Kauai Temptations

by Terry Ambrose

  “So there were other guys around?”

  “Sure, guys was hitting on her all afternoon. Just like they do with you.” He glanced sheepishly at Shar.

  She beamed back at him. Oh great, they were in lust again. I could almost see the hormones leaping back and forth between their bodies. Their brains were functioning in heat-seeking mode and it was time for me to leave. I thanked them both, wished them a happy life together, and wandered back toward the parking lot.

  It was already after four, probably too late to visit Antoine Figland’s office. Besides, if I didn’t hurry, I’d be late picking up CJ. My options were a quiet evening with CJ back at her place or go to the Tropical Breeze and mix it up with Stan’s cousin.

  I reached the car, opened the windows as far as they’d go and put my hands to the air conditioning vents. Not even a whisper. Buster was a ridiculously independent machine who did what he wanted, when he wanted. “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that, Buster? Maybe I can talk your momma into going with me to the Tropical Breeze. You probably like her driving more than mine anyway, you little bastard.” The air kicked on, full force.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Getting information out of people you don’t know can be tricky business. If you’re the police, it’s easy. You walk in, flash a badge, and start asking questions. If they don’t answer, you haul them away. Simple. Or, as we say in the islands, ma'alahi.

  On our way to the Tropical Breeze, CJ and I worked out a little charade to engage Stan’s cousin because we wouldn’t have that whole badge advantage. We arrived just a little after 8 p.m. with evening trade winds promising a delightfully moist night. Inside the beat-up front door of the bar, the soft whir of an aquarium pump greeted us. Judging by the fish, the tank was filled with salt-water. It was probably around a hundred gallons and gave off a blue-green glow. One of the tank’s residents was a Cinnamon Clownfish who lurked in an anemone’s wavering tentacles. For the time being, watching the little guys in their glass-lined world carry on peaceful lives made me long to develop gills and leave my world behind. Air bubbles floating to the surface amid pink and purple corals and a few tangs reinforced the feeling that theirs was a life with far less stress than mine.

  CJ interrupted my moment of false serenity. “Looks like the inside of a damn pirate’s den.”

  “What? The nets?” An inverted triangle made of fishing net hung on each wall. Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom, each had a variety of shells and corals attached in a haphazard pattern. Rusted out ship parts; an anchor, a propeller, and various metal doodads that I didn’t recognize, occupied spaces in the shadows between the nets. Occasional spotlights illuminated shipwreck photos and cast their overflow into the center of the bar.

  “I hate those red candles. Reminds me of my ex.” She nodded at a nearby table.

  Off to one side, I noticed that the only two patrons in the place sat at a table in the corner, without the candle. “Those are a staple in every bar in the world. How could those remind you of him?”

  “You don’t wanna know what he could do with one of them, uh huh.”

  The candles might be as common in bars as zits on a teenager’s forehead, but I had no desire to know where CJ was going with the candle story. Take that, uh huh.

  The bartender nodded in our direction as we approached. “What’ll it be?”

  “Red wine,” said CJ. “And not the cheap stuff.”

  “Got a nice Cab, eight bucks a glass.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Buster had acted up all the way from CJ’s, so we’d decided to use that as our introduction. To CJ, I said, “I should’ve taken a taxi.” Then, to the bartender, “Coke.”

  CJ snapped, “You could’ve been nice to Buster, but no, you had to insult him. Now he’s all cranky and out of sorts.”

  The bartender clucked his disapproval at my obvious cantankerous nature. Chicken Man seemed like an apt description for him, given his beak-like nose and beady eyes. It was almost like watching a chicken serve up liquor. “Buster’s her car. You’d think he was a relative.”

  “You’re the one talking about a car like it’s human.” He glanced at CJ and nodded as he planted both hands on the bar. “Sure you don’t want something else in that Coke?”

  I raised an eyebrow while watching Chicken Man’s face. “Ice.”

  CJ raised her glass to the bartender. “You gotta treat your equipment like it’s a friend. Otherwise, it’s not gonna perform. Am I right?”

  The bartender gave CJ a thumbs up as he slid my glass in front of me with the other hand.

