Trouble in Tahiti

by Hayford Peirce

  “With sort of a sexy face?” said Susan. She looked at me.

  “Could be,” I admitted. “Her face wasn’t in very good shape when I saw it.”

  Hinano shuddered. “That’s awful. It sounds to me like it could be Patrick and Mareta Atatia.”

  “It does,” agreed Bob. “Wasn’t she from the Marquesas?”

  “Oh dear,” said Susan. “She’s probably all alone there, with no one to look after her. You know what that hospital’s like. I’m going to go find out if it’s really her.” She stood up decisively and I followed suit. “Bob?”

  He climbed to his feet reluctantly. “Yeah, maybe we should. Sorry to leave you, Rocky, but visiting hours are at noon.” He patted his belly. “I can afford to skip lunch once in a while. Can you take care of Hinano for us?”

  I raised my brows at her. “Do you need taking care of?”

  She giggled. “Lots.” She stood up, and I felt a pang of disappointment. But it was only to kiss Bob and Susan on both cheeks. “If it is Mareta, say hello to her for me,” she said. “I’ll be by sometime to see her. Tell me how she looks. I just couldn’t stand seeing her all bloody and sewn up, with pieces of thread and tubes sticking out of her. Ugh!” She gulped her lemonade.

  “Nice meeting you,” I said to Susan as she gathered up her things. “You remind me of someone too, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “I…do?” Her eyes seemed startled.

  “But it can’t be anyone I’ve met,” I said gallantly. “I’d remember anyone as beautiful as you.”

  Her eyes disappeared behind polarized sunglasses. “Just as long as it’s not one of your awful criminals,” she said seriously.

  Bob smiled indulgently and patted her arm fondly. “Let’s go, dear. Bye, guys.”

  Hinano and I were still standing after the Wests had left.

  “I think you like finding naked girls on the road,” she said.

  “Not nearly as much as I like finding half-naked girls on the terrace.” We looked over each other’s body appraisingly. “How about a swim? There’s not much else we’re dressed for. You can give me my first lessons in the dangers of the lagoon.”

  She smiled in the direction of the bare-breasted girls sprawled on the terrace and black sands. “The biggest danger is the man-eaters. I’ll try to keep them away from you.”

  I took her by the elbow. Her bare flesh glowed with heat. “Maybe after lunch we can find a beach with less of a crowd on it and get to know each other a little better,” I suggested.

  She considered this. “It is Saturday, and I guess I could teach you to body-surf,” she conceded. “So why not?”

  After lunch we drove halfway around the island to a secluded beach that was hidden from the road by fifty yards of thick growth. There was no protective barrier reef beyond, and the long Pacific waves rolled in languidly to crash against the grainy black sand. Further down the beach a couple of sun-blackened Tahitian boys rode the surf in on homemade boards.

  We spread out brightly colored pareo cloths, and Hinano slipped matter-of-factly out of her bikini top. The firm, sharply pointed breasts were the same lovely ivory as the rest of her body. She handed me the bottle of perfumed coconut oil and stretched out on her belly. “Oil me,” she ordered. “All over. Then I’ll do you.”

  I took a long time rubbing the clear oil deep into the warmth of her back and buttocks. When I reached the soft yielding flesh of her upper thighs she wriggled sensuously and made no move to avoid my hands. I massaged her shoulders until she murmured lazily, “If I were a little pussy cat now, I’d be purring like crazy.” She rolled over.

  I poured more oil into my hands and placed them firmly on her breasts. As I worked the oil in, I could feel her nipples stiffen against my palms. She bit her lip and moaned softly. My hands moved down to her taut belly. She sat up with a smile and took the bottle from me. “I better finish it myself, before I faint and leave you with another body on your hands. We came here to go body-surfing, remember? Maybe after dinner and dancing I’ll let you finish what you started.”

  “It’s never too late,” I agreed.

  “I’ve never gone dancing with a policeman before. I can see now that you really are one.”

  “How’s that?” I asked, puzzled.

