Paradise, Passion, Murder

by Terry Ambrose

  “You say that the victim landed on top of another man?”

  “Well, I guess…maybe not. But there was enough of a mess that it seemed like there were two people.”

  Keiko wanted to emerge from her hiding place and tell Dan the truth about what happened, that there was only one man, and hardly any blood at all. She also wanted to tell him that the coroner hadn’t been the one to collect the body, but somebody else pretending to be ambulance drivers. But getting involved right then would mean destroying her current lifestyle and having to start all over again, something she’d had far too much experience at in her lifetime.

  “Hey, you gonna buy those sunglasses?” the clerk asked Keiko.

  Still trying to avoid making eye contact with Dan, she looked at the clerk and nodded her head. “Shitsurei—pardon?” she said, pitching her voice to a higher tone than usual.

  “Are…you…going…to…buy…those…sun…glasses?”

  Keiko turned back to the display rack and shoved on a new pair, now trying to hide cheeks flushed red. In the tiny display mirror, she saw Dan looking her over. “Still looking…”

  Dan cleared his voice. “Miss, did you see what happened earlier?”

  She tried to ignore him, but sensed he was waiting for an answer. “Ah! Yes, sorry. Not speak English so good.”

  He cleared his throat again before attempting his same question in Japanese. “Nani ga okatta…mimashita ka?”

  His accent was terrible and his grammar worse, even for a Hawaiian-born Japanese American, and Keiko had a hard time not laughing. “Sorry! Just visiting. I no have friends in Hawai‘i.”

  She tilted the fedora even lower on her face, hoping he’d buy the story. After a moment, he seemed to, or at least gave up on his interrogation. Once Dan was back in the food section, she took one last peek over her shoulder.

  “You want to buy those sun glasses?” the clerk asked her again.

  She put them back on the rack. “No, thanks.”

  With her bag of purchases in one hand, she darted for the door and never looked back. In her hotel room, she dressed in the brightly colored new shirts and shorts, different colors than what she usually wore. She found the right position for the fedora on her head. With the cheerful daisy-topped rubber slippers, she was in her disguise, dressed entirely different than normal, the real value of any disguise. There was no doorman or front desk at the condo, but she’d still need to avoid being recognized as one of the women that lived on the nineteenth floor. The last thing she needed was trying to answer questions about what had happened in her unit that day.

  “Okay, Keiko, think. Who wears a suit of clothes like that? Even going out in the evening, no one dresses like that in Hawai‘i. In Miami or Central America maybe, but not here,” she muttered as she hurried to the condo next door to the hotel. The lobby was crowded with residents chatting about what had happened. Eavesdropping for a moment, she could tell there were as many stories as people telling them. She got to the elevator, which thankfully opened right away.

  “And who wears those dumb high-tops anymore?” She hit the button for the seventeenth floor, planning to walk up the last two floors, just in case anyone was paying attention. “And what was with those toe nails? Is that why he wasn’t wearing socks?”

  Off the elevator, she dashed up the stairs to her unit. There were multiple bands of yellow crime scene tape across the door, a warning sign taped to the middle of the door, indicating there was an active investigation, and to call HPD detectives for further information. She recognized Dan’s old cell number as one of the contacts.

  She knew there were closed circuit security cameras in the hallway, so she wasted no time in letting herself in, ducking through strips of tape. Once she was inside, she felt it was prudent to move quickly and silently. That was going to be difficult because of the mess.

  Every pot and pan from the kitchen had been removed from their storage spots, the drawers and cabinets emptied onto the floor. The little food they kept in the refrigerator had been taken out, lids removed from jars, the bottle of milk poured down the drain, the container left in the sink. Jars of spices had been dumped onto the counter. Fresh coffee grounds had been spilt. The kitchen had been ransacked as though somebody was looking for something small.

  Taking snapshots of the mess, she left it behind and went to the bedrooms. There was as much of a mess in the two bedrooms as in the kitchen. Dresser drawers had been hastily emptied, dresses tossed out of the closets, linens pulled from the beds, even the mattresses turned on end. She went to the bottom drawer of her dresser and looked for her father’s framed set of military medals. It was still there, almost as if it had been untouched.

  In her roommate’s room, the few little knickknacks that she had on the dresser with the frog charm had been tossed about, mostly on the floor. She didn’t see a frog anywhere, so the one in the dead man’s hand must’ve been Megumi’s.

  ‘She’s going to be pissed,’ thought Keiko. ‘She really doesn’t like her stuff being touched.’

  She went to the bathroom and found another mess. Cosmetics had been opened, hand soap dumped into the sink, which had been filled with water for some reason. Body wash and shampoo bottles were dumped in the shower. Even the cleaning supplies had been tossed and strewn everywhere.

  The couch cushions had been thrown aside in the living room, the couches themselves moved from their proper positions. The newspaper Keiko had been reading earlier that morning was taken apart, pages separated and tossed around. It was as if whoever had searched the unit was pissed, only wanting to trash the place, rather than actually searching for something. Strangely, nothing was broken; just a mess that needed to be cleaned up. Out on the lānai, she found Megumi’s ashtray up-ended like everything else, but no cigarette butts.

