The Musubi Murder

by Frankie Bow

  “Oh, right. The Hanohano. Like what kinds of things?”

  “Liquid dropping on people. The sound of dogs barking. Seaweed smells in the hallways. So, is Pat your boyfriend?”

  “Pat? No, of course not. Pat’s . . . I don’t have a boyfriend.

  “Did you find any ghosts? When you went there with Pat?”

  “Well, there were smells in the hallways, no doubt about that. And I did hear about an accident that happened when they rebuilt the hotel. A worker was killed.”

  “Salvador Pung,” Donnie said.

  “Yes! Oh, do you think that could have had anything to do with that incident with the skull? Someone reminding Jimmy Tanaka that he had blood on his hands, something like that?”

  “Could be.”

  “Speaking of Jimmy Tanaka, have you talked to him at all since yesterday?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re not exactly close friends though.”

  “You know, my friend Emma told me a story about him. She says he didn’t come home one night, and his wife got the police to look for him. She didn’t know the details, though. Is there anything to that, do you think?”

  Donnie smiled, and instead of answering my question, asked me what I was planning to buy at the Farmers’ Market.

  I detoured through the Farmers’ Market on the way back, still hungry after my stop at Donnie’s Drive-Inn. The air was hotter under the shade tarps than out on the street. I bought a few avocados, a couple of dented papayas, and a bag of bedraggled greens from a young couple with ratty blond dreadlocks and a cardboard sign advertising 100% organic produce. The walk home was so steep I had to lean forward as I trudged uphill. It had grown much hotter in the past couple of hours. By the time I got home, the handles of my shopping bags had cut red marks into both wrists.

  I turned on my ceiling fans full blast, called in an order for a pizza, and poured myself a glass of wine. My “accidental” meeting with Donnie had gone pretty well, but it had taken the whole morning. Now I only had the afternoon to deal with my considerable to-do list. I had to work on my conference paper, finish up my Student Retention Office forms, start preparing next week’s classes, and get some laundry done. I felt tired just thinking about it.

  Then I heard the knock on my door.

  I pulled the door open. Officer Medeiros hulked in my doorway, wearing his work uniform: white short-sleeved shirt with stitched-in seams, black slacks, and shiny black shoes.

  “Professor Barda.” He eased his hand down from knocking position. “Sorry to bother you on a weekend. I need to ask you a couple of questions. This will just take a minute.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I hurried through the drizzle to my classroom, fuming. I had barely managed to get caught up on my grading this weekend. But I hadn’t made any progress on my conference paper, my Student Retention Office forms were overdue, and I hadn’t had a chance to do laundry, which meant that I was wearing swimsuit bottoms instead of underwear. I had spent my entire Saturday afternoon getting grilled by Officer Medeiros.

  It wasn’t his fault, of course. He had been nice enough to explain what had earned me the house call. Stephen Park had told him that I was the expert on how the prop room was set up. The basis of Stephen’s infuriating half-truth was that once upon a time I had tried to help him to organize his inventory, but he never put my system into place. If Stephen had listened to me in the first place, none of this would have happened.

  I paused at the door of my classroom, retrieved a disinfectant wipe from my bag, and busied myself scrubbing greenish-black mold from the various surfaces. After the latest budget cuts, we no longer have regular janitorial service in our building. As usual, my efforts seemed to make little difference. The room was a monument to years of deferred maintenance. The acoustic ceiling tiles were mildewed and crumbling, and some had fallen away entirely, exposing the moldy ductwork overhead. The cinderblock walls were a discouraging shade of gray that looked like something left over from painting a submarine. A sign printed on pink paper, taped to the wall over the wastebasket, read: No tobacco. No gum. NO BETEL NUTS! Directly below the sign, the wall and floor were encrusted with blood-red betel nut spit stains.

  I hoped that today’s guest lecture would be better than the time Emma’s husband Yoshi came to talk to my students. I suppose it was nice of him to volunteer, but instead of imparting helpful advice about navigating corporate culture, he had spent most of the time talking up his Ivy League credentials and keen business acumen. One of my students had come to see me in my office the next day. He told me that Yoshi’s visit had taught him a lot about what kind of person he might become if he remained a commerce major. He then presented me with some forms to sign. He was dropping my class and changing his major to social work.

  Donnie Gonsalves, owner and founder of Donnie’s Drive-Inn, poked his head into the classroom.

  “Oh, great, you’re a little early!” I gushed. “Fantastic! Parking was okay? Thanks so much for coming.” I hurried over to him and clasped his hand in a businesslike handshake.

  “Happy to do it,” he smiled, drawing me closer for a hug and a cheek kiss. “Did your security person ever find you?”

  “In fact, he did. He came to my house right after I had lunch with you. I guess this thing is pretty serious.”

  Donnie released me and began to leaf through a deck of index cards. He’d prepared lecture notes.

  “Of course it’s serious,” he said, examining and rearranging the cards. “You want to stay on good terms with your donors.”

  “Not only that. Officer Medeiros told me that the skull was real. The chair of our theater department apparently had a genuine human skull. And he claims he didn’t know. He thought it was plastic, or so he said.”

