Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “Never mind. Let me hold her for a while.” He took the baby and walked her around, mumbling in her ear. “RNA transcriptase,” he said. “Plasmid vector.”

  Orli grinned up at him and drooled. Patria laughed. “How you do talk. All right. What’s going on now?”

  “You read about the death ship?”

  “Of course. The paper’s having a wonderful time with it. A skull chalked on a wall and all that. Any ideas yet?”

  Chazz shook his head. “Six dead. A seventh not quite dead, but near enough. They died of anoxia, otherwise known as a pathological deficiency of oxygen.”

  “You told me that last night. My theory is it was bad shrimp. But how could they have declared them all dead only to have one of them come back to life.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I’m a molecular biologist. How’s Plato?”

  “Go check. I forgot all about him.”

  Chazz carried Orli out the sliding door to the lanai at the rear of the house. The house backed up against a densely wooded hillside. Under a broad ohia tree was a saltwater aquarium. Chazz had rigged a filtration system, and tiny bubbles floated around like lost stars in the water. The sandy bottom appeared empty at first, but when Chazz squatted down beside the tank, a bulbous shape nosed around the large rock against the right side of the tank. The rubbery shape withdrew and reappeared shyly, following the tip of a tentacle, which slithered over the sand and tapped soundlessly at the inside of the glass.

  “He still likes you.” Patria said behind him. Chazz held the child up to the glass. Orli drooled at the octopus but said nothing special.

  “I’ll have to let him go soon. I don’t think this tank has adequate filtration to keep him long. It’s damned hard to keep a salt-water tank going, anyway, and we don’t have time…”

  “You don’t have time.”

  Chazz nodded his assent and stood up. He gave Orli a little toss into the air. She did indicate her approval by gurgling, an activity that caused her to drool directly on her father’s forehead.

  Later, when she was asleep, Patria asked him if there was any danger from the Ocean Mother.

  “I doubt it. No one has had any trouble. The Coast Guard was all over it, without protection, and nobody reported any ill effects. Kimiko is fine.”

  “I talked to her this morning. She’s still shaking, but she wouldn’t let Dr. Standish know that. He’d keep her in the hospital forever, and she can only stand reading Hegel for a day or two.”

  “Come on, it would do her good to read more Hegel. Have we got anything for lunch? I’ve got to get back to the lab in a while, and I’m starving.”

  “Peanut butter. Maybe some jam. What’s the rush? We had to race back from the Big Island for this emergency, which seems to be no longer an emergency, so why keep running?”

  “Dr. Shih is sending over some samples for me to look at. And Sammy Akeakamai thinks the whole affair smacks of ’ana’ana. Black arts again, evil magicians praying folks to death.”

  She rolled her eyes, a gesture Chazz loved, since her slender neck swiveled with them, stirring her short, dark helmet of hair.

  He made himself a sandwich and had just settled onto the floor in seiza, the Japanese style of sitting on his heels, when a car pulled up on the gravel drive. He floated to his feet and went to the door just as the bell rang, waking Orli from her brief nap.

  “Damn,” he muttered, opening the door. In the background Patria had picked up the child and was soothing her when Cobb Takamura entered. He saw the mother and child and stopped.

  “Sorry. My untimely arrival awakened her?”

  “Sometimes you start to sound like Charlie Chan even when you aren’t quoting,” Patria said. “She was about to wake up anyway.”

  “Ah. I just stopped by to give you this.” He handed Chazz a wooden slide box.

  “Dr. Shih?”

  “The Medical Examiner as usual seeks your expert opinion. A dust or powder I think she said. Sergeant Handel thinks it is alien pollen, death dust from the stars.”

  “Want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” Chazz asked. “I’m going to have another.”

  Takamura removed his awful porkpie hat and tossed it expertly onto the hall table, spinning it like a Frisbee. “That would be nice. I can tell you about our latest case over peanut butter.”

  They all settled on the lanai. Chazz finished his second sandwich, wiped his hands on his pants and took Orli again so Patria could eat. “Your latest case,” he urged.

