Right from the Gecko

by Cynthia Baxter

  She stopped, pretending the reason was to sip her iced tea. Before speaking again, she cleared her throat. “By the way,” she asked, “did you ever get in touch with Holly?”

  “Yes, thanks to you,” I said. “I used that number you gave me. We had lunch in Lahaina a few days ago.” I hesitated before adding, “You were right. There were definitely some issues between her and Marnie. I’m not sure I understand all of it.” Thinking out loud, I added, “Maybe I should call her again to see if I can find out anything more.”

  “You’d better hurry,” Karen advised. “She’s leaving the island.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “That’s right. She stopped by the Dispatch office yesterday afternoon to say good-bye.”

  “But I just talked to her a few days ago,” I said, still in shock. “She didn’t say a word about it.”

  “I had no idea either. Not until she came in to say good-bye to Peggy and me.”

  “Not Mr. Carrera?” I asked, surprised.

  Karen grimaced. “They’re not exactly on the best terms. I don’t think he ever forgave her for quitting so abruptly and leaving him in the lurch.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t realize there was tension between Holly and Mr. Carrera.”

  “Sure. When Holly quit, she hardly gave any notice at all. If I remember correctly, she announced on a Thursday that she was leaving and that the next day would be her last. Mr. C was in such a panic to find a replacement that he started going through all the résumés he had on file. We get a lot of them, since it seems just about everybody in the universe wants to live on Maui. Anyway, Bryce Bolt was the first person he contacted who said he could start the following Monday. He hired him sight unseen.”

  So that’s how he landed another reporting gig, I thought, despite the scandal that drove him away from his previous job. But I decided not to mention anything about Bryce’s past.

  “Do you know where Holly’s going?” I asked.

  “Back to the mainland,” Karen replied. “Florida. That’s where she’s originally from. But I believe she’s flying out this weekend, so if you want to talk to her, you’d better not wait. If you’d like, I can give you her home address.”

  “Had she been planning this for a long time?” I persisted. “Do you know if she has another job there or her family wants her to come home…?”

  Karen shrugged. “As far as I know, it’s something she just decided on the spur of the moment. Yesterday was certainly the first time I’d heard anything about it.”

  I hadn’t intended to contact Holly again. But the fact that she’d suddenly decided to take off made me anxious to talk to her one last time.

  Especially since I couldn’t help thinking that her decision to leave Maui less than one week after Marnie had been murdered was more than a coincidence.

  Chapter 16

  “A dog is a man’s best friend. A cat is a cat’s best friend.”

  —Robert J. Vogel

  Like Marnie, Holly Gruen lived in an apartment. But her complex looked considerably older than Marnie’s, with its shabby white stucco buildings and its dense growth of bushes in desperate need of trimming.

  According to the mailboxes, the Gruen residence was located on the third floor. I tromped up two flights of open-air steps, which were covered in terra-cotta tile. When I reached the landing, I was surprised to see that the door of Apartment 3B was wide open.

  “Holly?” I called softly. “Anybody home?”

  I peered inside, scanning the empty bookshelves, the cleaned-out kitchen cabinets with their doors wide open, and, through an open door, a bed stripped down to the mattress. Two giant wheeled suitcases lay on the floor, packed so densely that zipping them up promised to be a real challenge. The three cardboard cartons that sat on the kitchen counter were just as full. Two of them were crammed with dishes, pots, and other housewares, while the third one was stuffed with file folders, envelopes, and papers.

  “Holly?” I called again, this time more forcefully.

  She appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. Even though it was warm, she was wearing jeans, a baggy black T-shirt, and scruffy sandals. Her dark-brown hair was tucked behind her ears but stuck out haphazardly in a few spots.

  “Jessie?” she asked, looking surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  Ignoring her question, I said, “Karen Nelson told me you were moving this weekend. I can see you’re already halfway out the door.”

  “My plane leaves in…” She glanced at her wristwatch, an oversize model with a clunky stainless-steel band. “Four hours and twenty minutes. So if I’m going to make it, I’ve really got to get busy.”

  I glanced around. From the looks of things, she’d already packed away every possible sign that she’d ever inhabited the compact apartment in the first place.

  “I understand you’re going back to Florida.”

  “Yup.” She gave a careless little shrug, meanwhile pushing her black-framed eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose. “I’ve had enough of paradise. In fact, I don’t know why I didn’t leave months ago.”

  “Holly, did your decision to leave Maui have anything to do with what happened to Marnie?” I asked gently.

  “Why, do you think I’m next?” she returned sharply.

  Her words surprised me. “No,” I insisted. And then, doing some fast thinking, I added, “Do you?”

  She stared at me for a long time, her eyes burning into mine. At first I thought she was angry. Then I realized she was thinking. Thinking hard.

  I stepped toward her slowly, approaching her as if she was a frightened animal. “Holly,” I said in a soft voice, “I think it’s time for you to tell me what you know.”

  Her eyes immediately shifted to the box of papers sitting on the counter, a reaction that verified what I’d suspected almost from the beginning.

  “It’s all about the work you and Marnie were doing at the Dispatch, isn’t it?” I said. “The fact that you found something. Both of you, working together.”

