Tengu Read online

  Skrolnik sat down again. He stared at the photograph for a little while longer, and then tossed it away across his desk. “I don’t know whether to sing ‘God Bless America’ or go for a shit,” he said. “Forget the coffee. We’re going down to Anaheim.”

  They spoke very little as they drove through the dusty sunshine toward Anaheim. It was a very hot afternoon, and the Buick’s air conditioning was gurgling and splut-_ tering with every bump in the Santa Ana Freeway. Skrol-nik said from time to time, as if it were the first time he had ever said it, “El Krusho. Jesus.”

  Bright Brother Grand Circus had erected its big top just two blocks south of Lincoln Avenue, on Euclid. Detective Pullet parked the Buick next to a filthy truck that had DANGER

  MAN-EATING LIONS stenciled on the side. “Your middle name isn’t Daniel, by any chance?” asked Skrolnik, as he stepped out of the car ankle-deep into a dry sea of popcorn cartons.

  It took them nearly a quarter of an hour to find the chief clown. He was a morose, aging man, with a face like a canvas bag full of plumbing tools. He was sitting on the fold-down sofa in his silver Airflow trailer drinking Coor’s and watching baseball on a snowy-screened portable TV.

  His lean body was wrapped up in an aquamarine bathrobe.

  “Mr. Cherichetti?” asked Skrolnik, tapping on the open door.

  “Who’s asking?” demanded the clown.

  “Sergeant Skrolnik. Homicide. You got a minute?”

  “For what?”

  “For questions. Nothing personal. Just a few questions.”

  Cherichetti sniffed loudly and kept his eyes on the baseball. “I didn’t murder anybody, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Did I say you murdered anybody?”

  “You’re from Homicide, right? Detectives from Homicide want to find out who murdered whom. Did you get that good grammar? Whom, right?”

  Sergeant Skrolnik walked along the aisle in the middle of the trailer and made a show of admiring the Canvas-Tex reproductions of Olde Masters, including the “Monarch of the Glen” by Landseer and Boy’a “Maja Nude.” He delicately touched the rim of a blue-and-yellow cut-glass vase with his fingertips. “Nice place you got here, Mr. Cherichetti. Tasteful. Can you tell me where you were at half past seven on the morning of August ninth?”

  Cherichetti raised his hooded eyes and looked at Skrolnik with a noticeable lack of clownish humor. “I have to answer that? By law?”

  “You don’t have to answer anything. It depends whether you want to help me find the guy who tore an innocent young woman into pieces, that’s all.”

  “Sherry Cantor?”

  Skrolnik nodded.

  “Well, I seen her once or twice, in the flesh,” said Cherichetti. “That was before the TV show, you know? Two, three years ago. She used to come to see the circus with Maurice and some other guy.”

  “Maurice Needs? El Krusho?”

  “El Krusho,” said Cherichetti with disdain.

  Skrolnik raised an eyebrow at Pullet. “Well,” he said. “Tell me, Mr. Cherichetti, was there ever any evidence in your eyes that Maurice Needs and Sherry Cantor were more than just friends of the same mutual friend? What I mean is, do you think there was any kind of romance between Maurice Needs and Sherry Cantor? Anything like that?”

  “Depends what you call romance,” sniffed Cherichetti. “I don’t call it romance, everybody getting into the same bed together.”

  Skrolnik gripped Pullet’s wrist. For Christ’s sake, he thought to himself, this kid Pullet has a nose for homicide like a hunting dog. Needs and Holt and Sherry Cantor all shared the same bed?

  What a motive for Needs and Holt to tear the poor girl to pieces. What an incredible percent solid brass motive. Both of them were jealous, loverboy and strongman, and when she left both of them to rub shoulders with the glittering and the good-looking, both of them plotted to kill her. And how? With the ready-made weapon of El Krusho’s invincible and irresistible hands. What a case! What a fucking gold-plated 100 percent amazing easel

  “Is El Krusho here today?” asked Skrolnik. “I’d really like to talk to him.” Cherichetti shook his head. “He’s gone up to Venice to see some girl. He won’t be back until tonight’s performance, seven o’clock.”

