“I’ll take my chances with the captain, Detective.”
Anger smoldered behind anthracite eyes. I could see the steel in them. It was not something I wanted to challenge lightly. “You have no right to a police file, Mr. Caine. Your status won’t protect you. Right now you have admitted at least two felonies to a sworn police officer, and further incriminated yourself by admitting you have read the file. I could get a warrant for your arrest based on that information. So why don’t you make it easier on everyone and tell me where you got it.”
“Okay. Two nights ago a young woman, whose name I don’t know except as Jasmine, came to my boat and gave me the file. I suspect Jasmine is not her real name and I had never seen her before nor do I expect to see her again.” I left out the fact that I’d seen her since, hoping Alapai would not ask that question.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth.”
“Jasmine. I can assume that’s her nom de whore?”
“I have no idea.”
She nodded. “And I suppose you’ll tell me that you no longer have that file in your possession, that if we get a warrant we won’t find it no matter how hard we look, so if you keep quiet we won’t have grounds to hold you. Is that right?”
“That’s about it, Detective.”
“You’re cute, all right. And you’re probably right. Okay. Suppose we buy your story about the investigator. How did you come to that conclusion?”
I told her about my footwork, working through the cocktail waitresses in Waikiki, learning that both the police and the other private investigator had contacted Human Resources and did not bother talking with the current employees as Mary had not been employed there for over a year.
“We’ll interview the manager again. You’ve got some good moves, Mr. Caine.” She looked at me, appraising me as if for the first time. “Maybe you’re not the clown I thought you were. Maybe DEA was right.”
“What did they say about me?”
“Only that you could be trusted to do the right thing unless your personal interests conflicted with ours. Is that what you’re going to do on this? Are you going to screw up my investigation?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“But you might.”
“If I can’t help it.”
She smiled, and I saw the beautiful woman behind the hard, professional mask. “We might be able to work together on this, but I won’t give you anything. You come to me and tell me what you’ve got. You want to cooperate with me it’s going to be all one-sided. I’ve got stuff nobody else does and I’m not sharing it with anybody, especially an outsider. If you give me what you find, I’ll confirm it. But I won’t feed you what I already have. Do you understand?”
I nodded, sensing an offer coming. The conditions were not unexpected.
“It has to be this way. You’ve already given me several things to think about. The file was lifted and copied and sold and Jasmine or whoever gave it to you. That can’t happen; there are procedures in place that make that impossible. But you say it happened, okay, it happened. I’m going to sit on that right now. I like your idea about the van. It makes sense and it ties into something else I already know.
“And you’re going to ruin one detective’s day when I suggest that he look into a closed suicide case that might be a homicide connected to one I’m working. I’ll keep your name out of that, too. Otherwise you’ll have an enemy you don’t need.
“So I like the idea of you being out there, working this. You might uncover something I can’t.”
“I go blindly floundering about, stirring up the dust. If I get in trouble I’m on my own, but if I get lucky you get the credit.”
She grinned, showing perfect white teeth. It lowered the armor momentarily, making her look like a little girl. “You’ve got the picture.”
“Aren’t you going to give me a place to start?”
I could almost hear wheels and gears whirring inside her head while she considered it. I sipped my coffee and kept my mouth shut. I’d known her all of ten minutes and already I knew that any appeal would result in a negative.
“A father naturally wants to believe the best of his daughter. You want to know what really happened? Does the admiral?”
I nodded.
“It’s pretty brutal stuff.”
“The world’s a pretty brutal place,” I told her. “It could break your heart.”
“Spare me the sarcasm,” she said. “It doesn’t add anything to this conversation and if you shut up you might learn something.”
I shut up. There’s a time to argue and there’s a time to keep your mouth closed.
“The file isn’t everything we have, you know that. The daughter was connected to some players that scare me shitless.”
“Drugs?”
“I only wish it were that simple.”
