Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

“Especially because each source has put in about $225,000 so far. I can match up Dario’s withdrawals with Ari’s deposits in each case. Now, every month for the last six months, Dario has transferred $25,000 to Ari. And each time, he makes five cash deposits of $5,000 each just before the transfer.”

  “Why not just one deposit in the right amount?”

  “Remember what I said earlier? Because the bank has to report transactions greater than or equal to $10,000. And by the way, making small deposits like this is also illegal. It’s called structuring.”

  “Who ever expected you’d be the one telling me what’s illegal.”

  “Since Dario doesn’t want to show where he got that cash, he makes deposits into his account that go under the radar.” He showed me a number of other big deposits Dario had made in cash, all of them under $10,000. “Now where do you think he gets all that cash from? Selling surfboards and cappuccinos?”

  The wheels were turning in my head, and I didn’t like the direction they were going. “Back at the station, when we see somebody making large cash deposits, we figure that money usually comes from drugs.”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine Dario standing out in the parking lot of The Next Wave peddling nickel bags.”

  “Dario doesn’t do retail. He must be the middleman. The contact Lucie had at The Next Wave who supplied her with merchandise. He may even be the one who commissioned her to go to Mexpipe and bring drugs back. I’ll bet he’s got a whole lot of Lucie Zamoras out selling.”

  “Selling what? Dope? Heroin?”

  “Ice,” I said. “That’s what Rik said Lucie was selling. And I know they make crystal meth in Mexico, which is where the first three victims all went a little while before they died. There’s probably a lab somewhere here on the North Shore that converts the crystal into ice.”

  “There’s no way the cash just comes from the store?” Harry asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve been in and out of that store a lot over the last couple of weeks, and most of the big transactions I’ve seen are on credit cards. Sure, people buy lattes for cash, but I’m guessing most of his sales are plastic.”

  I sat back and thought. “Rik said Lucie’s source was at the store. I suppose it could be Dario. But I just don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like it because Dario’s your friend,” Harry said.

  “No, I don’t like it because I don’t like Dario. I’m scared that I’m trying to pin something on him just because he raped me ten years ago.”

  Harry shook his head. “I think the numbers show it’s got to be him.”

  “What are these numbers over here?” I asked, pointing to a different column of figures.

  “About four months ago, Dario took out an equity line against the store. He’s already drawn down nearly a hundred thousand on that line.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. And it’s all going into Ari’s account. Have they been running up extra expenses?”

  “I know they’ve run into zoning problems, and deed restrictions on Bishop’s land. Maybe that’s why they’ve needed extra cash.”

  “Dario’s about to run into a big problem,” Harry said. “See here, these are the store revenues. With business taking such a steep dive, there’s no way he’ll be able to afford the expense of running the store, paying for merchandise, paying his help, and paying the debt service on this equity loan. He must be sweating bullets right now.”

  I got up and started walking around the living room. “I’m trying to get my head around this,” I said. “If Dario’s selling ice out of The Next Wave, why isn’t he rolling in cash?”

  “Because he’s pumping it all into Ari’s real estate deal.”

  “Why would he do that, though? Ice’s a profitable business. Why risk all his capital?”

  “To make himself legit?” Harry asked. “Nobody arrests you for building condos these days.”

  “Or it’s a place to put a lot of spare cash,” I said. “Until the deal with Bishop started running into trouble, and then suddenly Dario’s business dried up.”

  “The ice business is probably sucking now, too,” Harry said. “With everybody leaving the North Shore.”

  “Both his businesses are going south, to coin a phrase.”

  I sat down on the sofa. Harry turned toward me and we both just sat there looking at each other for a long time.

  Sharpshooter

  The idea that Dario was dealing ice out of The Next Wave, and had been doing so literally under my nose for the last couple of weeks, threw me for a loop, and I was having trouble processing the information. Or maybe it was the beer. Either way, the best I could do was suggest we get some sleep, and try to think more about the problem in the morning.