  She grinned slyly at the tautness of my trunks. “You brought your nightstick with you.” She reached over to pat it lightly. “Don’t misplace it so you can’t find it again.” She laughed happily and ran down to plunge fearlessly into the surf.

  CHAPTER 4

  We had a leisurely breakfast late the following morning and exchanged greetings with Bob West, informal in his Sunday morning attire of bathing suit, T-shirt, and sandals. “We live in a place up in the hills,” he explained. “On Sundays I just drop by to make sure everyone’s come to work. If we lived at the hotel, the staff would be bothering us every time they had to change a bar of soap. That’s the trouble with this country: no one ever wants to make a decision on his own.”

  Hinano diverted him from his litany of woes by extracting a vague account of his visit to Mareta in the hospital. As expected, it was indeed Mareta Atatia that I’d picked up on the road. She was in a semi-private room and fairly presentable. With a cheery “Take care, gang,” he strolled off and left us to our second pot of coffee.

  “Maybe we could go visit her,” suggested Hinano.

  “You can’t think of anything better to do than that?”

  “What? Again? You’re an old man, Alain. You have to think of your heart.”

  “I am,” I said truthfully. “I hate getting involved with victims. I’ve seen too many of them, and they take too much out of you.”

  “You’re not a cop anymore,” she said cuttingly. “You’re supposed to be a human being. When are you going to start thinking and feeling like one?”

  I hadn’t expected this from a girl I’d picked up in Tahiti. I examined the contents of my coffee cup, abashed. “Are there any flower shops open on Sunday?” I said at last. “No? Well, go pick some in the grounds around here and let me finish my coffee. Then we’ll start on Project Redemption: Alain LaRoche.”

  * * * *

  Sunday visiting hours at the Hôpital de Mamao seemed to be as relaxed as the general administration. Children ran up and down the corridors hooting and screaming, radios and cassettes blared, guitars plinked, visitors snoozed on the floor beside their invalid relatives, bottles of beer and red wine were passed around, and in the indigent wards there were even a couple of meals being cooked on primus stoves. Over everything rang the high-pitched Tahitian voice raised in laughter and song. It was the jolliest hospital I’d ever been in, with the specters of pain, anguish, and death seemingly banished. I found my spirits lifting.

  They were immediately dashed.

  Bob West had said Mareta was presentable. I wondered what he would have meant by saying someone was in bad shape—probably that the vultures were already nibbling at his liver.

  We found her in a large sunny room she shared with a Tahitian lady who spent most of her time in a wheelchair out on the balcony that ran the length of the building and that permitted exciting wheelchair races among the patients. So for all practical purposes she had a room to herself.

  She looked as if she could have used a private ward in a somewhat less lively environment than the Hôpital de Mamao, the Mayo Clinic perhaps, one where a little less emphasis was placed on glorifying the human face of medicine and little more on its scientific aspects. But who could say? Perhaps the doctors at Mamao were actually highly skilled, supremely conscientious practitioners who disdained to let themselves be sidetracked by flashy but non-essential gimcrackery such as soap and water. At least her ribs seemed to be held tightly together in a mass of tape that circled her body, there was a plaster cast on her leg, and bandages around her shoulders.

  There was also dried blood on the pillows and sheets, on her face and arms, and thick clots of it in her hair. Her long black tresses were a tangled rat’s nest o
f blood, leaves, twigs, and whatever else had been on the hillside two nights before. One eye was swollen shut, there was an enormous bump on her forehead, and whatever portions of her skin weren’t black with dried blood were red with mercurochrome. She looked like the Bride of Dracula after a seven-course banquet.

  Hinano gasped, and even I was a little taken aback. Recovering, Hinano pecked her unenthusiastically on both cheeks, while I limited myself to lifting her lifeless-seeming hand and giving it a faint squeeze of encouragement. She was still heavily drugged, and our conversation was halting at best. She recognized Hinano, but had difficulty fitting me into her scheme of things.

  “Why did he do it?” asked Hinano bluntly after a while. Tears welled in Mareta’s eyes and slowly rolled down her cheeks as she shook her head feebly. Hinano dabbed at the tears with a soiled towel, then at her own eyes. She balled up the towel and threw it to the floor in disgust. “We’ll be back,” she whispered to Mareta, leaning over to kiss her. “You just go to sleep for a moment, and when you wake up I’ll be right her to clean you up.” She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me from the room.

