And this suddenly tied into what I’d learned at the HBA meeting this afternoon. The Four were opposed to the immediate announcement of Kelly’s big idea: his cockamamie scheme to transform the Hawaiian Islands from a sketchy tourist-dependent economy into some mythical filthy-rich bamboo empire. They were fighting for a delay.
It was suddenly clear. They needed time to lock up more land.
Land that was now worthless for agriculture might become a gold mine in the future, and the Bamboo Four wanted more time to get their hands on it cheap. But could they ever pull this agricultural revolution off? Their whole plan seemed so completely nuts to me, but then they were the bamboo experts, and I could barely grow a houseplant. I also happen to believe that the distinction between crackpots and visionaries is nonexistent, so no matter how far-fetched their scheme seemed to me, I had to take their own resolve very seriously.
With just the right property acquisitions, these wouldbe bamboo barons must have figured they could control a potentially explosive new industry. Like the missionaries that came to Hawaii almost two hundred years before and controlled the sugar plantations.
“Whoa,” I said, suddenly groggy with insight. I had to ride this train to the end of its logical tracks. Kelly loved the plants, loved the people of Hawaii. But Claudia and Earl? What did they love most? What about Cake and Marvin? Was it money? Did one of the Bamboo Four kill Kelly Imo? Did someone shoot Kelly and dump his body in the bay in order to keep the lid on these bamboo pipe dreams just a little while longer, while these monopolycrazed bamboozlers got their hands on more land?
I didn’t have a shred of evidence to support nine-tenths of my theory, but at least some of that had to be true. I felt certain of it.
“Earl,” I said, suddenly feeling ill, “did Marvin agree with Kelly’s plans for bamboo farming?”
“Oh, heck, no,” Earl said, looking at me weird. Could he read my thoughts? “Marvin thought we were all a bunch of morons!” He laughed.
“What?” I was totally thrown. “Didn’t he love bamboo just as much as the rest of you?”
“Marvin? Oh, he likes the stuff for landscaping. That’s about it. He thought Kelly was off his rocker about introducing the construction industry to using bamboo products.”
“But I thought Marvin was a big plant genius.”
“He is,” Earl agreed. “He is. But he couldn’t care less about farming. He’s more into immuno-whatzits. Using plants for medical research, all that sort of fancy stuff.”
“So he didn’t want to grow bamboo?” I felt my entire theory deflate.
“Not really, no. Why?”
“I’ve got to talk to him,” I said urgently. “Right away.”
“He’s probably out at his foreman’s house, back on the property,” Earl said. “His foreman doesn’t live there anyway, so Marvin sometimes uses that old house when he wants some privacy to think.”
“Where is it?”
Earl explained how to get there, following the private drive about two miles along the coast.
I ran out of the office and scanned the huge crowd, searching for Wesley. He wasn’t in the dining room or living room, and the housekeeper told me he hadn’t been in the kitchen for fifteen minutes at least. I ended up taking out my cell phone and calling Wes’s cell. I listened to the ringing and then heard his voice mail announcement. I described my discovery, that Marvin Dubinsky was not far away, and how important I felt it was to contact Dubinsky in order to protect Holly from any further threats.
Then I called the police. It was almost nine-thirty on Saturday night, so there weren’t any detectives available, but I left a message about my encounter with the gunman at the Grand Waikoloa.
Finally, I tried calling Chuck Honnett, but again, there was no answer. Why was no one ever near their phones when you needed them? And what was Honnett up to? It was half past midnight in Los Angeles. Why was he out so late on a Saturday night? I felt the true pang of jealousy over some unknown woman he was probably sharing a drink with. But I had no right. Hadn’t I been pushing Honnett away for weeks? Hadn’t he given me every chance in the world to start over?
“Madeline, hello. Here you are!” said Keniki, reaching her arms out, letting me give her a comforting hug. Her long hair had the gentle scent of coconut. “Look who’s here,” she said to the big yellow dog by her side. Dr. Margolis’s tail thumped the glossy hardwood floor.
