Trouble in Tahiti

by Hayford Peirce

  I found myself in an office that had been converted by the addition of a folding cot into a high-class cell—innate caution had kept them from tossing Payton into the tank along with the drunks. He could easily have smashed the plate-glass window or removed the air-conditioning unit from the wall and wriggled on through to freedom, but Payton obviously didn’t think along those lines. He was sitting at the desk, scowling at what he was writing. Probably a list of those to be readied for summary execution.

  I didn’t have to guess whose name would top it.

  He watched me walk around the desk, but recoiled in disgust as I leaned towards him—did I have bad breath, or did he think I was going to try to kiss him?

  Instead I whispered in his ear. “This room might be bugged. We better not take chances. We’ll sit on the bunk and whisper.”

  I moved to the bunk. He glowered at me, breathing heavily, then got to his feet. When he was sitting beside me, I leaned closer.

  “They’re going to charge you at two o’clock,” I said with all the conviction I could muster. “The Procureur and the Juge d’Instruction just finished a conference call with the Minister of Justice in Paris and have got the go-ahead. It’ll take them a couple of hours to draw up the papers, and then you’ll be moved to the prison in Faaa. Then you’ll have access to your lawyers, but this isn’t the States, you know. The French don’t even give bail to petty thieves, never mind murderers.”

  His mouth worked but he said nothing.

  “I know that old Mayor Curley used to get re-elected from his jail cell,” I whispered, “but that was back in Boston in the twenties, not New Mexico in the eighties. What do you figure your chances are? Today’s what—Saturday? The election’s on Tuesday, huh? Too bad.…”

  He turned bloodshot eyes to me. They were alive with hatred. “What do you want?” he whispered piteously. “Have you just come to gloat?”

  “Gloat? Me? Hell no, I’ve come to see if you wanted to get out of here.”

  “What do you think, you bastard?” he rasped.

  I grinned at him. “Frankly, I think you belong in here, but Tamara wants you out for some reason, and…oh, hell, forget it, I’ll get you out. But first.…” I reached in my pants pocket and pulled out a notebook. “Here, you can copy this in your own handwriting.”

  “What is it?” asked Payton, taking the notebook.

  “A personal services contracted, dated October 22nd, hiring Alain LaRoche for unspecified duties for an indeterminate period of time, for a lump sum of one hundred thousand U.S. dollars, payable upon satisfactory completion of his duties.”

  “You want me to sign that?”

  “Yep. But not until you write out the whole thing first. And then on the bottom you’ll add, ‘October 29th, duties completed to my full satisfaction, payment in full made by check number 7834,’ and you’ll sign your name again.”

  “What!”

  I smiled. “Don’t worry: I’ll give you a receipt. ‘Paid in Full.’ Make sure the check is dated yesterday—we wouldn’t want anyone to say I’d tried to coerce you in a jail cell, would we?”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “Isn’t it the truth? Oh, by the way: I brought your checkbook. Tamara was kind enough to find it for me. Isn’t it nice how much can be accomplished if people simply try to cooperate with one another?”

  His hand trembled under the impetus of some strong emotion as he reached for the checkbook.

  I didn’t bother to ask him what it was.

  “Well?” demanded Tama.

  I shrugged. “It’s dicey,” I said. “I’m going to have to check it out and get back to you.” I left him scowling at my back, and walked down to the post office, where I mailed the check to my bank in San Francisco.

  I returned with as sprightly a step as my aches and pains would allow to the Commissariat and the Renault. I was a rich man. Now all I needed to do was think of a means of getting Charles Wentworth Payton out of jail before nightfall.

  * * * *

  I slumped half asleep on Mareta’s couch, trying to keep my chin from drooping to my chest, while she made coffee in the kitchen. I’d found her at the house she and Patrick had shared in town, anxiously awaiting the warrior’s return.

  “You mean you’ve been here ever since…that afternoon at your place in the hills?” I asked. It seemed like years had passed.

  “Of course. Didn’t you tell me to?”

  I nodded, dumbfounded. It was hard to believe that such fidelity and self-discipline still existed in today’s slipshod world. I pulled her to me and we kissed, hard.