  “Oooh, that Susan!” she hissed, as she clattered down the stairs. “How can she possibly run a hotel? She saw her like that yesterday and didn’t do a thing?” She stalked angrily to my Fiat in the parking lot. “You’ll just have to take me.…”

  Her voice trailed off. Susan West straightened up from the open trunk of the car parked beside mine. We stared at each other in mutual surprise. Her arms were laden with pillows, towels, and nightgowns. There was a large carton in the trunk. While she and Hinano exchanged the customary kisses I peered inside. Kleenex, soap, rubbing alcohol, glasses, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, mineral water, hairbrush, combs, fruit, books, magazines, slippers, and a dozen other items of feminine interest. She’d had a busy morning.

  “I was just cursing you out,” said Hinano sheepishly.

  “I don’t wonder,” said Susan. “She was like that yesterday noon and the head nurse told me everything would be fixed within a couple of hours. When I came by early this morning she was just the same, so I went yelling and screaming around the hospital, but everyone says it’s not their fault. They just shrug and say, ‘What do you expect on a weekend?’ It’s disgusting.”

  Her eyes glittered with purposeful anger and her jaw was set with determination. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a mere doctor or nurse trying to get in her way. She no longer seemed slightly simple, or spaced out. I apologized to her mentally for ever thinking she was.

  “I was on my way home to get some of this stuff,” said Hinano. “Let’s see what you have.” She inventoried it and decided it was lacking only in eau de cologne and toilet paper. “I’ll bring that later. In the meantime, our gallant rescuer here of stranded damsels can wait in the parking lot while we go and start making her feel like a human being again. Here, amuse yourself. She handed me a magazine grabbed at random from the carton and stumped off grimly. Susan West flashed me a quick smile and followed hastily.

  I opened the car and rolled down the windows. The temperature was about 145 degrees. I got out. The sun beat down. The ice-cream shop across the street was closed. I picked up the magazine. It was in French, and told you how to make your own dresses.

  It wasn’t going to be easy, being remade into a human being.

  CHAPTER 5

  I had dinner that night on the terrace of the Taaone with Bob and Susan West. Hinano worked in commercial documentation in the foreign exchange department of the Banque de l’Indosuez and had returned home just as the sun was settling into the lagoon to prepare for the onset of another week’s labors. We’d driven around the island, along with most of the rest of the population, after she and Susan had finished at the hospital, and had a late Sunday lunch, which in any French restaurant worthy of its name can easily last until 4:30 or 5:00. Afterwards we’d returned to my bungalow for some slightly tipsy, drowsy love.

  I was asleep on the bed when Bob West’s voice called from outside the bungalow. Would I like to join them for dinner? Not really, being still groggy and stuffed from lunch, though I didn’t say so. But now that I was awake what else was there to do? I stood under a cold shower for a long time, then strolled through the dark to the terrace. It was lit by kerosene tiki torches, and the crystal glasses and stiffly starched linen glittered invitingly on the tables. The Wests were already seated, the only people on the terrace, although there were a handful on others in the dining room.

  They set down their glasses, and I shook hands with Bob, while Susan half-rose from her chair to proffer her face for a kiss. She was dressed tonight in an electric blue jumpsuit that was unzipped enough to let your eyes play peekaboo with her small breasts, and had stuck a bright red blossom of some kind into her pale blonde hair. She’d put on a light pink lipstick, blue and gold eye shadow, and a subtle hint of perfume. My opinion of her continued to redefine itself: she was still a mite bony and angular, I judged, but only by just a mite. She smiled warmly, and when her lips brushed my cheeks and the scent of her freshly washed hair was in my nostrils a pleasurable tingle ran through me.

  Bob had reverted to his usual fashion-plate self from this morning’s casual undress, but when he shook my hand I didn’t experience any tingle at all, pleasurable or otherwise.

