Dead Before A Rival Read online

  “Wow. I thought Toni kept me on a tight leash.”

  “Exactly what is it you want us to look for?” Kay asked, ignoring the humorous taunt.

  “Impressions, mainly. From what I understand, you and Sid were the first passengers aboard after Bart. So, unless one of the crew switched bottles, it’s unlikely the bottles were changed on that cruise. At least no one was likely to have smuggled it on yesterday.”

  “Haven’t you and Corky already been out to interview the crowd out at the Ranch?”

  “Yup. We’re both convinced there’s more there than meets the eye and it wouldn’t hurt at all for you to cover some of the same ground with them. Sound them out about whether they visited the boat recently, or whether they know of anyone who did. Ask them to name suspects. Hell! Why should I be telling you? You know better what to ask than I do.”

  “How far is the ranch house from the gate, Hank? I’ve never been to the house.”

  “That’s a surprise for you I almost forgot about. They don’t live at the ranch house. Three years ago, just before he died, Mark Forbes built a house over on the windward side, just above Olea Cove. He called it Cliffhouse. I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you by describing it.”

  Chapter 9

  It was a surprise for both Kay and Laura. Cliffhouse was an enormous two-story structure sprawling along the edge of the sheer three hundred foot lava cliff. Kay, who had just finished viewing the beginnings of her future home, was especially impressed. Though her new home would cover more than three times the floor space of their apartment, it had seemed pathetically small with just the foundation boards in place. Now, after seeing this resplendent mansion, the new house was merely a hovel.

  Dolph answered their ring. He informed them Joanna was back from the Big Island and Marshal and Sam were also at home. When asked if he could take time out to answer a few questions for them, he said he was helping the cook at the moment but would be free by eleven. Since that gave them plenty of time to meet Fe for their one o’clock luncheon engagement, Kay agreed to see him then.

  Marshal received them in what was probably a waiting room, just off the hall from the front entrance. If the outside of the house was imposing, the inside was a disappointing contrast. The furnishings were simple, though obviously expensive. Art was of no interest to the residents. In fact, there was an almost spartan quality to the waiting room, a quality duplicated in the other rooms Laura and Kay saw during their visit.

  Later, Kay was to discover Joanna’s open-handed spending did not include expenditures for the household. There were no live-in servants. A daily, doing most of the housework with the help of a monthly cleaning service to do window washing and other routine work, maintained the inside of the house. The cook doubled as chauffeur, and Dolph served as butler, cook’s helper, and yacht steward. A yard service handled the garden with occasional help from Kerwin.

  They had barely stepped into the waiting room when Marshal offered them a drink. Laura couldn’t help but look at her watch. Marshal laughed. “I never drink before noon.” He shrugged his shoulders. The laughter changed into a lopsided smile. “But then, it must be noon somewhere.” So saying, and receiving no takers, he poured himself a hefty drink of whiskey, adding a bare squirt of soda and one ice cube.

  Kay decided to have Marshal look over the necessary papers before his drinking became serious. Marshal quickly signed them with just a token glance at their content. Pushing them back across the table to Kay, he said, “OK. Shoot. I’m ready for questions, but I have one first. When will the new trial start?”

  “While the possibilities of a new trial look pretty good,” Kay answered, “there’s never any certainty about such things. If the appeal goes through, the new trial should come up in about six months. I’ve checked with the court clerk in Honolulu, and they’re pretty well backed up. So it should take that long, at least.”

  “Suppose the appeal doesn’t go through?”

  “We can request a new trial in the lower court based on new evidence. And, even if we do win on appeal, there’s nothing to prevent the Prosecutor from retrying the case. That’s the main reason we’re here. We want to be ready to go back into court, so will you give us all the background information, starting with the boat trip?”

  “There’s not much to tell. We’d been planning the trip for a week or so. Just waiting for a break in the weather. Sis wanted it to be a night with a full moon, so that’s what finally decided it. We left here as it was getting dark, took our time, and pulled into the yacht club harbor early the next morning. I had a dinner date that night, for eight. Just before I left, which was sometime around six, I had one drink. A small one.” He held up his glass. “Smaller than this.”

