Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 10 — January 1939)

Jake and Jill by Steve Fisher

A weirdly assorted pair prove murder’s no accident in Hawaii.

The man who came into the Honolulu Police morgue was very small, and he wore baggy trousers, and a loose, open coat; you could see his pink shirt under the coat, and that he didn’t wear any tie. The suit looked as though he didn’t have much faith in cleaners and pressers. But the thing you noticed most about the man was that his head was completely nude and round; and on his monkeyish face there were huge, thick eyebrows. The eyebrows were so big and thick you might have got the idea they made up for the naked pate of his head.

A woman came in with the man, and she was his exact opposite. She was a head taller than he; and she was finely dressed in white tropic linen. Though she must have been in her fifties, her gray hair was done up in the latest Parisian coiffure, and she wore strapped to her jacket a lorgnette. She was prim and dignified. She looked extremely social, which she was. Her social asset was definitely established with the fact that she had inherited a vast fortune many years ago. Despite her eccentricities she’d had the good sense to hang onto her money.

Both she and the man were glancing toward the naked corpse of a girl on the slab across the room; they didn’t pay much attention to the coroner who sat at the door, puffing on a pipe.

“Hello, Jake,” said the coroner.

Jake lifted his heavy eyebrows. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, Miss Conway,” the coroner continued.

Jill Conway nodded. “Good morning, good morning,” she said.

Jake walked over to the corpse, and Jill Conway, fumbling with a notebook, followed him.

The corpse of the girl was a little crushed around the hips, and the back spread out, and you could see two ribs sticking through the flesh. But she had been a pretty girl. Her hair was reddish, and her face, though coarse, was nice. She’d had thick lips, and big eyes.

Jake addressed Jill. “Now this girl,” he said, “she was a Portugee; but she lived in the Islands so long among the Chinks and the Hawaiians and the Filipinos, she was what you call a White Kanaka.” He glanced back at the corpse; then he looked over at the coroner. “Will you please cover Rosy up,” he said. “The idea of subjecting Miss Conway to such nudity!”

The coroner hurriedly threw a sheet across the body. Just the feet stuck out.

Jill was making notes.

“What are you writing?” said Jake.

Jill lifted her lorgnette and glanced down. “I was writing that the corpse has dirty feet.”

“Now, why in the hell do you want to write that?”

“Why it might be an interesting thing,” Jill said, “you never know.”

“Well, it won’t be an interesting thing,” Jake said, “because this is just a corpse; and there wasn’t no murder, or anything like that. I was trying to tell you about it, but you gotta write about her feet. Anyway, all these Island girls are pretty careless. Sometimes I’m sorry I contracted to take you around with me during my day-time hours. You pay me good money, I ain’t kicking about that; but I was perfectly happy before, just being house dick in the Hell Acre Hotel. I was doing all right, then you gotta come down and offer me so much dough to conduct you through my cases that I can’t turn it down. As I say, sometimes I’m sorry.”

Jill Conway was properly humbled, for she was in mortal fear that the grumbling Jake Sutton would one day refuse to take her with him on his investigations, and then she would never get finished her notes on the book which for two years she had been planning.

The book was to be her gift to humanity, a treatise, entitled: “The Grim Aspects of Island Crime.” She so far had nothing but notes; but way back when she first decided to write it, she contacted Jake. He was house detective in the largest and most run-down hotel in Honolulu. It sat on the edge of Hell’s Half Acre, the squalor hole of the world, where, as Jake said, “Things happen.”

Jill was well convinced that Jake could do without the money she paid him, for twice in the past two years, each time after a political shake-up, he had turned down the job of Homicide Chief of the city.

“I kind of like it where I am,” he’d said. “I come and go as I please; and if I feel like looking into a case I do, and if I don’t I just forget about it, and nobody in Hell’s Half Acre has anything to say.”

Jill had long ago decided that Jake Sutton would be the main subject of her book, if and when it was ever written. She was beginning to suspect that she enjoyed this life of moving around where there was danger and murder better than she would the idea of sitting down to write about it.

“Now this girl,” Jake went on, “the police have it all down on the books, and there ain’t nothing else to do about it. I just brought you here because there ain’t nothing else happening today.”

