Paradise, Passion, Murder

by Terry Ambrose

  Last Monday, Emma and I were at the Maritime Club. We invited Pat Flanagan along this time. Emma ordered a pale ale, I got the cabernet, and Pat opted for coffee. We waited quietly for our drinks and watched the waves break on the black lava rock next to the lānai.

  Pat finally broke the silence. “So what did you learn from all this?”

  Emma and I looked at each other.

  “Learn?” I asked.

  “You must’ve learned something,” Pat said. “You go through a horrible experience like this, there should be a lesson.”

  “Keep your door open when you have a student in your office,” I said.

  “You mean the Rodge Cowper rule?” Pat asked.

  “Don’t trust anyone,” Emma said.

  “Really?” Pat said. “That’s what you got out of this? Don’t trust anyone?”

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t stand on chairs.”

  “Yeah, I agree,” Emma said. “Don’t stand on chairs. It’s dangerous, and you could fall off. Next time someone tries to get me to do one of those trust falls, I’m gonna tell ’em no way.”

  “Me too.” I took a satisfied sip of cabernet.

  “I don’t think you two have to worry,” Pat said. “The university lawyers are never gonna allow a workshop like that on campus again.”

  “Well there’s a silver lining,” I said.

  “Shoots.” Emma high-fived me. “Where’s the food menu? I wanna get something to eat.”

  Frankie Bow

  Frankie Bow is the author of The Molly Barda Mysteries. Like her protagonist, Molly Barda, Frankie teaches at a public university. Unlike her protagonist, she is blessed with delightful students, sane colleagues, and a perfectly nice office chair. She believes if life isn’t fair, at least it can be entertaining. In addition to writing murder mysteries, she publishes in scholarly journals. Her experience with academic publishing has taught her to take nothing personally.

  Find me on the web at frankiebow.com and follow me on Facebook.

  Thoroughly Dead: A Honolulu Thriller Short Story

  Kay Hadashi

  The Body

  Finishing a mid-afternoon run on Waikīkī Beach, Keiko was almost back to her high-rise condo. In a full sweat, all she wanted was a cold shower, a tumbler of lemonade, and to finish her romance paperback. She had time off and planned to use it properly: by being lazy.

  When she turned down the short street toward the main entrance of the condo, a crowd had formed on the sidewalk directly below the corner of the building in which she lived. It couldn’t have been a car accident, as there was almost no traffic, just one sedan driving away in the opposite direction. Someone in the crowd pointed up at the building where Keiko lived. She had a bad feeling about the rest of her afternoon.

  Tempted to keep running, Keiko nudged her way through the crowd to the front. She stopped when she saw what the others were gawking at. A man lay on the flagstone sidewalk, arms and legs in crooked positions, one arm twisted behind his back, a leg bent unnaturally at the hip. His head was crushed. She reached to where his twisted neck was exposed and felt for a pulse anyway.

  There was something strange about how the man lay as if posed for a scene in a movie. Even though he had a deep wound exposing his brain and his skull was badly deformed, strangely there was almost no blood. Keiko knew there would’ve been massive amounts of blood splatter if he had been alive before an injury as devastating as his. He could’ve been hit by a speeding car and thrown from the street to the sidewalk, or have fallen from the roof of a building. Since there was no blood, and no damaged car with a screaming driver, he was most likely a body dump.

  The man looked like a character out of an old gangster movie. His white linen suit was barely rumpled, and his black silk shirt and red necktie were too neat and tidy for having been in an accident. A straw hat lay on the sidewalk nearby. Maybe weirdest of all were the old sneakers on his feet. Dark skinned, he needed a shave. To Keiko, he looked like someone that owed fifty bucks to the Miami mafia. There was nothing ordinary about him.

  Which led to the question of why would someone dump a dead body in full daylight in a place as public as a busy Waikīkī street? This wasn’t how things were done in Honolulu, where life was civilized. Body dumps were done in the Ala Wai Canal, only a few blocks away, and late at night. A drive-by drop off to the sidewalk didn’t make any more sense than any other explanation.

  “What happened to him?” she asked anybody who might answer.

  A woman dressed in an I Love Waikīkī T-shirt pointed toward the upper floors of a condominium. “He was pushed from up there!”

  Keiko looked up at the building in which she lived. Her bad feeling about the rest of the day returned.

  “He fell,” a man said. On the opposite side of the crowd, he was wearing an Izod pullover, khaki shorts, and a sunburnt forehead, just back from a round of golf.

  “He totally was pushed,” the woman said again. “I saw it, the whole thing.”

  “I think he was thrown,” said a new contestant in the witness game. “Look how far his body is away from the building. You can’t get that kind of distance just by falling. I know, because I was a high-diver in school.”

  “He fell from the roof?” Keiko asked. She was already tired of the bickering strangers.

  The woman who loved Waikīkī counted building floors by jabbing her finger in the air. “Nineteenth floor.”

  “Twentieth,” the man said.

  “Look,” the woman said, starting over again. She counted aloud jabbing her finger in the air. “Nineteenth. He came flying off that corner balcony, the one with the potted plant. See it?”

