Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 09 (24 page)

That’s when he saw Chang. The lids of his eyes rolled up like windowshades, and he swallowed audibly.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, backing away.

“Out on terrace,” Chang said.

Tahiti swallowed again and nodded.

The dance floor opened directly onto grass that led to the rocky shore of the fetid canal. On really busy nights at the Ala Wai, couples spilled out onto this terrace. Tonight wasn’t that busy, and only a few couples were out here holding hands, looking at the slice of moon reflecting on the shimmering surface of the smelly craphole of a canal.

The George Ku Trio went on break just as we were wandering out, so there was no music to talk over. Chang took Tahiti by the arm and led him to a wood-slat table near the thatched fence that separated the club from its residential neighbor. We were tucked beside a small palm and near where the grass stopped and the rocks began their fast slope to the lapping water.

“Nice night for swim,” Chang said pleasantly.

“I don’t know anything,” the boy said.

“You don’t know anything?” I asked. “Not anything at all? Not even your name?”

“Philip Kemp,” he said.

“You know a guy named Sammy, Phil?”

He looked upward, shook his head, sucked on his cigarette again, looked down, shook his head some more. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it….”

“Knew what?” Chang asked.

“Trouble, Sammy was always trouble, too much booze, too many girls….” Then wistfully he added: “But he plays steel guitar like a dream.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “He took off for the mainland, didn’t he, Phil?”

“I don’t like that name. Call me Tahiti, ya mind? That’s what I like my friends to call me.”

Hand still on his shoulder, I nodded toward his glass. “What you got there, Tahiti?”

“Little Coke. Little
oke.
”

“Try this on.” I removed my hand from his shoulder and took my flask from my pocket and filled his glass almost to the brim. “Take a sip.”

He did. His eyes widened. He half-smiled. “Hey! Smooth stuff.”

“Bacardi. Genuine article.”

“Nice. Look—fellas…gentlemen…Detective Apana, we ain’t met but I see you around. All I know about Sammy I told you already.”

“No,” Chang said, and he grabbed Tahiti’s wrist, the one attached to the hand holding a cigarette. Chang tightened and Tahiti’s fingers sprang open and the cigarette went tumbling, spitting orange ashes in the darkness.

“It got too hot for Sammy,” I said, “didn’t it? And he took a run-out powder to the City of Angels.”

Chang let go of the wrist.

Tahiti, breathing hard, his eyes damp, nodded.

“So we agree on that much,” I said. “But what I need to know is,
what
made the Islands too hot for Sammy?”

“He was afraid,” Tahiti said. “We were…talking in a hotel room, back on Maui…this was in January…he had a gun, a revolver. He was afraid this friend of his would hurt him.”

“Hurt him?” I asked.

“Kill him.”

“What friend?”

“I can’t say.
I’m
afraid, too.”

“Lyman,” Chang said.

Tahiti’s eyes popped again. “You
know?”

“What did Sammy tell you?” I asked. “What did Sammy know about Daniel Lyman?”

Tahiti covered his face with a hand. “Lyman’s a nasty one. He’d kill me, too. I can’t tell you.”

“We can talk at headquarters,” Chang said.

The dark eyes flashed. “Right, with billy clubs and blacksnakes! Look, I’ll tell you what Sammy told me…but don’t ask me where Lyman is. I won’t tell you. No matter what you do.”

I glanced at Chang and Chang glanced back: interesting choice of words on Tahiti’s part—he seemed to be saying he
knew
where Lyman was….

“Fine,” I said. “What did Sammy tell you?”

“It’s something…big.”

“We know.”

The pretty eyes narrowed, lashes fluttering. “You
know
who was peeling Sammy’s banana?”

I nodded. “Thalia Massie.”

“You
do
know…”

“Yes. And Sammy was here at the Ala Wai the night Thalia Massie was supposedly attacked.”

And the sensual mouth twitched. “No supposedly about it.”

He seemed to want prompting, so I gave it to him: “Tell us, Tahiti.”

“Sammy said she was a little drunk, tipsy. She came up to him, he was standing up by the door, and she said she was gonna get some air, you know, take a little walk in the moonlight. She told Sammy he could join her, but he should wait a little while, be discreet, you know. They were gonna go to one of those rent-by-the-hour rooms down by Fort De Russey that the soldiers use to bang their Island sweeties. Well, Sammy was waiting, being discreet, only first he saw this Navy officer that used to be Thalia’s back-door man…I don’t know whether she threw him over or he threw her over…but anyway, Sammy knew this officer had a history with her, and when the guy took off after her, Sammy got, well, jealous, I guess.”