“Dr. Margolis,” I said, bending down to pat his square head. “How are you?”
“He’s well,” said Keniki. “But I’m falling apart. Have you heard?”
I nodded. Kelly’s death was no accident. It was murder. I could see it was wearing her down. “Try not to think about it too much,” I said. “Things will get clearer as the days go by. The police will sort it out.”
“But what if the police suspect me?” Her eyes had a glassy appearance.
“I’ll help you, Denise,” I whispered, concerned about her.
“You are so sweet,” she said and attempted a half smile. “The doctor gave me a pill. I can hardly feel anything now. Don’t worry, Madeline.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just hugged her again.
“And I like it how you called me Denise,” she said, moving away to greet other guests. “Not everyone knows how much I like that name. That’s what my mother used to call me.”
Score another point for the dolphins.
I opened the door and looked up the road. It was more than past time I jumped in the Mustang and took a little trip looking for Marvin Dubinsky.
Malawina
(Marvin)
I started up the Mustang and slowly pulled away from the large plantation house onto the back path, hearing the crunch of lava rock gravel under my tires.
The top was down, of course, and the night sky was brilliant, filled with billions of stars. The farther I drove away from the main house with its huge floodlights out in front, the more breathtaking the sky became. The moon was full tonight, but at the moment he was hiding behind clouds, like a self-confident hero allowing his astral rivals their chance to shine.
The private road skirted along the coast, permitting glimpses now and then of the night-black Pacific beyond. The road was only one lane wide and meandered, weaving along the contour of the coast; thick roadside foliage masked what was coming around each bend. I had checked the Mustang’s odometer when I got into the car, keeping watch that I not go too far. Earl had said two or three miles from the house. It would be a long walk, too long for anyone dressed in high heels like me, but no trouble for the only guest at the party who had managed to sneak her car inside the security perimeter. I was pretty proud of myself.
The Mustang turned a bend, and I saw light up ahead in the distance. Soon I could see a house—the foreman’s house. It looked like your average San Fernando Valley ranch home, nondescript and low. The lights were a good sign. Marvin must be home.
The terrain was markedly different up here. Outcroppings of brush petered out abruptly, and vast fields of black lava rock spread in most directions away from the shore. However, down closer to the ocean, a large system of PVC pipes crisscrossed neat semi-submerged fields. A dense leafy crop was growing behind an additional barrier of razor-wire fencing.
The road eventually brought me to the backside of the foreman’s house, and still crunching on black gravel, I parked the Mustang near the back door. However, I felt it was only respectful to walk around and approach the dwelling from the front. The sidewalk took me past a neatly swept rock garden, where masterful designs were arranged out of coral, to a sliding glass door. The interior of the house was illuminated but masked from view by a closed curtain. I stepped up and pressed the doorbell, which I could hear ringing throughout the house in the night’s silence.
“Hello,” a voice called.
“Hello,” I called back. “I’m Madeline Bean. Holly Nichols’s friend. May I come in and speak to you?”
The floor-length white curtain was pushed aside, and s
tanding behind the sliding glass door was Marvin Dubinsky. Marvin Dubinsky, found at last.
“You’re Holly’s boss,” Marvin said, beaming at me. “Wow. What are you doing out here? I mean, wow. This is blowing my mind. But wait. I mean, come on in.”
First hurdle jumped. He remembered who Holly was. I had no idea what her name might mean to him after all the years that had passed, but I suppose a wife is hard to forget.
And, second thought, he knew who I was too. Now that was unexpected.
I walked into the house and turned to take a good look at my host in the strong light. In no way did he now resemble the Marvin Dubinsky that Holly described.
For one thing, a growth spurt had obviously come to a very last-minute rescue. Marvin stood a towering six foot four, if I could guess from standing next to him. He was also attractively free of any skin problems or braces. The Marvin Dubinsky before me now was an extremely tall, messy-haired, deep-voiced, cute geeky-god.
