“…sweetie?” I asked.
“Maddie. This ‘Cake’ of yours just tried his hardest to get you in trouble. Even after the spa requested you both leave. He asked to be reprimanded.”
I laughed. There I was, no way innocent in this scarlet affair, having pretended to be a spa pro and messing around in a treatment room with an incredibly sexy man I barely knew, but Wes only saw fit to blame the other guy. Never my fault, in his eyes. I took back all my grouchiness. I loved Wes.
“You laugh,” he continued, returning my smile, “but think about it. You are a sweet, innocent girl, and he’s a scoundrel. A story like this will make him an island sex legend.” Wes shuddered again. “Cake.”
“It’s short for Ekeka,” I reminded him. “A noble Hawaiian name. You know, deep respect for island culture. You have to admire that.”
Wes shook his head at me but kept smiling. “I’m thankful, at least, the spa didn’t decide to ban all of your friends for life. Imagine that.”
“No more lotus wraps for my darling Wes!”
“That would be a true disaster.”
Paloma had calmed down immediately once she realized I had nothing to do with the temporary agency she had called. Well, that, and once she saw the incredibly huge tip Cake handed her. In cash. But she did ask Cake and me to please take our private relationship somewhere private.
The thing was, every wild, spontaneous moment has a shelf life—the wilder, the shorter—and by the time Cake counted out two hundred dollars for her trouble, our wild moment had already expired.
We said good-bye, and then I got back to business. I had no time, really, for strange interludes with handsome strangers. I found Wes and told him about the memorial luau for Keniki’s boyfriend, Kelly. And the two of us decided we needed to bring something to the luau that was our own and home-cooked. It was our way.
Wesley and I headed for the resort’s premier restaurant, Ben A’s, and introduced ourselves to the chef, Ben Anderson. It was standard procedure among us in the culinary biz, and we talked about whose new restaurants were taking off on the islands and in L.A., and with which chefs we had worked in common and other fun industry gossip.
“We are going to need some cooking space,” Wes said, looking around. But the kitchen at Ben A’s was too crowded and busy to allow a couple of mainland cooks like us enough room in which to work.
However, Ben and his kitchen staff knew Keniki Hicks. Most had met her fiancé, and they all wanted to help out. In addition, there is a professional courtesy among the culinary community, and Ben, like all successful chefs, was a problem solver. A few minutes of conversation with the front desk was all it took for Chef Ben Anderson to clear our path, and soon we were invited to pick up the key card to the hotel’s Presidential Bungalow.
Wesley and I just blinked when we saw it. And then melted. The Presidential Bungalow was an incredible residence, the ultimate Four Heavens extravagance, the most heart-stoppingly luxurious accommodations available at a super-top-end resort. And the front desk had just tossed us the key, gratis.
The five-bedroom mansion, complete with its own dipping pool, normally rents out for $5,000 per night, but as our luck had it, a rock-and-roll heartbreaker checked out early in the A.M., and a Silicon Valley half-a-billionaire had delayed his arrival until tomorrow, leaving the luxury dwelling free for just this evening.
The Presidential Bungalow was really a mini-mansion set apart from the rest of the guest rooms and suites. In addition to five enormous bedrooms, it had seven bathrooms, and a fully stocked library of over two thousand books. When we were looking around earlier, I had picked up several pristine volumes in awe.
“Looks like this is the only book anyone has actually read, though,” said Wes, replacing The Da Vinci Code on a shelf.
Figured.
The Presidential Bungalow offered a stocked wine cellar, a koi pond, and a three-thousand-square-foot lanai. But the most desirable features to us by far were the two fully equipped gourmet kitchens, one indoors and one located out on the lanai. We were like Paris Hilton in a Prada factory-outlet store, Wesley and I, and we eagerly accepted the hotel’s offer to use these kitchens as we wished.
“If we had the time,” Wes mused, “I would love to make the honey garlic ribs recipe I got from those two fabulous guys I met in the bar. Those professional wrestlers. What were they called, again?”
“The Hawaiian Gods of Destruction,” I reminded him.
“Ah, yes!”
