1 Murder on Moloka'i Read online

  Other Surfing Detective books

  by Chip Hughes

  WIPEOUT!

  KULA

  SLATE RIDGE PRESS

  P.O Box 1886

  Kailua, HI 96734

  [email protected]

  ISBN: 0982944411

  ISBN-13: 9780982944417

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9829444-0-0

  First published by Island Heritage 2004

  Slate Ridge Press edition 2011

  Murder on Moloka‘i © Chip Hughes 2004

  “The Making of Murder on Moloka‘i” © Chip Hughes 2011

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Slate Ridge Press.

  For Stu Hilt,

  Honolulu P.I.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter one: (1995 draft)

  Chapter one: (1998 draft)

  Chapter one: (1998 draft, revised)

  Chapter two: (1998 draft, revised)

  Chapter three: (1998 draft, revised)

  Chapter four: (1998 draft, revised)

  (cut from): Chapter ten

  (cut from): Chapter eleven

  (cut from): Chapter twelve

  Chapter twelve: (longer version)

  (cut from): Chapter thirteen

  (cut from): Chapter twenty-four

  (cut from): Chapter thirty-five

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my wife, Charlene Avallone, for her inspiration and editorial instinct, and to my mother, Kathryn Cooley Hughes, and to Stu Hilt for generously sharing his forty years’ experience as a Honolulu P.I.

  Specialist editors who assisted include Ku‘ualoha Ho‘omanawanui and Puhi Adams, Hawaiian language and culture; Rodney Morales, pidgin dialect; Scott Burlington, Hawaiian spellings and place names; Steve and Donna Curry, surfing scenes; Peter Read Smith, Big Island topography; Dr. Max B. Smith, mule behavior; Karen Roeller and Dr. Bani H. Win, medical examiner’s procedures, Dr. Randy Baselt, blood work.

  Thanks to Lorna Hershinow, Laurie Tomchak, and my Mānoa writing group: LaRene Despain, John Griffin, Linda Walters-Page, Sue Cowing, and Felix Smith. And to Buddy Bess, Bennett Hymer, Roger Jellinek, Eden-Lee Murray, and Ian MacMillan for their help; and to virtuoso with piano and pen, Les Peetz.

  Special thanks to John Michener at Mediaspring for the Surfing Detective website, and to Island Heritage CEO Dale Madden and Art Director Scott Kaneshiro for the series logo and cover art.

  Finally, a big mahalo to my invaluable editor Kirsten Whatley.

  ‘A ‘ole kānā wai ma kēia wahi.

  In this place there is no law.

  one

  “Mr. Cooke?” The throaty voice came through my office door in deep, honeyed tones that told me this was a woman I wanted to meet.

  “Be right there.” I slipped on some holey Levi’s over my wet skin and groped in vain for a T-shirt, cursing myself for having gone surfing so close to a client appointment.

  I opened the door to a tall, slim woman in her mid-twenties with chestnut hair and eyes the cool blue-grey of a glacier. Tommy Woo, my attorney, who had referred her, was right. I was “damn glad” this woman had come to see me, even if all I could remember was that she lived in Boston.

  “Mr. Cooke … ?” She asked again in those rich tones, her brow furrowing as her eyes fell on the crescent of pink welts on my chest. Tiger shark. Laniākea.

  She turned away.

  I wrapped my damp beach towel around my shoulders. “Sorry, I … lost my shirt.”

  “I’m looking for Mr. Cooke, the private detective.” She tried again.

  “You are Miss … ?”

  “Ridgely. Adrienne Ridgely.”

  I gestured to the Naugahyde chair by my desk and she sat. Her fruity perfume soon replaced the sharp odors wafting up from Maunakea Street below.

  “I’m Mr. Cooke. Call me Kai.”

  She surveyed my soaked board shorts atop an expanding puddle of sea water on the dusty linoleum and then said without much conviction, “Mr. Woo told me you are the best detective in Honolulu.”

  “That was generous of him.” I glanced down at my towel. “The reason I’m dressed this way is …”

  She cut me off. “Nothing but the best for Sara. That’s what I told Mr. Woo.”

  “And Sara is … ?”

  “My sister.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about her.” I pulled a yellow legal pad from the jumble on my desk and found a pen.

  “We were very close.” Adrienne blinked her cool grey eyes and I wondered if she were about to cry. “Sara was the best sister I could ever have.”

  I jotted on the legal pad.

  “She was always good to Mother and Father when they were alive. And she was good to me. She left me everything.”

  “She must have been a fine person.”

  “Sara was an attorney, you know.” Adrienne said this as if I should know. “And a gifted teacher. And then there were her causes. She gave unselfishly to those causes.”

  “What happened to your sister?”

  From a Louis Vuitton handbag of soft calf’s leather she pulled a tissue. “Sara was only thirty-two.”

  “When she died?”

  “Yes, in that horrible way.” She worked the tissue with her fingers. “She fell off a cliff …”

  I jotted on my pad.

  “From a mule,” she said.

  “On Moloka‘i?” Her story was beginning to sound familiar.

  “Yes, they said it was an accident. But from the beginning I had my doubts.”

