Slay Ride for a Lady Read online

  But Phillips Clark, his legal right hand, had figured the angles. I knew that. And Buster Eddington, with his open face, sport clothes and crew hair-cut, he had doped out the method. For only Lungs Garcia was there no place in this plan that I could see. Lungs used a knife more than brains or brawn, but he was a great persuader.

  Henry Nelson had not wanted his wife back! Connice had said that, and now I knew it was true!

  Nelson had used me for only one thing! To fine Connice for him so that he could have her killed. What had Connice done to him? That I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it had sent Connice fleeing half around the world, and sent Henry Nelson after her because he wasn’t going to let her go on living.

  Nelson hadn’t been able to find Connice for months. He must have been growing frantic. I could see the four of them sitting around Nelson’s huge apartment figuring the angles, making the plan. Get Dan Henderson, somebody said. That might have been Lungs. They pounced on that, chewed it over. Henderson is in the Pen. It might be dangerous to have him sprung. But could he find my wife? He could find her if she’s alive. But it might be dangerous to let him out again. He’s made plenty of trouble. Wait a minute. That would be Buster Eddington. Why not spring Dan Henderson? Why not let him find Connice for you? You’ve got Connice then. And you’ve got a fall guy.

  You’ve got Dan Henderson to take the rap for you!

  I jumped up from the cot and sprang at the bars. I gripped them in my hands until the knuckles turned white. All I could think was that I was going to get out of there. I was going to beat this rap. I was going to beat every rap. I was going to get back to Henry Nelson if it was the last thing I ever did.

  A jailer unlocked the cell and I was led along the dark corridor to a small office marked “Honolulu Police. Lieutenant of Homicide.” Goichi Guerrero awaited me.

  They sat me on a straight chair in the center of the room.

  “As a former police man,” Guerrero said, “I think you will be impressed by our efficiency.”

  “I was never a cop,” I said. “My name is Victore Kapiolani.”

  “You’re going to find, the sooner you drop that one, the better,” Guerrero said.

  “I won’t drop it,” I said. “Have you established the time of my wife’s death?”

  “You have no wife. The woman was killed upstairs over Oya’s tailoring at ten o’clock this morning.”

  “I was at a restaurant.”

  “Where is the woman’s child?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Answer my question!”

  “There is no child.”

  “I personally cannot beat the truth out of you,” Goichi Guerrero said. “But I can personally believe that would be the quickest way with you, and personally order it done.”

  He was standing close over me. I looked at him.

  “You’re wasting your time,” I said.

  “Here on the Islands time is not important as it is Stateside. We here say Aloha to today and Aloha to tomorrow. Greeting and farewell is one word.”

  “I was in a restaurant at ten o’clock,” I said. “A restaurant from which you undoubtedly got a call to remove two men who had been injured in a brawl.”

  “That is right, the Bombay Grill,” said one of the men leaning on Guerrero’s desk. Guerrero only looked at him.

  “All of this is highly immaterial,” Guerrero said. “We have established that you have taken rooms at the Breakwaters Hotel, Waikiki, that your name is Daniel Henderson of Tampa in Florida, the United States.”

  “Very brilliant,” I said. “But I don’t believe you established that, Guerrero, I think you were told that. I think it was handed to you on a platter.”

  Guerrero came nearer. “Let’s not play at games, Henderson. You have killed the wife of an influential man of the States. You are going to pay for that crime with your life. You can save us a lot of time by confessing.”

  I laughed at him. “Would you let me die, Guerrero, before you find the child?”

  Guerrero pounced on that. “The child! Where is the child, Henderson.”

  “There is no child,” I said. “My name is Victore Kapiolani.”

  Guerrero glared at me through his glasses.

  Then he stepped back and waved his arm resignedly at his goons in uniform.

  I’ll say this for him. He was delicate about it. He didn’t watch any of it. He slid over to the window and stood staring out into Queen Street. He must have heard it, though, for when they stopped and revived me, he came back over and his face was drenched with sweat.

