Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “Stay where you are, please.”

  The police officer turned to the boys. “Over here, gentlemen.”

  Another car had driven up. And for a moment my heart stopped its hammer-hammer and was still. Colonel Primrose came in, Sergeant Buck the traditional two paces behind him. They were both moving more rapidly than was traditional.

  “Nothing has been touched, sir,” somebody said.

  Colonel Primrose’s sparkling black eyes moved swiftly around the room without a gleam of recognition of any person he knew.

  “This way, sir,” one of the officers said.

  Harry Cather moved. “I can tell you, Colonel Primrose——”

  “Thank you,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “Mr. Kumumato will come with me.”

  I heard the swift catch in Mary’s breath as she sat by me on the sofa. Alice Cather raised her head sharply, Harry Cather’s lips tightened to a thin straight line. Only Aunt Norah seemed not to hear. She sat rigid and erect as before, her eyes fixed on the wall ahead of her. It took an effort for me to remember that it was she who’d screamed and that it was her hand shaking as if with palsy as she’d given the gun to her brother. And Tommy and Dave looked at Kumumato, their jaws sagging a little before they glanced at each other and then did an elaborate ritual of getting out cigarettes, as if what the hell, it didn’t make any difference to them who the Colonel had help him. And the silent trio by the service door, the two little maids and Mrs. Kumumato, huddled together, their eyes big with fear.

  I don’t know how long it was we sat there. It seemed years to me as I listened, straining my ears to make out some intelligible syllable from the shadowy voices coming along the lanai. I could see them, in my mind, opening the door, stopping an instant, going to the bed. Was one of the men in uniform a surgeon? I didn’t know, he could easily be. I could see them taking off the pink silk quilt . . . that would be the moment the voices stopped and there was complete silence for an instant. I kept on trying to follow them in my mind. Colonel Primrose picking up the red bag and the gold compact with the pink feather puff lying beside it, Sergeant Buck picking up the newspaper with the stain of blood . . . all of them sniffing the air, recognizing the smell of cordite . . .

  I went through all of it, sitting there, but much too fast, because I’d followed them every step over the room and was through long before they were, in physical fact. Then I sat there, waiting . . . not daring quite to look at Aunt Norah, wondering what sentences she was framing to bring out later when they began to question her, what was going on in her mind.

  Suddenly down the passage there was a small commotion, a quick raising of voices that still weren’t clear enough to understand, a more hurried moving of feet. It was not very long after that that Colonel Primrose came back. Kumumato was behind him, and Buck behind him. They were all three tight-lipped, their eyes hard and intent. They brought a chill in with them . . . the kind that creeps into the human heart and numbs and paralyzes.

  “Who fired this gun?” Colonel Primrose asked.

  His voice was not loud, but it sounded like the report of a gun itself. He stood in the center of the room where we could see him, all of us, his hand out, the blue-black automatic lying in his opened palm.

  22

  “WHICH ONE OF YOU FIRED THIS?” HE REPEATED deliberately.

  I looked at the floor intently, terrified for fear I’d unconsciously look across the room at the rigid old woman in the print dress by the fireplace. Everything that moved me seemed to be physically pulling at my eyes to turn them that way.

  “I believe none of us is bound to say anything that would be self-incriminating, Colonel Primrose,” Harry Cather said. He turned, looking at him calmly. “—If any one of us did fire it.”

  Colonel Primrose looked at the watch on his wrist.

  “I’m merely trying to save time, Mr. Cather,” he said evenly. “The picture here is very clear indeed. I’d like to save you all as much heartbreak as is possible, under the circumstances. Mr. Kumumato has been in the house for some time. He is an Intelligence agent. I already know everything that has been going on up here. I’ve known it for several days. This is the second murder that has taken place——”

  Harry Cather was staring at him as if he had lost his mind. Alice started to get up, abruptly, and stopped, still staring at him, her lips gray. And I realized that the people who were not staring were the important ones—the ones who knew. Mary wasn’t, nor Aunt Norah . . . Kumumato, Swede, Tommy, Dave, or myself. The three boys knew, then. I looked from one of them to the other, remembered quickly that I must not look at anybody there, and looked down at the floor. It was too easy to give away people, with Colonel Primrose watching all of us, his eyes moving everywhere in the room at once.

