Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “Does this mean no one will have time or money to dig there?”

  “Part of the controversy, of course. The local historical society would like to block the development long enough to dig if not preserve. The development company takes the position that there are already a number of well-developed archaeological digs on Kaua’i, and that another one would reveal nothing new. The historical society counters by suggesting that we won’t know that for sure until the site is explored, and that even if it does reveal nothing new, it is a piece of priceless cultural heritage that will be lost forever should the development proceed, and that there are few enough remnants of traditional Hawaiian culture as it is.”

  “I’d have to say I agree with them,” Patria said. “By the way, what’s in that awful-looking drink?”

  “This? Do you really want to know?”

  “Actually, I don’t.” They all laughed. Conversation moved easily through the news of the day, as if talk were fish schooled to the local reef, flashing from one angle to another, seeking the arches and hollows of local interest: the economy, county politics, surf conditions, mainland intrusions and caprices.

  “I hear it’s a Russian satellite that’s falling tonight off to the west,” Chazz said at one point, and Kimiko said she read in the Honolulu paper that there was some doubt about that, that it might be American since two satellites almost collided and both went off the air. One was still up there.

  They were still talking about it when they heard the noise, the whistling shriek and the final punctuation of an explosion. Like everyone else in the bar they hurried outside.

  A few people were standing on the porch, others down the driveway, looking to the west. “Over there,” Chazz said. Patria stood on a stone to get higher.

  “I can see some smoke. Looks like the Fourth of July just after a big rocket,” she said.

  “Except,” Kimiko added, “that the trail goes down instead of up.”

  The smoke drifted away and nothing further disturbed the tranquility of the night sky. The stars continued unerring in their courses. Cloud still shredded itself against the distant dim flanks of Wai’ale’ale.

  The tropical balm returned, yet something had changed. Conversation was more muted, less boisterous and slack. Intimacies formed in the bar moments before dissolved without a trace. Others intensified. Patria, settling back into her seat, noted the change in the social pattern of the room: less movement; fewer approaches between the sexes; more introspection.

  “It won’t last,” she said.

  Chazz was used to this. “What won’t last?”

  She waved her hand at the room. “All this. The new tone, new atmosphere. The ambiance is different. The lights seem a little brighter, as if something happened that frightened everyone, and they called for more light to keep away the darkness.”

  “You know, you’re right. They did turn up the lights a little. I’ll be damned.”

  “Oh, Chazz, I hope not,” she said, serious. Yet she was smiling.

  The cheep-cheep of Takamura’s beeper sounded. “Uh-oh,” he said, pulling it out of his belt.

  “How come they didn’t call you on that thing this morning at the beach?” Chazz asked.

  “Because this morning I left it at home. ‘The wise man digs his well before he is thirsty’.”

  “Charlie Chan?” Chazz asked.

  Cobb nodded.

  “What does it mean? Or should I ask.”

  “It means, I left my beeper at home because I thought duty would not call if I could not hear. And now it calls again. I must make a phone call.” After he left the table, the other three watched the room. If the shooting in the coconut grove that morning had dampened anyone’s enthusiasm, it had not shown. Now the falling meteor had done what murder could not.

  “I wonder if it’s the Chicken Little syndrome,” Patria said.

  “Chicken Little?” Kimiko asked.

  “The sky falling. No one believes it will actually fall on land, nearby. When it does, we are all shocked and a little afraid.”

  Cobb returned. He did not sit down.

  “I have a feeling our dinner has been postponed,” Chazz said.

  “That was Sammy, my former partner, now a civil servant in the pay of the county finance office. He knows everyone, of course. His cousin Darrell works for the county Civil Defense office. It seems that Civil Defense got a call a few minutes ago.”

  “Uh-oh,” Patria said. “I have a funny feeling.”

  Cobb nodded. He was not smiling. “The call was from the state Public Health office.”

  Patria looked at Chazz. “I spoke too soon.”

