Livin' Lahaina Loca

by JoAnn Bassett

  “Pali, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Please, get down here as soon as you can.”

  “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

  “Just get down here.” She hung up.

  As I headed for the back door I asked Steve to stick my plate in the oven. “I’ll be back in a little while to finish it.”

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  “Apparently not.”

  The trip down Baldwin Avenue seemed to take forever. What had Beni done now? The guy was smelly, rude, and infuriating, but Farrah had infinite patience. I was speeding ten miles over the limit and yet it felt like my wheels were slogging through mud.

  Farrah opened her apartment door. “Come in.”

  I looked around her dimly lit living room. Beni was nowhere in sight.

  “Did your new roommate take off?” I said.

  “I wish. He’s holed up in the john again.”

  “So, what’s going on?”

  She gestured toward her lumpy sofa. “Sit. You need to hear this sitting down.”

  As soon as I sat,’ Farrah’s Jack Russell terrier, Sir Lipton, jumped in my lap. The dog had been named before her gender had been correctly determined, so her name should’ve been Lady Lipton, but Farrah refused to acknowledge the error.

  “Lipton’s such a good boy. He always knows when to lend support,” she said.

  “Okay, spill,” I said. “The suspense is killing me.”

  “Oh, Pali. I know you’ve been really concerned about that bridesmaid. You know, Crystal Wilson.”

  She paused. I waited. That kind of phony tee-up from Farrah almost always signaled disaster.

  “I’m afraid the news isn’t good. A little while ago Beni told me those druggies he’s hiding from killed her.”

  My thinking slowed way down. I couldn’t even form a complete sentence. “What? Why?”

  “I guess when they sent Keith the ransom note and he just took off, they went nuts. They blamed Beni and made him watch while they killed her.”

  “Beni’s not the most reliable source of information, you know.”

  “Yeah, but I believe him. He was there—he saw stuff. I called you down here to break the bad news myself, before he goes to the cops.”

  “As if the cops give a damn,” I said.

  “So, what now?”

  “I don’t know. Give me a minute.”

  The anger that erupted in me came as a surprise. Farrah snatched Lipton from my lap just in time to avoid the poor dog getting dumped on the floor.

  “Those bastards!”

  I felt something rattling around the back of my mind but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I started pacing.

  “I’m so sorry, Pali. I wish I didn’t have to tell you this. You and I aren’t strangers to heartbreak, that’s for sure.” Farrah and I had both been orphaned when we were young, and she’d recently had to deal with the death of a newfound love interest.

  “I can’t even imagine how horrible this was for her,” I said. “All alone, so young and far from home. Being held by a bunch of drug-crazed assholes who chopped off her hair and ripped off her fingernails. She must have been terrified.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Beni said she was incredibly brave, right up to the end.”

  “Sorry, but that’s no consolation. In fact, it makes me even more pissed off.” I slammed my fist into my palm. “Would you get Beni out here? I need to talk to him.”

  “He probably won’t come out. He’s afraid. He said his cousin Doug told him you could kick his ass from here to Hana, and he’s scared you’re gonna do it.”

  “I’d like nothing better, but I promise to maintain control. Please go get him.”

  Beni hung his head as Farrah led him into the room. “Sorry, man,” he said.

  “Sorry? You let them kill a defenseless woman in cold blood and you think you can wipe it away with a ‘sorry’? How screwed up are you? I tried to help you. I even worried about you.” By now I was in full shriek mode.

  “No, man. Listen. I didn’t do nothin’. They said they’d send their guys after me if I didn’t show. So I go up there. They were way deep up in there, man. They give me a da kine shovel and say dig a big hole. I figured they were messing with me but then I get they’re serious. It takes me a long time to dig the hole, and when I get done I go down to where they were in this blue tent. I see that girl—with the hair chopped off. Next thing I know they drag her out. They push her, like down on her knees.”

  He hung his head.

  “And then what, Beni?”

