Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09

by Damned in Paradise (v5. 0)

  As we headed down the beach road, the landscape again shifted; we were on a narrow blacktop, and right now we were the only car on it. The road was in some disrepair, rather bumpy, its coral underlayer glowing white in the moonlight. Though the ocean was nearby—you could hear and smell and sense it but not see it—we might have been driving through a desert, what with the algarroba thickets and scrubby underbrush and wild cactus. No palms, here—the closest things were the telephone poles lining this sorry roadway.

  “They use to fight,” she said suddenly.

  “Who did?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Massie.”

  “Like how?”

  “He swear at her and tell her to shut up. Sometimes she walk out.”

  I frowned. “Do you know what these fights were about?”

  “She didn’t like it here. She was bored. She drink too much. He tell her to stop, he said she drive his friends away. She has sharp tongue, Mrs. Massie.”

  “How long did you work for them?”

  “Over two year.”

  “Then you didn’t come aboard after Mrs. Fortescue moved out, to help with the housekeeping?”

  “No. I was there when Mother Fortescue moved in.”

  “How did she and Thalia get along?”

  “They didn’t. She use to scold Mrs. Massie for not doing more housework, more cooking, for sleeping too much.”

  “That’s why Mrs. Fortescue moved to her own bungalow?”

  Beatrice nodded. “And the fights between Mr. and Mrs. Massie. They disturb Mother Fortescue. Here—pull in, here.”

  We’d come maybe a mile and a half. A small lane led into a clearing, and I turned the nose of the Durant in; my headlights picked up the cement foundations of a torn-down building poking through weeds. Scattered rubbish, broken bottles, cigarette stubs, and the tracks of tires designated this as a makeout spot.

  I cut the engine, and the lights. The moon was full enough to allow us to see each other plainly. The red of her lips and the flowers on her dress were muted in the moonlight. I was staring at her, part of me just admiring her, another part trying to figure her out; she looked away.

  “What else do you know, Beatrice?” I asked. “What do you know that troubles you so much you sought me out?”

  Her head swiveled on her neck and she turned her dark steady eyes on me. Without inflection, as matter of fact as a bored clerk behind a store counter, she said, “I know that Mrs. Massie was seeing other man.”

  “What other man?”

  “Some officer. When Mr. Massie was away, he would come. At first, once a week. Then in May last year, he come oftener. He stay all week, when Mr. Massie was away on submarine duty.”

  I let some air out. Behind us, lurking behind the brush, the ocean was crashing on a reef. “This sounds pretty brazen, Beatrice.”

  “They don’t kiss or touch in front of me. They sleep in separate rooms—at least, they start night and begin morning, in separate rooms.”

  “Still pretty bold…”

  “They would go swimming at Waikiki, go picnic at Kailua, Nanakuli Beach. Sometimes she would stay away, two, three days—take sheets, pillow slips, towels, and nightclothes.”

  “Who was this officer?”

  “Lt. Bradford.”

  Jimmy Bradford. The guy stumbling around with his fly open; the guy Thalia made assurances to before she was taken to the emergency room….

  “You never came forward,” I said.

  Her brow tightened. “And I’m ashamed. I need this job. My mother is widow with five kids. I’m just one generation away from coolie labor, Nate. I couldn’t risk…”

  I moved closer to her. Touched her face. “You got nothing to be ashamed of, honey.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like. My father came from Hiroshima, too many people, too many poor people. Here in cane fields, on plantation, my father make nine dollars a month plus food. To him that was big step up. He made more at cannery, but eighteen-hour day for so many year, kill him.”

  I stroked her hair. “Honey, I grew up on Maxwell Street. I’m a slum kid, myself. But every generation has it a little easier—your kids’ll go to college. Wait and see.”

  “You’re a funny one.”

  “How so?”

  “Selfish but sweet.”

  “Sweet, huh?” I ran my hand from her hair down onto the coolness of her bare arm. “Then why don’t we quit talking about all this depressing malarky and find something better to do….”

  I kissed her. She put herself into it, and gave a very nice kiss, though it was pretty much standard issue; I mean, the secrets of the Orient didn’t open up to me, even if her mouth did and our tongues danced the hootchie-koo. Still, it was doing the trick, all right—I was getting my full growth again.

