The Pearl Harbor Murders (13 page)

Again Sterling referred to the notebook.

" 'What kind of flowers are in bloom in Hawaii at present?' Ogawa asked her," the FBI agent reported. "And Mrs. Mori said, "The hibiscus and poinsettias are in bloom now.'"

Fielder seemed almost amused. "And, what? You believe this to be code?"

"I believe she may have been reporting on the movement of specific battleships, yes."

Burroughs, knowing he was out of his element, had largely kept mum; but now he couldn't resist, saying, "Wooch, if somebody in Tokyo did invent this flower code, and was willing to spend upwards of two hundred bucks for a fifteen-minute transpacific call... could Frank Teske have been right? Are we in imminent danger of air attack?"

Fielder ignored Burroughs, saying to Sterling, "Do you have the full transcript with you?"

Sterling said, "Yes," eagerly withdrawing the several folded sheets from his jacket pocket. He handed them to Fielder, who sat and read them, while Sterling and Burroughs waited. The pergola was so near the water, the view of the surf and its riders was particularly peaceful; the silhouette of Diamond Head seemed so tranquil, the concerns the FBI man had been expressing were absurd in contrast.

But Burroughs had seen a dead girl on these white sands, the night before, and was inclined to pay attention.

The chief of Army intelligence, however, was not overawed. Handing the transcript back, Fielder said, "It seems like quite an ordinary message. Sounds like just the sort of mundane stuff a newspaperman would need for a feature story on life in present-day Honolulu."

"Colonel," Sterling said, "I can't agree—I know nothing here can be clearly defined as manifestly dangerous to security ... but the general tone of the conversation, in light of suspicious activity by a German 'sleeper' agent, and the Jap Consulate burning their papers ... Wooch, damnit, man—I have a sick feeling about this."

Fielder crushed his cigarette out in a little metal ashtray. He was nodding. "Fair enough. I'll tell General Short you want an appointment, Monday morning."

"No—tonight. As soon as possible."

The colonel looked up, sharply. "I told you, Adam—the general has plans for the evening."

"Then I'll meet with him on his goddamn front porch. I have to insist, Colonel. These Moris are on my list of potentially disloyal Japs. I'm positive this call means something—something's definitely in the wind."

Fielder sighed heavily. He finished off his rum punch and said, "All right, you stubborn s.o.b. Can you meet me at my quarters at six o'clock?" "Yes. Absolutely."

Nodding, Fielder rose; the two men shook hands. "See you there."

And Colonel Fielder headed toward the tavern and its parking lot. "I think you're doing the right thing," Burroughs said.

"Hell," Sterling said with a laugh. The FBI man gulped down the rest of his rum punch. "I was just hoping I was full of crap."

NINE
Chinatown

For a Coast
haole
(as mainlanders were referred to), Hully Burroughs had a better-than-average understanding of Hawaii's Japanese community.

He knew that Japanese owned many of the restaurants in Honolulu, that they repaired most cars and built most houses, that they worked behind most retail counters. And, anyway, you didn't have to be terribly aware to notice the dozens of Japanese teahouses, or the kimono shops, or the sake breweries, the Japanese-language newspapers, fish-cake factories, movie houses....

Still, much of mis eluded the average
haole,
particularly the typical tourist, because on the one hand, Hawaii worked hard at its Polynesian image—Waikiki wallowed in it—and on the other, Hawaii was insistent upon its American status, indignantly reminding forgetful mainlanders that they were in the United States, not some foreign land.

Hully had gained his awareness, limited though it might be, through his friendship with Sam Fujimoto, the son of their maid at the Niumalu. Sam—a senior in prelaw at the University of Hawaii—had shown Hully the local ropes, when the mainlander had first arrived.

This afternoon, Hully needed his friend's help, for two reasons. First, he needed wheels—his father had taken the Pierce Arrow to the Shriner game. Second, he needed a tour guide—because, despite whatever scant familiarity he had with local Asian customs, Hully felt that would not be enough for where he needed to go.

Chinatown. The Oriental neighborhood had been staked out many decades before by Chinese workers fleeing the sugar and pineapple plantations, marking off this triangle of downtown Honolulu—Nuuanu Street on the southeast, North Beretania Street on the northeast, South King Street as the hypotenuse—for small retail businesses and restaurants.

