Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09

by Damned in Paradise (v5. 0)

  “It’s true. I even eat pork. I’ll do it tomorrow. You can watch.”

  “You’re a funny person.”

  “Do you want to dance or not? Or did Darrow crush your little piggies?”

  Finally she smiled; a full, honest, open smile, and she had wonderful perfect white teeth, and dimples you could’ve hidden dimes in.

  It was the kind of moment that can make you fall in love forever—or for at least as long as an ocean voyage.

  “I’d love to dance…Nathan, is it?”

  “It’s Nate…Isabel….”

  We danced to the rest of “I Surrender, Dear,” then snuggled close on “Little White Lies.” We left in the middle of “Three Little Words” to get some air out on the afterdeck. We leaned against the rail near a suspended lifeboat. The fog of San Francisco was long gone; the stars were like bits of morning peeking through holes punctured in a deep blue night.

  “It’s cool,” she said. “Almost cold.”

  The thrum of the engines, the lapping of the ocean against the luxury liner cutting through it, made us speak up a little. Just a little.

  “Take my jacket,” I said.

  “No…I’d rather just snuggle.”

  “Be my guest.”

  I slipped my arm around her and drew her close; her bare arm did feel cold, gooseflesh tickling my fingers. Her perfume tickled my nose.

  “You smell good,” I said.

  “Chanel,” she said.

  “What number?”

  “Number Five. You’ve been around, haven’t you?”

  “I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.”

  She laughed a little; it had a musical sound. “I can’t help liking you.”

  “Why fight it? Do you do anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, go to school, or…do rich girls like you ever work?”

  “Of course we work! If we want to.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t want to…. But maybe I’ll have to, someday. I’m not so rich, you know. We got hit hard in the Crash.”

  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  She flashed me a quick frown. “Don’t be smug. It’s not a joke, people jumping out of windows.”

  “I know it isn’t. How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Are you in school?”

  “I might go to college. I wasn’t planning to, but…”

  “What happened?”

  “I was engaged to this boy.”

  “You were?”

  “He met someone else.”

  “Not someone prettier. That wouldn’t be possible.”

  Her eyes studied the dark water. “He went to Europe. Met her on the Queen Mary.”

  “Ah. Shipboard romance.”

  “Maybe it started that way. He’s engaged to her, now.”

  “I know an excellent way for you to get back at him.”

  “How’s that?”

  And when her head was tilted up to look at me while she asked that question, I kissed her. It started out gentle and sweet, but then it got hot and deep, and when we parted, we were both damn near panting. I leaned over the rail and caught my breath and watched whitecaps rolling over the inky sea.

  “You kissed fellas before,” I noted.

  “Once or twice,” she said, and she kissed me again.

  Her stateroom was just across the hall from mine, but as we paused there, I took a moment from us pawing each other and said breathlessly, “I gotta get something from my room.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “You know…something.”

  “What…Sheiks?” She swatted the air. “I have some in my train case.”

  I guess you’ve guessed by now she wasn’t a virgin. But she wasn’t all that experienced, either; she seemed surprised when, after a while, deep inside of her, I rolled with her, moving her around and up on top. I had a feeling her former fiancé had been strictly a missionary position sort of guy.

  But she soon got the swing of it, and was liking riding rather than being ridden. Her eyes were half-hooded, as if she were tipsy with desire, her body washed with ivory from the porthole, the shadows of the half-open shutters making an exquisite pattern on the smooth planes of her body as she leaned forward, hips grinding, breasts swaying. Those breasts, lovely, perfectly conical, not big, not small, were peaked with large, swollen aureoles, like those of an adolescent girl just entering puberty. She was well out of puberty, however, and the smooth warmth of her around me, the movie star loveliness of her hovering over me, turned me tipsy, too….

  She slipped out of bed, and into the bathroom while I plucked a tissue from the nightstand to dispose of the lambskin armor she’d provided me. Two or three minutes later, she returned, and slipped the compact curves of her flawless young body into her undergarment, a creamy little teddy, got herself a Camel from her purse on a bamboo chair, and lighted the ciggie up with a tiny silver lighter.