  Donnie looked up sharply.

  “So why are you involved with this?” he asked.

  “Oh. I put together a spreadsheet for . . . for the department. To keep track of their inventory. I don’t think they ever used it though.”

  “That must have been a lot of work for you.”

  “Oh. Well, we’re all expected to contribute service hours to the university.” I didn’t see any need to go into my personal history with Stephen.

  “So who’s the audience today?” he asked. “You told me these are your advanced students.”

  “That’s right. BP has mostly juniors and seniors enrolled.”

  “BP?”

  “Business Planning. BP.”

  “Business Planning. That’s right.”

  He checked the index cards again.

  “These students are all Commerce majors,” I said, “and they’re pretty motivated. Between you and me, I really prefer this class to IBM. It’s night and day.”

  “IBM?”

  “Intro to Business Management, sorry. Oh, gosh, what can I say about my Intro students? Same classroom, totally different experience. I mean, bless their hearts, on the very first assignment of the semester, a quarter of the class turned in plagiarized papers.”

  “I think my son told me he’s taking one of your other classes.”

  “Oh! Your son! Really?”

  Donnie had a college-age son? Gonsalves is a common name. Now that Donnie mentioned it, though. . . .

  “Davison Gonsalves.” Donnie smiled a little. “I hope he’s not giving you a hard time.”

  “Well, I don’t know all of the students’ names yet,” I said truthfully. I knew Davison Gonsalves’s name, though. I’d seen it on one of the plagiarized papers.

  “So how’s he doing?” Donnie asked.

  I picked up the eraser and began wiping stray marks from the whiteboard. “Well, even if I knew, I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you,” I said to the whiteboard.

  “Why is that?”

  “The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. FERPA. We’re not allowed to give out any information about college students. Even to parents. Especially to parents.”

  Donnie laughed. “Legal stuff. I understand. You can’t blame me
for asking, though. I’m trying to encourage Davison to get a little more serious about school. I think he’d do well if he’d just apply himself a little more.”

  I finished cleaning off the whiteboard and turned around to see Donnie surveying the classroom, looking confused.

  “You can stand up here,” I said. “This setup can be a little disorienting. Our Student Retention Office remodeled the room over the summer, and we’re still getting used to it.”

  The Student Retention Office had indeed come in to refurbish the room, but they didn’t repaint it or replace the rotted ceiling tiles or fix the broken blinds. What they did was transform the classroom into a “learning center” by removing all of the desks and installing round tables in their place. The idea was that there should be no single focal point in the room from which a professor could lecture. We were no longer to play the role of “Sage on the Stage,” but instead we were to be “Guides on the Side,” moving around the room to facilitate student discussion.

  A few weeks after the Student Retention Office remodel was finished, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Engagement attended an ed-tech conference. Upon his return, we were directed to record our class sessions and post them online, so that students could watch them at their leisure. The problem was that we were “guides on the side” now, and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Engagement didn’t want to post hour-long videos of students sitting in circles talking. So we all had to go back to being “sages on the stage,” lecturing to the video camera, but this time we were cautioned to act as “facilitators of experience” rather than “providers of knowledge.” We’re still stuck with the immovable round tables.

  The wall clock was off by several hours and a random number of minutes. I took out my phone and watched the time display as students accumulated in the classroom. When the readout hit the right time, I stepped up to introduce Donnie. Students lifted their headsets off, snapped their game consoles shut, switched off their phones, and turned their attention to me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I stepped up to introduce Donnie to the class.

  “Remember the first day of class,” I asked, “when I told you that whatever business you choose, whatever you do, don’t open a restaurant? Today we’re very fortunate to have as our guest speaker Mr. Donald Gonsalves, owner and founder of Donnie’s Drive-Inns, who obviously didn’t listen to my good advice.”

  A ruffle of polite laughter mingled with applause. Donnie segued smoothly from my introduction. “Your professor is right,” Donnie said. “Restaurants have a high fatality rate. People start restaurants because they love cooking for their friends, but they sometimes ignore important business basics.”

  Margaret Adams, my straight-A accounting major, raised her hand: “Like cash flow?” she asked.

  “That’s exactly right.” He smiled. She beamed back at him. Donnie went on to discuss vendor contracts, health inspections and worker’s compensation insurance. He seemed at ease in front of the classroom, effortlessly holding the students’ attention. And mine. He shared his own story. He had started right out of school working for Jimmy Tanaka. He had worked his way up to a management position at Merrie Musubis before opening his own restaurant chain.

  “That’s really the key,” he said. “You don’t just jump in to owning your own business. You work for someone else for a while, learn the ropes, and then go out on your own.”

  One student raised her hand. “Did Jimmy Tanaka get mad when you started your own restaurant?”

  “Business people in an island community can’t afford to make enemies,” Donnie said. “We don’t think short term like that. We have to think of ourselves as partners and work toward our common interests.”

  “Mr. Gonsalves, Miss Barda—I mean Professor Barda—told us when Jimmy Tanaka rebuilt the Hanohano Hotel, they ran out of money and let it go all bus’ up and now it’s so junk the university don’t put its guests—”

  “Micah,” I interrupted, “do you have a question for Mr. Gonsalves?”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.” Micah sat up in his chair and pushed up the brim of his baseball cap to clear his line of vision. “Mr. Gonsalves. Professor Barda always telling us, act professional, keep your commitments, show up on time.”

