Moonlight Cocktail

by William Cassidy

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re familiar with the properties of the common poisonous plants like Oleander and can easily identify them, but there are a great many others out there that we may not see in a lifetime. This may be one of them. We’re working on it.”

  “How soon do you think you’ll have it nailed down?” Jack asked.

  “I can’t say,” the doctor replied. “We’ve put as many resources on it as we can spare but we have many other responsibilities. I hope to get an answer soon.”

  “So, what’s this got to do with me, Dave?” Jack asked.

  “Well, I thought you might be the best person to explain to Gordon where we are in this investigation. I know he consults you on legal matters and so I thought you could explain the investigative process to him.

  “And I could also help you avoid a sticky wicket since you are a good friend of Gordon’s and you will be conducting the investigation of what appears to be a murder at the Club of which he is President and you are a member,” Jack pointed out.

  “Precisely. I knew you’d understand.”

  “I’ll do it. But you’ll owe me one for this. I’m thinking at least three rounds of golf at your club,” Jack said with a smile.

  “You bring the cigars and it’s a deal,” Dave said.

  “Deal,” Jack replied. “It was very nice to meet you, Doctor,” he said to Doctor Wong.

  Jack left Dave’s office and walked back to his car, shaking his head.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jack climbed into his Jeep and headed for the Diamond Head Canoe Club, looking forward to a run in Kapiolani Park and a jaunt in his outrigger canoe. He made a beeline for the locker room, changed quickly, and walked back out through the garage to Kapiolani Park across Kalakaua Avenue from the Club’s entrance.

  The park supplied Jack with a peaceful retreat on this otherwise troubling day. Mothers walking with their children stopped to spread blankets for early lunches. A few other runners circled the park, and a small group of men and women practiced yoga in the bright sunshine. Pairs of Common Myna birds swooped and zoomed like fighter jets, the white swaths on each brown wing flashing like military insignia as they flew by. The scene had a calming effect on Jack as he set out on the two-mile preface to his paddling workout.

  Running always cleared Jack’s head. When he was trying cases, he invariably reserved time in the evening for a run. It was then that he thought of points he could make the next day and refined his strategy in light of the way the day’s evidence had played to the judge and the jury. Frequently, he would develop new ideas by the beginning of the second mile.

  As he ran, Jack reconstructed the events of Monday evening. First, he categorized the various groups of people who were present at the Club during the party. There were the Club’s employees — a most unlikely source of malefaction. There was the Hollywood group: the cast of the movie and those involved in its production. Hard to say how each of them felt about Reynolds, but it wasn’t likely that they wanted to murder him midway through the filming. There were some local public officials and Navy people, but Jack doubted they knew or cared much about Derek Reynolds before that evening. Finally, there was the local social group, some of whom had known Reynolds previously and had little good to say about him. Most of them, however, seemed to be pretty benign on any issue other than a proposed increase in Club dues.

  As he started around the park for the second time, Jack applied the classic formulation for solving crimes. Many people at the party had the opportunity, just by being there, to put something in Reynolds’ drink. Several of those present may have had a motive, in light of the way Reynolds treated people professionally and personally. But only one of those had obtained the means and placed the extract from a poisonous plant in Reynolds’ drink. Thus, Jack concluded the solution to this crime lay in finding the means, and the best place to start looking for it was the Bishop Museum, which had books on every aspect of Hawaii, including its plant life.

  His run completed, Jack walked back across Kalakaua Avenue and cut through the parking garage to the Club’s locker room where he changed into his bathing suit. He then walked out to the canoe storage racks, lifted his canoe from its rack, and walked down to the unusually deserted beach.

  After placing his canoe on the wet sand, Jack dove into the ocean to cool down after his two-mile jog. The Pacific was warm and salty and its waves massaged his tired legs as he took long, slow strokes out to the end of the seventy-five foot long jetty. Jack floated on his back to relax and gazed at Honolulu’s skyline, amazed that such tranquility existed at the edge of a modern American city.