“Did Sammy have any words with the officer?” I asked. “Try to stop him or—”

“Naw. Sammy was too smart, or too cowardly or too something, to do that. He kinda followed along after the officer a good ways, till the officer caught up with Thalia, only he didn’t exactly catch up. The officer sorta trailed behind her; they were arguing, lovers’ quarrel kinda thing. So Sammy figures maybe he’ll just say hell with it and butt out when he sees a ragtop cruise by with some guys in it, some guys Sammy knows, or
thinks
he knows.”

“Did he know them or didn’t he?”

“He knew ’em, but he thought it must be somebody else till he got a close look and, sure enough, it was his buddies, two wild guys who was supposed to be in prison.”

Chang said, “Daniel Lyman and Lui Kaikapu.”

Tahiti nodded. “Those two are
pilikia,
bad trouble. But Sammy used to go drinking with ’em, chasing women, they was his buddies, but they were supposed to be in Oahu Prison, Lyman for killing a guy in a robbery, and Kaikapu, he was a thief, too. Anyway, when Sammy realized it
was
them, he knew his
haole wahine
was in trouble. They was driving by whistling at her, saying things, like, you know, ‘Wanna come for a ride, honey?’ and ‘Do you like bananas and cream, baby?’”

Sure were a lot of bananas ripening that September night.

He was getting his cigarettes, a pack of Camels, out of his front shirt pocket. “Anybody got a match?”

Chang found one for him, then took the opportunity to light up a cigarette himself. Tahiti drew smoke into his lungs in greedy gulps, like a guy on the desert getting his first drink in days. He blew the smoke out in a stream that dissipated in the gentle breeze. He was shaking a little. I let him calm down. Chang, eyes locked on our witness, sucked his smoke like a kid drinking a thick malt through a straw.

“How did Thalia react to this attention?” I asked.

“Like she liked it,” Tahiti said. “She talked right back to them, ‘Sure! Anytime, boys!,’ stuff like that. She was acting like a whore and that wasn’t smart ’cause that’s a street where the chippies strut their stuff, y’know?”

“What did the officer do?”

“Nothing. Sammy thought the way she was acting musta made her officer boyfriend mad or jealous or something, ’cause he turned around and headed back the other way.”

“Did he run smack into Sammy?”

Tahiti shook his head, no. “He didn’t notice Sammy. Sammy musta been just another native on the sidewalk to him. This is along where there’s a
saimin
shack and all sorts of shops, food and barber and all, and it’s not like nobody was around.”

“What did Sammy do?”

“He followed along and he came up and said, ‘Hey, Bull, come on, leave her alone.’”

“Which one was named Bull? Lyman or Kaikapu?”

Tahiti shrugged. “Any of ’em. There was a third guy in the ragtop that Sammy didn’t know, some Filipino. See, in the Islands, ‘Bull’ is a name like ‘Mac’ or ‘Joe’ or ‘Bud’ or ‘Hey you.’ Get me?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know what Sammy did, but he went up and tried to help her, talk to her, talk his friends out of picking her up. And I think she started getting scared, changing her mind about getting in with these guys, if she ever meant to. Maybe she was just flirting to make her officer mad, that’s what Sammy thought; or maybe she was just drunk. Hell, I don’t know,
I
wasn’t there….”

“Keep going,” I said, patting his shoulder. “You’re doing fine.”

Hand shaking, he drew in smoke in several gasps, exhaled it like a man breathing his last. “Anyway, Sammy said they shoved him away and grabbed her and pulled her into the car and drove off. And that’s it.”

“That’s all Sammy saw? All Sammy did?”

“Yeah—except when Lyman and Kaikapu busted out, or anyway walked out, of prison on New Year’s Eve, and their two-man crime wave started, Sammy got nervous,
real
nervous. He never came back to Oahu after that. Like I said, on Maui, he was packing a gun. He’d do his gigs with Joe Crawford’s band, then he’d hole up in a hotel room. He was relieved when Kaikapu got picked up and put back inside, but it was Lyman he was really scared of. When the cops couldn’t catch Lyman…” He gave Chang an apprehensive look. “…no offense, Detective…”

“None taken,” Chang said.

“…Anyway, Sammy finally caught a boat to the mainland, and that’s it.”

The George Ku Trio, back from their break, began playing again, the muffled strains of steel guitar and falsetto harmonies echoing off the water.

“That’s everything I know,” Tahiti said. “I hope I helped you fellas. You don’t have to pay me or anything. I just wanna be a good citizen.”

“Where’s Lyman?” Chang said. His voice was quiet, but you could cut yourself on the edge in it.

