When Doug Randolph moves to Honolulu, the nuts he meets aren’t all macadamias. Author Scott Rose serves up a luau’s worth of South Pacific fun in his entertaining novel, Death in Hawaii.
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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A |
bove Hawaii, the sun shone resplendently.
Doug Randolph stood in his Waikiki condominium, a towel at his svelte waist. His left hand held the morning mail, his right, a cellular telephone. He was near the end of a heated discussion regarding congress, sexual congress.
“So, when are you coming to fill my hot hole?”
“Thursday at five. Good bye.”
After hanging up, Doug looked out his wraparound windows at an eye-tingling, skyscrapers-in-paradise panorama of greater Honolulu.
Sorting mail, he put magazines on a marble-and-onyx coffee table, bills atop his sandalwood work desk, solicitations in the trash.
He had received three personal letters, two of which, from friends in London and Paris, caused him fleeting happiness. The third, by contrast, occasioned long-lasting angst. Its envelope, postmarked Woodstock, N.Y., bore a skull-and-crossbones weeping tears of blood.
Did he know any persons presently in Woodstock? No. Hesitant to open the envelope, he put it down, reclined on a supple calfskin couch and reminisced, chronologically, about his life.
* * *
He had been born in the resolutely genteel Greenwich, Connecticut of 1951, and was an obedient child who evolved into a rebellious adolescent. His early teen years were characterized by clamorous familial conflicts over U.S. participation in the Vietnam War.
At the beginning of eleventh grade, Doug had a crush on his English teacher, Miss Laura Baskin, who requited his love. Their intergenerational affair was titillative for them both.
And Miss Baskin opened Doug’s mind to serious, highbrow culture. Whereas the pre-Baskin Doug dropped LSD at Rolling Stones concerts, the Baskin-influenced one preferred Bach Fugues and Earl Gray.
The Baskin Effect proved most propitious; Doug got into Harvard, majored in French Literature and graduated summa cum laude. Following graduation, he moved to Paris, where he worked as a freelance English teacher.
In 1974, he relocated to Everything’s epicenter, Manhattan, where, for exceedingly quaint reasons, he believed nothing could be more gratifying than to become a real novelist. He began authoring novels, keeping body and soul together by tending bar.
Twelve years, six unpublished real novels later, Doug was ready to eschew literature, Manhattan and bartending.
And in 1986, he encountered his old sweetheart, Miss Laura Baskin. Having quit teaching, she had turned herself into a super-agent, a literary super-agent who hawked sundry manuscripts for sky-high, groundbreaking, chatter-worthy sums.
Miss Baskin saw no commercial potential in anything Doug had yet written, but her instincts told her his talents were convertible, so she encouraged him to write a money-maker, a block-buster, an instant nationwide best-seller. She handed him the outline of a novel that could be sold into the big time, pronto.
But Doug was beyond writing. In fact, he won a state lottery jackpot and used the booty to escape New York City for Waikiki, there founding a self-help group called Writers Anonymous. Its purpose? To help writing-addicted humans abandon their delusory, against-all-odds ambitions of making it as professional novelists. From around the Hawaiian archipelago, people whose lives had been perverted by foolish fantasies involving literary glory came to Doug for help with their nasty little writing habits. He profoundly helped many, they were immensely grateful. Between 1986 and 1991, Doug accomplished much for his fellow literary casualties.
* * *
Doug’s reminiscences ended, leaving a present in which he opened the skull-and-crossbones imprinted envelope. Inside was a wrinkled sheet of paper, and taped to the page were various sized newsprint letters spelling out one ominous message: WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU!
Consternation! Who wanted to kill him, and why? Did conceit make him believe he had no enemies?
Naked, Doug paced wraparound windows, pondering a reaction to this threat. He paused, and a sunbeam, kissing his copulatory organ, rendered it tumescent.
“Must you?”
After pandering to his erection, Doug resumed worrying about the death threat missive. Severe stress sullied his psyche, he therefore craved comic relief, some reminder of how seriously one ought to take the human condition, so he opened a desk drawer reserved for whoopee cushions, and withdrew the largest one, the one he knew made the longest, loudest, most vulgar farting sound. He inflated that whoopee cushion to bursting and then sat on it with forceful abandon.
What hilarity! The whoopee cushion had produced a fart, a big old fart whose silly spluttering certainly did remind Doug of just how seriously one ought to take the human condition.
