. Just away from here.”

“I figured you weren't inviting me to lunch.”

“You got that right. I don't want my family involved in this
jhanjhat.
” (Trouble.)

“What
jhanjhat
?”

“After we spoke the other day, I decided to ask around about Eagle Services.”

“What did you learn?”

“No one was willing to talk.”

“But?”

“You're right. There is a but. There were rumors the firm had been hired to carry out a hit.”

“Who by?”

“I don't know. No one was willing to discuss that.”

“Who was the target?”

“Now there I can help you. But you've got to promise me that nowhere does my name enter this if it goes any further. No matter what. I stay out of it.”

“Shakil, come on, you know me. We're old friends.”

“Yes, but you're also a
chooth
who doesn't know what he's dealing with. For you everything is a bloody joke. A bloody story.”

Jay didn't say anything.

“So if you want me to tell you what's going on, you need to promise me that you won't involve me in any way.”

“Dude, you have my word.”

“OK. I asked around about any jobs Eagle may have been involved in. Of course, no one wanted to talk. Who wants to take a
panga
with someone like Chhota Mirchi? But then I heard a rumor.”

“Who from?”

“Never mind that. He's reliable.”

“OK.”

“So I heard a rumor—a tip if you will—that Eagle had been contracted to kill that woman.”

Jay felt his heart race.

“Liz Barton?”

“Yes. That's the one.”

* * *

After Jay dropped Shakil Shah off, he drove back toward the newsroom. Without really expecting to, he had now become fully involved in the Barton killing. Jay was so lost in his thoughts that he drove toward the newsroom oblivious of the noise and traffic around him. The only reason that he even noticed his phone was that it was on vibrate. It was Gaikwad.

“
Haan
, Inspector sahib,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“We've caught the burglars,” the inspector replied. “Come to Santa Cruz station.”

Chapter 15

Gaikwad's day had begun without any hint of how it would develop. He rose early, met Chitre for a walk, heard his neighbor complain again about his children, the real estate market, the Indian cricket team, and his impending retirement. Gaikwad then returned home for a quick breakfast with Lata and the kids. Quick because Lata had to be at work early.

At work, his first order of business was to meet with Hindu and Muslim community leaders—or as the Indian newspapers referred to them, for fear of provoking riots, members of one community and members of another community. There had been religious tensions at a slum. Gaikwad wanted to get a handle on things before they got out of hand. It was an important and little-known part of his job. People were quick to pounce on the police when law and order broke down, or accuse the force of doing nothing when riots broke out, but officers like Gaikwad, and there were many all across the country, had regular meetings with religious elders to ensure villages, neighborhoods, towns, and cities stayed peaceful. Despite the best efforts, there was occasional violence. But in the larger scheme of things, Gaikwad was amazed and grateful that it didn't happen more often.

Constable Gaitonde reluctantly ushered the two leaders in. They were accompanied by a retinue of young men. Each group eyed the other warily, like dogs sizing up one another before a pissing match. Gaikwad asked the two leaders to sit down and asked Gaitonde to bring them all tea. He was wondering how to broach the issue without either side taking exception or umbrage that they were being blamed for the tensions.

“They started it,” one of them said, not looking at his religious rival sitting next to him.

“No,” the other countered vehemently. “They did. If they hadn't assaulted that boy, none of this would have happened.”

Gaikwad decided to step in.

“I understand your frustrations,” he said as if talking to a group of children incapable of playing nicely. “But you must also understand our position. We want both sides to thrive. After all, this is a democratic India where everyone has equal rights.”

“What equal rights?” one of the boys standing at the back shouted. Gaikwad shot him a stern look.

“I'm sure your leaders will agree that this discussion is best left to us,” he said. “We will come and solicit your opinions later.”

Gaitonde arrived with the tea and reluctantly served it.

Gaikwad looked at the men in front of him. They both claimed religious authority but were nothing more than common thugs. He wished he could jail them and leave them to a sadist like Gaitonde. Instead, he would have to “liaise” with them in order to keep the peace.

“We will ensure that incidents like the one in which the boy was beaten won't be repeated. And you have my word that we will catch those responsible.”

He looked at the youths at the back. “If it's one of you, step forward now. If it's someone else, I expect you to name them. We have no space for incidents like this in this area.

“Sirs, I will keep my end of the bargain. In return, I'd like you to shake hands and promise me that there will be no violence. We can meet again next week to see where we are. Agreed?”