  “I didn’t wanna look. She didn’t scream or beg or nothin’. And then Slam pulls a gun and there were two shots—bam! bam!”

  “You didn’t try to stop him? You just let him murder this poor girl right in front of you?”

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t…” He put his hands over his face.

  “So then what’d you do?”

  “Whaddaya think? I took off runnin’.”

  “Did you think he’d shoot you too?”

  “Hell, yeah. Those dudes don’t want no witness. And that hole I dug was plenty big for two.”

  It was hard for me to feel sorry for Beni, but I did. How did the sweet little fifth-grader I’d met ten years earlier at Sifu Doug’s manage to grow up to be such a degenerate ‘okole?

  At that moment I recalled what had been rattling around the back of my mind: Hatch’s fiancée. She’d been murdered the same way—executed by drug dealers. Hatch went into a steep nosedive after witnessing her murder. And now it’d happened again. I was used to watching nightly reports on the Honolulu news detailing crimes committed by O’ahu drug lords. But Honolulu was a big city; drugs and crime came with the territory. Over there it was expected, but here on Maui it was a disgrace.

  “Beni, I know a sure-fire way to get the police to offer you protection,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “First light tomorrow, you and I are going to retrace your trip up to ‘Iao Valley. We’re going to find that hole you dug and take some pictures. The Maui cops will have to take us seriously or we’ll let them know we’ll go over their heads.”

  “But what if Slam and those other dudes are still up there?”

  “What’re the chances of that?” I didn’t wait for him to answer before saying. “Zero. Why would those scum bags hang around a murder scene out in the middle of nowhere?”

  He shrugged.

  “I know it’s a little scary, but it’s the only way. We’ll go up there and get evidence. The police will have to act. You with me on this?”

  He gave me a nearly imperceptible nod.

  “Good. I’ll pick you up around six. The sun will be coming up by then but the park won’t be open yet.”

  I gave Farrah a hug and went back down to my car.

  On my way home in the dark, the boogey man began whispering in my ear. Why had Crystal’s disappearance gone unnoticed? Why had there been no news reports of her kidnapping, or requests for the public to keep an eye out for her? There’d apparently been no calls from family or friends inquiring about her whereabouts—or if there had been, they’d been ignored. Could the Maui Visitor’s Bureau have so much clout they could squelch news that cast our idyllic island in a bad light? Or was Beni correct in accusing the police of collusion? Whatever the reason, it seemed pretty clear if we didn’t make some noise, Crystal Wilson’s murder would disappear—like footprints swept away by the tide.

  Not on my watch. If Glen Wong wanted to throw me in jail for doing the job he refused to do, then so be it. He could argue that Crystal’s death was simply a bad end for a mainland party girl who’d gotten herself tangled up with local dope peddlers, but I didn’t buy it. A young woman—a human being—had been executed, supposedly collateral damage in a beef between a couple of lowlife drug dealers. She’d been buried in the loamy soil of the rain forest where the daily downpours and warm temperatures would quickly reclaim her body to the earth. We had to find her. Her soul deserved to rest in
peace knowing the lowlifes who’d brutally ended her short life had been brought to justice.

  Game on, scumbags.

  CHAPTER 24

  When I got back home I was in no mood to eat the dinner waiting for me in the oven. I scraped it into the garbage and was rinsing my plate when Steve came into the kitchen.

  “Everything okay?” he said.

  “Not by a long shot.”

  He waited while I stuck the plate in the dishwasher and slammed the door shut.

  “Got it. You’re mad. What’s the deal? Beni come up with yet one more way to piss you off?”

  I couldn’t help it—I started to cry.

  “Hey, hey,” he said. “The guy’s a dipshit. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

  “No, it’s not about Beni,” I said. “Well, it’s kind of about him, but not totally.”

  Steve squinted his eyes in confusion and then reached into his pocket for a freshly pressed hankerchief. He’s the only guy I’ve ever met who still carries cotton handkerchiefs. He handed it to me and I wiped my nose.

  “Sorry for the waterworks,” I said.

