Rook & Tooth and Claw (23 page)

Martin said, “You listen to me, you guys. Right now, we’re having a party. Catherine’s coming and if you like, you can come along too. After the party, Catherine and me are going to LA Buzz for some kick-ass chilli. After
that,
I’ll bring Catherine home, safe and sound. Now, do you have any problem with that?”

“Catherine – you come home now,” Grey Cloud demanded.

Catherine hesitated for a while, and then shook her head. “I want to go to the party. Come on, Grey Cloud, it’s only a party.”

“Father wants us all together tonight.”

“Father wants us all together
every
night. I have to have some life of my own.”

“With
these
?” said Grey Cloud, contemptously, looking around at Martin and Russell and Mark Foley and Rita Munoz.

“These are my friends.”

“These will
never
be your friends.”

Grey Cloud made another attempt to snatch her arm, but this time both Martin and Russell pushed him away. “Hear this, pal,” said Russell. “You try to touch her one more time and I’ll sit on your head.”

“Yeah,” warned Mark. “You ever hear of a tribe called the Flatheads? Well, that’s what happened to them!”

“Don’t you insult my culture!” Grey Cloud snapped at him, jabbing him in the chest with his finger. “My culture barely survived because of people like you!”

Jim said, “That’s enough, guys. If Catherine doesn’t want to go home with you, there’s nothing you can do
about it. So just leave the campus quietly, OK, before I have to do something I don’t want to do, like call security.”

Grey Cloud gave an aggressive shrug of his shoulders. He looked Martin straight in the eye and said, “I can make you one promise, my friend. If you try to take Catherine out tonight, you won’t see tomorrow’s sun come up.”

“Are you threatening me?” grinned Martin. “Because if you are, you’re crazy. I’ve got all these witnesses.”

“I’m not threatening you,” Grey Cloud replied. “I’m telling you what will happen to you, just as surely as one moon follows the next.”

With that, he and Paul turned around and walked back to their car. They climbed in and drove slowly away, although they paused for a moment so that Grey Cloud could take off his sunglasses and give Martin and Catherine one last steely look.

“Pretty protective, those brothers of yours,” Jim remarked.

Catherine was flushed and upset. “They’re so angry all the time! They hate white culture, both of them. Especially Grey Cloud.”

“Yes, I can see that by his Armani jacket and his Ray-Bans.”

“Oh, it’s not the accessories, Mr Rook. Navajo have always been good at adapting, at changing their ways. A long time ago they were farmers. Then they became hunters and travellers and raiders. Once they walked. Then they rode horses and carried guns. But what Paul and Grey Cloud don’t like is the way that the Navajo are trying to ape white society.

“They think that too many Navajos are forgetting the old ways – forgetting what we are, forgetting what we mean. They think that we’re forgetting the legends, and the stories, and the magic. They think that in ten
years’ time, we won’t be anything more than second-class whites.”

“And that’s why they don’t want you to go out with Martin?”

Catherine took hold of Martin’s hand, and squeezed it. “They don’t want me to go out with any white man. But they won’t stop me, no matter what they say.”

Martin said, “Listen, I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

“I know that,” said Catherine. “But you promised to take me to the Disaster Party, didn’t you? And you promised to take me to LA Buzz? Don’t tell me that you’re going to be one of those white men who speaks with forked tongue.”

“All right,” said Jim, “I’ll let you get on with your evening. Martin – too bad about the game. Maybe one day.”

“Sure thing, Mr Rook,” Martin told him. “And maybe, one day, Gloach will fly.”

Jim and Susan went to the Disaster Party for about a half-hour, just to show willing, but Jim wasn’t really in the mood for techno rock, flashing lights and noisy students, and he felt like something harder to drink than strawberry punch. “I think I’m a little too old for this,” he shouted into Susan’s ear. Susan nodded, although she was jiggling enthusiastically to the sound mixes of TYOUSSi and DJ Ham and he could see that she was itching to dance.

Amanda Zaparelli came up and wrapped her arms around him. “Come on, Mr Rook, let’s show them what we can do!” But he managed to steer her over to Ray Vito, who had carried a torch for her ever since junior high, and he swept her away in a techno merengue that had everybody clapping and whistling.