  “You know where in Venice? What kind of car he’s driving? Anything like that?”

  “He drives a ‘69 Pontiac, you know, the one with the long pointy hood. Turquoise blue, except for one door, that’s beige. The girl lives on Rialto Avenue, pretty girl, he took me around there once to meet her. Her name’s Bitzi or Titzi or something like that. Pretty girl.”

  Detective Pullet said, “Mr. Cherichetti, there’s one more thing. Do you happen to have noticed if any of your greasepaint has been missing lately? Any of it been dipped into by somebody else, or maybe stolen?”

  Mr. Cherichetti frowned at them. “My slap? Why would anyone want to steal my slap?”

  “Well, it could be relevant,” said Pullet.

  “I don’t know,” said Cherichetti, slowly shaking his head. “I use so much of the stuff I wouldn’t notice.”

  At that, moment, a hefty black-haired woman in a spangled corset and fishnet tights came up the steps of the trailer, patting sweat from her face with a multicolored towel.

  “What goes on here?” she asked.

  “The police,” explained Cherichetti. “They came to see me because they felt like a laugh.”

  The woman stalked aggressively into the trailer and planted her fists on her spangled hips. “They wasted their time, huh? Nobody gets a laugh from you.”

  Mr. Cherichetti raised his beercan and said, “This is Josephina, my girlfriend. The most beautiful woman in California, if not the universe.”

  Skrolnik looked from Josephina to Cherichetti and then back to Josephina again. He gave Cherichetti’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Good luck,” he said. “It looks like you need it.

  Come on, Pullet, let’s go see what the score is in Venice.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jerry Sennett was putting the finishing touches to a homemade pepperoni pizza when the doorbell rang. He dusted the flour off his hands, took a quick swallow of whiskey from the glass beside the pastry board, and then walked through his living room to answer it. It was Mack Holt, in jeans this time, and a T-shirt. He looked hot and agitated.

  “Mr. Sennett? Jerry? I’m sorry. I should have called first.”

  “You saw the news bulletin?”

  Mack nodded. “You’re right. It’s the same mask. The damned same mask! What was that you said about ‘a cold wind’? That’s like something psychic. Intuition, or something. ‘‘

  “Well, you can call it a hunch, if you want to,” said Jerry. “Listen, I’ve just made a pizza. Do you want to stay and have some? It’ll take a little while to bake.”

  “Pizza? Well, sure. I mean, I don’t want to impose on you.”

  Jerry smiled. “I told you before. I am impervious to imposition. Anyway, my son David’s staying with friends this evening out at the beach. He’s reached the age when he has a social life of his own, which apparently doesn’t include dear old Dad.”

  No Mom?” asked Mack. It was an innocent question, not prying.

  “Mom–my wife, Rhoda–well, she died a few years ago,” said Jerry. “Since then I’ve been trying to bring David up on my own. With varied success, I might tell you. He’s cheerful.

  Ebullient, even. But I sometimes think he lacks the security that a mother could have given him.

  Do you understand what I mean?”

  “I sure do,” said Mack. “My parents broke up when I was ten, and I missed my dad like hell. He married some waitress from Albuquerque. Not that I blame him, she was half his age and real pretty. I mean, real pretty. But, you know, I didn’t get any of that friendly cuffing around the head, none of that talk about football and airplanes and cowboys. I used to look at other kids who had two parents, two normal parents, you know, and I used to be so damned jealous.’’

>   “You’re not jealous now, though?” asked Jerry, pouring Mack a drink.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I still envy them their memories.”

  Jerry sat down on the sofa and crossed his legs, watching Mack with sympathy but also with the perceptiveness of a trained intelligence officer. It was a habit that thirty-eight years had done nothing to erase. Jerry wanted to know things because he had been trained to want to know things. His old instructor had rasped at him, “The intelligence officer who isn’t incurably curious isn’t worth doodly-squat. Dis-miss!”

  Jerry said, “What about Sherry? Did Sherry represent any kind of security for you? Did you ever talk about getting married?”

