Slay Ride for a Lady Read online

  “Let her go,” said the boxer. He and his friend now barred the passage to the dining room.

  “Come and get her,” I said.

  The boxer only laughed. He walked with a rolling motion toward me. He couldn’t have been more than five feet four, but he was deep chested and mean.

  He grasped her arm and jerked her away from me. I let her go as he tugged. For the moment, Boxer was thrown off balance and I hit down at his face as he went backwards.

  He kept going, dragging the moaning waitress after him. I moved after him because I knew I had to be ready for him before he got set. There wasn’t any sense in letting him get set.

  The waitress stumbled on past him, and I drove in upon him. I saw him grab at my head for a Judo hold, but I was already bringing my knee up into his groin. The look of agony in his face, I’d seen in a hell of a lot of other faces over a lot of years.

  I backhanded at Skinny before I saw the knife in his hand. I should have known. Any cop who ever had a beat, or answered a riot call in Ybor City should expect a knife. And that was my first horrible, sickening feeling that I wasn’t so far from Tampa after all!

  Skinny flung himself and his long bladed knife in upon me, jabbing as he came. I admired his technique. It showed he meant to get me, he meant to bring blood, because any knifer knows half the fight is over when his victim begins to bleed. It’s certainly true that the sight of a man’s own blood has an upsetting effect on him.

  But I was counting on the opium Skinny had been inhaling. He was wild. I suppose in his own mind he was being adroit and skillful, but actually his coordination was off. All he had was the definite intent to kill, and a look of sweaty savagery in his face. Otherwise he was as helpless as any plain drunk — any plain drunk that is, who happens to be armed with lethal weapons.

  I let his knife flash past my face just once. I clutched his wrist on the down thrust, and I know I broke his arm when I twisted. I meant to break it. I heard it snap, and I heard the knife clatter on the floor.

  The look of hatred never left his face. For a second he kept plowing in before his mind got the message from his broken arm. That was too bad for him. I clutched up his shirt front and beat his face pulpy with my doubled fist.

  When I let him go, he slid down the wall. By now the boxer was sitting doubled up on the floor. His hands were knotted at his belly. When he looked up at me, I kicked him in the face as hard as I could. He lost interest in his belly then and went over backwards.

  The waitress was leaning against the table, her eyes fixed on the boxer on the floor. She looked up at me in horror.

  “You will finish eating now — please,” she said. I could see she was as afraid of me as though I were a two headed man from Mars.

  “No,” I said. “But here is a tip for you, baby. Get out of this business. And get out of it quick.”

  “Yes. Please,” she whispered.

  One thing I know, I told myself as I walked through the moist heat toward Beretania and the tailoring shop. Somebody paid those boys to call on me. Somebody knows me, and somebody was looking for me. Henry Nelson’s dirty, rotten money could buy more even than I believed.

  But one thing made me feel good. It couldn’t buy me. Not any more. Not now. Those two boys back in that restaurant had made up my mind for me. Connice Nelson wasn’t going to go back to the mighty Henry. Not if I was smart enough to outrun the smartest hounds Nelson could hire.

  For the first time since I’d been sent up to the state pen at Raiford, I felt good. I breathed in deeply, and I crossed the streets without even seeing the cars or the people around me.

  The tailoring shop was closed when I got there. And that was odd. Closed in the middle of the morning. I went up the steps two at a time. I could hear Connice’s baby, what had she called her? — little Patsy — screaming.

  The front door was standing open. The baby didn’t stop screaming even to breathe. And there crumpled on the floor before the scarred baby crib was Connice. And she wasn’t going back to Henry Nelson. Not on this earth. There was a ragged bullet hole through her beautiful right cheek. She had writhed around and blood was on everything. I went over to her and bent over her. I didn’t have to touch her. I knew. She was dead. I hunkered over her, and there was this awful ache across the bridge of my nose. And for the moment I didn’t feel anything else. The baby screamed, and outside on Beretania somebody punched out The Campbells Are Coming on one of those musical car horns.

