Trouble in Tahiti

by Hayford Peirce

  I’d always heard that French cops were tough and brutal, working as they did with few of the restrictions that hemmed us in. Maybe they are, but in Hitler’s case they didn’t bother to exert to exert themselves. Tama, I think, behind his usual mask of absolute self-confidence was growing desperate, but he ran it by the book, with all the standard cop routines: good cop, bad cop; twelve cops yelling at once; long, stony silences; hushed whispering among the cops about how many years he’d get and whether the death penalty still applied; bright lights; dire menaces; cheery promises; and a dozen other hoary old chestnuts.

  It was to laugh.

  Unfortunately it didn’t produce much, and certainly not Danielle Payton. Hitler was in tears when I sat in, and remained that way for most of the next twelve hours. He was clearly terrified. He was large brawny Tahitian of twenty-six with the same gentle bovine eyes of Hiro, my old sparring mate of The Book of Dreams. He had no fixed job or income or abode. The 750cc motorcycle he’d bought on credit from a gullible dealer whose prospects for seeing the rest of his money had always been non-existent. His eyes rolled desperately and he cowered pitiably on his wooden stool. Occasionally a gendarme would slap his face, more in exasperation with Hitler’s sniveling than from innate brutality.

  From time to time he babbled incoherently or told preposterous lies, but always he came back to the same story. Monday night he’d been in a downtown watering hole aptly named Le Saloon, wondering where the next cigarette and beer were going to come from. Around nine o’clock a French soldier pushed his way into the bar. This raised Hitler’s eyebrows, since Le Saloon was well-known as a gathering place for the rowdier elements of Tahitian youth and was informally considered off-limits to French military personnel. Even more striking, this particular foolhardy soldier compounded the offense by being still clad in his khaki uniform.

  The Tahiti regulars at the bar were initially too astonished to do more than gape. Before their baser instincts could reassert themselves the soldier began to buy whisky and cigarettes for the house. An hour later they were one large happy group, ready to defend to their last drop of whiskey the right of their new-found French friend to buy them drinks.

  At some point in the evening the soldier cut Hitler out from the herd and asked him if he would like to earn 5,000 francs. Since it involved no labor whatsoever, Hitler was more than willing. The soldier, it appeared, had left his car the night before in the parking lot of the Maeva-Beach, and in its trunk his overnight bag. He now needed the bag. The problem was, he had to wait here in town for a friend to join him. The only solution he could see was for his friend Hitler to go on his beautiful red Kawasaki and get the bag for him.

  So Hitler, as a good friend would, had gone to get the bag. Only his friend the soldier was no longer at Le Saloon when he returned.

  “You didn’t go back to Le Saloon,” said a gendarme wearily. “You went straight home.”

  “Oh. Well, I remembered that I was sleepy, and anyway, he said he didn’t need the bag right away.”

  “You saw all that money and decided to steal it then?”

  “Oh. Oh no! I was just borrowing a little. He said I could borrow some.”

  A policeman slapped him impatiently. “Stop lying, Hitler, and tell us where you’ve got the woman hidden. They still guillotine kidnappers, you know.”

  Hitler burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 22

  The only things we’d learned twelve hours later was that the soldier was medium-sized, slightly plump, had a thick moustache, and curly black hair. Separate confrontations of Hitler with the three paratroopers had produced nothing except dirty looks in my direction. The paras were led back to their cells.

  “What bothers me,” said Tama to Tamara and Charles Wentworth Payton that evening, “is that this soldier evidently took no steps at all to disguise himself. I’m afraid that it probably means he was simply another cut-out like this wretched Hitler, hired by the actual kidnappers on the basis of some story or other.”

  Payton scowled. It was Tuesday evening, almost twenty-four hours after I’d watched a motorcycle drive up to a parked car in a hotel parking lot, and we were sitting in his library in Punaauia. Tama had come personally to deliver the bad news.

  “In brief,” said Payton harshly, “you’re no closer now to finding my wife than you were two days ago. And her life has almost certainly been endangered. I see now why people with any intelligence don’t go near the police when there’s a kidnapping.”

