Big Island Blues

by Terry Ambrose

  He returned a moment later with Benni on his heels. She came and stood at the desk, then began opening drawers. As she did, she said, “I don’t clean in here. That’s Andi’s job. You’re sure it’s not here?”

  I put a hand on her arm. “When did you get back?”

  “A half hour ago. Why?”

  If none of us had moved the laptop, that left only one other person who could have removed it. I slumped back on the bed. How had I not seen this possibility? “Andi must have come back while we were all gone. We’re out beating the bushes to find her and she slips in under our noses to take the one source of information we had.”

  Benni gazed at the open doorway, her jaw slack.

  “What?” I asked. “Do you remember something?”

  “I need to check the kitchen.” She rushed out of the room.

  We found Benni frantically rummaging through the freezer.

  “What’s up, Sis?” Alexander asked.

  Benni slammed the freezer door so hard it bounced back open. She held a small clear, plastic baggie in her hand. “She took it! Damn, damn, damn!”

  I closed the door gently and asked, “What did she take?”

  “Our rainy-day fund!” Benni leaned against the counter, her shoulders shaking as tears dribbled down her cheeks. “We had almost $500 in there.”

  “What’s in the plastic bag?”

  She held it up in the air. “A note. It’s probably an IOU. I can’t believe my daughter would sink this low.” Benni tossed the note on the counter and stormed outside onto the lanai.

  For the first time, I noticed a cardinal standing on the lanai railing. His little red head turned from side to side in fast, jerky motions. There was a little prickle at the back of my neck as I picked up the baggie and unsealed it. Nothing Andi had done so far struck me as being the work of a petty thief. No, she was running from, or to, something.

  I read Andi’s short note out loud. “I’m at the center of something terrible and can’t let anything happen to you. I love you, Andi.”

  To my left, I heard the screen door inching open. Benni sheepishly eased through the opening and gazed at me. “What’s the note say?”

  Crap. Now what?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It had been a restless night for all of us. Benni, of course, had demanded to see the note. After that, she’d gone to pieces. We’d spent hours trying, unsuccessfully, to figure out what Andi’s message meant. For the first time, I felt as though Benni was telling us everything she knew. Unfortunately, the note was too vague for the police to call it actionable. Give cops a crime and they’re on it, but a maybe-possibly scenario? Let’s just say I prefer to avoid ridicule whenever I can.

  Benni wanted to go with us on our search for a band member willing to talk about Shaw Hardy or Andi’s whereabouts. Personally, I thought it was a bad idea. She was way too emotionally involved to maintain her composure or focus. The phone rang in the middle of our debate. It was another emergency callout from Cam, which reinforced my opinion that he was nothing more than the adult version of a fourteen-year-old juvenile delinquent. I’m not proud of my weakness, but I couldn’t stop myself from listening in.

  —How did you find a tattoo parlor at three in the morning?

  —Where did you find a helicopter at that time?

  —You’ve got to be kidding me. No, I’ll be there in an hour.

  She hung up the phone, closed her eyes, and said, “He got a pilot he met in the bar last night to fly him to Hilo. They’re lucky to be alive.”

  I licked my lips. Call me a pervert, but I had to know. “What’s the tattoo say?”

  Benni snatched up her keys, her purse, and her phone. She stomped toward the door. Halfway out, she stuck her head back inside. “It says, ‘I’m a loser.’” She closed the door and was gone.

  I wasn’t about to disagree with Cam’s tattoo. He definitely seemed like the loser type to me. On the other hand, he had enough money to rent a helicopter to fly to Hilo in the middle of the night. I had to sponge off a friend’s frequent-flyer miles account. No matter how much money he had, it sure seemed as though Cam needed to learn about dealing with the consequences of his actions on his own.

  We left shortly after Benni to search for Boston Pete. Sam had said he’d be practicing ukulele in the park at the Hulihe’e Palace. Alexander parked in almost the same spot he’d used yesterday, then we walked the couple of blocks to the palace. I’d been so focused on Donny and the High Tide Surf Shop yesterday that I hadn’t paid attention to the palace. It was a majestic old building painted a bright yellow with white trim set in a park next to Kailua Bay. The dark storm shutters added another layer of contrast to the image and the manicured grounds cast this into an idyllic setting in stark conflict with Hawaii’s sometimes warlike and difficult past.

