CHAPTER 29.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Los Angeles, CA.

It was a defiant Neil we encountered in the LA Men’s Jail.

I was familiar with the place, having visited Bill almost a month ago. I was told that Neil was on suicide watch and was scheduled to be moved to the prison after our meeting with him. He sat on a chair in the interrogation room, heavily shackled, with two hefty policemen behind him. He was now a prisoner to be wary of.

Bigsby and Al sat down, and Al turned his recorder on and placed it on the table. The Lieutenant signaled to start the interview.

Neil looked at Al and avoided my eyes. “Is my sister alright, Detective? Where’s she---”

I answered. “---I saw Melissa at the station last night, Neil, with Alice. She was relieved to see me. She’s worried. Kept asking if you were OK.”

I saw Neil’s eyes soften. “I’d miss her. She’s a good kid.” His voice became gruff, “Let’s get on with this.”

I repeated the story I gave the police earlier in the day and Neil listened carefully to every word I uttered, sometimes indulging in a smile. “You got your story mixed up a little bit, Professor Rao. Is this the best the police and you could do? Clearly, you should stick to art history and  leave the sleuthing to others, although I can’t imagine how much this motley crew of cops would’ve done without your help.”

I knew Neil was taunting the police, and goading me. So I played with him. “Tell us where we went wrong, Neil. Are you suggesting that you didn’t kill Faust? That wasn’t what you told me in my office.’

Bigsby said, “You must know that we found a whole host of evidence under the new tree you planted behind your house. Your sister Melissa told us about it although she didn’t know what we’d find underneath.”

That they found evidence under a tree was news to me. Kudos to Melissa.

“Professor. Rao,” Neil said. “You asked me for my thesis while ago. You’d find it at the bottom of the tree.” He laughed. “Although I cannot promise it’d be in good shape.”

I made a note to see it after the police processed it. “You went back to the Restaurant after dropping Bill off, followed Faust to the Davidson’s home, right?”

I pulled out from my satchel the two old faded photos of Jaya Varma, one with her roommates, and the other with Faust and the Davidsons. I’d put them in a plain envelope, and I now placed the envelope on the table close to me. “Tell us about what happened in Davidson’s front yard, Neil.”

Neil looked at the envelope. “What do you have here? More evidence to taunt me?”

I looked at Al for a signal but his face was impassive as though he was waiting for my next move. “Neil, You’re very clever, no, brilliant. You covered your tracks well. We know some of what happened that night but not all. Well, If you fill us in, I’ll give you something valuable in return.” I felt wretched trading his mother’s photos like market commodity, but I knew I had to match his ugliness to get the missing facts.

“What’s it?” His eyes opened wide and he stretched out his cuffed hands as close  to the envelope as physically possible.

“You have to trust me on this, Neil. First the information, then the reward.” I moved the envelope closer to me.

“OK, I trust you, so I’ll play along.” He smiled at all of us in turn. “Well, let me see. You guys know I followed Faust to the Davidson’s home. I just wanted to talk to him, to hear him acknowledge me as his son, but he refused. Again. I was furious, beyond belief. I had given him many chances to own up. He turned his back on me, grabbed his stuff from the car and was about to get to the door, when lo and behold, Davidson comes out of the house.”

I glanced at Al and his eyes were riveted on Neil.

I said, “Go on.”

 “He was holding something wrapped in plastic in his hand. He froze seeing me and Faust, started to run inside. Faust stopped, turned to look at me, as though he wasn’t sure what to do. I was too quick for either of them. I grabbed what Davidson was holding. It was wrapped in plastic, and was heavy. I lifted it up and beat my father’s head with it. I don’t remember how many times I hit him with it.” Neil was dispassionate and clinical in his storytelling.

“Once he fell and failed to move, I asked Davidson if the package contained the stolen Durga. He confirmed that it was the Mahishasura Mardini from Mayapuram.. I knew right then that Davidson had stolen it and was coming out to hand it over to the buyer. Just as my father returned from the conference.” Neil laughed, and looked at his hands as though seeing them for the first time.

“What happened then, Neil?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I asked Davidson to get back inside  and not to come out. I’d no se for the idol and  decided to leave it on his body.”