  “That’s excellent advice,” Donnie said with a glance in my direction.

  “I heard the College of Commerce guys jus’ had one big party for Jimmy Tanaka and he never come! So this guy. Unprofessional, yah?”

  I watched Donnie to see how he would respond. I was pretty unimpressed with Jimmy Tanaka’s disappearing act myself, but I couldn’t say that in front of my students. Donnie spun out an effortless answer, something about giving people the benefit of the doubt and seeing the good in every situation.

  At the end of class, students clustered around Donnie. I gathered my things undisturbed, and then I heard Micah shout, “Eh, Professor. Professor!” He was pointing at the trash can in the corner. I went over and peered in. I’m afraid I let out a rather unprofessorial shriek.

  “Want me to call security?” Micah asked.

  “Yes. Yes, please do that.”

  Officer Medeiros arrived within a minute. He strode to the trash can, plunged his hand in, and pulled out the skull.

  “No gloves?” I asked.

  “Looks like the glow-in-the-dark kine,” someone said.

  Officer Medeiros brandished the skull at me.

  “This your classroom, Dr. Barda?”

  “I teach my classes in here, yes. But so does Dr. Rodge, Roger Cowper. And I think Larry Schneider teaches in here too.” I remembered hearing Larry complaining about Rodge not erasing the whiteboard.

  Officer Medeiros turned the skull over and examined it.

  “This one get the sticker. See?”

  He turned the skull to show me the holographic inventory sticker indicating university property.

  “You know anything about how it got here?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I found it,” Micah said. “Professor Barda, she never come back here.”

  “I’m gonna have to take this back up with me,” Officer Medeiros said.

  “By all means. Please. One thing. Can you play back the lecture tapes for the last few days? Maybe the camera caught what happened.”

  “Hm,” said Officer Medeiros. “Not a bad idea. I’ll look into that. Lotta footage to go through, though.”

  Donnie had waited for me. He accompanied me out of the classroom, avoiding any mention of the skull in the wastebasket, his plagiarizing son, or any other unpleasant topic. Instead, he said nice things about my students, and I said nice things about his talk. When the path split off and it was time for him to head toward the parking lot, he thanked me as if I had done him a favor, rather than the other way around.

  As Donnie disappeared around the corner, I realized that we had made no plans to meet again. I was the one who had invited him to give the talk in my classroom. If he had wanted things to keep going, he should have taken the initiative this time. He certainly had the opportunity. Maybe he didn’t want to get involved with his son’s teacher. Who could blame him for that, really?

  I thought the class had gone well, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling that good. I needed to focus and get my mind off this skull business, which, after all, was Stephen’s problem, not mine. I had to deal with the plagiarists from Intro to Business Management. If one of them happened to be Donnie’s son, well that was just too bad. My awful dean, Bill Vogel, wasn’t going to back me up, but Dan Watanabe, my department chair, just might. It was worth a try.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dan Watanabe has served as department chair for the past decade or so, and has been part of the College of Commerce for years longer than that. Not quite as long as the mutual loathing society of our two most senior professors, Larry Schneider and Hanson Harrison, but long enough to know where the bodies are buried, so to speak. Dan has been voted back in as department chair for years because he’s even-temper
ed and fair, and also because no one else wants the job. I sat across from him in his tidy office, printouts of the plagiarized assignments stacked on the desk between us.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” I said. “This is the first semester that I’ve used the plagiarism checker. Now I’m wondering how much cheating has been going on this whole time.”

  “Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.” Dan looked particularly wornout today. Maybe it was the way he was dressed, his hair, skin, glasses, and reverse-print aloha shirt of all grays and beiges.

  “Vogel won’t let me refer these students to the Office of Student Conduct,” I said.

  Dan pulled his glasses off and rubbed his eyes.

  “Bill’s the dean. Those referrals need his signature. If he says no, I can’t go against that.”

  “You know what’s almost worse than the cheating? They uploaded plagiarized papers to a plagiarism detection site. I mean, they can’t be that stupid, so they must think we are!”

  “I get that, Molly.”

  “And what’s the point of us paying for this website to help us catch cheaters, if we won’t do anything about it anyway?”

  “Listen, even if you could get a referral to the Office of Student Conduct, I’m not sure you’d get the result you want.”

  “I know,” I sighed.

  During our most recent reorganization, the Office of Student Conduct was moved into the Student Retention Office in order to cover salaries with the SRO’s grant. The most severe penalty that comes out of that office these days is that the offender has to write a one-page reflection paper. Still, it’s something.

  “I can’t do anything, Molly. Bill wants to give them a second chance, doesn’t matter what I think. He outranks me. You should know that he wasn’t happy that I passed along your complaint to him. He told me that my job was to contain problems like that.”

  Dan placed his hand on the jar of antacid tablets on his desk.

  “Where’d you get that huge jar?” I asked. “Galimba’s Bargain Boyz?”