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  A BIRD IN THE HAND

  A Samoan Mystery

  Lynn Stansbury

  iUniverse, Inc.

  New York Lincoln Shanghai

  A BIRD IN THE HAND

  A Samoan Mystery

  Copyright © 2006 by Lynn Gilbert Stansbury

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, dialogues, and places are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, governmental institutions, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-595-37730-5 (pbk)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-595-82108-2 (ebk)

  ISBN-10: 0-595-37730-0 (pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-595-82108-1 (ebk)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For John and Aaron, first and always, without whom, nothing

  For the Blackfrogs, the Berger-Hardens, Ruth, Liz and Cushla, for whom no thanks could be enough

  And for Tiuta Faumuina, who runs a whole lot better dump than the Bobcat chief

  CHAPTER 1

  Ann Maglynn, Doctor of Medicine and Master of Public Health, stared up at the mountain of trash in the otherwise pristine tropical forest clearing and wondered, as she did about a dozen times a day, why the hell she was still in American Samoa. The answer to that question being more than she wanted to tackle sober, she pulled on knee-high rubber boots and climbed out of her jeep.

  She worked her way through the mud, rocks and debris at the edge of the clearing toward where a middle-aged Samoan, presumably the landfill caretaker, sat parked in a Bobcat. Ann’s orders from her Health Department bosses were to see if this private dump site was big enough for the Territorial government to consider leasing it to add to the sites already managed by the Department. Things that would have mattered in the States for a dump site, good deep soil and drainage, distance from community drinking water supplies and the various issues under the heading Not-In-My-Back-Yard, weren’t issues in Samoa. The soil was a thin layer over lava and basalt; drainage was erratic at best; and community drinking water was not something you wanted to examine too closely. As for the rest, those issues existed but were so tightly laminated into the traditional culture that they were, for most non-Samoans, as unfathomable as the drainage. But Ann had been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Western Samoa before going on to the schools of public health and medicine in Hawai’i. Whatever her personal angst at the moment, it had nothing to do with Polynesians or their islands.

  For a non-Samoan, Ann spoke the language fairly well. She and the caretaker exchanged polite greetings. The caretaker looked over the clearing and shook his head.

  Too much rain.

  Three days of tropical storm on a South Pacific island that gets two hundred inches of rain a year anyway had drowned the clearing and turned the dump into a forlorn archipelago. Ann waved to the caretaker and walked back to where the span of flood-water between her and the tallest trash pile was only a few yards wide.

  “How’s breakfast, guys?” she said to the myna birds fluttering and pecking at this side of the heap. At the sound of her voice, the birds flushed up in an explosion of dark bodies and yellow eye patches then settled again farther up the slope. Ann stepped gingerly into the water, wondering how deep it was. She wasn’t very tall. She could see the headline: Health Dept doc drowns in dump ditch. But she got across without losing either her footing or her boots and climbed the left knee of the slope. Steadying herself on the end of a protruding couch, she looked out over the clearing beyond.

  And was hit with the smell like a punch in the face.

  “Shit” The mynas fluttered off again, twittering hoarsely. She grinned at them. “Shit, in this case being pure expletive. Though “ She looked around cautiously. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to step in it or touch it unawares. “…The real thing might be better.”

  All dumps smell. But not, in Ann’s experience, of excrement and rarely of death. This was death. She looked around again. Samoa has no vultures and no crows or ravens, but the seagulls and the mynas do their best. Beyond the main heap, smaller piles of trash barely cleared the water. Little flocks of a dozen or so birds clustered around each of these shoals. The nearest pile, a heap of bulging black plastic bags, had attracted a larger flock. Their raspy chatter filled the air as they flung themselves at it.

  Ann stared at the bags. But now she saw the blackened back of a human skull, the slope of a spine, and the broad swell of buttocks. Horrified, she shouted and waved her arms. The mynas flew off, chattering madly, but a few came back. She chucked a bottle at them. It splashed down just beyond the body. Oh God. Mustn’t disturb the site. Have to get police. Police. Am I hallucinating? Making this up? Could anything else smell like that? Then she saw the hand, unmistakable, undeniable, five grey-brown fingers and a bit of palm, half submerged, at the body’s hip. Clothes? Maybe a stretch of jersey across the back; maybe a fold of floral cloth across the buttocks. But mostly just skin, skin the violaceous black of death that is days old.

  That was all she could take in for now. She turned and slithered back down to the ditch. The smell of death faded into the general dump smell, but the image of the body stayed with her. She waded into the ditch. Police. The word lit up her mind again like a neon sign but now with its real meaning: So now you have an excuse to talk to Han. And why should you need an excuse to talk to the man who s been your lover and your best friend for a year? Just because his wife’s come back, and no way in hell are you going to let him know how that hurts? Damn. Damn.

  She forded the ditch and went over to the Bobcat.

