For a Song

by Morales, Rodney;

  “No, it can’t be. Memorial Day was—it must be Saturday.”

  “No … it’s Friday.” It was all coming back.

  “You wanna do it today?”

  “Can ya?”

  I had just wanted Rian to show me some things, so I could get to Kona by myself. Didn’t want to impose any more than that. But he quickly showed me that it wasn’t like Hey dad, let me have the car keys. There was too much I didn’t know, too many things that could go wrong. He insisted on accompanying me. And when the kid got up and got wind of an Ironman Triathlon happening on the Big Island, he told us he had to be there.

  “We could leave you there and tomorrow you could catch a flight back,” I suggested to him. “Whadaya think, Rian?”

  He looked at me with arms folded. “Have you considered that the girl you’re looking for might be on that island? Lotta places to hide.”

  “So you wanna stay there overnight too?”

  “What do you want to do, Skipper?”

  No one had ever called me that. Boy did it sound weird. “Well, she did tell her friend that she’d be there at the finish line.”

  The three of us laughed, though mine was muted by the thought that this could be another instance of trending toward expediency.

  “There you go,” Rian said before I could change my mind. “Let’s go there, get up early tomorrow and stake out the event.”

  “Don’t you guys say ‘stake-away’?”

  “No, we’re on the same page when it comes to stake out.”

  I offered Rian and son some fruit and some just-expired yogurt I found in my fridge, and we quickly ate that. Kawika Jr. then ran over to the Marina Front Café and came back with coffees and pastries. And within the hour we were in the channel sailing out to sea. I steered, Rian instructed, and Kawika Jr., secure at the bow, embraced every spray of ocean water.

  We arrived at Honokohau Harbor in the late afternoon. Having had my fill of pastries and coffee, along with another handful of ibuprofen tablets, I felt just fine, in a world-weary sort of way. We grabbed our backpacks and took a quick cab ride to Kailua-Kona and got off at Quinn’s Almost by the Sea. I headed toward the hotel and left my traveling companions to wander about the town.

  When I got to the Seaside I went up to the front desk and asked the desk clerk if anyone had left anything for me. Told her I had stayed there two nights earlier.

  She asked for ID. After she checked my name, she looked into some kind of record book, stepped into a side room, and returned with an 11 × 14 envelope.

  The envelope had been carefully and abundantly taped. I had to borrow a scissors just to get it open. I sat down in the lobby and pulled out a slightly smaller envelope, one that contained some 8 × 11 and 4 × 6 photos. The first photo was a group picture. It was at a beach, the men in aloha shirts and swim trunks, the women in bikinis. In one of the other beach photos I spotted my whistle-blower—in shades, of course. Also wearing shades and smiling were Kamana and Blankenship. One of the Sperry brothers, my guess would be Curtis, stood with them. He wasn’t smiling. Another photo featured some guy with a fat mug standing between two lovely wahines: Irashige. The last photo was one of the entire entourage, thirteen people, minus the whistle-blower, who must have taken this picture. Six of the thirteen were young Asian women; they all were making shaka signs. The seven men were all holding up champagne glasses, and making shaka or thumbs-up signs with their free hand. I couldn’t make out four of the men, though a couple of them looked vaguely familiar. If only they weren’t wearing shades. This was the only photo that came with an annotation, which was taped to the back. It stated, The guys to the right of Kamana and Blankenship, except for Irashige, all abbacus. Still working on getting their names.

  A few pictures? Is this what I came all the way here for?

  I took one more look at the photo. Stared at it. Imagined it as a scene in a film, where one of these guys dropped his cocktail glass, and the glass exploded like a gunshot, prompting all of them to begin shooting at each other till everyone dropped dead.

  One can only wish….

  I left the hotel through a side exit and walked down toward Kailua town. I passed the rent-a-car place where Mia had rented the PT Cruiser. I decided to call her. See what she was up to. Up for.

  “How ya doin’?”

  “I’m at Hapuna. We just had an orientation and I went for a swim after. The water’s beautiful.”

  “What you up to this evening?”

