Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  The bathroom medicine cabinet was filled with prescription and over-the-counter drugs, mostly for digestive conditions. This would be Welter’s room.

  A small second closet held two empty nylon-sided suitcases.

  The dresser in the bedroom was likewise filled with clothing— shirts, underwear, socks, small change, and one and a half pairs of cufflinks, although none of the shirts had French cuffs.

  The bed was made. It had not been slept in recently. Of course.

  Handel stood in the middle of the room and looked around. His uneasiness, which had receded for a time while he went through the rooms, came back. Heavy drapes covered the windows, and the room seemed suddenly unbearably stuffy.

  He began to feel as if the next room he looked in would contain a corpse. The thought provoked a brief chuckle. “Silly,” he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice increased his discomfort. He left the master bedroom, closing the door carefully behind him.

  The hall was deserted as ever. The old plank flooring, highly polished, creaked very slightly underfoot.

  He moved into the entry.

  The windows on either side of the paneled front door looked out on the drive. His car was the only one out there, parked next to a garage that had once been a carriage house or stable. It too was empty, though recent signs of occupation remained visible through the small panes in the garage door— garden tools, including a power lawn mower, three large brown plastic garbage cans, a neatly arranged workbench, no cars.

  He stood beside the front door examining the ornate, carved paneling of the wall. A small panel disguised as a unit of the carving clicked, released, and opened when he pressed it. Inside was the touchpad and LED readout of an elaborate burglar alarm system. He examined it for a moment, then shrugged. Opposite the burglar alarm was an ornate built-in gun rack. An antique shotgun was displayed inside. The glass-fronted door was ajar, though, and three of the four rests were empty.

  He went through the arch into the living room. The aroma of sandalwood was almost overpowering, yet the paneling was over fifty years old. He walked the length of the room, expecting at any moment now to hear the sound of wheels on the gravel driveway outside. He paused to look at a framed paper covered with Chinese or Japanese calligraphy. It reminded him of the paper he had folded in his pocket, except there were no Arabic numerals in this one.

  A soft buzzing sound made him jump. When it repeated he crossed the room to the multiline telephone on the side table. It rang again. Then there was a click, and a voice message indicated Mr. Welter was unavailable.

  After the series of clicks and the tone, a man spoke. “Grant. Kano here. What the hell’s going on? Ueda and the other two just left here with Peter. They act as if Vic had something to do with this satellite, and they think I know something about it. Angela… well, never mind. Get back to me as soon as possible, will you? This whole project is suddenly starting to unravel on us.”

  The sound of Kano hanging up was angry and loud.

  Handel, about to pick up the phone, pulled his hand back as if shocked. The silence after the bang was more eerie than ever.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and picked up the receiver. He pressed the buttons and waited. When someone answered he asked for Cobb Takamura.

  “Sorry,” Sergeant Hirogawa said. “He’s out. Went to the hospital, I think. I could try his car. Hang on.”

  After several minutes he came back on the line. “No answer on the car. He left the hospital awhile ago, they said. Didn’t know where he was going. Dr. Shih said to tell you that Propter started to recover, but had some kind of relapse.”

  “OK. When he gets back tell him I’ve been through the house in Kalaheo. No sign of the Billings woman. The house is empty. Looks like it was locked up, except they left the solarium door open. Burglar alarm was not set, though there’s a lot of computer stuff here.”

  He moved on to the dining room, a stiffly formal room in muted off-whites. The table had some kind of reflecting enameled surface, and the twelve chairs arranged around it were high-backed and upholstered with beige canvas. In another kind of building this could have been a boardroom instead of a dining area. There were no visible signs of recent use.

  He sat down in the chair at the head of the table and looked down its length. The drapes at the end, ones he had seen from the outside before, were closed tightly, but allowed a pale rose filtered light through, a light which gave a fairy tale quality to the room. He could imagine Victor Linz as a prince of industry seated in this chair, holding court. The house was a castle.

  If Victor Linz were a prince, and this was a castle, where was the dungeon?

