Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “I don’t think that’s anatomically possible,” I said, as my brothers snickered behind me.

  Brad sprayed gravel making a fishtail turn, then sped out of the parking lot.

  “Oh, to be single again,” Lui said. “Not.”

  “Yeah, I take back what I said about envying you the studly life,” Haoa said. “I’m remembering what a pain in the ass it was.” Suddenly he held up his hands toward me. “Don’t take that literally. And don’t give me any details.”

  There was a lot of kissing and hugging as everyone got ready to leave, and my mother even got a little teary. “You can come home any time you want,” she said, hugging me.

  “I know, Mom.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Really, I’m fine. I’m relaxing, I’m surfing, I’m meeting people. I’m going to come home sometime, but there’s stuff I have to work out up here first.”

  I choked up, watching the cars all back out and head down toward Honolulu, wanting so badly to be able to get into my truck and follow them, to reclaim the life I had left behind. But like I told my mother, there was stuff I had to do on the North Shore first.

  There was still some daylight left, so I went back to my truck and pulled out my notes on the case. I wrote up my discussion with Rik, along with a reminder to talk to Ari again. He might know more than he had let on at our first meeting.

  I wrote up Terri’s observations about Lucie’s character, wondering if her Catholic upbringing really had caught up with her. And I made a note to email Harry the names and addresses of all three victims. I didn’t want to think too hard about what kind of computer mischief he’d get up to, but I needed all the information I could find.

  By the time I was finished it was dark, and I started to feel bad about Brad, thinking of him brooding in his apartment. I had hurt him, and I needed to apologize. I drove over there, but his car wasn’t in the parking lot.

  I didn’t want to go back to Hibiscus House, but then again, I didn’t want Brad to think I’d turned into some kind of stalker, that I was chasing him around Hale’iwa. So I decided to go back to the Drainpipe, where I’d been looking for Frank, the bartender, the night before. I still had a couple of questions for him about Lucie.

  And if I drowned my sorrows in a beer or two, well, that wouldn’t be all that bad either.

  Back to the Drainpipe

  The Drainpipe was not nearly as busy on Sunday evening as it had been on Saturday night, and I saw Frank behind the bar as I came in. I picked a stool, and when he came over I ordered a Kona Pacific Golden Ale. Even though it’s brewed on the mainland, it’s about as local a beer as you can get these days.

  It took a little while before Frank had a free moment to come over and chat with me, and I busied myself with enjoying my beer and checking out the rest of the patrons. A few surfers, a few tourists, a few locals. George and Larry were nowhere in sight, which I found a relief. I’d had enough wild sex to last me for at least a few days, though I wasn’t sure I’d be able to resist temptation, if it was placed before me.

  “How’s it going, dude?” Frank said, coming over to stand in front of me. He wore a San Francisco 49ers ball cap and a Budweiser T-shirt, and still had that annoying little goatee.

  “Just chilling. If you’ve got a minute, though, I wanted to ask you more about Lucie.”

  “I’m taking a break in about ten,” he said, looking at the clock.

  “Cool.” The time passed quickly, and he came out from behind the bar, bringing me a fresh beer, and led me to a table at the far side of the room, where it was quieter.

  “You’re the guy that used to be the cop, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Word gets around.”

  “You gonna find out what happened to Lucie?”

  “I’m going to try. That’s why I had some questions for you.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I know she was dealing ice,” I said. “I’ve talked to somebody who used to buy from her. And I know she used to hang out here to meet up with customers. I’m not trying to jam you or anybody else up over that. What I’m trying to trace back is where she got the stuff from.”

  “She was always real cagey about that,” Frank said. He pulled a pack of sugar out of the dispenser and swung it back and forth between his fingers. “But I think she had a contact at the place she used to work, The Next Wave. Even after she quit working there, she’d be stopping by, at weird hours like after closing or first thing in the morning.”

  “She ever mention any names? Even a first name or a nickname?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, she was pretty secretive about it. It was like she was embarrassed, you know? Her mom was this real sweet lady, hard-working, totally honest. A maid at this hotel in Waikiki. Lucie’d tell me stories all the time about stuff her mom found, that she’d turn in to the hotel, because it was the right thing to do. Her mom would’ve died to know Lucie was selling drugs.”

  He looked at the clock. “Gotta get back behind the bar. You think of anything else, just ask me.”

  “Okay.”

  He stood up and walked back behind the bar. Based on what Rik had told me, I needed to talk to Ari. I looked at my watch. It was just nine o’clock; I could probably make a stop by Sugar’s and not seem like I was stalking Brad.

  I drained my beer, waved at Frank, and drove the mile or two to Sugar’s. Like the Drainpipe, it was quiet, but I was lucky to see Ari sitting alone at a table by the window, sipping something that looked like a Cosmopolitan and making notes on a Palm Pilot.

  He looked up as I got close to his table, and said, “If you’re looking for Brad, he’s already gone.”

