“YOU’RE A FOOL,” Guerrero said. He stood at the door of the Honolulu Police Station with me. We could hear the sounds of the harbor. Gray Navy jeeps whipped past us. The sun was bright, and burned into my shoulders. “You’re a fool. If anything happens to you, what becomes of the baby?”
I only smiled at him. I was feeling better. The very knowledge that I was free, even if only for the moment, was a psychological boost. And besides, I wanted to laugh in Guerrero’s face. His witnesses, Eddie Alkao and Nakayama, were afraid of him, but they were more afraid of my fists!
I could see through Goichi Guerrero’s thick lensed glasses that this knowledge was not lost upon him, either. I think he hated me because the two bums had changed their minds even more than he hated me because I stood there in the sunlight, grinning, free of anything he could do.
“The baby?” I said. “There is no baby, Guerrero. If there were a baby, it would be in good hands. If it grew up there, it would be happier than if it were returned to Henry Nelson, don’t you think?”
His face showed a little shock.
“Nelson?” he said. “Henry Nelson?”
“Didn’t you mention that name?” I said.
“No,” Guerrero replied.
I smiled. “That’s funny. I thought I’d heard it somewhere. I’ll see you around, Guerrero. Keep your nose clean.”
“The same to you, Mister Kapiolani. You’ll see me around. I promise you.”
As I said, I wanted to laugh at him. I wanted to laugh out loud. All these years a cop, and for the first time in my life I was enjoying myself, fighting the Law!
I started walking up Hotel Street. There was a native woman waiting at a corner for a bus. I stopped beside her as though I’d decided to take the bus, too.
When I turned and looked over my shoulder, I saw him. He was a little fellow, skinny, and what you’d call nondescript, the kind you could lose in a crowd. The kind, I told myself, that police anywhere would be smart to employ.
It would have been easy to convince myself he wasn’t my tail. He was looking in a window across the street and halfway down the block from me. But I knew. He was going to be looking in windows, studying stars, or just standing wherever I happened to go. The bus came then. I stepped into it. It was a Punchbowl bus and turned sharply on Punchbowl Street. The first time it stopped, I stepped off of it. There was a taxi and I rode in it over to Alakea and Beretania. I went into a bar on Alakea and had a cocktail.
When I came out, he was waiting for me. I pretended not to see him and walked slowly along Beretania to the Oya Tailoring Shop. As I went up the outside steps, I could see him across the street in the photographer’s studio.
The door to the apartment was locked. I went back down the steps to the Oya’s shop. Oya peered at me. “The key,” I said.
He didn’t want to give me the key. I still don’t know how I got that impression. He didn’t say he didn’t want to give me the key, he just stood there and stared at me with a vacant smile on his brass green face.
I picked up a chair and looked meaningly at Oya’s glass showcase with its neat rows of Navy rating badges, threads and cloth samples. I grinned at him as vacantly as I could. He got the idea, and placed the key with its white paper tag on top of the glass showcase.
As I went back up the stairs, I could hear him calling the police. There was nothing wrong with his English as he told them that the escaped murderer, Kapiolani, was in his upstairs apartment.
I knew that Guerrero, if he heard of this, would use the fact that I had “forced my way” into the apartment as excuse to return me to jail. I wanted only one thing from the apartment. I went through it quickly. It was changed. The baby bed was gone, as were Connice’s clothes and suitcase. The rooms had been freshly dusted, but they still looked dingy and foreign with insubstantial furnishings crowded in them.
The wallet was gone from behind the water closet!
Somebody knew plenty about me, and that same somebody was several hundred dollars richer!
I had no time to stand there and worry about that. Anyway, I’m an old worrier and can worry on the run. I locked the door, came down the steps, tossed in the key to Suiki Oya, who was standing in the exact center of his little shop with his hands clasped in front of him, and that same vacant grin on his face.
I hailed a cruising taxi and jumped into it just as a police car screamed into the curb in front of Oya’s tailoring shop.
