A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  “Actually,” Ann said, “Your pills are probably still dry. But you do need your dressing changed. They should have given you supplies when you were discharged.”

  “In my pack,” he said. “They’ll be all fucking wet now.”

  “Yeah, well,” McGee put in, “Let’s at least get you dry. Do you have a car? Where do you live?”

  “No car. I stay at Sa’ili Tua’ua’s. You know him?” McGee shook his head.

  “I know him,” Ann said. She couldn’t take solo credit for saving Sa’ili’s life once upon a time, but she had certainly been part of the effort. More than that, his injury had been recent enough that he might still have supplies around that she could use to change the Birdman’s dressing. Even better, Sa’ili’s sister and manager of his household was a nurse and might be willing to do the dressing change herself so that Ann could get on with transporting McGee out to the dump. Best of all, Sa’ili Tua’ua was Welly Tuiasosopo’s cousin and high chief. Surgeon, nurse, supplies, political clout. What more could a man want? She and McGee got the Birdman moving toward Han’s jeep.

  “You’re name’s Grayson, isn’t it? Don Grayson?” Ann said. The Birdman was clutching his pack in front of him now like a teddy bear. “You’re the ecologist working on Sa’ili’s family’s eco-tourism thing?” Grayson nodded. Alcohol, Ann thought, recognizing another smell. Booze. She wondered if Sa’ili was aware that his consultant and houseguest was loaded by nine in the morning. A serious Samoan no-no. There was no point in wondering if Welly would notice. Of course, after three days as an inpatient at the Territorial hospital, most people might consider a toot. And you’d definitely want anesthesia on board to tackle one of the Baltic schooner’s crew bare-handed.

  Sa’ili Tua’ua’s house crowned a tree-shaded lava terrace up behind the police station and the Gooney Bird, technically a part of Fagatogo village but rather above all that, like a Victorian lady sweeping her skirts out of the way of something disagreeable on the street. The back part of the house was conventional local western style, glass-louver walls framed in pastel-colored plaster, peach pink in this case, with a low, gabled green tin roof. But the front extended out onto a broad stone rampart, built of modern materials but patterned, pillars and roof, like a traditional Samoan house, every bit as big as the house in back.

  Ann pulled up beside Sa’ili’s vintage right-hand-drive Land Rover and what she thought at first must be a second family car, a white hard-topped Suzuki jeep. Except that the license plate was Han’s. Not a police vehicle. His own. Sa’ili’s sister came out of the back of the closed house to greet them. She was tall and broad, the epitome of Samoan village dignity. Ann stumbled through the courtesies, trying to understand about the jeep. How? How could he be here? Where is he?

  Behind Sa’ili’s sister, in the short wing that housed the kitchen, a second figure moved behind the flat-opened louvers. Ann caught the flash of a big knife and could hear it hitting something wooden, a cutting board maybe. The figure shifted briefly into Ann’s line of vision through the doorway, and suddenly she understood about Han’s jeep. The figure was tall for an Asian woman, slender, utterly feminine. Her head turned at some sound farther inside the house, and her profile was smooth, slightly elongated, slightly convex, the nose hardly breaking the lines of the mask, long hair coiled onto the back of her head. The coil was fixed by a red plastic banana clip rather than lacquered Edo sticks but still managed to look like a Hokusai masterpiece. There was only one person in all of Samoa she could be: In-yong Han’s Japanese wife, Sakiko. She wore a raspberry pink shift that fell to just below her knees. The calves below the hem were short and thick for one so tall and slender. Turnip legs, Ann thought nastily, the rude term Hawaii-Japanese boys use to describe Japan Japanese girls.

  A toddler, four-square and fast-moving, ran in and grabbed Sakiko at knee level. Sakiko set her knife down carefully, then bent and detached the child. She signaled with a flicker of smile to a Samoan girl of about ten who ran in, swept the child into her arms, and carried her away to the accompaniment of much screeching. Over her shoulder, Sakiko shot a glance at Ann. In that glance, Ann read pity, disdain: a woman who has a child towards one who has not.

