The Musubi Murder

by Frankie Bow

  Nate shook his head. “It’s such a travesty,” he said. “I can’t believe our college accepted his money. Didn’t the faculty protest?”

  “We didn’t know about it until it was a done deal,” I said. “And it’s not like we have people lining up to hand us money. Hey, did you see Mr. Tanaka when he was here?”

  “Yeah, for a second. I was working that night. I remember someone came to meet him for dinner. Tall haole dude. His hair was real shiny. Kinda like doll hair.”

  “Probably our dean, Bill Vogel.”

  “Oh, name’s familiar. Never met him though.”

  “Do you remember them coming back from dinner?” I asked.

  “No, but they wouldn’t have to come through the main building. If Mr. Tanaka got dropped off he coulda just walked right across to his cabin. I never seen Mr. Tanaka after he checked in. But . . .” Nate trailed off and looked at the floor.

  “But?”

  “Oh. I dunno. I forgot what I was gonna say.”

  “By the way, why didn’t you send Mr. Tanaka’s suitcase back to his address in Honolulu?” I asked.

  “Mercedes had me look up how much it would cost to send it over. It’s really expensive to ship a big bag like that interisland. That bag’s a lot heavier than it looks.”

  I heard the water shut off in the bathroom, and Pat popped out of the doorway. He shook his head no. Our investigation here was apparently over.

  “No gun taped to the inside of the toilet tank?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Pat said. “Nothing. You guys keep this place nice and clean.”

  “Thanks,” Nate said. “Well, I hope you find Mr. Tanaka. Good to see you again, Professor Barda. Really a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Flanagan. I read Island Confidential every day. I’m a big fan.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s nice to have a loyal reader.” Pat directed that last comment at me, not at Nate.

  “You guys should hurry. You probably wanna get on the road before it gets dark,” Nate said.

  “You can’t get rid of us that easily,” I said. “We’re staying for dinner.”

  Nate lingered in the doorway for a few seconds, looking from me to Pat and back again. Then he turned away and mumbled, “Okay. I better get back to work.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  After half an hour of bumping down an unlit road, I was convinced that we had taken a wrong turn, and were going to end up either driving into the ocean or, worse, blundering onto someone’s well-defended pakololo plantation.

  “We should be getting close,” Pat said. “Are you okay?”

  “I forgot how dark it gets down here, with no streetlights,” I said.

  Just then, we saw light blazing through the tall trees. The Kuewa Hongwanji Mission was right where the GPS said it would be. Flying termites swarmed in the light from the tall temple windows and clouded around the strings of lanterns in the parking lot. Energetic children, harassed parents, young hippies with tawny dreadlocks, slightly older hippies with gray ponytails, and an assortment of high school and college kids lined up at the concession stands for Styrofoam chili bowls, greasy bags of fried wontons, rainbow shave ice, and paper-wrapped Spam musubis.

  The Bon Dance was not an event restricted to the Buddhist faithful. These were now emerging from the temple, having honored their departed in the Obon ceremony. Pat and I sidled up the stairs of the temple against the downward flow of the crowd. Through the wide doorway I could see that it was set up very much like my idea of church—except where it wasn’t. A single aisle separated the area into two rows of pews on either side. Racks on the back of the pews held booklets and hymn books. To the right was a church organ, and to the left a pulpit. That’s where the similarity ended. In the center sat a golden altar decked with red anthuriums, scrolled brass candelabras and various ceramic and metal vessels. At the top of the altar stood a slender golden Buddha about two feet high, surrounded by a radiant cloud. It reminded me a little of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “And you thought us Catholics had all the bling,” Pat said.

  “We Catholics, not us Catholics. We have the bling.” I hesitated at the doorway.

  “What’s the matter, Molly?” he asked.

  “I don’t feel right just barging into someone’s place of worship like a tourist.”

  “You getting bad juju?”

  “I’m sure Emma would feel just as uncomfortable walking into St. Damien,” I said.

  “I’m uncomfortable walking into St. Damien.”

  “Yeah, well, big surprise there.”