  I spit blood out of my mouth at him.

  “Kapiolani,” I said through my swollen mouth. “My name is still Kapiolani.”

  He bent over me. “Tell me where is the child? I’ll take you back to your cell then.”

  I shook my head. “There is no child.”

  He stepped back and waved his hand again. They started in on me this time before he could get over to the window with his back turned. But it didn’t last so long for me. I passed out quick this time. That scared them a little and they threw me back in my cell. At least, I suppose they did. Because that’s where I woke up.

  It was early morning of the next day. Daylight streamed in. I heard Guerrero at the bars.

  “Come. Get up. You, Kapiolani. I have the two men in my office who were picked up at the Bombay Grill yesterday at ten o’clock for fighting. They have looked at you through the bars and say they don’t know you. But I am willing to let them tell you so to your face.”

  • • •

  I COULD HARDLY stand. My knees buckled when I stood so that I toppled forward across the cell and grabbed at the bars. They were cold in my hands. I think my hands were the only parts of me that didn’t ache.

  Guerrero stood there with a satisfied smile making a wrinkle in his receding chin. He nodded at the uniformed jailor. This islander was uncommonly tall and broad in his brown police uniform. The keys jangled as he unlocked the cell door.

  “Wait,” I said to Guerrero. “Toilet.”

  Guerrero shook his head. “No. Not now.” He grinned at me. “You don’t to go to the toilet just when you are about to be set free by an alibi of your friends, do you?”

  I was too miserable to even answer him.

  The jailer reached for my arm to pull me from my cage.

  I shook his hand down, and took a giant step out along the corridor. I felt the backs of my knees tremble. There was sweat across my shoulders, and my face was drenched with it.

  Guerrero and the jailer walked slowly behind me. I saw I couldn’t make it the rest of the way. It must have been twenty feet more to the door of Guerrero’s office. I was breathing through my mouth. I leaned against the sand finished wall and looked at Guerrero and the jailer. My mouth hung open, and my eyes were distended.

  Guerrero looked at me with contempt. “Go ahead and wet your pants,” he said, “lose all of your dignity. Why don’t you get on your knees and crawl the rest of the way? How will this look to your friends?”

  I tried to answer him, but my tongue was thick between my teeth. It wasn’t worth it. I rolled my head back away from them to look at the door of Guerrero’s office. The door was open now and two plain clothes men were standing there watching me.

  I let my body roll around to the wall, and leaning against it, I stumbled along to the door where the two men were. They each took an arm and helped me in to the same chair in which I’d been tortured last night.

  I saw the boxer and Skinny staring at me. Their faces plainly showed the contempt they felt at seeing me like this. A smile pulled at the cut lip of the boxer.

  Guerrero slammed the door. He was obviously angered because his two plain clothes assistants had helped me into the room. Quite evidently, he would have preferred that I crawl in on my belly, so that the two men would see what an object of contempt I was, of how little importance I was, how completely the man who had beaten them yesterday was gone this morning.

  T
here was silence in the room as he riffled through some papers on his desk. He overcame his anger, I suppose, for when he looked at me again, there was that superior grin in his face.

  “These are your friends, Henderson,” he said. “Of course you know their names? The heavier gentleman is the famous light-heavyweight boxer Eddie Alkao. Eddie was born here on the Islands. His parents were simple folk, worked in the pineapple fields beyond Ewa. You know, don’t you Henderson, the pineapple grows forever. Each year it is cut back, and each year it grows again out of itself. The volcanic earth in which it grows is itself beautiful, the color of beautiful rust. It looks good and strong. Young Eddie grew good and strong in that soil. He once won the Mid-Pac Championship from the Marines during the war in a contest at Bloch Arena. He was beaten the next year by a Negro in the Navy, but Eddie will tell you he was fouled.”

  The inside of my mouth was like cotton, my head throbbed and I was sweating. I knew better than to ask for water. I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. The hell with him.

  “What’s that to me?” I said.

