“Conscience, eh?”
“Oh, no. If you’d ever starved for excitement as I have, your conscience wouldn’t raise any objections when you achieved it. No. But Alms was jealous. He left his money to me. But I could never remarry. More, even if there was any scandal attached to my name, his money could be taken from me. His money! I worked like a slave for him. Lived like a slave! But his money could go to his cold-blooded relatives if I dared to enjoy a dollar of it in any way they didn’t approve.”
I nodded. “Where does Herb fit into this cozy little picture?”
“Well, we went to some parties. They were pretty wild. We all did some wild things. When I saw the pictures that had been made of me, I thought it some terrible debased joke. Herb handed them to me as though it was all a jest.” She shook her head, clenching her fingers. “But it was no joke. He said the man who had taken them was demanding a thousand dollars for the negatives. He didn’t know what trouble those pictures could cause me. But I did know. I gave him the money for the man — then I began to suspect Herb was the man.”
I nodded, sickened. “Then he convinced you that he wasn’t?”
“No. He let me find out that I didn’t have all the prints as I had been promised.”
“And then?”
“Then, bitterly angry, I just laughed at him. I told him about the man that killed the golden-egg laying goose. Those pictures might ruin me among the people I knew — but he’d never be able to collect, and he’d lose whatever he had with me. I had to get a copy of the will to convince him. Then he dropped me, cold.”
The telephone rang. I stood at the window while she went over to the end table and answered it. She listened a moment, replaced the receiver, and looked at me with an odd smile.
“And now the police,” she said. “A lieutenant of homicide, Albert Mosani. You see how it is, Mr. Patterson. Lonely, empty, you make a mistake. The joy of it is soon gone — but they won’t ever let you stop paying for it.”
I could think of nothing to say except goodbye. “Mosani isn’t so frightening,” I told her, “if you’ll remember to laugh at him.”
She nodded and held open her door for me. I was going along the corridor when Mosani and the cop who’d been watching me in the lobby, came from the elevator.
Mosani didn’t smile. “You,” he said. “May I warn you again, Patterson. I know what happened to the cigar box — even though my man did chase your cab all the way to Ewa. We followed your trail to the Nuuanu Pali road — ”
I looked at him, “Rough wasn’t it?” I said.
“When a man asks for trouble, and is burned, I cannot have pity for him,” Mosani said coldly.
“No,” I agreed. “You wouldn’t.”
10
SHE HAD one of those damned brass monkeys in her hands the first time I saw her. I’ll try to give it to you the way it hit me. She was perched on her knees in the middle of a wide, low divan, and she was holding this figurine in her hand, looking at it and laughing softly, low in her throat.
She was wearing only a filmy negligee and it parted across her golden knees and folded back deep in the cleavage of her breasts. They were full, but high and set wide apart; the same gilt tint as the rest of her lovely body. I had heard of her, she was a night club entertainer, but this was the first time I’d ever seen her. It was as though I were seeing some perfectly made Far Eastern doll: the slender high breasted build of the Polynesians, the soft amber coloring of the finest Malayan. Her luxuriant waxed-black hair was down about her shoulders. Her green eyes slanted devilishly when she turned to look at me. She was something, with her green eyes, that could only happen here in the Islands. Her ancestry was mixed, and mixed again, but Lanai Okazi inherited the beauty of all who’d loved and lived in her cluttered family tree.
“What you want?” she said, the accent making it a pleasure, the voice making it music.
“Everybody thinking I want something.”
Her mouth was straight, but her eyes smiled. “Don’t you?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” I looked at her.
Her voice was even. “All men. They all want something. But you told the manager of my apartment that it was most urgent. You do not look very urgent just now.”
I smiled. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen you.”
She seemed disappointed. “So — my body is pret-tee. People pay to stare at it every night at the Bali Hi. Why shouldn’t you pay? If that’s all you wanted, please to go.”
Now I was able to look about her room, rather crowded with Eastern looking furniture. I suppose she had taste in her language, whatever it was, but it was far from the sturdy Grand Rapids styles. Then my eyes came back to the brass monkey. Exactly a replica of the one I had thrown in the creek earlier.
“That’s an interesting curio,” I said slowly. “May I look at it?”
“Sure.” She handed it over casually. “That’s what should never hop-pen to you.”
I took the monkey. “I hope it never does,” I said.
“Would it matter so much?”
“To me it would. Purely personal of course.”
“Would it? Most men think it would be a catastrophe. But only with a few of them would you notice the difference.” She was staring at me. “What are you doing?” Then as the bottom slid back on the monkey, her lip curled away a little from even, gleaming white teeth. “It is empty. What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you.” I handed the monkey back, a little ashamed of myself, only I knew what it was used for.
“What about? My pret-tee body? What is that? How does that show you what I am like inside? No. I wish you would go away. About you — there is something I don’t like — already.”
“Maybe it’s that I mistrusted you — about the monkey,” I watched closely.
To my surprise, she smiled. “Of course, that’s it. It put me on my guard. I do not like that when I’m not working. I like to relax. But the poor little monkey. It was given to me by my — -by a husband of mine.”
