Mahu Surfer m-2 Page 10

  I drove past slowly. A row of fantail palms separated the property from the street, and a hibiscus hedge was struggling to take root alongside the parking area. A pair of young guys were camped out on a tie-dyed blanket in the center of the grass, and music blared out of an open door. It was obvious Ari hadn’t completed his gentrification project, though the lawn was neatly trimmed and the building had been freshly painted.

  I circled back and pulled into a parking space.

  The two guys on the lawn regarded me with interest. “Hey,” I said, walking up to them. “I’m looking for a girl I think lives here. Lucie? Surfer chick, brown hair, drives a Volkswagen Bug?”

  The guys had the glassy eyes of habitual drug users. “She’s gone, man,” the first guy said.

  “You know when she’ll be back?”

  They both laughed. The first one had a hiccupy laugh, as if he was trying to get enough air to keep on breathing. “No, she’s gone-gone,” he said. “Gone to heaven, gone.”

  He made wiggly motions with his hands, simulating, I suppose, the progress of Lucie’s soul rising to heaven. This set his friend into paroxysms of laughter again, and he quickly joined in, hiccupping all the way.

  I left them laughing and made my way to the apartment, pulling on the rubber gloves as I went. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that they were now lying on their backs, comparing clouds. They’d forgotten all about me.

  I punched the code into the lock box on the door, and it swung open. The place was an efficiency, one room with a galley kitchen along one side and a closet and the door to a bathroom opposite. A window next to the door looked out at the parking lot.

  The appliances in the kitchen were new, and the carpet was in good shape. The rest of the room was empty, though, as Ari had said, the walls were covered in surf posters, just like my bedroom at my parents’ house. My surfers had been all male, of course; Lucie’s were female. I recognized a couple, including Melanie Bartels and longboarder Belen Connelly, and there was a promotional poster for the MTV series Surf Girls, fourteen girls following big waves around the Pacific and competing to be number one. It was a show that was tailor-made for Lucie Zamora and her goals.

  All around me, strong, confident women rode the curl, zoomed through tubes, or simply surfed on big waves. I stared at them, trying to get into Lucie’s head, and then I remembered something from my brief stay in Vice, before I moved over to Homicide. Drug dealers often keep a carefully hidden private stash. I knew from reading the dossiers that the investigating officers hadn’t known that Lucie dealt, so they would have had no reason to search.

  I started in the galley kitchen, pulling the appliances away from the walls. Nothing there except dust bunnies. The cabinets were empty, and there was nothing in the toilet tank except water and hardware. I tested the tape holding each poster to the wall-it was all strong, and all of roughly the same vintage. The indoor-outdoor carpeting was firmly fixed to the floor.

  I had worked on enough construction sites with my father to know how buildings like this were constructed-a framework of studs covered with drywall. There had to be a way to get into the hollow spaces between the studs, and it had to be easy enough to give Lucie access as she needed it.

  I walked around the room once more, trying to see it as Lucie might have. I ended up in the bathroom, staring into the mirrored medicine cabinet. And then it hit me. Looking in there, I saw the cabinet was held to the wall by a set of screws, and when I jiggled it, the cabinet was slightly loose.

  Back at my truck, I had a tool kit. Once I had the right screwdriver in my hands, the cabinet came off in minutes. There were a half a dozen small baggies in the hollow space behind where the cabinet sat. I opened one and sniffed.

  Without a chemical analysis, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought what Lucie had stashed there was crystal meth, which was often processed in the islands into its smokeable form, called either “ice” or “batu.” I didn’t know why Lucie had left so much crystal meth there, and I had no idea how much it was worth.

  Tucked into the back of the compartment was a piece of paper, folded and then folded again. It looked like a computer printout from a police database, an arrest record for someone named Harold Pincus, who had been charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, securities fraud, and first-degree fraud in connection with his alleged operation of a Ponzi scheme. I had no idea who Pincus was, what a Ponzi scheme was, or why Lucie had kept this paper with her stash, but I copied down all the information before I replaced the paper in the niche.