“What happened to the poor creature?” Jill asked.

“Why this Rosy,” Jake said, “she was a taxi dance dame. You know how those kind are by now. They work at the Rizal; or at that Gook joint across the street, and they work so hard, and dance so much, they get tight almost every night. It seems that last night Rosy got good and swacked; right up to the ears. Then she came home. She was walking peacefully along on the fourth floor of Hell Acre Hotel, only she was kind of blind drunk, and instead of turning left from the balcony and going into her room, she turned right.”

Every floor of Honolulu hotels are skirted with outside balconies; there is no hallway.

“Go on,” said Jill, “she turned right.”

“Well, that’s all,” said Jake. “She turned to the right and went through the banister and fell four stories and got killed. The wood’s kind of rotten, and the banister is very weak. Well, it’s not weak now, it’s just not there. Rosy took it with her when she fell. She fell kind of straight and she landed on her—” He paused, lifted his shaggy eyebrows. “She landed sitting down, if you know what I mean.”

“And that’s all?” asked Jill. “Nobody’s going to do anything about it?”

“What can anybody do? It was an accident, and that’s all. She wasn’t important, so the cops ain’t breaking their necks to find out much more. They figure I’ll make the routine examination and turn in my report which is required of the hotel; I guess they figure I can do it as well as they can. Sometimes I think the cops are lazy; but don’t tell nobody that because they might libel me.”

“Maybe it was murder,” said Jill. “If it was it would make a very good chapter in my book. I would call it ‘The Corpse with Dirty Feet’.”

“Yeah; but it wasn’t murder,” said Jake. “It was just that Rosy got drunk and went right instead of left.” He scratched his bald head as though something was biting him. Jill winced at this. She squirmed a little herself and straightened her jacket. “But you can tag along while I make the check-up on the details,” he concluded.

“That means,” said Jill, “you think and hope this is murder just as much as I do. Else you wouldn’t take me. You don’t fool me at all.”

Jake was scratching his leg; he didn’t say anything.

Jake and Jill stood on the sidewalk out in front of the only theater in Honolulu which featured high-class vaudeville; most people in the Islands didn’t know that vaudeville was out of date, and they thought these stage acts were quite a thing. Jake and Jill were a sight: Jake with his baggy coat open showing his pink, tieless shirt; and Jill a head taller, all dressed up like a rich tourist. She wasn’t a tourist, she was an old resident.

“I’ll tell you why we’re here,” said Jake, “it was just a little idea of my own. There’s a guy in here that’s got an act. He does imitations and all that. He was on an amateur hour once in New York and, when he imitated Garbo and Sophie Tucker, people thought he was almost as good as Shiela Barrett. The thing is, he’s Hawaiian; started out by touring the States in an Hawaiian string trio. These Hawaiians, they’ve got high voices when they sing; they can hit notes like a woman does, and he found out he could imitate everybody he’d ever seen on the screen, so he broke away and got his own act. It’s a pretty good act and he finishes it by doing a yodel.”

“But what has that to do with Rosy?” Jill asked.

“Well, I saw this guy at the hotel a few times; he was always with Rosy. I thought that was kind of screwy, because once these Kanaka boys get in the dough, and they come back to the old home town, they try to pretend like they never saw Hell’s Half Acre, and don’t even know it exists. They get maybe a thousand or ten thousand in the bank and they think they’re rich, and they want to live at the good hotels; and they don’t want to know nobody they knew back in the old days when they was eating poi and were glad to get it.”

“And you saw this boy down at the hotel?”

Jake scratched his chin. “Yeah, and with Rosy. That’s the thing. Because this guy — he calls himself Prince Kalemi now — he’s married to a Spanish dancer that’s in an act here at the theater. She does an adagio with a Russian. Kind of a good looking number, I’d say she was. Kind of—”

A huge, handsome Hawaiian emerged suddenly from the little side door that, was next to the theater’s foyer. He was carrying sheet music under his arm. He was six feet, and he had kinky hair, which was plastered back; his eyes were brown and very large. From the cut of his high-waisted gray trousers, and his Hollywood pleated coat, you could see he didn’t want anybody to mistake him for a beach boy.

“Prince Kalemi,” said Jake.

