Mayhem, Mystery and Murder

by John A. Broussard

  “To gloat, I imagine.”

  The words were hardly spoken when the three occupants of the room looked up to see a smiling Brown entering—in her arms, a huge bouquet of flowers. She grinned and said, “I caught the florist just as he was closing up.”

  In spite of herself, Van Damm exclaimed, “They’re beautiful.”

  The nurse made protesting sounds as Van Damm struggled to sit up, saying, “I guess I owe you an apology.”

  “For what?”

  “For doubting you and Jane.”

  Brown looked puzzled for a moment. “Didn’t Lieutenant Jackson tell you? When we pulled the mask off, the perp was even blacker than me. No need for an apology. We were both right.”

  THE DROWNING

  Sorry, but I just don’t fit the stereotype of the private eye. I’m not an ex-cop, I don’t happen to be an alcoholic, and beautiful women never drop into my office with an eye to seducing me. That latter deficiency may be because I’m middle-aged, bald and have too much of me around my waist. I also happen to have a loving wife who has kept my sexual roaming strictly at the fantasy level for something over thirty-five years, now.

  I’m even semi-successful at my trade. Not to the point of having a permanent secretary, though. But an occasional temp catches me up on paperwork, and Squirt, my nephew, keeps my computer humming. “Squirt” isn’t his real name, of course. And now that he’s just turned into a teenager, I’m careful not to call him that in front of anyone. He’s Mortimer Chang, son of my kid sister. He does allow me to call him Morty when other people are around. In fact, he’d probably cut me dead if I called him Mortimer.

  All-in-all, I can’t complain. I was born and raised in Hawaii. That raising included wild, wild behavior in high school to the point where the principal called me in one day and said it was either jail or the army. I joined the army and ended up in Texas—where I began to think I should have picked jail. But that was where I met Gayle and made her Mrs. Souza, brought her back here to meet all my Portuguese relatives, and settled down—first to security work with an Oahu firm, and eventually off on my own to form António Souza, Inc. It’s the only private investigating firm on the island of Elima, which is just a thirty-minute flight from Honolulu.

  So much for my background, and now for the surprise. I’m sitting behind my desk trying to figure out the spreadsheet Squirt tossed in front of me before he retreated back to his corner with all the electronic gadgets. That’s where he makes the computer do contortions only he can dream up. Anyhow, this beautiful young thing—somewhere in her early twenties, I guessed—walks through the door. If I’d been wearing a tie instead of my usual Hawaiian shirt, I would have immediately checked to make sure it was straight. No need, though. I’m still batting .000, because Lindy Jo Walker, all five-foot two, blue-eyed, blonde inch of her, was in my office strictly on business—and she got down to it immediately.

  “Mr. Souza?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I want to hire you to do some investigating for me.”

  “Maybe you should tell me what you want me to investigate first.”

  “I want you to find out what really happened to my brother, Shane Walker.”

  The name rang a bell, but it didn’t have to ring long, as she went on to explain. “He drowned two days ago. It was in the papers. I’m sure you must have seen the news.”

  “Yeah, sure. Actually, he drowned the day before… oh, I’m sorry. Sorry about your brother.”

  She just nodded acknowledgment, so I went on. “The police patrol boat went looking for him when the lifeguard called about his having gone out and not come back.”

  She finished the story for me, though it was obviously hurting her to tell it. “They couldn’t find any trace because it was getting dark. His body washed ashore the next morning.”

  “The police report it as an accidental drowning?” There was a question hovering in my voice even though I knew the answer already.

  “Yes. They did an autopsy that same day. There’s no doubt he drowned.”

  I must have really looked puzzled, because she rushed off into an explanation for why she wanted more investigation and exactly what she wanted investigated. “Mr. Souza, my brother—actually he was my twin brother—was an expert swimmer. He won the state high school championship for freestyle swimming two years in a row. I will never believe he drowned accidentally.”

