The Flaming Luau of Death

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  She looked at me, and something behind her eyes shifted. “I know we’re all shocked that Kelly is gone. But are you saying you don’t believe it was an accident that killed him?”

  “Well.” I looked at her and made a quick decision. “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “Only, I have to be truthful with you, Claudia. I did not actually know Kelly. I know his fiancé, Keniki.” And as she kept her very wise eyes on me, I told her all about what I suspected regarding the Four Heavens incident as well.

  “I wish I knew what to say.” Claudia pulled her sunglasses out of a straw bag and began to polish the lenses with a special tissue. “I’m sure more information will come to us. There’s sure to be an official investigation. But it makes absolutely no sense to me. I loved Kelly, and I can’t imagine who didn’t.”

  “What about Earl?” I asked.

  “Yes, the two of them were often at odds,” she said mildly, “but surely you can’t suspect Earl of being involved in Kelly’s death?”

  I shrugged.

  “And how do you feel about bamboo? Are you a plant lover, my dear?”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d say we’re lovers. More like just good friends.”

  “I have always loved botany. Passionately. It was my major at UCLA. Kelly and I both found bamboo completely fascinating. We talked about bamboo most of the time. And then he hit it off with the men in my family. They all love the ocean. But I agree with you, it is certainly a mystery. And now I’m afraid I have got to go.”

  “Did Kelly have any trouble at work, do you know?” I asked, realizing my final lead had led exactly nowhere.

  “He seemed very happy,” she said, shaking her head and standing up.

  “Where did he work?”

  “Down the coast,” she said, pointing southward. Then she put on her sunglasses. Of course, at this northernmost point on the Big Island, almost everything was located in that direction. “Say,” she said, turning to me, “do you need a ride somewhere?”

  “No, thanks. I have a car.”

  “Well, then. I wish you luck, my dear.” Claudia Modlin, secretary of the Hawaii Bamboo Association, opened the door of a spiffy late-model Mercedes parked near the restaurant’s entrance and pulled away from the curb like a bat out of hell.

  I turned to leave, and out of the front entry of Bamboo Restaurant walked Earl, the heartless leader of the HBA.

  “Hey, little lady,” he called to me. “Hey. Thought you had gone already.”

  “Just talking to Claudia for a minute. Well, bye-bye.” I backed away.

  “Say, wait a sec!”

  Damn. I had almost pulled it off. As an impostor bamboo fanatic, I had done pretty damned well. I had managed to implant myself into a fractious horticultural society meeting at which I had absolutely no credentials. And then, knowing nothing at all about plants, I had stood up and made a motion to support a bamboo viewpoint that heretofore I had never even heard of. And in the process, I had gleaned a bit more knowledge about Kelly and his enemies. So it seemed to me, my work here was done. Now all I had to do was get the heck out of Dodge pronto before I blew my own cover.

  “Miss!” Earl was walking fast. He would catch up with me in just a few more strides. “What did you say your name was again?”

  I didn’t want to tick the guy off now. I had done so well up to this point. No one hated me yet. No one was yelling. I was only half a block from my car, but I hesitated to break into a sprint. Instead, I stopped and turned back while Earl caught up with me in one long step.

  “Miss…?”

  “Bean.”

  “Friend of Kelly’s, right?” he asked, looking me over.

  Note for the future: when impersonating a plant enthusiast, it is much better to quit while one is ahead. Run like hell after the meeting is over.

  “Horrible damned thing,” Earl said. “Boy like Kelly getting washed up onto the rocks at A-Bay. I would never have believed it, great swimmer like Kelly. Terrible thing.”

  “It is.”

  “You live here on the island, Miss Bean?” He pulled a golfer’s cap out of one of his pockets and put it on, shading his pale eyes.

  “No. No, I’m just here for a few days.”

  “I see. Well, maybe you don’t know it, then, but me and Kelly have been buddies for a while. I’m the one who brought him into the HBA, in fact. He had a genius for cultivating plants.”

  “I didn’t realize you were friends,” I said.

