Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  I started Googling and clicking on links, finding individual surfers and groups that opposed sapping the strength from waves to provide electricity. I remembered the photo of Zoë Greenfield surfing on the wall of the house on Lopez Lane, though I hadn’t seen a surfboard anywhere.

  I called Greg Oshiro. Two could play his game, I thought, and when he answered, instead of saying hello, I said, “Did Zoë Greenfield surf?”

  “Before she met Anna, I think,” Greg said. “Why?”

  “Just asking.” I hung up before he could get anything else in.

  I tried Googling her name, this time looking for any connection to surfing or to groups that were protesting the use of wave energy. It took a while, but I found an online petition sponsored by a group called Save Our Beaches for Surfing (SOBS). The specific petition was against the construction of a sewage plant on the North Shore, but when I went to the main SOBS web site, I found that they had also organized protests against the use of wave capture technology.

  I paged through the site, looking for any other mention of Zoë. Her name didn’t appear, but a familiar one did. My cousin Ben was a member of the organization’s board of directors.

  Ben was a competitive surfer, better than I’d ever been. He spent much of the year following the waves, entering, and often winning, competitions around the world. I hoped that the cell number I had for him was still good, and that he wasn’t in one of those dead zones they’re haunting people with in those TV ads.

  The call went to his voice mail. “Hey, brah, it’s cousin Kimo,” I said. “I’ve got a question about a case. Can you call me as soon as you get a chance? I don’t know where you are now, but I hope you’re surfing well.”

  I was going over my idea with Ray when my cell rang. “That was quick, brah,” I said. “You in town?”

  “Yeah, getting ready to leave on Sunday for Costa Rica. What do you need?”

  “You’re on the board of a group called SOBS, right?”

  “Bunch of nutcases,” he said.

  “Can we meet up somewhere? I want to talk to you about them.”

  “I’m in Haleiwa. Got a sponsor meeting later in the afternoon. How about over dinner?”

  “Let me check with Mike and call you back.”

  Mike was up for a quick trip to the North Shore. “I should go look at a fire scene up there anyway. How soon can you get away?”

  “Meet you at the house in an hour?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Lieutenant Sampson agreed that Ray and I had put in enough unbilled overtime on the case to let us sneak off for the afternoon. “You think this could be a lead?” he asked, half paying attention to us and half reading something on his computer.

  “It’s a chance,” I said. “We’re running out of other options.”

  “You’ve got ‘til Friday. After that, I’m putting you back in the rotation.”

  He went back to the computer, and Ray and I left his office. I called Ben to confirm our dinner, then left for home, feeling like a schoolboy playing hooky. I was loading surfboards and rash guards into the back of the Jeep, Roby jumping around like a demented kangaroo, when Mike pulled into the driveway.

  He looked at all the gear. “I thought you were going to Haleiwa for a meeting.” He reached down to scratch under Roby’s chin.

  “Not ‘til dinner. I figured I can get some surfing in. The waves should still be pretty strong.”

  The big waves on the North Shore start in October, and start to fizzle by March. That’s why Ben was on his way to Costa Rica. But I knew I could still do some quality surfing at Pipeline or Sunset.

  We zoomed along the freeways, then climbed up Kam Highway through the center of the island, blasting “Island Girls’ by Fiji and singing along. It was breezy up there, and I didn’t trust Roby not to jump out if he saw some other dog, so we left the flaps down and just opened the side windows. We passed the Dole Plantation, driving through endless fields just coming green in the springtime.

  “You think this will all be developed some day?” Mike asked, leaning back in his seat.

  “Hope not.” I spent a lot of time on the North Shore just after I came out of the closet, working undercover to find out who had killed a trio of surfers, and I could see more and more development encroaching the closer we got to the traffic circle where Kam Highway turned right toward Haleiwa.

  Instead of turning right toward Haleiwa, I followed the circle around to Waialua Beach Road, and then to Haleiwa Road. I dropped Mike at Fire Station 14 in Haleiwa, where he said he’d get one of the firefighters to drive him out to the scene of the fire, off the Cane Haul Road. Roby and I continued up through Haleiwa, connecting back with Kam, cruising along looking for a good break.