Outside, Jim took hold of Susan’s hand. The yuccas were silhouetted black and jagged against a sunset as garish as a Hawaiian shirt. “How about coming back to my place?” Jim asked her. “We could pick up some Chinese and a bottle of wine on the way. I’ve found this great Szechuan place where they do a stir-fried quail you could kill your mother for.”

Susan shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jim. I have a whole heap of assessments to do. And we’re going on a field trip Monday, to Mount Wilson. I have to get everything ready for that.”

“Hey – we’re not drifting apart, are we?” Jim asked her.

“I don’t think so. We’re just like two boats, bobbing on a pond. Sometimes we bump together and sometimes we don’t.”

“I know. But we haven’t had a good bump in ages.”

She kissed him. “I like you, Jim. In fact I think I almost love you. But I don’t want to commit myself too much, not just yet.”

Jim walked her over to her pink Volkswagen Beetle convertible and opened the door for her. He almost felt like proposing marriage on the spot, but he knew what her answer would be, and he preferred to keep on hoping that ‘almost love’ would eventually flourish into something more. He kissed her and said, “I’ll call you later. Maybe you’ll have changed your mind.”

“I’ll be up to my ears in assessments.”

“Didn’t you know? That’s what first attracted me to you – your assessments.”

“Good
night,
Jim,” she said, emphatically.

Jim watched her drive away, waving to him as she went. He stood and watched her until she had rounded the curve in front of the college, and then he walked thoughtfully back to his car. Maybe he should ask his
grandfather about her. Maybe the dead knew more about love than the living. It was always worth a try.

He made himself a tuna sandwich and watched sports for the rest of the evening, while the feline formerly known as Tibbles sat on the arm of the chair opposite, her eyes locked onto every tiny movement his sandwich made. When he had finished it all she gave him such a death-stare that he put her outside the front door of his apartment and told her not to come back until she stopped feeling so resentful.

He went to bed early and had a sleepless, sprawly night. He dreamed that his grandfather was walking away from him along Electric Avenue, moving in a strange, eerie glide. He kept calling his grandfather to stop.

“What do you mean it bristles?” he kept shouting. “You said that it bristles. What did you mean?”

But his grandfather wouldn’t stop, and wouldn’t turn around. He kept on gliding away down the street, and all the sky was luminous purple, with a bone-white sun.

He heard an alarm-bell ringing, and he thought he ought to warn Susan that something terrible was going to happen. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to find out where she lived. He started to run, and then he realised that his telephone was ringing, and that he wasn’t running at all, but kicking against his sheet like a small boy in a tantrum.

He sat up and dislodged the receiver. “Yes? Who is it?”

“Mr Rook? Mr Jim Rook? Sorry to disturb you, sir. This is Lieutenant Harris.”

“Lieutenant Harris?” He groped for his bedside lamp. “What the hell time is it?”

“It’s a little after seven-thirty, sir. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, no. I’m always awake in the middle of the night.”

“Well, it’s pretty much morning now, sir. And I’m afraid I’ve got some real bad news for you.”

Jim rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Bad? How bad?”

“Just about as bad as it can get, sir. Martin Amato was found dead on Venice Beach this morning.”

Jim felt a terrible tingling surge of dread. “Dead? Martin? I can’t believe it. Are you sure it’s Martin?”

“His father’s just identified him, I’m afraid.”

“Well, what happened to him? Was it some kind of accident?”

“I don’t think so, sir. It looks like he was attacked by some kind of animal. And when I say animal, I mean something very wild, and very mean, and very, very strong.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked Jim.

“It’d be a help if you came down to the morgue, sir. Martin’s girlfriend is here … Ms Catherine White Bird? She’s in a real bad state and she keeps asking for you. I also think it’s going to be worth your while talking to one of our counsellors – you know, so that you know how to break the news to Martin’s fellow students.”

“Yes,” said Jim. “Yes, I’ll come down right now.”

He replaced the receiver and sat on the edge of the bed and he was literally shaking. Animal, Lieutenant Harris had said. Very wild, and very mean, and very, very strong. All Jim could think about were those deep scratches on the walls of the locker room, and the way that the lockers themselves had been twisted and ripped open as if by huge and powerful claws.