  Keiko looked up to where everybody else looked and didn’t like what she saw. A bad case of indigestion was starting. The only balcony with a potted plant was her own, the one she shared with a roommate who just happened to be out of town.

  She turned away from the dead man as a new argument started. The crowd was growing thicker with neighborhood residents coming out to see what the commotion was all about and Keiko had a hard time pushing her way out again. As soon as she was a few steps away, she got her cell phone and dialed a number she knew by heart.

  “Davison, we have a problem,” she told the man. Bill Davison was, in fact, the leaseholder of the condo unit. He was also a federal agent, the head of the Honolulu office of Homeland Security. Keiko and her roommate worked as contract assets for Davison, doing “jobs” for him that couldn’t be on the books and needed a certain amount of discretion. A lot of discretion, actually. Part of their pay was free rent in the condo. It wasn’t luxurious, but with two bedrooms, two baths, and a wrap-around corner lānai, it was good enough for the two of them.

  “What is it?” he asked, in his usual hurried way. “A little busy right now.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a little busy here at the condo right now also.” She cupped her hand around the phone to speak privately. “Some guy just jumped, or at least fell from our lānai.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I have no idea. Never seen him before, at least that I can tell. Arms and legs in every direction. Head sort of flat. Not much of a shape, really. Just sort of pretzeled. The odd thing is that there’s no blood.”

  “Thanks for the details. The police aren’t there?”

  “Not even sirens yet.”

  “And he definitely fell from your lānai?” he asked.

  “Visual confirmation by witnesses. Right now they’re arguing over whether or not we can have potted plants on the lānais.”

  “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Go back to the body and act officious. Tell everyone you’re from a police stakeout, and just make up whatever story you can think of. Go through his pockets for ID, anything that he might have on him. Don’t hang up though. Just keep telling me what you’re doing. Most important: ignore what th
e others are saying to you.”

  Keiko kept him on the line as she pushed her way through the crowd again, the group dividing to let her through on the mention of police. She noticed a couple of them skulk off, and she tried getting pictures on her phone of them as they left.

  “What’s he look like?” Davison asked.

  “Dark skinned, but not Hawaiian or Filipino. Maybe Mediterranean or Middle Eastern? He used a lot of that oily stuff in his hair. What’s it called? Afro Sheen for white guys.”

  “Vitalis?”

  “I guess. He’s wearing a clean white linen suit, unlined, a black shirt and a red satin tie. Like he’s some sort of model for that old Miami Vice TV show.”

  Someone tossed something at Keiko. “Hey lady, here’s his hat. It flew off him on the way down.”

  “And a straw Panama hat, with a matching red satin band around it.”

  “No shoes?” Davison asked impatiently.

  “No socks anyway. He’s wearing those old-fashioned high-top sneakers you guys used to wear a long time ago, the white kind, but his are a nasty gray color and holes in the tops where his toenails stuck through.”

  “Take them off, see what might be inside.”

  “Do I have to?” Keiko asked, turning her nose up at the prospect.

  “Just look. Sometimes guys keep their money or ID cards in their shoes to make it hard to steal them.”

  “Nice.” Using only her fingertips, Keiko took off his shoes, tossing them aside. “Nothing but toenails.”

  “Needed a pedicure?”

  “More like pruning shears.”

  “Anything in his pockets?” he asked.

  She reached into a pocket and found something small and soft. “Cigarette butts.”

  “Smoked or fresh?”

  “Smoked down to the filter, but they can’t be his because these have traces of lipstick on them. They look like what Megumi sometimes leaves after she’s done smoking.”

  “She wears lipstick?”

  “Check your collars, Davison. But the weird thing is he has something else of Megumi’s in his hand, like he stole it before he jumped, or whatever.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing special. Certainly not worth any money. But it was like a good luck charm to her.”

  “What is it?”

  “A little jade frog.”

  “A frog?”

  “Just like the one she has tattooed on her thigh,” Keiko said with a sharp tone. “Surely you’ve noticed it.”

  She heard a siren coming then, still several blocks off from the sounds of it.

  “The cops are on their way.” She hurried her pace. “Nothing else in his pants pockets, but he had a wallet in his jacket.” She flipped it open. “No ID or credit cards. All he had was twenty-nine dollars in cash, a twenty, a five, and four ones. What do you want me to do with him?”

  A second siren joined the first, closer now.

  “Return the wallet and put his shoes back on. Try to get his thumbprint on something, and a picture of his face. No tattoos?”

  “Not that I ever saw,” Keiko said, snapping a full-face and profile of the dead man on the sidewalk. Two police cars turned the corner onto her street, turned off their sirens but left the flashing lights on. “HPD is here.”

  “Okay, blend in with the crowd and try to get pics of the cops and their license plates. Whatever you do, don’t hang around or volunteer any information.”

  “But…”

  “Don’t get involved, Keiko. I mean it!”

  Keiko backed out of the crowd, telling witnesses to remain and give statements, snapping pictures of the approaching cops with her phone camera. Once she was at the back of the crowd, she got a few pictures of the general scene and the people in the crowd. Satisfied there was nothing more she could do, she hurried away, ducking into a convenience store.

