Trouble in Tahiti

by Hayford Peirce

  Tama exchanged a long, cool long with Colonel Schneider. It was Schneider who had been in charge of the deployment of the troops.

  There was nothing to do except wait.

  At six o’clock I stood up. “There’s something wrong here. I’m going by their house.”

  Colonel Schneider blinked. Tama nodded grimly.

  * * * *

  It was dusk when I got there, with the sun already hidden behind Moorea. But all I had eyes for were the two cars parked in the garage on the side of the road.

  I rang the buzzer three times, each time more insistently than before.

  I looked around. There was nothing to see except the darkening hills.

  I climbed the chain-link gate and dropped heavily to my feet. The small tiled terrace at the bottom of the stairs was in deep shadow and the hibiscus plants that guarded the front door had closed up their flowers for the night. The door was unlocked and I pushed it open. There was a light switch on the wall. I switched it on and walked on into the living room.

  The rest of the house was in darkness and there was total silence. I switched on lamps and overhead lights.

  “Bob? Susan?” My voice echoed emptily.

  I walked out on the terrace. Cushions were arranged here and there in intimate little groupings, as if awaiting their next orgy. Or, more likely, recovering from their last one—there were even a couple of them sunk on the bottom in the pool.

  There was something odd about those cushions.…

  I found the switch that flicked on the pool light.

  Instead of the bright fluorescent blue-green I’d expected, the water was dark and murky. I stepped closer

  I looked down at the bodies of Bob and Susan West lying face down in the shallow end of the blood-tinted pool.

  Next to my right foot was a tired looking yellow hibiscus. The bright color of its interior was half hidden by a large brown blotch of congealed blood.

  CHAPTER 25

  There was obviously nothing to be done for them, so while I awaited the arrival of Tama and Schneider I made a high-speed search of the house. Mindful of the fact that there were now French fingerprint experts on the scene I tried to avoid leaving mine or smearing any that might already be there.

  The only item of interest I came across was a small .25 Biretta automatic in the drawer of the night table beside the Wests’ bed. I sniffed at it suspiciously: there was a faint odor of cleaning oil, but none of gunpowder. I put it back, hesitated, took it out, and, feeling vaguely guilty, jammed it into my pants pocket. Someone on the island was taking potshots at me; it would be comforting to be able to return the fire.

  I loped back through the house and up the stairs and stuck the gun under the seat of the Fiat but I needn’t have hurried: it was another six minutes before Schneider and his troops drove up noisily. In that time I’d poked through the rest of the house. Another bedroom, a bath and a half, kitchen, living room, and dining room. Next to the stairs leading down from the road a laundry room and empty storeroom had been built into the hillside underneath the garage.

  I examined the storeroom with interest. The walls were concrete and the only exit was a single thick door—a perfect spot for sequestering an abducted millionairess. But the only way of locking somebody in was with a key in the outside of the doorknob, and the lock could be disengaged by turning the knob on the inside. It would be a fine cell for keeping a small puppy dog locked up. I sighed. It obviously wasn’t my day.

  The Wests would probably have been sorry to hear that.

  I sighed a second time and walked back to the edge of the pool. Now that I looked more closely I could see a dozen or so small drops of dried blood staining the wooden decking over a four-foot wide area. I eyed the bloody hibiscus as if it might be a clue of major importance, then shrugged and turned away. If it was, it was going to take someone a lot smarter than poor old LaRoche to figure it out.

  Tama and Schneider, when they got there, seemed as dazed by the grotesque turn of events as I was and they directed the routine as if they were sleepwalking. The bodies were pulled from the pool and turned over. Bob West had been shot twice through the face, and Susan West several time through the neck and body with what appeared to be a small caliber weapon. I thought of the .25 Biretta lying carelessly on the floor of my car a few yards away and felt sweat begin to prickle on my forehead. If no other weapon turned up conveniently to hand.…

  I swallowed with a gulping sound I was certain could have been heard across the room. I didn’t like to think what Colonel Schneider’s reaction would be if he learned I had sauntered off with the murder weapon. LaRoche, my boy, you could be digging yourself into deep, deep trouble, I told myself.

