Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

  “I don’t like you stirring the shit without backup,” Pono said brusquely. “Make sure Kamuela’s with you next time you go fishing for information, or I’ll sic Stevens on you.”

  “Funny.” Lei rolled down the blinds. “But what do you think of the Posse having motive?”

  “Pretty thin. If it was them, more likely it would be some beachfront beat down in front of their home break and posted on YouTube. I can’t see something like what happened to Makoa at his home break being their style.”

  “Agree.” She found herself using Kamuela’s terse comment. “Well, with any luck at all, I’ll be home tomorrow. Talk soon.”

  She hung up, still thinking about Shayla and Pippa, crying in each other’s arms over the same man.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lei was down at the surf break at the crack of dawn, looking around and unobtrusively taking photos of the team house, the surfers on the deck, and the crowd that began to gather as the sun broke over the heaving ocean on another day of pristine surf.

  The sand was damp and cool, its golden color muted in the early light. Silvery mist rose above the glassy ocean, the exhaled breath of spent waves condensing above the breaks. Lei wished she had a board and more time; it was smaller today, and she was pretty sure she could handle one of the smaller peaks at Pupukea. But this was work, and she didn’t have much longer on the island.

  Lei didn’t set her tripod up this time. Instead, while she waited for the lifeguards to arrive at the big yellow shuttered tower, she shot the faces of the gathering observers and the denizens of the team house as they rose. When the lifeguards arrived, she approached them, quickly identifying Eddie Nanaio, whom Kamuela had introduced her to the previous day.

  Nanaio’s eyes lit up, giving her an approving once-over as she approached the tower, gesturing for him to come down to speak with her.

  “Looking fine, Detective,” he said with a grin, coming down the stairs.

  “Thank you.” Lei grinned back. “I’m just trying to pick up gossip about Makoa. I was wondering if you know or heard of anything about his love life.”

  “I knew he was having a thing with two girls.”

  Lei’s pulse raced at this confirmation. “Really? Tell me more.”

  Eddie, rolling up a rope attached to a float device, sat on the step with an air of settling in to a story. “Both beautiful Maui girls who would follow him over. Friends. It seemed like he was with Shayla, the darker one. But then we started seeing him with Pippa, the blonde, and we didn’t see Shayla come to Oahu anymore. He’d go back to Maui, and the story was, he’d see Shayla there. But the blonde, she came to Oahu all the time for work and he saw her here.”

  “What does she do for work?”

  “Heard it was modeling. Catalogs, bathing suits. Like that.”

  “Shayla, too. So do you know which one he was really with?” Lei frowned.

  “Both of them. Pippa here, Shayla on Maui.” The older lifeguard tipped back his head to laugh. “Oh, that boy was in a world of trouble.”

  “Well, when we interviewed them at the scene, Shayla was very clearly presented as his girlfriend and Pippa as her BFF,” Lei said. “So it seems like one of them is in the dark about this arrangement.”

  Nanaio shook his head. “No. They all knew about it. I saw the three of them together plenty of times. I think they had a story they all agreed to for the public. But he was with both girls, if you know what I mean. Sometimes together.” He waggled eyebrows fuzzy as caterpillars suggestively.

  Lei snorted. “Fo’ reals?”

  “Fo’ reals.” The lifeguard finished wrapping the rope around the float and hung it from the steep metal stairs. “Andy! Come tell her about Makoa’s ladies.”

  “Oh, he had it going on with those two bikini models,” Andy, the younger lifeguard, confirmed. “We’d give him shit about it once in a while after we saw him hanging out with one or the other, sometimes both of them. He just said we were jealous. And we were.”

  “So if you had to pick which girl he’d pop the question to, which would it be?” Lei asked.

  They both shook their heads. “Depends if you like blondes or brunettes more.” Nanaio grinned.

  “Oh God,” Lei said, and flapped a hand in disgust. “This is no joking matter.”

  “Well, then, my money’s on Pippa,” the younger lifeguard said, with unexpected gravity. “They laughed a lot. Seemed like friends as well as lovers. I think he liked her more.”