I realized that he never learned his mother’s middle name.

Bigsby said, “Davidson watched you kill Faust and didn’t do anything?”

“Yeah, he did plead with me to let him call 911. He offered me a deal that if I left, he’d not tell anyone who killed Faust. He so wanted to save his buddy. I turned him down, and told him he can call 911 in the morning and pretend he just discovered the body.  I told him not to reveal anything to the police, or I’d report him for the theft and accuse him of the murder.” Neil’s voice held no remorse, he was just rattling off facts with clinical precision.

I now understood the depth of Davidson’s grief and his confession to me of cowardice. “Why did you move the body, Neil?” I needed to know.

“I dragged him into the Japanese garden for one reason. What you don’t know is that my mom had left a twig of a Japanese Maple Bonsai tree inside the book.” He tapped his chest. “ I’ve been carrying it close to my chest ever since I found it, but like everything else, it was taken from me as evidence.” He laughed.

Al asked, “Why did you force Davidson’s truck over the cliff and kill him?”

Neil seemed startled that Al had a voice. He looked at him briefly and focused back on me. “I didn’t trust him. I had to kill him to keep him quiet. Even with Faust dead, I had a bright future elsewhere. I knew he’d ruin it. So he had to go.”

I asked, “You took Bill’s car to Roy’s and to follow Faust, right?”

Al took a sharp look at me.  

Neil nodded, “Yeah, I did.”

Al asked, “And when your friend Bill was arrested for the murder, you never came forward with this.”

“Well, I couldn’t, without implicating me. I knew Bill would be cleared.”

I looked at my notes and then at Neil. “I have a few more questions, Neil. Did you mean to turn Faust’s tie around to the back or did it happen while you dragged him?”

Al nodded at me, as though he too had thought of the same question.

Neil smiled. If evil was embodied in a smile, this was it. “On purpose, of course.” He looked down at his rather large hands, then up at me and down again. He leaned forward and put his cuffed hands on the table.

 “On my computer, Professor Rao, you’ll come across a death certificate for my mother dated the day after I was born. Three years ago when I went to Cambridge, I’d reviewed the microfiche in the police library and found several registered deaths in the year 1996-97. I could match only one to the day after my birth which was entered as a suicide. Luckily, I was able to track down a retired cop who’d registered it decades ago and found out that my mother killed herself by hanging. I wanted to hang Faust too, at least figuratively. You see it, don’t you?”

I plainly didn’t, and was relieved I couldn’t fathom the evil on his mind. “Lastly, how did you know Faust was your father? You might have killed an innocent man for nothing.”

“No, no. You cannot charge me with sloppy work. I did thorough research. After adoption, my birth certificate only listed my adoptive parents. I wanted to get my original  birth certificate. But it looked like I needed a court order for that. So, I looked through the book my mom had given me to see if she’d left any clues. If you can get it from my room, I can explain what I found in it.”

I said, “I took it, Neil. Alice opened your room for me.”

Neil laughed. “Go figure.”

Al pulled out the book from his briefcase, and gave it to Neil. “You can open it. It has your finger prints all over it anyway.”

 Neil opened the book to the frontispiece, and showed us what was written in a neat sharp, slanted handwriting.

I said, “We’ve all read it, Neil. What does it mean?”

Neil decided to read it out loud.

Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.” 

Neil said, “An inscription for her tombstone. She was a Literature major.”

I decided to act dumb because I wanted to hear it from his mouth. “I’ve to confess, Neil, I don’t see the connection to your father.”

Once again, Neil was full of pride. “You see, my mother was also a bright woman. Instead of giving me his name, she left a clue for me in this book. It took me a while to figure it out. I researched poems using the verse and found out it was from a tragic play called Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. At Harvard, I searched the names Goethe and Faust among those who matriculated in Fall 1996.”

Neil continued. “It’s about a highly successful scholar who’s dissatisfied with his life, and makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Sounds like somebody we knew?”

Only in your distorted mind, I thought, but said, “No, the Faust I knew didn’t fit the bill.”

