Then he looked down at me. “How do you like my jail?” he inquired.
“You’re a son of bitch,” I said.
He leaned over me. I could hardly see him through my swollen eyelids. He spoke over his shoulder to the guard. “Maybe I was wrong,” he said. “Maybe they can work on his face. One more day. I think it will last longer than his resistance.” He turned back. “Or do you want to confess now, Patterson?”
“Go to hell,” I told him.
He just looked at me. “I wonder if Ona would laugh at you, now?” he said. “If she could see your face. It looks very much like hers did. Only we keep you alive.”
“I’ll get out of this, Mosani,” I whispered. “God help you, then.”
“God would do well to help you, murderer. Now.”
I heard the door close behind him. I went on lying on the cot. It was between relays. They worked on me continually, a new group every time a tour ended.
When I heard the door opened, I thought they had come for me again. I strained down against the straw mattress. But it was only the turnkey. “You have a visitor,” he said. “Mr. Mosani has consented to let her visit you here as you are in the solitary block.”
“I don’t want to see her,” I said.
He didn’t answer me. He spoke to someone at his side. “You only got couple minutes.”
I sat up on the side of the cot. The room whirled. Then when it settled into place, I saw Lanai Okazi sitting on a straight chair facing me. She was smiling. Smiling. My God, hadn’t she done enough to me?
She was smartly dressed in a beige suit, her wax-black hair seeming polished, the petals of a hibiscus at her ear glistening. The flower looked wax-like, unreal as Lanai herself.
“Jim-mee,” she said. Her voice sounded full of sympathy, but her slanted green eyes were lighted devilishly. I wondered if she’d ever cried. She hadn’t a face for crying at all — the soulless doll, the eternal smile. “Jim-mee, you must get a good private detective.”
“I’m a good private detective,” I said bitterly. “Look where it got me!”
“Jim-mee, I know a good wan. Hees name is Lester Sakayama. He weel find out truth for you. He weel help you. I weel ask heem.”
I looked at her, lovely as something on a shelf of expensive dolls, green eyes slanted, white even teeth glistening like the petals of the hibiscus.
“Why do you want to help me now?” I said.
“You are in trouble,” she announced simply. “Is it not because of me you are in trouble? Besides, you are the man Herb forever talks about. The best friend. The man so smart. I do theenk it a sin to keep you here like these men do. Herb was not good, but he felt that you were. First I see you, Lanai feel you are old friend. Old friend. Somewan good from the bad Lanai had with Her-bert.”
“If you knew he was so bad, Lanai, why didn’t you go back to your Kam?”
She shrugged. “Lanai and girls everywhere are so alike. We want nice things. With Kam I could never have them. With Her-bert, I hope I have them. Until I find out the truth. And then it is too late. With a man like you are — perhaps Lanai can have much she wants.”
“Lanai, Herb was a plaster saint. He was all right. Stay away from me. I’m a guy who married a girl just to get even with another one. I’m a bastard, Lanai. Even if I didn’t kill Ona, I guess I’ve hurt Troy enough to earn this.”
“If you are a bastard, you cannot help that, Jim-mee. I do not like the word. Sometimes, I want to cry when I hear it. I am — a bastard, too, Jim-mee. We cannot help that. We cannot pick our parents. We cannot force them to marry — ”
I tried to smile, but my broken lips made the pain too intense for smiling. How could a girl be like Lanai? I knew what she was. I had known from the moment I saw the brass monkey in her hand. I knew how you came by those things. I knew that Eddie Kole and Hooks Alkao had had coaching before they lied at the inquest. I knew she wasn’t simple at all. And yet, there was about her, a look of pagan simplicity, a childlike goodness. I swore. All it was, damn it, was such hurting beauty, you couldn’t stand to look at it without wanting to possess it, without desiring it, so you tried to conceal the evil you knew was in her.
“I’m married,” I said. “As far as you’re concerned, I’m happily married.”
She shrugged. “That wan. That rich wan. She can take care of herself. If she lose Jim-mee, her papa buy her another wan just like heem.”