  Tama flushed angrily. “We still have Hitler, we have these three paratroopers, and we have the military authorities helping us in our hunt for the soldier in the bar. With their ties to the military, it’s no great surprise that the gangsters and their accomplices turned to the army when they needed a cut-out. Now it’s just a matter of hours before we find him. Once we have this missing link the chain will be complete. And at that point one of them, probably Luria, will crack, and we will retrieve Mrs. Payton.” He pulled his enormous bulk upright with the gracefulness that always surprised me, nodded curtly, and marched out. Payton made no move to call him back.

  “Get your bags from the hotel and move in here,” he said without looking at me. “You’re running this show from now on.”

  “If it isn’t already too late,” said Tamara dismally.

  I studied Payton with exasperation while a dozen questions ran through my mind.

  Did he or didn’t he believe that his wife had been actually kidnapped?

  .…that her life was in danger?

  .…that somewhere she was directing this extortion hoax and laughing at him and the police?

  .…that the police were a liability?

  .…that Alain LaRoche was an asset?

  Payton stared back blandly. However ambivalent his own role, there was nothing to indicate he knew anything more than I did.

  Which was nothing.

  I stood up and left to get my stuff.

  * * * *

  The parking lot of the hotel was half-filled with cars, and I could hear music from the direction of the beachfront restaurant. It reminded me that I hadn’t had dinner. I looked at my watch. 9:27. Time to pack my one suitcase and still get to the dining room before it closed.

  The pathway to my bungalow led past the building that housed the lobby and I stopped in to tell the clerk to prepare my bill. Instead, I found Bob and Susan West behind the counter, their blond heads huddled together, stacks of paper and accounting ledgers scattered around them. Susan was running an adding machine, while Bob stared pensively at his hand-held calculator. He looked up and smiled wearily.

  “Know anything about accounting?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nuts. The accountant we pay money to has made some terrible mistake here somewhere and we’re trying to track it down.”

  Susan twisted her mouth in disgust and slammed a ledger shut. “Screw it!” she hissed. “What’s the news about…? Nothing good, I suppose?”

  I slumped wearily in a chair and told them about the Hitler fiasco. “The cops and the military police are shaking up the army and navy camps looking for this soldier in the bar, trying to establish some connection with your gangster pals.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I’m not so sure, though. Old army uniforms must be a dime a dozen around here.”

  Susan sat up a little straighter. “You mean.…”

  “…he might not be a soldier at all,” I said. “Tell me. In your…circle, I guess, is there anyone who’s not too big, a little plump, dark curly hair, a black moustache? It’s not much of a description, but.…” I spread my hands helplessly.

  Bob tugged at the end of his nose. Susan stared down at the keyboard of her adding machine. “Not that I can think of,” said Bob slowly. “He sounds like an Italian barber, but it’s so vague it could cover half the Frenchmen in southern France or North Africa. And there are a lot of them here.”

  I nodded and told them I was checking out. “I’ll walk on down with you,” said Bob. “I’ve got to ch
eck a leaky faucet in the bungalow next to yours.”

  “The pleasures of owning a hotel,” I said with a tired leer in Susan’s direction. She smiled back without any great conviction.

  There were only a few dim lights every five yards or so along the cement walkways that twisted in and out of the vegetation that choked the hotel gardens, and I’d occasionally wondered how everybody got himself back to the right bungalow on moonless nights. But maybe in romantic Tahiti they sometimes preferred finding the wrong bungalow. Bob and I made our way through the darkness shoulder to shoulder until we reached the path that led to my bungalow.

  “I’ll meet you in the restaurant and we’ll have a farewell drink,” said Bob with a hearty clap to the shoulder that over-balanced me when my shoe caught the edge of the cement joint where the pathways came together.

  It also saved my life.

  Flailing my arms wildly I began to topple like a California redwood into the bushes behind me. I’d got a curse as far as my lips when I felt the rush of the first bullet whining past my nose. An instant later I heard the shot, and then another, and yet another.