  “That’s Buster’s problem,” said CJ. “He don’t wanna perform now because you got him all upset. I’ll bet you called him names.”

  “So? What if I did?”

  “Lady’s got a point, Mac. I gotta treat my bar with respect. Otherwise nobody’s gonna want to come in here.” The bartender tossed a white towel from one hand to the other. The guy must have thought he was a relief pitcher about to be called in at the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded.

  “It’s McKenna. Not Mac. And I understand all that. But, do you—what’s your name, anyway?”

  “Call me Jake.”

  “Well, Jake, have you given your bar a name?”

  “Didn’t you see the sign outside? The Tropical Breeze.” Jake’s forehead gleamed in the overhead light. The guy was probably no more than forty, but the reflection from that mirror he called a forehead could blind someone.

  “No, Jake. I’m talking about the bar. I slapped my hand down on the shiny wooden counter.

  Jake shook his head and scrunched up his cheeks. Our little drama was working. It took a few more minutes to work him around past the point where he thought I was completely off my rocker, but we’d soon become chummy enough that it was time for the question of the night. Was he Stan’s cousin?

  According to the plan, I was supposed to ask. CJ, however, had almost finished her wine and beat me to the punch. “So, Flakey Jakey, you got a cousin named Stan?”

  I was beginning to understand why CJ hated red candles, they made her misbehave. Too late now, on all counts. The cat was out of the bag, and he’d left a present on the floor. Fortunately, the bar only smelled like stale booze, not something else.

  Jake threw his bar towel into the sink. “What’d he do this time?”

  “He was stalking this woman.” I held up Morah’s picture. “I think she worked here, yah?”

  Jake rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “You cops?”

  I shook my head. “Investigators.”

  One eyebrow went up and he let out a heavy sigh. “Shame about Morah. Funeral’s tomorrow, huh.”

  “Yah,” I said.

  “She was so mixed up, but a sweet kid.” He winced as though he were in pain. “He was following her around. I kinda thought they’d make a good couple. Two lost souls, you know? Sorry I introduced him to her now. Anyways, I don’t think he’s here anymore and I ain’t got no idea where he’s at. Haven’t seen him in weeks and that’s fine by me.”

  CJ suppressed a burp and slid her glass across the counter. “So you don’t know where he lives?”

  Talk about asking the wrong question; I changed it up immediately. “What’s his address?”

  Jake shook his head. “Dunno. Stanley moved pretty often. I’m surprised anyone on the island would rent to him. More often than not, I think he stiffed the landlord.”

  “You must have some idea where he was staying.”

  “Maybe an apartment in Kapa'a.” Jake frowned and polished a glass. A moment later, he added, “Seemed like he wasn’t too far away from here cause one time he called and said he was home, but wanted to see Morah. I told him she was here, so he showed up in maybe fifteen minutes.”

  I held his gaze as I sipped my drink. “You think Stan had something to do with it?”

  “With what?”

  “Morah’s death.”

  He glanced off in the direction of the two customers
in the corner. “Hang on. This guy wants another round.” Jake turned, poured two draft Millers and left. He returned a couple of minutes later. “What was your question?”

  “Do you think Stan had anything to do with Morah’s death?”

  “Ask me, I think Stan was scared shitless to go near her ever again.”

  Silence is a great interviewing technique that almost always forces the interviewee to fill the void. In this case, it worked—but not the way I’d expected. It was CJ who couldn’t stand the silence.

  “Why’s that? She threaten him? I’ll bet she went off on him and—gimme another.”

  Jake had apparently anticipated CJ’s alcohol needs and was already pouring. “Hell, no,” he said. “It was some guy that used to come in here all the time.”

  CJ shot back. “A customer threatened your cousin?”

  Great, I was irrelevant. Again. These two were doing fine without me.

  “I don’t know that the guy actually threatened Stan. One minute Stanley was here, the next, he wasn’t.”

  “Right,” I said. “This guy walks into a bar, sees your cousin, and makes him disappear. Lousy punch line.”