I ignored that. I knew better. Troy was vulnerable, and I had hurt her. Sitting there, even wishing I could crush those unreal lips under mine until they bled, I was even more deeply wishing I could make up to Troy some of the hurt I’d caused her.
I said sharply, “Lanai, why did Eddie Kole and Hooks Alkao lie at the inquest.”
She frowned, the thin lines of her brows pulling together above her straight nose.
“I do not understand, Jim-mee. There is so much I do not understand. That is why I have come to tell you, you must let me have Lester Sakayama work for you.”
“It won’t do any good. I’m fixed.”
She looked at me, her carmine mouth forming a round, startled o. “Jim-mee, you did not kill her!”
“What difference does it make? Looking guilty is three times as important as being guilty.”
She lifted her head. “I am going to Lester Sakayama.”
The turnkey was there then. I looked beyond him and there was Troy. She was wearing a dark suit and it made her appear even more palely blond, tall, shapely. Lovely, even with a wispy lace kerchief against her nose.
Lanai stood up. For a moment they faced each other. Lanai’s mouth hardened. Her slanting green eyes narrowed, and it seemed to me, her nostrils flared slightly. As for Troy, she let her eyes brush across Lanai’s face, in passing and that was all.
“I tried to arrange your bail, Jim,” Troy said.
I shook my head. “There’s no bail for me,” I told her.
“I have sent for father,” she said. “When he comes, there will be something he can do. I can’t let you stay in this place — ”
“I never lived better,” I told her. “I have people talking to me twenty hours every day. If I don’t want to stay awake to listen, they keep me awake.”
“I tried to come before, darling. They wouldn’t let me. Isn’t there something we can do. I thought it was against the law to treat you like this.”
“The law is for laughter in this place,” I told her. “They never heard of it.”
“We’ll get you out,” she said forlornly. “Some way.”
“You better hurry,” I told her. “Or you’ll have to serve me for chopped meat.”
“Oh, Jim.” Her voice was bottomless with grief.
“I always hurt you. Don’t I, Troy? I try not to, and yet I do. I want to tell you, Troy, I’m sorry for what I’ve done to hurt you. If there were any chance, I’d like to make it up to you. Really I would.”
She looked at me. For a moment she was silent. Shadows slid across her face. The Fifth Avenue face. The Newport grace. The Miami tan. The smart laughter. The sleek cars. That was Troy, and that was Troy’s life. But when the shadows were gone, her eyes were bleak, her cheeks drawn, and you knew that underneath all that stuff didn’t matter, and Troy had been so deeply hurt, you couldn’t ever make it up to her….
I watched her go. Silently watched her go along the corridor until she was out of sight.
• • •
It was about seven o’clock that night when Lester Sakayama came to my cell.
Sakayama was a mussed, stout man of slightly under medium build, with a round, balding head and a trim moustache. The pocket of his cream colored coat was fat with expensive cigars, and Sakayama had the look of a man who wore one habitually between his thick lips. He was only a year or so older than I, but his black eyes were disillusioned, bitter in a way that made him appear much older.
He sat on the straight chair and leaned back in it. He chewed his cigar. “Lanai Okazi, the dancer, has paid me to come and talk t
o you,” he said. “From what I have seen, you need a good lawyer. Have you attempted a writ? At worst, you could hope for temporary freedom.”
I shook my head. “At best I’d get a lawyer and me laughed at.”
Sakayama shrugged and sucked slowly at his cigar. “Is there any investigation you’d care to have me make for you?”
“You can’t help me. I’m not even going to hire a lawyer. The Territory will even have to hire one for me. I’m not throwing any money away.”
The mussed man smiled. “Either you are no gambler at all, or you are a wise gambler who bets only on certainties.” He shook his head. “For me, I’d say your chances are not too good.” He put out his right hand and I touched it briefly. “Anyhow, good luck.”
“Do you know anything about a blackmail ring, or anyone who has syndicated such racketeers as the dope peddlers?”
