Tengu Page 6

  Mr. Esmeralda said, “Go on,” coaxingly, but she shook her head.

  “Well,” he said, leaning back on the cushions of the couch, “whatever you were going to say, it couldn’t possibly have affected the way I think about you.”

  “About me? You scarcely know me.”

  “I know you, my dear Mrs. Crowley, as well as any unhappy woman needs to be known. In fact, my own view is that unhappy women hardly need to be known at all. Only two things matter.

  Their unhappiness, and their beauty. You have both.”

  She looked toward the liquor cabinet. She bit her lip. Then she looked back at Mr. Esmeralda.

  “Are you trying to make a pass?” she . ked him.

  He smiled silently for a moment, and then he let out a sharp little bark of laughter.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said. She could hear how much her voice was slurring.

  “Nothing is funny,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “And then again, everything is funny. Yes, I am trying to make a pass.”

  She blinked at him. “Why?”

  “Why? That is one question that no woman has ever asked me before. My dear Mrs. Crowley, don’t you know why?”

  “Perhaps. But I want to hear you say it.”

  “Then I shall. I am trying to make a pass at you because you are a delicate, beautiful woman. You are sad, and you are drunk. Your husband has temporarily deserted you for a receptionist with a noticeable bust but no IQ, and therefore you are prey to any man who makes you feel attractive and confident once again.”

  Eva pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead. Mr. Esmeralda sat with his legs neatly crossed, watching her.

  Eva said, “You must think I’m a fool.”

  He shook his head. “Not at all. There are only two fools in this menage. Your husband, for rejecting you; and me, for laying my heart so openly on the line. I risk frightening you away. I know that. But if I don’t make love to you now–who knows, your husband may decide to come back tomorrow, and my chance will be gone.”

  “You want to make love to me now?”

  “I’m rushing you?”

  She threw her head back and tried to laugh, but all that came out was a strangled, high-pitched hih-hih-hih. She turned to him, her eyes watering and her hand pressed over her mouth.

  “I amuse you?” Mr. Esmeralda asked.

  “No,” she said. “No, you don’t amuse me.”

  “You laughed,” he pointed out.

  “Yes.” Then, more softly, “Yes.”

  She stood up. “I laughed because you frighten me.”

  He watched her carefully. “I told you I might be a robber,” he said. “Or a rapist.” She didn’t answer. She couldn’t understand the feelings rising inside her stomach. What was she doing here? Where was this place, with its intolerable afternoon light and its pale furnishings?

  She said, without looking at him, “The twins will be home in a quarter of an hour.”

  He didn’t move. His eyes were liquid and dark; the eyes of a conjuror, or a fairground hypnotist.

  “We can’t,” she whispered hoarsely. “There isn’t time.”

  Mr. Esmeralda thought about that for a while, and then nodded. Eva crossed the room and sat down opposite him, on a natural-colored canvas chair with X-shaped chrome legs. She hated the chair, but somehow her discomfort in it made her feel better. More real.

  She said, “I need to know who you are.”

  He lifted an eyebrow.

  “I don’t mean that’s a prerequisite” she added, hurrying her words. “I mean–I’m not saying that if I know who you are, if you tell me–that I’ll...”

  Mr. Esmeralda nodded again. “I understand.”

  She breathed out. She could smell the gin on her own breath. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a bad time,” she said. She hated the sound of apology in her voice. After all, this was her apartment. This was her marriage. Her pain. But somehow Mr. Esmeralda was the kind of man who invited apologies. He was so calm, so self-possessed, that she couldn’t imagine him ever having done anything wrong. Not socially, anyway.

  Even his seduction had been a model of politeness.

  They waited in silence. The apartment began to fade as the afternoon light faded. They could even hear the sound of the elevators rising and falling through the building.

  Eventually Mr. Esmeralda stood up. He said, “You will allow me to call you, then? One evening, when your husband is engaged with work.”

  “You can call, yes,” she said, her mouth dry.

  “Perhaps dinner, a few cocktails. Dancing.”

  “Perhaps.”

