A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  She slipped out of the water and into the shelter of the grove, trying not to rattle branches, run a stalk into her eye or step on anything obviously disastrous. From here, she knew that she was just to the right of the hospital drive. She wasn’t sure how strict the evening prayers curfew was in the hospital village, but the number of young men in white shirts on the beach was not encouraging. She, like most Samoans, made a point of not having to go anywhere from six to seven in the evening. She listened, tense, trying to get a sense for what was going on down the beach.

  A car crossed the bridge over the Faga’alu creek, headed towards her. Its lights caught the group on the beach. Then the squared-off form of a hard-top jeep swept past her. She couldn’t see the driver, but there was only one person who drove like that and didn’t give a damn whether it was evening prayers time or the

  Pope’s birthday. Should I tell him about McGee? No: you don’t want him to know you were that stupid.

  She heard a distant patter inland, like people trotting in rubber slippers: tropical rain, on the march. The sound grew to the high-pitched clatter of horses galloping on pavement, and then water pounded down through the leaves onto her head. She couldn’t see more than a few yards. But nobody else could either. She dashed across the road. Water bounced up, heated, from the tarmac. She darted into the darkness under the canopy trees and started up the lane to the hospital, alert as an animal for the patrol.

  The rain eased, and she became aware of some kind of commotion ahead. She shrank to the right, out of the line of the light at the end of the road. Though all she really had to do was be quiet. Whatever was going on would occupy any good villager’s attention. Against the lights from the hospital grounds, she could see four or five of the patrol around a tall, bearded figure.

  A high tenor voice snapped, “Leave me alone, will you. I just want a beer.” Grayson, the hospitalized biologist. Or, at least, supposed to be hospitalized.

  Inspired, Ann called out, in English, “Thank God.” And then, in Samoan, “Thank you for finding him. This is my patient. He is ill and confused from a bad wound.”

  She slipped between the patrol, grasped the biologist’s forearm and lifted the hand with the rain-soaked dressing up as Exhibit One. “Let us get him back to the hospital.”

  Fortunately, the palagi lady doctor who spoke Samoan was well enough known that, even under the extreme circumstances of disturbing evening prayers time and being rather inappropriately dressed, her spin on the situation carried the moment. At least the rain explained her being soaking wet. For a split second nobody moved or said anything, and Ann thought she might be in the soup after all. Then, the tight circle of Samoans shifted back a pace with a polite rumble of nods and greetings. Now for Grayson. She had no idea how toxic he really was, but even your average psychotic will respond to a direct command, if you’re lucky. At least for a moment. Ann shifted her grip to above Grayson’s elbow and steered him through the group up the road, murmuring, “You want a beer. I’ll get you a beer. But right now, we’re going to keep you from getting stoned. And I don’t mean marijuana.”

  The two largest of the Samoans peeled away from the group and flanked them up the road. Grayson didn’t say anything, and he had the sense not to pull away from her. As they moved into the pool of light from the hospital, she glanced up at him. He had the raccoon-eyed look of people whose medications are making them crazy. The rain picked up again. Ann turned to their minders.

  “Thank you,” she said again, hunching her shoulders against the rain. “I think we’ll be okay from here. God’s peace to your families.”

  The two young men halted and returned her formal farewell. But they didn’t stop watching until Ann led the biologist up the steps onto the hospital verandah.

  “Shit,” Grayson said. “What was that all about?”

  “Evening prayers curfew. Thought you’d have known about that by now.”

  “Don’t need prayers in the woods. Need to know what the hell you’re doing.” Grayson’s eyes glinted in the light, and suddenly Ann was seeing one of her sisters’ horses, flinging its head up, ears flat, with that half-mad look horses get when their fears reduce them to the size of rabbits. Fortunately, the skies opened again like a breaking dam. She hauled the biologist through the hospital’s front door, hoping like hell she could attract some attention and get help before he broke away from her again.

  He balked, just inside the screen. Again, she was aware of smells: rusty screen, rotting vegetation, a rank scent that must be the man himself. He looked at her intently, grey eyes flat and unreadable. He pulled away. For a moment, she was afraid of him; she couldn’t have said why; hospitals were one of the few places where she was rarely afraid of people.