  “Best I should wait until the anthropologist in the family is finished eating. It is not so pleasant.”

  They discussed the condition of the surf on the north side, as reported by the county government’s champion surfer that morning. Waves were running to twelve feet outside Hanalei Bay, making for nearly ideal conditions for those hearty enough to spend a number of minutes under water if they fell. They discussed the latest decline in sugar prices and the effect that was having on island economy and, by consequence, the current elevated levels of petty crime. They discussed the ineptitude of the Coast Guard investigation of the Ocean Mother. “I almost hope it does turn out to be a crime so I can take the investigation away from Shafton,” Cobb said with uncharacteristic directness.

  The sun declined, throwing part of the back garden into shade. Patria took the dishes inside and returned. Orli threw her arms in the air and waved them around, squirming. “She’s going to need a jaunt somewhere today,” Patria declared, putting the child on a blanket. Then both she and Chazz looked expectantly at Lieutenant Takamura, who cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “It’s not my case. Taxeira is taking it on himself, since the victim is a tourist. But the case has some strange elements. A woman, wife of a radiologist from Santa Barbara, is found in a room at the hotel, in bed. She is very naked. The maid came into the suite to clean up. She vacuumed. She dusted. She straightened up and opened the curtains. She went into the bedroom to clean. There was a woman in the bed. At first the maid thought she was asleep. Then she got scared, since she had been making a great deal of noise and the woman did not wake up. Then she shook the woman. Then she screamed.”

  “Dead?” Patria asked.

  Cobb nodded “Strangled. A very competent job, according to the captain. Professional, no marks on the throat. Preliminary investigation revealed no indication of sexual activity.”

  “And…?” Chazz urged after a brief silence.

  “And the room is very, very clean.”

  “Sure. The maid cleaned up.”

  “Cleaner than that. No fingerprints anywhere. No sign of use. No luggage. No hair in the sink, no scraps of paper in the wastebaskets. The woman, too. She had been cleaned. After she died.”

  “Who rented the room?”

  Cobb nodded at Patria’s question. “The murderer, most likely. A phantom. Vanished. As if never existed. A Frenchman who called himself Henri Christophe, a clerk in the French consulate in San Francisco. But there is no such person. Immigration has no record in the computers. He checked in the day before yesterday. Paid for two nights in advance with cash from a large folded packet of American money, twenties, used. He tipped generously. Gave a Visa card for identification and guarantee. Also his international driver’s license number. Since he had not charged anything on the card, the clerk did not run the computer check. There is no such card and no such license. He was a nice-looking man with a heavy accent. Nothing else to distinguish him. Brown hair, medium length. Didn’t remember eye color, but they were probably brown. Average height, average weight, average looks. Good clothes but not outstanding. Quiet and polite. Unmemorable.”

  “A real murder, and it isn’t your case?” Patria asked. “If Taxeira is handling it, it will probably remain a mystery.”

  “You are kind to suggest I could do better. But as the great detective Charlie Chan has said, ‘Successful detective is plenty often man on whom luck turns smiling face.’ The captain will need plenty of luck on this one. She had no clothes.”

&
nbsp; “The murderer cleaned up, packed her clothes with his, and left. What kind of luggage did he come in with?” Patria asked.

  “You would make a good detective, Mrs. Koenig. The check-in clerk thought he had a shoulder bag. That was all. Didn’t require a bellhop. He could walk out of the hotel carrying it and no one would notice.”

  “Maybe you should be grateful it’s not your case,” Chazz suggested.

  “Mmm.”

  After Cobb left Chazz suggested Patria bring Orli down to the lab with him while he examined Dr. Shih’s samples. “She’d enjoy a visit to the gardens.”

  Patria would have none of it, though. She walked tightly to the bedroom door. “You take her, you think it would be so damn nice.” She opened the door.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She turned. “God damn it, Chazz. I have work to do. I can’t spend all my time baby-sitting.”

  “Patria,” Chazz began patiently. “You wanted…”

  She flared up then. “I did not goddam want! You wanted. You wanted children. I wanted my career. I had a career!”