  “The satellite?” Chazz asked.

  Again Cobb nodded. “They suspect it may have had some dangerous materials on it.”

  “Dangerous? In what way, dangerous?” Chazz was frowning.

  Cobb nodded as he answered. “Biological or radiological materials of some sort. They aren’t sure. A ‘reliable source high inside the space agency’ told the press a satellite was coming down and they aren’t sure which satellite.”

  “Ours or theirs?”

  “Yes.”

  Chazz put some money on the table and they left. Behind them the conversation in the bar was slowly returning to normal. Already the lights were dimmer. The world was a stable place, and would not long be disturbed.

  In the car Chazz asked again, “Our or theirs?”

  “I say yes,” Cobb said, turning down the Kuhio Highway toward town, “because it’s unclear. It could be ours, of course. It could be Soviet. If it is theirs, then nobody knows what’s on it, but it’s probably a plutonium reactor. And if it’s ours, then…”

  “Trouble? It’d be a stunning coincidence if both ours and theirs had some kind of biological agent on board, wouldn’t it? But we don’t use plutonium reactors, I understand. And then again, we might ask what kind of biological agent? If the satellite was testing the effects of weightlessness or the radiation of the Van Allen Belt on household detergent or something, we’d have nothing to worry about… I see from your expression we have no such luck.”

  The rest of the trip was short and silent. As Cobb parked in front of the County Building he waved at Sammy, leaning against one of the pillars flanking the door that supported the two-story portico. He was chewing thoughtfully on his inevitable toothpick.

  “Hi, boss,” he said. He nodded to the others and tossed his toothpick into a sand-filled standing ashtray by the entrance.

  “Door was unlocked,” he said as they went inside. “Darrell thought that was funny. He was coming in to check on some new high-frequency all-band transceiver they just got in. Darrell’s a ham radio fanatic, and this is his baby. So. He found the door unlocked. Odd, but he didn’t think a lot of it. Usually Loretta’s good about locking up, but maybe she forgot. Anyway, he was down in the Civil Defense office when the call came. Now this was strange—who ever calls Civil Defense? All they ever get are weather—high surf, hurricanes, tsunami; there’s usually plenty of warning for those. In the Pacific you can see weather coming a long ways off, especially with satellites.”

  “Right,” Cobb said. “Get to it, Kukui Nut. State Health…?”

  Offices lined the outside walls of the County Building, leaving the central space open. Broad stairs went to the second floor from the center of the lobby. Behind them a narrow staircase, protected by a waist-high swinging door, descended to the Civil Defense offices in the basement.

  “So the phone rings, you see.” Sammy paused to hold open the door and let the others descend. He went on, “Now SOP says an emergency call after hours would be forwarded in turn to his number, then his boss Sherm Coelho’s house, then the Mayor’s. But he answered it. It was someone over at State Health, a woman. She sounded worried. She suggested, and it was just a suggestion, she said… well, I’ll let Darrell tell you. He’s still here.”

  Sammy followed Cobb and the others through the glass-paned door at the bottom of the stairs. They entered a square
room, brightly lit, containing two desks and counters covered with radio equipment.

  Darrell, a slim young Hawaiian whose sober clothes contrasted strongly with the violent colors of Sammy’s aloha shirt, clambered to his feet as they entered. After Sammy introduced everybody, Cobb asked, “Why did you call Sammy? He’s certainly not next in the chain of command.”

  Darrell shuffled his feet a moment, standing awkwardly beside his desk. “Yeah, well, I did call Mr. Coelho, you see, after. But I thought Sammy might want to know, so I called him first. It was such a strange call, Lieutenant. I mean, Bea— that’s the woman over at State Health— she was really worried, but she couldn’t be too specific or anything.”

  “Start from the beginning,” Cobb suggested. “And for goodness sake, sit down. You’re making me nervous. ‘Too many dark clouds shade the scene,’ as the great man would say.”