  “You want a tailor-made?” she asked.

  “No. It’s one bad habit I haven’t got around to.”

  “We used to roll ’em, back at girls’ school.” She inhaled, exhaled, the blue smoke drifting like vapor. “You got anything to nip at?”

  “There’s a flask in my jacket pocket…no, the other pocket.”

  Cigarette dangling from the Kewpie mouth, she unscrewed the cap on the silver flask and had a jolt. “Ah! Demon rum. Want some?”

  “Sure. Bring it back to bed with you.”

  And she did, passing me the flask as she eased under the covers next to me.

  “You must think I’m terribly wicked,” she said. “Just a little tramp.”

  I sipped the rum. “I certainly won’t respect you in the morning.”

  She knew I was kidding, but she asked anyway, “You won’t?”

  “Not some little trollop who sleeps with the first good-lookin’ kike who comes along.”

  She yelped a laugh, and grabbed a pillow and hit me with it; I protected the flask so as not to spill any of its precious contents.

  “You’re an awful person!”

  “Better you figure that out now than later.”

  She put her pillow back in place, and snuggled against me, again. “I suppose you think we’ll be doing this every night of the trip.”

  “I have nothing else planned.”

  “I’m really normally a very good girl.”

  “Good, hell. You’re great.”

  “You want me to hit you again?” she asked, reaching for the pillow. But she left it in its place, and settled back against it and me and said, “You just pushed the right button, that’s all.”

  I slipped a hand over one silk-covered bosom and touched a forefinger to a puffy nipple ever so gently. “Hope to shout…”

  “Awful person,” she said, and blew out smoke, and French-kissed me. It was a smoky, rum-tinged kiss, but nice. And memorable. Funny how much this rich little good girl kissed like some of the poor little nasty girls I’d run across.

  “Poor Thalo,” she sighed, taking the flask from me.

  “What?”

  “Sex relations can be so wonderful. So much fun.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  She swigged, wiped her mouth with a hand. “To have it ruined…by some awful greasy native beasts.” She shuddered. “Just to think of it makes me want to run and hide….”

  “What was she like?”

  “Thalo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mean, growing up together?”

  “Yeah. Docile, quiet…?”

  “Thalo! Not hardly! You think it’s a bowl of cherries, being rich. But you more or less have to raise yourself. Not that I’m complaining. Those days at Bayport, they were something….”

  “Bayport?”

  “It’s a little community on the South Shore of Long Island. Thalo’s parents have a summer home there. It’s like a park, really—that big house, lake, woods…. We used to go bareback riding…and I
do mean bare.”

  “No parents around to object to such shenanigans?”

  Another swig. “They were gone most of the time—social functions, foreign jaunts. The house was run by the Filipino domestics, who Thalo didn’t have to answer to. Glorious days, really.”

  “You went to school together, too?”

  “Yes—Hillside in Norwalk, then, later, National Cathedral, in Washington. Strict schools, but summers were madcap; we ran wild. Lived in our bathing suits all summer.”

  She handed me the flask and got out of bed; a lovely thing in that teddy, completely unselfconscious in her near nudity.

  “We had this old Ford,” she said, fishing another smoke from her purse, “that we painted up with all sorts of colors and crazy sayings. Rode around with our feet and legs hanging out of the car. Tore around, regular little speed demons.”

  “Never got picked up? Never lost your license?”

  She lighted up the new ciggie. “Oh, we didn’t have licenses. We weren’t old enough.”

  Soon she was back in bed with me, the orange eye of her cigarette staring in the darkness.

  “I shouldn’t say this, but…she used to love it.”

  “Love what?”

  “It. You know—it! Doing it? Boys from our set, visiting their own parents, they’d come to that big house…we had the run of the place…come midnight we’d go skinny-dipping in the lake….”

  “With the boys?”

  “Not with the gardener! I don’t think Tommie…nothing.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just…I shouldn’t say.”

  “Something about her husband?” I asked, passing her the flask.

