Mahu Surfer m-2

by Neil S. Plakcy

  When I was surfing the North Shore, The Next Wave was a hole in the wall next to a discount shoe store. Since then, Dario had moved up from occasional salesman and the store had taken over the adjacent space. A news clipping on the side wall described how Dario Fonseca, owner of The Next Wave, had been given the key to the city of Hale’iwa by a previous mayor. Maybe Dario was more serious than I’d given him credit for.

  I hadn’t surfed competitively in years, but I still kept an eye out for the latest gear, and Dario had it. There was some serious money tied up in his inventory, everything from O’Neill surfboards to Rip Curl wetsuits, Oakley sunglasses to Reef sandals, Croakies to Sex Wax. As you moved around the store, you could shop for T-shirts, boogie boards, leashes, and cork coasters in the shape of aloha shirts. The Next Wave also sold surf guides, magazines, signs that read Surfer Girl Crossing, and beach towels featuring the Ford woody station wagon that the Beach Boys had made famous.

  Clothing took up nearly half the store, with fake surfboards at the ends of the racks with face-outs of shirts and shorts. You could buy every type of souvenir gadget known to man, including miniature surfboard magnets, bottle openers that looked like shark fins, ball caps with a long flap around the back to protect your neck from the sun, roof racks for your car or truck, and plastic cups with The Next Wave logos. After I’d made a complete circuit of the store, I wasted time by trying on a couple of different pair of sunglasses, modeling for myself in the tiny mirror. I thought I looked a little like Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix; just give me a black duster and the ability to do those jumping, twirling moves in slow motion and I’d be the baddest detective in the Honolulu PD.

  It was late in the afternoon, and The Next Wave was busy, a mostly young crowd shopping, discussing and buying. Dario had even installed a little cyber cafe in one corner, serving cappuccinos and lattes and renting out time on six computers. Each of them was busy, and from the expectant looks of a number of the coffee drinkers sitting near the stations, I figured they would be for some time. I also saw a couple of people using their own laptops and realized the cafe offered free Wi-Fi.

  Against my expectations, Dario seemed to have turned himself into a solid citizen. I’d given up on sunglasses and moved on to hats by the time he came over to me again. “So, how does it feel to be out and proud?” he asked. “You’re here, you’re queer, get used to it?”

  “Strange,” I said. “I never wanted to be a celebrity. But now my face has been on TV and in every newspaper.”

  “It’ll pass,” Dario said. He gave me a smile that was half a leer. “I always knew you’d come out of the closet some day. I didn’t know you’d do it so spectacularly.”

  “How did you know?” I blurted out. “When I didn’t even know myself?”

  “This calls for some liquid refreshment,” he said. “Hey, Cindy, keep an eye on things,” he called to a girl by the register. He took me by the arm and steered me back to his office, past a display of sun block featuring life-sized models of scantily-clad guys and gals.

  His office was at the rear of the store, down a corridor that led to rest rooms and a loading dock. He had a side view of the ocean through a big plate-glass window; I could see wind restlessly whipping waves against the deserted shore, a line of rock and scree too rough to surf.

  The rest of the office was cluttered with sales props and advertising memorabilia. The walls were lined with posters of past surf champions, including a couple we’d both surfed with way back when. He opened a small refrigerator and pulled out a pair of Kona Longboard Lagers.

  He used a bottle opener in the shape of a palm tree, with the Next Wave logo, to pop the tops and handed one to me. “To your new life,” he said, toasting me.

  “And to yours. Looks like you’ve come up in the world.”

  He shrugged. “I’m doing okay. Retail’s tough, though. You’ve got to be on top of things every minute or you can lose your shirt.”

  We sat down in a couple of beat-up armchairs. “Back to your question,” Dario said. “How did I know you were gay when you didn’t know it yourself.” He took a pull on his beer. “It’s in the eyes, usually. Hunger. The way a guy will look at another, thinking no one is noticing. Straight men touch each other without thinking-they’ll wrap an arm around another guy’s neck, they’ll hip-check or punch one another in the arm.”