  “Hey, you’ve had a lousy week.”

  “Not as lousy as some people. I gotta sit down,” I said. I sat at the kitchen table and Steve took the chair across from me. “Beni says those drug dealers killed Crystal Wilson.” I filled Steve in on the few facts I’d gleaned from Beni—that he’d been ordered to dig a hole up in ‘Iao Valley; that he’d seen Slam shoot Crystal in the head; and that after the shooting he’d run away.

  “Wow. Do you believe him? You’ve got to call Glen Wong with this.”

  “Yes, I believe him, and no, I’m not calling Wong.”

  Steve sat tight, staring me into continuing.

  “I believe Beni witnessed the murder,” I said. “That’s why he’s so freaked about those guys coming after him. And the reason I’m not calling Wong is because when I gave him the ransom note he made me promise I’d leave it all up to them.”

  “I doubt he ever imagined you’d be hanging out with an eyewitness to murder,” Steve said. “Things have changed.”

  “No, you don’t understand. He was adamant about keeping this a police matter. He made it quite clear he wanted me to butt out.”

  “Well, how about I call Glen? I could tell him I overheard something. He knows how much the guys at the bar blab after a couple of martoonies.” Steve and Glen Wong traveled in the same social circle—although Steve was way out of the closet while Detective Glen Wong was back in there so far you couldn’t have found him with a flashlight.

  I didn’t want to tell Steve about Beni’s assertion that the police were dirty, and maybe even complicit. First, because Beni’d been on the wrong side of the law for so long he wasn’t the best judge of character, and second, because Wong was a friend of Steve’s and I didn’t want to throw Steve into a moral dilemma about whether or not he should tip off Wong.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “These drug dealers are dangerous. If word ever got out you were the snitch, they’d probably come gunning for you. And then I’d have to break in a new roommate, and remember to take fresh flowers up to your grave every week, and—”

  “Okay, okay. So, what’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m going to go up there and find some convincing evidence. The only way Wong’s going to take me seriously is if I bring him something he can’t sweep under the rug, like he did with the hair and the ransom note. Think about it—I go to him with some tale I heard from a convicted meth dealer? I mean, really, if I were Wong, I probably wouldn’t believe any of this either.”

  “But you do—believe Beni, that is.”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “So how’re you going to get this so-called ‘convincing evidence’?”

  “I’m going up to ‘Iao Valley tomorrow morning and find the campsite where Beni dug Crystal’s grave.”

  “You’re gonna just tromp right into a drug nest up in the wilds of ‘Iao Valley? Wait a sec, let me look up the number for the suicide hotline. I’m sure they’d like to weigh in on this. And besides, there’s like a zillion acres of rain forest up there. How’ll you even know where to start?”

  “I didn’t say I was going by myself.”

  ***

  When Farrah opened the door to her apartment the next morning, she informed me that Beni was once again holed up in the bathroom.

  “I yelled at him that you were on your way up, but he didn’t come out,” she said.

  I went to the bathroom and rapped on the door. “Get out here, Beni. It’s time for our ‘Iao Valley field trip.”

  No response.

  “Or, if you’d rather, we could take a short drive over to the Wailuku Police Station and tour that instead.”

  Again, no sound.

  “You know I’m not above breaking down this door.”

  Not so much as a whimper.

  “You have a key for this?” I asked Farrah.

  “No, but look at it. It’s just a crummy puka lock,” she said. “I’ll bet I can get it open with a bobby pin.” She rummaged around in her nightstand and came up with a pin. She dug around in the lock for about ten seconds and then the bolt clicked as it cleared the latch.

  Farrah’s bathroom was so tiny it didn’t take long to figure out it was unoccupied. In fact, the only evidence that Beni’d been hanging out in there for hours on end was a lingering malodorous tang in the air.

  “How’d he get out?” I asked.

  “Heck if I know,” Farrah said. “That little window opens onto the roof. From there he’d have to climb across the roof and then drop down almost eight feet to the eaves on the first floor. It’s another ten feet down to the alley.”

