The Scent of Waikiki

by Terry Ambrose

  There was a heavy sigh, followed by a reluctant, “You’re probably right. Besides, if I got you shot up, Benni would have killed me. She scares me more than Naomi.”

  “I hear you. Benni will appreciate you taking the safer path.”

  “Assuming we can get out of here alive or without a breaking-and-entering charge.”

  I looked down at Chance’s wrists, which were locked behind him by a single plastic zip tie. I knew just how to get out of this mess. “It’s no problem, buddy. All we have to do is move the little pin on the zip tie so it loosens up. Piece of cake.”

  “If it’s so easy, what are you waiting for?”

  “Um, the last time somebody busted me out of zip ties, she had nice, long fingernails.”

  “She? So you didn’t do it yourself?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Chance rolled his eyes. “So you’re saying you can’t get us out of these things.”

  “I can probably do it. No. I’m sure I can. All I have to do is…get my fingernail inside the little plastic box part.”

  “McKenna! Shut up and do it. We don’t have all day. We’ve spent the last five minutes talking about this. If you can do it, just get on with it.”

  “Right. Okay. So, um, let’s try…” I twisted sideways in hopes I could see Chance’s tie better. “No, that won’t work. Turn right...no, you’re other right. That’s better.”

  “Good.”

  “No, bad. I still can’t see what I’m doing.” I moved one way, then the other. Nothing was working. What we needed was a tool. Something with a sharp point. “It would probably be bad form to call for help.”

  “What do you want to do, McKenna? Phone a friend? Go next door to the neighbor’s and tell them we were double-crossed during a B&E?”

  “Well, when you put it that way. Wait! I know. We need something sharp.”

  “You already suggested that.”

  Rats. I had, hadn’t I? We sat there watching the minutes tick by on the clock. When we hit the fifteen-minute mark, I said, “This is not going well. Is it?”

  Chance sighed and shrugged; his voice sounded conciliatory. “It was a good idea, McKenna.”

  “What was?”

  “The sharp tool. But as you can see, we don’t exactly have a toolbox at hand.”

  “We could look for one,” I said.

  “Right. She took our gloves. What are we going to do? Leave fingerprints on a few dozen surfaces?”

  My eyes widened as I looked down at the bulge in the back pocket of Chance’s shorts. “I don’t think we have to worry about it, buddy. You have your lock picks, yah?”

  He twisted so he could see me and smiled. “That’s the first brilliant thing you’ve said since you got us into this mess.”

  I let his jibe slide. I figured it was the least I could do since it was my ‘brilliance’ that was going to get us out.

  It turned out Chance was remarkably adept at working with his hands tied together. He opened his back pocket, pulled out the leather case containing his picks, and unzipped the case all on his own. That’s when the plan went in the crapper.

  Apparently, in his haste to get us in the apartment and out of view from the neighbors, Chance hadn’t properly secured one of his picks—the very one we needed. It fell to the floor and pinged as it bounced off the tile.

  “No freaking way.” Chance stared at the pick lying on the floor.

  It was flat as could be and picking it up would be no big deal with your hands in front of you, but with them tied behind your back? Whole. Different. Story.

  Chance lowered himself to the floor and sat crosslegged, feeling around behind him. I guided him…sort of. All my directions were backwards—in his opinion. Personally, I saw nothing wrong with them.

  Once Chance finally had the pick in his hand, he worked the tip into the tiny square lock on the zip tie. When he pulled his hands apart, he smiled, rubbed his wrists, and stood. “Much better,” he said as he gazed at the door.

  “Come on, buddy. Get me out of this thing. My wrists are killing me.”

  He hesitated. “McKenna?”

  “What? Hurry up, would you?”

  “Who’s the best private investigator on the planet?”

  My breath caught and I turned to face him. “Seriously? We’re going to play that game?”

  He rubbed his jaw and shrugged. “Everyone needs a little positive reinforcement now and then. I’m not sure I’ve gotten my share lately.”

