Trouble in Tahiti

by Hayford Peirce

  “There is?” I said hollowly.

  “Certainly. A rather trivial one, to my mind, but.…” He shrugged elaborately. “Different people, you know.…”

  “If you could possibly tell me,” I said with a dignified composure worthy of Colonel Schneider: I hate being laughed at.

  “Of course, of course.” Dr. Laurent leaned forward confidentially. “I can’t tell you why your investigation seems to be leading you to all the leading swingers of Tahiti—you’re just lucky perhaps.…” He broke off to chuckle at his own wit. He really was an intolerable person.

  “Well?” I said brusquely.

  “Somewhere, not long ago, I haven’t been able to track down where, Patrick picked up a rather virulent strain of sexual herpes. As you may know, a number of these herpes varieties are presently incurable. You’re stuck with them for life. Evidently Patrick contacted it somewhere…outside our little circle. Naturally, he was…ostracized once we became aware of it. That sort of thing does put rather a pall over a friendly gathering, don’t you think, Monsieur LaRoche?”

  “Merde,” I muttered. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “How could you? And naturally it’s the sort of thing a well-brought-up young lady like Mareta Atatia would be…reluctant to—”

  “Has she got it?” I said brutally.

  Jackie shook his head. “Actually it’s not all that easy to transmit. And I believe that their relations…were really quite limited.”

  I nodded.

  “As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” he went on, “Mareta does have rather a sharp tongue. No? Ah, of course. You see her demure and sedated, lying in the hospital in her bed of pain. Believe me, Monsieur LaRoche, you’re seeing only half the woman. The other half is sharp, tough, abrasive, and with a hair-trigger temper. Once Patrick was incautious enough to permit her to know about his…little ailment, she made life a living hell for that poor fellow.” He smiled maliciously at the reminiscence. “So not only was he blackballed from his little group of friends, he now no longer dared to set foot inside his own door for fear of being bludgeoned to death by her tongue. And then, of course, Mareta told him she was divorcing him.… That, I suppose, was the last straw. A few days later he drove them off the cliff.…”

  “Hrmph,” I said ungraciously. I got to my feet and stalked to the door.

  Jackie’s voice behind me was cheerful. “I adore being helpful.”

  * * * *

  The day dragged on. I had a lunch of sorts and drove over to the Commissariat. Tama was out, so I went on to Punaauia. The only one at home was Bobby Lee Tanner, Payton’s campaign manager. He was on the lawn, fending off questions from a dozen bored media people. I sneaked by them and lay on my bed in the guesthouse and tried to nap but sleep wouldn’t come. So you were wrong, I said to myself. It’s nothing criminal. Anybody can be wrong. Even LaRoche.

  Impossible thought.

  I got up and took a cold shower and drove back to town. I walked the streets and visited the market and sat in cafés drinking coffee until my watch told me it was 4:00. That was seven in the evening in San Francisco, and Charlie Hennigan was waiting for my call. So I strolled up the waterfront to the public telephones at the post office and had the operator put me through, collect. He could always send me the bill.

  “I’ve got a couple of surprises for you,” I told Tamara and Charles Wentworth Payton fifty minutes later. Bobby Lee Tanner sat on a corner of the living room couch, his plump fingers endlessly rolling and unrolling a copy of the National Geographic.

  “Well?” said Payton impatiently. “What is it?”

  I grinned at him mirthlessly. “I can say it in a few words. My pals Bob and Susan West are the kidnappers of your wife, Danielle.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “I called a guy named Charlie Hennigan who’s on the force in San Francisco,” I told Tama a short time later. “For a hundred bucks he ran some names through the computer and put out some telex inquiries.”

  “You didn’t use the Paytons’ phone,” he said with absolute certainty, his face clouding over and his hands tightening into fists the size of boulders.

  “Why should I let you guys listen in on my mistakes? For laughs? Anyway, he told me what I wanted to know.”

  Still scowling, Tama flipped on his recorder. “Which was?”

