“You go back to your room,” said Jake. “I’ll instigate an investigation into the disappearance of your uniform.”
Barney moved off grumbling. He was wet from the rain. But he’d had to come down stairs which are outside; and along the balcony which was only partially protected by a sloping roof.
“Why didn’t you look and see if he’d rolled up his pants, taken off his shoes and stockings; and was just fooling us,” asked Jill. “He could have done that, and put on the bathrobe over his uniform.”
“Because,” said Jake, “I’ve got my own ideas. Though, I’ll say this: The incident involving Barney’s missing whites, it’s well—” he scratched his ear lobe. “It’s peculiar.”
“Yes,” Jill replied, “very.” Then she thought of the bullet which had barely missed her, and she began once more to chatter.
Prince Kalemi came in after his last-night performance, as Jake had requested. He looked very nice, wearing a tux, and a big blue band around his waist, like a Cuban trying to look Spanish. The only thing Hawaiian about the Adonis was a silk lei which he wore around his dusky neck. Jill looked at him and sighed. Then she remembered her age.
“Tell you why I asked you to come,” said Jake. He was wetting his fingers with his tongue, and then running the wet fingers along his eyebrows to paste them down. Kalemi’s beauty made him self-conscious. “It’s like this,” he went on. “We’re pretty sure Rosy was bumped off by Gertrude.”
He told how so many people had heard the argument just prior to the fatal fall. “Now these same people are in their same rooms. If I could have that noise all over again, and they could hear it again, we could be absolutely sure. They’d swear that they’d heard the quarrel.”
“But where do I come in?” asked Kalemi.
“Well, you do imitations. You know what these taxi dance kanakas sound like when they get fighting. If you can imitate a movie star, you could sure imitate one, or two, of these babes, because you lived here in the atmosphere so long. You just go up there on the fourth floor, and for about four minutes you sound as much as you can like Rosy and Gertrude having a fight. Do you see what I mean?”
“I do. But I don’t understand how it’s going to help any.”
“Well, maybe it won’t help so very much; but it was my idea of an experiment, and I thought you might be nice enough to help me out. After all, the dead girl was once your wife.”
Kalemi bowed. “I’m glad to.”
Jake and Jill waited on the third floor balcony, while Kalemi went up to the fourth. In a moment he launched into his act. It sounded exactly like two Kanaka girls having one hell of a row. Perhaps it was the pride Kalemi had in his profession that induced him to make the sounds hauntingly real. At any rate, there wasn’t anyone of the twelve people Take had asked to listen who could believe it was one man making all those noises like two girls.
When it was over, Jake went up to the fourth floor, and Jill followed. The rain was pouring down.
“That was fine,” said Take. “Step into Rosy’s room a minute.”
They stepped into Rosy’s room. Gertrude was sitting on the floor dead drunk. She had on Barney’s whites.
Take locked the door. Jill looked at Gertrude through her lorgnette. Prince Kalemi looked at her too.
“Poor girl,” said Jake. “These kids get hysterical when things happen. There was so much evidence against her that she had killed Rosy that she went off her nut. I guess everybody was accusing her, and like that. Anyway, she got stinking drunk. She swiped Barney’s whites, and she probably got an old, ancient gun from a hock shop. She got so plastered and hysterical she was going to kill me. The reason she took Barney’s whites from next door — while the guy was taking a nap — was so if I saw anybody running away, it’d look like a sailor.”
“You mean she was the one who shot at us?” asked Jill.
Gertrude raised her weary head. Hair tumbled down about her white face. She belched; and then she began singing. Her voice was irregular and hoarse. She sang the words: “When I was young and handsome—” and stopped. She belched again.
Prince Kalemi was impatient. “Well, have you the evidence you want?”
Take turned slowly. “Yep. Against you.”
“Me?”
“That’s right. I thought this whole thing over. I just took a chance that when Gertie said she was asleep and hadn’t done any arguing, that she was telling the truth. But it was such good evidence against Gertie I began wondering how somebody could frame her with evidence like that. Then I thought of you with those imitations. It’d be easy for you to pick up Rosy outside the Rizal, get her half crocked, then come up here and shove her off.”
“Why you fool! You can’t convict me on evidence like that!”
“I think I can,” said Jake. “You sounded very real, and a lot of people heard you. Back up all that testimony with the fact that you never bothered to get a divorce from Rosy, and you’ve got something. I know you kanakas do that all the time, so I went down to city hall to check up, and there it was. You hadn’t divorced Rosy, but you were married to this Spanish woman. You’re nuts about the Spanish girl, and you didn’t want any trouble.
“But Rosy was clever. When you came here, a big success, and all high-hat like you were, she decided she’d indulge in a little blackmail. She wanted money, and lots of it, to keep still about the information that you were a bigamist. You stood not only to lose the money, but your Spanish wife. You were kind of frantic when you got Rosy’s letter. So you came here to see her. You tried to settle it without no trouble. You tried to get her to keep her mouth shut, but it was no go.”
Kalemi had his back to the door; he was breathing hard.
“So when Miss Jill Conway asked you how you’d gotten Rosy’s address, she really had something. Because I’d just told her when you guys get a little dough you don’t know your old friends. You try to travel in a different circle. The way you got Rosy’s address was from that first letter she wrote you. And with the testimony of your little performance here tonight, and the fact that you’re married to two women; and the letter Rosy wrote you—”
Jake pulled an old-looking letter out of his pocket.
Kalemi had drawn a knife from his pocket. He snapped open the blade. But now he stared at the envelope.
“That isn’t the let—” He stopped.
“So there was a letter?” Jake snapped. “I figured it that way, that’s why I— Well, there’s witnesses that can—”
Kalemi was moving forward. “You runt, you insignificant little—” He kept coming, the knife blade pointed toward Jake’s throat. “I’m going to kill you!”
Jake was ready for Kalemi. He’d picked up a little ju jitsu in his day. But he didn’t have the chance to try it. Kalemi had walked past Jill; and now she picked up a light wicker chair and slammed it across Kalemi’s head. The Hawaiian was unhurt, but enraged. He whirled around. Jill saw the knife and screamed.
Jake grabbed Kalemi’s arm, twisted it behind him. The Hawaiian howled, and dropped the knife. Jake whirled the huge man over his shoulder. Ju jitsu at last. When Kalemi thudded to the floor, Jake was on him, putting on handcuffs.
Gertrude was drunkenly unconscious of the drama. She began once more to sing. “When I was young and handsome, it was my chief delight, to go to balls and dances...”
Jill wrote in her notes the following day:
“As I reflect back over the case of the corpse with the dirty feet, it seems to me that the most horrible thing about it was the song that Gertrude insisted upon singing; time will eventually put from my memory the thought of Prince Kalemi’s broken confession that night at the police station; and too, the noises Barney made when he found Gertrude had not only stolen his uniform but had stained it, will slip away from me. But I shall never forget that song Gertrude kept singing over and over. It haunts me. ‘When I was young and handsome...’ ”