Surfing Detective 02 - Wipeout

by Hughes, Chip

  I didn’t really expect to hear from her. She was spinning in Sun’s powerful orbit; who was I to pull her out? Tommy was very likely right. I had been merely an errand boy—and now Mr. Sun was through with me. I wasn’t going to give up, but I did take his message seriously. A shadowy drug lord was often a businessman of many enterprises.

  My job now was to find Summer’s wayward husband before Sun did, if it meant saving her. I wondered if Sun’s men would stop tailing me just because my investigation had been declared over.

  I locked the two dead bolts of my door on my way out, then navigated the incense haze wafting from Madame Zenobia’s shop. Descending the stairs I spotted Leimomi in the back room stringing blue-dyed carnations and perfumy tuberose. Tourist leis. She sat by herself, looking glum, so I rushed on before she could catch my eye. But I didn’t evade Mrs. Fujiyama.

  “Mr. Cooke.” Her courteous smile straightened.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fujiyama. How are you today?”

  “Very good,” said the silver-haired matriarch. “But not so good my lei girl.”

  “Anything wrong?” I acted puzzled, but a sinking feeling told me what my landlady was about to say.

  “Leimomi.” Mrs. Fujiyama’s smile now turned down at the corners.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked the obvious.

  “Maybe you know?” She peered at me over her half glasses. “You her friend, yes?”

  “Yes, I’m her friend . . .” What else could I say? She thinks she’s pregnant and I’m the father? That wouldn’t do. So I settled for, “We’re having dinner tonight. I could ask her then if anything’s wrong.”

  “Leimomi very young.” Mrs. Fujiyama’s eyes darkened.

  “Yes, Leimomi is young,” I conceded.

  “Time for Mr. Cooke to marry?” She held me in her gaze. “Maybe you like have family -- wife and keiki. Single life not so good, you know.”

  “Plenty of time,” I said uncomfortably. “I’m only thirty-four.”

  “Thirty-four,” she echoed. “Old man already. You be surprise’. Time fly. Before you know it—too old for family. Wife want young man. Not dry old man.”

  I was about to say something I’d probably regret, so I let her remark pass and made for the door.

  Later that afternoon I headed for a quick session at Paradise. There was still one hour of light. I intended to use it.

  Offshore of the Halekulani Hotel, Paradise is one of the most remote and least crowded spots in Waikiki, producing a narrow, peaky break that pumps up into crystal-blue curls. Takeoffs are steep and lightning fast. Rides are brief and intense. Though compared to the liquid mountains I had scaled at Waimea Bay, these small swells were tiny anthills.

  But today I had them nearly to myself—one pristine swell after another—since most dedicated surfers were still haunting the North Shore. At the first glimmers of sunset, the sweet strains of an ‘ukulele and the twang of a slack key guitar from the Halekulani echoed across the water. The spendthrift setting sun painted the sky with more gold than all the kings and queens of the world ever owned.

  Out here I felt immeasurably rich. Out here I felt at peace. But back on shore trouble was brewing.

  Friday morning I flew to Maui for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. On the plane in first class sat a pale, white-haired man in dark glasses looking eerily similar to Sun’s albino. I watched him disembark at Kahului Airport, then waited until he had claimed his luggage and hailed a taxi before I picked up my rental car.

  Find Corky first. That’s what ran through my mind as the grey Nissan climbed twisting Baldwin Avenue into the cool upcountry. I glanced again and again in the rear view mirrors. Nothing but winding road.

  Soon the eclectic town of Makawao came into view. Today I bypassed the general store and the New Age book shop, and drove straight to the yellow cottage. It hadn’t changed since yesterday. The overgrown cane field—stray stalks bending forlornly—still climbed the sloping hillside beyond it. I knocked on the screen door.

  “Anyone home?”

  No answer, though the inner door was open and what I saw inside didn’t look right.

  “Hello?” I knocked again and waited.

  No reply.

