The Brass Monkey Read online

  The

  BRASS

  MONKEY

  HARRY WHITTINGTON

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Also Available

  Copyright

  1

  I CAN TELL YOU how I know it wasn’t suicide.

  Even when I couldn’t prove it was murder, I knew Herb hadn’t killed himself.

  His room was full of people. And Herb was dead. Lonely and cold and broke and dead in that Aala Street room. Three thousand miles from home, and I was his only friend — God pity him. I with the money in my pocket that might have saved him.

  The Honolulu police looked at his room, and his wallet, and the small gun in his hand. They shrugged. Obviously suicide.

  I stood there and looked down at Herb. The bed was an iron four-poster, sweated and sagging in the middle, streaked with blood from his writhing as he tried to keep from dying, even when it was too late and he must have known he had to die.

  He was sprawled across the bed and the bullet had gone upward through his mouth, so his lips were powder burned and torn. The coroner said he had been drinking. He even said how many cc’s of alcohol were in his stomach, but I was too sick to listen.

  I was thinking. You know what I was thinking? I was standing in that cheap and horrible room, and I was drawing back from all I saw, wishing to God I hadn’t come, wishing I had never seen it.

  Why? Because I was thinking this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

  Even standing there looking at Herb, I was thinking about it in terms of what it was doing to me, what it was going to do to me. I had found out you never get mixed up in a thing like this and come out of it untouched, unchanged. It had happened to me every time I got tangled up in the messes people made of their lives.

  I’d seen all of it I wanted. It got so that I exhaled a little prayer of thankfulness after another day in my musty office passed and there was no work for me, no fouled up lives for me to get caught up with. I winced every time I looked at evil and hurt and inhumanity. I didn’t want any more.

  And now, here was Herb. And he was my best friend. And he was dead.

  I guess if the truth were known, everybody thinks of tragedy in terms of what it means to him, the personal loss, the personal grief. Only with me it was a hell of a lot worse, because this meant I was going to have to do something about it: I was going to have to see about things, funeral, maybe shipping the body clear back home to Carroltown, writing letters, his family, his friends, to at least two of Herb’s wives — the only two who would care. Carole —

  Then I stopped. Then it all stopped. And I knew Herb hadn’t killed himself. Carole was due on a Matson liner this afternoon — Herb hadn’t killed himself!

  The people in the room, the khaki clad police, the plainclothesmen, the sloppy woman manager, the curious with their brown faces and their black eyes at the door and out in the smelly hall, all of it faded and I could see Herb as I had seen him yesterday morning in the bar on Alakea Street.

  “Herb didn’t kill himself,” I said to the detective.

  He heeled about and looked at me. He was wearing a white straw hat with brim snapped down all around. His nose was broad across the bridge, and even broader and flatter across the nostrils. His lips were thick and seemed to turn outward and were slightly less brown than the rest of his chubby face. His eyes were almond shaped, and his brows were very black but so short they ended above the center of his pupils. He was sweating across the shoulders of a yellow print shirt, and the stains under his armpits were bucketshaped. His white trousers were pressed but sweaty. His sport shoes were very neat and small.

  “Obviously suicide, Mister Patterson,” he said.

  “Obviously hell! He wouldn’t kill himself. I was talking to him only yesterday morning. I’m — I was his best friend.”

  The fat mouth smiled. “You wouldn’t kill yourself, Mr. Patterson. But because you wouldn’t, understand how it was with your friend. He, unlike you, had nothing to live for. As you have seen, he had no money in his wallet. Obviously, he drank it up, to the last penny, either to get courage for this thing, or because it had been coming for a long time, and he chose to go out this way.”