  I shook my head. “I see gay men touch each other all the time.”

  “That’s true. What you want to look for is the ones who are afraid to touch. They’re the ones in the closet.” He smiled. “They’re the ones who are the most fun to chase. They know they want it, but they’re scared, and you have to get them past the fear.”

  “By getting them drunk,” I said.

  “That’s one of the ways.” He lifted his bottle to me, took a long drink. “By touching them. Giving them these deep, searching looks that say, ‘I can see into your soul.’”

  I shook my head. “Dario, you are so corny.”

  “Rhymes with horny.” He raised his eyebrow. “I’m always horny. How about you?”

  That was something I wasn’t expecting, and it took my breath away for a minute. “That was nine or ten years ago,” I said, finally. “And I’m already out of the closet by now. You can’t drag me any further.”

  “Honey,” he said, leaning toward me, “you don’t know how far I can take you.”

  He must have seen that he’d gone too far, too fast, because he backed up then. “You’ll come to me sometime.” He smiled. “I’ll be here.” He drained the rest of his beer. “Now come on, let me show you the rest of the store.”

  If it hadn’t been for Dario’s obvious connections to the surfing community, I would have walked out, rather than taken a tour. He was just so full of himself, I thought, and I imagined he was still taking twenty-something surfer dudes who were conflicted about their sexuality out for a few beers-and then back home with him, wherever home was. It was predatory, and the cop part of me didn’t like it.

  He walked me around for a few minutes, then had to go to the register to handle a customer, and I took that opportunity to leave. I knew I’d be back; it was clear that The Next Wave was one of the centers for the surfing community, and I couldn’t avoid it for too long. I just had to manage to avoid Dario when I was there.

  What was it about me, I wondered, as I drove back to my room, picking up some fast food on the way, that attracted these predatory males? A kind of naivete? I wasn’t some confused teen-ager. I was thirty-two years old, a cop. I had no trouble facing down the toughest criminals, but a guy who wanted to get in my pants still scared the crap out of me. It reminded me of a William Styron quote, from Sophie’s Choice, something about being six feet of quivering nerve. That was how I felt, even though I knew it was dumb. Really, really dumb.

  Down Mexico Way

  I surfed all day Friday, then returned to The Next Wave with my laptop to use their internet connections. I sent a quick email to Harry about the waves, and then a check-in message to Terri, who had just lost her husband a few weeks before. I felt bad that I had left town when she or her young son Danny might need me.

  I wrote to my parents, too, a quick note about the surf and how the North Shore had changed in the past ten years. I sent Lieutenant Sampson a longer message about surf bags, rifles, and talking to surfers.

  I sat back and thought about the case. If the only thing that connected the three victims was surfing, then maybe if I learned more about them as surfers, I’d find a clue. The dossier I’d been given didn’t have much detail, but I found that by searching for all three names online, I could find out which events they had competed in and what their results were. The only pad I could buy at The Next Wave was one in the shape of an aloha shirt, but with that and a surfboard-shaped pen, I began making notes. Soon there were shirt-shaped pieces of paper piling up, and I built a matrix, looking for any events where they might all have been entered.

  Pratt was the best surfer of the three. He was twenty-f
ive, and had been surfing competitively since he was a teenager on the Jersey shore. He’d placed in the top ten in a number of contests, including Mexpipe in Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.

  Lucie Zamora had also competed at Mexpipe, though she hadn’t placed anywhere near the top. And way at the bottom of the men’s list I found Ronald Chang’s name.

  Interesting, I thought, sitting back. All three had been at Mexpipe. Was it just a coincidence, or a real connection? I couldn’t know for a while if it meant anything. I jumped over to email, and sent a message to my brother Lui, asking if he could dig up any video footage of the Mexpipe championship. I told him I was interested in studying form, but I thought perhaps I could see one or more of the murder victims there.

