Felonious Monk, chapter 10
Chapter 10: Saturday, Barnet, VT
Chapter 10
In the dining room Abbott poured himself a cup from a five-gallon urn on which was taped a label saying “CSF tea”. Crowe took a cup too. Made of equal parts cumin, coriander and fennel, it was considered by ayurvedic practitioners as tri-doshic, capable of balancing the three essential humors of the body. Crowe suspected Abbott needed some balancing this morning.
Sergeant Quaid showed up, carrying Greer’s suitcase. Neville offered him some tea, which Quaid declined. But he did accept a cup of instant coffee and took it with the suitcase out to his truck.
Neville offered to make Abbott and Crowe some breakfast. In a few minutes they were eating buckwheat waffles with local maple syrup.
“So what do you think of my situation?” Abbott said.
Crowe shrugged and took out his phone. He opened his astrology app and displayed the chart he’d calculated when Abbott first phoned him. That was when the situation had come into his awareness and prompted his involvement. Even though death had occurred hours ago, he could still use this chart to pose the question, Whodunnit?
In the sidereal chart for 6:05 AM, Aries was rising. At dawn the Sun was in the ascendant. So was the new moon that had occurred only hours earlier.
Crowe’s first thought was, dharma would rule and justice would prevail. The Aries ascendant, representing Abbott as client, was occupied by the Sun, Moon and Jupiter. All three were sattvic, or spiritual, planets. The Sun and Jupiter ruled the other two dharma houses, the fifth and ninth of Leo and Sagittarius. However ironic, this confluence of dharma lords suggested a crime interwoven with spiritual themes.
Crowe considered the facts. Abbott was a guru of sorts. Death had occurred on an ashram. The rest remained to be seen.
Whereas the ascendant also represented the victim, the seventh house showed the perpetrator. Saturn in the seventh occupied Libra, exalted with directional strength. Saturn was also retrograde, giving it a three-fold strength that implied an accomplished killer or someone of power, maybe both.
Since Saturn ruled the tenth and eleventh houses, the killer might occupy a position of authority, while profit was his motive.
Seventh lord Venus was in Taurus with Ketu, a point in the Moon’s orbit where eclipses were enabled. Ketu was the headless one, associated with yogis, sadhus and ascetics who surrendered ego to pursue God. But Ketu was debilitated in Taurus, implying a phony yogi, like a corrupt evangelist who adopted a spiritual persona to profit from his followers.
He summed it up for Abbott. “I know you’re a good guy, and this chart tells me Greer was too. I think his presence here wasn’t so much a personal issue as it was some sort of noble quest, like a modern-day Don Quixote… But whatever he was looking for, he ran into opposition from someone powerful.”
“Looking for…?”
“Maybe a story.” Crowe considered the chart. “I think he was a journalist. Is there anything here that might have interested him?”
“How about threats to the first amendment and the free exercise of religion…?
“What do you mean?”
“I’m joking,” Abbott said, “but it hasn’t been easy these past several years. The locals didn’t welcome us with open arms. Over the years we’ve received hate mail suggesting we join a real church. We’ve had road kill stuffed in our mailbox. Some yahoo with a rifle even took a few pot shots at our bell tower.” He shrugged in resignation. “I know Buddhism might strike folks as a bit foreign, but I’d hoped for a little more acceptance from the local community.”
“Did you advise the police of the harassment?”
“Sure, but they can’t identify who’s behind it, so there’s nothing they can do. It’s our problem. And Greer’s death will take it to a whole new level. A criminal investigation could shut us down.”
“You said the lease agreement threatened termination only if a member of your community was involved in a felony. Your discovery of a crime doesn’t constitute involvement. Your lawyer should be able to argue his way out of that one.”
“I certainly hope so,” Abbott said.
“You said Bishop was a regular attendee. What do you know about him?”
“Very little other than what I have from his original application, plus a few brief conversations over the years. Aside from the subjects at hand – Buddhism, meditation, self-discovery – we discourage those ‘What do you do for a living?’ conversations. We want everyone here to feel equal.”