I watched my smart little tail write down the license number of the cab I was riding in. When I saw that I sat back and forgot him. I wasn’t going to get rid of him by running, and I felt pretty sure, he’d begin shadowing again as soon as he shooed the police cruiser away.
I gave the driver the address of the Breakwaters Hotel out at Waikiki and sat back to watch Honolulu. We drove swiftly and silently out Kapiolani Boulevard to the Cross Roads of the World, where there’s a drink stand that looks like something intended for Los Angeles. Then beyond the bandstand under the banyans, the beach and the big hotels and the little shops lined the avenue. The places the armed forces had taken over during the war were beginning to look respectable again.
At the hotel I asked for my key. The clerk hesitated and then turned it over to me. I realized as I went up in the elevator that the police were being called. What a waste of the taxpayer’s money it was to have me shadowed!
The police had been through my room, and they didn’t bother to hide their quick and sloppy work. From between the mirror glass and backboard, I pulled out a receipt with a fingernail file. Then I packed the bag I’d brought with me from Tampa and returned to the lobby.
My shadow was there, sitting near the cigar counter with a copy of the Star-Bulletin before his face. I returned the key, paid my bill, and they charged me for the night I’d spent in jail. When I was ready to leave, I took the receipt from my pocket.
“Could I have this from the manager’s safe, please?”
The clerk looked at it. I saw him go pale. It was something he had overlooked. I knew he was praying the police never found out that he’d withheld evidence from them.
“Would you step this way, please?” he said.
I followed him into the manager’s office. They opened the safe and handed me the thick manila envelope. I could tell it had not been opened. From it I took the five one hundred dollar bills and the return tickets I’d bought for Connice Nelson, her baby and me.
When I came out of the manager’s office, the little shadow had moved to a chair just across from the clerk’s desk. He still had the paper in front of his face.
Each time you walked into the sun, it was like walking into a steam bath. You began to sweat the minute the sun hit you. It was very still, there wasn’t even a breeze, and the Pacific looked as smooth as a mill pond.
I took a taxi down town to the offices of the Matson Line. There I inquired about rates to China. The offices were crowded, the Hilotania was due to sail at four that afternoon. I wanted to check my suitcase to the liner, but I couldn’t do it. There was nothing to do but lug it along.
It was heavy, but I walked swiftly. From swift steps I changed to a jogging trot and then I broke into a run. At the first dark and narrow alley, I swerved sharply, the suitcase banging my leg as I ran between the buildings.
I put on brakes and thrust my self hard against the building. I could hear the snapping steps of the little police man as he ran after me. He whipped into the alley and too late saw me waiting for him with the paving brick high in my right hand.
He howled high in his throat and threw up his hands to ward off the blow. I threw a punch at him with my left and when he brought his guard down, I let him have the brick, hard. He crumpled loosely, tottering for a second on his knees. I stood there to see if I’d have to hit him again. I didn’t. He was out, cold.
I kept on running down the alley then until I came to the oleander hedge I remembered. As I ran, with the heavy bag bumping me, I began to laugh, remembering the lie I’d told Goichi Guerrero about the midwife on Kam Highway. I’d never even been out that way. I’d read about it in some directions on how to reach the Dole pineapple company where you were welcome to free pineapple juice piped through coolers.
There was no sign of the highway as I reached Momi Cantania’s yard. The huge pineapple above the Dole Company was blocks away. There was some kind of Chinese ceremonial dance going on in the streets. I pushed my way through it, and rattled the picket fence when I opened the gate.
I went up the steps to the antiseptically scrubbed front porch. Putting my suitcase down, I knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer.
The house was quiet with the silences of abandoned places. I began to sweat with a kind of sweat that had nothing to do with the heat.
I can’t tell you how sick I got. I knocked again, without hope. I turned all the way around and stood staring at the celebration in the street.
