Tengu Page 4

  Today, however, neither Skrolnik nor Pullet was happy.

  They had been urgently called off the Santini investigation–an intriguing high-society poisoning with two equally beautiful sisters as prime suspects–and sent up to this bungalow in Hollywood without any warning that they shouldn’t have eaten breakfast first.

  Sherry Cantor’s body had been strewn all over the living room rug. Her right leg had been hanging, bloodied and awkward, over the back of an armchair. Her stomach had been torn open in a pale gleaming slide of intestines. Somebody had gripped her face in one hand, with fingers pushed deep into the sockets of her eyes, and then wrenched most of the skin and flesh away from her skull.

  Worst of all, the whole bungalow had been humming with blowflies.

  Pullet had gone out into the garden and vomited up two scrambled eggs, Canadian bacon, and a side order of home fries. Skrolnik had lit up a cheap cigar, and then wished he hadn’t.

  Pullet asked, “Did you ever see anything like this before? Anything so darned fierce?”

  Skrolnik shook his head.

  Pullet said, “You remember the Edgar Allan Poe story? The Murders in the Rue Morgue? The one where they found the girl had been strangled by a large fulvous orangutan of thfrEast Indian Islands?”

  Skrolnik stared at him. “An orangutan? You think an orangutan did this?”

  Pullet looked embarrassed. “I didn’t exactly mean that. But I guess we shouldn’t discount the possibility. Orangutans are incredibly strong, and you can teach them to do almost anything.”

  “So,” said Skrolnik, pacing around the perimeter of the dark stain on the rug, “we could be looking for an orangutan.”

  “I didn’t exactly mean that.”

  Skrolnik pretended he hadn’t heard. “How do you think the orangutan got here? I mean, nobody walks in L.A. Did he have his own car? Would a taxi driver remember picking him up? Did he have the right change? Did he come dressed, or did he come au nature!? You have to ask yourself these questions, Pullet.’’

  “I have already,” said Pullet. “But if you’ll let me get a word in edgewise, you’ll see what I’m trying to say.”

  “You’re trying to say it could have been an orangutan.”

  “I’m trying to say it’s so darned unusual it could have been anything or anybody. Come on, sergeant, we’ve both seen ax murders, and kitchen-knife murders, and sex murders. But what kind of a murder is this? It looks like the victim was torn to pieces like a telephone directory.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Skrolnik, chewing gum.

  Pullet took out his handkerchief and fastidiously wiped sweat from his narrow forehead. “Of course I’m right. We have to entertain every possibility that anybody ever thought of, and a few more besides. We have to think lateral.”

  “I prefer to think standing up,” Skrolnik told him.

  Pullet said, “You make fun of orangutans. Okay, maybe orangutans are funny. I admit they are.

  But we can’t discount them.”

  “Them? You mean there was more than one?”

  “I mean somebody could have brought on orangutan, or a gorilla, or some other kind of wild beast right up the road in a truck. They could have let it loose in the victim’s house, and then zowie.”

  Skrolnik chewed patiently for almost half a minute. “That had entered my mind.”

  “It had?” asked Pullet, surprised.

  “Listen,” Skrolnik told him, “we’re going to have to tackle this homicide a little different from usual. If we don’t, I don’t believe we’re going to be able to solve it.”

  “That’s just what I’ve been saying.”

  “I know, and as a matter of fact you’re quite right. But this is the way we’re going to play it.

  You’re going to think of all the nuttiest possibilities you can. Gorillas, men from Mars, anything you like. You’re going to think how they got in here, how they killed the victim, and why. You’re going to let your mind run totally loose.’’ Pullet pulled a face. “Well, that’s okay,” he said, sounding reassured. “But what are you going to do?”

  Skrolnik stared down at the blood. “I’m going to get into it systematically, conventionally, and right by the rulebook. I’m going to go through all the clues, and I’m going to interview all Ms.

