Tengu (26 page)

Olive took
Mack’s arm, as if to reassure him that whatever had happened in the past wasn’t
going to affect the strength of their friendship now. Mack said disjointedly,
“There was something like that, yes. But not
serious,
and only one time. It started as a party, and then I guess we all had a little
too much wine. There was no bad feeling afterward, no problems.”

“You don’t
think that, having slept with her once, Maurice Needs may have thought that
Sherry Cantor was a lover of his? That he might have gotten overpossessive
about her?
Jealous, even?”

“Look,” said
Mack, “this is all completely off the wall. Maurice never hurt anyone, never
would.

We had a scene
with Sherry, ail right, I admit it, but it was one time only and that was it.
We all stayed good friends. Sherry and
me
used to go
down to the circus to see him, and he was always totally friendly. He wouldn’t
do anything like that, not to anybody, and especially not to Sherry.”

“Mr. Sennett?”
Skrolnik asked Jerry. “Did you ever see that man before? Lurking around your
street maybe?”

Olive said, “That
guy couldn’t lurk if he tried. Look at the size of him. But don’t you think
he’s cuteV

“Don’t get
ideas,” said Mack. “He isn’t very big where it really counts. These Muscle
Beach types never are.”

Sergeant
Skrolnik impatiently put in, “Will you take a look at the suspect, please, Mr.
Sennett?
A real good look?”

Jerry shook his
head. “I’m sorry, sergeant. I never saw him before.”

“Can we talk to
him?” asked Mack. “I mean, you’re not going to hold him, are you? Not really?”

Detective
Pullet said, “You can talk to him if you want to. But until we have some pretty
good evidence that he didn’t murder Sherry Cantor, he stays right here.”

Mack said,
“Jerry–Olive–can you wait for me? I’d really like to give the poor guy some
encouragement.”

“Don’t
owrencourage him,” said
Skrolnik,
glancing at Pullet
in a way which showed that he didn’t really think that allowing Maurice Needs
to speak to Mack was a very good idea. But Pullet said, “It could help, right?
Anything which gets us nearer to the nub of what actually happened.”

“All right,”
said Skrolnik.
“But not longer than five minutes.
Then
I’m going to have to tell the commissioner we’ve hauled someone in.”

Detective
Arthur sneezed loudly.

Outside again,
on the vinyl bench, Jerry and Olive waited and smoked while Mack was given time
to talk to El Krusho. Olive said, “What were you in the Navy, Jerry?
Afloat or ashore?”

“Mostly ashore.
Naval Intelligence
Department.
Nothing very much like the Navy and not
very intelligent, either.’’

“My husband’s
in Records. Right now he’s working on some kind of official history of Midway,
something like that.”

“Do you miss
him?” asked Jerry, looking at her carefully through the winding cigarette
smoke.

She nodded. Her
eyes gave away just how much she Tengu missed him.

“I can’t believe
this guy is called El Krusho,” Jerry said, to change the subject. “Did Mack
ever talk about him before?”

“He did mention
he used to know a circus strongman. But that was all.”

Jerry said, “He
didn’t really look the type to commit murder, did he? You see the way he kept
looking at the door?
Sort of soft and hopeless, like he’s
waiting for his gray-haired momma to come bail him out.”

“He looked
strong enough,” remarked Olive.

“Well, sure,
and that’s obviously one of the reasons they’re holding him. But unless he had
an accomplice, I don’t really believe he did it.” He reached into his plaid
jacket and took out the sheet of soft scrollwork paper
he
had-found under his windshield wiper. “If anything convinces me that it wasn’t
him, this does. I found it on my car tonight, just after Sergeant Skrolnik
called me.”

Olive took the
paper and read it carefully, “The hawks will return to their roost?” She
frowned.

“What the hell
does that mean?”

“I don’t know.
It sounds like an old Japanese proverb. But like all Japanese proverbs, it
could have several meanings. Maybe something like ‘that which has been
troubling you before is going to come back and trouble you again.’ On the other
hand, it could mean something altogether different.”

“Do you know
who might have put it on your car?”

