Rook & Tooth and Claw (27 page)

Miss Neagle stepped her way carefully through the wreckage. She stood close to Jim and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry … you must be devastated.”

“Devastated isn’t the word for it. I’m terrified, too. And my cat – whatever it was, the damn thing killed my cat.”

Miss Neagle sniffed – a long, inquiring sniff – and it sounded more like Mrs Vaizey sniffing. “I can still smell it,” she said, after a while.

Jim sniffed, too, but all he could smell was Folger’s coffee, spilled all over the kitchen floor. “It’s left a
smell
?” he asked her.

“Not a real smell … it’s more like a spiritual aroma. Sometimes, when I stand close to somebody who’s done something really evil, I can pick up a terrible sour kind of odour, like rotting meat. Other times, I can smell when somebody’s happy. It’s very warm, and floral.”

Jim sniffed again. “So what does this smell like?”

“It’s an animal, although it isn’t an animal. It has a very strong musky odour, like a bear. I can smell its aura, too. It’s very fierce, almost berserk. I don’t think anybody could stop it, even if they tried. It has incredible determination. It would go through brick walls to get at you, if it had to.”

She paused, and frowned, and then she said, “And yet, you know – and yet –”

“And yet what?”

“I don’t know. I can smell something else. A sense of
confusion,
maybe.”

“It wasn’t confused enough to tear up everything I own. Even my goddamn pajamas.”

Miss Neagle looked at him and raised an eyebrow and now she looked just like Miss Neagle, and not at all like Mrs Vaizey. “Oh … I didn’t know you wore
pajamas
.”

Jim said grimly, “I don’t, do I? Not now.”

Just then, his call was connected. Lieutenant Harris sounded as if he had a headcold coming, and kept clearing his throat every few seconds. “Harris? What’s the problem, Mr Rook?”

“Somebody just tore up my apartment, the same way they tore up the locker room at West Grove.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry. Is there very much damage?”

“They killed my cat and they ripped up everything I
own. Furniture, books, paintings … there isn’t anything left intact.”

“Did anybody see anything?”

“It’s probably just as well that they didn’t. Whoever did this could rip your lungs out with one blow.”

“What makes you think it was the same person that tore up the locker room?”

“I’ve got very similar scratches here, and clawmarks. And who the hell has the strength to pull the door off an icebox?”

“Listen,” said Lieutenant Harris, “I don’t want you to touch anything. I’ll send a patrol car around as soon as I can, and I can get down there myself in twenty minutes. OK? But don’t touch anything.”

He put down the phone. Miss Neagle was prowling around the apartment, sniffing and sniffing, her arms held out almost like a ballerina. “What else can you smell?” Jim asked her.

“I smell
two
animals, not just one. I can’t understand it. I can smell dog, as well as bear. Two distinctly different spiritual aromas.”

“So what does that mean? That
two
animals came here and trashed my apartment, instead of one? What difference does that make?”

“It makes a whole lot of difference, Jim … because one animal is very strong and determined but the other feels as if it’s fighting an inner battle with itself. That’s all part of the
confusion
I was talking about.”

“I don’t follow this at all,” said Jim. “I’m just going outside to wait for the cops.”

But as he tried to pass, Miss Neagle clutched his arm and said, “The dog aroma comes from very far away – hundreds of miles. It must be tremendously powerful to make itself felt at such a distance. The bear is very dangerous, Mr Rook, but it’s the dog you have
to be wary of. The dog is going to do something really, really bad.”

Jim looked around at his apartment, at his disemboweled furniture, at his shattered pictures, at his ripped-apart books. “You’re telling me that this isn’t really, really bad? Quite apart from the fact that I’m supposed to have less than three-and-a-half days to live.”

“Something worse is going to happen, believe me.”