  I was leaning in, for another kiss, when she said, “You know where we are, Nate?”

  “Sure—lovers’ lane.”

  “That’s right. Ala Moana.”

  And I started to kiss her, then pulled away.

  “Shit,” I said. “Pardon my French…. This is where it happened. This is where it happened!”

  She nodded. “This is old Animal Quarantine Station.”

  I drew away, looking out the windshield at the weeds and rubble and cement slabs. “Where Thalia says she was taken…and raped….”

  She nodded again. “Wanna get out? Look around?”

  I was torn between the two great needs of my life: the yearning between my legs, and the curiosity between my ears.

  And the damn curiosity won.

  “Yeah, let’s get out for a second.”

  I got out on my side, and came around and opened the door for her.

  “See those bushes over there?” she asked. “That’s where she say they drag her.”

  And I turned and stared at the darkness of the thicket, as if it could tell me something; but the moonlight didn’t hit the thicket, and there was nothing to see.

  But I could hear something.

  Someone.

  “There’s somebody else here,” I whispered, holding a protective arm in front of her. “Get in the car!”

  More than one someone—I could hear them moving, crunching the weeds underfoot, and I hadn’t brought my damn gun! Who would have thought I’d need a goddamn nine-millimeter Browning to go on a goddamn date with a geisha girl housemaid?

  Then one by one they emerged from the darkness—four faces, belonging to four men, sullen faces that looked white in the moonlight, but they weren’t white faces, oh no.

  They were the faces of the four men, the surviving four, who had brought Thalia Massie to this place to rape and beat her.

  And as they advanced toward me like an army of the Island undead, I reached for the handle of my car door, only to feel it slip from my grasp.

  The car was pulling out of this lovers’ lane, without me.

  From the window as she drove, hands with blood-red nails clutching the wheel, Beatrice called out, “I’ve done what you ask. Now leave me out!”

  And somehow I didn’t think she was talking to me.

  10

  As I backed away, they encircled me, four skulking boys in denim slacks and untucked silk shirts; the shirts were of various dark colors, which had helped them blend into the darkness of the underbrush as they waited. But as I moved backward into the moonlit clearing, and they moved in lockstep with me, four Islanders dancing with the only white mainlander at the colored cotillion, blossoms emerged on the dark blue and dark green and deep purple shirts, flowers of yellow, of ivory, of red, strangely festive apparel for this brooding bunch of savages to have worn on this mission of entrapment.

  I stopped, then wheeled within the circle, not liking having any of them behind me. From the pictures in the files I knew them: David Takai, lean as a knife blade, dark-complected, his flat features riding an elongated oval face, sharp bright eyes shining like polished black stones, black hair slicked back; Henry Chang, short, solidly built, eyes bright with resentment, curly hai
r sitting like an unruly cap atop a smooth, narrow face whose expression seemed on the verge of either tears or rage; Ben Ahakuelo, broad-shouldered boxer, light complected, matinee-idol handsome in part due to heavy eyebrows over dark sad eyes; and Horace Ida, who was a surprise to me, as the photo had shown only the round pudgy face with its slits for eyes and an unruly black shock of pompadour—I was not prepared for that fat-kid puss to sit atop a short, wiry, lean, powerful frame, nor for those eyes to burn with such intelligence, such alertness, such seriousness.

  “What the hell do you want with me?” I asked. I did my best to sound indignant, as opposed to scared shitless.

  For several moments, the only response came from the nearby surf crashing on the reef, and the rustle of leaves shaking in the wind. Like me. Ida looked over at Ahakuelo, as if seeking for a prompt; but the broad-shouldered mournful-eyed boxer said nothing.

  Finally Ida said, “Just wanna talk.” He was facing me now, as I did my slow turn within their circle.

  I planted my feet. “Are you the spokesman?”

  Ida shrugged. I took that for “yes.”

  “If you wanted to talk,” I said, “you should’ve just stopped by my hotel.”

  Ida grunted a laugh. “We draw reporters and coppers like shit draws flies. You think Ala Moana boys can go waltzing into Royal Hawaiian?”