  “Is your radio a two-way transmitter?”

  The man smiled and lifted one earphone away from his head. “There is music only.” Ann could hear it: distant, vaguely Hawaiian, the Muzak of the Pacific. She looked back at the site. The dump stack hid the body.

  She said, “The body of a dead person is there.” Samoan has n
o equivalent for corpse, no word that isolates the dead from the living. “I go for the police.”

  The man’s face went slack with terror. Not of the police, Ann knew. In Samoa, the spirits of the dead don’t have much room to get on with whatever being dead is about, and they cause the living a lot of trouble. And this was going to be one seriously pissed-off ghost.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lieutenant Han was making tea in his new office, a screened porch in the upper back corner of the police station building, and listening to an old recording of Richard Burton as Hamlet: words, words, words. From here, he could just see down the alley between the station and the jail to the bay and the green wall of mountain behind it. The water glimmered like polished abalone shell, aquamarine and teal, emerald, olive, steel. It was a moment of rare peace in his usual day, and he savored it.

  A leggy, dark-skinned girl trotted across Han’s line of vision, kilting a length of floral cloth around her as if she didn’t care much what went uncovered in the process, and disappeared into the fortress-like arcade that fronted the station building. Han recognized her: a bar girl from The Frigate, AKA, the Gooney Bird. The Gooney Bird stood two doors over from the jail and the police station, sharing the cobbled street that edged the Fagatogo village green. Proximity to the village green, the sacred and ceremonial heart of a Samoan village, was a privilege unimaginable in traditional Samoan society for any of these establishments, mainly because traditional Samoa had no place for either professional sex or a professional police force. So they shared a certain sisterhood. And central Fagatogo hadn’t looked much like a traditional village green for a very long time.

  Being at once curious and also Acting Chief of Police while his boss was away in Honolulu, Han took his tea and went downstairs. Most of what happened at the station happened in the big room that was the bay side of the ground floor. As Han entered from the back hall, the bar girl, a handsome young officer in the grey shirt and black shorts of the police uniform, and then two more uniformed officers the size of small buildings, filed out the front door. Han followed them.

  He could hear the shouting now. A tall, red-faced, red-bearded man stood in the street in front of the bar, yelling for someone to open up. Han nodded to the first officer, set his mug on a windowsill, and started across the green. Collaring drunks was not his usual morning chore, but this crew was special. In the week since the seventy-foot Baltic schooner had anchored in Pago Bay, the three male members of the yacht’s crew had not killed anyone, but that was a miracle. The big sailor saw him coming. Han was in uniform. And how many Korean cops are there in Samoa? The whole crew knew damned well who he was by now.

  “If I wish to drink,” the sailor shouted, “I will drink. You cannot stop me.” This one was a head taller than Han and built like an ox. Beads braided into his beard clattered as he swayed.

  “This is true,” Han said, stopping just short of lunging distance if the sailor went for him. “And you could probably do some damage to the two officers behind you “ The man lurched, taking in the two who had come around the tavern building. Unlike the officers who would have been with Han at home in San Francisco, they were armed only with their own bulk and a certain glint in their eyes. Some of that glint was traditional Samoan male group behavior, and some was the bruises from a week of dealing with this particular group of drunks. “…But you see all these young men turning up? They’re not coming to defend you.” Han could count seven without moving his head. Others would be gathering behind him, seeing the confrontation, changing the direction of whatever errand they were on, trotting across the green. His third officer, he knew, was behind him, keeping an eye on the assembling mob. They were getting good at this. They had practice. “Nothing Samoans like better than a good fight.”

  “Yah, well,” the sailor said, “I like a good fight too.”

  “I know,” Han said. “But the Samoan idea of fair odds is about twenty to one.

  Another tall, blond, sunburned European appeared on the Gooney Bird’s verandah, carrying two cases of beer. Like the first one, he was bearded and wore khaki shorts and a T-shirt, but he wasn’t part of the Baltic schooner’s crew. He set his boxes on the porch floor.

  “Ay, mate.” The new one’s accent was also European but steel-tempered Southern Hemisphere: New Zealand, maybe, or Aussie. The big friendly grin didn’t quite reach the cold blue eyes. “Share mine with you: too bloody hot to fight.” _

  “He is not that big.”

  “Yeah, but he’s a copper. S’like putting a brick on the scale. Come on, gimme a hand w’ this lot. I’ve got a car. Take y’ back to the dock.”

  For a moment, Han could read the drunk’s furry face: shrug off the newcomer, launch himself at Han. Do it, Han thought, please God. And then I will nail your ass to the wall. He hated bullies. And he worked very hard not to be one. But there are moments, please, God, that people hand you on a plate.

  Maybe the man read Han’s face. Suddenly, the tension was gone, and the two sailors were loading their crates into the back of a new red Toyota short-bed pickup parked just beyond the bar. Then they motored sedately across behind the courthouse and out the far end of the village toward Nozaki’s dock. The officers with Han grinned and shrugged and, at his nod, headed back to the station.