“The H-Gods, for short.” I shook my head at him, amused as always.
Wes liked to collect authentic local recipes wherever we traveled. He met folks. He talked food. He often wangled invitations to sample great regional dishes by proud home-cooks the world wide. These wrestlers, however, the Hawaiian Gods of Destruction, were an unusual source for culinary inspiration, even for Wesley.
“Exactly. Good fellows. Tiki and Bruiser.” Wes had run into them at the resort bar late last night, after our luau. “You have got to meet them, Maddie. They have an authentic island…”
I looked up from the drawerful of brand-new spatulas I’d been rooting around in, in my survey of the kitchen’s batterie de cuisine.
“…charm,” he finished.
“And you make fun of my new friend,” I said. “So this Tiki and Bruiser can cook?”
“Oh yes. They are Food Channel junkies, apparently. Anyway, we got to trading recipes. You know how one thing leads to another…”
I nodded.
“…and I thought these boys’ ribs might be perfect for our gathering tonight. Unfortunately, the recipe calls for preboiling the ribs for three hours.”
“It’s not to be,” I agreed. “If we had that much time, I would have loved to try preparing authentic laulau.”
“The dish with the taro leaves?”
I nodded. Taro is the staple of the Hawaiian diet and gave the name laulau (which means “taro tops”) to the traditional Hawaiian feast. “It sounds fabulous. You bake the taro leaves with coconut cream and octopus.”
“But according to tradition, the leaf-wrapped bundles of laulau must bake and steam for six hours, right?” Wes asked.
“Right. And today we need something quick.”
Wesley looked around the kitchen, pulling a large black platter from one of the cupboards. “Ben is great. I don’t know how he got us into this bungalow.”
I nodded. The executive chef at the Four Heavens on the Big Island carried a lot of weight.
Wes pulled out a second large black platter. “He said every one of the kitchen staff knows Keniki. The ones who have the night off tonight are going to the luau near Hilo. So whatever ingredients we need, they will provide.”
“Very generous.” I walked over and gave Wes a hug. “Let’s make something special, Wes. It will do me a lot of good if I can cook something really magical for Keniki.”
“So let’s create a new recipe for her.”
“That’s perfect. I want this dish to remind her of the sweet things in life.”
“Should we devise some sort of dessert? Using something…let’s see, what’s local? Coffee? Or pineapple?”
“How about an appetizer? Something to pass around and share when we arrive.”
“Good thought.”
“Hey,” I said, looking up at Wes, inspired as I always was by getting together with my best friend over food talk, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s use raw sugarcane.”
“Sugarcane.” Wes started a shopping list on his Palm Pilot.
“It’s got that stiff texture, right? Maybe we can carve the cane?”
“Wow.” Wes nodded, happily in thought. “I love that. But there is a time factor…”
“Okay, we carve the sugarcane into something fairly simple”—I made a few chopping gestures in the air—“like lollipop sticks.”
“You go, Maddie.”
Wes and I brainstormed for five more minutes and came up with an outrageously cool plan. We phoned over to the resort kitchen, and
soon, thanks to Chef Ben, all the ingredients we asked for, even a pile of sugarcane stalks, came over on a motor cart, fresh and ready for us to prepare. A young man helped unload the items and brought them through the bungalow and out to the lanai kitchen where we had set up. I mean, if you could cook anywhere in the world, wouldn’t you pick an outdoor patio right on the sand by the blue Pacific Ocean?
“Heck, Wes.” I picked up a handful of fresh green stalks about two inches in diameter. “They even had the cane.”
“Actually,” the guy said, bringing the last box of provisions out to us, “I just stopped in our field out there and cut some down for you. If you need more, just let me know.”
“Thanks.”
“And,” he said, laying down a silver tray holding two chilled mai tais in icy glasses, “compliments of the chef.”
Heaven, I suspect, is most likely alcohol free, so I now had to figure we had one-upped even Paradise.
Wesley handed the young guy a large tip. Not, I noted, quite as glaringly large as the tip Cake handed over to Paloma, but sufficiently generous as to reward the fellow for hacking around in the cane fields for us.
