Before I had a chance to ask myself what else could possibly go wrong, I noticed that the emcee in the grass skirt was weaving through the aisles, heading straight in our direction with a fierce look of determination in her brown eyes.
Run! a little voice inside my head commanded. But I was stuck to my chair—no doubt the result of either my horror over what was about to happen or that devil rum hidden amid the melted ice cubes.
“Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give this happy couple a big round of applause as they join us up on stage!” the hula dancer cried loudly enough for all to hear. Apparently she had a microphone tucked away in her coconut bra.
“Um, no, thank you,” I told her. “We’re not much for—”
“Where are you two from?”
I had no idea hula dancers could be so pushy. “No, really,” I insisted amid the loud clapping that erupted all around me. “We’re not the ones you want.”
“Don’t tell me, the East Coast, right?” our Polynesian princess continued. “I can tell because you’re both so pale. I’m thinking New York, Philadelphia, Boston…someplace where there’s lots of snow.”
“Uh, New York,” I croaked. “Outside of New York. Long Island.”
“Welcome! But you’re not in the Big Apple anymore. It’s time for you both to experience a little Polynesian-style fun.”
Frantically I glanced over at Nick. As I’d expected, he had the same deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face that I was certain was on mine. But even he was no match for the dark-haired waif wearing someone else’s lawn around her hips. Before you could say “pupu platter,” she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him toward the stage.
I had no choice but to follow.
On stage, I stood frozen, staring out at the audience and blinking. The Marine-drill-sergeant-turned-hula-dancer hadn’t even put our leis on yet, and I was already overwhelmed by the tiki torches, the pounding drums, and the sea of faces I could see gaping at me through my mai tai–induced fog. By this point, I really hoped human sacrifice wasn’t on the program.
“I’m Lokelani,” she chirped into her bra. “And you are…?”
“Jessie,” I replied, doing my best to smile.
“And who’s your handsome friend?”
“Nick,” he grunted.
“Great!” Draping a lei over each of us, she added, “Welcome, Jessie and Nick, and thanks for volunteering.”
“We didn’t exactly—”
Before I could finish that thought, Lokelani exclaimed, “You two are going to demonstrate to our audience how easy it is to learn the hula!”
“I don’t think we’re the best people for the job,” Nick protested.
“You see, we have no actual Polynesian dance experience,” I added lamely.
But I knew I was wasting my breath. We were already part of the show. There was no turning back now.
Besides, Lokelani had put her hands on Nick’s hips and was grinding them back and forth in a swaying motion.
“Now bend your knees and move in time to the music,” she instructed. “There you go! You’re a natural!”
“You’re doing great, Nick,” I added encouragingly as I copied his movements.
“Our first vacation in years,” he whispered loudly, “a romantic getaway in paradise, and you have to spoil it by throwing yourself into the investigation of the murder of somebody you barely knew!”
“Now raise your arms and move them like the graceful leaves of a palm tree!” Lokelani cried.
“It’s not as if I planned any of this!” I whispered back. Fortunately, the music was loud enough that no one in the audience could hear us.
“Now move your feet,” Lokelani instructed. “And pretend your fingers are drops of rain…. Go for it, you two! You’re doing great!”
“You can’t let it go, just this once?” Nick persisted, talking through clenched teeth even as he moved his arms like the graceful leaves of a palm tree.
“A young woman has been murdered!” I countered, turning around slowly and making fluttering movements with my fingers. “And her murderer thinks I have something he wants! Do you really expect me to ignore all that?”
“Yes! That’s exactly what I expect!” he shot back. “Because even though I try to be supportive, I think this time you’ve got some serious delusions about your role in this whole—”
“Keep those feet moving!” Lokelani interrupted. “Now you two face each other…. You’re both doing a terrific job!”
“Then you’re just not getting it!” I told Nick as we stood eye to eye, our hips swaying and our fingers fluttering. “Not to mention the fact that you’re cold and heartless!”
“What I am is somebody who’s supposed to be enjoying a relaxing and well-deserved vacation!”
“Come on, you two!” Lokelani urged. “Put a little more sway into those hips!”
“Maybe you can stand by without doing anything,” I whispered impatiently, “but I can’t.”
“Then don’t expect me to sit around and wait for you while you’re off indulging your Nancy Drew fantasies,” Nick returned. “I plan to have fun while I’m in Hawaii!”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
“Believe me, I won’t!”
“All right!” Lokelani exclaimed happily. “Great job, you two! Let’s have one more round of applause for Jessie and Nick!”
I glared at him. He glowered back.
“And because the two of you were such good sports,” Lokelani continued with just as much enthusiasm, “here are four free tickets to the Royal Banyan Hotel’s luau, any night you choose. Mahalo, and enjoy your stay!”
How could we not? I thought grimly, aware that this Hawaiian vacation of ours was starting to feel an awful lot like instant replay.
As Nick and I shuffled back to our seats, everybody else in the audience applauded loudly. A few let out yelps of appreciation. No doubt they were all demonstrating how grateful they were that they weren’t the ones who’d been dragged up on stage and publicly humiliated.
