William Bankier: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

The facts of the case were always simple. They played, in the failing light, a game of bowls. At some point in the game Jimmy went off, as he was bound to do, to go to the small public lavatory by the green. The other men claimed they had not noticed when he left, nor who had gone to the lavatory immediately afterwards. They had all relieved themselves at some stage of the game, but they had not gone into the cubicle. They had finished playing without Jimmy — it was a friendly game, and an umpire was not necessary — and had then gone home. Jimmy’s body was found next morning in the cubicle. He had been stabbed, and the old raincoat which had been used to protect his murderer from blood had then been thrown over him.

Those were the facts, and no one ever got very far behind or beyond them. The next day the police began a series of interrogations of the men — and, to a buzz of local gossip, their wives. The men stuck doggedly to their story: they didn’t remember when Jimmy had left the green, and they didn’t remember who had gone to the lavatory after him. They had assumed he had gone home, and had gone on with the game without thinking any more of him. They never pretended to have seen other men or women on or around the green, for, though they were hard men, even brutal, they were fair. At one point, three weeks after the murder, the police charged them all with conspiracy to murder, but they could find no evidence that the men had conspired so, fearing a fiasco in court, they soon dropped the charge. And so there it was: six men, all with the opportunity and the identical motive for murder. The police, and everyone in Armley, knew that one of the men had done the deed, but no one knew which.

I must be one of the few people alive who does know. I was told by my grandmother, Florrie Abbot, sitting in her little kitchen in Armley, while upstairs in the bedroom they had shared, the man I called my grandfather was dying painfully of cancer. She told me the story in low, angry tones, interrupted by tears, none of them for the dying man upstairs.

© 1994 by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini is probably best known for the series of novels and short stories featuring his “Nameless Detective,” but he can spin a good non-series tale too, and in this one he makes use of his wide experience as a traveler ...

Jan and I met the Archersons at the Hotel Kolekole in Kailua Kona, on the first evening of our Hawaiian vacation. We’d booked four days on the Big Island, five on Maui, four on Kauai, and three and a half at Waikiki Beach on Oahu. It would mean a lot of shunting around, packing and unpacking, but it was our first and probably last visit to Hawaii and we had decided to see as many of the islands as we could. We’d saved three years for this trip — a second honeymoon we’d been promising ourselves for a long time — and we were determined to get the absolute most out of it.

Our room was small and faced inland; it was all we could afford at a luxury hotel like the Kolekole. So in order to sit and look at the ocean, we had to go down to the rocky, black-sand beach or to a roofed but open-sided lanai bar that overlooked the beach. The lanai bar was where we met Larry and Brenda Archerson. They were at the next table when we sat down for drinks before dinner, and Brenda was sipping a pale green drink in a tall glass. Jan is naturally friendly and curious and she asked Brenda what the drink was — something called an Emerald Bay, a specialty of the hotel that contained rum and creme de menthe and half a dozen other ingredients — and before long the four of us were chatting back and forth. They were about our age, and easy to talk to, and when they invited us to join them we agreed without hesitation.

It was their first trip to Hawaii too, and the same sort of dream vacation as ours: “I’ve wanted to come here for thirty years,” Brenda said, “ever since I first saw Elvis in Blue Hawaii.” So we had that in common. But unlike us, they were traveling first-class. They’d spent a week in one of the most exclusive hotels on Maui, and had a suite here at the Kolekole, and would be staying in the islands for a total of five weeks. They were even going to spend a few days on Molokai, where Father Damien had founded his lepers’ colony over a hundred years ago.

Larry told us all of this in an offhand, joking way — not at all flaunting the fact that they were obviously well-off. He was a tall, beefy fellow, losing his hair as I was and compensating for it with a thick brush moustache. Brenda was a big-boned blond with pretty gray eyes. They both wore loud Hawaiian shirts and flower leis, and Brenda had a pale pink flower — a hibiscus blossom, she told Jan — in her hair. It was plain that they doted on each other and plain that they were having the time of their lives. They kept exchanging grins and winks, touching hands, kissing every now and then like newlyweds. It was infectious. We weren’t with them ten minutes before Jan and I found ourselves holding hands too.

They were from Milwaukee, where they were about to open a luxury catering service. “Another lifelong dream,” Brenda said. Which gave us something else in common, in an indirect way. Jan and I own a small restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, Carpenter’s Steakhouse, which we’d built into a fairly successful business over the past twenty years. Our daughter Lynn was managing it for us while we were in Hawaii.

We talked with the Archersons about the pros and cons of the food business and had another round of drinks which Larry insisted on paying for. When the drinks arrived he lifted his mai tai and said, “Aloha nui kakou, folks.”

“That’s an old Hawaiian toast,” Brenda explained. “It means to your good health, or something like that. Larry is a magnet for Hawaiian words and phrases. I swear he’ll be able to write a tourist phrasebook by the time we leave the islands.”

“Maybe I will too, kuu ipo.”

She wrinkled her nose at him, then leaned over and nipped his ear. “Kuu ipo means sweetheart,” she said to us.

When we finished our second round of drinks Larry asked, “You folks haven’t had dinner yet, have you?”

We said we hadn’t.

“Well then, why don’t you join us in the Garden Court. Their mahimahi is out of this world. Our treat — what do you say?”

Jan seemed willing, so I said, “Fine with us. But let’s make it Dutch treat.”

“Nonsense. I invited you, that makes you our guests. No arguments, now — I never argue on an empty stomach.”

The food was outstanding. So was the wine Larry selected to go with it, a rich French chardonnay. The Garden Court was opensided like the lanai bar and the night breeze had a warm, velvety feel, heavy with the scents of hibiscus and plumeria. The moon, huge and near full, made the ocean look as though it were overlaid with a sheet of gold.

“Is this living or is this living?” Larry said over coffee and Kahlua. “It’s a taste of paradise,” Jan said.

“It is paradise. Great place, great food, great drinks, great company. What more could anybody want?”

“Well, I can think of one thing,” Brenda said with a leer.

Larry winked at me. “That’s another great thing about the tropics, Dick. It puts a new spark in your love life.”

“I can use a spark,” I said. “I think a couple of my plugs are shot.”

Jan cracked me on the arm and we all laughed.

“So what are you folks doing tomorrow?” Larry asked. “Any plans?”