“I’m sorry, darling,” her voice had tears in it. “I never liked him — I guess I’d never like anybody who took you away from me — even for a little while.”
“It’s all right,” I told her. “He wasn’t much. Carroltown’s finest, he called us. Two assembly line bastards. Whatever chance we had, we managed to foul it up good. He in his way. I in mine.” I stood over her and looked down at her. “One thing, Troy. One thing. It’s going to put me back to work. Somebody killed him. I’m going to find out who did it.”
She lay there silently so long I thought she was still woozy from the pills and had gone back to sleep. I was slipping into my sport jacket when she spoke, her voice carrying the throaty timbre of much crying, “He’s gone — and what you do for him won’t do any good — maybe it’ll be like that for me. Maybe some other lifetime, my darling.”
• • •
I parked Troy’s car out on Fort Street. I walked past the sandwich shops and up the ramp at the Matson Pier. There was the excitement of a ship’s docking. People moved hurriedly by me on both sides.
I spotted a steward at the gang plank. I could hear the boys yelling and diving for the tourists. There were flower leis around the shoulders of everyone. A band was playing, and through it all the sun bore down hot and metallic.
“Mrs. Baldwin,” I said, hoping Carole was traveling under that name. “Do you know if she has left the ship.”
He looked at his chart and then smiled. “I’m sure she has not, sir. I’ll have a boy show you to her stateroom. I think she was to meet someone aboard.”
Sure, I thought, following the white suited boy against the current of people. Sure. Meet someone aboard. Remarriage. A second chance. Honeymoon in Hawaii. Find your happiness. Grab it before it’s too late. Grasp at it and swing around hard. It’s quick and it’s elusive, kids. And now; right before your broken hearts, it’s gone.
Carole was standing in the doorway wearing a white suit and a lei across her shoulders. Her pale blond hair was brushed back from her face, and she didn’t look young any more. Not young the way I remembered her anyhow. She was almost thirty, and heavier, and she looked a little tired, and a little unhappy, even under the expectancy in her pretty face. As I came toward her, she smiled first in recognition, then she looked by me, and around me. The smile seeped away from her lips for a moment, and then she brought it back almost with a visible effort. I gave the boy a dollar, and he left. Carole tried to appear glad to see me.
“Jim,” she said. She put out both her hands, and I took them. They were icy. “Jim Patterson. I can’t imagine you thirty. Any more than I can imagine coming all these days across an ocean and finding you — the way it used to be when I’d walk into a soda shop in Carroltown. But thirty becomes you, you look smart, and full grown, and kind of insolent and bitter — ”
I held tight to her hands. “Go on,” I said. “Ask it. Ask me where he is.”
She drew me inside and closed the door. She looked about the stateroom where her bags were packed. The place already had a vacant look about it. “I know,” she said. “He isn’t here. He isn’t going to be here. My God, I should have known. A leopard doesn’t change his spots. And Herb’s too old to change. How many times — My God, how many times have I gotten somewhere he’d promised to meet me, and been stranded there? Is it eight hundred times? Is it eight thousand? Oh, but this time it was going to be different. This damn fool time was going to be different — ”
I swallowed hard. “This damn fool time was different, Carole,” I said. “This time he meant to — ”
She laughed at me. “This is where I came in. This is old times. Jim Patterson, the good guy, trying to explain for the dirty rotten heel that nobody can explain — ”
“Listen to me, Carole — ”
“Sure. Sing an old song. Why not sing the songs we used to sing on my front porch when you had to come around and break a date that Herb was too cowardly to break. Anything to take little Carole’s mind off her woes.”
I walked over to a porthole and looked out. The sun was like a sheet of yellow fire in the water. I turned around and leaned against the bulkhead.
“Shut up,” I said. “I tell you this time Herb meant to be here. Sit down, Carole.” She sat on the edge of a white straight chair, and stared up at me intently, some intuition making her eyes bright, making her face ready for anything. “I found him dead, Carole.”
