by Don Porter
“The spotlight swung away from us, and I ran. I ducked into that area by the fish market and jumped into an empty tuna tub. The car pulled a U-turn and came after me, but they drove past the tuna tubs. They must have spent an hour searching around that area, driving back and forth, and I didn't even breathe.”
Dallas had made a good swath up the sides and across the top. She was working around behind, and the wastebasket was just about full. With the top tamed down, the beard looked a lot like Santa's, but O'Malley's was reddish instead of white.
“So, you got a good look at the guys. Could you identify them if you saw them again?”
“Oh, sure. We were standing twenty feet apart, and that light was brighter than day. Besides, one of those guys looked familiar. I think I've seen his picture in the newspaper.”
George and I exchanged glances, and rolled our eyes in unison. I had been expecting O'Malley's story to be bad, but not that bad. O'Malley tried to turn his head to look at Rose, but Dallas jerked him back, so he spoke to Rose over his shoulder.
“Remember a few months ago we had a string of cold nights, and you brought home a bundle of newspapers for extra bedding? I slept with that guy's picture in my face, but I never read the caption.”
“Yeah, I remember those papers,” Rose agreed. “They were the Honolulu Advertiser. I found a whole bundle that hadn't been sold. I guess it was three or four months ago.” Dallas had moved around front and started on the beard. O'Malley was looking like a peeled onion, although he still had hair on top; it was just the contrast that made him look sort of naked.
“You do realize that it isn't safe to go back to the bridge?” I asked. I got a general consensus of nods. “Are you guys going to be okay here? Food and all that?”
“Are you kidding?” That was Willie, and he looked as if I had just slapped him. “We live off the fat of the land. Do we look like children?” I had to admit that they certainly did not look like children. “Okay,” I said. “That's good. We need to be able to contact you, so stay here. We'll rent the rooms for another week. O'Malley, you must never tell us which room you're in, because we have to be able to tell the police that we don't know where you're staying. We'll get some newspaper pictures together and get back to you.” O'Malley couldn't answer. Dallas was whacking whiskers and mustache, and he didn't dare open his mouth.
Chapter 6
“Did you have to rent two rooms?” George groused. We were back in the office, clipping pictures out of newspapers.
“ We have to maintain plausible deniability. That's the first rule of politics.” We had checked the weather statistics and found a week, three months before, where the nighttime temperatures had hovered near 65 degrees. Maggie was at the library, printing out the pictures from all of the Advertisers for a two-week period around the cold snap. George and I were snipping any pictures we found in recent papers and the Honolulu Magazine.
We had looked around the building and the parking garage for a tail, and didn't spot one. That was bad. It didn't mean that there wasn't one, it meant that the one who was there was a pro. As a precaution, I had parked the Jag in a garage over on Bethel Street. I figured that whoever was watching would have spotted the BMW, but wouldn't know where the Jag was parked.
Maggie came bustling in with a sack full of pictures and a new scrap-book. We made an assembly line, George and I handed pictures to Maggie, while she glued them into the book.
“Geez, I never noticed there were so many pictures in newspapers.” Maggie dumped the last pile onto the desk.
“It's a modern trend,” I said. “People don't read anymore, and the newspapers are trying to compete with comic books.” We handed and glued in silence for a while, and the book was filling right up.
“How are you planning to get these pictures to O'Malley without being followed?” George asked.
“That's why I parked the Jag over in Chinatown. Why don't you take the BMW for a cruise through Waikiki and check out the bathing suits. The bad guys can follow you, while I walk out the back.”
“You don't think the bad guys have figured out that there are two of us? Maybe they haven't noticed that there are entrances on both sides of the building.” George had a good point.
“If I had some of O'Malley's spare hair, I could make a wig and a beard for a disguise.” That idea wrinkled Maggie's nose.
“Why don't I deliver the pictures?” she asked. “They won't know me. I could even pretend to be going out to lunch, stop for a Coke in the Fort Street Mall, and then just casually grab the Jag and make the delivery.”
