Mahu Surfer m-2

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Brad was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said. “That’s what the newspapers and the TV say. That is, when they don’t say he was a surfer.”

  “My time is your time,” I said. “I’ve just got surfing and investigating five murders on my agenda.”

  “I won’t be up there til noon. Want to meet me for lunch?”

  We agreed to meet at Rosie’s Cantina at noon, and hung up. I was pretty beat, but I had trouble getting to sleep. I kept thinking of Brad, wondering if it would have made a difference if I’d tracked him down at Sugar’s. I must have dozed off eventually, because I woke to find a few rosy fingers of light coming in through the bedroom window. I got up, checked for bruises, and took a quick shower before heading down to Pipeline.

  In the fifteen or more years I had been surfing there, I had never seen it so empty when the waves were high. It was almost spooky, sharing such a great beach with only a half dozen other surfers. The police had taken away the yellow cones around the hollow where the bodies had been, and I couldn’t even identify that patch of sand again.

  Maybe that was why my heart felt lighter; maybe it was that I thought I was making progress on the case. In any event, I was able to surf for a couple of hours. I was just dragging my board up the beach when I saw Kawamoto’s blue Taurus on Ke Nui Road.

  They were both out of the car, talking to a female surfer, though they finished up with her as soon as I got there.

  “Morning, detectives.” I thought it was still morning, though noon was fast approaching.

  “Need to speak to you, Kimo,” Ruiz said. He was in full Miami Vice mode: beige sports jacket over navy shirt, knife-pressed black slacks, those spit-polished loafers again, all topped with mirrored sunglasses. “Come on, get in the car.”

  “I’m wet,” I said. “And I’ve got a lunch date. What do you need?”

  He motioned me with his head, and I followed him down the road a hundred feet. “Why are you so interested in Lucie Zamora?”

  “Brad had this idea,” I said. “He and Lucie were friends, and he had introduced her to most of his friends, too. He thought you guys weren’t doing enough to find out who killed her.”

  I held up my hand to silence his immediate objection. “I know, I told him that a lot of police work goes on behind the scenes, that you guys might be just about to arrest somebody. But he had this idea that since I had some investigative skills, maybe I could nose around and find some things out that might help you.”

  He looked down his nose at me, over the mirrored sunglasses. “We don’t need the help.”

  “I know. Listen, I know how hard your job is. Remember, I used to do it, up til a couple weeks ago. Just to make Brad happy, I said I’d talk to each of his friends and see what they knew. If I found anything out I was going to bring it to whoever was in charge of the case.”

  Behind him, I saw Kawamoto, looking rumpled as ever, fiddling in his pocket and pulling out a crumpled pack of Marlboros. “Did you find anything?”

  I shrugged. “Probably nothing you didn’t already know. Lucie Zamora was dealing crystal meth, but nobody knew where she got the stuff. All three of the dead surfers had been to the Mexpipe surfing championships in Mexico in August.”

  Ruiz pulled a notepad out of his pocket and started to write. “How do you know that?”

  “Brad told me Lucie had gone to Mexico, so I checked the competition listings on the Internet. That’s when I saw all three of them were there.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us all this yesterday?”

  I tried my best to look casual. “You didn’t ask.”

  Ruiz angled his jaw and the sunlight flashed off those mirrored lenses.

  “Look, what was I supposed to say? Hey, Lucie’s friends don’t think you’re doing a good job finding the person who killed her, so they asked me to help out. That’s not something I wanted to volunteer. But you see, I’m happy to share anything I found out with you.”

  “Obviously, you’ve got some insight that we don’t have,” Ruiz said, putting away his pad. “I want to know everything you’ve discovered.”

  “Like I said, I’ve got a lunch date,” I said. “After that I can write it up for you. Give me your card again, I’ll email something down to you by the end of the day.”

  “Not something, everything.” Ruiz pulled out his wallet and handed me a card. “Everything you know. Otherwise we’ll be having a little chat again, and you know my partner doesn’t particularly care for you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, glancing at Kawamoto, smoking and glaring in the background. “You can tell him he’s not my type.”

