Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  The news jumped on to the beaching of a killer whale off Lahaina, and I turned the radio off. My brain was still working on Brad’s murder by the time I turned into The Next Wave’s parking lot.

  It was noon by then, and I desperately needed some caffeine. It had already been a long day, and I had a lot of work ahead of me. I got a grande raspberry mocha and laid my laptop out on a wooden table. By the time two hours had passed, I’d assembled all there was to know about Tommy Singer’s surfing career, and there wasn’t much there.

  I’d also done some checking on Brad Jacobson. No one had shut off my access to the police computer system, or perhaps it had been shut off and Sampson had reinstated me. I was able to get into the network remotely and surf a couple of databases. Brad had been arrested once, a misdemeanor charge involving offering a blow job to an undercover agent in Honolulu two years before. He was as fastidious in his financial life as he’d been in his dress; he had a number of credit cards, all up to date, and he was almost finished paying the loan on his Camry. He had a small nest egg in mutual funds.

  Frank, the bartender at the Drainpipe, came over. “You hear about those two guys they found out at Pipeline?”

  “I was there,” I said. “Heard this girl screaming. I was the one who got somebody to call 911.” I paused. “You know either of them?”

  “I think I might have known the one dude,” he said. “Brad. I think I met him once or twice with Lucie.”

  That made sense. “How about the other one, the surfer?”

  Frank shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

  It was the same with everyone I talked to at The Next Wave. I hung around for a couple of hours, striking up conversations with people I recognized from the waves. It was an easy thing to do, and Brad and Tommy were on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Though several people claimed at least a passing acquaintance with Brad, no one seemed to know anything about Tommy.

  That made it certain to me that he wasn’t a serious surfer. The world of the North Shore is a close one, as I’d already discovered, and everybody knew everybody else—or least knew someone who did. Tommy Singer was an outsider, a college kid who made it up on weekends, and hadn’t penetrated the inner circle of rhino chasers—the slang term for those who follow big water wherever they can.

  It was frustrating, though. I knew there had to be a connection, but just couldn’t figure out what it was. Just as I was finishing, KVOL’s five o’clock news began playing from the TV by the cappuccino bar. I stood up as a bunch of other people gathered around to watch.

  My brother’s station, always first with any scandalous news, led with coverage of the murders, as I expected. They began with a pan around the beach, showing surfers out at Pipeline, then focusing in on the hollow in the sand where the bodies had been found. Ruiz and Kawamoto had set up plastic traffic cones around the area, where the bodies had been found, and roped it off with yellow police tape.

  Ralph Kim, the guy who’d interviewed me, had been dispatched up to the North Shore for a stand up. He was all smarmy professionalism, his crisply pressed aloha shirt a poor attempt to seem like a North Shore kind of guy. He repeated what I’d heard on the radio, describing Brad and Tommy and how they’d met.

  “In a bizarre twist to the case,” Kim continued, “police have identified a lover of one of the dead men as former Honolulu police detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, who left the department in disgrace over the revelation of his homosexuality, and who has recently been seen at numerous locations on the North Shore.”

  “Holy Shiite Muslim,” I heard a voice next to me say. “They got you, brah.”

  I turned and saw Dario. He looked tired and drawn, and even the bright red aloha shirt he was wearing didn’t bring up his natural color. Everyone in the area had swiveled around to look at me. So much for keeping a low profile.

  Dario took my arm and hustled me back to his office. “What exactly are you doing up here?” he asked me. “Because you know, you’re not a cop any more, and you can’t go around playing at being one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been asking around about Lucie Zamora, haven’t you?”

  “What if I have?”

  “But why? You didn’t know her. What’s it to you if she’s dead?”

  “I was a cop for six years, Dario. Even if they say I can’t be a cop here anymore, it’s still part of who I am. I guess I just can’t let go of that yet.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to. It’s going to look pretty suspicious if you keep nosing around dead people. Especially if they’re dead people you fucked.”

  He looked at me, an evil sort of grin twitching the edges of his lips. “You are a top, aren’t you? Don’t tell me under that macho man exterior there’s a bottom just eager to spread his juicy hole for any guy who asks.”

  I crossed my arms in front of me and started at him hard. “Are you asking, Dario? Because you could have fucked me that night, at your place. I was drunk enough.”

  Dario stalked around the room to the other side of his desk. “I knew I could get in your pants from the moment I saw you,” he said. “It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me? You didn’t have to get me so drunk I was passed out, and then basically rape me.”

  “If I’d asked you, would you have said yes? Answer me honestly.” He pointed his index finger at me and shook it.

  For what seemed like the twentieth time that day, my heart rate zoomed and I felt flooded with adrenaline. My body was shaking, but not with fear. “Nope. I was scared shitless about being gay. And what you did only made it worse. I went running home, gave up all my dreams of surfing, and signed up for the police academy because I thought there was no way a cop could be gay.”