  I shifted from foot-to-foot and held his gaze. Unfortunately, he’d hit the nail on the head. I’d been doing the same thing to him that I’d done with Benni. With everyone.

  “You’re right, Chance. I haven’t been appreciative of the people around me. I’m going to do better. I promise. For now, I won’t say you’re the best PI in the world—mostly because you don’t have a license. However, you are one of my closest, dearest friends and you’re going to make the best private detective in the world someday.”

  Chance grunted, then gave me a nod. “Okay, that’s fair.” He turned me around so my back was to him.

  There was a little pressure on the zip tie as he worked the pick against the plastic, then my hands were free. I rubbed my wrists to restore the circulation and winked at him. “And for the record, I think you’ll make a great dad someday, too.”

  He pulled me into a hug, then handed me one latex glove. “I have one pair left. I’ll split them with you.”

  I took the glove and we did a final visual inspection of Stephen’s apartment. It appeared Naomi had gotten the good stuff, everything related to Island Passion, but what she’d left behind revealed more about Stephen Brantley.

  I opened a three-ring binder that he’d left on an end table. Inside, was a series of photos of Angela on letter-sized paper. They’d obviously been printed on a color printer. Each had an annotation with the date of the photo, the location where it had been taken, and a reason for the photo.

  “Chance, you’re going to want to see this. It’s a blueprint for the…well, the seduction of Angela Keating. He’s got information about what she likes and what she doesn’t. This guy was ruthless.”

  As he peered over my shoulder, Chance let out a heavy sigh. “Yeah. Cold and calculating.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. I wish we could take this with us.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, McKenna. What if the cops turn this into a crime scene? It’s bad enough we broke in. I don’t think either of us wants to add theft to our resumes.”

  “Unlike Naomi.”

  Chance looked at the door and sneered. “Yeah, unlike Naomi. Man, I’d like to pay her back.”

  I echoed his desire. I’d never liked being double-crossed and really hated it when I missed the big red flashing lights that said this person’s lying. “We’ll find a way. Let’s make some photos of this stuff and then get out of this place.”

  We split up the notebook and began taking photos. When we each had captured about ten pages, Chance’s phone rang. He glanced at the display and frowned.

  “I don’t recognize the number,” he said. His tone was guarded as he answered, but he nodded a couple of times as I continued to snap photos and eavesdrop.

  “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” He disconnected the call and pocketed his phone. “Joseph’s back.”

  Holy crap. Everything was about to hit the fan. We put the notebook back together and returned it to its spot on the table. When we were in the Ferrari and Chance had fired up the engine, he looked over at me, a huge smile on his face.

  Over the roar of the engine and squealing tires, I heard him yell, “Hang on, McKenna!”

  CHAPTER 45

  By my count, it took us twelve and a half minutes to make the drive to Joseph’s apartment complex. During the drive, which was twelve and a half minutes of sheer terror, we not only flitted from lane-to-lane, but from subject-to-subject. Chance started out with Stephen and Angela’s murder, ranted on about how Angela had been too young to
die, cursed Naomi for her trickery, and finished with a few choice expletives about Bootsy and how complicit she’d been in helping Stephen to cover up what he’d done.

  By the time we arrived at Joseph’s parking lot, Chance was just getting warmed up. He said he was going to accuse Joseph of Angela’s murder as a way to make him talk, then jumped out of the car. “Come on, McKenna. Hurry up.” He trotted away and was halfway to the stairwell by the time I had my door open.

  From the second floor, Eddie peered over the railing. A man on a mission, he watched eagerly as Chance approached and handed him a bill. At one point, it looked like he might be trying to negotiate a larger payment, but Chance squashed that effort by moving closer to Eddie, which sent him scurrying away like the rat he was.

  What I didn’t understand was Chance. Something was going on with him. I rubbed my jaw and watched his deliberate strides across the walkway toward Joseph’s door. At one point, he glanced down at me and gestured frantically for me to hurry up.