“I don’t know. Why would
I
know?”

“You know where Lyman is,” Chang said. “You
said
you did.”

“I didn’t say…”

I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeezed; not hard—friendly, almost affectionate. “Detective Apana is right. You said you wouldn’t tell us where he is, no matter what we did. That means you know where he is.”

“No, no, you fellas misunderstood me…”

“Where is Lyman?” Chang asked again.

“I don’t know, I swear on my mama’s grave, I don’t even
know
the bastard…”

I drew my hand away from his shoulder. “I can get you money, Tahiti. Maybe as much as five hundred bucks.”

That caught his attention. His dark eyes glittered, but his full feminine lips were quivering.

“Money doesn’t do you any good in the graveyard,” he said.

That sounded like something Chang would say.

“Where is Lyman?” Chang asked.

“No,” he said, and gulped at his cigarette. “No.”

Faster than a blink, Chang slapped the cigarette out of Tahiti’s hand; it sailed into the water and made a sizzling sound.

“Next time I ask,” Chang said, “will be in back room at station house.”

Tahiti covered his face with both hands; he was trembling, maybe weeping.

“If he finds out I told you,” he said, “he’ll kill me.”

And then he told us.

In the paltry moonlight, the squattersville along Ala Moana Boulevard looked like the shantytowns back home, with a few notable differences.

The squattersvilles in Chicago—like the one at Harrison and Canal—really were little cities within the city, miniture communities populated by down-on-their luck families, mom-pop-and-the-kids, raggedy but proud in shacks that were rather systematically arranged along “streets,” pathways carved from the dirt, with bushes and trees planted around proud shabby dwellings, to dress up the flat barren landscape; fires burned in trash cans, day and night, fending off the cold part of the year and mosquitoes the rest.

The Ala Moana squattersville had bushes and trees, too, but wild palms and thickets of brush dictated the careless sprawl of the shacks assembled from tar paper, dried palm fronds, flattened tin cans, scraps of corrugated metal, scraps of lumber, packing crates, chicken wire, and what have you. No trash can fires, here—even the coolest night didn’t require it, and the Island’s meager mosquito population was down at the nearby city dump, or along the marshier patches along the Ala Wai.

Chang Apana and I sat in his Model T alongside the road; a number of other cars were parked ahead of us, which struck me as absurd. What kind of squattersville had residents who could afford a Ford?

Of course, I had it all wrong….

“Native families build this village,” Chang said. “But couple years back, city make us chase them out.”

I could hear the surf rolling in, but couldn’t see the ocean; it was obscured by a thicket across the way.

“Why didn’t you tear it down, clean this area up?”

Chang shrugged. “Not job of police.”

“Whose job is it, then?”

“Nobody ever decided.”

“Who lives here now?”

“No one. But these shacks shelter bootleggers and pimps and whores, gives them place to do business.”

I understood. This was one of those areas of the city where the cops cast a benignly neglectful eye, either for graft or out of just plain common sense. This was, after all, a town that lived on tourist trade and military money; and you had to let your patrons get drunk and get laid or they’d go somewhere else on vacation or liberty.

“Well, if Tahiti can be believed,” I said,
“somebody
lives here.”

Chang nodded.

Tahiti, who regularly bought his
oke
at the squattersville, told us he’d seen Lyman several times, on the fringes of the camp, over the last week or so. The boy, shocked to see Lyman there, had gingerly asked his bootlegger about the notorious escapee; he’d been told Lyman was pimping for some
hapa-haole
girls (half-white, half-whatever), building a bankroll to smuggle himself off the Island. Having spent the last several months staying one step ahead of Major Ross’s territorial police, hiding all over Oahu, sheltered by criminal cronies, shifting between hideouts in the hills, in the small towns, and in Honolulu’s slum neighborhoods (the very ones Chang and I had recently combed), Lyman was getting ready to make his move.

So was I.

We had discussed contacting Jardine and, through him, Major Ross, to launch a full-scale raid of the squattersville. But we decided first to determine if Lyman was really there; even then, if we could bring him down with just the two of us, so much the better. No chance of him slipping away in the hubbub.

Besides, people got hurt in raids; people even got killed. I needed him alive.

“I stay in shadows,” Chang said. “Somebody might know me.”

Hell, so far everybody had known him.

“Good idea,” I said, getting out of the car. “I don’t want to get made as a cop.”

“When you need me,” he said, “you will see me.”