  I glanced down at the gaping wounds in the torn flesh of Bob and Susan West. Their vacant eyes stared dully back.

  But not as deep as theirs.…

  “Well, I’m glad they’re dead!” flared Tamara Payton sometime around midnight. “They…were nasty people.”

  “I think I agree,” I said, “but the question is still: where is your mother?”

  Charles Wentworth Payton blinked sleepily. “But what have these killings.…”

  “…got to do with it?” I finished wearily. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. Tama never really believed the Wests were the ones anyway, and this just confirms his opinion. It’s either a coincidence, he says, or they were killed by the real kidnappers, to keep them from revealing some information they might have picked up.”

  “But that’s crazy,” protested Payton. “If they had any information and they weren’t involved, they’d have given it to us long ago.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “They were strange people, and I wouldn’t want to bet on their motivations. But there’s another consideration that Tama and I hadn’t mentioned to you before.”

  “That sounds rather ominous.”

  “It depends on how you look at it. If the Wests were the kidnappers, then the chances of ever finding Mrs. Payton alive.…”

  “What?” Payton scowled until understanding suddenly flooded his face. “Oh…oh.…”

  I nodded grimly. “If your wife was kidnapped by people she’d been friendly with for years, there’d be only one way to make certain she’d never identify them.…”

  “No!” screamed Tamara Payton.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said softly. “But it looks like I’m wrong about the Wests. Thank God, I guess. If they were really killed by these mysterious accomplices of the paratroopers, then…there’s a chance she’s still alive.”

  “You…you really think so?” Tamara breathed.

  I nodded. “The last photo of her was taken only a couple of days ago. And the doctors say…the finger was…cut off very recently.…”

  She wrapped her arms around me and began to sob on my shoulder.

  Charles Payton Wentworth eyed me sourly. This wasn’t what I’d been hired for. He’d forgotten that Tamara Payton had hired me first.

  The next morning was Friday, October 22nd. The elections were less than two weeks away, and Payton’s chances of making it to the United States Senate were diminishing by the day. “Where can she be?” he muttered, his voice thick with anguish, whether for Danielle Payton or himself I couldn’t tell. “For chrissake, LaRoche, do something!”

  “I’m going to,” I said savagely. It was ten in the morning, late enough to be certain there’d be no ransom notes or severed fingers in that morning’s mail. Tama and Schneider were busy trying to find witnesses to the double killing but so far had come up with nothing. Whoever had rung their buzzer yesterday noon, strolled in and shot the Wests, coolly turned off the electric mixer, and then disappeared, was no closer to being found than Judge Crater.

  Unless the murderer had lived in one of the upper-class homes in the neighboring hills, in order to get to the West’s house he would have had to drive past Colonel Schneider’s roadside sentries on the main road, both coming and going. But Schneider’s gendarmes had been on the alert only for Bob and Susan W
est, and at noontime with several hundred people returning to their homes in the hills for lunch, they’d paid no attention to other cars. I wondered which beats in the outer Tuamotu Islands these particular gendarmes would soon be pounding.…

  I could think of only one course of action, so I walked to the Fiat, where my nifty homemade blackjack lay in the glove compartment, just aching to be tried out.

  I double-parked on the waterfront until a parking space opened up, and darted into it just ahead of an indignant Frenchwoman driving a deux chevaux. It was a good omen. Fifteen minutes later Hiro Beachboy climbed down from The Book of Dreams, crossed over to the shade on my side of the street, and ambled aimlessly down the sidewalk in my direction. I reached over and opened the glove compartment.

  A minute later as he came abreast of the Fiat I leaned over and pushed open the passenger door, almost against his legs. “Hiro,” I said warmly, screening my face with my shoulder. “Take a look at this!” My left hand beckoned him into the car.