If the men disagreed, they did not show it. They promised to turn in the men responsible for the assault and vowed to keep the peace. They agreed to meet again the next week.

When they left, Gaikwad asked Gaitonde for another cup of chai. He was making no progress with the murders. DCP Khan hadn't sounded pleased when they'd spoken that morning.

“You're killing me, Gaikwad,” he had said. “I can only hold off the vultures on top for so long.”

Just when he thought the rest of the day was a lost cause, he received a call. The man in the video—as well as a second man—had been caught.

* * *

Gaikwad and Gaitonde arrived at the police station where the men had been taken.

“They're in separate cells, sir,” the waiting constable said as he entered.

Gaikwad hoped they hadn't been roughed up yet.

“Bring the main one first,” he said. “The other one can stew.”

The capture of the two men had been the result of some old-fashioned police work. Once he'd gained access to the tapes from Jay Ganesh, Gaikwad had taken them to the police lab at Kalina. There, despite the grainy image, they'd been able to come up with a likeness of the person in the video—not perfect, but better than the facial composites that were drawn up from unreliable eyewitness accounts. He'd given a team of particularly sharp officers the unenviable task of matching the image from the video with their records. It took a day, but they'd found a match. But there were two problems. It was a juvenile record from nearly two decades ago and there was no known address for the man in the video. Still, the shortcoming didn't deter Gaikwad. He used the police techniques that had been highly effective in the old days. His men contacted each one of the known associates of the man in the video. Most had no idea what had happened to him, some had died, and one, just one, had been able to tell them where the man now lived.

Gaikwad looked up from the face on the printout he was holding. The man in front of him looked remarkably similar. If there was one thing that could be said about him, it was that he looked nondescript: medium height, average weight, a soft belly like many Indians his age, and what India's newspaper matrimonial columns, with their obsession with color, would call a “wheatish complexion”—neither dark nor fair.

“Sit,” Gaikwad told him. “I'm Inspector Vijay Gaikwad. This is Constable Gaitonde. We have some questions for you.”

Gaikwad did not tell him that Jay Ganesh of the
Tribune
was in the next room watching the proceedings, taking notes for his exclusive. Gaikwad had been reluctant to call Jay, but he didn't want to break his word.

“We know what you did. You might as well start talking now.”

There was no response. Gaikwad knew he would have to at least threaten him before he got a reply.

“Now there are two ways in which this can be done: You can cooperate and tell me everything or I will leave you in this cell with my sadist constable and send in a couple of other brutes who will first beat you, then torture you, and then think of ways to sear the pain onto your memory.”

Gaikwad looked at the constable. He looked positively excited.

“OK. I'll talk,” the man said. “But you have to believe me. I didn't kill her. We didn't have anything to do with that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The woman. The American woman in the papers. We took the body to Mahim but we didn't kill her.”

It slowly dawned on Gaikwad that the body had been dumped in Mahim not by the killer but by the burglar—that is, of course, if he was telling the truth. He decided to play along.

“Don't lie. We know you killed her. We know you put her in the bag. We know you took her to Mahim and dumped her. Why did you kill her? Did she take you by surprise?”

“No. No. You have it all wrong. We were behind the burglaries, true. We were,” he said, tears trickling down his face. “But I'd never kill anyone. Never.

“I entered the house. It was dark and I didn't want to turn the lights on just in case there was someone there. I made my way into the bedroom and suddenly tripped over something before falling to the floor.

“I was sure that if there had been someone in the house, they would have heard me. So I turned on my flashlight and saw my hands covered with blood. I wasn't sure where it came from, so I turned the torch to the floor. I had fallen on the body.”

“Why didn't you just leave?”

“My fingerprints. They were all over the body from my fall. If you'd found the body there, you would have known it was me. I have a prior from when I was a teenager. My fingerprints are on file.”

“Did you see anyone else while you were there? Think carefully.”

“No. No. We just drove away as fast as we could.”

As pathetic as the explanation sounded, Gaikwad knew he was telling the truth. He may have solved one crime—the burglaries—but his boss, DCP Khan, would not be happy to hear that a murderer was still at large. Of course, he could always charge him. No judge could fail to convict this man based on the evidence against him. He had already confessed to the burglaries; another charge, even if it was murder, wouldn't really matter. With his own sense of right and wrong blurred, Gaikwad decided that the best thing he could do was keep the men under detention for another day and hope for a breakthrough in the murder. He could decide later what to do with him and his driver.

