Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “Exactly what you heard. Maybe he was just going to sharpen a pencil, but that’s not what it looked like to me, in the middle of the night. When I saw the Japanese houseman bringing him food on a silver tray maybe I should have got up and drawn him a bath. But I just have no way of knowing these things. He looked dangerous to me, and Mary and I had a naïve idea we were doing a patriotic duty. And anyway, how do you know all this? How do you know when he got there, and what he was doing?”

  He was looking at me thoughtfully and with not quite so much distaste.

  “That happens to be my business,” he said quietly. “We have agents.”

  He hesitated. “I don’t mind telling you we’ve had one on the Cather place a long time, knowing Roy Cather would try to get back. We were sure he was going to, after the broadcast from Tokyo.”

  I looked at him skeptically. If he had an agent on the place he was equipped with a magic hat that made him invisible to mortal eyes. Alice Cather, of course, had told Uncle Roy that I was it. I wondered suddenly if it could be Alice herself.

  “Who is your agent?” I asked blandly.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “What was the broadcast? Can you tell me that?”

  He nodded. “It was to Alice Cather. She was in Washington then. It said, ‘The Cardinal will call soon. Be at home.’ It was picked up by monitors and amateurs all over the country. I saw her on Massachusetts Avenue and she pretended she hadn’t heard it, but she was terrified. And that’s when she decided to come home. No cardinal called on her in Washington.”

  I thought with some triumph that I might be halfwitted but I was at least ahead of him on something.

  “One did here,” I said.

  He looked at me as if he thought I’d lost my mind. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, one did here. He meant a redbird.”

  “A redbird? Oh, you mean——”

  “A cardinal, a bird with red feathers. That was his signal. I heard it when she did. She was scared out of her wits. That’s how I got in it in the first place.”

  He sat there looking at me—narrowly, I believe it’s called.

  “I should have thought your agent would have told you,” I added, not without malice. “And about Kumumato cutting the phones off, and about Roy Cather’s daughter——”

  He cut me off. “We know all about that. The phones from the house and the shelter have been under observation. He called the house, and he called his daughter. She went up and got a message he slipped under the door to her. We have the message. He ordered her to go to Mrs. Cather and have her unlock the door and let him out. And Corinne didn’t do it. She went home and reported him to G2. At once, I may say. She turned him in before the man we sent to check on her got there.”

  “How patriotic,” I said. “Or was it? Why did she?”

  It just didn’t make sense to me. I suppose I should have admired her loyalty, but somehow, what with her barging in on the Cathers and the story she’d told Swede, it sounded to me more like the fine old Order of the Double Cross.

  “Does she know he’s dead?” I added.

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “She probably thinks Army Intelligence has him. The reason she reported him is obvious. In the first place, get it out of your head that the Japanese and part Japanese in these Islands are on the side of Japan. Most of them are loyal citizens and have proved it. They know too much about Japan to want to be slave labor for their emperor. And Corinne . . . well, she would have been running an awful risk helping to hide him. I don’t know how she feels about her father. I know how I feel about him. Anyway, she turned him in—in great haste.”

  “That’s . . . funny,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  I let that pass. “And I suppose Kumumato’s a fine, loyal, upstanding citizen too. I suppose he didn’t know who he was taking food to, in the middle of the night. Or why he polished up the air-raid shelter. Or——”

  “He knew who he was taking food to,” Colonel Primrose said calmly. “He didn’t polish up the shelter.”

  “Who did, then?”

  “The fingerprints on the under side of the table and chairs are Mrs. Bronson’s.”

  “Oh,” I said. I sat there, trying to put two and two together. The only thing Colonel Primrose hadn’t seemed to know about was Roy Cather in my room. And Alice Cather did know it . . . and it was the only thing Kumumato didn’t know . . .

  It dawned slowly on me who the invisible agent on the Cather place was.

  Colonel Primrose smiled a little at the look on my face, and nodded.

  “I expected you’d guess that sooner,” he said blandly. “Would you think we’d help Roy Cather get to a place where there was a Japanese we weren’t absolutely sure of?”

