Rook & Tooth and Claw (7 page)

“Do you believe in any of that?”

Grant’s eyes gave nothing away. “I’m just telling you what my grandfather told me.”

“All right, then. What about the smoke that Elvira was talking about?”

“My grandfather used to mention the smoke, too, but I could never understand what it was. He used to say, ‘The smoke can always find you; and the smoke can always do you harm; like real smoke can choke you to death. But what can you do to the smoke? You can’t do nothing. It’s there, but it isn’t there. You can smell it,’ that’s what he used to say, ‘but you can’t touch it. You can see it, but you can’t feel it. Watch out for the smoke’, that’s what he used to say.”

“But you don’t know what the smoke actually is.”

“No, Mr Rook, I don’t. And to tell you the God’s-honest truth, I believe I’d rather not.”

“Well, I appreciate your telling me,” said Jim. “I was beginning to think that I was going crazy.”

Grant looked at him narrowly. “You know something about Elvin’s killing, don’t you? Something connected with this voodoo stuff. You want to tell me what it is?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t, just at the moment.”

“You can’t, or you won’t? Which is it?”

“Mr Clay … I don’t know very much more than you do. But I’ve seen some things that aren’t normal at all, and I think they could be connected with Elvin’s death. You’ve done the best thing possible: you’ve put me on the right track. I promise you, if I can find out who killed your Elvin, then you’ll be the very first person to know.”

Grant said, “Thanks,” and relaxed.

The doors slid open and Elvira smiled, “Your pie’s ready for you, Mr Rook.”

“Thanks, Elvira,” said Jim, and followed Grant inside. As he glanced over the balcony, however, he was sure that
he could glimpse a shadow in the trash-crowded corner between the swings and garages. He tried to focus, but the garages were too far away. Besides, Grant was taking his arm and ushering him inside to finish his coffee.

Chapter Five

It took him over twenty minutes to find the Jones house, in a tatty triangle of scrubby hinterland right next to the freeway. It was so noisy that you had to shout at yourself to find out what you were thinking; and the air was yellow with photochemical smog.

There was a scrubby patch of grass outside the house, on which a derelict bronze Buick Riviera with no wheels was supported on cinderblocks. A small black boy with no pants on was furiously tricycling up and down the sidewalk. Glistening snot poured from each nostril and he intermittently stopped to lick it. Jim was almost tempted to give him his handkerchief, but one handkerchief wouldn’t do much to solve the problem of child neglect. He had seen kids of seven and eight, openly smoking cigarettes that their parents had given them. What was a little snot?

Jim went up to the front porch and rang the doorbell, although the door was already half-open. The green paint was faded and flaking and one of the windows was cracked. From inside the house came the smell of chicken frying and the monotonous thumping of garage music.

After a while, Jim stepped inside. The house was shabby but well-kept, with lace doilies on all of the side-tables and antimacassars on the backs of
the armchairs. The walls were crowded with colour photographs of aunts and uncles and cousins, as well as a garish painting of wild animals coming down to an African waterhole to drink.

He made his way along the corridor to the kitchen, where a thin bespectacled woman in a green dress was chopping peppers. He rapped lightly on the open door, and she looked up, flustered. She was obviously Tee Jay’s mother: he had inherited her eyes and her nose and her firm, determined jawline.

“Mr Rook!” she said. “What brings you here?”

“How are you, Mrs Jones? I just came by to make sure that everything was okay at home.”

“As good as it can be, with my son accused of killing his best friend.”

“Have you seen him yet?”

“Saw him this morning, over at the police headquarters. They were fixing to find him a lawyer.”

“How is he?”

“Not much different from always,” said Mrs Jones, scraping the chopped-up peppers into a saucepan. “He hardly said more than two words strung together.”

“Mrs Jones, I want you to know that I don’t think Tee Jay did it.”

“Huh!” she said, wryly. “Looks like you’re the only one who does.”

“I’m not so sure. Most of his classmates don’t think he did it, either; although some of them said that he’d been acting kind of weird lately.”

“Acting kind of weird is the understatement of the century,” said Mrs Jones. “For the past three or four months, Tee Jay has been just impossible to live with. Staying out till all hours, giving me mouth. Hanging out with all kinds of low-life.”

“You mean he’s been behaving like any normal eighteen-year-old?”

“Maybe so. But I’m trying to keep this family together all on my own, working every hour that God sends me; and the last thing I need is rebellion and bad language and slamming of doors. I just don’t need it.”

She suddenly turned to Jim, and her eyes were crowded with tears. “And I don’t need my son in jail, accused of first-degree murder.”

“Mrs Jones—” Jim began, “if you don’t want to talk right now—” But then the garage music stopped and Tee Jay’s older brother Anthony appeared, wearing a Dodgers T-shirt and a baggy pair of Bermuda shorts. He was even taller and broader than Tee Jay, and he put a large, protective arm around his mother’s shoulders.

