“I tailed them to that apartment and I was prowling around the back stairs when I heard shots and saw the redhead run out the back door. So I went there.
“Afterward I went back to the Bolero and in the back door there when — bam! — something hits me and I don’t know any more until I hear you talking here. Even then I felt sort of dopey as though a couple of full-backs had run over me and I thought maybe I was dreaming until the shooting started.”
O’Hara wagged his head despairingly. He said, “You dope, if you’d only told somebody in the beginning instead of trying to imitate a whole Homicide squad—”
“All I was after, Ken, was the story. I thought that was the way to be a reporter.”
Deke Hanna moved a little and Eddie took hold of his ears again and banged his head.
“Hey, you,” said Eddie. “The rules say no crawling with the ball after the referee blows his whistle.”
At the airport Tony Ames came through morning sunlight toward O’Hara and Eddie Mullen. She grinned at O’Hara, said when she got close, “Your girl friend’s sore at you, Ken.”
“My what is which?”
“Seena. I’ve just come from talking to her at the city jail and she says she saved your life last night and why don’t you come to see her. What is this strange power you have over redheaded women, my broth of a boy?”
O’Hara looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t stop now.”
“She said she angled you into things at the apartment last night because Philippi was getting ready to move Atkins’ body before she had a chance to tip off the cops and she wanted you to see it, sort of be a witness. She hadn’t figured Philippi would also decide to remove you and she liked you too well for that so she decided to create a little diversion and give you a chance to get out from under.”
O’Hara said, “Sure, and also get me to the outside where I could yell my head off to the cops.”
An announcer began bellowing in a megaphone something about Trip Five to El Paso, Memphis and so on and so on and points east and Eddie Mullen looked lugubrious.
A redcap grabbed his bag and Eddie said. “Gee, kids, I don’t know why the folks had to wire me to come home when I was just about getting warmed up out here.”
“I can’t imagine,” Tony Ames said, smiling.
Eddie got under way. Over his shoulder he said, “We’ll make a swell team when I come back in the spring, Ken. So long — and don’t forget. I’ll be back with you in the spring.”
O’Hara chuckled. “Lord,” he prayed to Eddie’s retreating back, “Lord, give me strength.”
Jake and Jill
by Steve Fisher
A weirdly assorted pair prove murder’s no accident in Hawaii.
The man who came into the Honolulu Police morgue was very small, and he wore baggy trousers, and a loose, open coat; you could see his pink shirt under the coat, and that he didn’t wear any tie. The suit looked as though he didn’t have much faith in cleaners and pressers. But the thing you noticed most about the man was that his head was completely nude and round; and on his monkeyish face there were huge, thick eyebrows. The eyebrows were so big and thick you might have got the idea they made up for the naked pate of his head.
A woman came in with the man, and she was his exact opposite. She was a head taller than he; and she was finely dressed in white tropic linen. Though she must have been in her fifties, her gray hair was done up in the latest Parisian coiffure, and she wore strapped to her jacket a lorgnette. She was prim and dignified. She looked extremely social, which she was. Her social asset was definitely established with the fact that she had inherited a vast fortune many years ago. Despite her eccentricities she’d had the good sense to hang onto her money.
Both she and the man were glancing toward the naked corpse of a girl on the slab across the room; they didn’t pay much attention to the coroner who sat at the door, puffing on a pipe.
“Hello, Jake,” said the coroner.
Jake lifted his heavy eyebrows. “Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning, Miss Conway,” the coroner continued.
Jill Conway nodded. “Good morning, good morning,” she said.
Jake walked over to the corpse, and Jill Conway, fumbling with a notebook, followed him.
The corpse of the girl was a little crushed around the hips, and the back spread out, and you could see two ribs sticking through the flesh. But she had been a pretty girl. Her hair was reddish, and her face, though coarse, was nice. She’d had thick lips, and big eyes.
Jake addressed Jill. “Now this girl,” he said, “she was a Portugee; but she lived in the Islands so long among the Chinks and the Hawaiians and the Filipinos, she was what you call a White Kanaka.” He glanced back at the corpse; then he looked over at the coroner. “Will you please cover Rosy up,” he said. “The idea of subjecting Miss Conway to such nudity!”
The coroner hurriedly threw a sheet across the body. Just the feet stuck out.
Jill was making notes.
“What are you writing?” said Jake.
Jill lifted her lorgnette and glanced down. “I was writing that the corpse has dirty feet.”
“Now, why in the hell do you want to write that?”
“Why it might be an interesting thing,” Jill said, “you never know.”
“Well, it won’t be an interesting thing,” Jake said, “because this is just a corpse; and there wasn’t no murder, or anything like that. I was trying to tell you about it, but you gotta write about her feet. Anyway, all these Island girls are pretty careless. Sometimes I’m sorry I contracted to take you around with me during my day-time hours. You pay me good money, I ain’t kicking about that; but I was perfectly happy before, just being house dick in the Hell Acre Hotel. I was doing all right, then you gotta come down and offer me so much dough to conduct you through my cases that I can’t turn it down. As I say, sometimes I’m sorry.”
Jill Conway was properly humbled, for she was in mortal fear that the grumbling Jake Sutton would one day refuse to take her with him on his investigations, and then she would never get finished her notes on the book which for two years she had been planning.
The book was to be her gift to humanity, a treatise, entitled: “The Grim Aspects of Island Crime.” She so far had nothing but notes; but way back when she first decided to write it, she contacted Jake. He was house detective in the largest and most run-down hotel in Honolulu. It sat on the edge of Hell’s Half Acre, the squalor hole of the world, where, as Jake said, “Things happen.”
Jill was well convinced that Jake could do without the money she paid him, for twice in the past two years, each time after a political shake-up, he had turned down the job of Homicide Chief of the city.
“I kind of like it where I am,” he’d said. “I come and go as I please; and if I feel like looking into a case I do, and if I don’t I just forget about it, and nobody in Hell’s Half Acre has anything to say.”
Jill had long ago decided that Jake Sutton would be the main subject of her book, if and when it was ever written. She was beginning to suspect that she enjoyed this life of moving around where there was danger and murder better than she would the idea of sitting down to write about it.
“Now this girl,” Jake went on, “the police have it all down on the books, and there ain’t nothing else to do about it. I just brought you here because there ain’t nothing else happening today.”
“What happened to the poor creature?” Jill asked.
“Why this Rosy,” Jake said, “she was a taxi dance dame. You know how those kind are by now. They work at the Rizal; or at that Gook joint across the street, and they work so hard, and dance so much, they get tight almost every night. It seems that last night Rosy got good and swacked; right up to the ears. Then she came home. She was walking peacefully along on the fourth floor of Hell Acre Hotel, only she was kind of blind drunk, and instead of turning left from the balcony and going into her room, she turned right.”