  Irritation flashed across Jake’s face, but this time my technique got the desired result. “Look, man, Morah was working that night. She’s chattin’ up this guy who’s just sittin’ here, having a Kona Pale Ale. Stan was being super-obnoxious with her. She tells him to back off. Twice, in fact. She even tells him she’s gonna have the cops take him away again if he doesn’t get his ass out. Cousin or not, he was jerk enough that night I was ready to throw him out myself.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’d have had to bash his brains in, probably. He never listened to me.”

  Stan’s involvement in Morah’s death was looking better and better. “Did you do that?”

  “What? Bash his brains in? Nah. Never got the chance. This other guy took care of it.” Jake glanced beyond me and nodded. He called across the room, “Comin’ up.” He reached for two glasses. “S’cuse me.”

  Another guy? Was that Antoine Figland? Jake filled the glasses with draft beer, put them on a tray with a bar towel and left. He took them across the room to a young couple at a corner table. She wore jeans and a tank top; her skin practically glowed in the dark from her sunburn. He had on an oversized tee decorated with illegible script. He, too, was working on a tomato-quality sunburn.

  “You think he’s telling the truth?” asked CJ.

  “We’ll find out. Just leave this to me. I’ve done this before.” Well, sort of. Jake returned and said, “Newlyweds. First day here. Spent the day at the beach.”

  Under my breath, I said, “Nice honeymoon, gotta drink themselves to sleep to kill the pain.”

  Jake nodded. “About sums it up. Great start.”

  “Damn red candles.” CJ’s tone was morose. She took a sip of her wine and asked, “So if you didn’t kick Stan outta here, who did?”

  Nice and subtle, mahalo for that, CJ.

  “Dunno. I had to get some stuff in the back. When I came out, Morah’s standing here, looking dumbfounded. A minute later, the guy Morah was talking to walks back in and says, ‘Stan had to leave. He sends his regrets.’”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nah, guy came in a few more times. He and Morah got pretty chummy, but then he stopped showing up, too. I dunno what he said to Stan, but it must’ve scared the bejesus out of him cause he ain’t called or anything. Course, I never really heard from him much before either, so, who knows, maybe he’s found someone else to hound.”

  “Stalk,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, I ain’t introducing him to no other women, man. Never again.”

  “One last question, what’d this guy look like?” I tried to picture Antoine Figland making a threat that would scare a stalker away and it just didn’t work.

  “Big, frizzy hair. Muscular. Most people would pray to God this guy didn’t even say ‘boo’ to them.”

  I nearly choked on my drink. “He have a scar on his cheek?”

  “Uh, not that first night, no.”

  “What’s that mean? Did he have one later on?”

  “A few nights later he was bandaged up. He never said how it happened, but it sure looked to me like someone took a piece out of him.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I sat next to CJ in one of the fifty little white chairs that Meddle’s had set up for Morah’s funeral. CJ had agreed to be my kökua hewa, my partner in crime. Last night, after our visit to the Tropical Breeze, when I’d nonchalantly explained my plan to attend Morah’s funeral, she’d thrown a fit. She told me I was out of my mind for not calling the cops to report what I knew. But, what had we really learned? That Morah might have had an affair with her attorney? That she’d met her scary boyfriend after he’d chased away a stalker? So what? Who cared? If the cops were going to change their conclusions about Morah’s death, they were going to need something concrete, way more compelling. She got horny on the weekend or her boyfriend did a magic act with some guy who’d harassed her weren’t going to cut it.

  CJ had, in her classic push-back style, said, “I get horny on lots of weekends, even weekdays sometimes. But you don’t see me shacking up in the Marriott with some skinny little bugger.”

  “No, but I could see you having a grand time with some big Hawaiian named Freckles.”

  “It’s Frankie, not Freckles, moron. Okay, fine, you want to go to this thing tomorrow, I’m going with you. And if things start to go bad, I’m calling the cops to bail your puny behind out of the hot water you’re gonna dip it in!”

  It was Friday morning and the realization that I’d made what could be a fatal mistake practically gave me a panic attack. On a small island like Kauai, the coconut wireless would have already begun telegraphing my presence. I scanned the faces of those around us, wondering if one of them might be a killer. If so, did that person know me? Why I was here?

