Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09

by Damned in Paradise (v5. 0)

  “Relieve himself in what way?”

  “I won’t dignify that with a response.”

  “Why did you say to him that everything would be all right, just before the cops hauled him in for questioning?”

  “He was cleared,” she said. “Tommie vouched for him. Tommie had been with him every second all evening.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  “Nate,” Isabel said, “I’m getting very perturbed with you….”

  Perturbed. That was how rich people got pissed off.

  I said to Thalia, “If you don’t want to answer the question—”

  “He’s a friend,” she said. “I was reassuring him.”

  She had just been beaten and raped by a bunch of wild-eyed natives, and she’s reassuring him.

  “I think this charming breakfast has lasted quite long enough,” Thalia said, bringing her napkin up from her lap to the table, pushing her chair back.

  “Please don’t go,” I said. “Not until we talk about the most crucial matter of all.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “The time discrepancy.”

  Another flinch of the mouth. “There is no time discrepancy.”

  “I’m afraid there is. The activities of the five rapists are fairly well charted—we know, for example, that at thirty-seven minutes past midnight, they were involved in the accident and scuffle that made them candidates for suspicion in the first place.”

  “I left the Ala Wai Inn at eleven thirty-five, Mr. Heller.”

  “That’s a pretty exact time. Did you look at your watch?”

  “I wasn’t wearing a watch, but some friends of mine left the dance at eleven-thirty and I left about five minutes after they did. My friend told me later that she had looked at her watch and it’d been eleven-thirty when they left.”

  “But your statement that night said you left between half past midnight and one.”

  “I must have been mistaken.”

  “And if you did leave between half past midnight and one, those boys didn’t have time to get from the intersection of North King Street and Dillingham Boulevard, where the minor accident and scuffle took place…”

  “I told you,” she said, rising, “I must have been mistaken, at first.”

  “Your memory improved, you mean.”

  She whipped the sunglasses off; her grayish-blue eyes, normally protuberant, were tight and narrow. “Mr. Heller, when I was questioned that night, in those early morning hours, I was in a state of shock, and later, under sedation. Is it any wonder that I saw things more clearly, later on? Isabel—come along. Beatrice.”

  And Thalia moved away from the table, as Isabel gave me a withering look—two parts disgust, one part disappointment—and Beatrice followed. I noticed the maid had left her little purse behind and I started to say something, but she signaled me not to with the slightest shake of the head.

  When they were gone, I sat there wondering, waiting for Beatrice to tell her mistress that she had to go fetch something she’d forgotten.

  And soon she was back, picking up the purse and whispering, “I have tonight off. Meet me at Waikiki Park at eight-thirty.”

  Then she was gone.

  Well. Hotcha.

  Looked like even with Isabel mad at me, I still had a date tonight.

  9

  The gentle rustle of palms and the exotic fragrance of night-blooming cereus gave way to the insistent honk of auto horns and the pungent aroma of chop suey as quietly residential Kalakaua Avenue turned suddenly, noisily, commercial. And even the star-flung black velvet sky and its golden moon were eclipsed by the glittering gaudy lights of Waikiki Amusement Park, engulfing the corner of Kalakaua and John Ena Road like a bright spreading rash.

  Signs directed me to turn left on Ena for entry into the parking lot; across the way were shack-like businesses catering to the amusement park overflow, cheap cafes, a beauty parlor, a barbershop. Locals, kanakas and haoles alike, were walking along in the yellow glow of street-lamps, couples strolling the sidewalk hand in hand, drinking bottles of pop, nibbling sandwiches, licking ice cream cones; just a block or two down was the beach. A few native girls in their teens and twenties, looking both absurd and sexy in flapperish attire, were trolling for sailors and soldier boys; this was the sort of typically sleazy but seemingly safe area you might expect to find outside any amusement park.

