Birds in Paradise

Part 14

Blakely and another uniformed officer were waiting for us outside Mr. Fu's house.

"Told you she was lying to us," Blakely hissed as I passed by him toward the front door.

"Can they wait outside?" I asked Pete, purposefully ignoring Blakely and his sour-faced buddy, Officer Grant.

"No," Pete and Blakely answered in unison.

"If Fu is dangerous, we'll need the backup," Pete said, though he didn't sound as if he believed a word of it. His brows were still knitted, a telling sign that he was just as puzzled about things as I was. The evidence so far added up all wrong. Mr. Fu was behind both the women's disappearances and the attempts on my life? True, he was the one who'd been interviewing new prostitutes. He was the one who had suddenly changed his behavior, refusing to see me. And he apparently had sent the man in the white hat to stab me.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to think of Mr. Fu as a killer...or a kidnapper. Although, if his reputation was to be believed, he could very well be both.

By the time we reached the front door, Mr. Fu's stoop was crowded with testosterone and police-styled grandstanding. I had to physically push my way past Blakely and Grant in order to stand next to Pete when he rapped his fist on the red and gold painted wooden door. When Fu's ancient housekeeper opened the door Pete had his badge out.

"He not here," the housekeeper rasped before anyone had a chance to demand anything.

"Are you sure he isn't dead?" I asked her for a second time, feeling slightly alarmed.

"Not dead. Just not here," she said, a sly smile pulling tight her wrinkled lips.

"Please don't make me go through the trouble of getting a warrant, grandmother," Pete said, his voice deceptively pleasant. His white teeth flashed in sharp contrast to his dark skin. And he suddenly looked like a beautiful savage, the idealized kind that might have fallen out of some fifty-year-old Hollywood movie set on the islands.

"A warrant, huh? Might as well come inside," the housekeeper said. Her yellowed, watery eyes shifted to me. "She stay put out here."

"No," Pete said, his voice growing even softer, "she stays with me."

The housekeeper mumbled something under her breath and moved away from the door. Pete took hold of my arm as we followed the old woman into the house's dark interior. All the shades had been drawn, and the overhead lights were turned off. The housekeeper moved quickly down a narrow hallway. It was a good thing that we could hear the clapping of her sandals on the bamboo floor or she might have gotten away from us.

We followed her into a cramped room that was nearly as dark as the hallway. A dim light burned on a bedside table. It shed a little light on the crumpled lump of skin and red silk pajamas in the middle of a large hand-turned teak bed.

"We need to see Mr. Fu," I told his housekeeper, thinking that this was another game she was playing.

"That him," she said with a dismissive wave in the direction of the bed. She then plopped down in a chair beside the bed, practically disappearing into the shadows.

"Mr. Fu?" I couldn't make sense of what my eyes were showing me. Sure, he was an old man. For all I knew, he'd lived in this house in the middle of what was now a bustling industrial area for as long as there had been an island. But old—heck, even ancient didn't describe the man who was currently sinking into the mattress of the large bed. Wasting away, fading from life might be more appropriate for what I saw, but only if imagined in the most extreme condition.

Ashy gray skin hung loose on his bones. His healthy cheeks had completely disappeared into the deep shadows under his eyes. And his long, narrow Fu Manchu mustache was grizzled and tangled.