  That, of course, made me wonder if I even knew that myself. My original purpose was to find an identity thief. Then along came Morah’s murder. Now, there was the question of what had happened to Stan. I breathed in the scent of plumeria and looked around. There were lilies and an assorted spray of other flowers, but no plumeria, so I assumed the fragrance was from a can. How depressing. What had we come to? Next thing you know, Walmart would be doing funerals.

  The islands were changing, becoming more like any other social center. But, one thing hadn’t changed, the coconut wireless. It’s power source was people. It could create or destroy careers or relationships and grind out information 24/7. As long as there was a sender and a receiver, it did its job. In the islands, information traveled around an island unhindered. Come to think of it, that information went between islands with similar ease.

  We shared our little lanai space with ten other mourners. I leaned into CJ. “They’re not going to fill a third of the seats.”

  She nodded. “It’s funeral foreplay. We’re waiting for more of them. They’re waiting for things to get good, uh huh.”

  I didn’t even want to know what CJ had in mind for funeral foreplay—that just seemed plain wrong to me. The best distraction I could think of was the little card I’d grabbed on my way in. Don’t ask me why—I never intended to get buried here. But right now, the idea of reviewing the funeral home’s history was a more comfortable option than exploring CJ’s line of reasoning. I cleared my throat, then said, “It says here that the original Monsieur Meddle was studying in the U.S. when he eloped with his girlfriend. They moved to Kauai in 1939.”

  “You think I don’t know what you’re doing, McKenna? Avoiding the subject of—” CJ leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “Foreplay.”

  It felt like the temperature went up ten degrees and I wondered if my cheeks were as red as they felt. CJ certainly knew how to push my buttons and I barely squeaked out my answer. “Maybe not.”

  I looked straight ahead and focused on the surroundings to regain my composure. Meddle’
s had set up six cloth-covered tables, three at each end of the lanai. They’d all been decorated with arrangements of white lilies. On the center table in front of us, an eight-by-ten photo of Morah in a silver frame smiled as though she were an innocent young girl. The chairs, a standard dining room style with a straight back and a seat hard enough to make me wish I had CJ’s padding, were arranged in two sections, much like the layout at a wedding.

  Lu Tawana, Morah’s sister, sat at the front of the left section in the left-most chair. She wore a conservative black dress and shiny matching pumps. She’d tied her hair into a tight bun and based on her severe demeanor Lu struck me as Morah’s opposite, an impression that was reinforced when I’d overheard the funeral director giving instructions to one of his employees in hushed tones. He’d jabbed his finger in Lu’s direction and hadn’t sounded any too happy about what he needed done.

  In the middle of the first row on the other side sat a man who could only be Kong Lam himself. It seemed odd to me that he and Lu wouldn’t be coming together at a time like this—unless they blamed each other for Morah’s death. Maybe that’s why they were at opposite ends of the front row, yah?

  Jake and Kari had described Kong with the same word: scary. I’d taken one look at him and known immediately who he was. Their descriptions made him easy to spot. The scar on his cheek, which was about two inches long, appeared red and inflamed, as though it had been irritated by infection or too much exposure to the sun.

  I’d guess Kong was in his middle twenties. His weight was around 175 to 180 and, at six feet tall, his muscular build led me to believe that Kong was a nickname based on his physical resemblance to the movie gorilla. I could see this guy hanging from the Empire State Building, fighting off persnickety airplanes. The scar on his cheek accentuated his image as a wild man. On the other hand, maybe his parents made terrible name choices.

  In the second row sat Kari and another woman I didn’t recognize. Kari wore dark capris and a subdued patterned top. The woman next to her was dressed about the same. Today, Kari didn’t look as though she’d come from the beach. I was surprised she’d simply nodded when she’d seen me and not said hello or sat with us. Maybe she was put off by my not being alone. Or, maybe she was avoiding me because she didn’t want to return the pendant. I’d have to tell Najar or Richard Carson about her soon, but I didn’t want to broach the subject while anyone was within earshot.