  Bishop Clark

  Once in my truck, I dialed Sampson’s office. “I think my cover is in danger of being blown.” I explained that Ruiz and Kawamoto had discovered I’d been asking questions about Lucie, and once I gave them a taste of what I’d discovered, they wanted more. “I can’t withhold evidence. I have to tell them what I’ve found.”

  “I agree. What do you think of them?”

  “Pretty decent interrogation,” I said. “And they’re doing a good job of digging information up now. Otherwise they wouldn’t know anything about me.”

  “I think it may be time to let them in on your purpose up there. But only them. I don’t want your cover compromised to the rest of the world.” I didn’t mention, though perhaps I should have, that Harry and Terri already knew. I didn’t know how kindly Sampson would take to Harry’s cyber-snooping, and I didn’t want to find out.

  “You’re going to have to be the one who tells them,” I said. “I’m still a suspect, so they won’t believe anything I say.”

  “Of course. Let me check my calendar.” He was off the phone for a minute, then back. “Tomorrow afternoon. I can be in Wahiawa by two.”

  “I’ll be there.” I hung up and looked at my watch. I had just enough time to run up to the house, shower and change, to meet Terri for lunch at noon.

  Like the rest of the North Shore, Rosie’s was nearly empty. It was as if some kind of disease had swept through, wiping out two-thirds of the population. Terri was right on time, despite the possibility of traffic or accidents on the hour-long trip up from Honolulu. But that was her; I’ve never known her to be late for anything. If you asked, she’d simply say it was the way she was raised; Clarks are not late.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” she said, after we’d kissed hello and sat down. She looked, as usual, casually elegant; a gray linen blouse, black slacks, black pumps. The dark circles were still there under her eyes, but she looked a little happier, a little healthier than she had on Sunday. “I want to say right up front I’m hoping I can drag you along to this meeting with my uncle.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s getting nuttier every year,” she said. The waitress came by and we ordered. “Not that I’m really frightened of him, but he’s walled himself in at this old place, with an electrified fence and a security guard. It sounds creepy.”

  “Sure. I was supposed to spend today hanging out, asking people if they knew this last dead surfer, but as you can see, the North Shore has pretty much emptied out, and there’s hardly anybody left to ask.”

  “It’s so sad, what happened,” she said. “Were you dating that guy, Brad?”

  I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know what you’d call it.” I explained about meeting him, how I’d spent most of the night with him twice, then how he’d come to the park on Sunday to yell at me.

  “Well, can you blame him?” she asked, tilting her head toward me. “You shouldn’t have slept with his friends.”

  “I guess not. I wasn’t thinking much about him at the time.”

  Terri frowned. “No wonder he was upset.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I keep thinking, what if I’d gone to Sugar’s first, to find him. I might have kept him from going off with that kid, and maybe they’d both be alive today.”

  Our food arrived, and as soon as the waitress left, Terri said, “You can’t think like
that. There are so many what ifs. What’s important is that you do what you can to find out who killed him.”

  “I’m trying, but it’s not easy. I can’t find a single connection between Tommy Singer and the other three surfers.”

  We talked as we ate, Terri throwing out ideas, almost all of which I’d tried myself. “Tommy never lived up here, so that cuts a lot of possibilities out,” I said. “Of the other three, only Ronald Chang went to UH, and he graduated while Tommy was still in high school. Tommy wasn’t a good enough surfer to enter competitions, or even to hang out with older, better surfers like Mike Pratt or Lucie Zamora.”

  “No drugs, right?”

  “His parents say no. The autopsy’s today; I should get the report from Sampson sometime later. But I don’t think any drugs will show up. So he couldn’t have known Lucie that way.”

  “A computer connection to Ronald Chang?”

  I shook my head. “Tommy had a computer, but just for school and email and games. It’s always possible he ran into one of the three on a beach, and somehow they hooked up, but there’s no evidence.”

  We finished, and Terri insisted on paying. “I’m on the Foundation dime.” Much of her family’s money had been funneled into The Sandwich Islands Trust, a family foundation that did charitable works around the islands.

