Dangerous Legacy

by George Harmon Coxe

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  Dangerous Legacy

  George Harmon Coxe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media ebook

  Dangerous Legacy

  1

  SPENCE RANKIN was not sure how it started. He hardly ever knew any more and a sort of nameless horror filled him that it should so often be this way when there was no longer any fun in fighting, but only bitterness and resentment and confusion in his mind.

  He tried to think back, knowing it was not the liquor because he was not drunk, but they were crowding him, the young Air Force colonel and his two civilian companions, and the barman was coming through the bar gate to move in from behind. He took a solid punch to the head and jabbed twice at the nearest face, the sickness growing in him now because the pattern was so futile and familiar, remembering the last time and what the judge had said, remembering other times, the ones he’d started and those he had not run from.

  And now, for the first time, it came to him suddenly that he wanted to quit, a strange and unfamiliar impulse that he did not know how to handle. He wondered whether if he stopped and apologized it would end. He blocked two rights, the battler in him realizing that the trio was getting in its own way, that a couple of well-placed hard ones would even up the odds; then he saw the little fellow move in from the doorway.

  He had not seen him enter, but there was a woman with him, saying something, trying to hold him, and the little man not stopping but reaching for the tall civilian from the back and trying to haul him away. Rankin stared, no longer swinging. He tried to say something but found no words, seeing the tall man hook his right as he turned, hearing the smack of fist on flesh and bone.

  The little man went down and out of sight. Rankin got his back to the bar. He held his palms up, one at the colonel and one at the barman.

  “Wait!” he yelled. “Wait, will you?” He watched them stop. “This is silly. I apologize. I’m sorry.”

  They didn’t believe him but they waited, the barman eying him suspiciously as he got out a bill and slapped it down.

  “I’m buying,” he said. “I was out of line. I apologize, Colonel,” he said, and stepped quickly past the still incredulous officer and bent over the little man.

  He was sitting up now, bewildered but not much hurt. Rankin reached for him but the woman already held one arm so he took the other and together they walked him to a corner booth. The little man sat down and grinned.

  Rankin grinned back, his sickness forgotten and his heart warm. “Hello, Ulio.”

  “Hello, Spence.”

  They shook hands. They sat there that way quite awhile, studying each other as real friends do after a long separation, Ulio Kane, the little man from Manila, born of an Irish-American father and a Filipino mother, and Spencer Rankin.

  “It’s been a long time,” Ulio said, and Spencer Rankin nodded, remembering the day.

  Right here in San Francisco. The Palace bar in the summer of ’39, after Palo Alto and graduation, with Ulio booked on the clipper and both of them a little drunk. It made him feel good inside thinking about it—until he realized how much Ulio Kane’s thin dark face had changed.

  The lines around the mouth and nose were new and deep and there was some gray above the temples, but mostly it was the eyes that told the story. Wiser, quieter, stamped deeply with things like pain and suffering and disillusionment that no grin could hide. The change so bered Rankin but he did not say so. He said:

  “You haven’t changed much. You never were any good with your fists. You hardly ever landed a punch.”

  “I always tried.” Ulio shrugged. “I just never was able to find anyone my size and you always threw too many. It seems you still do.” He nodded toward the bar. “What was this one about?”

  Rankin turned. The trio had apparently forgotten him. “I don’t wear a discharge button. They made some cracks.”

  “Why shouldn’t you wear one? You were in three years.”

  Rankin said he didn’t know. Maybe it was a complex. He grinned and said maybe it was because the colonel, no older than himself, was a colonel.

  “I came out a first looie,” he added. “I guess sometimes I was a bad boy. How did you know I was in three years?”

  Ulio reached for his wallet and a strange voice said, “Would it be all right if we had a drink?”

  It was the woman at Ulio’s side and when Spence Rankin looked at her he was a little amazed that he could have so long ignored her, for she was very nice indeed in her tailored suit and fur-trimmed black coat.

  Ulio apologized and signaled the waiter. “This is Claire Maynard,” he said. “Spencer Rankin. We went to school together…. Claire, too, is from Manila,” he added. “She is here buying clothes for her new shop.”

  Greenish eyes smiled at Rankin, the lids half-closed and subtly shadowed. He said, “Hello,” and liked what he saw. She wore her dark brown hair piled high and her skin was good, the cheekbones prominent without being bony. Her mouth was full and ripe and very red because the lipstick had been generously applied. He wondered how it would be to smear it hard, something about her look telling him that she might like it too. About his own age, he thought, maybe thirty, and all woman.

  “Hello,” she said in her pleasantly husky voice. “I was beginning to wonder whether you were a real or fictional character.”

  “Oh?”

  “From what Ulio has been telling me about your various exploits I couldn’t be sure.” She smiled lazily. “We’ve been looking for you for eight days,” she said. “It got a little wearing.”

  “She is right, Spence.” Ulio put a small newspaper clipping on the table. “Here is how I knew.”