  Pat nudged me. “Come on, there’s Emma.”

  He started forward over the threshold.

  “The incense is bothering my nose. You go in. I’ll wait here.”

  Emma emerged from the temple first. She paused at the threshold, turned around and bowed toward the interior, then turned back out to face me. For someone who had just attended a solemn ceremony, she seemed to be having trouble keeping a straight face.

  “Hey Molly, Pat told me you took one look inside and started crossing yourself and backing down the stairs.”

  Pat sauntered out behind her. I glared at him as he loped past us down the stairs and off into the darkness to take pictures of the last Bon Dance of the summer.

  “Don’t believe everything Pat says,” I said.

  “So how was the Hanohano Hotel?” she asked.

  Emma and I strolled down the stairs, with the flow of the crowd this time.

  “Horrible,” I said. “Jimmy Tanaka just threw up that hideous building, and now he’s letting it fall apart. It’s this awful combination of extravagant waste and ridiculous penny-pinching.”

  “Oh. Sounds like our university,” Emma said.

  “At least our university doesn’t smell like wet laundry that was forgotten in the washing machine for three days. Pat and I had dinner down at the Cloudforest, though, so that was nice.”

  We stepped onto damp grass.

  “It’s so dark out here,” I said. “I hope I don’t step on a sprinkler head.”

  “A what?”

  “Sprinkler head?”

  “That’s funny, Molly. How long have you lived here? You know we get like a billion inches of rain a year, right? Hey, by the way, when are you going to get rid of that suitcase in your office? It gets in the way of your coffeemaker.”

  “As soon as I can find Jimmy Tanaka and give it back to him. I was hoping he’d be there at the Hanohano, but the place seemed to be abandoned, except for one poor lady who was stuck at the front desk. Why do you care if the suitcase gets in the way of my coffeemaker?”

  “Oh, that reminds me. Jimmy Tanaka. I have something you might be interested in. Just a second.” She tipped her chin up and scanned the crowd. I followed her gaze for a few seconds, but it was too dark to see much. The lanterns were more decorative than illuminating.

  “Hey!” She socked my arm. “You think that was actually Jimmy Tanaka’s skull on the table this morning? Maybe that’s why you can’t get a-hold of him.”

  “No,” I said. “This isn’t one of your low-budget horror movies, Emma. That skull came from Stephen’s prop room. Stephen called and confirmed it. Besides, Jimmy Tanaka was just out at dinner with my dean the previous night.”

  “Wait. Stephen called you? Did he ever apologize?”

  “No,” I said. “He just wanted me to get him out of trouble, again, as if I could do that. And it sounds like he is in trouble.”

  “You have to stop pining after him, Molly.”

  “I’m not pining after anyone!”

  “Good. That leaves the field clear for Donnie Gonsalves. Know what you should do? You should run into him, accidentally on purpose. Donnie’s Drive-Inn is like a five-minute walk from your house, right?”

  “It’s not that close,” I said. “But I guess it’s walkable.”

  “And tomorrow is the Farmers’ Market. So you have a perfect excuse. Stop for something to eat on your way to shopping. Okay, there�
�s Mrs. Saito. Hang on for a sec. I’ll be right back.”

  Emma disappeared into the crowd. I watched the taiko drummers setting up, and considered the logistics of Emma’s plan. If I walked down to the Farmers’ Market, it wouldn’t be that much out of my way to pass by Donnie’s Drive-Inn. And I definitely wanted to stop on the way down, before the lunch rush. Not on the way back up, when I’d be sweaty and laden down with perishables. As my eyes adjusted, I spotted Emma in conversation with a woman I had seen exiting the temple earlier, a slender octogenarian in full kimono.

  When she returned, Emma shouted over the booming taiko drums, “That was Mrs. Saito.”

  “Can we go somewhere quieter?” I shouted back.

  Emma led me away from the music and the lights, toward the solitary banyan tree in the center of the lawn. Headlights flashed by on the main road.

