Letterman started a ruckus the minute Louie appeared.
“It’s too early for another drink,” he told the bird. Then he grabbed the television remote and surfed the channels until he came up with an animal program to settle the parrot down again.
Once the duffle was stashed under his bed, Louie got into his pickup and headed for Black Pot Park near the Hanalei Pier. If he was going to get the real scoop on Captain Jack’s death, he hoped he’d find it there.
A light drizzle fell all the way to Hanalei, but when Louie drove onto the beach beside the pier, the sun broke through the clouds, and a stunning rainbow arched over the wide mouth of the bay. Kids were already doing cannonballs into the water below.
Louie drove to the river mouth along the sand. It wasn’t ten-thirty yet. This early in the day, just a handful of his old cronies were there gossiping and checking out the surfers, stand-up paddlers, and kayakers on the river. Out on the bay, crews off-loaded tourists from inflatables that carried them out to the tour boats for Na Pali sightseeing cruises.
When Louie parked under the ironwood pines, which shaded the park, he spotted his friend, Shelby Brown. Tall and lanky, Shell had been on island for decades. Too many hours in the sun and chain smoking had destroyed his skin, but the man couldn’t care less. Louie crossed the park to join his friend, who was busy raking sand in the horseshoe pit the old guys used nearly every day of the year.
“Hey, Shell,” Louie said.
Shelby raised his ball cap and scratched his head. “Hey, Louie. Howzit?”
“Can’t complain.”
“What are you doin’ out here this early? You’re usually working,” Shell said.
“Coconut wireless verification. I just heard Captain Jack washed up on the beach this morning. You hear anything about it?”
“Hear anything?” Shell jerked his thumb toward his chest. “I found him. Damnedest thing. It doesn’t pay to be one of the first guys out on the beach. That’s what I get for sleeping in my car last night.”
“Have too many beers?”
“Something like that.”
“Good thinking.”
“I got up to take a swim and clear my head and I see this guy laying on the beach half in and half out of the water. He had all his clothes on, which shoulda tipped me off.”
“What’d you do?”
Shell shrugged. “I was too fuzzy headed to think much about it, so I went for a swim. He was still there when I got out. I was thinking a bit clearer, so I tried to rouse him. Rolled him over and recognized Captain Jack. He was looking back at me but wasn’t seeing anything, you know?”
“Yeah. I know.” Those same eyes had been alive and looking at Louie yesterday. A chill ran down Louie’s spine as Captain Jack’s last words came back to him.
“If anything were to happen to me, bury that bag. Bury it deep and don’t look back.”
He tried to shake off a feeling of foreboding.
Shell was still talking. “I called 911. KPD came out. Never knew them to work so fast. I guess they didn’t want old Jack splayed out in the sand when all the tourists started pulling in. Said they’d let me know if they needed to talk to me during the investigation.”
“Investigation? I thought he drowned pure and simple,” Louie said.
Shelby shrugged. “Looks like he drowned, but you never know.”
By the time Louie got back to the Goddess, the parking lot was full. Everyone working inside would be busy. He slipped out of the truck and headed back to the beach house, breezed past Letterman, grabbed the duffle bag, and headed to the old shed behind the house where he kept what few gardening tools he owned. As he passed a half-full bag of potting soil, he grabbed it, along with an empty plastic trash bag, and slipped the duffle inside. Then, he headed around to the shady side of the house.
He scanned the beach out front in both directions and found it empty. Mostly only residents used this narrow stretch of Hā‘ena beach. Tourists preferred parks where they were near lifeguards, toilets, and showers.
Thankfully, the soil was soft and sandy. Louie quickly dug up a ti plant and set it aside, then deepened and widened the hole. Once he was satisfied with the size, he picked up the sack and slid his hand inside. His fingers found the zipper on the bag.
Promise me you won’t open it. No matter what.
You’re the most honest man I know.
Louie jerked his hand back as if he’d singed his fingertips.