  He shook his head. Cobb Takamura would lift his eyebrows and quote some incomprehensible Charlie Chan aphorism at a time like this. His uneasiness came back, a slow tide of cold black water seeping upward. He stood up and pushed the chair back in. He had found no corpses. There was no dungeon. Victor Linz was not a prince of anything, he was a stiff in the morgue.

  He paused to examine the painting on the wall, an abstraction in rose, tan, and pale blue. It made no sense whatever.

  Somewhere at the intersection between youthful comic books and adolescent television, Scott Handel had acquired a fund of knowledge and belief that shaped his view of the world. He also had an imagination that frequently scared him although he hid it well; fear was a liability in his chosen profession. Yet he had chosen his profession largely because his fantasies of heroism loomed large in that imagination, and because he felt that imagination was an asset.

  Despite his uneasiness, he was pleased with the job he was doing, the clues he was collecting. He was sure the paper he had picked up in the computer room was a lead to what Ueda was doing in Kaua’i. Because of his uneasiness, an idea was forming in his imagination, borne up into consciousness on a slow tide of daydream: perhaps there was a dungeon in this castle. Perhaps there was just a princess in distress. Perhaps voices were calling out from a terrible distance, beseeching him for help.

  He thumped himself on the forehead, as if to drive away this vision. He could hear his father denouncing it. Nonsense. There wasn’t even a crime, much less this fairy tale. Besides, he had not yet examined the kitchen, the last room.

  It was as clean and empty as the rest of the house. The windows onto the garden were spotless. The restaurant stove showed no evidence of grease. The counters had been cleaned, the sink was scrubbed, the pots and pans and utensils were all hung on pegs or arranged in drawers as if on show. The kitchen was professional.

  So where was the cook?

  Where was everybody— Welter, Ueda, Lianne Billings? He leaned back against the sink and looked around the kitchen. Highlights winked off the stainless steel knives and ladles hanging above the range. The bar of light falling through the door from the solarium had moved since he had seen it from the outside, and no longer encroached on the floor to the freezer.

  He looked at that door. It had a large steel handle. Really, it was a big refrigerator, a walk-in cooler, not the enormous room he had imagined when he’d noticed it from the outside.

  Still, it was large enough to hold a person or two.

  No, that was silly.

  He stood in front of the door. The corpse would be hideous. He opened the door.

  Lianne Billings, crouched on the floor, cradling her sleeping daughter to her, glared at him.

  The room was a cooler, not a freezer. The shelves were filled with bread, canned goods, eggs.

  Lianne stared at Handel for several seconds. Then she spoke. “It’s about goddamn time,” she said.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE HIBISCUS COURT Motel was a two story cement block structure painted a floral yellow that the years had faded. The structure languished on a neglected side street on the south side of downtown Lihu’e amid an assortment of small-appliance repair shops, an insurance adjuster’s office, and a one-hour photo lab. There was no sign anywhere on the premises of hibiscus except conceivably in the color of
the paint. Propter’s room was on the second floor.

  The manager of the motel, an elderly deaf woman who had probably learned her trade from a correspondence course, shifted her feet beside him. She wore an enormous muumuu of a lavish parrot green, and constantly rubbed against one another arthritic fingers thick with rings set with all the birthstones of the year. Her hand trembled as she pushed the key into the lock.

  “He didn’t want maid service,” she said. “We couldn’t understand it, Fredik and me. Who wouldn’t want maid service? But we obliged, you see. No one been in here, not since he checked in. Now, I haven’t seen him in awhiles, neither. There.” She pushed the door open. “Lock when you leave, please. He don’t want maid service.” She shuffled away along the outside balcony to the stairs at the end and, gripping the railing tightly, descended slowly, one jerky step at a time.

  Cobb stepped inside.

  He could see at a glance the room had been swiftly and efficiently searched, though it showed none of the disarray of television drama searches: no slit mattress spilling stuffing on the floor, no haphazard chaos of tossed drawers and overturned chairs. It was something more subtle, the smallest hint of a presence: the lampshade slightly askew, the suitcase on the folding luggage rack showing the corner of a shirt, a feeling of intrusion.

