Birds in Paradise by Dorothy McFalls Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    “Mr. Fu?” Could this be the same man who had hugged me so hard after I’d saved him that I had thought my ribs would snap?
    “My angel.” He reached out a gnarly hand toward me. “You shouldn’t be seeing me like this.”
    “I need to talk to you about the missing prostitutes,” I told him, trying to pretend that his appearance hadn’t shaken me. It was difficult, considering how my legs weren’t too steady to begin with. I had just checked out of the hospital a few hours earlier...and had been told by the doctor to spend the rest of the day in bed. And at that moment, I was on the verge of collapse.
    It wasn’t just my weakened state. The air felt smoky and moist within the closed up room thanks to a humidifier and several incense pots. The room started to spin as I struggled to breathe in the thick atmosphere. Luckily Pete grabbed my arm before I fell on my face. He led me to a second chair near the bed and deposited me there. I fought the urge to put my head between my legs as my vision swam in and out of focus. Gradually, my body adjusted to the dim light and heavy incense clogging the air.
    “I don’t know how much help I can be,” Mr. Fu said, his thready voice a weak echo of his former self. “In light of how you’ve helped me out in the past, I will talk to you and, I suppose, to your detective boyfriend.” The bed sheets rustled as he shifted in the bed. His housekeeper jumped to her feet and stuffed several pillows behind his thin back so he presented the illusion of sitting up.
    “I will talk to you,” he said again, “and to Aloha Pete, but your dirty cops will have to wait outside.”
    “Now see here—!” Blakely shouted.
    “I assure you, they are as clean as I am,” Pete said, his jaw tightening. He’d stepped between Blakely and