  “Maybe he did,” I said. “Maybe he did choose to go out this way. Maybe he played with the idea. I don’t know. I guess he was broke a lot, and in the dumps. But I happen to know that from this morning it was to be different — ”

  That smile again. “With these people — with poor wretches like your friend — it is always different, Mr. Patterson. Now they are in the sky with joy. In an hour — snap — they are miserable and wretched. This is a shock to you, Mr. Patterson. But — ” he looked about the dirty little room and shrugged. “But there is not one sign that — ”

  I turned from him to the stout woman who owned this miserable two-story frame house a block from the Oahu Railway station. Her dress was practically the original missionary Mother Hubbard. It hung from her inflated body like a sweated sack, her breasts and stomach making round folds in the faded cloth. There was a wart on her chin, and three black hairs sprouted from it. Her eyes were as black as the detective’s, and as hard to see into, as impossible to read.

  “Did you see anyone come up to visit Mr. Baldwin?” I asked her.

  “We have already asked her that,” the detective said sharply.

  “Did you?” I insisted. I didn’t look at him.

  She shook her head, and smiled through a little shrug at the detective.

  “We have been thorough,” the detective said. His voice was impatient, and angry. “We know our job, Mr. Patterson. We have made the necessary investigation. Obviously, your good friend committed suicide. As little as you like to believe it.”

  “Investigation?” I said. “You haven’t investigated anything. I’ll go to the sheriff. The Governor. You’ll investigate.”

  The detective was no longer smiling. “I wouldn’t like that, Mr. Patterson. Please do not ask for trouble with us. You are overwrought. I am trying to understand that. But, will you see? Powder burns. Gun in his hand. A lock on the door that my men said you were in witness when the landlady opened it. Your friend was drunk. Your friend was broke. Because you have much to live for, you cannot readily believe how a man gets to feel — ”

  “Stop telling me how much you know about what a man feels,” I said. “Look into this thing! Look. First, all you have to do is listen to me.”

  “I have been listening, Mr. Patterson. I have tried to suggest to you that those who ask for trouble with the police here usually can find it. Have you any evidence to show that murder has been committed? Have you any knowledge of any motive?” He clapped his fist into the palm of his hand. “Will you forgive me, Mr. Patterson? But I have already spent too much time on a routine police matter — ”

  I looked at him. “And this is all you’re going to do?”

  He smiled condescendingly. “The coroner can call an inquest. But he won’t. There is nothing more here, Mr. Patterson. If anything turns up, why don’t you come to see me at police headquarters?”

  “I’ll do that. What’s your name?”

  “Mosani. Lieutenant Mosani. Homicide.”

  I guess I wanted to let it go at that. Let it ride. Surely all the people Herb and I knew back home would be willing to be
lieve he had taken his own life. The police stated it positively. And maybe if it hadn’t been for what happened in that Alakea Street bar the morning before, that’s what I would have done. It would have been easier. And God’s my witness, that’s what I wanted, the easiest way a thing could be handled. But as I stood there, I knew that this was a thing I couldn’t let alone. I had been wrapped up in my own thoughts, my present dedicated to the past with a girl who wouldn’t walk across the street to speak to me. Herb had died in that little room while I forgot him. That was going to pound at me, and hound me. I knew that Carole’s returning made his killing himself an impossible thing. Even if I couldn’t point and say, that shows it’s murder, I could say why I knew it wasn’t suicide. And I wasn’t going to be able to let it alone, in spite of all the police, and the powder burns, and a lieutenant named Mosani, and in spite of hell itself.

  Mosani stepped aside as I started from the room. I glanced at him as I passed. His black eyes were flat and cold.

  2

  IT WAS ONLY yesterday that I saw Herb — not realizing that it would be the last time.

  It was at a bar on Alakea Street. This was like any other bar in Honolulu, with only one slight difference, important to me. It was dim and gray even without any cigarette smoke early in the morning. Blue palms and green fish on a pink sea was the mural motif. I went there in spite of that. It was the only place I knew on the Island where the Scotch wasn’t cut.