Said fart, however, hardly eliminated the threat on Doug’s life . . . and oh! did he want to live, live, live . . . surfing Sunset Beach . . . eating papaya and passion fruit in the shade of monkey-pod trees . . . dancing hula beside flaming tiki torches . . . so many other things . . .
But there was no time to envision them now; Doug had to prepare for a Writers Anonymous meeting.
* * *
He knew that real writers can never be cured.
And as the father of Writers Anonymous, he was haunted by two questions: 1) Why should a human feel driven to put words on paper? and 2) To what ultimate end are real writers burdened with trying to make order and sense and meaning out of the chaos of life?
Sadly, even after authors have endured prolonged, bittersweet, meaningless suffering in the name of literature, they still can not look at double rainbows arched over misting Hawaiian waterfalls without feeling compelled to describe the sight in print.
Indeed, a real writer can no more divorce himself from the urge to write than a dog can help scratching where it has sarcoptic mange.
So the raison d’être of Writers Anonymous is clear.
Doug counseled his patients often, on both an individual and group basis, as frequent treatments seemingly helped writing victims achieve a less book-and-word oriented existence.
And he held his Writers Anonymous group meetings in a pleasant office on Honolulu’s Punchbowl Street, whose reception area was kept scrupulously free of reading material. A wet bar was stocked with ingredients for potent tropical drinks. Fresh, sliced, chilled pineapple was always at hand for snacking.
The actual mahogany-paneled meeting room was decorated according to a certain Hawaiian eclecticism. A Polynesian mask hung above a portrait of George Washington. Bonsai guava trees grew in planters fashioned of Eskimo soapstone. There was Scandinavian furniture upholstered with Indonesian fabric, and in an ancient Persian vase there stood the stars and stripes.
* * *
Doug waited in the meeting room for his group members to assemble in the reception area. What an incongruity; that he should this day be helping others towards a less anxious mode of being! Was he not torturously distraught by the WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU! letter?
Admitting his Writers Anonymous patients to the meeting room, Doug found they were in the aloha spirit, drinking giant mai-tais. But after exchanging cordialities, they got down to the brass tacks of their Writers Anonymous session.
A 25-year-old woman, one Gudrun Schwarzpech, stood before the group.
* * *
Native to Pfaffenhofen, Germany, Gudrun had grown up on a dairy farm, awakening long before dawn, each day, to help with chores. The young Gudrun detested farm labors as much as she loved reading, thus, by the time she was eighteen, she had been through many, many of the word’s great novels, and had written a book of her own, a novel of Pfaffenhofen. Thereafter, Gudrun violated her parents’ wishes by moving to West Berlin, where she waitressed in a world-class restaurant while attempting . . . with unastonishing lack of success . . . to sell her Pfaffenhofen novel. So she removed to Paris, earning handsomely as a waitress, writing an erotic French novel on the side, but Lo! no publisher would publish the thing, let alone read it.
In 1988, Gudrun migrated to New York, where she accumulated money by waitressing at a four-star restaurant, and wrote, in English, her third novel, which would certainly have found a publisher had she been Oprah Winfrey, Marilyn Quayle’s sister, or Ivana Trump.
Gudrun subsequently attracted the amorous attentions of an aging Japanese dollar billionaire, resident on Molokai, Hawaii, who convinced her to renounce waitressing.
They married, and to show she was a modern woman, Gudrun retained her maiden name, but shared most else with her husband, including his money, excluding his bed.
She handily put waitressing in the purposely unrecalled parts of her past, and participated in many diverting activities on Molokai. For example, she carried glass bowls to candlenut trees, filled them with dainty white candlenut blossoms, and then placed them in her parlor. Gudrun also golfed on the sumptuous fairways of the Kauakoe Golf Course at the Sheraton Molokai, and even visited Indian and African animals, such as kudu and ibex, at the Molokai Ranch Wildlife Park.
But despite this richly varied life, she could not detach herself from books, nor from her desire to break out big as an author. One evening her husband would find her hopelessly spellbound by Moby Dick, then the next evening, he would discover her weeping over rejection letters garnered from publishers in oh so many countries.
* * *
Ahem. Gudrun Schwarzpech stood before this Writers Anonymous group, making the ceremonial declaration.
“I am a recovering writer,” she intoned with quavering voice, eyes shifting, limbs a-shake. Distractedly, she combed her right hand through her hair, then, positioning the hand in front of her mouth, she nibbled a cuticle.
Other group members, understanding her travails, offered Gudrun support.
“Courage,” said one.
And Doug added:
“Yes, yes. Go on.”
