The House at Sandalwood (17 page)

Even now, looking back on that time, I remember how firmly I assured myself that Ingrid Berringer was very much in the present tense, very much alive. And the truth was, I had no way of knowing—it was mere wishful thinking. But still, I never once allowed myself to question this firm assumption.

Bill rang the little doorbell, which buzzed raucously somewhere in the house. A slight, pretty, young Oriental woman came to the door. Her figure was slim as a boy’s in jeans and a brightly printed halter top, and she flashed a welcoming smile. The gleam of excitement in her dark eyes made me suspect the welcome was influenced by strong curiosity.

“I am Teresa Asami. You are the
malahini
gentleman who called. My husband is at his job now but he told me you had found out from the Surfrider that Miss Berringer stayed here a few days.”

Bill introduced himself and me, explained that he was another of Ingrid Berringer’s “relatives.”

We were invited inside and in the warm little living room I saw sprays of orchids, a vase of beautiful bird of paradise and exquisite watercolors in the Japanese style on the walls, in addition to family portraits. There was one eight-by-ten black-and-white framed portrait of two delightfully grinning young Japanese boys in U.S. Army uniform, though they looked scarcely old enough to be wearing anything but Boy Scout uniforms.

“My uncles,” Mrs. Asami explained with pride in her small voice. “They were in the Italian campaigns. That was World War Two. You have heard of their motto: ‘Go For Broke!’ They took it from us in the Islands. It is an old saying. Tommy was killed. He is the boy on the left. But Georgie came home. He is a Toyota dealer out Kahala way.”

“It is a wonderful picture. So very expressive,” I remarked, but Bill Pelhitt interrupted her nervously, “Was it here that Ingrid stayed? How did she find out about it?”

Mrs. Asami motioned us to a big red plush couch. “Do you drink tea? Or—saki?
Malahinis
seem to have taken a fancy to it lately.” We refused politely and she sat down opposite us, with a graceful tucking away of those good-looking legs underneath her.

“My husband is desk clerk at the hotel and Miss Berringer asked him if there was a small place she could rent. ‘Away from things,’ she said. My husband suggested the bungalow next door. It isn’t ours but we rent it out for the owner who lives in Osaka. Afterward, my husband said he should have guessed what she wanted it for.” She clapped her hand over her mouth in sudden embarrassment. “I beg your pardon. I do not mean to say that she—that is, we have no reason to believe she did anything improper, and except for her one visitor, she was absolutely alone.”

“Please,” Bill put in anxiously. “Don’t hesitate to tell us everything. We are trying to find her, and any little bits and pieces of information may help us.”

She nodded. “I understand. It was only a few days, and when she left she took a small case—an overnight case, I think. We imagined she would send for her things from the hotel, but during her stay here that was all she had.”

I knew Bill was frantically anxious, and curious as I was, and I broke in, ‘The visitor. You say she had a visitor?”

“Oh, yes. That was in the early morning. The day before she left. My husband and I were sound asleep. He works nights. And we heard this quarrel. The young lady yelling ‘Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! Just a complete moron!’ And several unpleasant things like that. My husband opened the shade but we couldn’t see anything. Our windows were open and so were Miss Berringer’s. It—it was quite unpleasant.”

Bill Pelhitt’s fingers closed on the glass edge of the cocktail table. He leaned forward, wanting to hear more. I had quite an opposite impulse. I knew exactly what was coming. If only I could shut her up, get this Pelhitt out of here without discovering the rest, or what I thought was the rest!

“Mrs. Asami,” he said, “When Ingrid’s visitor left did you get a good look at her? Could you describe the young lady? Was she—?”

“Describe Miss Berringer?” Mrs. Asami asked, obviously confused.

“No, no. Her visitor. This young lady she was calling an idiot and a moron.”

Still bewildered, Mrs. Asami waved her hands as if to clear the air.

“Her visitor? I don’t think you understand, Mr. Pelhitt. Her visitor was a man.”

Twelve

I am not especially quick-witted, but it couldn
’
t have been more than a few seconds before I suspected this visitor to whom Ingrid yelled “Idiot!” was the person most nearly concerned with Deirdre. It was her husband. Ingrid had spoken of her one-time friend as a “moron” and had made other cutting remarks, and I thought she would probably speak in this way about Deirdre only to Deirdre herself or to Stephen Giles. It was likely that she would try to hurt Deirdre in any way she could. But this revelation of her quarrel with the visitor was almost as damaging as a public quarrel with Deirdre herself would have been. Only it gave one other person grounds for harming her. And for killing her? But the woman was not dead! She
couldn
’
t
be. I repeated this thought to myself. No one had any evidence that she had been murdered. No one!

Bill Pelhitt was puzzled. “But did you see him, Mrs. Asami?”