“I heard you wanted to see me,” Kalemi said, coming up; he had a deep, husky voice. It was smooth and studied.

“Yeah,” said Jake. “I wanted to know what you were doing hanging around with Rose?”

Kalemi’s eyes flickered. He spoke softly. “I read of her death in this morning’s paper. I was awfully sorry. I used to be married to Rosy. About six years ago, that was. Naturally, when I finally arrived back in the Islands for this engagement, I went down to see her. That was how I happened to be in the hotel.”

Prince Kalemi’s reply was so smooth and convincing that Jake floundered for another question.

Jill said, “You had correspondence with Rose all those six years, young man?”

“Why, no ma’am; of course not.”

“Then how did you know where she lived?”

Kalemi looked tolerant. “I got in touch with friends at the Rizal dance hall. They told me. Rosy was a taxi dance girl then, too.”

Jake finally revived himself. “You’re married now, Kalemi? A nice little number, I hear.”

“Thank you,” said the Hawaiian. “Yes, it is true; and I know you are happy for me.”

“Indeed we are,” said Jill, gradually being impressed with the Adonis build of the brute.

Jake glared at her.

When Prince Kalemi had gone, Jake said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll take a walk over to the city hall; then we’ll go back to the hotel. There was a sailor that Rosy was in love with, and he’ll be there. Rosy roomed with another taxi dance girl. We’ll talk to her too. Just routine stuff, of course. You can come if you want to.”

“This city hall business,” Jill said. “You must have an idea.”

Jake didn’t say anything.

It was five o’clock, and the sun was very hot still. Jake and Jill had been asking questions of the people in Hell Acre Hotel, and now they were walking along the fourth floor balcony where there was no rail, because Rosy had taken the whole side of the place with her when she plunged. Jake knocked on the door of the room in which Rosy had once lived.

A tall, thin girl opened the door. She was garbed in a print dress, and wore no stockings. She was half-Hawaiian, and her legs and arms were very brown; her face looked better because she wore a lot of rouge to play down the thickness of her lips. She had warm eyes, but they looked kind of tired.

“This is Gertrude,” Jake said. “She and Rosy were friends. Anyway, they saved rent by living in the same room.”

“Yeah, that’s what we did,” said Gertrude.

Jake and Jill entered. There was a sailor in the room, sitting on a day cot looking at funny papers. He glanced up now. He was fairly handsome; but he hadn’t shaven today. He wore whites, and they were fresh and clean. He had short-clipped black hair; and on his arm there was the rate of yeoman.

“This is Barney,” said Jake. “He was Rosy’s boy friend.”

“That I was,” Barney said, “and I think it’s a stinking shame this hotel can’t have strong enough guard rails to hold people when they get crocked. By Gawd, if I was married to Rosy and had some legal right, I’d sue the pants off this joint.”

Jake scratched his bald head, and lifted his shaggy eyebrows. Jill was regarding the pair through her lorgnette.

Gertrude pointed at it. “You know,” she said, “I always wanted one of those hinkeys.”

Jake sat down. He had turned a chair around. “Well,” he said, “I came about Rosy’s death, and let’s get all the dispositions of you people over with it. It’s like this: I think maybe it’s murder. And I’ve never been wrong yet. I thought I might as well tell you.”

“Murder!” snapped Barney.

“That’s just what he said,” Jill echoed. She had her notebook out and was writing in it.

“What you writing?” asked Jake.

Jill looked up. “There’s no wall paper on the wall; and I saw a cockroach.”

“Well, look under the bed sheets,” Jake replied, “you’ll probably see more than that.” He turned to Barney. “Now look, gob. I’ve been around; I’ve seen a few yeomen and radiomen and guys that worked in navy post offices taken in. All the time they catch up with guys and arrest them — espionage charges, mostly. Some enlisted man selling stuff that comes his way at ten bucks a crack. Just little cases, but—”

Barney leapt to his feet. “Are you accusing me?”

“No, I’m not,” said Jake, “I’m just considering possibilities, that’s all I’m doing. What kind of a yeoman are you?”

“Communications.”

“Well, that’s all the better. You’re usually hanging around Rosy. Where were you last night?”

“I went swimming up near Wailupe. Night swimming.”

“Why weren’t you with your girl?”