  “My money’s on the brunette, Shayla,” Nanaio said. “She was the alpha of the three.” He went on to describe several anecdotes where Shayla had called for sunscreen on her back, or to move to a different spot on the beach, and the others had gone along. “If anyone was getting a ring, it was her. She called the shots.”

  Lei frowned thoughtfully. “Thanks, both of you. I may need to talk with you again.” She walked away, heading down the beach toward the team house. It was time to bring Kamuela in on this information. She took out her cell and called him with her interesting news.

  “Pick me up at the team house. I want to check out what Cantor and Oulaki have to say about Makoa’s girlfriends.”

  Lei and Kamuela sat with Pete Cantor in the back office where they’d done yesterday’s interviews. Lei tugged her cover-up shirt lower on her thighs, wishing she’d taken the time to go back to the house and change into more appropriate clothes, but time was wasting. Now that she had this lead, she was eager to get back to Maui and follow up with the girls.

  Lei started off open-ended. “Tell us more about Makoa’s life here in the team house.”

  “Makoa was disciplined. Not a partier. Some of the guys, once their heat is over for an event, they’re cracking out the beer and calling up chicks. Not Makoa. He trained for his events,” Cantor said. He looked stressed—bloodshot eyes, his hair in disarray. “He never cut loose.”

  “What about when his girlfriends visited?” Lei asked as if she knew all about both Shayla and Pippa’s involvement with the surf star.

  “They were supportive. They both understood his career demands.”

  “Which one did you see more of, here at the house?”

  “Pippa. I got that was the arrangement. He was dating both of them, but they’d worked it out that Shayla was his public main squeeze, and Pippa was company for him on Oahu.”

  Lei felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “So how did he pull off such an unusual arrangement?”

  Pete shrugged. “It’s not that unusual for a pro athlete to get plenty of attention and have multiple partners. At least these girls were friends. We never had any drama.”

  “Do other guys on the team have this kind of ‘arrangement’?” Lei made air quotes around the phrase.

  “Not a steady situation like Makoa had, no. Most are dating multiple chicks or have a steady girl.” Pete tipped his head forward, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. “You don’t know the kind of attention these guys get. They’re the Hawaii version of football players. We get women showing up at the house in nothing but a beach towel. I do my best to keep everything safe and sane around here, because I want the guys performing their best. So I was happy Makoa had those girls and they’d worked something out between them. No jealous scenes or catfights throwing off his concentration.” Lei didn’t like the picture he painted, or his tone. Time to provoke him a bit.

  “I see why you’re single with that kind of attitude toward women,” Lei said. Her potshot hit the target, because Pete’s face darkened.

  “Who says I’m single? Sluts and hos are a dime a dozen,” he growled. “They just interfere with the guys’ focus.”

  “Alrighty, then,” Kamuela chimed in, smacking his thighs. “We get the picture. But now that Makoa’s dead, we’re interested in motive for his murder. What kinds of reasons occur to you?”

  “I don’t know.” Cantor looked down, his throat working. “We have the paddle out in a few hours. I’m doing the best I can just to deal with all the fall
out from his death. Frankly, I can’t stand to think of it for long.”

  “I’d like to come to the paddle out,” Lei said. “I need to observe.”

  Cantor handed her a half sheet of printed paper. “It’s too rough here at Pipeline, so we’re going out at Waimea Bay. The surf is down, so it will be mellow.”

  Lei took the flyer. “We may need to talk with you again. Please send Bryan Oulaki in.”

  “He’s not here.” Cantor stood up and pushed his chair back in. “He had to go in to Honolulu for a photo shoot.”

  “So he’s not at the paddle out,” Lei said. “How convenient.”

  Cantor didn’t reply, just went out of the office and shut the door a little harder than necessary.

  “That was interesting,” Kamuela said. “Got anyone else you want to speak to?”

  “No. I’m going to that paddle out, and then I’ll go back to Maui. I’m eager to get those girls in a room and see what they have to say.”