  “Come on,” she said again, her voice hearty and her guts hollow. But the roar of the rain blunted other sounds. Half shouting, she said, “Better get you back to the ward before the nurses discover you’ve tried to make a break for it.” She gestured to his arm. A slow trickle of blood was reforming where the rain had washed it clean. “What on earth did you do with your IV? You better not have wasted any of our IV antibiotics.”

  “Fuck,” he said, mumbling, looking abashed. And, like having a frenzied, three-quarter-ton animal go quiet under your hands, he came along.

  Suddenly, Samoan nurses filled the hallway in front of them. That is, there were two of them and that was more than enough. They marched the poor man back to the men’s surgery ward. Ann wondered fleetingly how many cockroaches there were in the ward bathtub tonight and then wondered if she was going to get to the dinner with the inspectors and then wondered how life in a place where nothing much ever happened could have gotten so complicated. She grabbed a scrub shirt from a cart then stopped at the nursing station. Sure enough, Grayson had missed his evening antibiotics. Just as well. Now to find something that wouldn’t make him crazy. She went over to Grayson’s cubicle. The nurses were still mopping him up and getting him settled.

  The first thing she saw was the bouquet on the table beside Grayson’s bed. One large butter-yellow hibiscus and two smaller ones, pink and red, arranged just so in a tiny, dark-glazed vase. The vase had the graceful swell from foot to lip that only a skilled hand can do, simple, dynamic, elegant, feminine.

  With an almost audible pfuut, like the sound of the flare opening against the evening sky, Ann’s mind lit up. Sakiko and the Birdman? Colleagues: of course. Kindness to an ill colleague. But she didn’t know which was more awful, her thoughts or the hopes that rose with them. She walked back to the nursing station and re-wrote Grayson’s orders, hardly conscious of what she was doing.

  Finally headed home, down a hospital corridor, she saw Neil Hutchinson, the hospital director, come through a side door. He took in her definitely-not-dressed-for-dinner outfit. Also the meaning of bare feet, wet shorts, and dampness seeping into the scrub shirt.

  “Were you on that boat? What’s going on? Anyone hurt?”

  “’D’you talk to McGee?”

  “Said he didn’t see any other boats. Maybe somebody just goofing off with a flare gun.”

  Ann laughed, a startled bark of sound. “Well: he certainly doesn’t lie.” She had not, in the forty-five minutes of getting off of the boat and then through the village and then dealing with Grayson, thought about how to manage McGee professionally. Han, she could avoid. Neil was the asshole’s supervisor.

  “We had a disagreement,” she said. “About what it means for a colleague to agree to help you move your boat from one anchorage to another. But he’s probably right. No harm done.” Neil looked at her, his eyebrows drawn to a wrinkle in the middle, his face legible as movie sub-titles: Thank-you for not making me have to deal with this right now.

  “Well,” he said. “Go get changed. Adele and I’ll give you a ride to dinner.”

  CHAPTER 21

  At the police station, Han found Ioane l
aboriously writing out his report on the search of the cove. Han was grateful that some part of his life was trying to do right without him prodding it, but sometimes he just wished Ioane would get a life, recognize when his shift was over and go home. And he had enough grace to know that the message was for himself as much as Ioane.

  “What’d’you find? Keep it short. I need dinner, and you need to get home.”

  Ioane grinned. “Very much garbage, sir. All bagged for rubbish now. Also, a thing.” He spread his arms, making a rough square about five feet by five feet. “Plastic.” From a drawer, folded into a sealed clear plastic bag and, thanks be to God, even labeled, was an orange square of woven stuff. Between the edges, Han could see the reverse side was silver.

  “Used to be called ‘space blankets’. Standard camping gear. Boats too, probably. Waterproof, hold or reflect heat as needed.”

