The man in front was a big guy, about my size. He jumped toward me, swinging his arm down in a hard swift motion toward my head. I could see small teeth in his open mouth, lips pulled apart and stretched out of shape.
I didn’t duck. I didn’t even reach up to block the descending arm and hand. Instead I stepped forward, keeping my left foot planted on the sidewalk and swinging my right foot ahead and around a little in front of me as my body turned. The move pulled me just enough to my left so that when I bent forward slightly the gun or sap in the mans hand merely brushed my back, bouncing harmlessly from the skin. Without being aware of it I had, when I’d first moved, thrown my right arm across the front of my body. The hand was open, thumb pulled back from the fingers as far as I could force it, the hard ridge of muscle at the base of my little finger tight and ridged.
As the blow bounced from my back I swung toward the man, arm whipping away from my body, eyes following the dipping motion of his head and neck. The force of his blow bent him forward and I aimed my swinging hand at the base of his skull. It landed hard on his neck, with a smack like a butchers cleaver.
He kept going down but I jerked my head toward the other two men, almost on me. There was a little more light here and I could see them clearly enough. The one on my left was about my height but maybe fifty pounds under my weight, with bushy black hair and eyebrows, a big fat spread-out nose and thin lips. Light glanced from the gun in his right hand, a big automatic pistol The other man was short and stocky, with a wide square face. He didn’t hold a gun. A long-bladed knife was in his hand, held low, point forward and up.
The first guy I’d hit was still falling when I spun toward the other two, bringing my right arm back, throwing it forward like a club, hand in an open fist with the knuckles sticking out. The tall skinny guy with the gun was closer. I dropped my right shoulder, digging the toes of my right foot against the cement, drove my hand toward his midsection. I felt the knuckles hit his arm, bounce by and into his stomach. A strangled sound erupted from his mouth. I clubbed him once more, in the face this time, as that blade flashed on my right.
I jerked my body, but not quickly enough. The knife sliced across my chest, bounced from a rib. The stocky man swung back toward me, started the knife ripping toward me again. But the blades point was far to my left side. I hit his wrist, forcing it out and up, swung in toward him pivoting on my left foot and felt my hips slam into him. I got my right foot planted on the outside of his own right foot, pointing in the same direction as his, while my right arm went under his left armpit, fingers clutching the back of his coat. I twisted hard to my left, pulling with my left hand, lifting him with my right arm. He flew over my hip, turned in the air and slammed to the street. The fourth man came out of nowhere, hit me, sent me to my knees. He stumbled, sprawled near me.
The man I’d hit in the stomach was on all fours, the pistol on the asphalt a foot from me. I scooped it up, dropped flat and rolled aside, yanked at the trigger. The gun hadn’t been cocked, didn’t fire. I rolled again, got to my knees, the hard asphalt grinding skin from them. But the gun was tight in my right hand. As if I’d done it a thousand times I slapped my left hand over the top of the gun, flipped back the slide and let it snap forward again. In the same motion I jerked the guns muzzle toward a man moving near me and squeezed the trigger.
The automatic jumped, the hard blast sounding like a cannon in the quiet. But the gun hadn’t been aimed close to the man. And now I saw he hadn’t been coming toward me. He was sprinting for the car. Another man, still on all fours, was scuttling away, also toward the car. But the guy with the knife was on his feet again. And the knife was still in his fist. He took one fast step toward me, then another.
When he was a yard away, I shot him.
The big Colt was almost touching his breastbone when I pulled the trigger. It was as if I’d braced myself and kicked him with both feet. The impact of the heavy slug stopped his forward movement, spun him, even sent him backward. His arms flapped loosely, knife spinning in the air and slithering over the asphalt. He hit the street, rolled onto his side and hung there for an awful moment, nearly motionless. Then slowly his body turned and he settled face down against the pavement.