I went on telling her about it. Slowly and coldly. She sat on the chair, listening, her face rigid and pale. She didn’t cry. She didn’t do anything until I stopped talking. Then she reached up and broke the lei, pulling it down from her throat as though it was choking her.
• • •
I parked on Bishop Street and left Carole sitting in the Packard. She sat limply, her hands in her lap, her eyes dry and staring. I walked to the Bank of Hawaii where Troy had her account. I took the rumpled check she’d made out to Herb from my pocket. First I wrote out Herb’s name in a backhand scrawl, and then signed my own under it. The teller knew me, and cashed the thing without any questions. The Bank was closing as I went back into the street.
Carole was just as I had left her. She turned and looked at me when I slid under the wheel. “I’ll send you back home,” I said. “I guess that’s about all I can do, isn’t it?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” she said.
That would please me, I thought. But I said, “What will you do?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. I hadn’t thought. I’m broke, though. I had no idea. I really thought — no matter what I say — I really thought — ”
“Sure you did. I’ll buy you a ticket on the first ship out. There’ll be some money left over and — ”
Suddenly she began to laugh. “What fools we are!” she said. “I — I don’t need your money, Jim — ”
I frowned, looking at her. Maybe it’s the shock, I thought. I looked around trying to remember the closest M.D.’s office.
“Don’t you?” I said.
“Of course not. Even if Herb is dead, he must have left me taken care of. The shock was too much, Jim, and for the moment I forgot all about it. But I came out here because Herb wrote that he had plenty of money. Not in a way that was phony. He sent me the money to come out, and he said — he said there was plenty more where that came from — that he was going to buy me everything I wanted.”
I looked at her. “Herb wrote that. And you believed it?”
“You couldn’t doubt it, Jim. It was in the very way he wrote. The way they must have written back from California in the Gold Rush. I don’t know what it was — but something was paying off — and Herb was in the middle of it. That’s why I came, Jim. I’m thirty now. Not a starry eyed kid like before. I was convinced, because Herb said he’d struck on something that would pay off forever.”
6
I NEVER MET two women with less to say to each other than Troy and Carole. I left them together on the sun porch overlooking downtown Hawaii. I drove back down past Aala Park and turned in the alley where Herb had died. But they had removed his body to the morgue, and the landlady already had out her sign: Room To Let.
She started back into her own rooms, but I stopped her. I took out ten dollars that Troy’s grandfather had probably worked a week for. At the sight of the money, she smiled at me. But guardedly.
I had done enough investigating for the Navy, and later on my own in my unfruitful detective agency to know that ten dollars wasn’t going to buy too much in this market.
But what I wanted was a place to start. True, we’d lived in this same alien town, and it was just as true that we’d played together as kids. But as I stood there on the porch of that dingy old house, I could not think of one friend of Herb’s. I could name on the thumb of one hand, my own friends in fact. And I knew there had to be a starting place. I knew that Herb was mixed up in something. And I knew it was violence. He had thought he had something under control, a quick way to a fortune when he wrote for Carole to c
ome out to him. I remembered the way he had told me he had a job, he’d get plenty and I’d get back Troy’s five hundred. I was pretty certain that if I could follow any thin threads to the thing Herb had struck, I’d find out why he was dead now.
“His friends,” I said. “Did he ever have any friends who came here to call?”
She shook her head after a moment. “He was a strange one. He brought no one here. Not even ladies. Sometimes, I wondered.”
I looked around, not wondering. “But there must have been someone.” I shoved the ten dollar bill toward her.
She grinned, the three hairs on her wart wriggling, and took the money. She wadded it tightly in her fist. Her eyes gleamed and she said. “There was one, who came often to see him. Sometimes he would not see her. But she came.”
I felt my heart quicken. “All right,” I said. “Do you know what she looked like. What was her name?”
“She was huge and fat. Almost as fat as I. Almost as old. Only disreputable. You understand. She did not care how she looked before people.”
At first, angrily I was sure she was making some kind of joke. Something to tell the boys of a hot evening.