“Hi, Anthony,” said Jim. “I just came round to make sure that your mom was okay. You found yourself a job yet?”

“Start Monday, Mr Rook, working for Santa Monica ’Vette. The money ain’t great but I’ll be doing what I’m good at.”

“Hope you’re still reading … keeping your brain in shape.”

“Oh, sure thing. I just finished
Native Son
.”

“Have you been to see Tee Jay too?”

Anthony shook his head, and gave his mother a comforting squeeze. “Tee Jay and me haven’t been getting along too good lately. Tee Jay hasn’t been getting along too good with anybody, as a matter of fact. That’s why he left.”

Jim frowned. “You mean he doesn’t live here any more?”

“Uhn-hunh. Not for three months now.”

“So where
does
he live?”

“Down near Venice Boulevard. He’s staying with his uncle, Dad’s big brother. That was another reason we were arguing so much. His uncle’s been away for years and years, right, working in Nigeria and Sierra Leone and places like that; and all of a sudden he turns up and pays us a visit. Me and mom and the rest of the family really dislike him, you know, but for some reason Tee Jay takes a shine to him. He starts visiting him two or three times a week and that was when the trouble really starts. In the end the rows get so bad that Mom tells Tee Jay to pack his bag and get the hell out. So of course, where does he go? Straight to Uncle Umber.”

Jim thought for a moment, and then he said, “This Uncle Umber. Tell me about him. Why didn’t you and the rest of the family like him?”

“You ought to meet the guy, then you’d know. He’s, like, really heavy, if you know what I mean. He walks in through the door and he fills up the whole house. And he’s full of all this stuff about racial heritage and African tradition. Real mumbo-jumbo, you know; but if you try to disagree with him he gets totally aggressive, and treats you like you’re some kind of traitor to your race.”

Jim said, “I think I’d like to meet this Uncle Umber of yours.”

“Believe me, Mr Rook,” said Mrs Jones, “you wouldn’t. If I were you, I’d leave well enough alone.”

“All the same, do you have his address?”

Anthony tore the corner off a piece of kitchen-towel and wrote it down. “He’s a blowhard, okay? So don’t take him too serious.”

“
Ly
,” Jim corrected him. “It’s ‘serious
ly
’.”

“Right, well, that too,” said Anthony.

Uncle Umber’s address near Venice Boulevard turned
out to be one of four apartments over Dollars&Sense, a small cut-price supermarket in a scabby street lined with ten-year-old automobiles and overflowing trash cans. The upper part of the building was painted white, but at one time it must have been light green, because the paint was scaling off like skin-disease.

There was an intercom speaker and three doorbells, one without any identifying card, one saying Puchowski, and the other ‘U.M. Jones’. Jim pressed it and waited.

Nobody answered, so he pressed it again, and then again. At last a deep, crackly voice said, “
Who is it
?”

“Mr Jones? My name’s Rook, Jim Rook. I’m Tee Jay’s teacher. I wonder if I could have a word with you.”

“
You’d better come on up, Mr Rook. I’ve been expecting you. It’s Apartment 1
.”

The buzzer sounded and the door unlocked, but Jim hesitated.
I’ve been expecting you
? He didn’t like the sound of that. Maybe he should back off, and leave Mr U.M. Jones for Lieutenant Harris to interview.

The buzzer sounded again. “
Are you coming on up, Mr Rook, or is there something that’s bothering you
?”

“I’m coming.”

He pushed open the door and found himself in a gloomy, airless hallway with a single fluorescent tube dangling from the ceiling by its wires. He climbed the concrete steps until he reached the first landing. Then he went up to the black-painted door marked ‘1’ and knocked.

The door was opened almost instantly – and there, to Jim’s horror, stood the tall dark man from college, hatless now and dressed in a long black kaftan. He was grinning at Jim with a gleeful ferocity, baring his teeth.

“It’s
you
,” Jim whispered. He wished to God he had
a crucifix or a vial of holy water or whatever it was that kept supernatural creatures at bay.

“Yes, Mr Rook, it’s me. But don’t look so shaken. I’m only Tee Jay’s uncle, after all.”

“Oh, no. You’re a hell of a lot more than that. I don’t know what you are or who you are, but don’t try to tell me that you’re ‘only Tee Jay’s uncle’. You murdered Elvin Clay.”

Uncle Umber gave a light, dismissive shrug. “So what do you propose to do about it? Call the police? Make a citizen’s arrest?”

“There’s no point in that if nobody else can see you. You said so yourself.”

Uncle Umber’s brow furrowed. For the first time, Jim noticed that he had a pattern of cicatrices on his forehead, tiny self-inflicted scars in an arrow-pattern that met between his eyes. “Nobody else can see me? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play games,” Jim told him. “Nobody can see you but me, and even I can’t feel you. But you murdered Elvin Clay and by God I’m going to find some way to make you pay for it.”