  “We lived together for quite a while,” said Mack. “I guess I always assumed that we were going to stay together forever. She was very warm, you know. One of these girls you can sit with all evening, and you don’t have to say a single word, and you know that you’re getting through.”

  “I think that came over on the TV screen,” said Jerry.

  Mack swallowed Chivas Regal and shrugged in acknowledgment. “Sure. The trouble was, when everybody else started loving her, I started to feel crowded out.”

  “You argued?”

  “/argued. She didn’t say anything, just took it, hoping I’d learn to understand. I don’t think she really wanted to leave me, but you know what insecure people are like. Forever saying, ‘Get out of here, I don’t need you,’ in the hope that she’ll say, ‘You may not need me, but I need you.’

  Classic. She packed and left, and I didn’t do anything to stop her. Five minutes later I was banging my head against the wall and wondering why the hell I was so damned stupid.”

  Jerry looked across at him carefully. “Did the police question you?”

  “Oh, sure. I’m not supposed to leave the city, and I have to rack my brains to think of anyone who might have killed her.”

  “Any ideas?”

  Mack tugged his fingers through his blond curls and shook his head. “Why did Manson’s creepie-crawlies kill Sharon Tate? Why does anybody kill anybody? I don’t know. This whole town is nutty. I thought you were nutty, until I saw that mask on television.”

  Jerry stood up again. He needed to stand up to say what he had to say next. “I am nutty,” he said. “Well, slightly. I had some bad experiences in Japan during the war, things to do with conscience, and guilt. Things you don’t easily forget. You remember Colonel Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima? You remember what happened to him, how he turned into a kelptomaniac, that kind of thing?”

  “The same thing happened to you?” asked Mack.

  “I used to steal clocks and turn the hands back to 8 A.M. the minute before they dropped the atom bomb, in the hope that it might never have happened. I don’t steal clocks anymore, but I still have dreams about it. That morning, we killed 78,150 people at one stroke, in one instant and burned or injured 37,425. Hundreds of people are still suffering for what we did, even today.”

  Mack didn’t say anything for a while, but then he suggested gently, “We were fighting a war, right? A whole lot more people would have died if we hadn’t dropped it.”

  “You think so? Well, who can say? Yes, you’re probably right. My doctor says the same thing.

  ‘You helped to save the lives of countless American troops,’ he tells me. ‘It was either us, or them.’ But that doesn’t take away the enormity of what I had to do. That doesn’t take away the fact that at one moment in history I was solely responsible for America’s decision whether to drop that atomic bomb or not. I’ve never even told David about it, my own son, I’m so damned ashamed.

  There was a garlicky smell of baking pizza coming from the kitchen. Mack swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and said, “You picked that mask up in Japan?” It was an obvious attempt to change the subject.

  Jerry lifted the mask up from the table. The late-afternoon sun shone brilliantly through its empty eyeholes, giving it a disturbingly triumphant appearance. “You don’t believe me?” he asked.

  Mack shrugged. “It was Truman who decided to drop the bomb, right?”

  Jerry hesitated for a moment, then looked down at his half-empty glass. “Yes, it was Truman who decided to drop the bomb.”

  Mack looked distinctly uneasy. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Sure, it was Truman who decided to drop the bomb. It was Truman who said go. But Truman wasn’t sitting beside me in those mountains by Yuki and Namata, with a high-power receiving set, listening to Japanese intelligence reports from Hiroshima. Truman didn’t know whether I was fabricating everything I heard on that radio or not. When I said That’s it,’ Truman said go; but if I hadn’t said ‘That’s it,’ then Truman would have said forget it. You really believe he was eager to drop that thing? Maybe he was. Who knows?”

  Mack finished his drink and put down the glass. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t even born then.”

  “Sure,” nodded Jerry. “You weren’t even born. Well, that lets you out. You can think about Hiroshima with an easy mind.”

  “Listen,” said Mack, “I don’t even pretend to understand it. I came here because of the mask; and because of Sherry. I didn’t come here for a lecture in moral philosophy, or some kind of psycho confession about World War Two.”

  Jerry looked at Mack for a moment, and then nodded. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m acting my age. I’m out of date. And I’m even more sorry that I’m having to say sorry.”