  Cantor’s friends and relations and whatever lovers she might have had, and I’m going to build up a solid file of established facts.”

  Skrolnik paused. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “and I’m talking about damned lucky, the time will come when one of your off-the-wall ideas fits my proven evidence, and the other way around.

  And that’s when we’ll find out who did this, and for what reason, and where the hell they are.”

  Pullet blinked. “There has to be some explanation. Even if it’s crazy. Remember that guy they pulled apart between two cars?”

  There was a polite knock on the open door. It was a young forensic detective called Starkey. He was wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt and very crumpled white slacks, and he sported a small, dark, wispy mustache, which he had obviously grown to make himself look older than 19-

  “Sergeant?” he asked.

  “What is it, Starkey? Don’t tell me you’ve found an orangutan’s tocprint on the path.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Just tell me what you’ve found, Starkey.”

  “Well, sir,” said Starkey, “it’s the wrought-iron gates.”

  “What about them?”

  “You said they must have been opened up with a crowbar, sir, something like that?”

  Skrolnik’s eyes narrowed. “What are you telling me, Starkey?”

  “Well, sir, there’s no evidence of that. No paint missing, no place where the crowbar might have been lodged to give it leverage. And so far we haven’t found any crowbar, either.”

  “So,” said Skrolnik, “any opinions?”

  “It’s kind of hard to say, sir. But it looks like the lock was twisted out of place by hand.”

  “By hand!”

  Starkey went pink. “I know it’s impossible, sir, but that’s the way it looks. I’m not saying that’s the only explanation. We won’t know until we examine the lock for traces of human skin oils and sweat.”

  Skrolnik looked at Pullet, and for the first time there was something in Skrolnik’s expression that made Pullet feel alarmed. The sergeant licked his fingers, took the gum out of his mouth, and wrapped it up in a crumpled Disneyland ticket.

  “By hand’’ he repeated. Both Pullet and Starkey watched as he let the thought sink into his mind.

  Then he raised his eyes and asked, “But what about the French doors here? How were they forced open?”

  “That’s harder to say, sergeant. All the glass was broken. But the aluminum frame was bent pretty bad, too, and that may give us some answers.”

  “You haven’t checked it yet?”

  “No, sir. I was waiting for you to finish in here.”

  “You were waiting? A young girl’s been torn to pieces, and you were waiting? Starkey–there are thousands of other young girls out there, and I’d hate to think that one single one of them has been put at risk just because you were waiting. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll get at it right away, sir.”

  When Starkey had gone, Pullet said, “You shouldn’t ride him too rough, sergeant. He’s pretty good, in his own way.”

  “So are you,” said Skrolnik harshly. “But that doesn’t mean you can treat a serious homicide like a picnic in the park.”

  “No, sir.”

  Skrolnik was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Come on–let’s go take another look at those gates.”

  They pushed their way through the flapping drapes and out into the heat. The faces of the silent crowd rippled in the rising air like hot pink pebbles on a seashore. There were five police cars parked across the street, their red lights ceaselessly revolving. Skrolnik wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

 
Sherry Cantor’s bungalow was set on the side of a steeply angled hill, so the detectives had to lope down a scries of winding concrete steps before they reached the street. A high fence of black-painted wrought iron was set in a low stone wall, ostensibly to keep out intruders. At the foot of the path, the double wrought-iron gates were wide open, and there was a cluster of forensic men around them, with their aluminum attache cases of fingerprint powder and litmus lying open on the path.

  “Okay,” said Skrolnik, “let’s see that lock.”

  The forensic men stood aside. They all wore dark sunglasses and short-sleeved tennis shirts, and one of them had a bronzed bald head that gave off a dazzling reflection.

  Skrolnik and Pullet bent forward and peered at the gate. The lock was a hefty five-lever deadlock with steel plates bolted onto either side to prevent housebreakers from drilling into the mechanism. It was welded into the decorative wrought-iron frame of the gate on all four sides. In normal conditions, Skrolnik would have pronounced it pretty well unbustable.

