Tengu (5 page)

But.
Skrolnik was known as a hard man. He played by the
rules, straight down the line, and he made sure that everybody else did too,
whether they were prostitutes or politicians, winos or brother lawmen. The
bunco squad still talked about the day he had caught his partner taking money
from a drug racketeer, and had taken him into an alley and beaten him so hard
that the man had taken three weeks’ sick leave with broken ribs.

Skrolnik was
41, a career policeman with twenty years of service behind him. His father, a
barber, had always wanted him to be a judge. But Skrolnik had known his own
limitations, and he was satisfied for the most
pan
with what he was. He could be oddly romantic at times, and he doted on his
plump wife Sarah and their two plump children. He liked beer and television and
taking his family out to the International House of Pancakes.

Out on the
streets, though, Skrolnik was caustic and unforgiving. He was even readier than
most to shoot first and discuss the Dodgers afterward. Three of his partners
had died in five years, and Skrolnik was quite certain that he didn’t want to
end up with his face on the road, watching his lifeblood draining away down the
gutter.

Pullet, on the
other hand, was nervous and erratic. He was tall and skinny, with a great wave
of brown hair, loose wrists, and a way of grimacing so violently that people
often thought they might have offended him without knowing how. At college in
Philadelphia, Pullet’s lecturers had marked him for a better-than-avcrage
research chemist. But one silent snowy night, Pullet’s kindly parents had died
in the wreckage of their 1961 Plymouth on the Burlington Pike, and Pullet had
given up science and wandered off like a stray dog.

Pullet had
traveled west by bus, and stayed for several months in a boarding house in San
Francisco, under an assumed name. He had played chess in caf6s and thrown
pebbles at the ocean. He had eaten more Chinese food than was good for him. He
had developed a passion for girls in very short shorts.

Eventually, one
foggy fall, he had driven south to Los Angeles in a rented Pinto and signed up
as a policeman. He could never say why; he didn’t even understand it himself.
But his officers found him enthusiastic and occasionally inspired, and they
could almost forgive his twitches and his unpolished shoes. Skrolnik tried not
to think about him too much, but liked him in a big-brotherly,
scruff-of-the-neck fashion, and frequently invited him back to his suburban
house in Santa Monica for burned wieners, half-thawed apple pie, and a tumble
around the crabgrass with his two children.

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.

T
he 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.