The Musubi Murder

by Frankie Bow

  “Of course he did,” I said. “We have to break down the silos that separate the academic side of the house from the Student Retention Office, apparently.”

  Emma wrinkled her nose. “Why is it a good thing to break silos? All that happens when you break a silo is that the grain spills out. Or the missile falls over. Pilau, your dean.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m going to try to talk to my department chair again. Maybe he can do something. Anyway, let me tell you what else happened at breakfast—”

  “What’s Jimmy Tanaka like?” Emma interrupted. “Does he walk funny cause of his cloven hooves?”

  “No idea,” I said. “He never showed. It’s probably for the best, actually.”

  Before Emma could interrupt again, I told them about the skull turning up in the fruit platter.

  “Weren’t you hoping the breakfast was going to be a disaster?” Pat said.

  “No, Pat, I was not hoping for it to be a disaster. How petty do you think I am?”

  “Was it a real skull?” Emma asked.

  “Nah. It looked fake to me. I bet it’ll turn out to be from Stephen’s prop room. He always forgets to lock up.”

  “Oh, yah!” she exclaimed. “Remember last year—”

  “I know,” I said. “So guess who I was sitting next to? Donnie Gonsalves! From Donnie’s Drive-Inn!”

  “Donnie Gonsalves! Ooh, I think he’s single, Molly!”

  “So I guess you’re over Stephen now,” Pat said. “That didn’t take long.”

  “Oh, shut up, Pat. You hated Stephen. Don’t pretend you feel sorry for him. Anyway, Molly, you get his number?”

  “No. Things got kind of hectic.”

  “Aw, girl.” Emma shook her head. “We gotta work on your game.”

  Emma nudged the suitcase with her toe.

  “Emma, stop that!”

  “Come on,” Emma said. “Let me open it.”

  “No! It might have bedbugs.”

  “That’s gross,” said Emma.

  “Molly’s right though,” said Pat.

  “Yah,” Emma conceded, “does look kinda junk.”

  My office phone rang. I hoped it was Serena calling me back about the suitcase. It wasn’t.

  “Hi, Betty!” I hoped my tone of voice didn’t betray the fact that I had forgotten my appointment with my coauthor. “Yes, of course I’m here. Ready to go. See you soon.” I hung up the phone, moved my stack of unopened mail from my desk to a shelf, and pulled down a milk crate labeled “Rapport—Relationship Building/SF Conference.” It was full of article reprints, manila folders, and loose papers.

  “Sorry, guys,” I said, pulling out folders and sorting them into piles on the desk. “I have to kick you out. Betty’s going to be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “You still haven’t finished your presentation?” Emma said. “Isn’t your conference pretty soon?”

  I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips to my temples.

  “Yes, it is. Plus I have papers to grade, I’m behind on my Student Retention Office reports, and now I have to write this stupid—”

  “Hey, Molly,” Pat said. “You want come to the Hanohano with me after work?”

  “The Hanohano?” I opened my eyes. “That’s one of Jimmy Tanaka’s properties, isn’t it? I wonder if he’ll be there.”

  “Why do you wanna meet Jimmy Tanaka so bad?” Emma asked.

  “Oh yeah, I didn’t tell you. Vogel ‘tasked’ me with writing the press release about the donation. He wants me to get in touch with Tanaka first.”

  “How come Vogel’s making you write it?” Emma asked. “Don’t we have a marketing office?”

  “Why should he bother putting in a request and waiting his turn when he can just make an untenured faculty member do it? Just another one of the indignities routinely heaped upon the junior faculty in my college. At least he’s not making me pick up his dry cleaning. Poor Serena gets stuck doing that. Anyway, Pat, what’s happening at the Hanohano Hotel?”

  “I can’t go,” Emma said. “I have to get home right after my lab, otherwise Yoshi gets grumpy.”

  “That’s okay,” Pat said. “No offense, Emma, but I was really hoping Molly would come with me. I need someone who looks like a tourist.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “What exactly are we supposed to be doing there?”

