“You look great.” Kiki climbed in carrying a huge black duffle bag and settled into the shotgun seat.
As per Kiki’s request, Big Estelle was outfitted in wide-legged, lime green harem pants gathered at the ankles. She had on a forest green blouse and had already pinned fern fronds all over her head.
Lars, outfitted in his green camo gear was crammed into the very back of the van with Little Estelle, also decked out in camo. She was seated on her Gadabout.
“Let us out,” Little Estelle hollered. “It’s gettin’ hot back here.”
“Hang on, Mother,” Big Estelle shouted. “Prepare to launch.”
Big Estelle hit the control button behind the wheel, and the lift on the back of the van slowly lowered Lars, Little Estelle, and her Gadabout to the pavement. Kiki rolled down her window and cautioned, “Keep the noise down. We’re undercover.”
“What should we do?” Little Estelle revved her engine.
“Reconnoiter. Cruise the perimeter of the parking lot. Let us know if you see anything suspicious.” When Little Estelle headed for the far corner of the lot, Kiki rolled up her window.
“Are you expecting trouble? What kind of suspicious things are you looking for?” Big Estelle wanted to know.
“I just wanted to keep your mother out of trouble.”
“That’s impossible.”
“So is Lars going to be here forever?” Kiki watched the long-legged Norwegian lope along behind the Gadabout. “Is he for real?”
Big Estelle shrugged. “Right now he’s doting on my mother. She’s happy, and he seems perfectly harmless.”
“What about the future?”
“What future? Mother’s ninety-two. The most he can get out of her is a green card.”
Just then Trish and Suzi pulled up in Suzi’s car. Kiki waved them over, and they hopped into the back of the van. Before Kiki could answer any of their questions, Pat and Flora arrived. Once they were all crammed into the van, Kiki unzipped the duffle, revealing three, two-way radios. Kimo had bought them a couple of years ago for hunting trips, and she was sure he would have happily loaned them to her had she asked, but she hadn’t.
She handed one to Pat.
“This is your radio, Pat. You’ll remain here in the van. From here on out we’ll call this Command and Control Central, or CCC. I’ll have another radio, and I’m giving one to Big Estelle.” She handed one to the woman behind the wheel of the van.
“Pat and Flora, you two will remain in the van. Little Estelle and Lars will continue to watch the parking lot and discourage parking. Big Estelle, you’ll walk two blocks over with Trish, Suzi, and me, but then we’ll separate, and you’ll remain on the corner. Find the biggest tree or shrub you can and hide behind it. Trish, Suzi, and I will continue on to our destination.”
Pat was fiddling with the two-way. The others nodded in understanding.
“Where is Lillian?” Kiki looked out the van window.
Trish raised her hand. “The Lillians are still touring. Today they’re taking the inner tube adventure down the irrigation ditch, and real Lillian is going with them.”
Kiki glanced up at the sky. “In that case I hope it doesn’t rain any harder. They could get decapitated in the tunnels if the water rises too fast.”
Suzi rolled her eyes. “Can you imagine all those pink heads bobbing downstream?”
“What about Precious?” It irked Kiki to no end that all of the Maidens hadn’t showed.
“I called her,” Trish said. “She’s sorry, but she had customers booked for the whole day. She really wanted to be here.”
“People who have real jobs just irk me to death,” Kiki grumbled.
Lars was tapping on the van door. Big Estelle opened it. “What?”
Little Estelle called up to them. “We checked the lot. Everything’s a-okay. Now what?”
Kiki leaned out. “Cordon off the perimeter.” She pointed at Lars and yelled, “No cars in! No cars!”
“Ya! No cars. Goot,” he yelled back and clicked his boot heels together.
Big Estelle closed the door.
“So we’re good to go,” Kiki said.
Pat clicked on the two-way and said, “Roger. Copy that.”
Suzi raised her hand.
“What?” Kiki was fumbling with the two-way, trying to clip it to the waistband of her harem pants.
“After we leave Big Estelle in a bush on a corner two blocks from here, what will we actually be doing?” Suzi asked.
“Here’s what’s up,” Kiki said. “Long story short, Marilyn’s disgusting nephew Tom is trying to frame me. Someone who shall remain nameless thinks he’s been lying from the get go about when he arrived on island and probably about a lot more. We need to find proof we can take to Roland and the KPD to prove that he’s up to something. We have to find out why he’s so anxious to have me take the fall for Marilyn’s murder. We three are heading over to his house to see if he’s there, and if he’s not, we’re going in and we’ll have a look around.”
“Why am I not liking the sound of this?” Trish mumbled.
“So what do we do?” Pat wanted to know.
“Trish and Suzi and I will go around the block by cutting across the golf course to Marilyn’s house where Tom is staying. Big Estelle will stand watch at the end of his street and radio to let us know if she sees anyone approaching his house.”
“I just stand there?” Big Estelle wasn’t happy.
“Watching the street,” Kiki said.
“In the rain?”
“I’d do it for you.” Kiki gave her a hard-eyed squint.
“Okay, but I’m taking a plastic trash sack to sit on and one to wear.”