  “That almost everything the Wests have told me since I met them has been a lie. As far as Bob West is concerned, there actually are two Wests with seats on the New York Stock Exchange, but neither of them has a son living in Tahiti or plans for a $10 million hotel there. But unfortunately Robert West is a common name and there’s no way of distinguishing ours from any of the others without a lot more effort. However, we do know he’s a liar, when we consider what he also told me about his hotel ownership, where and how he bought it, its profitability, and so forth. I also wonder if that touching story he and Susan told me about her being molested and threatened by the paratroopers isn’t equally imaginary.”

  “Fine,” said Tama caustically. “You’ve established that Bob West is a liar, either of the tall-tale variety, or of the pathological kind. My dear Monsieur LaRoche, so what?”

  “So nothing. Unless you consider him in conjunction with his wife, Susan, the millionaire’s daughter from Philadelphia. Who sailed down here years ago on Bob’s yacht. Well, Susan West is not from Philadelphia and she’s not a millionaire’s daughter. She’s the daughter of a farmer in Fresno, California, and she spent six years in San Francisco, where she has a police record as a suspected terrorist and kidnapper.”

  “What!” Tama nearly leaped from his chair.

  “In the later sixties, and early seventies,” I said, “when the Vietnam protest movement was at its peak, she was a graduate student at Berkeley and a member of the Rainy Day Army, an off-shoot of the Weathermen. They blew up a couple of banks, burnt down an Army recruiting station, and were generally disagreeable people. Once they kidnapped an Army recruiting sergeant but eventually turned him loose. They were suspects in the kidnapping of a John Birch Society big shot who was a leading supporter of the war. He was held for ransom, which was paid, but his body was found three months later. No one was ever indicted for it, since it was never very clear whether the Rainy Day Army had really been responsible, or whether it was someone else capitalizing on their name. The Army always denied the charges. Susan West, her name was Schaffer then, was a prominent member and was lucky to avoid prison on a dozen counts. By 1973 she’d dropped out of sight.”

  “And you recognized her?” said Tama.

  “Too late,” I said regretfully. “If I had, maybe this whole mess would never have happened. But I got sidetracked, mostly by my own stupidity. Here’s the story, the way the I put it together.

  “The Wests’ hotel is about to go belly-up, no matter who owns it. It simply isn’t doing any business. It’s gotta be losing money. There’s never anyone in the restaurant or the hotel, and you see Bob and Susan running the desk and carrying towels and closing up the bar at night: they can’t afford to pay the help. They’re under pressure from the paratroopers, and they’re caught in an interminable lawsuit so they can’t bail out by selling. I think that when I got here three or four weeks ago they were already desperate enough to have decided to kidnap Danielle Payton.”

  For a moment I considered adding that they’d probably got the idea from Danielle Payton’s own twisted psyche, but didn’t see that it added anything to the story. “At that point,” I said, “in comes LaRoche onto the scene and immediately introduces himself as a San Francisco cop who thinks there’s something familiar about Susan West. No wonder she looked a little strained: she thought I had recognized her as someone already involved in a kidnapping. Maybe I would have come up with her name in time, but I got put off by Tamara Payton—she said that Susan looked liked an old folksinger named Mary Travers, and like an idiot it wasn’t until this morning I remembered she also looked like someone who didn’t sing folksongs.

  “But she’s nerv
y—she bluffed me with a dumbbell act and the Philadelphia heiress story, and I fell for it. I think they decided to wait a while to see what would happen—after all, I’d be leaving shortly. But then they had another idea: they’d distract me with the French gangster story. Or maybe they were actually serious. Maybe there was one chance in a thousand that I’d let myself be hired to bump them off. Which might have solved some of their more immediate problems, or might not have. But I didn’t, so they decided to go ahead with their original plan now that it seemed certain that I hadn’t remember Susan from her Rainy Day Army days.

  “Bob and Susan were friends of Danielle’s: she’d probably even arranged to meet them wherever it was most convenient for them to kidnap her. Then they put the bite on Payton in the States, but he refused to play along, so they waited for Tamara to come back. She was a softer touch, and to help her make up her mind they sent her off to old bonehead LaRoche, who could be trusted to take a gloomy view of matters.”

