by Toby Neal
“Okay, yeah, once we got into the competition thing, we worked it. I’m not gonna lie. I didn’t think Makoa deserved all the buzz he was getting. I’m North Shore born and raised, been surfing Pipe since I was thirteen, and here he comes, Mr. Haole Prep School Maui, acting like he’s all that.” Lei could see by the young man’s tense shoulders and flared nostrils that the resentment was real. “But we never had a problem anywhere but in the water. It was all just for the cameras.”
“Sounds like you had motive.” Lei gestured toward the front room they’d just left. “With Makoa gone, that sweet view’s all yours, not to mention Torque’s top billing.”
“Hey, I never wished nothing on the guy.” A hint of pidgin had crept into Oulaki’s sullen voice. “Except that he would go back to Maui.”
“Maybe you helped him stay there,” Lei said, leaning forward to pin the young man with her cop stare. She slid the sketch out of the folder toward him. “This a picture of you?”
Oulaki’s black brows snapped together as he took the sketch. “Why are you asking? Makoa clocked his head on his board and drowned.”
“How’d you hear that?”
“I don’t know—that’s what I heard. What makes sense.” Oulaki looked flustered, frowning and moving restlessly on his chair as he gazed at the sketch. The gold earring in his ear caught a stray sunbeam. He could have so easily changed his appearance: shaved, worn a black rash guard to cover up those distinctive tats, taken out the earring, which she remembered seeing in most publicity photos. When Oulaki got back to Oahu, he could have buzzed off the longish hair in the sketch. In another surf break on a different island, he wouldn’t have been readily recognizable.
“Makoa was murdered. Someone dropped in on him and held him under.” She delivered her words as smoothly as sliding a knife between Oulaki’s ribs.
Oulaki looked up directly at Lei. Color ebbed from beneath his tan, leaving him jaundiced. “This isn’t me.”
He thrust the sketch back at Lei. She didn’t take it, and it fluttered to the ground and lay on the floor, looking up at them accusingly. Things devolved from there into a mute stare down between Lei, arms folded, and Oulaki, equally closed off.
Finally Kamuela said, “We need an alibi. Where were you day before yesterday?”
“I went to visit family in Honolulu.”
“So you weren’t out here at the team house?” Lei said.
“No. I have family in Mililani. I saw them. Spent a couple of nights at a friend’s house, too. He can verify I was there.”
“We’ll need that information,” Kamuela said, and took down the contact names.
Lei tried not to react when she heard his friend’s last name was Tadeo. Hoping her voice was neutral, she said, “We have a Maui family by that name.”
“It’s common enough.” Oulaki eyed her sullenly. “Are we done now?”
“For the moment,” Lei said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
After the surfer left, Lei got up and shut the door. “I like him for it.”
“I kind of do, too—though if his alibi checks out, we aren’t going to be able to do much unless your team can find some trace that ties him to the body. We don’t have his fingerprints in the van.”
“He isn’t dumb. He could have found a way around that, and the van was filthy and full of trace from a dozen possible contributors. Unfortunately, we already know the body was clean. Let’s just get names, contact info, and alibi statements from the rest of the guys here, and then get out to that van driver Freddie Arenas’s address in Kahuku. Let’s take all of Makoa’s boxes, and I can go through them carefully elsewhere.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Chapter Nine
Lei held the pile of threat letters and printed-out e-mails Pete Cantor had given her as Kamuela navigated out of the crowded driveway at the Torque team house. Glancing down at the pile in a manila envelope, Lei frowned.
“I don’t think Cantor would have given these to me if I hadn’t known to ask for them.”
“Seemed like that to me, too. He didn’t like us hassling Bryan Oulaki,” Kamuela said. The team manager had stormed in after Bryan left, blustering and defensive. But between the two of them they soon had him groveling as he handed over the collection of threat letters and Makoa’s boxes of possessions, stored in the garage.
“Well, if Oulaki’s Torque’s anointed successor, I can see that. But withholding the letters shows he suspects someone, someone who may be in that house. I think I should go back and reinterview Cantor later. Maybe bring him into the station, intimidate him a bit.”