Kiki sighed and then continued. “If the coast is clear, we’ll enter the house and look for evidence. Trish will take photos.”
“Enter the house? Breaking and entering?” Trish was shaking her head no.
“This,” Kiki said, straightening her spine, “is a matter of life and death.”
“I don’t know about this,” Suzi said.
“What if he’s home?” Trish asked.
“We wait until he leaves,” Kiki said.
Suzi wasn’t convinced. “What if we get in, and he comes right back?”
“Then you’ll say you assumed he would be selling the place, and you already have some prospective buyers. You will say you are there to see if the house is in condition to show.”
“I could lose my real estate license.”
“And if we don’t do something, I could spend the rest of my life directing hula shows in prison,” Kiki shot back.
Trish shifted her camera strap. “What are we looking for exactly?”
Kiki shrugged. “Anything suspicious. We’ll know it when we see it.” She turned to Pat and Flora. “If any busybodies or Princeville security come nosing around and wants to know what we’re doing in the neighborhood, tell them we’re gathering kukui nut leaves for head lei. Point out that we are in costume because we’re on the way to Happy Days Long Term Care Center to entertain.” She had but one more instruction. She looked around the van at each of them in turn. “No matter who you talk to, no matter what comes up, tell no one about this. Ever.”
“Tell no one. Got it!” Pat saluted and then reached into a battered briefcase at her feet. She pulled out a large map of Princeville and spread it open on the back of the center passenger seat. Then she clicked on the two-way.
“Command and Control Center is good to go.”
40
Identity Thief
Em was in the office that morning finding it hard to concentrate with Roland Sharpe’s presence filling the room. He stood there in a white T-shirt and a bright red lava lava wrapped around his hips. His skin glistened.
Nothing lik
e the scent of a well-oiled fire dancing detective in the morning.
“You haven’t been home all night, I take it?” She was curious as to why he was still in his luau costume but wasn’t sure she actually wanted to hear the answer.
“This is the new standard issue uniform for the KPD,” he said.
“Lucky for Kauai, then. I hope all the other guys wear it as well as you do.”
“You like this look? A man in a skirt?”
“You bet. There’s something oddly sexy about it. Like a man parading around in a bath towel.” She tried to focus but couldn’t stop smiling. “If you’d like to use our shower and change, go right ahead. There are fresh towels in a basket near the entry.”
“Thanks, but I’m headed home. Maybe some other time when you can join me.”
If she thought he was going to fess up to where he was last night, she was wrong.
“You left a message, said it was important, and you needed to talk to me right away,” he reminded her.
Em watched Roland cross the room, his coffee-brown skin highlighted by the stark white of his T-shirt.
She cleared her throat. “What?”
“You wanted to talk to me.”
“Right. Last night Sophie and I were talking about Tom Benton, and I told her about the things I saw on his dining table. We were trying to figure out what they might mean. She thinks he could have been lying about being in India.”
“That’s a very accurate assumption. I checked the airline manifests, and he wasn’t aboard any planes to Kauai on the day he supposedly flew in. Nor any time before that that I can find.”
“What do you mean? He has to be. How did he get here?”
“Not by cruise ship, either.”
“Why would he take a cruise ship? He was in a hurry to get here after Marilyn died.”
“Something else turned up. Dewey Smithson has supposedly been on island for nearly a month according to flight manifests. We’ve been looking for him all over the island, as you know. But when I called his bank to check on that credit card number on the card in the photo, it turns out Smithson is still in Indiana. He’s never been to Hawaii in his life.”
“Are you sure it’s the same Smithson? Dewey Smithson?”
“Yep.” He perched on the edge of the desk, and his lava lava gapped open just enough to tempt her to glimpse a peek of the tattoo on his thigh. “Turns out he’s not a birdwatcher. His identity was stolen a little over a month ago. He’s been working on clearing things up ever since, but it’s been slow going. Whoever did it is an expert. His Social Security and every other important number the poor guy had is now compromised.”
Em had her movable chart laid out again. Roland glanced down at the pages.
“What’s all this?”
“Names of the murder victims, possible suspects and motives, and any other clues I could come up with yesterday.”
He frowned as he studied the pages on the desk but didn’t say anything.
“I saw Nat working on one of his show plots once, and he had made up a moveable chart just like this one.” She picked up the page with Kiki’s name on it and moved it to the bottom of the suspect list across from the Motive column. “I thought it might help us see something we’re missing. Something that will clear Kiki. I’m pretty convinced Tom Benton is in this much deeper than we know.”
“This isn’t a TV show, Em.”
“I know,” she nodded. “Do you think Tom has been posing as Dewey Smithson? That he’s an identity thief?”
“If he is, then Benton was on island before Bobby’s death, and before the maid’s. Both of them were connected to HBR, and whoever posed as Smithson was staying there.”
“Why would Tom kill Bobby? Why kill Esther Villaviejos?”
“Why hide his own identity?” Roland asked.
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Tom has Smithson’s credit card. Maybe he’s working on Smithson’s identity theft case.”