  “It could be done,” I said.

  “By your Sifu Doug, maybe. But Beni? The guy had trouble buttering a piece of bread.”

  “Desperate times require desperate measures,” I said.

  “So now what?” she said.

  I gave her my most soulful stare.

  “No. No way. I can’t go up there with you. You know how sensitive my psyche is to stuff like they got going on up there.”

  Farrah wasn’t talking about possibly running into the drug dealers, or even being squeamish about finding Crystal Wilson’s body. I’d known her long enough to know she was referring to the bloody history of the ‘Iao Valley. In 1790, Kamehameha the Great came over from the Big Island of Hawaii to lay claim to Maui. He killed Maui’s head chief and forced the Maui warriors deeper and deeper into ‘Iao Valley before unleashing fire from a cannon he’d seized from a haole ship. The Maui fighters never had a chance. The bloodshed was so horrendous they named the battle Kapaniwai, or “the damming of the waters” because piles of dead warriors’ bodies clogged ‘Iao Stream, reducing it to a trickle. The little water that did get through ran blood red. For more than a century no one ventured into the valley. The screams and moans of the ghosts trapped there could be heard for miles around.

  “You want me to go up there all by myself?”

  “No, I think you should call Hatch, or maybe the cops.”

  Neither of those options appealed to me.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll ask Ono to go with me. You stay here and call me if Beni shows up. As much as I’d like to never deal with that scum sucker again, it’d make it much easier to find Crystal if I had some idea of where to start looking.”

  “Oh. I almost forgot,” Farrah said. “Beni said something last night that sounded kind of feeble at the time, but it might help: he said they went alongside the stream from where it goes through the park. Once they started climbing, he got worried about finding his way back. He began singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on a Wall” in his head so he’d be able to figure out how far he’d gone. He was at thirteen bottles of beer when they finally got to the campsite.”

  “Really? Mr. Mope-a-dope had the presence of mind to sing eighty-six stanzas of a stupid drinking song while he hiked up the valley? Maybe his whole strung
-out act is just that—an act.”

  “Hard to say. But he sang a little of it for me. And he sang it pretty slow. Like this: ‘Ninety-nine…bottles of…beer…on the wall…’ Like that. So, hopefully that gives you some kind of idea as to how far up he went.”

  I gave her a hug and left. On my way down to the car I called Ono.

  “Hey, two calls in two days,” he said when he picked up the call. “I’m flattered. Howzit shakin’?”

  I quickly filled him in on what I’d learned over the last two days about Crystal Wilson’s fate. When Ono responded, his voice was two octaves lower.

  “Those rotten sons of bitches,” he said. “I had a bad feeling about this from the get-go. What can I do?”

  “Can you go up to ‘Iao Valley with me this morning? I’d rather not go up there alone.”

  “I’d rather you not go up there at all. This is some serious shit, Pali. I think you should call the cops and let them handle it.”

  “I plan on calling them, after I verify Beni’s story. He’s not the most reliable source, and I’m afraid they’ll blow me off again if I don’t bring them something to prove Crystal’s been murdered.”

  “Don’t you think you should at least give them a heads up on what you’ve heard?”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t want to go into it now, but I don’t want to give them any more information until it’s absolutely necessary. So, how about it—are you up for a little stroll in the woods with me?”

  “Sure, I’ll come. But I’ll be loaded for bear. Last thing I need is to be ducking through the underbrush trying to dodge some strung-out druggie taking pot shots at us.”

  “You’ve got a gun?”

  “I didn’t say that. And it’s best I don’t say anything. What you don’t know can’t be held against you. When are you thinking of going?”

  “Right away. I’d like to get up there before too many tourists show up.”

  “Tell you what. Can you give me a couple of hours? I’ve got an idea and I’ll need that much time to run down the details.”

  “Okay, let’s meet there at eight-thirty. I’ll park on the road, just outside the pay parking lot.”

  “See you there,” he said, and signed off.