“There must be some,” Sakayama said coolly. He shrugged noncommittally. “But there is too much such talk. Young men of these Islands are loyal as the young men of any state. Crime is of no greater importance here than stateside. Such talk should be stopped, for it harms our chances of achieving Statehood.”
“I’m not worried about Statehood,” I said. “Somebody framed me for a murder. It’s all tied in with blackmail and dope peddling. If I could find out anything about the people behind it, I might still beat this thing.”
Sakayama’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I don’t know enough about such matters as that,” he said.
He was just leaving when the iron bars opened so that Albert Mosani could enter. Mosani looked at Sakayama with distaste, and the stout private investigator brushed quickly past the detective.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Time for another treatment? Don’t tell me you’ve run out of all knuckles but yours.”
Mosani shrugged. “If I started on you, I could not stop. No, the Territory wishes to be shown how you could have braked your car at the edge of the road, leaped to safety while it plunged down the side of the hill to the banyan.”
“And that will prove something?” I inquired.
“For me,” Mosani said evenly, “it will put the top on the bottle, you might say.”
“Would you mind saying why?”
“No. Get up.” He snapped handcuffs on my wrists. “There was one other witness. We did not call him at the inquest. I did not see how it would serve. He was nearer than the other cars. He actually saw the car going over. But he says he saw you leap to safety as the car lurched off the road. It pleases me to believe you did that. I would say you are too cowardly to have taken that ride downhill with Ona.”
“She didn’t mind it. She was already dead. Remember?”
“Are you ready to confess then that you killed her.”
“She was already dead. But I didn’t kill her.”
He looked at me. His face was sallow, but hardset. “Let’s go,” he said. He prodded me from the cell.
There were several large official cars at the Merchant Street curb. Mosani led me toward one of the small police cruisers.
Down Bethel, I could see the lights of Honolulu Harbor, and Aloha Tower. There was only a slight breeze in across the waterfront. There were small, glistening puddles of oil-slick water in the street for there had been a brief rain.
Mosani’s car pulled away from police headquarters first. The procession following us was as solemn as a funeral march. My funeral, I thought. It was funny riding handcuffed beside the silent Mosani, his profile straight, his eyes fixed on the road, the feeling of hatred seeming to come out of him the way sweat exudes from sweat glands. I wasn’t thinking about Mosani. I wasn’t even thinking about Julie. I was wondering what Troy was doing, how hurt her family must be at the scandal I’d brought to them. And I thought about how you begin to scratch the smooth surface of a thing, like Herb Baldwin’s suicide down in Aala alley. Underneath, nothing was smooth, it was all black slime pits, and the farther you went, the more you were covered with it, so you could never retreat, you could never be whole or clean again …
I watched the busy, brightly lighted streets slide past. The laughing people walking together on the sidewalks, reflected for a moment in the shop windows, didn’t seem real. We passed my office, and I looked up at the darkened windows. It didn’t even belong to me any more.
A bedraggled jeep zipped past the police cars with eloquent contempt. I watched the little car swing left off Bethel, make an illegal U-turn and speed across the intersection directly in the path of the police and jury cars. Mosani had to slam on his brakes. He cursed under his breath.
There was something familiar about the torn and flapping canvas top, the blinking headlights, the mud splattered sides. I remembered then. The cop baiting, police despising woman, Hattie Contona.
I wondered if I’d helped her if I’d known. I decided I would. The world was becoming too much a police state, everywhere. I would do my little best to protest. I’d added to Mosani’s hatred of me. But I doubted Hattie now. I believed she delivered milk in her jeep. But there was the richness of the inside of her house, the money she’d lent Herb. And she hated the police almost as much as they disliked her.
It was a strange night, the glowing shop windows, the small dark people laughing and talking in their dialects. Old Hattie Contona whipping about in her jeep to despoil the dignity of a solemn police action.
I glanced at the thick face of Mosani. I was surprised to see he was secretly smiling to himself. To me, that smile was the finishing, nightmare touch.
