by Rob Swigart
“I don’t think I want to hear about your sex life again, Angela. It’s not something women should discuss with their lover’s children.” He had his father’s assured confidence when he spoke, humorless but effective.
She fell silent and put her drink down very carefully on the bar, next to the three other half-finished whiskeys. “You don’t understand. You never liked me, did you?” Her voice now matched his tonelessness. She lit a cigarette and exhaled loudly, blowing smoke in his direction.
“No,” he admitted. “But if it helps any, I don’t like Anne either. I got a message yesterday: my father was dead, shot. I’m not too surprised by this, but I have to deal with it. There are details: autopsy, funeral, transportation… the estate.” As he spoke he moved restlessly around the room. His gold cufflinks winked as he walked through the pool of direct light from the floor lamp where she had tilted the shade up. “Tell me what happened.”
The smoke from her cigarette snaked past her eyes, into her carefully dyed red hair. He knew her hair was reddish brown with no gray in it, and never understood why she dyed it. When she spoke, the smoke curled away from her mouth, writhing. “I don’t know much, Peter. He went out. Someone shot him while he was jogging in the coconuts in front of the hotel. He was shot in the stomach, and died slowly. It must have been horrible for him, bleeding like that. He had his Rolex, his pulse gadget, he always wore them when he jogged. He’d run along, watching his heart rate. He was terrified of a heart attack, Peter.”
Peter stood next to the window. The drapes were maroon and very heavy. He stood with one hand holding his silk tie, a dark solid color. Carefully he pressed it back inside his jacket against his chest. “What kind of weapon, Angela? How was he killed?”
She made a despairing gesture. “Why do you ask me these things? I don’t know anything about it.”
“Come on, Angela,” he purred softly. “You’ve gone hunting with Victor. You like to pull the trigger, don’t you? You like to watch the little bodies fall, Angela. You’re as bloodthirsty as any of us. What kind of gun?”
“Don’t talk to me like that.” There was almost energy in her voice. Almost. “A twenty-two,” she answered finally. “Twenty-two long. One shot. He died.”
He nodded, no longer looking at her. The air in the room was growing more stale and thick as she smoked. Yet his prior restlessness seemed to have gone, replaced by a brooding calm she found disquieting. She wanted to speak, started to say something, then lapsed into her own dense silence. “It’s shock,” she said in a nearly inaudible voice, after a long time, not to break the silence or lessen the tension, but to herself, as if she had to explain it. “I’m in shock. ’S why I don’t feel anything. I know that.” She could hear the wonder in her own voice.
He ignored her. With his free hand he reached out to lift the drapes aside. It was hard to see through the reflections in the glass— the sofa and coffee table, Angela seated to the left, himself with his arm outstretched— into the night. “There’s some kind of emergency,” he said. He let the drape fall. The sound of the surf outside, momentarily louder, was muffled again.
“What?” Her voice was bleary, without curiosity. She took deep rapid puffs on the cigarette, then abruptly smashed it out in the ashtray.
“I don’t know. I got in at nine. People were talking. The emergency sirens had gone off, then stopped. That’s what I heard. I got a cab, checked in. I asked the driver about it but he shrugged and tried to sell me discount tickets to a luau in Princeville next Friday. I assume he gets a cut of the take, any customers he sends. The sirens sounded again after I checked in, I heard them. Didn’t you hear the sirens, Angela? Sounded like they were in the lobby.”
“I didn’t hear any sirens.” She studied her fingers, apparently surprised they no longer held either her drink or her cigarette. She looked at him. “I was taking a shower.”
He nodded without looking. Her robe had fallen open. It was pink satin, with white fluff on the collar and hem, right out of the fifties. He didn’t want to look at Angela’s trim ankles and smooth calves. She stretched them toward him, unconsciously teasing. Her skin was smoothly tanned, leaving only white lines where the straps of her sandals had blocked the sun.