“Apparently he didn’t feel that way about Greer.”
Abbott shook his head. “I’m shocked and dismayed that someone with a spiritual practice would actually throw a punch at another attendee. I still can’t believe it.”
“Maybe you don’t know Bishop as well as you thought you did.”
“Obviously.”
“And I’m still waiting to hear what you do know,” Crowe prompted.
“Now you’re starting to sound just like Lynch.” Abbott rolled his eyes. “Okay, I know he’s some sort of corporate security consultant in New York. Must pay well because he always drives a late-model high-end vehicle. This time around it was a BMW X6. He’s traveled extensively in Southeast Asia. Seems knowledgeable about Buddhist art. I don’t think he’s married because he sometimes brings different women with him.”
“You have his birth date?”
“Should be on his registration form. You want to do his chart? I can get his file.”
“Later. How long’s he been coming here?”
“Almost as long as we’ve been in operation. Since the fall of ninety-nine. He used to come once a year in the autumn. Lately, he’s been coming every three months.”
“He have any friends?”
Abbott thought for a moment. “First time here, he came with a married couple from Bar Harbor. They all arrived in a camper van equipped with a satellite dish. Other guy was a bit of a kook. William Kinkelman, a writer. Haven’t seen him since.”
“What do you know about him?”
“A second-tier author who never made it. He gave me one of his books, a mash-up of sci-fi and fantasy. Ripper Van Winkle, it was called, about a sleeping zombie who woke up every seven years to go on a killing spree. Terrible novel – misogynistic, pornographic and violent. Ironic, considering Kinkelman was pretty mild-mannered.”
“You called him a kook, though. Why?”
“He couldn’t seem to keep his clothes on. Mind you, it was very hot that Labor Day weekend. Most of the time all he wore was a red Speedo and a leopard-skin tank top. It would’ve been funny if it weren’t so ugly. He was a skinny runt, with long hair and a scraggly beard.”
“What about his wife?”
“Completely normal as far as I could tell. Pretty woman.”
“And they were friends – Bishop and the Kinkelmans?”
“They came together. They stayed in adjacent cabins. They ate together. They left together.”
“But you never saw the Kinkelmans again?”
“They’re still on our mailing list so they get our quarterly newsletter, but I never hear from them. Why are you interested?”
“Birds of a feather flock together. But Bishop is the real person of interest. You saw him knock Greer down. Twelve hours later, Greer’s dead. It’s a no-brainer to take a hard look at Bishop.”
“I assume Lieutenant
Lynch will follow up on that.”
“You said Bishop usually brought a female friend. Which one was it this time?”
“There’ve been different women over the years, but the past few courses, it’s been Kitti Poornchai. Maybe you noticed her at roll call? Nice-looking Thai woman, back of the hall, wearing a blue yoga outfit.”
Crowe closed his eyes and visualized her in the southwest corner. The image stimulated the pattern recognition faculty in his mind. The southwest was associated with Rahu, one of the lunar nodes associated with eclipses. Rahu was in Scorpio these days, exalted and powerful. In this morning’s prashna chart, Venus lay on the Rahu/Ketu axis. While Venus indicated a woman, the nodes suggested the foreign and exotic.
This sparked an idea, however tentative, that Kitti Poornchai might be implicated in Greer’s death. Crowe recalled the note he’d found in Greer’s pocket. Although printed rather than written, it’d left him uncertain as to whether it had been penned by a man or a woman.
“They arrived together?”
“Yes.”
“But he left alone and she stayed?”
“Participants take their commitments seriously. There’s spiritual merit in completing ten days of silence as prescribed. That’s why no one, even if they had something to tell, was willing to break their silence when Lynch asked for information.”
“How’s she getting back to New York?”
“Beats me. Maybe she’ll catch a ride with someone.”
“Maybe he’s still in the area, waiting to pick her up when the course is over.”
“I’ll mention that to Lynch. He could intercept Bishop and question him about why he decked Greer. Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
Crowe nodded. That was true, but where there was smoke, there were sometimes also mirrors.