  As Sam had predicted, Boston Pete wasn’t hard to find. He wore a white Panama hat to top off his ensemble, which really was colorful enough to classify him as a “walking mynah bird.” When we saw him, I glanced at Alexander. “I’ll bet he’s first in line at a luau.”

  Alexander rolled his eyes. “He gotta weigh 300 pounds.”

  “He’s got rolls of fat on his rolls of fat. But look at him, he’s a cheery son-of-a-bitch with an attitude the same size as his shirt.” Another pretty girl swayed past Boston Pete, giving him a smile as she walked by. I grumbled, “It seems to work on the girls.”

  When we were about ten feet away, he glanced in our direction and smiled. “Aloha.”

  I returned the greeting, but he ignored me. Instead, he said, “How are you today, sweetheart?”

  A singsong voice answered. “I’m good, Petie, have a great day!”

  I turned around. A stunning brunette behind me waved, her perfect smile nothing short of sparkling white. The trade winds blew her hair to the side. She winked as she passed while “Petie” beamed at her. Personally, I found Boston Pete to be disgusting. What could a girl like that see in—him? I muttered, “I might as well become a monk.”

  Thankfully, Alexander was focused on Boston Pete and not my rambling.

  Pete seemed completely content with just enjoying the girl’s short shorts and tanned legs as she walked along the path by the water. “Man, I can handle me some of that.”

  I didn’t think so. It looked to me as though the luau king’s little heart might have to work overtime just to supply blood while sitting down. “You’re Boston Pete, right?”

  He picked a couple of notes on the ukulele. Here in the shade with the street far behind us, the notes were clear and vibrant. “At your service. How do we know each other?”

  “Sam sent us. He said you could help us find Andi. And a guy named Shaw Hardy.”

  Pete’s smile cracked for an instant, then was back. “Shaw Hardy.” He picked a few high notes on the uke. “Guitarist extraordinaire. Man of many talents. Haven’t seen him in years.”

  Alexander walked straight up to Pete and clamped a hand on the neck of the instrument. “What about Andi?”

  Pete got a worried look on his face. “Hey man, chill. Andi’s cool.” He plunked a dead note, then gave up.

  “I don’t think he’s going to chill.” I pointed at Alexander. “Andi’s his niece and he’s concerned about her.”

  For a moment, I thought Pete was going to cooperate, then he was ogling a young woman in a flowered sundress. The dress fluttered in the breeze and Pete’s blood pressure obviously fluttered in the hot-to-trot range. “Check out this piece, man. Gotta be new in town. Wonder how long she’s here.” Alexander stepped between Pete and the object of Pete’s unrequited lust.

  “Okay, okay, man. Look, Andi comes to talk to us day before yesterday.” Beads of sweat had formed on Pete’s brow. He wiped at them with a handkerchief he pulled from the pocket of tent-sized shorts.

  “Us?” I craned my neck forward, gazing at him expectantly.

  “Yeah, man, us. The band.” He pinged a couple of notes. “Sweet. Anyways, we’re having the practice session
and she hasn’t been around for, like, a week. We’re all getting worried because it looks like Andi’s getting ready to have a meltdown. We kept telling her it’s cool, we got it covered. Turns out, she’s all freaked out for a completely different reason.”

  Boston Pete hoisted the instrument to his chest and began to play. Alexander clamped a hand on the strings again and Pete’s eyes grew to about the size of saucers. I think he finally understood—we wanted answers and the big guy was going to make sure we got them.

  The ukulele was suddenly in his lap and he was apologizing. “Sorry, man. It’s like, a thing for me. You know us musicians. We get a tune playing in our heads and it’s got to come out.” When neither of us said anything in response, he continued. “Anyways, Andi shows up and tells me she’s all worried about the gig. She won’t tell me what’s going on, but she says she needs to find Shaw. You know, clear up some personal business with him. She wouldn’t say what it was, but Shaw doesn’t come around. She can’t just call him. He’s off the grid.” Pete looked both ways, then lowered his voice. “There’s a process to get to Shaw, man.”

