Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Assuming that the guy who’s killing surfers gets caught, and people come back to the North Shore,” I said.

  “Oh, my,” Terri said, and she sat quickly on the couch. “I just thought of something.”

  “What?” I was worried she’d remembered something about Eric, her late husband, that had upset her.

  “Property values will go way down if people are frightened,” she said. “Maybe some of the people who are opposed to Uncle Bishop’s development will leave, or the government will ease up on restrictions in order to keep the economy moving.”

  “So you think your uncle might be directing Rich to kill surfers?”

  “I don’t know. But you saw him today—he’s not the same man he used to be. He’s getting crazier. And I can see a guy like Rich, wanting to prove he could be useful again, appreciating the chance Uncle Bishop has given him, wanting to help.”

  “And you don’t know, Bishop could be paying him, or promising him money when the development gets going.”

  Terri shivered. “I don’t want him to be involved. Please, I don’t want him to be involved.”

  “I haven’t seen a connection between Bishop and any of the dead surfers,” I said. “And it seems to me that Bishop would want land values to go up, not down, so he could get more money for the land.”

  “It’s a question of short-term versus long-term,” Terri said. “If Uncle Bishop trades his land for a piece of the equity, then the development company acquires the land cheaply. By the time the houses are built, everyone’s forgotten about the killings, and house values go up. There’s that much more profit to be made.”

  “You know who else has a motive there,” I said, thoughtfully. “Aristotle Papageorgiou. He’s very determined to see this project succeed.” I made a note to check him out further.

  She looked at her watch. “I should go.”

  At the front door, she hugged me. “This was fun. I miss you. I want you to come back to Honolulu soon.”

  “I will.”

  I had barely gotten back in the door from seeing her off when my cell phone rang. “Yo, Harry, what’s up, brah?”

  “I’m thinking I need a little surfing in my life. You got some extra space at that hotel hell where you’re staying?”

  “Actually, I’ve upgraded.” I told him about the switch from Hibiscus House to Cane Landing. “Got room galore. But if you’re going to surf the North Shore, you’ve got to be fearless.”

  “I have been surfing the North Shore with you since we were hitching rides on cane trucks.”

  “Yes, but no one was shooting surfers then.” I told him how the whole North Shore seemed to have emptied out.

  “More waves for us. I’m teaching until noon Friday. I can be up there a little after one and spend the weekend. And we’ll find out what we can about all these folks you’re interested in.”

  We made plans to meet, and I hung up. I fired up my laptop and put together all the notes I wanted to share with Ruiz and Kawamoto. Step by step, what I had learned about Lucie, Mike and Ronnie, with as many names, places and facts as I could put together. It took me almost two hours, but by the time I was done I was pretty impressed with myself. I emailed a copy to Ruiz, and then separately, a copy to Sampson.

  When I was finished, I sent a couple of other emails, fixed dinner, and then relaxed in front of the TV. It was definitely a different lifestyle from the one I’d enjoyed in Honolulu. There, I lived in a small studio apartment on Waikiki. I tried to surf when I could, but most mornings found me at my desk rather than on the waves. I worked with a station full of cops, I had a partner to bounce ideas off, I had a badge and a gun and a sense of identity as a police detective. I spent a lot of time with my family, I read, I rode my bike, I roller bladed, walked and ran. Here on the North Shore, all I seemed to do was eat, sleep, surf, and try to figure out who had killed five people.

  Dario’s Surprise

  Around nine o’clock that night, I started getting antsy. I knew I ought to just go to sleep, but I wanted to see if there was anyone hanging around at any of the bars. After all, people are more likely to talk when they’re drunk, and I wasn’t getting any leads sitting around the house staring out at the stars.

  I decided to start at Sugar’s, because I hadn’t been there since Sunday night, when I’d gone there looking for Brad. I was still planning to keep my vow of celibacy—at least until I got this case behind me. Back in Waikiki, who knew what would happen. But on the North Shore, I was keeping my pants zipped up. Then what was I doing going to a gay bar? Well, for one thing, I wanted somebody I could talk to about Brad. I was hoping his friends would be there.

  Ari was there, sitting with Dario at a table near the bar. Of course I knew that Dario was some kind of investor in Ari’s project, and Dario had been the one to call Ari and get me the place at Cane Landing, but I didn’t picture them as the kind of friends who hung around together for a drink.

  While I was at the bar getting a beer, Dario came up. He wearing a Next Wave logo t-shirt and cargo shorts, looking like he’d spent a long day on the selling floor at the surf shop. “Got to drain the lizard,” he said. “You gonna come join us?”

  “Sure.”

  I took my beer over to their table. “Hey, Kimo, how’s the house working out?” Ari asked. He wore a white dress shirt open at the neck, with a loosely-knotted striped tie, and he looked tired.

  “It’s great. I really appreciate your fixing it up for me.” I held my glass up and clinked it against his.

  “No problem. Any friend of Dario’s, you know.”