I swung toward movement on my right. Across the street, the Chevrolet was moving. I hadn’t even heard the engine start. The cars right rear door was open and one of the two men who’d run had thrown himself inside. He wasn’t yet all the way in, must have fallen flat on the floor by the rear seat. His feet stuck out past the side of the car, toes pointing downward. As the car leaped from the curb he pulled his legs in, the door slammed shut.
I raised the gun in my hand, squeezed the trigger, heard the bullet smack into the car. I kept pulling the trigger until the slide stop caught the slide, held it open. The gun was empty, but I knew I’d hit the car again. It slid around a corner with tires shrieking.
For seconds longer I stood there in the street. Nearby a light went on in a darkened building. And then impressions began to flood in on me. Street and trees, lights, farther down Monsarrat a cars headlights glowed as it came this way. Then it turned off. I realized that I was standing in a crouch, knees bent, gun held before me. And that my teeth were jammed so hard together that thin arrows of pain darted in my jaws.
Slowly I straightened up, dropped the empty gun. I looked at the man in the street, at the other man still lying face down near the brick wall. I knew the man I’d shot must be dead. I walked to him, though, touched him. There was a little hole in his chest, an unbelievably big and ragged hole in his back. The bullet had torn clear through him. He’d been dead a split second after that .45-caliber slug had touched him.
I walked to the other man, felt for the pulse in his throat. There was no pulse. His neck was broken. I stood up, dryness in my throat, my skin cold. I raised my hands and looked at them. They were trembling a little. And I felt as if I were trembling the same way inside.
I realized then that I hadn’t been frightened when those four men had come at me. Maybe there hadn’t been time for fright, but I’d known only a sudden alarm, a quickening of attention and perception. Not really fright during those swift just-ended moments. But there was fright now.
It was from not knowing who the men were, why they’d come at me . . . who I was, and what I was. Not even knowing how I’d been able to live through those moments. Except for the painful but not dangerous knife slash across my chest and side, the skin scraped from my knees, I hadn’t even been hurt. I remembered the ease with which I’d slapped back the automatics slide, remembered the edge of my palm cracking against the back of the mans neck — the man now dead at my feet. It was bad enough to know I had killed two men. But the worst of it was the not knowing. . . .
I shook it all out of my head, stood indecisive for a few more seconds, then bent and grabbed the man at my feet. I dragged him to a gate in the brick wall, and through it into the grounds before the still dark two-story building. Quickly I stripped the clothes from him, pulled off the grass skirt and dressed in the dark suit he’d worn. He’d been big enough; the suit was a pretty good fit, a little tight in the shoulders. The shoes were too small, but I got them on. His snap-brim hat fit well enough. I left him there in his shorts, the grass skirt on the ground near him, then walked to the other man, started going through his clothes. I heard a siren, raised my head. It was getting louder, coming in this direction.
Whatever papers the other man had been carrying were in his clothes, which I wore now. So I dug into the pockets of the man I’d shot, found his wallet and grabbed it. If there was anything else on him, I didn’t have time to look for it
I ran back through the gate in the brick wall, alongside the building and came out on a street named Kaunaoa. I ran to the corner, turned, kept running for a minute or two. Then I slowed, walked normally until I could hail a cab.
The cabbie, driving slowly up Kapahulu Avenue, said, Where to?
I . . . take me to a hotel. Any hotel. I thumbed through the two wallets. There were a lot of bills. I said, Make it a good hotel. Not right downtown, though.
Hawaiian Village is pretty far out. Nice place, too.
Okay.
It was after four a.m. when we got there and drove along a gently winding drive to the big, impressive entrance. A few minutes later, registered as John Smith, I was in a sixth-floor room which faced the mountains. I hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, locked the door and took a look at myself in the bathroom mirror. I wasn’t marked up much; the knife slash on my chest and side was long and painful but wasn’t going to slow me down.
I showered the dried sea salt and blood from my body, then sat in darkness on the cement deck outside my room. The wind off the sea was warm and strong. I thought for a while about what had happened, then crawled into bed.