All right, I told myself, the baby is gone. Guerrero outsmarted you. What happens to the baby doesn’t matter to you anyway, Henderson. Life’s too short. The only thing that matters to you is getting back alive to Tampa to square things with brother Henry Nelson. That’s the last thing you’ll ever do, you’ve got the same chance as a snowball in hell. The main thing is to get out of here and start back across that four thousand miles to Tampa.
But the ache across the bridge of my nose didn’t lie. I knew it was important to find that baby. So what could I do for a baby? I didn’t even know how to change its pants for sure. But I didn’t like the thought of leaving her over here where nobody knew her, where maybe nobody would love her, anyway not the way Connice Nelson had loved her. Somewhere Connice had people, and somewhere that baby would grow up loved and looked after. And that’s where she belonged, and that’s where I meant to take her. And then, kind of under my breath, I added, with God’s help.
The fear that Guerrero had the baby, or that I’d been sold out, changed to a cold anger. I picked up my suitcase and tramped through the muddy yard around the side of the house. The windows were so high I had to stand on my tip toes to look in them. They were closed, but there were no shades.
Inside the rooms were in order, but they looked the way a house does when the people have gone away from it. Things were put not where they’d be if they were needed, but where they would look best. Everything was in place.
Momi Cantania’s house was deserted.
“Your hands. Drop the bag. Put up your hands, please.”
It was a woman’s voice from directly behind me. She had stepped up close to me, and I hadn’t even heard her! I tried to tell myself it was because I was worried about Patsy, but I knew I was getting careless, and from now on all I had to do was get forgetful like that just once and I was finished.
I dropped the bag and turned around slowly. It was fat Momi Cantania.
“You!” I snarled at her. “Where is my baby?”
She let the gun sink down to her huge hips. “The baby,” she said softly. “There have been men here all night, all day, looking, searching, seeking. The first one came less than an hour after you left me yesterday.”
“Where is she now?”
“She is quite safe. You have needed a friend. I have been one, you’ll see.”
“Where is she?”
She smiled. “Come.”
She led me across the mucky back yard, through a wooded grassy place where a stubby black cow grazed contentedly. Beyond this there was a shack even browner and meaner than the house of Momi Cantania. This one was not even lifted off the ground. In one place the roof sagged.
As we came to the door, I heard children laughing. Momi Cantania looked at me and grinned.
“Estella,” she called.
A girl of twenty came to the door. She was in a cheap frock. She was soon going to be as fat as Momi Cantania, and in twenty years she would look just like her. But for now, you could still see that it was almost yesterday that she had been lovely.
“Estella is my daughter,” Momi said.
Estella stared at me.
“She saw your picture in the paper, Mister Kapiolani. She read about you. She reads well.”
“It isn’t true. I didn’t murder her,” I said.
“Still Estella likes to look at you. You had your picture in the paper.” She pushed her daughter aside. “In here are the babies.” She laughed. “Come, Kapiolani, pick out your own.”
I stood there. There were four kids from toddlers to six year old. They were all the color of tan rugs, with smeared faces. I chose the youngest because she had blue eyes.
Momi laughed. “She is yours. But the men who came to search, they could not tell. The child played on the floor while they fretted about the house to see where we had hidden her.” She shook her head and laughed. “Never try to hide a child, for they pick that moment to cry.”
Estella was washing Patsy in a tub at the side of the room. I looked at my watch. It was almost three o’clock.
When the baby was washed and its clothes changed, I looked at her. Estella had done a beautiful job, but she hadn’t brushed up the curl the way Connice had. I took the brush and pushed it up on both sides.
Momi laughed. “Mothers do that who have a lot of time for their children,” she said.
I gave her the hundred dollars. “And so our friendship passes,” she said with a smile. “May good come to you. Aloha.”
“See you,” I said.
I looked at my watch as I walked back the way I had come. I kept watching for a taxi but there was none. I knew this had to be timed just right. By now the police would have found the little shadow knocked out in the alley. The call would be on.