  I shook my head, trying to make more of the basic two plus two.

  “Kumumato,” he said, “has a law degree and he’s a public accountant. He worked for a firm with offices in Tokyo and travelled back and forth a good deal. Roy Cather had become a Japanese subject, out of our jurisdiction—one of those people who thought the Japanese culture was superior. He had a Japanese wife under Japanese law. His function for the Japanese was to interpret this country to them. Kumumato kept in touch with him. He told Kumumato he’d be back when there was a war . . . and the Japs placed Kumumato with the Cathers again. In a sense, at any rate—they bombed him out on the 7th, incidentally killing his daughter, so he could move up there without attracting any particular attention.”

  “And Corinne?”

  Colonel Primrose shrugged. “Roy Cather misunderstood her too. He thought both of them loved Japan, as he did, and hated America, as he did. I assure you, Mrs. Latham, she’s been checked again and again.”

  I sat there a little disconcerted, all my spies evaporating like mist before my eyes.

  “But,” I said, “how do you account for her coming up to the Cathers, the way she’s done?”

  “—A purely personal matter between her and the Cathers,” he said quite suavely. “None of the Army’s business. She’d have been up there long ago if she’d known she could. That was what her father told her last night. It was his threat against Alice Cather.”

  I remembered then Alice Cather saying, “And she’s not coming here,” when Mary and I were listening to them through the open door.

  “—It’s no concern of mine,” Colonel Primrose said.

  “Is murder any concern of yours?” I asked. I wouldn’t, even at that point, have given three cents for Corinne Farrell’s survival value if she stayed on up at the Cathers’ house. I could feel it in the air, the way I’d felt it when she stood in the doorway asking her Aunt Alice where her bags should be put. And Colonel Primrose misunderstood me the way Uncle Roy, apparently, did the local Japanese.

  “It is a concern of mine,” he said gravely. “The murder of that kid on the beach, for instance, that Roy Cather can’t be called on to answer for now. And his own murder, in a special sense. But it won’t be hard to find out who did that. There weren’t many people there. The three boys in the cottage, you, Corinne, Kumumato’s family, Mrs. Bronson, Alice Cather, Harry, Mary. That’s the lot.”

  “Harry didn’t even know he was there,” I said.

  “He’s out, then. It gets down to fewer still. You consider opportunity, and motive. The motive behind this is the only real interest it has.”

  He walked over to the window and stood looking out for a moment. I could see the large figure of his guard, philosopher and friend outside, polishing the field tan car.

  “It’s all very discouraging,” he said at last. “I got you over here because I thought you’d be around the Cathers and go the places they went, and get an outside view of what Kumumato reported inside. I guessed wrong all the way around. All I’ve got left is a simple case of murder. If you’d only minded your own affairs, my dear . . .”

  He turned around. “Don’t look so violent,” he said. “I may have been a little unjust. But you’re t
he most exasperating woman I’ve ever known. God knows why I’m in love with you. I don’t. But that’s what I asked you to come down here and have dinner with me to tell you . . . before we knew Cather was dead. I didn’t realize until I saw you this morning how much I’d missed——”

  A crashing noise came through the front door. I thought at first one of the giant carriers we could see over the roof top had emptied the bilge water. But I should have known it was just Sergeant Buck clearing his throat. I never thought I’d be glad to see his face again, but actually I was delighted. Colonel Primrose was not. He was the color of a molten brick, and for the first time in all the years I’d known them he turned on his sergeant violently.

  “Will you get the hell out of here?” he said.

  It was the uniform, surely. Sergeant Buck raised one large iron fist in a salute. “Yes, sir,” he said rigidly.

  Colonel Primrose turned back to me.

  “I asked you down here because I want to ask you to marry me,” he said.

  Men are strange people. Of all the times he could have asked me to marry him when I would possibly have been delighted to say yes, he picked the one when I was still seething with indignation, with a full catalog of the wrongs I’d suffered at my tongue’s tip—and having just been called a half-wit. All the other things he could say would just go in one ear and out the other. He’d called me a half-wit.