  “What?” His mouth fell open and he bent over to stick his guileless face into the car. “What is it?” My right hand came up from behind the back of the passenger seat and sandbagged him neatly behind his left ear.

  His eyes rolled up and he grunted softly, almost apologetically. I pulled him into the car and got the door shut behind him. His head lolled semi-consciously on his chest. I patted him on the knee. “Nice to see you again, Hiro,” I said cheerfully. “What do you say about a little drive in the country?”

  Half an hour later I opened the door and pulled him out by the arm. He came reluctantly, like a half-awakened zombie. Once again the weather was cloudy and soggy feeling here in the mountains at Danielle Payton’s Japanese retreat. I let Hiro fall back against the side of the car and positioned myself in front of him, the sandbag tapping ominously against my palm. He stared at me sullenly for a moment, then lowered his eyes.

  “Okay, Hiro,” I said, “this time it’s too serious for any more games. You know whose house this is, and who I am, and what I want to know. And you’re going to tell me.” I rapped him smartly on the point on his shoulder bone and he winced. “Because if you don’t, Hiro, I’m not going to fool around with you the way those cops did when they talked to you and Billy. You can tell them you never heard of Danielle Payton, Hiro, but you can’t tell that to me. Because you know what I’ll do to you if you try to tell me any lies, Hiro? Hmmm?” I raised his chin with the tip of my forefinger and leaned forward until he could feel my breath on his face.

  “Why I’ll just tap you lightly on the head,”—I feinted a blow and he winced pitiably, but I told myself that this was the same guy who had pounded my face, kicked my body, and thrown me half-conscious into the harbor to drown.…

  “I’ll just tap you on the side of the head, Hiro,” I repeated, “and then I’ll march you over to that cliff there, and I’ll push you over the side. Maybe in a month or so somebody might find your bones.” He seemed to shrivel up before my eyes. “Now talk, Hiro baby, talk.”

  * * * *

  The plane ride to Moorea took seven minutes. They run shuttle flights between the two islands, and I’d been lucky enough to step out of my car and into a plane. In the shiny new terminal in Moorea I rented a jeep and got directions to the Hotel Maraamu. Like Tahiti, Moorea has just one road around it, so it’s hard to get lost, but at least I bothered to find out if I should turn left or right when I left the airport.

  The manager of the Hotel Maraamu was a leathery-skinned old American named Bailey who wore nothing but a bleached-out pair of bermuda shorts and transparent plastic sandals. He looked as dilapidated as the twelve-bungalow hotel he was running, but unlike other hotel managers I’d met recently he let me buy him a drink at its modest bar without trying to tell me how much money the operation was coining. I explained what I wanted while he examined me with pale blue eyes in which the hope had been washed out along with the color.

  “Why not?” he said listlessly, looking down at the liver spots on the backs of his hands. “Let’s go take a look.”

  * * * *

  There were nine lawyers listed in the yellow pages of the Papeete phone book. Maître Sivel was the seventh one I called. A woman’s voice came over the line, startling me. It was all very well calling a French lawyer Master, but if the he turned out to be a she, was the lady lawyer called Mistress? I called her Master just to see what happened, and she didn’t correct me.

  “I’m trying to locate the lawyer who’s representing a certain Monsieur Jérôme Baudchon, as well as his two friends. I have some very important news to communicate.”

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting in the office of Maître Sivel, a frizzy-haired lady of thirty-five who was tiny enough to be tucked away in my pants pocket. She was dressed in blue jeans and a faded print shirt and had an engaging smile that showed lots of teeth. She was enthroned in an enormous chair that towered over her desk, while I sat in a small wooden one so low my bottom nearly scraped the floor. I grinned up at her, and she grinned back. There was no question who was boss in her office.

  “So you’re the man with all this phony evidence who’s responsible for my clients being in jail,” she said accusingly.

  “Right now I’m trying to get them out. As I understand the police case, they’re saying that nobody has seen Danielle Payton since October 1st at the latest, about the same time your clients’ boat sailed out of Papeete for a couple of days. Correct?”