  I found a parking space near Alligator Rock, between Leftovers and Marijuana’s, and pulled in. It’s not one of the toughest, or the easiest, breaks, so it wasn’t too crowded. I pulled on my rash guard then tied Roby’s leash to a stake in the sand, opened a beach umbrella for shade, and left him a towel to curl up on. But he sat at attention, watching me walk down the beach.

  The water was cold, and the swells looked about five feet. I dropped my board in and then turned to look back at him. I made a downward motion with my hand, and he went down on his haunches, though I could see he was still watching me.

  I duck dived through the incoming surf, setting myself up beyond the breakers to wait for a good wave. I could just make out Roby on the beach towel, a golden blob on a field of blue, surrounded by sand the same color as his fur.

  I surfed for about an hour, then rode the last wave in to the shore for a good landing. As I walked toward Roby, he jumped up and strained against the leash.

  We were all alone in our little stretch of beach, so I let him loose, and raced him down to the water. We romped in the surf for a few minutes, him tearing back and forth and all around me, and then we went back to the towel, where I’d left his leash. I walked him up to the street, let him empty his bladder, and then took him over to the pole shower.

  We both rinsed off as best we could, and he rewarded me with a spray of cold water as he shook. I put some water in a bowl, which he slurped up. Then we went back to the towel and lay down to dry off in the sun. He dozed, but I sat there, letting the warmth roll over me, and thought about the deaths of Zoë Greenfield and Miriam Rose.

  I had to believe that the spreadsheets held the key. But what did they show? Was Néng Yuán cheating the state, and was Zoë killed to prevent that information from being made public? Or had Zoë planned to release that information to a group like SOBS, to damage the wave power movement? In that case, the list of potential suspects could grow—even to include Levi Hirsch, who had invested a lot of cash in Wave Power Technology.

  I didn’t suspect Levi, or I would never have given him Zoë’s spreadsheets. But as I sat there and watched the never-ending surf, I couldn’t help but think about how much energy was out there for the taking. Between the heat generated by the sun above me, the gusts of wind that occasionally whipped the sand around us, and the waves, there was a lot of force that could be tamed.

  I remembered the old saying that power corrupts. In this case, it was a different kind of power than whoever first said it had meant. The sun, wind and waves could generate energy, and then that energy could be sold to people and businesses who needed it. And didn’t having a commodity that others wanted, and were willing to pay for, generate power in the marketplace?

  I sat there for a while, watching the waves, until the sun went behind some clouds and I realized it was getting late. I called my friend Ari, who owns and manages property up on the North Shore, and asked if he had a place I could shower and get cleaned up.

  “If you don’t mind something a little messy, I’ve got a time-share you can use. The last set of guests checked out yesterday, and I don’t have a new set ’til the weekend, so the maid hasn’t gotten over there yet.”

  “Thanks. That’d be great.” He gave me the address and the co
de for the lock box on the door. There were even a couple of clean towels, and I was able to shower, change, and get Roby pretty dry before Mike called.

  I picked him up at the fire station, and Roby was so glad to see him you’d think the poor dog had been abandoned for days. Mike leaned down and sniffed the dog’s fur. “He smells like strawberries.”

  “Don’t tell Ari, but I dragged him into the shower and shampooed him,” I said. “We went into the water for a while, and he was salty and smelly. They had a maximum strength blow dryer at the time share, so it was like a puppy salon treatment.”

  We got a patio table at Jameson’s, where Roby could sprawl at our feet, and ordered frozen daiquiris while we waited for Ben. It was nice there with Mike and Roby, a family outing in the midst of all the confusion. I was sad that Zoë Greenfield would never spend time like that with her daughters again, and wondered how they would grow up—with Greg? With Anna, who was still hiding out somewhere? Would the loss of their mother leave a hole behind, or would they grow up never even knowing that there had been another mother in the first years of their lives?