“She has to work; but there’s no sense of me dancing every night just because she has to.”

“You went swimming by yourself?”

Barney nodded.

Jill glanced over. “As you always say, Jake: It has the odor of an alibi.”

Jake said, “Well, we’ll have to let it pass for right now; but if Barney was fooling around with navy communications, and Rosy was going to spill her guts...” He turned to Gertrude. “How about you, sweetheart? What time’d you get in?”

“About twelve; I was sick.”

“You mean drunk?”

“Call it what you want,” said Gertrude. She lit a cigarette.

“It was about one when Rosy fell off the balcony outside here. I suppose you were asleep?”

“That’s right. I was passed out cold. I didn’t know anything about it till Barney got here and woke me up and told me.”

Jill stared through her lorgnette; and Jake raised his eyebrows again. “Oh, so it’s like that. Maybe you and Barney bumped Rosy off to—”

“You’re nuts,” Gertrude spat.

“Maybe so,” Jake said, “maybe I’m nuts. But I’ll tell you, Gerty. We’ve got half a dozen witnesses here in the hotel that was awake at that time that heard you and Rosy arguing like hell at about one o’clock. You were screaming your heads off at each other. You mentioned Barney’s name several times. Right after that Rosy took the pitch to eternity. I just found out about all this half an hour ago.”

Gertrude’s face was scarlet. “It’s a stinking lie!” she screamed. “I was sound asleep. I didn’t even hear Rosy singing when she came reeling down the balcony.”

“How do you know she was singing?”

Gertrude jerked. “Somebody told me. They said she was singing ‘Frankie and Johnny.’ That’s only what they told me. But I didn’t hear her.”

Jake was on his feet. “We’ll be around to see you later. But it looks pretty bad, Gertie.”

“Get the hell out,” she snapped. “You can’t frame me on anything like this!”

Barney had left his funny papers. He was holding open the door.

Jill sniffed and swept through the portal. Jake followed along behind.

“I guess it was murder,” said Jake.

That night a nice soft, definite rain dripped across the porch of the hotel. Now and then there was a streak of lightning, and a clap of thunder. Through the downpour you could hear the sharp laughter of men and women; or angry argument; and far in the distance, though it was only half a block away, there came the brassy melody of the Rizal. Soldiers and sailors moved by in rubber coats, and girls were squealing and talking. A few automobiles swished past in the street, and the lone gas lamp shone bleakly down on them.

Through the rest of Hell’s Half Acre there was the rattle of rain on tin roofs, washing the soot from them. The original wooden roofs of the section had long ago defied repair, and they had been replaced with cheap galvanized tin.

Jill had returned to her elegant suite in the Majestic Hawaiian Apartments in the Waikiki district; but now she was back at Hell Acre Hotel. She was sitting in the chair that faced Jake’s roll-top desk. Jake was pacing up and down. He walked back and forth past an open window that was on the ground floor. You could look out through it and see as far as the little bridge over River Street, and Aala Park, where Filipinos clustered in groups under an awning; across from Aala park there were Chinese shop lights still gleaming from their windows, although the hour was late.

“I had supper,” said Jill.

“You were gone long enough to see a couple of movies,” Jake complained. Jill was writing notes. “Here I get things lined up, fool around making a thing that looks like an ancient letter — postmarked and all; and you take a powder on me. If you want to see things concluded, you should hang around.” He turned on her. “What are you writing?”

“What I had for dinner,” she said.

Jake was disgusted. “Now what good is that?”

“Well,” replied Jill, “maybe this’ll be an important night; maybe we’ll accomplish something, and it’s nice to remember little things about the evening, such as what you had for dinner. I’ll bet you don’t know what you had for dinner just three nights ago, even. That goes to show how people forget things.”

“I, for one,” said Jake, “don’t want to read your book when it’s written. If it wasn’t that I thought you might finally fall in love with me and marry me, I wouldn’t even bother with you.”

He hurried on before she could interrupt with an exclamation. “Now about Rosy. We’ve got all these people that say they heard her arguing with Gertrude. Gertrude claims she was in bed passed out. These people that heard the fight, they make what is a pretty good hunk of evidence. But I’ve got just one more idea by which we can get even more evidence, and maybe definite proof of what happened. I—”

While he was talking a large revolver lifted over the windowsill. A gloved hand held it. Its giant muzzle followed Jake as he moved up and down the room. Jake paused to scratch his knee, and Jill saw it. She screamed.