  “Oh, hell, yes. He was a great kid.”

  “You didn’t agree with his plan for bamboo to take over the world, though.”

  “Well, now.” Earl was not a tall man, about my height, and he smiled at me, eye to eye. “We had differences, sure. He was a young man, and perhaps I’m an old one.” He paused.

  I work with men like Earl all the time. I knew what Earl wanted to hear. “No,” I said, “you’re not!”

  “Okay, then, not too old. But I respected Kelly a lot. I think he was on to something very big. Bamboo is an amazing material. You know that. But the enterprise had to be approached the right way. We need to proceed very, very cautiously. Line up investors. Get some construction giants from the mainland to come over here. Junkets. You know what I mean. Sponsor seminars on bamboo and how to use it in building. Stuff like that.”

  “That sounds pretty well thought out,” I said, taking the shortest route to Earl’s heart.

  “Sure. I worked as a lobbyist in Lincoln, Nebraska, before my wife and I decided to move here. It takes a special talent for getting key interest groups to back a major new industry. And that takes time. Kelly was much too impatient. He wanted us to go right to the state legislature. Right now. Get the state to subsidize test bamboo plantations, pay for brand-new processing plants, the whole nine yards. Before we developed a market! He’d drawn up maps, marking out abandoned cane fields and selecting ideal sites, all located on state land. Kelly had lots of grand plans. I told him to take it slowly, but would he listen? Hell, no.”

  “You fought about it. Kenicki said—”

  “Sure, we had quite a few late-night phone calls, Kelly and me. I’m sure his girlfriend would rather have been canoodling with Kelly, instead of listening to him argue all those times Kelly called me. But Kelly and I enjoyed getting a rise out of each other, getting into the nittygritty details of our plans. Jeez, I can’t believe he’s really gone.”

  What Earl said made sense. And so, I had to reconsider everything. Looking at it all from this angle, it wasn’t plant politics gone deadly. It was a couple of bamboo enthusiasts disagreeing about the finer procedural points of a pie-in-the-sky, altruistic plan that could mean work to men who really needed it. A gallant plan to save their adopted home state by cultivating the vegetation they loved.

  I’d run clean out of ideas and subtlety. I held up a hand and shaded my eyes from the glare of the steady sun. “Earl, do you have any idea why Kelly would have been in a vacant hotel room at the Four Heavens Resort yesterday?”

  “Not a clue. Was he?” he asked, smiling down at me.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let me guess. Meeting up with his girlfriend, maybe, for some afternoon delight?”

  Now, that was something I hadn’t thought of. Keniki worked at the Four Heavens, of course. Maybe once in a while, they borrowed a free room to take advantage of her work breaks. Could Kelly have been waiting for Keniki yesterday afternoon?

  “Well, if you have any other questions, you just let me know,” he said, handing me his business card. Earl Maffini, North Coast Real Estate.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Actually, there is one more thing. I’m trying to find out where Kelly worked.”

  “You don’t know where he worked?”

  Okay, I could read his mind here. If I was such a close friend of Kelly’s that I would show up and put forward his master bamboo-conquers-the-world scheme before the board of the HBA, how was it I didn’t even know where he worked?

  I shook my head. W
hen stepping through such a narrow maze as the one I’d built, I always stick to the strict truth. Well, as close as was possible. “I’ve been thinking about what I might do to help Keniki, and I thought I could gather up his personal things at work—just to save her the sorrow. Only, she was pretty upset this morning, as you can imagine. I didn’t want to trouble her for the address.”

  “Well, you were just talking to Kelly’s boss. I’m surprised you didn’t just ask Claudia.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sure. Kelly worked for Claudia for the last year or so.”

  “I wonder why she didn’t mention it to me.”

  “Well, now,” Earl said, smiling again, “it was on the QT. But it wasn’t like they were very good at hiding the secret. They thought their project was pretty hush-hush.”

  “Did it have something to do with bamboo, Earl?”

  “Hell, no. Nothing as cool as bamboo, Miss Bean.”

