Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I realized, too, that I had to tell Ruiz and Kawamoto everything I knew about Brad, including the fact that we had slept together, because they were going to find out quickly enough from Brad’s friends, and I didn’t want them to think I was hiding anything from them. “I’d better tell you more about Brad Jacobson,” I said to Ruiz.

  He stepped away from the bodies, motioning me with him. He pulled out a pad and a pen. “He worked at Butterfly, a ladies’ clothing store at the North Shore Marketplace.” I gave him Brad’s address.

  “How well did you know the deceased?”

  “We met up at the shopping center,” I said, being as vague as possible about why I’d be at an exclusive ladies’ boutique. “We got friendly quickly, and he took me to a bar called Sugar’s to meet a couple of his friends. After that we went back to his place.”

  Ruiz made a bunch of notes. “You had an intimate relationship?”

  I nodded. I turned a bit, facing toward the water, because I couldn’t keep Brad’s body in my peripheral vision. I knew soon enough that the coroner would arrive, and I knew only too well what would follow that. Looking at his body kept reminding me that at least in a small way I was responsible for his death, all that had happened and all that would.

  “That was Wednesday night,” I said, “and then I went back to his place again on Thursday night as well. I didn’t see him again until yesterday afternoon.” I took a deep breath. I was sweating and my heart was still racing. “A couple of the friends Brad introduced me to were interested in me, and I ended up spending Saturday night with them. Intimately,” I added. Might as well get all the dirty laundry out there in the air.

  “Somehow Brad found out, and he wasn’t happy about that. His impression of our—relationship—was somehow deeper than mine was.”

  “Mmm hmm.” Ruiz made more notes.

  “My family came up from Honolulu yesterday for a big luau at Waimea Bay Beach Park. Brad found out I was there.”

  Ruiz raised his eyebrows.

  “I think you’ll find Brad’s friends form a pretty effective gossip network,” I said. “Word spreads around quickly.” I felt another emptiness at the bottom of my stomach. Brad’s friends would miss him. And they’d probably blame his death on me. I didn’t like that idea.

  “So he came to your family luau yesterday and what—confronted you?”

  “That’s a good word for it. He let me know that he was angry, and that he wasn’t interested in seeing me again. He left, and that’s the last time I saw him.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  “My family was packing up at that point, so I helped them load up the cars, and then they all left, to head south. I felt bad about Brad, though, so I drove over to his apartment. But his car wasn’t in the parking lot, so I went to the bar where he and his friends usually hung out.”

  “You see him there?”

  I shook my head. “He had already been there and then left. I had a beer and hung out with one of his friends for a while, then I went back to the room where I’m staying and crashed. I slept until just before dawn, when I came out here to surf.”

  “Who was the friend you met at the bar?”

  I gave him Ari’s name. “I have his card back at my room,” I said. “But his company’s called something like North Shore Real Estate or North Shore Investments. It’s probably in the phone book.”

  “He go back to your room with you?” Ruiz asked.

  I shook my head. “Nope. I went home alone. And I didn’t see anybody on my way home, or anybody I knew until I got here this morning.”

  I saw Ruiz write the words “no alibi” on his pad. That wasn’t a surprise; I’d written the same note myself many times. What was a surprise was how bad it made me feel, even though I knew I hadn’t killed him. I wondered if all suspects felt that way. This whole case was giving me a new perspective on how people view the police. “You have a number where we can reach you?”

  I gave him my cell number. “Don’t leave town, all right?” Ruiz asked. “I’m sure we’ll want to talk to you again, once we figure out what’s going on.” He paused. “You know the other guy at all?”

  I shook my head.

  “How about anybody who didn’t like your friend, anybody who might have reason to want to harm him?”

  “He was a nice guy, lots of friends. But I got the feeling he had a tendency to pick up—guys who might not always be nice to him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “When I met Brad, I was looking pretty scruffy. I hadn’t showered or shaved in a while, that kind of thing. From things he said, and things his friends said, that was the kind of guy he often looked to pick up.”

  “And they weren’t all as nice as you underneath?”

  I shrugged. “I guess not. He said something to me right before we went to sleep, that first night.” I struggled to remember how Brad had phrased it. “It was something like, ‘I know you won’t be here in the morning, but at least I know my wallet and my stereo will be.’” Remembering that, in Brad’s voice, thick with sleep, made me want to cry, and I wanted so badly to get away from that beach.

  “We’ll check out his habits,” Ruiz said. “For now, I think it would be best if you left the beach.”

  I was happy to comply. Even if he hadn’t shooed me away, I couldn’t have stayed there any longer, and I certainly couldn’t have gone back in the water as if nothing had happened. I dragged my board back to my truck and headed toward The Next Wave. I need a cup of coffee and an internet connection.

