Rook & Tooth and Claw

by Graham Masterton

  It cannot say what loves have come and gone;

  I only know that summer sang in me

  A little while, that sings in me no more.”

  Catherine lifted her head and looked at him, her eyelashes clotted with tears. “That’s so sad,” she said.

  “Yes, but it tells you that you’re not alone, that other people grieve too. It tells you that other people understand the pain you’re suffering.”

  Catherine took out a balled-up tissue and wiped her eyes. “They won’t let me see him. Could you ask them if I could see him, just one last time?”

  “Well, I’ll ask Lieutenant Harris, see what he says. I can’t promise you, though.”

  He got up, and he was about to leave the room when the door opened and Catherine’s brothers came in. They were both dressed in black T-shirts and black jeans. Grey Cloud’s was emblazoned with the initials DNA – not for dioxyribonucleic acid, but for Dinebeiina Nahiilna Be Agaditahe, the Navajo legal aid corps.

  “What do you two want?” Jim demanded. “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough trouble already?”

  “We’ve come to take our sister home,” said Grey Cloud, taking off his sunglasses.

  “Well, you’re going to have to wait,” Jim told him. “We’re not through here yet, and your father’s given Catherine permission to stay till twelve.”

  “Do you have some kind of hearing impediment? I said we’ve come to take our sister home.”

  Jim stepped up to him so that their faces were only six inches apart. “You listen to me, you punk. Your sister has experienced a traumatic shock and she needs all the understanding she can get. What she doesn’t need is you two swaggering in here like two medium-grilled John Travoltas and putting her through even more stress. So back off. You can wait, if you want to, and give her a ride when she’s ready. Otherwise put an egg in your boot and beat it.”

  “You don’t talk to us like that,” put in Paul, jabbing his finger at Jim’s chest. “This is our country, man. Not yours. You don’t have the right.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting what you said to Martin in front of half-a-dozen witnesses at yesterday’s football game? I’m sure my friend Lieutenant Harris is going to be very interested in that.”

  “Threaten him? I didn’t threaten him,” Grey Cloud retorted. “I simply told him what was going to happen to him if he kept on dating Catherine. It was a prediction, capiche? You can’t arrest anybody for making a prediction.”

  “Oh, no? Well, here’s another prediction: if you don’t back off and give Catherine the time she needs to get over this shock, your nose will be mysteriously broken before the count of ten. Besides, what the hell kind of Navajo word is ‘capiche’?”

  Grey Cloud angrily clenched his fist but his brother Paul held him back. “Come on, man, this isn’t worth it. We can wait for five minutes.”

  “Thank you,” said Jim, trying not to sound sarcastic. “I’m going to talk to Lieutenant Harris and while I’m gone maybe you can find it in your hearts to be good to your sister.”

  “Mister, you don’t know how good,” Paul told him.

  Lieutenant Harris was standing outside the morgue door, talking to Dr Whaley, the medical examiner, a balding, stoop-shouldered man with lopsided spectacles and a huge mournful nose.

  “You and the rest of your faculty must be feeling pretty shaken,” said Dr Whaley. “I never saw anything like this, not in thirty-two years with the coroner’s office.”

  “Catherine wants to know if she can see him.”

  “I don’t think that’s very advisable. But you can, if you like.”

  Jim glanced at Lieutenant Harris, but all Lieutenant Harris did was to shrug and say, “It’s up to you. You haven’t had breakfast yet, have you?”

  “It’s just that I’d appreciate another opinion,” said Dr Whaley. “And I mean any opinion, whether it’s medical or not. I’ve already called Jack Skipper from the LA Zoo. He’s going to come and take a look and see if he can’t identify what kind of animal might have inflicted these kind of injuries. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t a dog, and that’s for sure.”

  He led Jim busily into the chilly, green-tiled autopsy room, his rubbers making echoey squeaks on the floor, and Lieutenant Harris followed. There were two stainless-steel tables set side by side. One was empty. On the other lay a body, under a green hospital sheet. Dr Whaley walked around it and switched on his bright pivoting lamp.

