Free Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) by Warren Murphy

before leaving, ruining what looked like a freshly typed pile of correspondence. In the doorway leading to the hall, Razoni said, “Tough, I’ve got to ask you something very important.”
    In the hall, with the door safely closed behind them, Jackson said, “What, Ed?”
    “What the Christ is a guru?”
    “You don’t know? You live in this city and you don’t know what a guru is?”
    Razoni wrinkled his brow. “Somebody who eats roses?”

10
     
    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