  Harry was suitably impressed with the guest room, and he was still asleep when I woke at first light on Saturday. I didn’t feel rested at all; I had spent most of the evening rolling around in bed, trying to get comfortable, thoughts about Dario moving back and forth across my brain.

  “There’s something I think is really scary about Dario as a suspect,” I said, as I made pancakes for us for breakfast. “I had this weird idea the other day—which isn’t seeming so weird any more—that whoever killed the first three got scared when he or she found out I was investigating these murders.”

  “Kimo, do you really think it’s possible a woman is the killer?”

  I shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “Then stopping being so English major on me. You don’t have to be politically and grammatically correct all the time.”

  “Point taken. So I had this idea that maybe the killer shot Brad and Tommy Singer to throw me off the track.”

  “Not such a weird idea.”

  “No, I guess not. But suppose it gets weirder. Dario told me the other day that he likes me.”

  “Yo, dude, the guy got you drunk and had sex with you ten years ago, and he’s been coming on to you ever since you got up here. I’d say he likes you.”

  “Suppose he was jealous, though. Suppose he killed Brad and Tommy, and stripped them down and all, out of some weird jealous rage?”

  Harry shook his head. “I don’t know why anybody does anything, brah. You want the touchy-feely, you’ve got to talk to Terri. You have any more hacking, you ask me.”

  “How bout we just go surf, then,” I said, and we did. Since it was Saturday I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get hold of Ruiz or Kawamoto, so I thought I’d let my ideas about Dario gestate for a few days. He’d been around the North Shore for a long time, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Plus I had to practice restraining myself from telling the world about my long history with Dario Fonseca—or even about what had happened between us in his office a few days before. I didn’t want it to start looking like I’d had sex with every victim and villain on the North Shore.

  The beaches were less empty than they’d been. Human beings have short memories, and surfers are only human. I could see from the number of cars on Ke Nui Road and the number of boards out in the water that people were starting to come back, even if there was a crazed killer out there. Good for business, if nothing else; The Next Wave would be buzzing again like it had before.

  We surfed, with breaks, for a couple of hours. I saw people I knew—my cousin Ben; Frank, the bartender from the Drainpipe; even Tepano, the Hawaiian guy from the outrigger club. Everybody was delighted that the beach was so uncrowded, and nobody was particularly worried about a crazed killer on the loose. Harry and I went to Rosie’s Cantina for lunch, stopped at The Next Wave for our caffeine fixes, and then went back to Pipeline to surf some more.

  From the top of a wave, you can often get a clear view of the shore, if you’re not too busy struggling to maintain your balance or place your next turn. I was surfing smoothly, so I had a chance to look up at the beach. I just had enough time to make out the barrel of a rifle pointing out at me before the wave dipped unexpectedly and I went down.

  I’d like to say I heard the rifle, but since I was tumbling
head over heels into the center of a wave, there’s no way I could have. But as soon as I surfaced, I walked the last couple of feet in to shore dragging my board, trying to figure out if what I’d seen was an optical illusion.

  There are a number of palm trees up along Ke Nui Road, and some have various kinds of underbrush around them. I saw the rifle barrel protruding from a stand of pili grass, which grows naturally in two or three foot lengths—thick enough and tall enough to hide someone laying flat.

  I stuck my board in the sand and trudged up to the road. The pili grass had been broken and pushed flat in one area, big enough for a person to lay down. The kicker was finding a spent shell, and then another and another, in the sand just in front of the grass.

  I didn’t have anything resembling an evidence bag, but I did have an empty water bottle. I waved Harry in, and yelled for him to bring me the bottle.

  “What did you find?” he asked, as he came up with it.

  “Shell casings.” I pointed down. “Somebody’s been shooting at us, brah.”