  But this morning, someone or something had bent it inward, so that its reinforced tongue had been pulled clear of the plate on the opposite gate. Not just an inch or two, which would have been quite sufficient to open the gates without any trouble at all, but almost nine inches.

  Skrolnik stood straight and glanced toward the sloping street.

  “Now, if this lock had been bent outward’’ he said, “I would have guessed that someone tied a rope around it, and fixed the other end to the back of a car. But inward...”

  “Like it’s been pushed,” said Pullet. “Or maybe punched.” The forensic men looked at each other in their dark glasses. Skrolnik looked at Pullet. The crowd looked at all of them, like baffled spectators at a tennis tournament, and didn’t understand for a moment the strange fear they were feeling.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The coroner’s report was part nightmare, part fact. It said that Sherry Cantor had probably died from brain damage following irreparable damage to the central nervous system. Any one of her other injuries, however, could have killed her almost immediately. Her right leg had been severed by twisting, and there were bruise marks on the thigh and calf which indicated clearly that the twisting had been done by a man’s hands.

  Her abdomen had been torn open from her vagina upward, and again the indications were clear that the tearing had been done by hand. Her facial flesh had been pulled clear of the bone in the same manner. The coroner guessed that most of the disfigurement had been done after Sherry Cantor had died. He hadn’t been able to resist adding, “Thank God.”

  That afternoon, the television stations began to carry reports that a “King Kong Killer” was loose in the Hollywood hills, and that single women should take extra care to lock and bolt their apartments at night. Sergeant Skrolnik spent twenty minutes on the telephone to Blooming-ton, Indiana, and afterward went across the street to Matty’s Cocktail Lounge and swallowed two Old Crows, straight up, no ice.

  Pullet said, “I can’t help thinking about that darned orangutan.’’

  CHAPTER SIX

  He was driving back from his weekly hour with the analyst when he turned the corner and found the whole street jammed with police cars and ambulances and jostling crowds. He slowed down, and a policeman came across and told him: “You can’t come up here, mister. Not a hope.”

  “I live here,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  The policeman laid a hand on the windowsill of his car. “Hold it right here,” he ordered. He beckoned across the street to a young ginger-haired detective in a splashy red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt. The detective came over and said: “Who’s this?”

  “I live here. Number Eleven. Would you mind telling me what’s going on here?”

  The detective took a notebook out of his hip pocket and thumbed through it. “Number Eleven,” he repeated. “That’s Jerry Sennett, right?”

  ‘‘That’s right,’’ Jerry told him. ‘‘Is something wrong?”

  The detective put away the notebook. “I have to ask you some questions. Would you care to pull your car into your driveway? The officer will help you through the crowd. Take it slow, please.”

  Jerry nudged his eleven-year-old Dodge around the cluster of police cars, with the policeman walking in front of him, one hand custodially resting on the front fender. Then Jerry slowly turned into his sloping driveway, which ran alongside the wrought-iron fence of Sherry Cantor’s garden next door, nosed the car right up to the low wall at the top of the gradient, and put on the handbrake. He climbed out. His shirt was wrinkled and sweaty at the back.

  The detective in the Hawaiian shirt came up the driveway after him, taking off his Ray-Bans. “Do you mind if we go inside?” he asked. “It would give us more privacy.’’

  “Sure,” said Jerry. He led the way up the crazy-paving steps to the front door of his pale-green bungalow. He couldn’t help glancing toward Sherry Cantor’s house as he took out his key and opened the door. There were four or five men in short-sleeved shirts and sunglasses poking around in the garden like golfers who had lost their balls.

  “Miss Cantor’s okay, I hope?” he asked the detective.

  The detective said: “Let’s just get inside, please.”