For a minute or two after awakening I was completely disoriented. The room was strange. Bright sunlight poured past open draperies before the big sliding glass door opening onto the deck. When I moved, my head started banging; the knife slash pulled at my chest and side.
Then I remembered.
Honolulu, Hawaii. Me, John Smith, about half a day old now. And, considering the kind of muggs who seemed to be after me, not likely to get much older.
I showered and dressed, then at eleven a.m. called room service and had orange juice, a pot of coffee, and two of the local newspapers sent up. I had the juice, poured coffee and started looking through the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Honolulu Advertiser. I didn’t have to look far; both papers had the story front-paged. They were about me, I was sure. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would happen twice on the same night.
But there was no name in the stories. I learned that a man had jumped or fallen from Don the Beachcombers Tree House in the Banyan, at the International Market Place, and disappeared by fleeing into the ocean. There was a possibility that he had drowned. It was not known who the man was, since he’d given no name to the waiter who had taken his reservation for the tree house dinner. A fairly good description of the man had been obtained, however, from the waiter — and other witnesses to the event.
The waiter had also been able to supply police with the name of the woman who, presumably, had been dining in the Banyan Tree at the time of the accident. Her name was Loana Kaleoha, and she was a dancer now at the Pele. When police investigated, however, she had not been found in the tree house. A waiter stated that during the excitement she had phoned him to be let out of the house, and had disappeared; shed been carrying something in her arms, perhaps a mans coat, he said. The police had so far been unable to find Miss Kaleoha at home.
There was little more to the stories. One of them said the police had some of the mans clothing at the Honolulu Police Station. A detective named Robert Wang was on the case. There was no indication that the police knew anything about the man besides the fact that he’d toppled indelicately out of a tree, or that they had any interest in him other than the desire to ask him a few pointed questions.
What, then, had sent those four characters after me last night? I hadn’t carefully checked the clothing I’d taken from the dead man, or the wallets, so I looked over the stuff I’d placed on the dresser. Besides the two wallets, there was only a pocket comb, gummed up with hair and dandruff and dirt, a ring of keys, cigarettes, and some small change. I dropped the comb into the wastebasket and examined the wallets.
They had belonged to men named, according to the drivers licenses, Gordon Vennor and James Bowen, the former thirty-two years old, the latter forty-one. Vennor had been the guy with the knife, Bowen the first man who’d reached me there against the wall — the first man who’d died. The licenses also gave me their addresses, both in Honolulu. Nothing else in the clothing or wallets was of help to me — except the money.
The two men hadn’t been going hungry. One wallet held well over three hundred dollars, the other almost two hundred and eighty. With the small change, I now had a little more than six hundred clams. Maybe some day I’d pay back their heirs, but right now I didn’t feel guilty about using the cash.
I had a number of bruises, scrapes and aches, and my head felt pretty well battered, but aside from the physical discomfort I felt fairly good. I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I was a big guy, with short white hair and angled white eyebrows looming over gray eyes, darkly tanned face, my nose a little bent. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years old. There were some swellings on my face and forehead, a bruise on my left cheekbone, but they seemed to fit the face somehow.
The white eyebrows stood out like beacons against the deep tan of my face. I doused them with dregs of coffee from the pot until they had an odd brownish color, then put on the snap-brim hat. It helped. Not much. I looked up Loana Kaleoha in the phone directory, called her number. There was no answer. I left the room, went down to the lobby and out to the hotels entrance. Nobody paid more than casual attention to me. I climbed into a cab.
An hour later I’d checked on both Gordon Vennor and James Bowen. Both had lived alone in sleazy hotels, each in one cluttered and dirty room. The rooms didn’t tell me any more than I’d already learned from the stuff in their wallets. There was still no answer when I called Loana again.
So I went back to the cab and told the driver to take me to jail.