  What was that supposed to mean? “I don’t give a damn about your process, where is he? When’s the last time you saw him?” I glanced at Alexander. His impatience was building. It wouldn’t be long before Boston Pete met and felt the wrath of Volcano Alexander.

  “The last time me and Shaw saw each other was back in ’91. He was tight with Haiku back then, but they’ve never talked since.”

  “Who’s Haiku? Another band member?”

  “Plays guitar, keyboards. He writes a lot of our songs. His mama was a poet, man, hence the name.”

  Alexander crossed his arms over his chest. The edge in his voice was sharp enough to cut through any attitude. I was sure Pete got the message—the big guy had had enough. Boston Pete was sweating like the pig he was. Alexander snarled, “Where’d you send my niece?”

  “A little B&B in Kamuela—Waimea. I never know what to call that town.” Pete’s brow furrowed as he contemplated the strings on the ukulele. After a moment, he glanced up. “All I know, man, That’s it. We cool?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “You’re holding out.”

  “No way, man. That’s everything.”

  Boston Pete fingered the collar of his aloha shirt, then pulled the hat from his head and began to fan himself. His hairline had long ago gone into full retreat mode and without the hat Boston Pete took on ten years.

  Drenched in sweat, I suspected he was close to telling us everything he knew. “My friend here is really tired of people lying to us,” I said. “And right now, the little lie detector in my head is telling me you’re only giving us half the story.”

  Pete put the hat back on his head, then swallowed hard.

  Alexander fixed him with a vicious stare. “Don’t mess with me, man.”

  “The place is called Big Island B&B. The owner, Carla, she’s the only one who knows where to find Shaw. He’s pulled the plug on society, man.”

  The bench on which Boston Pete sat was near the shoreline in a stand of palms that stretched toward the sky. The trees danced in the trade winds, their fronds casting picnic-table sized patches of filtered shade onto the green grass. The shadows were moving though, and Pete would soon be in the sun. Despite the trades drifting through this beautiful park by the water, I could smell the tang of his fear. “Much better,” I said. “That wasn’t hard, was it?”

  “Can—can I go now? I’ve got to meet the band for practice.”

  I glared at him. “No! You can’t leave. Did Andi say anything about Shaw?”

  He shook his head. “No, man.”

  “One last thing—did you get a visit from some badass dude who says he’s Andi’s boyfriend?”

  “If Andi’s got a boyfriend, she’s keeping it strictly on the down low. But, there was a guy who came around asking about how to find Shaw Hardy. He had one of them prison tattoos, you know. I’ve seem them before when we played a prison. Those guys were cool, but not this dude. I wasn’t messing with the likes of him, so I told him to go to the B&B.”

  “That’s it? Some guy shows up and gets a little grumpy and you sell out a friend?” The irony wasn’t lost on me. After all, we’d just used the same pressure tactics. I stared at Pete. “Well?”

  Boston Pete swallowed hard. “Man, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

  He didn’t seem like much of either to me. “Has anyone else been asking about Andi?”

  “No, man. Just you guys and the guy with the tattoo.”

  “Did this tattoo guy give you a name?” I asked.

  “He called himself Art. That’s all I know.”

  Great. We had to find a guy named Art who had bad-ass tattoos and was running around a 4,000 square mile rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. How’s that for narrowing a search?

  Alexander got in Boston Pete’s face again. “Don’t be talking about my niece to anyone, Petie. You don’t want me comin’ back.”

  We left Boston Pete to swim in his own pool of sweat. He’d moved so that he was still in a little pocket of shade and looked as though he might wet his pants at any moment, which is exactly what I wanted. The more afraid he was, the less likely he might be to betray us. On the plus side, he had given us the prospect of being on Andi’s trail. Thanks to him, we might finally have a viable lead. Once we were out of hearing distance, I said, “That was a good act you put on back there, Alexander.”

