Paradise Crime Mysteries

by Toby Neal

“Familiar like you’ve seen him around town, or familiar like you saw him that day?” Pono asked.

  “I’m not sure. He was far away. I only got an impression, you know?” Sharkey looked up, frowning. “But I feel like I recognize both of these guys.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” Lei said, giving one more pat on the Rottweiler’s head as she stood. “I’ll give you a call about Conan. He might be good company for my old girl. She’s been in a funk lately. How’s he with kids?” She thought of Kiet’s relentless pursuit of Keiki around the little cottage.

  “No problem. The people in the big house have a toddler. I’ve actually let the kid ride Conan and he was fine with it. He’s a great dog, but I’m gone most of the day and this house is too small for him and there’s no fenced yard here. I should have thought of all that when my friend dropped him off, but I didn’t want to see him go to the Humane Society.”

  Lei left Sharkey her card and they got back on the road. “Need to stop by a drugstore and pick up a pregnancy test,” Lei said.

  Pono widened his eyes. “Already?”

  She snorted, even as she felt her belly hollow with loss. “Not me. What, you lolo? No, we need Pippa to take it.”

  “You just gonna bring it to her and ask her to go pee on the stick? Not sure that’s legal.”

  “Well, it’s worth a try,” Lei said. “You got a better idea? That pregnancy, or lack of it, speaks to motive, too, and Shayla says Pippa’s lying.”

  Pono shook his head but pulled into Long’s Drugs, and Lei jumped out. “Sure you don’t want to buy it instead?” she teased Pono.

  “No, thanks. Got a cousin who works there. That’s how rumors get started,” her partner said.

  A few minutes later, they were back on the road, this time for Ipo Gomez’s house. This turned out to be an apartment in a run-down building on the outskirts of Paia. It was late evening by then, the sunlight slanting long across the weedy, dandelion-choked lawn near the building. Ipo’s apartment on the second floor had a peeling rubber welcome mat in front of the door, piled with pairs of cheap rubber slippers.

  Lei knocked, and it wasn’t long before the young man was shooing his roommates out so he could study the photos. “Who did Sharkey identify?” he asked.

  “We can’t discuss that. I’m sure you understand,” Lei said.

  “Yeah. I get it.” Ipo, who himself could have passed for that all-too-generic sketch, rubbed a round dark soul patch of beard on his chin. “Well, I recognize this guy. Bryan Oulaki. He’s a pro. But I couldn’t say for sure if I recognize him because he was the guy in the water or from the pro circuit.” He paused again, this time over Tadeo’s picture. “He looks familiar, too.”

  “Tell us more about that day.” Lei tried to get Ipo to narrow it down by taking him through the story again.

  This time the young man said, “I think it could be that I recognize Oulaki because he’s a pro and I watch all the pro surfers. But I’m pretty sure I don’t know this guy, and I think I know him.” He tapped Tadeo’s photo. “And, come to think of it, this guy, too.” He tapped the photo of another man of roughly the same height and weight, with dark skin and eyes, a man Lei knew was locked up at Halawa for armed robbery.

  “Well, thanks. We may be back,” Lei said.

  Pono frowned as he pulled them onto the highway. “I don’t like it that they both put Tadeo back in the lineup.”

  “Yeah. It’s not good, but it opens interesting possibilities,” Lei said. “Let’s hope Pippa is in a mood to cooperate.”

  The man who opened the door of a large, well-maintained house on the Pukalani Golf Course halfway up Haleakala had a hint of blond hair on his shiny, reddened pate and the vivid blue eyes his daughter shared. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sergeant Texeira and Detective Kaihale. We’re here to speak to Pippa?” Lei held up her ID. “She’s expecting us.”

  “Okay.” The man opened the door reluctantly. “I’m Kellogg Thomas. I hope you’re getting closer to nailing whoever that bastard is who killed Makoa Simmons. Fine young man.”

  “We’re running down every lead, which is why we need your daughter’s help,” Lei said. She could feel Pono, a looming presence at her elbow. “Did you know of anyone who had negative intentions toward him?”

  “No. He was a great guy.”

  Pippa appeared at the door. “Oh, Daddy. I hope you weren’t bending their ears with your theories.”