  “Let’s back up a minute. What time did you get into Honolulu?”

  Marshal shrugged. “You’d have to ask Silva. It must have been sometime after midnight. The rest of us went to bed before we got there. We all had our fill of moonlight sailing long before we arrived.”

  “We? Who’s we?”

  “The passengers and the rest of the crew. Sam, Joanna, me, David Rouse and Jeff Bentley. Oh, yeah! I almost forgot. Francis, my nephew—Joanna’s boy—was along too.” Marshal returned to the table from the liquor cabinet where he had replenished his drink, minus the soda.

  “Was Bart along?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Sure. He was a crewman back then.” There was Silva, of course, and Dolph.”

  “Kerwin?”

  “Nope. Joanna didn’t hire him until last month.” Marshal grinned. “It wasn’t until Bart got promoted from crew to passenger which—come to think of it—happened on the way back from the cruise, that a replacement was needed.” Marshal laughed and added. “Bart had actually been one of the family for at least a month. The return trip made it official.”

  Kay checked through her notes. “According to the transcript, all of the passengers, except for Rouse and Francis, testified on your behalf at the trial. So did Dolph. Any special reason why Bart and Captain Silva didn’t?”

  “Uh-uh. I barely saw them that morning, and Feinman didn’t think they’d add much to the testimony we already had.”

  “How about Rouse?”

  “He just didn’t want to. The attorney figured an eighteen-year old wouldn’t have much credibility, so Francis didn’t testify.”

  “How long have Joanna and David known each other?”

  Marshal was on his third drink by the time Kay asked the question. Even so, he caught the change in the direction of the questioning. “What’s that have to do with my trial?” he asked, a trace of truculence in his voice.

  “Probably nothing. If we bring all these witnesses back to the stand, I’d like to have some idea how well they know each other. I also should know them as well as possible. Some times, even extraneous information can provide leads on how questions should be phrased for particular witnesses.”

  The answer mollified him. “David and his ex-wife are old time friends of the family. They used to visit before Mark died.”

  “Ex-wife? Since how long?”

  Marshal laughed. “I hope you’re as sharp in questioning the cop who stopped me. She became an ex shortly after Mark’s death. David started coming up here without his wife. That finally got to her. She’s living with the two of the kids in Florida. The divorce isn’t final yet, I understand, but it’s not far off.”

  “What was Jeff doing aboard?”

  Marshal shrugged. “He had some business in Honolulu. It was lucky we had him along. I have to give him credit. He got down there quick and ran down Kishimoto even though the old man wasn’t home. He knows where all those old attorneys hang out. Between him and Kishimoto they pulled the right strings and got me out right after being booked. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to spending any time behind bars.”

  Kay was wondering if Marshal, now on his fourth drink, had mellowed enough to answer totally unwarranted questions. She decided to try, and was pleased to see her question evoked no
resistance.

  “Weren’t you married until recently, Marshal?”

  “Uh-huh. My ex lives in Honolulu.” As he said that, his blurred eyes came back into focus. “She wasn’t the one I was visiting, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “Did you get to your destination that night?”

  “Hell, no! It was as much as I could do to get a phone call out to her. The damn cops were trying to pull that one-call jazz on me. Kishimoto straightened them out.” Marshal snickered.

  “We may need all the character witnesses we can find,” Kay continued. “Can you give us the address and phone number of the woman you were going to see—also you’re ex-wife’s?”

  “Sure. I can’t see why not?” Marshall fumbled through his pockets and finally found his address book, handing it over to Kay, but not before dropping it on the floor and going through a painful recovery of it. “Her name’s Dorothy Eng.”

  “What was your wife’s name,” Kay asked as she flipped through the pages of the book.

  “Shibyl…Sibyl!