  “No,” I said. I said more, but No is all that mattered. It gave me enormous pleasure to say it, and it gave me more still, a couple of hours later, to decline to be driven back to the Cathers by Sergeant Buck, meek as he then was.

  We were coming out of the officers’ club. I had been fed and given orders to keep my mouth firmly shut about the fact that Roy Cather was dead or found or both.

  “Buck will take you back. I’ve got work to do in Bethel Street,” Colonel Primrose said.

  But I’d spotted Tommy Dawson. He was over at the little grass shack where they dispense one bottle of luau juice a week to officers on the canteen list. He’d been to the post office too. He had a large batch of letters sticking out of his pocket.

  Colonel Primrose saw him too. “What are you doing down here?” he asked.

  Tommy paid for his bottle and came across to us.

  “Collecting the mail and laying in a little rat poison, sir,” he said cheerfully. “Coming up now, Grace?”

  I nodded.

  “Come on, then. You better come too, Colonel. We’re going to have a murder up there tonight. Right down your alley. We’re drawing straws. Only a sawbuck to enter.”

  Somehow, when it happened it didn’t seem quite so funny. If indeed, I thought, Tommy meant it to be funny . . . if he wasn’t in some curious kind of way telling Colonel Primrose he really ought to come.

  “Well, she’s got him, now,” he said. “The big Swede.” We were going up Nuuanu Avenue on the Pali road. “She spilled the dirt. Now that he knows Mary’s all he ever cared about, he’s got to pay up—just to make her keep her trap shut. It’s a lousy deal.”

  He didn’t say what dirt she’d spilled.

  “Even if she shuts up till she gets the big Swede tied, sealed and delivered, I don’t see anything to keep her shut up, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’d sure be too bad if she accidentally slipped and fell over the Pali tonight, wouldn’t it?” he said deliberately. “—It would be a damn shame, wouldn’t it?”

  But Corinne didn’t slip and fall over the Pali. And there was no possible question of accident when they found her.

  20

  TOMMY DEPOSITED HIS BOTTLE OF LUAU juice, sardonically known in these parts as Black Death, in the cottage and came back to the car. The rain had stopped and the night was lovely, the sky above the black jagged rim of the mountains clear and luminous.

  Down in the house Aunt Norah was sitting alone in the living room, her knitting idle in her lap, her head erect, back rigid, staring off into some very far distance. She began knitting instantly when she saw us.

  “They’re downstairs,” she said curtly.

  “Okay, Madame Defarge,” Tommy said, after he’d closed the door, however, and we were going down to the game room.

  Alice Cather and Harry weren’t there, but the other four were, playing bridge. It was a curious sight, Mary’s bright golden head, Corinne’s sleek black one, Swede, large and blond and weatherbeaten, and Dave Boyer lean and taut—all of them silent at one of those friendly games where the players are determined to be polite or bust. Whatever the upheaval had been that had sent her flying back to the house, Corinne had recovered. She had u fixed, confident and a little insolent smile on her lips, and her small soft hands fluttered daintily with the cards.

  Tommy leaned over the bannister and regarded them with an ironic grin. “Hi, friends.—Mail call. Catch it, David.”

  He tossed a whole batch of letters down to Dave.

  “Just one for the Swede. It almost got on out forward. Came in a fat cat with a load of brass. It’s from your old man.”

  He shied it over to Swede. It went wide and landed by the outside door. Swede went after it.

  I’ve never seen a bridge game break up so willingly, at least on the part of three-fourths of the table. It looked as if they had been waiting in mutual agony for some excuse.

  “Read your mail, children,” Mary said. She gathered up the cards. “There’s some Scotch, Tommy.” She went over to the door to the service quarters. “Ice, please, Kumumato, and some ginger ale.”

  I wondered if now that his job was over he’d quietly pack and go back to his own business, leaving the Cathers, like everybody else in Honolulu, hunting frantically for a cook. I had the bizarre idea that maybe that was the way they’d get rid of Corinne. She’d no doubt take a dim view of helping with the housework, even in a house where her mother had learned the domestic ropes à l’Américaine.