“You collect them?”
“Monkeys?”
“Husbands.”
She laughed — the most purely beautiful sound I ever heard. “Oh, no. Each time it is for permanent. This husband was not good. I was fond of him. But he was bad. Even bad-der than me. But I was fond of him, and he gave me this little monkey — to make me laugh.”
I watched her face, it changed swiftly, the way lights and shadows sift on some shadowy lagoon. And that’s what I was thinking about, looking at her, a hideaway island, no rescue ship …
“And now the husband is dead?” I said slowly.
She looked at me. “Oh. Yes. So that is why you have come. I wonder no one has been to see me. Herbert was my husband, although for some long time now we have lived separate and apart — ”
I smiled at her. “What’s the difference?”
“Oh, you know.” She knew I was teasing her, but she wriggled a little, leaning back in the divan. She smiled. “Oh, many married people live separate in the same house — in the same bed. It was like that with Herb-ert and me. Then, after a long time, we decided to live apart also.”
“I find out something everyday,” I said. “Now I think he was crazy. Were you mad with him when he left you?”
“Maybe we disagree. You see he charged many things to my account in stores down town. The Bombay Bazaar, Watamul’s — but they are ladies’ things. But they are never for me. I am very angry. People pay money to look at my body. And he uses me like that — ”
“I hear he was on the edge of a big thing, about to cash in and become very rich when he died.” I said this casually, but I was watching every movement of her eyes.
For half a silent minute, she seemed not to know what to say. And then because she was a fine actress, she knew enough to say something. Anything. Keep the show moving. But I knew I had found the first break in this thing. There was something Herb had been on to, and this wife of his knew about it!
I was on
ly half listening to her rapid speech: “Well, I don’t know of anything like that. I can tell you I don’t. But it would be a good thing if he did. Maybe I could get some of my money back. Maybe he could pay Eddie Kole some of the gambling debt Eddie has held against him — and Eddie only patient with him because he was my husband — and Eddie was a friend of mine.”
“Eddie Kole,” I said. “The one who owns the Bali Hi at Waikiki?”
“Yes. I work for him.”
“And Herb owed him a great deal of money?”
“More even than Eddie Kole will admit. He does not like for one to think he has been a suck-er. Like the — ” she pointed a slender finger at the brass monkey — “like this poor little fellow.”
“Lanai,” I said. “Somebody killed Herb. Maybe he had hurt you. Maybe you have reason to hate him. But the police are trying to find the one who murdered him — only I want to find whoever did it first — ”
“Why?”
“Whoever did it will have a very strong reason. For his sake, I hope it is also a good reason — ”
“It will be,” she said with a shrug, “whoever did it.”
The door swung open and I wheeled around. A man about five feet six, young, maybe twenty-three, black hair brush-thick and brush-straight on the side of his head, burst in. He was handsome in a heavy featured way, and would have looked more at home in a breech clout and hibiscus behind his ear than he did in his gaudy slacks.
He ran in slamming the door behind him.
I heard Lanai’s rippling laughter behind me. “Sometime, Kam, you are going to run in like that, and find some horrible thing that never can you back away from — ”
“That’s why I do it!” he shouted. “Do you hear? That’s why!” He pointed at me. “Who is he? What does he want? I thought you promise you are finished with these stateside sons — the last one was not enough, eh? Promising to marry you. Not even caring if you get a divorce from Kam Okazi or not! Now look at you — undressed — and another one!”
“Kam, don’t be a fool,” she said slowly, “This one has his hat in his hand. No man who comes to see me keeps his hat in his hand — you should know that.”
For a moment he went on clinging to his anger, not wanting to release it, not wanting to let it go because in it was the only way he could pour out the hatred he felt for the way Lanai used him. For the way he let her use him.
At last, he said to me very quietly. “Who are you?”
“I am a friend of Herbert Baldwin. My name is James Patterson. I am a private detective. He was killed, so naturally I wanted to talk to his wife.”
“His wife!” Kam Okazi spat the words at me. “Lanai was never his wife. He never divorced the one before her. He made of Lanai a fool, but never a wife. That is all you need to know. Why do you care that such a man is dead? Who could let a man like that go on living? Who?”
I looked at him, his flushed face, his raging black eyes. “Talk to me like that all you want to, Okazi,” I said. “I don’t care. I just want the truth. But be careful how you yell that at the police. They are not so interested in the truth — they care more for evidence.”
“I tell him that all the time,” Lanai said from the couch. I wanted to look at her again. I wanted to stand there looking at her. But I knew how Kam Okazi suffered because of her. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him any more. The way I looked at it, there was plenty ahead for him.
11
THE TELEPHONE was ringing when I came into my office twenty minutes after I left Lanai’s apartment. There was an insistent, forlorn sound to it, as though it had been ringing for a long time. At first, thinking it was Ona Kalani, I decided to let it ring. And then I remembered the threat in her voice. I hadn’t any idea what silly thing Ona might attempt to make me sorry, but just now I didn’t have time to take chances. I picked up the telephone.
“Hello,” the woman’s voice said. It was not Ona. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or not. “Is this the James Patterson Detective Agency?”