  By the fourth shot I was on my back deep in the middle of scratchy bushes and trying desperately to fight my way out to the other side. A moment later I was out of the shrubbery and on my feet and around the side of the bungalow. I peered back cautiously. The firing seemed to have stopped. The only thing I could see in the general darkness was Bob West in a circle of muted lighting. He was on his hands and knees in the grass on the other side of the path, his head swinging back and forth as if it were a pendulum.

  Feeling horribly exposed, I ran across to the circle of dim yellow light and half-lifted, half-dragged him to his feet and back into the darkness. At least I couldn’t see any blood on him.

  If he’d been in a state of shock, he suddenly came out of it, shaking himself all over like a wet dog and staring at me wild-eyed. “Those were bullets!” he muttered unbelievingly. “Those were bullets!”

  “I know,” I said softly, although something about seeing him like this made me feel a little superior. I poked my knuckles into his shoulder. “You saved my life, pal, when you knocked me over. Thanks.”

  “They…they were shooting at…you?”

  “Why would anyone shoot at you?” I said over my shoulder as I began to trot cautiously across a clearing in the garden. I’d seen flashes of light in that direction at the time of the fusillade and dimly heard what might have been the noises of somebody plowing his way through the bushes and plants. I hadn’t gotten very far when a beam of light shot out of the bushes to my right, found my feet, and worked its way up. I was pinned like a butterfly.

  “Jesus,” I whispered to myself. “Gunned down in Tahiti.…”

  I gulped deeply and was about to make a last desperate attempt to outjump a bullet when I heard a feminine voice say in tones of astonishment, “Rocky? Is that you?”

  Nothing ever sounded sweeter. I let out whatever air was left in my lungs and told the man down in the engine room to turn my heart back on.

  “Susan? Susan?”

  She ran up to me, the flashlight in one hand, and grabbed my shoulder. “Are you all right? Where’s Bob? I heard shots. Or I thought I did. My God, Rocky, where’s Bob?”

  “Right behind you,” I said, just as Bob came panting up. She turned, startled, and I watched relief smooth out the tension in her face. “You heard shots,” I went on. “Did you see anything?”

  “I don’t know,” she said with a ragged edge to her voice. “I heard all these shots and naturally I looked up and there was some movement outside the windows of the lobby, in those banana trees, like someone was going through them. But they’re not really lit up, you know, there’s just those little red and green spotlights at nighttime. I got the flashlight and shined it in there, but couldn’t see anything, so then I came looking for Bob. And you, of course,” she added politely.

  “These banana trees,” I said. “They’re down that way, huh?” I pointed into the darkness and Susan nodded. “Once you’re through them you’d go past the back of the kitchen and come out on the beach, right?”

  “Right,” said Bob weakly. He began to shake, and Susan threw her arms around him. “Jesus, we could have been killed!”

  But I already knew that.

  What I wanted to know now was why anyone would bother.

  The three of us stared at one another in dismayed speculation.

  None of us seemed to have the answer.

  CHAPTER 23

  Mareta was soaking up the sunshine on the hospital balcony when I stopped by to see her early the following morning. The cast had been removed from her leg the day before and she had just finished a strenuous session of physical therapy. What I could see of her leg was white and wrinkled. An aluminum crutch lay across her lap. She used it to pull herself to her feet. “Watch,” she said gaily. “I’m almost ready for that dancing you keep talking about.” She limped slowly and, I judged, painfully, a few yards down the balcony and back. When she collapsed into the chair her face was pale and strained.

  “Great,” I said. “When are they going to let you out?”

  “They say a week or ten days.”

  “Why so long? Why not today?”

  “What have I got to go to?” she said wistfully. “And I can’t go back to work like this. They’ve got plenty of room, and the government picks up the bill, so they’re in no hurry to get rid of me.”

  “All that for a sprained ligament,” I teased.

  “A very badly sprained ligament,” she said through pouty lips that immediately broke into a wide grin. I reached over to squeeze her forearm It felt warm and healthy from being in the sun.