However, Doug’s mind counterpointed him away from Gudrun’s problems, with ruminations regarding the WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU! letter. If “we” really meant to kill, why had “we” not simply committed the heinous act? And then too, suppose “we” were the people in this very Writers Anonymous group?
Doug looked at Frau Schwarzpech, in whose red-rimmed eyes tremulous tears did brim. How could this German, so obviously imprisoned in a personal, psychological chamber of horrors, possibly be part of the murder plot against him? He prodded her.
“Continue.”
She blubbered softly.
“What I did this week is . . it’s . . . just . . . unbelievable.”
“What, Gudrun?”
She sniveled her next words.
“I actually looked at the New York Times best-sellers list.”
The Writers Anonymous group gasped in horror, and Doug felt crestfallen. Just when he believed Gudrun had been making genuine progress. Ach, what a pain in the ass that so much of life should be Sisyphean!
And as the session proceeded, Doug became increasingly preoccupied with the threat against his life. By meeting’s end, he had resolved to inform the police.
* * *
Heading towards the Waikiki Police Station, Doug felt glad to be alive, if only because the circumstance allowed him to sense Hawaiian sunshine warming his back. Plucking a length of bougainvillea, he slipped it behind his right ear.
Inside the station, Sergeant Corky Kim was doing desk duty. Before him stood seven police, and one gigantic civilian, getting booked, caterwauling in a Bronx accent. At the end of his booking the caterwauler was forced through a doorway, into a holding pen, whence came a lurid wailing.
Doug then believed that Sergeant Kim was ready to hear his story. Sergeant Kim, however, motioned towards a plastic bench where a woman of numerous years patted at her face with an embroidered handkerchief. Slowly, slowly, slowly, she approached the desk.
“How may I help you?”
“My prize-winning Abysinnian has been catnapped.”
Mm, hmm. Where did this crime occur, Mam?”
“In the Kahala Hilton.”
“Does the Kahala Hilton allow pets?”
“Well . . . sort of . . . I mean . . . mercy me! Why do you think I’m reporting the theft to you, rather than to them?”
Sergeant Kim finished dealing with the woman at a leisurely pace, then further exasperated Doug by answering the phone, and carrying on a cootchie-coo conversation. He shielded his mouth, as though preventing Doug from hearing his maudlin piffle. Finally, finally, he greeted Doug.
“Alooooooo-ha!”
“Aloha yourself! I’m Doug Randolph, and I need your help. Crazies are out to kill me!”
Sergeant Kim looked appraisingly at the bougainvillea behind Doug’s ear.
“Which crazies are out to kill you, Mr. Randolph?”
“If I knew that!”
Casting his glance towards the ceiling, Doug got a look at unsightly fluorescent tubes.
“Listen, this morning, I received a baleful envelope . . . postmarked Woodstock, with a skull-and-crossbones instead of a return address. Inside, a rumpled sheet of paper. On it, the message ‘We are going to kill you!’”
Following some leisurely consideration, Sergeant Kim commented:
“A hell of a thing.”
There was a dull stand-off, with Doug expecting questions from Sergeant Kim, and Sergeant Kim waiting to hear more from Doug. Eventually, Doug spoke.
“Aren’t you gonna ask questions?”
“Sure, Mr. Randolph. Here’s a question: Who put that bougainvillea behind your ear?”
“This blossoming vine has nothing to do with the plot against me.”
“How was I to know? Look, you shouldn’t necessarily take this threat seriously.”
“What!? The letter said ‘We are going to kill you!’ and . . .”
“Did you bring the letter with you, Mr. Randolph?”
“Well no, I . . .”
“Mr. Randolph, even had you walked in here without bougainvillea behind your ear, and with a . . . uhm . . . baleful letter, I’d still be inclined to take this threat lightly.”
“How dare you say that?”
“It’s easy. These vague threats are made more often than you’d think, and usually, they come to nothing. Only two weeks ago, a barmaid called from The Polynesian Pub, reporting a bomb scare, in their toilets, no less. Mr. Randolph, this precinct is understaffed, our officers are way overworked. Think anybody around here wanted ta look for a payload in some stinkin’ latrine? But a bomb scare’s a bomb scare, so off we went. Now, did we find any bombs?”
“I don’t know. Did you?”
“Not the exploding kind. And in fact - - surprise, surprise – one of The Polynesian Pub’s toilets was backed up, somethin’ revolting. That woman who called us in the first place batted here eyelashes at a few of our men, and before you could say Pearl Harbor, the Waikiki police were poking a plunger into a stopped up potty. With all respect to you as a tax payer, Mr. Randolph . . . and by the way, are your taxes paid, in full?”