  “I was kind of looking for him. But for you, too. Got a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me just get a beer.” I got another Kona ale, and sat across from Ari.

  “So Brad found out about your little dalliance?” Ari asked, tilting his head toward me.

  “Yup. I didn’t realize it would bother him. I mean, I hardly know him. He was really nice to me, getting me cleaned up, and we had sex a couple of times. But it’s not like we had any kind of relationship.”

  “He’s a little sensitive,” Ari said. “And this isn’t the first time this has happened.”

  “So why’d he come yell at me? Why not go after Larry and George?”

  Ari crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “Because we all live here, and we see each other all the time.”

  “Okay. Doesn’t make much sense to me, but I can see it.”

  He closed his Palm Pilot and put it away in the briefcase by his side. “So what did you want from me?” he asked, as he looked back up.

  “I wanted to ask you about Lucie. I’ve been hearing that she was trying to get away from selling drugs, go legit. She got a real estate license.”

  “Yup. I told her that if my project went through, I’d hire her to work for me, selling units. And she’d have been good at it, too. She was hungry, and hungry people make the best salespeople.”

  “By hungry you mean…”

  “She had a big appetite for life,” Ari said, waving his right hand around. “She liked designer labels and expensive meals and traveling to surf competitions around the world. She had been brought up poor and didn’t want to be poor any more. Somebody with that kind of motivation will do what it takes to close a deal.”

  I took a drink of my beer. It was just as good as the first two had been. “You think she would have given up dealing drugs if she came to work for you?”

  He shrugged. “I hoped so. I had a feeling she was heading for trouble. I guess she didn’t get ahead of it fast enough.”

  “Is there any possibility that whoever she worked for might have resented her wanting to get out, or that she knew more than she should have?”

  “Always possible,” Ari said. “It wasn’t like we sat around and talked about her dealer or anything. I deliberately didn’t talk about any of that stuff with her, because I didn’t want to know.”
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  I nodded. I didn’t have anything else to ask, but I was happy enough to sit there with Ari drinking my beer. By the time I’d finished it, though, he’d finished his Cosmopolitan, and we both stood up around the same time. “Give Brad a day or two to simmer down,” Ari said. “That is, if you’re still interested.”

  “He’s a nice guy. I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “I’m glad.” We walked out to the parking lot together, and he hugged me before we parted. “Take care of yourself.”

  “You too.” I got into my truck, and felt the accumulation of all my surfing and my late nights. I drove back to Hibiscus House and fell promptly and soundly asleep, not waking until six the next morning.

  I woke feeling refreshed, yet somehow very sad. Seeing my family the day before had made me realize how much I missed my old life in Honolulu, my friends, my job. But the only way to get back there was to solve the three murders, and I had to keep on surfing, and pretending to be a disgraced former detective who had nothing better to do than hit the waves.

  It was enough to make you crazy. And when I get crazy, I surf—that’s how I let go of what’s bothering me and clear my head so I can get back to work. I knew I needed to think about Brad and what had happened on Saturday night and then on Sunday, and I hoped that I could work it all in between waves. Which led me to Pipeline, just a little while before the bodies were found.

  Bodies in the Sand

  It was about half an hour before sunrise when I slipped into the water, and the sky above Hale’iwa was already lightening from black to gray. Around me, inky silhouettes of surfers in wetsuits paddled their boards out beyond the breakers, the slap of their hands in the cold water an intermittent counterpoint to the crashing waves. I lay flat on my board and tried to feel the water.

  I saw a wave coming, knew intuitively that it was my wave, and started paddling, fast, as the motion of the water thrust me forward. As soon as I could, I stood up, and then I wasn’t thinking any more, I was part of the wave, holding on to it, following it, running with it, first toward the shore, then parallel, surfing the curl, sliding along the crest as the wave and I made our way toward the moment when it threw itself onto the shore in its final dance with death.

  I cheated the shore’s embrace just in time, sliding away and dunking myself in the cold water again. For about three minutes, I had forgotten everything about my life, what was right and what was wrong, and just lived in the moment. That was why I loved to surf, why for four years as a patrolman and then two as a detective, surfing most mornings had been the way I made it from day to day with some piece of myself still intact.

  The sun finally peeked over the Leilehua Plateau, and the dark shapes around me began to become recognizable. I kept on surfing, pushing myself as much as I could. If I couldn’t be a cop for a while, and had to be a surfer again, then at least I was going to be the best damn surfer I could be.

  I had just mounted a mid-sized wave when I heard the scream. It was far away, and the surf was roaring, but something about the pitch or the urgency in her voice penetrated my consciousness. From my peak, I could see her—a young girl, late teens at most, dragging a wide board down the sandy strip from Ke Nui Road. Something had stopped her in her tracks, kept her screaming, hiccupping and finally crying by the time I’d surfed in and run up the beach to her.