  I realized, looking at Ari, that there was a question he could answer for me. “You know, I wanted to ask you something about Sunday night, something that’s been bothering me.”

  “What?”

  I put my beer down on the table. “I can’t figure out why Brad took Tommy Singer out to the beach. He took me home; why not Tommy?”

  “That would be thanks to Rik.” Ari folded up the papers he had in front of him and put them into his briefcase. “Rik stopped by Brad’s to see if he wanted to come out, but Brad’s car was already gone. Your truck, however, was there in the parking lot. When Rik showed up at Sugar’s, while Brad was at the bar with the college guy, he told Brad you were out there.”

  “That’s right. I wanted to apologize.”

  “Brad didn’t know that. Just before he left, he told me he thought you were angry, that you were waiting for him to get home to make a scene. I told him he was crazy, you weren’t like that, but that’s probably why he didn’t go back there.”

  “And with Tommy Singer being a closeted college student sharing a dorm room, they couldn’t go there,” I said. “Beach the next best thing.”

  “Guess so.”

  Well, that made me feel like crap all over again. Every thing I’d done with Brad had been wrong, and each seemed to have led inexorably to his death. But like Terri said, there were so many what ifs. I couldn’t focus on them.

  Dario came back and sat down with us.

  “How’s The Next Wave doing?” I asked him. “Still slow?”

  “Dead. I took in about a thousand dollars today. After I pay for the merchandise, I’ve got just about enough left to keep the doors open. Fortunately most of my staff quit, so I don’t have much in the way of payroll.”

  “The silver lining is that if this goes on much longer, the county commission will get nervous and want to jump start development up here. That puts Bishop’s Bluff in a good situation,” Ari said.

  “If we can all hold out that long.” Dario took a long drink from his beer. “But enough about my troubles. So, Kimo, how are you enjoying this forced retirement of yours?”

  “It’s not bad. I’ll have to get another job eventually, but it’s nice to go back to a time when all I had to worry about was the surf conditions.”

  Of course that wasn’t true, but I was playing a part—a part I felt I had to keep playing even around an old friend like Dario. We kept on talking, a
nd drinking. We ordered a pitcher, and it was gone much too quickly, so we ordered another. We talked about surfing, and the North Shore, both as it was when Dario and I were younger, and now. Ari told us a couple of stories about growing up in Minnesota, and then we started talking about what had caused us to leave home and come to the North Shore in the first place.

  “I was so damn glad to leave the Big Island I think I’d have been happy on a pig farm,” Dario said.

  “I forgot you came from the Big Island,” Ari said. “Whereabouts?”

  “Kamuela. Also known as Waimea. The whole town’s pretty much run by the Parker Ranch. My dad was the real deal, a paniolo his whole life, just like his daddy and his granddaddy and his great-granddaddy before him.” He drank some more beer. “You can just bet how happy he was when I told him I wanted to be a surfer, not a paniolo.”

  “Probably about as happy as my dad when I told him I was leaving Minnesota,” Ari said. They both looked at me.

  “Sorry, my dad was a surfer when he was young, and I’m the baby, so my folks didn’t get too excited when I told them I wanted to surf. They just wanted me to wait until I finished college.”

  Ari drained the last of the pitcher. “Another?” Dario and I nodded, and he signaled the waitress. “So tell us about growing up on the ranch,” he said to Dario. “You learn to ride horses, rope cattle, all that stuff?”

  “You bet. I’m a rootin’ tootin’ dang cowboy all right.” He laughed. “It sounds pretty goofy to be a Hawaiian cowboy, but the Parker Ranch is the largest privately owned ranch in the country. Over 225,000 acres, over 50,000 head of cattle, a hundred paniolos to take care of it all.”

  “Oh, those long, lonesome nights on the range,” Ari said. “Just you and the other cowboys. No womenfolk around for miles.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a porn film,” Dario said dryly. “Most of the time you’re just too damn tired to think about anything besides curling up in a bedroll or a bunk house and getting some sleep.”

  “Oh, come on, you must have a story to tell us,” I said.

  “My life is not the stuff of your late-night fantasies,” Dario said.

  “That’s right, you’re a married man,” Ari said.

  It’s a good thing I didn’t have any beer in my glass, or I’d have choked on it. “Married?” I asked. “What’s his name?”

  “Her name is Mary,” Dario said. The waitress delivered the new pitcher, and I poured a glass full and took a good long drink from it. “I like a little variety in my diet. So shoot me.”

  “Don’t say that so loud,” Ari said. “Somebody’s likely to take you up on it.”

  “Okay, Dario,” I said. “Explain to me how you got married. I’m dying to hear this one. It either has to involve parental pressure or a significant amount of alcohol.”

  “Neither. Well, maybe a little of the first. I went home a couple of years ago and saw Mary. Her dad’s a paniolo, too, and I’ve known her all her life. She’s five years younger than I am, and she was just wasting away there in Kamuela, dying to get out. The only way for a girl to get out of there is to get married, so I married her and brought her over here.”