“Yes. Does it matter right now?”
“Listen . . . ya walk in here . . . bougainvillea behind your ear . . . tellin’ me crazies’ve threatened ya. What do I hav ta go on? If ya wanna see us take this serious, come back with that letter. Our boys’ll look it over, ask ya questions, we’ll see how far we get. O.K.?”
CHAPTER 2
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A |
fter departing the police station, Doug entered a period of doubt over whether assassins really meant to deep-six him.
The death-threat letter, after all, had been postmarked in Woodstock, New York, not a likely goon squad center. Woodstock, rather was a sleepy backwater famous for having once hosted a hippy throng.
On the other hand, that letter did say ‘WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU!’ Readily distinguishable from ‘WE ARE GOING TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK!’ And Doug believed that killed is killed, a thing he did not want to be. So with or without help from the police, he had to take some action that would stay this mysterious “we” from murdering him.
Undecided about which action to take, Doug went oceanside. He lay on a plush towel, toying with a plastic wind-up walking pineapple, and right there on Waikiki beach, totally failed to enjoy that evening’s splendiferous Hawaiian sunset, so thickly overcast by anxiety was his inner self.
Gathering his towel, and his wind-up pineapple, he headed home, his thoughts an undirected blur, a befogged chaos, a morose muddle. He cared not how his existence might be fitting into world history.
He opted for a short cut between the beach and his luxury condo, a short cut which involved walking down a dark alley. Like most dark alleys, this one had a narrow stretch of asphalt, two windowless walls, and a palpable absence of light. Graffiti marred the windowless walls; some ruffian had smashed a macadamia nut jar on the pavement. Doug, for his part, was too worried about the threat against his life to be unnerved by the alley’s darkness. But what was that pressure on his shoulder? Why was he being tripped? Face to asphalt, treacly blood oozing from his nose, a violent human on his back, Doug knew he was under assault.
So, the mysterious “we” really did mean to kill him, and all he had for defense was a plastic wind-up walking pineapple. Cold sweat broke out around his goose pimples.
The attacker gripped Doug’s neck. Now, why was he snipping Doug’s belt, and pulling off his pants? What ensued left no question; Doug was the target of an attempt at homosexual rape.
Twisting away form the rapist, Doug kicked the scissors out of his hands. The rapist lunged. They struggled, pants around their knees, and the rapist was strong. He clenched Doug’s wrists and then fondled his privates.
This violation infuriated Doug. He drove the plastic wind-up walking pineapple into the rapist’s face, and the rapist snatched at the wind-up pineapple. Doug drove it toward his face again. The rapist whimpered, and then dropping to the ground, grasped Doug’s ankles.
Doug heard a teary, effeminate voice.
“Please . . . . help me!”
His uppermost concerns were escaping the rapist, and getting out of the dark alley, but the rapist redoubled his grasp on his ankles, and Doug, scared both to and of death, could not budge. He thought how very much he wanted to live. He thought how he wanted to see moonlight streaming through palm fronds. Again there came the rapist’s teary, effeminate voice:
“Please . . . help me!”
Doug was trapped; trapped and flummoxed.
“You are trying to kill me, and I should help you?”
The rapist interspersed his words with whimperings.
“I’m not . . . trying . . . to kill . . . you . . . I swear it.”
“What about the letter?”
“Which letter?”
“What do you mean, which letter?”
The rapist clutched still harder at Doug’s ankles. Convulsed with sobs, he bleated out:
“Help . . . please help me. I’m just a silly old queen. I didn’t mean you any harm. Take me to a shrink who’ll cure me of being gay.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. One’s sexuality is not a malady in need of a cure. Don’t you know that scientists have discovered enlightening things about the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus? But regardless . . . you are odious. Considering what you’ve done to me tonight, I’d like to see you behind bars.”
A quiet tension reigned. The rapist fixed his grip still more firmly. How was Doug to escape the dark alley with this Homo sapiens clutching his ankles? Seeing no alternative, he micturated on the psychopath’s head. It worked. The rapist let go. Doug had to stop the stream while pulling up his pants, and bolting from the alley.
He felt humiliation and disgust, but upon consideration, he also felt relief. No way was this silly old queen of a rapist involved in the murder plot against him.