  “She asked me fair and square. And I didn’t have a chance to tell them anything.”

  “What were you going to tell us?”

  “That I think that kid’s sponsor had him killed. For the insurance money. Torque was doing badly the last few years. I have stock in them, and I’ve been watching it carefully. It’s not doing well.”

  “Anyone specific at Torque you have in mind?” Lei cocked her head and dimpled a little to show she liked him and was ready to listen to his theory and take it seriously. “We were aware of the life insurance policy on him, but were given to understand it wasn’t unusual for a professional athlete to have something like that as part of his contract. Especially in a dangerous sport like surfing.”

  “Well,” Kellogg huffed. “No. But it bears looking into.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Now can we speak to Pippa privately?”

  He left with a harder-than-necessary slam of the door.

  Lei reached into her purse and took out the pregnancy test in a small, brown paper-wrapped bag. “Will you please go to the restroom and take this test?”

  Pippa recoiled, looking around wildly. “My parents don’t know!”

  “And we don’t need to tell them. But we do need to know if you really are pregnant. It’s important,” Lei said gently. “There are those saying you are faking this. For sympathy. Or some other reason.”

  Pippa straightened her spine. “Shayla. That bitch. Well, I took one of these last week and it was positive. So no skin off my nose to do it again. It would be a relief if it wasn’t accurate, but I’ve been having other symptoms, too.”

  Pono rubbed his nose, uncomfortable. “I’ll be out in the truck.”

  Lei followed Pippa to the bathroom, and the girl frowned at her. “Aren’t you going to wait outside?”

  “I’m sorry, but this test may be evidence. We have a care, custody, and control protocol. I have to verify that it’s really your urine that goes on that stick,” Lei said as gently as she could. “And while we’re talking, I’m so sorry about how things went with Shayla. It was necessary that we saw her reaction to the news.”

  “Whatever. There was no way she was going to react any way but badly when she heard the news,” Pippa said, stepping inside and leaving the door ajar for Lei to follow. Lei shut the bathroom door, and Pippa unwrapped the pregnancy test. Lei’s stomach clenched as she remembered finding out her own results with Baby, how joyful and excited she and Stevens had been.

  She turned her back to give Pippa privacy as the young woman did her business on the stick. Pippa set the pregnancy test wand on the brown paper sacking, wiped, and washed her hands. She flushed the toilet.

  “Satisfied?” Pippa’s puffy eyes were narrowed angrily.

  “I’m sorry. This makes me as uncomfortable as you are,” Lei said softly. “Ready to find out?”

  “I guess.” Pippa pulled apart the two sides of the wand. The little while chemical strip was blue.

  “You’re pregnant,” Lei whispered. “Congratulations.” She stood stoically as Pippa turned to embrace her, bursting into tears.

  Lei took the test and slid it into an evidence bag. She sealed and labeled it and exited the bathroom, followed by the weeping girl.

  Kellogg and his wife came out of their bedroom.

  “What’s the matter, Pippa?” her father demanded. Pippa just cried harder.

  “Do you want me to stay? Talk to your parents?” Lei asked the distraught young woman.

  Pippa shook her head. “No.”

  Pippa’s mother embraced her. “Come, sit
, honey. Talk to us. Tell us what’s wrong.”

  “I’ll let you be alone with your family,” Lei said, and left the sobbing girl with her parents. Out at the truck, she gave a single nod, holding the evidence bag. “Take me back to my truck. I need to get home. I’ve had enough for the day.”

  They drove in silence.

  “Do you think those two sets of parents are going to be able to work out being grandparents of that baby?” Pono asked.

  “Funny you should ask that. I was just thinking of Pippa’s father and Makoa’s father in a shouting match over who gets to babysit,” Lei said. “They’re both such bulldog types. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.”

  Lei had fallen into something of an exhausted trance, staring out the window as Pono drove, when the radio crackled into life. “Units respond. Ten fifty-six found in Kanaha Canal.”

  Lei lifted her head to look at Pono. “A body in Kanaha Canal? Where’s that?”

  “It’s a slimy rain runoff channel out by the Cash and Carry,” Pono said. “We’re only a few blocks away. Up for a floater?”