“What was her name?” I said coldly.
“Contona,” she said with an air of triumph. “She told me often to tell him she was here. Hattie Contona.”
“A native woman?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “Very likely,” she said. “Very likely her father lived here on this Island. But a long time ago.”
• • •
The morgue smelled of formaldehyde. The white haired man limped as he led me through the icy corridor to the dimly lighted room. He studied a moment and then pulled out a rack. Casually, he turned back the sheet.
“I’ll call you if I want you,” I said.
He just stood there.
“I told you. I’ll call you if I want you!” I said.
“It ain’t regular. You ain’t police. You — ”
I took out my private agency badge, and my credentials. He took them from me, and carried them over to the frosted glass door where the light was better. He smiled woodenly then, and went out of the door, carrying the things with him.
I stood there for a long time with the hooked wire in my hands. I felt my insides let go twice and I swallowed hard. I took out a pocket knife then, and holding my teeth clamped tight shut, I began to force the wire into the bullet hole. My teeth let go, chattering. The breath spilled out across my dry lips, smoking in the cold. My hands trembled and I began to sweat.
I heard him at the door. His voice was impatient. I let go the wire and stood straight. “You’re a long time. A long time. What you want in there?”
I turned my head. He must have been nearly blind because he didn’t see the sweat beads across my forehead. All I wanted was a stiff drink of Scotch. “I’m robbing the gold out of his teeth,” I said. “What you think I’m doing?”
That pleased him. He gave a cackling little laugh. “Split halves with me, and I won’t say anything,” he joked right back at me. I waited, watching until the door swung closed behind him.
At last, I pulled it out. When it was out in my handkerchief, still caught in the wire, I wondered how in God’s name I could touch it. I’d seen them dead, and blown apart in the war, but death was relative then, it was the natural state of affairs. Then I’d become like the old morgue keeper — death was a casual thing. But now it was Herb, lying bloodless and frozen on an ice chamber slab …
• • •
Detective Lieutenant Mosani looked up without smiling when they showed me into his office down on Queen Street.
He let me come all the way into his office and stand there for a full, silent minute before he even bothered to ask me to sit down. And when he did, his voice was cold. If there is anything to this business about each of us sending out antagonistic waves, that might explain the way it was with Mosani and me.
When the door was shut behind me, and we were in chairs regarding each other across the space between us, he said, with contempt. “All right, Patterson. What you want now?”
“Ah,” I said. “This morning it was Mister Patterson. What happened to your polite facade, Mosani. Or do you shed it along with that sporty hat when you come in here?”
“Before, I’ve tried to be nice. There was the sense of loss, the great feeling of grief behind your outbursts this morning. I tried to understand that.”
I smiled at him, and I could see he hated that. “Or was it you weren’t sure who I was — this morning.”
“If I didn’t know then,” he said. “I do know now. I know now that you are the James Patterson who runs a very poor detective agency, although you have had little practical police experience.”
“I investigated with the Navy,” I said in a tone that meant I wasn’t explaining, I was just stating a fact to enlighten him. “I’ve had plenty of experience.”
He laughed with irony behind it. “Oh, yes. You find a runaway prisoner hiding in some whore house. Or some poor devil of a pay clerk runs off with eighteen dollars and fifty-five cents. You are able to bring him back. So you are equipped to open your own detective agency.”
“Yes. I watched a flatfoot named Mosani kiss enough behinds until he was a sergeant and then a lieutenant of detectives. Onward, I said. Upward. To success. The hard way. The way of Lieutenant Mosani.”
He looked at me, his black eyes narrow. “We shall see about that, mister,” he said. “I studied at night. Sure I walked a beat. I learned the hard way. I had to be polite to the wonderful Navy while it puked all over me and all over my streets. I had to watch them insult my women, and slap my men around and call them kanakis in the worst sneering way. I’ve learned my job, mister. I’ve learned to know what goes on, and to watch and to think. I don’t live on some woman’s money. I don’t keep my office closed six days a week, and open it only to get out a quart of bourbon — ”
“Scotch. I always drink Scotch.” I said. “It tastes like pure hell, but it’s the only drink I know that they don’t squirrel around trying to make it taste better. I’ve every respect for your ability, Mosani. I’m sure it was a tough climb from gutter to gutter. It’s just that this once — this time, about my friend Herb Baldwin, I think you’re wrong!”
