1 Murder on Moloka'i Read online

  Leonard Souza was a scurvy looking fish with salt-n-peppa whiskers and shadowy circles under his charcoal eyes, the kind of scum you’d want to keep miles from your sister or daughter or girlfriend. Lei’s picture, autographed in her feminine teenaged hand “To Mr. & Mrs. Souza,” must have been taken at her junior prom. She wore an orchid corsage, frilly mauve dress, and an innocent smile. On her beauty-shop bun perched a rhinestone crown. Queen for a day. She was girlishly slim, with the telltale curves of a blossoming woman. Her pimple-faced boyfriend stood two inches shorter than his queen. From the nervous look in his eyes, she was obviously too much for him. Way too much.

  I looked up. Nothing doing on Souza’s boat. To stave off hunger and tedium I sucked on my favorite “crack seed,” a local delicacy. “Sweet Li Hing Mui” is a pungent, sweet-sour plum seed that puckered my lips with such intense flavor that I quickly forgot my appetite and boredom.

  Glancing again at the morning paper, I flipped to the weather page to check out the waves. Despite the confused shark at Laniākea who once mistook me for his lunch, I ride my longboard every chance I get. Surfing relieves the stresses of detective work and helps me explore the delicate balances that make up my job.

  Sherlock Holmes had his pipe–I have my surfboard. Floating on the glassy sea, scanning the blue horizon for the perfect wave, sometimes I drift into a kind of trance. Then I can disentangle the most intricate web. When my wave finally rolls in, an instinct takes over. In one fluid motion I swing my board around, stroke like the wind, and rise. Slip-sliding down the thundering cascade–perched on a thin slice of balsa and foam–I find a precarious balance.

  That’s what surfing (and my job) is all about: balance.

  The Advertiser forecast waves in Waikīkī at two to three feet. Elsewhere, a paltry flat to one. To Waikīkī I would go, once I served the affidavit on Souza.

  Then I remembered a nine o’clock appointment with a woman from Boston whose name escaped me. I don’t usually forget client names, but she had been referred during a long and rambling phone message from an attorney friend of mine.

  “Oh, Kai, Ms. So-and-so from Boston may stop by …,” Harry had said offhandedly, as if he wasn’t sure she would. Then he added cryptically: “If she shows, you’ll be damn glad she did.”

  Whatever Harry’s meaning, I was stuck with the appointment. Surfing would have to wait.

  I glanced up again at the Hōkūlani, portholes still black as night. A typical stakeout. Sometimes I sit for hours sucking on my sweet-sour crack seed. But as I said, balance is the name of the game. Watching and waiting have to be as active as my moves, or I might miss something. Inevitably, when my vigilance slips, the case gets bungled. When my guard goes down, things turn dangerous.

  So I stayed alert as I flipped pages in the Advertiser– from that chilling story about the plunging death from a mule of Sara Ridgely-Parke–to the sports pages, checking the baseball playoff scores and sumo standings from Japan.

  After glancing at those alluring ads for tires and Korean hostess bars that follow sports–“ONO PUPUS & EXOTIC GIRLS!”–I turned to the business section and checked out an artist’s sketch of a proposed Moloka‘i resort called “Kalaupapa Cliffs.” The resort loomed grand and blindingly white, an art deco Taj Mahal with marble spas and meandering pool and hundreds of ocean-view suites. “Kalaupapa Cliffs” promised to be a luxury palace designed for the super rich. Like we really need one more of those! Because of a technicality concerning the building site, the Moloka‘i resort’s construction awaited a vote of the Land Zoning Board.

  Still no movement on Souza’s boat. The climbing sun sent bars of intense light between Waikīkī high-rises, illuminating the drowsy harbor in jailbird stripes. Would Souza and his girl never crawl out of bed?

  I started to worry that this stakeout might drag on into my nine o’clock appointment with the woman from Boston. It was now nearly seven thirty. An hour and a half had gone by and, although other fishing boats chugged one by one out to sea, on the Hōkūlani nothing had happened. Nothing.

  If Souza didn’t show his scurvy face pretty soon, I might have to start something.

  three

  (1998 draft, revised)

  At twenty past eight, my patience wearing thin, a naked yellow bulb inside the slanting cabin of the Hōkūlani finally flashed on. Through the two portholes I saw movement. Tossing my crack seed into a planter of fragrant lauwa‘e ferns next to my teal Impala, I grabbed the manila envelope and strolled down the dock toward the rusty hulk.