  Rankin reached for it, recognized it, and let it alone. It was a police-court item and said that Spencer Rankin had been fined ten dollars for disorderly conduct in a Powell Street tavern. It said that had it not been for the three years honorable service in the Air Force the judge would have given him thirty days.

  “I’ve seen it,” he said dryly and watched Claire Maynard as the waiter put down the drink. Presently her eyes came back to him, amused and faintly mocking.

  “So have I,” she said.

  “I just happened to see it,” Ulio said, putting the clipping away. “That told me you were in town and I knew if we tried enough bars we’d find you.”

  Rankin took his attention reluctantly from Claire Maynard and asked about Ulio’s family in Manila. The little man shook his head and his face was quiet. “Now there is only me,” he said. “And at home I am not sure they even know about me.”

  Rankin’s brain recoiled and he sat very still. Over at the bar another argument was getting under way and the room was full of laughter and noisy chatter. Rankin heard none of it and in the quiet of his mind something within him wanted to cry out in protest. Instead he waited, thinking, letting the moment of shock and incredulity pass, knowing there was nothing he could say. That summer of ’39 when Ulio had taken him to Manila by boat and clipper there had been a half sister and a brother and a father in that house on Dewey Boulevard. Now he knew this was not the place to ask for details.

  He watched Ulio toss off his drink and glance about. Claire Maynard was making wet circles on the table with the bottom of her glass. Once her glance met Rankin’s
and moved on, revealing nothing as it focused somewhere across the room.

  “Your sister too?” he said, putting down his glass. “I’m sorry, fella. I wondered a lot about you. I thought she might have been here.”

  “She was in Manila on a visit,” Ulio said. “She could not get out in time.” He leaned back, his voice brisker as though determined to put such memories from his mind. “Why don’t we get out of here? We could have a drink at the hotel.”

  “Yes.” Claire Maynard sounded relieved as she readjusted the coat across her shoulders. “That would be nice.”

  It was cold outside and raw, with little promise of an early spring in the night air. They turned left, walking toward the hill, Claire between them, shivering a little as Rankin slid his hand inside her arm, then clamping his hand there for a moment with the pressure of her elbow.

  He gave her a covert glance, finding her taller than he had first thought, taller by a good two inches than Ulio’s five foot seven. She was looking straight ahead, her head slightly bent into the wind, and her closeness brought to Rankin a penetrating fragrance he had not noticed before. It gave him a lift and he found it pleasant to wonder about her—and Ulio Kane.

  In the hotel lobby Ulio stopped and looked at the clock. “It’s later than I thought,” he said and glanced at Claire. “Maybe we—”

  “It’s only eleven o’clock,” she protested.

  Confusion touched Ulio’s dark eyes. “I know,” he said and smiled sheepishly. “What I really meant was—Well, would you mind awfully if Spence and I went up to my room and—”

  “But I thought—” Claire Maynard stopped abruptly. She cocked her chin at him. She twisted her red mouth into a pout, but her voice remained amused. “All right,” she said. “I can take a hint, darling. If it’s broad enough.”

  She disengaged her hand with elaborate disdain and pushed Ulio gently toward the elevators.

  “In which case,” she said, “I’ll go in and have a drink by myself. If I can’t find some tall handsome blond to buy one for me.”

  She smiled at Rankin and gave him her hand. She let him hold it while she said she hoped she’d see him again.

  “You will,” Ulio said. “He might even go to Manila with us.”

  Rankin, watching her, saw surprise and what might have been a frown touch her face and pass swiftly on. She glanced from one to the other and seemed unable to make much sense with Ulio’s remark. She compromised by bidding them a pleasant good night and turning toward the cocktail lounge.

  “You sort of gave her a fast brush, didn’t you?” Rankin said as they got out of the elevators and went along the sixth floor hall.

  “Brush? Oh, you mean Claire?” Ulio chuckled. “She won’t mind. She makes a lot of sense.”

  “I can imagine she might,” Rankin said. “Lots of fun too, hunh?”

  Ulio let that one go while he unlocked the door. “She arrived two weeks ago and one of the clerks told me about her being from Manila and asked if I knew her.”

  “So you got together. You’ve been doing the town.”

  Ulio grinned and nodded. He took off his coat and vest and loosened his tie. Rankin got rid of his own coat and hat and stretched out in an easy chair, waiting until Ulio had called room service.

  “And what was that crack about me going to Manila?”

  “I will come to that,” Ulio said. “First I would like to know what you have been doing since graduation, not counting the war.”

  Rankin hunched a little lower in the chair, a moderately big man, a fraction under six feet and solid-looking rather than bulky. His hair, thick and unruly, had a coppery sheen in the overhead light; there was a clean hard line to his jaw and he had that look of muscular fitness so often common to men of action and well-coordinated reflexes. His mouth, usually easy, was turned down at the corners now and his blue eyes were brooding as his mind went back into a past that had little to recommend it.

  “Sold things,” he said without enthusiasm. “Insurance, cars, advertising, none of them very well.”

  Ulio let the waiter in with ice and soda and made two drinks. He handed one to Rankin, sat down on the bed.