  Darrell frowned. “What?”

  Cobb sighed. “Never mind. Just tell us what happened, Darrell.”

  He sat down abruptly and picked up a microphone. He looked at it for a moment, as if he had never seen it before, then fiddled nervously, pressing the talk switch and releasing it with a click. “I came by after dinner to look at the new radio.” He patted a complex black box covered with dials and switches. “It’s a new high-frequency all-band transceiver from Hitachi with automatic programmable frequency scan.”

  Cobb put out his hand. “Yes, Darrell. We understand. Please continue.”

  “Sorry.” He put the microphone down with an effort. “I had my key out, you see, to open the door, and I found it was unlocked. It shouldn’t have been, of course. Loretta usually locks it. She’s the Mayor’s assistant. She’s almost always the last to leave unless someone works late, which doesn’t happen very often. You see, everyone works for the county, so they don’t put in much overtime or anything.”

  “We understand that, too, Darrell. Then what happened?”

  “OK, so I locked the door and came downstairs here. I thought I’d be a half hour or so. I wanted to check out the radio and all. So I turned it on and the phone rang. Ordinarily I would have let it ring, and the call would be forwarded up the list. But, see, I’m the first on the list, being the lowest-ranking member of the Civil Defense Agency, except Adrienne— she’s the secretary— so I went ahead and answered it, and it was Bea, over in State Health. I know Bea because she’s my great-aunt, which means she’s Sammy’s third cousin or something though I don’t think they know each other very well, do you?”

  Sammy shook his head. “Go on,” he said. “She called. What did she say?”

  “She said she was sitting at her desk reading the newspaper— you know, about the satellite falling and all that, everyone’s been talking about it, and the phone rang. She works over in the state building, and almost everyone in her department had left. This was about five-thirty, she said, and she was about to leave. A man told her that the satellite was going to cause problems. Big problems. She asked him why he was calling her. He said the problems were going to be public health problems. She asked him what that had to do with the satellite, and he told her he couldn’t tell her that, and he hung up.”

  Cobb walked over and stared at a set of huge maps marked with small pins on one wall. He touched the head of one of the pins. The word WAIMEA was written on a piece of masking tape stuck to the map. “What do these pins mean?” he asked after a silence.

  “Red ones mark the locations of warning sirens,” Darrell said eagerly. “Blue ones are locations of RADEF installations, up in Koke’e there, and over on the west side.”

  Cobb turned. “Radef?”

  “Radar Defense.”

  “Oh. So this mysterious man called Bea at five-thirty. She called you at what time?”

  “Eight-fifteen. She said the satellite had crashed somewhere on the island. She said she thought maybe we ought to know about the call. At the time she had thought he must be a nut case. They get those, you know, nutty people calling in. All kinds of strange people out there, saying there’s some new disease loose and all that.”

  “I see. Let me check.” Cobb picked up the telephone.

  Chazz and Patria poked around the room, looking at maps and circulars, charts of emergency medical procedures and lists of phone numbers, while Takamura called headquarters. Sammy leaned against the doorjamb and chewed on another toothpick. Kimiko leafed through a brochure filled with advice on what to do in the event of nuclear attack.

  Cobb hung up and turned back to Darrell. “The satellite came down near the crater, according to radar tracking from both the airport and the station up in Koke’e. No one lives up there, so nothing much is going to happen. So, Darrell, Bea grew alarmed about the call and telephoned you. Just to report it?”

  Darrell nodded. Cobb went on, “Did she say anything else? Something the man said, something about his voice, or the tone of his voice?”

  “He had an accent, she said.”

  “OK, an accent. Did she have any idea what kind of accent?”

  “Well…” Darrell picked up the microphone again and stared at it intently, as if it were an object of unbounded curiosity. “She said it was a foreign accent,” he said at last.

  Chazz looked up. “Why am I getting the feeling this is going to become very complicated?” he asked no one in particular.