He looked like his father, had the same restless way of moving around a room, picking things up, examining them, putting them down again abruptly, as if they displeased or bored him. He had the same slightly disapproving expression, too, and the same charm. He began to collect the half-empty glasses and carry them into the kitchen. The floor was wet. She must have walked in here naked after her shower to get another drink.
“You’ve had a shock,” he said, coming back into the room.
She nodded.
“I wasn’t here, you know,” he said. “The message was a shock too. Not surprising, but shocking, not the sort of thing one expects at any moment, not murder. I’ve gotten over it. There are things we have to do, Angela. Victor’s dead. Someone killed him.”
Again she nodded, looking down. She tugged the edges of her robe together over her knees, smoothing the white fluff. Then she crossed her legs and looked up. Her slipper dangled from her foot. He looked at her toe nails, painted crimson. They looked bloody.
“Did you do it, Angela? Did you shoot Victor?”
She stared at him.
There was a mirror behind the bar. He straightened his jacket, rebuttoning it. The dark silk draped flawlessly over his shoulders. “No, of course you didn’t shoot him. Still, that was a lady’s kind of shooting, wasn’t it? A twenty-two, you said.” He kicked a skirt lying on the floor across the threshold into the bedroom and closed the door.
“Are you a policeman now, Peter?” she asked, but the spirit was gone. She removed another cigarette from the pack and held it for a while without lighting it.
He smiled. At least, he showed his teeth. “I work in security. You know that.”
She nodded. Suddenly she put the cigarette back in the package, tossed it on the table, stood up and strode to the small bar refrigerator. She began heaping cubes into another glass, but felt his eyes on her back. “I’m having a glass of water,” she said. She went into the bathroom and ran the water in the sink. When she came back she looked brighter. She’d run a brush through her hair and wiped deep semicircles of mascara from under her swollen eyes. The bar was scattered with plastic vitamin bottles and fresh oranges.
“Of course I know you’re in security, Peter. I just didn’t know it was the job of security to investigate murders.”
“It’s my father who’s dead, Angela. I think I have a right to be curious.” He opened the bedroom door again and swept a pair of shoes in with the side of his foot.
“Of course.” She was trying to be bright and competent now. “The police have already talked to me. Victor was meeting some people about the development, investors or something. There’s growing opposition to Kapuna Shores here. That was probably it.”
Peter barked a short laugh. He pushed his hand through his dark wavy hair and shook his head. “Victor had a lot of enemies, Angela. More than just a bunch of antidevelopment back-to-nature freaks. Lots more. My mother was one of them, but there were plenty of others. He was not exactly a tactful man, was he?”
She shook her head, unwilling to discuss it. “Are you hungry? You’ve had a long trip, haven’t you? I mean, there aren’t any direct flights. You must’ve been on planes a long time. I could call down for something.”
He didn’t answer. “Jesus, you’re a slob. Just like my mother.”
She held out her hand, palm up, offering him her despair. “Peter, I’ve had a shock. Leave me alone.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m tired, too. I took the company plane to Salt Lake, then had to change again in Frisco, then again in Honolulu. It was a long day.” He showed his teeth at her again, as if smiling.
She could see his fatigue then through her own, yet she felt no sympathy, no warmth. He had never liked her. He was intense, ambitious, bitter, impatient
, and intolerant of her and her needs, her love for his father.
He told her they would talk in the morning, if this emergency allowed. They would talk in the morning about matters, he said, of mutual interest. She was sure he was referring to money. She watched the door close, but try as she might, she could not hear his footsteps on the carpet in the hall going away.
He did go away, though. Her suite (his father’s suite) was on the ground floor at the end of a wing of the hotel. Her room fronted the beach, while his was on the second floor in front, looking at the mountains and the highway. Tomorrow he would do something about that.
In the lobby he went to the front desk, where a sleepy woman in a deep blue muumuu leaned close to a small radio. Her face was solemn and very broad. She looked up as he approached. Behind her the clock told him it was after midnight.
“Any news about this so-called emergency?”
She nodded. “Something on the satellite.”
