Tengu (9 page)

“That’s what I
thought,” Skrolnik said, mostly to himself. “And that’s what makes it look like
this homicide 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.

He shook his
head. “Not if you can stand a little mourning.”

She smiled
sadly. “I lost my first man in Vietnam. There’s nothing you can teach me about
mourning.”

“You didn’t
tell me about that.”

“There wasn’t
no
need. I don’t know
nothing
about
you, and you don’t know nothing about me, and that was the way we were meant to
be.”

Mack laid his
hand on her bare shoulder, and leaned forward and kissed her. “You’re very good
for me. You know that?”

“Yes,” she
smiled, her eyes glittering.

He was silent
for a moment. Then he said, “I guess I’ll go out. Maybe get some beer and some
food. We could have Dick and Lois around later, if you like.”

“Come to bed
first,” she said. Her beaded black hair rattled as she shook her head.

“I just got
up.”

“This is
therapy.”

“What kind of
therapy?”

“Forget-your-sadness therapy.
Come on.”

She took his
wrist and led him back into the bedroom. He stood silent while she tugged his
Snoqualmie T-shirt over his head and then unzippered his Levi’s. She knelt on
the bedroom floor and pulled the pants down his legs.

He felt as if
he couldn’t catch his breath; the way you feel in a high wind. Olive’s perfume
was strong and flowery, and there was something about the way her long
fingernails grazed over his skin that he found intensely arousing. She guided
him toward the bed and gently pushed him backward onto the red satin sheet. He
looked up at her, and the muted flare of the sun that shone through the blind
behind her made her appear darker and more mysterious than ever.

He wondered if
her first lover had been black or white. He wondered how he had died.

She
unwrapped
her sarong. It fell to the floor, pure silk,
silent
as a shadow. The soft sunlight gleamed on the brown skin
of her impossibly huge breasts, nippled with black. She climbed onto the bed,
and her breasts swayed.

“You have to
forget everything,” she whispered. He wasn’t sure if her voice was far or near.
The room was dim and warm and funky from their night of love. He felt her
tongue run along the sole of his foot, and her teeth nip at his heel. Then she
began to lick and kiss him all the way up the inside of his left leg, pausing
every now and then to trace with the tip of her tongue a more elaborate pattern,
like the shape of a butterfly, or a star. He had thought that last night was
enough, but now he could feel himself hardening
again,
and a deep pulse between his legs.

Olive’s
searching mouth at last reached his thigh, and then her wet tongue was
burrowing between the cheeks of his ass and licking around his tightened balls.
He let out a short, tight breath. Thoughts of Sherry still crowded his mind.
Sherry standing in that same bedroom doorway.

Sherry lying asleep on that pillow beside him.
The
unhappiness in him began to overwhelm him, and he could feel himself soften.

But to Olive,
achieving this moment of oblivion was vital. Mack had to know that he could
turn to her for forgetfulness when his sadness for Sherry was too much to bear.
He had to know that she could blot out his grief.

She held him in
her hand, her long fingernails gently digging into the flesh of his penis, and
she licked his shaft until it stiffened again. Then she kissed and nuzzled the
head with her lips, and probed the salty, secret crevice. She felt his thigh
muscles tense up, heard him groan.

Olive took him
deep into her mouth. Dark lips enclosed white flesh. Her head moved up and
down, faster and faster, until her dreadlocks sounded like maracas. Her mind
was a jumble of thoughts. Her eyes were tight closed. All she knew was that she
wanted to suck out of him all the love she could. She felt his strong, thin
fingers clutching at her breast, pulling at her nipple.

There was a
long minute of tension. The world had closed its doors to memory, to Sherry, to
Hollywood, to everything but one rising and irresistible sensation.

Then Mack said,
“Ah,” quite softly, and flooded Olive’s mouth.

Olive, after a
short while, sat up. Her lips shone in the shaded bedroom sun. “How was it?”
she asked him, and she wasn’t surprised to see tears in his eyes.

I
f his wife Nora hadn’t given him sliced onion in his liverwurst
sandwiches that morning, patrolman Ed Russo wouldn’t have died. But the onion
had given him heartburn, and he asked his partner Phil Massey to pull the car
into the curb at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland so that he could
buy himself a pack of Rolaids.

It was four
minutes after eleven. Sergeant Skrolnik was just leaving Mack Holt’s apartment
building on Franklin Avenue. Olive Nesmith was just saying: “Forget-your-sad-ness
therapy.

Come on.” In
West Los Angeles Mrs. Eva Crowley was staring at her face in the mirror and
trying to keep herself from throwing up, and Sherry Cantor had been dead for
slightly more than twenty-seven hours.

Ed Russo, a
slim, soft-spoken man with a heavy brown mustache, walked through the cold
air-conditioned drugstore until he found the shelves he wanted. He bought two
packs of Rolaids, one to keep in his locker and one for the car. He wouldn’t need
either of them.

The
strawberry-rinsed woman behind the pharmaceutical counter said, “How are you
doing?”

Russo held up
the Rolaids. “My wife gave me onions today. I love onions, but onions sure hate
me.”

“Doesn’t
anybody or anything like cops?” asked the woman.
“Even
onions?”