Twelve
The Honolulu Police Station was a big cream-colored building at the corner of Bethel and Merchant Streets. I stood across the street, looking at the carved wooden doors of the entrance at 842 Bethel, wondering how to go about this.
Farther down the block were a Surplus Center, Georges Diner, a bondsmans office. Directly across from me was the Traffic Court. Behind me on Merchant doors opened into what were apparently small offices, and over a door only a few feet away was a sign, Detective Division. I remembered the name of Detective Robert Wang had been mentioned in the newspaper reports. So I took a deep breath, and went through the door beneath the sign, Detective Division.
On my left another door led into a fairly spacious room in which several men were standing and sitting behind a long L-shaped counter. I went in, leaned against the counter and waited for somebody to walk over and put the arm on me.
Nothing happened. Finally a man in a business suit stepped up and asked me what I wanted.
Bob here?
Which Bob?
Wang.
He called to a guy across the room and the guy walked over. Wang was short, with wide shoulders, an Oriental officer with smooth skin and light brown eyes.
He looked at me and said, Do I know you?
You might have seen me around the office, Bob, I said breezily. Advertiser. Hell, maybe he had. Practically anything I told him might be true.
Uh, he said, not very happily. Another reporter. New man, arent you?
I grinned. Brand new.
Whats it this time?
Human interest stuff. Follow-up on the Banyan Tree story. Find the guy yet?
He shook his head. Not yet. But well get him.
He sounded so grim about it that I said, I — we werent even sure at the Advertiser that you’d still be looking for the guy. He didn’t do anything so terrible, did he?
Maybe. Maybe not. It could be a homicide case now.
Huh?
Couple men killed last night out on Monsarrat. Lieutenant dropped the case in my lap. We want to talk to that tree guy about it.
Something must have happened to my face. I wasn’t certain it showed, but it sure felt like it from inside.
Wang said, Whats the matter?
Uh, nothing. I thought it was just a novelty story. What makes you think he could have had anything to do with the killings?
This character ran from the Market Place wearing a ti-leaf skirt. Next to one of the dead men was — a ti-leaf skirt. And the dead man was stripped.
Looks pretty clear, wouldnt you say? The killers probably wearing the dead mans clothing right now.
This time I knew a sort of creeping sickness must have been showing on my face. I swallowed and said, Makes sense. Or maybe he just came along, saw the guy, and traded outfits . . . The expression on Wangs face stopped me. I could feel perspiration on my forehead, at the back of my neck. No, I guess not, I added lamely. I wanted out of here now, and fast, but I couldn’t turn and run. So I said, You make the guy yet?
Not yet. You know how eye-witnesses are. Weve got about seventeen different descriptions so far. The gal he was up in the tree with could give us a description of him. A good description.
This Loana?
Uh-huh. But we havent located her yet. Maybe shes with the guy. He paused. No matter, Ill have the works on him before the days over.
Oh? Anything . . . in it for me — us?
He thought about it. Don’t know why not. Come on.
I glanced back at the door leading to the outer world, then followed him across the room, into a small office. He sat behind a desk, pulled the center drawer open and took out a slip of paper. Found the guys trousers up in the tree house, he said. Nothing else, no coat, shirt, nothing. The girl wasn’t there either by the time we checked, and we havent been able to talk to her, so were not sure what happened.
Wang kept looking at me curiously, as if trying to remember where he might have seen me somewhere before. Pretty quick he was likely to match my chops with one of the descriptions of the escaped killer I was asking him about. It gave me a singularly nauseous feeling.
Finally he went on, I figure hes either a guy named Shell Scott, or Webley Alden, or a thief. One of the boys says Scotts an L.A. private detective. Don’t know who Alden is.
I looked at the paper. It was a check made out to a Shell Scott and signed Webley Alden. Printed on the check was Aldens name and an address in Medina, California.
Dance with the Dead (The Shell Scott Mysteries) Page 14