  “How come? Does this land Bishop lives on actually belong to the Trust?”

  “Not yet. The way the documents are written, it’s his for life, and passes to his legitimate heirs. If he dies without children, then the property goes into the Trust.”

  “And he wants to change that.”

  She nodded. “Come on, I’ll drive. I’ve already told him what kind of car I have, so his guard won’t shoot me.”

  I must have looked dubious, because she said, “Don’t doubt it. Apparently the guard has shot at trespassers before, but the police couldn’t prove anything.”

  On our way up the coast, Terri continued to tell me about the land. “It belonged to my great-grandparents. My grandparents used to go up there in the summer. My father never liked it, and Bishop did, so he was happy to let Bishop have it.”

  “Bishop never had kids?”

  “Nope. He was married three times, always to much younger women, but they all left him-taking a chunk of his money with them, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “He had a trust fund, but he hired an attorney from one of the big firms and broke it over some technicality. He drained it, and then started selling off other property that was in his name alone. He’s finally run out of money, and he wants to sell this land to a developer, who will give him cash and a new house on the property.”

  “Sounds like a good deal for Bishop.”

  “He and my father haven’t spoken for years,” she said, peering at the road ahead. There was very little traffic, but I could see she was looking for landmarks. “It’s the ant and the grasshopper thing-my father worked his whole life, managing Clark’s, building it up, and all Bishop did was have fun and spend money.”

  I leaned back against the door of the SUV so I could look at her. “Can you change the terms of the trust?”

  “It’s not the trust that needs changing, just the deed restrictions on the land. And my father, and my great aunt Emma, who’s the chair of the Trust, have the power to change those. My father wants to make sure that at least part of the land is preserved, though. That’s where I come in.”

  I nodded. “The negotiator.”

  “Exactly. Now that I no longer have a husband to answer to, Aunt Emma is grooming me to take over the Trust from her. At least that’s her attitude. She forgets I still have a son.” She sighed. “Anyway, this is my first assignment.”

  “Is that something you want?”

  Terri turned makai, or toward the ocean, off the Kam Highway at a barely visible driveway, narrow and rutted, between hibiscus hedges bright with platter-sized yellow blossoms. “The Trust gives away a half million a year in grants,” she said. “Mostly to education and family issues. Do I want to control that? You bet.”

  “It’s a shame your family sold the chain. You would have made a great CEO.”

  “Not me,” she said, pulling up in front of a gate with a crude speaker mounted next to it. “I saw how hard my father worked all those years. I want to have a family life, too.”

  She blew the horn, and the speaker crackled. “Uncle Bishop, it’s me, Terri,” she said into it.

  “Just a minute,” a disembodied voice said.

  We waited, and a man dressed in a camouflage T-shirt and khaki shorts appeared from behind a purple bougainvillea a few hundred feet ahead of us. As he walked toward us, I noticed his oddly stilted gait-and then recognized him. “I know that guy. His name’s Rich, he rows for the North Shore Canoe Club.” I remembered what I’d learned about Rich’s habit of shooting surfers; that tied in with what Terri had heard. I didn’t want to tell her he was a suspect in the shootings.

  “We’ll talk about him later,” she said. Rich came up to the gate, unlocked the padlock, and swung it open. We continued up the driveway, and turned the corner, to park at the back of the house. In the rear view mirror, I saw Rich swing the gate shut and connect the padlock again.

  The house was long and low, plantation style, painted white with dark green shutters. A hipped roof sheltered the windows from the sun, and a gravel yard lay between us and a back door. Bishop Clark stood in the doorway.

  He had aged a lot since I’d met him, which had probably been at Terri’s and my high school graduation. “He used to be so handsome,” she whispered to me. “Just devastating.”

  The man before us was skinny and stooped, with straggly white hair down to his shoulders. But he had good bones in his face, and if you looked closely you could see that indeed he had been very handsome.

  We got out of the car, and I stood to the side while Terri hugged him. “Such a young lady,” he said, holding her at arm’s length for a good look. “Very Clark.”

