Janwillem De Wetering - Just a Corpse at Twilight

Grijpstra laughed.

"You like that, Krip?" She sighed. She wasn't going to tell him the rest of it, then she did. Her father started up with an older ugly woman, nobody knew why, he didn't know why, and he lost his job. And they were in a trailer that had been on fire and was still blistered outside. Her father was drinking and beating up people, his car got dented, he wasn't even proud that Aki got a full scholarship in Honolulu and then she started drinking too. Dope, too, everything. Honolulu is the Far East and marijuana is a cash crop in Hawaii.

"Heroin?"

Not too much, she didn't like the needle but it liked her, like the boyfriend did. He with the different faces, who took herto the mainland to keep himin a style he wasn't accustomed to at all, by taking weird men in and out of motel rooms, for years, all the way across the continent, to Maine in the end, where the boyfriend (she kept getting away from him and he kept coming back in different guises, colors, ages) assumed a military face and she was in the barrackswith her clothes off, jumping up, trying to reach that china bowl screwed against the wall out of reach, with all the jocks watching. They weren't even laughing, they were too embarrassed.

"Alcohol?"

"What else?" Aki asked. "It got me arrested then, but I was out of it. The cops might have released me into my family's custody but there wasn't any family left so I finished up with some nuns."

"That's when you became lesbian?"

"I always preferred my own side. With Hawaiians the gay have their own place." Her hand was on his again. "You mind?"

Grijpstra said he was from Amsterdam, which was like…

"Key West?"

He didn't know where that was.

"Provincetown?"

Never heard of Provincetown.

"San Francisco?"

Grijpstra remembered watching TV pictures ofmostly beautiful men and women waving protest banners down steep streets and thinking at that moment that the New World was behind the times. In Amsterdam it was getting to be the other way around, with a heterosexual majority trying to move out from the shade of guilty regularity. "Yes," he said happily, "San Francisco."

They were both smiling, having a wonderful time.

"Akiapola'au," Grijpstra asked, "are you and Beth watching the coast for drug trafficking?"

"Daddy-O," she said, her face hardly cooling, "you don't have to be so clever." She leaned over to peck his cheek. "I was about to tell you all about it."

"So what eke is new?" de Gier asked Grijpstra across a table at Beth's Diner, where he was positioning the table's honey bear within a circle of sauce bottles. "I could have told you that. Isn't that the way law enforcement works? After Aki was treated at the Hospital of the Loving Little Lamb in Lordsville, the cops must have jumped her, with a shitload of charges to back them up. She had been running around all over the country, being bad…"

"Did she tell you how bad?"

De Gier waved vaguely. "Overdrawn checks, theft of rental cars, stealing from Johns, drug charges, and"-he dropped his eyelids halfway-"I think she said this… mail fraud? Anyway, there she was, in the hollow of the law's hand, so to speak. Rather than being squeezed, she became an informer. She works for the DEA, watching the coast."

"What's mail fraud?"

"Forgot to ask," de Gier said. "I think the post office here has its own inspection." He waved around him. "Free democracies are tricky places."

"This one has good roads," Grijpstra said. "I like that interstate. I tell you, if I ever get really distraught back home, I'll take that El Al plane out here again and rent one of these Ford products of yours and just drive."

"You'll fill asleep."

"I'll hire a beautiful lesbian lady driver."

"Aki won't duplicate." De Gier smiled. "So we're doing good." The smile thinned out. "Both you and I, being experienced interrogators, get through to subject. She tells all, in-cludingand up to how the DE A directs her tojameson, Maine. She needs a job for a front and there's Beth looking for a compatible live-in waitress." De Gier tried a new configuration, Honey Bear dominated by the combined forces ofWorcester-shire and horseradish sauce. "The princess and her princess buy a CD player and listen to jazz trumpets for ever after."

They studied their menus.

Grijpstra looked over his. "So what?"

De Gier nodded. "We should play that. I've got it all on paper. I've been trying to learn but it's hard to transcribe Miles, he sounds incomprehensible at half time, you ever noticed that? The man is just too subtle. At half time that probably doubles. Now if you play Clifford Brown at half time nothing much changes. But all-enlightened practitioner Davis…"

"Yes. Yes."

"You listening?"

"Sure," Grijpstra said. "But I meant 'So what?'-not the tune, the question. So what if Aki tells us she's spying on us and that she loves us and won't tell so we tell her what we're doing here and she tells on us anyway? The foreigners she has nothing to do with anyway thrown out? The tricksters tricked?"

De Gier laughed.

Grijpstra shook a heavy head. "Not funny, Rinus."

"But we didn't tell her… No!" De Gier put his hand over his mouth. "You did tell her? About me and Lorraine? You didn't. Did you? Of course you did. She seduced you. Alone, shy, lonesome… oh, shit…"

Grijpstra grinned. "Scared you?"

"So you didn't tell her anything," de Gier said. "Okay, this is what I know. Aki and Lorraine were friendly. Sister biologists. They've been out kayaking on occasion, to hear the loons chant at daybreak. Has Aki missed Lorraine yet?"

"She didn't say so."

"So she may still think we're here for drugs." De Gier moved more bottles around. "I was smoking pot the night I pushed Lorraine. She gave it to me too. It came from Jeremy Island, it's all over the place there, hidden under trees mostly. The fishermen grow it."

"With the sheriff's blessing?"

"Of course," de Gier said. "Give and take. Yankees are like the Dutch-why fight ifyou can split the dollar mostly your way? But the homegrown stuff is hard work and doesn't compare in quality to what Hairy Harry is bringing in."

"Or doesn't bring in."

"What?"

Aki came to take their order. De Gier ordered crab rolls for both. "Aren't you lucky?" Aki said to Grijpstra. "You get to eat again and I rush straight back to work. Aren't we busy?" More fishermen were coming in, she had to hurry off.

"Didn't Aki tell you about the arrests near the Point?" Grijpstra asked.

"I heard," de Gier said. "You mean the DEA missing out on the truckers who came to pick up a ship's load of Jamaican or Guatemalan or some other top-quality pot, hidden here near the Point? I read about it. So what happened really?"

"Aki didn't tell you?" Grijpstra looked surprised. "I thought she told all."

"Not all." De Gier looked modest. "I'm not the fatherly type."

"I'm not sure about the details," Grijpstra said. "She said someone spotted the shipment from the air, so that was probably Ishmael. Her contact told her he saw stacks ofbales, in camouflage-colored covers hidden on the shore somewhere near here. So Aki tells her secret employer, and the DEA tells Hairy Harry, as it's his turf. Hairy Harry and Billy Boy hide in the woods waiting for someone to pick up the consignment. The DEA is there too, eager pimply youths according to Aki, lots of them, hands on guns, but Hairy Harry, being the local warlord, is in charge."

"Oh dear," de Gier said.

"Right. An eighteen-wheeler backs up slowly into the glade, the driver and his mates jump out of the truck's cabin…"

"… and before they can put their hands on the merchandise Hairy Harry is out there snapping on handcufts." De Gier nodded wisely. "That's how it goes."