  “But you don’t actually sleep with her,” I said.

  “He has a child,” Ari said, and I could see the mischief dancing in his eyes.

  “This is surreal.” I leaned in close to Ari. “He sucked my dick,” I said, and as I did I realized I was probably drunker than I had thought.

  Ari laughed, a big guffaw that resounded around the room. “Mine, too,” he said, when he finally stopped laughing.

  “I’m a bisexual,” Dario said, struggling to regain some dignity.

  “You’re an omnisexual,” Ari said. “I’ve seen the way your dog runs away when you come in the house.”

  I laughed, and Dario said, “That was uncalled for, Aristotle.”

  “You must only fuck her from behind,” I said. “Can you pretend she’s a boy from that angle?”

  “This conversation is on a vertical slide.” Dario drained his beer, then pulled out a few bills from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “Good night, gentlemen. And I use that term loosely.”

  He got up and stalked out of the bar. “I guess I hurt his feelings,” I said. “But considering how much my tits hurt when he was done with them, I think we’re even.”

  “Do tell.” Ari scooted his chair over closer to mine, and I told him the whole sorry story. A funny thing, though; the more time I spent on the North Shore, the more times I told that story, the less power it seemed to have over me. I guess that was a good thing.

  We left a little while later, both of us trying to make sure the other was sober enough to drive. I made it back to Cane Landing without incident—the roads were almost completely deserted, so I probably couldn’t have hit another car if I’d tried.

  I barely managed to punch in the security code and stumble to the bathroom, where I found a bottle of aspirin, and took a couple, along with several glasses of water. Then I collapsed into bed.

  When I awoke in the morning, just as the sun was rising, I barely had a hangover, just a vague headache that I treated with more aspirin. The yards at Cane Landing were fresh with dew and the promise of a new day. I got dressed and drove down to the outrigger halau, to see if their Thursday morning practice was still on.

  Rich Sarkissian

  When I got down to Waimea Bay, I found Rich sitting on the ground fiddling with the iako of one of the canoes. The basic design of an outrigger is that it’s a long, narrow canoe with two wooden spars sticking off to one side. Those are the iakos. They are attached to a long narrow piece called the ama, which runs parallel to the body of the canoe and helps to stabilize it.

  The lashing that held one iako to the ama seemed to have come undone. “Need a hand with that?” I asked.

  “You know anything about it?” Rich asked. “Cause I sure don’t. Tepano’s the one who knows about maintaining the canoes, but he told me he was heading to Honolulu until things get better up here.”

  “I helped build an outrigger when I was in high school,” I said, sitting down across from him. “Not anything fancy, and we had the teacher telling us what to do, but I think I still remember.”

  I took over from Rich. “Are you a native Hawaiian?” Rich asked, as I tied the iako to the ama. It was tricky, and I had to remember how it all went together, something I’d promptly forgotten as soon as the project was finished.

  “Part,” I said, trying to focus on what I was doing. “My father’s father was full Hawaiian, and his mother was haole. So that makes my dad fifty percent. My mom’s father was Japanese, and her mother was Hawaiian. So she’s half, too. That means my brothers and I end up at half too. Which is really interesting only because in order to be recognized as a native Hawaiian, under state law, you have to be fifty percent.”

  I finished tying the iako. “That should do,” I said. “How about you? What’s your ethnic breakdown? Your name’s what, Armenian?”

  “Yup. All my grandparents came from Turkey, trying to get away from massacres. I grew up in this totally Armenian little town in New Jersey. Armenian church, all the old people speaking with funny accents. Almost every person in town had a name that ended in ian.”

  “Must be weird for you to be here, where it’s such a melting pot.” We both stood up and started carrying the canoe toward the water.

  “I think it’s cool. I hated everybody being the same back home.” He shrugged. “I guess that’s why I joined the army. To go someplace where people were different.”

  “Well, you certainly found a place here where people are different. Although there aren’t a whole lot of people around at the moment.” I looked around; where there had been twenty people at the halau the first day I’d shown up, now it was just Rich and me.

  “How come you haven’t gone back to Honolulu?” Rich asked me. “You’re not scared?”

  I shrugged. “I used to be a cop. I’ve had people shoot at me before. I don’t p
articularly like it, but you have to get philosophical after a while or you freak out. When it’s my time to go, I’ll go. Until then, I have to get up every morning, get dressed, and get on with my life.”

  We continued toward the water, stepping carefully on the sand. “How about you?” I asked. “How come you’re still here?”

  “I’m the anti-surfer,” he said, with a little laugh. “If anybody’s killing off surfers, they aren’t going to aim for me.”

  “You’re assuming they were all killed because they were surfers. It could be some other reason altogether, just a coincidence that they all surfed. And as a matter of fact, Brad Jacobson didn’t surf at all.”