  In truth, as Sakiko turned back to her work, Ann had to admit that the woman may not have even seen her. Nor would have known Ann’s name nor recognized her as someone from the hospital. Much less anything else. Sakiko had only lasted in Samoa a couple of months the first time before life as a Korean’s wife and a cop’s wife and a wife in Samoa had gotten to be just one thing too much, and she had decamped. But a lot of things had happened in the year she was gone.

  Sa’ili’s sister was speaking again. Ann replied as politely as she could, given that she had no idea where they were in this conversation. The other woman’s gaze moved to McGee and Grayson, climbing out of the jeep.

  Ann nodded toward Grayson. “This man is your guest?”

  “Yes. He has been in hospital. The patient of Sapatu.” Sapatu was Welly Tuia-sosopo’s highest village rank, talking chief to Sa’ili’s rank as the senior high chief in their home village on the other side of the island. Surprise, concern, anger moved openly across the older woman’s face.

  “There was a fight,” Ann said, “At Nozaki’s dock.” The woman’s expression suggested that Nozaki’s dock and the Gooney Bird’s bar girls occupied roughly equivalent places in social rank. “Not really a fight.” Ann hesitated. Samoan culture rather tends to blame the victim. “It was not the fault of your guest.” Well, other than the alcohol, but Grayson and the sailor were about even on that score, and Ann wasn’t going complicate matters if she could help it. Jesus Christ. Samoan, Japanese, Korean, palagi, work, wives, love and envy: what a nightmare. Only Sa’ili would try to tend those spaces. Does he know? About me and Han? “But he needs to get cleaned up and his dressing needs to be changed. Can you do that here? I need to get Dr. McGee somewhere, and it’s a bit of an emergency.” Maybe they should have just dropped the man at the hospital. “He is angry, of course. He should go later to the police to make a complaint.” Sa’ili’s sister’s gaze was locked onto Ann’s face now.

  “Who has done this? Who is at fault?” The woman scowled at McGee.

  “You know the men in the big sailboat? The men from the north?”

  The woman nodded. “They are like the night. They bring much evil.” She turned to Grayson. “Come,” she said in English. “We will take care of you. We have very good chicken for lunch. Teriaki. Very tasty. Very tender. Killed just the way you showed us.”

  Jesus, Ann thought, as she and McGee made their polite farewells and got back into the jeep, better the eco-tourists don’t hear that last bit. She put the jeep in first and let the motor ease them down the slope. “The Baltic schooner may possibly have met its match.” McGee raised an eyebrow. “I mean Old Lady Nozaki is one thing, even with a butcher knife. But one really doesn’t want to offend the dignity of a senior Samoan matron.”

  “You mean that lady? What can she do?”

  “Oh, like the rest of us, in today’s world, probably not a lot. But in the old days, in the traditional villages, the chiefs—and, through them, the senior women in the village—didn’t just have dignity, I mean, you know, cultural clout, but, like, a private army in the form of the young men’s organization Sorry,

  I’m just kind of nattering.”

  She negotiated the front corner of the Gooney Bird and drove around the green toward the shore road. In fact, she was a little worried. She could trust Sa’ili to deal with drunken sailors effectively but also diplomatically. She didn’t know the sister at all. The senior family advocate in the Samoan system would be the talking chief. Welly Tuiasosopo was the best surgeon in both Samoas and could hold his own in any OR in Honolulu or New Zealand, but the likelihood of his being available—or sober—for delicate issues of family pride was dim to non-existent.

  McGee’s voice
broke in. “So, tell me about your Lieutenant Han.” He said leftenant, just like, Ann supposed, the entire English-speaking world except Americans. “What’s he like? I mean, he seemed to know what he was doing this morning, but how is he as an investigator? How much of a mess is he going to leave for me to sort out? He’s not from here is he?”

  Ann drove through Fagatogo, mentally picking through McGee’s questions, trying to find something safe to respond to. “This morning? More trouble with our seafarers?” McGee nodded. Ann smiled. “They have occupied a lot of public sector attention this week. Haven’t sewed one up yet. That’s usually where I get involved. But they’ve set off at least one major scrap a day for the last week. We’ve patched up a fair number of their fellow pugilists in the ER.”