  He grinned. “You are feeling better, are you?”

  “Yes.” I said. “It was just at first. I was sick at first when I woke up. I’m all right.”

  “That’s good. You can talk to your friends now, can’t you? The slender gentleman is Oliver Nakayama. He has had a little trouble with me in the past. But we do not hold that unpleasantness against each other now, do we Oliver?”

  Nakayama, his right arm in a sling, grinned and shook his head. “Oh, no, sir,” he said, “I understand, you do what is your duty.”

  “My duty,” Guerrero said. He gave Nakayama and the boxer, Eddie Alkao a pained smile. “You are in jail here on a simple assault charge. You are not to be nervous or afraid. You are free to speak your mind. In the interest of justice, and my duty, Oliver. Do you understand that?”

  Oliver’s nose was twitching. Obviously he had been off the powder all night. But he was trying to be ingratiating for the police detective. He nodded, grinning. But his eyes were looking dry and his pupils were dilating. He wasn’t going to continue so docile for very long.

  “This man — this murderer,” Guerrero said nodding at me, “desires to use the word of you gentlemen that he was in the Bombay Grill yesterday morning at ten. He says that you know him, and can swear that he was in this restaurant at that hour.”

  Eddie Alkao looked at me. “I never seen him in my life, Chief.”

  “Nor did I, ever,” said Nakayama.

  I knew it was useless. I could see the smug smile widen on the face of Goichi Guerrero. The American, Daniel Henderson, was down now and helpless. But I forced myself to stand at the side of my chair without touching it.

  I glared at Nakayama. “How did you get that broken arm?” I demanded.

  Oliver looked at Guerrero instead of me. Guerrero said impatiently, “Tell him!”

  “My friend and I disagreed over a girl. He is very strong. He broke my arm. He did not intend to, nor do I grudge him for he doesn’t know his own strength.”

  I nodded at Alkao. “Is he the friend who broke your arm?”

  Oliver bobbed his head. His lips were twitching now and he kept licking at the bottom of his nose with the tip of his tongue. “Yes.”

  “And did Nakayama break your face like that?” I said to the boxer.

  Eddie Alkao said reluctantly. “I had been drinking. I was not myself. It was a friendly brawl, we had had too much to drink. At heart we are friends. We come to trial tomorrow morning in City Court. Nothing will come of it. I will pay the damages.”

  My voice was hoarse. “And neither of you ever saw me?”

  They shook their heads, staring at me.

  “That’s all,” Guerrero said sharply. He nodded at the jailer, “Return them to their cell block, Thomas.”

  There was a copy of the Honolulu Advertiser on Guerrero’s desk. I think he must purposefully have turned it so that I could see the headlines. “SOCIAL LADY MURDERED BY EX-COP.” This was all, in the story, qualified by a lot of “it is alleged’s” and “the police say,” and “Lieutenant Guerrero believes.” There was a wild-eyed picture of me, looking mussed when they’d booked me the day before. And there was a blurred picture of Connice as she had been found.

  Even at that moment, I was glad that the picture might have been of anyone, or of a sack of potatoes on a floor as a matter of fact. Connice was Nuuanu Kapiolani to me, that was what she wanted. And it was just part of my plan to keep it that way to help me repay Henry Nelson for his monstrous double-cross that got me accused of murder and slapped around by Kanaka goons.

  Just then, I had no idea how I was going to get out of there, I simply knew that I was getting out, with God’s help!

  Guerrero slapped his manicured hand down on the copy of the newspaper.

  “All right,” he said to me and to the detectives who remained with us in the room. “That is enough. I’ve indulged you this far, Henderson, so that no one, not even my police colleagues here, can ever say I was not eminently fair to you, although at the moment I hold in my possession all the facts and evidence I need to convict you of murder in the first degree.”

  It was a very impressive delivery. The men about the room were impressed. I laughed at him.

  “My name is Kapiolani,” I said. “Victore Kapiolani.”

  I couldn’t have incensed him more if I’d struck him across his thick lensed glasses.