  The aqua water of Waimea Bay, sparkling with sunshine, gave lie to the sad occasion of Makoa’s paddle out as Lei, with Kamuela beside her, launched her rented longboard over the looming shore break. She churned her arms to get over the mountain of whitewater and far enough out not to take the next wave on her head. Adrenaline pumped through her system, energizing her as she joined the straggling host of surfers heading out to the middle of the bay.

  Glancing ahead, she recognized two gorgeous women in bikinis paddling toward the circle of surfers that was forming—Shayla and Pippa, neck-deep in leis.

  Of course they are here. She wasn’t going to have to go back to Maui to talk to them after all.

  Lei and Kamuela pulled up and sat on their boards in the floating circle. Talking was going on between friends and acquaintances; Lei kept her gaze moving around the circle, taking note of many famous surfers and influencers in that tight-knit community.

  Kamuela had brought her a small waterproof camera; she held it unobtrusively near her waist and shot photos of the people gathering in the circle.

  It felt great to be in the water, even for this somber occasion. Lei sat on her board, only partly submerged, the warm sea lapping at her thighs. The deep green valley felt like welcoming arms surrounding them, and Lei could see the other half of the ceremony, onlookers, supporters, and friends, gathering on the beach.

  She wished she wasn’t here at the memorial on the job, but it was necessary. She glanced over at Kamuela.

  He sat upright on his board, floating with the supple grace of a surfer waiting for a wave, his body gleaming with beads of water. But when he met her eyes, his were all cop. He scanned the circle with a hard, alert stare that took everything in and gave nothing away.

  When the circle was several hundred strong, everyone occasionally adjusting their position by paddling, the kahu priest officiating from a nearby canoe blew a conch three times.

  Silence fell over the circle as the blaring yet haunting notes echoed across land and sea, and spontaneously the surfers reached for one another’s hands. The circle drew tighter and closer, a changing mandala on the surface of the water. As Lei held Kamuela’s hand on one side and a stranger’s hand on the other beside her, she felt a ripple of powerful connection between the people here and the ocean that nurtured them.

  The kahu blew the conch one more time, and then the group closest to the canoe, whom Lei identified as other Torque team riders, Oulaki obviously missing, raised their clasped hands in the air.

  “Makoa! Makoa! Makoa!” they cried. The chant of the young man’s name was taken up by everyone, hands clasped and raised in the air.

  Lei felt the tears she’d been holding back since the moment she’d seen the magnificent young body on the beach at Ho`okipa spill to join the salty moisture of the ocean on her cheeks. She let the tears come, and tilted her face back toward the sun.

  Finally, the cries of his name died down, and the kahu began to chant, the vibrating tones of Hawaii’s rich native language joined by the percussion of an ipu on the canoe. The mesmerizing sound was magnified across the water and reflected back by the crowds on the shore.

  Lei kept her eyes on the team riders and Makoa’s girlfriends. They held hands even when everyone else let go, leaning in to each other and weeping quietly in the lee of the canoe.

  After the chant, spontaneous stories broke out around the circle. Stories of Makoa’s best rides at Pipe, of his grom days on Maui, and of his generosity to others. Lei’s skin shivered with the breeze on the water and an overdose of emotion, with grief that reminded her of all her own losses: her baby, her beloved aunt, her grandmother and mother, her home, burned to the ground with all she owned.

  But here she was, still alive.

  Finally, the ceremony wrapped up with a beautiful rendering of “Over the Rainbow” played on ukulele and sung by a Hawaiian musician seated in the canoe with the kahu. One final cheer and chant of Makoa’s name, and the lei and flowers worn by everyone were tossed in the center of the circle. They floated on the water, a fragrant offering.

  Lei photographed that moment as best she could, looking for anything unusual, but there was nothing to see but heartfelt, bittersweet grief and love on the faces of those around her. The circle broke up as everyone turned and paddled back in, laughter and talk resuming with the release of emotion.

  “I have to grab those girls,” Lei muttered in an aside to Kamuela, spotting Makoa’s girlfriends still floating by the canoe. “Let’s wait for them on the beach.”