But I knew better than to run. I kept walking and kept looking for a taxi. It was almost three-thirty when I got to the big drug store on Hotel. I went in and sat at a counter.
I was suddenly hungrier than I’d ever been before. But I checked my watch and knew I didn’t have time to eat. I ordered a coke and a sandwich. I held the baby against my hip. The waitresses cooed at her and talked to her. The baby didn’t even whimper.
At exactly ten minutes of four, I went out and caught a taxi.
There was music and singing and shouting as I ran up the ramp at the Matson company pier. There were leis and native bands. I could hear the throb of the ship’s engines as I ran.
I was almost up the ramp when I realized someone was running behind me.
I hurled a quick look over my shoulder. And he was upon me. He was a tall, thin man, with a long head and gray hair. His nose was sharp, and his eyes dark. His tan skinned face was lined.
“Sorry, Mr. Henderson,” he said. “You’ll have to go with me.”
“Who are you?” I said.
He smiled. “Haven’t you seen me before?”
There was a warning blast from the ship. “I haven’t time for games,” I panted.
“This is no game,” he said. “I’m from the Honolulu police. I’ve been following you since you left the police station this morning!”
• • •
“LISTEN,” I SAID. “I am on my way back to Tampa. I have business there. Nothing is going to stop me.”
“I have already stopped you,” he said quietly.
“Don’t be too sure of that,” I said.
“You have stayed free this long only because Lieutenant Guerrero wished to see what you would do. Also he wished to get his hands on this baby here in your arms. Did you really think he would put only one man to watching you?”
The music was louder, the way it is over there just before a sailing. There was a feeling, a tension in the air of a ship’s departure. There were shouts and cries from the Matson pier to the huge white ship tied along side it. I knew in only a moment the gangplank, with its short canvas sides and big M, would be removed. The throb of the ship’s engines went through the whole building.
“Even if you had gotten away on this ship,” the detective reminded me, “you would only have been returned from San Francisco as a material witness in the murder of this woman.”
I looked at him straight in the eye. His gaze wavered under mine. “Still,” I said. “It is a chance I mean to take.”
He smiled enigmatically at me and reaching in his coat pocket took out a small police whistle. He put it to his mouth and blew shrilly upon it.
As he blew, the baby began to scream and tremble, terribly frightened.
There was the last blast from the ship’s whistle. There was the song “Aloha” of which you get so damned tired there in the islands.
I knew the gang plank was coming down. People were moving away down the ramp and as the thin detective shrilled again upon his whistle. I drove my suitcase hard against him, and his face turned green. The whistle fell from his paralyzed hand, and as he doubled forward toward me, I wheeled about and ran toward the ship.
I ran up the short gang-plank as fast I could. There must have been, at that last moment, at least twenty people who decided to leave the ship. These visitors, all singing and laughing like people in some foolish musical comedy, streamed around me. I pushed through them roughly, with the baby crying and the people laughing.
These fools didn’t seem to mind the way I snarled at them. They only laughed at me, reached at the baby, and slapped me on the back. One woman tossed a lei over my head, and as my hands were full, I came aboard the Hilotania with baby, baby bag, suitcase in my arms and a bright wreath of flowers about my shoulders.
Somehow the wreath seemed to me one of those “Rest in Peace” things I had seen in Ybor City funerals. I wanted to pull it away, but I could not.
As I stepped on deck, two stewards stopped me. They wanted my tickets. I put the suitcase down and then a woman reached for the baby. I let her take Patsy while I showed my tickets to the steward.
“Everything seems to be in order, Mr. Henderson,” said the steward. “Except your wife, she is not with you?”
“She’s not going,” I said.
“Very good sir. If you will mail her ticket to the San Francisco offices, I’m sure the company will refund the price of her ticket.”
“All right,” I said. “Which way to my stateroom.”
“We’ll have a boy show you.”