  I wheeled Mrs. Fortescue’s Durant roadster into the pretty nearly filled lot, in the shadow of a roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and motorcycle death loop. The music here wasn’t the Royal Hawaiian’s lazy steel guitar and ukulele mix designed to lull rich tourists away from their money: it was the familiar all-American song of the midway—bells dinging and kids screaming and the calliope call of a carousel. And this tune, too, was designed to part a fool from his money.

  She was waiting around front, at the arcaded entrance on Kalakaua, just under the A of the looming white bulb waikiki park sign, leaning against an archway pillar, a cigarette poised in fingers whose nails were painted blood red. The white blouse and long dark skirt were gone, replaced by a clingy bare-armed tight-in-the-bodice knee-length Japanese silk dress, white with startling red blossoms that seemed to burst on the fabric; her shapely legs were bare above white sandals out of which peeked the red-painted nails of her toes; her mouth was lip-rouged the same bright red as the flowers on the dress; and a real red blossom was snugged in her ebony hair, just over her left ear. Only her white clutch purse remained of this morning’s mundane wardrobe.

  “Mr. Heller,” she said, and her smile set her face aglow. “Nice see you.”

  “Nice see you,” I said. “That dress is almost as pretty as you are.”

  “I didn’t know if you show up,” she said.

  “I never stand up pretty girls who ask me out.”

  She drew on the cigarette, emitted a perfect round smoke ring from a perfect round kiss of a mouth. Then, smiling just a little, she said, “You flirting with me, Mr. Heller?”

  “It’s Nate,” I said. “And with the way you look in that dress, any man with a pulse would flirt with you.”

  She liked that. She gestured with her hand holding the cigarette. “You want smoke?”

  “Naw. Might stunt my growth.”

  “Don’t you got your full growth, Nate?”

  “Not yet. But stick around.”

  The white flash of her smile outshone the flickering lights and neons of Waikiki Park. I offered her my arm and she tossed her cigarette in a sparking arc, then snuggled awfully close for a first date. Was Thalia Massie’s little maid attracted by my he-man charms, or was she tricking on the side?

  I wanted desperately to think that this curvy little chop-stick cutie was irresistibly attracted to me; I hated to think she might be a hooker who knew a horny mainlander when she saw one. I was certainly irresistibly attracted to her—the intoxicating scent of her (was it perfume, or the flower in her hair?), the way the pencil-eraser tips of the full little handfuls of her breasts poked at the silk of her dress (it was just cool enough to inspire that), and of course the lure of the unfamiliar, the allure of the Far East, the unspoken promise of forbidden pleasures and unspeakable delights….

  We didn’t say much, for a while. Just strolled arm in arm through a crowd of mostly locals, a yellow woman on the arm of a white man no big deal in this melting pot. Other than the racial hodgepodge, this could have been the midway of the Illinois State Fair—very little of the park seemed uniquely Hawaiian. The merry-go-round with its seahorse mounts, the giant clapboard Noah’s ark with its gangway up to a petting zoo, had vague ocean ties; and there was an ersatz Island flavor to the hula dolls and paper leis and toy ukuleles the shooting galleries offered up for marksmanship. But mostly this was the same world of sawdust and sideshows that any American would recognize as foreign only in the sense that it transcended the ordinary humdrum of life.

  We had cotton candy—shared a big pink wad of it, actually—as she guided me toward a spr
awling two-story clapboard shed.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “No bugs. No gnats or skeeters, no nothin’.”

  She shrugged. “They leave when swamp drained.”

  “What swamp?”

  “Swamp where Waikiki is now.”

  “Waikiki used to be a swamp?”

  She nodded. “Go down to Ala Wai Canal, you wanna find some bugs.”

  “No, that’s okay….”

  “Years ago, they drain Waikiki to make room for more sugarcane. All the swamps and ponds, all the little farmers and fisherman, gone. The beach and all this tourist trade, that was just happy accident.”

  “Like the bugs that left.”

  She nodded. “No snakes in Hawaii, either. Not even down at Ala Wai.”

  “They got driven out, too?”

  “No. They never here.”

  I gave her a little smirk. “No serpents in Eden? I find that hard to believe.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Just human kind. They everywhere.”