  Even though I wanted to curl up in bed and sleep until it stopped hurting, or pick up a six pack and drink myself into oblivion, I had to let Lieutenant Sampson know what had happened, and about my personal relationship with Brad. I was still a cop and I was still investigating the original three murders, so I would also need him to get me as much information as he could on the dead surfer, who I was willing to bet had been to Mexico recently, or at least had some connection to Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora or Ronald Chang.

  It was going to be a lot more difficult for me to investigate now that the police knew me and knew I had a connection to the case, through Brad. I had to find out how Sampson felt about that. Maybe he would take me off the investigation, let me return to Honolulu and reclaim my badge.

  As I pulled up in front of The Next Wave, I realized I didn’t want that to happen. I already felt connected to the three dead surfers, and wanted to know what had happened to them. And now with Brad, my personal sense of responsibility deepened. I couldn’t give up the case so easily.

  My first email was to Lieutenant Sampson. I filled him in with everything I knew about the latest murders, including my relationship with Brad. I squirmed a little writing it, trying to balance an honest recitation of the facts with my own personal reticence about spreading my sex life around the department. But in this case, it couldn’t be helped.

  I felt bad for Brad Jacobson, who had obviously been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he’d only gone home and waited for me to show up and apologize, he’d be alive, I thought. Or if I hadn’t let him leave the parking lot angry.

  I finished the email and hit send. Then I sent a couple of other messages and did some surfing. Just as I was getting ready to start nosing around The Next Wave, my cell phone rang.

  I recognized the 529 prefix as originating from police headquarters before I answered. “Kanapa’aka.”

  “Sampson. I need to see you ASAP. How soon can you meet me?”

  “I can leave now, and be in Honolulu in a little over an hour,” I said.

  “Traffic is tied up inbound on the Kam,” Sampson said. “You’ll be stuck around Wheeler for at least an hour while they clear it. How about if I meet you half way. Parking lot of the Dole Plantation, 45 minutes.”

  “I’ll be there.” I sat there wondering why things had become so urgent that Sampson had to see me immediately. Was he angry about my relationship with Brad? I hardly knew the man, so I couldn’t say, but I knew he h
ad taken a chance on hiring me when I wasn’t exactly everybody’s favorite cop. Would this give him a reason to change the deal we’d made, and cut me loose?

  An Explosive Situation

  I spun gravel in the parking lot of The Next Wave, heading out to the Kam. All the way south I alternated between guilt over Brad’s death and worry over what Sampson would have to say to me. I made it to the plantation a few minutes before he did, and got out to look at the visitor’s center, a long, hipped-roof building with a vaguely colonial feel to it. A big sign advertised the world’s largest maze, as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. I felt like this case was turning into a maze, and I was stuck somewhere inside it.

  Sampson pulled up in a big silver Lexus. He had a folder in his hand when he got out of the car. “Hot off the press, just for you,” he said, handing it to me. “As much as we have so far on the latest victims.”

  I stood there next to his car and flipped through a measly three pages. They’d gotten a quick ID on the guy with Brad. That was the good news. The bad news was that his name was Thomas Singer, and he was just a kid, twenty years old and a junior at UH. The worse news was that his father was a captain in the traffic division, which meant the pressure from inside the force to solve these murders was going to shoot through the roof.

  We started walking, hoping to stretch both our legs and our cognitive powers. Sampson wore a gold short-sleeve polo shirt with khaki slacks, looking every inch the professional. I wore a pair of hibiscus-patterned board shorts, flip flops, and a t-shirt from the North Shore Cattle Company with an angry-looking black steer on it. No one would have made us for a pair of cops. “Any proof yet that they’re related to the previous three?” I asked.

  “Same caliber weapon was used as on Ronald Chang. We’ll have to wait for ballistics tests to be sure, but my gut tells me they are.”

  The fields around us were laden with pineapple plants, and we walked around an exhibit showing the different varieties of pineapple and where they were grown.

  “Any particular reason?” I asked.

  “Too many coincidences. Pratt and Zamora killed with the same weapon. Zamora and Chang killed on the same day. Then two more surfers killed in the same general area, with the same type of weapon used on Chang. You do the math.”

  “Let me play devil’s advocate,” I said, stopping in front of a display of pineapples from Indonesia. “The first three were all involved somehow with professional surfing. I don’t recognize this kid’s name, so I’m willing to bet he wasn’t professional grade, at least not yet. The first three victims were all killed individually; this one is part of a pair. And by the way, Brad Jacobson wasn’t a surfer.”

  “So the alternative is two different killers, both in the same area, with similar weapons and similar targets. My coincidence meter rings on that.”

  Sampson toed the red ground with his black dress shoe. “Doc Takayama will do the autopsy tomorrow morning,” he said, “and I’ll get you the results as soon as I can. I already sent a detective over to the boy’s dorm room at UH to see what we can find out about him, and I’m talking to the parents myself as soon as I get back to town.”

  “So this is a full-court press.”

  Sampson nodded. “I have a daughter. If anything happened to her, I’d want to see the force do the same for me.”