  I printed out a list of the top 100 finishers at Mexpipe; hopefully a couple would be around the North Shore, and I could ask them some questions. I also spent some time on the competition web site, learning about the races and the atmosphere surrounding them.

  The three dead surfers had been at very different places in the surf hierarchy. Pratt was at the top, a real competitor. Lucie Zamora was struggling to make it out of the pack. Ronald Chang was a weekend surfer who would probably never have finished in the money.

  Where did I fit, on that scale? I had to put myself somewhere between Lucie Zamora and Ronald Chang, though without Lucie’s obvious drive and determination. I had some natural ability as a surfer, and I’d been doing it nearly all my life. But to be the best at anything, you have to pour yourself into it, heart and soul. Dario Fonseca had shown me that I couldn’t do that, not while I was hiding my sexuality. I guessed I ought to be grateful for that, but gratitude was a hard emotion to feel around him.

  I saw him pass by a couple of times while I worked at the computer. I don’t know why, but I tried to look busy each time, so that he wouldn’t stop and chat. I wasn’t comfortable with him, and I didn’t want to give him another opportunity to proposition me.

  I found one interesting piece of information about Mike Pratt that I hadn’t seen in his dossier. He rowed with the outrigger team that practiced in Waimea Bay. Cross-referencing them, I discovered that they practiced every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, and competed in single, double and six-man races. That worked for me; I could stop by the next day.

  By then it was late and I was hungry. I stopped for dinner at a bar called the Surfrider, where I had a beer and a burger. Neither were that good. The waitress seemed to recognize me, and so did a guy who was about twenty years too old for me, wearing a Heineken T-shirt that was too tight. He came up to me as I was finishing dinner and asked me, in a low voice, if I wanted to go home with him. I politely declined.

  Saturday morning, I awoke to the NOAA’s surf report in my drab, dingy room at Hibiscus House, confused at first as to where I was and what I was doing. Then as my body’s aches and pains began to catalog themselves, I remembered.

  I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom, considering what had brought me there, and all the unfinished business I had left behind in Honolulu. For a minute, I wanted to chuck the whole North Shore business and go back to Lieutenant Sampson’s office, tell him to get someone else to solve this case, give me back my gun and my shield and put me to work in District 1.

  But I didn’t. Instead, I looked at the case files again and again, memorizing every detail of the three dead surfers. Then I headed down to Hale’iwa Beach Park, to where the North Shore Canoe Club practiced, across the street from Jameson’s by the Sea. There were already a few people there by the time I arrived, and while we waited I helped bring out the canoes.

  The light was bright and harsh, glinting in shards off the placid water. Almost everyone knew everyone else. I introduced myself as Kimo and we began stretching exercises as the sun moved up over the hills behind us. A fit, blonde woman named Melody introduced herself to me and asked if I’d ever paddled before.

  “Yup, in Honolulu. For a while when I was a kid, we belonged to this native Hawaiian club after school, where we practiced speaking Hawaiian. We made leis out of kukui nuts, we surfed, we learned to paddle. A little hula, too, but don’t ask me to dance for you.”

  She laughed. “I won’t.” She sized me up. “You want to try the back of the canoe?”

  “Sure.” I knew that’s where they put the biggest and strongest guys. I joined a team of six in pushing an outrigger into the water, and then we all jumped in and started paddling out to sea.

  I sat in the fifth seat, behind a slim Hawaiian guy with incredible biceps and triceps, and in front of a stocky haole guy. I noticed that his right leg, from the knee down, was prosthetic, but he was able to move around easily on it, and use his awesome upper body strength in the outrigger. Whenever I lost the rhythm of the oars, I felt his jabbing me in the back. I never heard him whoop or yell as the others did when we crested the wave. He approached his rowing as if he were on work-release from prison, with a grim determination that sapped some of my fun.

  We got a good workout, paddling out beyond the surf, then turning around, catching a wave, and paddling like hell to catch it. We did some quick races as well, and then returned to the beach. The Hawaiian guy introduced himself to me as we dragged the canoe back up on the sand. “I’m Tepano. You rowed before?”

