“Except for the transvestites,” she laughed, then quickly sobered. “Isn’t it dangerous using them as…witnesses like that? Suppose they change their mind, suppose the police discov—”
“Hah!” I jabbed her on the knee. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you.” I could feel my face, tired as it was, breaking into a broad grin. “That’s the best part of all.”
“What do you mean?”
I burst out laughing. “I was paying those glitter queens to tell the truth! Payton really had spent all day with them, the rotten son of a bitch! No wonder he looked a little pale when they waltzed in to kiss him in Tama’s office.…”
Mareta stared down at the $10,000 check, her lips parted in a dazed smile. “It’s so hard to believe, this whole thing…” she murmured, then sat up with a jerk. “But then…if Payton didn’t kill…his wife, it was the Wests after all?”
I nodded. “Sure.”
Her eyes glittered. “Good! I hoped so.” Her smile was hard and vindictive.
“Good?” I echoed.
“Of course. Then we don’t have to feel sorry for them being killed themselves, if they were killers and kidnappers themselves.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, they were killers, all right, but they had some help with their kidnapping.”
“What do you mean?” Her eyes widened.
I leaned forward and put my hand on her knee.
“It was Danielle Payton who kidnapped herself, just as her husband said from the start.”
“But…but…she was killed!”
I nodded in sad agreement. “It went wrong on her. We’ll never know which of them originated the idea, she or her pals the Wests, but they were in it together from the start. She wanted the money, but she also wanted to give her husband a bad time. She was a little…obsessed that way. This wasn’t the first time.…”
“You mean…it was all a hoax?”
“Danielle Payton thought it was. But she didn’t realize that her partners were absolutely serious about it. It was a beautiful set-up for the Wests. I mean: what more could a kidnapper want than the active help of the victim in planning the crime? It certainly ought to make it a lot less chancy,” I said distastefully.
“But what…?”
“All of the evidence that was used to frame the three paratroopers was set up by Danielle Payton herself. No wonder it looked so good.” I shook my head incredulously. “It was so simple it was impossible for us to see. She walked on board their boat—hell, I watched her casing the boat once—and planted her purse with the letters in it. And picked up one of their loose cigarette lighters to leave in the generator house up in the hills. And then, of course, her masterstroke was writing her diary, with all those oblique references to the three horny Frenchmen. No wonder it sounded authentic, no wonder the handwriting was hers!”
Mareta shook her head and frowned in perplexity. “But…how could she hope to get away with it? Once the ransom was paid and she’d been released? Then what was she going to say? That it really had been these three Frenchmen? Or that the kidnappers were somebody else? Or what?” She seemed almost frightened by this sudden glimpse into a world of irrationality. “She must be crazy!”
“She was,” I said softly, “she was. She even messed up the case against the paras by going off to spend the weekend in Moorea with Hiro when she was supposed to have already been kidnapped. I don’t know what she thought she was going to say once she was free. Maybe she was going to tell some story about being blindfolded, about never seeing her captors. We’ll never know.”
“Poor crazy Danielle,” whispered Mareta. “And the Wests were just using her.”
“As long as it served their purposes,” I said. “Just as soon as she’d played her role—bam! Down into the leach field. They knew that a bubblehead like her would last five minutes with the cops before she’d be telling the truth.”
Mareta shuddered and threw her arms around my neck. “It’s so horrible,” she murmured, “so horrible.…”
“It’s not pretty,” I admitted, and tried to concentrate on rubbing her back in wide interlocking circles. Her hair smelled fresh and full of sunshine.
But she couldn’t seem to leave it alone. “But who was shooting at you and Bob West at the hotel, then?” she asked, her voice muffled against my body. “That couldn’t have been Danielle?”
“Hell, no. That was Susan West, the bitch!” My hands abruptly clenched into fists at the memory.
Mareta straightened up and pushed herself away. “Why?” she demanded sharply. “Why would she want to—”
“Kill me? I don’t know. Simple panic, I think. The Wests must have been under enormous strain. First of all, their hotel was clearly failing. Then they were under pressure from the paratroopers and the courts. Then they got themselves involved in a kidnapping, and even if it was just a hoax from Danielle Payton’s point of view, it was out-and-out extortion from the law’s. And then there’d be the strain of keeping Danielle out of sight, just as if she had been kidnapped. I suppose they had to keep her hidden away in that empty storage room in their house. Hell, it’s a wonder they weren’t basket cases. And then, of course, the real pressure started.”
“When…when…they killed her?”
I nodded grimly. “Even for them, that couldn’t have been any fun. Or cutting off her fingers. Or stuffing her down the leach field.”
“They did it though,” said Mareta in a taut voice. “Maybe it wasn’t fun, but they did it.” She glared at me intensely.
“They sure did. All I’m saying is the night I was shot at they were probably as hopped up as a cat in a kennel of dogs. They’ve just tried a trial run for a little bit of ransom money to see how it’d go, and here I come to tell them that the cops were all over the place, and that their bagman Hitler has been arrested. And then I said that the cops were looking for a French soldier in a bar who had gotten Hitler into the game, but that there were probably a lot of military uniforms floating around Tahiti, and was there anyone in their group of swingers who could fit the description of the guy in the bar? I think that’s when her nerve snapped.”