Chapter Two

Lieutenant Harris said, “This way,” and opened the door to a small waiting-room with two beige couches, a collection of
National Geographic
magazines and a faded framed poster of an orange grove. Catherine White Bird was sitting in the far corner, her arms crossed tightly across her chest and her face rigid. She looked as if she were just about to make her first parachute jump.

Standing by the window was Henry Black Eagle, Catherine’s father. He was as tall as his sons, with silvery-black hair that hung long over his shoulders. He had the same high cheekbones as Catherine, although his nose was much more hawklike and his cheeks were deeply lined. He wore a fringed black buckskin jacket and black jeans.

“Mr Black Eagle, this is Mr Rook, Catherine’s tutor from West Grove,” said Lieutenant Harris.

Jim held out his hand. “Of course, we’ve met. How are you doing, Mr Black Eagle? I watch your TV show whenever I have the chance.”

He turned to Catherine and said, “How are you feeling, Catherine? Is there anything you need?”

She looked up at him with desperate eyes. “I just want Martin back, that’s all. I just want you to tell me that this is all a dream.”

Jim sat beside her and put a comforting arm around her. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say to you.
Martin is such a great guy.” He didn’t correct himself and say “
was
.”

Lieutenant Harris was cleaning the edge of his thumbnail with his teeth. “She says she and Martin took in a chilli at LA Buzz and then they went for a long walk on the beach. The last time she saw him was when he dropped her off home.”

“So why did he go back to the beach? He lives in the opposite direction.”

“Who knows? His car was parked about a half-mile away.”

Jim said to Catherine, “Did Martin tell you he was going back to the beach?”

Catherine tearfully shook her head. “He kissed me goodnight and then he drove off. I can still see his face, the way he was laughing.”

Her father said, “Why don’t you come home now, Catherine? There’s nothing more that you can do here.”

“I don’t want to leave Martin. I can’t.”

Henry Black Eagle said, “Catherine, this was a terrible thing to happen. But Martin’s gone now, and nothing can ever bring him back. Besides, he could never have been yours, you know that.”

Jim frowned at him. “What makes you say that?”

“Because, Mr Rook, Catherine is already spoken for. She has been pledged in marriage since she was twelve, and when the time comes she will have to honour that pledge.”

“I thought that only Indians from India believed in arranged marriages.”

Henry Black Eagle didn’t answer. Instead, he reached out his hand and took hold of Catherine’s shoulder. “Come on now, Catherine. Your brothers are waiting for you.”

“Please, dad. I don’t want to go. I want to stay here a little while longer.”

Jim said, “Why not let her stay, Henry? Let me have a talk to her, and then I’ll bring her home. I think she could use a little unburdening, if you know what I mean. Come on, now. Be a guy.”

Henry Black Eagle puckered his lips so that they looked as if they been sewn together by headhunters. But then he said, “All right. So long as you bring her back no later than noon,” he said, checking his gold Rolex Oyster.

“I’ll be on time, honest Injun,” Jim promised, and then flushed bright red when he realised what he’d said. Whatever he thought about it, Henry Black Eagle didn’t reply, but nodded curtly to Lieutenant Harris and walked out of the waiting-room.

Lieutenant Harris turned back to Catherine. “Pretty serious individual, your dad. It’s strange that, isn’t it? On TV he always seems like such a fun guy.”

“On TV he speaks from a script,” said Catherine, and there was a flatness in the way she said it that made Jim think that she had often clashed with her father before, and often said those same words before.

A uniformed patrolman came in to tell Lieutenant Harris that the medical examiner wanted to talk to him, so that Jim and Catherine were left alone. Jim said, “You want to talk about what happened last night?”

“I’ve told you everything. We left the Disaster Party and then we drove to Venice for a chilli. Afterward we walked on the beach for a while. I’ve never dared to go there at night because of all the local lowlife. But with Martin I felt safe. With Martin I
always
felt safe.”

“Your family didn’t care for him too much.”

