Tamara zoomed her red Mercedes coupé to the Punaauia house with me in pursuit in the rented Fiat. It was a half-hour drive and I spent the time asking myself and my conscience what I was going to do to justify depositing her $10,000 into my dwindling San Francisco bank account. So far this morning I’d earned about a nickel of it by talking to the Wests.
I’d found them in his office behind the front desk. They looked strained and tense when they saw me, but not because of the brief scene we’d played out at their pool ten days earlier. The next morning, in fact, they’d greeted me on the terrace as equably as if I’d been invited over for a game of croquet. Of course, for them it probably was.
“What do you think?” asked Bob in a flat voice.
“That’s what I came to ask you. Could this be a hoax, as her husband seems to think, or is it for real?”
Susan’s tongue darted out to lick her lips, and she shook her head slowly, as if bewildered. “That’s…that’s what we’ve just been talking about. It’s so…unbelievable! It must be a hoax. Things like that just don’t…don’t happen to your friends.”
“How well do you know her?” I asked in a neutral voice.
Bob shrugged. “Oh, comme-çi, comme-ça. We met her and her husband years ago, back when he used to come down here more often. She comes by for lunch or dinner at the hotel now and then, usually with visiting firemen. Once in a while we have a drink together and maybe dinner. How often would you say, Susan?”
“Oh, maybe every six or eight months we’ll go to her house, or she’ll come to ours. Maybe once a year.”
“Hrmph.” I wanted to ask if Danielle Payton had been a member of their swinging set, but I was no longer a cop on an official job, and there was no sense in antagonizing half the population of the island before I’d even got started.
I leaned over the desk and gave him my best earnest cop look. “Bob. What do you think? Is it a hoax or is it real? Take your time.”
He stared down at the glossy wood and with his fingertips pushed paperclips around on its surface, frowning. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Danielle…between you and I , I don’t think Danielle is all that stable. She’s not…crazy…or anything like that. It’s just…well, if someone asked me which of the people I know might pretend to be kidnapped, she’s the only one I would think of.” He held up a hand. “But even so…if we were in L.A., I’d say of course she was kidnapped. But down here…as Susan says—it’s just so unreal.…”
“That’s not much help,” I said. “Yeah, I know: it’s an impossible question. What were your plans for last night?”
“Plans?” Bob looked bewildered. “Oh! With Danielle. Let me think. It was what, Susan? A couple of weeks ago? We ran into her at a cocktail party someplace and got talking about Maine lobsters. I said I was trying out a supplier in the States who was going to fly some down, and the first shipment was going to be this weekend. We asked her to come by and have some with us, but she said she was busy on Saturday and Sunday, so Monday was the first day she could.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I saw some lobsters in a tank when I walked past the kitchen. So you had a lobster dinner for her last night and she didn’t show up. Tamara says she was the sort of woman who hated no-shows. Didn’t you think that was unusual, her not arriving?”
“We certainly did,” said Susan. “When she wasn’t here by eight we called her home, and then again at nine. No answer.” She shrugged Gallically.
I nodded glumly and returned to the terrace.
* * * *
There were two servants at Tamara’s home, a middle-aged Tahitian couple who lived a mile down the road and came to work on a motor scooter. When none of the Paytons were in residence they moved into the guesthouse and stayed on full-time. As soon as Danielle Payton flew in to set up shop, they returned to their own house.
“Mommy doesn’t like to have servants around,” said Tamara. “She says she doesn’t need the status of having live-in help, only Frenchwomen who were peasants back in France want to make their lives miserable by having servants underfoot, now that they can afford them in Tahiti.”
“Spoken like a true snob,” I said, but to myself. Out loud I said, “I can understand that. Not much privacy.” I looked around again. We were in a corner of a living room that was as homey-feeling as Candlestick Park. The Payton residence was yet another one of bamboo walls and pandanus roofing, built Tahitian-style with a number of independent buildings. We were sitting in an enormous central structure that sported a thirty-foot ceiling and that was nothing more than your average dining room, living room, and ballroom. You could have tucked three San Francisco Victorian apartment buildings into it easily. I half-expected to catch a glimpse of condors roosting in the rafters. The kitchen, bedrooms, offices, and whatnot were all separate buildings connected to the main house by pandanus-covered walkways. Most of those buildings were little more than droopy roofs supported by coconut posts, so privacy from servants would be at a minimum.