  I thought again of Greg and Anna, and their possible motives. Suppose Ray and I were running off on the wrong track, chasing down energy companies and disgruntled surfers, when Zoë’s killer was right in front of us?

  “Earth to Kimo,” Mike said, nudging me. “Are you here with us, or off somewhere?”

  I raised my glass. “I’m here with you, sweetheart. And very grateful for that.”

  DINNER WITH BEN

  As Mike and I were finishing our daiquiris, Ben arrived, deeply tanned, wearing a polo shirt with the logo of a waterproof sunscreen company. “One of my sponsors,” he said. “I had to meet with them this afternoon.”

  Ben’s dad was a Kansas-born gambler Aunt Pua met and married in a quickie ceremony in Vegas, where she was working for a short while as a cocktail waitress. I don’t think he ever knew that she had two other kids back in Hawai’i, and the marriage lasted only long enough for her to become pregnant with Ben.

  He looked a lot like me, the haole from his dad coming out on top of the Hawaiian-Japanese mix from his mom. He had short, straight black hair, a tall, wiry frame, and biceps that bulged out of his pale blue polo shirt.

  We made small talk until after the waiter had taken our orders – I got Portuguese bean soup, and the opakapaka, a Hawaiian pink snapper, poached in white wine and topped with a Hollandaise sauce. Mike and Ben ordered salads and fish as well, grilled ahi for Ben and the sautéed mahi-mahi for Mike. I was salivating just thinking about what a great meal it was going to be. The waiter even offered to bring some steak tidbits for Roby.

  “So tell me about SOBS,” I said, after I drained the last of my daiquiri. “You said they were nutcases?”

  “They’re well-intentioned.” Ben leaned back in his chair. “The guy who founded the group is named Steve Hendrix, and he tends to get excited about stuff. There was this sewage plant thing, and then parking along Kam Highway, and then he wanted more showers installed. Now he’s got a bug up his ass about wave power.”

  “How big a group?”

  Ben shrugged. “They turn out a crowd for demonstrations. Mostly because he’s smart, and he schedules things when the weather’s bad for surfing. He runs a surf shop, and he’s always giving away free stuff, too, so people show up. Like I said, he’s the main guy, but he’s got three or four other people who help him out.”

  “How’d you end up on the board of directors?”

  Ben grimaced. “One of my sponsors. They do a lot of business with Steve’s store, and they pressured me to let him use my name. I didn’t have much choice.”

  I told him the bare facts about the case—that a woman who analyzed alternative energy statistics had been killed, and we were tracking down all angles. “You think there’s anyone at SOBS who might want to sabotage some of these energy companies?”

  “You mean kill somebody?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

  “I know this woman, Zoë, surfed a little. What if she was handing off energy data to a group like SOBS, and somebody from an energy company found out?” I suggested. “Maybe this Steve guy made some threats to some company, and they had Zoë killed to prevent the information getting out?”

  Even as I said it, the idea sounded dumb. I could see I was getting way out. Zoë’s killer wasn’t some anonymous energy company executive trying to protect market share.

  The waiter brought our entrées, including the platter of steak tidbits for Roby, who immediately began to wolf them down, as if we never fed him at home.

  The fish platters were beautiful, like works of art. “As my mother used to say, Gladys Yuu couldn’t have carved this better,” Mike said, looking down at his.

  For a moment I thought I’d misunderstood him. “What did you say?”

  “It’s an old family joke,” he said. “When my parents moved to Hawai’i, my mother took cooking lessons from this Chinese woman who was an expert at carving meat, trimming fish, all that knife stuff. My father used to tease my mother, when she did a bad job. ‘Didn’t you learn anything from Gladys Yuu?’ And then when something was good, he’d say, ‘Gladys Yuu couldn’t have done it better.’”

  “I need to talk to your mother when we get home,” I said.

  Mike’s eyebrows raised. I’d had a rocky relationship with his parents, mostly with his father, who still believed I was a bad influence on his son, and it was rare that I initiated any contact with them. It was awkward sometimes, but I managed to avoid them most of the time.