  • • •

  I MUST HAVE gone completely insane.

  I didn’t think at all. I only moved, and kept moving, and some of the things I did, I can tell, but I cannot explain.

  Thirteen years a cop, thirteen years of seeing the dead and the hurt. It wasn’t the first time I’d ever heard a helpless child screaming over its dead mother.

  The baby kept screaming. I had no idea what to do for a screaming baby. I knew better than to touch a corpse. But I touched that one. I grabbed her limp arms in my hands. I clutched her up roughly and shook her. I felt my eye lids pulling down with the agony I felt.

  I must have had some crazy idea that if I could hold on to her tightly enough, I could will life into her again.

  I didn’t say anything. I was too choked up and sick inside to speak at all. The baby went on screaming, went on needing its mother, went on living, but Connice was dead and couldn’t help her, and though she’d heard her least whimper before, she couldn’t hear her baby’s wailing now.

  I stared at her in agony until I couldn’t look at her any more. My fingers began to open, stretching out, releasing her, letting her sink back to the floor, letting her go away to the dead.

  I got up then, and I don’t think I looked at Connice again. Not just then at least.

  I could only think that the baby was screaming. I found a cold bottle of milk in a pan of water on the black stove in the dingy kitchen.

  I lighted the stove and let the water get hot. And when the water was hot, I took the bottle out of it and carried it in to the baby’s crib.

  The baby was blue with its screaming. I touched its cheek with my finger and the poor little devil broke off in the middle of a scream, and sobbing, turned toward my finger.

  I thrust the nipple in the baby’s mouth. The milk was too hot. The baby screamed, and then closed its mouth hungrily over the nipple.

  I found the baby’s bag. I remembered my sister-in-law had called her boy’s diaper holder, a go-away bag. So I picked up the kid’s Go-Away bag, and I stuffed diapers and a rubber rabbit and celluloid rattle in it. I picked up the baby and wrapped a blanket about it.

  I went out of there then with the baby crooked in my left arm so that I could hold the milk bottle to its mouth. I carried its Go-Away bag in my right hand.

  I walked slowly. I let the screen door bang after me and I went down the steps in the sun. North Beretania seemed almost deserted. But I didn’t go out on the pavement.

  Instead I went between the two buildings. There was a row of frame shacks on an alley. People stared at me from the porches and from the open windows.

  I crossed a paved street, and stepped through an oleander hedge. There was another alley and I walked along it. There were pool parlors and I could hear the racking of balls, the click of cues, sudden laughter and sudden silence. An old man was selling boiled peanuts.

  There was a narrow alley running Ewa, and a sign, “Off Limits to Military Personnel.” I passed the sign and then I saw this little frame shack behind a picket fence. There was one of those signs on the door, “Mid-Wife. Also Sewing & Reading.”

  When I thrust open the gate, the whole fence tottered. There were coffee cans lined along the scrubbed front porch. Potted plants grew in the coffee cans. The yard was dank and wet. I went up on the porch and knocked at the door.

  A fat woman answered it. She was wearing one of those Mother Hubbards that came to the Islands with the missionaries. She bulged obscenely, the highly colored cloth was sweated through. She wiped her pudgy hand across
her broad, flat face.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Do you care for infants?” I said. “Do you take care of babies?”

  She shook her head. “I am a mid-wife. I don’t like children after they are born. I’m too fat, I can’t get around. Try the woman in the next block. She’s a fool, she’ll do anything.”

  “I haven’t time,” I said. “I’ll pay you well.”

  “How much?”

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars to keep her until I come back. If she’s all right when I get back, I’ll give you another hundred. If she’s not, so help me — ”

  “I’ll do it. You must be in bad trouble. If you need a friend bad enough to pay a hundred dollars for her, you can count on me.” She put out her fat arms for the baby.

  I handed Patsy over. “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Momi Cantania. If you have trouble finding this place, you may ask anyone along any of these streets. They all know me, Momi Cantania.”