  ‘So, that’s where he got the ones in his pockets,’ she thought.

  Knowing there was nothing on the computer worth saving, she turned it on and deleted all files and folders, along with her recent browsing history. Even though it was password-protected, it would only slow down a crafty technician. It needed to be wiped clean.

  Taking pictures of the mess as she went back through the unit, she slipped back out of the door and walked quickly to the stairwell, making a get-away from her own home.

  The Investigation

  Ignoring orders to call Davison back as soon as she was done inside her condo, Keiko caught the city bus for the nearby mall. There she’d be able to ask a few questions of store clerks. Never married, she knew little about men’s grooming products, or even where men shopped for clothes. The first thing she wanted to know about was the oil she found in the man’s hair. With that in mind, she went to the personal grooming section at a large drug and variety store.

  Sniffing the contents of jars and bottles, she worked her way from one end of men’s hair grooming supplies to the other. She found the cheapest products on the bottom shelf. Taking the cap off a bottle of clear golden oil, she gave it a sniff.

  “Looking for something for your boyfriend?” a clerk asked her. Well-groomed, he stood over her, smiling.

  “Not for my boyfriend,” she said, recapping the bottle. She grabbed a can of pomade and wrestled the lid off. “I’m looking for something with a peculiar smell to it, and I think it’s this stuff.”

  “Yeah, that’s the generic brand.”

  “Who uses this kind of stuff?” she asked.

  “Nobody, really. That’s why it’s on the bottom shelf. There’s probably dust on each of those cans, they’ve been sitting around for so long.”

  “What do guys use it for?”

  “Keeps hair in place, no matter what. Sort of like that gel women use. He could put that stuff in his hair and go out in a typhoon. His clothes might get ripped to shreds, but his hair would look nice.”

  Keeping the can in her hand, she stood, looking him over again. “You
look like you know a thing or two about men’s fashion. You know those old-fashioned high-top basketball shoes?”

  He wrinkled his nose at the question.

  “Who wears those things these days?” she asked.

  “Ten or fifteen years ago, they were popular with rappers, but in odd colors. Neon, green, pink, purple. Otherwise, you can find them at the discount shoes stores for about ten bucks.”

  “But guys wore socks with them, right?”

  “I would hope so. But nobody has worn high-tops since Wally Cleaver.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, that old ‘Leave it to Beaver’ TV show?”

  “Whatever.” She was curiously attracted to the guy with a mainland accent. She decided to pour on the charm, just in case he was interested in helping her with more than customer relations. “Say, you look involved, as though you have a social life. Are there any role-playing groups in town? You know, the kind where people dress up in costumes?”

  “Like Halloween?”

  “More like characters in a mystery novel? I know this guy who wears that old kind of linen suit, and a black shirt and satin necktie. He even wears the Panama hat that would go with it.”

  “Oh, like Miami Vice?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is the pomade for him?”

  “Should be. Not for me anyway.”

  “And he wears high-tops and a Panama hat with his linen suit?”

  “Maybe,” she said, wondering where he was leading.

  “Find a different boyfriend,” he said walking off.

  With her phone, she snapped a picture of the pomade before setting it back on the shelf. There were several department stores at the mall she could search for that style of suit, her next project.

  “Okay, so nobody uses that brand of hair gunk, and nobody wears high-tops, not even rappers.”

  Keiko shopped her way through the men’s departments of five different department stores at the mall. Not a single one had linen suits in the style of the dead man.

  “Maybe you can find something like that at a thrift store?” the last clerk offered.

  “Yeah, or maybe it’s not so important now.” Once again, she apprised the man of his taste and style, and figured him to be fashionable. “Let me ask you a personal question, if you don’t mind?”

  “Sure,” he said, tidying suit jackets on hangers.

  “If you’d just broken up with your girlfriend…”

  “You mean my boyfriend?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sorry, I guess so. But if you’d just broken up with him, would you go back and try and steal some little memento of his?”

  “Like a keepsake?”

  “Yeah. What would it be?”

  He shifted his weight a bit, scanning the area for other customers. “Oh, maybe some little thing that reminded me of the better times, something I gave him maybe. Why? Did somebody take something from you?”

  “From my roommate. Someone broke in and took a little good luck charm of hers. I was trying to figure out who might’ve taken it, and why he took that one little thing and not jewelry or something more valuable.”

  “Well, it was valuable to him. Maybe he bought it for her originally.”

  He pardoned himself to help another customer. Keiko felt as though she’d learned everything she could about linen suits and men’s grooming products. Getting something to drink in the food court, she noticed it was now dark outside.

  “Okay, nobody wears those suits, and they’re almost impossible to find, even if someone wanted one. Nobody wears high-tops. Everybody around here wears fedoras, not Panama hats. And nobody lets their toe nails get like his, except for people that can’t reach their toes.”

  She sipped at her drink for a moment, thinking about where her clues were leading her.