  Usually we ran into each other in the driveway, waving and saying hello, maybe sharing a comment about the weather. Even Mike wasn’t that friendly with his folks, certainly not to the degree I was with my family. He had spent so many years hiding his sexuality from them that lack of communication had become a habit.

  After dinner, we said good night to Ben and I got a plastic bag from the restaurant. Mike and I walked Roby down along Kam Highway. There were a million stars out over the ocean, and a cool breeze blowing in. “What do you need to talk to my mother about?” Mike asked.

  “I wonder if the Gladys Yuu who taught your mother how to cut up meat and fish is the secretary in the office where Zoë Greenfield worked.”

  Roby stopped to squat next to a hibiscus bush, the bright red flowers already closed up for the night. In the morning, though, new blossoms would open up. I wondered if new ideas would open up with the case the next morning, if the middle-aged Gladys Yuu we’d met at Zoë’s office would turn out to have the skill to put a knife into someone.

  “Middle-aged Chinese woman,” I said, turning to look at Mike.

  He stuck his hand into the take-out bag, reached down, and grabbed Roby’s poop. “Excuse me?” he said, standing up.

  “Gladys Yuu is a middle-aged Chinese woman. At least the one at Zoë’s office is. And that fits the profile of the person who pawned Zoë’s jewelry at Lucky Lou’s.”

  We turned back around toward the Jameson’s parking lot as I explained how Ray and I had traced Zoë’s dragon pendant to Lucky Lou’s. “But we were thinking that it was a home invasion then,” I said. “And that kind of person didn’t fit with what we were expecting, so we pushed it aside.”

  “But now you think it might connect,” Mike said.

  I was so excited about the possibility of a new lead that I probably drove too fast on Kam going home. “Slow down, Kimo Andretti,” Mike said once, as I sailed around a convertible full of tourists.

  We pulled into our driveway just before nine. There was still a light on in his parents’ living room when Mike knocked on the front door.

  His father answered, wearing a khaki t-shirt, denim shorts and reading glasses that looked just like Mike’s. If you saw Mike and his dad together, you’d know they were father and son. Mike was a couple of inches taller than his father, and he had a mustache and a slight epicanthic fold to his eyes, but otherwise, his facial structure and bearing were just the same as his
dad’s.

  Roby went nuts seeing his grandfather, and before he said anything to us, Dominic Riccardi knelt down to rub behind the golden retriever’s ears. “This is a nice surprise,” Dom said, standing up. “Come on in.”

  He stepped aside to let us all in the house, and called out, “Soon-O. Mike and Kimo are here.”

  Mike walked ahead of me and leaned down to kiss his mother’s cheek as she sat on the sofa doing a Sudoku puzzle. Even though I have Japanese blood, I think the gene for number puzzles was strained out of my makeup somewhere along the way. I love crosswords, but I can’t figure Sudoku out at all.

  Soon-O put the puzzle book aside and motioned Mike to sit beside her. She was a tall, slim, Korean woman, a nurse who had met her future husband when he was her patient in an Army field hospital during the Korean war. She wasn’t a great beauty; her face was flat and almost circular. But her eyes revealed a deep intelligence, and she was quick to grasp a situation and deal with it.

  Her husband still harbored a grudge against me for dumping his son when we broke up the first time, and driving Mike to drink. But Soon-O had more faith in Mike and his ability to control his own life, and never blamed his problems on me.

  I sat in one of the wing chairs across from the sofa, and Dom sat in the other. Roby sprawled at Dom’s feet, the traitor.

  “Kimo has a question about Gladys Yuu,” Mike said.

  “It was something Mike said at dinner,” I began. “About a woman you studied cooking with?”

  Soon-O nodded. “When we moved out here from New York so that Dom could start work at Tripler, I decided to take a couple of months off to help us all get settled.”

  Tripler was the big Army hospital just ewa of downtown, where Dom Riccardi was a doctor and Soon-O a nurse. I knew that Soon-O had been very unhappy on Long Island, where Asian-Caucasian marriages were a rarity, where she hadn’t been able to buy the foods that reminded her of home, or hear her native language other than through the long-distance lines.