  “If I tell you in advance, it won’t work as well.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The third floor was as high as we could go. The buttons for floors four and five glowed through the duct tape covering them. The elevator heaved and shuddered to our stop, and then paused for an unnerving length of time before the metal doors creaked open to let us out.

  I followed Pat down the dim hallway, doing my best to ignore the squelch of the damp carpet. By the time I caught up to him, he had disappeared into one of the guest rooms.

  “Are you sure it’s okay for us to be here?” I called into the room.

  “No wonder the TV crew didn’t find anything.” Pat emerged from behind rust-mottled vertical blinds, brushing something off his face. “What kind of unfabulous ghost would ever want to haunt this place?”

  “It smells horrible up here,” I said. “Can we go back downstairs now?”

  “Let me take a couple of pictures first.”

  “Pictures? Of this? Are you kidding? Why?”

  Watercolor blotches of peach and salmon adorned the bedspreads. The couch picked up the theme with an abstract pastel print and whitewashed oak arms. The wallpaper was a faded peach and aqua stripe, peeling away at the seams.

  “I think all this stuff was already out of date the day it was put in,” Pat said, pulling up the edge of the carpet. He stood back up and started snapping pictures of the floor.

  Pat Flanagan and I were on the third floor of Jimmy Tanaka’s New Hanohano Hotel, a grim concrete box that had been built out to the edge of the property, blocking the light and the view of its more modestly sized neighbors on Hotel Drive. The original Hanohano had been a picturesque single-story sugar plantation house, with a generous porch and nine-foot ceilings. The only things the original landmark had in common with its successor were the location and the name.

  We took the emergency stairwell back downstairs (I refused to get back on the elevator). Pat paused at the fire door that led to the lobby and tugged his flannel shirt straight.

  “Do I look like a friendly lifestyle reporter?” he asked.

  “Friendly? If you were going for ‘friendly,’ you shouldn’t have shaved your head. You look like an IRA gunrunner.”

  “Paying someone to cut my hair is wasteful,” he said. He pushed the stairwell door open. “Your cell phone’s buzzing,” he called back to me.

  It was a text message from Stephen. It must have been a misdial. Why would he try to get in touch now, after all this time? I swiped the message to delete it and followed Pat into the lobby.

  “Who was it?” he asked.

  “Wrong number.”

  We approached the receptionist, the only living soul we had seen so far. Purple orchids adorned her lacquered black up-do and complemented her purple hibiscus-print uniform. She beamed at us as we drew closer. In her situation I suppose even I would have been grateful for human contact.

  Pat introduced himself and started asking her questions about the legendary ghosts of the Hanohano. Did the ghosts leave when the old building was torn down? Had she ever heard mysterious footsteps? Felt the presence of night marchers?

  She laughed at the mention of ghosts. She confirmed what Pat had already told me, that the advance crew from one of those ghost hunter reality shows had come to check out the Hanohano. The scouts had found no paranormal activity and had left disappointed. I hovered at the edge of the conversation, listening, nodding, and (thanks to the mildewy stench that permeated the building) taking the shallowest breaths I could manage.

  Pat glanced at her name tag. “So, Moana, what’s it like to work
for The Most Hated Man in Hawaii?”

  “We don’t call him that,” she giggled and lowered her voice. “Not to his face, anyway.”

  She had worked at the old Hanohano, she told us, and she felt lucky to get her job back after Jimmy Tanaka bought the hotel. She glanced around the empty lobby. “Most of my friends were not hired back. Sandy Medeiros, her and me was best friends, and she was a single mom. And then when Sal was killed . . .” She blinked. “He had a wife and a young boy, you know. It was terrible.”

  “Sal?” Pat repeated. He was committing the conversation to memory.

  “Salvador Pung. You probably never saw it in the paper. Just one small story when it happened.”

