Ari simply raised his eyebrows and smiled. Coffee revived me a bit, and we ordered breakfast. “So what kind of real estate investments?” I asked, fingering the card. “Brad said you owned the apartment building where Lucie lived?”
Ari nodded. “I went to college in Minnesota, and while I was there I got interested in real estate. I saw people buying houses near the college, living in them while they were in school, then reselling them after graduation. I convinced my dad to front me the money for a down payment, in lieu of paying for a dorm room, and while I lived there I rented out rooms to other students. By the time I graduated I was able to pay my dad back and make a nice profit.”
“A mogul in training,” I said.
“Not quite Donald Trump, but it was a start. I wanted to get the hell out of Minnesota, though, so I came to Hawai’i and started looking for property to fix up and resell. I found a niche up here on the North Shore.”
“That’s what you do—buy houses and then fix them up?”
“Among other things.” The waitress brought our breakfast and we dug in. “I bought a run-down apartment building a couple of years ago. The place was full of drunks, drug addicts and surfers, and I can’t tell you which were the worst tenants.”
He took a forkful of eggs. I figured him for about forty, and it looked like he’d been at least moderately successful—Ralph Lauren shirt with the little polo player over the left breast, thick gold chain around his neck, gold coin pinky ring. His hair was immaculately groomed, his fingernails clearly manicured. In contrast, I was still in full surfer mode, in board shorts, slippas, and a Banzai Pipeline t-shirt with an incongruous bird of paradise superimposed over a picture of a monster wave.
“Lucie moved in as I was trying to upgrade the quality of tenants,” he said. “Pretty girl, you know, very athletic, great sense of style.”
“She have a job that you know of?”
“Yeah, she was working at the time at The Next Wave—you know it?”
I nodded.
“Guy who runs it, Dario Fonseca, he’s a business partner of mine. He recommended her.”
Interesting, I thought. I never mentioned my interest in Lucie, or any of the dead surfers, to Dario. We had too much old ground to cover. “Dario invests with you?”
“I’ve got this project in the works,” Ari said, pushing aside his empty plate. “Up on a ridge overlooking Kawailoa Beach. Quirk in zoning lets me build a multi-family property up there.”
“Condo?”
He nodded. “Nothing too tall, you understand. Even so, I’m fighting against a community organization.” He shook his head. “Idiots don’t want any development. I’ve got mine, the rest of you get the hell out. You know the attitude.” I saw him tensing up. “They cloak themselves in this false environmental shit. Preserve the open space, keep the old Hawai’i. Well, I got news for them. Time moves on. That’s my land, and I’m going to build on it.”
“Dario must be doing pretty well if he’s a partner with you on that.”
“He’s one, among others. Right now, the property’s tied up in litigation, but as soon as I get rid of these Save Our Scenery jerks I’m breaking ground.”
“Lucie involved in any of that sort of thing?” I asked casually. “Protest groups, anything like that?”
He laughed. “Not Lucie. She had her eye out for Lucie only. She wanted to surf, and she wanted nice things.”
“You can’t make much money working in a surf shop.”
“She quit The Next Wave a few months after she moved in. I never found out what she was doing for money, but her rent always came in on time.”
“Cash?” I asked, as the waitress approached to refill our coffee.
Ari smiled at her, and she smiled back. “How’d you know?” he asked, when she’d left.
“Just a hunch.”
“You think she was doing something illegal?” he asked. “I swear, I didn’t know anything about it. Only reason I really knew her at all was first, because of Dario, then I knew she dated George for a while.”
“George is bi?”
He laughed again. “George is a little bit conflicted. He can pass for straight, six days out of seven, so every now and then he tries a little pussy just to remind himself what he’s missing. Lucie had a trim little body, turn the lights off and stay away from the front, you could almost imagine she’s a boy. My personal belief, that’s the only way George could do her. But what do I know? Forty years old and I’ve never been with a woman. Never wanted to.” He eyed me. “You?”
“I was conflicted myself. For a long time.”