  “Not much. A group of us are gonna carbo-load, you know, spaghetti. Then I gotta try to rest. Too bad you’re not here. You could join in on the fun. Oh, I forgot, you don’t do fun.”

  I couldn’t find it in me to impose on her evening. “You go have your fun. Good luck tomorrow.”

  “You too. Maybe later you can tell me about what that guy told you—you know, about what went down on Tinian. I really wanna know.”

  “Sure.”

  I met up with Rian and son outside the Kona Coast Shopping Center, near the Jamba Juice store. They were sitting on the circular cement bench that surrounded a turtles-on-water sculpture/mural. Both were reading paperbacks—le Carré’s The Mission Song and Kirino’s Grotesque. Rian told me they had rented a car.

  “Think you could drop me off at the boat?” I asked, partly as a reminder to Rian that I had work to do. “Forgot something there.”

  He pulled out a key fob. “Just take the car. We ain’t going nowhere, are we David?” He was saying the last part to his son.

  “Nope. I’m good,” Kawika Jr. said as he barely looked up from his book.

  “We’ll just check into the King Kam and meet up with you later.”

  “Thanks.”

  We agreed to meet at eight.

  Back at the boat, I pulled out a big envelope that I had managed to squeeze in the tiny space between the ceiling of the cabin and the flooring above. It seemed a better hiding place than the safe, simply because a safe is the first place a thief or a spook would look. I’d rather have a cracked or busted safe than lose important documents.

  I opened the envelope and took out the smaller envelopes within. One had those Vegas photos. To these I added the ones I now had, the ones taken on the Tinian beach. I spread them out on the cabin floor. Noticed right away that while Curtis Sperry was in one of the Tinian photos, he was nowhere to be seen in those taken in Las Vegas. That could mean something. Or not.

  I matched the Tinian photos against the ones I had downloaded.

  Something was wrong. Something bothered me as I emptied each envelope and laid more photos on the floor. Then I realized it wasn’t the photos; it was the envelopes. They weren’t in the right order. I had arranged them chronologically, and they weren’t chronological.

  Someone else had been through these. And the only people on my boat recently were Rian and his son. Unless someone came onto the boat after we had landed.

  I straightened out the chronology on the floor and as I examined the sequence I stopped at that photo of the thirteen people on the beach, the men with their champagne glasses. I counted hands. It became clear that there was an extra hand. Someone’s arm covered the shoulders of the right-most woman. A man’s arm. The rest of this person had been cut out from the picture. Was this intentional, or just shitty camera work? This couldn’t have been cropped. Besides, why would the guy trying to give me information, hide information? Did he not notice that whoever was on the extreme right was not in the picture?

  And that hand. It seemed oddly discolored. It took me a couple minutes and a magnifying glass to realize it was a tattoo of some sort. Perhaps a Polynesian tattoo. And there seemed to be a ring; since it was the left hand, maybe a wedding band.

  I looked more carefully at the faces of the men the whistle-blower couldn’t identify. One of them was looking at someone else, so he was in profile. A very familiar profile. A profile that took me all the way back to Andy’s house with those guys Larry and Ed. As the whistle-blower wrote, these guys were working for abb
acus.

  What kept bothering me more and kept getting in the way of my attempts at getting every bit of data I could glean from these agglomerations of pixels was the pestering thought that someone had been on my boat, looking through these same photos.

  I was back at the shopping center at eight sharp. Rian and Kawika Jr. were sitting close to where I had left them, but now they had boxes and shopping bags with them.

  “They got sales on everything related to exercise, brah,” Rian said. “Your namesake got himself some good running shoes.”

  At my suggestion we drove over to Waikoloa for drinks and dinner.

  The area around the Mauna Lani and Fairmont hotels was abuzz with activity. Triathletes out on the town, finding food, drink, trying to shake off the jitters. Kawika Jr. took it all in. When we finally sat down to eat at Roy’s, after finding a couple other restaurants too full, he talked excitedly about getting a road bike. Said he used to swim and run track back in high school.