  “It wasn’t no act.” The big guy’s jaw was set and there was menace in his eyes. Yikes, I’d created a monster.

  We were almost to the street and the traffic noise was again a steady drone. From this distance, we could see Boston Pete, but not hear him. “What do you think about this mysterious guy who’s looking for Andi? Do you think it really is a boyfriend? What if it’s someone else?”

  Alexander looked lost. “We bettah find her first.”

  I glanced over my shoulder.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Alexander.

  “He’s still there on the bench playing that damn uke. You think he’s just waiting for us to leave? He said he had a practice.”

  “Maybe he was lying,” Alexander said. “You thinkin’ we should watch him? He might be going someplace he don’t want us to know about, yah?”

  “The thought crossed my mind. If we spooked him, he might call someone for help. He might know more than he told us.”

  We turned right onto the sidewalk and found a spot under the banyan tree. Alexander, however, was antsy. He kept glancing over his shoulder at Boston Pete, then in the direction of where we’d parked. “What if we’re just wasting time? He might have told us everything.”

  “Let’s give him fifteen minutes. After that, if he’s still sitting there, we head out for Kamuela.”

  The wait turned out to be far shorter than I’d expected. We hadn’t been on spy duty for more than five minutes when Pete pulled a phone out of his pocket.

  “Well, goddamn,” I said. “Look at that. I don’t suppose you can read lips, can you?”

  “He’s probably calling for pizza.”

  The call lasted only a few seconds, then Pete stuffed the phone back into his pocket. “I suspect he just set up some sort of meeting.”

  “This is a waste of time.” The big guy still didn’t look at all happy with me.

  “You agreed to fifteen minutes. We’ve got ten left.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Here we are,” I said, “two grown men spying on a fat guy in a park. Talk about deserving the pervert label.”

  “McKenna. . .” Alexander stretched out my name as though it was some new seven-letter swear word. “I ain’t spying on no fat guy, right now.” He was staring at the restaurant on the second floor of the building across the street. “You see who’s up there?”

  I hadn’t even really paid attention, but now I looked closely at where Alexander was pointing. “Legs,” I murmured.

  “The guy she’s with don’t look like he’d
be too happy if he heard you call her that.”

  “Okay, Harris. This is the third time I’ve seen her.”

  Knots formed in Alexander’s brow. I could tell he was worried about me. “You thought she left the state. If she back, maybe we should call the cops.”

  “No. I won’t do that to her. She scammed me and almost got me killed, but in the end she saved my life. And besides, if it wasn’t for her, I’d still be holed up in my apartment grousing at the world. I won’t turn on her.”

  “Benni got you pegged. You one crazy haole, brah. Your decision, not mine. You change your mind, I’m volunteering to dial the cops for you.”

  I thought of everything to do with threes. Three’s company. Three’s a crowd. Third time’s a charm. “I’ll be right back. I have to go up to Pancho Lefty’s for a minute. Watch Petie and signal me if he moves.”

  Alexander’s jaw fell, but he stayed put as I crossed the street. I went up the stairs to the restaurant and scanned the tables. There she was, Harris Galvin, fully involved in a conversation with a guy who was, I had to admit, quite the stud. She wore strappy sandals, another white sundress, and had her hair held back with one of the shell clips so popular with tourists. A wide-brimmed, floppy hat lay on the chair next to her.

  I closed the gap to their table until I stood just a few feet away. Studley glanced in my direction; so did Harris. She smiled just as she had the first time we’d met, then her jaw fell in recognition. She rose suddenly, wrapping her arms around me in a tight embrace.

  My jaw fell as I struggled with what to do next. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t another of those hugs that had broken my heart—and made me whole again. I felt awkward doing it, but slowly wrapped my arms around her.

  She kissed my cheek. “McKenna! I want you to meet my fiancé, Skip.”

  I pulled away and took her hands in mine. I held her out in front of me, not sure of what to say. She was still well-tanned. Her eyes were the same deep blue. Dead serious, I said, “Is he? For real?”