  He moved swiftly through the room, checking the bathroom, the closet, the dresser drawers. Then he took his time, going over the same ground more carefully.

  The bed was made, the floor clean. He opened Propter’s suitcase and gazed thoughtfully at its contents— shirts and underwear and rolled pairs of socks, two baggy bathing suits with price tags still on them, a nylon wind breaker folded neatly.

  Here was an unknown life revealed. There were things you could know about a person just from the way he moved into a motel room. Propter was neat, almost compulsive. Each item had a specific place in the suitcase, a specific manner of folding or rolling. The right top corner held laundry, also rolled tightly and arranged as carefully as the produce section of a grocery. Pockets along the back of the case held a small, expensive tape recorder and a leather folder containing a calculator and an expense ledger. The shirts were bound with professional laundry paper tape. A small sachet of cedar deodorant was tucked in a corner. Because of this compulsive neatness, the signs of search were all the more evident. The shirttail that flopped over the edge of the case, the misaligned roll of dirty socks, the folded tab of paper on the expense ledger.

  The closet held three Hawaiian shirts, all pressed, on hangers. A pair of Rebok running shoes sat on the floor, toes aligned. They looked as if they had never been worn.

  The top drawer of the dresser contained papers, their perfect alignment disturbed by someone slamming the drawer shut: rental car contract, airline ticket, passport, a generic purchase receipt for $235.97 made out to a Mr. Robert Short, and an envelope, neatly sliced open, from Sharleen Propter, Room 89, Taylor Care Facility, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The name and street address was the same one Propter had given him, although he had not mentioned anything called the Taylor Care Facility.

  Cobb slid the letter, a single sheet, from the envelope. He read, “Dearest Elliot,” then two long paragraphs followed by “Love, Sis.” It was printed with a high quality dot-matrix printer. There was no signature. Sharleen had written with a computer. He could see her painfully tapping the keys, perhaps with a stick in her mouth, perhaps with one finger of a hand twisted by disease. She told him not to worry, that she was doing fine, the doctors said she was healthy as a horse, she had taken a trip to the aquarium with some of the other chronics, and she was going to try out a new kind of chair soon, one that would let her steer with her chin, and she had seen his syndicated piece on acid rain.

  The passport was well used, stamped with visas to Europe, South America, and the Far East. It included a five year visa to Japan, dated two years before.

  The purchase receipt offered a small mystery. Who was Robert Short? There was no store name on the form and the purchased item was not named. The date was that of the previous Saturday.

  He examined the airline ticket and the rental contract. The car had caused a lot of trouble. A number of people who had handled it were in the hospital, not to mention Elliot Propter himself.

  The other drawers were empty.

  He looked under the bed, felt between the mattress and springs (noting the corner of the sheet pulled out by the previous searcher), felt inside the shoes and on top of the shelf in the closet.

  Either they’d found it or it wasn’t here or Elliot Propter had hidden it somewhere else.

  Whatever it was.

  Tape, perhaps. But what kind? There were many tapes. Scotch, strap, packing. Sewing tape, bookbinding tape, tape measure, ticker tape. Microcassette. Standard audio. Video cassette. Reel-to-reel. Professional one inch or three-quarter inch. Computer tape.

  He sat in the plastic chair beside the cheap Formica table by the window and looked at the telephone. It was black, with no dial. A small sign in the center of the circle where a rotary dial would have been said to pick up the telephone and the front desk would dial for you.

  He moved the chair slightly and picked up the handset.

  It took well over a minute for anyone to answer. “Desk,” a voice, male and cracked, announced.

  “Lieutenant Takamura here. I’m in two-twelve, a room you rented to Propter.”

  “I know what room you’re in, son. A little light here tells me that.”

  “Of course. Did Mr. Propter leave anything with you for safekeeping?”