  I smiled at that.

  “But they were growing something there down the coast. Everything grows best in our volcanic soil, you know. From what I could gather, they thought they would get rich from it.”

  Had Kelly come up with another brilliant idea, a second cash crop to make a fortune in Hawaii? Was he growing something illegal? Marijuana, maybe? And if he was mixed up in drugs, there could be a lot of reasons Claudia wouldn’t want to talk to me about it. “You know where their office is located?”

  “No office that I know of,” he said. “Just a field.”

  “Where?”

  “Near the water. Right down the coast aways. Not far from where they found his body, poor guy.”

  So Kelly had been working on some secret project with Claudia Modlin, which my active imagination was now convinced had to be cultivating the Big Island version of Maui Wowie, and I, great genius at discretion that I am, just told the woman that I was suspicious of his death.

  Nice one.

  Haru Wahine o ka Lomi

  (Mistress of the Spa)

  The difference between Wes and me is that Wes truly enjoys turning off his brain once in a while, and I have a hard time finding that switch. I stopped back at my room at the Four Heavens, hoping to find Wes, but it looked like he hadn’t come back. Apparently he’d been gobbled up in a marathon day of beauty, and the lure of free treatments had turned his head completely. I needed to see him, though. Preferably now. We needed to sort through the layers of information.

  I noticed as I stopped into the room that the message light on the desk phone was glowing. Maybe it was from Wes.

  I dialed the message center and heard a pleasant automated female voice state we had four messages.

  The first one was from the front desk of the resort. The man at the business center was calling to say they had received a package addressed to Wes and me. Hm. I would go pick it up in a few minutes. The second message was from Liz.

  “Hey, Wes and Maddie. I’m over at the North Shore Medical Center, but I’m grabbing a cab back to the Four Heavens. Don’t worry, I’m fine. They did tests. They took my temperature. Nothing wrong with me at all.

  “Holly came out here to the emergency room with me, but I told her not to wait around. I’m sure she’ll turn up back at the resort. Okay…” There was the sound of Liz huffing and puffing. “I’m out by the parking lot now. I’m walking…I’m looking…” More sounds of heavy breathing. “Nope. I don’t see her rent-a-car in the hospital lot. So I guess I’ll see you back at the ranch. And I just wanted to say, well, sorry about all the fainting. This is so unlike me. I’m usually really, really strong. I never get all flustery. I mean, I’m an accountant. I am used to scary things—you know, like arithmetic. Anyway, later.”

  Liz was fine. That was certainly good news. I slid back into party-planner mode and checked off one more mental concern. All party guests were required to have fun if at all possible.

  But something else didn’t seem exactly right. Why had Holly left Liz all alone at the ER? I bet Liz insisted Holly go, not wanting to completely spoil the bride-to-be’s weekend. Friendships are so complex. And between Liz’s fainter’s guilt and Holly’s caretaker’s instincts, who can say what feeling would win out when you had only a few more hours of daylight on an island holiday?

  The third message was from Keniki Hicks.

  “Madeline, you were so very very sweet to come by and see me this morning. My goodness, you are on your vacation, after all, and you still took the time to drive all the way out here to Hawi. I am really grateful for that, and thank you so much for dropping by the check, and, well, for everything. Also…I wanted to apologize to you for getting so…well, so upset. I am never like that. Never. It’s just been…Well, Cynthia says we’re all in shock.”

  I heard her sister’s voice in the background, giving some gentle reminders.

  “Oh,” Keniki’s voice continued, “and I also wanted you to know that some friends are putting on a small luau in honor of Kelly tonight. Everyone wanted to get together and we thought…well, we thought Kelly would like the idea of a luau. I know you are probably busy, but we would love to see you there. It’s being held at a friend’s house, over on the other side of the island. Near Hilo. And my cousin, Roddy, is helping out. He owns a helicopter tour company, and his heliport is pretty close to the Four Heavens. Roddy and his pilots are going to ferry all our friends over to Hilo and back. So you can see our beautiful island from above. That is, if you can make it. Starting at eight tonight and going on probably all night. Just go to Pele Helicopter Tours. You’ve probably seen their sign. They are right there off the highway just south of the resort, you know, toward Kona.”