I turned for the baby. But she and the woman were gone. In a rage, I started forward. There was a knot of maybe ten women, of all sizes and ages, most of them dressed in white, still with leis about their shoulders.
In the center of them was this blonde woman who had taken the baby from my arms.
I pushed my way in among them. The baby was whimpering.
“Give me my baby.” I said.
The blonde only laughed at me, and turned half away, and the rest of them only laughed and went on cooing and making faces at Patsy. Patsy’s whimper changed to a scream.
I grabbed the woman’s shoulder in my right hand.
I know my fingers hurt her. I saw her face go very white as I turned her back to me.
But she went on smiling, as though it were important to keep these women about her from knowing how badly I was hurting her.
“Now give me the baby,” I said.
She looked up at me. Tears glinted in the corners of her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “She is such a beautiful child. We only wanted to look at her.”
I let her go and took Patsy in my arms. The baby stopped crying at once. All the women laughed and chattered about this. The blonde was still looking at me.
“All right,” I said to the blonde. “It was only that you were frightening her. She does not like people.”
“She takes after her father,” the blonde said.
“Perhaps,” I answered.
I pushed back through the crowd of women. My eyes for a moment met those of the tallest of them. Her nose was large, and her mouth twisted a little with an insolent smile. “A real nice gentleman,” she said straight at me.
I don’t think she could have said four swear words as insultingly. I only stared at her.
“Go to hell,” I said very softly.
She heard me. “Aloha,” she said without smiling.
The decks were still crowded. I followed a wiry brown Hawaiian in a natty steward’s uniform through a companionway, down a wide metal ladder to a lower deck. We went along it, stateroom doors were open. We passed the office of the Ship’s doctor, and turned along a second corridor.
He pushed open the door of number 18-B.
“Most everyone will be on deck, sir,” he said. “You’ll want to watch the Aloha tower, you can see Waikiki and Diamond Head as we leave the Island.”
“Thanks,” I said. I handed him a dollar. “Would you bring some warm milk for the baby?”
“Yes sir. The dining room is aft. All corridors are clearly marked with directions fore and aft. Dinner is announced with chimes. A doctor is just along the corridor. You may call him at any hour if you need him.”
“All right,” I said.
The boy bowed and closed the door after him as he left.
I put the baby on the bed and changed her pants. I knew one thing, she was going to need a lot of attention. Just changing those pants was no small matter. I felt damned inadequate as I stood there looking down at her.
She laughed and put out her hand to me.
Funny, I thought, the way things happen. The only kid I’d ever had anything to do with was my brother’s boy. I had never married because I’d begun young in a rotten business and I’d soured on everything. I always said I’d marry if I found a woman I could trust, and I always managed to find something about them I couldn’t trust.
I’d had plenty of dames, though. Too many of them. Sometimes I was with one of them when I should have been working, because in thirteen years I’d learned I wasn’t going anywhere in the Tampa police department. I hated my job. I hated the things I had to stomach, and the only way I could forget was with a bottle and a dame. And I never cared much for one without the other.
And here I was in trouble up to here, and with a baby on my hands. I don’t think it was out of my mind more than a few minutes at a time that there was something I had to do for that baby. Some way I could make her safe, and get her back where she belonged at the same time. I worried about it. But I got nowhere near an answer.
My trouble had just begun. If they didn’t move fast enough to get me off the ship, they’d have me returned from San Francisco.
One thing I was sure of. Henry Nelson already knew that I had beaten the Honolulu rap and was headed home. It didn’t take a radio message long to get four thousand miles. And Henry Nelson would know that if I was headed home — without Connice — that a lot of things were clear to me that had never been clear before. He would know I was on my way to see him.
I knew for sure there had been plenty of men who had started out to see Henry Nelson with vengeance like a cold and terrible thing in their hearts. Few ever reached him alive. None had ever gotten anything for his efforts except a cement kimono, a broken skull or a fast ride out of town.