“You look nothing like I was expecting, Marvin,” I said, still checking the guy out rather closely.
“Holly told you about me?” he asked eagerly, his voice getting an excited bounce.
“She did.” He still seemed to have some feelings for Holly—go figure?—so I figured I’d better let him down softly. “Well, you have been on her mind ever since she began to get these threatening e-mails. And she began to worry that someone might try to kill her if she didn’t tell them everything she knew about where to find you. Which, of course, she had no freaking idea.”
“Damn those idiots,” Marvin said, abruptly losing his temper. “They had no right to upset Hollyhock.”
“What idiots?”
He sighed and pulled his hand through his thick hair. “It’s a long story. Say, where are my manners?” he asked, startled at himself. “Sit down. Here.” He moved a notebook computer from a cushion on the yellow sofa. “I’m doing some research on the Internet. Just love the Internet,” he said.
I sat down. “So just what is all this stuff about Mountain Hollyhock, anyway?” I asked more directly. “Are you still in love with Holly?”
“What?” he asked, again looking startled. “Oh, that. Oh, yes. Of course.” He looked embarrassed. “I’ve always loved Holly.”
“This is seriously strange, Marvin,” I said. “You haven’t talked to her in, like, eight years! If you loved her, why did you just disappear off the face of the earth?”
“I’m…” He looked at me, an appealing man without much experience socially, by the look of him. “I’m just shy,” he said. “Too shy. I know. But when I left town after graduation, Holly was already on her way, dating another guy.” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “Look. Hollyhock was the most popular girl in our class. I knew I was lucky to have had that one perfect night with her. I just sort of crept away. Off to college. You know.”
“And then?”
“Then? Well, I expected I’d hear from her. Every week I just knew she would get in touch. To annul our marriage. You know. Or get a divorce. I expected she would be getting in touch very soon. But she never did. So I kept hanging on to the hope that she had some feelings for me after all.”
“But you never called? You never came over to see her?”
“I wrote her letters,” he explained. “I told her I loved her in the letters. I sent her poems. But I told her of course I would sign any papers she wanted me to in order to let her out of our marriage. After all, it was just a mistake to her. I understood. But she never answered the letters. I figured she would when she was ready, so I didn’t want to rush her.”
“Marvin,” I said, a little lost, “whoa. Stop. I don’t think Holly has ever gotten your letters. She would have mentioned them to me. I’m positive. Were they e-mails?”
“No. I sent real, regular mail letters.”
“Where did you address them?”
“To her home. I mean her parents’ home.”
I wondered if Holly’s parents had conveniently forgotten to deliver them to Holly. I would have to check with Holl to see if her parents approved of Marvin way back when.
“And you never just picked up the phone, Marvin?”
He looked uncomfortable. “And said…what?”
I could think of a million things. But the point was, of course, this lovesick dweeb couldn’t. “So that’s why you call this place Mountain Hollyhock? Why you have the kanji for Mountain Hollyhock on your wall. And on T-shirts.”
“Well, yes and no,” Marvin answered, taking a seat opposite me in one of those odd rocking chairs that have gliders on the bottom. “See, I became fascinated with a certain plant when I was away at school.”
“Where did you go to college?”
“Berkeley first,” he said. “They were eager to let me design my own major.”
“Which was?”
“I wanted to combine ethnobotany and phytomedicinal prospecting, actually.”
“Oh. Right.” This guy was either crazy-smart or just crazy. “What’s that?”
“Okay, well, ethnobotany is studying the historic uses of plants as medicines. Mostly it’s digging into the medicinal traditions of Europeans, Chinese, Egyptians, American Indians, and like that. I was intrigued at first by what could be learned from more recently discovered cultures. I did field studies with shamans in Amazonia and Belize, for instance, but then I suddenly got interested in Japanese culture and took a different route.”
“And phytomedicinal prospecting?”