  Poor Keniki. She had an awful lot to deal with, but she sounded like she was on her way to managing. What else can anyone do?

  The last message was from Jennifer Sizemore, newly appointed president of the Four Heavens Resorts Division and, although we’d yet to see her, our hostess for the weekend. Oh, good. I’d left her a message yesterday, letting her know about the trouble Holly had checking into her room.

  “Well, kiddo, hi.” Jenn’s voice sounded cheerful, and very much as I remembered it from our days together in Chef Louis’s class on grilling techniques. Funny how well we recall the voices from our past. “I’m in my office in New York and I’ve got to say, I was surprised to hear from you. Look, I don’t know anything about your trip to Hawaii. You are staying at one of our top properties, so I do hope you enjoy it, sweetie. But I was confused by your message. I never invited you or your friends to stay there. Is this your way of hinting I should have? Call me sometime soon and let’s talk.”

  Not her guests? What the hell was that about? I redialed her office number in New York but only got weekend phone mail and left her another message.

  I was annoyed, my typical Jennifer Sizemore reaction. Wait until Wes heard we were going to end up paying for all the rooms. How had this misunderstanding happened? I left our room and walked quickly over to the main resort building, the one that held the reception desk. I had dealt with billing issues a million times in my events business, and it wasn’t unheard of for the costs that were projected before a party to suddenly balloon up after it was too late to change things.

  “Hello,” I said to the lady behind the front desk. “Can I please speak with Mr. Jasper Berger?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Berger is gone for the weekend. Might I be of assistance?”

  “Yes. There may be a misunderstanding. Would you be able to look up my room and see to whom the bill is being charged?”

  “Didn’t you leave a credit card imprint when you checked in with us?” she asked kindly.

  “No. I did not. I was under the impression we’d been invited to be guests of the hotel.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes. And when I spoke with Mr. Berger yesterday, he concurred. Could you please look it up?”

  “Of course. Your name?”

  I told her and waited as she hit a few keys on her computer.

  “Your par
ty has four rooms for two nights, is that correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Yes, Miss Bean. It’s fine. Your room charges are being taken care of.”

  EPub Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN: 9780062013897

  “By the Four Heavens, you mean?” I asked. “By Jennifer Sizemore?” I tried to remember Jenn’s married name. “I mean, Jennifer Handley?”

  “No,” she said, her manner still most helpful and charming. “That’s not what I have listed on your record.”

  “Then who is paying for us?”

  She scrolled down the screen, her eyes darting back and forth as she read. “We are instructed to accept all charges made to those four rooms. It is noted that we received a cash deposit in advance, so you needn’t worry at all, Ms. Bean.”

  But yes, in fact, I did.

  “Cash? Who paid for us?”

  “That I do not know. But the deposit was ten thousand dollars in advance, which should be quite enough to cover all your costs this weekend. So have no fear.”

  “Please,” I asked, my concern mounting by the minute, “can you ask any of the others working here if they know who paid for us?”

  “I’m afraid that information would only be held in the accounting office of the resort. And they do not work on the weekend. Perhaps you could inquire on Monday?”

  “Thank you.”

  Someone had made sure we came to the Big Island of Hawaii this weekend and stayed at this resort. And if it hadn’t been my old nemesis from culinary school, Jennifer Sizemore, who the hell had brought us here?

  I was so lost in this new and disturbing thought that I almost forgot to inquire about my package. But just as I was leaving the lobby, I noticed another desk tucked into a corner which offered business center services to the resort’s guests.

  “I believe there’s a package for Madeline Bean.”

  “Miss Bean?” The young man behind the light wood desk looked up. “Oh, yes. Would you please sign on this line?” He pushed across a receiving log, and I signed on the line indicated. “I have it right here,” he said. “It was dropped off personally, by quite a fan of yours.”