“Let’s see about this Arenas guy in Kahuku first.” Kamuela finally got the truck turned around. He pointed to a coconut tree in the team house’s yard. A surfboard emblazoned with Makoa’s name was propped against it, surrounded by flowers, cards, and other offerings. “It was good to hear they’re doing a paddle out for Makoa.”
“Yeah. That helped me not bite Cantor’s head off for how he threw Makoa out of the master bedroom so fast,” Lei said. The paddle out was scheduled for the next day. The informal ceremony that had sprung up among the surfing community was a way to give honor to their fallen. Surfers paddled their boards out into the ocean, made a circle, and said prayers, told stories, sang songs about the one lost. Plumeria flowers and leis were tossed into the circle at the end, and waves were surfed to honor the dead. Lei had seen flowers from these ceremonies washed up on the beaches, and they never failed to give her a bittersweet pang.
“No one else popped for me besides Oulaki. What did you think?” Lei asked.
“Agree.” Kamuela gave a terse nod as he navigated the narrow frontage road and got back onto busy two-lane Kamehameha Highway.
They’d taken statements of whereabouts during the time of Makoa’s murder from all the surfers in the house and had taken prints and hair samples as well in case they got lucky with some trace. Lei hadn’t enjoyed the stony stares and attitudes some of the riders showed, but there hadn’t been anything more definite to go on.
Now they headed out past Sunset Beach, a wide swath of yellow sand alongside the highway. Lei rubbernecked across Kamuela’s broad chest to get a look at the surf at the famous beach, where the wave break was visible from the road. “We don’t have anything like this on Maui.”
“Yeah, but you have Jaws.” Kamuela named the break famous for huge twenty-to-fifty-foot surf off the rocky coast north of Paia on Maui.
“It’s not really accessible like this is. Jaws is a real project to find, out in the pineapple fields. You need a car with four-wheel drive and mud tires just to get to the overlook. No wonder North Shore Oahu’s such a tourist attraction.” Lei could actually feel spray from the pounding surf curling her hair into even tighter ringlets as Sunset’s waves detonated off the beach.
They drove on past the end of the famous stretch of coast, through a wide area of squared-off, grassy ponds that were freshwater shrimp farms. Food trucks featuring the island delicacy dotted the side of the highway.
“Never seen so many food trucks as out here,” Lei commented. “You got all kinds, too.” She pointed to Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, and, of course, Hawaiian.
“Yeah. Food trucks are a thing out here with real estate so high for restaurants,” Kamuela agreed.
Kahuku was a depressed-looking bend in the road. Cinder block buildings dingy with permanent mildew held down weedy yards cluttered with rusting vehicles and decrepit boats. The school was a barracks-like cluster of buildings. “Economy seems down out here.”
“Kahuku’s too far out here to commute into Honolulu for work,” Kamuela said. “And the beaches here get the full prevailing winds, so there’s no demand for the beachfront houses you see along the Seven Mile Miracle.”
“So much contrast in just a few miles.”
“Isn’t that always the way in Hawaii?” Kamuela slanted her a glance from sharp dark eyes. “Rich people from somewhere else and the people who take care of their vacation happiness.”
“I know.” Lei sometimes hated the steep division between rich and poor, the struggle of the middle class in Hawaii, a pricey place to live in so many ways. Her experience with the Smiley Bandit a few years ago had brought that situation into sharp focus, and she’d never forget how close to the surface resentments simmered. “The real price of living in paradise.”
Freddie Arenas’s address was a squat cube of a house made of cement block with a flat roof and the requisite dead boat and broken-down trucks in the yard. It was newly fenced in six-foot chain-link, though, with a rolling gate over the driveway, and as Lei and Kamuela got out, she saw why.
A pair of pit bulls, battle-scarred and crop-eared, barreled up to the fence, letting them know Freddie was well guarded.
They called a few times, but no one answered. Kamuela got back in the truck and leaned on the horn. Finally, a bent-over older woman opened the screen door into the garage. She called the dogs and then creaked her way to the fence. “What you want?”