  There was a long pause. Finally the man, presumably Fredik, came back. “I don’t think we can give out that kind of information.”

  “Your wife has seen my credentials, Fredik. I’m investigating a crime.” Well, that was true.

  Again he waited through a long pause as Fredik went into consultation. A radio in the background outlined the complex rules of a contest underway at the station. It seemed to have something to do with the final disposition of the satellite that had fallen to earth a few days before. Was it American, or Soviet, or some other country? NASA apparently wasn’t sure whose it was. In fact, NASA strongly suggested the tracking data was very ambiguous, and that it may not have been a satellite at all that came down on the small island of Kaua’i.

  The question was, whose satellite was it? The station was taking a poll. The tenth person to guess correctly would win a prize. Dinner for two somewhere or other. A running account of names and guesses was kept.

  “Well, all right,” Fredik, back on the line, breathed loudly into the phone. “He did give us a envelope to keep. We got it in the safe. Chloris says you can look at it if you want. She says Mr. Propter’s in the hospital and needs help, she says you said. She says come on down. But we wouldn’t ordinarily do that, you know. We wouldn’t tell them other people he done it. These is unusual circumstances, I guess. What with the satellite.”

  “The satellite?”

  “Sure. Indonesian satellite, I say. Had some foreign disease on it, made people sick, I heard. I figure that’s what happened to two-one-two, got sprayed by that satellite when it come down. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta call in my guess. They’re having a contest.” The line went dead.

  Cobb hung up slowly. Was the room hiding anything else, something he had overlooked?

  Almost as an afterthought he checked under the toilet seat (no paper tape to proclaim its sanitary condition— Propter had used the facility) and inside the tank. He pulled the shower curtain rod down and looked inside, then carefully replaced it. He felt under the sink inside the vanity.

  He went back into the bedroom and pulled the tape recorder from the pocket of the suitcase. There was a tape inside, but the record button was down and the tape at the end. He rewound it and listened, but there was nothing on it. He wound to the end and turned it over.

  The other side was blank as well, but to make sure he fast-forwarded and pressed play again. He did this several times, and
was rewarded, somewhere in the middle, with a word.

  Holding down play and cue, he found the beginning of a small section of speech.

  “Wakefield on Kaua’i. Three-four-seven, Vandenberg in eighty-seven. Why would Wakefield be here if this is a NASA jurisdiction? Strong suspicion Sandstone involved. Research satellite. Follow Wakefield and the answer will be at the end.”

  The rest of the tape was blank. Someone had erased the other side, but Propter had hidden his note in the middle of side two. Why? Who erased side one? Propter? Or Wakefield?

  The office was a sticky little room with a yellow coil of old-fashioned flypaper hanging in the corner and a television set so ancient it produced only snow. The snow was a fit visual accompaniment to the radio contest, apparently in a new round of calls after a musical interlude.

  “Did you win?” Cobb asked.

  Fredik ran a hand both thin and spotted through hair to match. “Don’t know. Fact is, nobody knows what kinda satellite it was either. But I’ll tell you something, mister.”

  When he lapsed into silence, Cobb prodded him to tell him something.

  “That satellite’s dumped customers out of the Hibiscus Court like slops to the hogs.”

  “Slops to the hogs?”

  Fredik snorted. The sound may have represented a reaction to something humorous. “We’re from Iowa, me and the missus. Farm folk. Always wanted to travel, after retirement. So here we are.” He seemed unaccountably pleased with himself, as if this were, indeed, travel.

  “So. Mr. Propter left a package here, I believe, for safekeeping?”

  Fredik nodded his head vigorously. His thin gray hair flew in several directions when he did, but when he stopped, all the hair fell precisely back into place. “Sure did,” he said when the bobbing had subsided. “Sure did.” He made no move.

  “Give it to the man, Fredik.” The green muumuu ambled into the office from some back apartment, preceded as if led by the writhing hands, winking watery gem light in the office blend of bluish fluorescent and late afternoon sun. “He’s from the police.”