  “Why don’t you go lie down?” she breathed into my ear.

  “Because if I did I wouldn’t move for a week,” I muttered regretfully. “I’ve gotta stay awake. And try to get my brain awake, although that’s going to be a lot harder.”

  “Lots of coffee, then,” she said.

  “And just a tiny bit of loving,” I added.

  “Too late,” she said primly. “It’s coffee time.”

  I drank coffee until my stomach gurgled and told her what had been happening to her white knight since we’d parted a lifetime before. “So now,” I concluded glumly, “the question is: how do I get this guy off?”

  “For $100,000?”

  I nodded.

  “Easy,” she said after a moment’s thought. “You tell the cops he was with me all day. I’ll be his…what do you call it? Alibi.” She grinned impishly.

  I set the coffee cup down. “You know,” I said slowly, “that isn’t a half-bad—” I stopped.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Lemme think.… Nope, it’s no good. The Wests were murdered on the 20th, 21st, something like that, that’s ten days ago. You were still in the hospital, remember?”

  “Oh. I’d forgotten.” She looked downcast at being deprived of her moment of glory in the spotlight. “You think they’d check?”

  I thought about it. “Yeah. Someone would remember that you were…associated with me—” she snorted delicately “—and that you’d been in the hospital. So that wouldn’t work. Sorry. It was a great idea.”

  Actually, it was as lousy an idea as I’d ever heard, and it only shows how hopelessly ineffectual I felt that I even considered it.

  “Hrmph,” she said, unconvinced. “What kind of a man is this Payton? I’ve never met him.”

  “A jerk,” I said pithily. “Just like the Wests, only queer into the bargain.”

  “Queer? What kind of queer?”

  I waved a hand. “Who knows? I guess he just likes boys. Isn’t that enough? No, I recall now: he likes boys who dress up like girls. I guess he likes to dress up like that too. That kind of queer.” I sighed.

  “Oh. Transvestites.” She giggled, then pursed her lips thoughtfully. “You’ve got lots of money, haven’t you?”

  “I do now.”

  She scowled, impatient with my dullness of mind. “Why don’t you get the transvestites to say he was with them? They’ll do anything for money, you know.”

  There was a silence. I gaped at her foolishly, much as Sherlock Holmes might have stared when confronted by the vastly greater faculties of his brother Mycroft.

  CHAPTER 39

  The Clarinet Club’s red vinyl door was opened wide to the noontime sunshine, while inside a tall Tahitian transvestite or transsexual—it was hard to tell precisely which—in bluejeans and T-shirt worked on the floor with a bucket and mop.

  “Hel-lo,” she whispered huskily, running a coy finger over her two-day beard.

  “I’m looking for Christine and Chantal,” I said. “I’ve got a present for them.”

  “I bet,” she murmured archly, ogling my crotch. “Well, I should be jealous, but.…”

  Her directions weren’t hard to follow, since the two glitter queens lived twenty yards away, in a fair-sized cement building on the corner of the waterfront. As I climbed the narrow concrete stairs and passed a number of open doors I saw that I’d stumbled into an entire commune of
variously sexed creatures. The smells in the dimly lit hallways were enough like the monkey house to make me want to turn back, but I pressed on. “Duty calls, Sergeant Preston,” I muttered, and knocked lightly on the last door on the left.

  Seen in broad daylight, dressed in only a pareo, and before her morning toilette, Christine was a sight to stir deep emotions. Her legs were knobby and scarred, and her hair frizzed out like the Bride of Frankenstein’s. I swallowed hard and manufactured a smile.

  “Remember me? I was looking for Hiro the other night. You and Chantal helped me out.”

  “I did?” She squinted in perplexity while absently scratching one of her breasts. “I help so many people.…”

  “That’s what I thought. You like helping people, don’t you?”

  She nodded, completely baffled now.

  “Especially if people help you,” I added, rubbing my thumb against the tips of my fingers.

  “Oh,” she said, enlightened. “Of course, of course. But.…”

  “Let me tell you about it,” I said winningly. I gestured toward the clutter of the room behind her. “If we could step inside…?”