“Oh, yes. He was a
kamaiana haole
. About six feet tall and very handsome, I thought. A fine, bronze fellow in a terrible rage. He shouted at her—something about warning her. He was very angry.”

Pelhitt frowned and rubbed his temple. He had almost hit on my own suspicion, I was sure, but something seemed to have stumped him.

“Do you think it was someone she knew well?” He laughed awkwardly. “But she apparently knew so many.”

Mrs. Asami murmured conventional sympathy but it was not, after all, any fault of hers, and I could see that she was at a loss to console a melancholy stranger.

“I’m afraid that is all we know here, Mr. Pelhitt. Miss Berringer left late that afternoon. We thought she was going on an interisland trip. But when she didn’t return—she paid a month’s rent—we decided she had gone on to the South Seas. Tahiti. Samoa. She hinted to my husband that she was in love, and that she would soon ‘persuade’ the man.”

Mrs. Asami made a little gesture of apology. “I really am afraid Miss Berringer sounded quite ruthless when she went after a man. That was the impression we got, anyway. Otherwise, there is nothing we can tell you.”

Reluctantly, Bill Pelhitt got to his feet. I joined him. I was anxious for him to get out of here before he realized the identity of the man quarrelling with Ingrid Berringer. At the same time I couldn’t understand why the answer hadn’t struck him as quickly as it had me.

I discovered when we reached the car that Pelhitt’s ignorance of the identity of an angry man was based on an absurd misconception. As we drove off, he said with discouragement, “So she was mixed up with a Hawaiian!”

“A what!”

“You heard those Hawaiian words. The man was a half-blood of some kind. All that talk about golden—”

“Bronze.”

“Same thing. So she was mixed up with one of the locals. You know, it might be one of the fellows in that Hawaiian group on Sandalwood Island. Ili-Ahi, or whatever they call it. There were some that I guess you’d call good-looking.”

I was noncommittal. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite and agree with him. On the other hand I was terrified for fear he would realize who that quarrelling man might be. I was reasonably sure that the unidentified man, if he
was
Stephen, had not harmed Ingrid Berringer. But he might well have bought her off, persuaded her to leave, and that might sound bad to Victor Berringer who would be certain to make something suspicious out of it. Worst of all, I wondered when Bill Pelhitt would find out what a
kamaiana
really was, that a
kamaiana-haole
was simply a long-time Caucasian resident of Hawaii.

“A native,” Bill murmured. He said the word distastefully. “Ingrid and a native!”

“Bill, citizens born in an American state are natives of that state. I’m a native of California. You are a native of—”

“New York. Upper New York state. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

I wished I hadn’t brought the matter up. I wasn’t anxious to fight the world’s battles, and I had a headache. I am not sure just when the headache started, but I knew I was getting awfully tired of Bill Pelhitt’s company, especially now that I would have to be careful in discussing the things we had learned at Mrs. Asami’s. I made a rather obvious gesture of rubbing my forehead and, very ashamed of myself, I pleaded, “I wonder if you would mind driving me back out Kalakaua to the Princes Kaiulani, where I can wait for the others. I have this splitting headache.”

He glanced at me, and the muscles around his jaws tightened. After that one glance he kept looking ahead as we started across downtown Honolulu toward the Ala Wai district and Waikiki.

“I guess I’ve been boring you. I really didn’t mean to. I thought it might be interesting, kind of like detective work.”

“And it was. Really, it was!”

He further upset me by saying with deep feeling, “Thank you, Judith. That was kind of you to say so. I can’t persuade you to go to lunch with me, I suppose.” Before I could answer he went on hurriedly, “But I imagine that wouldn’t help your headache; would it?”

To accept his negative invitation seemed the least I could do; so I said of course I would be happy to have lunch with him. He cheered up considerably and we drove out to the beautiful Kahala Hilton and had our lunch. I admired the gardens and enjoyed the food, wishing I hadn’t gotten used to eating less in the past nine years. Institutional cooking had somewhat dulled my taste buds.

My companion talked about his childhood with Ingrid Berringer—how he, being somewhat older, became a kind of guardian to the girl who ran around freely, uninhibited, doing as she pleased, while Victor Berringer was busy adding to his fortune.

It was not until we were finishing our lunch and had turned to a discussion of the decorative pools, paths, lawns, and the endless varieties of green outside in the gardens, that I noticed the little man two tables away. His hooded, Oriental eyes dropped their gaze rather obviously as I looked his way.

“Mr. Moto seems awfully interested in us,” I remarked.

Bill Pelhitt was far less casual than I. He turned and stared with deliberation at the little man who gave all his attention to the fruit salad he was toying with.

I saw that my companion was taking far too much interest in the little man, and I tried to turn his attention from what probably was a trivial incident. After Bill’s reaction, I was sorry I had ever mentioned the Oriental man, who was minding his own business, after all.