Jerry took back
the paper, folded it up, and shook his head. “Not a clue. But I think whoever
did it knows who killed Sherry Cantor; and whoever did it knows exactly what’s
going to come down next.”

Olive stared at
him. “You mean–the murderer’s still out there? He could do it again?”

“I hope not,”
said Jerry dryly. “And the reason I hope not is because the next murder could
well be mine.”

Mack was almost
a half-hour. Jerry took a stroll around the hallway, smiling at the impossible
desk officer; trying to pat a police dog on the head, going over to talk to a
young blonde woman police officer who was typing up reports at a desk to one
side.

“Hi,” he said.
“It looks like you’re pretty tied up tonight.”

The policewoman
looked up at him, sharply. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but visitors are requested
to wait over there.”

“Okay,” said
Jerry. “I was only trying to support my local police department.”

At that moment,
however, just as Jerry was turning away, a lieutenant came up, sweating and
paunchy, and handed the policewoman a sheaf of documents.

“Janice, can
you do me a favor and get these sorted out for me? I
mean,
real quick. I need them two hours ago.”

“Which one’s
this?” the policewoman asked him, leafing through the notes.

“The Japanese one.
The young guy they found in that culvert
out by West Covina.”

“Okay,
lieutenant,” the policewoman said, and laid the papers on the edge of her desk.

Jerry didn’t
ever quite know what led him to do it. But as the lieutenant headed for the
squad room, he turned around and deliberately knocked against the policewoman’s
desk, so that all the papers were scattered on the floor, swooping and
tumbling.

“I asked you to
wait over there!” the policewoman snapped, getting up from her seat. But Jerry
was quicker. He knelt down and gathered the papers up, and as he did so he
snatched a quick read at every page. A name: Kemo Toyama. Part of a report by
the officer who first arrived at West Covina: Seriously mutilated, heart
dislocated, brain damaged.
Names of witnesses, no time to
read any of those.
And then, like a newsflash, a name and address: do
Nancy Shiranuka, Alta Loma Road.

Jerry handed
the papers back to the policewoman with a sheepish smile. “I’m truly sorry. I
guess I’ve always been clumsy. Can I buy you dinner to make up for my boobery?”

The policewoman
sat down again and zipped a fresh sheet of paper into her typewriter.

“Just sit down
and behave yourself, and I’ll resist the temptation to arrest you for
interfering with police business,” she said. Jerry saluted.
“Yes,
ma’am.”

O
n the way back to Franklin Avenue, Mack said, “The poor guy’s
completely innocent. I don’t even know how they can hold him.”

“Does he have
an alibi?” asked Jerry.

“He was in bed
asleep.”

“Alone? Or
accompanied?”

“Alone as it happens.”

Jerry made a
face. “Lying alone in your own bed, no matter how peacefully, is not really
much of an alibi. What about the police killing?”

“He doesn’t
have an alibi then, either. But he couldn’t have done either of them. It just
isn’t in him.”

Jerry produced
the Japanese paper and handed it across the car. “This is what really convinces
me it wasn’t him.”

“This piece of paper?
What does it mean?”

“It’s a warning
of some sort. It’s Japanese. And it must have been attached to my car long after
Sergeant Skrolnik locked your friend Maurice Krusho up in the cells.”

“Why didn’t you
show this to Skrolnik?”

“I don’t know.
I suppose I’m still not sure that what / think about Sherry Cantor’s death
isn’t just another manifestation of my neurosis about Japan.”

“But if it
could have sprung Maurice from jail...”

“It’s not
evidence,” said Jerry, taking it back. “Not the kind of evidence that Skrolnik
is looking for.’’

‘‘For you,
though ?”

Jerry tapped
hjs forehead with his finger. “For me, it sets off that cold wind.”

They had
reached Mack’s apartment, and Jerry drew over to the curb. Mack said, “Are you
sure you don’t want to stay with us tonight? If there’s a killer on the loose
and he’s looking for you...?”

“I’ll be okay,”
said Jerry. “I’ve got a Colt automatic in the bedroom and I can still remember
some of my judo.”

“You’re welcome
to wine and Revenge of the Jedi’’ smiled Olive.