  I didn’t realize I had so much anger in me towards Dario. I didn’t think much about that night, because the consequences, the way I’d lied to myself and others for so many years, were too painful.

  He pulled something out of one of the drawers, then came around to my side of the desk. “You were a lousy lay.”

  “I was drunk! Passed out!”

  He moved closer to me. I could smell the beer on his breath, and the perspiration mingling with a sharp lemon scent from his cologne. His whole body seemed to be twanging like a plucked guitar string. “Have you gotten any better?” he asked in a low voice, one tinged with sex.

  “You’ll never know.” I moved a little away from him.

  “Oh, yeah?” He came right up next to me again. “You want to show me, don’t you?”

  He was so close I could feel the heat radiating from him. But I was determined not to back down. He grabbed the back of my head and mashed his face against mine. It was so disorienting I closed my eyes, and then all I felt was his tongue forcing its way into my mouth, his crotch grinding against mine. I got hard immediately. So much for swearing off sex.

  I kissed him back. I don’t know why I have so little control over my hormones; maybe it’s all those years of denying them. Or maybe I did want to show Dario something, take back something I felt he’d stolen from me all those years before.

  “You wanted this,” Dario said, through clenched teeth. I heard a ripping noise, and then felt a condom being thrust into my hand. “You want me.” In a quick motion, he’d wriggled around so his back was to me, and he was facing the desk. He unzipped his pants and pulled them down, presenting his bare ass to me.

  Then he reached back for my dick, groping it through my board shorts. “Come on,” he said harshly. “Fuck me. I raped you all those years ago, you said it. Now do the same thing to me.”

  Confronting Dario

  My God. My dick was straining to get out of my shorts, but I knew if I took Dario there, like that, I’d hate myself for it. It was time for me to be a homicide detective again, and a professional one at that. I had promised Sampson, and myself, that I would learn to control these impulses, at least while I was investigating a case.

  I put
my hands down around his chest, leveraged him back up against me. I leaned down and kissed the back of his neck. “I won’t do it like this,” I said into his skin. “Not out of anger. I don’t want to rape you.”

  He squirmed around again, and he was facing me. We kissed again, this time both of us pressing against each other, and I felt his dick, hard as a rock, up against mine. He caught his breath and spasmed for a second, and I knew what had happened. “Was it good for you?” I asked dryly.

  “Sorry.” He smiled sheepishly and backed away from me. There was a big wet spot on my board shorts, but it hadn’t come from the inside. “I guess you aren’t the only one who remembers that night on the beach.”

  I had a funny thought then. Suppose Dario had liked me, all those years ago, instead of trying to drag me out of the closet out of some misplaced anger. What if I’d hurt him almost as badly as he’d hurt me, by abandoning him after that night?

  I didn’t know what to think. All I knew was that I had a case to investigate, and this blast from the past was only going to get in my way. “You’d better get out of those pants,” he said, tossing me a pair of blue board shorts with a surfboard pattern from a pile behind the desk. “I can turn my back if you want.”

  “Don’t bother.” I dropped my shorts. His cum had soaked through to my boxers, too, so I dropped them as well. My erection swung free as I bent down.

  “I can take care of that for you,” he said. He’d cleaned himself up, pulled his pants up.

  “Another time.” I pulled the new board shorts up, carefully tucking myself in, pulling the drawstring tight.

  “You know the press is going to be after you,” he said. “You can’t go back to living at Hibiscus House.”

  “I’m not running back to Waikiki. I came up here to surf, and I’m going to keep on surfing.”

  “I’d invite you to come stay with me, but my living situation is complicated. I’ve got a friend who rents out apartments,” he said. “Let me see if I can get you a place that’s a little more secure than that rat trap where you are.” He looked at me. “Please? Let me do this for you?”

  “That would be great, Dario. I appreciate it.”

  He dialed a number. “Hey, it’s Dario. Listen, I need a favor.”

  As he talked, I realized I knew who it was. Aristotle Papageorgiou, also known as Ari, Brad’s friend, Lucie’s former landlord. It was true, the North Shore was a small world.

  Dario hung up. “It’s cool. He’s going to meet you at this place.” Dario scribbled an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Give me your keys. I’ll get your stuff and bring it over there.”

  I thought for a minute. The only incriminating thing I had was my laptop, with my notes about the murders, and I had that with me. All Dario would find at Hibiscus House was a pile of books, dirty laundry and sports equipment. I dug the key to my room out of my pants pocket, and handed it to him. “Thanks, Dario.” I transferred everything else to the pockets of the new board shorts.

  My erection had finally started to go down as Dario came back around the desk again. “I can’t leave here until I close at nine,” he said. “So you probably won’t see me until ten.” As he passed, he slid his hand under the drawstring and tried to cop a quick feel, but I grabbed his wrist.

  “Uh-uh-uh,” I said.

  Dario smiled and shrugged. “Can’t blame a boy for trying.”