“Let’s do it,” Wes said, smiling at me, clinking glasses.
I began to strip the individual sugarcane stalks of their outer leaves. Meanwhile, Wes walked over to the bungalow’s impressive sound system and popped in a CD. Ukulele music. Fabulous uke music. I looked up, and Wes held up the CD case: Tropical Swing. Bill Tapia was the legendary, barely remembered ukulele jazz genius that had suddenly, brilliantly, been rediscovered and had improbably just recorded his first ever CD. At age ninety-six. I smiled. Perfect.
Wes and I carefully selected the right knives from a pretty impressive collection and, still sipping our drinks, got straight to work. Other tourists could lie about in the sun if they wished, or splash in the waves, but the two of us had our own kind of superb relaxation. Ocean view. Fabulous kitchen. “My Little Grass Shack (in Kealakekua, Hawaii)” on the CD player. And a brand-new recipe about to be born.
We began by trimming the leaves from the stalks and then slicing through the thick cane, carefully whittling each one down to a pile of four-inch-long sticks, one-quarter inch by one-quarter inch thick, making thin skewers out of the hard and fibrous sweet raw cane. We needed two hundred skewers, quite a lot of work, but then we couldn’t resist sampling our booty, relishing the odd texture, noting how juicy the freshly cut cane was, and remarking on the tangy flavor that colored the pure sweetness.
“This could become addictive,” I said, popping a second slender sliver of cane into my mouth and biting down.
For all his artistic flare, Wes was a kitchen workhorse. He carved up the cane so neatly and efficiently we were almost two-thirds through the pile before I began to tire. He hadn’t even broken a sweat. While we worked, I told him about Keniki and her sister, Cynthia. I told him about Liz Mooney and Marigold. I told him about the HBA and their amazing plan to save Hawaii. I told him about Claudia Modlin and Earl Maffini. And I told him that our entire trip was being comped by some mysterious person who was not my old pal Jennifer Sizemore. He didn’t say a word, just heard me out.
“You start the chicken,” he offered, “I’ll finish the carving.”
Exactly. When in doubt, cook.
Our idea was to produce lemongrass chicken on sugarcane. I started with about eight pounds of chicken, which Ben’s chefs had thoughtfully sent to us freshly ground up in the resort kitchen. It was much easier to prepare a large batch of food when one had the benefit of professional kitchen equipment. And I smiled when I saw the added gift Ben had sent out to us from the restaurant. I said a prayer of thanks for industrial-size Cuisinarts, and minced several small red onions and half a dozen peeled carrots. Then, by hand, I finely chopped two large bunches of lemongrass, about fifty stalks in all, along with a bunch of cilantro and a bunch of basil. The perfume of the herbs was intoxicating, bewitching. All the vegetables must have just been picked from the resort’s own kitchen garden, because every chef knows that the freshness of one’s ingredients makes all the difference in the glory of the final dish, and every great restaurant has access to the freshest produce.
Into the large mixing bowl, I added additional ingredients. I diced up half a dozen small jalapeño peppers, humming along to the divine musical combination of the steel guitar, double bass, and ukulele. From the excellent sound system, Bill Tapia strummed and sang “Hapa Haole Hula Girl,” which of course made me think of Keniki once again.
I sighed, and Wes looked up. “Life,” I explained. “Death.”
He nodded, thoughtful, and added, “Food.”
“Food.” I looked at the harvest of ingredients on the vast outdoor counter and perked up.
Wesley was still hard at work. “I’m almost done with these freaking sugarcane sticks, you evil genius,” he said, laying his knife down into a small puddle of sweet cane juice. “I’ll make the sauce next.”
While he moved over to the gas range, I crushed about a dozen cloves of garlic and added them to my bowl, stirring them together with all the other ingredients. I love, above all else, spicy flavors mixed in subtle relationship with sweet. It’s all about balance. But in this creation, our new recipe for Keniki, more flavors were called for. I grated fresh ginger root until I had about four tablespoons, and then counted out half a dozen plump limes and began juicing them. The idea was to combine the tart and the sweet, the savory and the hot, together into the mild ground chicken base, and then finish the appetizer with the candy-treat zing of fresh sugarcane, until the entire concoction blew everyone’s taste buds to smithereens. At least that was the goal.
