A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  “None,” Han said. “Police contract lab in Honolulu. Along with just about every other modern investigational tool you think you can’t do without.”

  McGee grinned at him again. “Sounds like home to me, mate. Turn around time?”

  “Problem’s transport. Next flight’s Saturday afternoon. Unless the airline strike happens. If it does, you can sail your samples up there faster. Not to mention the body.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Let’s get some lunch.”

  Han thought: classic pathologist gambit. Gross ‘em out over food. Han viewed himself as the least picky eater on the planet, but the hospital dining room sometimes pushed his limits, immediately post-autopsy or no. He turned to Ann.

  “Baked any bread lately?”

  “Sure,” she said. Who says, Han thought, English isn’t a tonal language? Yes, her voice said, and don’t think for a minute I don’t know what you’re doing. She looked at McGee. “I could make you guys some sandwiches, if you want. I live just across the road. What used to be the Nursing School.”

  They followed her out through the hospital breezeways. Noonday sun radiated up from the packed sand of the hospital drive, blinding them at first. A white girl, Han thought. So why isn’t the entire palagi community screaming the place down? What do the funky clothes mean? Was this chickie living with one of the warring dump families? So who can I get to rat? Ann led them up through the low terraces of the old nursing school compound.

  “.These two front pavilions were classrooms. The four back here were dorms.. “

  What about the blond boat floozy? But even so, why wasn’t the schooner’s crew—or at least the other boat girls—screaming the place down? Conspiracy? Coercion? We know you guys—girls—offed her. We’ll keep quiet for a price.

  “.Nobody’s fantasy of a tropic island paradise, but they’re not as bad as you’ll hear from your colleagues. There’s nothing like Americans who think they deserve better.”

  “’Spect I’ll live on board my boat,” McGee said. “I’ve got a car, so that’s not a problem. Though I’m gettin’ a little tired of the company at Nozaki’s. Think they’d let me anchor here in the cove?”

  “Possibly. Ask Old Mrs. Nozaki about it. A nephew of hers runs the store at the end of the hospital drive.” Ann nodded at the rough quadrangle between the old dorm buildings, scrubby and unkempt, patchy grass, sand, weeds. “What my aunt, the anthropology professor, calls ‘The tragedy of the commons among people without community’,” Ann said. “Could be Texas.”

  Han surfaced suddenly into the interaction between Ann and McGee. Was she flirting with him? Didn’t sound like it. She was giving a lecture, something she did when she was disconnecting herself from things. Her family were academics, so maybe that was how they handled emotion. Worked for him. He sank back into his own thoughts.

  Occam’s razor: look for the simplest connecting solution. In this case, one dead blond white girl had to be the boat floozy, killed by her companions and disposed of by them, until proven otherwise. How the hell’d they get her out there? How the hell’d they know about a private dump site? Well, figure that out, and you’ve got ‘em.

  Ann unlocked her door. (At least, Han thought, he had gotten her to start locking it.) Before McGee could follow her, she was herding him back out again, carrying a kitchen chair like a lion tamer. “Why don’t you guys sit out here? The place is so small, and there’s no air conditioning. At least the overhang gives some shade.” Han suppressed a grin. Ann was doing her Samoan thing: perfectly obliging regarding guests but all open and entirely visible to the village.

  “Funny,” McGee said, standing on the narrow lanai in the shade under the eaves and looking across the shabby compound toward where the ocean should have been. “To be this close to the water and have no idea it’s there. You can’t even hear it.”

  “Faga’alu cove—Faga’alu’s the village between here and the shore road—is well inside the reef, so you don’t get the waves and you don’t hear the pounding on the reef. Like I said, you might as well be in Texas.”

  “Wintervelt,” McGee said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Not important. So how long have you been here?”