He leaned in close. “And you could—get it up?”
“I could.” I shrugged. “And I did, more times than I can count. But I always knew something was wrong. Just took me a long time to figure out what.”
We both sipped our coffee for a minute or so. Finally, I asked, “What happened to Lucie’s stuff?”
“Her mom and her younger brother came up from Honolulu to pick it all up,” he said. “They were both pretty broken up. You could tell they had no idea she was into anything illicit. Kept talking about her being such a good girl.”
“Our parents never really know us,” I said.
“You’re right about that.” He drained the last of his coffee and signaled for the waitress. “The apartment’s still vacant, if you want to take a look at it.” He wrote the address down on a post-it note he took from a little leather case. “I’ve got a lock box on it so brokers can show it. I wrote down the code for you. She covered the walls in surfing posters and I didn’t take them down—I thought maybe they might help rent the place.”
“I’ll check it out.”
He took the check from the waitress and wouldn’t let me even leave the tip. “This one’s on me,” he said. “Hell, I can’t say I knew Lucie all that well, but consider this my way of saying thanks for looking out for her.” He frowned, and in that moment he looked all of forty, and more.
The wind was still up, throwing a chill into me as I left the restaurant, and I knew that meant Pipeline and Banzai Beach would be almost unsurfable for anyone but the best, so I ended up at Chun’s Reef, a much easier break. A guy picked up his stuff and moved away when I dropped my towel near him, and a couple of girls giggled and pointed at me. One asshole even said, “Out of my way, faggot,” as he cut across me on a wave, but overall the atmosphere wasn’t any worse than Pipeline on a bad day. I surfed until three, when I made my way to Sunset Beach Elementary.
Jeremy Leddinger had obviously been the class clown growing up, from the sarcastic tone I’d heard him use the night before. A chubby gay kid who defended himself with a rapier wit, who depended on being able to make his tormentors laugh to save his hide.
I found him in a classroom decorated with posters of the solar system, grading homework assignments at a wooden table at the front of the room. I wasn’t sure what he could tell me; I knew that he had once lived in that same apartment complex where Lucie lived.
“So, Brad’s newest project,” he said, when I walked in the door. “I have to admit, you clean up well.”
“Brad’s the kind of guy who picks up strays?”
He laughed. “Unfortunately, it’s a problem I share with him, so I can’t criticize too much.”
“You lived in the same building as Lucie,” I said. “Sounds like a rough kind of place. What were you doing there?”
“I was in the first wave of Ari’s gentrification effort,” he said. “But I have an unfortunate taste for bad boys. The kind who lie to you, steal from you and give you unpleasant diseases. So putting me in there was like giving crack to a junkie.”
If Jeremy lost about fifty pounds, I thought, he’d be pretty cute. But the weight was probably tied up with his self-image, with the little boy inside looking for attention and only accustomed to getting it packaged around abuse. “How’d you get to know Lucie?”
“I was in lust with a little Filipino with a big ice habit,” he said.
&nbs
p; Ice is the smokable form of crystal meth, a real scourge in the islands.
Jeremy leaned back against his chair. “He and Lucie used to get together and jabber away in Tagalog. Eventually he stole too much from somebody who wasn’t interested in his dick or his ass, and he got sent away to do some time. I still used to see Lucie, so I’d say hello.”
“You think your boyfriend got his ice from Lucie?”
Jeremy nodded. “I don’t know where she got it, though. But I’m pretty sure that’s how she was able to afford the designer clothes and the trips to surf contests.”
“She wasn’t the kind of girl who’d use sex to get what she wanted?”
Jeremy shrugged. “She wasn’t trying to sell it to me, that’s for sure. But that guy you mentioned—what was his name—her friend, the computer guy. Ronnie. She led him around by his dick.”
“He was her boyfriend?”
Jeremy laughed. “What a quaint expression to use regarding Lucie. She didn’t “do” the whole boyfriend thing. Even that bartender she was sleeping with when she died—Frank—she was just using him. An excuse for her to hang out at the Drainpipe, so her customers would know where to find her.”