  Neither of us had much interest in going back in the water at that point, even though the waves were running high and the beach was still mostly empty. The idea of somebody pointing a rifle at you can wreck even the simplest pleasures, I guess. So we packed up and went back to Cane Landing around three o’clock, where I looked up Kevin Ruiz’s card. No beeper or cell number on it, which wasn’t surprising. After all, he’d given me the card when he considered me an informant.

  I called the Wahiawa station to try and track him down. But because I couldn’t say I was still an on-duty officer, I got a run-around, the opportunity to leave a message on his voice mail. I did, though I didn’t expect him to check it til Monday morning.

  I emailed Sampson, and told him I was holding the shells for ballistics. I knew, though, that they would match the gun that had shot Mike Pratt off his board, the one that had killed Lucie Zamora as she exited Club Zinc. Even if they didn’t match, I knew it had to be the same shooter.

  “So what do we do now, brah?” Harry asked, as we lounged on the leather sofas in the living room at Cane Landing.

  “Damned if I know. But I’m sure a beer would help me think.” I’d stocked up on Konas in anticipation of Harry’s visit, and we each had one and sipped in silence. We ended up grilling some gourmet burgers—a mix of ground beef, pork and lamb, topped with prosciutto and brie—on the major-league barbecue in the yard, and if we hadn’t been worried that the shooter might somehow find his way into Cane Landing, it would have been a near-perfect evening.

  Sunday morning my cell phone rang as I was scrambling eggs with the leftover ham and cheese and we were debating whether to risk surfing again. It was Sampson. “I got your email,” he said. “I want to see you at nine tomorrow morning in my office. Let’s go over what you’ve got and regroup. I want to know everything about this surf shop owner. And bring those casings you found—you can run them downstairs to ballistics while you’re here.”

  I agreed and hung up the phone, then repeated the gist of the conversation to Harry. “He didn’t tell you not to go surfing, did he?” Harry asked.

  I shook my head.

  “So you want to?”

  I thought about it for almost a minute. “I do. But not Pipeline. And I don’t want to go anywhere near Bishop Clark’s place and risk Rich Sarkissian taking pot shots at us there. How about Sunset?”

  Sunset was another great break, one I hadn’t patronized much because so much of the case seemed to revolve around Pipeline. Harry agreed that was a good compromise; it was unlikely that the killer would be driving up and down the North Shore with a pair of binoculars. Just to be on the safe side, we left my truck at Cane Landing and drove in Harry’s BMW, our two boards strapped to the roof. It was almost like being in high school again, only with a much better car.

  We surfed until mid-afternoon. We were sitting on our boards beyond the breakers, looking for waves, when Harry said, “This is my last wave, brah. Then I have to start packing up for the trip back to Honolulu. Arleen’s mom is babysitting Brandon so she and I can have dinner on our own.” He smiled. “That’s a big event in my life. I like Brandon a lot, he’s a great kid, but sometimes I want Arleen all to myself.”

  “Hey, I won’t stand in your way.” I saw a wave coming and grabbed it, leaving Harry behind. I got a couple of turns out of it, and then started dragging my board up the beach. Then I saw Al Kawamoto sitting in the blue Taurus up on Ke Nui Road. My first instinct was to turn around and get back in the water, even though I was exhausted and every muscle in my body ached. I was just tired of dealing with him; he was a homophobic asshole, and I just didn’t have the energy for his bullshit.

  “Gotta talk to you,” he said, rolling down his window as I approached.

  I didn’t want to tell him about someone shooting at me. Frankly, I didn’t think he’d believe me, even with the shell casings as evidence. “I’m exhausted, Al. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I kept moving past him.

  “It can’t.”

  There was something in his tone of voice, a note of resignation, even despair, that I had never heard from him. I turned around. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it here. Come on, get in.”

  “Al, I’m full of salt and sweat. You don’t want me in your car.” I looked at my watch. “Meet me at the Surfrider in half an hour. There are some tables beyond the tiki huts in the back. Nobody will see us there.”

  He rolled up his window and drove off. “Nice talking to you, too,” I said.