  I watched a pinkish-tan gecko scamper up the wall behind the reception desk. It looked like the ones that hang out on the ceiling of my carport and gobble up termites. There seemed to be plenty of insect life to feast on at the Hanohano. Lucky gecko.

  “My husband was a foreman,” Moana said. “He always come home grumbling about how the building is going up too fast. They wasn’t giving the workers their breaks or nothing. And then they brought in the crane . . .”

  By the time she got to the part where the ambulance arrived, I was ready to pass out. I excused myself from the conversation and wandered over to the closest couch. Close up, I could see black specks on the flowered pillows. They were not part of the original design. I sat on the white fiberglass cube that served as an end table, rested my elbows on my knees, and took out my phone to check my email.

  The top item in my inbox was from someone claiming to be my student, although he had not yet shown up to class.

  Hey proffeser, I need to make up the assignment I missed. I couldn’t get the textbook cuz the bookstore is totaly sold out. Thx, Joshua

  The bookstore still had plenty of my assigned textbooks in stock, and I had placed copies on reserve in the library as well. I’m a patient person, regardless of what Emma might tell you, but I take exception to being lied to. I considered a number of crisply worded replies before my better angels prevailed. I wrote,

  Dear Joshua,

  Please refer to the course syllabus for the policy on late work.

  The next email was from our Student Retention Office. The subject line read, “Use Social Media to Connect with Your Students!”

  I deleted it unread, and walked outside to get some air.

  The Hanohano didn’t look any nicer on the outside. Black mildew streaked down the white stucco below the windows like runny mascara. I turned away from the hotel to watch the ocean roll and sparkle in the sun. Poor Salvador Pung. Why did the name sound so familiar? I knew there must be a word for this. You hear about something for the first time, and next thing you know it seems like you’re seeing it everywhere.

  I found Pat in the gift shop, taking pictures of the ceiling. There was no one behind the counter to guard the neon plastic flowers, odd-smelling straw hats, tiki key chains, or the plastic stick-on soul patch and eyebrow package, which was the only item I thought might be worth buying.

  “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Very. Are you going to tell me what we supposedly accomplished here? There sure wasn’t any sign of Jimmy Tanaka.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s get out of here first.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I took a deep breath as soon as we stepped outside. The air was warm and dense, and mercifully free of the sour, moldy smell that had pervaded the interior of the Hanohano. Drops of drizzle spattered the broken asphalt of the parking lot.

  “I hope we don’t track the odor into my interior,” I said, as we made our way back to my car.

  “Why didn’t you let me drive?” Pat asked.

  “I like driving,” I lied.

  I don’t like putting extra miles on my 1959 Thunderbird, especially with gas prices the way they are, but it was worth it not to ride in Pat’s car. You’d think that Pat, who lives off the grid twenty miles out of town, would have reliable, sturdy transportation. Especially since his cabin sits at the end of an unpaved private road that turns to muck whenever it rains.

  But you would only think that if you didn’t know Pat. He likes to find cars that cost less than $500, and then run them until his duct-tape fixes stop working. It’s his way of sticking it to the Man. Right now he’s driving an oxidized white Plymouth Valiant with one brown door, a missing muffler, and a hole in the passenger-side floorboard big enough to stick both your feet through. The original color of the upholstery is a mystery, obscured by sticky stains and what looks like damage from some kind of burrowing vermin. I won’t ride in Pat’s car without putting down a clean towel first, and even then I don’t feel good about it.

  “Pat, that poor man who was killed. In the accident. His last name was Pung, right?” I inched the Thunderbird out of the Hanohano parking lot, steering to avoid protruding roots and clumps of buckled asphalt.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Same name as on one of your plagiarized papers. You don’t have to drive so slow, Molly. Your suspension’s not made of toothpicks.”

  “I just want to get out of here with my muffler still attached. That is where I saw the name! How did you know?”

  “I had to help you download the similarity reports, remember? The website wasn’t working because you forgot to turn your script blocker off.”

  “Oh. That’s right. Anyway, what’s that called when you see something once and then suddenly you’re seeing it everywhere?”