The gun went off with a bang. The bullet landed in the wall, three inches from Jill’s head.

Jake whirled around. He grabbed at the gun. In the next moment he had it by the muzzle and was whirling it around over his head. The hand at the window vanished. Jake stuck his head out the window. He tried to straighten the gun to shoot it; but rain pelted down across his bald head, and in the excitement, the heavy old revolver slipped through his fingers. It fell into the mud. Jake saw the vanishing figure; it was in white. It looked like a uniform.

While Jake was still bent out over the window, trying to cope with the figure which had now disappeared, Jill got to her feet. She opened the door of the office and ran into the lobby. There she stopped. Jake came out after her.

He looked upset. “You see? It must be murder.”

“It must be,” said Jill, chattering.

At that moment a figure in a bathrobe and bare feet moved in through the back of the hotel. It was Barney, the sailor. He didn’t look happy.

“You’re the house dick, aren’t you?”

“That I am,” said Jake.

“Well, some skunk stole my uniform. I don’t know what kind of a joint you’ve got here. But I demand you find my whites or I’ll sue you birds right up to your eyeteeth!”

“My goodness,” said Jill.

“You go back to your room,” said Jake. “I’ll instigate an investigation into the disappearance of your uniform.”

Barney moved off grumbling. He was wet from the rain. But he’d had to come down stairs which are outside; and along the balcony which was only partially protected by a sloping roof.

“Why didn’t you look and see if he’d rolled up his pants, taken off his shoes and stockings; and was just fooling us,” asked Jill. “He could have done that, and put on the bathrobe over his uniform.”

“Because,” said Jake, “I’ve got my own ideas. Though, I’ll say this: The incident involving Barney’s missing whites, it’s well—” he scratched his ear lobe. “It’s peculiar.”

“Yes,” Jill replied, “very.” Then she thought of the bullet which had barely missed her, and she began once more to chatter.

Prince Kalemi came in after his last-night performance, as Jake had requested. He looked very nice, wearing a tux, and a big blue band around his waist, like a Cuban trying to look Spanish. The only thing Hawaiian about the Adonis was a silk lei which he wore around his dusky neck. Jill looked at him and sighed. Then she remembered her age.

“Tell you why I asked you to come,” said Jake. He was wetting his fingers with his tongue, and then running the wet fingers along his eyebrows to paste them down. Kalemi’s beauty made him self-conscious. “It’s like this,” he went on. “We’re pretty sure Rosy was bumped off by Gertrude.”

He told how so many people had heard the argument just prior to the fatal fall. “Now these same people are in their same rooms. If I could have that noise all over again, and they could hear it again, we could be absolutely sure. They’d swear that they’d heard the quarrel.”

“But where do I come in?” asked Kalemi.

“Well, you do imitations. You know what these taxi dance kanakas sound like when they get fighting. If you can imitate a movie star, you could sure imitate one, or two, of these babes, because you lived here in the atmosphere so long. You just go up there on the fourth floor, and for about four minutes you sound as much as you can like Rosy and Gertrude having a fight. Do you see what I mean?”

“I do. But I don’t understand how it’s going to help any.”

“Well, maybe it won’t help so very much; but it was my idea of an experiment, and I thought you might be nice enough to help me out. After all, the dead girl was once your wife.”

Kalemi bowed. “I’m glad to.”

Jake and Jill waited on the third floor balcony, while Kalemi went up to the fourth. In a moment he launched into his act. It sounded exactly like two Kanaka girls having one hell of a row. Perhaps it was the pride Kalemi had in his profession that induced him to make the sounds hauntingly real. At any rate, there wasn’t anyone of the twelve people Take had asked to listen who could believe it was one man making all those noises like two girls.

When it was over, Jake went up to the fourth floor, and Jill followed. The rain was pouring down.

“That was fine,” said Take. “Step into Rosy’s room a minute.”

They stepped into Rosy’s room. Gertrude was sitting on the floor dead drunk. She had on Barney’s whites.