  Jack returned to the beach with twenty fast and powerful strokes and placed his canoe in the water. The sea was calm as a lake, and he paddled easily alongside the jetty and through the reef. He decided to take a different trip and headed left toward the Diamond Head Lighthouse rather than to the right and Waikiki. The waters near the Lighthouse were rougher than the waters off Waikiki, because the island of Oahu begins to take a turn at that point toward its Windward Shore. Beyond the Windward Shore lies the North Shore with its famous surfing beaches like Waimea and the Banzai Pipeline that draw the world’s best surfers to ride Hawaii’s biggest waves.

  As he paddled southeast, Jack had to work hard to stay clear of the waves and to avoid being pushed into the reef that lay along his left side. It was an exhilarating tour, one that Katherine hated to see him take because of the strong currents and rambunctious waves, but Jack loved it. When he reached the Diamond Head Lighthouse, marked by its red dome and flared white walls, Jack stopped, rested for a minute, then turned his canoe seaward and paddled out for fifty yards before turning right and heading northwest, back toward the Club.

  Jack did not think about other things when he was on the water. Paddling in the Pacific required constant attention. The ocean was always moving and changing, impeding one’s ability to stay on course and return safely.

  Soon, the wind increased, and the waves began to break earlier and more frequently. Jack applied left rudder with his left foot pedal and took more strokes with his paddle to avoid being shoved on to the reef. He worked hard to keep his canoe headed toward the orange windsock on top of the stake that marked the right side of the channel through the reef to the Club’s beach.

  As he drew closer to the windsock, Jack noticed that there were still no people on the Club’s beach. Had the members been spooked by the events that occurred two days earlier? How would they feel when they learned that Reynolds had been murdered there?

  Jack reached the windsock and rested for a moment, surveying the approach to the channel through the reef. As he sat on his canoe with the paddle across his legs, Jack saw a dark shadow on the water to his right. But the azure sky was cloudless, its brilliant blue enhanced by the Central Pacific sunshine.

  There were no clouds to cast a shadow, so it wasn’t a shadow that Jack had seen. The dark form was in the water, not on it, just beneath the surface, only a few feet from Jack as he sat on the canoe’s precarious perch.

  Jack looked down and saw the form approaching his canoe at a ninety-degree angle. It was brown and at least half the length of his canoe, nearly twice as long as Jack was tall. He froze as he realized that the form was precisely what his instincts had told him it was - a Tiger Shark - but instantly decided that the best way to deal with this most dangerous shark was to act as if he were not phased by it. He paddled parallel to the beach, taking long and smooth strokes as the shark emerged on the other side of his canoe.

  As he paddled, Jack imagined the headline in The Advertiser: local coffee plantation owner attacked and killed by Tiger Shark off Waikiki. Just then, as abruptly as the shark had appeared, it vanished. Jack turned his canoe around carefully and took long and deep strokes back toward the windsock. He stretched his torso upward to find the jetty and line it up with the left side of the Surf Hotel so he could run the middle of the channel. Suddenly, Jack h
eard the sound of an engine behind him, and an outboard motor boat roared by, leaving a wake that threw him off the canoe not far from the place where he had first seen the shark.

  The wind and current swiftly pulled his canoe away from him, but Jack maintained a death grip on his paddle. He swam toward the canoe like a man being chased by a shark, which he felt was likely the case, and reached it just as the canoe passed the seaward end of the jetty. Fueled by adrenaline, Jack launched himself like a rocket up out of the water and onto the canoe. Breathing heavily, and rotating on his stomach, he brought both legs on board and sat upright, paddle in hand. Soaking wet and suffused with the joy of a man spared a prehistoric death in the jaws of a sea monster, Jack cursed the driver of the boat and then paddled toward the windsock. When he felt he had reached the midpoint between the jetty and the windsock, he applied pressure to the left foot pedal, turned the canoe straight toward the beach, positioned his canoe between two waves, and dug the paddle into the water repeatedly. As the canoe surfed onto the beach, he relished the luxury and security of the sand between his toes.