  She had a point. The building we were heading to was jumping with music and kids. The closer we approached, the more the night throbbed with a very American jazz band version of “Charley, My Boy”—with the strum of a guitar and some steel guitar thrown in, to make it nominally Hawaiian style. Kids yellow, white, and brown stood out front and along the side of the clapboard pavilion, sharing snorts of hooch from flasks, catching smokes and smooches. I was definitely overdressed in my suit and tie—the boys wore silk shirts and blue jeans, the girls cotton sweaters and short skirts.

  I paid at the door (35 cents admission, but couples got in for half a buck), got a ticket stub in return, and we squeezed past the packed dance floor and found a table for two. Up on an open stage, the band—the Happy Farmers (according to the logo on the bass drum head), Hawaiians in shirts almost as loud as their music—had segued into a slow tune, “Moonlight and Roses.” The sight of these couples—here a yellow boy with a white girl, there a brown girl with a white boy, locked together in sweaty embrace under a rotating mirrored ball catching flickering lights of red and blue and green—would have given a Ku Klux Klan member apoplexy.

  “You want a Coke?” I asked her.

  She nodded eagerly.

  I went off to a bar that served soft drinks and snacks, got us two sweaty cold bottles of Coke and a couple glasses, and returned to my beautiful Oriental flower, who was zealously chewing gum.

  Sitting, I sneaked my flask of rum from my pocket and asked her, “Can we get away with this?”

  “Sure,” she said, pouring Coke into her glass. “You think Elks don’t like their oke?”

  Oke, I gathered, was Hawaiian for white mule.

  I poured some rum into her glass of Coke. “This is an Elks Club?”

  She stuck her gum under the table. “Naw. But local fraternal orders, they take turn sponsoring dances. It was Eagles, that night.”

  By “that night” she meant the night Thalia Massie was assaulted.

  “This is the joint where the rapists went dancing,” I said, making myself my own rum and Coke, “before they snatched Thalia.”

  She looked at me carefully. “You really think that?”

  I slipped my flask away. “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you think I ask you here?”

  “My blue eyes?”

  She didn’t smile at that. “You were giving Mrs. Massie hard time today.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “Giving her hard time?”

  I shook my head, no. “Trying to shake the truth out of her.”

  “You think she lying?”

  “No.”

  “You think she telling truth?”

  “No.”

  She frowned. “What, then?”

  “I don’t think anything—yet. I’m just starting to sort through things. I’m a detective. That’s what I do.”

  “You haven’t made mind up?”

  “No. But somebody did do something to your boss lady. I mean, she didn’t break her own jaw. She didn’t rape herself.”

  She thought about that. Sipped her drink. “Crimes like that don’t happen here. Violence—it not Hawaiian. They a gentle race. Tame like dog or cat in house.”

  “Well, only two of these dogs were Hawaiians. One cat was Japanese.”

  Something flickered in her eyes, like a fire that momentarily flared up. “Two are Hawaiian. The Chinese boy, he half-Hawaiian. This not a crime that make sense, here. Rape.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because girls here…” She shrugged. “…you don’t have to force them.”

  “You mean, all you have to do is buy ’em a Coke? Maybe put a little rum in it? And you’re home free?”

  That made her smile, a little; like I’d tickled her feet.

  But then, like the flare-up in her eyes, it disappeared. “No, Nate. That not it…hard to explain to mainlander.”

  “I’m a quick learner.”

  “Before missionaries come, this friendly place. Even now, only rape you hear of is…what do you call it when the girl is underage?”

  “Statutory rape?”

  She nodded. “Young girls give in to older boys, then parents find out, or baby is on way…then you hear about ‘rape.’ Colored man forcing himself—on a white woman? Not happen here.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “Besides, are you telling me the racial line doesn’t get crossed under the sheets?” I nodded toward the polyglot parade of lust out on the dance floor. “What’s that, a mirage?”

  “It get crossed,” she said. “Beach boys—Hawaiian boys who teach surf at hotel beach? Their pupils usually female tourists, sometimes lonely Navy wives…but this sex is, what’s word?”