“What satellite is that?”
She tilted her head toward the west. “The one that crashed near the crater. Russian. They say there was some kind of poison on it. They don’t know how much got into the air.”
“Really? Can’t be all that serious.” He asked for his room key. The lobby was deserted. Even the bar was almost empty. There was supposed to be some kind of floor show, hula dancing with torches or something, but the lights on the small stage were turned off. He reached into his jacket pocket and removed an old-fashioned gold cigar case. For a moment he studied its surface, the reflections of the dim bar lighting. Then he removed a slim cigar, bit off the end, and lit it.
A fat bartender wiped the black shiny surface of the bar with a cloth. An elderly couple sat at a table near the glass doors to the pool. A woman sat by herself at one end of the bar, staring moodily into her drink. Peter sat down two stools away and ordered a bourbon on the rocks. He watched her for a time.
“Waiting for someone?” he asked finally.
She nodded without looking at him.
“Something wrong?”
She did look up then. “My boy friend,” she said. “He got real sick. I’ve been at the hospital all evening. I live over at Hanapepe so I’m waiting here. He’s real sick,” she repeated.
She looked young, younger than he’d thought at first, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Her tan was very deep and very smooth. He imagined under her fashionably faded cotton shift she had a strong athletic body, the kind he liked.
“Must be hard, waiting like this. With him sick.” He leaned his elbow on the bar and took a drag on his thin cigar, blowing the smoke toward the tower of glasses and bottles behind the bar. The wall there was mirrored and he could see fragments of himself, the smoke, the girl. Air conditioning sucked the smoke away.
“Yeah,” she said after a time, remembering he had spoken. Her thick black hair was pinned up on the side, falling toward the back, showing the clear outlines of her lips and nose, very finely carved against the windows. The lights at the pool went off, putting her into shadow.
“Maybe it would help to walk, have someone to talk to,” Peter suggested gently. He did not look directly at her, but to one side, not pressuring.
“I don’t think so. I’d better wait.”
He made a gesture and put out the cigar. He sipped thoughtfully on his drink.
“All right,” she said. He looked up. She had turned sideways and was looking at him now.
He nodded and signed the check. They went out onto the patio by the pool.
Her name was Lianne Billings, from San Diego. She worked as a day waitress at a Mexican restaurant in the Kukui Grove Shopping Center. Her boy friend was visiting from the mainland, someone she’d known before coming here. He’d only been here a few days, and now he was sick. She had lived in Kaua’i for four months, she and her small daughter.
That surprised him. “Daughter?” he asked.
She nodded. “My husband was killed a year and a half ago, just before Corinne was born. He never knew her.”
He put his hand on her elbow sympathetically, guiding her around the pool. Her husband was working at the naval shipyard when a load of steel girders swung against him, pinning him to the side of his pickup; he died two days later of internal injuries. A little over a year after that she came to Hawaii.
“And Corinne?”
“Oh, I got a neighbor to look after her when the hospital called. She’ll be all right; she’s a good kid. He’s in a coma.”
He murmured something sympathetic about what a tough life she seemed to have. Something about her story bothered him.
“What about you?” she asked.
“Not much to tell. I’m from Utah.”
“Yeah? So what are you doing here? Tourist?”
He smiled. She was going to turn out to be one of those antigrowth environmental freaks; her type always were. “No,” he said. “Just business.”
She asked him what kind of business, but he put her off. “Pretty boring, I’m afraid. Straightening out my father’s estate, that sort of thing.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just been thinking of my own problems. It must be hard, your father dying.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We weren’t close.”
They strolled down to the beach and watched the small surf roll onto the sand. Overhead a waning moon rode behind drifting rags of cloud. They stood for a while gazing out at the occasional moonlight, the small waves. She scuffed her sandals in the sand and he saw the wink of an ankle chain. Finally they moved on.
He could see the lights in Angela’s room from here, still on above the plantings along the hotel wall. He steered her along the path beside the hotel. She let her hand trail through the blossoms. They were almost beside Angela’s window when he asked her what they were.