* * *
The following Sunday, Doug had a private Writers Anonymous session with Gudrun Schwarzpech on the island of Molokai. He made an early morning, 20-minute flight from Honolulu aboard a Paradise Air, 5-seater plane.
Gudrun met Doug at Molokai’s Hoolehua Airport. Her contentment at seeing him was such that she temporarily reverted to her native tongue.
“Willkommen!”
“Danke. Nothing quite like good old Hawaiian gemütlichkeit.”
They got into Gudrun’s car.
“Doug, Doug, are you going to be proud of me. I haven’t looked at a book in three days.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said sincerely, knowing the intractability of Gudrun’s addiction to literature and writing.
“I am proud of you, as you ought to be proud of yourself. I dare say, you deserve a reward.”
“I thought I’d reward us both. We’ll drive across the island to Palaau State Park where there’s a phallic rock that’ll be fun for us to see. Later, of course, we’ll come back, to drive my honorable husband to church.”
The term honorable husband spoke volumes to Doug. He knew Gudrun had married an eccentric Japanese billionaire named Takamisho, a man who lived at an infinite remove from the people’s myriad rat races. Takamisho was the sort who relaxedly conducted aquaculture experiments in the ponds on his property because he could.
“Is Takamisho happy that you’ve gone three days without looking at a book?”
“Ach, happy as a Bavarian in beer.”
Doug and Gudrun continued their ride across Molokai to Palaau State Park. During the trip, Doug noted with satisfaction that Gudrun barely mentioned literature or writing. One slip-up did transpire when Gudrun told Doug of a strudel she had prepared for her honorable husband. The aroma of the strudel as it baked had brought to Gudrun’s mind a passage from Goethe. Gudrun, however, emphasized her pastry over Goethe’s passage, so Doug saw scant grounds for concern.
At Palaau, Doug and Gudrun drove through a forested area to a parking lot. From the parking lot they walked in the woods until they reached a six-foot tall rock, a rock undebatably shaped like a thingamabob.
“There it is; the penis of Nanahoa.”
“How’d this rock get that name?”
“It’s part of a Hawaiian legend. Because his wife, Kawaluna, fussed about the God Nanahoa having sex with another Goddess, he threw her over a cliff.”
“Horrors.”
“Don’t think Nanahoa got off easy. As punishment, he was turned into this penis-rock.”
“Rather a stupid legend.”
“Du liebe Zeit! It’s just part of the ancient Hawaiian weltanschauung. Besides, you have to admit, this rock looks exactly like what we Germans call a schwanz.”
They drove back to Gudrun’s house, where Takamisho, awaiting his ride to church, was licking strudel from his fingers.
This Takamisho, though mainly Japanese in cultural orientation, was Episcopalian, and unbothered that Gudrun, 30 years his junior, was an atheist. Uncomplainingly, he allowed her to remain outside church while he worshipped.
Whatever, Doug and Gudrun drove Takamisho to his Episcopalian church on Molokai’s Church Row, where many, many denominations have erected little buildings symbolizing people’s headstrong determination to maintain faith despite everything. Once Gudrun’s honorable husband had gone inside his church, Gudrun exclaimed:
“Na! Thank goodness there’s no wind; we can cross the street and safely stroll the Kapuaiwa Coconut Grove.
As Doug and Gudrun entered the grove, Gudrun made a query.
“Did you know that King Kamehameha the Fifth’s friends planted this grove of 1,000 palm trees for him in the 1860s?”
“Yes. What of it?”
“Well, wouldn’t you like your friends to plant 1,000 palms all in one place for you?”
Doug made a thoughtful face. Before he could answer Gudrun, though, they each had an awareness of an object plummeting from the trees. Only millimeters from Doug, something made a frightful thud.
Gudrun shouted:
“The coconuts are falling! Run from the grove!”
Doug thought he had noticed that the object which nearly clunked him was not a coconut. With Gudrun still shouting at him to evacuate the grove, he scooped that object up.
Once Doug was out of the Grove, he and Gudrun observed that the object was in fact no coconut. It was a thick, heavy porcelain cookie jar bearing an image of the Beatle, John Lennon. Doug immediately suspected a connection between this John Lennon cookie jar and the WE ARE GOING TO KILL YOU! letter.
“Jesus Christ,” said Gudrun, the atheist, “how the hell does a John Lennon cookie jar drop from the top of a coconut grove? What a great short story this would make!”
“Gudrun, don’t talk about turning events into short stories . . . you know it leads to no good . . . but just where this John Lennon cookie jar came from . . . that is a mystery.”
