He said, “All right. I’m coming.”
The knocking was repeated, louder this time.
He opened the door, seeing across its threshold the troubled face of the hotel manager and the chilled face of two men he supposed to be Honolulu homicide detectives.
They entered the room and then the three of them paused, staring down at the dead girl on the pink shag rug.
“How did this happen?” The hotel manager whispered it, sick.
“I don’t know,” Illya said. “I was not in the room.”
“Who is she?”
“I do not know. I got in the room by mistake. The wrong room. I found her here.” He hesitated, glanced toward the balcony, and added, “There was a man with her. A tall, Oriental-looking fellow.”
One of the detectives, slender and mahogany dark, said, “And where is this man now?”
Illya inclined his head toward the balcony. “He went out there when he heard you knock.”
The detective jerked his head toward the balcony. His fellow, a stout man in his thirties, his temples flecked with gray, strode across the room. “He’s armed,” Illya said mildly.
The detective paused at the door, removed a snub-nosed .38 police revolver from his belt holster. He turned the knobs, threw open the doors.
The balcony was bare.
“Very amusing,” the detective said at Illya’s shoulder.
“I didn’t think he’d hang around out there,” Illya said.
“We are on the eighth floor,” the detective reminded him.
“That’s what I told him,” Illya said.
“Oh?”
“Yes. He didn’t seem unduly impressed.”
The detective did not smile. “Neither am I,” he said.
“I was afraid that would be your attitude.”
“I better warn you. Anything you say may be used a against you.”
Illya shrugged. “I have just one thing to say.”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever had those days when nothing seemed to go right?”
IV
SOLO WALKED SLOWLY in the mid-morning heat reflected from the red-brick streets around the train station, College Park. He felt as if he were moving through an unfiltered nightmare where nothing went right and even the buildings seemed to waver rubber-like when he looked at them.
He’d been prowling for a long time. It had taken much indirect questioning to learn the names of the two young people who’d blasted over the bluff at Pall Pass.
“Polly Jade Ing,” they told him. “She was the girl who sold leis. Kaina Tamashiro worked as beach boy at Waikiki. They planned to marry.”
Beyond this, there was little he could learn. It consumed two hours to learn that Polly Jade Ing’s parents had returned to China six months earlier. She had lived over a tailor shop near the carnival park, on River Street. Her room revealed nothing to him except that she was a casual housekeeper who wrote no letters and kept none if she received any. She had a weakness for flashily colored spiked-heel slippers, shifts, and seemed unable to find a satisfactory hair lacquer. A dozen different brands lined her cluttered dresser.
The Honolulu Star listed Kaina Tamashiro’s address as only Aala Street. Solo had asked at a dozen houses, but the dark eyed people stared at him and shook their heads. Most of them did not even speak.
Solo sighed, walking in the sun. He no longer believed that either Kaina Tamashiro or the pretty Polly Jade were any more than pawns in the deadly game that had caused Ursula’s death. But he had to keep pushing it now because they were the only link to whoever had hired Polly Jade to deliver the lethal lei at the airport. And Polly Jade had known there was something wrong with the deal; that was fear he had seen in her face, fear that had made her run, fear that had sent her to her death. Clearly she had been hired by a more devious employer than the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce. The lei had been deadly, and Polly Jade had known this when she had tossed it over Ursula’s head—obviously she’d even known that only the upward pull on the lei would detonate it.
What else Polly had known he’d never be able to learn. But perhaps the beach boy might be involved—he had run, too, and had seemed to know why he was running. Anyhow it was a lane he had to follow all the way because he had no leads except a silver whip—and a letter of meaningless jargon.
Solo was near the shabby depot of the small-gauge railway when he first noticed the young boy. The child was the color of beer in the sun, about nine. He wore a flowered shirt, brown shorts. He was barefooted. Each time Solo glanced over his shoulder, the boy was somewhere near him.
He glanced at the small train pulling out of the station, windows open. Across the street the military had posted “‘Off Limit” signs. There were small stores, paint-peeled houses and narrow alleys.
Solo felt someone tug at his shirt. “Mister.”
Solo was not too astonished to see it was the boy, staring up at him with round, black eyes.
“Mister, you looking for something?”
Solo nodded. “A beach boy who’s supposed to live around here.”
“I know most everyone who lives around Aala Street, Mister.”
Solo said, “You know Kaina Tamashiro?”
“Oh.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He is dead, mister.”
“I know that. He lived around here, didn’t he?”
“I know where he lived.”
Solo flipped the child a fifty cent piece, tossing it so it fell into the boy’s shirt pocket. The boy grinned admiringly.
“Can you take me where he lived?” Solo asked.
The boy removed the coin from his pocket, clutching it tightly in his fist. “All right.”
He motioned Solo to follow, and ran across the street. A car wailed at him.
The boy waited at the mouth of a debris littered alley until Solo crossed the street and stepped up on the walk, then he moved away into the narrow passageway.
Solo glanced both ways and followed.
Cats slithered between cans and barrels of refuse. Rear windows opened on the alley and voices came from those windows, along with the smells of cooking, of rancid foods.
Solo watched the boy run cat-like ahead of him. As he walked deeper into the alley a strange quietness seemed to envelop him, and to move along with him. There was tension in the silence, watchful and waiting.
A cat screeched behind him and Solo glanced over his shoulder. Two men had entered the alley behind him. One of them had stepped on a cat’s tail. Solo saw that they looked young, about the age of the dead Kaina Tamashiro. They even resembled him in flesh color and body size, as well as the casual and gaudy garb affected by the surfers and the beach boys.
He would not have been certain they were following him except that they tried to hide when he turned.
Solo exhaled heavily, looking again for the child ahead of him. The boy waited impatiently where the alley intersected with another, even less prepossessing.
“How much further, boy?’
Something in his tone diluted the last ounce of the boy’s courage. The child gazed at Solo for one moment, then heeled and ran along the side alley.
Two more brightly garbed beach boys stepped from the alleyways, blocking Solo’s path.
Behind him, Solo heard the other two running toward him.
Solo moved to the wall and put his back to it. His face set, he watched the four youthful men advance upon him.
They began to talk to him, their voices flat and cold, not waiting for him to answer, not wanting him to.
“What you doing down here?”
“You looking for Kaina, huh?”
“Kaina’s not down here.”
“Not any more. Kaina’s dead.”
“You know he’s dead?”
“You know Polly’s dead?”