The Pearl Harbor Murders (14 page)

"I am sorry, I do not. But it is a pleasure." Harada held out his hand and he and Sam shook, like they were both Americans ... which, of course, they were.

"I was a friend of your niece's, as well, sir," Sam said, with another respectful nod. "We're sorry for your loss."

The grocer offered a curt nod in return. "Thank you, gentlemen."

"When will the service be held?" Hully asked.

Harada seemed confused. "Service?"

"Pearl's funeral."

"Oh... no arrangements have been made."

"Ah. Can I help?"

"I have written her parents. Posted the letter."

"You didn't call them?"

"No. It is long distance."

Hully exchanged glances with Sam. "But Mr. Harada, surely Pearl deserves better than this....As I said, I'll be glad to help...."

"Offer is ... kind." Harada smiled faintly, patiently. "Burroughs-
san
, I like my niece, but we were not... close. I am Buddhist, she was Christian. She would not want a service in my faith; I no have interest in arranging one in hers. Her parents share her Christian belief. They may feel other way."

Frowning, Hully asked, "Where is her body now?"

"I understand is in morgue. She was murdered."

"Well, I know she was murdered, but—"

Harada held up a hand. His face was strangely hard. "I am sorry for her death. But she turned her back on her people. She did not like it here, with me—and she did not return, once she got her... job."

"I thought she helped line you up your grocery account with Fred Bivens, at the Niumalu."

"She did. I was grateful."

Sam said, "But you weren't close."

"No."

Hully tried another angle. "Did she have any friends down here? Or for that matter, enemies?"

Harada's eyes narrowed; his face seemed to harden even more. "Why do you ask this?"

"Well, someone killed her...."

Harada's chin lifted. "A man is under arrest. She had loose morals and a man killed her. He is in custody, is he not?"

"Yeah, sure, but—"

"The circle has closed. Why do you ask questions as if you are a policeman?"

Hully gestured with an open hand. "Mr. Harada, I meant no offense. I merely ... we merely ... thought we'd offer our sympathies in what we had assumed would be a dark hour, for you."

Harada said nothing.

Sam said, "I guess that was our mistake."

For several long seconds, Hully just stared at the little grocer, who didn't even blink. Then Hully rushed out onto the wooden sidewalk, anger bubbling; Sam followed. Hully was several storefronts down, moving quickly through the interracial crowd, when Sam caught up with him. 'Take it easy, Hul....You just ran head-on into a cultural war I've fought every day of my life."

Hully stopped, looked at his friend. "Something smells."

"Yeah, fish and dirty diapers and incense. What, you think Harada killed his own niece? Why? Because she was Christian?"

Hully didn't know what to say, and was still looking for words when a small dark man in a snap-brim fedora, orange tie, and brown rumpled suit was suddenly in their midst.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Detective John Jardine demanded. His dark eyes were daggers.

"I, uh... well..."

Jardine took Hully by the back of the arm and bus-tied him into a booth in a nearby cafe. Sam came along, a wide-eyed bystander, who slipped in next to Hully.

A waitress in a kimono came over, and Jardine said, "Three coffees," and she went away.

"You were grilling that guy," Jardine said.

"You... you heard?"

"There's no damn door. Sure I heard—I was on my way in to interrogate him myself. What in the hell are you doing, walking my damn beat?"

Calmly, Hully said, "Have you talked to my dad today?"

"No—we've missed each other, traded phone calls. Why, is he in this too?"

With another glance at Sam, who shrugged, Hully sighed and made a clean breast it—sharing not only the notion of the informal investigation he and his father had been conducting, but the various pieces of information they had discovered.

Though he looked irritated, the Portuguese detective jotted much of this down in his small notebook.

"Thank you for the information," Jardine said, sliding the notebook into an inside suit-jacket pocket. "Now—give your father a message for me: leave this to the professionals. I won't write about his jungle, and you and your father need to stay the hell out of mine."

Hully leaned forward. "Are you looking at any suspects, other than Harry Kamana?"

An eyebrow arched. "I was about to interview that grocer, wasn't I? Damnit, boy—leave this to the police." He looked sharply at Sam. "What's your part in this?"