“But then if he’s innocent, why didn’t Tom didn’t fly here under his own name? If he wasn’t already here posing as Smithson, how did he get on island? On the other hand, what if he checked into HBR pretending to be Smithson? If he did, that would put him on Kauai before his aunt’s wedding, yet he told her he couldn’t attend because he was supposedly in India. Again, why? He had to be up to something.”
She told him about Sophie’s photoshopped email photo theory.
“We still have Marilyn’s notebook. I’ll have our tech guys go over her emails from Benton. They’ll know if the photos are fake.”
“So we’re back to why he hid the fact he was on island from Marilyn.”
Em picked up the photo of the credit cards on Tom’s dining table. “Maybe he was into identity theft big time. Maybe he came over here to hide out.”
“That’s possible,” Roland said. “But he’s not hiding now.”
“No.”
“You’re overlooking something, Em.”
She scanned the chart. “What? What am I missing?”
“Tom was here on the night of Marilyn’s murder.”
“Do you think he could have killed her? He loved her.”
Roland shrugged. “Supposedly he loved her. Why else was he hiding from her? He is the executor of her estate and her only heir.”
“So he had motive.”
“Big time.”
Em stared at Roland for a second. “Okay, so maybe Tom killed Marilyn, but what about the other two murders?”
“The only connection between them is Haena Beach Resort. Other than that, I have no idea why he would kill the cameraman or the maid. We may still be dealing with two murderers.” He stood up. “Three is a long shot.”
“What now?” Em stretched her neck, rolled her head.
“Those photos you sent yesterday were a big help, Em. You did good. Now it’s time to step out of the way.”
“And let the big boys handle it, you mean?”
“Right.”
“Are you going to pick up Tom for questioning?”
“Yes. I want to find out if he came to Kauai posing as Smithson and why he has Smithson’s credit card. I doubt he’ll admit anything. We’ll need to search his aunt’s house, legally, for evidence, which involves a search warrant. We need to stick to the letter of the law so he can’t slip off the hook.” He locked gazes with her to get his point across then added, “I’m not going to do anything else today until I’m out of this skirt and I have a warrant in my hand.”
41
Deep Undercover
Kiki led Big Estelle, Trish, and Suzi along the perimeter of the Woods course, past golf course homes with wide lanais open to the view. Kiki gave the women the universal sign for shh! as they crept past an elderly couple having breakfast at a table under an awning.
The woman peered over the edge of her morning newspaper. Kiki froze and motioned for the others to duck behind some Song of India plants.
“I thought I saw some belly dancers running across the course,” the woman said.
“What?” the man mumbled.
“Belly dancers on the course,” the wife yelled.
“Most belly aches run their course,” he said.
Kiki waited until the wife went back to reading. She signaled for the women to run, and off they ran. When they reached the corner of Marilyn’s street, she waved Big Estelle over to the nearest yard, but Big Estelle hesitated.
“I don’t want to do this by myself. Can’t Suzi stay with me? Trish can go with you and take photos,” she said.
Kiki shook her head. “I may need them both. Suzi is small enough to lift through a window, and Trish is my photographer. Hide behind that big schefflera over there.” Kiki pointed to a nearby overgrown bush that was a good eight feet high and four feet wide.
“Are you sure nobody can see me? I feel stupid squatting back here.” She carefully picked her way through wet leaves until she was behind the bush. Trish was watching the house behind them. There didn’t appear to be anyone there.
“Most of these places are empty,” Suzi said. “The snowbirds have flown the coop this time of year.”
Big Estelle bent down to place a plastic trash liner on the ground. She fussed with it, trying to get it perfectly flattened on the leaves.
“Hurry up,” Kiki prodded. “We don’t have all day.”
She was headed toward the street but froze when Big Estelle let out a bloodcurdling scream and grabbed her right foot. Hopping on her left leg, the woman kept screaming at the top of her lungs.
“What! What’s going on?” Suzi ran away from Big Estelle as fast as she could.
“What happened? What’s wrong?” Trish tried to help Big Estelle balance on one foot.
“Centipede!” Big Estelle’s eyes bugged out. She clutched her throat and staggered back. “A centipede bit my foot! Help me! Help me! I’m gonna die!”
Kiki ran back to the bush and slapped Big Estelle so hard she was shocked into silence.
“What did you do that for?” Trish asked.
“Shut up! This is a covert mission. You’re attracting attention,” Kiki whispered.
Big Estelle was staring at her foot.
“It’s already swelling,” Suzi said.
“Wow. You can see the fang marks,” Trish pointed the camera at Big Estelle’s foot and took a photo.
“Not fangs,” Suzi said. “Pinchers.”
“Where is it?” Big Estelle hopped out of the debris around the bottom of the schefflera. “Is it on my cuff?” She shook out the blousy harem pant leg, kicked her foot around and screamed at the pain.
“Ow! Ow, ow, ow. It hurts like hell.”
“I think we’re supposed to pee on it,” Suzi said.
“That’s for a jellyfish sting,” Trish said. “Or maybe that’s the remedy for stepping on sea urchin spines.”
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