  I held up a hand. “Wait a minute. I have no objection to doing this work for you, but from what little I read in the paper and what I remember, it seems clear he did accidentally drown. He swam at Kaikenue Beach regularly. The lifeguard knew him. Reports he used to go far out late in the afternoon. This time he did—and didn’t come back. The sea was dead calm. There were no signs of a fish attack. Some bruises, but pretty much what you would expect from where he was found, a mile or so south on beach rocks. You’ll be wasting your money to hire me.” From the expression on her face, I could tell she was thinking I was talking down to her. She put her thoughts into words.

  “I’m three times seven, Mr. Souza. If you are willing to thoroughly investigate the circumstances of my brother’s death, I’m only too willing to waste my money on you. If, after you’ve finished, you still insist it was just an accidental drowning, I’ll feel a lot better. So my money really won’t have been wasted.”

  I shrugged, and reached for my legal pad. From the corner of my eye I could tell by looking at the back of Squirt’s head that he had become more interested in what was going on at my desk than in what was flashing across the monitor screen. I was already bracing myself for a host of questions and a raft of theories as soon as my client left. “OK. You’re on. Give me all the details about your brother. And call me Tony, by the way.”

  She gave me a nice smile. “I go by Lin.” She paused for a moment, and then began piling on the details. “My brother and I were born in Baltimore where Mom and Dad owned and ran a publishing company. Our folks died in a boating accident a little over a year ago. That’s when and why Shane decided to quit college. He’d been majoring in chemistry. I went on and finished with a degree in design. We both have trust funds, and we sold the company for quite a bit. We have enough so we really don’t have to work, but I got myself a part-time job as designer for a furniture manufacturer. Shane just drifted. That’s how he ended up in Hawaii. I think the idea of being able to swim in the ocean the year-round was what brought him over here.” She spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, with no indication she was criticizing her sibling for what he’d been doing—or not doing.

  “Did he keep in touch with you?”

  “Yes. Mostly through e-mail.”

  “Did you keep copies?”

  She smiled at that, reached into her fanny pack and pulled out a CD. That’s when I became sure Squirt had been listening.

  He turned around at the mention of e-mail, so I introduced him. “This is my computer consultant and nephew, Morty Chang. Meet Lin Walker, Morty.” I could see Squirt’s eyes light up when he looked at Lin, which convinced me he was growing up fast, in spite of the baby fat he was still carrying around and his voice still being shrill. He managed to mumble something and almost dropped the disk when she handed it to him. While he went back to feed it into the computer, she continued. “Shane really didn’t tell me much about what he was doing here, but he did tell me he was sharing a house with a young couple, and I have their address and phone number.”

  I scribbled the information on my pad as she read it from her address book, and I took down the name of her hotel. “Any other addresses?”

  She shook her head.

  “Anything else you can tell me about what he was doing here? He couldn’t have been swimming all day.”

  “He was doing something that had to do with chemistry. But it wasn’t a regular job, and he didn’t really tell me what it was or where it was. And recently he told me he’d met a woman he was interested in, but he didn’t tell me her name—or much of anything else about her.”

&nbs
p; That was pretty near the sum of the information Lin could provide, so we decided I’d go over the e-mails and get back to her later with a rough sketch of what I planned on doing. Actually, at that moment, I didn’t have even a vague idea of where I’d be heading. Visions of wild geese fluttered through my head as she shook hands with me and left.

  “Maybe he got a cramp, or was hit by a boat, or just decided to commit suicide. Wasn’t there some famous writer who did that? Just walked out into the ocean and didn’t come back?” So, as I’d expected, Squirt was spewing out theories, almost before I’d closed the door behind my client.

  “Whoa. Slow down.” I said. “Investigators investigate first, before they start cooking up explanations.” I began making a list on my pad. “First we should interview the lifeguard who was on duty when Shane drowned. Then we check the couple he was living with. Next come the police and the pathologist. Then we try to find out where he was working—if he was—and we’ll look up his girlfriend. I’m going to start making phone calls and, in the meantime, you can print me out a copy of his e-mails and let the theories rest for a while.”