  “What did she tell you?” she demanded, her voice shrill.

  I decided to take a stab at it. “She told me all about FloraTech,” I said simply, hoping she’d fill in the blanks.

  Holly’s reaction told me I’d struck gold.

  “She was such a fool,” she mumbled, shaking her head hard. “I tried to get her to listen. But Marnie was so ridiculously headstrong. She thought she knew it all.” Laughing coldly, she added, “Or else she was so naive she never believed they’d make good on their threats.”

  Her words struck me with the force of a physical blow. I walked over to the couch, a red plaid upholstered monstrosity that looked as if it belonged in Hawaii about as much as an igloo. I sat down, my way of communicating that I wasn’t going to leave until I got the whole story.

  “Tell me everything, Holly,” I said in a low, urgent tone. “I want to hear your version of what happened.”

  “Oh, boy.” Rubbing her forehead, she sank onto the couch beside me. “I knew from the start that those people from FloraTech were ruthless,” she said in a dull voice. “I could tell they meant business. They’d been watching us, so they knew from the beginning what we were doing.”

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  “What reporters do,” Holly replied. “Talking to people, working our butts off to find out the truth….”

  She let out a deep sigh before continuing. “It was Marnie who figured it all out. Of course, she was the one who’d been suspicious right from the get-go.” With a strange little laugh, she added, “This was one time when what we were all in the habit of thinking of as her paranoia turned out to be a real nose for news.

  “And at first it was great, working on the story with Marnie. We felt so cool. I mean, here we were, barely out of college, and we were uncovering the hottest story of the decade. It was fun. At least, until they realized what we were doing. They found out we were talking to some of their employees, and they weren’t happy about it. That
was when they approached each of us—Marnie and me—and offered to pay us to keep quiet about what was going on. A lot of money too. More than either of us was making working for the Dispatch. The deal was that as long as we agreed not to go public with what we knew, they’d keep paying us hush money.”

  She looked at me with dull eyes. “That’s why I left. It wasn’t a deal I could live with. But Marnie kept on going. Not only did she refuse to believe they were serious; she pushed even harder, determined to follow it through to the end.”

  “But what was it that FloraTech was so anxious to keep under wraps?” I asked.

  Lowering her eyes, Holly muttered a single word: “Cocaine.”

  “What did you say?” I demanded, my voice a hoarse whisper. Just hearing the word sent a chill more powerful than a blast of the strongest air-conditioning on the island through my entire body.

  “Cocaine,” she repeated. “Snow, C, blow, flake, whatever they’re calling it these days. Coca plants are being grown here on Maui, right under our noses.”

  I was still having trouble taking all this in. “And no one’s noticed?” I asked. “Not the police, not the DEA, not even the nosy neighbors next door to wherever they’re growing it?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Holly replied, her eyes boring into mine. “It doesn’t look like coca.”

  Whatever she was trying to say didn’t make sense. “Tell me what you know,” I insisted.

  Holly took a deep breath. “There’s this new plant FloraTech developed, a crazy hybrid. It looks like an ordinary hibiscus. As far as anybody can tell, the fields that are covered with it look like regular hibiscus fields. But by using genetic engineering, they’ve invented a hibiscus that produces cocaine.”

  “How?”

  “I’m no scientist, so I don’t understand all the technicalities,” she continued in a low voice. “But somehow they take the genes from the coca plants and stick them into a hibiscus. The DNA gets mixed up so they end up with a flower that looks like a regular hibiscus—except it has the same chemical the coca plants make on their leaves. That’s the stuff they process and turn into cocaine. Here, I’ve got the name written down in my notes.”

  She strode over to the box on the kitchen counter and shuffled through the file folder until she located the piece of paper she’d been searching for. She handed it to me.

  Written on a sheet of paper in a handwriting I now recognized as Marnie’s was a single word: benzoylmethylecgonine.

  I knew enough chemistry from my four years of college plus another four in veterinary school to recognize it. She was absolutely right. This was, indeed, the chemical compound that most people knew as cocaine.

  If what Holly was telling me was really true, I thought, my mind racing, if this cocaine-producing hybrid had actually been genetically engineered and was growing right here on Maui, then the two reporters were on the verge of uncovering one of the biggest stories to come out of Hawaii since the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

  It also explained why Nick couldn’t find any information on FloraTech, I realized. It wasn’t a legitimate company at all. It was a front for an illegal drug-producing scheme—not some innovative biotech firm using the science of botany to advance medical science.

  “Holly, how did Marnie figure all this out?” I asked.

  “A secret source,” she replied. “Some guy who worked for FloraTech started getting nervous about working for such a sleazy operation. In fact, he’s the one who approached her, not long after FloraTech arrived on the island. Seems he was having second thoughts about being involved in what they were doing, even though the money they were paying him was phenomenal. She wasn’t sure whether or not he was being straight with her, but she taped their conversations on this little tape recorder she had. After she did some nosing around and verified what he was telling her, she planned to use those tapes as proof. Not only for the newspaper articles she intended to write, but also for the cops.”

  I could practically hear a snapping sound as one more piece of the puzzle fit into place.