This woman was not the kind of person to admit fear of anything or anyone. Of the two cops in the restaurant, she was the most dangerous.
“For the last year of her life she lived with a man in Haleiwa,” she said. “Too bad you no longer have the file. His name’s in there. If you had it and were good you’d see what I saw. Be cautious. He’s connected to some really bad people. I want you to form your own conclusions and then filter them through me. It’ll be a check system. I’ll be your only contact. I know you know others on HPD, but this one’s mine. Only mine. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Say it, Mr. Caine.”
“I understand.”
“Oh, by the way. You said you were out at the Shark Cave yesterday. You didn’t run into a couple of local boys out there, did you?”
“Local boys?”
“The report we got was that they were minding their own business when a man matching your description went berserk and beat the hell out of them. You wouldn’t know anything about any of that, would you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“They didn’t have records of arrests and convictions, did they? These local boys?”
“You mean, did they have a history of car theft? Stuff like that?”
“Yeah. Stuff like that.”
“They have arrest records that go back to the fourth grade. And yes, they specialized in stolen cars. Are you psychic, Mr. Caine?”
“Just a lucky guess, Detective Alapai,” I said.
10
I left the coffee shop and drove directly back to the marina. From what I’d learned the file warranted another reading.
The sun fell behind the Waianae Mountains as I headed home, a bright glare shining directly into the eyes. Smoky haze hovered over the far cane fields as the harvest continued. In a few years the final curtain will be dropped on the plantation era in Hawaii. Lanai shut down its pineapple fields a few years ago, that quiet island converting to expensive hotels, golf courses and luxury homes. Every year Oahu loses more and more agricultural acreage to suburbia, while Dole and C&H flee to the cheap land and cheaper labor of the Philippines, far away from labor unions, EPA and OSHA.
I’m not lamenting a lost way of life. From what I understand the plantation existence was not a good one. But transitions are always hard on those going through them. Displacement is never agreeable. Hawaii will be forever changed. But then it has changed every year since Captain Cook saw mountain peaks rising over the horizon and thought he’d better take a look. I’d like to think we’ve made improvements, but that lie is exposed each time I anchor Duchess in a pristine cove where development has yet to reach, where coconut palms line pristine white beaches and the only sound is the gentle roaring of the distant surf far out on the reef.
I found a parking place close to the dock and unlocked my boat. Her electronic detection system told me Duchess had been undisturbed during my absence. I went below and retrieved the file from its hiding place and set up a bank of cushions on the aft deck against the cabin facing the sun. An opened bottle of Kendall-Jackson provided me with
a chilled glass of chardonnay. I set up the file and read through it again, sipping the wine and letting the Kona winds riffle my hair. Pearl Harbor’s surface was luminous from the slanting rays of the sun.
Finding another body in this mess was an unpleasant surprise. There were questions, too, about the people I was stalking, but they had to slide for the moment. I didn’t yet know enough to know what those questions were, let alone know how to answer them. I contented myself with the file.
Detective Alapai had mentioned the man Mary MacGruder lived with in Haleiwa. She’d hinted he might be the starting point for my search, and that she knew something she wanted me to confirm. But I’d come across him before. He’d been in the file and in my conversation with the cocktail waitress, and from Chawlie. Thompson was almost certainly the man Louise had seen with Mary and the other girl. A big man, she had said. Bigger than me. Broader. A freak.
Katherine Alapai knew something I didn’t and she wanted independent corroboration. Chawlie wanted information about him, too, and had sent his little woman-toy Jasmine to become a spy in the enemy camp. He’d also recruited me. Did Chawlie know something about Thompson that he wasn’t telling me? Of course. That was Chawlie’s style. Even if it were easier to be direct, Chawlie would take the interesting course.