  He came around his desk and with both hands shoved me back into the chair. “Listen to me, Henderson. I have said nothing of the diapers in that apartment. I accept your story that the baby food I found was for your own ulcerated stomach. These things I don’t even need! Wireless from Tampa has informed me of who you are, your prison record, the fact that already you killed a man with your reckless driving. We know that you followed this woman here. You killed her in her apartment, did away with the baby. Perhaps it too is dead? We have witnesses who saw you running through the streets with a child in your arms!”

  I felt panic burning at me. The baby! Perhaps they’d already trailed me to the Cantania woman’s shack? I had to get out of there. Inside my belly was raw with the need to get out of there. But I knew if I lost my temper, if I said the wrong thing, Guerrero had me and I was forever stopped.

  “There is no child.” I said as quietly as I could. “My name is Victore Kapiolani. We had no child!”

  Guerrero almost sprang at me with the rage that ate him up. His eyes grew wide behind his thick-lensed glasses, his lips were pulled back off his buck teeth. His face was flushed. His hands, making claws out before my face, were trembling.

  I said it again, softly, “We had no child.” But I had the terrible knowledge that of the two of us, I was the most enraged, I was the most angered, I had the most anxiety, and I was dead sure I was going to break first.

  “We have all the facts we need, Henderson,” he shrilled at me. “If I find the child, or the body of the child, you’ll have no chance. You can make it much easier on yourself to confess now. Tell me where is the child. We may even be able to make it easier for you, we can even get you a good lawyer, if you will tell us where is the child!”

  I looked at him. “Dan Henderson was a cop, back in the States?” I said.

  He looked at me speculatively. At last he nodded.

  “And he killed a woman here in Honolulu?”

  Again he nodded, waiting.

  “If I was Dan Henderson,” I said, “I’d know a lot about the way you work, wouldn’t I?”

  “I suppose so. We are very modern here in the Islands. Only this year we had a teacher, an FBI man who trained in Chicago.”

  “You can’t get much fancier than that, can you?” I said.

  He only looked at me.

  “Cops make trades sometimes,” I said.

  He licked the tip of his tongue across his two buck teeth. There was a thin line of sweat under the lower rims of his glasses.

  “What do you have in mind, Hen
derson?”

  “If my name was Henderson,” I reminded him. “I’d make a trade with you?”

  “Tell me what it is. Perhaps if it is in my power — ” he left that unfinished. Let me finish it in my mind.

  “If I tell you where the child is,” I said slowly, watching him. “What would you trade?”

  He leaned forward. “What do you want?”

  “Will you let me talk to Nakayama and Eddie Alkao for five minutes? Alone? Here in this office? With your door locked?”

  I could see him figuring all the angles. It didn’t take him long, not even as long as it takes to tell it. His mind was fast, it worked like a lightning calculator, an IBM machine, only smoother. Still, he considered everything. The bars at the windows. The two men he would leave on duty outside the door. The condition of Nakayama and the boxer. My own battered condition. The opportunity to get his hands on the child and sew up the case.

  His smile was almost friendly. “Assuredly,” he said. “My dear Henderson, why didn’t you ask that before?” He nodded at one of his plain clothes assistants and then looked back at me, his dark eyes glistening like a boa’s under glass. “Where is the child?”

  “On the bus run to Navy Housing,” I said unwillingly. “Past the Iwilei Road on Kam Highway — the Dillingham Boulevard, or whatever they call it. The first midwife on the right side of the road. I didn’t have much time.”

  His smile was slow and secretive. “My dear Henderson,” he said, “we will radio a call to one of our cruisers. In the meantime, your friends will be brought back in.” He went to the door. I sat there trying to appear as dejected as I could. He stopped with his small, neat hand on the knob. “I hope you will bear no grudge against me when our trade avails you nothing. I’m sorry for you, but neither of these men will change what he has said, for he has spoken the truth. I recognized in their eyes that neither had ever seen you before.”