Wrapping the plastic bag tight around the duffle, he knelt down and gently lowered it into the hole. He straightened and quickly refilled the hole with a little sand, picked up the ti plant, and centered the root ball inside.
It only took seconds to replace the sandy soil around the ti. He opened the potting soil and sprinkled some on top of the dirt around the stem of the plant. He was tamping it down with the shovel when a voice nearly startled him into a heart attack.
“Hey, Uncle Louie.”
It was Jeanne Montrose. She owned the house on the north side of his own and lived in California most of the time.
“I didn’t know you were back.” Louie wondered how much Jeanne had seen.
“I’ve been here three days. Mostly I’ve been running errands to Costco and Home Depot to replace household stuff the vacation renters wear out. Makes you wonder how they live at home.” She’d been renting her house to weekly guests for over twenty years. Most of the time, Louie was so busy he had no idea when guests came and when they left.
She tried to peer around him at the hole. “I didn’t know you gardened.”
“Just needed to move this ti plant over a bit.” He realized that made no sense. “Rain’s been dripping right onto the leaves. Em said the sound was keeping her up at night.” He nudged the potting soil with his toe. “Still have to put a little more potting soil in. Might just plant a few flowers out here later.”
He made show of grabbing a couple handfuls of dirt and scattering it around. “How long do you get to stay, Jeanne?”
She shook her head. “I’m taking the red-eye out tonight. This was just an in-and-out for me. Gave me a chance to check on the place. Ron and I will be back in a couple months, and this time we get to stay for about five weeks.”
“Great. Tell Ron I said hello.”
“For sure. Take care, Uncle Louie.”
The smile he gave her before she walked away was fueled by genuine relief. With Jeanne flying off tonight, she wouldn’t be around to tell anyone she saw him digging in the yard.
The day after Captain Jack’s body was discovered on the beach, the temperature reached the high eighties by six in the morning. Because of an El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific, a constant parade of hurricanes passed the islands. The near misses stalled the trades and hiked up the humidity to the level of a Swedish sauna.
Louie woke up drenched in sweat, but not because of the oppressive heat. Nightmares had littered the landscape of his dreams. Somehow, he pulled himself together, filled a mug of coffee, and checked on Letterman. After fixing the parrot’s wake-up beverage, Louie headed across the parking lot to the Goddess hoping to divert his thoughts from the lingering shock of Captain Jack’s death.
Em looked up from the battered old desk in his office where she was paying bills. Concern showed on her features.
“You look terrible. Are you all right?” she asked.
“I didn’t sleep much. It was too hot.”
“Didn’t you have your fan on?”
“Yeah, but it didn’t help.” He couldn’t tell her that he’d been haunted by Jack Parsons’ death and worried over the unknown contents of the bag he’d buried beneath her bedroom window.
“I’m sorry about your old friend. His death had to have been a shock after seeing him in here day before yesterday.”
He shuffled out into the bar and poured himself a mug of strong
black coffee. Across the room on the small stage, the Hula Maidens were practicing a new number, this time using bamboo pu‘ili, musical implements made of two foot-long bamboo sticks carved into long strands with a handle at the bottom.
In the hands of gifted hula dancers, use of the pu‘ili was exciting to watch. In the hands of the Hula Maidens, the bamboo implements were downright dangerous.
Pat, the troupe’s sergeant-at-arms kept, stopping their recorded music whenever one of the Maidens got out of time crossing and tapping the sticks. Crossing them in and out of an X while keeping time to the music was hard enough for the old gals, but when they flung open their arms to tap the pu‘ili of the person beside them, more often than not someone missed and smacked a hula sister on the arm, or worse yet, in the face.
Louie ignored the bickering and occasional yelps from the stage and hoped no one lost an eye. As he cut up limes and filled the garnish container, the Maidens put up a valiant effort, until their leader Kiki Godwin got knocked on the noggin and called a halt to the practice.