  “When I was a kid. How about you, you been doing this for a long time?”

  “Couple of years. It’s a great workout.” The rest of the team streamed off around us, leaving me walking up toward the parking lot with Tepano. “Everybody’s pretty friendly, too.”

  “That guy behind me didn’t seem so friendly,” I said, referring to the haole with the prosthetic leg.

  “Rich? He’s okay. He just doesn’t like surfers.”

  The sun was fully up, and there was a nice breeze coming in off the ocean. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Some awful surfboard incident in his childhood?”

  Tepano laughed. “Not exactly.” His face got serious then. “He was a pretty good surfer, once. Then the Army sent him to Bosnia and his leg got blown off. That prosthetic is state of the art, but he can’t feel a board under him, so he could never surf again. Made him a little bitter.”

  “I guess.” I could only imagine how I’d feel if I couldn’t surf any more.

  “Plus he has this job, security guard for this crazy old guy who owns a stretch of beach. He’s always chasing surfers away.”

  “I’ll keep my distance.”

  “Probably a good idea.” He gave me a shaka, the Hawaiian two-fingered salute, and said, “Hope to see you here again some time.”

  “You probably will.” As I was walking the last bit to my truck, Melody was walking past with another woman, Mary, who was, like Melody, in her late twenties or early thirties, and very fit. Mary’s skin was tanned dark, and her glossy black hair was pulled into a long ponytail.

  Melody asked me, “You going to be around for a while? We could use some strength on our B team.”

  “A few weeks,” I said. “I can’t commit to anything, but I’d like to drop by practice again some time, if that’s okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Mary said, “Gotta go, Mel. See you later,” and kissed Melody on the mouth. It seemed like a pretty intimate gesture to me, and I noticed that Mary wore a yellow gold wedding band. I wondered if they were lesbian partners, but Melody did not wear a band at all.

  As Mary walked away, Melody turned back to me. “What brought you out today?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been surfing the last couple of weeks, saw your poster.” I decided to take a gamble. “I remembered that a surfer I knew recommended you. Jersey guy named Mike Pratt?”

  Melody’s face fell. “I guess you didn’t hear. Mike died about a month or two ago.”

  “No!” I said. “Surfing?”

  “You could say that. He was on his board at Pipeline, and somebody shot him. Dead by the time he washed up on the shore.”

  Tears began forming at the corners of Melody’s eyes. �
��Gosh, I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours?”

  “Yeah, I guess. He was on our A team for a while. Really strong guy. You probably saw, we’re like a family here. Mike’s death hit us all pretty hard.”

  “They catch the guy who did it?”

  She shook her head. “Not a clue. The police came around, but they didn’t know anything.”

  “I’m surprised anybody would even talk to them,” I said. “Surfers and cops don’t usually get along.”

  “If they’d known the right questions to ask, we might have talked,” Melody said. She looked at me strangely. “Hey, do I recognize you?”

  “Kimo Kanapa’aka,” I said. “Formerly of the Honolulu PD.”

  “Oh, my God, I read about you. That is so totally unfair, what they did to you.” I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. “Say, maybe you could look into what happened to Mike. I could make some introductions here for you.”

  “I don’t know. The police aren’t exactly eager to hear from me-or my lawyer-these days.”

  “But you could show them. Find out what happened to Mike, prove you should be a detective again.”

  I knew the friends and family of victims were eager to see murderers caught and punished, but I’d never seen this side before, this view that the police were clueless and needed the help of someone outside the force to solve crimes.

  “You think people here know something the police don’t?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Melody said. “You got time for a cup of coffee?”

  Conversations

  Melody and I met a few minutes later at the Kope Bean, a little coffee shop in a strip center on the Kam Highway. A lot of surfers were getting a caffeine fix before hitting the waves, and a bunch of clearly Honolulu-bound business types were doing the same before hitting the H2 down toward the city.