“It wasn’t Martin in particular. They’ve never liked
any
boy I’ve dated,
ever.
If they had their way, I’d go back to Arizona and do nothing but sit outside a
hogan
all day, weaving blankets.”

“This guy you’re supposed to be marrying … what’s he like?”

She shook her head. “I only ever saw him once. He lives out by Fort Defiance. Dad took me to meet him on my twelfth birthday, and said ‘This is the man you’re going to marry.’ Can you believe that? It was very dark in the trailer where we met, and all I could see was a very thin young man, naked to the waist. That’s all I remember. Except that my father cut our wrists and pressed them together and said that our blood was now joined forever, no matter what happened. I think I cried. In any case my father never took me to see this man again and I kind of forgot all about it. I never thought that I really
would
have to marry him. But when we came here, and I started to date Ray, and then Martin … well, it’s all come up to the surface again.”

“You don’t even know the guy’s name?”

“No. And I’ve never wanted to know. I want to marry somebody I fall in love with. I want to marry somebody here in LA. I want some fun, you know? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting in some trailer park in Arizona.”

Jim said, “You realise you’re old enough now to do whatever you damn well like?”

“Try telling that to my dad. Try telling that to Paul, and Grey Cloud.”

“You’ll work it out, I’m sure of it. And if you can’t work it out, come back and talk to me again. Right now you shouldn’t be worrying about your family problems, anyway. You should be trying to come to terms with what’s happened to Martin. It’s been a hell of a shock, hasn’t it, and it’s going to be days before you’re ready to start accepting that it’s really happened. Weeks before you stop crying all the time. And
months,
believe me,
before you can go through a whole day without thinking of him, even once.”

Catherine’s eyes welled with tears and her shoulders started to shake. “He’s dead,” she wept. “He’s dead, and he’s dead, and he’s dead.”

Jim held her close, and smelled the light musky perfume that she wore. He didn’t particularly like it, but it was just what young girls wore, and whenever he smelled it again he would think of that bare waiting-room with its beige couches and its faded framed poster.

“You remember me talking a couple of weeks ago about Edna St Vincent Millay?” he said, in his softest voice. “She wrote a sonnet that I sent to my sister once, after her husband had died of a heart attack. It ends up:

Catherine lifted her head and looked at him, her eyelashes clotted with tears. “That’s so sad,” she said.

“Yes, but it tells you that you’re not alone, that other people grieve too. It tells you that other people understand the pain you’re suffering.”

Catherine took out a balled-up tissue and wiped her eyes. “They won’t let me see him. Could you ask them if I could see him, just one last time?”

“Well, I’ll ask Lieutenant Harris, see what he says. I can’t promise you, though.”

He got up, and he was about to leave the room when the door opened and Catherine’s brothers came in. They were both dressed in black T-shirts and black jeans. Grey
Cloud’s was emblazoned with the initials DNA – not for dioxyribonucleic acid, but for
Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe,
the Navajo legal aid corps.

“What do you two want?” Jim demanded. “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble already?”

“We’ve come to take our sister home,” said Grey Cloud, taking off his sunglasses.

“Well, you’re going to have to wait,” Jim told him. “We’re not through here yet, and your father’s given Catherine permission to stay till twelve.”

“Do you have some kind of hearing impediment? I said we’ve come to take our sister home.”

Jim stepped up to him so that their faces were only six inches apart. “You listen to me, you punk. Your sister has experienced a traumatic shock and she needs all the understanding she can get. What she doesn’t need is you two swaggering in here like two medium-grilled John Travoltas and putting her through even more stress. So back off. You can wait, if you want to, and give her a ride when she’s ready. Otherwise put an egg in your boot and beat it.”

“You don’t talk to us like that,” put in Paul, jabbing his finger at Jim’s chest. “This is our country, man. Not yours. You don’t have the right.”

“Aren’t you forgetting what you said to Martin in front of half-a-dozen witnesses at yesterday’s football game? I’m sure my friend Lieutenant Harris is going to be very interested in that.”

“Threaten him? I didn’t threaten him,” Grey Cloud retorted. “I simply told him what was going to happen to him if he kept on dating Catherine. It was a prediction,
capiche
? You can’t arrest anybody for making a prediction.”