  “I think no one need pretend surprise,” he said, I thought a little dryly. “Roy Cather was murdered here night before last. His daughter has been murdered here tonight.”

  The room was so silent that a centipede crawling across the lau-hala matting would have sounded like a company of marching men.

  “Roy Cather was murdered, and his body thrown into the ravine,” he went on quietly. “Mr. Kumumato informed me at seven-forty-five that evening that Roy Cather had been locked in the air-raid shelter by Miss Cather. Mrs. Latham helped. Dawson here and Boyer acted as a guard of honor—unsuspecting, I imagine-in case there was trouble. Mr. Kumumato was directed to unlock the shelter and give Roy Cather as much reassurance as possible, and help him to escape . . . for reasons we need not go into here. He reported that he could not unlock the shelter. In the meantime, Mrs. Cather——”

  He turned to Alice, sitting motionless and white.

  “In the meantime, you, Mrs. Cather, telephoned Mrs. Bronson.”

  He turned to Aunt Norah then.

  “You telephoned to Mrs. Bronson, at her hotel, asked her if she had her key to the shelter, and asked her to bring it up at once. Which you did, Mrs. Bronson.”

  Aunt Norah made no sign that she was aware he was talking either to or about her.

  “You not only brought your key up here,” Colonel Primrose continued evenly. “You went to the shelter alone, Mrs. Bronson, and unlocked it. Mrs. Cather did not go with you. Why, Mrs. Bronson?”

  Aunt Norah looked up at him then, very steadily.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Colonel Primrose.” She said it without batting a single eyelash. “Roy Cather is in Tokyo, to the best of my meager knowledge. I have never pretended to keep track of him or his doings.”

  Colonel Primrose put his hand in his blouse pocket and took out an envelope. He opened it deliberately. He took out a small jagged piece of purple and white printed silk, and laid it calmly on the table beside him, under the bright yellow light from the Chinese lamp. Mrs. Bronson’s eyes were fixed on it. She said nothing, and Colonel Primrose made no comment. He went on equably.

  “We have checked a telephone call made from the air-raid shelter to you in Maui, on Sunday night at ten-eighteen o’clock, Mrs. Bronson. Roy Cather called you then. He told you he was here, that he was coming to stay with you shortly, that you were to have a place ready for him.”

  “Nonsense,” Norah Bronson said.

  “And yesterday morning, early, you sent your purple and white print dress to the cleaner. It’s in our possession at present. It has dried blood on it, Mrs. Bronson, that you attempted to wash out but missed in several places.”

  He looked down for an instant at the tiny piece of silk on the table.

  “And this piece of that dress caught on the money belt that Roy Cather wore under his shirt. We found it there when we found his body. It was caught there when you dragged his body to the side of the ravine and pushed it over, Mrs. Bronson.”

  Aunt Norah looked at him. for a long instant. Her face darkened.

  “Roy Cather was a traitor and a spy,” she said harshly. “He deserved a worse death than he got.”

  Her eyes met Colonel Primrose’s steadily, and there was no
tremor in her voice.

  “I have no sympathy with this coddling of prisoners and spies and traitors. I have long since forgotten that Roy Cather’s parents and mine were the same.”

  Her voice rose.

  “Even if I were to be hanged, Colonel Primrose, I’d have done the same thing. But I don’t think any jury in the Islands will do anything but say ‘Well done.’ I don’t expect them to hang me.”

  Colonel Primrose looked at her curiously. “Then may I ask why you went to all the trouble of cleaning up the air-raid shelter?”

  “I like things neat. And I cleaned up after Roy Cather the way you’d clean up after a polecat in the cellar.”

  She looked him squarely in the face. “If you’re trying to get me rattled, Colonel Primrose, you may as well stop. I’m an old woman and I’m a tough one.”