  Harry came out of the water then, and I waited at his car for him. “Who were you talking to?”

  “Homophobic asshole. I have to meet him for a drink in half an hour.”

  “Then we’d better hustle,” Harry said.

  My Dinner With Al

  Harry had to load up his car himself, because though I didn’t want to, I had to jump in the shower, then throw on an aloha shirt and khaki shorts. We told each other to take care, and I promised to call him the next day after my meeting with Sampson. “You think you’ll stay in town, or come back up here?”

  “I should see my parents. I’ll probably stay at my place tomorrow night.” We gave each other shakas and hit the road.

  It was probably forty-five minutes before I made it to the Surfrider, and Al Kawamoto was just starting his third beer.

  I sat down across from him. “So what’s so important?”

  “I didn’t know who else to go to,” he said.

  I’d been getting attitude from Kawamoto for days, and I was in the mood to give him some back. “Al. Don’t tell me you’re really gay and you’ve been in the closet all this time.”

  He gave me the dirtiest of dirty looks. “All right. I’m here. I’m listening. Talk.”

  “Me and Kevin, we’ve been partners for six years. He’s a stand-up guy. Jesus, I hate this.”

  My sensors started to go off. “Hate what, Al?”

  “Maybe I’m just crazy. But I don’t want to jam Kevin up if I’m wrong.”

  Al Kawamoto looked genuinely anguished. I had to figure he wasn’t happy about having to come to me—from day one, he hadn’t been my biggest fan. So what he had to say had to be that much more important, for him to overcome his dislike of me.

  “You’re a cop, Al. You know you can’t make accusations without evidence. So lay the evidence out for me.”

  He took a long sip of his beer—Dutch courage, my father called it. “We caught that first murder, the guy, Pratt. One of his buddies told me he thought Pratt had gotten mixed up in some kind of drug deal. I brought it to Kevin, he pooh-poohed it. ‘The guy’s a straight arrow,’ he said.” He looked up at me. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “Your partner was right. Pratt was a good guy. Everybody liked him. Didn’t fit the profile of a guy mixed up in drugs.”

  “Nope.”

  I took a sip of my beer and considered. “Except for the fact that surfing’s an expensive h
obby. If you don’t win tournaments you don’t get sponsors and you’ve got to come up with all the cash yourself for equipment, entry fees, travel, all that stuff. Pratt taught surfing on the side, but you’ve got to give a lot of lessons to make any real money.”

  “That was what I thought, but Kevin, he wouldn’t listen. Finally I gave up.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “Same thing with the girl. We started hearing rumors she was a dealer. Even connected her to that surf shop where she used to work, The Next Wave.”

  “I heard those same rumors, you know.”

  He nodded. “We couldn’t connect Pratt to the girl except through ballistics. Some reason, Kevin didn’t want to explore the drug angle. And I have to say I didn’t push as hard as I could have.”

  “Hey, I’ve had partners. It’s a give and take.”

  He finished his beer. “You ready for another round?”

  “I’m still working on this one. And why don’t you get a burger or something, Al? You don’t want to let the beer get too far ahead of you.”

  He called a waiter over and we both ordered burgers. He ordered another beer, too, but I noticed he started taking that one more slowly.

  “So far, Al, you haven’t got much to worry about. Kevin didn’t want to follow a couple of leads, well, maybe he thought they were a waste of time. Can’t argue with a judgment call.” I looked at him. “Do you think he’s using something himself?”

  He looked up at the thatched roof above us. We were in a glorified tiki hut, a couple of big poles holding up the sloping roof, only a few other high-topped tables around us. A pretty private area, even when the rest of the place was busy. That night, only about half the tables were filled.

  It was clear he didn’t want to answer that question, but I waited. Finally he said, “I think so.” That admission seemed to take something out of him, and his whole body sagged.

  “Why?” I asked gently.

  “His moods have been all over the place, and he’s always complaining about money. And lately he’s been cagey sometimes, about where he’s going or where he’s been.”