  I stepped up my pace, but felt butterflies flapping around in my stomach over the kid’s sudden zeal. By the time I got there, he was pounding on Joseph’s door.

  “All right, all right! I’m coming!” The door flung open and Joseph glared at Chance, then his eyes got wide. He tried to slam the door, but Chance stuck his foot in the way to stop it.

  “You are in a heap of trouble, my friend.” Chance shoved Joseph’s chest and forced him back into the apartment.

  I double-timed it through the door in hopes Chance wasn’t already tearing Joseph apart. Fortunately, the kid and our quarry were engaged in a stare-down contest, not hand-to-hand combat.

  Joseph’s tattered red baseball cap was tilted back on his head, exposing his receding hairline. His bleary eyes blinked rapidly, and he had his hands raised in front of his chest. “What you want, brah? Why you come breaking in here?”

  Chance didn’t say a word. Instead, he just glared back at Joseph. The gambit must have worked because Joseph began to stammer.

  “Look, look, brah. We ain’t got no beef, yah?”

  The words were wasted on Chance, who appeared unmoved by Joseph’s protests. There was something about those words, though. They were slurred. Joseph had been drinking heavily. Anything that happened between the two of them would not be a fight; it would be a massacre.

  I laid a hand on Chance’s shoulder. He didn’t flinch. Joseph could not have missed the intensity. As guilty as I thought Joseph might be, I felt a certain obligation to at least hear his side of the story before I let Chance beat him to a pulp. “We have a big beef with you, Joseph. We think you killed your girlfriend.”

  Joseph’s lower lip began to quiver and he blinked rapidly. His breathing turned ragged as he fell back onto a worn couch. He buried his face in his hands and his shoulders shook as he stared at the floor.

  “It wasn’t me, brah. I loved Angela. I wanted to marry that girl. Now I got nothing.”

  Glancing around the apartment, I saw no signs of a staunch romantic other than a teddybear on the bed and the broken soul before me. Instead, what I saw were signs of a man struggling to deal with his situation. A nearly empty beer bottle stood next to two football trophies on the end table. The trophies were tarnished and, I suspected, came from a time when Joseph’s life had been filled with hope. The beer only reinforced my suspicions.

  “Joseph, you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?”

  He kept his face buried in his hands as his head bobbed up and down a few times.

  Fear seized my gut as I watched him. That was me. If something happened to Benni, I’d be doing the same thing Joseph was right now. I inserted myself between the two men and laid a hand on Joseph’s shoulder. “I want you to tell me what happened Tuesday night.”

  “Why? You ain’t gonna believe me. Nobody gonna believe me.”

  “I believe you loved her too much to hurt her. But I want to know, that night—where were you? Did you go to see Angela Tuesday night?”

  Another nod. A sniffle. And he sat up straight. Tears streaked his cheeks, but he ignored them. His words punctuated his ragged breaths. “Me and Angela had a big fight that night. She told me about the box of perfume she stole for that guy Stephen. I got so angry, brah. Not at her, but at him. He was using her to get back at Skye for some reason.”

  “What happened with the perfume?”

  “I made her give me the box. I told her I was gonna return it the next day. You know, I could just take a couple hours off, walk in, and drop it off. No signature. No tracking. It would just show up. Like maybe the order got misplaced or something.”

  I glanced up at Chance, who was now looking around the apartment. Inspecting it as I had. His gaze came to rest on a surfboard in the corner, and his determination seemed to soften. When he turned to face me, I smiled at him and he nodded. Thank goodness. My buddy was back, though still a bit distant.

  “Did anyone else know about the package?”

  Joseph shook his head and glanced at me. “No way, brah. I didn’t tell nobody.”

  “So she gave you the box. Was it full?”

  He nodded. “I returned all them bottles the next day.”

  “What happened after she gave them to you?”

  “I proposed.”

  I stared at him. “You asked her to marry you? After you had a big argument like that?”

  His shoulders slumped and he nodded. “I even got down on one knee. Told her I never wanted to be with nobody else.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was gonna think about it.”