Take locked the door. Jill looked at Gertrude through her lorgnette. Prince Kalemi looked at her too.

“Poor girl,” said Jake. “These kids get hysterical when things happen. There was so much evidence against her that she had killed Rosy that she went off her nut. I guess everybody was accusing her, and like that. Anyway, she got stinking drunk. She swiped Barney’s whites, and she probably got an old, ancient gun from a hock shop. She got so plastered and hysterical she was going to kill me. The reason she took Barney’s whites from next door — while the guy was taking a nap — was so if I saw anybody running away, it’d look like a sailor.”

“You mean she was the one who shot at us?” asked Jill.

Gertrude raised her weary head. Hair tumbled down about her white face. She belched; and then she began singing. Her voice was irregular and hoarse. She sang the words: “When I was young and handsome—” and stopped. She belched again.

Prince Kalemi was impatient. “Well, have you the evidence you want?”

Take turned slowly. “Yep. Against you.”

“Me?”

“That’s right. I thought this whole thing over. I just took a chance that when Gertie said she was asleep and hadn’t done any arguing, that she was telling the truth. But it was such good evidence against Gertie I began wondering how somebody could frame her with evidence like that. Then I thought of you with those imitations. It’d be easy for you to pick up Rosy outside the Rizal, get her half crocked, then come up here and shove her off.”

“Why you fool! You can’t convict me on evidence like that!”

“I think I can,” said Jake. “You sounded very real, and a lot of people heard you. Back up all that testimony with the fact that you never bothered to get a divorce from Rosy, and you’ve got something. I know you kanakas do that all the time, so I went down to city hall to check up, and there it was. You hadn’t divorced Rosy, but you were married to this Spanish woman. You’re nuts about the Spanish girl, and you didn’t want any trouble.

“But Rosy was clever. When you came here, a big success, and all high-hat like you were, she decided she’d indulge in a little blackmail. She wanted money, and lots of it, to keep still about the information that you were a bigamist. You stood not only to lose the money, but your Spanish wife. You were kind of frantic when you got Rosy’s letter. So you came here to see her. You tried to settle it without no trouble. You tried to get her to keep her mouth shut, but it was no go.”

Kalemi had his back to the door; he was breathing hard.

“So when Miss Jill Conway asked you how you’d gotten Rosy’s address, she really had something. Because I’d just told her when you guys get a little dough you don’t know your old friends. You try to travel in a different circle. The way you got Rosy’s address was from that first letter she wrote you. And with the testimony of your little performance here tonight, and the fact that you’re married to two women; and the letter Rosy wrote you—”

Jake pulled an old-looking letter out of his pocket.

Kalemi had drawn a knife from his pocket. He snapped open the blade. But now he stared at the envelope.

“That isn’t the let—” He stopped.

“So there was a letter?” Jake snapped. “I figured it that way, that’s why I— Well, there’s witnesses that can—”

Kalemi was moving forward. “You runt, you insignificant little—” He kept coming, the knife blade pointed toward Jake’s throat. “I’m going to kill you!”

Jake was ready for Kalemi. He’d picked up a little ju jitsu in his day. But he didn’t have the chance to try it. Kalemi had walked past Jill; and now she picked up a light wicker chair and slammed it across Kalemi’s head. The Hawaiian was unhurt, but enraged. He whirled around. Jill saw the knife and screamed.

Jake grabbed Kalemi’s arm, twisted it behind him. The Hawaiian howled, and dropped the knife. Jake whirled the huge man over his shoulder. Ju jitsu at last. When Kalemi thudded to the floor, Jake was on him, putting on handcuffs.

Gertrude was drunkenly unconscious of the drama. She began once more to sing. “When I was young and handsome, it was my chief delight, to go to balls and dances...”

Jill wrote in her notes the following day:

“As I reflect back over the case of the corpse with the dirty feet, it seems to me that the most horrible thing about it was the song that Gertrude insisted upon singing; time will eventually put from my memory the thought of Prince Kalemi’s broken confession that night at the police station; and too, the noises Barney made when he found Gertrude had not only stolen his uniform but had stained it, will slip away from me. But I shall never forget that song Gertrude kept singing over and over. It haunts me. ‘When I was young and handsome...’ ”