  “It is torn,” Ioane said. “Many scrapes. Much dirt.” He produced the adverbial iambs with as much pride as he had the space blanket. “Two old ladies are gossiping.” Again, his eyes seemed to sparkle as much with the pleasure of the new word as the meaning. “They are friends of Mrs. Nozaki. They tell “ He shook his head impatiently. “… Told her they…saw the tall bearded palagi sitting by the roadside on a big rock. They remember because he is so careful. He sits on his orange lavalava spread upon the rock. They laugh about this very much. Because he is so drunk, he sits on the wrong side of the road.”

  “What time?”

  Ioane shrugged. “Time with old ladies is always very hard. Mid-day? The sun is high, very hot.”

  “Noon yesterday, yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They were walking and saw him? What’s the wrong side of the road?”

  “Bay side, sir. Bushes and rocks. Very bad place to walk.”

  So, had someone run over the drunken s.o.b. and then just rolled him into the water? It wasn’t exactly where they’d found the scraps the sharks had left. How far would the sharks drag the corpse? What would tide and current add? “I’m assuming they saw him sitting on something orange—like, maybe the space blanket—and called it a lavalava. The guy wasn’t naked from the waist down.”

  Ioane laughed. “No, sir. Like all sailors: khaki shorts, T-shirt.”

  “No description of the shirt?” More of Pedersen’s shirt had been left than torso.

  “No, sir.”

  “Okay, well, find a picture of Pedersen and show it to your old ladies. See if you can get a positive ID.” He tried to remember Pedersen alive on the village green yesterday morning instead of dead in the water this morning. “Ask ‘em if they saw the beads in his beard. Where was the space blanket?”

  Ioane grinned slyly, and Han guessed that, even more than finding witnesses who were probably, other than his murderer, the last people who had seen Thor-vald Pedersen alive, this was the payoff.

  “In the water, sir. Under rocks.” He gestured, making melon-sized boulders between his hands. “Maybe the rocks fall. But I do not think so.” If Ioane didn’t think the rocks could have fallen on the submerged space blanket by accident, then Han was about as certain as he could be that they hadn’t. And what about Pedersen’s shorts? Had they been full of rocks as well?

  “Good work,” Han said. “Very good.” The gratitude in the kid’s eyes almost hurt. Han had turned to walk away but he stopped and looked at Ioane again. “Why did they think he was drunk? Did they talk to him? Smell him?”

  “No, sir. They were across the road. But he sings.”

  “He was singing?”

  Ioane nodded. “Singing. Yes, sir. Old ladies think this is very funny.”

  “Anything else?”

  Ioane hesitated, and, again, Han had the sense that something was on the boy’s mind. But then Ioane reached back into the drawer, pulled out another plastic bag. It held a tangle of brown cord attached to a small sack about the size of a man’s hand, woven of the same brown cord.

  “With the body.”

  Han turned the plastic bag in his hands, shifting the contents between his fingers. “Some kind of purse?”

  “Of a lady.” Han looked at him. “There are much rotten plants. You remember. We get.got the body to the bag…and…on the stretcher.” Han remembered the scene clearly enough. You try not to shut down, try not to miss details, but there are times when your mind refuses to take things in.

  “How do you know it’s a purse? Was there a label? Anything in it?”

  “It is DKNY.” He said it like a brand name, though Han didn’t recognize it. “Not sold here or Apia. I ask at the shops. Only Honolulu or Auckland. It is empty.”

  Ninety-nine percent of what’s found at a crime scene is junk. But you get an instinct for what isn’t. Like the space blanket. “Show it to the people on the schooner. See if it belongs to any of them.” Ioane’s eyes widened. “The girls, I mean.” Han’s gaze swung around the office. “Speaking of those girls: anybody talk to them yet?”

  Ioane made a face. “Mele says she writes the report tomorrow.” Before Han could explode, Ioane went on. “The girls told her they do not see Wendy for four days. They are worried because they think she is pregnant.”

  “ID?”

  “No,” Ioane said. His face took on the stoic dispassion of someone delivering bad news to a superior, with the attendant risks. “Mele says, ‘this is the work of chiefs’.”

  Han snorted. “She’s probably right. But not right this minute. Girls back on the boat?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. They can stay there. I’m going to get something to eat.”