  “In the Pacific, altogether, more than ten years. You could almost say I grew up here. Peace Corps in Western Samoa; public health, medical school, and internship in Hawai’i. Now back here for what’s supposed to be more public health residency. All a bit of a stretch. I remember it sounding good at the time but, for the life of me, I can’t remember why.” For a moment, her face and her voice were normal: wry, comic. Sex was one thing, but Ann could make Han laugh. No one had ever done that before. It was what he had fallen in love with. Her eyebrows twitched, but she was looking at the floor. “But here I am.”

  McGee laughed. “Hopeless case.”

  She smiled and went back into the kitchen. Han took his sandwich and his glass of water from her and sat down in the shade on the cool concrete of the lanai. Again, he wondered if she was flirting with McGee. Would he, Han, know? He took a bite of sandwich. The bread was wonderful. He knew, in an intellectual way, that his wife was a brilliant cook. That was part of what she was doing back here with Sa’ili and Welly and their tourism project: sushi for the masses. But rice was not his comfort food. Ann made the closest thing to a Caesar hero on sourdough French anywhere more than a mile from San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.

  He thought about what Ioane had said. Not about the dead girl’s family. Who the hell knew who they were other than rich, some where back there in New Muddle, U.S.A., paying for orthodontists and a taste for fancy underwear. Samoa was the place you couldn’t get lost. Everybody always knew where everybody was, and if they didn’t, they were raising hell about it. Four days and no had reported her missing? And, like Ann said, no one screamed louder than palagis. In Samoa, unidentified didn’t mean who is it? It meant who’s lying?

  Okay, let’s do devil’s advocate. Who else could she be other than the boat blond? Could she just be some girl who climbed off an airplane long enough ago to have been dead for four days but not long enough to have been identified as being here, at least in the Samoan sense of belonging to some group. Or to have her family screaming because they hadn’t heard from her? So, airplane arrivals, one-ways from somewhere, like he had told Ioane, any day up to about this Monday. And if he was right, and this was some kind of quickie, got off the plane, got the chop and that was it..

  McGee laughed at something Ann said, and Han wondered about McGee. Here for something less than a week. Has a car and no visible attachments. Could he have arranged to meet someone, or, more likely, someone insisted on meeting him here, now that he was going to be in one place for a while? Meet her at the airport. No, I don’t care whether you say you’re pregnant and how would I know it was my kid anyway, bitch? Not my problem; you’re not ruining my life. Whop. Into the short-bed pickup. Off to the dump. And now here I am, the new medical examiner and forensic pathologist, commenting on the fetal age of my own kid, isn’t it all mysterious? Wouldn’t be the first time a man had chosen that mode of solving a question of paternity.

  CHAPTER 8

  Angry, relieved, Ann watched Han and McGee walk back toward the hospital together. She picked up the chairs she had set out for them.Han had disdained his.and half threw them back into the kitchen. Metal feet clattered on the linoleum. Fuck Han anyway. What did he think he was doing? All but throwing her at McGee. She slammed things around in the kitchen a little more and then decided that she’d better just go for a swim and then see if she could get a couple of hours sleep before she had to be in the ER at four for the beginning of her shift.

  What was the likelihood that she had not known that person? That young woman she had just watched McGee slice up for their edification? Oh, be fair: edification in the hopes of discovering how she had died. Ann pulled on a bathin
g suit and wrapped a towel around herself as a lavalava. One didn’t need any more clothing than that in Samoa, at least outside of church, but one did need that. Because she had been here so long, at least relative to any of the other palagi doctors, and because she was female, she ended up doing a lot of women’s team primary care, even though her actual job was in the pubic health division, with a little moonlighting in the ER. She’d even done throat cultures on the three girls off of the Baltic schooner when they first arrived, all complaining of sore throats. But she remembered the blond girl off the boat as chubbier than the dead girl. Beyond that, Ann had no memory of a well-cared-for blond palagi female that she had seen recently, in clinic or out. Certainly not one who would have been caught dead in that ragged old lavalava and a do-gooder T-shirt. She shivered and made a face. Caught dead. Ugh. Puns aside, the outfit was more like the kind of thing you’d see on a Peace Corps volunteer or a palagi married to a local. The physical description McGee had concocted from that reeking corpse was more like someone who would turn up at the hotel. But, like the boat girls, you’d expect the uniform: short, short, khaki shorts, crop tops, gold earrings and anklets. Would that account for her anonymity, being a hotel guest? But why the funky clothing? Didn’t sound like the persona McGee had painted. Don’t let it be me she thought suddenly, pulling her door closed behind her. Free, lost, alone, gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  Han drove McGee back to Nozaki’s dock. “S’pose I could run the distance every day,” McGee said. “Doesn’t look like more’n about five K.”