  “Those blokes are a hard lot. And I’ve been kicking around the arse-ends of the world’s oceans long enough to know.”

  “What about the girls? On the boat.”

  “Not pro’s, I don’t think.” Ann was beginning to hear the faintly Dutch overtones in McGee’s accent, subtleties of pitch and tempo in the vowels that differentiated it from the softer New Zealand or harsher Australian. “But out for what they can get. Got the impression one of them’s found herself a local sugar daddy. Lot of bitching and moaning around the dock last few days about her jumping ship.” He grinned at her. “Offered myself as consolation, but no takers.”

  “You don’t think they’re.well, kind of in over their heads? That’s what’s worrying people here, I think, Samoan andpalagi alike.”

  “Palagi. That’s whites, yes?”

  “The word actually means ‘sky-bursters’. The first people different from themselves that Samoans saw came in tall ships with tall white sails, perhaps they dropped from the skies. Now that most palagi come by air, the term is actually less fanciful than it was originally.”

  “What do they make of Han?” They rounded the point by the hotel and headed into the village of Utulei, the administrative center of the Territory. McGee had asked her that before, so she was going to have to come up with some kind of an answer.

  “The original funding for Han’s job was a grant from the Korean fishing industry based here. They wanted a Korean-speaker in the police department.

  Technically, I think, he’s still on extended leave from the San Francisco PD. And don’t ask him how he likes not carrying a gun. It’s his second least favorite question. Right behind, Where did you learn to speak such good English? Well, that and any form of joke about eating dogs.”

  McGee snorted. “Actually, he sounds sort of like a pom. That supposed to be good?”

  Ann laughed. “You use that term in South Africa?”

  “Our word isn’t so polite. Did my residency in Melbourne. Must have picked it up there.”

  “One of Han’s uncles was reading economics at Oxford when World War II broke out. Japan had annexed Korea in 1905, so his passport was Japanese.”

  “So the Brits interned him?”

  “’Enemy of the state.’ He was transported to Canada—which of course delighted his family who’d done everything they could to get him clear of the Japanese. He spent the war waiting tables at an officers’ mess. After the war, through his Oxford connections, he ended up in San Francisco. By the time he could try to find any of his family, the Korean War had come and gone, and they were all dead except this one little boy, in a Catholic orphanage in Seoul.”

  McGee grunted. “I can see how that might give you a thing about law and order. Can’t say I’m used to cops with brains, though. Comes across more like a judge.” He grinned. “If you cast Toshiro Mifune as a judge.”

  Ann grinned back. Like eating chocolate, she recognized this conversation as both self-indulgent and having more to it than its surface pleasures. Like, why was McGee so curious about Han? And why was she so eager to talk about Han to a stranger? But, like chocolate, it was hard to resist. “Yes, well, so, in answer to your first question, he does know what he’s doing. And, you’re right, he does have a thing about…social order and the rule of law. That’s probably why he gets along so well with Samoans—as little as he knows about them or them about him—that commitment to the social order. Only sometimes, it comes across like a rocket-propelled grenade.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “White?” Han said. “You sure?” That the body was a female, they had guessed in the process of extracting it from the dump. But the race had been pretty well subsumed by the Great Leveler.

  McGee snorted. “Race is something I know about, mate.” He stripped off his outer pair of latex gloves and pitched them toward the morgue trash bin. They fell onto the wet concrete floor with a soft plop. “What little hair’s left on the skull; structure of the zygomatic arches.” He drew with his index fingers across his cheekbones. His eyebrows went up and down. “But I don’t have a clue how she died. Have to wait for the fine tuning: micro slides and toxicology.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Han saw Ann bend, pick the gloves up and put them in the trash. The moment disturbed him, but he couldn’t have said why: McGee’s casual superiority; Ann’s picking up after him; the curve of her back and thigh as she reached down.

  “Do you really not have a clue? Or are you just being careful?” The smell of rotting flesh had been bad in the dump. Here, it was beyond belief.