  “ ‘How loud is the thunder, how little it rains’,” Cobb quoted.

  “And what, might we ask, does that mean?” Patria demanded.

  “It means,” Cobb said, moving toward the door, “that I don’t know why you get that feeling. It means that I hope the little saying is true, and that it is not going to rain on us. It means I am hoping that Darrell is correct, and that this is a nut calling Bea of the State Health Department, but that we cannot take that chance, and I at least must of course speak with Bea. I am hoping all these things because I still have a shooting to investigate, a simple murder that begins to look more attractive to this detective all the time, since it involves only simple human passions like jealousy, hate, greed, and revenge and not complicated things like high-technology, international relations, and Civil Defense. Darrell, I think it might be best if you waited here for Mr. Coelho to arrive. He will no doubt want to make sure this isn’t some kind of hoax.”

  Darrell nodded. He opened a drawer and pulled out a large binder titled “Kaua’i Civil Defense Agency Emergency Operating Procedures.” He began to leaf through it, one tab at a time. “I’ll be ready,” he said. He nodded at a list written in red on a white board near the door. “That’s the list of calls. If something is on that satellite, and Public Health gives the word, we start coordinating county agencies. Health would have the doctors ready and so on. We can arrange transportation, shelter, emergency services, everything.”

  “Very good. Sammy, folks, let’s go. This really isn’t our turf. We can let Darrell get on with what he has to do. Just in case.”

  On the way out Cobb said, “I may as well run you all home. Nothing will happen until morning at the earliest. It’s impossible to get up the Jeep trail to the crater at night. Meantime, you might think about what could be on that satellite, Chazz.”

  “Anything I can think of you don’t want to know about,” Chazz said.

  When they stepped outside the stars were invisible. The bottoms of the clouds, lit a dirty gray by the lights of Lihu’e, released a light drizzle on the town.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE MAN FACING COBB WAS short. He was round. His eyes twinkled in a network of seams and grooves, though his mouth did not smile. He shook his head, rubbing his hands down a spotless and stiffly starched apron.

  “Who was around at that hour?” Cobb asked. He stood by the back door of the hotel beside a suite of six green plastic garbage cans filled with empty milk cartons, used paper towels, plastic wrapping, Styrofoam egg crates, soda bottles, grocery bags, and crushed cardboard. Flies, relatively scarce in Hawaii, were concentrated here. From time to time Cobb brushed one away from his face.
r />   “No one around then. Early, early morning like that, some janitors, some cooks, busboy. No one. All in kitchen then, working. Get ready for breakfast, see? Restaurant open at six-thirty, much to do then. Working. No one outside.”

  Cobb took off his porkpie hat and waved it in front of his face. The flies redistributed themselves without a fuss. He put the hat back on. “OK, Lee. Everyone was inside. You’re sure of that?”

  “Sure, sure. Everyone. I’m head morning chef, know where everyone is. Must know. You ask manager maybe? Desk clerk, bookkeeper, they get here early, I hear.” He tilted his round head and looked up at the detective. “You think maybe manager did it, shoot him?”

  Cobb took off his hat again before answering. He waved it through the flies once more. He held it at his side. “Lee,” he asked, “have you had a health inspection around here recently?”

  “What are you asking? Health inspection, you ask? You got ideas? What time you think the truck comes, anyway? This all from last night. You wait two, three hours, when truck comes. Flies go away with truck, then.”

  Cobb fanned himself. He wrinkled his nose. He put his hat on again. “OK. Do you know Mr. Linz?”

  “Mr. Linz, he dead, Lieutenant. He shot down. Maybe manager did it.”

  Cobb smiled. “Answer the question, Lee. Did you know him?”

  Lee shook his head. “No. I don’t know him.”

  Cobb sighed. “Lee,” he chided.

  Lee’s eyes went suddenly round for a moment. “Oh, do I know him? Oh, of course, everyone knows him. But I don’t know him. Understand?”