  He smiled. The same smile. He bowed his head.

  “I shall look forward to it, my dear Mrs. Crowley, in the same way that the night sky looks forward to the lighting up of the stars.”

  She lowered her eyes. “That’s the first sham sentiment you’ve uttered.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But I am a Colombian, and all Colombians are permitted one sham sentiment per day.”

  She said nothing more. He waited a while longer, and then left. His shoes clicked on the floor.

  He closed the apartment door behind him.

  She sat in the X-legged chair, staring unblinkingly at the opposite wall and wondering if this was the way all marriages ended.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sergeant Skrolnik pressed the doorbell for the third time. Beside him, Detective Arthur took out a Kleenex that was crumpled into a tiny, tattered ball and wiped his nose. Skrolnik said, “If you could run like your nose, Irving, you’d catch every murderer in town.”

  Detective Arthur sniffed and didn’t answer. There was flowering jasmine tangled around the doorway of this shabby three-story building on Franklin Avenue, and flowering jasmine always got to his sinus. He wished somebody would hurry up and open the door so that he could ask for a fresh Kleenex. With almost masochistic regularity, he forgot to bring along a pack of his own.

  “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here,” said Skrolnik, stepping back onto the cracked concrete path and shading his eyes so that he could peer up at the second-floor windows. “Can you make it back here this afternoon on your own? I have a briefing with Captain Martin.”

  Detective Arthur shrugged okay and sniffed again, more conclusively this time.

  Skrolnik was turning to leave when a downstairs window opened, and a withered old man looked out. “Did you want something?” he asked in a tremulous voice.

  Skrolnik turned back and stared at him. “No, no. I was just testing your response to your doorbell. It’s a new city ordinance, you mustn’t respond to your doorbell for at least ten minutes. But I’m glad to say you’ve passed with flying colors.”

  “Doorbell?” queried the old man. “That doorbell hasn’t worked in fifteen years. You want anybody, you have to throw stones at the winders.”

  Skrolnik looked at Detective Arthur, and then back at the old man. “How foolish of me. I didn’t realize. Is Mack Holt home?”

  “Sure. He’s on nights this week. He’s probably sleeping.”

  “Should I throw a stone at his window, or might you come and open this door for me?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have any choice,” said Skrolnik, and produced his badge. The old man screwed up his eyes so that he could make out what it was, and then said: “Oh.”

  It took another two or three minutes before he came shuffling to the door to let them in.

  Skrolnik said: “Thanks. If you ever need us cops for any reason, I hope we come just as quick.”

  “It’s upstairs,” said the old man, oblivious to Skrolnik’s sarcasm.

  The hallway was dim, and smellcd of Lysol and cheap tile polish. The walls were roughly plastered and painted an unpleasant shade of orange. Someone had penciled by the lightswitch:

  “Sherry: L called, wants to know if you can call back.” It was an epitaph to Sherry Cantor’s past. It would probably still be
there when they tore the building down.

  Skrolnik led the way up the noisy stairs. He crossed the landing and knocked loudly on the door numbered 2. Almost immediately, he knocked again. The old man waited downstairs in the hallway. Detective Arthur said, “Beat it.”

  There was a sound of bolts being shot back. A thin face appeared at the door, with curly blond hair and a slightly twisted nose. Two blue-gray eyes. A lean, brown twenty-five-year-old torso.

  Bright-green underpants.

  “What do you want?”

  Skrolnik pushed the door wide open and stepped into the room. It was dark, with all the drapes drawn tight, and smelled of stale marijuana zndfri/o/es refritos. Mack Holt said tensely, “What is this? What do you want?”

  Skrolnik flipped open his wallet and showed his badge to Mack Holt without even looking at him. His eyes flicked around the room, taking in the sagging basketwork chairs, the stacks of paperback books and magazines, the cut-price Japanese stereo, the posters for rock concerts and bullfights.

  “Is there anybody else here?” asked Skrolnik, nodding toward the half-open bedroom door.

  “A friend.”

  “Go take a look,” Skrolnik told Detective Arthur.