  Forgoing the weights, Jack took a steam and a shower and decided to reward himself with a grilled mahimahi sandwich on the Club’s Lanai. He walked through the bar on his way to the Lanai and saw Kulani getting ready for the lunch crowd. Jack waved and asked how he was doing.

  “I was doing pretty well, Mr. Sullivan, until midnight last night,” Kulani said.

  “What happened?”

  “I was driving home after cleaning up and closing the bar, and some guy tried to run me off the road. Nearly killed me.”

  “Where did it happen?” Jack asked.

  “I live out near K-Bay,” Kulani said, referring to the Marine Corps Air Station at Kaneohe Bay on Oahu’s Windward Shore, “and I was driving near Kailua Beach when this maniac comes up from behind and tries to pass me, but instead hits me and pushes me off the road. My car is totaled.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, but my car is ruined.”

  “Did you get a look at the driver?”

  “Only briefly, when the car was next to me. I looked over just before I got hit. I told the police.”

  “What did the driver look like?”

  “A haole for sure but with a hat on and a scarf around the neck like you see in those old movies. And a turned-up collar,” Kulani added.

  “Young or old?”

  “Hard to tell. But the eyes, they were on fire. They looked at me as if they were mad at me.”

  “Was it a case of road rage?”

  “If it was, I didn’t do anything to cause it.”

  “Have you done anything to anybody lately that would make them mad at you?”

  “No. This was something else. I’ve never seen a look as angry as this one. Must have thought I was someone else.”

  “Did you get the license plate?”

  “No, by the time the car passed me, I was off the road and on the beach, just trying to keep control of my car.”

  “Could you tell what kind of car it was?”

  “I told the police it was a Ford Taurus, I think. It looked like the rental cars you see all over the island.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard for the police to track down,” Jack said.

  “No, they said they’d go to the rental agencies and try to find it.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay, Kulani.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Sullivan.”

  Jack enjoyed a grilled mahimahi sandwich, cole slaw, and two Diet Cokes. Then he decided he was ready to return to the business at hand, still grateful that he had escaped the interest of the twelve-foot Tiger Shark.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jack bounded up the steps of the Bishop Museum with an enthusiasm he had previously reserved for less sedentary activities than research. He waved to the librarian he knew best, Maile Carter, and asked where he could find materials on poisonous plants.

  “Where is your interest in Hawaiian coffee plantations taking you now, Jack?” Maile asked.

  “This isn’t for my farm. It’s for a special project.”

  Maile smiled and pointed to a dark corner of the stacks.

  “The botany section is over there. I recommend that you start with general treatises on plants that are native to the Hawaiian Islands. They will lead you to the dangerous ones.”

  “Are there many of those?” Jack inquired.

  “I’m no expert,” Maile replied, “but we do get inquiries from time to time, mostly from students who are interested in Hawaiian customs.”

  “Why would they want to know about poisonous plants?”

  “I’m about to exhaust my knowledge of this topic, Jack, but I think you will find that Native Hawaiian customs and traditions include a god with power over sorcery and poison. His name is Kalaipahoa, and his poison came from plants that grow in these islands.”

  “Well, that gives me a good start, Maile. Thanks,” Jack said.

  “I’m afraid that’s all I know about the subject. You might consult a Hawaiian Healer if you want to pursue it further.”

  “A what?”

  “A Hawaiian Healer,” Maile repeated. “They practice herbal medicine. It’s called ‘la‘au lapa‘au’, and those who practice it use herbs and plants as their medicine. In Hawaiian, ‘la‘au’ means plant and ‘lapa‘au’ means medicine.”

  “Do you know one of these guys, Maile?” Jack asked.

  “The most famous ‘kahuna la‘au lapa‘au’ on Oahu is Papa David Wai’hee.”