  “No,” Lei said, but Pono turned on his cop light, placed it on the dash, and put his foot down on the gas.

  A few minutes later they pulled up in the grocery store’s parking lot, where a waving spectator drew their attention. Lei braced herself mentally as she approached the lip of the canal.

  A blonde-haired woman was floating facedown in the shallow canal with its steep cement sides. She was wearing a familiar blue tunic top, beginning to swell with gases trapped in the floating body. Lei gasped as she took in the long body in narrow jeans, all of the clothing swollen tight. The sweetish smell of decomp, not too strong now but bound to become overpowering soon, wafted in Lei’s direction.

  “Oh my God. I think this is Stevens’s mother,” she said. “She’s been missing.”

  “I’ll radio Stevens. You shouldn’t have to tell him,” Pono said, and hooked his radio off his belt.

  A few minutes later Pono came back. “He called in to work today. Not answering his radio.”

  Lei thought of his trip to find his mother last night. He’d been unable to find her, and now this. She took out her cell and speed-dialed him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lei was watching for her husband and saw Stevens’s Bronco arrive right behind the medical examiner and his van. Fujimoto, a good detective who’d been hastily assigned now that she and Pono couldn’t investigate the case due to possible conflict of interest, was working with the responding patrol officers and firefighters to hook the body and drag it closer to the cement embankment for retrieval. It was a clumsy business, and she’d hoped it would be completed before he arrived.

  She hurried to the Bronco and he opened the door, almost falling into her arms.

  “Lei,” he breathed into her hair, holding on too tightly. Fine trembling, as from a fever, shook his tall frame, and she could smell alcohol on his skin and hair. “It’s her?” He hadn’t yet looked toward the figure in the shallow, filthy water with its gasoline sheen.

  “I don’t know. But I recognized the shirt and the hair. I had to call you.”

  Stevens raised his head, let go of her, and walked deliberately forward to the edge of the cement lip. Lei followed and took hold of one of his cold hands.

  The body had reached the nearest side-sloping cement embankment, but it was too far down to drag up with the big boat hook they’d used to bring it to the edge. Fujimoto, leaning down to try to haul the body higher, slid down the cement with a cry and landed in the water with a splash.

  The retrieval effort took on a darkly comic aspect as the firefighters that were part of the first response threw Fujimoto a line. Standing waist-deep in the greenish water, he tied the line around the body’s waist and the firefighters hauled it up the side. Lei glanced at her husband. Stevens’s face was white, with pinched marks beside his nose.

  “I hope Jared doesn’t hear the fire department call,” he hissed between his teeth as the soggy, bloated body was hauled by main force up the steep cement wall.

  Dr. Gregory, the ME, fussed around the sodden corpse as the firefighters threw Fujimoto a second line and the detective walked his way back to the top.

  “Turn her over,” Stevens said. “I need to see if it’s my mother.”

  “Oh dear,” Dr. Gregory murmured. “I’m so sorry. Let me get her hands covered.” He finished bagging the body’s hands, and then he and his assistant, Tanaka, rolled the body.

  The woman landed with a wet thunk on her back. Her mouth was ajar, filled with water that ran out the sides of peeling lips. The eyes were open and milky. The face was bloated and pale, damaged by something that had left pockmarks of decay, probably nibbling fish or crustaceans. But it was still a distinctive face, and it wasn’t Ellen Rockford Stevens.

  Lei felt Stevens stagger beside her. She caught his arm. They leaned against each other in support as Stevens’s breath whooshed out in relief.

  “Not her,” he said.

  “But she’s wearing Ellen’s clothes,” Lei said slowly. “Dr. Gregory, this is not my mother-in-law. But she’s wearing her clothes. I think we should proceed as if this is a homicide.”

  Fujimoto brushed his hands off against each other.

  “Tell me everything you know,” he said. “Let me record you for time’s sake.”

  “I’ll go over the clothing carefully,” Dr. Gregory told Stevens. “If there’s anything on the body that can help you locate your mother, I’ll find it.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Lei said. Stevens just nodded. Even though a little color had come back into his face, he still looked terrible. Beard roughened his cheeks, and his vivid blue eyes were sunk in caves of shadow. As she leaned in to him, she smelled the sharp reek of alcohol making its way out of his pores in acrid sweat.