  McGee grinned and pulled on a fresh pair of gloves. Like this morning, Han was aware of an expression that didn’t quite reach the man’s eyes. “Not going to let me get away with that, ay? Actually, it was a very precise statement. Come on, let’s get ‘er zipped up and in the cooler for a while. It’ll make the rest of my job a hell of lot easier.”

  They went outside into one of the impromptu courtyards, grassy spaces between the hospital’s four long single-story wooden pavilions and the screened breeze-ways that connected them. It was just noon. Big white clouds were beginning to pile up. By late afternoon, they would catch on the forested mountain ridges and, like leaky water balloons, drench the island before evening.

  “Okay,” Han said slowly. “Female, probably early twenties, probably white, cause of death unknown. Clothing: one lavalava made of an un-hemmed piece of fabric, one T-shirt with a logo, fa’aolo o le vao “ He nodded to Ann. “’Save the forest’, one pair of Victoria’s Secret thong panties, color black. No foot gear; no identifying marks; no other ID.”

  “Bloody good dentition,” McGee said. “And not original. Post-orthodontist and, therefore—though I wouldn’t want to have to testify to it—almost certainly American. Suspect expensive upbringing. Toenails, for instance: surprisingly good condition. Gotta say: for cause, my money’d be on OD. There’s just no violence. Hyoid intact, so probably not strangled. No obvious broken bones. Least not where they might be lethal, cause ‘er to bleed out or bleed out into a body cavity. No pooled blood anywhere: chest, belly, skull. Liver, spleen, lungs, brain all looked good. I mean,” McGee grinned, and his eyebrows went up and down. “Considering. No obvious pre-death wounds. Just the normal wear and tear of being dead in the tropics for.oh, four days, I’d say.”

  “What about infection?” Ann said. “That’s what kills most people here. Especially any kind of wound. Even minor wounds go septic all the time. On any given day, that’s most of our inpatient population.”

  “Like that guy today?” McGee said.

  She nodded.

  “Who?” Han said.

  “You know the Birdman?”

  “I know who he is.” Han thought about the Birdman on the green this morning. “Had a bandage on his hand this morning. You mean that?”

  She nodded again and made a little grimace. “When I went to pick Wills up at Nozaki’s, he was there. One of our Vikings threw him off the dock. He’s okay, but “ She looked at McGee, who nodded.

  “Our friend with the beads in his beard. From this morning. I think he’s called Ped.”

&
nbsp; “Ped,” Han said. He was still trying to take in Ann calling McGee Wills. Well, hell, they were colleagues. But, sweet Jesus: one down. One of those sons-of-bitches off of the Baltic schooner, down for assault. Now: how about homicide?

  “If she died of sepsis,” McGee’s voice broke in. “You’d expect to find a seeding point, and you saw the gross: nothing obvious in the lungs or in her belly or in her uterus.”

  “Except a pregnancy,” Ann said. Her face was tight.

  “Early,” McGee said, his voice conceding a point but unconcerned. “And a primagravida. She may not have even known yet. Certainly wasn’t showing. And it was intact. Not like she bled out or anything.”

  Her face and voice still flat, Ann said, “You can get pretty toxic pretty fast around here from simple skin wounds. We’ve had people her age die of old ear infections, and not be able to do a thing about it.”

  McGee shrugged. “Okay. But my money’s on toxic substances dujour. What’s current?”

  “Surprisingly little,” Han said. “There’s some weed. On any given day, you can walk through a cloud of it half a dozen times, but it’s home grown. Nobody’s selling it on street corners.”

  McGee grinned. “Nobody ever died of smoking marijuana.” He flashed a glance at Ann as if looking for confirmation, we liberal physicians tweaking the cop, but she was picking a scrap of trash off the lawn and probably didn’t see it.

  Han said, “From smoking it: maybe not. But plenty of people get hurt from being seen as poachers, real or imagined. And a fair number of them die. Maybe that would happen less if the stuff were legal. But it isn’t. And it happens.”

  McGee’s eyebrows went up and down again. He smiled wryly and changed the subject. “What kind of tox support you got here?”