  Mack Holt said, “Hey, now, hold on there. She’s not dressed yet.”

  “Keep your hands over yours eyes,” Skrolnik instructed Detective Arthur. “And no peeking.”

  Mack asked, “Listen–what is this? Do you have a warrant?”

  “A warrant for what?”

  “A search warrant. You can’t search this place without a warrant.”

  “Who’s searching?”

  Skrolnik crossed the room. He touched the corner of the bandanna that had been hung around the lampshade. He drew it toward him and sniffed it, then let it swing back. “As a matter of scientific fact,” he said, “you’ll find that Aramis works better than Carven when it comes to masking the smell of grass.

  Mack said, “What are you, an aftershave salesman?”

  Detective Arthur rapped at the bedroom door. A girl’s voice called out, “Mack?”

  “It’s the heat,” Mack called back. Then he looked at Skrolnik’s stony expression and added, almost inaudibly, “The police.”

  “You’ll have to wait a moment,” said the girl. Skrolnik didn’t take his eyes off Mack. Detective Arthur hesitated at the bedroom door.

  Mack said quietly, “I suppose you’ve come about Sherry.”

  “That’s right,” nodded Skrolnik. “You were a friend of hers, weren’t you?”

  “More than a friend. She lived here.”

  Skrolnik gave the room an exaggerated reappraisal. “She sure took a step up when she moved out.”

  “Maybe,” said Mack defensively.

  Skrolnik walked around the room. “When did she leave?”

  “Right after they gave her that part in Our Family Jones. What was that? Eighteen months ago.

  Eighteen, nineteen months.”

  “You’ve seen her since?”

  “Once or twice.”

  Skrolnik searched systematically through the pockets of his doubleknit coat until he found a stick of gum. He peeled off the wrapper, folded the stick into his mouth, and then said offhandedly,

  “they tell me you were jealous of her.’’

  “Jealous? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You were two out-of-work actors. She got a plum part and you didn’t. Don’t tell me that didn’t make you jealous.”

  “I was pleased for her.”

  “So pleased that she packed her bags and cut out?”

  Mack ran his fingers through his tangled blond curls. “All right,” he admitted, “I was jealous.

  What does that prove?”

  “You tell me.”

  Mack folded his arms across his bare chest. Then he raised a finger and said incredulously,

  “You’re not trying to say that / killed her?”

  Skrolnik stared at him with contempt. “Whoever killed Sherry Cantor was pretty well superhuman. I don’t think you’re quite in his league. Let’s say it’s the difference between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Woody Alien.”

  Mack lowered his head. “Yes,” he said. “I heard about it on the news.”

  “Can you tell me where you were yesterday morning, around eight o’clock?”

  The bedroom door opened wider, and Detective Arthur said, “Come on, miss. You don’t have to be shy.”

  “I was here, in bed,” said Mack. “Olive will tell you.”

  Skrolnik raised an eyebrow. Olive was a glittering, glossy-looking black girl, and she stalked into the living room with her dreadlocks shaking and her head held defiantly erect. She was wrapped in a thin flowered-silk sarong which barely concealed her enormous bouncing breasts. She was pretty in a wide-eyed, 1960’s Tamla-Motown kind of way, and there were jingling gold bells around her left ankle. She paused, with her hand on her hip, and said, “That’s right. He was here, all right.”

  Skrolnik said, “The poorer the nabes, the fancier the domestic help. What’s your name, miss?”

  “It’s Mrs.,” said the black girl. “Mrs. Robin T. Nesmith, Jr. But you can call me Mrs. Nesmith.”

  “Where’s Mr. Nesmith? Hiding under the comforter?”

  “Mr. Nesmith is in Honolulu, with the U.S. Navy.”

  “And this is the thanks he gets, for serving his country?”

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business,” said Olive, “but Mr. Ncsmith knows about it. He reckons it’s better the devil you know.”

  Skrolnik chewed thoughtfully. “Even when the devil’s a white devil?”

  “Mr. Nesmith is white, too.”

  “I see. Can anyone else substantiate your whereabouts?”