  I struggled, as I left The Next Wave for my truck, to bring my focus back to the case, but I just couldn’t. My brain was still buzzing from Dario’s overture. I gave up the case for a moment and tried to figure out how I felt about Dario as I drove to meet Ari. Did I want to have sex with him? Or was my dick just responding to any old stimulus?

  It was a complicated situation, all tied up with the past as well as my new sexual emancipation. Had I subconsciously wanted to have sex with Dario all those years ago, but kept pushing it below the surface until he finally made the move? He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, and his figure was trim. I knew now that he had a shapely, smooth ass, and an average-sized, uncircumcised dick. He was a passionate kisser, and his body made mine feel good.

  I couldn’t have done it at his office. Even with him pushing his ass up against me, then ripping open the condom wrapper for me. The way the whole situation had played out was like some rape scenario from a porn movie, and I didn’t like that. He’d raped me, all those years ago, because I was powerless to resist, and trying to get me to act out the situation again, in reverse, wasn’t going to make the past go away. And I couldn’t do anything as long as I still had a case to investigate, and as long as there was any indication that The Next Wave, or possibly Dario himself, could be involved.

  I wasn’t opposed to a power struggle as part of a sexual situation. A pair of tongues vying for dominance, a little wrestling, one person taking the lead. All of that was good, it was part of the fun. But there was something weirder about our situation, and I would have to think about it for a while to figure it out.

  The address Dario had given me was up in the hills above Hale’iwa, and dusk had just begun to fall as I left the Kam for a narrow, climbing road. I had to stop before an iron gate and a big sign which welcomed me to Cane Landing. Through the bars I saw a winding street, lined with tall royal palms, and a series of big houses set back from the road in a swale of landscaping. Almost as soon as I arrived, Ari pulled up behind me. He left his car running behind my truck, got out, and walked up to my window.

  “Here’s the opener,” he said, handing me a black remote control. “And here are the keys. It’s the third house on the right, and the code for the alarm is two-five-one-five.”

  “I don’t know that I can afford to stay in some place so fancy.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ari said. “We’ll make an arrangement about the utilities. Most of these places sit empty forty-eight weeks a year. The owners rent them out for a week or two at a time and make enough to cover their costs.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Nice to have money, isn’t it?” he asked. “Anyway, make yourself at home. You should be pretty safe from the press back there.”

  He turned away, but I got out of my truck and called, “Hey, Ari, can I ask you a question?” He turned back to me, framed in his own headlights. “You told me you saw Brad at Sugar’s on Sunday night, before I got there.”

  “Yeah. He was pretty steamed.”

  “How’d he meet that kid—Tommy Singer?”

  The night was quiet but for the low hum of both of our engines, and the chirp of a cricket somewhere behind us. I saw Ari close his eyes, trying to remember. “I was sitting there with Jeremy when Brad came in. He didn’t even stop for a drink first, just came right over to us. He told Jeremy something like, ‘You were right. He really is a sleaze ball.’”

  I felt an emptiness in the pit of my stomach. “That would be me.”

  “Yup.”

  “So Jeremy’s the one who told George and Larry I was at the Drainpipe, and then he told Brad that I’d gone off with them.”

  “Jeremy’s a sad guy.” Ari leaned back against his car. “Don’t blame him too much. He gets off on manipulating people because he doesn’t have much of a life of his own.”

  I shook my head. He’d manipulated Brad right into his grave. “So what happened after that?”

  “Jeremy went up to the bar and got us all a round. When he came back, he told Brad he’d seen a cute guy up at the bar. We all looked around and we saw that boy, Tommy. He was wearing a motorcycle jacket, trying to look tough, but you just had to look in his eyes to see he was scared stiff.”

  I knew that feeling well.

  Ari shifted around. “We talked for a couple of minutes, and Jeremy encouraged Brad to pick the guy up. Not really Brad’s usual type, as you know, but Jeremy kept insisting it would be good for him. That old get-back-on-the-horse routine after you’ve fallen off.”

  “So Brad took his advice?”

  “Brad bought the next round. He chatted the
boy up while he was at the bar, and after he brought Jeremy and me our drinks, he went back up there. Rik came in a little later, said hello to Brad and the boy, then came back to our table. He was telling us a story about something he saw at the park—some couple having sex in a tree, if I remember correctly—and the next time we looked up, Brad was gone. Jeremy and Rik left a little later, and then shortly after that you showed up.”

  He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go. Take care, Kimo.”

  He got into his car, and I pressed the remote to open the gate. I drove in, and the gate closed behind me as Ari made a U-turn and headed back down the road.

  I drove into the third driveway. The house was vaguely Mediterranean in style, white stucco with a sloping tile roof. I picked up my laptop and my cum-stained shorts and boxers and walked up to the front door. The big square key opened it, and I immediately punched the four numbers Ari had given me into the keypad right inside. The system beeped softly and showed a green light.