  “You still…”

  “Oh, shut up! You don’t understand anything.”

  He felt his own anger rising and started to turn away. Aikido was not helping him deal with this kind of conflict. It seemed as if it never did. But he stopped before taking the first step. “We came here, got back together, to get away from the stress of the mainland, competing careers, all that,” he said softly.

  Her face tightened. “I miss the stress,” she said with frightening intensity. “I miss the competition, the excitement. I was publishing important research.”

  “You still publish.”

  “One lousy archeology piece on the Kapuna site for a popular magazine!”

  “You got paid. A lot of money.”

  “Oh, Chazz,” she wailed.

  He went over to her and took her in his arms just as Orli woke up and started crying. They both turned and started toward her. She rolled her head in their direction, her eyes screwed shut. Then the eyes opened wide, and she smiled widely with a hiccup.

  Patria and Chazz both started laughing. Patria scooped the infant up and said, “Okay, okay. Let’s go to the goddamn gardens and show her all the pretty poisonous plants.”

  Chazz took that in silence. The crisis was over, but he knew there would be others.

  The day had darkened as a squall moved in before the trades. A deep shadow fell on the flanks of the mountains, veils of dark gray shrouded the peaks, and the warm drops began to fall as his ancient white van lurched and rattled down the dirt road to the highway. Orli looked around alertly, seeming to take in everything passing by with such wise intelligence that their mood lightened despite the gloom of the afternoon.

  By the time they reached the highway, the rain was falling heavily and Chazz had to slow down. He could barely see up the road to the east through the oncoming sheets of rain, and when he did finally make the turn west, a car emerged out of the downpour and slid at him with a squeal of brakes just as Chazz was accelerating. When the moment was over without damage, the other driver leaned on his horn.

  “He was going too fast,” Chazz muttered, but he drove carefully the rest of the way.

  When he reached the entrance to the DRC, the rain had slackened and a blue line was visible to the east. The wind still played around the van, which rocked gently as he descended down the driveway after the guard waved him through.

  Patria looked at the shafts of sun slashed across the wooded slopes and open patches. “Maybe it will turn out all right after all,” she said, looking at her husband with a smile.

  “I hope so. I do have to take a look at these samples.”

  “I know.”

  He parked and she picked up Orli out of her car seat. “Come on, Kiddo. Let’s go for a walk. Maybe I’ll find out something about family patterns.” She pulled the stroller from the back and fastened Orli in the seat.

  “Come by in an hour or so,” Chazz called after her.

  She waved cheerily and pushed the baby away. The small wheels rattled on the gravel drive, and Chazz could just hear the child gurgle with delight at the jostling.

  Under the microscope, it was a powder. Grayish. He prepared a sample for the scanning electron microscope and determined it was a complex mixture of organic and inorganic dusts. It was rather pretty but otherwise uninformative.

  In the corridor he ran into Sy, the graduate assistant he had for the semester from UCLA. “Got the samples all stored away, Dr. K.,” Sy told him. “I ran an assay on some of the plants like you asked. The electrophoresis plates are on your desk.”

  “I got them, thanks Sy. They looked very clean. Good job.”

  Sy glowed. “How’s Plato?”

  Chazz shook his head. “I’ll have to find him a real home soon. Listen, Sy, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Sure, anything.”

  “These samples. There’s a lot of organic debris of one kind or another. I wonder if you could check it out for me, see what’s in here.”

  Sy raised his eyebrows. The quizzical expression that resulted was comical under his bushy shock of tightly kinked hair. His glasses magnified his eyes, too. He was a tall, skinny redhead with a very keen mind and a talent for lab work, though, and Chazz trusted him.

  “Sure thing. This about the Death Ship?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The box has Wilcox Hospital printed on it. I assumed it might be from the M.E. You working on a case after all?”

  “Just helping out. Want to take care of that now?”

  Sy started. “Oh. Yeah, yeah, sure. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?”