The police procession halted at the place where Ona and I had gone off the road in my car. I shivered. Not far ahead was the Pass, a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. But how had I driven us this far and known nothing about it?
I shook my head.
“Get out,” Mosani said to me. Three uniformed policemen stood at the shoulder of the road as I stepped out of Mosani’s cruiser. But I was looking at Mosani’s face. It was deathly pale. At his side, he was holding his police positive. His finger was curled on the trigger. The law may have been bringing me here to finish off the case, but Mosani was hoping I’d attempt to escape!
I had a crazy thought that maybe Mosani’s case wasn’t as airtight as he hoped it would be. Maybe the frame was coming apart at the seams. I decided to hell with giving him a chance to shoot me. If he did, it would have to be before all these witnesses.
But as my foot touched the ground on the shoulder of the road, Hattie Contona’s jeep whipped past, and I heard Hattie’s high cackling laughter and the curses she spat out at Mosani.
In the second that all eyes followed her speeding car, I lunged outward over the side of the cliff. I dove as far as I could, throwing myself out and down into the darkness.
I doubled up as much as I could. I could not protect my head with my manacled arms.
Guns exploded up on the road. I went rolling downward in an avalanche of brush and lava rocks.
Bushes caught at me and scratched my face as I reeled past in the darkness. I had no idea what I was going to do with the temporary freedom I’d achieved, maybe die with it.
I stopped tumbling at last. I lay still in the cold, wet darkness. Heavy foliage had tangled about my arms. I could hear the cars starting up on the highway, the scream of alarm sirens, the pounding feet of pursuing men coming downslope.
It was painfully slow pulling myself free of the tangled vines. I was sweating coldly when I stood up with my shackled hands before me. In the jungle of darkness, I looked about. Far above were the headlamps and searching beams from the cars, but below and around me there was nothing but hot suffocating darkness. Vines that grew forever sending out heavy groping fingers.
I took one step forward and plunged downward.
I was in a pit, completely overgrown with a brittle, heavy stand of vine and banyan roots. I was thankful there were no snakes on Oahu, for I was in what would have been a heaven for them!
When I tried to pull myself upward, the vines broke under me, and I felt mysel
f sink further into the bottomless pit. I grasped out wildly. My fingers caught around the root of a banyan.
I chinned myself on the rubbery wood. I was up on the rim of the pit when I saw the men moving within ten yards of me upslope. Spotlights were punching holes in the darkness down the side of the hill. In a moment, the light might find me. But in the meantime, it picked out the men who were searching for me.
I worked my way slowly downslope. I kept moving in the thick fern until I reached a place where the Nuunau Pali road had twisted back near me.
I stood concealed in the brush, watching the cars race past on the highway.
I saw Hattie Contona’s jeep. It was creeping along, lights dimmed, at the very shoulder of the road. I began to laugh. I could see the man’s hat sitting straight on Hattie’s head, and I ran toward it.
17
HATTIE CONTONA slowed her car just enough so that I could topple into the littered seat beside her.
She jammed her foot down so hard on the gas, I felt my head snap back. The car lurched forward downhill.
“Where are you going?” I managed to say.
She was watching the road, her man’s hat pulled almost to her thick brows. She had both hands on the wheel. “That is up to you, my good friend. I have been looking for you. I’ll take you where you think you will be safe.”
I shook my head. “They’ll only get you in trouble, Hattie, for aiding a fugitive. They’ll hold you as an accomplice.”
Her face wrinkled into a smile. “Who will know I aided you?”
“The police might stop you.”
She just smiled and didn’t bother to answer this. I saw an orange glow far inland against the horizon. “Are those lights for me?”
Hattie tossed me a ring of keys. “Press hard on the lock with each of these,” she said, “until you find one that works. The right one is there.” She looked at the orange glow spreading upward against the night sky. “Someone burns his cane fields for an early harvest.”
I was already working with the cuffs. I heard Hattie drag in a deep breath. “A police car,” she said. “Behind us.”
The Brass Monkey Page 10