  And to pass along any progress that he or the police might make in their investigations, but I didn’t think I needed to call this factor to Tama’s attention.

  Tama snorted skeptically. “How could they know that Miss Payton would telephone them and give them a chance to bring up your name?”

  “Easy. If Tamara hadn’t called, they would have called her. ‘Where’s your mommy, dearie? She was supposed to have dinner with us last night.’ Think about it, Tama. The Wests probably knew that Danielle Payton had been sleeping around with the parachute boys. Why would her diary lie about it? And anyway, that’s the sort of thing she likes to do. In which case, the paratroopers could be the perfect patsies.

  “They had suspicious backgrounds, I was already interested in them as possible extortionists, they had a boat, and disappeared at odd moments. What more could you ask for? I’ll bet the Wests waited until they saw the Aventurier sail out one morning and kidnapped Danielle Payton later that same day. And since then we’ve played right into their hands.

  “And now that they know that Payton has been working with the police and trying to capture them instead of paying the ransom, they’ll get serious. No more stunts with any more Hitlers and talk about five million in U.S. cash dollars to be paid in Tahiti. No sir. There’ll be transfers to banks in the Bahamas or Beirut, just the way the real terrorists do it.

  “And one more thing, Tama.” I leaned forward and tapped the back of his mahogany-colored hand with my forefinger. “They’re going to stop fooling around. We’re going to be getting fingers in the mail.”

  “I’m not convinced,” he said judiciously. “For instance, who fired those shots at you and Bob West and why? Where have they got the Payton woman hidden—surely not in a hotel bungalow? Who is the soldier who picked up Hitler in the bar?” He waved a hand dismissively. “But let’s pass over all that for the sake of argument. What are you suggesting? You’re obviously dying to try something.”

  “You don’t need much evidence to pick up the Wests and sweat them,” I said eagerly, “but you do need some. Suppose…just suppose…that you and Colonel Schneider overhead Bob West talking to his cute little wife, saying something like this:

  “‘Jesus, honey, what’s going on here? That guy LaRoche just tells me the cops have found Danielle sitting in a friend’s house in Moorea playing backgammon and that she’s already left for the States on Payton’s airplane!’

  “And she says, ‘But…how can she.…’

  “And he says, ‘Yeah, you better go check on her. This sounds like some kind of trick, but you never know.…’”

  Tama studied me for a long, pregnant moment. Then he smiled bleakly. “And how would we happen to overhear a conversation as interesting as that one?”

  “Right now it’s 8:30 in the evening. Let’s say that you and Schneider have until tomorrow noon. You’re telling me that your boys can’t bug the Wests’ house and their hotel and their phone lines so that you’ll pick up anything they say? You could do the hotel tonight, and their house tomorrow morning. And then later tomorrow I’d drop by the hotel and give them the scam about how crazy Danielle Payton dreamed up her own kidnapping in order to harass her husband. After that, just make sure your recorders are rolling.”

  Tama slumped back with some of his chins in his hand. “You know, LaRoche,” he said after a while, “you have a nice sneaky way of thinking. You could almost be a Frenchman.”

  * * * *

  We had two nasty shocks the next day. The first came in the morning’s mail. It was a small package that contained a woman’s finger and a blood-stained note. The note read:

  WE WARN YOU THAT YOU DO NOT ACT IN GOOD TRUST. ONE MORE FINGER THAN HER HEAD. WE GIVE YOU MORE INSTRUCTIONS AND NO POLICE THIS TIME.

  The finger looked as if it had been chopped off by a sharp instrument with a single blow. I hoped so. I’d seen worse sights, many of them, but I winced at the thought of the cleaver falling, and my stomach turned over as I tried to imagine the agony she must have gone through. And still was. Charles Wentworth Payton had been a Marine in two wars, he said. But those had been a long time ago. He bolted for the toilet next door.

  I could fee my lips drawing back in a snarl of primeval savagery. “Let’s get those sons of bitches,” I said between my teeth.