  Mack put his arm around Olive and drew her closer. He said, “A couple of friends called on the telephone just before eight. But that’s all.”

  “Give Detective Arthur their names, will you?” asked Skrolnik.

  Detective Arthur took out his notebook and his ballpoint, while Skrolnik turned his back on them and went to investigate the bedroom. There was a wide, sagging bed covered by stained red satin sheets. The room smelled of perfume and sex, and a blue tin ashtray beside the bed exuded its own peculiar fragrance. The walls were papered with faded floribunda roses.

  Skrolnik stood there for a while, chewing and thinking. In one corner of the room, on the floor, were a paperback edition of H. R. Haldeman’s The Ends of Power and a tiny pair of transparent purple panties.

  The incongruity of human life, he thought.

  He came back into the living room. Olive was sitting on one of the basketwork chairs, and Mack was stepping into a pair of newish Levi’s. The jeans were so tight that he had difficulty zipping them up over his cock. Skrolnik said, “Need a shoehorn?”

  Mack picked up a T-shirt with Snoquaimie National Forest printed on it. “You must be the life and soul of the squadroom.”

  “Mr. Holt,” Skrolnik retorted, “if you saw people torn apart the way that Sherry Cantor was torn apart, then you’d understand just what it is that makes me talk the way I do. After despair, there’s nothing left but humor.”

  Without raising his eyes, Mack asked, “Was she hurt? I mean, do you think she felt anything?” Olive reached up and held his hand. Skrolnik said, “We don’t know.”

  “I guess you’re going to ask me if I knew anyone who could have done something like that,”

  Mack told him. “But I didn’t before, and I still don’t. She used to get to people sometimes. She used to get to me. But that was only because life seemed so easy for her. There she was, fresh out of Indiana and raw as an onion, and success fell straight in her lap. That was what finished us, in the end, Sherry and me. And what made it worst of all, she was so nice about it. She used to say that success wouldn’t change her, and it damn well didn’t. She was just so damn nice.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Skrolnik said, mostly to himself. “And that’s what makes it look like this h
omicide wasn’t premeditated. Not for any personal reason, anyhow.”

  Olive kept hold of Mack’s hand and stroked the back of it with her long, dusky fingers. “Do you think you’re going to catch the guy who did it?” she asked Skrolnik.

  Skrolnik grimaced.

  Detective Arthur said, “Where are you working now, Mr. Holt? I have you down as a car-parking jockey at the i Old Sonora Restaurant.”

  “I’m still there,” Mack nodded. “The food’s better than most.”

  “Maybe we’ll drop by,” said Skrolnik. “Meanwhile, I don’t want you to leave the city.”

  Mack looked up. “Okay,” he said. Then, hesitantly: “Can you tell me what actually happened? The television news didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. Was it really that awful?”

  “Mr. Holt,” said Skrolnik patiently, “did you love Sherry Cantor?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  Skrolnik put on his hat. “In that case, you’ll prefer it if I don’t tell you. As it says in the Good Book: ‘In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’

  Tengu Mack stared at him. “You surprise me.”

  “I surprise myself,” said Skrolnik, and pushed Detective Arthur out of the living room ahead of him. At the door, he turned around and said, “I want you to think about Sherry for the next few days. Yes, I’m sorry, Mrs. Robin T. Nesmith, Jr., but it’s going to be necessary. I want you to think about every possible angle of what she was, all the people she knew, and everything she said. I want you to sieve through your memory, Mr. Holt, because you’re the the only person who can. And if you think of anything unusual, anything that jars, anything that seems out of place, then give me a call.”

  Skrolnik took a card out of his breast pocket and tucked it in the crevice behind the lightswitch.

  “So long,” he said. “Pleasant dreams.”

  He closed the door behind him, and Mack and Olive stayed quite still, like a tableau in a shabby small-town museum, as the detectives’ footsteps clattered down the stairs. The front door slammed, and after a while they heard the whinny of a car starter. Mack coughed.

  Olive stood up. “Do you want me to go?” she asked Mack in a gentle voice.