But despite the name, in Chinatown, the Japanese (and the Filipinos, too, for that matter) vastly outnumbered the Chinese, though the white tourists, coming and going from the main port at the foot of Nuuanu Street, rarely knew the difference, much less noticed how the Japanese and Chinese merchants kept their distance from each other, even when jammed side by side.

Coast
haoles
saw only the Orient, a nonspecific Asia crammed into a few blocks—sleazy storefronts and Shinto shrines, silk shops and tattoo parlors, bathhouses and Buddhist temples, live chickens and dead ducks, coffee shops and chop suey joints, incense and strangely aromatic spices mingling with the sickly-sweet perfume of the nearby pineapple canneries and the salty stench of the marshlands below the city.

"What do you think her uncle's likely to know?" Sam Fujimoto asked.

The slender, smoothly handsome
nisei
—black hair trimmed military short (he was in ROTC at the Manoa campus)—was casual at the wheel of his dark blue '38 Ford convertible sedan; his sportshirt was a lighter blue, his trousers white, his shoes the slippers so common on the island (Hully was wearing a pair himself).

"You and I, we only knew Pearl through the Niumalu," Hully said. "The only people in her life that we know, too, are musicians, hotel staff and guests."

"And boyfriends like Bill and that Stanton character, who met her there."

"Right, Sam. But she used to live with her uncle, in Chinatown, when she first moved to Oahu—that could open up a whole new world of friends and acquaintances."

"Maybe it is worth talking to him." Sam had never dated Pearl, but he knew her a littie, had spoken to her a few times. "But it'll probably be a dead end. My feeling is, she distanced herself from anything... overtly Japanese." He shrugged. "A lot of my generation do."

"Pearl sure seemed like an all-American girl."

One hand on the wheel, Sam gave Hully half a smile. "She
was
one—she was born in Frisco, right?"

"Right."

The convertible was bouncing along Fort Street. They crossed Nuuanu Street, where the Liberty Theater—home to a Chinese stock company that went in for horrific flights of fancy—was at the left.

"I think I've seen this guy around the Niumalu," Sam said, referring to Yoshio Harada, Pearl's grocer uncle. Though he didn't live at the hotel, Sam had spent his share of time there, what with his mother's work and his friendship with Hully.

"I saw him just yesterday," Hully said. "Helped him unload, a little. Bivens buys fresh seafood and fruit and vegetables from Harada. Seems like a nice enough little guy ... You would think he'd be heartsick, today."

"His niece murdered, I should say."

Actually, Hully had his doubts, though he said, "Maybe he won't even be working."

"Oh, he'll be working," Sam said with a knowing smile. "Guy like that doesn't miss a Saturday at the market."

Hully knew Sam was right—knew that Harada was indeed working today. Since Hully hadn't had an address for the grocer, he'd stopped at the front desk and checked with manager Fred Bivens, who'd said, "Funny thing is, you just missed him. He made a delivery not ten minutes ago."

"Really? Gosh, he delivered a boatload of stuff just yesterday—I helped him unload some of it."

"I remember—but sometimes Mr. Harada makes unscheduled stops when he has something nice for me—like the swordfish he dropped by with, just now."

"How's he doing?"

"Doing?"

"His niece was murdered last night, Fred. How is he doing?"

"Oh. Well, he's doing fine. I paid my sympathies, he thanked me, we both said what a sad awful thing it was, and... frankly, then we did business."

"So Pearl's uncle isn't holed up in some funeral home or church, mourning, then."

"No. He said he was on his way back to his store."

"You have an address?"

"Actually... funny thing, no. I never been down there to his shop in Chinatown... he always makes deliveries. All I know is it's down near the Aala Market."

They were deep into Chinatown now. Just past Mau-nakea Street, on the right-hand side of Beretania, was notorious Tin Can Alley, that quaint, exotic, harmless-looking entry into a deadly tenement area replete with crooked pathways, whores, rickety wooden stairs, pimps, sagging balconies, and thugs—a literal tourist trap. Within easy walking distance were neighborhoods with such sobriquets as Blood Town, Hell's Half Acre and Mosquito Flats, home to a staggering array of opium dens, gambling halls and cathouses.

"What's your take on this?" Hully asked his friend. "You know Bill well enough—could he be a suspect?"