Louie stopped Big Estelle, one of the more stately, full-figured women of the troupe as she headed for the door. “Want some ice for that cut on your nose?”
She shook her head. “I’m okay. I’ve got bruises all over my shoulders. I’ll ice myself down when I get home. Besides, I have to get home and make sure mother isn’t accosting our new gardener. He’s really good looking and, well, you know how she is.”
Louie did indeed know. Big Estelle’s ninety-plus-year-old mother, Little Estelle, had a passion for strapping young men.
Flora and Kiki slid onto tiki bar stools and leaned on the bar while the rest of the women exited.
“I’m so done, and it’s only ten thirty,” Flora said.
Louie set coasters in front of them. “What’ll it be ladies? Something refreshing?”
They ordered white wine.
“You been down in the dumps all morning,” Kiki said to Flora.
“I can’t help it. Bad things gonna happen soon if the talk is true.”
“What talk?”
“The guy who died, the one who washed up on the beach, you know, da kine,” Flora said.
Suddenly they had Louie’s full attention. He didn’t waste a second filling their glasses to the rim, turning around and setting them on the bar.
“What about him?” Louie asked Flora.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I hear he found something that was better left lost. That thing killed him.”
“What are you talking about?” Kiki set her wine glass down. “Did he find a bunch of drugs and overdose?”
The image of the navy blue bag flashed through Louie’s mind.
Flora looked behind her. She saw no one there. Sophie was in the kitchen, so it was just the three of them in the bar. She lowered her voice.
“Worse than that. Coconut wireless says he found the lost tiki.”
“What lost tiki?” Kiki rolled her eyes.
Louie could almost feel the size and weight of the bag in his suddenly damp palms. He wiped them on the bar towel.
“What lost tiki?” He repeated.
“I can only tell you what I heard from my grandparents, aunties, and uncles years ago.”
Louie nodded encouragement. “Go on.”
“Back in the old, old times, one of the ali‘i, a chief from O‘ahu, wanted to make a summer home in Hanalei. He tried to claim the land for himself, but it belonged to an old Kaua‘i family. While his workers were digging on the land, they found a stone tiki long time buried. Strange thing because it wasn’t made of wood. It was carved from stone, so they figured it was very, very old. Maybe from the first people who sailed here.”
“How big was it?” Louie’s heart was racing.
“How do I know?” Flora shrugged.
“Go on,” Kiki polished off her wine.
“So right after they dug the tiki outta the ground, most of the workers got sick, and a lot of them died. Then the son of the chief died. So the man gave up wanting a house here and decided to sail back to O‘ahu. He didn’t know the tiki was to blame, so he loaded it on the ship back to Honolulu. You can guess what happened next.” Flora finally drank some of her wine and smacked her lips.
“The ship went down.” Louie barely got the words out.
“The chief drowned. Everybody drowned. The ship never got out of the bay.” Flora added between sips. “Nobody ever saw the stone tiki again.”
Kiki rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on.”
“True dat,” Flora said. “Folks salvaged all the stuff they could get off the chief’s boat, finders keepers, but nobody found the stone tiki. Nobody remembers the old chief’s name either.”
“That thing is probably still at the bottom of the bay,” Kiki started to rummage in her purse for her wallet. “If it ever existed.”
“It should stay there, but maybe the crazy haole captain found it,” Flora said. “Now he’s dead, too.”
Louie grabbed a napkin and wiped his brow.
“Captain Jack was a fisherman, not a diver,” Louie said. “If it was on the bottom all this time, I doubt he or anyone else found it without dredging equipment.”
“Remember when the Smithsonian came and dredged up stuff from that ship that went down in the bay in the eighteen hundreds?” Kiki asked.
Louie remembered. “I can’t recall too much, just that it was a big deal,” he said. “But Jack’s just a fisherman. Was just a fisherman.”