  Henry Chang was smirking; the expressions of the other two remained grimly blank. These four—with the late Kahahawai—were of course the so-called “Ala Moana boys,” named for this lonely stretch of ruined blacktop along which their crime was supposedly committed.

  “Besides,” Ida said with a little shrug, “how we know you pay attention? Here you pay attention.”

  He had a point.

  “What do you fellas want from me?”

  “If we want to fuck you up, we could, right?”

  I started turning in a circle again; my hands balled into tight fists. “It might cost you more than you think….”

  Now Henry Chang spoke, only it was more of a bark: “But we could, right, haole?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted; my stomach was jumping—the first guy who hit me in the stomach was getting a cotton candy facial. “Yeah, I think the four of you got me sufficiently outnumbered. What do you say we go one at time, just to be sporting?”

  Ida slapped his chest and the thump echoed in the night. “You hear our side, okay?”

  “Huh?”

  His voice was so quiet, the sound of the breakers on the reef almost drowned it out. “We not gonna fuck you up. We ain’t gangsters like haole papers say. We just want you hear our side.”

  Tentative relief trickled through me. “I, uh, don’t mind talkin’ to you boys—but isn’t there someplace a little less cozy…?”

  “Yeah.” Ida nodded, smiled, and there was something unsettling about the smile. “I know a good place. We take you for a ride….”

  To a guy from Chicago, that phrase had a certain unhappy resonance.

  But I couldn’t see trying to make a break for it; at least one of these guys, brawny Ahakuelo, was a top athlete, a boxing champ and a star of the local variety of football, which was played barefoot. What were my odds of outrunning him?

  Besides, I was feeling increasingly not in danger. Melodramatic as this stunt may have been, luring me by way of an Oriental siren to this weed patch in the boonies between Waikiki and Honolulu, this didn’t seem to be about harming me. Scaring me, yes. Harming me—maybe not….

  Ida was gesturing around him. “This is where Massie woman say we bring her and screw her and beat on her.”

  Henry Chang said bitterly, “You think I got to force a woman? You think Benny here gotta force a woman?”

  What was I going to do, disagree?

  “This doesn’t seem like too tough a town to get laid in,” I granted them.

  “We can kill you,” Ida said. “We can beat shit outa you. But we ain’t gonna.” He turned to Takai. “Mack, get the car.”

  The lean Japanese nodded and headed out of the clearing onto the blacktop.

  Ida said, “You know what the cops do? When they not find my tire tracks here, they bring my car out and drive it around and make tracks. But they not get away with it.”

  “I heard,” I said. “But I also heard you’ve got supporters in the department.”

  Ida nodded and so did Ahakuelo; Chang was studying me with apparent hatred.

  “Lemme tell you how far that help go,” Ida said. “That just means when some cop is doin’ things to frame us, another cop warn us.”

  Nearby, an auto motor started up. In a few moments, headlights came slicing into the clearing as Takai pulled up and, leaving the engine running, hopped out of the tan Ford Phaeton, its top down.

  “The infamous car,” I said.

  “Come for ride,” Ida said.

  Soon our little group had piled into the Phaeton, Takai, Chang, and Ahakuelo in back, Ida behind the wheel in front with me in the rider’s seat.

  “We didn’t rape on that woman,” Ida said over the gentle rumble of the well-tuned Model A engine. We were tooling down Ala Moana smoothly, but for the occasional pothole.

  “Why don’t you tell me about that night, Horace?”

  “My friends call me Shorty,” he said.

  So we were pals now?

  “Fine, Shorty,” I said. I turned my head to look back at the three unfriendly faces in the backseat. “You guys call me Nate.”

  Takai pointed to himself. “They call me Mack.” He pointed to dour Henry Chang. “He’s Eau.” It sounded like he was saying, “He’s you.” But I figured it out after a second.

  Ahakuelo said, “Call me Benny.”

  And I’ll be damned if he didn’t extend his hand. I reached around and shook with him. No similar offer came from the others.