“Good retentive memory,” Marvin said, flashing a quick smile. “See, once you discover the plants that have been used as medicines by primitive cultures, you need to screen the plants for biological activity.”
“Okay,” I said. “I can follow that.”
“Huge projects are currently under way by such organizations as INBio, Costa Rica’s National Institute of Biodiversity. INBio is cataloging all species of plants and animals in the country—estimated to be around five hundred thousand! I spent some time down in Costa Rica helping them train what we called ‘community taxonomists’ to identify plants and animals.”
“Sure,” I said, almost keeping up.
“Anyway, I had some laughs, made a few discoveries, started a few companies, and turned them over to doctors to run—you know, the usual postadolescent fun.”
“Marvin, you are one strange dude,” I said, marveling at the guy my Holly had married.
“Yeah, well,” he said bashfully. “Anyway, I had theorized there was a class of medicinal roots that were like the antibiotics of the plant kingdom, with healing properties like no other. I’d been doing the biological activity studies on a class of plant found in Asia, and I suddenly fell in love with my first root. The specific variety I needed was only grown in Japan, a semiaquatic member of the cabbage family, but the medicinal properties of this plant are phenomenal. Anticarcinogenic. Antitoxin. It was, like, absurd, this root was so wonderful. The only problem was, the Japanese growers refused to let me have samples to grow in my lab so I could continue my studies.”
Somehow, as Marvin Dubinsky waxed rhapsodic about roots, I was certain I knew where it was all heading.
“Marvin, are you talking about wasabi?”
“Of course,” he said, looking incredibly happy with me. “Wasabia japonica. You know it’s been served with raw fish for centuries, not simply because the taste is pleasing. Because it actually counteracts food poisoning.”
I shook my head. Imagine that.
“Mountain Hollyhock! That’s the kanji for wasabi. Don’t you see how perfect it all is? I fall in love with a girl in high school named Mountain Hollyhock, and years later I discover the most medicinally significant plant known to humankind, and its historical Japanese kanji from the tenth century translates as Mountain Hollyhock. How could I not leave my postdoc position at Harvard then? This was more than fate, Miss Bean. It was about destiny, I think.”
“So what happened?”
“I still had this problem with the Japanese grow
ers. They were becoming more and more suspicious. I tried to buy larger quantities of their finest specimens of wasabi, but they balked. They traditionally sell in only very small quantities to a set list of buyers, mostly upscale restaurants in Asia, and they couldn’t make an exception for me, the guy who was about to cure bloody cancer. I mean, really! I wanted to grow my own, but of course they wouldn’t let me.”
“So you stole some specimens. You stole them from the Japanese farms and began growing your own wasabi here in Hawaii.”
“Well,” Marvin said, sheepishly. “Yeah.”
That explained a lot. The razor-wire security fencing and electronic gates. The enormous security guards. The secrecy. The crop fields I had just seen. The perfect specimen of fresh raw wasabi our sushi chef, Mori, had produced. I guessed Mori must be connected to this ranch in some way and was slipping out his own samples for lessthan-medicinal purposes.
I was pretty upset. I stood up. “And now some angry hairy-fisted goons have been sent from Japan to retaliate because you stole their precious plants, the secrets about which they have been protecting for ten centuries.”
Marvin looked completely forlorn. “That’s about it, yes.”
“This just sucks.”
“Look, I’ll take care of it,” Marvin said, trying to calm me down a bit. “I’d never let anything happen to my Hollyhock.”
I glared at him. Men. They think they are invincible. But he hadn’t had to stare down the barrel of a gun, like I had. And what had happened to Kelly? I had been sure Kelly’s death was wrapped up with some deep dark bamboo plot, but now I was no longer so sure.
“What happened to Kelly?” I asked.
“Please sit down, Miss Bean,” Marvin pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”
I sat back down and waited.
“Now this first part is the difficult part. I’m going to ask you to just hear me out and not scream or get freaky, okay?”
The Flaming Luau of Death Page 19