  Tama nodded grimly, his face tight with fury. “Just as soon as the equipment is in place. Schneider’s men had to wait until the house was empty. Once we pick them up.…” His eyes glittered with hatred. “They’ll talk, LaRoche. How they’ll talk.…”

  I shuddered in spite of myself.

  * * * *

  At the last moment I didn’t trust myself to talk to Bob West in person without giving something away, so shortly before noon I put through a call to the hotel. The adrenaline surged through my body. My legs felt light and disconnected, as if they belonged to somebody else.…

  “Bob? Rocky here. Hey, you’re not going to believe this.…” By the time I’d finished the adrenaline charge had worn off and I think I was even smiling a nasty little smile as I said, “…and Payton’s flown her out on his private plane one jump ahead of the cops. No, I didn’t see them myself. Tama told me. The police are howling! How he got her to the plane and off the ground we’ll never know. The Procureur is filing every charge he can think of against her, and against Payton too. I tell you, it’s a madhouse over here!”

  “A nice touch, that,” said Tama dryly.

  “Yeah,” I said, sudden sober. “But let’s see if it gets us Danielle Payton back.”

  * * * *

  Tama and I sat in Schneider’s office at the Gendarmerie. Payton, I gathered, was in Punaauia talking fretfully with his campaign staff in New Mexico. A relay line connected us with the post office, where the taps had been arranged on the Wests’ phones at home and the hotel. Three minutes after I’d finished talked to Bob West he dialed his home. We sat as if graven from stone, the breath heavy in our chests.

  “It’s me, honey. I think I’ll come on home for lunch.”

  “How come?”

  “Tell you then. See you in twenty minutes.”

  They were the longest twenty minutes I ever spent.

  There were sound-activated bugs in various parts of the Wests’ home. They worked perfectly: we listened to domestic sounds as Susan West walked from room to room, flushed a toilet, banged dishes in the kitchen.

  A drop of sweat ran down my forehead.

  At the seventeen-minute mark the radio crackled and a voice said: “Duclos here. West just turned off the main road.”

  An eternity passed.

  Tap-tap-tap sounds grew louder over the speaker. It was Bob West clattering down the stairs. My fingernails dug into my palms.

  His voice suddenly blurted out, sharp and clear.

  “Hey! I just got a call from La—”

  A shrill buzzing sound screeched through the speaker. All of us jumped in our chairs. “What’s that?” cried Schneider,

  The sound shrieked again.

  “Now what?” sai
d Bob West irritably. “Who the hell is that?”

  “It’s the buzzer on their gate,” I said. “It must be right by the transmitter.”

  “Well, go see who it is,” said Susan. “The speaker isn’t working. Let me finish mixing this cake.”

  We listened to footsteps walking away, and a moment later the transmission was blanketed by a dense roar of static. A technician fiddled hastily with the controls to reduce the noise.

  “The slut has turned on the electric mixer!” shouted Tama, beside himself with tension. “The motor isn’t—”

  “Shielded,” I said. “How long can it take to mix a cake?”

  For six nerve-racking minutes we listened to the harsh shriek of the static pounding and pulsing. It was like being tortured by six minutes of rusty nails dragging down an old blackboard. My teeth were clenched and my shirt was wet with sweat when suddenly the noise cut off.

  I think we all breathed a little easier.

  Light footsteps, as if of someone in rubber sandals, padded across the kitchen and faded away.

  After that there was silence.

  We listened for twenty minutes.

  Silence.

  “They must have gone back to the hotel,” said Schneider.

  We sat there for the rest of the afternoon. The phone rang unanswered three times in the Wests’ house. We heard the hotel switchboard girl tell four callers that Monsieur West had gone out and not yet returned.

  “They must have gone to check on Mrs. Payton,” I said hoarsely. “Don’t you have someone following them, for chrissake?”

  “They’re waiting down at the main road,” said Tama. “They’d have radioed us if the Wests went by. There’s no other way out of those hills. They’ve got to come out there.”

  “Well, either they got by your men—”

  “Impossible!”

  “—in the back of someone else’s car, say, like whoever it was that just rang their doorbell. Or they have her hidden away up in the hills and they’ve gone on foot.”