  Paki’s Bar and Grill was indeed open for business and doing just fine by way of repairing the family fortunes depleted by any big funeral. Ioane hadn’t talked to Paki himself, but one of the busboys had told him that the big sailor with the beads in his beard had been drinking there late yesterday morning. Certainly before they started serving the regular lunch crowd and definitely after Dr. Tuia-sosopo had left. (There was some use in Welly’s being so well known in all the bars on the island; his comings and goings were the local version of the time records built into surveillance cameras.) The sailor hadn’t eaten lunch there. Indeed, the boss had chucked him out when he had started to sing. Han wondered idly what Paki’s gift was at getting Pedersen out of his bar without setting off a fight; no one else had managed that. Maybe because Pedersen had been alone. It was a good enough pretext for combining dinner with a quiet talk with the restauranteur.

  Paki shrugged as he brought out Han’s seared ahi himself. “Guy was no biggie. I was a M.P. in the Army.”

  “Yeah, well, so was I. Can’t say it’s helped a lot with this bunch. Do you remember what time you ran him out?”

  “Lieutenant. I never ‘run out’ a customer.”

  “Yeah, okay, you escort them to the door for a little fresh air. What time, in this case?”

  Paki shrugged again. “Eleven-thirty?”

  “Your busboy told my officer it was because he was singing. That right?”

  “Well, he was sure makin’ a hell of a lot of noise. Maybe he called it singing. He was some kind o’ drunk. I mean, that’s my business, but this guy was putting it away like someone stole his last love. Good thing he didn’t have a car. I’d’a had to find someone to drive him back to the dock.” Paki oozed civic virtue.

  “Drinking with anybody in particular?”

  Paki shook his head. “Nah. Just putting it away like he couldn’t afford to let up. Cause if he ever sobered up, he was gonna feel real bad.”

  “He meet anyone outside?”

  “Nah. And I watched him ‘til he started up the road. Made sure he didn’t just lie down in the middle of the road to sleep it off.”

  “Nothing else? Nothing unusual? Nobody unusual here for lunch?”

  Paki shook his he
ad again. “Right about then I got the call about my uncle dying out in Amouli. We closed right after that. Well, one funny thing did happen. Bunch of Koreans tried to come in here. They know I don’t like ‘em in here. They’re dirty, and they stink of fish.”

  Han didn’t comment, but one corner of his mouth twisted.

  “Meaning no disrespect, Lieutenant.”

  “What time was this? When the fishermen turned up?”

  “Round about all that same time. When the guy you were asking about left. But they weren’t still outside when I went out with him.”

  “You didn’t see which way they went?”

  “Nah, but this is about as far around the bay as they come.”

  Outside, climbing into his jeep, Han thought that Paki probably did mean no disrespect. To Han, that is. He just didn’t see Han as Korean.

  Han drove through Pago, quiet now in the soft, deep, dark. There weren’t any bars in Pago. Han wondered if that was another of the unspoken ways in which the wider community kept the fishermen immured in their unofficial ghetto around the fishing docks and the cannery. Only the squatter community of Tongans up on the mountainside above the canneries had ever shown much hospitality to the fishermen and even that only as commercial transactions of one sort of another. But at least, in the bitter lives of the fishermen, that was something.

  He parked in front of the fleet office and sat looking out across the bay. The chain of street lights along the shore road was punctuated, like the glitter of big pendant jewels, by extra lights at Paki‘s, at Nozaki‘s, then along the stretch of beach at Fagatogo and on around to the point and the hotel. The dozen or so boats anchored off of Nozaki‘s were silhouetted against the lights. But, in daylight at least, could anything happen on one of those boats that an observer here wouldn‘t see, wouldn‘t hear? Seemed unlikely.

  Han got out of the jeep and walked up the road toward the fishing docks, sandals crunching in the sand. The shore road threaded through the cannery compound, in places almost beside the network of smaller docks where the fishing boats tied up. The men lived on board, even in port. The area right around the marine railway was flood-lit but quiet. Last night, they had been sandblasting one of the boats, and the place had looked like a special corner of hell. Now it just looked burnt out, as the tuna fleet always did to him, rusting relics of a never-quite-consummated dream of first-world status.