“We need to speak to Freddie Arenas. He live here?” Lei held up her ID.
“He not home. He working.” The woman sucked her dentures, dark eyes suspicious.
“We can go to his workplace, speak to him there. It’s an urgent police matter.”
“My boy a good boy. I nevah have to tell you notting.”
“Aunty.” Kamuela came over to the fence with that charming dimpled grin. “So sorry. No pilikia. He’s not in trouble. Just need to ask Freddie a couple questions. “
Lei was never in favor of making false promises to potential witnesses, but Kamuela’s dimpled schmoozing was definitely working better than her direct approach, as “Aunty” told him Freddie could be found cooking at one of the shrimp trucks back toward the North Shore.
“You have a way with the ladies,” Lei said as they got back into the truck.
“So they tell me.” Kamuela winked.
They got on the road back toward Haleiwa, and as they did, Lei flipped through her little spiral notebook. “Did you catch the name of that friend of Bryan Oulaki’s? Tadeo?”
“He just said Tadeo.”
“Well, the Tadeo we’re looking at on Maui is the jealous ex-boyfriend of Makoa’s current flame, Shayla Cummings.”
“I’ve seen pictures of her. Bikini model, right?” Kamuela waggled his brows.
“Yeah. She’s a beauty. Seems to really love Makoa. We found out he recently made her his accidental death insurance beneficiary, to the tune of a couple million. Her ex, Eli Tadeo, is kind of tricky. His twin brother is our Maui Police Department poster boy, and I mean that literally. He’s our main recruiter.” Lei filled Kamuela in on what she knew so far.
“So how could those two be connected? Oulaki and Tadeo?”
“No idea,” Lei said as they pulled in beside a battered-looking silver Airstream sporting a big hand-painted sign reading Fresh Island Shrimp. No one was currently in the graveled parking area between two open ponds trimmed in long grass.
Lei and Kamuela got out, and Lei heard her stomach rumble. She gave Kamuela an eyeball. “Gonna get some shrimp.”
“Sounds good.”
“How can I help you?” The young man who leaned down into the window cut in the side of the Airstream also could match the sketch: multiethnic face, medium height, black hair, clean-shaven, and well-built. Half a dozen men they’d seen met that description. The sketch wasn’t turning out to be all that helpful.
“I’d like the lunch special,” she said.
“Make that two,” Kamuela rumbled beside her.
“Coming right up.”
“So, been working here long?” Lei asked, going for casual as Freddie Arenas turned away to a bubbling kettle on the propane stove.
“Just a year.”
“So these shrimp farms. Really seem to be a good thing for the North Shore,” Kamuela said, picking up her thread of making conversation.
“Sure.” Arenas turned to nod. “Not much going on out here besides the surf community. It’s good they figured out shrimp did well here.”
“Looks like it,” Lei said, surveying the shallow, square ponds. She couldn’t see anything beneath the wind-ruffled brown surface of the water. “So, you surf? Everybody seems to, out here.”
“Not much else to do.” Arenas smiled, a good-humored grin. “But I like kiteboarding better.”
“I’m from Maui. That’s the thing to do over there,” Lei said. “You ever get over there to sail?”
“Matter of fact, I do. Like to take my gear, go for a few days. Meet buddies over there.” Arenas finished putting together Styrofoam clamshell boxes piled high with breaded shrimp and accompanied by a scoop of white rice and a pile of anemic-looking coleslaw. “Anything else I can get you?”
Lei took the boxes, handed them to Kamuela, paid, and turned back holding up her ID. “Yes. The date of your last visit to Maui.”
“Oh.” Arenas drew back. “What’s this about?”
“Just answer the question.”
“Well, I was over there a week or so ago.”
“What were you doing?”
“Kiteboarding. Like I told you.”
“Did you do anything else?”
“I need to know what this is about.”
“What kind of vehicle did you drive?”
“I rented one of those windsurf vans. I slept in it, parked at Kanaha Beach Park. People do that all the time. That’s why I rent a van.” Arenas was talking fast now. “I never did nothing.”