“Oleander, I think,” she said.
“Poison,” he said. The drapes were tightly drawn and he could see nothing. There was no sound from the room. The night was very quiet.
“My… friend, they think he might have been poisoned. Or had some kind of allergic reaction.”
“Really? What happened?” He continued to hold her elbow gently, guiding her beside the hotel and along the edge of the drive past the coconut grove; she felt his grip tighten. There was very little traffic on the highway as they approached.
“He got sick, they said. He had these sores on his face. The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it. He was unconscious when they brought him in. They found my name and phone number in his wallet and called me.”
He grew thoughtful for a time. Then he asked her about the satellite.
“Yeah, sure. I heard about it. Came down somewhere out there.” She pointed ahead at the invisible mountains lost in darkness.
“Did you hear anything about what kind of satellite it was?”
She shook her head. “Naw. Is it important? I mean, the sirens were going off all night, but it didn’t seem to mean anything. No one pays any attention to the sirens; they go off all the time. I mean, once, a few months ago, there was real high surf, and the sirens went off. You’re supposed to go to high ground when they get high surf like that, or if it’s a tidal wave or something. There’s a whole page in the phone book with maps and everything, where you have to go when a storm comes, that sort of thing. But you know about them before they get here, don’t you?”
“I suppose so. You didn’t hear anything about the satellite? It’s been in the news all over.”
She frowned, an expression he could just make out in the momentary moonlight. “No, not much. I might’ve heard it was Russian. They’re always lobbing things at us, I guess. Why?”
“Nothing about some kind of poison on it?”
“I didn’t hear that, no… Oh!” She put her hand to her mouth. “That couldn’t be it, could it? He was poisoned?”
With his hand on her elbow he indicated they turn around and walk back. She went along without speaking as he tried to reassure her that her boy friend pr
obably just had a flu or hives or something.
At the door to the hotel she told him she’d better get back to the hospital and then get home to check on Corinne. She was no longer depressed but apprehensive. He nodded politely and let her go, but took note of her license plate as she drove away.
When her car was out of sight, he walked quickly to the elevator, noting on the clock behind the desk that it was almost one-thirty. On the second floor he went to his room, moving almost at a trot. Once inside he sat on the bed for a moment, then picked up the telephone. It would be five-thirty in the morning in Utah, where he was from.
CHAPTER 14
THE FOLLOWING MORNING began, as many mornings did, with drizzle in some places, sunshine in others. Only a particularly sensitive native would have detected anything out of the ordinary about this day.
The beaches, for example, might have seemed curiously deserted, even for this early in the morning. The roads, on the other hand, would have appeared a bit more crowded than usual. Hotel lobbies, too, appeared to harbor more activity than might be expected for this season and time of day, with a slightly higher level of anxiety. Cobb Takamura stood on the front steps of the Moali’i Hotel looking out at the coconut grove that hid the distant highway without muting its constant hum. Most of the traffic flowed toward Lihu’e to the south.
He might have been impatient, since he was waiting. Yet his eyes were half-lidded behind his dark glasses; his posture was relaxed. He leaned casually against a smooth wooden pillar, hands in his pockets. It was unlikely anyone would notice the faint outline of his service automatic under the light fabric of his windbreaker.
He could see at some distance a drizzle that hissed faintly against the palm leaves. Beyond, toward the mountains, were open patches of early sun splashed against the almost virulent green of wooded slopes.
As might be expected of one who waits, Cobb checked his watch, although infrequently. It was 8:30 one time, 8:47 the next. His position changed little in the intervening minutes. The drizzle drifted toward him; within a time it passed overhead, dampening the asphalt of the driveway, which then dried as the clouds drifted out to sea. Without betraying any particular concern, Cobb backed under the protection of the portico as the rain approached. The oleander bushes stirred, although he did not feel their stirring could be called restless. They could not know what was disturbing the rhythms of island life, however slightly.