All lines of logical progression crossed at Thompson. It wasn’t a stretch to conclude that he had something to do with Mary’s murder and possibly something to do with Souza’s. I needed an approach. Everyone has a vulnerability, a handle to use to get to them. Once I found that, access was easy. Even the president of the United States will pick up the telephone if you have the right number. It all comes down to information. Finding that handle would be easier if the guy was dirty, and both Chawlie and Katherine Alapai were sure that he was.
What was a girl that reminded people of Princess Grace doing living with a man like Thompson? People attract for the strangest of reasons, but this pairing made Fay Wray and King Kong seem like Ozzie and Harriet. What had Mary MacGruder been getting out of this man? Drugs? I’d heard of coke whores before who’d sell their bodies and their souls for the white powder and there was evidence that she might have had a problem with the stuff. Sex? With the face and figure she possessed she could have had any man, if it were only a man she wanted.
I reminded myself why I was involved. Max had given me this mission to find her murderer and to protect her father. I’d become so focused in tracking down her killers I’d nearly overlooked the fact that protecting her reputation, and her father’s, was the more important of the two goals. There were some nasty stories floating around about her but she was dead, a murder victim, and those stories would taper off in time unless there was some hard evidence to back them up, or unless they surfaced again in a murder trial. That’s what I was afraid I’d find at the end of the trail. That is what Max feared when he’d handed me this quest.
The best way to find out seemed to be through Thompson.
There was little data in the police notes about the man. There was just his name and a short statement he’d given the police, saying he had not seen Mary for a month, that he did not monitor her whereabouts. Other than his short statement there were few facts about him. He listed his occupation as an entertainment producer. That could mean anything from a producer of feature-length motion pictures to a street-hustling pimp.
Forensic evidence put another man at the scene, an Asian. My own conclusion was that more than one man had to be involved. Did Thompson have a partner? And if so, was he a left-handed, AB-positive Asian? Laughter bubbled from deep in my chest. All I needed now was a severe British fellow in a deerstalker, waving his meerschaum, sagely telling me it was all quite elementary, my dear Caine.
This was beyond my experience. My training had been to plan and perform high-risk, high-reward operations using a small team of similarly trained specialists, each of us capable of extreme violence. Get in, get done and get out. Be gone before the smoke cleared and the dust settled. As a civilian my jobs tended to be similar but were more of a protective nature, preventing others from achieving what my own teams could have done. Imagine the worst scenario and plan for it. Protect the executive and his family from harm, make certain his stay in the Islands would be a pleasant one. With that kind of problem I was in my element. But in this arena I was the amateur, stalking the grizzled gladiator, armed only with my wooden sword.
I closed the file and locked it away again. I washed out the glass in the galley and put on my Nikes for my evening run.
This time I ran the bike path all the way to Pearl City. It’s a ten-mile round trip from my slip in the marina to the Monkey Bar and back. The sun had already gone down when I returned. It was pitch black under the canopy of kiawe trees near the end of the run and I felt a little uneasy padding through there. If someone had ill feelings toward me this would be where they would have the best advantage. But this path was the only access to the base on foot. There was no way around it. Thinking that I was retracing Souza’s path, I felt patches of ice from my neck to my shoulder blades. I increased my pace until I reached the well-lighted parking lot near the Marina Restaurant.
An empty Duchess welcomed me home, creaking a lonely tune through her rigging. I’d managed to convince myself that Thompson was somehow connected to Mary’s murder and I was committed to finding the leverage to reach him, regardless of what it took.
After changing, I spent a quiet hour on deck smoking a Cuban Romeo y Julietta and thinking of a way to gain access, reflecting on what I’d learned about Thompson from Louise, from Katherine Alapai, and from Chawlie.
It took about that long to reach a decision. Sometimes the direct approach is the best one. In this case it looked like the only one.
11
At nine o’clock the next morning I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe in the shadow of the Pacific Tower waiting for CAT Productions, Inc., to begin its business day. All I’d managed to deduce so far was that “CAT” was Carter Allen Thompson’s initials.