  My Dockers shorts, polo shirt, new pair of Raybans, and rubber zoris would have fit in well with the yachting crowd–had they been out of bed yet.

  I wear a number of such outfits for protective coloration, trying not to stand out. At six feet even (well, almost) and one eighty, I have a fairly deep chest and well-developed shoulders and arms from surfing. Despite my year-round tropic tan, my skin looks light for a hapa. I seem to have inherited my sandy-haired father’s fair complexion and my brown-eyed mother’s Hawaiian soul. Truth is, she was one quarter Hawaiian, which makes me only one eighth.

  So that Souza wouldn’t get instantly suspicious, I folded and slipped the envelope containing the affidavit into my back pocket.

  “‘Morning,” a sun-burned crewman said, mopping the deck of a spotless cabin cruiser.

  “Howz’it?” I smiled and walked on. Beneath my feet that lime green sea lapped between planks in the dock. Sleek sailboats and motor yachts graced the countless slips.

  Striding across the dock planks I wondered what Harry had said that Boston woman’s name was. His message on my answering machine had been vague about why he referred her. Though I would have rather spent the morning surfing three footers in Waikīkī, I began to feel curious about this potential case. I don’t get many clients from Boston.

  The closer I got to Souza’s listing craft, the worse it looked by comparison to its pristine neighbors. Soon I was standing near the two portholes that had appeared pitch black from my car. Now they were transparent. I caught a glimpse of the girl, who bore faint resemblance to her photo as prom queen. She wore only bikini panties and a sheer nightgown that stopped half way down her thighs. She was reed thin with little upturned breasts. The rounded bulge in her tummy confirmed what her high school friend had confided.

  Behind the girl I saw the dark, whiskered man slipping on soiled denims and a black t-shirt with sleeves ripped out. Flecks of yellow-grey riddled his patchy beard and oily hair.

  Scum. That’s what flashed through my mind when I laid eyes on this cradle-robbing deadbeat. Even if Mrs. Souza could pay me nothing (a distinct possibility), I would relish busting up his scuzzy little boat party.

  Since neither the girl nor Souza seemed in any hurry to leave their tiny cabin, I had to do something soon or stand up the woman from Boston.

  The Hōkūlani’s sloping aft deck offering neither boarding plank nor ladder, I climbed aboard over a gunwale onto the badly caulked teak. Two fishing poles mounted in chocks on either side of the stern had lines out in the water. One pole bobbed. On deck lay a long, hooked gaffe. The gaffe gleamed in the sun the like chrome bumper of my Impala and looked razor sharp.

  I tapped on the cabin door. No answer. Though I’m a veteran at serving papers, a few butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I wouldn’t exactly call this fear, just adrenaline. I knocked on Souza’s door again.

  Silence in the cabin.

  “Hello!” I announced in perfect mainland English. “You’ve got a nibble on one of your lines.”

  The door opened and Souza swaggered out. He looked grubbier than his photo and he smelled rank, like stale sardines. A jagged scar, not visible in the snapshot, slanted up over his left eyebrow like a bent apostrophe. He’d been in a few beefs, all right. But despite my butterflies, he didn’t scare me. I could handle him, though laying him out wasn’t part of my job.

  “Eh, brah!” Souza snarled. “What you doin’ on my boat?”

  “So sorry,” I replie
d like a high-toned yachtsman. “Thought you might have a bite.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. The bobbing pole went slack. Souza had lost his fish.

  “What do you catch in this harbor?” I pointed to the murky, lime-green water.

  “Kōkala–Puffer Fish,” he replied grudgingly. “Why you like know?”

  I glanced on deck again at that gleaming, razor-sharp gaffe.

  “Bettah get off da boat, eh?” Souza said. “My insurance no cover you.” He turned toward the cabin.

  “Another nibble!” I shouted. When he looked back at his poles I reached into my pocket and put the envelope in his hands.

  “What dis, brah?” His coal eyes smoldered.

  I glanced toward the dock, mapping my escape. Instinctively, my knees bent and my feet shifted, ready to jump. Once Souza saw the manila envelope he knew.

  “Fuckah!” he shouted. “You Fuckah!” He dropped the envelope on the deck and, sure enough, grabbed that vicious-looking gaffe.

  Before I could leap onto the dock, he swung the gaffe. The fastest way out was over the stern. Bail out, brah! Bail!