  * * * *

  The only time I saw Commissaire Tama genuinely startled was when I held open the door of his office for my two new friends, Christine and Chantal. As they pranced in, all 400 pounds of them on the hoof, togged out in slinky red evening gowns, six-inch heels, and bouffant hairdos, his eyes widened, and he gaped frankly.

  They twisted their lips into garish smiles. “Commissaire Tama: Miss Chantal, Miss Christine. May we sit down?”

  “What?” he said weakly. “Oh. Of course, of course.” He picked up the carved warclub that was still decorating his desk, glared at it, and dropped it with a thud. “What now, LaRoche? Every time you come in here, it means nothing but trouble.”

  I waved a hand airily. “No trouble this time,” I soothed. “That’s all in the past. I’m here to help. These two ladies were initially reluctant to accompany me here, but finally their sense of public duty more than overcame their…delicacy of feeling.”

  “I see,” said Tama, his scowl deepening.

  “And, of course, this is also extremely embarrassing for me,” I said disarmingly. “No one likes to admit that he’s been wrong, but in some cases.…”

  “Wrong about what exactly?” asked Tama, his eyes narrowing. “It’s hard to think of anything in this case that you’ve been right about.”

  I grimaced in the face of injustice. “It’s Payton, I’m afraid. Everything I said could be true, except.…”

  I had his full attention now. “Yes?” he said eagerly.

  I shrugged apologetically. “He couldn’t have killed the Wests after all.” Tama sat back with a little sigh. “I assume you’ve been checking around his airplane and the airport. Well, he stayed on board for a while, just as he said. Then, I’m afraid, he got a ride into town, where he spent the rest of the morning, and most of the afternoon, in…the company of these two charming ladies.”

  Chantal simpered delicately.

  Tama’s eyes moved back and forth between the trannies and me. He opened his mouth, shut it, drew a deep breath, let it out, and stared at me tight-lipped.

  “All the time?” he said finally, his voice vibrant with hope shaded by disbelief.

  I gestured urbanely. “It’s not something…that a candidate for the United States Senate would readily.…”

  “I see,” said Tama shortly. He leaned back and turned the situation over in his mind. After a while he appeared to come to a conclusion. “How much did you pay them?” he asked.

  My face registered shock and righteous indignation. “Pay them? Suborn a witness?” I glared at him fiercely. As a matter of fact it’d been only 50,000 francs apiece, in old, used bills. At $400 per witness Payton was getting a bargain.

  Tama nodded cynically. “Of course not. Well.…” A faint smile brightened his vast countenance. He’d just realized that given sufficiently bizarre circumstances involving his release, Payton would be only too eager to put the whole distasteful affair behind him.

  “This alibi will stand up?” he asked warily.

  “Like the Eiffel Tower,” I assured him. “There were half a dozen people in the building who saw him going into their apartment.”

  His nostrils flared skeptically, but his head nodded. “Well, first we’d better get a firm identification. This way…ladies.”

  * * * *

  Payton was slumped on his cot, his head in his hands, a stereotype of despair. His reaction to the sight of the trannies was no less extreme than Tama’s. His hands fell slowly to his side, and his eyes goggled.

  “Well?” demanded Tama, prodding Chantal and Christine into the room.

  Christine giggled behind her hand. “Oh yes,” she said. “That’s him. We had just so much fun!”

  “Charles!” admonished Chantal, stepping forward. “You don’t even say hello?” She seized him by the ears and kissed him twice on each cheek. “There! Now do you remember me?”

  Payton sat open-mouthed.

  I shoved Christine forward. She stumbled and fell against Payton, her arm swinging around his neck. “Hold it right there!” I yelled. They looked up in surprise just as the flash went off. It would make a touching tableau of Charles Wentworth Payton sitting on a bed in intimate converse with two somewhat recondite lady friends.

  I jammed the camera—which I’d purchased twenty minutes earlier—back in my pocket before Tama could grab it. “Just a memento,” I said to him, “for my scrapbook. No law against that, is there?”