  Han didn’t follow them. He stood, hands in the back pockets of his shorts, easing his shoulders, looking across the green towards the bay. At ground level, the view was blocked by the legislature building, a sprawling blend of traditional Samoan house and modern building materials, and by stacks of rusting ships containers. But beyond them, across the bay, Mount Pioa, The Rainmaker, rose into the sky, strings of white cloud caught against its square top. The air was wet and hot in the morning sun, something to bathe in rather than breathe. Everything that Han could see was dappled with mold or rust, grubby, decaying, threadbare, trash-strewn. Marginal places attract marginal people. That you? As he did most mornings, he wondered how he was going to get through another day in Samoa without finding one of the island’s few guns, putting the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger. But survival gets to be a habit. Maybe that’s how he had ended up in a place where people usually forgot to load the guns.

  “Hel-lo! Captain!” Han looked around. Samoan didn’t seem to have a word for lieutenant. Three of the Gooney Bird’s girls now sat on its concrete veranda, bare legs hanging down, their short skirts roofing dark tunnels up between their thighs. They were slicing and eating mangos and throwing the peels and the big flat hairy seeds into the street. “Want eat mango?”

  Want eat was about as far as Han’s Samoan went. But because the Gooney Bird’s girls didn’t exist in traditional Samoan society, they heard all kinds of things that they weren’t supposed to. Just like the walls that didn’t exist in traditional Samoan houses. He walked over. One of the girls handed him a slab of mango, cross-hatched and the peel everted so that the fruit stood out in neat rows.

  Han said, “So, who’s the Kiwi with the pick-up?”

  Two of the girls were Samoan: copper skin, long, black wavy hair twisted into a tight knot on the back of the head. The third was Fijian, darker skinned, taller, her face coarser than the Samoan girls, hair cropped into an Afro of tight curls.

  She was the one who had come to the station. All three grinned at him, legs swinging.

  “Not Kiwi,” the Fijian girl said, handing down another slab of mango. “Doctor.” Giggling overtook the other two, and they spoke quickly. The Fijian girl looked at them and laughed and looked back to Han. “South Africa,” she said, her voice husky, her tongue not really able to cope with th or r, so that what Han heard was Sout-A-fi-ka. He grunted. The national origin was unique, but the profession wasn’t. Probably twenty percent of off-islanders worked for the Territory’s health care system. “He drinks with Dr. Tuiasosopo.” Welly Tuiasosopo was a Samoan surgeon and a good friend. But, like the Gooney Bird, he attracted trouble,
so being in his company wasn’t always helpful. Scowling, the Fijian girl went on. “You make boat girls go.” The invasion party from the Baltic schooner included camp followers: two Hawaiian-Chinese girls straight off a Gauguin canvas and a pouty, overweight blond who looked like a suburban princess after one too many pills.

  Han grinned. “Competition, eh?”

  “Where are their families?” Like yours, Han thought, Somewhere else. But the boat floozies were listed on the boat’s papers as tourism staff, and they were old enough to serve liquor. On the other hand, Han also had a daughter. She was barely two, but that was irrelevant.

  The Fijian girl pointed. “You see? Poor Birdman!”

  Beyond the legislature building and the courthouse, the shore road widened into an unofficial terminus for the island’s unofficial public transport system, family pick-ups converted to jitneys with benches in the back and awnings or makeshift roofs to keep out the rain. A young white man—the ubiquitous local term was palagi—stood there with a day-pack at his feet. Medium height, thin, shoulders held square, like a soldier or a dancer, pale brown beard. Like the sailors, he wore the palagi uniform, T-shirt and shorts, with hiking boots and a bush hat. His right hand was swathed in a dressing. One of the Hawaiian boat girls stood facing him, long black hair snaking down to the backs of her long bare brown legs. She handed him something. He held it briefly, but the girl snatched it back and tossed it into the weeds beside the road. She bent for the man’s pack, but he jerked it up and swung it over one shoulder. Then, as if apologizing, he nodded towards a little tuck shop down the road.

  “You see. No good. Maybe eat at Mickey D.” One of the others said eat Miti. All three tittered like starlings, looking at Han sidelong to see if he’d gotten the joke. Miti was the Gooney Bird’s bartender. The Birdman was a biologist, Han knew, called Green or Black, some color anyway, doing post-doc work in the islands and helping Welly Tuiasosopo’s family with their rainforest eco-tourism project. This same project had given Han’s Japanese wife a pretext for coming back to Samoa. But at least coming back to Samoa with his daughter. Which, given Japanese child custody laws (not to mention the Japanese aversion to Koreans in general and, presumably, a Korean-American cop in particular) was about Han’s only hope for having any part in raising his child.