Once we sat down, our fifteen minutes of fame already old news, I turned to him and said, “At least we got free tickets to a luau. We can even go twice.”
Nick just grunted, his way of signifying that he’d heard what I’d said but had absolutely no intention of responding to it.
Terrific, I thought sullenly, rearranging my lei to keep it from scratching the back of my neck. Here I am on a romantic getaway in paradise, and my significant other isn’t even speaking to me.
True, I felt bad. But at the same time, I was already switching my focus to the next step in my unofficial investigation of Marnie Burton’s murder. My interest in finding her killer was as strong as ever, not only because of my desire to see justice done but even more because I still believed that I wouldn’t be completely safe until the murderer had been caught.
I only hoped her boyfriend would be more willing to talk to me than my own boyfriend was.
Chapter 5
“The clever cat eats cheese and breathes down rat holes with bated breath.”
—W. C. Fields
It was after nine by the time Nick and I settled into our new hotel room, one that looked identical to our first room but was a few floors higher up. Getting the manager to move us turned out to be harder than I’d anticipated. While at first he’d seemed quite concerned about the break-in, his attitude changed when I told him that the only thing that was taken was an envelope filled with booklets from the veterinary conference. He gave me a form to fill out, one I suspected would get stuck in some file folder, then begrudgingly handed me a new set of key cards.
Since Nick and I were still not officially on speaking terms, as we unpacked we limited our communications to simple questions and curt responses. We topped off the evening by flopping into bed and falling asleep without any of our body parts touching.
By the next morning, the air still hadn’t cleared. I was glad Nick decided to take advantage of the hotel’s free windsurfing lesson. I,
meanwhile, had a task of my own: tracking down Marnie’s boyfriend and trying to decide whether he was someone who deserved a spot on my list of suspects.
Thank heaven for the yellow pages, I thought after Nick took off, leaving me alone in our room. I ran my finger along the page with the heading Auto Body and Collision Repair and stopped when it collided with Ace’s Auto Artists.
The Plastic Surgeons of Car Bodies! the subheading read. But I was much more interested in Ace’s address, which was printed below the drawing of a sleek automobile with an even sleeker woman draped across it. She had more curves than a Rolls Royce.
Ace’s Auto Artists was located near the airport. In fact, as I drove toward it with my trusty map in tow, I passed the Purple Mango, the bar I remembered Detective Paleka mentioning as the place where Marnie was last seen. Startled, I stepped on the brake to get a better look. I don’t know what I hoped to find out, but I didn’t learn anything besides the fact that the Purple Mango looked like a seedy bar that I, for one, would be nervous about patronizing. Just riding past it gave me the creeps. It was a terrific reminder of why I was pursuing this investigation with such determination—as if I needed one.
Compared to the Purple Mango, Ace’s establishment, two blocks away, was a breath of fresh air. It looked positively ordinary: a low concrete-block building with a black and white sign informing me that this was the place. Through the open garage doors I could see a couple of car-filled bays.
In fact, as I strode inside with a confidence I didn’t actually feel, I saw that everything at Ace’s was related to cars. Big metal tools, paint, oil, noise, brawny men. The place practically reeked of testosterone. The only reminder that the planet was also inhabited by women came in the form of the Babes of Hawaii calendar hanging over a cluttered desk.
I spotted the man himself as he strutted into the office from the back, wiping his hands on a greasy towel and thrusting his pelvis out as if he was cruisin’ for chicks. Given the way he’d billed himself in the yellow pages, I half-expected him to be wearing scrubs and a surgical mask. Instead, he was dressed in tight jeans and a navy blue T-shirt with the name Ace printed in white on the front and Ace’s Auto Artists across the back. The shirt looked as if it was at least one size too small, given the way the stretchy fabric pulled against his exaggerated muscles.
He stopped abruptly in front of a small plastic-framed mirror that hung on the side of a tall metal file cabinet. It looked like one of those mirrors designed for hormonally challenged high-school students to stick inside their lockers to facilitate frequent zit counts. Even though Ace was well past the bad skin years, he stopped and peered into it, taking a comb out of his pocket and running it through his straight black hair. It was already perfectly styled, thanks to a shiny substance that looked as greasy as the tattered rag he’d stuck in his belt.
But I was looking for something beyond the obvious. I was trying to evaluate his attractiveness to the opposite sex. Frankly, at first glance I couldn’t figure out what Marnie had seen in him. His preening aside, his face had the leathery look of someone who’d spent too much time in the sun as a young man and, as a middle-aged man, discovered it was prematurely turning him into an old man.
But one thing that was definitely in his favor was that he had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. In fact, they were as blue as the Pacific Ocean. I could see how a young woman who wasn’t a very seasoned swimmer could drown in them.
I was still studying him when he suddenly flashed a grin at the mirror. At first, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming he was checking his teeth for sesame seeds or taking care of some other form of personal housecleaning. Then I realized he was simply admiring his own reflection.
Overcome with embarrassment, I cleared my throat loudly.
He snapped his head in my direction. “Hey, how ya doing?” he called, looking completely unfazed. He swaggered toward me, still carrying himself as if he was king of the hill—or cock of the walk. “Drive around the side so I can take a look.”