  I called Sampson’s cell number, and got a recording that he was either out of range or his phone was off. I left him a message, telling him that the investigating detectives ought to check out the hollow place behind the medicine cabinet in Lucie’s apartment. I even left the access code for the lock box. Then I put the cabinet back in place and left.

  I had been hoping I’d get some kind of vibe from the place, maybe a message Lucie Zamora had encoded in the building’s DNA, but instead I got a sad feeling that this was the best she’d been able to do before her life was snuffed out.

  On the way back to Hibiscus House, I tried to recap what I had learned. I knew from both Brad and Ari that Lucie paid for everything in cash. That’s a typical profile for someone with illicit income who doesn’t want a paper trail. Jeremy thought his Filipino boyfriend had bought ice from her. And I’d found her private stash of crystal meth behind her medicine cabinet.

  There were still a lot of questions, and I missed my partner in Waikiki, Akoni, a big, beefy Hawaiian guy I’d gone through the academy with. I wanted to go over everything with him, get his opinion, but I couldn’t, because I was flying solo. I wanted to know if Lucie had brought the crystal meth in her apartment back from Mexico, and if she’d recruited Mike Pratt and Ronnie Chang to help her. Why was there still so much left, though? Had she held some back as part of a private deal? And if someone killed her because of her drug connections, why hadn’t they torn apart her room to find the drugs I had? I pulled my aloha shirt pad and pen back out and started making notes.

  I had some time to kill before meeting George and Larry for cocktails, and I was pretty surfed out, so I decided to go back to Hibiscus House and take a nap. I thought I’d earned one.

  The Plains of Africa

  Larry and George had suggested I meet them at Kahuna’s, a surfer bar on the Kam Highway just south of Hale’iwa. I remembered the place all too well; it was where my buddies had taken me that fateful night after my fifth-place finish. How many more messages from my past were waiting for me, I wondered, as I parked my truck in the lot and walked up to the ramshackle thatched-roof bar, which was pulsing with the sound of The Beach Boys singing about the joys of California surfing.

  I went to college in Santa Cruz, and I surfed up and down the California coast during the four years my parents thought I was studying the great works of literature, perhaps as a prelude to law school. There was hardly a break there that could equal any of a dozen spots on the North Shore.

  Neither Larry nor George were at the bar when I arrived, so I went up and got myself a Corona. At the bar, I saw Melody, from the outrigger club, with the blonde who had been introduced to me as Mary. They looked very intimate, clasping each others’ hands. As I was getting ready to go over and say hello, I saw Mary kiss Melody, and decided they probably wanted to be alone.

  I staked out a high-topped table with a view of the front door. Around me I saw a couple of guys I recognized from Pipeline, but for the most part the crowd seemed to be a tourist one. Nobody moved away from me or muttered insults, and for that I was grateful.

  George arrived first. Since my gaydar still wasn’t very well developed, I never would have thought he was gay. He wore a sleeveless t-shirt that showed off his well-muscled biceps, a pair of khaki board shorts, white socks and work boots. He seemed to be a popular figure, high-fiving and laughing as he worked his way over to my table.

  “So how did you know Lucie?” I asked, when he’d finally got h
imself a Heineken and come over to sit across from me.

  “Met her at the gym. I’m a personal trainer and I work with a lot of surfers on conditioning. Another client referred Lucie to me.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Really tough. She could take whatever I dished out for her. Super motivated, didn’t understand a lot of the physics involved in surfing, so she didn’t know which muscle groups she had to work on, but she wanted to win and she was willing to do what it took to get there.”

  “What can you tell me about Lucie that nobody else knows?”

  George though for a minute. “She was nosey,” he said finally. “Always snooping around. At the gym, I caught her going through a guy’s bag once. She swore she wasn’t looking for cash, and I believed her. Whenever she was over at my place, she was always looking through my mail, my bills. I know she did the same thing to Larry and to Ari.”