  “I’ll find you,” I told her. “If any one asks you, you don’t know me. This baby is not mine. Do you understand?”

  “I understand everything, my poor friend. I’ve been a mid-wife many years and I’ve learned much.”

  “All right,” I said. “Take care of her.”

  As I turned away, she said evenly, “My poor friend has much on his mind. But if we would keep our friends, we would prove our friendship. After all, one must live, you know.”

  I took out the wallet. I looked at the stinking money that Nelson had given me. I handed her a hundred dollar bill. She just looked at it. I don’t think she believed she was going to get it until it was in her stubby fingers.

  “You have proved your friendship,” Momi Cantania said. “I will prove mine. You will see. Rest well about your child, my friend.”

  I had no idea in what part of Honolulu I was. I started to walk again, I passed all the places I had passed with the baby in my arms.

  I went slowly up the steps, feeling the sun burning through my shirt into my sweated back.

  Connice was still crumpled on the floor where I had left her. It was easier to look at her body now, but that blank wall still was reared in my mind, I was still moving without plan, without memory, without thinking.

  I spoke to her. I said, “He hasn’t found you yet. He hasn’t got you yet.”

  And I laughed. I went all through her things. There was almost no money in her purse, almost no clothes left in her battered suitcase. Under her clothes I found a double stack of baby food and canned milk and there were plenty of diapers.

  I took all identification from her clothes, from her purse and from her baby’s things. I held them balled in my fist. The papers, passports and letters I ripped up and all of it, I flushed down the toilet.

  There was nothing left in that house to prove that she was Connice Nelson. It could be proved, but it would take a long time, and that gave me satisfaction.

  I then went over my own things. All identification papers I removed along with the wallet of Henry Nelson’s money. I kept three five dollar bills, a couple of ones and some change. All the rest of it, I stuffed between the water closet and the wall.

  I was coldly calm as I went down the steps and into the tailoring shop below. I didn’t bother to ask the Jap owner if I could use the telephone. I just took the receiver off its hook and asked for the police.

  “Please come,” I said slowly when they answered. “This is Victore Kapiolani. I have just come home to find my wife dead. She has been murdered.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  GOICHI GUERRERO was in charge of the Homicide detail. They pounded up the steps to the apartment over Oya’s tailoring shop followed by reporters from the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin.

  The reporters and the Honolulu cops swarmed in and took the place over. But Goichi Guerrero was different.

  He held back, almost shyly, seeming to turn sideways and slide unwillingly into the room. He wore plain clothes: an orange and green and tan sport shirt with leis, and water skis, and diving men printed on it, and sharply pressed white gabardine trousers. His sport shoes were newly shined. He wore heavy rimmed, strong lensed glasses. He had a short, straight forehead, two buck teeth and a receding chin.

  He slid over close to me, and bared his teeth in a grin.

  “You are the man who called the police? The man who said he was Victore Kapiolani?”

  “That’s my name. I am Victore Kapiolani.”

  This seemed to make Goichi Guerrero sad.

  “And that is your wife?” He gave a bird-like nod at Connice’s body on the floor.

  “Yes. That is my wife.”

  “And what is her name?”

  “Kapiolani,” I said. “Nuuanu Kapiolani.”

  I began to remember then, the way Connice had looked when she called herself Nuuanu Kapiolani, the way her eyes had shone when she looked at her baby. I knew the wall was crumbling, I was going to think, and it was going to hurt like hell, the things I would think.

  “And she is dead?” Guerrero asked apologetically.

  “Yes,” I said sharply. “Someone shot her through the right cheek. The bullet came out of her head.”

  His mouth tightened and he looked at me as though he hated me for brutally stating the truth.

  “The coroner will take care of that part of the details, Mr. Kapiolani. I deal with the living. I prefer it that way.”

  “All right.”

  We stood there looking at each other. I wasn’t deceived. I knew Guerrero was a smart cookie, maybe the smartest man I’d meet.

