Curtis Cluff - Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 31, No. 1 — January, 1948)

I found the two coolie outfits, plus a .38 Smith & Wesson and a shiny Yale padlock key, stuffed in the hollow trunk of an ancient hau tree. The heavy padlock yielded easily. I swung open the wide door of the boathouse, slipped inside and lowered the patented latch. The dark interior smelled strongly of brine and creosote. A pile of dry-rotting throw-nets were heaped in a corner near the door. An inverted dinghy hung under the darkened rafters, its paint and seams in good condition. A pair of collapsible aluminum oars leaned in one rear corner, there was a barrel with a lid on it in the other. I lifted the lid and discovered an outboard motor inside. Its tank was full of gas and it was ready to go. I pulled the pile of rotting throw-nets out of the corner. Nothing was concealed either in or under them.

I got down on my hands and knees and worked my way across the slatted floor. My bruised knees began crying for mercy almost immediately, but it wasn’t until I reached the rear corner with the barrel in it that I found what I was looking for. I rolled the barrel aside, slipped my fingers through the slats and heaved. The corner section of the floor came up easily. Instead of an expanse of sand that one might normally expect to find beneath the flooring of a boathouse, there was a zinc-covered trap door about a foot beneath the floor level. I lifted the rope handle and looked down into a square concrete well. I could not tell how deep this pseudo well was because from wall to wall to within a couple of feet of the surface were duplicates of the little sealed tin that had been planted in my cottage.

I had what I wanted. At current market prices there was at least half a million dollars’ worth of heroin in the cache. I wiped the nervous sweat off my face onto my coat sleeve, let the trap door fall, put back the floor section and rolled the barrel back in the corner. I arranged the throw-nets in their original position and took a last look around. I lifted the latch, slid outside and made the padlock fast. Back at the hau tree, I put the key back in the dungarees, replaced everything as I remembered it, covered my traces as well as I could and headed for my car. Except for making an accurate mileage check back to the township limits of Kaneohe, the ride to Honolulu was uneventful and my mind was free to speculate.

Anne Seccombe wasn’t in evidence when I got back to The Bookshop. I asked the little clerk if Walter Kent was around.

“Yes,” she smiled. “He just came in.” She went back to his office, knocked and went inside. She came out in a moment and beckoned me in.

Kent’s lean flushed face had a drawn look but his smile was affable enough. He waved me to a chair. “I hear you came to see me this morning. Sorry I wasn’t in.”

I nodded slowly, examining his face.

“Well,” he raised his eyes quizzically, “what did you want to see me about?”

“You know I’m working on a job for Allan Norris, don’t you?”

“So Norris said last night.”

“There are some things about the job that have turned out to be pretty screwy,” I said, “and I need some help. Naturally, since I can’t tell you anything about the ease, I couldn’t blame you for refusing to answer questions. I hope you will answer them, though.”

Kent’s eyes narrowed and his face grew thoughtful. “Ask the questions and then we’ll talk about the answers,” he said.

“What were you and the lawyer. Carter MacDonald, doing at Norris’ house last night?”

He smiled slightly. “It was a minor business matter of no concern to anybody but Norris and myself. It couldn’t possibly have any bearing on your investigation. Unless, of course,” he grinned, “you’re investigating my credit standing?”

I shook my head. “It’s funny though,” I mused out loud, “that you and Norris should...” I trailed off.

Kent’s face clouded over. “That Norris and I should be on speaking terms after my somewhat involved marital mix-ups with his daughter?”

I nodded. “Something like that.”

“Jennifer and I both were very strongly individualistic,” Kent said slowly, “and that’s about all we had in common.” He shrugged. “It would take a psychiatrist to tell you what was really wrong with Jennifer, but a lot of the blame can be laid at her father’s door. Norris is a swell person and high-minded as hell but, as you’ve probably noticed, he likes to be the one to give the orders. I wouldn’t say he wholeheartedly approves of me but he’s too intelligent to blame me strictly for the mess we made of our marriage. Or maybe I should say ‘marriages.’ ” He grinned.

I grinned with him and asked: “You still won’t tell me about the business matter you discussed with him?”

“Hell, yes. I’ll tell you.” Kent was irritated. “Norris owns some land. I want to buy it. Does that have anything to do with your investigation?”

“Where is the land?”

Kent continued to look exasperated. “All right, here’s the whole story: I own a little hideaway on the other side of the island. It’s surrounded by fertile taro fields which Norris owns and rents much too cheaply to small farmers. I want to buy it up, drain it and plant papayas. There’s a good market for canned papaya juice and it’s getting bigger all the time.”

I looked around. “You going to be a papaya farmer and run this place, too?”

“I want to give up the bookstore. I’ve done well with it in the past, but I believe that money is going to get tight in the next few years. When it does, the first thing people are going to stop buying is books.”

“Sounds logical.” I got up and wandered over to the sectional bookcases lining the side wall. They were glassed-in and each section had a separate lock. The titles of the books were innocuous enough and the subjects ranged from ballistics to sugar technology. But most of the books had dust jackets. I turned back to Kent. “I can see why you want to get out of such a precarious business as this.”

“I wouldn’t say that it was precarious. Business has been rather good lately.”

“But it could suddenly get very bad — any day, any hour — couldn’t it?”

Kent eyed me speculatively. “What do you mean by that?”

I shrugged. “Just observant. There’s a dust jacket in there with the title, Hawaiian Salads and How to Make Them, but it doesn’t seem to fit the book very well. And it’s the first time I ever saw a cookbook with a morocco leather binding, printed on thin paper with gold edges.”

“Oh, that! I wanted to protect the leather binding from the sun and that paper jacket happened to be handy.”

“What about this one — Kings and Chiefs of Old Hawaii? The jacket doesn’t come within an inch of covering the book, the binding is cheap cloth and the pages are the poorest kind of pulp. You trying to protect that binding, too?”

“What are you trying to prove anyway?” Kent rose. “Those are rental library books that are not for the casual reader — expensive technical books. They’re not on general display because we only lend them out to qualified customers who are seriously interested in the technical aspects of a subject. What about it?”

“Would you be willing to say that eighty per cent of the books in those cases are pornography?”

“I most assuredly would not be willing to say that.” Kent grinned shamelessly. “But what the hell if they were? Who am I to dictate to people’s tastes? I just rent books — and at very fancy prices, too. It pays the overhead and helps me make available the best supply of books in town to legitimate customers.”

I grinned. “That argument made just as much sense when black market operators used it during the war. To hear them talk, they were misunderstood public benefactors.”