  A few minutes of rummaging through the last few days’ newspapers to read up on the drowning mainly convinced me that that was what it was—a drowning, nothing more. The e-mails weren’t much help either. I marked a few items in them I intended to talk to Lin about. Beyond that, nada.

  Well, I’d committed myself. Phone work produced some changes in the schedule, but I had it pretty well laid out—at least enough to give Lin’s hotel a call to let her know that I was going to visit some people. She insisted on making the tour with me. I wasn’t particularly happy about having a client along when I was out asking questions, especially since I knew Squirt would want to be in on it too. But, convinced as I was that I knew the answers I’d be getting anyway, I bowed to the inevitable. Squirt, of course, was pleased to hear Lin would be making the tour with us, though he didn’t actually say so.

  Fortunately, the lifeguard was on his regular afternoon shift, so I told Lin that Squirt and I would pick her up at her hotel and take her out to Kaikenue Beach. We spotted the guard perched up in his lookout chair, but when he found out Lin was Shane’s sister, he hopped down and told her how sorry he was about what happened. He was apologetic about the drowning, as most lifeguards would be, but I’d read enough to know he was in no way responsible.

  “I never got to know Shane very well,” he told us. “He wasn’t much of a talker. But he came by here pretty regular. Almost every day in fact. Used to bring a frisbee along and walk the beach throwing it out over the ocean. He was real good at it. He’d flip it out so it would catch the onshore wind we usually get in the afternoon, and it would come back in where he could catch it. Then he’d go out for a long swim.”

  “That’s what he did the last time?” I asked, half hoping there might have been something different. There wasn’t.

  “Yup. He frisbeed the length of the beach, the way he usually does—even though there was barely any wind that day—then he went for his usual swim.”

  Squirt couldn’t resist cutting in, though I’d told him that I was going to do all the questioning. “Were there any boats out there?”

  “Sure. Some. There’s always someone out there hoping they’ll hook a billfish. But they have to stay beyond the mile markers, and the swimmers are warned not to go out that far. Shane never did. He pushed the limit once in a while, but mostly he’d swim back and forth between the north and south points. I wasn’t much concerned about what he was doing, since he was a better swimmer than I am. But then it got late, and his flip flops, shirt and frisbee were still sitting out there where he’d left them. I scanned the horizon as the last of the swimmers were coming in, and when I couldn’t see any trace of him, I called 911.”

  Before Squirt could cut in again, I asked, “Nothing unusual out there? No shark sightings or anything like that?”

  The guard’s tone of voice when he answered told me that was a dumb question to ask, that the surf would have been cleared instantly if there had been the least sign of a shark. But I did find out that, in addition to no sharks, there were no whales, no porpoises and no other swimmers out where Shane had been. He also pointed out that the ocean was close to dead calm at the time, so that any unusual activity would have shown up for sure.

  Lin hadn’t said anything during the interview, but I could tell from her expression that she was disappointed. As we were walking back to the car, I reassured her. “We’ve barely begun.” Which was true, though that may not have been especially reassuring. It sure didn’t reassure me.

  Then Squirt chimed in enthusiastically with a “You bet,” and it brought a smile to her face. That set him off on a raft of questions, the first of them directed to Lin. “Where did he leave his car?”

  Now why hadn’t I thought to ask that? I was about to point out that Lin wouldn’t know the answer, when she proved me wrong by knowing it. “He didn’t have a car. That’s what he liked about Napua. He could walk anywhere he wanted to go to. He told me he lived only six blocks from the beach, so I’m sure that’s what he did. Walk.”

