Hotel Honolulu

20 Rapture

Blood is adhesive. In a hotel it is like a curse. It is a taint that never goes away. For selfish reasons I was glad that the murder of Amo Ferretti was not committed in my hotel. Murders leave a sweetly poisonous smell that lingers, and any hotel unlucky enough to be the setting for a murder ceases to be a hotel and is known only as the scene of the crime, vicious and provocative, attracting all the wrong people, photographers and thrill seekers. The hotel never gets its reputation back, even after the charade of the most elaborate and noisy purification ceremonies, the howling monks, the gongs, the firecrackers, the tossing of salt, the prayers, the expensive and conceited exorcists. We were in the clear. Yet I still wondered why Chip had not killed Amo in the hotel, and why had he killed him at all.

"Chip in shock," Keola said. I loved hearing this dim, unlettered handyman use technical terms like "nonselective blackouts" and "shortterm memory." At that moment he was cleaning the pool filter. I had approached him for the pleasure of hearing him say "I'm purging it," which meant nothing, the way "in shock" meant nothing.

Chip had committed the murder of Amo Ferretti on the windward side of the island, avenging his mother's honor. Public sympathy was with him, and Ferretti was seen as a villain. Chip was charged with murder, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of aggravated manslaughter, was

sentenced to twenty years with the possibility of parole. He could be out of Halawa Prison and back on his surfboard in five or six years if he behaved himself.

"Shock" did not explain why Chip, described as "furious," had not murdered Amo when he was naked, at his most helpless, his hairy back turned, in the act of rape. No one asked the question. Still, it seemed unusual for so much time to pass.

"They were arguing," Buddy said.

"The man raped his mother," I said. "What was there to argue about?"

Around this time I found Rose in my office looking at a dictionary. I asked her what word she was looking up.

She hesitated and then said, "Rapture."

Her innocent literal-mindedness made her a bad liar. Why had she concealed from me the real word she had searched for and found on that same page? The word "rape" was all over the hotel.

Trey, the assistant barman, told me that Amo and Madam Ma had had lunch and that Chip had not been present. The rape had occurred after lunch. Chip had surprised Amo in the act and then left the hotel the way he had come. In the earlier version of the story he had been chasing Amo, but the kitchen staff said he left alone and that Amo had left later. Why had they left separately, and why no chase? Our phone records showed that

Madam Ma had reported the rape later that evening. She had also called Ferretti's wife, whom she knew, looking for Chip.

"There was a beef. They was fighting," the woman said. "Your kid went off on my husband. They left, I don't know where."

Instead of looking for her son, Madam Ma went to Honolulu Police headquarters and filed a complaint, reporting in detail that Amo Ferretti had raped her, that her son had stumbled upon the crime, and that Ferretti had threatened to kill him.

There were discrepancies in the exact times, but certain facts were not in dispute: Chip had been to the hotel, seen the rape, and left; Amo had been seen leaving later; Madam Ma had not reported the rape until after she had spoken to Mrs. Ferretti.

"I wanted to find out where he was so the police could arrest him," Madam Ma said, explaining why she had not reported the rape earlier.

But the complaint she filed late in the evening was explicit. The time of the incident was given as 2:25 P.M. She was taken to the hospital and examined. The report was made public — "evidence of bruising in the genital area," and "traces of semen were found," and more of equally grotesque clinical descriptions on page two of the family newspaper. What vindicated the publication of these unseemly facts was that justice had been served, and the murder charge had been reduced. Even so, there was general disapproval that a son had been given any jail time at all for killing his mother's rapist.

Talk about the case finally ceased, but Madam Ma was still on my mind. As a resident of the hotel, she was visible every day. I knew her movements. She said nothing. Chip was in jail, Amo was dead, she was her old antagonistic self, writing her insincere column. If she knew anything more about the case, she wasn't saying.

Of course, the hotel staff knew everything. The Honolulu police had interviewed them, yet shrewdly they answered only the questions they were asked. In the police station they did not volunteer any information; they were unspontaneous and monosyllabic. With me they were more forthcoming, however, especially when they saw that Madam Ma had begun to order them around. Sweetie, as head of Housekeeping, supplied me with informants.

"We saw the guy Ferretti all the time on the fifth floor, and in the room," Pacita said. And Marlene, her cleaning partner, said, "If you clean someone's room, you know all about them. The wastebasket is full of secrets. The bathroom too."

Amo regularly visited Madam Ma in her room. On the days he replaced the flowers in the lobby, Amo stayed for lunch — it was part of his contract — and Madam Ma joined him. Usually they drank on her lanai afterward, and Room Service had a record of those orders. Housekeeping did the rest — disposed of the bottles, picked up the glasses — and part of performing their job was to wander the corridors, tidying, vacuuming, trying doors and entering unoccupied rooms. On the days of Amo's visits, Madam Ma's door stayed locked, with the Do Not Disturb sign hung on the

knob. Later, the Please Service This Room sign went up and the sheets were changed.

"If you make the bed, you know everything," Marlene said.

Madam Ma was one of the strongest women I had ever known. She looked birdlike but she was a bully. There was a reason for Marlene to confide in me. One day she had broken a glass in Madam Ma's bathroom. To punish her, Madam Ma insisted that Marlene pick up the bits of glass with her bare hands, and she stood over her, scolding. She hectored Rose, she nagged me, she bossed the staff. How was it possible that she had been overpowered by Amo?

Simply, she had not been. Amo was her lover. She had been in control the entire time. The staff knew every detail: how she was dressed on the afternoons when they were together, the pink negligee, the high- heeled slippers. "She looked beautiful those days." And they had games, fantasies that she scripted, that they acted out, that were audible in the adjoining rooms. After the drinking, she slipped into the bedroom to get ready, and Amo entered the bedroom from the lanai as Madam Ma admired herself in the mirror. She saw the man's menacing reflection.

Hairy Amo slipped the negligee from her shoulders, pushed her to her knees, and took her from behind. Her greatest pleasure came later, when Amo was so frenzied he ignored her pleas. He took her roughly on the floor of the room, and that was rapture. And though their endearments could be heard afterward, on the day in question they were interrupted by Chip, who drew his own conclusions and saw the lovemaking as rape.