  Kumumato put the tray on the bamboo bar, his face as unrevealing as when he’d stood by and heard the captain calling Corinne a slant-eyed Mata Hari. She’d taken a deck and was dealing solitaire, apparently oblivious to the fact that she was about as popular as a bunch of kahili flower, which is Hawaii’s virulent version of the Mainland’s poison oak and used by apparently reputable florists in lavish bouquets for innocent tourists.

  Mary and Tommy were by the bar, Dave had slumped down on the sofa, grinning over his mail. Swede had opened his father’s letter. A curious well of silence seemed to envelop him, so tangible that Mary and Tommy and I looked over at him all at the same time. His face was very strange, as if it were frozen, stunned into complete immobility by the news he was reading. He finished the last page and just sat, staring through it onto the floor. Then he got up, unaware of any of us, and went out, walking slowly across the garden.

  “It’s his aunt,” Tommy said quietly. “The A. T. C. pilot that brought it told me she had a stroke. She always looked like an old sour puss to me, but she thought the Swede was the white-haired angel child. I guess he must have thought she was okay too. You knew her, Grace.”

  I nodded. She was my next-door neighbor. I’d been expecting her to have a stroke for years, every time Sheila, my Irish setter, and her aged yapping Peke had a boundary dispute at the tree in front of our houses. I wouldn’t have thought, however, that her emanation could have stretched so far. The atmosphere was completely changed. It hung around us, heavy as sable lead. Dave stopped reading and looked up. Swede had gone out of the light from the door and was standing at the top of the steps leading down to the pool, motionless, his hands in his pockets, his head bent forward. Inside we sat silent for a moment, distressed for him.

  “—Hey, Swede,” Tommy called.

  He moved like a man summoned from a long distance, shook himself, turned and came slowly along the lighted rectangle. For a face that was hard-bitten and stubborn and not made to show emotion, it was extraordinary how much was there, etched deeply in the rugged lines of his mouth and jaw. He came into the room. It was Mary h
e was looking at. He stood looking at her, not seeing any of the rest of us.

  “Swede,” Mary said. She started toward him, and remembered. “What is it?”

  He came over to her. He put his hand under her chin, lifted her face up, and looked down into her bewildered eyes.

  “You didn’t let me down, after all, did you, Mary?” he said. It was hard to believe Swede’s voice could be so gentle and so tender. “I was a damned fool. I should have known. Forgive me, will you, Mary?”

  “I . . . don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  He stood looking down at her for a moment.

  “I’ll read you this,” he said then. “You can all listen. It’s from my old man.”

  He read the letter.

  “Dear Son,—Joe’s here in the office and is taking this out to you.

  “Your aunt had a light stroke Thursday evening and sent for me. She couldn’t talk clearly but I don’t think there was much she could say.

  “What was on her mind, thinking she was going to die, was three shoe boxes of letters in her secretary drawer. They were your letters to Mary Cather and hers to you. You had better trusted the post office. There was a note there your aunt must have written when her conscience began seriously troubling her. I won’t send it on. It says that she worshipped you and couldn’t see you ruin your life by a war-time marriage to a girl you scarcely knew and whose background nobody knew anything about. There’s more but that’s the gist of it. I might bring myself to feel sorry for her—her remorse is pathetic—except for the hash I understand you’re making of your life at present. But after all this I wouldn’t presume to try to advise you. I can also see what Mary must have felt, never hearing from you either. I tried to call her, but they’ve left Washington. There’s nothing else to say. I can’t even find it in my heart to say your aunt meant well—as I’ve often said in the past.

  “The letters are here in my safe. Tell me what to do with them.

  “Your aunt is better today. We’re well. Your mother is writing. All our love.—Dad.”

  He read the letter through without a pause. Mary stood unchanging as a statue of alabaster. Neither Tommy nor Dave moved, nor did I. Corinne listened a moment, and deliberately went on with her solitaire. Swede folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He and Mary looked at each other, silently. I think neither of them could trust himself to speak, with words, if indeed they had any need of words. The silence was so long prolonged that Corinne put down her cards. She pushed her chair back and got up, facing us all, a startling gleam of triumph shining out of her dark burning eyes.