  I needed a drink. I admitted I was feeling sorry for myself, and a boy’s best friend is his Scotch in the morning. Of course, I could have done my drinking at home where Troy’s money had already paid for it. But I knew how Troy disapproved of my drinking. Just as she disapproved of my trying to earn the money to buy my own liquor, and my own clothes. Because she loved me, Troy always said, because she wanted to take care of me.

  Besides, I’d become a solitary drinker. I’d gotten so I hated yattata with my liquor. All I wanted was the small glass, and the stuff, and a little ice to tinkle against the sides. Maybe somebody else’s nickel in the juke box, so I could sit maudlin and solitary and dream about long ago places and faraway things: the way a girl’s hair smelled in the warm night, the things I’d believed in once. Maybe end up thinking what a lousy bastard I was, what an assembly-line, chrome-finished heel I was. But not being loud about it, not telling anybody, not even the bartender, just sitting there, quiet and miserable and alone.

  I’d just pushed open the glass door, feeling the sticky sun on my back and the air conditioning against my face, when I saw Herb Baldwin at the bar. Before I could turn away, Herb saw me and waved.

  “Jim!” he said. “Come have a beer.”

  I hesitated a long half minute, even with Herb watching me.

  The way things were with me, I no longer cared what people thought about me. But he went on smiling, as though he didn’t actually see that I was trying to pretend I hadn’t seen him. I shoved my hands in the slash pockets of my sport jacket and started across the dining space and the small dance floor to the bar.

  Herb told the dark little bartender to bring me a beer. Then he twisted around on his stool facing me and grinned, his veined-streaked brown eyes bright.

  I tried to smile back at him. I hadn’t seen him for months, and he looked worse than I remembered. His red hair was thick and uncombed. His full jowl ed face was gleaming with sweat. His cheap gabardine suit was sweated and wrinkled. Either he’d been drinking all night, or had slept in a park somewhere.

  “How goes it, Jim? How’s everything?” Herb said. There was an odd smile on his full-lipped mouth. At first, I thought alcohol had put it there. It had that look: as though it couldn’t be erased.

  “Fine, Herb,” I said. “I haven’t seen you for so long, I thought maybe you’d gone back home.”

  Herb shook his head and stretched that smile into a laugh. “Once I couldn’t. Now I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “I won’t ever go back now, Jim,” he said mysteriously, “Until I’m ready to go back in style — Carroltown’s finest.”

  We were silent. At the end of the bar a very small Jap was making a ten dollar bill disappear and turn up as a small American flag in bottles, glasses, and from a hole in his shoe. Once or twice would have been amusing maybe, but he kept at it. I looked at Herb’s fixed smile, and I thought, he’s always insisted I’m his best friend. But I’m not. I’m his worst friend. I wish he didn’t like me, and looking at him, I wondered if I’d ever really liked him.

  “Still blaming all your woes on Julie?” Herb said, with the sneer showing under his smile.

  “No!” I picked up the beer in the frosted glass. I preferred Scotch, that’s why I’d come in, but Herb had ordered and I didn’t even know if he had the price of Scotch and soda, his best friend! But now, with him looking down his nose at me, I wished to hell I’d gone on and ordered what I wanted.

  “How’s Troy?” Herb asked after another brief silence. All this time that grin was on his mouth.

  I looked at him. “She’s all right.”

  Herb replaced his frosted glass on the bar emptied. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he motioned to the little Japanese bartender to bring another beer. But when it came, Herb didn’t look at it for a moment. I was watching him looking at his hands, the way they trembled slightly. He looked up suddenly, catching me watching him. That fixed smile finally seeped from his mouth. He said, sardonically, “What’s the matter, pal? Everything not all right, huh?”

  “Of course everything is all right. I told you it was, didn’t I?”

  “You don’t have to tell me, pal. I’ve had so much trouble I can smell it.”

  “Well, everything is all right.”

  “Might help if you told me about it,” he persisted.

  “I had a Navy Chaplain during the war sounded like you,” I said. “He made me sick at my stomach, too.”