  “Baader Meinhof phenomenon,” Pat said.

  “Ah. Thanks! I guess now I’ll be seeing ‘Baader Meinhof phenomenon’ everywhere I look.”

  “Probably.”

  “So did you find anything interesting?” I asked. “Ghostwise?”

  Pat waited until I pulled out onto Hotel Drive.

  “I’m doing a story on the construction of the new Hanohano,” he said. “It’s even worse than it looks.”

  “What do you mean? How could it possibly be worse than it looks? And what, the whole ghost thing was just a ruse?”

  Pat clicked his lap belt shut and pulled it snug.

  “Your car smells weird,” he said.

  “That’s what a clean car smells like.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “It’s the new upholstery. So you are writing about the Hanohano?”

  “The whole thing is really fishy,” he said. “How did Tanaka manage to get this thing permitted? I mean, they didn’t even try to make it look like it was built to code. There’s mold under the carpets and probably inside the walls. There’s a utility room downstairs with carpet sitting right on bare dirt. I bet just spending time inside that building is a health hazard.”

  I glanced back at the monstrous hotel. Construction had begun with great fanfare and no expense spared, but as the project progressed, money had run low. Preposterous, twenty-foot concrete columns flanked a gleaming plate-glass front entrance, but the windows were the cheap aluminum kind. The top floors were never finished. Decayed scaffolding clung to the building, and rusty rebar bristled from raw concrete at the top.

  “I can’t even imagine what they were going for,” I said. “It’s aesthetically incoherent.”

  “Seriously. It looks like a Motel Six designed by Albert Speer.”

  Pat stretched his long legs out, his gigantic work boots dirtying the new/old stock gray carpet I’d had installed a few months ago. He began to type into his phone.

  “That was pretty clever, Pat. Going in asking about the ghost stories.”

  “Well, if I’d gone after what I really wanted to know, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. A manager would probably have materialized out of some back office right away and ordered us to leave. But you being there with me, and us asking about the ghost legends—”

  “We were just a goofy haole couple chasing a story that had probably been concocted for tourists.”

  “Exactly! Nice job, by the way. Next time try not holding your nose the whole time, though.”

  “So are you postin
g this on Island Confidential?” I asked.

  “I’m not even close to ready. I’m still finishing up the piece about the telescope protesters.”

  “What’s the latest with that? I’ve seen some headlines but I haven’t really been following it that well.”

  “The summit of Mauna Kea is over thirteen thousand feet, right?”

  “I knew that,” I said. “I thought it was closer to fourteen thousand.”

  “So it’s one of the best sites on Earth for ground-based telescopes. But it’s also the sacred home of the Divine Ancestors. And home to an endangered species or two. So you have a coalition of environmentalists and native practitioners who don’t want the telescope to happen.”

  “I already knew that too. But that’s all been going on for a while, right?”

  “Well the latest thing is, they tried to bring Mo’oinanea into a contested case hearing.”

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “A guardian spirit of Mauna Kea,” Pat said. “But the judge ruled that she doesn’t have standing because she’s not a person.”

  “Oh, I know the answer to that one. Incorporate. Mo—what was the name?”

  “Mo’oinanea.”

  “Corporations are legal persons. The Mo’oinanea Corporation would be recognized as a person, no problem. We’re going to cover this in class in a couple of weeks.”

  My purse hummed from the back seat.

  “I’ll get it,” Pat said. “You’re driving.”

  “No, it’s okay, you don’t have to—”

  But Pat had already pressed the green button.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Hi, Molly? It’s Serena,” said my speakerphone from Pat’s huge hand.

  “Serena,” I shouted over the road noise, “I’m so glad you called back!”

  “Hey, Serena.” Pat was holding my phone for me as I drove, so I suppose he felt entitled to join the conversation between the dean’s secretary and me. “How’re you holding up?” he asked her.

  “Oh, hello Pat. I guess you heard what happened, yah? And then the guest of honor never even showed up.”