  Lieutenant Harris said, “Martin Amato was found at approximately 5 a.m. by two joggers exercising their dog on the beach. When you see his injuries you’ll understand that whoever or whatever attacked him killed him almost instantly.”

  “Judging by his body temperature, he hadn’t been dead for more than two hours,” said Dr Whaley. He took hold of the edge of the sheet, and then he said to Jim, “Are you ready for this?”

  Jim nodded, and Dr Whaley slowly drew the sheet down the whole length of Martin Amato’s naked body. Or what was left of Martin Amato’s naked body.

  His head was unrecognizable. One side of his face had been torn completely away, exposing his teeth and part of his jawbone. Most of his scalp had been wrenched off, too, leaving a clotted red tangle of skin and hair. But it was his chest and stomach that horrified Jim the most. There were four terrible rips – three or four inches deep in places – which crossed the front of his body diagonally from his left shoulder to his right thigh. They were parallel, like a clawmark, but what kind of animal had claws that could cut through the muscle and bones of a young man’s ribcage, snagging his heart and puncturing his lungs, before slicing his insides into hideously decorative ribbons? Reds, blacks, yellows and sticky beiges.

  Jim stared at Martin’s body for almost a minute without saying anything. Then he turned away, and he heard Dr Whaley replacing the sheet.

  “Well?” asked Lieutenant Harris. “Any ideas? You ever see anything like that before?”

  “I thought mountain lion at first,” said Dr Whaley. “But mountain lions don’t only claw their quarry, they bite them, too – and there are no teethmarks anyplace at all. What was done to that poor boy was done with no more than three extremely powerful blows – either with an animal claw or an implement that resembles an animal claw.”

  Lieutenant Harris said, “Besides that, how the hell could a mountain lion get to Venice Beach? We’ve had no reports of lions missing from zoos or private menageries or movie animal companies. And the interesting thing is that – apart from the pawprints left by the joggers’ dog when it first approached the body – there were no tracks in the sand that resembled anything like the spoor of a very large lion-like animal. Only human footprints, that’s all, and some bicycle tires.”

  “And there were no eye-witnesses that you know of?” asked Jim.

  “We’ve already started knocking on doors, and we’ll be putting out an appeal on the news – but no, not so far. The kind of people who frequent Venice Beach in the middle of the night are not normally the kind of people you might describe as concerned citizens.”

  Jim glanced back at Martin’s body. “I think I’d like to get out of here,” he said.

  Lieutenant Harris took him outside, and they stood on the steps in the sunshine so that Jim could take three or four very deep breaths. “God,” he said, “I hope it was quick. I hope he didn’t suffer.”

  “Almost instantaneous,” said Lieutenant Harris. “Just imagine the shock to the system. Wham. He didn’t stand a chance.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” said Jim. “I’m not supposed to report this without going through Dr Ehrlichman, but I think the sooner you know, the better. Just before yesterday’s football game against Chabot college, somebody broke into the boys’ locker room at West Grove and smashed everything to pieces. They tore washbasins away from the walls, they ripped steel lockers to pieces. What was more, they left deep scratches in the tiles – scratches that went right through the glaze into the clay. Scratches that looked like clawmarks.”

 
“And this wasn’t reported to the police?”

  “Dr Ehrlichman wanted an internal inquiry first. We’ve had quite a bit of police trouble lately up at West Grove. Mainly minor stuff – speed, crack, petty theft. But he wasn’t keen to have a black-and-white rolling up in the middle of a major football event.”

  “What you’re trying to tell me is that the lacerations you saw on Martin Amato’s body reminded you of the scratches you saw on the locker room walls?”

  Jim nodded. “There’s something else, too, although I don’t know whether it’s related. Martin’s girlfriend is a full-blooded Navajo. Her two brothers came to the college yesterday and there was an argument between them. One of her brothers made a threat that if Martin didn’t leave Catherine alone, he wouldn’t live to see the next sunrise.”

  Lieutenant Harris whistled. “Who heard him say that?”

  “Me … and maybe seven or eight other students.”

  “In that case, I think I’d better have a talk to these brothers of hers. Where can I find them – any idea?”