Miss Neagle stared into his eyes and they weren’t her eyes. They were pale and lucid as Mrs Vaizey’s. “You don’t even know what this thing can do to you, Jim. These animals can take your spirit, as well as your body. When you die, you expect to be back with your parents, don’t you, and the people you always loved? You expect to be back in those old familiar places where you used to play when you were a boy? But if you give your spirit to
these
beasts, Mr Rook, you won’t know anything but pain and darkness, for ever and ever. There
is
an afterlife, believe me, but if you let these beasts get hold of you, you’ll wish to God that there wasn’t.”

Chapter Four

Jim spent the night on the couch round at George Babouris’ house in the less desirable part of Westwood. George was big-bellied and black-bearded and catastrophically untidy. His living-room was strewn with cast-off sneakers and discarded sweatshirts and empty pizza boxes, as well as heaps of books and students’ coursework. It looked only marginally less devastated than Jim’s place.

George got up early and came padding through to the kitchen in a Homer Simpson T-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, scratching his behind and puffing on the first cigarette of the day. Jim looked up frowzily from the couch and said, “What time is it, George, for Christ’s sake?”

“Five-thirty. I always get up at five-thirty. It gives me time to have a little bit of life outside of college.”

“Five-thirty is so damned early it’s practically still yesterday.”

“Yes, but think what you can get done. I’m writing a book at the moment. I can write two or three pages every morning before I have to start thinking about banging Newton’s Law into those sloping foreheads in Applied Physics. Here, look—” he said, and passed Jim a handful of crumpled, coffee-stained paper.

Jim rubbed his eyes and peered at the title.
The Lute of Apollo: The Complete History of Bouzouki Music.
He handed it back without comment.

“You see?” said George. “I went to the library and found that nobody has ever published a definitive book on Greek café music – not even in Greece. So I thought, here’s a gap in the market, I’ll write one myself! I’ll be famous! Maybe they’ll make me President of Greece! How about some coffee?”

Jim dressed and went to college almost an hour earlier than usual because George fried himself a huge breakfast of corned beef hash which filled the whole apartment with greasy smoke, and then insisted on playing
bouzouki
music so that Jim could learn to appreciate how much it spoke of the sun, and the wine-dark sea, and a land where men were men and had seriously hairy chests and women did all the work.

Alone in his classroom, he sat in the dust-speckled morning sunshine marking essays. He had given up smoking seven years ago, but he had never felt more like a cigarette. He had asked Special Class II to write him a critical assessment of
Treasure Island.
Mark Foley had written, “Long John Silver was this cool dud with 1 leg, leder of the pirates. He wants to rip off all of the treasure but Jim Hawkins stops him. He should of kill Jim Hawkins but they had a bond, lik a father and son should of been.”

Jim always found it extraordinary how his least able students were able to get right to the nub of a story. They ignored the plot and felt the pulse of it. Beattie McCordic, who always interpreted everything she read from a radical-feminist point of view, had written that ‘there are no women pirates in
Treasure Island
which is ridiculous because in real life there were plenty of them and some of them were real ballbreakers.’ But she went on to say ‘that doesn’t mean that the story is anti-feminist. The way Jim Hawkins behaves is influenced all the way through the story by his mother, who is quiet but strong
and very moral. There are two main characters in this book: Long John Silver and Jim Hawkin’s mother, even though she only appears right in the beginning and right at the very end.’

After two or three essays, he stopped marking, and stared out of the window. He thought of the feline formerly known as Tibbles and he felt so angry and sad that he could have cried. But while he was looking out of the window he saw a dark-blue Chevrolet Caprice turn into the parking-lot, and Lieutenant Harris climb out. Lieutenant Harris put on his dark glasses, combed his hair, straightened his coat, and walked toward the college buildings like a man who was very pleased with himself.

Two or three minutes later, there was a knock at the classroom door. “Mr Rook?” said Lieutenant Harris.

“Sure, come on in,” Jim told him. “You look like the cat who got the caviar.”

“Well, I thought you’d like to know that we’ve made a breakthrough in the Martin Amato homicide.”

“That’s good news. That’s really good news. Did you make an arrest yet?”