“OK. Slow down,” Gaikwad said. “And what have you been doing since that day?”

“Nothing,” he replied in a whisper. “Nothing.”

“No more burglaries?”

“There was one burglary, but all I could think about was the body. I tried to lie low. I told my partner to lie low. We made it a point not to be seen together in public—to act normally. I thought if we behaved normally, the police would stop paying attention. I went about my daily routine: I went to the gym, met with friends.”

“Are they accomplices, too?”

“No. They have no idea what I do. They think I'm living off the money my father left me.”

“What else did you do?”

“I used to go to clubs, meet girls. Things I used to enjoy. But I found I no longer enjoyed them. I felt I was being watched. I felt the end would come at any minute. But appearances had to be maintained. I had to continue doing what I always did.”

“What did you steal? Where from? How did you pick the houses?”

“It was easy. We went after executives or those with foreign connections. Areas like Bandra, Versova, Worli. They have plenty of toys. Xboxes, iPods, jewelry, computers—stuff that can fit in a bag. We watched a few buildings and then zeroed in on the ones where we could make out a pattern. Who left when. When they came home. It was easy.”

He sounded wistful in the knowledge that those days were over.

“And you sold the electronics?”

“Yes, but that was more for pocket money. The real prize was the laptops and PCs. We would extract data or remove the hard drive and send it to Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore. We have buyers there. They pay good money for that information. Credit card data, corporate information. That kind of stuff. The beauty of it is that by the time anyone complains of identity thefts, we've moved on to new people. And the credit card companies get left holding the bill. So, really, no one's getting hurt.”

Gaikwad couldn't help but think that this was the brave new frontier of crime.

“What were you afraid of being caught for? The murder or the thefts?”

“The murder, of course,” he replied. “I know you have an overstretched department. A few thefts you won't bother. One murder—especially a foreigner—you'll be on it. I expected the police to come knocking at the door. I read the paper diligently, scouring for details of that bloody red bag in the garbage dump. But there weren't any—neither that nor any report on the burglaries. For a while, just a brief while, I breathed easily. I thought perhaps the police and the press were incompetent. But at other times, I became paranoid: Were you close to catching me and didn't want any information made public that could tip me off?”

“So what did you do?”

“There was rationally no way for you to link me to the bag. I'd made no errors since taking the body. And I know my partner is reliable, too. But I found myself becoming paranoid. When people lingered too long at street corners, I thought they were cops. I felt I was being followed. I began to inspect the lampshades everyday, suspecting that you had wired the place. That's when I decided: I would have to leave the country—alone. I wanted to tell him . . .”

“Who?”

“My partner.”

“OK.”

“But I lacked the courage. I felt I was betraying him. Leaving without saying good-bye only reinforced that. Yet, I had little choice. I could explain later. After all, he knew how to take care of himself. There was no reason to worry. Many years earlier, I had come up with a list that I had tucked away. It comprised the most important items I'd need if there ever were an emergency. I put together the items on the list: passport, underwear, socks, two suits, a folder with papers bearing pie charts and bar graphs, a laptop. To all outward appearances, I'd be an executive traveling overseas on a short, work-related trip. The passport was made out to another name just in case there was any trouble. I took it and drove to the airport.”

“And that's where you got caught.”

“Yes,” the man said, again in a whisper.

It was this part of the operation that had given Gaikwad particular satisfaction. The man in the video had walked up to the immigration official, past whom every traveler has to walk at India's international airport. The man behind the counter had looked at the assumed name on the man's passport, Shankar Mahamurthi, and began speaking to him in Tamil. Despite his planning, the man did not know the language and panicked. His expression gave him away.

“Please stand aside,” the immigration official said. “Secondary screening.”

Soon another official appeared and took him to a room. He opened the door and entered. Two policemen were waiting inside.

“Mr. Pankaj Taneja,” one of them said.

The man in the video did not reply, but he could see the officer was holding a sketch with his own image on it.

“Good. Good. Now that we've met you, let us go back to the police station where your good friend, Dinesh, is waiting for you. We have some questions for you.”

* * *

On hearing his partner's name, Taneja knew it was over.

From a vantage point across the street, the police had continued watching Taneja's apartment after he'd left. They'd seen Dinesh visit the apartment and then, finding his partner gone, rush back to his own home. They could see he wanted to run, but he kept his nerve, even stopping to greet acquaintances on the street.