Without a word, Uncle Umber stepped out of his apartment and swept past Jim to the opposite door, Apartment 2. Jim felt his silky kaftan sliding against him, and he could
smell
him, too: that distinctive incense aroma that had been left in the college corridor the first time that Jim had encountered him. He stood back while Uncle Umber knocked at the apartment door; and then knocked again.

The door opened and an elderly man in a grey short-sleeved shirt appeared, with a checkered napkin tucked into the collar. His face was grey and his hair was grey and even though it was thinning it stuck up at the back like a cockatoo’s crest.

“What is it?” he demanded, querulously. “I’m trying to eat my supper here.”

“Zygmunt,” said Uncle Umber, with all the showy patience of a stage magician, “can you see me?”

The elderly man stared at him as if he were mad. “What the hell do you mean, Umber? Of course I can see you. I just don’t happen to
want
to see you, that’s all. I’m trying to eat my supper.”

“Zygmunt,” said Uncle Umber, “before you go … can you tell this gentleman where I was yesterday morning round about eleven o’clock a.m.?”

“You was in your apartment, wasn’t you?” said the elderly man. “I saw you going in round about quarter after ten and I saw you coming out again just before two.”

“You’re sure of that?” asked Uncle Umber.

“Of course I’m sure. You couldn’t have left without closing the street door, and when I hear that street door shut, I always look out to see what’s what.”

“There,” said Uncle Umber, in triumph. “I don’t appear to be the man that you say I am, do I? Other people can see me; and I couldn’t have possibly killed Elvin, because I was here; and I have a witness to prove it. Even if I
had
managed to leave without Zygmunt hearing me go, I could never have reached West Grove College in time to do the dirty deed – now, could I?”

He came up to Jim and stood right over him; and this time Jim could actually
feel
his aura, vibrant and dark. His eyes were yellowish, with bloodshot rims, like the yolks of fertilised eggs. He laid his hands on Jim’s shoulders and gripped him hard. It hurt, but Jim did his best not to wince.

“You said you could see me but you couldn’t feel me?” Uncle Umber growled. “How does this feel?”

Jim said, “You don’t frighten me, Mr Jones. I know what I saw and I know what I felt. Or rather, what I
didn’t
feel.”

“So call the police,” Uncle Umber suggested, lifting his hands away from Jim’s shoulders and holding them up wrist-to-wrist as if he were waiting for handcuffs.

“I came here because of Tee Jay,” said Jim. “Not because of you. All right, you can prove to the police that you didn’t do it. But what about Tee Jay? No matter what else you are – if you’re his uncle, how can you let him take the rap for a crime that
you
committed?”

“He won’t,” said Uncle Umber. “The police don’t have any witnesses. They don’t have any forensic evidence. They don’t have anything but circumstantial evidence – except, of course,
your
story that you saw me leaving the boiler-house, and they won’t believe that for a moment. Plus, one more thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Jim.

“One of your class will suddenly remember that he saw Tee Jay at the very time that he was supposed to be stabbing Elvin Clay.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“He saw him smoking behind the science block, that’s what I mean.”

“But the cops have talked to every student in the school. Nobody saw him doing that.”

Uncle Umber tapped his forehead with a long, dry finger. “They will, Mr Rook. They will.” He held out his hand in front of his face, palm uppermost, and gently blew. “All you have to is to puff a little dust their way, Mr Rook, and they will remember anything you want them to remember, forever. Polygraph proof.”

He beckoned Jim toward his apartment. Inside, it smelled even more strongly of incense, and Jim sneezed
three times before he could go any further. There was a dark hallway, its window shuttered, its walls painted oxblood red. Three skulls were hung in a triangle. They had twisted horns and pointed noses, and they were probably nothing more bizarre than oryx, but Jim was beginning to think that anything was possible. Standing in one corner, half-hidden by the thick black velvet drapes, was an ebony statue of a beautiful naked woman with the head of a snarling dog.

Uncle Umber led Jim into a large living-room, whose walls were entirely lined with black-and-red fabric. It was furnished with two leather sofas the colour of clotted blood, a black carpet, and a huge coffee-table strewn with books and magazines and strings of beads and all kinds of other bizarre detritus, such as bones and feathers and wedding-veils. One side of the room was taken up with charts and diagrams and something that looked like an astrological map, although it was covered with drawings of scorpions and beetles and oddly-deformed children.

In the opposite corner stood a wooden carving of seven naked men, all joined together with the same long spear.

Jim said, “I’ve seen that before.”

Uncle Umber looked at him in surprise. “You’ve seen the piercing ceremony? Where?”

“I mean I’ve seen the same image. Tee Jay drew it in his art lesson.”

“Tee Jay is very expressive, Mr Rook. Very creative. He is also very proud. He finds it difficult to do what he’s told.”

“There are times, Mr Jones, when, for the common good, everybody has to do what they’re told.”