We walked down to the retaining wall that kept the lawn from falling onto the beach and into the lagoon, beyond which Moorea was a dark blue mass on the horizon. We continued on around the property. There were three or four acres of neat lawn and coconut trees, with a tennis court and swimming pool flanked by their own bamboo and pandanus out-buildings hidden discreetly by bougainvillea and hibiscus. I tried to imagine what a spread like this would be worth on the California real estate market and quickly gave up. I couldn’t count that high.
“Bob West said they called here last night about eight when your mother hadn’t arrived for dinner.”
“I’m sure they did.” Tamara Payton scowled at a fallen coconut as if it had personally offended her. “The phone’s in the living room and by eight o’clock I was dead to the world. I never sleep on that overnight flight from L.A. It’s a wonder I heard it ring the next morning—this morning—when.…” She shoved the intrusive coconut under a bush with the side of her foot.
We returned to the house, where I tried talking to the Tahitian couple again. They were simple, good-hearted people and clearly willing, but spoke only broken French and were unable to be of any help. The last they had seen of Danielle Payton was eight days ago, October 4th. Or was it seven days ago, September 20th? In any case, it was a Monday. Or maybe Thursday? They knew now that something was wrong, but only because we were questioning them. They were obviously troubled. Tamara did her best to reassure them, and sent them out to gather limes and make a cold citronade.
“So your mother got in her car and drove off one morning and that’s the last they’ve seen of her,” I said. “Then where’s the car?” I made an entry in my notebook. “Is that the only phone?” I asked, pointing to the one on a table of monkey-pod wood.
“There’s one in my mother’s room, out behind the house.”
“Okay. Let’s split up the labors a little. I have some calls to make. You know the house better than I do, so you start by looking for your mother’s passport and license number of her car. And anything at all that might be even the smallest bit unusual or out of place. If you find the passport, keep on looking through the rest of the house.” I smiled at her as hopefully as I could.
She nodded soberly and disappeared into the shrubbery outside.
I walked over to the phone. All I’d really wanted was a little privacy.
I called the Chinese girl who’d stood me up on the waterfront a couple of weeks before, and the Tahitian girl I’d taken dancing. I called everybody whose number was in my address book. None of them had ever heard of Danielle Payton.
I sat looking at the phone for a long moment.
Finally I sighed and called Hinano at the bank.
Her voice came over the wire tiny, remote, and frosty, as if she were talking down to me from the peak of an Alp.
But policemen, even ex-policemen, have thick skins. I persisted. “Look, we’ll have lunch together in a day or so and clear up all these silly misunderstandings,” I wheedled. “In the meantime, this is very important. I’ll tell you why when I see you. At the moment it’s not my secret, okay?”
“Well.…” she said reluctantly. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I laughed. “Neither do I , most of the time. All I want to know is this: do you know an American woman named Danielle Payton? I know she’s a friend of the Wests.”
“Danielle? Of course. Why?” Her voice was normally curious now, with a healthy dose of womanly suspicion in it.
I had begun to sweat. Where was the citronade?
“I’ll explain when I see you. What I really want to know is this: is she someone that ever goes, or used to go, to those…parties the West have…on Saturday afternoons?”
There was a moment’s silence. “So!” her voice hissed. “That’s why you call me—so I’ll tell you if you can take her out and fuck her!”
“Don’t hang up!” I yelled, just in time probably. “That’s not the reason! Not at all! I told you, this is important!”
“Oh,” she said in a small voice. People in Tahiti apparently grow up yelling at each other. After a while I’d learned that unless you scream they don’t take you seriously.
“Listen, Hinano,” I cajoled. “I really do need your help. And so do some other people. Please. Please try and tell me who she came with to these parties, or who her particular friends were. That’s all I want to know.”
By the time I’d hung up and managed to mop my brow I’d had to promise to meet her for lunch the following day to explain my strange behavior. But in exchange I had the name of two of the guys and dolls that were Danielle’s special swinging friends: Yves, a guy in the administration, and Chatoune, a doll in a drugstore.
I gulped the icy citronade the maid carried in and hoped for her own sake that Tamara hadn’t been listening in on the other phone.