As we worked, I asked Wes what he thought had been going on with Kelly Imo and his sudden death.
“What worries me,” said Wes, a man who virtually never worries, “is the way in which Kelly died.”
“In the ocean,” I agreed. “I know. It doesn’t make sense that a healthy young man could have such an accident.”
“What,” Wes asked gingerly, “if Holly hit him over the head so hard that she…”
“She what?” I asked, suddenly startled. A flood of scenes flashed quickly before me. Holly bashing Kelly with the lamp. The hotel maids removing his dead, lifeless body and cleaning up. Jasper Berger tossing Kelly’s lifeless body into the sea in the dark of night. It was simply impossible to believe. “You think Holly may have accidentally killed him?”
“Not exactly.”
“Wes. Be serious. She couldn’t have hit him that hard. And what happened to his body? I know the Four Heavens has a reputation for customer service, but disposing of bodies has to be beyond even them.”
“I’m not saying she killed him,” he said, shocked at my suggestion. “But what if she hit him so hard he got a concussion. Maybe he was working out by the cliffs later that night and just got woozy for a moment. Maybe he lost his equilibrium.”
I felt a little sick. What if Wes were right? “Don’t tell your theory to Holly,” I said quickly. “Let’s wait to see what the coroner says.”
It seemed even more important now that we get answers to what happened to Kelly Imo. Whatever strange business he had been mixed up with, whatever sent him to Holly’s hotel room yesterday, whatever other troubles he had accumulated in his life, we needed to find out fast. That’s the direction in which I was certain we should be looking for answers.
For the time being, though, I was grateful to have the cooking project to distract me. I cracked a dozen eggs—they would help the mixture bind together—before I added the last ingredients, some fish sauce and plenty of salt and pepper. Then it was just a matter of mixing the ground chicken into all the minced and chopped herbs and juice with my bare hands. This sort of finger mixing can be extremely therapeutic.
As I kneaded the lemongrass and spices into the ground chicken, Wes finished stirring up his impromptu sweet chile dipping sauce. He planned to transport it to the luau in a large ceramic bowl, and I watched as he put the covered bowl
into the refrigerator. Then he came over to help me begin our huge construction project.
“Okay, then,” I said, looking up at the prepared ingredients. “Some assembly required.”
Wes waited for me to take the lead. With the tip of a teaspoon against my palm, I quickly rolled about one ounce of the chicken-lemongrass mixture into a ball, then molded that portion onto the top of a sugarcane stick, lollipop-style. It only took a second or two. Then I made another. Wes joined in. It was, of course, a race. Wesley Westcott, born competitor. Every culinary challenge an Olympic event.
We each had a large black platter beside us, and soon the mountain of four-inch-long sugarcane sticks became flatter and flatter as our neat rows of chicken appetizers materialized and grew, herringbone-patterned, around the rim of the large platters.
I looked up, certain I had finished ahead of Wes, only to discover him checking his watch, his platter completely full. How does he do that?
“It’s almost five-thirty,” he said, covering the trays with plastic wrap from a restaurant-size roll.
“We’re great,” I said. “Let’s just toss these trays into the refrigerator and we’ll pick them up on our way to the heliport.” Our plan was to fry them fresh at the luau. We had borrowed an enormous wok from the hotel kitchen and had procured a huge jug of peanut oil for that purpose.
“Right. The thing is, I need to find Holly,” Wes said. “Rather quickly.”
“Yeah,” I said, “where is our girl?” I picked up a cordless phone from the outdoor kitchen counter and dialed her room. No answer. I dialed each of her sisters’ rooms, one after another. Again, nothing but automated offers to leave voice mail, which I ignored. I tried our room even, but of course no one was home. I called over to the spa, but a rather frosty-sounding Paloma said Holly had never returned to the spa that entire afternoon. And the rest of our gang, like Wes, had left long ago.
The Flaming Luau of Death Page 14