The Paradise Affair

by Bill Pronzini

  Earlene Thurmond was waiting in the parlor with Philip Oakes, the two of them sitting stiff-backed some distance apart and ignoring each other. Both stood when Sabina entered. The young blond woman was indeed Junoesque, broad-hipped and abundantly endowed above the waist. Her eyes were a light gray, her mouth a somewhat pinched cupid’s bow. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking as she faced Sabina; her round countenance was as unreadable as a closed book.

  Oakes had a glass in one hand; the amber color identified its contents as whiskey undiluted by either water or soda. He had not had enough of it to visibly affect him. His gaze was both expectant and impatient, as were his words when he spoke.

  “What took you so long? Did you find out anything?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure? What do you mean, not sure?”

  “Just what I said.” Sabina gave her attention to Miss Thurmond, introduced herself.

  “Yes, Mr. Oakes told me your name and why you’re here.” The woman was attractive only until she opened her cupid’s-bow mouth; her voice had a thin, reedy quality that befitted a less statuesque woman. “I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t already know.”

  “Perhaps nothing. Do you mind answering a few questions?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Have you an opinion as to how Mr. Pettibone died?”

  “It may have been an accident, as Mr. Oakes believes, or it may have been suicide. The police think it was the latter.”

  “They’re wrong,” Oakes said. “Wrong!”

  Sabina said, “One or the other, then. You don’t suppose it could possibly have been foul play.”

  Miss Thurmond arched one of her pale eyebrows. “Foul play? Of course not. The door and windows were bolted on the inside. Mr. Oakes and I made sure of that.”

  “Which of you first checked the windows?”

  “I don’t recall. Does it matter?”

  “I’m just curious. Could it have been you?”

  “I believe it was Mr. Oakes.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he said. “No, it wasn’t. I remember now … she told me the windows were locked when I came back from talking to you outside. Then I went over to have a look for myself. But I still don’t see that it matters.”

  “Were they always kept closed and bolted during the day?” Sabina asked Miss Thurmond.

  “Almost always, yes. With the drapes drawn over them. Mr. Pettibone didn’t care for the view.”

  “The drapes were open on the night he died, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, they were. He must have opened them for some reason. They were drawn when he and I left the study earlier that evening.”

  “Did he check to see that the windows were bolted before you left?”

  “Yes. Usually he did.” The eyebrow arched again, interrogatively. “I don’t understand what the windows have to do with what happened.”

  “Neither do I,” Oakes said. “He was careless with the pistol, fired it accidentally—that is what happened.”

  Sabina asked the secretary, “Do you have any idea why he went into the study armed with the pistol?”

  “No. Unless he planned to use it on himself.”

  The annoying Mr. Oakes interrupted again. “He didn’t, I tell you! He didn’t!”

  “How did Mr. Pettibone seem to you that evening, Miss Thurmond? His state of mind, I mean.”

  “He was grumpy because the book he was writing wasn’t going well. Otherwise, he seemed all right.”

  “Had he shown any recent signs of despondency?”

  “Not that I could tell. He was his usual self around me.”

  “And what was his usual self?”

  It was a few seconds before the woman answered. “Demanding and particular. He wanted everything done a certain way.”

  “Did you get along well with him?”

  “For the most part.”

  “No friction of any kind?”

  “Well, he wasn’t exactly generous, but you probably already know that. We never had words about my salary, though. Or about anything else. I know my place.”

  Oakes emitted a rude snorting sound. Neither Miss Thurmond nor Sabina paid him any mind.

  “Then you were satisfied with your position?” Sabina asked.

  “Yes, quite satisfied,” Miss Thurmond said. “It won’t be easy to find another that includes room and board. Certainly not in Honolulu.”

  “May I ask how you came to be employed by Mr. Pettibone?”

  “Employed as his private secretary, you mean? I held previous secretarial positions at Great Orient Import-Export, first in the San Francisco office and then in the branch here when an opportunity for advancement opened. He found my work to be exemplary, and when he offered me this position, naturally I accepted.”