  I understood. We began to walk back toward the parking lot and our cars. Around us, tourist families were oohing and aahing over the tiny pineapples, the oddly-colored ones, the very idea that their morning juice began in fields like these.

  “I’ll get on line as soon as I get back to Hale’iwa and see if I can find any record of the kid in any surfing competitions, and I’ll keep my ear to the ground and see who’s talking about him.” I hesitated for a minute. “Am I going to be able to talk to the local detectives at all?”

  Sampson shook his head. “If they want to talk to you, tell them what you know about your friend. But don’t make any connections to the other murders, at least not yet. I’ll send you copies of whatever they discover.”

  We stopped in front of his Lexus. “There is one thing I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Unintentionally, you’ve developed a personal connection to this case.”

  Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to call me on the carpet for sleeping with Brad. My heart rate started to accelerate.

  “Each and every member of the force has a personal life, Kimo. I’m not here to tell you how to run yours. And I’m very sympathetic to your situation—I have gay friends, and I’ve watched them go through all kinds of problems, both internally and with the world around them.” He leaned back against the car, crossing his arms in front of his polo shirt.

  My throat was dry and all I could do was nod along.

  “But you’re going to have to find a way to balance your personal life with your investigation. I’m not telling you to become a monk, but I will tell you what I would tell any detective who worked for me, gay or straight. It’s a bad idea to get personally involved with anyone you meet through a case, as long as the case is ongoing. Once a case is cleared, you want to reconnect with someone, that’s fine. But you see where things can go wrong—if Jacobson’s murder turns out to be connected to the first three, as I think it will be, your involvement with him only complicates matters.”

  “I understand,” I said, struggling to get some moisture back in my mouth. “I know I made an error in judgment in starting a relationship with Brad. I guess I justified it at the time because he wasn’t a suspect, just a source of information. But I promise you I will be more careful in the future.”

  I wanted to salute him, but out there in the parking lot, under the relentless sun, surrounded by red-skinned tourists and the hum of harvesting machinery, it didn’t seem right. So I shook his hand instead.

  My heart rate had returned to normal by the time I got back to my truck. I was impressed by how skillfully Sampson had handled the situation—I didn’t feel that I’d been called on the carpet, though clearly he could have expressed a lot more anger with me. And I didn’t feel that I’d been discriminated against because I was gay; I knew straight detectives who had gotten personally involved in cases, in many different ways, and knew that it was a dangerous road to tread.

  If I was going to be gay, I thought, as I waited for traffic to open up a way onto the Kam for me, I was going to have to learn to keep my personal life separate from my job. I needed to practice some restraint; I needed to keep my pants zipped for a while. Not just for my job, but for my own sanity.

  Despite the gentleness of the reprimand, I was pretty shaken up. It had been a tough day so far, probably one of my worst, beginning with seeing Brad’s body on the beach. I won’t say I had fallen in love with him, because I hadn’t; I can’t even call him a friend, because I hadn’t known him for long enough.

  But I had cared about him, and he had cared about me, and he was dead. Knowing that at least part of the responsibility for discovering who had killed him rested upon my shoulders was a heavy burden, and when it was added to the burdens I’d been accumulating and carrying for the past weeks, I started to feel like I was stumbling.

  The only cure to that was to focus again on solving the murders. I knew even more clearly what was at stake: I wanted to find out who had killed the surfers, and who had killed Brad. And I wanted to earn the right to go back to Honolulu and pick up my career again.

  I tuned in to the news radio station to see if there was anything about the bodies. Within minutes I heard, “Police announced the discovery of the nude bodies of two gay men, found on a North Shore beach just after sunrise,” the announcer read. “The two men, who are unidentified pending notification of relatives, are alleged to have met at a gay bar in Hale’iwa called Sugar’s and then retreated to the beach to consummate a sexual relationship.”

  Sugar’s, I thought. I wondered who had seen the two of them there, besides Ari, who had mentioned to me only that Brad had been at Sugar’s and then l
eft before I arrived.

  “Jacobson, manager of an exclusive North Shore ladies’ clothing boutique, is reputed to have frequently picked up strangers for sex. Sources close to the investigation hinted that a former lover may have been jealous of Jacobson’s latest conquest.”

  That nearly caused me to drive off the road. Did Brad have jealous former lovers floating around? He’d never mentioned one, nor had any of his friends.

  Suddenly I realized they might be talking about me. I was, after all, a “former lover” of Brad’s, and though he was the one who had been jealous, people had seen us have an angry break-up at Waimea Bay Beach Park. It’s a strange feeling to hear about yourself on the news, even in a veiled reference, and unfortunately a feeling I was quite familiar with.

  I’d have to find someone who was at Sugar’s the night before to tell me how it had all looked. Given the jungle drum hotline of Brad’s friends, who seemed to know where I was at all times, that shouldn’t be hard. All I had to do was sit back, and one of them would find me soon enough.