  She took another slug, then said, “I haven’t seen Thalo since she and Tommie were stationed at Pearl Harbor almost two years ago. I don’t have a right to say anything about it.”

  “About what?”

  “I…don’t think he could satisfy her.”

  “In what way?”

  “In whatever way you think. He’s so…ordinary, dull, unexciting. She’s a romantic, fun-loving girl, but her letters to me…. She was bored with being a Navy wife. He was off on submarine duty all the time, she was lonely…no fun. No attention. And now this.”

  “It’s nice of you to go to her side in this dark hour.”

  “She’s my best friend,” Isabel said, and took another slug of rum from my flask. “And anyway, I’ve never been to Hawaii before.”

  She fell asleep in my arms; I removed the glowing cigarette stub from her fingers, crushed it out in a glass ashtray on the nightstand, placed my flask there, and allowed the motion of the ship, plowing its way through the Pacific, to lull me.

  But I didn’t go to sleep for a long time. I kept thinking about Thalo and Isabel, fun-loving girls skinny-dipping with boys.

  And how Thalia Massie’s dull husband had helped kill a man to preserve his wife’s honor.

  3

  I leaned against the starboard rail with Isabel on one side of me, and Leisure on the other. Mrs. Leisure was next to her husband, and the Darrows were just down the rail from her, as our little group peered across deep blue waters. A balmy breeze ruffled hair, rustled dresses, fussed with neckties; the sky was as blue as Isabel’s eyes, the clouds as white as her teeth. She was a foolish girl, but I would love her forever, or at least till we docked.

  “Look!” Isabel cried; it was a cry that would have made sense, a hundred and fifty years ago, when spying land meant fresh water and supplies and the first solid ground in weeks or even months.

  But at the end of a modern four-and-a-half-day ocean voyage, it was just plain silly—so why did my heart leap at the sight of an indistinct land mass, dancing in and out from the morning clouds? Gradually revealing itself, growing larger and larger on the horizon, was the windward shore of Oahu, and as the Malolo rounded the point, we got a gander at a cracked gray mountain.

  “Koko Head,” seasoned traveler Leisure informed us.

  Maybe so, but it was a head with no more natural growth than a bald old man—a disappointing, and inaccurate, envoy of the island, as very soon the grayness of Koko dipped into a valley of luxuriant green foliage, including the expected gently waving palms and occasional flower-blossom splashes of color.

  “There’s Diamond Head!” Queen Isabel squealed, pointing, as if informing Columbus of the New World.

  “I see you’ve read the National Geographic, too,” I said, but I didn’t even get a rise out of her. Her blue eyes were wide and her smile that of a kid with a nickel viewing a well-stocked penny candy counter; she was even jumping up and down a little.

  And Diamond Head was a magnificent sight, all right, even if a city kid like me wasn’t about to tip as much to my society page cutie-pie. After all, I came from the town that invented the skyscraper, and some paltry seven-or eight-hundred-foot natural wonder wasn’t about to earn oooh’s and ahhh’s from a hardboiled boyo like me.

  So why was I staring goofy-eyed, like a hypnotist’s watch was waving in front of my mug? What was the magic of this long-dead crater? Why did its shape demand study, call out for a metaphor? Why did I see Diamond Head as a crouching beast, its gray fur furrowed, its blunted sphinx head lifted ever so gently, paws extended into the ocean, a regal, wary sentinel to an ancient land?

  “See that small depression, on the ledge of the crater?” Leisure asked, though he was really instructing.

  “Near the peak there?” I offered. Beneath the lower, greening slopes of the volcano nestled a lushness of trees and a scattering of residences that were pretty lush themselves.

  “Exactly. The natives say an enormous diamond once perched there, snatched away by an angry god.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t find a virgin to sacrifice,” I said. “Scarce commodity, even back then.”

  That got me a nudge from Isabel. I wasn’t sure she’d been listening.

  As the natural barrier of the volcanic sentry gradually drew away, the supple white curve of Waikiki Beach began revealing itself.