  We dawdled through a long, slow dinner while they kept my glasses filled with various wines and the conversation turned to my experiences on the force. Everyone likes to talk about himself, retired policemen especially, and Bob and Susan didn’t have much difficulty extracting a highly colored account of LaRoche’s years on the force, the Terror of the Evil-Doer, including a brief description of the events that had led to my forced retirement.

  “But that’s terrible!” said Susan, her eyes wide. “It’s just what he deserved, the sneaky little bastard!”

  “It’s not as if you’d killed him!” put in Bob indignantly.

  “Well, paralyzed for life, he probably got more sympathy from the sob-sisters than if I’d just wasted him with the magnum,” I said casually. “At least if the son of a bitch was dead, he wouldn’t have been giving out interviews to the newspapers and talk shows. I won’t make that mistake again.” I hiccupped and sipped my cognac, feeling warm and pleasantly fuddled, not much caring what I was saying. If the Wests were police groupies who got a kick out of thinking of me as a big bad macho cop ready to blow away little old ladies for fifteen-minute parking violations, what difference did it make? In a couple of weeks they’d never see me again, and in the meantime, I knew, female police groupies sometimes got themselves up to pretty interesting activities.…

  “Boy, that must make it hard getting another job,” said Bob, pouring cognac and oozing sympathy.

  “Not for me, pal,” I could hear the cognac boasting. “Got me a buddy down in Dallas who owns a private security firm down there, biggest one in Texas. I’m going in on November 15th as executive vice-president at twice the salary I was making on the force. Hell, a little caper like mine, in Texas they’re giving you promotions.” It’s a wonder I didn’t let out a rebel yell.

  “I see,” said Bob thoughtfully. He exchanged glances with Susan, and I saw her nod slightly. “The thing is, Rocky, we were wondering if we could maybe hire you on the quiet for a little bit of unofficial work for the hotel.”

  “The house dick for the Hotel Taaone?” I laughed derisively. “I’m afraid that’s not quite my speed.” I suppose I could have been more obnoxious, if I’d been wearing boots and spurs, maybe, and had climbed up on the table to stomp around the dishes.

  Bob smiled faintly, but Susan reached across the table to grasp my hand firmly, and as she shifted about, her knee came to rest lightly against my thigh. The sensation was agreeable, and I made no move to end it. “Not for the hotel,” she said softly, “for us. We need your help.”

  “Well, maybe,” amended her husband cautiously. “I’m not sure what kind of help we need. You see those guys sitting in the dining room, over by the
windows there, one of them’s just lighting a cigar?”

  There was no one else in the restaurant right now except a bored Tahitian waitress, so I could make them out all right, but not much more than that. They were some distance away, and the Taaone specialized in romantic dining by candlelight. All three appeared to be in early middle age. They wore long-sleeved Tahitian shirts and dark trousers, and something indefinable about them, their clothes, their faces, or their bearing stamped them unquestionably as Frenchmen. Their faces were hard and competent, and there was an air of confidence that radiated from the table.

  “What about them?” I said in a small voice, while I told myself, through the brandy fumes that clouded my brain, to tread carefully, carefully. Warning signals prickled all over my body and I recognized dimly that the entire dinner had been a long, slow build-up to just this moment. I knew that I was going to be asked to do something a little trickier than checking the towel count.

  “They’re three Frenchmen, from France,” said Bob. “They say they’re businessmen.”

  “Gangsters is more like it,” said Susan venomously, and squeezed my hand.

  “Whatever,” said Bob, wearily. “Here’s the deal. Susan and I came down here five or six years ago and bought this hotel. My old man’s got a couple of seats on the New York Stock Exchange, and I made a little money on my own when I used to work for him. Susan’s family is, well…well-off. We’d sailed down here on our boat a couple of times and thought we’d like to retire while we were young enough to enjoy it. But we wanted something to occupy us, and when this place came up for sale we bought it. It was a bankruptcy sale, so we got it cheap, and since then we’ve turned it into a real money-maker. Right now my father is getting together a syndicate to put up ten million, and we’re going to build a hundred-room addition.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, envious. “How do these Frenchmen fit in?”