  Chazz shook his head. “I have an idea or two, but I’d rather not say.”

  “Okay. I’ll call if I find anything.” Sy headed down the corridor, carrying the box as if it contained the last fertile egg of an endangered species.

  The phone was ringing when Chazz got back to his office.

  “Hello,” Cobb said. “I thought you might be interested to learn that Taxeira has asked me to lend a brief hand to his investigation. Dr. Richards, the radiologist from Santa Barbara, says his wife left a note saying she took the DRC tour yesterday. She never came back. He was at a panel discussion on bone scans at the time. I’m on my way over to see if we can find the murderer.”

  “He’s here?”

  There was a pause. “We found the mysterious Frenchman’s luggage. There are suggestions he may have been killed as well. Perhaps they met someone at the Center. Someone who works there.”

  EIGHT

  INVESTIGATION

  “Calcified material. Aromatics. Various complex organic compounds. And I do mean various. Dozens of different chemical substances. You’d have to send it to the mainland to get a precise list. We have the facilities, I suppose, but we don’t have the staff. Anyway, it’s a mess of pottage. Where did this stuff come from?” Sy was waving a computer printout in the air.

  “Pottage is a meat stew. Are you suggesting…?”

  “No, no, it was a figure of speech, for Christ’s sakes. But look at all this stuff…”

  “What kind of calcified material?” Chazz interrupted. He turned back from his office window and looked over at Cobb Takamura with raised eyebrows. Sy was an enthusiast, hard to reign in sometimes.

  Sy shrugged this time, though “I’d say bone.”

  There was a silence. Chazz looked out the window again. There were no murderers out there, surely. The lantana was blooming its small designer colors. The sky he could see from his office was dark: Rain was coming back. Patria and Orli would get caught in it if they didn’t get inside soon.

  “What kind of bone?” Takamura asked. His voice was dreamy, as if the answer were not important.

  Sy nodded energetically. “Yes, yes. What kind of bone. Exactly!”

  “Well?”

  He shrugged. “Probably human.”

  Cobb nodded as if he expected that answer.
r />   “So.” Sy said expectantly. “Where?”

  “Where did the powder come from?” Cobb said. “Feet.”

  Chazz and Sy must have both looked comically mystified, because Cobb gave a short bark that passed as a laugh and grinned. “Feet,” he repeated, as if speaking to children. “Bare feet.”

  “Feet?” Chazz said.

  “Yes. The victims’ feet. Not all the victims, understand. Just the ones with bare feet.”

  “What victims are we speaking of here? I thought the so-called Death Ship was listed as an accident at sea or something. Isn’t that what the Coast Guard…”

  Cobb snorted loudly in uncharacteristic derision. “Shafton! That man… well. They’ve tramped all over the ship, moved everything around, put their fingerprints all over the walls and furniture, and generally mucked up the entire ship. Found chalk dust on several of the walls, including the drawing of a skull. Could have been there for years, some bored sailor on a long cruise maybe. Now, as detective Chan of Honolulu police would say, ‘Our evidence is hazy, like flowers seen in pool.’”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they were killed. The powder proves it.”

  “It does?” Sy caught his breath and leaned forward. Too many Sherlock Holmes stories in his youth, Chazz decided.

  “Sure,” Cobb said.

  “How?”

  Cobb thought for a moment. “Not sure,” he said shortly.

  Sy was confused. “I don’t get it. Are you pulling my leg?”

  “An interesting pastime, but not one I engage in at the moment. Someone put this strange powder on the decks. Powder containing human bone. People in bare feet would step in it. Bingo, foul play.”

  “Was there powder on the decks?” Chazz asked. The rain began to fall outside, large, fat warm drops rapidly gathering momentum.

  “No,” Cobb admitted “And a good thing, too. Kimiko walked all over that ship in bare feet.”

  “Then why… Oh. I get it.”

  Sy didn’t get it.

  “It rained day before yesterday, quite a squall. No doubt it washed the decks nicely.”

  “Yes,” Takamura agreed. “Shortly after someone left the ship.”