  “That’s the Moana Hotel,” Leisure said, “oldest on the island.”

  It was a big white Beaux Arts beach house got out of hand, with a wing on either end bookending the main building; a massive banyan tree and a pavilion fronted the hotel’s stretch of beach. Beyond this turn-of-the-century colonial sprawl was an explosion of startling pink in the form of a massive stucco Spanish-Moorish structure, a cross between a castle and a mission, spires and cupolas lording it over landscaped grounds aswarm with ferns and palms.

  “The Royal Hawaiian Hotel,” Leisure said. “Also known as the Pink Palace.”

  “Hot dog,” I said.

  “Why so chipper?” Isabel wondered.

  “That’s where I’m staying. The Royal Hawaiian….”

  “I’ll be with Thalo, in her little bungalow in Manoa Valley,” Isabel said glumly. “She says it’s no bigger than the gardener’s cottage back at Bayport.”

  “Well, the posher crowd stays at that pink flophouse, there. Drop by anytime. Feel free.”

  Leisure was looking at me through those ever-narrowed eyes; he wore a mild frown, and whispered, “You’re staying at the Royal Hawaiian?”

  “That’s what C.D. said.”

  “Funny,” he said, still sotto voce. “He told me the party’s lodgings are at the Alexander Young. Anne wasn’t any too thrilled.”

  “What’s wrong with the Young?”

  “Nothing, really. A sound choice. Downtown, close to the courthouse. More of a commercial hotel.”

  “I’m pretty sure he said Royal Hawaiian,” I shrugged. “Want me to ask him?”

  “No! No….”

  Waikiki Beach appeared to be a narrow strip of sand, rather than the endless expanse I’d imagined; but room enough for dabs and smidgens of bathing suit and beach umbrella color to paint the shore, as bathers bobbed in the water nearby. A few hundred yards out, occasional bronze figures would rise out of the water like apparitions: surf riders, gliding in, in a spra
y of white, shooting toward the beach, occasionally kneeling to paddle up some extra speed, mostly just standing on their boards as casually as if they were waiting for a trolley. Was that a dog riding with one of them?

  “Could that be as easy as it looks?” I asked Leisure.

  “No,” he said. “They call it the Sport of Kings. Get crowned by one of those heavy boards, and you’ll know why.”

  Sharing the surf, but keeping their distance from its riders, were several long, narrow canoes, painted black, trimmed yellow, warlike-looking hulls supported by spidery extensions to one side (“outrigger canoes,” according to Leisure). The four-man crews were paddling in precision, stroking through the water with narrow-handled fat-bladed paddles.

  Just to the left of the Pink Palace was a cluster of beach homes and summer hotels; then the low-slung severe structures of a military installation peeked out among palms; in the fore was an incongruous water playground of floats, diving platforms, and chutes, in use at this very moment by sunners and swimmers.

  “Fort De Russey,” Leisure pointed out. “The Army dredged the coral and came up with the best stretch of beach in town. Civilians are always welcome.”

  “Not always.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t that near where Thalia Massie was abducted?”

  Leisure’s tour guide spiel suddenly stalled. He nodded gravely. Then he said, “Best not to forget why we’re here.”

  “Hey, don’t let me spoil the party. I’m eatin’ up this sunshine and ocean spray, too.” I nodded toward the dazzling coastline. “But you know how sometimes a girl looks gorgeous from a distance? Then when you get close up—pockmarks and bad teeth.”

  A shrill siren split the air, the sort of breathy whistle that might announce a shift change at a factory, or an air raid.

  “What the hell…”

  Leisure nodded toward the shore. “We’re being greeted—and announced. That’s the Aloha Tower’s siren, letting locals know it’s a ‘steamer day.’”

  A clock tower did indeed loom above the harbor, like a beacon, ten stories’ worth of sleek white art deco spire, topped by an American flag. Not everyone on this ship was aware they were visiting a United States territory; I’d even overheard the ship’s purser being approached by one well-to-do imbecile wanting to exchange his U.S. currency for “Hawaiian money.”