  Jim heard footsteps and looked around. “Speak of the devils,” he said. Walking toward them were Paul, Catherine and Grey Cloud. They came up close and then stopped.

  “Sorry, but we’re tired of waiting for you, Mr Shoulder-To-Cry-On,” said Grey Cloud. “We’re taking our sister home now.”

  “I told you before. Your father said she could stay.”

  “Sometimes our father says things that he doesn’t really mean. We’re going.”

  “Well… I don’t think so,” put in Lieutenant Harris. “I’d like to ask you two gentlemen a few questions first.”

  Grey Cloud gave Jim the coldest of stares. “Has somebody been talking to you, lieutenant?”

  “Somebody did mention something that you said to Martin Amato at yesterday’s college football game.”

  “I told him to stay away from our sister, yes,” said Grey Cloud, without hesitation.

  “And you said that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t see another sunrise?”

  “That’s correct. But it wasn’t intended as a threat.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a term of endearment.”

  “It wasn’t. I didn’t like Martin Amato at all, and I’m not going to pretend that I did. But if you warn a man not to walk across the San Diego Freeway and he insists on doing it, what do you say to him? You say the same thing: ‘you won’t live to see another sunrise.’ That isn’t a threat. It’s simply a prediction.”

  “But why should dating your sister be such a risky enterprise? Who else was going to take objection to it, if not you?”

  “Some things just can’t be explained,” said Grey Cloud.

  “I’m sorry … you’re going to have to explain them. Whatever you want to call it, you made a threat against Martin Amato’s life in front of witnesses and the next morning he was found dead.”

  Grey Cloud said, “My brother and I were both at home last night. All night.”

  “Can anybody vouch for that?”

  “My father and my sister.”

  “No other independent witnesses?”

  “A friend called me from New Mexico just after 2 a.m. He forgot how late, it was. His wife had just had a baby boy.”

  “You’ll be able to give me his name, won’t you?”

  “For sure. And his telephone number, too. Henry Red Jacket. He called from the Wide Ruins reservation.”

  Lieutenant Harris jotted it down. Then he thoughtfully scratched the back of his neck. “There’s still one point you haven’t made clear. If you didn’t have anything to do with Martin Amato’s death, then who do you think did? And what made you so sure that he was going to die?”

  Paul said, “Don’t forget that we’re Navajo, lieutenant. We can feel the rain coming days before the clouds appear. We can hear people approaching hours before they arrive.”

  “So? What difference does that make?”

  “Martin Amato had the look of death on him yesterday, that’s all. It was almost a certainty.”

  Lieutenant Harris pointed his pen at him, warningly. “Let me advise you, my friend. You may be able to predict all of next week’s winners at Santa Rosita, but that’s not going to help you in a court of law.”

  “You’re arresting us?” asked Grey Cloud.

  “No, I’m not. But I’m going to want to talk to you again. Do us both a big favor and stay at the same address until I advise you otherwise.”

  Catherine looked as if she were about to say something, but then Paul and Grey Cloud took her arms and hustled her down the steps to their waiting car.

  “What do you make of those two?” asked Lieutenant Harris.

  “I’m not sure. I guess if you want to understand them, you have to look at life from a Navajo point of view. They’re trying to protect their culture. They’re trying to keep their bloodline pure. That’s why they don’t approve of Catherine dating whites. Apparently she’s already betrothed to some guy out on the Navajo reservation – has been for over five years.”

  “Damned pretty girl,” Lieutenant Harris remarked, as he watched her being driven away. “Seems like a waste to me.”

  “Do you think her brothers might have killed Martin?” asked Jim.

  “I’d like to think so. It would make my job a whole lot easier. They had motive, for sure. They might well have had the opportunity, too. If Grey Cloud’s friend called from New Mexico at 2 a.m. and spoke for twenty minutes, he still would have had plenty of time to drive down to the beach and meet up with Martin Amato.”

  “Why didn’t you pull them in?”

  “Think about it. The real question is – how? Those guys are fit, and they’re tough, but even they wouldn’t have had the strength to rip a man’s body open with one blow. Not like that. As you say, they might have had some kind of special implement – but even so …”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Urgent priority number one is a cup of strong black coffee. Then I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to go plodding around looking for witnesses and circumstantial evidence and in the meantime I’m going to be keeping a close eye on those two jokers.”

