Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Saturday morning, I awoke to the NOAA’s surf report in my drab, dingy room at Hibiscus House, confused at first as to where I was and what I was doing. Then as my body’s aches and pains began to catalog themselves, I remembered.

  I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom, considering what had brought me there, and all the unfinished business I had left behind in Honolulu. For a minute, I wanted to chuck the whole North Shore business and go back to Lieutenant Sampson’s office, tell him to get someone else to solve this case, give me back my gun and my shield and put me to work in District 1.

  But I didn’t. Instead, I looked at the case files again and again, memorizing every detail of the three dead surfers. Then I headed down to Hale’iwa Beach Park, to where the North Shore Canoe Club practiced, across the street from Jameson’s by the Sea. There were already a few people there by the time I arrived, and while we waited I helped bring out the canoes.

  The light was bright and harsh, glinting in shards off the placid water. Almost everyone knew everyone else. I introduced myself as Kimo and we began stretching exercises as the sun moved up over the hills behind us. A fit, blonde woman named Melody introduced herself to me and asked if I’d ever paddled before.

  “Yup, in Honolulu. For a while when I was a kid, we belonged to this native Hawaiian club after school, where we practiced speaking Hawaiian. We made leis out of kukui nuts, we surfed, we learned to paddle. A little hula, too, but don’t ask me to dance for you.”

  She laughed. “I won’t.” She sized me up. “You want to try the back of the canoe?”

  “Sure.” I knew that’s where they put the biggest and strongest guys. I joined a team of six in pushing an outrigger into the water, and then we all jumped in and started paddling out to sea.

  I sat in the fifth seat, behind a slim Hawaiian guy with incredible biceps and triceps, and in front of a stocky haole guy. I noticed that his right leg, from the knee down, was prosthetic, but he was able to move around easily on it, and use his awesome upper body strength in the outrigger. Whenever I lost the rhythm of the oars, I felt his jabbing me in the back. I never heard him whoop or yell as the others did when we crested the wave. He approached his rowing as if he were on work-release from prison, with a grim determination that sapped some of my fun.

  We got a good workout, paddling out beyond the surf, then turning around, catching a wave, and paddling like hell to catch it. We did some quick races as well, and then returned to the beach. The Hawaiian guy introduced himself to me as we dragged the canoe back up on the sand. “I’m Tepano. You rowed before?”

  “When I was a kid. How about you, you been doing this for a long time?”

  “Couple of years. It’s a great workout.” The rest of the team streamed off around us, leaving me walking up toward the parking lot with Tepano. “Everybody’s pretty friendly, too.”

  “That guy behind me didn’t seem so friendly,” I said, referring to the haole with the prosthetic leg.

  “Rich? He’s okay. He just doesn’t like surfers.”

  The sun was fully up, and there was a nice breeze coming in off the ocean. It was going to be a beautiful day. “Some awful surfboard incident in his childhood?”

  Tepano laughed. “Not exactly.” His face got serious then. “He was a pretty good surfer, once. Then the Army sent him to Bosnia and his leg got blown off. That prosthetic is state of the art, but he can’t feel a board under him, so he could never surf again. Made him a little bitter.”

  “I guess.” I could only imagine how I’d feel if I couldn’t surf any more.

  “Plus he has this job, security guard for this crazy old guy who owns a stretch of beach. He’s always chasing surfers away.”

  “I’ll keep my distance.”

  “Probably a good idea.” He gave me a shaka, the Hawaiian two-fingered salute, and said, “Hope to see you here again some time.”

  “You probably will.” As I was walking the last bit to my truck, Melody was walking past with another woman, Mary, who was, like Melody, in her late twenties or early thirties, and very fit. Mary’s skin was tanned dark, and her glossy black hair was pulled into a long ponytail.

  Melody asked me, “You going to be around for a while? We could use some strength on our B team.”

  “A few weeks,” I said. “I can’t commit to anything, but I’d like to drop by practice again some time, if that’s okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Mary said, “Gotta go, Mel. See you later,” and kissed Melody on the mouth. It seemed like a pretty intimate gesture to me, and I noticed that Mary wore a yellow gold wedding band. I wondered if they were lesbian partners, but Melody did not wear a band at all.

  As Mary walked away, Melody turned back to me. “What brought you out today?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been surfing the last couple of weeks, saw your poster.” I decided to take a gamble. “I remembered that a surfer I knew recommended you. Jersey guy named Mike Pratt?”

  Melody’s face fell. “I guess you didn’t hear. Mike died about a month or two ago.”

  “No!” I said. “Surfing?”

  “You could say that. He was on his board at Pipeline, and somebody shot him. Dead by the time he washed up on the shore.”