  Herb didn’t smile. “Two of Carroltown’s finest young men. Us. That’s a laugh, isn’t it?”

  “Have you thought about going back home?” I said.

  “Have you?”

  For a moment I didn’t answer. I watched the two flat nosed women with black, waxed-looking hair, dark almond-shaped eyes and small, high-breasted bodies in flowery frocks and red shoes. laughing and chirping as the magician continued his interminable tricks with their ten dollar bill.

  “My home’s here,” I said. “I work. It’s not the same with you.”

  “Work? You? I’ve been by your office six times in the last month. Why hang around there? A spider has built a web over the keyhole. Confidential investigations. You haven’t worked in months and you know it. You don’t even look for work.”

  I shrugged. “So what. I go to the office everyday.”

  “You’ve done good work, pal. In the Navy, you were a greased whiz — turn Lieutenant Patterson and one prisoner-chaser loose on a case, and whammy! It’s this island. This climate is too even. And inside you’re not, pal. You need a change in seasons, and a change of scenery — ”

  “Let up. I’m bleeding. You sound like the local Dorothy Dix.”

  “I’m worried about you, Jim. Have been, for a long time.”

  “You? Worried about me? Oh, great God!”

  “I know. You’re the brilliant one,” he said angrily. “I see the way you look at me, pal. Sure, I drink. But my trouble’s all out where you can see it, pal. Maybe it’s better that way. You — you hide yours. You look polite and drop your own little iron curtain even when I ask about Troy. Everything’s fine, you say, and behind that iron curtain, you’re in a hell of a lot worse fix than I am.”

  I finished the damn beer slowly, thinking I could forgive Herb Baldwin whatever he said. I’d been forgiving him for one thing or another he’d done to me for all these twenty-five years.

  I looked at Herb. Was it true that I was in worse shape than this mussed up, sweaty redhead? Herb who went from one scrape to another, drinking his way into them, and drinking his
way out again. Running into drink, running away from it, drinking until he blacked out, and then when he finally sobered up, drinking again?

  Maybe he was right, or maybe it was the beer when I’d come in for Scotch. Maybe, I decided, Herb’s troubles were all on the surface. But whoever else had such a string of woes east of those soap operas they transcribe in Chicago and rebroadcast out here a month later?

  Look at his marriages. The first one with Carole had been a mess. She’d been a nice girl, too nice, and he made her miserable. Carole had been Herb’s last nice girl. The next marriage with a woman he met on a binge existed on bourbon, and died on a hangover. His third marriage had been to an eighteen year old camp follower during the war. I never met her, but I saw a snapshot of her once. She was a dime a dozen lulu. And to escape her, Herb had run away to Honolulu. I’d heard he’d married a native cafe singer, but I never met her with Herb, and so I always doubted that he’d really married her.

  I admitted I’d always felt superior. I could tell myself Herb was shallow and vacillating. Snobbishly, I lent him money and snobbishly charged it off as a bad debt without even keeping a record of it over the last ten years.

  I pushed back from the bar and stood up. Suddenly, I was seeing myself as Herb Baldwin must always have seen me. Self-centered. Condescending. Superior bastard. In flashes, I could see the way I’d laughed secretly at him when we’d run together as kids. He never even had a girl that I didn’t promise myself I could date if I wanted. Every time he got in trouble, I just nodded as though I’d expected it, whatever it was. Yet Herb had gone on liking me, though he’d seen me clearly for what I was all those years.

  He’s borrowed my money, drunk my liquor, eaten my food, lived in my house. And all this time, even liking me as a friend, and all the while I’d been feeling so damned superior, he’d been sorry for me!

  I drew the tip of my tongue across my dry lips. I was forced to admit, seeing myself candidly as Herb saw me, that I was living on Troy’s money. I hadn’t been doing anything for a whole year, and all that time she’d been supporting me. Sure, I had deluded myself, pretending to believe things were going to change any day, and I’d get back to work, to another investigation job like the one I’d done for the sugar company.