He neatened the corners of some papers on his desk and then looked back up at me. “But what do I know? I didn’t even know Georgie boy was doing her until it was all over.”
Something in Jeremy’s eyes told me the thought of anyone else having sex with George made him very unhappy. “Well, thanks for your time,” I said. “I hope you find someone who treats you the way you deserve.”
“Oh, I’ve found him a bunch of times.”
I looked him right in the eye. “No, you haven’t.”
“I don’t suppose there are any more at home like you.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got two brothers, but they’re both straight.”
“Brad’s a lucky guy.”
I held my hands up. “Brad and I had a little fun, that’s all. Maybe we’ll have some more fun, maybe we won’t. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be up here, anyway.”
Jeremy smirked, and I left him to his grading. The wind was still up, so I decided to head over to the apartment building where Lucie had lived. Though Ari said he had cleaned it out, if felt like a loose end I should check out.
On my way, I stopped at Fujioka’s and bought some rubber gloves and plastic zip-lock bags. In case I found anything there, I didn’t want my prints getting in the way. The building was just off the Kam Highway, on the south side of Hale’iwa, a two-story U with parking around the edges of a grassy square.
I drove past slowly. A row of fantail palms separated the property from the street, and a hibiscus hedge was struggling to take root alongside the parking area. A pair of young guys were camped out on a tie-dyed blanket in the center of the grass, and music blared out of an open door. It was obvious Ari hadn’t completed his gentrification project, though the lawn was neatly trimmed and the building had been freshly painted.
I circled back and pulled into a parking space.
The two guys on the lawn regarded me with interest. “Hey,” I said, walking up to them. “I’m looking for a girl I think lives here. Lucie? Surfer chick, brown hair, drives a Volkswagen Bug?”
The guys had the glassy eyes of habitual drug users. “She’s gone, man,” the first guy said.
“You know when she’ll be back?”
They both laughed. The first one had a hiccupy laugh, as if he was trying to get enough air to keep on breathing. “No, she’s gone-gone,” he said. “Gone to heaven, gone.”
He made wiggly motions with his hands, simulating, I suppose, the progress of Lucie’s soul rising to heaven. This set his friend into paroxysms of laughter again, and he quickly joined in, hiccupping all the way.
I left them laughing and made my way to the apartment, pulling on the rubber gloves as I went. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that they were now lying on their backs, comparing clouds. They’d forgotten all about me.
I punched the code into the lock box on the door, and it swung open. The place was an efficiency, one room with a galley kitchen along one side and a closet and the door to a bathroom opposite. A window next to the door looked out at the parking lot.
The appliances in the kitchen were new, and the carpet was in good shape. The rest of the room was empty, though, as Ari had said, the walls were covered in surf posters, just like my bedroom at my parents’ house. My surfers had been all male, of course; Lucie’s were female. I recognized a couple, including Melanie Bartels and longboarder Belen Connelly, and there was a promotional poster for the MTV series Surf Girls, fourteen girls following big waves around the Pacific and competing to be number one. It was a show that was tailor-made for Lucie Zamora and her goals.
All around me, strong, confident women rode the curl, zoomed through tubes, or simply surfed on big waves. I stared at them, trying to get into Lucie’s head, and then I remembered something from my brief stay in Vice, before I moved over to Homicide. Drug dealers often keep a carefully hidden private stash. I knew from reading the dossiers that the investigating officers hadn’t known that Lucie dealt, so they would have had no reason to search.
I started in the galley kitchen, pulling the appliances away from the walls. Nothing there except dust bunnies. The cabinets were empty, and there was nothing in the toilet tank except water and hardware. I tested the tape holding each poster to the wall—it was all strong, and all of roughly the same vintage. The indoor-outdoor carpeting was firmly fixed to the floor.
I had worked on enough construction sites with my father to know how buildings like this were constructed—a framework of studs covered with drywall. There had to be a way to get into the hollow spaces between the studs, and it had to be easy enough to give Lucie access as she needed it.