  “Okay,” Emma said, “this all happened a long time ago, way before you moved here. I was away at school. Mrs. Saito was my parents’ neighbor. She worked in the town post office, so she got all the news. Anyway, this was from back when Jimmy Tanaka was still living in Mahina, before he moved his show to Honolulu. Back then he was married.”

  “Jimmy Tanaka was married? Huh. I guess that’s one person who didn’t hate him.”

  “Yeah, well, listen to what happened. One day he doesn’t come home. Then the next day? He still doesn’t come home. So Jimmy’s wife goes to the police station ’cause she wants them to find her missing husband. They assigned this young cop to look for Tanaka.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “Oh, the cop found him. Alive and well, and in a very compromising situation.”

  “What kind of compromising situation?”

  “Mrs. Saito wouldn’t tell me. She said it wasn’t proper conversation for a young lady. I guess she meant me. Anyway, Tanaka’s wife divorced him pretty soon after that. And things didn’t turn out well for that poor cop.”

  “What happened?”

  “His performance evaluations all got changed, somehow. Even the ones from years earlier. They all went from good to unsatisfactory. Someone got into the records and just rewrote his history. So he had to leave the force. Moral of the story, don’t mess with a powerful man like Jimmy Tanaka and expect to keep your job.”

  “I better write really nice things about him then. Yikes.”

  “Oh! Becho!” Emma said.

  “What?”

  “The song! This is the one everyone knows! Come on, you want to come dance?”

  “I don’t know how to dance to this,” I said. “I’ll watch.”

  Emma trotted across the lawn toward the lights and the sound of a flute wheedling over heavy drumbeats. I went to find Pat and tell him I was ready to go home. I wanted to make sure to get my beauty sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  When I first bought my little plantation-style house, I envisioned myself making the short walk to the Farmers’ Market every weekend to buy papayas, purple sweet potatoes, fiddlehead ferns, and other exotic fare that I would learn to prepare. I quickly realized that open-air shopping looks great in photographs, but in real life it’s hot and exhausting. Furthermore, I found that I could buy the same mottled papayas and slug-perforated lettuce any day of the week at Natural High Health Foods, which is air-conditioned. And I never did develop a taste for fiddlehead ferns.

  But today I was going shopping.

  It was only ten in the morning, but I could already feel the heat on my skin. My vintage cotton dress felt tighter around the waist than when I’d bought it, probably because of something the dry cleaner did. I wasn’t exactly cool or comfortable—only a climate-controlled astronaut suit could have accomplished that—but I was dressed for the weather and I felt presentable. I trusted that the red-and-white gingham pattern would obscure the sweat stains spreading under my arms.

  I’d passed by Donnie’s Drive-Inn countless times, but until Emma gave me the idea, it had never occurred to me to eat there. I spotted Donnie wiping down one of the outdoor picnic-style tables. He looked up and grinned. The red Donnie’s Drive-Inn polo shirt set off his golden skin and his close-cropped black hair. The bands of the sleeves strained over gleaming, muscular arms.

  “Well,” he said as I approached, “this is a nice surprise!”

  “Nice!” I agreed. “I mean, yes, this is a pleasant surprise! I just happened to be on my way to the Farmers’ Market!” I brandished my recycled rice bag shopping tote to emphasize my credibility on this point.

  “I was going to get something light before the lunch rush,” Donnie said. “Would you join me, Molly?”

  I accepted his embrace and cheek kiss and then slid onto the bench as gracefully as I could. “Something light” turned out to be a platter of oily Portuguese sausage slices, hard fried chicken katsu strips, and candy-sweet curls of teriyaki beef. I would have preferred a cold salad, but I suppose Donnie wanted to save me the trouble of deciding.

  “This is quite a coincidence,” he said. “I had a visit from your security folks this morning.” He snapped a pair of chopsticks apart and used the large end to transport a sausage slice to his plate.

  “Was it about that thing that happened at the breakfast?” I asked.

  “Yes. And they were asking me about you.”

  “About me? What did they want to know?”

  “They wanted to know how well I knew you, and if I’d ever heard you talk about Jimmy Tanaka.”