“It is,” I said, “but why’d you think I’d be in my office at seven o’clock at night?”
“I didn’t think you would be,” she said. “I only hoped so. I am Sybil Tinsley. You remember, you talked to me here at my hotel this afternoon?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Could you come back to see me? Now. Right now?” her voice cracked. “I’d rather not discuss it over the telephone.”
“Yes,” I said. “Would twenty minutes be all right?”
Somebody else with troubles, I thought, hanging up. Now I would go deep into Sybil Tinsley’s life, whether or not I wanted to. I kept a Scotch bottle in the top right hand drawer of my desk. I pulled it out, but it was empty. I swore, dropping the empty on the desktop.
I had planned to telephone all the photographers in town and attempt to make an appointment for some party photographs. The dynamite kind that Herb had used to blackmail the poor lonely widow, Sybil Tinsley. But there wasn’t time for that, so I locked up the office again, and went down to the car.
I broke speed laws on my way to Waikiki. But traffic was slim and settling night pulled long shadows across the wide highway. I went through the crossroads without slowing down and parked the car just outside Sybil Tinsley’s hotel. I reminded myself of a private op in search of twenty-five a day and expenses.
• • •
Sybil was waiting just inside the door at 518 when I rang the bell. Before I could punch it again, she’d pulled open her door, standing swollen eyed, her face drawn.
I followed her in and sat beside her on the divan.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “This afternoon nothing mattered.”
“It’s different now,” she said. “Now everything matters. Everything.”
She got up and stood looking down at me.
“I’ve made my mistake,” she said, “and I thought a thousand dollars was enough to pay for it besides the personal humiliation I’ve suffered. Must I go on paying forever?”
“I don’t know. It beats me,” I said. “I’ve about decided it’s not what you do, it’s what you get caught doing that you pay for. That way it about evens up.”
“Well, I don’t care to have it even. As I told you this afternoon, there were pictures taken of me, in most horrifying situations. I have no excuse — no apology. I was a fool. Besides it — was a marijuana party. There were other women there besides me. I realize now that it was a racket — that every one of the other poor, neglected fools paid later just as I did.”
“And that’s the thing Herb ran?”
But I said it mostly to myself.
“I don’t know who ran it. I think he did.”
I looked at her.
Herb had been playing with dynamite.
“How terribly did you hate him?” I said abruptly.
She stopped talking.
She realized I hadn’t even been listening to her.
“I didn’t kill him, Jim,” she said. “Don’t you see, the only way I can live as I do now is to stay out of scandal? I convinced him. I showed him Alms’ will. There wasn’t a chance for Herb to collect. He agreed to let me alone. And I called off the police. We were quits. It was over, I thought.”
I looked at her.
“And now it has started again?” I said.
“Yes. Now they’ve started again. It’s got to stop. They won’t believe me when I say I cannot pay, and if I cannot, the scandal they create will ruin me, and spoil their chances.”
I shook my head.
“I’m afraid they’ll make you pay,” I said.
“How can I?”
“Or you’ll be likely to lose everything.”
She spread her hands.
“But I live on a fund — it’s in trust. It’s paid to me by the month. A few withdrawals like the thousand I made for Herb — there’d be an investigation. Alms’ brother is a banker. You don’t know that family!”
“And so they called today?” I said. “They’v
e started at you again?”
“Yes. A woman called this afternoon. She said she had happened to find an old negative in some things that belonged to Herbert Baldwin that I might be interested in — for a three thousand dollar look — ”
“Three thousand! That’s it. Somebody has taken over from Herbert. I think when he got it working, it just looked too good to somebody else.”
“I want to hire you,” she said. “I want you to handle this for me. See whoever it is behind this thing, and try to tell them before I’m ruined. They won’t care about me. But maybe when they see they can’t collect anything — ”
“You say a woman called?”
“Yes. She said she was a dancer at the Bali Hi Club here at Waikiki.”
I stared at her. “A dancer. The Bali Hi!”
Lanai Okazi!
“Her first dance is at eleven tonight. I’m to be there. I’m to see her in her rooms. If I don’t pay — ” she shrugged, and her mouth sagged. Her bitter, hopeless, unhappy mouth. “I want you to go there for me. I’m willing to pay you, whatever your fee is. I’m — prepared to offer one last five hundred dollars for the last negative.”
Still reeling under that news, I promised to see Lanai at the Bali Hi after her first dance at eleven p.m.
From Sybil Tinsley’s hotel, I drove clear across town and parked outside the Oahu Railway station. I walked across the street and down Aala. There was something else I needed to know.
When the fat landlady answered my knock, I said, “Have you rented the room yet?” I nodded toward her sign, Room To Let.
She spat. “No. People are such fools. But I give them a week to forget. My rooms are cheap.”
“I’ll rent it for the night,” I said. I gave her a five dollar bill and started up the stairs. “You can keep the change.” I gave her my version of a sly wink.
She smiled toothlessly, and leered. “All right, but it ain’t a fine place to bring a lady.”
“Well, she ain’t a fine lady,” I said. I was already going up the stairs.
The Brass Monkey Page 7