  I dove down into the murky harbor as far from the boat as I could. But the gaffe came flying in after me, catching my right ankle. A sharp pain shot up my leg. I struggled under water, my polo shirt clinging like a wet blanket. My new Raybans sank into the murk. I kicked off my zoris and swam beneath the surface as long as my breath would hold. Behind me trailed a thin stream of blood. Hungry sharks? I wondered.

  Coming up for air, I looked around to get my bearings. The Hōkūlani lay thirty feet away. My rubber zoris bobbed nearby on the water like two planks adrift. Souza glared at me from the stern.

  “Fuckah!” He waved the court order angrily. The long legal pages flapped in the air.

  I dove down deep and swam under water again. When I rose for another breath the rusty boat looked smaller, less menacing. Souza was nowhere in sight. I swam on the surface to the nearest dock, patting my shorts for my wallet and keys. Luckily neither had gone south with my sunglasses.

  Climbing onto the dock planks I limped barefoot and dripping to my car. The zoris I simply left floating by the Hōkūlani. My bleeding ankle stung. Like a shallow coral cut, the wound thankfully went just beneath the surface.

  At the harbor’s edge I glimpsed again those aqua towers of the Ilikai Hotel where Jack Lord flashed his steely eyes at the opening of Hawaii Five-0. I tried to recall if his Detective McGarrett ever served papers on a deadbeat or got attacked by a gaffe. Doubtful. Or did I miss that episode?

  I checked my watch. Quarter to nine. Fifteen minutes till my appointment. It would take me nearly that long in traffic to drive–soaked and bleeding–to my Maunakea Street office. Then ditch my sodden clothes.

  I wished I’d never agreed to meet with that woman from Boston.

  four

  (1998 draft, revised)

  My Impala crawled along the waterfront on choked Ala Moana Boulevard past the soaring Aloha Tower. Both long white hands of the tower’s Big Ben-like clock, a dozen stories above the harbor, pointed to a black Roman nine.

  Beneath the Aloha Tower the nautical flags of a Norwegian cruise ship–crimson, mustard yellow, and navy blue–barely rippled in the slack trades. My clothes dripped like wet laundry begging for the spin cycle. The beach towel I always carry for surfing lay under me drenched, not doing much to keep the driver’s seat beneath it from growing soggier by the minute. Blood trickled from my stinging ankle. Damn that Souza!

  I wasn’t too happy about the salt water and blood dripping in my Impala. It’s sort of a classic.

  I bought the teal blue ‘69 Chevy from a widow whose late husband purchased it new at Aloha Motors, a defunct dealership formerly on the site of the Hawai‘i Convention Center. With less than 50,000 original miles, the Impala’s three hundred horse V–8 still really rocks. And with the back seat removed, my longboard slides right in.

  Wheeling the Impala downtown between steel and mirror office towers that hid all but a sliver of the grass green Ko‘olau Range, I wondered again about the woman from Boston. What did Harry mean: “If she shows, you’ll be damn glad she did”? Despite my six years in the business I still feel a little queasy when meeting new clients. You never know what you’ll get.

  I turned onto Maunakea Street, a slice of old Honolulu bordering Chinatown’s teeming, mismatched buildings and pungent aromas. Along the half mile the two-lane drag runs makai, or seaward, from Foster Botanical Gardens to the harbor, Maunakea intersects notorious Hotel Street–a strip of raunchy bars, porno houses, flea bag hotels, prostitutes, and drug dealers.

  The boys in blue at the HPD sub-station try occasionally to weed out these bad elements, but they always spring back like the flamboyant night-blooming cereus up the street at the botanical gardens. Me, I don’t mind. You’d be surprised how helpful these neighbors can be on certain cases.

  Maunakea Street’s hodgepodge of crumbling buildings brought to mind that young “Ecofeminist” attorney who had tragically lost her life on Moloka‘i. What would she have thought of my funky digs? This is not the part of town where you’d expect to find a P.I. with ambitions. Truth is, a half dozen years back when I was just starting out I had higher expectations. My first office in a swankier part of town–Bishop Street, no less–cost me most of what I could make. But that’s another story. When I figured out I was giving up too much wave riding just to keep an address, I moved here to Maunakea.

  Things are simpler now. These days I maintain only two rules for business: don’t starve and don’t get drilled. Oh, and a third rule for pleasure: Plenny time fo’ surf!