  I hesitated, then told her about the activities of the past few days. She gasped at the account of the previous night’s shooting and her face suddenly hardened. “A couple of ideas occurred to me,” I said, a little disconcerted by the intensity of her expression. “I just spent half an hour over at the post office calling a friend of mine in San Francisco, asking him to check them out. But there’s something I’ve got to know more about, even though I don’t know whether it ties in or not. Tell me about Patrick, and your accident. Everything you can.”

  Her eyes veiled over. “Must I ?”

  I nodded somberly.

  An hour and a half later I knew more about Patrick than I wanted to. I knew about Patrick’s relations with Mareta, with Danielle Payton, with Bob and Susan West, with Chatoune and Yves and Marie-France and Hinano and all the rest of the swinging band. And none of it, as far as I could see, was of any use.

  I left Mareta sitting drained and pensive on the balcony and drove on into town. Tama, I knew, was at the Hotel Taaone, interviewing the Wests and trying to dig spent bullets out of hibiscus bushes and taro leaves.

  I parked behind the cathedral and walked up to the offices of Jackie Laurent, swinging doctor. There were two Tahitian women and a Frenchman in the waiting room, but Tahiti medicine seemed to run its course a little quicker than it did in the States, and within twenty minutes I was sitting in front of his desk. He pumped my hand and smiled at me expectantly.

  I spent ten minutes giving him enough information about the events of the past week to keep him happy and to justify my nosing about, then said, “If this was a detective story all the loose ends would come together nice and neat and there’d be one elegant solution explaining everything.” I shook my head ironically. “I never saw it happen like that while I was a cop on the force, but now that I’m kind of a private eye, who knows? I can always hope.”

  He nodded, as if what I was saying made sense.

  “I don’t like coincidences,” I went on. “Practically the first day I’m here I run into Patrick Atatia, or his body. He’s part of a swinging circle. Then I meet the Wests. They’re part of that same group. First they get me involved with their problems, then with a kidnapping. The woman who’s been kidnapped is another member of that same group.” I held up my hands as if to say,
How much, oh Lord, how much?

  “It’s a small island,” said Jackie, unimpressed.

  “That’s so. But even so.… I think it might all tie together. There are questions that nobody seems to be asking about the death of Patrick Atatia. Like: Why did he kill himself? Why did he try to kill Mareta? Is there any way he could have been mixed up in this kidnapping, and if so, is that what caused his death?”

  Jackie Laurent frowned. “How do you mean? He was dead before Danielle disappeared, wasn’t he?”

  “Patrick sounds like just the sort of yoyo with a screw loose who could easily wake up one morning and find himself involved with a kidnapping,” I said. “He could have been mixed up with the actual kidnapping itself, in the planning stages, let’s say. He then might have had an attack of remorse, or he feared he was going to be exposed, so he killed himself. Or he might have been completely innocent, and learned something he shouldn’t have, and got himself killed by the kidnappers.”

  “What!” Jackie’s mouth fell open. “But, but.…”

  “Yeah, I know. Mareta says he drove them over the cliff. But in my kind of job I’ve seen a lot of people who’ve suffered accidents or assaults: they’re in shock, their memories are dim and confused, reality mingles with dreams. You’ve seen them too. I know Mareta pretty well now, and I still haven’t been able to discover any other reason for Patrick wanting to drive them over that cliff. It doesn’t make sense. And when something doesn’t make sense, you begin to look for another explanation.”

  I sat back expectantly. What I was waiting for, I suppose, was a thoughtful silence while the good doctor respectfully mulled over the considered opinion of the big-time police officer. What I got instead was a sharp giggle that became a full-bellied horselaugh. I looked at him first with astonishment, then with growing indignation. What I’d just propounded wasn’t as ridiculous as all that.…

  “But my dear Monsieur LaRoche,” he said with an infuriatingly superior smile, “of course there’s a reason for the unfortunate Patrick Atatia trying to do away with himself and the charming Mareta.”