Jerry shook his
head. “Thanks, but I’ve got to get back for my son. He was supposed to be home
a half-hour ago. But let me think this all over tonight, and maybe I’ll call
you in the morning.

There’s
something real complicated going on here, you know.
Something
that makes some kind of sense if only we could fit all the pieces together.
I just need to get it all assembled in my brain.”

It was almost
nine o’clock by the time Jerry swung his car into Orchid Place. Considering
that David was supposed to have gotten back from the Lechner’s by eight o’clock
at the latest, he was surprised and concerned to find that the house was still
in darkness. He parked his car, locked it, and went to open the front door. It
was already two or three inches ajar. He stood and looked at it for a moment,
unsure of what to do. Then he reached out with his fingertips and nudged it open.

In the hall, he
paused and held his breath. The killer could be waiting for him anywhere, in
any shadow. He took two or three steps forward, trying to remember what his old
judo instructor had told him. You are the wind, nothing more. You are the air.
When your enemy attacks you, you will become the air, invisible yet strong. You
will give way; but in your giving way you will vanquish your enemy instantly.

Something else
came into his mind. An unbidden thought that made him feel cold and alarmed.

A single word.
Tengu.

He called,
“David? Are you there, David?” but there was no reply. Either David had come
back early and then gone out again when he found that his father wasn’t home,
leaving the door unlocked by accident, or else–

Jerry reached
for the living room light and flicked it on. Everything was in chaos–cushions,
chairs, vases, books were scattered all over the rug. Even the liquor cabinet
had been wrenched open and its pink-tinted glass smashed. One of the drapes had
been pulled down, and there was a smear of blood on the wallpaper.

With stiff,
chilled movements, too shocked now to think about judo, Jerry crossed the room.

Sprawled on the
sofa was a Japanese Hotei doll, a puppet of one of the seven gods of fortune.

White-faced, cloaked in black, with massive earlobes and the
joking, malevolent smile of a trickster.
Jerry gently lifted it up, and
its head and arms flopped back. Where it had been lying, there was another
sheet of scrollwork paper, neatly rolled and tied with string. He opened it up
and read, in growing fright, the message: “We have your son. Wait patiently for
instructions. Tell nobody.”

Beneath the
writing was a brushwork picture of a dove with its wings aflame.

Jerry went
immediately to the telephone, picked it up, and dialed Sergeant Skrolnik’s
number.

Then, before
the police switchboard had answered, he set the phone down again.

He felt at last
as if his nightmares had broken through from the past into the present day,
like devils crawling and scrambling out of one of those huge pandemonic eggs in
a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. He felt as if everything had turned to fire, as
if hell had come to life, as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki were again incandescent.

He said, “Oh,
God,” but the words sounded empty and pitiful.

T
hey had expected Admiral Knut S. Thorson to die within hours of
his last and most paralyzing stroke. He was 78, after all, and his last ten
years of life had been dogged by serious heart disease and delibitating
collapses. But “Inch-Thick Thorsen,’’ as the Navy had always nicknamed him, was
made of tough, durable stuff, and his hours of life had lengthened into days,
then months.

He had lain for
nearly a year now inside his oxygen tent at Rancho Encino Hospital, one of the
most luxurious acute-care facilities in the whole of southern California, a
stumpy little gray-haired man with ferocious eyebrows and
a
ruddiness
in his weathered face which even twelve months of hospitalization
had been unable to fade.

Every two days
his wife visited and sat watching him breathe inside his plastic cocoon; a
plain woman who always wore flowers in her hat. On holidays and anniversaries,
his entire family came to Rancho Encino, and stared at him with respect,
regret, and boredom. “Inch-Thick” remained with his eyes closed, his heartbeats
monitored by the latest and most sensitive of cardio-pulmonary equipment, his
brainwaves monitored by electroencephalograph.

His wife was
still with him at 9:06 the evening after Jerry Sennett had been asked by
Sergeant Skrolnik to come down to police headquarters and look at Maurice
Needs. She had said nothing to him for most of the afternoon; but toward
nightfall she had recited to him, without any hope that he could hear or
understand her, one of the love poems he had written to her during the war.