  “She ever find anything she wasn’t supposed to?”

  “Not that I know of.” He drained his beer. “Gotta piss. I’ll be back.”

  While George was in the rest room, Larry came in. Wheat blond hair, with a slim, but muscular physique, he was the kind of guy who attracted attention wherever he went. It seemed like every girl in the place swiveled her head toward the door when he walked in.

  He saw me, and came directly over to the table, where he leaned over and hugged me. “It’s great to see you again,” he said. There seemed to be a genuine warmth there, and it surprised me. Of all the guys, I expected Larry to be the most standoffish, just because he was the most handsome. Wrong again, detective.

  “I think it’s really cool that you care enough to look into what happened to Lucie,” he said. “Too often nobody cares about people on the edges of society.”

  “Was Lucie on the edge?”

  “She came from a poor family. She didn’t even finish high school. But she didn’t want anybody to know that, and sometimes she told people that her family back in the Philippines was rich, that they were bankrolling her surfing career.”

  “Did she lie a lot?”

  Larry shrugged. “Sometimes. Occasionally she shoplifted, and I know once or twice she picked up tourists, had sex back at their hotel rooms, and stole their wallets. I wouldn’t say she had a lot of morals. And even though she was pretty, and smart, and talented, she wasn’t successful yet, and she didn’t have rich or influential friends to make sure that the police investigated her murder.”

  “They investigated,” I said. “A friend of mine showed me the report. They just couldn’t find anyone who would be honest with them about her.”

  “It’s hard,” Larry said.

  George reappeared, with Heinekens for all three of us. “You talking about sex already?” he asked Larry.

  “Get over yourself, George,” Larry said. “I’m talking about Lucie. According to Kimo, nobody would talk to the police about her.”

  “Nobody asked me,” George said. “Not that I had that much to say. Or that I’d trust the cops too much anyway.”

  “George has had a couple of run-ins with the police,” Larry said. “He’s a little too fond of having sex outdoors. With strangers.”

  “Up yours.”

  “You’ve been there.” Larry turned to me. “Always with a condom, though. You don’t know where that thing has been.”

  “How’d you know Lucie?” I asked.

  “We used to go shopping together. I was at Butterfly one day, hanging out with Brad, when she came in. We totally hit it off. She had great taste in clothes. We’d go down to the outlet mall in Waikele together and look for bargains.”

  “She didn’t strike me as the bargain hunter type,” I said. “Butterfly certainly isn’t a discount operation.”

  “Lucie loved labels,” Larry said. “More than she loved a bargain. Me, all I can do most places is browse, but I can actually buy at Waikele. Lucie’d go with me, help me pick out what worked best for my coloring, my build.”

  He was dressed beautifully, I had to admit. His linen slacks caressed his body, and the Dolce amp; Gabbana logo t-shirt he wore seemed almost to have been custom-made. He wore suede shoes that looked like they were fresh from the box.

  The conversation turned to more general topics, and I was just enjoying their company when Larry turned to George and said, “Did you ask him yet?”

  “I was just about to when you showed up.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “If you were interested. In us.”

  I must have looked as confused as I felt. “In a three-way,” George clarified. “You, me and Larry.”

  I was nonplussed. “Wow, I’m flattered.”

  “Good,” George said. “Let us flatter you some more, over at Larry’s place.”

  “I’ve never done it with more than one guy,” I said. “And I can’t say I’ve met two better-looking guys up here, guys that I’d be more interested in experimenting with.”

  “Then let’s go,” George said.

  I felt like I was flailing around wildly for an excuse. My dick had already decided for me, and its vote was clear: get naked with Larry and George. But I was trying to learn to think with the big head, too, when it came to sex. And the big head was telling me I had a case to investigate, and I had one more guy to meet with that night. “I’m supposed to have dinner with Rik,” I said. “I don’t have any way to get in touch with him to cancel.”