Lieutenant Harris triumphantly lifted one finger. “Let me tell you something, it was classic procedural police-work. We did a house-to-house down at Venice Beach, and then we staked out the boardwalk and stopped every single cyclist and jogger and skater. We interviewed every bodybuilder on Muscle Beach and every rollerblader in the Graffiti Pit.”

Jim put down his pen and waited for Lieutenant Harris to finish complimenting himself on the trouble that he had taken.

“In the end, we found two young guys from Idaho, of all places. They had hitch-hiked all the way from Boise in the hope of becoming movie extras. Saturday night they
didn’t have anyplace to stay so they tried to sleep on the beach. They were lying in their bedrolls when two men ran right into them.”

Lieutenant Harris picked up the small plaster bust of Shakespeare on Jim’s desk and peered at it closely. “Who’s this? Don’t tell me. That guy from
Star Trek
.”

“Lieutenant,” Jim said, impatiently.

“Oh, sure. Well, there was a scuffle between these two young kids from Idaho and these two guys who had run right into them. It wasn’t much, and the kids wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except that when the two guys had gone running off, one of them found that his hands were covered in blood. The first thing he thought was that one of the guys had stabbed him. So he went to a local bar and washed it all off, and found that he hadn’t been stabbed at all. The blood must have come from the other guy.”

“Suggesting what?”

“Suggesting that the other guy had either cut himself badly – or else he’d very recently cut somebody else, and gotten himself splattered in their blood.”

“And?”

“And he couldn’t have cut himself. The blood must have come from somebody else.”

“How do you know that?”

Lieutenant Harris gave him a triumphant smile. “Because the two kids on the beach positively identified him as Catherine White Bird’s brother Grey Cloud – and it didn’t take much to establish that Grey Cloud didn’t cut himself that night. His partner they identified as Paul – Catherine’s other brother.”

“You’re kidding me. Those two pretend they’re tough, but I don’t believe they’d go that far.”

“They did it, Mr Rook. That’s obvious. They didn’t like their sister going out with a white man, so when she
refused to give him up – that was it. Tribal honour was at stake, or whatever.”

“You’ve arrested them?”

Lieutenant Harris nodded. “Suspicion of first-degree homicide. I’ll admit that I still don’t know how they inflicted those wounds on Martin Amato, but they were down on the beach at the time he was killed, and Grey Cloud was covered in blood. We’re running a DNA and haemotology test right now, and if that blood turns out to be Martin’s … well, that’s all folks.”

“What about the locker room? What about my apartment? What about my cat?”

“In those instances, Mr Rook, I believe that we’re looking for somebody else altogether.”

“But the scratches match, don’t they?”

“There’s some superficial similarity, but we haven’t finished our forensic tests yet.”

“Lieutenant,” Jim protested, “these incidents are all connected. That locker room was trashed by the same person who killed my cat and trashed my apartment, and the same person who killed my cat and trashed my apartment is the same person who murdered Martin Amato.”

“I have a problem with that,” said Lieutenant Harris.

“Problem? What problem?”

“At the time your cat was being killed and your apartment was being remodeled, Paul and Grey Cloud were having dinner at home with their father and five friends from their father’s TV show.”

Jim stared at him. “So what do you conclude from that?”

“I conclude that the two cases are not connected.”

“What if Paul and Grey Cloud
didn’t
do it? They could still be connected then.”

“
Yes,
Mr Rook,’ said Lieutenant Harris, with thinly-disguised impatience. “But they’re not, and we’re going to
prove that they’re not, and once we’ve done that, Paul and Grey Cloud are going to get what’s coming to them.”

The door opened and David Littwin cautiously put his head around it. “OK to come in, Mr Rook? I thought I’d come in early to finish off my poem.”

“Sure, come in, David,” said Jim. “Lieutenant Harris was just leaving.”

“I may need to talk to you some more,” said Lieutenant Harris. He was obviously upset that Jim hadn’t clapped him on the back and acknowledged him as the greatest procedural detective since Maigret.

“Sure, any time,” Jim told him. Lieutenant Harris hesitated by the door for a moment, and then left. Jim went back to his marking.