  He laid his hand on Jim’s shoulder and said, “A word to the wise… if I were you, I’d keep your eyes open. If they were the perpetrators, they’re not going to be thinking it’s a million laughs that you told me what they said to young Martin at the football game.”

  He checked his watch. “After the coffee, I’m going to take a photographer and a forensic officer and I’m going to go over to West Grove and check out that locker room. Maybe you’re right. Maybe those clawmarks match.”

  “What if they do?”

  “Then I really don’t know what the hell we’re looking for.”

  Jim had almost forgotten that it was Sunday. He drove back to his second-story apartment in a pink-painted block just off Electric Avenue, parked his car, and wearily climbed out. The morning was hazy and not particularly warm, but three or four residents were already sitting on the dilapidated sun-loungers by the pool, reading newspapers or knitting or listening to Sony Walkmen. Jim said hi to Miss Neagle, the middle-aged woman who had taken over old Mrs Vaizey’s apartment. Miss Neagle was wearing huge dark glasses and a scarf on her head, and her big dimpled thighs bulged out beneath a 1960s-style swimsuit with brown-and-white flower patterns on it.

  “Hi, Miss Neagle.”

  Miss Neagle lifted her sunglasses and smiled up at him. Her lipstick was so bright she looked as if she had been eating strawberry jelly. “Good morning, Mr Rook. You seem a little under the weather.”

  “I didn’t sleep too good, that’s all. Tossing and turning most of the night.”

  “Ha! You don’t have to tell me about tossing and turning. I’m a martyr when it comes to tossing and turning. Sometimes I just dread the sun going down.”

  “How about sleeping pills?”

  “No, Mr Rook. There’s only one sure cure for tossing and turning.”

  “Oh, yes? T
hen why don’t you try it?”

  She lowered her black-blotched eyelashes coquettishly. “I would if I could, Mr Rook, believe me.”

  Jim suddenly realized what she was talking about, and gave her a quick, humorless smile. “Can’t always have what we want, Miss Neagle.”

  As he walked toward the steps that led up to his apartment, he was narrowly eyed by Myrlin Buffield, from Apartment 201. Myrlin used to have a belly that hung over his shorts like a tide of slowly-melting marshmallow, but he had been working out at Gold’s Gym lately and now the tide had crept back upward, giving him an extraordinary puffed-up look, as if he were constantly sucking in his breath. He still had the same slicked-back hair, though, and the same dagger earring. He was pretending to read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.

  “Hi, Myrlin,” said Jim.

  “You ain’t been creeping out of your apartment nights and spying on me again, have you?” Myrlin wanted to know. “I was sure I heard somebody creeping outside of my apartment last night and I was pretty damned sure that it was you.”

  “Sorry, Myrlin. My creeping days are over.”

  Myrlin was deeply suspicious of Jim, almost to the point of paranoia. Ever since old Mrs Vaizey had held a séance in Jim’s apartment, and had left it thick with incense smoke, Myrlin had suspected him of being a drug addict or a dabbler in the black arts, or worse – especially since, soon after, old Mrs Vaizey had disappeared, and had never been seen again. Only Jim knew what had happened to her, and Jim was never going to tell anybody, ever.

  Jim went up the steps and along the balcony until he reached his apartment. The feline formerly known as Tibbles was waiting for him outside the door with an expectant look on her face. He hadn’t had time to feed her before he went out. He unlocked the door and she dashed straight into the kitchen and waited by her bowl with her tail sticking up in the air like a witch’s broom.

  Jim opened the icebox and was just popping open a cold can of beer when he heard a rapping at the door. It was Miss Neagle, wrapped up in a pink toweling robe. That wasn’t so extraordinary: she often came up in a variety of highly informal attire to borrow coffee or sugar or orange juice. But what was extraordinary was that she was wearing a pink lobster SpaceFace hat, complete with eyes and claws. It had been a favourite of old Mrs Vaizey’s.