“I’m only telling you what folks are saying,” Flora picked up her wine. “There’s always a grain of truth under a rumor.”
“Usually,” Kiki said.
“I hope not,” Louie mumbled.
The last thing he needed was a cursed tiki buried on his lot.
As soon as he could get away, Louie hurried back to the house. He’d forgotten to turn on the television for Letterman when he left. By the time he walked in the door, it was almost two o’clock, and the parrot was using its beak to try to disassemble the cage. The bars were reinforced, and Dave wasn’t getting anywhere.
Once his feathered taste tester was appeased, Louie picked up the phone and called Detective Roland Sharpe of the Kaua‘i Police Department.
The full-time detective and part-time fire knife dancer had been dating Em, so Louie hoped to pry a little inside information about Jack’s death out of him.
After some preliminary chatting, Louie got to the point. “Roland, do you know anything about the cause of Jack Parsons’ death? The fisherman who washed up on the beach in Hanalei yesterday?”
“Did the Hula Maidens put you up to this? Please tell me they’re not snooping around again on this one.”
“Not as far as I know. I’m asking for myself, Roland. I’m worried it wasn’t an accident because, well, because of a couple of things I heard recently.”
“The curse of the lost tiki theory?”
“You heard it too?”
“Kaua‘i’s a small island.”
“So what do you think?”
“Are you asking if I think a cursed tiki is responsible for Jack Parsons’ death? The answer is no.”
“Jack was an old friend.” Louie wasn’t ready to break his promise to Jack and say any more. Not yet anyway.
There was a pause on the line before Roland said, “I can tell you the preliminary reports say it looks like he had a stroke. There was no sign of physical injury. His dinghy was found out of gas and floating near Waikoko. A little farther out of the bay and it would have been long gone. We figure he was headed back to his boat the night before his body was found. At some point, he had a heart attack or a stroke, fell overboard, and drowned. Somehow, the dinghy made it unmanned across the bay before it ran out of gas.”
After Louie thanked Roland and hung up, he walked onto the screened front lānai filled with comfortable vinta
ge rattan furniture and retro barkcloth drapes. Staring out at the ocean, he wished he felt more relieved.
Two days after Captain Jack’s body was found, Louie got up and donned the colorful, long silk kimono he used as a bathrobe. Em was already up, sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the main room checking her emails and watching the local a.m. talk show.
“Kaua‘i is under hurricane watch,” she announced.
“Not again.”
Em sighed. “I’m so tired of this. The talk show host just said islanders are experiencing hurricane fatigue.”
“A ‘watch’ just means they’re watching the storm. If they issue a warning, we batten down the hatches. We’ll have hours of notice.” He glanced over and saw he hadn’t allayed her fears. He’d been through hurricanes Iwa and Iniki. Em had no idea what to expect.
“Besides,” he added. “as long as we’re okay and Dave’s okay, we’ll be fine.”
“Still.”
“I know.” He wasn’t sure that at seventy he had the energy to rebuild. Just now, he had worse things to worry about.
“Look at that.” Em indicated the television screen. Hurricane Enrique covered a wide swath of ocean. One of its projected tracks showed it moving directly over Kaua‘i but missing all the other islands.
“That’s just weird,” Em said.
Louie pictured the duffle bag as he lowered it into the ground next to the house. The idea of a cursed tiki was ridiculous. But what if Captain Jack had found the thing and pulled it out of the bay? Could it be cursed? Could it have caused Jack’s death and be drawing the hurricane to the island?
The only way to find out what was in the bag was to open it, but he’d given Jack his word.
“You’re the most honest man I know, Louie. There’s nobody else I can trust.”
He was fixing a mini-portion of Kahlua and lukewarm coffee for Dave when an idea hit him. Captain Jack’s first mate, Chuckie Robbins might know something about the contents of the navy blue bag. If Jack was aboard his fishing boat when he discovered the tiki, surely Chuckie would have been there.
Paradise, Passion, Murder Page 20