  “You could,” Han said, wondering why McGee would raise this as an issue now. Wanting to avoid the reminder that he had acquired a vehicle so soon? Or just scoring, man-to-man, against Han. But Han could play too. He negotiated the tight curves of the shore road just fast enough to force McGee to hold on to the door frame. “But the locals like picking off stray runners.”

  “Picking ‘em off? You mean, like, shooting?”

  “No. Rocks. And they’ve got good aim. Or grab you as they go by in a car. Over where I live, on the far side of the bay, where you actually have to run through villages, they usually just mob you. Boys in their late teens. It’s a way of letting off steam. Their lives are so controlled otherwise, it’s about all they’re allowed to get away with.”

  “Jesus. Welcome to the new South Africa. That personal experience?”

  “In the beginning. They don’t bother me any more.”

  McGee grinned. “Doesn’t pay to beat up coppers, ay?”

  “Something like that.” He glanced at McGee. “What’s your take on the Baltic schooner crew? You’ve been living with ‘em for a week.”

  McGee grinned. “You asking as a sailor or as a cop?”

  Han snorted. “I don’t even like toy boats in the bath tub. Their papers list them as a commercial venture, tourism. But other than the local whores complaining about the girls cutting into their business, I haven’t seen any obvious signs of enterprise.”

  “Haven’t a clue. The blokes are right bastards. The birds are “ He shrugged and grinned. “Well, you’ve seen ‘em. What can I say?”

  “They all still accounted for?”

  “The girls, you mean? Far as I know. Can’t say I kept tight watch after my first lack of success. Bloke with boat, not much interest.” He grinned at Han again. “Particularly not with smaller boat.”

  “When was the last time you saw the blond one?”

  McGee looked at him steadily for a moment. “Not today, certainly. Nor yesterday, I don’t think. Beyond that “ He shook his head. “Couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Ever see her in local clothes?”

  “You mean, like the body? No way. Strictly up-market, that one.”

  “ Victoria’s Secret?”

  McGee shrugged. “Point taken. But still. It’s a chore to get a stiff into a T-shirt. And the skirt wrap thing, what-do-you-call it..”

  “Lavalava.”

  “Ann said it was tied properly. Suggests she did it herself. The dead girl, I mean.”

  Han didn’t add, or whoever did it for her. He parked the jeep on the stretch of hard sand that Old Lady Nozaki considered her private parking spot. McGee unloaded himself and, with a wave of thanks, was gone around the end of the building. Heat radiated up from the road in visible waves, and, when Han stepped out of the jeep at the edge of the pavement, the tarmac gave underfoot. He followed McGee, in the mood for some serious police harassment. But the schooner wasn’t tied up to the dock. For a second, he thought, Fuckers! Got away! Then he saw the big sailboat tied out in the bay. McGee was pulling away from the dock in a little boat that looked like Han’s daughter’s swimming pool.

  “Give me a ride?”

  “Out to the schooner?”

  Han nodded, McGee nosed back into the dock, and Han stepped into the dinghy. He slipped into the single butt’s-worth of passenger space, trusting to the cover of dark glasses and the fact that you’re always sweating in Samoa anyway, so who’s to tell heat from nerves. McGee rowed facing backwards, another of the incomprehensible customs of boat people, but from this position Han could examine the schooner as they approached it. He didn’t like boats because he didn’t like the notion of drowning, particularly not in something he couldn’t control himself, but that didn’t mean he was oblivious to how beautiful the thing was: gleaming varnished wood and brass, the tracery of lines and spars against the sky, the slow lift and fall of the hull riding in the water, as if it were breathing.