  “I remember now. I read a tribute to your sister in the Advertiser a while back.”

  Sara Ridgely-Parke had had a freak accident on Moloka‘i. Ascending the switchback trail above the former leper colony at Kalaupapa, her mule had stumbled and catapulted her down the face of a thousand-foot cliff. She had been killed instantly.

  The newspaper had called the Harvard-trained attorney an “ecofeminist” committed to preserving the ‘āina, as Hawaiians call the land. I had seen her once in action at a rally to save a pristine surfing spot called Coconut Beach from a proposed strip mall. The fiery, strawberry-haired woman had galvanized me–and the crowd.

  “Sara Ridgely-Parke.” I jotted her name on my yellow pad. “So you want me to investigate the mule tour company?”

  “No.” Her voice lowered. “I have no intention of suing the tour company.”

  “Then why did Tommy send you?”

  “I’m not here about money. I want justice.”

  I nodded, unsure ho
w to reply.

  “Sara was the first person ever to die on the Moloka‘i mule tour. But she was no novice. We used to ride horses together in Brookline.”

  “Her experience with horses probably didn’t matter,’ I said. “There’s nothing to riding a mule. You just sit there and the animal does the rest.”

  “Sara wouldn’t fall from a mule,” she insisted. “Anyway, I’m told those surefooted animals rarely stumble.”

  “Didn’t the newspaper say the mule broke its leg?”

  “I don’t believe it.” Adrienne fixed her teary eyes on me. “My sister was murdered.”

  “Murdered? By who?” I was starting to think she had an overactive imagination.

  “Her ex-husband. J. Gregory Parke.”

  “Why would her ex want to kill her?”

  “Sara received half of their home in the divorce.” She daubed away a tear. “It’s an oceanfront estate in Kāhala. Worth a fortune. Greg wouldn’t part with the place, so he had to pay her off.”

  “How much did she get?”

  “After lawyers’ fees, about four million.”

  “Parke had that kind of cash?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a developer.”

  “Your environmentalist sister married a developer? That’s hard to imagine.”

  “I never understood what she saw in him. We didn’t always have such different taste in men.”

  “So you think Parke was so angry after forking out all that money that he killed your sister?”

  “Yes.” Her lower lip quivered.

  “Do you have any evidence?” I was sympathetic, but still skeptical.

  “Greg abused her during their marriage. It all came out in the hearing. And after the divorce he wouldn’t leave her alone. I think he finally just boiled over.”

  “Wait a minute.” I stopped writing on my pad. “Your sister fell from a mule on Moloka‘i. How could Parke have been responsible?”

  “I don’t know.” She crushed her damp tissue into a little ball. “I just know he was.”

  “Was Parke on Moloka‘i when the accident happened?”

  “That’s why I’m hiring you. To find out.”

  “I’ll have to fly to Moloka‘i. My regular hourly rate, plus three hundred a day for neighbor island travel.”

  “Cost doesn’t matter. I’m doing this for Sara.”

  “O.K. I’ll start with the tour company, then check out the accident scene and interview witnesses. After that I can give you a better idea if you have a case. For the initial investigation I’ll need a two thousand dollar retainer.”

  She didn’t even blink, just pulled out her checkbook. Her tears were gone now. “Will my Boston check be all right?”

  “Sure. Where are you staying?”

  “The Halekūlani.”

  “Can I give you a lift back to Waikīkī?”

  Her blue-grey eyes took on a touch of frost. “My cab is waiting in the alley behind the flower shop.” She was referring to Fujiyama’s Flower Leis, on the ground floor below my office.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I have anything to report,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “And here’s my card.”

  She glanced at the sand-toned card that said “Surfing Detective” and “Confidential Investigations–All Islands.” Above these words was a full-color longboard rider with toes on the nose: back gracefully arched, knees bent slightly, arms outstretched like wings, turquoise wave curling over board and surfer alike. A thing of beauty.

  Unfortunately, my card failed to make much of an impression on her. Her expression didn’t change.

  “You might be surprised by the crank calls I get.” I tried to lighten the moment. “Just the other day this wacko phones for Jack Lord. ‘Book ‘em, Danno!’ the guy says, delusional from watching reruns of ‘Hawaii Five-O,’ I guess.”

  “Interesting.” Adrienne rose and edged toward the door.

  “And then a few weeks back,” I continued, on a roll now, “some woman with a breathy voice whispers into my phone, ‘Thomas Magnum?’ Before I can break the news that her heartthrob Tom Selleck left the islands, she hangs up. Crazy, huh?”

  “Call me if you need more money.” Adrienne abruptly stepped from my office. I watched her silky dress sway like an undulating wave as she glided down the stairs.

  A moment later I gazed down onto Maunakea Street and saw a taxi pull in front of the flower shop. Adrienne climbed in and glanced up at me with those cool eyes.

  Suddenly I felt a rare chill in the tropic air.

  two

  Later that day I flew to Moloka‘i. It was Wednesday and turbulent for early October. Squeezed into a propeller-driven Twin-Otter airplane, slightly larger than my car, I had my first leisure to think about the bizarre events that had sent me on this impromptu jaunt.