“Oh, no? Well, here’s another prediction: if you don’t back off and give Catherine the time she needs to get over this shock, your nose will be mysteriously broken before
the count of ten. Besides, what the hell kind of Navajo word is ‘
capiche
’?”

Grey Cloud angrily clenched his fist but his brother Paul held him back. “Come on, man, this isn’t worth it. We can wait for five minutes.”

“Thank you,” said Jim, trying not to sound sarcastic. “I’m going to talk to Lieutenant Harris and while I’m gone maybe you can find it in your hearts to be good to your sister.”

“Mister, you don’t know
how
good,” Paul told him.

Lieutenant Harris was standing outside the morgue door, talking to Dr Whaley, the medical examiner, a balding, stoop-shouldered man with lopsided spectacles and a huge mournful nose.

“You and the rest of your faculty must be feeling pretty shaken,” said Dr Whaley. “I never saw anything like this, not in thirty-two years with the coroner’s office.”

“Catherine wants to know if she can see him.”

“I don’t think that’s very advisable. But you can, if you like.”

Jim glanced at Lieutenant Harris, but all Lieutenant Harris did was to shrug and say, “It’s up to you. You haven’t had breakfast yet, have you?”

“It’s just that I’d appreciate another opinion,” said Dr Whaley. “And I mean
any
opinion, whether it’s medical or not. I’ve already called Jack Skipper from the LA Zoo. He’s going to come and take a look and see if he can’t identify what kind of animal might have inflicted these kind of injuries. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t a dog, and that’s for sure.”

He led Jim busily into the chilly, green-tiled autopsy room, his rubbers making echoey squeaks on the floor, and Lieutenant Harris followed. There were two stainless-steel tables set side by side. One was empty. On the other
lay a body, under a green hospital sheet. Dr Whaley walked around it and switched on his bright pivoting lamp.

Lieutenant Harris said, “Martin Amato was found at approximately 5 a.m. by two joggers exercising their dog on the beach. When you see his injuries you’ll understand that whoever or
whatever
attacked him killed him almost instantly.”

“Judging by his body temperature, he hadn’t been dead for more than two hours,” said Dr Whaley. He took hold of the edge of the sheet, and then he said to Jim, “Are you ready for this?”

Jim nodded, and Dr Whaley slowly drew the sheet down the whole length of Martin Amato’s naked body. Or what was left of Martin Amato’s naked body.

His head was unrecognizable. One side of his face had been torn completely away, exposing his teeth and part of his jawbone. Most of his scalp had been wrenched off, too, leaving a clotted red tangle of skin and hair. But it was his chest and stomach that horrified Jim the most. There were four terrible rips – three or four inches deep in places – which crossed the front of his body diagonally from his left shoulder to his right thigh. They were parallel, like a clawmark, but what kind of animal had claws that could cut through the muscle and bones of a young man’s ribcage, snagging his heart and puncturing his lungs, before slicing his insides into hideously decorative ribbons? Reds, blacks, yellows and sticky beiges.

Jim stared at Martin’s body for almost a minute without saying anything. Then he turned away, and he heard Dr Whaley replacing the sheet.

“Well?” asked Lieutenant Harris. “Any ideas? You ever see anything like that before?”

“I thought mountain lion at first,” said Dr Whaley. “But mountain lions don’t only claw their quarry, they
bite them, too – and there are no teethmarks anyplace at all. What was done to that poor boy was done with no more than three extremely powerful blows – either with an animal claw or an implement that resembles an animal claw.”

Lieutenant Harris said, “Besides that, how the hell could a mountain lion get to Venice Beach? We’ve had no reports of lions missing from zoos or private menageries or movie animal companies. And the interesting thing is that – apart from the pawprints left by the joggers’ dog when it first approached the body – there were no tracks in the sand that resembled anything like the spoor of a very large lion-like animal. Only human footprints, that’s all, and some bicycle tires.”

“And there were no eye-witnesses that you know of?” asked Jim.

“We’ve already started knocking on doors, and we’ll be putting out an appeal on the news – but no, not so far. The kind of people who frequent Venice Beach in the middle of the night are not normally the kind of people you might describe as concerned citizens.”