  “Are you planning to move elsewhere now that he is deceased?”

  “As soon as I can make arrangements to return to San Francisco. There is no reason for me to remain here.” She added, “Mr. Oakes certainly doesn’t require my services.”

  “I require none of your services, that’s right,” he said with emphasis on the noun. “None of them.”

  She continued to ignore him. He might not have been in the room at all as far as she was concerned. “If you have no more questions, Mrs. Quincannon, there are things that require my attention.”

  “No more questions. Thank you for your candor.”

  “Not at all.”

  When Miss Thurmond was gone, Oakes said pettishly, “I don’t like that woman. I’ve never liked her. She’s a tramp. A trollop.”

  The insult dripped rancor and bitterness. His dislike of Earlene Thurmond, Sabina suspected, was rooted in the rejection of advances made to her before or after she had moved into this house. It must have been a severe blow to his ego to think that she was willing to share his uncle’s bed and not his.

  “Well, Mrs. Quincannon?” he said then. “Can accidental death be proven or can’t it?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The sound he emitted this time was one of distress. “But it is possible, isn’t it? It has to be.”

  She was growing very tired of Philip Oakes and his obsessive behavior. She was hot, sticky-damp, still slightly light-headed, and not at all inclined to put up with him any longer. She said, “We have nothing more to discuss just now, Mr. Oakes,” and started out of the parlor.

  He followed her. “What do you mean, ‘just now’? You’ll have something to say to me later? What? When?”

  Lord, give me strength.

  “Later,” she repeated firmly. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be leaving. You needn’t walk me back to the Pritchards’. Unless you have an objection, I will take the same route across the side lawn as I did last night.”

  He had no objection, or at least none that he voiced. And he had the sense not to follow her through the kitchen and out the side porch.

  * * *

  She felt better after a wash and a short rest in the guesthouse bedroom. She had just finished changing into fresh clothing when Margaret appeared with an invitation to dinner. Sabina declined, pleading a headache. Margaret, fortunately, had no knowledge of her visit to the Pettibone house, so she did not have to make explanations or fend off questions.

  The short rest had cleared her head; she sat on the porch to think over what she’d found at the Pettibone house and what it implied. She had no doubt now that Gordon Pettibone had been the victim of foul play. Nor was there any question in her mind of who had done the deed, or of how the sealed study had been entered before and exited afterward; that was the easily solvable part of the conundrum.

  What she did not know yet was the why of it—the motive, the choice of place and time. Without that knowledge, or at least a clear idea of what those factors might be, she was reluctant to take her suspicions to the police.

  She had the feeling that Gordon Pettibone’s dying words were the key to why. The meaning of “pick up sticks” continued to elude her,
yet she felt that she ought to be able to figure it out. There must be something she was not considering. Something she had been told? Something she had overlooked in the study?

  There was a stirring at the back of her mind. Could it have something to do with that index card she’d found in the Bible? She fetched the envelope on which she’d written the letters and numbers from the card, stared at the line until her eyes ached. RL462618359. Incomprehensible. Then she thought: By itself, yes, but perhaps not in conjunction with something else.

  If only she could remember what it was that she had been told or had overlooked …

  19

  QUINCANNON

  The Millays must have had very few guests, for there were no spare rooms available in the ranch house for that purpose. The only accommodation was a single room located in an outbuilding behind the house that was used mainly for the storage of dry goods. Quincannon was conducted there by the servant girl, Mele, while Grace Millay arranged with Sam Opaka to have the Kona nightingale unharnessed, fed, and quartered for the night.

  The partitioned bedroom in the outbuilding was small, almost monastic, its furnishings limited to a bed with a straw-tick mattress, a ladder-back chair, and two rough-hewn puncheon tables. There was no electrical service on this remote section of the Big Island; the Millay ranch buildings were lighted by kerosene lamps of one type or another. The one in here was a small flat-wick lamp, the kind that did not give off much illumination. A hanging lantern would produce a circle of flame of considerably more candlepower, but there was none of this type in the outbuilding. Where one could be found, Quincannon thought, was in the stable.