  Mack said, “Okay. Listen, I wasn’t very understanding. I never had to serve in the Army, you know? I don’t even know what I’m talking about. I’m just as sorry as you are.”

  Jerry thought for a while, then emptied his glass and set it down on the table beside him. “You want to talk about the mask?” he asked Mack.

  “Sure. I couldn’t believe it when I turned on the television and there it was. The same goddamned mask. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so creepy in my whole goddamned life.”

  “You’re happy it was the same mask?”

  “If happy’s the word for it.”

  Jerry said, “Come on into the kitchen. That pizza’s going to be ready before you know it.”

  Mack perched on a stool while Jerry took the pizza out of the oven and fumbled it onto a wire rack to cool. Jerry said, “That white mask is similar to those they use in No theater, in Japan.

  There are two main kinds of traditional theater in Japan–Kabuki, which was the dance theater introduced for commoners at the end of the sixteenth century–and No, which was reserved for the aristocracy. There was also, of course, the Bugaku theater, which was performed exclusively for the Japanese royal family, and which wasn’t seen by the public from the time it began in the seventh century until the end of World War Two. Can you imagine that? A whole art form which was kept secret for 1,300 years. When you start to think about that, you can start to think about what you’re really up against when you’re competing with the Japanese. I know, I know, you’re thinking about Toyotas and Panasonic televisions and Suntory whiskey. But you’re missing the point. Everybody’s missing the point. “Japan is a mystical, rigid, highly formalized society; a society in which magic and occult forces have considerably more strength because they’re so widely accepted and believed. Japan is the last great magical society of the modern world; and that magic was only slightly diminished by losing the war to the United States. Oh–they were prepared to accept certain superficial changes, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are times when even the dragon is prepared to surrender to the atomic bomb. But Japan remains, and always will. That extraordinary group of islands has a social and religious history more ancient than Americans can imagine. You know something? The city of Nara, that’s about 26 miles south of Kyoto, that used to be the capital of Japan, from the year 710 to 784. Can you imagine that? One thousand years before the Declaration of Independence. And that’s where the culture that created this mask, the
culture that was responsible for Sherry Cantor’s murder–that’s where this culture began.”

  Mack said, “I’m not sure that I understand what you’re saying.”

  Jerry began to slice up the pizza. “I’m not sure what I’m saying, either. No masks may make some kind of sense to me, but why should they have anything to do with Sherry? Did Sherry ever visit Japan?”

  Mack shook his head. “She never traveled farther than Bloomington, Indiana. That’s where her mother lived.”

  “Did she know any Japanese people? Work in ajapan-ese restaurant?”

  “Not that she told me.”

  Jerry slid a plate out of the cupboard and handed Mack a steaming slice of pizza. “You want a beer?” he asked.

  Mack said, “Sure. A light, if you’ve got it.”

  They sat side by side at the kitchen counter, devouring the pizza. Every now and then, Mack would stop to fan his mouth with his hand. “This is terrific pizza. I’m going to have a thousand blisters on the roof of my mouth tomorrow. Jerry said, “We could be making a really bad mistake. I mean, /could. When the witnesses said that the murderer was wearing a white mask, they could have been confused. They were all in passing cars, remember. What they saw was probably nothing more than a glimpse. And the guy could have been wearing anything. A white stocking over his face. White makeup. Maybe he was just naturally pale, like an albino.”

  “But the police drawings,” Mack put in. “They look just like that mask.’’

  “Well, sure they do,” agreed Jerry. “But what do we have here? Two eyes, a nose, a mouth; and a white, blank face. Not much to go on.”

  Mack looked up at Jerry narrowly. “That cold wind you talked about. You don’t feel it anymore?

  That intuition?”

  Jerry toyed with his last triangle of pizza. “I’m not sure. Once you start analyzing it, once you start thinking about it, you lose it. It was in Kyoto once, after the war, walking along Shijo Street on my way to the Fujii Daimaru department store. I stepped off the curb just opposite the Shiro Karasuma station, and I felt that cold wind like ice. I stepped right back onto the curb again, and an Army truck grazed my hip. Just missed me.”