Damned in Paradise

“Where is Lyman?” Chang asked.

“No,” he said, and gulped at his cigarette. “No.”

Faster than a blink, Chang slapped the cigarette out of Tahiti’s hand; it sailed into the water and made a sizzling sound.

“Next time I ask,” Chang said, “will be in back room at station house.”

Tahiti covered his face with both hands; he was trembling, maybe weeping.

“If he finds out I told you,” he said, “he’ll kill me.”

And then he told us.

19

In the paltry moonlight, the squattersville along Ala Moana Boulevard looked like the shantytowns back home, with a few notable differences.

The squattersvilles in Chicago—like the one at Harrison and Canal—really were little cities within the city, miniture communities populated by down-on-their luck families, mom-pop-and-the-kids, raggedy but proud in shacks that were rather systematically arranged along “streets,” pathways carved from the dirt, with bushes and trees planted around proud shabby dwellings, to dress up the flat barren landscape; fires burned in trash cans, day and night, fending off the cold part of the year and mosquitoes the rest.

The Ala Moana squattersville had bushes and trees, too, but wild palms and thickets of brush dictated the careless sprawl of the shacks assembled from tar paper, dried palm fronds, flattened tin cans, scraps of corrugated metal, scraps of lumber, packing crates, chicken wire, and what have you. No trash can fires, here—even the coolest night didn’t require it, and the Island’s meager mosquito population was down at the nearby city dump, or along the marshier patches along the Ala Wai.

Chang Apana and I sat in his Model T alongside the road; a number of other cars were parked ahead of us, which struck me as absurd. What kind of squattersville had residents who could afford a Ford?

Of course, I had it all wrong….

“Native families build this village,” Chang said. “But couple years back, city make us chase them out.”

I could hear the surf rolling in, but couldn’t see the ocean; it was obscured by a thicket across the way.

“Why didn’t you tear it down, clean this area up?”

Chang shrugged. “Not job of police.”

“Whose job is it, then?”

“Nobody ever decided.”

“Who lives here now?”

“No one. But these shacks shelter bootleggers and pimps and whores, gives them place to do business.”

I understood. This was one of those areas of the city where the cops cast a benignly neglectful eye, either for graft or out of just plain common sense. This was, after all, a town that lived on tourist trade and military money; and you had to let your patrons get drunk and get laid or they’d go somewhere else on vacation or liberty.

“Well, if Tahiti can be believed,” I said, “somebody lives here.”

Chang nodded.

Tahiti, who regularly bought his oke at the squattersville, told us he’d seen Lyman several times, on the fringes of the camp, over the last week or so. The boy, shocked to see Lyman there, had gingerly asked his bootlegger about the notorious escapee; he’d been told Lyman was pimping for some hapa-haole girls (half-white, half-whatever), building a bankroll to smuggle himself off the Island. Having spent the last several months staying one step ahead of Major Ross’s territorial police, hiding all over Oahu, sheltered by criminal cronies, shifting between hideouts in the hills, in the small towns, and in Honolulu’s slum neighborhoods (the very ones Chang and I had recently combed), Lyman was getting ready to make his move.

So was I.

We had discussed contacting Jardine and, through him, Major Ross, to launch a full-scale raid of the squattersville. But we decided first to determine if Lyman was really there; even then, if we could bring him down with just the two of us, so much the better. No chance of him slipping away in the hubbub.

Besides, people got hurt in raids; people even got killed. I needed him alive.

“I stay in shadows,” Chang said. “Somebody might know me.”

Hell, so far everybody had known him.

“Good idea,” I said, getting out of the car. “I don’t want to get made as a cop.”

“When you need me,” he said, “you will see me.”

I went in alone—just me and the nine-millimeter under my arm. I was in the brown suit with my red aloha shirt—the one with the parrots—wandering down the twisting paths, around trees, past shacks, my shoes crunching bits of glass and candy wrappers and other refuse. The street lamps of this haphazard city were shafts of bamboo stuck in the ground, torches that glowed in the night like fat fireflies, painting the landscape—and the faces of those inhabiting it—a muted hellish orange.

I had no problem blending in—the squattersville clientele was a mixed group, the haoles including venturesome tourists and civvy-wearing soldiers (no sailors tonight, thanks to Admiral Stirling canceling liberty), plus working-class kanakas from the canneries and cane fields; and, of course, youths in their late teens and twenties—restless colored kids of the Horace Ida/Joe Kahahawai ilk, and collegians both white and colored, any male with a thirst or a hard-on that needed attention. A steady stream was coming and going—so to speak.

The hookers, leaning in the doorways of their hovels, were a melting pot of the Pacific: Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, and mixtures thereof, painfully young girls barefoot in silk tropical-print sarongs, shoulders bare, legs bare