James Benn - The White Ghost

“Captain, this is the first we’ve heard of his murder. I’ll get over to the hospital right away. But we still need that air transport.”

“Very well,” Ritchie said. “You may be late on this Chang affair, but your timing is good on getting to Brisbane. There’s a PBY in the harbor that makes a daily run, leaves in thirty minutes. Yeoman Howe will give you the details. Now get out.”

“When did all this happen?” I asked Howe once the door to Ritchie’s office closed behind us. “He sounded like we should have known about Chang getting killed.”

“News does travel fast around here, Lieutenant,” Howe said. “As far as I know, he was found dead around dawn. His family was informed and in short order they’d marched in here demanding justice. I guess they thought the captain needed a push in that direction.”

“Why would they think that?” I said.

“Because Captain Ritchie puts the navy first,” Howe said, lowering his voice.

“And justice comes second,” I said. “For Melanesians or Chinese?”

“Your words, Lieutenant, not mine,” Howe said. “Is there anything else?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant Kazimierz needs to get on that PBY headed to Brisbane, pronto. Ritchie gave his okay.”

“No problem,” Howe said. “You need anything else like that, come see me. No need to bother the captain.” I liked the sound of that. But it was the only thing I liked the sound of this morning.

“This must have happened after I left this morning,” Kaz said. “There was no hint of anything unusual in the household.”

“Hurry back,” I said as we descended the steps outside the office. “I may need you to help run interference with Jai-li. The last thing we need is a second case and a bunch of angry Chinese on our tail. Ritchie seems more worried about them than about Tamana.”

“Perhaps he has lost interest in serving the Kennedy interests, since you demonstrated how obvious his links are to the ambassador. The Chinese can certainly close ranks and make his administration of Tulagi irksome. They are here, and the Kennedy family is far away,” Kaz said.

“Yeah, maybe. The good news is we might stumble upon a link between Daniel and Chang if we can find out why Daniel sought him out,” I said as I started the jeep.

“I’d say there is bad news and good news,” Kaz said. “The bad news is that if there was a link, with both men dead, we may never know what it was.”

“And the good news?”

“The good news is I will not have to suffer another boat ride to Guadalcanal.”

I drove Kaz to the harbor where he did have to endure a brief journey in a launch out to the waiting PBY. It was seven or eight hours to Brisbane, so depending on when he got to the hospital and saw Dickie Miller, he’d be gone two or three days. I hoped it would be worth the trip.

I proceeded to the hospital, wondering what the death of Sam Chang meant. A blood feud between gangs? There were a number of triad organizations active among the Chinese communities in the South Pacific. Like Mafia families, they often fought with each other. But from the little I’d heard about Sam Chang, he was a straightforward businessman, not a criminal. Maybe he borrowed money and couldn’t pay it back. The triad wouldn’t like that. Or maybe he loaned money and the borrower paid him back with a tight grip around the neck.

Or, perhaps somebody didn’t want us making the connection between Daniel Tamana and Sam Chang. Well, I had one now: both of them murdered on Tulagi.

“Lieutenant Boyle?” asked a sailor as I took the steps up to the hospital entrance. He was dressed in blue dungarees and a white Dixie cup hat and sported an SP armband. Shore patrol.

“If you know my name you know why I’m here,” I said. “Lead the way.”

“The doctors are in a snit waiting for you, sir. They keep saying they have to move the body. The other patients don’t like a corpse on their ward, if you know what I mean.”

“Can’t blame ’em, sailor,” I said. “But no one’s touched the body, right?”

“Yes, sir. My buddy is standing guard.”

He took me to a small ward off the main corridor. A small room, really. No nurses station, just six beds, three along each wall. All the patients were Chinese. In unison they began chattering at me, jabbing fingers at Chang’s body, obviously not happy. Neither was Sam Chang, with his broken leg in traction, the bed sheets thrown off, and his open eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“Does anyone speak English?” I asked.

“Already tried that, Lieutenant,” the second SP said. “No one even understands the question.”

“You finally made it.” The voice belonged to a harried doctor with disheveled hair, a heavy beard, and a rumpled white coat over his navy khakis. “Captain Ritchie ordered us not to move the body until you looked at it. So look.”

“I’m Lieutenant Boyle. And you are?”

“Captain Schwartz, and I’ve been on duty for twenty-four hours, so hurry it up, please.”

“Okay, Captain, but first tell me, are these patients civilians? What are they doing here?”

“We expanded the English colonial hospital when we first took the island. Medical facilities had been overwhelmed with natives and other refugees fleeing the Japanese. So we have a few rooms set aside for them. We put the Chinese patients together so they could communicate with each other.”

“That’s great, but I’d like to know what they’re saying now,” I said over the din of the continuing complaints.

“They wish my brother’s body to be treated with respect,” a soft, melodious voice said from behind Captain Schwartz. “And not left in such an undignified position.”

“Miss Rui Chang,” I said, recognizing the woman Jack had left with last night. She wore a white silk dress, buttoned high to the neck. I knew white was the Chinese color for mourning. “We mean no disrespect.”

“Even so, Lieutenant, our beliefs dictate that when a person dies, their body must be treated gently and with kindness. The spirit remains for a time near the body. Unless the spirit can move on in a state of happiness, it may not be reborn for a very long time. And any spirit would be distressed upon seeing my poor brother’s body.”

“Of course,” I said, taking in the traction device that held Chang’s broken leg up, not to mention the bruised neck and the open, sightless eyes. “I need only a few minutes, and the body can be released.”

She nodded and retreated to the corridor.

“When was he found?” I asked Schwartz as I leaned over the corpse.

“Around five o’clock. Orderlies check the rooms at night every hour. Everything was fine at four. He was found like this at five.”

“Death by manual strangulation, obviously,” I said, turning his head to see the bruises on either side of his neck. Schwartz nodded his agreement. “Was he being treated for anything other than a broken leg?”

“No,” Schwartz said. “Re-broken, to be precise. He sustained a fracture on that island he was evacuated from, and then fell and reinjured it getting off ship in the harbor. We reset it, and he would have been fine.”

“Did he have a lot of visitors?”

“Lieutenant Boyle, the Chinese have large families,” Schwartz said. “They’re in and out of here all day long.”

“White men? Melanesians? Anyone other than family?” I asked.

“No,” Schwartz said. “Not that I know of, but we don’t really keep track of visitors, especially when we don’t speak the same language.”

“Didn’t Sam Chang speak English? It seems he did business with lots of islanders; he must have known the lingo,” I said.

“He did. But still, this is a naval hospital. We treat civilians as needed and then get them out. Chang was here mainly because his injury was sustained while disembarking a naval vessel.”