  Colonel Primrose smiled a. little.

  “—Which brings up another point, Mrs. Bronson,” he said very suavely. “Why did you scream, just now, when you—or some one—shot Corinne Farrell? Kumumato heard some one scream. He came running up from downstairs. He found you there, still screaming violently. Is that correct?”

  “It’s quite correct.—Lieutenant Ellicott, my knitting, please, there by your chair. Don’t be frightened, Colonel, there’s nothing dangerous in it.”

  I heard, still trying not to look at her, the click-click of the needles.

  “As for Corinne Farrell,” Norah Bronson said a little more quietly, “I do not think they will hang me for shooting her, either.”

  Colonel Primrose looked at her intently, giving the impression as he does of also looking intently at every one else in the room at the same time.

  “I’m inclined to agree with you about that, Mrs. Bronson,” he said politely. His black eyes did move then from face to face around the room, and back to Aunt Norah. “And for at least one very good reason. There are several reasons, no doubt. The first and most important is that Corinne Farrell was not shot. She was stabbed to death . . . stabbed to death with a knife.”

  That sank in as a rocket would sink in a plummet dive down into the silent depths of the ocean. The silence received it, and closed over it.

  Colonel Primrose turned to the two officers standing at the top of the steps to the entrance hall.

  “You’ll find a knife here, somewhere,” he said. “You’ll probably find it wrapped in pages 3–4 of this evening’s paper. There won’t have been time enough to get it far away. Begin at this end of the house and find it.”

  He called them back when they had taken a step or two.

  “There are some shoes around here with face powder on them. Have a look for them, and also for any tracks.”

  It was all I could do to keep from raising my foot to look at the bottom of my slipper, and I suppose that was true of everybody in the room. But it wasn’t a sign of guilt, I told myself quickly, for I wasn’t guilty.

  Colonel Primrose turned back to us.

  “Where were you, Mr. Cather?”

  “I was in my room in bed, asleep,” Harry said. “I heard my sister scream, and ran in to see what was the matter.”

  “You heard nothing before your sister screamed?”

  “I was asleep,” Harry repeated. His face was very pale, but that, I thought, like the impulse to look for face powder on our shoes, was natural enough.

  Colonel Primrose turned to the three boys sitting together against the wall.

  “When you said there was going to be murder up here tonight, Dawson, this is what you had in mind?”

  “No, sir,” Tommy said. “Not exactly.” He spoke without hesitation and very seriously. “I just figured you couldn’t go on indefinitely asking for it without getting it. That’s all.”

  “And where have you two been?” Colonel Primrose looked at their soaked shirts.

  “Down in the gully looking at the orchids, sir,” Tommy said. “—Wet, down there.”

  “What were you doing besides looking at the orchids, Lieutenant?”

  “Preliminary reconnaissance, sir. Getting the lay of the land for future operations.”

  Dave Boyer moved impatiently. “Shut up, you fool,” he said. “—We were figuring on putting the fear of the Lord in Corinne Farrell, sir. We were going to frighten her so she’d watch her step. That’s all, sir. That’s as far as we got. We didn’t get to her room. We heard a shot, and somebody screamed. By the time we got out of the gully back up on the road the cops got us.”

  I remembered something suddenly. It might not be one of the people here. It might have been some one from the outside. I remembered the telephone call she’d got, from some one she’d said was trying to frighten her.

  “And you, Ellicott?”

  Mary Cather leaned forward quickly.

  “He was with me, Colonel Primrose,” she said. “We were out by the pool, sitting there talking. It seemed . . . it seemed like the last chance we’d have, and we . . . we wanted to use it. We were there all the time.”

  Colonel Primrose had not looked at her. His eyes were still resting on Swede.

  “Most of the time, sir,” Swede said. He looked across the room at Mary smiling at him. “Not all of it. I came in to get a coat for Mary, out of the closet in the game room. I went in the kitchen and got some chicken out of the ice box for us. I was there when Mrs. Bronson yelled.”