  She nodded. “Their boat began repairs on the 4th, and their movements are well accounted for since then. Before that, unfortunately, they were simply innocently abroad on the ocean, with no thoughts in their minds about the necessity of establishing alibis.…”

  “What about the night of Sunday, October 3rd?” I asked. “If the boat went in for repairs on Monday the 4th, they were probably back the night before.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, then reached down to pull a buff-colored dossier from a drawer. She leafed through it, and pushed a newspaper clipping across the desk to me. “This is from Les Nouvelles of Tuesday, October 5th. It’s an article about a party at the Yacht Club on Sunday the 3rd.”

  There were four photographs of men and women grinning toothily at the photographer as he snapped them on the dance floor or sitting behind forests of empty wine bottles. “This photo here,” she said, tapping the paper. “This table in the corner. See these three men?”

  I nodded. The three ex-paras were easy to recognize. “You can prove with absolute certainty they were there that night, October 3rd?” I asked. “Fine. And I can prove that on the night of October 3rd Danielle Payton was alive and well, and in the arms of a Tahitian lover boy named Hiro Rehenua, in a bungalow in Moorea at a roach farm called the Hotel Maraamu.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “Yessir, that’s just great,” said Charles Wentworth Payton in a rich voice that resonated with irony. “The Wests are dead, the paratroopers will be out of jail before nightfall, this Hitler character will be charged with second-degree theft, and that guy in the bar is still the Unknown Soldier. Just who does that leave as suspects?”

  “You’ve been reading too many detective stories,” I said harshly, in no mood to be used as a punching bag. “The chances in real life of kidnappers turning out to be someone you know are one in a million. Even in Tahiti it’s a longshot. It looked like it was going to pay off with the Wests, but it didn’t.”

  “First you put those Frenchmen in jail and then you get them out. What’s that supposed to mean?” he said peevishly.

  “Nothing,” I said. “LaRoche giveth and LaRoche taketh.” Payton scowled. “Look,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “As long as those three guys stay in jail the cops have got nothing but them on the brain, convinced that they’ve got at least three of the kidnappers on ice. And they’re not out looking for the real ones.”

  “They might have accomplices.…”

  I snorted in disgust. “Sure.” I ticked off the points on my fingers. “First these accompli
ces were sending the ransom notes. Then they were arranging for French soldiers and Tahitians named Hitler to pick up the payoff. Next they were shooting down bystanders and tossing them into their own pool. And now, in order to justify the accomplice theory, we’ve got the accomplices doing the actual kidnapping. If that’s the case, what the hell does that leave for the three paratroopers to do?”

  “Well, if you put it like that.…” he said reluctantly.

  “Of course I put it like that, and so is their lawyer, right now. As soon as the cops get a formal statement from Hiro and a copy of that hotel register they’ll have absolute proof that their case is shot to hell.”

  “You’ve been so smart about the rest of this,” said Payton bitingly, “first with the paratroopers and then with the Wests, how do you know these thugs Hiro and Billy aren’t the kidnappers? Hiro’s the last one to have seen my wife, and you just leave him off in town, walking around free.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “If you could see these two hash-heads in their floating outhouse.… Anyway, this guy Bailey at the hotel in Moorea remembered your wife when we looked through the register. She and Hiro were over for the weekend and there weren’t enough seats left on the Sunday afternoon planes, so they went on back to the hotel. She left in the morning, but Hiro stayed on for the rest of the day drinking beer and didn’t leave until that afternoon, when he came back on one of the boats.”

  Payton shook his head, unconvinced. “A couple of hopheads like that, they’re exactly the kind of crazies who kidnap people.”

  * * * *

  Schneider and Tama must have shared his opinion. That evening, about the same time Payton and I were nattering, Hiro and Billy were picked up for questioning, and the following morning the three paratroopers were released.

  “Now we’ll see some action,” said Payton with satisfaction after Tama had telephoned him with the news. “The cops have taken their kid gloves off.”