  “Because you were too independent and impulsive,” he said as though there had been no interruption. “Because it was too easy to tell the boss to go to hell and you didn’t give a damn.”

  “Every job was going to be the right one,” Rankin said. “And always it was the same. I’d start off okay but something always happened. I’d get sore or something would go wrong.” He shrugged. “I went into the Army because there didn’t seem to be much else to do.”

  “How long have you been out?”

  “Nine months. I sold radio time for six. I’m selling printing now.” He grinned and drank deeply. “Actually I guess the only things I’m good for are fighting and flying and I’m not quite good enough at either. I had plenty of twin-motor hours but none in transports. There’s nothing in commercial aviation for me with my record. I’ve been sort of dickering for a job with an industrial outfit. Private plane. Fly the big-shots around the different factories.”

  “That would be fine,” Ulio said. “You would then fly a few days a month—on expenses. For four or five hundred a month. That would really make a bum out of you. Remember what you said that summer we went to Manila? You liked it. You said you would come back some day; you said it looked like a country where a young fellow could get somewhere on his own. Did you ever get back?”

  Spence Rankin shook his head. “I can tell you all about New Guinea and the Admiralties and especially about Morotai.” He grunted softly. “I got as far as Leyte—Tacloban.”

  “You can go back with me,” Ulio said.

  Rankin finished his drink. He studied the glass a moment, feeling Ulio’s dark gaze upon him, remembering things he’d once wanted. He got up and made another drink; he turned and shook his head slowly.

  “Last time you paid for everything. One way by boat, one way by clipper, and four wonderful weeks. This time I go under my own steam or I don’t go.”

  “Sit down.” Ulio put his glass on the floor. “I would like to talk awhile. I would like to go ’way back—though you know some of this already—because I want you to understand everything. As you know, my mother was a Filipino who died shortly after my younger brother, Julian, was born. Two years later my father married an American woman who was visiting Manila and a year after that my half sister, Lynn, was born.”

  Rankin said he remembered. He said the summer he was in Manila Lynn and her mother were in the States.

  “Yes,” Ulio said. “My stepmother was what you might call a society woman and she did not particularly care for Manila, spending much time here.”

  “So did Lynn, didn’t she?”

  “After she grew up, yes. Then in 1940 her mother was killed in a traffic accident and Lynn stayed on awhile. She came to Manila in the fall of ’41 and was caught there in the Jap attack. At that time both my brother and I had commissions in the Scouts and he was with MacArthur, going with him to Bataan where he was killed. But I had other work. I saw my father the day the Japs entered Manila that January. He knew that he and Lynn would be interned but he was not worried too much because we did not think it would be so long before the Americans returned.”

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “I went into the hills with some others and came to work finally for an organization called Spyron which dealt with guerrillas and the Navy. We were in Leyte before the invasion and later in Mindanao, coming back to Luzon after Lingayen. I got to Manila the day after Bilibid was liberated and it was then that I learned about my father and sister, who had been in Santo Tomas.”

  “Somehow my sister had been smuggled out six months before the end and apparently she was all right until the battle for the city was on. Then, for some reason, she tried to reach our house; why I do not know unless she hoped to salvage some of our things. When I reached there the inside was gutted and burned and there were two charred bodies. White girls
. One with a fragment of dress unburned which I recognized and with this on what was left of an arm.”

  He moved to a chest and came back with an antique silver and turquoise bracelet. “Julian and I gave her that one birthday,” he said and sat down, his dark eyes enormous in his thin face, no longer seeing Rankin but something that had no part of the room.

  Rankin waited quietly and presently Ulio said, “There was still work for me and the Japs knew what I had been doing and there was a fancy price on my head. Unfortunately not all Filipinos were patriots so it was decided that I could work with more safety if it was announced that I was killed in action. It no longer mattered to me except for Marie—”

  “Marie?”

  “Marie Dizon, a mestiza.” A faint smile touched Ulio’s mouth and his voice softened. “She was my fiancée.”

  He went on, explaining how he had been wounded and evacuated unconscious to a hospital ship. “They brought me here,” he said. “Three months ago I was released. Since then—”

  He paused to reach for his glass and Rankin was about to ask him what he had been doing when he thought of something else. “What about your father?”

  “He was sick those last months in Santo Tomas when food was so scarce. He was taken to a small hospital a week before our troops came in.” He paused again and said, “When the Japs retreated they slaughtered every man in that hospital. I thought Father was among them.”

  Rankin sat up. “Thought he was,” he said, scowling as Ulio took something from his wallet.

  “Until this.”

  Ulio unfolded a piece of paper and passed it over. On it was a note, the body in one handwriting, the signature in another.

  José: I have heard that perhaps Ulio is alive. If you should find him in San Francisco give him this so he will know how it is with me. I need his help if I am ever to get out of these hills alive, but he must hurry or it will be too late.

  John Kane

  Rankin reread the note and returned it, a whisper of excitement stirring among his thoughts. “Who’s José?”