Sam shrugged a shoulder. "Only if Pearl was running around on him, and he caught her in the act."

"Do you believe that's possible?"

"She was a flirt, and she got around—but this last month or so? I can't see it. Hell, she was crazy about Bill—she was serious. They were serious."

Nodding thoughtfully, Hully said, "I'd like to track down this Stanton—he's on a weekend pass. Maybe we could check out Hotel Street later."

"I'm game."

Just beyond Lau Yee Chai—the best, most lavish chop suey house in Honolulu (a different sort of tourist trap)—was River Street, bordering the Nuuanu Stream. Soon they were on Queen Street, and Sam found a parking place, and they headed over on foot to the Aala Market and the Japanese sampan fishing dock.

Along the way they encountered Japanese women wearing silk kimonos clip-clopping along the wooden walkway in clogs called
gettas,
lugging children on their backs. Past the garish Oriental lettering of signs, small simple wooden storefronts were gorged with tourist-friendly merchandise; often a diapered baby would be crawling across a wooden floor, and one moonfaced older child sat unattended, nibbling pink gelatin candies, while tourists and clerks bartered. They passed pawnshops,
saimin
(noodle) cafes, coffee shops, and herb dens, the babblelike sounds of Asian tongues mingling with the occasional popping of firecrackers and the hollow echo of gongs gliding down the Nuuanu Valley from a Buddhist temple.

The Aala Market was democracy—and capitalism—in action: all classes of people, half a dozen or more races, moving along the vegetable, fish and flower stalls, rubbing (sometimes knocking) elbows in the common pursuit of food. The fish caught in Hawaiian waters were second to none, and spread out in rows for the approval of customers: red snappers looking like giant goldfish; enormous swordfish; tuna small and large
(aku);
bass; needlefish; even an octopus. Some of it had been chopped into slabs and steaks, and there was seaweed for sale, too, and dried salmon, and fresh
poi.

Hully let Sam do the talking—since much of it was in Japanese—seeking directions to the grocer's shop. Sam had little luck for some time, until Hully thought to ask him to explain to these merchants that they were not seeking Harada to make a purchase.

"I should've thought of that," Sam said, grinning, shaking his head. "They don't want to send us to a competitor!"

Next time out, they got the address—and it was close by.

As they strolled along the sampan dock, where both small blue sampans and larger diesel-powered boats were moored, Sam said, "These fishermen are all Japanese—no Chinese or Filipino or anybody else."

"Why?"

"We're just better at it." This was a rare instance of Sam referring to himself as in any way Japanese. "Faster boats, powerful shortwave radios. We're good at gizmos."

"Size of some of these boats is amazing."

"Fishing is big business, around here—one of those diesel-powered forty-footers can run you twelve grand. That kind of dough even Tarzan wouldn't sneeze at."

Hully whistled. "You know, all this talk of a Japanese attack on Oahu—would they really do it? I mean, there are so many Japanese here ... so much Japanese business."

"Well, it's really American business, Hully. But you have a point—Honolulu is probably the most Japanese city on earth, outside Japan."

"So you're saying they wouldn't bomb us?" "No." And Sam's eyes tightened into slits, and his smile was utterly mirthless. "They'd bomb us in a flash."

"That's hard for me to believe." Sam put a hand on his friend's shoulder. "Hully, there are quite likely people in Japan right now banking on that very attitude."

Yoshio Harada's shop was not a grocery in any American sense. It was a small, unpretentious wooden storefront whose front door was black hanging beads; the walls were consumed with shelves overflowing with reed baskets and glass jars of ginger root, shark-fins, seahorse skeletons, dried seaweed and other exotic wares. None of the fresh fish or produce that Harada delivered to the Niumalu (and, presumably, other clients) was on display—apparently, he strictly made his purchases at the nearby Aala Market for deliveries by pick-up truck.

The small, mustached man—wearing a white shirt and tan trousers and a grocer's apron, despite the lack of groceries—was manning a counter to the left, the shelves of weird roots and herbs rising surrealistically behind him.

Harada recognized Hully at once, half-bowing. "Ah, Burroughs-
san
. You honor me. What brings you to Chinatown?"

"I came to pay my respects." Hully gestured to Sam. "This is my friend Sam Fujimoto—his mother is our maid at the Niumalu—perhaps you know her."