  At five minutes to nine I pulled into my garage, then hobbled shoeless and dripping along the crumbling sidewalk toward my office. Not wanting to keep a prospective client waiting, I started to jog. Ouch! My ankle stung. I slowed again to a hobble. Given the stares of passersby, I must have been a sight–even in this neighborhood. A homeless man curled on yellowed newspapers by a bankrupt cigar shop peered at me, rubbed his pink eyes, then spit in my direction. The urine reek of his grimy clothes quickened my halting pace up Maunakea.

  My office is easy to find above the corner shop called Fujiyama’s Flower Leis. Mrs. Fujiyama owns a decaying pre-war building at Maunakea and Beretania Streets that boasts dazzling ornaments of an Oriental cast–two-headed dragons, serpents, wild boars, and ancient Chinese characters spelling some (to me) mysterious message in red. The walls are riddled with enough cracks to keep a journeyman plasterer busy for months. The second, or top floor is divided into five tiny offices. Mine, the roomiest of the bunch, is a twelve-by-twelve cubicle with a window overlooking Maunakea Street.

  Trailing drops of sea water into the flower shop, I searched among the refrigerated display cases for the woman from Boston. Plenty of ginger, plumeria, tuberose, pīkake, and orchid leis, but no sign of her. The vivid floral scent of the shop raised the hair on the back of my neck–making me feel sort of spiritual, or just plain lōlō.

  Mrs. Fujiyama’s establishment offers my clients both wonderful fragrances and a degree of anonymity. They can browse leisurely among the perfumy leis, then slip unnoticed upstairs. If detected, they can pretend to be patronizing one of the four other tenants: a free-lance editor, bookkeeper (who’s never in), passport photographer, or Madame Zenobia, a psychic. I wonder sometimes if any of these businesses are fronts, though I’ve never bothered to check.

  Fortunately, Mrs. Fujiyama didn’t see me trail sea water across her scuffed brown linoleum. But her youngest lei girl, a Filipino college student named Chastity, did.

  “Eh, Mr. Cooke,” said Chastity, stringing a pale yellow plumeria lei, “You’re so wet!”

  “Dawn-patrol surfah.” I winked and headed up the orange shag stairs past the glass bead curtain and locked door at Madame Zenobia’s, who seldom does readings before noon.

  The smoky veneer hallway was empty by my door that says “SURFING DETECTIVE” beneath the graceful longboard rider hanging ten–as on my
business cards. I unlocked the two dead bolts and the heavy mahogany door creaked open. I put in this solid wood door and the dead bolts myself because Mr. Fujiyama, when he built these offices, used hollow-core doors with cheap knob-locks. The locks were a joke. A common kitchen knife could spring them. As for the hollow-core doors, a little keiki–a mere child–could easily punch a fist through.

  The musty smell of the office floated through the opened door even before I stepped inside. But after my morning’s swim, the familiar whiff and disorder of the place felt reassuring. Atop a filing cabinet across from my battleship grey desk stood a tarnished trophy: THIRD PLACE–CLASSIC LONG BOARD– MĀKAHA. My faded glory.

  When I was twenty-five, nearly a decade ago, I won this trophy in a local contest at Mākaha. The infamous Mākaha “bowls” were cranking up in the final round to fifteen feet. And higher. Boards were snapping like toothpicks. I got lucky. One teeth-rattling ride positioned me to win it all. Then on the wave of the day–the wave of my life–I kicked out to help a fellow surfer hit by his board going over the falls. Neither of us took home first prize that day. But the third-place trophy, tarnished now by the years, still sits above my filing cabinet.

  I checked my watch again. Five after nine. Maybe the woman from Boston would be a few minutes late? I opened my lone office window, releasing the stale air, and took a quick look for her down on Maunakea Street. The sharp, competing smells of kim chee, espresso, rancid garbage, hot malasadas, and ginger leis wafted in.

  Across from the flower shop stood an old porno theater, recently converted to a Christian radio station. Last week I’d watched the new owners take down from the marquee two spicy titles–“Hot Rackets” and “Debbie Does It Again”– replacing them with “JESUS COMING SOON.” Nearby an old porno buff, unaware of the theater’s conversion, hustled to the ticket booth with visions in his X-rated mind of the man from Nazareth I shudder to contemplate. Whatever the faithful inside told him, the porno buff stalked away dejected with fists thrust in his pockets like lead weights. He was upset. Plenny upset.