I went in alone—just me and the nine-millimeter under my arm. I was in the brown suit with my red aloha shirt—the one with the parrots—wandering down the twisting paths, around trees, past shacks, my shoes crunching bits of glass and candy wrappers and other refuse. The street lamps of this haphazard city were shafts of bamboo stuck in the ground, torches that glowed in the night like fat fireflies, painting the landscape—and the faces of those inhabiting it—a muted hellish orange.

I had no problem blending in—the squattersville clientele was a mixed group, the
haoles
including venturesome tourists and civvy-wearing soldiers (no sailors tonight, thanks to Admiral Stirling canceling liberty), plus working-class
kanakas
from the canneries and cane fields; and, of course, youths in their late teens and twenties—restless colored kids of the Horace Ida/Joe Kahahawai ilk, and collegians both white and colored, any male with a thirst or a hard-on that needed attention. A steady stream was coming and going—so to speak.

The hookers, leaning in the doorways of their hovels, were a melting pot of the Pacific: Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, and mixtures thereof, painfully young girls barefoot in silk tropical-print sarongs, shoulders bare, legs bare from the knee down, beads dangling from necks and arms, blood-red mouths dangling cigarettes in doll-like faces with eyes as dead as doll’s eyes, too.

With Lyman’s mug shot in mind, I furtively scrutinized the faces of the
kanaka
pimps and bootleggers, roughnecks in loose shirts and trousers, hands lost in pockets, hands that could emerge with money or reefers or guns or knives; men with dark eyes in dark faces, round faces, oval faces, square faces, every kind of face but a smiling one.

For a place where sin was for sale, there was a startling absence of joy here.

Up ahead was a central area, or as close to one as the randomly laid out village had; a gentle fog of smoke rose from a shallow stone barbecue pit where a coffeepot nestled among glowing orange coals. Nearby, cigarettes drooping from their lips, a pair of Polynesian pimps played cards at a small wooden table not designed for that purpose; they had to hunker over it, particularly the taller of the two, a broad-shouldered bearded brute in a dirty white shirt and dungarees. The other cardplayer, a wispy-mustached pig in a yellow and orange aloha shirt, had more chins than the Honolulu phone book.

I got out of the way of a couple
haole
college kids who were heading home (or somewhere) with two jugs of
oke,
and I almost bumped into somebody. I turned, and it was a Chinese girl with a cherubic face and a flicker of life in her eyes.

She asked, “Wan’ trip ’round world, han’some?”

Second time tonight somebody called me that; unfortunately, the male who called me that had sounded more sincere.

I leaned in so close I could have kissed her. Instead, I whispered, “You want to make five bucks?”

The red-rouged mouth smiled; the teeth were yellow, or maybe it was just the bamboo-torch light. She was drenched in perfume and it wasn’t Chanel Number Five, but it had its own cheap allure. She was maybe sixteen—sweet sixteen, as Darrow had said of Thalia. The angel face was framed by twin scythe blades of shiny black hair.

“Step inside, han’some,” she said.

That time she sounded like she meant it.

As she was about to duck inside her hut, I stopped her with a hand on her arm, easily; her flesh was cool, smooth. “I don’t want what you think.”

She frowned. “No tie me up. Not even for five buck.”

“No,” I said, and laughed once. “I just want a little information.”

“Jus’ wan’ talk?”

“Just want talk,” I said softly. “I hear there’s a
kanaka
who needs a boat to the mainland, no questions asked.”

She shrugged. “Lot
kanaka
wan’ go mainland. Don’ you wan’ go ’round world, han’some?”

Very softly, I said, “His name’s Daniel Lyman.”

She frowned again, thinking. Now she whispered: “Five buck, I tell you where Dan Ly Man is?”

I nodded.

“No tell ’im who tol’ you?”

I nodded again.

“He got temper like
lolo
dog.” She shook a finger in my face.
“No tell him.”

“No tell him,” I said.

“I tell you where. I not point. You let me go inside, then you go see Dan Ly Man.”

“Fine. Where the hell is he?”

“Where hell five buck?”

I gave her a fin.

She pulled the hem of her sarong up and slipped the five-spot into a garter that held a wad of greenbacks. She smiled as she saw me taking a gander at the white of her thigh.

“You like Anna Mae bank?” she asked.

“Sure do. Kinda wish I had time to make another deposit.”

She laughed tinklingly and slipped her arms around my neck and whispered in my ear. “You got more dollar? We go inside, you talk Dan Ly Man later. Make you happy.”

I pushed her away, gently. Kissed my forefinger and touched the tip of her nose. Her cute nose. “Save your money, honey. Go to the mainland and find one man to make happy.”

The life in her eyes pulsed; her smile was a half-smile, but it was genuine. “Someday I do that, han’some.” Then she whispered, barely audibly: “Beard man.” And she nodded her head toward the two pimps playing gin.