Sherma Feldstein had written, ‘I think
Treasure Island
should be banned as the only physically-challenged person in the entire novel is presented as a villain. That is, Long John Silver, who only had one leg, not his own fault. This novel will further reinforce prejudice against the physically disadvantaged by presenting them as greedy and immoral and prepared to use their disabilities for nefarious gain.’

Jim gave her an extra point for good spelling and vocabulary, and for correctly using ‘nefarious’, but he simply didn’t know how to mark her for suggesting that
Treasure Island
had been written as a diatribe against the disabled.

He felt the same way about Lieutenant Harris. Maybe Lieutenant Harris was right, and Martin
had
been murdered by Paul and Grey Cloud. There was strong circumstantial evidence against them, after all. But it seemed to Jim that Lieutenant Harris was doing what Sherma Feldstein was doing – closing his eyes to everything except his own prejudice.

There had been no discrimination against Long John
Silver in
Treasure Island.
In fact, he had dominated all the other characters – while Paul and Grey Cloud seemed to Jim to have a mission that white men might not fully understand, but which amounted to very much more than attacking anyone who tried to be too friendly with their sister.

When the class assembled, there were three absentees. Titus Greenspan III had another bad attack of asthma; Seymour Williams had gone to his great-aunt’s funeral at Forest Lawn; and Catherine White Bird had simply failed to show. It wasn’t hard to understand why.

Jim didn’t tell the class that Catherine’s brothers had been arrested. They would find out soon enough, and he was more interested in teaching them how to cope with their grief. Revenge could wait until later.

“You want to tell me how you got on with your poems?” he asked them. “Did you find them difficult? Did you find that they helped you to express how you feel?”

“I think it’s better to smash something when you’re feeling that bad,” said Ray. “You know – break a window, kick in a door. It gets rid of your frustration better.”

“So you felt frustrated by Martin’s death?”

“Frustrated? You’re kidding me, aren’t you? I felt like
why,
man? The guy was so young. Like he had his whole life in front of him, and he happens to walk into some whacko who kills him. I just wish I could of been there. I just wish I could of saved him. I just wish it was Saturday afternoon again and he was still alive.”

“So what did you do? Did you write a poem or did you smash something?”

“I did both. I went home and I wrecked my old Spanish guitar. I smashed it up against the wall until it was nothing more than matchwood and strings.”

“And did that make you feel any better?”

Ray shrugged, and said, “Yeah. It made me feel better.”

“How about your poem? Do you want to read it to us?”

Ray fastidiously picked the gum out of the side of his mouth and stuck it under his desk. He picked up a well-folded sheet of paper and cleared his throat. Usually, the rest of the class would have barracked him, but today they were silent. They knew he wasn’t very articulate but they knew how he felt.

“This is called, like,
Smashed-Up Guitar:

“That’s good, Ray,” said Jim. “That’s probably the best piece of work you’ve produced this term. You’ve made a really vivid analogy about your guitar being broken and silent and Martin being broken and silent, too.”

Ray suddenly flushed scarlet – the first time that Jim had ever seen him embarrassed. He retrieved his gum and bent over his desk with his face covered by his hands.

“Anybody else?” asked Jim.

John Ng hesitantly put up his hand. “I’ve only written something very short,” he said. “It’s not exactly a
haiku
but I guess it’s kind of like it.”

“Do you want to explain that a little?” asked Jim.

“Well … I’m just trying to say that when you leave the earth, there’s another life waiting for you. Not a life that you can see, just like you can’t see the wind, but just as exciting.”

“So you believe in a life after death?”

“Of course, Mr Rook. The same as you do.”

Russell said, “Mr Rook, sir? Do you want to hear mine? It’s pretty long. Sixty-two verses. I call it
The Ballad of Martin Amato
.”

There was a quiet groan from Mark Foley. The last ballad that Russell had written was a blow-by-blow account of the plot of
Waterworld,
and it had gone on almost as long as the movie itself. But Jim said, “OK, Russell, let’s hear it.” He didn’t think it would do the class any harm to have a little light relief.