  I felt uncomfortably warm. I rested the palms of my hands on the tabletop to dissipate the heat. The wood was cool to the touch, freshly painted in the same vibrant red as the staff shirts.

  “So what did you tell them?” I asked.

  “I said I’d never heard you say anything about Jimmy Tanaka, good or bad. And then they asked, well, they seem to think you’re connected with a person of interest. Someone in the theater department.”

  “I see.”

  Stephen had given them my name. He was dragging me down into his mess again. I wanted to murder him. Then there would be something to investigate.

  “Are you?” Donnie asked.

  “What? Oh, you mean am I connected to someone in the theater department? No. That’s ridiculous. I’m not connected to anyone in the theater, and I certainly don’t have any motive to sabotage an event that my own college put on.”

  Donnie touched the back of my hand, a brief gesture of reassurance. “They’re just doing their job. Jimmy Tanaka is an important donor, and your university has to do damage control. Are you a vegetarian?”

  I glanced down at the platter.

  “Oh! No. No, this is very nice.” I picked up a hard chunk of chicken katsu and stuffed it into my mouth.

  “So what else have you been up to since I saw you last?” Donnie smiled. “Besides drawing the attention of the authorities?”

  The question caught me with my mouth full of breaded chicken. “Mm.” I chewed hard and swallowed. “You mean since yesterday morning? Here’s something. I finally had my first look inside the Hanohano. Have you been?”

  “Not since it was remodeled.” He shook his head. “Hanohano,” he said. “Noble. Praiseworthy. Dignified.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I was just thinking. That’s what the name of the hotel means.” He smiled. “It took me years to get the permits to remodel my kitchen. And Jimmy Tanaka rebuilt an entire hotel in a few weeks. Did you know he ordered the original Hanohano bulldozed just three days before it was going to be listed in the Registry of Historic Places?”

  “I remember that,” I said. “It didn’t win him a lot of friends in the community.”

  “He didn’t have many to begin with. What were you doing down there?”

  A puff of cool breeze brushed my cheek. From where I sat I could glimpse the ocean through the tangle of power lines that criss-crossed the narrow street.

  “We were looking for ghosts,” I felt silly saying it, but I couldn’t tell anyone about the real reason for Pat’s investigation before Pat publishe
d his story.

  “Who is ‘we’?” Donnie asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “You said ‘we’ were looking for ghosts.”

  The part of that sentence that made an impression on him was the “we” part and not the “ghosts” part?

  “Do you read Island Confidential, the newsblog?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard of it.”

  “A friend of mine runs it. Pat Flanagan. He used to be a reporter at the County Courier, before they had the layoffs. He’s working on a piece about the Hanohano Hotel. He went down there to investigate, you know, the ghost stories, and I tagged along.”

  “How do you know him?” Donnie asked.

  “He teaches composition at the university. Part time.”

  Donnie’s expression was neutral, but something in the tone of his voice made me decide not to bring up Pat again. Maybe Donnie had had a bad experience with the news media, or maybe he didn’t approve of Island Confidential’s anarchist leanings. Or maybe Donnie didn’t like the idea of me gadding about with a male person? No, that was impossible. We barely knew each other.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

  “Well, not in the popular sense.”

  Not in the popular sense? Did I really just say that? Oh, I used to be into ghosts, before they sold out and went all mainstream.

  “Sorry, that didn’t sound right. What I meant is I don’t believe in the stereotypical ghost that looks just like the person before they died. There’s no reason your immortal soul should look like your former body. Any more than I’d be able to recognize you by looking at your brain.”

  I glanced down at the glistening heaps of meat.

  “Forget I said that. About your brain. I didn’t mean to bring up brains over brunch.”

  What was wrong with me? Whatever interest Donnie may have harbored, I was certain I’d killed it. I’m an evolutionary dead end, I thought. Sorry, Mom and Dad, no grandchildren for you.

  “I’ve heard some of the stories,” Donnie said.

  “Stories?”

  “About the haunted Hanohano. Some of the old-timers talk about things that happened to friends of friends.”