  * * * *

  The metal casket with the remains of Danielle Payton had been loaded on The Quest for Truth and the turbines had begun turning over. Tama and I stood at the foot of the boarding stairs and watched Tamara and Charles Wentworth Payton walk slowly across the apron. They walked with bowed heads and with three yards between them, each in their separate world of grief. It was nearly dusk, and they cast long disjointed shadows across the blacktop.

  They halted, and for a moment we stood staring sullenly at one another. Then Tamara stepped forward. She reached up, his eyes still downcast. Her lips brushed mine for an instant, and then she was running up the stairs and through the hatch into the bright interior.

  I watched her go, touching a fingertip tentatively to my lips. I knew I’d never see her again.

  After a while I turned away.

  Tama was murmuring to Payton. I didn’t bother to try to listen. I knew what it was: the final truth about the death of the Wests. How Bob West, fearing inevitable capture and humiliation, had shot his wife and then himself, both of them falling into the pool, along with the murder weapon. “It was a mistake, not draining the pool,” I’d said to Tama an hour before. “With all that blood it wouldn’t have been easy to spot a small gun at the bottom, especially at nighttime.”

  He gave this the consideration it deserved. More, actually. “Then where is it now?” he demanded. “If there’s no gun—”

  I shrugged. “You know how it is at the scene of a crime. You can’t keep the rubberneckers away, and anything that isn’t nailed down they figure is up for grabs. What do they care about justice? All they’re interested in is ripping off a souvenir.”

  “A gun?” said Tama dubiously. “Out of a swimming pool?”

  “It’s a murder gun. What better souvenir?”

  “Hrmph,” he snorted. But he didn’t rush off to throw anyone else behind bars in place of Payton. In fact his only rush was to get to the Juge d’Instruction’s office to get Charles Wentworth Payton out of his Commissariat and out of his jurisdiction before the full weight of the Republican Party and the United States Department of State fell upon him from a great height.

  I kept a sober face and offered to drive him to the airport.

  * * * *

  But Payton’s interest in the strange demise of Bob and Susan West was obviously minimal. He suddenly nodded brusquely, slapped Tama’s great paw with what might pass for a han
dshake, and pushed his way past us.

  I laid my arm firmly on his forearm as he began to mount the stairs. “One last word with you,” I said. I stepped up beside him and pulled him up the stairs out of earshot of Tama. “Your check was greatly appreciated. But I should have told you at the time there’s a penalty charge on late payments. And you were just a teeny bit delinquent, weren’t you?”

  “How much?” he said between his teeth.

  “Only ten thousand.”

  “Francs?” he asked, brightening immediately.

  I snorted. “Guess again.”

  “But that’s blackmail.”

  “Blackmail? Would a blackmailer ask for a check? I don’t know what you’re talk—Oh, that picture I snapped of you and your friends? That’s not blackmail, that’s simple insurance. So that you don’t put a stop-payment on your checks first thing Monday morning.”

  With an agonizing effort of will he brought his eyes down from the open hatchway and the world beyond. “How do I know…?”

  “…that I won’t keep tapping you?” I asked. “I guess there’s only my word for it, isn’t there?”

  “Your word! What’s that worth?”

  “Rather more than yours, I’d say.” My voice was flat.

  His eyes caught mine, flickered, and looked down at his shoes.

  “Make it out to ‘cash,’” I said. “And then you can get on to your election.”

  CHAPTER 40

  “A finder’s fee,” I said, handing Mareta the check. Her eyes widened.

  “For me?” she whispered. Her eyes moved from the check to me and back to the check.

  “Why not? You earned it.”

  “You mean…it worked?”

  “You heard that plane going over twenty minutes ago? That was the last you’ll ever see of Charles Wentworth Payton.”

  She lowered herself awkwardly onto the couch beside me, still favoring her leg. She turned the check over and over in her hands. Her eyes were troubled.

  “He’s really guilty?” she asked quietly.

  “Of killing his wife? Naah, he’s just what I said: a jerk. He tried to stiff me for that money, and I guess I got carried away with myself. I thought I’d make a little trouble for him: I didn’t know I could make such a good case against him until I heard myself doing it.” I spread my hands apologetically. “After that…well, I almost started to believe it. It could have been true, you know.”