George and I just looked at each other. Maggie's idea was certainly better than any that either of us had.
“Good thinking,” I had to admit. “Grab a ten out of petty cash, take your time, and be careful. If anyone looks the least suspicious, just bring the pictures back here.”
Maggie took the scrapbook under her arm, bent at her desk to rob petty cash of the offered bribe, collected the purse that was hanging from the coat tree, and breezed out the door. It was twenty minutes later that the phone rang. “Payne and …” Maggie interrupted me. “Dick, I'm being followed.”
“Where are you?”
“Heading out Nimitz. I'm calling from your cell phone. There's a gray Honda Civic three cars behind, and he was waiting when I came out of the parking garage.” George had seen my expression and was hovering. I held the phone between us so that he could hear it. He suddenly slapped his own face, so hard that it must have hurt, and grabbed the phone.
“Maggie,” he said, “something has come up. You just keep driving, we'll get back to you.” He hung up the phone. I started to ask what the devil had come up, but he put a finger to his lips in a shushing motion and strode toward the door. By the time I collected my wits, grabbed the Beretta automatic out of my desk drawer, locked the office, and joined him, he was holding the elevator door for me.
“ Okay, what the devil has just come up?” I asked.
“There's a bug in the office. How else would they know to follow Maggie, and where the Jag was parked?”
George drove, I used his cell phone to call Maggie.
“How are you doing?”
“I'm fine, just passing Kalihi Street, and the Honda is still with me.”
“Okay, keep driving. They don't want to stop you; they want you to lead them to O'Malley. Take it easy, stop for every yellow light. When you get to the intersection with the freeway, stay underneath on Nimitz Highway. We're behind you. If anything changes, call us on George's cell.”
“Righto. Gee, this is sort of exciting. Beats the heck out of answering the phone. Slow and steady, under the viaduct.” She hung up.
George was in his kamikaze mode, weaving through traffic and jumping the lights like those young servicemen who are stationed here.
“Do we have a tail?” he asked.
“ We had one, until you ran that last red light. This one was a blue Ford, but fortunately for us, the driver isn't insane.” I'd been looking back when the brakes screamed, and closed my eyes for a second before I turned around. Our front bumper was under one of those big diesel tractor-trailer rigs. We were snookered by a city bus on our right, and another truck on the left. George was pounding the steering wheel. The light changed, and George whipped around the diesel. There wasn't any extra lane; he went between the two trucks.
Traffic thinned after we passed Sand Island, and George hit eighty on the ramp to the freeway. He took the HOV lane, and we were making time. I called Maggie again.
“Hi, where are you?”
“I just passed the airport, the Honda is right behind me now.”
“Okay, we're above you on the freeway, and if George doesn't get us killed or arrested, we'll catch you at the Pearl City exit. Take Kamehameha Highway. It should come up in about two minutes, and stay on the phone.”
“Roger, Dodger.”
We looped the loop off the freeway down onto the Kamehameha. The Jag went past, and we had to wait for the Honda that was
riding her bumper. I chambered a round in the Beretta and looked at George. He nodded. We were passing that no-man's-land on the edge of Pearl City where the highway runs behind military housing. There's a ten-foot-tall slope of grass next to the highway, and there aren't any cross streets.
“Okay, Maggie, take off.” I heard the rubber scream from two car-lengths ahead. She must have shifted down before she stomped on it. One second she was ahead of us, the next she was disappearing in the distance. We were doing some rubber screaming of our own, around the Honda. It had tinted windows, so I couldn't see inside. George cut him off, hit his front bumper with our rear door, and he should have stopped, but he kept going, right up the grass slope. We skidded to stop on the edge of the highway. Suddenly a siren screamed down off the freeway, and a black-and-white came roaring up behind us.
The Honda made it to the top of the slope, his front wheels went over, but the edge was too steep. The Honda's frame dug into the grass and he hung there, high centered. I was out, had my gun leveled, waiting for the Honda's doors to open.