I’d already visited CAT’s floor twice and found the entire floor locked off the elevator. For the past twenty minutes I’d entertained myself in the open-air pastry shop with a morning paper, a cup of coffee and a bear claw. The paper told me things I didn’t want to know about people for whom I cared little or nothing. Someone in the Middle East had done something unforgivable. Congress had done something unprintable. The president had done something unpardonable. A hurricane was thrashing Guam and a tropical storm was forming off the coast of South America, gaining strength as it pushed its way into the Pacific. It wasn’t a problem yet, but it was causing concern to the local weather people who were paid to be concerned about such things.
I was dressed in my best Hawaiian business sincere, in a raw silk sport coat, a white Oxford-cloth shirt with an open collar and tropical-weight wool trousers. Both the jacket and the pants were natural colored, offsetting my deep-water tan. I carried an aluminum Haliburton briefcase. It was a prop designed to make me look like a successful businessman from Kahala. The briefcase was filled with Sunday’s Advertiser.
By nine-thirty most of the office workers had been busy for over an hour. I’d read all there was to read in the paper and I didn’t want another cup of coffee. I walked around the block, pausing outside the Honolulu Book Shop to look in the window. The new Stephen Hawking book seemed interesting and I went in for a sample read. By the time I’d made my purchase I decided it was time that even pornographers should be at their desks, beginning a busy day of photographing blondes with their legs open, or whatever they did that passed as work. I walked back to the elevator lobby on the harbor side of the building.
Two approaches to Thompson were possible. Neither was foolproof, but the first was the weaker. It had the advantage of not having to work for any length of time, just long enough to get me in the door. I wasn’t worried about the receptionist, Chawlie’s girl, who had been briefed, but I had to be in the presence of the man before I decided to try the second scheme.
The second scheme, the big con, had been approved by Chawlie. I’d gone back to Chinatown last night to seek his approval and advice. After I’d sketched out my approach, he offered refinements of his own.
Chawlie told me more about his son Garrick, the good boy who liked blondes and gambling but was not effective with either. This time he told me the truth—or part of the truth. I was never sure with Chawlie. Garrick had been working for Thompson until this week, when Chawlie’s people swept him off the streets and got him into hiding. Now he wanted me to pretend to sell the boy to Thompson, to use him as a Judas goat to get Thompson out in the open. I thought Chawlie’s plan risky, but he insisted. It was his son, after all, and he was confident he had the resources to protect him.
My first approach was my cover story to get in to see Thompson. I was Harold Jenkins, senior insurance adjuster for the Fidelity Casualty & Life Insurance Company of Seattle, and I was looking into the death of one Mary MacGruder. I was fussy, anal-retentive and committed to trivia. I was the bureaucrat personified. I even had a business card. Several of them. I expected Mr. Thompson to be suspicious of a cold call from Mr. Jenkins, but the receptionist would cover by calling the company and checking my bona fides. It’s a real company and Mr. Jenkins is a highly regarded employee. I’d met him once and he gave me a handful of his cards, and for just this kind of occasion I decided to keep them.
Once in Thompson’s presence I’d play it by ear. My aim was to get into his confidence. The police would have played it too cute, would have tried too hard to look like criminals to get inside. Once that lie is exposed, the rest of the charade would soon tumble. I decided to play it straight once I was inside his guard, abandon the little con for the bigger one.
Maybe Chawlie was right. Maybe I am a crook.
I rode an empty elevator nonstop to the thirtieth floor. This time the elevator doors opened into a reception room that could only be described as Japanese Modern Severe. Hardwood floors were offset by stark, nearly naked white walls. What little furniture there was was black lacquered enamel. Very chic. Very expensive. A teak and ebony wood representation of a black cat entwining itself around a pole dominated the far wall, CAT Productions’ logo. I got it. The cat was acting sensually, the pole a phallic symbol. That cat was no ordinary cat. It was a pussy cat.
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