  The screen door made a chilling squeal when I pulled it open. The cottage was in shambles. Either Corky and his lady friend lived like pigs, or they had been visited by pigs. Papers and magazines were scattered on the floor. A waste basket was overturned. Unwashed dishes filled the sink. On the dining table, breakfast sat uneaten: two bowls of cereal soggy in milk, a glass of orange juice in which floated a drowned fly, and a full cup of coffee. One of the chairs had been turned over on its side; another, pushed back far from the table, tilted rakishly against the sink counter. From the look of this barely touched breakfast, someone had evidently split in a hurry.

  I walked to the one and only bedroom, where a similar disorder prevailed. A double bed with sheets and blankets ripped off revealed a naked mattress stained in suggestive places. Dresser drawers lay open and emptied onto the floor. Bikini panties and jockey shorts were strewn and draped about.

  I peered out a back window. After the mayhem in the cottage, the tidy rows of young salad greens in a vegetable garden struck me as odd.

  “Anybody home?” I said a little louder than before.

  Still no answer.

  I wandered out into the yard and toward the overgrown cane field. And there, at the edge of the property where a split-rail fence separated a shaggy lawn from the field, stood a tall redhead whose hair glowed like copper wire in the morning sun. Her long slender arms were spread wide on the top rail resembling wings. She was gazing straight down at her feet. Her stance almost cut the figure of a crucifix: forlorn, solemn.

  “Hello?” I edged toward her.

  Her head slowly rose and turned in my direction. She had the face of a boy—a handsome, animated, sad boy. Grey-green eyes contrasted her copper hair. Rainbow-colored love beads hung around her neck. She wore faded denim bellbottoms and a scarlet tie-dyed T-shirt that revealed the silhouette of bare breasts.

  “I’m looking for a Charles McDahl.” I moved in for closer inspection. “Have you seen him?”

  Her sad face, up close, was lightly freckled and a little less boyish. Fine, delicate lines around her eyes recalled Skipper’s observation that Corky’s “lady friend” was several years his senior. Maybe she actually was a child of the Sixties.

  “You’re looking for Corky?” she replied in the high, husky tones of an adolescent whose voice is changing. “He’s out there.”

  She pointed to the fallow field. There was a faraway look in her eyes. “They just left. They took him into that field. Except the older man. He stayed in the car.”

  “Frank O. Sun?”

  “I don’t know.” She glanced away. “They kept me in the cottage. I heard a pop. Then they drove off.”

  She turned her distant eyes on me. “I’m Maya, Corky’s wife.” She offered me her fine-boned hand.

  “Kai Cooke. I’m a private investigator.” As my own hand closed over hers, I tried not to look too astonished at her declaration. Corky now had two widows?

  When she began climbing over the split-rail fence, I followed her. She didn’t try to stop me. I noticed she was in fact wearing a band on her ring finger, though dull like brass rather than gleaming like gold. We stepped warily through the uncultivated fields, searching the sod for what seemed inevitable.

  “What did the men want from Corky?” I asked as gently as I could.

  She didn’t answer, just scanned the barren ground. Then she stopped and turned to me. She had begun to cry.

  “They just kept shouting at him,” she said through her tears. “‘Where is it? Where is it?’ . . . Everybody shouting . . .”

  She started to walk away again, her steps now a stagger.

  “Can you remember what the men looked like?” I tried another question, but too late.

  Maya had frozen in place, suddenly silent and pale. I
followed her gaze to the shallow ravine ahead of her.

  Fifteen

  The red earth was stained black with blood. The biggest stain formed a ragged circle the size of a car wheel. Smaller spots dotted a meandering path. It looked as if someone had been shot and then dragged away. He bled profusely, I said only to myself. They must have shot him point blank.

  Maya mechanically followed the trail of blood, heading in the direction of the yellow cottage. Part way there, she bent down to pick up a black rubber zori. It was large and a local brand—“Surfah.”

  “His slipper,” Maya said without emotion. “That’s Corky’s slipper.”

  She then picked up a pair of mirrored sunglasses that even I recognized. In the photo that Summer had given me, hanging around Corky’s neck by thick cords was this same were pair—the expensive kind some surfers wear. Surfers with money.

  I figured the body of Corky McDahl was probably riding in the trunk of a car at this very moment, or his remains had already been dumped in an upcountry field or into the ocean.

  I turned to Maya. “It looks like they took him away,” I said in the most innocuous way I could. “It looks like they removed him from the scene.”