Sam's eyes widened. "I'm just a friend of Hully's ... I was a friend of Pearl's, too."

"Where were you last night?"

"At a college dance—pregame bash."

"But you weren't at the game today?"

"I don't like football."

"But you went to the 'pregame bash'?"

"Well, sure—I do like girls."

"Did you like Pearl Harada?"

"Not that way... hey, what is this?"

Jardine looked pointedly at Hully. "How's this guy for another suspect? We're looking at everybody and everything... including you, Mr. Burroughs."

A uniformed officer, a young Polynesian, peered in the cafÈ's storefront window and seemed relieved to see Jardine. The cop hurried in and stood next to the booth, hands behind him.

"Detective, may I have a word?" Jardine rose and, pointing to Hully and then at Sam, said, "Stay," as if to a pair of dogs.

Hully and Sam watched out the window as the uniformed cop delivered some
slice of
detailed information that made Jardine cover his mouth; then the detective pushed his fedora back on his head, and turned and gazed through the cafe window at Hully. He crooked a finger.

Hully raised his eyebrows and gestured to himself. Jardine frowned and nodded. Soon Sam had been left behind and Jardine—with the uniformed cop at the wheel—was sitting in the front seat of a squad car with Hully in back, feeling like a suspect.

"What's this about?" Hully asked. "Just ride," Jardine said.

Past the end of the Waikiki streetcar line, Jardine's driver headed out Diamond Head Road. The road was just about to begin making its winding way up the cliffs, when the squad car drew up along the roadside where another squad car was already parked.

Wordlessly, Jardine approached an opening between the rocks where another Polynesian uniformed cop was posted at the mouth of the path; the cop nodded to

Jardine and pointed down. Following the swarthy little detective—whose driver had stayed behind—Hully did his best to keep his balance as he navigated van-sized rocks down the grassy, sandy slope. On the beach below, the rock-infested white beach, lay a body—a naked man, sprawled on his stomach. Two more cops stood watch, but this fellow wasn't going anywhere.

The sand was moist under his slippers, as Hully trailed after the detective, who made a beeline to the body and knelt. The nude, slender frame of the corpse became a specific person when Hully got close enough to see the pale, sand-flecked, bulging-eyed face, the surf rolling up nearby, threatening to dampen the dead features.

"Recognize him?" Jardine said to Hully, looking up from beside the body.

“Terry Mizuha," Hully said. His tongue felt thick; his head was spinning. He turned away from the corpse, walked a few steps down the beach, his back to the cops and the body.

Then Jardine was at his side. "You said this boy might have more information to share."

Hully had included a summary of his conversation with the (late) guitar player when he had filled Jardine in, at the Chinatown coffee shop.

"Yes—he said he had to think... to 'sort things out' He'd said maybe we'd talk in a few hours."

"It's been a few hours—but Terry doesn't seem too talkative."

Hully swallowed, shivered. "How was he killed?"

The wind off the ocean was threatening to whip away Jardine's fedora, but somehow it stayed put. "Garroted—probably with a small rope."

Hully shook his head—such a violent way for so gentle a soul to meet his fate. "Do you still think Harry Kamana killed Pearl Harada?"

Jardine twitched a nonsmile. "I'd say a little doubt is raised."

Hully snorted a humorless laugh. "Well, Kamana sure as hell didn't kill this guy! I saw Terry at the Niumalu, well before lunch!"

Jardine heaved a sigh, and looked back toward the body. "We were probably not meant to find him so soon.... This is a rocky portion of the beach, not visible from the highway. But some tourists stumbled across him... forty-five minutes ago."

"What's the significance of finding him sooner, rather than later?"

The sharp eyes landed back on Hully; the faintest of smiles etched itself on Jardine's thin lips. "I'm supposed to write this off as a
mahu
kill."

"A what?"

"Mahu ...
fairy—homosexual. Lots of queers get killed in Waikiki, usually by soldiers or sailors. Kind of a... local tradition that horny servicemen, short of money, pick up a
mahu
on a street corner for a free 'thrill.' Some of these servicemen are sickened by the experience, and take it out on the poor bastards, after."