* * *
Back in Waikiki, Doug went to the police. He found Sergeant Corky Kim listening to an illogical human.
“Nows I’m up at the Nuuanu Reservoir, tryin’ ta catch some Chinese catfish, right? My radio’s tuned to a nice station – I mean real nice, they was playin’ Don Ho, and I gots a Chinese catfish on my line when suddenly, I don’t hear my radio no more, so I looks over my shoulder, and nows I don’t really see the guy who takes my radio, but I’m sure he’s a colored.”
Once Sergeant Kim was through speaking with the illogical human, he turned his attention to Doug. Narrowing his eyes at the John Lennon cookie jar, he said:
“What’s that? Weren’t you supposed to bring me some death-threat letter?”
Doug reached inside John Lennon’s head for the sinister missive. He showed Sergeant Kim the skull-and-crossbones envelope, as well as the page it contained. Frowning over the evidence, Sergeant Kim asked:
“Mr. Randolph, do you have any inkling why people in Woodstock would want you dead?’
“No.”
Sergeant Kim picked up a phone, and asked that Lieutenants Yakamoto and Jefferson report to Room C.
“Listen, Mr. Randolph. I am going to introduce you to two of my men, and they are going to help you get to the bottom of this. But lemme give you a hint. Want us takin’ your case serious? Do what you can not to look like a crackpot. You came in here today without bougainvillea behind your ear; that’s good. So for cryin’ out loud, whydja bring the letter inside this John Lennon cookie jar?”
Doug explained that during a private Writers Anonymous session with Gudrun Schwarzpech in the Kapuaiwa Coconut Grove, the John Lennon cookie jar had come plummeting from the palms.
Sergeant Kim stared at his interlaced fingers.
“Mr. Randolph, cookie jars don’t fall from palm trees.”
“They do if someone drops them. Sergeant Kim, I’m certain there’s a connection between this John Lennon cookie jar and the threat on my life.”
De-interlacing his fingers, Sergeant Kim motioned at a guard. The guard escorted Doug to Room C, whose walls were painted two shades of institutional green. Here and there were jagged black scuff marks. Taking up most of the room’s space was a sturdy looking, yet off-balance conference table.
After placing the John Lennon cookie jar atop the table, Doug shook hands with Lieutenants Yakamoto and Jefferson.
* * *
Twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Yuri Yakamoto was below average, both physically and cerebrally.
After television cop shows had influenced him to join the police, he felt disillusioned because his reality was tedious compared to boob tube drama.
Yakamoto, actually, had spent five years on traffic duty, and now that he was finally assigned to something more exciting, he evidenced lamentably goony enthusiasm over the search for Doug Randolph’s would-be killers.
As for Lieutenant Leroy Jefferson, he was an African-American born in the Nuremberg, Germany of 1949. Known in the vulgar parlance as an army brat, he passed the first ten years of his life stationed at a different post every two years.
In 1959, his family moved to Hawaii for keeps, and Leroy grew into a husky, pot-bellied man who liked boasting about his excellent record with the Waikiki police. He often did this boasting to people who would have been scandalized by his frequent use of recreational drugs.
* * *
After Doug reviewed the outline of his case with Yakamoto and Jefferson, Jefferson said:
“O.K., Mr. Randolph, we’re gunna have tha John Lennon cookie jar dusted. We’re gunna check tha envelope an’ letter, too. If we get matchin’ prints, we get some hints.”
Yakamoto smiled vacuously. Jefferson slapped his belly.
“Mr. Randolph, yuv gutta telluz tha truth so we can help yuz.”
“Of course,” said Doug, irritated by having an intellectual inferior speak to him in so condescending a fashion. Something further irked him: for no clear reason, Yakamoto, grinning broadly, was shaking his head up and down.
Jefferson posed a question.
“Yuv been uh full-time Writers Anonymous counselor fer almost five years. Have yuz had bad relations with any uh yer patients?”
“Never. I show them that they can live happily in spite of being writaholics, and they are always thankful to me. I did once suffer obloquy from a former patient’s wife who was convinced that if her husband kept writing, he’d eventually produce a best-seller, thus solving the family’s economic problems. But the man himself was limitlessly grateful for the help I gave him in mastering his addiction to literature and writing.”
Jefferson asked Doug many more questions, none of which were especially apposite. For his part, Yakamoto continued smiling imbecillically. Doug left Room C convinced this investigation was not in the best of hands.
Read more about Death in Hawaii HERE.
Copyright © 2007 Scott Rose.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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