  “Consenting.”

  She nodded.

  “Is that what you think? Your boss lady had a fling with a beach boy and it got out of hand? And she concocted a story that—”

  “Didn’t say that. You must…you must think I’m terrible.”

  “I think you’re a livin’ doll.”

  She avoided my fond gaze. “But terrible person. Traitor to employer.”

  I shrugged my eyebrows, sipped my spiked Coke. “I don’t think a rich person paying a servant a few bucks a week buys any great sort of loyalty. If it did, guys like me couldn’t ever get the dirt on anybody.”

  “You honest man.”

  I almost choked on the Coke. “What?”

  “You say what you think. You don’t hide nothing.”

  Often I hid everything, but I said, “That’s right.”

  “Will you dance with me?”

  “Sure.”

  The Happy Farmers had just begun “Love Letters in the Sand,” and the steel guitar was pretty heavy on this one, and as I held Beatrice near to me, the fragrance of the flower in her hair made me giddy—or was it the rum?

  “I thought you might not come,” she said, “because of Miss Bell.”

  “We’re just friends, Isabel and me.”

  “She told her cousin you sweethearts.”

  “That’s an, uh…exaggeration. We just met on the ship. Besides, she’s mad at me.”

  “Because you hard on Mrs. Massie today.”

  “That’s right.”

  I held her close.

  “Nate.”

  “Yes.”

  “You at your full growth now?”

  “Damn near.”

  The next tune was fast. I adjusted my trousers, as best as possible, and we headed back to the table. But before we sat, Beatrice said, “You have a car?”

  “Of course.”

  “We can’t go my place. I live with my mother and two sister and two brother. Over Kapalama way.”

  “I’m at the Royal Hawaiian.”

  “No. Not there. Miss Bell might see.”

  Good point.

  She touched my hand. Softly, slyly, she said, “I know place where couples go. Down beach road. To park
?”

  “Lead the way,” I said.

  Soon we were pulling out of the Waikiki Park parking lot.

  “See that barbershop?” she asked, pointing across the way to the line of dingy shops. “See that saimin wagon?”

  I glanced: a somewhat ramshackle two-story building (living quarters above) was given over to a barbershop with a traditional pole and a window that said ENA ROAD BARBERSHOP; through the window could be seen a woman barber snipping at a white male customer’s locks; next door, in the direction of the beach, was a vacant lot with a food cart (SUKIYAKI DINNER, SAIMIN, HOT DOGS) and some picnic tables scattered around, couples eating noodles out of bowls; a few cars were parked up on the lot, getting served by white-aproned Orientals, drive-in style.

  “That where Mrs. Massie seen by witnesses,” Beatrice said. “Walking along with white man trailing after.”

  “And that,” I said, nodding toward the big white two-story Store—GROCERIES—COLD DRINKS AND TOBACCO—that sat just ahead, on the corner of Hobron Lane and Ena, “is the building that obscured the witnesses’ view, when Thalia was grabbed.”

  “If that true,” Beatrice asked, “what happen to the white man following after? Did he disappear around that corner?”

  I looked over at her. “Beatrice—what’s your stake in this, anyway?”

  “Before he die last year, my father work at the same cannery as Shorty’s father,” she said.

  “Shorty?”

  “Shimitsu Ida. Horace Ida. Turn here.”

  “Huh?”

  “Turn right. If you still wanna go lovers’ lane.”

  I still wanted to go to lovers’ lane. Just as I was turning onto the beach road, the landscape of Ena Road had shifted somewhat: the eating joints and other small shops gave way to bungalows—little more than wooden shacks—and two-story ramshackle apartment houses clustered together.

  She noticed my giving the area the once-over. “Bachelor officer from Fort De Russey rent those.”

  I snorted a laugh. “You’d think they’d want something nicer.”

  “Out of the way, for taking native girl. Close to the beach where they can meet female tourist. And Navy wife. Only not all officer are bachelor, hear tell.”