“Come on, Professor, stop being so righteous. I’m sure my mother wasn’t sullying his name but leading me to it. She must have selected this particular verse because it alludes to what lay beyond her death. Comforting me in a way that she was going to be OK.”

I wanted to get away from the evil Neil embodied, but I had one more question left. “Did you come after me? Did you break into my house and attack me?”

“Wow, wow, hold on. Don’t accuse me of things I didn’t do. Come after you? No, absolutely not. A break in? No, I had nothing to do with it, I swear. I respect you. I’m sorry, I terrified you in your office. I didn’t mean to, it was a survival issue.”

I looked at Al. I knew he was thinking the same thing. Who broke into my house? If it wasn’t Neil, it had to be Matt Porter.

“Is there anything else you’ve left out?” I fingered the envelope of photos.

Neil’s eyes gleamed. “No, that’s all. Now what am I getting in return?”

“In this envelope, I’ve two photos of your birth mother. One with her roommates and the other with your father and the Davidsons.” I looked at Al. He nodded.

Neil started to tremble. “You mean you’ve seen what she looked like?”

“Yes, your unique coloring came from her, Neil. She was from India. I was puzzled by how she spelled your name in the book. It was Neel, meaning blue. But you never used that spelling. Why?”

Neil’s eyes filled. “You know as well as I do, that Neel is the color of Vishnu, Rama and Krishna. The purity of gods. By the time I was eighteen and got the book, I knew I could never live up to my name. So I stayed with Neil.”

He held out his hand for the photo.

I put the photos on the table and gazed at the beautiful woman who’d unintentionally created a monster. I pushed both photos toward Neil.

I got up, noticing that Al had shut off his recorder.

Neil leaned forward, his eyes glazed by the first look at his birth mother. The cops who brought him in moved towards him. He turned to them and said, “Just one minute, please. May I keep my mother’s photos? Please.” He tried to pick up the photos with his cuffed hands, but couldn’t.

Neil blinked furiously and tears dropped on to his cheek. He did nothing to control his silent grief. I looked at Al and Bigsby and saw them nod. The photos were not evidence and they rightfully belonged to Neil. I put them back in the envelope and handed it to him. He held it against his chest with his cuffed hands.

I said, “One more thing you didn’t know, Neil. Your mother’s middle initial, D., stood for Durga. That was why she left you the book of Durga prayers.”

This hit him hard. His eyes bulged, and he tugged at his cuffs and stamped on the floor with his chained feet. “I killed my father with a Durga. Don’ you see? In essence, my mother killed him. How appropriate.” He laughed out loud, and kept at it, until the guards grabbed him to take him back.

Neil looked at me again. “Professor Rao, will you keep an eye on Melissa...and mom for me? They like you and trust you. They’ll be all alone now. Will you make sure Melissa goes to college?”

This was the first time I heard him acknowledge Alice as mom. “I’ll do whatever I can for your family.” I hesitated for a moment. “Would you like me to come and see you when I can?”

I saw Al glare at me.

Neil nodded and shuffled away.

#

I said good byes to al and Bigsby, and walked quickly to the parking lot.

I heard footsteps behind me and saw Al striding across to catch up with me.

“Slow down, Rekha. What’s the hurry?”

I said, “I need to get away from all this.” I kept going, Al by my side.

We walked together in silence on the parking lot that was almost deserted. I wondered if this would be the last time we ever did that. What reason would I have now to see him? Instead of being relieved I had no longer any need for the Pasadena police, I was sad, immeasurably so, that it all had ended.

“Thanks, Al,” I said opening my car door. “That’s it, I guess.”

Al held on to the open car door, allowing me to get in and sit.

“Yes, I think once we get Neil to sign his confession, you’re officially off the case.”

“I thought I was never officially on it.” I laughed.

“Yes, I know. But you helped us, Rekha. Without you, this might have turned into a cold case. Or, we might have wrongly concluded that Davidson killed Faust. Thank you.” He paused and looked up where the night sky was mottled with stars. “Now that your work is over, what about a cup of coffee one of these days?”

Taken aback, I couldn’t find any one-upmanship comeback. “Sure, I need to get the diary back, right?”

Al’s smile lit up the dark corners inside my heart. He said, “I’ll hang on to it with my life.”