  Jerry walked through to the living room. It was gloomy and stuffy because the patterned drapes were drawn, and the air conditioning had been off all morning to save energy. Saving energy was one of the things that Jerry believed in, mainly because it saved him money, too. His service pension didn’t stretch too far these days.

  Jerry Sennett was fifty-nine, and on the last day of November he would turn sixty. But he had one of those lean, gentle, Gary Cooper faces that had improved with middle age. His eyes had an experienced, slightly sorrowful look about them, which always impressed the younger women he met at neighborhood parties. His hair was peppery and cut short. He stooped a little, and sometimes his movements seemed hesitant, but that was only because he was tall and rangy, and prone to knocking highball glasses off tables if he didn’t make a deliberate effort to coordinate his movements.

  His living room reflected his character. There were two frayed armchairs, a sofa with a wine stain on one cushion, a big old television set. On the walls were three prints of Connecticut in the summer. A 1950’s style liquor cabinet, all veneer and pink-tinted mirrors, stood in the far corner.

  He asked, “Do you want a drink? I have 7-Up here if you’re not allowed alcohol on duty.”

  “Thanks,” said the detective.

  Jerry opened the cabinet and poured himself a Chivas Regal, and a 7-Up for the detective. “By the way,” he said, coming across with the drinks, “did I ask to see your badge?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Why not?” The detective took his badge out of his shin pocket and held it out. Jerry peered at it nearsightedly, and then nodded. “They tell you to check out the freezer repairman, so I guess it’s doubly important to check out detectives.’’

  The detective gave a humorless smile. His name was Arthur, and he’d been working under Sergeant Skrolnik long enough to have lost his sense of fun. He said, “Do you mind if we sit down?”

  “Go ahead,” Jerry told him, and sat down himself, crossing his long legs. He was wearing sandals, and there was a large Band-Aid on the end of his big toe.

  “I have to tell you that Ms. Cantor has been the victim of a homicide,” said Detective Arthur. “It happened this morning, around eight o’clock.”

  Jerry stared at him. “Sherry Cantor’s Jeacft”

  Detective Arthur nodded. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound particularly sorry.

  Jerry let out a long breath. “That’s terrible. My God, that’s absolutely terrible. What happened?

  It wasn’t a shooting, was it? I didn’t have any idea.”

  “Someone broke into her bungalow and attacked her. I guess you’ll hear it on the news in any case. She was kind of mauled.”

  “Mauled? What does that mean?”

  Det
ective Arthur doodled with his pencil on the corner of his notebook. “Whoever it was, they must have been pretty crazy. She was just about torn into bits.’’

  Jerry took a drink. His hand was trembling. “Do you have any idea who might have done it?

  Jesus–how can anyone do something like that?”

  “We don’t know yet. There are plenty of clear prints, stuff like that.”

  “My God,” whispered Jerry. “She was so goddamned pretty.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  Jerry looked up. “Hardly at all. She left for work real early, and I never get out of the sack before nine. But we waved jo each other over the fence sometimes, and I talked to her once at a neighborhood party.”

  “What kind of a girl would you say she was?”

  “Hard-working. Career-minded. Who knows–I didn’t really think about it. I guess I saw her on television more often than I did in the flesh.”

  Detective Arthur sniffed. Jerry had turned on the air conditioning, and the flying fluff was getting to his sinus condition. “Did you see any men friends coming and going next door?”

  Jerry thought about it, then shook his head. “Nobody special. One or two friends, yes, but it seemed like they came in groups, mostly. I never saw her with one special man.”

  “What about you? Did she ever invite you next door?”

  “Once, to a party, but I couldn’t go. My son was down here for his vacation, and I’d promised to take him to a movie. He’s here now, as a matter of fact. I have to go pick him up at two-thirty.

  He’s playing baseball with some friends. You know how sociable kids arc these days.”

  Detective Arthur said, “Do you mind if I ask you one or two personal questions, Mr. Scnnett?”

  “I’m sure you’re .going to anyway, whether I mind or not.”