  So far there were only questions and none of them added up to what I’d call a case. Instead, there was a death by falling from a mule, which could be nothing more than an accident. But the victim’s sister was crying murder. And she had pointed the finger at Sara’s ex-husband–J. Gregory Parke. This seemed unlikely. Unless media accounts of the accident had been totally wrong.

  Was I bound for Moloka‘i on a fool’s errand? Maybe. But at least I was getting paid.

  I tried to get comfortable in my tiny seat and opened up the afternoon Star-Bulletin. On the front page of the business section was an artist’s sketch of a proposed Moloka‘i resort called Kalaupapa Cliffs. Brainchild of Umbro Zia, a shadowy Indonesian developer, and the islands’ largest private landholder, Chancellor Trust, Kalaupapa Cliffs promised to loom grand and blindingly white. It resembled an art deco Taj Mahal with marble spas and meandering pools and hundreds of ocean-view suites–another luxury palace for the super rich.

  Evidently, a technicality concerning the building site was holding up construction. Its fate awaited a vote of the Land Zoning Board. Considering the clout of the Chancellor Trust, the outcome was hardly in doubt.

  The Twin-Otter rattled along, barely above the Honolulu skyline. The Aloha Tower drifted by, then the ivory crescent of Waikīkī Beach. Longboards floated below on the turquoise sea like pastel toothpicks. Outrigger canoes etched frothy trails through the rolling surf.

  Soon we left O‘ahu behind and below us lay wind-whipped Ka‘iwi Channel–the twenty-five miles of whitecaps between O‘ahu and Moloka‘i. The tiny plane bumped along as if plowing through the choppy swells beneath us. Between jolts I folded my newspaper and took out some clippings I had gathered on the subject of my dubious case.

  The obituary photo showed Sara Ridgely-Parke to be the striking, youthful woman I remembered so vividly from the rally. Her eyes had the same flinty quality as Adrienne’s, though with an emerald tint.

  A Harvard-trained attorney who taught environmental law at the University of Hawai‘i, Sara had crusaded for affordable housing and “green” stewardship of the islands. Her greatest victory had been the Save Coconut Beach initiative, in which she and other activists saved the pristine windward surfing spot from development.

  From the news coverage at the time, I remembered that developers and conservative politicians alike despised Sara’s “ecofeminist” views. Being both an environmentalist and a feminist put her at the very radical end of the spectrum in their eyes. The article went on with lavish praise from Professor Rush McWhorter, Sara’s law school adversary and legal counsel for the Chancellor Trust. “A tragic loss to the people of Hawai‘i,” his quote read, which seemed at odds with the public rancor between the two during her life.

  Another jolt of turbulence shook the Twin-Otter. I set down the obituary and picked up a wedding clipping.

  After her Coconut Beach victory, Sara had become the darling of local environmentalists. Yet she then married developer J. Gregory Parke, a bald blimp of a man twenty years her senior, and lived with him in the ritziest neighborhood in the Hawaiian Islands.

  What an odd couple! Their contentious divorce seemed predictable given their strange conflict of i
nterests. I tucked the clips back into my briefcase and peered down at the inky whitecaps below. Sara’s short and admirable life had had its contradictions, as I suppose all lives do. But could these contradictions have any bearing on the fatal stumble of a mule?

  It was a stretch to think so. A long stretch.

  Our first sighting of Moloka‘i revealed the West End’s —pristine Pāpōhaku Beach, a three-mile ribbon of frothing surf and golden sand. One of the longest, most stunning beaches in the islands, it’s remote and often deserted. I saw not one surfer, swimmer, or sunbather.

  This dramatic beach, and most of Moloka‘i, has escaped the urban sprawl so prevalent on the other islands because residents here, primarily Hawaiian, have rallied repeatedly against unwanted development. Though jobs have been scarce since Moloka‘i’s pineapple plantations closed, forcing more and more kama‘aina to scramble for a living, few long-time residents see waikīkī-style resorts on their unspoiled island as the answer.

  The Twin-Otter angled and crossed over the island’s arid West End. From previous visits, I recognized the rugged terrain. Sloping plateaus painted the west in cocoa brown and rust red; sheer sea cliffs in the east soared in moss green. The thirty-eight-mile island pointed east like an index finger with one small irregularity–a bump on the north side where the middle knuckle would be. This knuckle was my ultimate destination: Kalaupapa. The once-infamous leper colony, now a national park, sat on a small peninsula beneath the world’s tallest sea cliffs. It was from these cliffs that Sara Ridgely-Parke had plunged.

  In Honolulu, I had obtained the medical examiner’s report on Sara’s autopsy. It offered little new information. I had also phoned the mule tour company and learned there was a log of all riders, including the four others in Sara’s party. A guide named Johnny Kaluna had agreed to walk me down the cliff trail to the site of the accident, then on to Kalaupapa. I arranged to meet him at seven thirty the next morning.

  The Twin-Otter began its bumpy descent as we passed over red dirt fields, inhabited by stunted kiawe and grazing cattle. Only one thread-thin highway, devoid of cars, gave evidence of civilization. A few other rusty side roads branched off from the highway. But I saw no vehicles there either.