  “I thought ‘kahuna’ meant chief or important guy. And what’s with the Papa?”

  Laughing, Maile explained the significance of these titles.

  “‘Kahuna’ is the unfortunate victim of colloquialism. Here in Hawaii, it actually refers to someone who is particularly skilled in something, in this case herbal medicine.”

  “And Papa?” Jack asked. “Is this an affectionate term like Papa Hemingway?”

  “Not quite, Jack,” Maile explained. “Papa is an honorary title given to an older man who has distinguished himself during his life.”

  “Could you set up a meeting for me with Papa David?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. But I think you should consult him only after you’ve done your homework here in the library. Papa David will be much more helpful if you’re familiar with the subject matter. He’s a very intellectual man who has spent his life studying and practicing herbal medicine.”

  “Okay. Let me get to it,” Jack said with a smile. “And, by the way, Maile, do you keep records of the people who come in here to look at your books?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you sign in?”

  “I did.”

  “Good, then I’m sure whoever you’re looking for also signed in.”

  “Why do you think I’m looking for someone?”

  “We Hawaiians are very perceptive, Jack. You expressed a sudden interest in poisonous plants followed immediately by an inquiry about the identity of people who may also have come here to learn about poisonous plants.”

  “I better get to the stacks before I blow my cover,” Jack said laughing.

  “CIA or FBI, Jack?” Maile asked with a broad smile.

  Jack returned her smile as he walked toward the dark corner and the stacks of books under the category of botany.

  Jack surveyed the range of scholarly books about plants that grow in the Hawaiian Islands. Their titles ran the gamut from botanical treatises containing descriptions accompanied by black and white drawings of plants to cultural tomes that explained the roles that plants have played in the social and religious lives of Hawaiians. He took Maile’s advice and began with the botanical treatises.

  As Jack paged through the descriptions of Hawaiian flora, he was grateful that his physician father had taught him so much about the Latin and Greek roots of English words. Like medicine, the science of botany employs the classical languages to describe and categorize its constituents.

  Jack decided to start with Oleander,
because Dr. Wong had mentioned it to him. He discovered that this very common ornamental shrub, known to botanists as Nerium oleander, was highly poisonous. The description of its long and narrow green leaves and large pink, white and red flowers belied the fact that consuming any part of them could cause irregular heartbeat, respiratory paralysis, and death.

  Intrigued, Jack turned the pages and found the drawing and description of a small tree with narrow, dark green leaves and yellow flowers shaped like a funnel. Known in the world of botany as Thevetia peruviana, this was commonly called the Be-Still Tree in Hawaii and it was often the cause of fatal poisoning preceded by vomiting and shock.

  Paging through the treatise, Jack came upon another common plant known in botanical circles as Solanum sodomeum and colloquially as the Apple of Sodom. It was described as a low weed with thorny leaves, blue flowers, and yellow berries; when consumed, it caused a sudden drop in body temperature, paralysis, tremors, and death in a deep coma.

  Another plant he came upon, called Datura stramonium by botanists, was known in Hawaii as the Jimson Weed or Thorn Apple. The treatise described its leaves as dark green on one side and light green on the other, with its trumpet-shaped flowers ranging from white to violet. If consumed, it could cause mania, convulsion and death.

  Jack sat back in his chair and reflected on his findings. He wondered how many poisonous plants there were in Hawaii and how long it would take the toxicologists at the Department of Health to identify the source of the fluid that had killed Derek Reynolds. As he reviewed the properties of the poisonous plants he had found, Jack noticed that one common thread ran through their symptoms. Each produced an evident form of trauma such as convulsion, vomiting, and paralysis. Derek Reynolds had not displayed any of these symptoms. He had merely collapsed and, later, expired.

  Jack looked at his watch and realized that the afternoon had flown by. In three hours, he had learned enough about the poisonous plants of Hawaii to talk intelligently about them with Papa David. As he walked toward the librarian’s desk, Maile smiled at him and beckoned him to her desk.