  Catching Kay’s expression and the slight motion of her head, Laura moved Marshall off to the liquor cabinet, asking for a soft drink as she did so. Marshal rummaged through the liquor supplies, could not find the odd brand Laura had asked for, and became increasingly befuddled in the process. Finally locating an acceptable substitute, he managed to pour a glassful for her without spilling much. He then made himself another drink, this time leaving out both the ice cube and the soda.

  Chapter 10

  “Let’s walk, Hank,” Corky said as they got up to go to the marina. “It’s less than a half-dozen blocks away. Besides, you need the exercise.”

  Hank did not particularly object to walking, but he did feel uncomfortable without his car. “Better not. Might be something important come up and the station wouldn’t be able to find us.”

  “Aw c’mon, Hank. Take your beeper along, and let the desk sergeant know where we’re going. We won’t be more than three minutes away from a roving patrol car, and it won’t hurt you to work off some of your beer belly.”

  Hank pulled in his stomach as he got up. “OK, but don’t try to talk me into walking to Rouse’s office. It must be almost a mile from here.”

  Napua was having its usual spring day, part of its usual year-round spring. The temperature seldom rose above the eighties, and caused comment and complaint on the rare occasions when it dipped down into the mid sixties. With some twenty inches of rain, mostly coming in the form of quick drenching squalls which were the only way of recognizing Napua’s winter, weather was seldom a topic of conversation for the city’s inhabitants.

  The walk to the marina took Hank and Corky though Old Town, the part of Napua still showing traces of the whaling days from the 19th century. These wooden buildings, starting a block away from the seafront, had been sufficiently far from the ocean to survive the impact of the half-dozen tsunamis of the previous hundred years. More mysteriously, the old stores had also managed to escape the depredations of the Formosa termites which voraciously consumed most wooden structures on the island.

  One explanation for the survival of the buildings was they had been constructed from dunnage and ship timbers, wood thoroughly soaked by the waters from a dozen seas. The received opinion was that termites just did not like salt-saturated wood. Whatever the reason for their continued presence, the old buildings were a marked contrast to the steel and concrete structures clustering along the waterfront. The casual tourist driving the coast highway through Napua saw only the newer part of the town, a section which had been consciously built with the tourist’s pocketbook in mind.

  Broken into dozens of small shops and restaurants, this newer Napua was the Hawaii whose sale items found there way into the kitchens and bathrooms, living rooms and dining rooms of visitors from Yokohama, Leipzig and Sioux Falls. Hand-painted shells from Hong Kong; muumuus from Taiwan; tapa cloth produced in Thailand; a guaranteed pearl, from one of Japan’s oyster farms, removed from the shellfish right in front of the purchaser. These were the offerings of the waterfront commercial district.

  The more enterprising visitor could find genuine Hawaii products, after only a brief search: sugarcane syrup from the Big Island, bottled in mason jars from Ohio; fresh pineapple, brought over from Maui in wooden crates made in the Pacific Northwest; macadamia nuts, processed and packed on Oahu in plastic containers produced in New Jersey. The impression left by this waterfront scene was that only an ocean front, or the shore of any large lake, was necessary for this kind of market to spring up and thrive. Reflecting the growing interrelationship of the nations of the world, it might have been anywhere.

  Napua’s unique contribution, however, was its sales personnel. The owners were mainly haoles and Japanese, the workers chiefly Filipino or someone with varying degrees of native Hawaiian blood. Scattered among them were also a mix of other Orientals, some of them relatively recent refugees from Southeast Asia. Inevitably, there were the Portuguese, descendants of the group from the Azores who had come to Hawaii to fish, to work in the cane fields, and finally to settle on the land. Despite the recent rapid growth of the area, both Hank and Corky still knew most of the shopkeepers and their sales personnel. Corky, especially, who had spent some years in Honolulu, valued the small-town atmosphere surviving the crush of tourists and newcomers. At least a dozen people greeted them as they worked their way down to the piers.