  We had to postpone a visit to the couple Shane had been living with, but I’d left word on their answering phone, figuring they were probably at work and telling them I’d get back to them later. So it was off to the local police station. We spoke briefly to one of the officers who had answered the call, and that added little to our fund of knowledge. I also picked up a copy of the police report, which didn’t do much for us either. I handed it to Squirt, figuring I might as well use him as my file clerk, since he’d insisted on coming along.

  Calvin Lim was a lot more helpful. He’s the county pathologist who also practices internal medicine at Napua Clinic. The fact that he sounds like Charlie Chan, in spite of having come to the U.S as a teenager sometimes fools people. But I’ve known him for years, and the strange accent doesn’t bother me. He’s tops in his field as far as I’m concerned. Fortunately, we caught him after his last patient and before he left for home. He was in no rush to leave, and invited us into his office where he answered our questions.

  “Your brother drowned, Ms. Walker. No question about that. Some bruising, but no reason to believe he was knocked unconscious on rocks before he drowned.”

  “Could you tell whether the bruises happened before or after he drowned, Dr. Lim?” That was from Squirt, who wasn’t about to wait for me to ask the obvious questions.

  Cal looked serious. “No way one can tell for sure, so many bruises. Some yes. Some on his body, some in facial area definitely long after he drowned. But others? Some on arms, some on legs.” He shook his head. “No way to tell. Could be right before. Could be right after. Difficult to decipher when body in water that long.”

  Cal’s expression changed as he added. “ No shark bites, if that is what you are thinking, Morty.”

  “Any sign of poisoning?” As I asked, I gave Squirt a triumphant look since I’d thought to ask that before he did.

  The answer to that and to the other questions I was able to slide past Squirt went a long way toward confirming my original belief. The autopsy indicated that Shane was a healthy young adult. There were no signs of poisoning or of any other physical changes that could have accounted for what happened. Cal was quite ready to admit that a bad cramp was something that he could not detect through a postmortem, however. He did add “I am no swimmer, so I cannot tell you whether or not cramp could cripple person to point where he might drown.”

  I noted that as a question better addressed to the lifeguard, and with that we left and called it a day.

  Fortunately, the next day was Saturday, so the couple, Wallace Cumisky and Sehena Kalakama were home and willing to have us come by early. As it turned out, Wallace and Sehena actually appeared pleased to see us. Wallace was a tall, gangly haole who towered over the short and plump young woman of mostly native-Hawaiian heritage. They both seemed genuinely upset at Shane’s death, glad to meet Lin, and relieved to be
able to be getting shed of his personal possessions.

  There weren’t many of those.

  Some clothes. About what you’d expect in Hawaii. Several pairs of shorts, colorful shirts, a half-dozen pairs of flip-flops, some bureau drawers half filled with underwear, socks and such. Shaving gear, a toothbrush, and a few other odds and ends—a wallet with a credit card, ATM card, a Maryland driver’s license, some other cards, and three five-dollar bills. It was obvious that Shane had traveled light. The one item that stood out in his room was a desktop computer. Squirt looked over at me, and I nodded in Lin’s direction. She caught on quick and said, “Sure.”

  Squirt didn’t get very far, though. After a few minutes he announced, “He must have crashed the hard disk.” Even so, he kept plugging away. Finally, he said, “If I can take it back to the office, maybe I can find out for sure.” Lin immediately agreed.

  While he was packing up the gear, I sounded out the couple on what they knew about Shane. It wasn’t much. About three months previously he had answered their ad for a roommate to help pay the rent. He turned out fine. Quiet. No trouble. Cooked his own meals, when he wasn’t eating out. Left early every morning, but didn’t tell them where he was going. They knew he was something of a beach bum, but were reasonably sure he went down to the ocean only in the late afternoon.

  “Do you have any idea where he went during the day?” I asked.

  Wallace was the one who answered. “He said something about working in a lab, but I have no idea where it’s located.”

  Sehena added the only bit of information that helped in that respect. “I had to go to the grocery store early one morning, and I saw him walk by. He was headed toward the warehouse district.”