“Drop it.” It was a cop, and I felt his pistol poke into the back of my neck. I dropped it. One word of attempted explanation, and I'd have been dead. If you have a gun in your hand, a cop has a legal right to shoot you, and some of these cowboys in Hawaii enjoy that. I sneaked a peek back, and another cop was standing by the car with his pistol covering George.
“Hands on the car, and spread ‘em.”
With no gun in my hand, it was safe to try to talk, but not to argue. “Look,” I said, “we're private detectives. The guys in that Honda are paid assassins. Don't let them get away.” That's when the Honda doors popped open and two guys scrambled over the top of the slope.
“Don't let them get away,” I shouted. “You're aiding and abetting a murderer.”
“Right,” the cop said. “I saw who had the gun. You can tell it to the boys downtown.” He snapped the handcuff onto my wrist. In the movies, they cuff your hands behind your back, but these were not movie cops. Mine jerked my left wrist, with the cuff on it, up behind my back, and then my right wrist back over my shoulder to snap the cuff onto that. There is something particularly humiliating about that arrangement, maybe because you feel so helpless, and you are. If your right shoulder cramps from your arm being behind your head, you can try to relieve the strain by shoving your left arm higher up your back, until that becomes too painful.
The cop jerked my chain, literally, and shoved me into the back seat of the black-and-white. George was already there, cuffed the same way I was. The only good thing was that they pulled a U-turn and headed back toward Honolulu, so we weren't headed for the jail in Pearl City.
When they hustled us into the cop shop, Cochran was leaning over the reception desk. He was wearing a serious scowl when we came in, but when he looked up and saw us it changed to a smile.
“Well, well, Payne and Clark. I told you we'd have one of you guys in custody by today. What were you doing, shoplifting candy bars?”
“We had the guys who murdered your John Smith, and these two cowboys let them get away.” That wasn't a real smart remark, because the cop behind me had hold of the chain between my wrists. He twisted it, which nearly cut off both my hands, and dislocated my shoulders.
“What are the charges?” Cochran was asking the cop behind me.
“The first one is driving ninety miles an hour in the HOV lane on the freeway, the next is causing an accident, and the third is threatening with a firearm.”
“Toss them in the tank,” Cochran said. Twenty-hour investigative hold while I figure this out. He turned back to the desk and resumed scowling.
Chapter 7
When they take the cuffs off, it's such a relief you almost don't mind being in a cell, but I had one moment of terrible temptation. The cop took the cuff off my left wrist first. With the cuff still attached to my right wrist, I could have swung around and literally brained him with the cuff. Every fiber in my being wanted to do just that. It would have felt so good, at that moment.
The problem is that it would be a life-changing mistake. It doesn't matter about justification. Killing a cop will get you many years, if not life, of the hardest time you can do. The cops have all the aces. They know it. If you like living, you just have to swallow your pride and take whatever crap they dish out.
The cop unclipped the other cuff and shoved me into the cell. The next second, George slammed into my back and the cell door clanged shut.
“Nice piece of driving,” I tried to imitate George's growl.
“Clever gun waving.” George stalked past me to sit on the lower bunk. He was working his shoulders, trying to get them back into place, and I joined him in that exercise.
It was a phony bust, and they didn't follow it through. We should have been searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and then allowed to make a phone call. Instead, we paced the cell for twenty minutes before a cop handed a cordless phone through the bars. It was the guy who had tried to break my arms. I was concentrating on his throat, the way his Adam's apple looked so crushable, and my hands were making choking motions by themselves, so I put them behind me.
“One call,” he said. “Post a fifty dollar bond on the speeding ticket, and you're out of here.” He was being a comedian. They had emptied our pockets, so they knew we didn't happen to have fifty dollars with us.
George shrugged and took the phone. His shoulders seemed to be working okay again. He dialed my cell phone.