  She didn’t respond but kept walking toward the cottage. I wondered why Sun had left Maya behind alive. She knew of Corky’s dealings with Sun, I would bet, and now she could identify the men who’d taken him, if not Sun himself.

  “Can you think of what they might have wanted from Corky?” I asked her again as I opened the screen door. Maya walked ahead of me, then stopped at the sight of the half-eaten breakfast. She ran her spider-like fingers through her hair and then looked up and studied my face for a long time. She appeared to be weighing my trustworthiness.

  “It would help with the investigation,” I coaxed her gently. “I wouldn’t want you to be next.

  Maya righted the tilted chair and slumped down into it. “Corky worked for a man in California named D–” Maya began hesitantly, “. . . Damon DiCarlo. At first Corky just took care of his BMW, but then DiCarlo said he would give Corky the car if he helped ship it to Honolulu. All Corky had to do was pick it up at the boat dock in Honolulu—and it was his.”

  “After Sun removed the drugs?” I helped her story along.

  “Ice.” Maya nodded. “Forty pounds hidden in the car.”

  “That’s what, a million in street value?”

  “I guess. But Sun never got it. Corky picked up the car at Sand Island and drove off.”

  “Was he crazy?”

  “Corky had it in for DiCarlo, not Sun. He never intended to deliver his car, or the ice, once he found out DiCarlo was sleeping with his wife.”

  “His wife?” I stared. “But you said . . .”

  “Yeah, Corky and I really are married. And he’s still married to her too.” Maya said this with a weird kind of distance. “But her baby’s not Corky’s. It’s DiCarlo’s.”

  “What? Is that what Corky told you?”

  “When Summer got pregnant she wanted Corky to bring home more money, so he agreed to ship DiCarlo’s car.”

  “And DiCarlo is a supplier for Frank O. Sun.”

  “Yeah, he brings drugs from Mexico into California and then ships them to Hawai‘i. Corky hid the ice, sold the car, and faked his wipeout at Waimea Bay,” Maya said matter of factly. “We hid out on the North Shore for a while, then on Lana‘i, now here.”

  “Where is the ice?”

  “On O‘hau. Corky didn’t tell me where exactly—to protect me.”

  “Or it was to protect him?” I said. “I’m sure you’ve thought of this, but what makes you think he wasn’t going to skip out on you too?”

  Maya seemed unfazed. “Then why would he tell me about the map he drew to the very spot?”

  “There’s a map?” Her story was getting loonier by the minute.

  “On Lana‘i.”

  I figured she was either setting me up for a really wild goose chase, or this was the key to the whole thing. “Then I guess we better get ourselves over to Lana‘i and find that map before Sun does.” My premonition had come true.

  “Go to Lana‘i? Now?” Maya’s freckled brow furrowed. “Give me a minute.” She disappeared into her bedroom.

  I considered phoning the Maui police, but decided against it. We couldn’t afford the time for police reports and the interrogations that always follow a murder. Maya herself, as Corky’s girlfriend—or “wife” as she put it—would be a crucial witness to his death, if not a suspect. And without her, even the tiny island of Lana‘i would seem like a huge place to hunt for one solitary map.

  A few minutes later Maya emerged with an overnight bag slung over her shoulder. Her sad face now showed an eerily vacant smile. Her hippie look had been replaced by Hawaiian chic: a hibiscus print sundress in blood red that echoed her fiery hair. The neckline was cut tantalizingly low, and she hadn’t bothered to wear a bra. It was easy to see how Corky might have been drawn in by Maya’s seemingly unconscious sexuality. She had a gypsy, footloose quality about her that seemed to lure one on an exotic journey.

  But even though she lived up to everybody’s intoxicating description, her empty smile so soon after the murder of her boyfriend—I wasn’t buying “husband”—made me leery of her. What is this woman made of? Was Maya simply trying to make the best of a traumatic event? Or was she traumatized herself— her face a plaster mask reflecting the numbness that covers pain?

  Maya slipped into the front seat of my rental car and we pulled away. With her sitting so close to me in that splashy red dress, it was a chore keeping the Nissan on Maui’s twisting upcountry roads. But I did. All the way back to Kabuli Airport.