  Tears began forming at the corners of Melody’s eyes. “Gosh, I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours?”

  “Yeah, I guess. He was on our A team for a while. Really strong guy. You probably saw, we’re like a family here. Mike’s death hit us all pretty hard.”

  “They catch the guy who did it?”

  She shook her head. “Not a clue. The police came around, but they didn’t know anything.”

  “I’m surprised anybody would even talk to them,” I said. “Surfers and cops don’t usually get along.”

  “If they’d known the right questions to ask, we might have talked,” Melody said. She looked at me strangely. “Hey, do I recognize you?”

  “Kimo Kanapa’aka,” I said. “Formerly of the Honolulu PD.”

  “Oh, my God, I read about you. That is so totally unfair, what they did to you.” I could see the wheels turning behind her eyes. “Say, maybe you could look into what happened to Mike. I could make some introductions here for you.”

  “I don’t know. The police aren’t exactly eager to hear from me—or my lawyer—these days.”

  “But you could show them. Find out what happened to Mike, prove you should be a detective again.”

  I knew the friends and family of victims were eager to see murderers caught and punished, but I’d never seen this side before, this view that the police were clueless and needed the help of someone outside the force to solve crimes.

  “You think people here know something the police don’t?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Melody said. “You got time for a cup of coffee?”

  Conversations

  Melody and I met a few minutes later at the Kope Bean, a little coffee shop in a strip center on the Kam Highway. A lot of surfers were getting a caffeine fix before hitting the waves, and a bunch of clearly Honolulu-bound business types were doing the same before hitting the H2 down toward the city.

  The place was decorated in a style I can only describe as island Starbucks; the walls were painted with murals of coffee beans, called kope in Hawaiian, growing on bushes on the slopes of what looked like Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. There were two groups of overstuffed arm chairs, and a number of blond wood tables and chairs for the laptop set.

  Melody ordered a tall vanilla soy latte and I got their signature macadamia mocha latte in the longboard size, their largest. We snagged a pair of the comfortable chairs and settled down. She was dressed for work by then, a light yellow linen dress and sandals, a lei of shiny brown kukui nuts and a sports watch her only jewelry. With her tanned skin and her sun-bleached blonde hair, she could have been an advertisement for healthy summer living.

  Mana’o Company was playing low in the background, encouraging us to “Spread a Little Aloha” around the world, and in
one corner of the room a bust of King Kamehameha surveyed us, an electric blue plastic lei around his neck.

  “So how long did you know Mike?” I asked, when we were settled.

  “About three years. He came to the halau right after he got to the North Shore, as part of his strength training.”

  Though most people think halau means a place you can learn to hula, it also means a long house for canoes. “How well did you know him?”

  Melody sipped her latte and considered. “Better than an acquaintance, not as well as a friend,” she said finally. “We talked a lot, and I heard all about his background, but I didn’t see him socially. Of course, you can’t help running into people up here; it really is a small world.”

  “I’ve heard he was a dedicated surfer.”

  “Fierce. It was what he lived to do. Everything else revolved around surfing. How he trained, who he hung out with, how he supported himself.”

  “How did he support himself?”

  She slipped one sandal off and twisted around so that leg was under her, smoothing the edges of the yellow linen dress. “Part of the reason why he came up here was because he met a shaper at some tournament who offered him a job,” Melody said.

  A shaper’s a guy who customizes surfboards by sanding, polishing and shaping standard boards.

  “Mike did the scut work, he called it, for this guy, Palani Anderson. Dragging boards around, cleaning up the mess, that kind of thing. He did that for about year, I guess, and then he started having breathing problems from the Fiberglas fumes so he had to stop.”

  “Bummer.”

  She nodded. “By then, though, Mike was good enough that he was able to start teaching. He worked out of the marina for a while, giving lessons, and then he started landing in the money at tournaments. His career was just taking off when he died.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Melody had to think about that one. The foot that was still wearing a sandal tapped lightly on the floor. “It was just a couple of days before he was shot,” she said finally. “I remember he went down to Mexico for a tournament, and so I didn’t see him for a couple of weeks, but then he was back at the halau. I remember he got into a fight with Rich over something and it really disrupted practice.”

  “Rich is the guy who hates surfers?”

  Melody nodded. “He’s not a bad guy, you know, but he and Mike used to argue about property rights—whether the beaches should be free for everyone, you know, that sort of thing.” She waved her hand a little for emphasis, and I saw she had a small tattoo of a sun on the inside of her right wrist.

  “I heard Rich used to be a surfer himself. I’m surprised that his attitude changed so much.”

  “Well, he’s a security guard for this guy who owns a piece of beach, and he’s always chasing surfers away. I think some friend of Mike’s—maybe his girlfriend—was surfing there and Rich frightened her. So they got into an argument and we had to cancel the practice.”