  Sam Opaka brought his carpetbag, handed it over, and departed without a word. Quincannon couldn’t tell if the bag had been searched, not that it mattered a whit if it had; it contained nothing of value or pertinence to his investigation. With a basin of water and a bar of lye soap supplied by Mele he scrubbed a layer of volcanic dust off his face, hands, and beard, then changed into fresh clothes for dinner.

  The meal was served by lamplight on the lanai. Home-grown beef, rich and tender, which he ate mechanically, without enjoyment. He and Grace Millay were the only diners. Her brother, she explained briefly, was “not feeling well” (an obvious euphemism) and preferred to remain in his room. As they ate, she questioned him briefly about his profession but made no further mention of his pursuit of the two swindlers. The remainder of their somewhat strained conversation was on neutral topics.

  After dinner he declined the offer of brandy and returned to the makeshift guest quarters. He stretched out on the bed fully dressed, the Navy Colt beside him and his ears cocked, and forced himself to remain awake and alert for any sign of danger. The vigil was groundless. There was no incident of any kind.

  An hour past midnight, he rose and went to the door to reconnoiter. The night was silent, the ranch grounds empty as far as he could see, the sky filled with enough scudding clouds to keep moonlight to a minimum. No lights showed in the main house; a dull lantern gleam in a bunkhouse window was the only light to be seen.

  He slipped out, made his stealthy way around past the cattle pens and dairy barn. The stable lay ahead to his right, but as he neared it the door to the bunkhouse opened, shedding a swath of lantern light and then a pair of paniolos. The hired wagon, fortunately, had been drawn near the corral fence; Quincannon ducked low into the shadows behind it, just in time to avoid being seen. He crouched there while the two cowboys rolled and smoked cigarettes. They took their confounded time doing so; his sacroiliac had begun to ache by the time they finished and went back inside. Straightening, he swallowed a grumble, stretched the kink out of his spine, and hurried on to the stable.

  The doors were shut; carefully, so as not to make any noise, he parted the two halves, eased through, pulled them closed behind him. Horses and the Kona nightingale moved restlessly in their stalls when he scraped a lucifer alight. That one match was all he needed to locate a lantern hanging from a nail near the door.

  He took it down, shook it to be certain the reservoir was full. Then, wrapped in shadow again, he drifted back out to the hired wagon and secreted the lantern inside the box beneath the seat.

  * * *

  Quincannon was up and on his way shortly after first light.

  The ranch had already stirred to life. Paniolos and other hirelings moved in and around the barn, corral, and cattle pens; none of them paid any attention to him. Stanton and Grace Millay were nowhere to be seen; neither was Sam Opaka. Quincannon found the cowhand he had spoken to yesterday, Keole, in the stable and together they brought the Kona nightingale out and harnessed it in the rented buggy’s traces.

  There was still no sign of the Millays by the time Quincannon drove out of the ranch yard. Just as well. Farewells were unnecessary; they would be as glad to see him gone as he was to leave.

  Rolling, dark-veined clouds obscured most of the towering slopes of Mauna Kea. They thickened and seemed to follow him, hiding the rising sun, as the donkey clattered him along the ranch road. Once he saw a lone rider far off among the cattle grazing on an upper valley slope. Otherwise he had the road and the morning to himself.

  By the time he neared the ocean the sky was a mass of dark-edged cumulus clouds that obliterated the sun. The muggy kona heat was already on the rise; that, the restive cloud cover, and the wind that blew in fitful gusts here and carried the smell of ozone, threatened the arrival of a new storm. The prospect goaded him into venting an epithet that made the donkey’s ears twitch. But the threat had yet to be fulfilled when he reached the intersection with the Kailua road. With luck, the downpour would hold off long enough for him to complete the task he had set for himself.

