Burroughs could already see who the woman was: Pearl Harada, still in her blue gown, askew on her side on the sand, her skull crushed, blood turning the beach black around her rained head. Nearby lay a blood-spattered stone, one of the thick, roundish rocks used in the luau imu-an impromptu weapon anyone might have picked up.
The man bending over the obviously dead girl was a handsome if pockmarked Hawaiian from her band-the trombone-playing leader, Harry Kamana.
All of this the writer took in, in a heartbeat, and then he was running toward the kneeling man and the dead girl, yelling, "You! Don't move!"
The musician looked up sharply, his eyes wild, but he did not obey Burroughs, rather he scrambled to his feet and ran, heading down the beach.
Though Burroughs was in his sixties and his quarry in his thirties, the writer was bigger than the slight, slender Hawaiian, still in his dance-band aloha shirt, and-as it turned out-faster.
He threw himself at the fleeing musician, tackling him, bringing him down onto the sand, rolling with him until they were both in the water, where the surf licked the shore. The writer had the younger man around the knees, but Kamana squirmed out of his grasp, pulling Burroughs forward, and the writer lost his robe, was climbing to his feet in the surf in just his pajama bottoms, chest as bare as Tarzan, and Kamana tried to ran again, but he was running in wet sand and didn't get very far before Burroughs slammed a fist into the man's back, nailing a kidney.
Kamana blurted a cry of pain, fell facedown, splashing into the shallow water, then flipped around and, making a shrill whining war cry, came up at Burroughs, small sharp fists flying.
The older man ducked and weaved, and threw a hard right hand into the musician's belly, doubling him over, then finished him with a left to the chin that didn't have much power, but was enough to drop the man.
"You want more, you son of a bitch?" Burroughs, looming over him, asked, breathing hard, but not as hard as the younger man.
"No … no… " Kamana's voice was high-pitched, hoarse; he was on his hands and knees in the shallow surf.
Burroughs grabbed the man by the arm and hauled him to his feet, dragging him down the beach, heading to the bungalow.
The writer paused at the girl's body. He didn't bother to take her pulse-her skull had been caved in by that rock; her brains were showing. Rage and nausea and sorrow rose in him, a volcano of emotions threatening to erupt. He turned to the musician, wanting to throttle the bastard, but something stopped him.
The man was weeping.
FIVE
After the luau wound down, Hully Burroughs had been in no mood to join his sailor friends Bill Fielder and Dan Pressman in any Hotel Street excursions. Bill had been rather on the morose side-he'd learned about Colonel Fielder's displeased reaction at seeing his son and the Japanese songstress on the dance floor; and Pearl herself had begged off any after-hours date, pleading fatigue from her night on the bandstand.
This meant Bill would get plastered, while Dan would be on the prowl for dames, and in that part of town, the likely candidates served up love for a fee. Hully was interested in accompanying neither a drunk nor a tomcat, and instead headed to the Royal Hawaiian, where Harry Owens's orchestra was playing. Nobody pulled off that hapa haole sound better, and Hully's odds of meeting a nice young female-a tourist maybe, as the absent, much-missed Marjorie Petty had been-were far better than down at sleazy Hotel Street.
He'd gotten very lucky-not in the way the sailors on Hotel Street did, either. He danced several slow tunes with a pretty brunette named Marion Thrasher, a local girl in her early twenties out celebrating a friend's birthday. She was down-to-earth and friendly, so different from the girls in California, all of whom seemed to be aspiring actresses (expecting Hully to land them a part in a Tarzan picture!). All he'd "scored" were a few lovely if tentative smiles, some conversation and a phone number… but he was walking on air.
Or rather driving on air, in his father's Pierce Arrow convertible, one hand on the wheel, elbow resting on the rolled-down window, enjoying the way the stirred-up, sweetly scented breeze raffled his hair. He loved this little low-rise city of Honolulu, which hid shyly under banyans and flowering shrubs, palm trees towering over telephone poles.
Waikiki itself was a bohemian village, increasingly given over to hotels and inns, but still with room for clapboard houses, fisherman's shacks, picket fences and vacant lots. On an evening like this-well, early morning, as it was approaching one a.m.-the sounds were unbelievably romantic, the music of strolling troubadours mingling with the benign roar of surf.
As he pulled into the moonlight-washed Niumalu parking lot, the revelry of the luau was long over, the staff's cleanup accomplished, with a few lights on in the lodge itself, but most of the bungalows-peeking from between palms-dark. He parked, headed down a crashed coral path toward the Burroughs bungalow, whistling "Sweet Leilani," jingling change and keys in his khaki pockets.
That was when he heard, coming from the beach, a man's voice-his father's voice, he could have sworn-shouting "You! Don't move!"
The shout conveyed an urgency, and a sense of menace, that sent Hully running down the path, and cutting through the hedges, toward the sandy shore.
By the time he got there, it was over: his father had apprehended (there could be no other word) the individual, who proved to be bandleader Harry Kamana. A bare-chested O. B. was hauling the aloha-shirt-sporting musician-who was blubbering like a baby-toward their bungalow.
Hully slowed and, approaching his father, was about to ask him what had happened when he noticed the twisted form of the girl, down a ways on the beach.
For a moment, he covered his mouth, in shock and horror; then Hully managed, "Is that…?"
"It's the Japanese girl," his father affirmed. "Pearl Harada. Head crashed with a rock-I caught this son of a bitch red-handed."
Literally: the musician's right hand was damply red with blood.
"I'm going to take Harry here to our bungalow," O. B. said, holding on to the slumping, bawling musician, "and call the cops. You go alert Fred at the lodge, and have him post somebody at the crime scene, so that the body isn't disturbed."
Had the situation not been so loathsome, Hully might have laughed. "I'll be damned, Dad," he said. "You really were a cop."
Burroughs nodded, and dragged Kamana off.
Hully went to the lodge and woke the manager, filling him in as they walked to the beach, where the younger Burroughs got his first close, grisly look at the beautiful dead woman with the ugly head wound, bathed in gold by an obscenely beautiful Hawaiian moon.
Manager Fred Bivens-who was in his pajama top and some trousers he'd thrown on, a heavyset genial fellow in his forties-turned away, aghast.
The tide sweeping onto the shore had a distant sound, despite its closeness, like the hoarse echo of a scream. The ocean stretched purple to the horizon, glimmering with gold, almost as lovely as this girl had been.
"Are you all right, Fred?" Hully asked, touching the man's arm.
"What a hell of a thing," Fred whispered. "What a hell of a thing… She was a sweet kid. Flirty, but sweet-and so talented… What a goddamn shame."
Hully understood and shared all these sentiments, and was not surprised by the tears in Fred's eyes.
"Can you stay here with her, Fred? Till the police come? Dad's calling them."
Fred ran a hand through his thinning brown hair, shaking his head, as if saying no, as he said, "Sure… sure. Poor sweet kid…"