“I’m sure you have now found plenty of reason for that belief,” he said with irony. “Oh, I know, Patterson. You have been to the morgue — you have looked at the body again. You were in there — ” he consulted a penciled note on his desk — “almost twenty minutes. I know that you have come forth with great discoveries — ”
I stood up. “I’m getting a little fed up with your quaint mid-Pacific charm,” I said. “I know this much, Mosani. It wasn’t suicide.”
“Wait!” He leaped to his feet, and leaned across his desk, knuckles down, white on its top. “This interference is intolerable! Do you understand? Every American feels he is superior. He knows it all. I’m quite tired of that, I can tell you. Now you listen to me. Herbert Roy Baldwin. Born thirty years ago in Carroltown, in the States — ”
“Which state?”
“Indiana. Why?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing like being thorough.”
“I am thorough. I have told you that before. This friend of yours then. He attended grade schools and high school. His grades were lower than average. He did not attend any college. But he didn’t go to work, either — ”
“A war,” I said.
“No war, for a few years,” he said. “You had time to go on to school. Anyhow, he was in the Army. He made Staff Sergeant three times but was busted down three times.”
“He’s always liked to drink,” I said.
“Yes. That remains true in every account I get of him.” He strode across the room. “He was married three different times in the States. And once in Hawaii — a cafe singer named Lanai Okazi — ”
I frowned, breaking in on his tirade. “How could he? He never bothered to get a divorce from the third one — �
�
“That’s of no interest to me, now,” he said. “He is dead. If there were an estate, it might be of interest to the Hawaiian girl, Lanai Okazi, who believed herself legally his wife.”
I remembered what Carole had said about Herb’s talking about great wealth. But the fact remained that he had been flat broke when we found his body. I decided against even mentioning it. Which wouldn’t keep me from trying to find out about it.
“Now that brings this charming gentleman to our Island. Here he was often in messes in which the police figured. Once in a fight over a native girl in a dive. There were many witnesses. All said he was drunk, disorderly, and the cause of the trouble — ”
“Carroltown’s finest,” I said, mostly to myself.
“There was a rich woman who said that he had taken a great sum of money from her. But later she took it all back, and refused to let us even hold him.”
“What was her name?”
“A Mrs. Sybil Tinsley. One of these widows who comes asking for it all the way to Hawaii on every boat. She got it. But good. Only he smooth talked her out of it. Or frightened her so that she was afraid to testify against him.”
“Are you through?” I said.
“There’s a great deal more. He has slept in this jail many times. Broke and screaming, either from drunkeness, or drugs. He was a despoiler and a waster. He had lived until he could face himself no longer. He is dead. The case is closed.”
“All those things you say about him. They’re true. But they’re not his fault.” I was talking to him, but I was looking out of the window, thinking. “You see back home they turn us out on conveyor belts. Assembly line bastards. We grow up believing in Santa Claus, the goodness of women, the fact of love and faith. We’re taught a million things that have nothing to do with the facts of life. When we try to live the way we’ve been taught to live — we find dishonesty, pettiness, cruelty, faithlessness. As far as I know that’s the worst thing that happens to you. When you find out about those four things and their place in the world you’ve got to live in. You strike back, you drink, you grab at some shoddy kind of love at every chance. And pretty soon, you’re as bad as the people who changed you — only you’re worse. You’re lost, and alone and broke. A dead bastard. An assembly line bastard that nobody cares about any more. That’s what there is to it, Mosani. Sure, Herb was everything you said. But there was one thing more. He was sure I was his best friend. That’s a laugh — nothing else. But he didn’t kill himself. And I’m going to find out who did.”
The Brass Monkey Page 4