"You don't really think this is a—"

"No. But I'm supposed to. Terry Mizuha was a known
mahu
—and he's nude, possibly preparing for ... you know."

"In the middle of the day?"

Jardine frowned. "That's why I say we weren't supposed to find him so soon. I would like to talk to your servicemen friends, Fielder and Stanton."

"Why, you think one of them may have lured him out here, on a pretext?"

"Possibly. It's secluded enough, even for a daytime tryst Anyway, there are no signs of the body being carried down the slope. He would seem to have been killed here, on the beach."

"But he
could
have been killed elsewhere."

"Yes—if the killer had an accomplice to help him carry the body down the slope. The body could have been transported here in the trunk of a car."

"Did you find the clothes?"

Jardine nodded. "I'm told they were neatly stacked in the rocks nearby."

The afternoon was dying. The setting sun seemed a red-hot ball of flame, tinting the waves pink, as if the ocean were watered-down blood.

The detective looked up at Hully with eyes that were bright but no longer hard or sharp. "Would you help me tonight, Mr. Burroughs? We'll go to Hotel Street and find that sailor and that soldier."

There was no question about it: Hully would go along with Jardine. But just the same, he said, "I thought I was supposed to leave this to the professionals."

"You'll be with a professional. What do you say?"

Down the beach, foamy surf licking ever nearer, Terry Mizuha seemed to have no objection.

"I had nothing else planned," Hully said.

TEN
An Evening at the Shuncho-ro

At the top of Red Hill, Burroughs slowed his Pierce Arrow to take in the panoramic view of Pearl Harbor on this peaceful evening—the scattering of stars in God's purple Hawaiian sky competing with the man-made twinkling of buildings and ships, the ebony sea highlighted shimmeringly by the rays of the near-golden moon. Dance band music drifted up from the officers' club below, the view including the Naval Station, Luke Field, and—in the distance—the Ewa Sugar Plantation; but the equipment, the trappings, of the great base were lost in the night, the workshops, the big hammerhead crane, swallowed by darkness, with only the lights of the Pacific Fleet remaining—and there were plenty, what with every battleship in port. Winding down the hill, passing through Halawa Gulch, the convertible glided by fields of sugarcane, which waved at the writer, friendly in the moonlight.

A sign told Burroughs that Pearl City Road Junction lay ahead just three miles, where a left turn would take him to the Peninsula residential section and the Shuncho-ro teahouse.

He had not connected with Hully, and Burroughs wondered what his son might have uncovered—he only hoped the boy hadn't gotten himself in any jam. For once Burroughs valued his son's friendship with Sam Fujimoto—snooping in Chinatown without a safari guide would have been reckless. Not that he was worried, really, other than a standard fatherly concern: Hully was as smart as he was strapping, and could damn well take care of himself.

On the other hand, it
was
a murderer they were chasing. And Burroughs was starting to wonder whether Pearl Harada's death really had been a simple crime of passion, driven by the jealousy of one suitor or another ... or was it a small yet important part of something greater and far more sinister?

Back at the Waikiki Tavern, after Colonel Fielder had departed, Burroughs and FBI agent Sterling had sat and talked for another fifteen minutes, in the matched-roofed pergola on the beach. No more rum punch: a waiter was dispatched to bring coffee for both men. As they spoke, a tropical sunset painted the water, the world, with shades of red and orange; but as the sun's ball of fire slipped over the horizon, darkness rapidly invaded.

Burroughs had told Sterling about the informal investigation he and his son were undertaking into the Harada girl's death, assuring the agent that Hully had not been clued in on Otto Kuhn's suspected status as a sleeper agent.

"To me, the most interesting thing you've come up with," the ruggedly handsome FBI agent said, stirring sugar into his coffee, "is that phone call that Kuhn and his wife argued about."

Burroughs lifted an eyebrow. "Apparently, Otto told her to deny there'd been any phone call, or anyway not to mention there had been one."

Sterling's eyes narrowed. "But who rang Otto, in the middle of the night? And why?"

"He's a sleeper agent—maybe it was a wake-up call."

The FBI agent nodded. "Maybe in a way it was—Otto receives a call, and then before you know it, he's on your doorstep, telling Jardine he witnessed Kamana killing that girl."