“Hi, uh, Maggie, would you … uh, come to the main precinct on Beretania Street, and … uh, bail us out?”
I drove us down Beretania Street and dropped Maggie off at the head of the Fort Street Mall to walk back to the office. I didn't want to drive past the office, in case we hadn't picked up a tail yet. The BMW would be in the impound lot on Sand Island. You know that, because it's the impound lot farthest from where we had left the car. A chain link fence around the property looked as impregnable as our cell had, but the gate was open. We wound through the maze, new and beautiful derelicts parked between wrecks that were so crumpled they were hard to identify.
A dirt courtyard opened up, surrounding a wooden shack that had bars on the windows. A padlocked door at ground level was being slammed against its hinges by snapping, snarling dogs that were trying to scratch it open.
At the front of the shack, a cigar-smoking grandmother sat in a wire cage. Her window was high, to give her authority, like a judge looking down on a courtroom. She had one eye closed, squinting through the cigar smoke, and her coal black pageboy was slightly askew, the parting angled thirty degrees, right to left. She condescended to release the BMW for a hundred-fifty dollars. They charge you ten dollars a mile for the privilege of having your car towed, as if they're doing you some huge favor.
We still didn't have any cash, but George handed the company Visa card up to her. She kept that, demanded a driver's license, compared the signatures on both to George's signature on the receipt from the cop shop, and squinted through the smoke again to be sure that George matched the picture on his driver's license. He passed inspection and she took the cigar out of her mouth to use it as a pointer.
George walked around the car and bent to check the dent where the Honda's bumper had hit the rear door.
“Hey, I didn't do that. That dent was already there.” It was a guy, also smoking a cigar, and leaning against the wrecker. If grizzly bears ever wear denim work shirts and overalls, this guy was what they would look like.
“Nobody's accusing you,” I said. “Where's the Honda?”
“What Honda? This was the only car at the scene of the accident.”
“What accident?” I asked. “All we did was park it beside the road.”
“Tell it to the cops,” he said. He lost interest in us and ambled back to his wrecker.
George drove the convertible back to town; I took the scrapbook and swung by the airport. I circled a block twice, and decided that I didn't have a tail, so I pulled into the lot at the Thunde
rbird. No one answered the door at 22. I checked 21, same results. I went back to 22 and tried the doorknob. It wasn't locked, but no one was in the room. I checked the bath, also unoccupied, no sign that anyone had ever been there.
When I turned back toward the door, it was blocked by a body that just fit it. When they made the standard exterior door thirty-six-inches wide by six-foot-six tall, they must have had Cochran in mind.
“So, this is where you had him stashed? You guys are cheap bastards, you know that?”
“Had who stashed?”
Cochran came in and grabbed the wooden chair from the desk. He spun it around, sat on it backward, and motioned for me to sit on the edge of the bed, so I did that. I didn't see any more cops coming in, and that was good.
“Look, Payne, believe it or not, just this one time, you and I are on the same side here.”
“Oh yeah? Then how come you released my client onto a deserted street where people were waiting to kill him?”
“Payne, I had four guys on that street to cover him. You think I couldn't figure out why Pendergast showed up? Only Slick Mick didn't go out, he ducked through the garage and we missed our chance to grab the perps.”
“And to get my client killed in the process?”
“Hey, you gotta take some chances.”
“Yeah, well, you missed another chance. We had two of the gang cornered when those Neanderthals of yours arrested us.”
“They were just doing their job. You try hiring smart cops for minimum wage. Anyhow, that's why I need to talk to you. There's a leak in my department, because someone phoned Pendergast. Apparently we hired somebody smart, and he's earning double wages. What have you learned from O'Malley? And, by the way, whose baby pictures are in that album you're carrying?”
I handed the scrapbook to Cochran. No point in waiting to be asked. He thumbed through the pages, stopping now and then to whistle a sort of “whew” sound.
“You're teaching a class in government? Putting out a new edition of ‘Who's Who in Hawaii’? What?”