  Sixteen

  By mid-morning we were airborne to Lana‘i. Cotton candy clouds floated lazily above the pitched roof of Lana‘ihale, the three thousand foot volcano reigning majestically over the “Pineapple Isle.” Maya held onto her seat and her vacant smile as the Twin Otter shuddered through the clouds, then swept over Lana‘i’s towering sea cliffs to a tiny asphalt strip.

  Dwarf kiawe dotted the plains beneath us where pineapple once grew, the kiawe’s ashen, salt-bitten stalks rolling endlessly up to the horizon. Atop a distant slope, Norfolk pines marked off Lana‘i City and the grand sprawling Lodge at Koele.

  The Twin Otter bounced twice on the slender strip before settling into an even roll. At the cozy little airport on the Pineapple Isle you can’t hire a rental car; you must catch a shuttle bus upslope to Lana‘i City. We hopped off the Otter and onto the bus. The shuttle climbed the slanting plateau toward those statuesque Norfolk pines, providing sweeping views of the small island.

  Given my hurry to find that map, I was glad of these visual reminders that the teardrop-shaped island of Lana‘i stretches only about eighteen miles by a dozen. The austere, bone-grey landscape brought to mind Hawaiian legend portraying this as a forlorn, desolate place haunted by the spirits of buried ali‘i and, therefore, uninhabitable by mortal beings. Although since the 1990s two elegant resorts—the Manele Bay and the Lodge at Koele—have combined to employ more workers than did the nation’s largest pineapple plantation here. Away from the resorts’ lush golf courses and posh accommodations, this island still appeared more likely to be haunted by spirits than by high-end tourists.

  The shuttle climbed slowly toward Lana‘i City—too slowly for me. We didn’t have endless time. Sun would soon enough figure out, if he hadn’t already, that I had with me the only person other than Corky McDahl who could lead him to his stash. Maya wasn’t saying much about the missing ice, or her departed lover, though she spoke freely enough about herself through that eerie smile that hadn’t left her face since we left Maui.

  Maya was forty-six. She told me this with pride, since she apparently knew she looked ten years younger. A military kid, born “Mary Leavis” to an artillery captain and a nightclub dancer in Texas, she grew up in the Sixties bouncing from base to base. She later married and divorced twice, then changed her name to “Maya Liveng
ood” when she became a free spirit in Hawai‘i drifting from island to island. Since then she had occupied herself swimming and diving and haunting the beaches of Hawai‘i’s famous breaks—and hooking up with guys like Corky who surfed them. To hear her tell it, she relished her “mellow” footloose lifestyle.

  “I’m into astrology,” Maya announced, with an artful flutter of her long eyelashes. “That’s how I knew Corky and I were right for each other. We were both water signs. He was a Pisces—a fish. And I’m a Cancer—a crab. His wife was all wrong for him. She’s an earth sign—Virgo the virgin—too distant and proper for a fluid, free-wheeling Pisces.” She looked at me intently. “What’s your sign, Kai?”

  “No signs for me, thanks. Whatever my horoscope says, I’m sure I don’t want to know.”

  “You’re bull-headed.” Maya shook her long hair. “What are you, a Taurus?”

  “You missed my point, entirely.”

  She got quiet again. But that ghost of a smile didn’t leave her face.

  The shuttle bus crested the rise into Lana‘i City—sixteen hundred feet above sea level—where the pines pointed into the sky like giant green arrows. The stately evergreens lent the plantation town an air of mountain serenity and coolness. Surrounded by these soaring Norfolks, grassy Dole Park lay at center of the village. A bank, a general store, a few diners, and other small businesses sat on the park’s perimeter with rustic sun-faded facades suggesting an earlier era. The village’s nearly deserted streets reinforced the sense of desolation that had set in at the airport.

  We stepped off the shuttle by the Kelly green Lana‘i Plantation Store, whose red tin roof covered gas pumps, a small convenience store, and the island’s only car rental agency.

  “It’s time you told me,” I said, opening the store’s door. “Where’s the map hidden?“

  Maya didn’t hesitate. “On Shipwreck Beach.”

  “Shipwreck Beach? That’s eight miles of sand and junk.”