Russo smiled,
although the gripes in his stomach had twisted up his sense of humor as well.
He walked back toward the checkout, juggling the indigestion tablets in his
hand.

Through the
ad-plastered window of the drugstore, Russo had a view of the traffic signals
at the intersection outside. He watched a souped-up Dodge Charger brake at the
line as the lights on Hollywood changed to red. The Charger was a pretty slick
job, in crimson metallic-flake paint with chromed exhausts. Ed Russo could have
done with a car like that himself. He was only twenty-four, and he still
hankered after beach parties and custom cars and big waves at Malibu. But
somehow, after he’d married Nora, he’d settled down to a routine of brown-bag
lunches, garage auctions, drive-in movies, and washing the car on the weekend.
In subtle, unnoticeable stages, in ways that Russo could never quite recall,
Nora had altered in three years of married life from a skinny, suntanned,
nineteen-year-old nymphct, pretty and shy, into a talkative, opinionated,
intolerant young housewife in a lurex headscarf and rollers, organizer of the
local church social club, the La Mirada PTA, and a never-ending ten-ring circus
of coffee-and-cake mornings, baby showers, and lectures by white-haired
evangelists who stank of tobacco.

When Russo
looked at Nora over the battlements of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Post Toasties
in the morning, he sometimes wondered if God was punishing him for some sin he
couldn’t remember committing.

Russo’s change
clattered into the tray of the change-maker. But as he reached for it, a
squittering sound of tires made him look back out of the drugstore window. A
dark blue van was driving straight through the red light, swerving to avoid a
white Lincoln, and then turning north up Highland Avenue in a cloud of burned
rubber.

Russo grabbed
his change, pocketed his Rolaids, and ran for the sidewalk. He wrenched open
the police car door and yelled to Phil Massey, “Let’s get going!”

Their siren
whooped as they U-turned on Hollywood, bucking on their suspension. Then they
squealed left on Highland, and the V-8 motor roared.

“Did you see
that?” asked Massey. He was young and gingery, with a face splattered with
freckles. “He could’ve killed somebody, coming round that corner like that.”

“There he is,”
said Russo.

The van was
speeding round the S-curve by the Hughes supermarket. It shot the lights and
kept on north toward the Hollywood Freeway, swaying from one side to the other
as it overtook cars, trucks, and a northbound bus. The police siren warbled and
howled as Russo and Massey chased after it. They flashed through light, shadow,
flickering
sunshine.

Weaving through
the traffic, the van sped ahead of them onto the glaring concrete of the
freeway. But Massey put his foot flat down, and as they sped through the
Hollywood hills, they gradually began to overtake the van, coming up on its
left side.

Russo wound
down his window and unfastened his holster. Then he put his arm out the window
and flagged the van down, pointing to the hard shoulder.

At first, the
van driver hesitated. But then Russo pointed to the hard shoulder again,
fiercely, and the van driver put on his right-hand indicator and began to slow
down. Massey slowed the police car, too, and nosed in behind the van as it
pulled off the freeway and gradually came to a stop. Through his loudspeaker,
Russo ordered:
‘‘ Get
out of the van slowly and put
your hands on the side panels where we can see them.”

Then he said to
Massey, “Run a check on his plate, will you?” It was a Florida license. “And
see if the Highway Patrol has any backup around.”

Russo climbed
out of the car and walked toward the van, putting on his cap. It was hot and
dusty on the freeway, and he unhooked his sunglasses from his uniform pocket and
put them on.

The van driver
was Japanese. He was standing beside his vehicle with his hands pressed against
the dark-blue paneling, and he was watching Russo guardedly.

Russo walked
around him and glanced in the driving compartment. It looked empty, except for
a tartan holdall with a vacuum flask sticking out of it. He turned back to the
driver.
Five foot five or six.
Late
thirties.
Dressed in a black satin windbreaker and
cheap gray slacks.
Cropped black hair, and a slight
white scar on the left eyebrow.

Russo said,
“Take out your license with one hand.
Slowly.
And hand
it over.”

The Japanese
reached cautiously into his windbreaker pocket and took out his license. He
held it out, six inches from Russo’s outstretched hand.

Russo snatched
it and stared intently at the Japanese for a moment before he opened it.

“Eric
Yoshikazu? Of Emelita Street, Van Nuys?” asked Russo.

The Japanese
nodded.

Russo inspected
the license closely, and then folded it. “I’m going to have to book you for a
serious traffic offense.
And for failing to stop when
requested to do so by a police officer.’’

Yoshikazu
shrugged.

“You have
anything to say about that?” asked Russo.

“I see my
lawyer,” said Yoshikazu.

Russo took out
his citation book. “You can see as many lawyers as you like. That’s your right.

But it doesn’t
alter the fact that you ran a red light on Hollywood Boulevard and made an
illegal turn and endangered the lives of yourself and innocent people.’’

“I don’t say
nothing
,” said Yoshikazu.

“That’s your
right,” said Russo. He paced round the van and stood at the back for a while,
noting down the license number in his book. Yoshikazu watched him all the time.
The freeway traffic swished past them, and the air was sparkling with sunlight
and grit and fumes.