Then she slipped inside the hovel.

The full-face beard had been enough, added to the dim, otherworldly torch lighting, to keep me from recognizing him. But as I wandered over to the barbecue pit, I could see it was him, clearly enough; the deep pockmarks even showed under the nubby beard.

And those were the blank eyes of Daniel Lyman, all right. And the many-times-broken lump of a nose.

I drifted over, stopping by the barbecue pit, very near where they were playing.

I spoke to the fat one: “What’s in the pot? Tea or coffee?”

The fat one looked up from his hand of cards with the disdain of a Michelangelo interrupted at his sculpting. “Coffee,” he grunted.

“Is it up for grabs?” I asked pleasantly.

Lyman, not looking up from his cards, said, “Take it.”

“Thanks.”

I reached for the pot, gripped it by its ebony handle.

Casually, I said, “I hear somebody’s looking for a boat to the mainland.”

Neither Lyman nor the fat guy said anything. They didn’t react at all.

Some tin cups were balanced along the stones; I selected one that seemed relatively clean—no floating cigarette butts or anything.

“I can provide that,” I said, “no questions asked. Private boat. Rich man’s yacht. Comfortable quarters, not down with the boiler room boys.”

“Gin,” the fat man chortled.

“Fuck you,” Lyman said, and gathered in the cards and shuffled.

“You’re Lyman, aren’t you?” I said, slowly filling the tin cup with steaming coffee.

Lyman looked up at me; his face had an ugly nobility, a primitive strength, like the carved stone visage of some Hawaiian god. The kind villages sacrificed maidens to, to keep him from getting pissed off.

“No names,” he said. He kept shuffling the cards.

I set the coffeepot on the stones that edged the pit. Tried to sip my cup, but it was too hot.

I said, “Tell me what you can afford. Maybe we can do some business.”

“I don’t know you,” Lyman said. His dark eyes picked up the orangish glow of the torchlight and the coals in the pit, and seemed themselves to glow, like a goddamn demon’s. “I don’t do business with stranger.”

That’s when I threw the cup of coffee in his face.

He howled and got clumsily to his feet, overturning the table, cards scattering, and the fat man, quicker than he had any right to be, pulled a knife from somewhere, with a blade you could carve a canoe out of a tree with, and I grabbed the coffeepot and splashed the fat bastard in his face, too.

It wasn’t scalding, but it got their attention, or rather it averted it, the knife fumbling from the fat man’s grasp, while I drew my nine-millimeter. By the time Lyman had wiped the coffee from his face and eyes, I had the gun trained on him.

“I’m not interested in you, Fatso,” I said. “Lyman, come with me.”

“Fuck you, cop,” Lyman said.

“Oh, did you want sugar with that? I’m sorry. We’ll get you some downtown.”

He was facing a gun, an automatic, the kind of weapon that can kill you right now, and he had every reason to be afraid, and I had every reason to feel smug, only feeling smug is always dangerous when you’re facing down the likes of Daniel Lyman, who wasn’t afraid at all and came barreling at me so fast, so suddenly, I didn’t think to shoot till he was on top of me and then the shot only tore a place along his shirt, cutting through the cloth and a little of him, only, shit, it was
me
going backward into that barbecue pit, and I had the presence of mind to clutch him like a lover and squeeze and roll and we hit not the coals but the stones, which was good, but we hit them hard, or I did, my back did, which wasn’t good, pain sending a white lightning bolt through my brain.

We rolled together, locked in an embrace, onto the ground and his shoulder dug into my forearm and I felt the fingers of my hand pop open and the gun jump out. Then I was pinned under him, and when I looked up into the contorted bearded orange-cast face hovering above me, the only thing I could hit it with was my forehead, and I did, hitting him in the mouth, and I heard him grunt in pain as teeth snapped, and he let go of me and I was squirming out from under him when the same massive fist that had no doubt broken Thalia Massie’s jaw slammed into mine.

This time there was no lightning bolt, but a flash of red followed by black, and consciousness left me, just momentarily, but long enough for Lyman to get up and off of me. Groggily, touching my jaw—unbroken jaw—I got to my feet and could see him cutting down a pathway between shacks, toward the road, I thought.

Meanwhile, the fat man was bending to pick up my nine-millimeter. He had it in his hand when I kicked him in the ass, hard enough to score a field goal, sending my gun flying again and him hurtling toward, and into, the barbecue pit, where he did a screeching scrambling dance, yow yow yow yow yow, sending orange sparks flying as he got himself out of there.

Where was my goddamn gun?