Entrance to the bar lounge was through a beaded archway at one end of the lobby. A wall placard there advertised a nightly show of native Hawaiian dances, featuring one called “the hula kahiko.” The interior of the resort was a small, dark, stuffy space that opened onto a broad lanai lined with torches. The lanai was where the dances were held, evidently; tables surrounded a central fire pit on three sides, and there was a sandy area decorated with potted palms on the fourth. At this hour there were few customers, almost all of those present seated at the outdoor tables; the only ones at the bar that extended along one wall were a pair of middle-aged men in business suits. The single barkeep moved in indolent shuffles behind the polished plank.
Quincannon stepped to the bar at a point farthest from where the two men had their noses in schooners of beer. The barman approached him with a professional smile of welcome lighting his ruddy cheeks. He was a broad-chested gent, bald except for a tonsure of curly brown hair above a pair of jug-handle ears. The Hawaiian shirt he wore, white with an array of bright orange-colored flowers, reminded Quincannon of one of his own favorite vests — a natty silk number festooned with orange nasturtiums that he seldom wore anymore in deference to Sabina, who considered it gaudy. Not here by comparison, it wouldn’t be. But then if he’d worn it in this climate, he would be roasting more swiftly than he already was.
“Yes, sir? Something cool and refreshing, p’raps?”
“Water,” Quincannon said.
“Plain water?”
“In a large glass. With ice.”
He drained the glass in two swallows and called for a refill, which lasted three swallows. The cold water was much more soothing to his parched throat than the tepid glassful he’d drunk in the Chinese restaurant.
“Hot day, isn’t she,” the barman said in a marked Australian accent. “Kona weather, y’know.”
“All too well. You’re Oliver Winchell?”
“That I am. And how would you be knowing my name?”
Quincannon laid the business card Fenner had given him on the bar top. He’d looked at what was penciled on the back of it after leaving the restaurant. Just the numeral 6 followed by a star symbol, and below that the initials G.F. A code of some sort that induced an immediate change in the Australian when he saw it. His blandly bored gaze turned shrewd, eager; his shoulders twitched as if shrugging off his barman’s persona. He leaned forward, and when he spoke his voice had lowered two octaves and taken on a confidential note.
“What can I do for you, mate?” he said. “Mate” now, not “sir”; the card, in his eyes, had put them on more or less equal footing, as with a couple of soon-to-be conspirators. Quincannon saw no profit in disabusing him of the notion.
“Tell me about Stanton Millay.”
“Mr. Millay? A fair dinkum gent. Lodges in our house reg’lar when he’s in from the Big Island.” Winchell’s voice dropped another octave. “Got an eye for a pretty face, he has. Fancies one of the girls wot dances the hula kahiko.”
That explained the rancher’s preference for the Hotel Honolulu. “My interest is in the night a week ago when he was here drinking in the company of two Americans.”
“The American gents, eh? Mr. Fenner was by askin’ about them just yesterday.”
“On my behalf.”
“Ah,” Winchell said. Then, craftily, “P’raps he told you about the arrangement him and me has....”
Quincannon fished out a silver dollar and put it down on the bar, closer to himself than to the Australian. Winchell eyed it covetously, and in a way that suggested he was thinking of asking for a twin. He would not have gotten it if he had.
“Tell me about that night, Oliver.”
“I remember it well. Saturday night, it was, the same day Mr. Millay came back from San Francisco.”
“... He was away in San Francisco?” Winchell must not have told this to Fenner, else the detective would have mentioned it.
“That he was. He travels there sometimes.”
“For what reason?”
“Buys cattle, sells cattle, likely — part of his business.” Winchell essayed a sly little wink. “Raises a bit of hell there, too, I’ll wager. He likes a good time, Mr. Millay does.”
“Do you know where he met the two with him?”
“On the ship coming across, eh?”
No, Quincannon thought, it was much more likely that Vereen and Nagle had made Millay’s acquaintance in a Barbary Coast saloon or one of the three Uptown Tenderloin fleshpots. That cleared up one point, if so.
“Were you in a position to hear some of their conversation?” he asked.
“Snatches of it here and there when I served ’em, only that. We’re always busy here of a Saturday night.”
“What were the snatches about?”
“Sheilas, mostly.”
“Sheilas?”
“Women.” The sly wink again. “Eager to sample the local wares, the two Americans were. Mr. Millay was talkin’ up a bawdy house he knows in Chinatown. I don’t recall as I heard him say which one—”
“Not important,” Quincannon said. “What else did they talk about?”
“Well, I think they might’ve had a deal on.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Sorry, mate, I can’t tell you because I didn’t hear ’em say what it was. Kept their voices down the one time I come in earshot while they were on about it. Something to do with the cattle business, I reckon.”
“Did Millay call either of the Americans by name?”
Winchell started to answer, but one of the men at the other end of the bar interrupted him with a call for another schooner of beer. He said, “Half a mo,” and hurried off to comply.
Quincannon waited, drumming fingers on the bar top. A swindle involving the cattle industry? It was possible, he supposed, but it struck him as improbable. Vereen and Nagle would know as little about the cattle business as he did, surely not enough to orchestrate a related con game that would fool a seasoned rancher.
Winchell came back and resumed his confidential pose. “Now what was it you was asking again?”
“If Millay called either of the Americans by name.”
“By name. Well...”
“Jack or James? Ned? Simon?”
“None of those is familiar. No, I don’t recall that any names was used whilst I was near.”
“All right. Did Millay bring them back again after that night?”
“No. I never set eyes on ’em a second time. Mr. Millay, he was in most nights last week to see Leilani, the hula dancer.” Wink. “He’s got good taste in sheilas, he has. Leilani is a sweet little piece.”
“Did he have anything to say about the Americans?”
“Only once,” Winchell said, “and not much then. Funny, though. I asked him how his American friends were and he said, ‘Friends. A poor damn joke that is.’ Turnabout from that first night when they was cobbers, eh?”
“Is that all he said about them?”
“That’s all. He seemed some devo — upset, like — to have ’em called to mind. Maybe the deal they had on fell through.”
Maybe so. But if Millay had seen through the swindle and ditched the pair, why had they stayed on in the Hoapili Street bungalow instead of returning to San Francisco? And why would Nagle keep the crude map sewn into his jacket lining? And where was Vereen now, if not gone to the Big Island with Millay or on his own?
There was no more useful information to be gleaned from Oliver Winchell. Quincannon slid the silver dollar across the bar and the Australian made it disappear with the alacrity of a stage magician performing a conjuring trick. Now you see it, now you don’t.
The question of whether Stanton Millay had returned to the Big Island alone or in the company of Lonesome Jack Vereen was largely if not fully answered by a clerk in the office of the Inter-Island Steamship Company. By claiming that Millay and the pseudonymous James A. Varner were business acquaintances, Quincannon learned that both men had purchased tickets for Kailua on the Kona Coast on Sunday morning.