I walked around the room once more, trying to see it as Lucie might have. I ended up in the bathroom, staring into the mirrored medicine cabinet. And then it hit me. Looking in there, I saw the cabinet was held to the wall by a set of screws, and when I jiggled it, the cabinet was slightly loose.
Back at my truck, I had a tool kit. Once I had the right screwdriver in my hands, the cabinet came off in minutes. There were a half a dozen small baggies in the hollow space behind where the cabinet sat. I opened one and sniffed.
Without a chemical analysis, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought what Lucie had stashed there was crystal meth, which was often processed in the islands into its smokable form, called either “ice” or “batu.” I didn’t know why Lucie had left so much crystal meth there, and I had no idea how much it was worth.
Tucked into the back of the compartment was a piece of paper, folded and then folded again. It looked like a computer printout from a police database, an arrest record for someone named Harold Pincus, who had been charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, securities fraud, and first-degree fraud in connection with his alleged operation of a Ponzi scheme. I had no idea who Pincus was, what a Ponzi scheme was, or why Lucie had kept this paper with her stash, but I copied down all the information before I replaced the paper in the niche.
I called Sampson’s cell number, and got a recording that he was either out of range or his phone was off. I left him a message, telling him that the investigating detectives ought to check out the hollow place behind the medicine cabinet in Lucie’s apartment. I even left the access code for the lock box. Then I put the cabinet back in place and left.
I had been hoping I’d get some kind of vibe from the place, maybe a message Lucie Zamora had encoded in the building’s DNA, but instead I got a sad feeling that this was the best she’d been able to do before her life was snuffed out.
On the way back to Hibiscus House, I tried to recap what I had learned. I knew from both Brad and Ari that Lucie paid for everything in cash. That’s a typical profile for someone with illicit income who doesn’t want a paper trail. Jeremy thought his Filipino boyfriend had bought ice from her. And I’d found her private stash of crystal meth behind her medic
ine cabinet.
There were still a lot of questions, and I missed my partner in Waikiki, Akoni, a big, beefy Hawaiian guy I’d gone through the academy with. I wanted to go over everything with him, get his opinion, but I couldn’t, because I was flying solo. I wanted to know if Lucie had brought the crystal meth in her apartment back from Mexico, and if she’d recruited Mike Pratt and Ronnie Chang to help her. Why was there still so much left, though? Had she held some back as part of a private deal? And if someone killed her because of her drug connections, why hadn’t they torn apart her room to find the drugs I had? I pulled my aloha shirt pad and pen back out and started making notes.
I had some time to kill before meeting George and Larry for cocktails, and I was pretty surfed out, so I decided to go back to Hibiscus House and take a nap. I thought I’d earned one.
The Plains of Africa
Larry and George had suggested I meet them at Kahuna’s, a surfer bar on the Kam Highway just south of Hale’iwa. I remembered the place all too well; it was where my buddies had taken me that fateful night after my fifth-place finish. How many more messages from my past were waiting for me, I wondered, as I parked my truck in the lot and walked up to the ramshackle thatched-roof bar, which was pulsing with the sound of The Beach Boys singing about the joys of California surfing.
I went to college in Santa Cruz, and I surfed up and down the California coast during the four years my parents thought I was studying the great works of literature, perhaps as a prelude to law school. There was hardly a break there that could equal any of a dozen spots on the North Shore.
Neither Larry nor George were at the bar when I arrived, so I went up and got myself a Corona. At the bar, I saw Melody, from the outrigger club, with the blonde who had been introduced to me as Mary. They looked very intimate, clasping each other’s hands. As I was getting ready to go over and say hello, I saw Mary kiss Melody, and decided they probably wanted to be alone.
I staked out a high-topped table with a view of the front door. Around me I saw a couple of guys I recognized from Pipeline, but for the most part the crowd seemed to be a tourist one. Nobody moved away from me or muttered insults, and for that I was grateful.
Mahu Box Set Page 41