  “And what is your address, Mr. Kapiolani?”

  “We lived here,” I said.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  I thought back. “Two weeks,” I said slowly. “My wife was here ahead of me. I came here from Okinawa. I was working for the United States on a Government project.”

  “Were you? I have people there. Perhaps you met them. My father was a Korean. Where is your home?”

  “We planned to live in the Islands — perhaps the Big Island.”

  “Hawaii?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now that she is dead, what do you plan to do?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “You have a child,” he nodded toward the scarred baby crib. “Some one will have to care for it.”

  “We had no child.”

  He went gliding past me to the crib. When he saw that it was empty, he wheeled to face me.

  “Why do you have this bed here, then?”

  “It was in the place when we took it. We didn’t have it taken out. We didn’t plan to stay.”

  He went all around the room. I could practically see his eyes bulging behind those thick rimmed glasses. He lifted the dresses and underthings and stared at the rows of baby food in Connice’s suitcase. He looked over his shoulder at me, but he said nothing. He went through all of her things, even looked in the small ice chest in the kitchen and sniffed at the water in which I’d heated the baby’s milk.

  “What were you having for dinner, Kapiolani?” he said. The apartment was so small he didn’t have to raise his voice.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I told you on the phone. I just came in. I just found her — dead — like that — shot through — ”

  He broke in. “You didn’t talk to me on the phone, Kapiolani. I wasn’t in the office when the call came. It was relayed to me, by wireless in my car.”

  “How modern,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes,” he said, as though he’d missed the irony. “We are not very slow here in the Islands any more. We know a great many things. Do you have any idea who killed your wife?”

  “No.” I said. “I don’t even know why any one would want to kill her. She was here two weeks ahead of me. I came from Okinawa. I was working on a Government project there. I had been out to a restaurant.”

  “Why? Didn’t your wife cook here?”

  “I was tired of baby food,�
�� I said evenly. “I have an ulcer, you see. The doctor said I must eat strained foods. I got sick and fed up with it. Any guy would, you know. I went out to eat. And when I came back, she was dead. Somebody had shot her through the right cheek. The bullet — ”

  “Do you own a gun?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “If you are lying,” he said from the kitchen door, “we will find it out, you know.”

  “Look here!” I shouted. “Why don’t you do something about finding out who killed my wife? Why do you stand there suggesting that I lie. Do you think that I killed her? Do you? If you think that, damn you, why don’t you say so?”

  “I think you did,” Guerrero said as though it pained him.

  I charged across the room at him, but two uniformed policemen grabbed me. They were well trained and efficient. I tried to throw the one on my right and ended with my arms cuffed together between my shoulder blades.

  “When the coroner is through here,” Guerrero said, “we’ll take you down to the Station. We can discuss it more comfortably there, Mister Kapiolani.”

  He said no more to me. They left me sitting bent forward on a straight chair, my arms still linked up my back. They moved swiftly before me, everything was photographed and catalogued.

  I began to think then. It began to pour through me like the painful searing of a scalding enema. It was more than I could take. I began to see a terrible and elaborate plan that I had never even suspected before. I saw what Henry Nelson really wanted when he hired me to find his wife for him.

  “Let’s go,” Goichi Guerrero said softly in my ear. I got up from the chair and they led me down the steps through the gaping crowds of the curious to the police cars. But I was not really conscious of what was going on. We roared over to Bethel with the sirens open, and down Bethel to Queen where the Honolulu police station was.

  They led me in between two uniformed cops who strutted importantly as I was docked and jailed.

  I sat on the edge of this cot. I could see Henry Nelson as clearly as though he was before me, with the empty sleeve of his expensively tailored suit pinned up on the left side. He was no taller than I was, but years of power and success had given him a look of bigness that it was hard to overlook. In his lined face were the signs of bitterness and mortal agony. He had a handsome face, and yet he was the ugliest man I’d ever met. He was consciously cruel, and I suppose the plan had been born in his large head.