  “And that was the last time Mike came to the halau?”

  She sipped her latte, thinking. “Yes, because I didn’t hear he’d been killed for a week, and I worried that he’d stopped coming to practice because of the argument.”

  She drained the last of her latte and patted her mouth with a napkin, then stood up and slipped her sandal back on. “I’ve gotta get to work. If you come back to the halau again for practice, I can introduce you to some of the other people who knew Mike.” She pulled a business card out of her purse and handed it to me. Her last name was Isaacson, and she worked for an investment firm in Honolulu.

  “Deal.” I stood up with her, cracking my back. “I got a good workout today.” I wanted to thank her for the information, but since I was playing it that I was helping her out all I could do was smile.

  I left Melody and headed back to Hibiscus House, where I showered and ate my Pop Tarts, thinking about my day. I decided I had to learn more about Mexpipe, which meant I had to find someone who had surfed there. I pulled out the printout I’d made the day before at The Next Wave of the top finishers, and scanned the names, looking for any I recognized.

  Pay dirt. My cousin Ben’s name was there. I made a point of keeping an eye out for him that morning at Pipeline, and when I saw him taking a break I went over to where he was hanging out on the beach with a couple of friends.

  He’s good-looking, in a scrawny, surfer way. There isn’t an ounce of fat on his six-foot something body, and he wears his black hair loose, down to his shoulders. His father was a haole Aunt Pua married in a quickie ceremony in Vegas, who left her life, and our family circle, shortly after Ben was born. So, like me, Ben has just a slight epicanthic fold around his eyes, and his skin takes a tan well.

  “Yo, cuz, how’s it going?” he said as I came up. “You guys know my cousin Kimo?” he said to his friends.

  We nodded all around. “You got a minute?” I asked. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  “Sure.” He and I walked down the beach a little to a refreshment shack, where we both got bottles of water. “Your folks still upset about what happened to you?” Ben asked, as we sat down on benches overlooking the water.

  “Pretty much. I talk to them every night and you know my mother, she’s full of ideas for me.”

  He laughed. “Boy, I know that. You should hear my mother talk.”

  “I never imagine Aunt Pua as the type to tell anybody how to run his life.”

  “That’s because you’re not her son. That laid-back act is for the rest of the world. Not for me. She keeps telling me I could be teaching surfing at a resort and making good money.”

  “My mother keeps telling me things like when the next LSAT test is. ‘You can still go to law school,’ she says. ‘Lots of people go back to school in their thirties.’”

  “Man, those two will never change,” Ben said, shaking his head. “So what’s on your mind, dude?”

  “You went to Mexpipe, didn’t you?”

  “Sure. Did better than I expected, not as good as I hoped.”

  “What’s it like?”

  He took a swig from his water bottle. “Zicatela’s the beach that everybody surfs. Six to fifteen foot ground swells; lots of tubes. Wipeouts can be really bad. There’s this break called the Point, and you can get some long, fast, challenging rides.”

  “How’s Mexpipe itself?”

  “Lots of good surfers show up, and the waves can be awesome.” He shifted around on his bench. “Big party scene, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Toga party, bikini contest—I mean, they try to make it fun.”

  “Lot of drugs down there?”

  He nodded. “I don’t do anything more than pot, and never when I’m in a competition, but you could get anything you wanted there. Just had to walk around the town for a few minutes and somebody would try to sell you something.”

  “I’m trying to track down some people who were there—maybe you knew them. Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora, Ronald Chang.”

  Ben narrowed his eyes at me. It was obvious that he recognized the names and had an idea of why I was interested in them. “I thought you were done being a cop.”

  I shrugged. “Old habits die hard.”

  Ben considered that. “I knew Mike Pratt pretty well,” he said finally. “Interesting guy. Really good surfer—I think he was just about to make a name for himself. He got in with this weird crowd in Mexico, though.”

  “Weird how?”

  “This Christian surfing ministry—they run a café at the main surfing beach down there, and they have Bible study sessions at this place called El Refugio. Now, I’m not against any religion—I figure, you want to believe, man, more power to you.”

  He stopped to take another swig from the water bottle. “But Mike, man, he really took it to heart. Then when we got back, he started bitching about his board not being right. You ask me, it’s his head that wasn’t right.”

  “You ever see him hang out with Lucie or Ronnie
?”

  “A couple times, I saw him with Lucie. But you know, she didn’t really belong there—she wasn’t good enough. I think she was just there for the party. The other guy—Ronnie—I just met him once or twice because he was with other people from the North Shore. He was a total wannabe.”

  He drained the last of his water. “I gotta get back. You gonna be around for a while?”