  The road was deserted; he saw no one anywhere, heard only the thrum of the wind and the sullen mutter of the whitecapped sea. He drove to the heiau, tethered the Kona nightingale to the same stunted tree as the day before, then removed the lantern he had appropriated from beneath the buggy seat. He considered donning the rain slicker that the charitable Kailua liveryman had rolled inside the box, decided against it. Even if the storm broke while he was prowling among the rocks below, he would be better off unencumbered by an extra garment.

  He had no trouble finding the ancient trail this time. He made his way down to the ledge above the beach. The offshore wind beat at him, stinging his face with spray from the breaking waves. The blowhole muttered and spouted, but its geysers did not seem to be as high-flung as the ones yesterday.

  The broken outer walls of the heiau provided some shelter as he moved into the ruins. The first of the openings he’d discovered on his previous visit led him, after a dozen yards, into a cul-de-sac of broken, sharp-edged lava rock. The second wound deeper among the massive stones, twisting so that Quincannon had to light the lantern in order to mark his progress, but it soon narrowed until he was unable to fit his body into the slit. Two more passages proved to be blocked and empty as well.

  The fifth, at the far end of the arrangement of flat volcanic slabs, had a tight, half-hidden opening. The entrance to the inner recesses of the heiau, he judged, partially concealed by reaching fingers of molten lava from a long-ago volcanic eruption. The space was so narrow that he had to suck in his belly and squeeze through sideways.

  After a short distance he was able to walk freely again. This was not a completely natural passage, but one that had been widened and carved through the rock at a sharpening downward angle. Its floor had been worn smooth by water seepage; twice Quincannon slipped on the slick surface and nearly lost his balance. The walls were spotted with some kind of moss that crumbled when he brushed against it. The ceiling lowered as he went, so that he was forced to bow his body and move in an awkward waddle.

  He had gone more than fifty rods when the slant lessened and the passage ended in a cave-like opening that led into what must be an ancient lava tube. The seaward end was choked off by a jumbled wall of rock, but the section that curled back inland appeared clear. Here it was cool and dry. The la
ntern’s light glinted off a glass-smooth black floor; off streaks of color in the surrounding rock that must be earth minerals carried along by the lava flows and solidified among them.

  After a short distance the tube grew clogged again, apparently with the residue of more recent flows, and at first he thought he’d stumbled into another cul-de-sac. Then, passing around one of the boulders, he encountered a slender continuation of the tube. He had to crawl a short way on hands and knees, muttering to himself, all but nosing the lantern ahead of him like a kid engaged in a peanut-rolling contest, before it widened again.

  Here, hanging stalactites and jutting stalagmites obstructed his progress. One of the former gouged his neck in passing and earned itself the same colorful name that had made the Kona nightingale’s ears twitch. The tunnel narrowed, curved, rose slightly, then once more widened, this time to merge with another, larger tube.

  No sooner had he entered this one than a faint current of warm, fresh air tickled his nostrils.

  So. The tube must have another entrance, or at the least an outside vent, somewhere ahead. He quickened his pace, walking upright now, holding the lantern high. The floor bore small cracks and the footing was more certain. Ahead, the tube widened into a kind of grotto whose walls were lined with piles of round, smooth stones. They seemed to have been arranged by primitive hands into a pattern—the first indication of human habitation. The fresh-air current was stronger here; he had a briny whiff of the sea.

  Around another turning he found the auohe.

  And something else even more momentous.

  This section of the tube was some thirty feet in width, its stalactitic ceiling pressed low as if spread by great force from above. The floor and the lower parts of the walls were grayish black, streaked here and there with encrustations of green and rusty red. Above and ahead, more recent lava flows had formed an embankment of solid glistening black that rose, with another upslope of the ceiling, into a jagged ledge some fifteen feet above the floor. Now the air was no longer fresh. The pungent odor that assaulted Quincannon’s olfactory sense was that of mold and rot.