  “Okay, I’m gone,” she told Davison when she called him back. “Now what?”

  “Where are you now?” he asked.

  “In the convenience store across the street getting something to drink. Eventually I need to go home.”

  “Not for a while. Once the local cops find out he was in your condo unit, they’ll seal the place up tight to investigate.”

  “Where am I staying then?” she asked. “And don’t tell me at your place.”

  “I have space…”

  “Forget it. You never call me anymore. You haven’t taken me out in like three full moons!”

  “There’s a full moon coming up this weekend, if star-gazing is what you want,” he said.

  “Not what I meant, and you know it. Where am I sleeping tonight?”

  “There’s a budget hotel next to your building, the Sundowner Hotel, something like that. Check in for a couple of nights until I can get something sorted out for you.”

  “There’s a police car in front of that place almost every night, Davison. I don’t like the looks of the ladies that hang around in the lobby. Anyway, I’m sweaty from a long run and I’m not dressed for checking into a hotel.”

  “If you’re sweaty, you’ll fit right in at the Sundowner. Anyway, it won’t be for long. Get a room that overlooks the condo building so you can keep an eye on what’s going on, how many squad cars come and go, how often detectives visit. Maybe even get a few pics of them so I know who to lean on later.”

  “And I’m supposed to pay for it out of my pocket?” she asked, leaving the convenience store with a bottle of water. “You still haven’t paid Megumi and me for the last job we did for you.”

  “Just pay. Keep your receipts. Get a decent room with a good lock and remember to use it at night. You’re trained to deal with anything that comes your way, Keiko.”

  The call ended abruptly, Davison’s usual way of dealing with a problem.

  The Stakeout

  After paying for two nights, the first thing Keiko did was strip the bed to check for bedbugs and stains. Satisfied the bed was at least sanitary, she went to the lānai. Leaning against the railing, she looked down at the scene that had developed on the sidewalk. An ambulance team was wrapping up the dead man’s body in a zippered body bag. A police department crime scene technician was measuring distances from the sidewalk to the building, while another technician took photographs of the general area, even of the crowd of vacationers that was still forming. Several police officers were interviewing highly animated witnesses, pointing at the upper levels of the building, waving their arms through the air, mimicking the man’s flight path. Another cop arrived, someone Keiko recognized as a Honolulu Police Department detective. Being cautious, she stepped back into a shadow where she couldn’t be seen.

  “Detective Dan Hata. You would have to be a part of this investigation,” she muttered with a sigh. “It was only a matter of time before our paths crossed again. Ironically, it might end up being in a cheap Waikīkī hotel room.”

  Keiko thought of everything of hers in the condo unit, if any of it could lead the detective to her. It had been ages since they had seen each other, during which she had been given a new name and identity, courtesy of Homeland Security and a federal witness protection program. During that time, twenty-six year old Keiko had been trained to work undercover jobs as an asset for Bill Davison. In fact, it was her roommate Megumi that had trained her, ex-special operations and military intelligence. On the day she got her new identity, there had been a changeover of sorts, from a weekly tryst with Dan Hata in her tiny central Honolulu dive, to sharing a Waikīkī condo with Megumi. As far as she knew, neither of them had ever met. Thinking of the few things she’d been able to keep from her old life, none of it could point directly to her.

  “Except Dad’s war medals,” she said to herself. “If he finds those, and my brother’s picture, he might make the connection.”

  Her father had passed a few y
ears before, and it had been through the help of both Dan Hata and Bill Davison that she’d been able to find a gravesite for his ashes in the national veteran’s cemetery in Honolulu. That was the last time she’d seen Hata, the day of the funeral. She wasn’t sure if she missed him or not.

  Keiko watched as he went inside the building, likely headed up to the nineteenth floor, where she lived. Other cops would already be inside, and she thought of the condition in which she’d left it that morning, and if the dead man had ransacked the place.

  She dug her hand into her pocket for the small jade frog. “Why in the world did he take this? It couldn’t have cost more than a few bucks, and we both have jewelry worth more than that. It certainly isn’t an antique, and all I ever saw Megumi do with it was to give it a rub.”

  She felt the slick surface of the frog with her fingertip.

  “One thing is for sure, this didn’t bring him any good luck.” She put the green jade frog back in her pocket. “Which makes me wonder who the heck it was that pushed him off the lānai,” she said.

  The only other items in her pocket were her driver’s license and debit card, and her cell phone. Carefully setting aside the license with the dead man’s thumbprint she’d collected, she called Davison again.

  “Want me to bring in this thumbprint and the pics I got of him?” she asked.

  “Email the pics and I’ll have a tech come by to get the print. I want you to stay put and watch the scene at the condo.”

  “You won’t see much in the pictures. He must’ve landed directly on his head and shoulder. Pretty deformed.”

  “A computer program we have might be able to reconstruct his face digitally.”

  “Good luck with that. Most of the left side of his face was on the right side of his head.” She finished her bottle of water from the minibar. “There’s a problem with the police investigation though.”