  The audiocassette. The faulty tape, the one she had left behind in my hotel room—the one that somebody else wanted badly enough to break in.

  “Who was the person who offered you this…this deal, Holly?” I asked. “Who told you FloraTech would pay you hush money to keep the truth under wraps?”

  “I didn’t know the first guy, and I never saw him again,” she replied. “I think he was somebody from FloraTech. A guy in a suit. He never told me his name.

  “But he wasn’t the only one,” she continued. “Someone from the governor’s office came to my house.”

  “The governor’s office!” I cried. “Who?”

  She looked surprised. “It’s nobody you’d know. He’s just an aide. I mean, it’s not as if he’s in the public eye or anything.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “John Irwin.”

  I gasped. “What did he say?”

  “That if the truth about FloraTech ever got out, the governor’s political career would be ruined. He said it was his job to make sure that didn’t happen.”

  I thought about the photographs Nick had found in Marnie’s folder, the ones of Governor Wickham with Norman Eldridge, FloraTech’s founder. He had described them as the type of photos he took when he was a private investigator. The two men outside a motel room, shaking hands. Dining in a restaurant, alone.

  And walking through a hibiscus farm.

  Is it possible even the governor is in on this? I wondered, a sick feeling suddenly descending over me. Could the story that Marnie was about to expose be that big?

  My head buzzed as I tried to think of who else might be involved.

  “What about Bryce Bolt, the reporter who replaced you?” I demanded. “Do you think he’s taking money from FloraTech?” By that point, my brain felt as if it was on fire. As the magnitude of what Holly told me really started to sink in, I was beginning to understand the possible ramifications. Not only in terms of what was happening right here on this idyllic island, but also in terms of Marnie’s murder. “And what about Richard Carrera? How does he fit into all this?”

  “Look, what goes on with Bryce and Mr. Carrera is really none of my business.” Within seconds, Holly’s entire demeanor had changed. She was suddenly so closed off it was as if someone had slammed a door shut. “If I’m going to catch my plane, I have to get moving. And believe me, I really want to catch that plane. The truth is, I can’t wait to get out of here.”

  She jumped up off the couch and crouched down in front of one of the overstuffed suitcases, pretending she was absorbed in rearranging the contents so she could eventually zip it shut.

  “Holly,” I persisted, “you have to finish this story. Aside from Marnie, you’re the person who was the most involved. The person who was closest to her and what she was doing. You must have some idea of who killed her.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she mumbled. But from the way she kept her eyes down, refusing to meet mine, I knew she was lying.

  “Holly, please,” I begged. “You’re getting on a plane in a few hours. You’re about to leave all this behind. But there are so many other people who won’t be able to come to grips with what happened to Marnie until they know the truth. The whole truth. Surely you must have your suspicions.”

  She stopped moving. Instead, she simply stared at the bunched-up sweater she clasped in both hands. I held my breath, waiting for what seemed like an eternity.

  My heart was racing when she finally looked up at me.

  “You want answers?” she asked with a cold smile. “Go ask Alice.”

  As I drove away, I realized I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my hands ached. It was an indication of just how frustrated I was over Holly’s unwillingness to tell me the whole story.

  She’d shooed me out right after she made her enigmatic comment, insisting she had nothing more to say and that she had too much to do to spare any more time. Yet I finall
y knew the truth about FloraTech. And what she’d told me about Marnie’s involvement made me determined to follow through on the one clue she’d been willing to give me concerning her murder.

  In a way, I wasn’t all that surprised that my search was bringing me back to Alice. I kept thinking about that earring I’d spotted on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink. I even wondered if Holly had known about it and if that was why she’d pointed me in her direction.

  Alice Feeley’s neighborhood seemed eerily quiet as I pulled up in front of her bungalow in my Jeep. In the fading daylight, her tiny house looked even more garish than the last time I’d been here. The turquoise exterior seemed almost luminescent, and the bold pinks and purples and yellows of her handiwork, the giant flowers and the rainbow that curved over the front door, popped out like the brightly painted decorations on a day care center.

  Going there in the daytime also gave me a chance to get a good look at her entire property. I was surprised at how far behind the house her land stretched.

  No wonder FloraTech wanted it, I thought grimly. The fertile soil that Alice used to grow vegetables would undoubtedly be ideal for growing the company’s genetically engineered hibiscus.

  There were no signs of life coming from her house. As I walked purposefully toward the front door, I heard nothing but the occasional chirp of a bird and the soft rustling of the bushes on the front lawn. In fact, I wondered if I’d even find her at home.

  But as I grew closer, I heard music drifting through the open windows, James Taylor crooning about fire and rain. I didn’t see a doorbell, so I knocked on the door loudly.

  As soon as I did, Facetious began barking from inside the house. Alice opened the door seconds later, clasping the black Lab’s collar in an only partially successful attempt at restraining her. She was dressed in a long batik dress splashed with the deep greens and blues of the sea. It looked like the type of garment Betty would wear, except that on Alice, it seemed to hang slightly off center. Her dark red hair with its silver glints was pinned haphazardly around her head, with loose strands falling around her face and neck.