"Nine times out of ten, it's the help," the officer told Puri.
The questions put to Monica, Malika and Sweetu were accusatory and misleading, and after all three had answered them in turn and professed their innocence, the policeman told Puri he strongly suspected an "inside job." Sweetu was his "chief suspect."
"You think he's dangerous, is it?" asked Puri, playing along.
"I'd like to take him down to the station and get the truth out of him," replied the officer.
The detective pretended to give this suggestion some thought and then said, "Actually, I'd prefer to keep him here. That way I can keep an eye on him and he'll lead me to the hit man."
Puri showed the cops to the door and, after watching them drive away and pausing for a moment to contemplate their crass stupidity, headed up onto the roof.
A careful inspection of the holes in the water tank and the pits made by the two bullets that had impacted on the exterior wall indicated that the hit man had positioned himself on top of the half-constructed building that stood a few feet to the east of the Puris' home.
Five minutes later, the detective was standing on the spot, behind a half-built wall, from where his assailant had shot at him.
There, on the ground, amid some broken bits of brick and lumps of dried concrete, he found six empty slugs and a few cigarette butts. These he scooped up one by one, wrapping them carefully in his handkerchief, and then returned to ground level.
From a number of boot impressions left in the earth, which matched those visible in the dust on the top of the building, he determined that the hit man had entered the site through an open back gate and could easily have come and gone without anyone seeing him.
Puri spent a fruitless hour asking the neighbors and their servants if they had seen anything unusual that morning and then returned home.
Once seated on the big blue leather couch in the sitting room, he wrote down everything he knew so far.
1. Hit man waiting 15 mins. at least.
2. Hit man expecting subject.
3. Hit man uses country-made weapon.
4. Hit man is man-size nine boots.
Next, Puri turned to his Most Usual Suspects file, which he'd retrieved from the safe in his study.
It contained up-to-date information on all the individuals with a strong motive for having him murdered and whom he judged to be a grave threat. In the event of his untimely death, Rumpi was under instruction to take the file to his rival, Hari Kumar. Despite their differences, he and Hari had an understanding that they would not allow each other's murder to go unsolved.
The Most Usual Suspects file contained details of four individuals. A fifth name, that of a serial killer known as Lucky, had recently been removed after he had been awarded the death sentence.
"Not so lucky after all." Puri chuckled to himself as he looked over the other names. In no particular order, they were:
Jacques "Hannibal" Boye, the French serial killer, serving a life sentence in Tihar jail for murdering and eating seven Canadian backpackers.
Krishna Rai, the opposition MLA from Bihar, whose son Puri had helped convict for murdering a bar girl.
Ratan Patel, the head of India Info Inc., serving six years for insider trading.
Swami Nag, the swindler, confidence man and murderer.
Without doubt, this last individual posed the greatest threat. There was a note on his page that read "absconding, whereabouts unknown." Before going into hiding, the Swami had sworn to kill Puri himself "by any and all means."
The detective decided to call his usual sources within the criminal underworld to find out about Swami Nag's whereabouts and whether any of the other three had put out a contract on his life recently. He would also ask Tubelight to make some inquiries; no one else had better informants.
Beyond that, there was not much more Puri could do.
There were hundreds of hit men for hire in Delhi; nearly all of them were ordinary, everyday people desperate to do anything to provide their families with their next meal. Their fingerprints were not on record; their weapons of choice were often "country-made" pistols and rifles, which were impossible to trace. Puri closed the Most Usual Suspects file, put it on the couch next to him and opened another dossier containing details of the attempts that had been made on his life.
Today's incident brought the tally to twelve.
On six occasions, his enemies had tried shooting him; twice, they'd attempted poison (once using a samosa laced with arsenic); and during the Case of the Pundit with Twelve Toes, a hired thug had tried to force Puri's car over the edge of a hairpin bend on the road to Gulmarg.
The most ingenious attempt had been orchestrated by a cunning murderer (a naturalist by profession) working in Assam's Kaziranga Park, who had secretly sprayed Puri's clothes with a pheromone that attracted one-horned rhinos.
The closest anyone had come (not including the three rhinos, who could move surprisingly quickly) had been a criminal hijra who had pushed a pile of bricks off the top of a building into an alley in Varanasi where Puri had been walking.
Hardly a day went by when Puri didn't relate one of these stories to someone. Prospective clients, journalists, visiting children doing school projects and Scotland Yard detectives had all heard one or more.
"Danger is my ally," he would tell eager listeners.
Fostering an image of fearlessness was vital to his reputation as a detective. But Puri was not lax about his own security. His Ambassador was a customized model fitted with bulletproof glass and a reinforced steel undercarriage. He kept two Labradors in the garden and employed an alert chowkidar armed with a shotgun. And he varied the route he took home.
Puri was also careful to appease the gods, visiting the temple at least once a week and observing all the major festivals.
If all that failed to protect him…well, the detective had not stared death in the face without being somewhat fatalistic. As he was fond of saying, "We're all one breath from this life to the next, only."
A couple of hours after the shooting, with the bump on his forehead no longer throbbing, Puri decided he was well enough to drive to Jaipur.
Rumpi had other ideas.
"Chubby, you must rest," she insisted in Punjabi, the language the two usually spoke with each other, returning from the kitchen with some tea for him.
"I'm making you some khichri and later I'll rub mustard oil on your head."
Obediently, the detective sat on the couch again. He knew when it was prudent to do as he was told. Besides, spending the day at home would not be all bad. He could repot his chili plants, watch some cricket and, in the evening, visit the temple.
Rumpi returned to the kitchen and Puri switched on the TV, surfing through the inordinate number of satellite channels until he found one showing the India vs. West Indies match in Hyderabad. It was the second test-the Indian batsmen having collapsed in the first-and the tourists were nearly eighty-two for one, with Lara two runs short of a half-century.
Half an hour later, as Puri was enjoying Rumpi's khichri with homemade curd and tart mango pickle, and reflecting on the perks of being shot at, a car honked its horn outside the front gate and the dogs began barking.
The detective listened as the gate was opened and a vehicle's tires ground against the gravel. Two doors banged shut and footsteps approached the house. A few seconds later, Puri heard the sound of his mother's voice in the corridor.
"Namaste," she said to Rumpi. "I came directly, na. But traffic delay was there. So many cars you can't imagine. At Ring Road junction, the light was blinking, causing backup. Police were being negligent in their duty. Drivers were just honking and shouting and such. But what a terrible thing has happened! Everyone is all right, though, na? Thank God. Where is Chubby? He is OK? That is the main thing."