  McGee turned in his seat and hailed the schooner. No answer. “May be nobody home,” he said. “Dinghy’s gone. But it’s not at Nozaki’s.” He hailed again.

  “Both Paki’s Bar and the hotel have docks. Could be there.”

  As McGee’s dinghy drifted closer, the big boat’s sides loomed above them. A scream, short, high-pitched, hair-raising, blasted from the boat. Pure instinct, Han bellowed Police! grabbing for some kind of hand-hold on the schooner’s sides and almost capsizing the dinghy.

  McGee yelled, “Siddown, dammit!” He was laughing now, though in that first instant when they had heard the scream, Han had seen the shock in the man’s face. “It’s a bird,” he said and then grinned. “Not that kind of bird. Bloody great eagle or something.”

  “Public Health know it’s here?”

  “Bloody worse than that. Birdman knows it’s here. S’why he tackled that guy, Ped, this morning. Like Ann told you: threw him in the water. Lady who runs the place was some kind of pissed.”

  “Not the first time Old Lady Nozaki’s dealt with drunken sailors.”

  “That’s why they’re tied out here now instead of red carpets on the dock.” McGee pushed off from the schooner with one oar and started back across the open water toward the dock. “Though the close-in moorings don’t really work for something this size. Birdman’s staying with some local bigwig, has a kind of native villa above the main village. Ann drove him up there after we fished him out of the water.”

  Pago Pago was the only village name outsiders knew, if they knew any, but once you were here, Fagatogo would be most people’s idea of the main village. And there was only one house in Fagatogo apalagi would describe as McGee had. “This bigwig: named Sa’ili Tua’ua? Or, Nofonofo Sa’ili, by his traditional chiefly title.”

  “Maybe. I’m no good at names yet.”

  “These guys,” Han nodded toward the schooner, “Ever bring anybody on board but their own girls?”

  “Not that I’ve seen. But they got here at least a day before I did.”

  “Which was?”

  “Me? Friday.”

  “From?”

  “Apia. Actually, they were there too, I think. Harborage was a lot more crowded than here, but I’m pretty sure they were there when I arrived. It’s a hard boat to miss.”

  The dinghy bumped against the concrete doc
k. Han grasped the dock ladder and began the delicate business of getting from the dingy to the ladder without landing himself in the water or flipping the dingy. The quick patter-patter of rubber sandals sounded above their heads. Old Lady Nozaki’s round face appeared above him like a frowning orange moon.

  “Hey, you, Mr. Police-man. Park where you suppose to.” Han started up the ladder. “You go home, eat dinner with family tonight. Your wife buys very good fish today.” Han didn’t guess the old bat had thought twice about Sakiko the first time she’d been in Samoa, but now that Sakiko was working for Sa’ili, Old Lady Nozaki was suddenly founder and president of the Nippon Benevolent Society.

  Han stood up on the dock. “How come you didn’t report the sailor from the schooner throwing the Birdman into the water?”

  “Hah. You think you know everything? Police are no good. Better I do things myself.”

  McGee was sculling just off of the dock, enjoying the show.

  “They still got all three girls out there with them?”

  The old lady snorted. “Pah. You want girls? Mo’ better you go to the Gooney Bird.”

  Han ignored her. “I would like to know if all the boat girls are all accounted for. Like, when was the last time you saw the blond one, the palagi?”

  “Who cares? Not me. She never pays for nothing. Alla time complain. Milk sour. Shower dirty. No sweets she likes. Stay away. Fine with me.”

  “Did you see her, say, yesterday?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Who cares?”

  Han didn’t believe her. On the other hand, this conversation was going nowhere. “Would your nephew have a mooring in Faga’alu Cove for Dr. McGee? He works at the hospital. Makes sense for him to keep his boat there.” The old lady’s nostrils flared. Han could all but read her calculation of what she would extract from her nephew for the referral.

  “Sure,” she said, nodding to McGee. “I fix you up.”