  “When was that,” I asked him, “last year?”

  “Two years ago.”

  Rian looked at me, looked around the amber-lit restaurant and said, somewhat begrudgingly, “Youth.”

  Back at the King Kamehameha Hotel we took turns showering and watched a bit of TV. Kawika Jr. insisted that his dad and I take the two queen beds. He wanted to sleep out in the lanai. I recalled Rian’s one word observation back at Waikoloa: youth.

  41

  (Day 13—Saturday, June 2) The three of us joined the convoy of cars and trucks headed toward Hapuna Beach, where the race began. After we found a parking spot not far from the bike transition area I spotted T-Rex rolling his two-wheeler in my direction. “Catch you guys later,” I said to Rian and his son.

  “Hey, you made it,” T-Rex said when he saw me.

  “You made it.” We high-fived and his backpack slipped off his shoulder. As he pulled it back up I asked, “Where’s Stoner?”

  And there he was.

  “Hey, you made it,” he said. Another high five.

  I followed the duo to the check-in place, then stood outside the bike corral looking for Mia.

  When our eyes met, she seemed startled. I put up my hand, gave her a slight wave. She came over. “Oh, I’m so glad you stayed.” She ducked under the rope and hugged me.

  T-Rex and Stoner were right there, saying All right, man.

  Mia glanced at them. “Who’s the dynamic duo?”

  “Refugees from Comedy Central, I think. Met them couple nights ago. You all set?”

  “I’m all nerves. I wanna throw up. Feel like peeing every five minutes. The usual.”

  The hordes were making their way toward the beach, half of them wearing nothing but swimsuits and goggles, and the other half—friends, relatives, volunteers—dressed in shorts and t-shirts, as I was. It looked like a small-scale Olympics, which I had only seen on the small screen, and the activity on the beach reminded me of those surf meets that bookmarked my preteen and teenage years, when all of us neighborhood kids hustled down to Ehukai or Sunset to watch the pros go at it.

  It was an ocean start, with all participants in the water when the gun went off. By then I was standing with Rian and Kawika Jr., watching as the sea of swimmers surged toward the first buoy—a chorus of swinging arms. It looked like grace in motion, but they probably were knocking each other around silly.

  One guy pulled ahead quickly, looking like the head meteor in a meteor shower.

  We waited onshore near the finish line, watching the swim part of the event with a cast of hundreds.

  Behind my shades I was really looking for any woman who resembled Kay.

  The leaders began coming in at about the twenty-fourth minute of the race. Contestants charged, limped, and crept across the transition mat one by one. Minutes went by before I saw Mia. She crossed at 32:49, barely acknowledged the cheers as she ran up the hill toward the bike transition. I ran along behind her, making sure not to get in anybody’s way, and recalled that first run with Mia, up Diamond Head Road. I was relieved to know that this was all I had to do. I wondered how T-Rex and Stoner were doing.

  I watched Mia take off on her bike. She was focused.

  I rejoined Rian and son and we drove over to the Mauna Lani for the bike-to-run transition. Most of the half-marathon run would be on and around the hotel grounds so it was the perfect place to get some food and hail or harass the triathletes as they went by.

  The crowd cheered as Chris McCormack, the overall winner, came in at three hours and fifty-seven minutes. I assumed that was awesome. Minutes later the second guy came in. Then nothing for a whole ten minutes. Then a few more. Sporadic finishers for the first half hour, all male, then a mix of women and men came staggering over the line in increasing numbers. I kept checking the crowd, looking for anyone who looked like Kay—or Matthew.

  A hopeless task.

  Another hour had passed before I saw Mia, running slowly but steadily, seemingly summoning up her last bit of energy to beat the clock. She picked it up when she saw the finish line. By the time I reached her, she was bent over.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah, just … need a moment.” And then she threw up. Seemed all liquid.

  “Sexy, huh?” she managed to say after. “Thanks for being here.”

  I rubbed her back, still checking out the crowd, still hoping that against all logic and conventional wisdom Kay would keep her promise.