  I remembered the first time we’d met Angela. How she’d been so friendly with the elevator repairman, then turned sophisticated and, yes, haughty, the moment we’d started asking questions.

  “Joseph, we met Angela at Island Passion. She did not strike me as the kind of girl who wanted to settle down and raise a family.”

  “I know. A guy like me with her? I wouldn’t believe it either. But that wasn’t her. She hated that job. Kept saying how she had to be this big fancy fashionista when she’d rather hang out at the beach.”

  This was sounding more like Alice in Wonderland than any kind of reality involving Angela Keating. “Then tell me, if you and Angela made up, why did you leave?”

  “She was still angry with me, brah. There was this thing about Angela. She kinda was two people, you know?”

  “And you wanted to believe in the down-home girl.”

  He gazed at me with watery eyes and his voice cracked. “Was I wrong?”

  “No, you weren’t wrong,” Chance said.

  I blinked and looked at him. He gave me a grim smile and nodded. I acknowledged his act of mercy with a slight smile of my own. “Did you go back to her apartment?”

  He nodded and his shoulders fell. “He was there. They was talking. She was telling him she never wanted to see him again.”

  “Why didn’t you go in?” Chance asked.

  “Like I said, brah. Angela could be two people. I figured she could handle him on her own.”

  It seemed Chance was ready to take over the questioning, so I moved to one side and made room for him.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I went to a bar to get drunk. Ain’t done that in a long time.”

  “Did you see anyone you knew?”

  “No. There was a lot of people there, though. And they was all looking at me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t dressed for the place. That Club Mystique is all fancy, you know?”

  “What? Wait a minute.” Chance gaped at Joseph, his jaw hanging open slightly. “That’s an expensive place to go just to get drunk. Why there?”

  “I wanted to tell that Stephen Brantley to stay away from Angela.”

  Glancing around the apartment, I had a sick feeling we were going in circles yet again—how could Stephen have been in two places at once? There were empty beer bottles on the kitchen counter, a few cartons of Chinese takeout next to them. Even with the
windows open, the place reeked of beer and neglect. This was a man coming undone.

  Chance had moved so close to Joseph I questioned whether he would be able to react if Joseph turned violent. I cleared my throat to get his attention. Both men looked directly at me. Could I trap Joseph in his web of lies?

  “Did you run into Stephen Brantley?”

  “Yeah, brah. He was there.”

  “What time was this,” I asked.

  “Would’ve been about nine.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  Joseph nodded, but instead of answering, grabbed the beer bottle off the end table. He started to take a swig, realized it was empty, and dropped it to the floor.

  “You don’t want to carry this burden around, Joseph.” I watched his face. He had tears running down his cheeks again and sniffled. “You didn’t see Stephen at Angela’s apartment, did you? You’re just trying to frame him for her murder. What did you do, go back to Angela’s? Maybe you were drunk and things got out of hand. You pushed her off the balcony and now you’re living with the regret.”

  His shoulders began to tremble as he clenched his fists. “I didn’t go back there, man. I should’ve. If I had, Angela wouldn’t be dead.”

  “Why, Joseph? Why would she still be alive?”

  “Because I could’ve protected her from him.”

  I closed my eyes, suddenly seeing what had been right there before us. But I had to hear it. Had to know. “What are you saying, Joseph?”

  “The guy confessed to me, brah. He told me he killed Angela.”

  Chance and I shot glances at each other. He looked as confused as I felt. How had Stephen Brantley confessed to killing Angela before he’d done it? Unless…oh, God.

  “You killed Stephen Brantley, didn’t you?”

  CHAPTER 46

  Joseph pushed up his red baseball cap and let out a noise that could have been interpreted as a chuckle, a gasp, or maybe an anguished cry for help.

  “This ain’t gonna work, brah. I can’t keep my stories straight. Man, I ain’t stopped drinking since I heard she was dead. That Brantley guy deserved to die.”