  I should have thought that massive as Sergeant Buck is and conscious of his presence as I always am, I should have noticed that he’d left. But I didn’t, not till he came back at that moment.

  “Sir,” he said stiffly. That was when I saw him standing at the top of the two steps to the entrance hall, bleak and stony-faced. He jerked his head and thumb simultaneously toward the passage behind him, that led toward my room and Alice Cather’s.

  Colonel Primrose hesitated an instant.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He followed Buck out. We sat there in silence till he returned.

  “Mrs. Cather,” he said, “—what were you doing this evening?”

  Alice drew herself together. It was an effort, a really great one. It took several seconds before she seemed able to trust herself to speak.

  “You don’t have to answer,” Harry Cather said. He went over and sat down beside her. “This is not a court of law.”

  Colonel Primrose nodded, his eyes not moving from Alice Cather’s white face. “Right, Mr. Cather. It is not a court of law.”

  “It’s all right, Harry.” She put her hand out and took his. “I was writing letters. It . . . took a long time.”

  “When did you burn them, Mrs. Cather? And why?”

  “You don’t have to answer, Alice.”

  “I . . . don’t have to answer, Colonel Primrose,” she repeated.

  “The ashes are still warm,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “I suggest you burned them when you knew Corinne Farrell was dead. Is that correct?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “You decided it was her life or yours, didn’t you, Mrs. Cather?” he asked, almost gently.

  She shook her head, and tried desperately to control her voice.

  “—I didn’t kill her.”

  “You were going to, weren’t you?”

  “I . . . perhaps,” Alice said. Her voice was hardly audible. “I . . . I thought about it. I . . . there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be as frank as Norah. But I wouldn’t have had the courage to . . . face a jury. I was going to finish it all the way around. Myself as well as her.”

  Harry Cather had put his arm around her and was holding her to his side.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s saying, Colonel Primrose,” he said patiently.

  Colonel Primrose looked at them in silence for an instant, and turned back to the rest of us.

  “I didn’t expect any one of you to admit openly at this time that he killed Corinne Farrell,” he said slowly. “One of you did. I tell you quite frankly, I know who it was. And I will tell you what happened. Mrs. Bronson has taken the blame for killing Roy Cather. I supp
ose she would be glad to take the blame for killing Corinne Farrell too. It happens that she did not kill either of them. She did throw Roy Cather’s body over the ravine. And she did something else.”

  He turned to her.

  “You didn’t shoot Corinne, Mrs. Bronson. She wasn’t shot.—Who did you shoot?”

  23

  AUNT NORAH DID NOT LOOK UP, BUT I thought the clicking needles sounded less like knives being sharpened than before.

  “I couldn’t say, Colonel. A shadow, possibly. I’m a nervous woman. I didn’t hit whatever it was. I’m a bad shot.”

  It was not exactly a gasp that went up from the three Cathers, but they weren’t entirely able, I thought, to conceal the fact that that last statement was not true.

  “You shot at something then. Before you turned on the light?”

  She nodded.

  “You’d come there—like others, we’re told—to frighten the girl?”

  Norah Bronson hesitated, and nodded. “Yes. I had.”

  “When you fired, in the dark—did you think it was Corinne?”

  There was only the slightest hesitation.

  “I may have. I don’t remember. I know I was very much alarmed when I turned on the light and saw her there.”

  “Let’s go back a little, Mrs. Bronson. Roy Cather was dead, when you unlocked the shelter and found him there. That is true, isn’t it?”

  “He gave every indication of it,” Mrs. Bronson said grimly. The needles stopped. Her eyes rested steadily on him, grave and suspicious.

  “Between the time Mr. Kumumato informed me the shelter was locked and the keys gone from their usual place, and the time you unlocked the shelter and found him dead, some one had gone in and killed him. Some one he trusted——”

  “Not necessarily, Colonel Primrose.”

  She interrupted him sharply.

  “—You forget I had to clean the place up. There were signs of considerable struggle.”