  “Fuck him,” George said. “Tomorrow night, if you want. That is, if you like ribs.”

  “That’s George’s charming nickname for him,” Larry said. “Rik is so skinny you can see his ribs when he strips off his shirt.”

  “The truth is that Brad wore me out last night.” I saw George and Larry raise eyebrows at each other. “Swear to God.” I thought for a moment, searching my fried brain cells for a detail that would convince them. “He said something like, ‘Jesus, open up those pearly gates because I’m coming!’”

  Larry laughed. “Okay, you proved you’ve actually had sex with him. That’s Brad’s trademark line. But that doesn’t get you off the hook permanently.”

  “I don’t mind being hooked,” I said.

  “Larry’s a bottom and I’m a top,” George said. “So we can take good care of you.”

  I was starting to feel like one of those zebras on the plains of Africa that’s been cut away from the herd, the predators circling. There was no reason why I shouldn’t have sex with two guys at the same time, if I wanted to. And there was no reason why the prospect should scare me. But somehow it did, which meant I would have to follow through with it-eventually. It’s the only way I know to overcome those things-to face up to them. For now, I could use the excuse of meeting Rik for dinner to get the hell out of that bar.

  Trish Dishes

  Rik and I had swapped email addresses, and he was supposed to send me a message confirming time and place for dinner. I had my laptop in my truck, so I swung past The Next Wave and discovered he had cancelled on me-he said he had to work late.

  It was almost seven, too late for me to head back to the water. I didn’t want to go back in the bar, either, though my dick sure wanted to. But then it’s an unreliable monitor of what’s right and wrong, and besides, it had gotten an amazing workout the night before, courtesy of Brad. Like the rest of me, it could use a little R amp; R.

  I decided to use the time productively, so I stayed at The Next Wave, where I began making copious notes on all the day’s conversations. Then I switched over to email. Sampson had replied to my message about Lucie’s apartment; he promised to get a detective out there to investigate. I responded to a bunch of messages from friends, worried about how I was doing. I had a stock message I wrote back, about how I was taking some time to think about my next step, and that I appreciated their support. It sucked to have to lie to people.

  I was excited by the case, eager to solve it, and frustrated that I couldn’t talk about it with anyone. I had to put on a facade for my family and friends, telling them I was still
getting my head together, and listen to their well-meaning advice. With every day that passed, I knew it would get harder to tell them the truth. Just one more reason why I had to settle this case quickly.

  When I finished my emails, I tried to track down Harold Pincus, but there were just too many of men with that name, and I didn’t know the jurisdiction where he had been arrested. Shelving that idea, I did some computer searches on ice, cross referenced to Hawai‘i and the North Shore. The problem seemed to be worsening, in all the islands. Drug treatment programs reported more patients with methamphetamine problems, and for the first time more people entering programs reported problems with ice than with alcohol.

  Child Protective Services estimated that 85 percent of their cases involved meth, and the number of methamphetamine-related deaths was climbing on O’ahu. I found a study which showed a jump in use by high school students as well.

  On the mainland, users are more likely to inject methamphetamine, or speed, into their veins, but in Hawai‘i we tend to prefer the smokable form. Ice’s pleasurable and addictive effects are immediate, and can last up to twelve hours. Most of the powdered drug was smuggled in from Mexico; processors used solvents to create the powerful, nearly pure crystalline version, which could be smoked.

  Because meth is so powerful, it can be profitable even in small chunks, and smugglers often brought it in from the mainland on their bodies, in luggage, and even in hand-held coolers. I wondered if somehow all three of the surfers who’d attended Mexpipe had been recruited to bring some of the drug back to Hawai‘i, for processing into ice. That would explain the crystal meth that I found behind the medicine cabinet at Lucie’s apartment. That would also explain how all three had lots of extra cash upon their return.

  Now I just had to find the person or persons who connected the three dead surfers to the ice business. Easy peasy.