  Napua’s dock area was divided roughly into three sections, all three located behind the breakwater built to resist the pounding waves generated by the storms in Antarctic waters. One segment, the southern portion, consisted chiefly of boats which engaged in commercial fishing and occasionally provided one-day angling trips for visitors. In spite of being overfished, the waters west of Elima still provided part of the livelihood for this small group of fishermen.

  The second segment was the tourist spot facing the center of town. Two large glass-bottomed boats and a hundred-passenger cruise ship had berths at the long pier. Scales for catches, local photographers eager to provide instant photos for the increasingly rare but happy successful anglers, and tourists clad in shorts and colorful shirts thronged the wharf.

  The third section of the waterfront, where Hank and Corky were headed, had an internal breakwater of its own to provide further protection from the occasional rough seas. Some thirty berths lined the two floating docks which made a ‘T’ at the end of a quay. The boats ranged from sixteen footers to the prize at the top of the T, the Jomark. The ship, floating high in the water, dwarfed its companions—a stately heron standing stationary in the midst of a crowd of bobbing mud ducks.

  “How much do you think it costs to keep it afloat?” Hank asked.

  “I’d guess the budget of the Napua PD wouldn’t do it,” Corky said.

  “Not far wrong. Not far wrong at all.”

  ***

  Captain Silva was leaning over the rail near the gangway as they approached. He waved his recognition at them. “What’s the latest on Bart?”

  Hank quickly summarized the police report. Silva’s eyes narrowed. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “What a way to go. I thought he just panicked, but it was hard for me to believe it. Do you have any idea who switched bottles on him? I imagine that’s why you’re here, to find out just that.”

  “Right,” Hank said. “Let’s start with the day of the cruise. Could anyone have brought the tank aboard.”

  Silva smiled. “They sure could have. I was the first one aboard. I usually sleep on the Jomark. I got up early and went ashore to pick up some supplies. I had a half-dozen boxes when I got back. Kerwin was with me. I’m not sure whether that makes it better or worse. He came down from the ranch about seven.”

  “Did he come aboard with any kind of a package?”

  Silva paused. “Let me see. Nope. In fact, he didn’t even come aboard when he first got here. He drove up in his old wreck and parked over there,” with the stem of his pipe, Silva indicated a parking area
crowded with cars and trucks with attached boat trailers. “I’d been waiting for him and we went off right away in my four-by-four.” He nodded in the direction of a Bronco parked in a reserved space at the end of the quay.

  “Dolph?”

  “He came down with Kerwin. I can’t remember whether he brought anything aboard that could have held something the size of the bottle. He stayed here getting things ready for lunch while Kerwin and I went into town.” Captain Silva paused. “I suppose he might have gone back out to their car and gotten something while we were gone. You’d have to ask Kerwin if Dolph put anything into the car before they left Cliffhouse.”

  “How about the passengers?”

  “Your attorney friend probably had the only thing big enough to hold an air bottle, and that would have been crowding the bag. The other lawyer and his girl friend didn’t have even a briefcase, if I remember right. Considering the bathing suit she changed to, he could have been carrying it in his wallet. As for the others, I can’t say for sure. I was up in the wheel house at the time getting ready to shove off. Kerwin might be able to tell you better. I doubt they brought anything, though. They usually have plenty of spare clothes and whatever in the staterooms.”

  “Did Bart bring his diving gear on when he came?”

  Silva shook his head. “Nope. He used to keep it in the cabin he shared with Dolph. When we got back to Napua after the Honolulu trip, he moved all of it into the second cabin on the port side going aft.” The captain’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “The trip kind of changed his status from temporary to permanent.”

  “Is there someone on the boat all of the time?”

  “Most of the time there is. Something this size is pretty intimidating, so I don’t worry much about it. We can lock it up, though I ordinarily wouldn’t if I was just going into town for something. There’s been no problem with pilferage, so we haven’t been knocking ourselves out with precautions. There’s a security guard who walks the marina at night. If I’m going to be away for several days, I usually tell him, and he keeps a special eye on it. Mrs. Forbes makes it worth his while.”