“Actually, I’m not here about my car,” I told him. In a gentle voice, I added, “I’m here about Marnie Burton.”
I braced myself for his reaction. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect, but I figured there was a good chance I was about to see a grown man cry.
Instead, he jutted out his chin defensively and demanded, “You a cop?”
“No, I was a friend of Marnie’s.” Trying not to show my surprise over his unexpected reaction, I said, “I’m trying to get some sense of closure, or maybe even some understanding, by talking to other people she knew. I thought it might help to meet you, since the two of you were so close.”
His eyebrows jumped up so high they nearly overshot his hairline. “Is that what she told you?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“No way,” Ace insisted, his voice suddenly sharp. “Listen, Marnie Burton and I had a business relationship, and that’s it. She became a regular customer after she came in with some dings on her Honda.”
And you’ve been dinging her ever since, I thought wryly.
“As far as I know, she didn’t even have a boyfriend,” he went on, sounding annoyingly confident. “I don’t think romance was very high on her list of priorities, y’know? She was too busy with her career. Yeah, that was real important to her. She was always going on and on about the newspaper business. She loved everything about it, even the weird people she was always talking to as part of her job.”
He must have realized suddenly that most of us don’t discuss our dreams and desires with the guy who smooths out our chassis, because he quickly added, “I mean, I think I remember her sayin’ something about that once. We were, y’know, making small talk.”
“So it sounds as if you’ve know Marnie for a while,” I commented. “I guess you met when she first moved here.”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember…maybe a year ago? After that, she ended up bringing her car in here every couple of months, since she was always banging it up. She wasn’t that great a driver, if you know what I mean. But there’s no way she was anything more than a good customer.”
I couldn’t help noticing that the longer he spoke, the more agitated he became. He kept slicking back his hair with one hand, and his left eye twitched, just a little. “Okay, so maybe you could say we were friends. It’s my policy to go out of my way to establish a good relationship with my regular customers, you know? It’s good business. But that’s it. If she told you we were anything besides friends, it was just because she had things twisted up in her head.”
Right, I thought wryly. Friends. Somehow, I didn’t see Ace as the kind of guy who had a lot of buddies of the female variety, even if they were steady customers. My main clue was Miss January, who, behind his right shoulder, was romping in the surf in nothing more than a lei, a seductive smile, and a few well-placed grains of sand.
I put on my “confused” expression. “So Marnie wasn’t telling the truth when she and I talked Sunday afternoon and she mentioned that she was meeting you for dinner later that night.”
Ace’s eyebrows shot up. “She said that?” he squawked.
I just nodded.
“No way,” he insisted. His left eye gave another little twitch. “You must have me confused with somebody else. Besides, Sunday night I was at Scores, havin’ a beer.”
I guess my face registered my surprise, because he quickly added, “It’s a sports bar. Y’know, scores? Like sports scores?”
I’m sure it’s an extremely wholesome place, I thought disdainfully. “So you were out with friends?”
“Actually, I was alone.” He reached into his pocket and began rattling a set of keys or something else metallic. Once again, his left eye got busy. “Sometimes I just like to relax by myself, y’know?” he said, sounding more than a little defensive. “So I get a table in back, alone, and watch the TV that’s over the bar. It gives me a chance to think.”
If I ever heard a weak alibi, I thought, that’s it. If the barte
nder can’t remember him being there, Ace can always blame the fact that he’s a shy, retiring guy who likes to be alone with his thoughts, no doubt pondering the great mysteries of the universe. And the latest sports scores, of course.
“I must have misunderstood what Marnie said.” I hoped I sounded as if I was actually buying all this. “And I certainly understand that in your line of work, you must need some serious downtime. It can’t be easy, spending all day dealing with cranky customers who come in upset because their cars are smashed up.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, smirking, “it’s not like I intend to do this for the rest of my life.”
Aromatherapist? I guessed. Yoga instructor? Kindergarten teacher?
“I’m gonna sell this place and get me one of those cushy nine-to-five jobs,” Ace went on, exhibiting more passion than I’d seen since I walked into his fine establishment. “One that comes with a steady paycheck and a ni-i-ice long lunch hour.”
Frankly, while there was definitely something to be said for having a reliable income, having a desk that one was expected to be seated at promptly at nine every Monday through Friday had never appealed to me. I much preferred making my own schedule, even if it usually ended up extending from very early in the morning until very late at night, Monday through Sunday, twelve months a year.
“So being your own boss isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?” I asked.
“It’s not that so much.” He hesitated before adding, “Let’s just say I’ve had a better offer.”
I wasn’t particularly interested in Ace’s career plans. I found his insistence that he and Marnie had been “just friends” much more intriguing. It left me with two possibilities to consider. One was that Marnie’s claim that she and Ace were boyfriend and girlfriend and that he was on the verge of popping the question had simply been a manifestation of her tendency to exaggerate or even to see things that weren’t there.
But I found that explanation hard to accept. Maybe some of the people who’d worked with her found her likely to exaggerate, but the starry-eyed way she’d spoken about him—and the pride she’d exhibited in his professional abilities—convinced me that Ace was the one whose story was out of alignment, not her.
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