Lei also got that Arenas had an alibi from a Maui kiteboarding buddy he’d partied with while over there. “He crashed with me one night out at Kanaha.”
Lei finally went back to join Kamuela, who’d finished most of his lunch already. She opened her Styrofoam container. “Not our guy.”
“I knew that.”
“Don’t tell me. Your gut.”
“A little bit. And a little bit the grandma he lives with. Guy like that isn’t going out on weekends to drown surf superstars.”
Lei sighed, poking at her coleslaw. “Wish we’d get a break on this case.”
“Maybe that break will be in the threat letters. Or the boxes. While you were talking to Arenas, I called Kahuku PD and asked for a room to sort and process Makoa’s things. We go there next.”
“Thanks, Marcus.” Lei’s appetite returned as the smell of fried shrimp hit her nose. “I’ll get a second wind after this.”
Chapter Ten
The afternoon passed in relative peace in an empty conference room at the small cement block Kahuku Police Department building as Lei and Kamuela opened the boxes of Makoa’s things and sorted through them.
Lei didn’t know what she was looking for as she shook out stacks of neatly folded T-shirts and board shorts. It was obvious from Makoa’s lack of possessions, other than his surfboards, which Cantor had said belonged to Torque, that Makoa had lived light, with an emphasis on function.
She was surprised to find a small black velvet box in the pocket of a pair of dress slacks still on their hanger. Lei opened it to find an engagement ring with sparkling, one-carat diamond lighting up a band of tiny, channel-set diamonds.
“Check this out. Looks like he was getting ready to pop the question to Shayla.”
“Whoa.” Marcus frowned, taking the box from her. “That’s a rock. The girlfriend’s going to want to have that, I’m betting.”
“Yeah.” Lei’s mind was whirling. “What if this is motive?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—maybe someone knew he was getting ready to ask Shayla to marry him. What if that person didn’t want him to?”
“Male or female?” Kamuela said, with one of his wolfish smiles.
“Could be either.” Lei was thinking back to Shayla’s pretty friend Pippa, equally distraught over Makoa’s death. And the Tadeo connection. “I feel like there’s something here about his love life. Something we don’t know.” She took the ring box back from Kamuela and turned it over, and made a n
ote of the jewelry store on the bottom.
“Well, this needs to go into a safe.” Kamuela put the velvet box into an evidence bag.
“I want to interview the salesman at the store where that was bought. And dig a little deeper into Makoa’s love life.”
“After we process the threat letters.” Kamuela pulled over a high-powered lamp and the manila envelope with the letters in it. Kamuela had asked the station chief for processing materials for paper. Lei handed him a small pile of handwritten letters and kept a pile for herself. The e-mails she set aside for later computer IP address tracking.
She and Kamuela used gloved hands to alternate spraying the postcards, letters, and folded cards with ninhydrin and then set them under the lamp where prints fluoresced. It was slow and quiet work as they photographed the prints that bloomed on the paper.
Only when all the prints had been collected and processed to the case file did Lei look through the letters for content.
“Does this strike you as a lot of hate mail? For a guy who, according to everyone we’ve talked to, was a likable kid?”
“I was just thinking the same.” Kamuela held up one of the letters he’d finished processing, crude letters cut from a magazine and glued onto paper spelling out, Haole, go home. “Nice.”
“I like this one.” Lei held up a block-printed card with genitalia on the front and the North Shore belongs to real men. “Real men don’t need to indulge in this kind of localism. Cream rises to the top, and Makoa had what it took to win the Triple Crown this year.”
“A damn shame. I had no idea he was facing this kind of harassment,” Kamuela said. “They sure kept it quiet in the media.”
“Well, Oulaki expressed a common sentiment, that the North Shore should belong to those born and raised. But it’s always been a magnet for the world, and that’s part of what makes it special.”
They forged on, and Lei made a pile of any that looked like they might have been authored by the same person. Most were the ones with the cut-out squares of magazine letters. “I think these were by the same harasser.”