  “It’s the way I was raised,” she said. “Uncle Bishop, this is my friend Kimo. I think you’ve met him before. We’ve known each other since Punahou. He’s living up here now, and I wanted to show him how wonderful this property is, and what a great development it could be.”

  Bishop stuck out his hand, and I shook it. “Pleased to see you again,” he said.

  “The pleasure’s mine, sir.” I did learn a few manners at Punahou.

  “Well, come on inside,” he said. “I’ve got some lemonade, if you’re interested. I can show you the drawings.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rich come up the driveway, and Bishop waved him away.

  Terri and I followed her uncle into the house. I guess I was expecting a rat trap, stained walls, the floor lined with piles of old newspaper, but the house was beautiful inside, flagstone floors and the kind of antique furniture that would have had my mother salivating, all made out of koa wood and probably over a hundred years old.

  In addition to a couple of sofas facing a wall of glass that viewed the ocean, there was a tall china cabinet filled with Chinese export porcelain, and next to that a gun cabinet with a display of old and new firearms. I recognized most of them, but some were such antiques that I’d only ever seen pictures of them.

  I was naturally drawn over to the cabinet. “Interested in guns?” Bishop asked.

  “Kimo is a… used to be a police detective,” Terri said.

  Bishop showed no sign of having seen a newspaper or heard a TV broadcast for the last few years. He came over and opened the cabinet. “Let me show you a couple of pieces.” He opened the cabinet and pulled out a pistol. “This is the Colt Model 1860. The principal side arm used during the Civil War. It’s the oldest one in my collection.”

  It looked it, too. Despite Bishop’s best efforts to keep the pistol oiled and polished, it had seen hard service. I admired it, and he replaced it in the cabinet and pulled out a rifle. “The Sharps ‘Big Fifty.’ Used to kill buffalo. It’s where the term sha
rpshooter comes from.”

  “Cool.” I raised the gun up to my eye and sighted down the barrel toward the ocean.

  “It can kill at a range of up to a thousand yards,” Bishop said, as I handed it back to him. The next gun was a pistol. “This one’s interesting. Japanese. Pistol type 94. One of the worst service pistols in history.”

  It was ugly and difficult to handle. “Doesn’t look that great,” I said.

  “Supposedly it’s capable of accidentally discharging rounds before they’re fully seated in the firing chamber.”

  “Boys and their toys,” Terri said, as I handed the pistol back to Bishop.

  “Here’s one you might recognize,” Bishop said. “I promise you, Terri, it’s the last one.”

  “A. 38 Special,” I said.

  “You got it. Standard issue for most police departments in the US at one time.”

  “They’re still making these, but this looks like an old one.”

  “At least 75 years old. I have some newer ones, too, but nothing all that interesting.”

  “Thanks for showing me.”

  “My pleasure. Don’t get to take them out all that often. Rich helps me keep them cleaned and polished, but he’s only interested in the new guns.” Bells started going off in my head; Rich had access to a wide range of weapons, including the kind of rifle that had killed Mike Pratt and Lucie Zamora, and the type of handgun that had been used in the other murders. I had to know more about Rich, and soon.

  The three of us walked over to the full-height glass windows of the living room. We were on a slight bluff, and the land sloped down, toward the Pacific. Terri had told me the property spanned a hundred acres, most of it behind us and on the other side of the Kam Highway.

  Bishop’s land looked out at prime surfing area, but his fence ran down to the water’s edge and kept surfers out. I saw that he probably kept Rich busy patrolling the waterfront-though today there were likely to be few surfers at any of the public beaches, no less trying to sneak onto Bishop’s land.

  The sky was a clear light blue, and there were no clouds in sight. There was mostly scrub, broken with the occasional splash of color, between us and the ocean, which rolled and frothed relentlessly against the shore. We watched the waves for a few minutes, then Bishop sat us down at a massive koa wood dining table, brought out lemonade in French crystal glasses, and spread out the plans for Bishop’s Bluff Estate Homes.