“Snapped? Why then?”
“For the same reason that Tama and Schneider and the whole French army couldn’t find a soldier who’d been in that bar, though God knows they tried. There never was one. The soldier in the bar was Bob West.”
“What!”
“Sure,” I said with a sour grin. “Remember what West looked like? Sort of a short stocky guy with short blond hair? All he had to do was put on a black wig, glue on a moustache, and change into a uniform. For nighttime in a dark bar? It was a cinch. His French was plenty good enough to pass with a bunch of drunken Tahitians who could hardly speak French themselves.”
“But why—”
“Susan must have thought I was hinting I knew it was Bob all along, and panicked. She grabbed a gun—a good old American habit—and came running after us through the bushes. Then.…” I shrugged. “She missed.…”
Mareta was silent, while I ran my hand through her hair. She sat motionlessly, staring through the glass doors into the night.
“I…I see,” she said in a small voice. “Then…then…it was the paratroopers who killed the Wests after all?”
My hand moved down to the nape of her neck and began to massage the warm firm flesh. “Of course not,” I said. “They were just innocent bystanders who happened to be in jail at the time, remember?”
“Oh.” I could feel her shoulders begin to tremble beneath my fingers. “Then…who…did?” she whispered fearfully.
“That’s a silly question,” I said lightly. “Especially when we both know that you did.”
* * * *
The breath hissed slowly from her lungs like air escaping from a punctured balloon. Her face was a rigid profile to me as she stared blindly into the outer darkness.
“You…you knew?” I could barely hear the words.
“It was always in the back of my mind. You had as good
a reason as anybody, better maybe. I suppose you could say that because of the Wests and their parties your husband ended up at the bottom of a cliff, and you made it to the hospital only by a miracle.”
“You fool!” She whirled on me savagely, her eyes blazing. “You think that’s the only reason?”
I blinked at her uncertainly. “I.…”
She leaned closer until her face was inches away. Her lips drew back from her teeth in a snarl and her eyes bored into mine. “It was for you,” she hissed.
“Me?” I echoed weakly. “Me?”
“You think I was going to let that bitch Susan West kill the…the only man who’d ever tried to treat me like a human being?” she gasped.
I stared at her round-eyed. “You…you knew that Susan West—”
“Who else could it be?” she demanded impatiently. “You told me what happened and I knew it was her. It was like looking at a picture. I could see her lifting that gun and.…”
She shuddered, and the intensity suddenly drained from her face and body. She sagged back on the couch like a rag doll. It was a minute before I could bring myself to speak. “Where did the gun come from?” I asked softly.
“It…it was Patrick’s,” she said, her head bowed, her fingers tearing at the hem of her shirt, the way I’d watched them tormenting her nightgown during my visits to the hospital. “He and Bob West bought them together from the same man, oh, two or three years ago. I don’t know why they wanted them. Ours just sat around the house. Until…until.…”
“…you came to get it,” I said quietly. We sat silently, each of us lost in our private speculations, until I said wonderingly, “And then you just strolled on out of the hospital.…”
“Limped,” she muttered. “It was only two or three days after they’d taken off the cast and…I was just sitting there in the morning, thinking about the Wests, and you, and…things, and all of a sudden I just said to myself, ‘Why don’t you go kill them?’ It seemed like a good idea so I just got up and walked out of the hospital. There was a Tahitian taxi driver who used to come and visit his wife every noon and take a nap on the floor in her room. I saw him asleep there and walked down to the parking lot and got in his taxi and the keys were there and I drove home and got the gun and…and.…” She buried her face in her arms, and her body was racked by sobs.
“I…I don’t know if I could…could really have done it,” I barely heard her ramble on, “but when I got there to the door I didn’t say anything and Bob put his arm around me and led me out to the pool and a moment later that slut Susan came out of the kitchen where she was cooking something and tried to kiss me on the lips and when I pushed her away Bob said, ‘What’s the matter, Mareta, you look terrible,’ and Susan said, ‘You’ve been lying in that narrow old hospital bed too long, chérie, why don’t you lie down here with us for a little while like we used to do and we can make you feel a lot better, can’t we, Bob,’ and then she sort of reached up and touched her hair and she had this hibiscus stuck there as if she’d forgotten all about it and she said, ‘Remember where we used to put the hibiscus so that we could.…’ and then she started to take the hibiscus out of her hair and I pulled the gun out and pulled the trigger and it hit Bob in the face and the blood squirted out all sideways and then I…I.…”
After a while she looked up, her face ghastly, her eyes round and shiny with tears. “You…you used…to be…a policeman,” she gasped haltingly. “What…what are you…going to do…about it?”
I looked at her for the space of three heartbeats.
“I’ve never given $10,000 to a girl before,” I said. “I’m going to take her to bed to see if she’s worth it.”
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
Landmarks
Cover
Table of Contents
Trouble in Tahiti Page 25