Nevertheless, I meant to get back to him. I don’t know what happened to me when I hunkered there in that apartment over the dead body of Connice Nelson. I don’t know. But it happened inside and out. I no longer had any thought except the obsession to square things with Henry Nelson, for Connice and for myself.
Nelson and his lawyer, Phillips Clark, would see that as soon as they heard that I was on my way. In my mind, as I stood there over Connice’s baby, Patsy, I could almost see them as they got the wireless message.
“So now he’s coming back?” It was as though I could hear Nelson’s voice. It was the sort of voice you’d expect a big man to have. College educated, accustomed to power and money, all shot through with arrogance, and bitterness that came to him, I suppose, along with the loss of his left arm.
I heard a lot of versions about where Nelson lost that arm. But the nearest truth was that about twenty years ago, a gang of hoodlums got fed up with Henry Nelson’s crooked, underhanded betrayals. He was dragged from his law office one night by unidentified men who cut off his left arm. There were other stories about a further operation, but mostly you heard he was rescued in time. None of the hoodlums was ever caught by the police. But in twenty years Nelson got plenty of revenge. The loss of that arm made him more dangerous. Now, he was not quite whole. He was not quite like the men around him. He resented it if anyone handed him anything, or seemed to notice he had lost an arm. And yet because of it, he took a thousand advantages. And more, Nelson wasn’t whole, so he didn’t mind watching, with his bitter face twisted into a smile while a whole man was dismembered.
“It compensates,” Nelson had once said when I was near. “It improves a man’s memory to lose an arm or a leg, or a testicle. Wouldn’t you say that’s right, Buster?”
Buster Eddington would be lounging, with his crew-cut head back. “I’m firmly of the opinion it will immeasurably improve this man’s faculty of retaining and recalling.”
And what would Nelson do when he heard that I was on my way back to Tampa?
“We can stop him,” Phillips Clark would confidently advise.
Nelson would toss the message to his desk then. “All right,” he would say, dismissing the matter, “stop him.”
No, I thought bitterly, Nelson wouldn’t give his personal attention to the matter of stopping a punk — an ex-sergeant of police detectives. Nelson was a big man. He was worth millions and his crowd was the sport coat and twelve dollar scotch crowd. His men were elected Mayor, Councilmen. They named Airports and Bridges and Housing Projects after them. There was plenty of evil, and plenty of rottenness in the political machine that Henry Nelson controlled, but it was hidden, so that no matter what happened on the lower levels of the rackets, the fixed elections, the rackets, the white slavery, the bribes, and the gambling levels, none of the stink ever worked up as high as Henry Nelson.
As I stood there, with Patsy’s fist curled around my index finger, I thought of the way I’d like to kill Henry Nelson. The City of Tampa could give me a medal and then send me up to Raiford to burn. But first I knew I had to get to him. And to do that, I was going to need help. I smiled bitterly. God’s help. And some other, more earthy, and more tangible. And then I thought of Big Mike Rafferty.
Between the political machines of Big Mike Rafferty and Henry Nelson there wasn’t a lot for the defrauded people of Tampa to choose. Nelson went in for white tie and tails, and Big Mike went in for fish fries, and back slapping. Underneath they were almost identical, although powerfully opposed. Big Mike’s men were rougher, but in recent elections, Big Mike had been able to stuff more ballot boxes. Henry Nelson still owned City Hall body and soul, but he had lost a great deal of the town to Rafferty.
I knew if anyone could help me get back to Tampa alive, it was Big Mike Rafferty. And if Big Mike believed I was going to somehow get to Henry Nelson, he would help me.
In my excitement, I pulled my finger roughly from the fingers of Patsy and she began to wail. I laughed at her, and shoved my finger back at her.
As she stopped wailing, there was a respectful knock at the door.
“All right,” I said. “Come in.”
The door opened and the steward entered. He was carrying two baby bottles on a tray. He was no longer smiling.
“Milk for the baby, sir,” he said. “And with his compliments, the Captain would like to see you now, sir. In his quarters.”