  “Mean,” he said, teasing.

  “It’s the job. Get ’em while they’re down and emotional. We’ll get more out of them. They should have told us about their ‘arrangement’ with Makoa when we interviewed them on Maui.”

  The relentless drive to nail the one responsible for this heartbreak rose up in Lei. She would grieve by getting justice for one taken too soon.

  Chapter Fourteen

  That morning Pono had e-mailed Lei the press release MPD had issued, citing “suspicious circumstances” in Makoa Simmons’s death. Knowing exactly what the public knew was helpful as Lei waited for Shayla and Pippa on the beach. She listened to the swirl of conversation among the knots of people, and much of the conversation centered on who the punk was that had dropped in on Makoa and caused his death.

  “I like pound that punk wen’ stuff Makoa in the barrel on Maui,” one burly local growled.

  Lei frowned, watching the girls slowly paddle in, talking to each other and to the people surrounding them. Maybe it was a stretch that one of these clearly grief-stricken girls was involved in Makoa’s death, but her gut was telling her otherwise.

  Shayla and Pippa spotted Lei and Kamuela before they got to shore, but they had to pay attention to the surf to make it in past the shore break without getting ragdolled up the beach.

  They both handled themselves well in the water, and Lei smiled warmly as they came up from the surf, carrying their boards. “Shayla! Pippa! Just the women we need to see. Can you spare a few minutes to talk with Detective Kamuela and me? Some new information has come to light in Makoa’s case.”

  They glanced at each other. “Does it have to be right now? There’s a party in Makoa’s honor happening at the Torque team house,” Shayla said. Her eyes were red-rimmed, but otherwise there was no sign she’d been crying. Her sleek dark hair clung to her perfect figure like skeins of wet silk. Pippa, on the other hand, was red-nosed and puffy-eyed, wearing no makeup. Her body was stunning even in the plain black tank suit she wore.

  “I’m sorry for the timing. We’ll try to be as quick as possible. Can you come with us?”

  The girls made a few quick phone calls, wrapped up in towels, and the four of them climbed into Kamuela’s extended cab truck.

  “Where are we going?” Shayla asked. Lei remembered Nanaio had described her as the “alpha” of the two.

  “We have some items to show you that we found among Makoa’s personal things,” Lei said. “They’re stored at the Kahuku Police Station.”
She didn’t want to give them any idea that they were anything but witnesses.

  The girls put their heads together, and Lei pretended not to hear them whispering as Kamuela drove along the winding, picturesque road, ending at the barracks-like police station.

  Lei waited with them as Kamuela, with his Oahu connections, went into the station to request use of two interview rooms. Once he came to the door and nodded, Lei gestured to the girls. “I’ll need to speak with each of you privately,” she said gently. “I hope you don’t mind.” Shayla frowned as she went into the battered-looking interview room with its bolted-down metal table and dirty plastic chairs.

  “I have to wait in here?” She put her hands on her hips.

  “Just for a few minutes,” Lei said, and closed the door behind her firmly.

  She led Pippa to the other room while Kamuela retrieved the box of Makoa’s clothing with the ring in it.

  Following her gut, she decided to interview Pippa first, as she looked the most vulnerable. She sat down with Pippa in the second interview room, no nicer than the first. The young woman had put on a caftan-like cover-up in lurid tie-dye colors, and once again Lei had the impression she was downplaying her looks.

  “How are you holding up?” Lei asked.

  “Okay.” Pippa plucked at a fraying braided cord around her wrist, rubbing it back and forth. Following a hunch, Lei asked, “Is that a friendship bracelet?”

  “Yes.” Pippa glanced up, her blue eyes filling. “Makoa gave it to me.”

  As if on cue, Kamuela came into the room carrying a box. “We have some things that were packed up from Makoa’s room at the Torque house. We were wondering if you could help us identify who they go to,” Lei said. She and Kamuela had decided on this tack ahead of time. She opened the flaps of the box and withdrew a stack of neatly folded shirts.