  “That would be comatose people, paralyzed people, people that can’t bend down into that position. Or people who just don’t care. But they’d still have to be self-care, right? If someone else was doing their care, their toenails would get clipped along with their fingernails.” She wrinkled her nose at the thought of something. “And all that stuff in his hair. Who uses that much gunk?”

  Keiko knew that to answer those questions, she’d have to find the dead man. It was the only way. But his body had been removed by imposters, not by the real coroner. Even Davison had verified the fact that he’d never arrived at the county morgue. She had watched from her hotel lānai as the body was loaded into the back of an ambulance, the lights flashing as it drove off.

  “Why put the lights on if he was already dead?”

  She took another sip, replaying the scene in her mind.

  “They turned toward the McCully Street bridge, which means they could’ve been going to the freeway, or to downtown to dump the body.” Keiko tried thinking of the places bodies were normally found: one place was in the mountains that divided the island into two halves. Pig hunters often found skeletal remains in dark ravines. Another place was the old irrigation ditches in the pineapple fields during rainstorms, usually organized crime hits. But there was one other place that Keiko was intimately familiar with, most commonly used for body dumps: the Ala Wai Canal, only two blocks from her condo building, and a short walk from where she was right now.

  The Confrontation

  Her phone rang for probably the tenth time that hour. She finally gave in and answered Bill Davison’s call.

  “Still investigating, Davison.”

  “Find anything useful yet?”

  “I went to the condo. Somebody had really trashed the place. Clothes and kitchen stuff everywhere. As far as I could tell, nothing was missing.”

  “Except Megumi’s frog. What else?” he asked.

  “Then I came here to the mall to check and see how easy it is to buy the clothes he was wearing.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I found the brand of that pomade stuff he had in his hair. Cheap. Also, nobody sells those suits, at least not at the standard mall department stores. And it seems the only place to find his kind of sneakers is at the discount store.”

  “What have you figured out about the frog?” he asked.

  “I asked one guy, and he said people steal little mementoes sometimes from their lovers right after they break up. But if that were true in this case, it would be a stretch of the imagination, because there’s no way I see Megumi making time with the dead man. Not with any guy that dresses like him and had toenails like his. No way that guy and Megumi were doing the dirty thing.”

  “What’s your conclusion then?”

  “I don’t have one, not yet anyway. We need to find the body, or at least get an ID from the dead man to make any progress. Was that real technician able to pull a print from my driver’s license?” she asked.

  “Only a few swirls. Nothing helpful at all.”

  “Which means we need to wait until the body turns up and ID’d by the coroner.”

  “Which might never happen,” he said.

  “You know, with the way that ambulance left in a hurry from the crime scene, something seemed too suspicious about it. But I didn’t get a pic of that, just the police cars that came to the scene. If I had, we could’ve tracked that down and talked to the guys assigned to it today.”

  “Too bad we can’t.”

  “I have one other place to go this evening before I call it quits for the night,” she told him.

  “Where?”

  “One place popular as a body dumping ground is the canal, the area over near the golf course. It’s secluded, unlit, and mostly ignored. I want to see if I can find anything.”

  “Yes, you know that area quite well, don’t you?” he said. “What do you expect to find?”

  Keiko didn’t like the idea of going alone, especially at night, after the experiences she’d had a coupl
e of years before. She knew firsthand how often bodies were disposed of in that canal.

  “I don’t know. His bloated body floating on the surface of the water might be too much to ask for. But maybe I can find fresh tire tracks in mud, or just some article of clothing of his.”

  “You think you’d get that lucky?” Davison asked.

  “I have to try anyway, or I won’t sleep. All I know is that the groundskeepers pick up the litter and empty the trash cans at that park first thing in the morning. I need to look before then.”

  Most of the people were gone from the food court now, and custodians were sweeping. She noticed on her phone that the hour had come for stores to close.

  “Davison, I got to go. I’ll call you in a while.”

  She hurried away, taking the mall exit closest to the canal. On one side of the Ala Wai Canal were the high-rises and busy streets of Waikīkī; on the other side were park land, ball fields, rowing clubs, a giant golf course, and homeless encampments. She stopped at a small convenience store for one thing, a flashlight. Checking that it worked, Keiko set off for the grassy fields at the far end of the canal, a place near the golf course. In a hurry, it took only half an hour to get there.

  The first place she went to was the edge of the slow-moving canal. Almost stationary where a smaller stream connected, there was a rock almost hidden by the deep, unmown grass. She thought for a second about the time two years before when she placed that rock there herself, a small memorial to a lost friend. It was the first time she’d been back since. Saying a quick and silent prayer, she moved on.

  Moving through the dark of late evening, she could hear the murmurs of homeless people tucked away in shadowy corners, under simple tents of picnic tables and tarps, and in brushy nests inside brambles. It was far from intelligent to snoop in an area like that alone, especially after dark. Right then, she stood out like a beacon of stupidity wearing her brightly colored disguise in a place where tourists never went.

  Getting the flashlight out, she shone the beam along the edge of the water. There was nothing. No tire marks, no footprints, no loose articles of clothing. Even the deep grass wasn’t bent over as if someone had walked along there recently.