  In a few minutes Mia was her old self. After receiving congratulations from Rian, then Kawika Jr., whom she was meeting for the first time, we bid a temporary adieu to the father-son duo, who wanted to watch more of the action, and I walked with Mia to her hotel room, conveniently located in that same complex. She had a suite on the ground level, nothing but trees and greenery all around.

  “I need a shower … and some mouthwash.”

  I read the Hilo Courier while waiting. Mia had left the bathroom door partly ajar and from my vantage point, even though I was facing the wall opposite the bathroom, thanks to a large mirror I could see a lot of what was going on. The shower door was opaque from the steam. When Mia stepped out after a few minutes I lost the battle to be discreet and simply gazed at her. Her three-tone skin coloring was even more dramatic now; she was pale where she was always covered, slightly tanned in the places that were sometimes covered, and golden brown everywhere she had been exposed. Her small breasts looked white in contrast to the surrounding skin and her dark brown nipples, and her black, neatly trimmed pubic hair glistened. She turned to grab the white towel and for a split second I saw that tattoo just above butt cheeks that were surprisingly white between the bikini lines before she covered herself up—oblivious to my sleuthing.

  Or was she livious? Why’d she leave the door partly ajar?

  Covered by the towel, Mia grabbed some clothes from the closet, then went back into the bathroom, this time closing the door. She came out in her knee-length jeans and a white blouse that accented the very deep tan she had acquired in her five and a half hours in the unforgiving sun.

  It was almost lunchtime, but Mia wasn’t all that hungry. Instead she sipped at a cup of fresh orange juice as we walked back to the finish line to meet up with Rian and Kawika Jr., check out the results, and watch the slaggers still drifting in. No sign of T-Rex or Stoner. They had probably come in when I was in her room.

  Mia learned that she had placed fourth in her age group. “No Ironman slot,” she muttered disappointedly as she left to retrieve her bike and gear bag.

  Worse than that. No Kay.

  42

  ENTER THE POLICE

  After returning to our hotel, checking out, and returning the rental, Rian, his son, and I sailed to O‘ahu. Mia stayed back, choosing to take a well-earned nap and then an early evening flight to Honolulu, where we’d all rendezvous.

  If Kay had shown up, as she had promised Mia she would, it went right by us. If she hadn’t shown up, which is far more likely, that tells me that decision making was out of her control. Th
e one good thing that came out of this impromptu trip to the Big Island and back was that I now felt I could confidently sail my own boat and, who knows, maybe a return trip will be in order.

  At about nine that night the four of us dined at Assaggio’s in the Ala Moana Shopping Center. Tasty Italian food cooked by Asians. While Rian, Kawika Jr., and I were ravenous and ate like champs, Mia picked at her food. She said it was common for triathletes to have their eating habits turned upside down. After spending the entire morning eating caffeine- and carbo-loaded gels and chewing on shot blocks and drinking pints of Gatorade and water, you’d think race participants would crave real food, but the stomach doesn’t always cooperate. Mia said she should have her appetite back by tomorrow.

  Her state of mind seemed somewhere between distracted and stupor. I didn’t even want to tell her about Minerva’s revelations about the Sperry family or Jerry Herblach. Or that I knew how she had obtained at least some of her documents. When I learned that she planned to spend the night at Les Biden’s place and hopefully get a good night’s rest, I don’t know if I was playing a hunch or acting out of misdirected concern, but I decided to follow her there and risk her wrath again by not letting her know that I’d again be tailing her. If she was still paranoid about being followed there was a chance she’d spot me, and that would be good; it would tell me she was paying attention.

  I told Rian about my plan and he said No problem. It was a short walk back to the harbor.

  • • •

  Something was going on. An indiscreet Dodge Stratus cut in front of me after the Pali Tunnel and when we reached Kailua town it made every turn she made. I pulled back a bit, making sure that the driver of the Stratus didn’t notice my sand-colored Corolla. Next to a slate-blue Civic, I would venture that my car was the most commonly sighted car on O‘ahu, which was why I got it in the first place. Plus, it was cheap.