“We have nothing to hide, Bill. Let him look.”

“I don’t like it. Who could have hired him? He is hired. Anybody can see that. He’s a private eye.”

“Private eye!” I sighed. Bill Pelhitt really had an imagination. Because the little man had done nothing else to attract attention to himself, I tried to ignore him. When this proved impossible because of Bill’s nervousness, I began to make a more careful study of the little man. He wore an aloha shirt with a raw-silk suit, and the outfit seemed a little too obviously “tourist” to be true. He was an Islander, I thought, and as I watched him I became convinced that he really
was
observing us for some reason, possibly in a professional capacity, as Bill had guessed. But who could have employed him? Bill was right, I was now convinced. The most important thing to discover now was the name of the little man’s employer.

I smiled at Bill and whispered with what I hoped was a teasing air, “When we leave, let’s walk through the gardens. See if he follows.”

Bill Pelhitt hesitated a minute but then agreed. “Right. Let’s go.” He put on a great performance—I was afraid it might be a bit overdone. “What do you say we take a stroll—dear?”

I tried not to laugh but to keep a suitably easy expression. “Of course, darling. What an enchanting view!”

We played along, walking out across the path, running our fingers through the water of a miniature pool, while I looked back and saw that our Mr. Moto had not left the dining room. Were we all wrong about him? He had certainly behaved oddly until now.

We couldn’t really afford to waste any more time, even in this heavenly spot. I suggested at last that we drive back into the center of Waikiki to wait for the others of our party.

“If we go through the hotel he’s bound to see us and follow.”

I shrugged. “Go around the building—through the grounds and out some side way.”

He knew no more about the grounds than I did, but after numerous wrong turns and mistakes, we did get back to the car and started into town. There was a good deal of traffic, and I had decided we should try to forget our spooky little pursuer. We could hardly have picked him out of all those trucks and cars behind us, I thought. But Bill was attempting to do so, all the same. He kept glancing at the rear-view mirror and making guesses. He was so persistent about it, he infected me with curiosity once more.

“I never noticed that truck before. Did you see the driver? Pretty small, isn’t he? Could be the one.”

I scoffed at this idea. “You surely don’t think our neat, precise Mr. Moto is driving a truck. Besides, that truck driver is red-haired.” I wasn’t going to tell him that the driver of the cream-colored Toyota beyond the truck and behind a Volkswagen did resemble our spy. Busy thinking about the spy and his probable purpose as well as his employer, I said very little after that and made the mistake of not answering Bill Pelhitt’s second question in a row.

“Judith, have you got something against me—personally?”

I was startled back into awareness by his plaintive question and denied guiltily, “Certainly not. Where did you get that idea?”

“Well, you did have that headache. And then, I suppose I’m not as fascinating as some men you’ve known.” He grinned a little shyly. “Come on, I can take it.”

With a frankness he probably did not understand the real significance of, I promised him, “You are a far nicer person than I have been used to.”

Unfortunately, he chose to accept this as a declaration of my interest and his free hand squeezed mine as it lay in my lap. He made no other physical advance but I couldn’t help being relieved when we reached the best-known hotel row of Waikiki, with the Princess Kaiulani, on the
mauka
side. Across the street, backing on the narrow strip of beach, were the Surfrider and the aged but popular Moana. The latter was the last testament to the romantic Hawaii of Somerset Maugham.

When Bill had parked and was escorting me to the chosen meeting place on the terrace of the Kaiulani, I began hoping the others would have arrived first. I didn’t want to spend more time alone with Bill Pelhitt. I was sorry for him but I felt that he was trying too hard to find a replacement for the missing Ingrid Berringer. He got a table and chairs for us and there seemed to be no way to avoid a long
tete a tete
.
Tete a
tete
? Did people have those any more? How much I was still a product of the time before my lost nine years! I wanted to be part of today but I was having problems adjusting. Bill Pelhitt ordered drinks for us. I hesitated as usual. I couldn’t seem to make a choice. It had never been a problem years ago. My fiancé, John Eastman, had always chosen for me. Now, when Bill ordered the ubiquitous
Mai-Tai
, I accepted it and tried to keep both hands busy pulling fruit out of my glass and sucking on it. It was sloppy, and it didn’t even serve my purpose.

Bill reached for one of my hands. My fingers curled under his slightly damp touch. My own fingers were sticky, but he didn’t seem to notice. He rambled on with his new theory that a Hawaiian had somehow caused Ingrid to disappear and interrupted himself to say suddenly, “We’ve thrown off our private eye! We haven’t seen him since the Kahala.”

“Maybe he never existed.”

He found this appealingly funny.

“You just won’t let me have my fantasy, will you? Doesn’t matter. I’m beginning to feel a little less lousy. And I did feel lousy when we first arrived here in the Islands, Vic and I.”