  “That Saturday night last September,” Ida said, “I was just fooling around. Go to Mochizuki Tea House, no action. Try a Filipino speak over in Tin Can Alley, run into Mack and Benny. Some beer, some talk.”

  The lights of Honolulu were up ahead, and the nearly jungle-like area was thinning out. The ocean was visible at left, endless black glimmering gold, stretching to a purple starry sky overseen by a golden moon.

  “Benny knew about a wedding luau we could crash,” Ida said.

  Behind me Benny said, “We weren’t invited but the son of the host, Doc Correa, he’s a friend of mine.”

  “We had beer, some roast pig. We run into Eau and Joe Kahahawai at the luau. Then things got kinda slow, and somebody say, how ’bout we go to dance at Waikiki Park?”

  We were passing by a Hooverville, a city of shacks fashioned from flattened tin cans, scrap sheet metal, crates and boxes…nothing uniquely Hawaiian about this squatter’s town, except that it was oceanfront property.

  “We get to dance at eleven-thirty. We don’t wanna pay for tickets ’cause we know at midnight, it pau, over. So we bum a couple ticket stubs off some friends who was leaving the dance, and Joe and Eau take the stubs and go in, I wait in parkin’ lot.”

  Ahakuelo said, “Plenty of witnesses saw us in there.”

  “Yeah,” David Chang said, “like that wahine you slapped on the ass.”

  Takai laughed. “Glad he did! That way she remember him.”

  Chang said bitterly, “She remembered you were drunk.”

  “Kulikuli,” Ahakuelo snapped at Chang with a scowl.

  The landscape along Ala Moana had a marshy look, now; I had a hunch I could find those mosquitoes here that had been driven out of Waikiki.

  “It does sound like a lot of drinking was going on that night,” I said. “How much did you boys have?”

  “Benny hit the oke a little hard,” Ida admitted. “Joe, too. Rest of us, couple beers. Joe and Eau run into Benny and Mack at dance, then after while, Joe come out to parking lot and pass off a ticket stub to me. I go inside a while, and he wait in lot.”

  To the left were tiny wharves where small boats were tied, mostly fishing boats, distinctive
low-slung sampans, with a few sleek yachts interspersed, looking as out of place as white tie and tails at a country hoedown.

  “Midnight,” Ida said, “dance over, stand around lot talkin’ to people maybe five minutes—then we pile in the Ford and go back to the luau.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Ten minutes maybe. Somebody was playing music in the house, but no action, it was pau. They was singing ‘Memories.’ They was outa beer. Benny wanna go home, he have football practice next day, so I drop him off and he head home, over on Frog Lane.”

  The buildings of Honolulu up ahead, the ships and lights of the harbor over at left, were distinct before us now.

  “You must’ve had that little fender-scraper with that white woman,” I said, “along about then.”

  “I show you where it happen,” Ida nodded, turning to the right onto Sheridan Street, the first opportunity to turn onto any street in some time.

  Soon we were turning left onto King Street, a magnificent old plantation on the right, glimpsed through shrubs, foliage, a stone-and-wire fence, and the spreading branches of palms protecting it and its grounds from the tourists frequenting the Coconut Hut, a tacky grass-shack souvenir shop directly opposite—its sign boasting “A BIT OF OLD-TIME OLD HAWAII IN THE HEART OF HONOLULU.”

  Before long, courtesy of the least likely tour guides Oahu might have provided, I was getting my first glimpse at the heart of Hawaiian government. Ida slowed down so I could have a nice look. At right was the Iolani Palace, set back far enough from the street to look like a dollhouse in the moonlight. A boxy Victorian affair with towers on the corners and in the middle (both front and rear) and plenty of gingerbread trim, almost ridiculously grandiose on its manicured grounds with its palm tree sentinels, the palace was a building that tried very hard not to look Hawaiian.

  And across from the palace, on my left, was the Judiciary Building, another quaint monstrosity with balustraded balconies, Grecian pillars, and a central clock tower. Several schools of architecture seemed to be doing battle, none a winner, yet there was a comic-opera grandness about it.

  In front of the building, on a stone pedestal, stood a golden statue of a native warrior, a spear in hand, a feathered cloak about him, his build powerful, his features proud.