  I saw what the morning light had revealed to her, in a hollow of sand: two naked men, in the act of embracing, both of them quite clearly dead from bullet wounds to the head. The blood had run downhill and what had not yet sunk into the sand was pooled around their feet. Though one body was unfamiliar to me, I was able to recognize the other immediately, and I felt my heart rate accelerate and sweat begin to accumulate on my forehead and under my arms.

  There was already a small crowd standing around, staring at the bodies. “Anybody got a cell phone?” I asked.

  A blond haole guy in surfer shorts that revealed a cast on his right leg held one up. “Call 911,” I said. “Everybody get back. Try not to disturb anything.”

  “You’re that cop, aren’t you?” a dark-haired girl said. “The gay one.”

  “Still gay, but not a cop any more,” I said, as I tried to get everyone to back away. I shrugged. “I guess old habits die hard, though.”

  I couldn’t see either of their faces, but the naked man I did not recognize was lithe and trim, a true surfer’s physique. The man I knew was a little older, a little out of shape, but still handsome. I resisted the impulse to kneel down and touch Brad Jacobson because I knew I would only be contaminating the crime scene.

  I calmed the screaming girl down, and a girlfriend of hers volunteered to keep an eye on her. Everybody else was eager to get back to the waves, and I had no right to keep them around. While I waited for the cops, I practiced bringing my breathing and my pulse rate back to normal. I had seen a lot of dead bodies, and I tried to remind myself that whatever essence had lived in both of them was now gone, leaving behind only an empty shell.

  To keep from staring obsessively, I forced myself to take a look around, as if I was the investigating detective and this was just another crime scene. I found a pile of clothes just behind the rise that sheltered the bodies. I noticed that the men were lying on a faded, oversized towel, the kind you keep in the back of the trunk for picnics. Or midnight cuddles on the beach.

  Seeing Brad and that other man there, I finally understood that it was my responsibility to find out who was killing surfers, and why. That I had to solve the case to make all my sacrifices have meaning. That whether I could flash a badge or not, I cared about righting the wrongs of the world, about speaking for the dead and making sure that their killers did not go unpunished.

  A black and white was there a few minutes later, parking up on Ke Nui Road, leaving the flashers going. Two cops from the 268 beat began balancing their way over the sand, belts weighing them down with nightsticks, flashlights, radios, handcuffs and more. I had stripped off my wetsuit and stood there in only a pair of board shorts, feeling less like a detective than I had at any point in my career.

  I stepped up as the two cops, a haole and a Chinese, approached, and laid the story out for them. “The girl over there was the first one to see the bodies,” I said. “Just after sunrise. I was surfing, heard her scream, came running up.”

  The haole cop, Luna, looked at me couldn’t figure out where he knew me from. “I ever pick you up?” he asked.

  I had to laugh. “I’m sure I’d remember you.” I stuck my hand out and introduced myself. “I used to be on the force.”

  Luna’s face turned bright red. He wouldn’t shake my hand but his partner, whose name was Chan, did. “Good to meet you,” he said. “I admire you, standing up for yourself.”

  “Thanks.” I stepped off to the side as Luna and Chan took over the site, calling in for a detective, blocking off the area. They didn’t seem to need me, so I went down to the water’s edge, pacing around and talking to other surfers, returning only when Chan waved me back.

  He introduced me to the detectives, Ruiz and Kawamoto. “Detective.. er.. Mr. Kanapa’aka secured the area,” he said.

  Kawamoto was probably in his mid-fifties, and maybe fifty pounds overweight, including a belly that rolled over his belt. He reminded me of that caricature you see of Southern sheriffs, only Japanese. He was missing the ten-gallon hat, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he chewed tobacco.

  Ruiz was haole and younger, maybe mid-forties, dark hair thinning on top. He wore a UH class ring in addition to his wedding band.

  I repeated what I’d seen, being careful not to reveal that I knew anything about the other three murders. I gave them an ID on Brad, but didn’t reveal our relationship and told them I didn’t know his companion. “Might have been a lovers’ quarrel,” Ruiz said, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves.

  “Might have been,” Kawamoto said. Something about his face, though, told me he was already making the connection I wasn’t mentioning.

 
I hung around for a while, memorizing the scene, trying, unobtrusively, to take a look at any evidence they found, but there wasn’t much. There were too many footprints between the hollow and the road, even that early in the morning, and it was clear, at least to me, that both had been shot at close range, because of the stippling and powder burns I saw around the wounds. Finally, Ruiz and Kawamoto turned the bodies, so I could get a good look at both faces.

  The guy with the surfer physique was young, in his late teens or early twenties, and he didn’t have much of a tan, which probably meant he hadn’t been on the North Shore for very long.

  I think maybe up to that point, some part of me had been denying that the other dead body belonged to Brad. But seeing his face, I couldn’t believe that any more. My heart rate zoomed up, and if I’d been connected to an EKG at that point I’m sure it would have gone off the scale.