  He’d been drinking. That was why he’d called in to work. He’d been drinking daily since the house fire, which had begun to worry her, but he hadn’t had a big binge since Kiet had come into their lives, after the murder of Steven’s ex-wife.

  Lei stuffed down her worry and anger and focused on Fujimoto.

  “Can we talk in your car or something? Just not out here.” Darkness was falling now, the gloom lit by amber pools of streetlight, but the firefighters were still nearby, stowing their equipment, and so were the patrol officers who had found the body.

  “Come to my car.”

  They followed Fujimoto to the jacked-up SUV he drove and got inside. Fujimoto turned on a small digital recorder and stated the date, time, and those present.

  “This is the on-scene statement of Lieutenant Michael Stevens and Sergeant Lei Texeira regarding the recovered body of an unknown woman from the north end of Kanaha Canal. Now, Sergeant Texeira. You asked that your husband be notified. Tell me why you made this request.”

  Lei described how she thought she recognized Ellen from the clothing and the blonde hair, and then the questions shifted to Stevens—who was his mother, where she’d gone, why he was looking for her but hadn’t put out a BOLO on her as a missing person.

  “She’s an adult making adult decisions,” Stevens said heavily. His voice was as raspy as a lifetime smoker’s as he described driving around looking for Ellen the previous night, the bar fight he’d broken up. “I couldn’t do any more at that point.”

  “So you think your mother has joined the homeless community and is somewhere drinking,” Fujimoto stated.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Lei spotted a yellow Maui Fire Department pickup truck pull up with a screeching of brakes. Her brother-in-law, Jared, got out, his tall, whipcord body all tight lines as he hurried to Dr. Gregory, who was just zipping the black body bag up over the waterlogged discovery in the canal.

  Lei hurried to intercept Jared, putting a hand on his arm. “It’s not her,” she said.

  Piercing blue eyes, so much like those she loved, blazed down at her. “I need to see anyway.”

  Mutely, Dr. Gregory unzipped the bag. The
woman’s ruined face stared at the sky with milky eyes.

  Jared turned away, retching. Lei could tell, by the abrupt release of tension, that his reaction was not horror, but relief.

  “She’s still out there, Jared. We’ll find her.”

  Stevens got out of the SUV, walking over to sling an arm around his brother’s shoulders. “Fujimoto’s putting out an island-wide BOLO on her. I’m not gonna lie—I’m worried the shroud killer is still at work. I’m not willing to bet it’s a coincidence that this woman looks like Mom, is wearing her clothes, and is a dead floater now.”

  Jared flung off his brother’s arm, turning to Stevens angrily. “Mom’s an alcoholic. She probably traded her clothes for a drink from this woman. Anyone can see how hard it would be to get out of this cement canal once you were in, and if the woman was impaired at all, she would’ve drowned. There doesn’t have to be any foul play—you’re paranoid!”

  “Maybe we are,” Lei said, trying to calm Jared’s agitation. “But there is a chance Chang or Ray Solomon is doing something. Solomon is out on bail.”

  “I think it’s time we made some calls,” Stevens said.

  “It’s just bad luck,” Jared said stubbornly. “You don’t know Mom like I do. You didn’t live through her shit in LA as long as I did. It was nothing for her to trade the clothes on her back, which were nice at one time, by the way, for another bottle.”

  Lei and Stevens stared at him as he strode back and forth, pushing his hands through his short brown hair in agitation.

  “Maybe you dealt with your mother for longer, but you haven’t been through what we have,” Lei said. “Too many people close to us have died for us to think this is a coincidence.”

  Stevens gestured with his head toward Fujimoto, who was directing the surrounding officers to spread out with lights. “They’re searching for anything that looks like a shroud or trace that goes back to Mom. I’m going to join them.”

  Forty-five minutes later, the area thoroughly searched, Stevens hugged his brother goodbye briefly and then met Lei’s eyes. “See you at home?”

  “Pono left, so you have to take me to the station to pick up my truck,” Lei said.