Mahu Surfer m-2 Read online

  “You think that’s what it was? A dangerous taste for the high life?”

  “And doing the things you gotta do to keep that taste satisfied.” Frank crumpled the last shreds of his coffee cup. “Gotta go,” he said. “I tend bar over at the Drainpipe. Come by sometime, dude.”

  “Sure.” I knew that I would, too, once I’d learned a little more about Lucie Zamora and had more pointed questions to ask. The dossier on her hadn’t mentioned a taste for designer labels, though that, combined with limited legal income, is often an indicator that there’s something fishy going on.

  I went back to the computer, and read a long email from Harry complaining about the crappy surf conditions at Kuhio Beach Park, our usual Waikiki surf spot. Then I waded through all the luau-related email. The kids were excited about seeing their dads on the surfboards, while my mother and sisters-in-law negotiated the menu. Who would bring the chicken long rice, the lomi lomi salmon, and the haupia, a coconut-milk pudding? Haoa had an imu, a Hawaiian style barbecue pit, in his backyard, so he would bring the kalua pig, a detail which could not help but annoy Lui. The two of them were only two years apart and had been battling for supremacy since infancy.

  When I finished, I sent an email to Sampson requesting any info that might indicate Lucie had expensive tastes-labels in her clothes or handbag, for starters. I looked up the store Frank had mentioned. Butterfly was a boutique in the North Shore Marketplace that sold designer-label clothing and accessories. I wasn’t sure how to approach it, though, without a badge.

  I didn’t want to try the same tactic I’d used on Maui. There was too much chance that the news I was investigating could get back to the wrong ears-either the killer, or the police. I didn’t want either to know what I was doing.

  It was nearly nine o’clock. I picked up some Mexican food and took it back to Hibiscus House. I was falling asleep as I ate. By the next morning, though, I had a plan. I’d surf for a while at Pipeline, then head up to Butterfly to see what I could learn about Lucie Zamora.

  Butterfly

  I surfed all day, and drove up to Butterfly just before six. It was Halloween, and the streets were full of little kids in ghost and pirate costumes. The North Shore Marketplace was decorated with fake pumpkins and orange-and-black banners.

  As soon as I arrived at the store, I realized I was in trouble. The dresses in the window were by Armani, Valentino, and Versace. A tiny purse studded with rhinestones had a price tag of $2400. The only recognizable label on my clothing was the Teva on my sandals; I wore a pair of board shorts whose pocket I had torn a few days before, and a T-shirt from Town and Country Surf Shop. Oh, and I’d forgotten to shave that morning in my hurry to get out on the water. In short, I looked like a moke, a native Hawaiian criminal more likely to smash the front window in and steal something than to walk in and shop for merchandise.

  I didn’t know what I’d hoped to achieve by going to Butterfly, and I was kicking myself for rushing in without thinking through a plan, when the door popped open and a guy in a black t-shirt and black slacks stuck his head out. “I know you!” he said, smiling. “You’re the gay cop!”

  “Busted.” I smiled and stuck my hand out. “Kimo Kanapa’aka.”

  “You are such a hero!” He shook my hand. “I’m Brad. Jacobson. It is so awesome to meet you!”

  “You work here?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not much, but it’s a living. Were you looking for something?”

  I decided to jump in. “Someone, more like. This girl I met at a surfing tournament. She told me she bought all her clothes here. I just moved up here, and she’s the only person I know in town. I thought-oh, it’s pretty dumb.”

  “No, what?”

  “I’ve been looking for her at the beach and I haven’t seen her. So I figured I might run into her around here.”

  “Come on inside.” Brad was in his late twenties, I figured, as I followed him into the store, which had the kind of elegant hush that comes from recessed lighting, thick pile carpeting, and price tags in the stratosphere. He wasn’t what you’d call classically handsome; his nose was crooked and his blond hair thinning, but he put himself together well. “What’s her name?”

  “Lucie,” I said. “Lucie Zamora.”

  “Oh, my God.” Brad clutched his heart. “You don’t know? Well, of course, you’ve been busy with your own troubles.”

  I tried to put surprise in my voice. “What?”

  “You’d better sit down.” He motioned me to an armchair that would have looked quite at home in my mother’s living room. I sat, and he pulled a similar chair up next to me. “She was killed! Shot down like a dog on the street.” Brad looked like he was ready to cry. “Oh, it was just awful.”

  I looked away from Brad, the way I’d observed the families of victims do when they heard the bad news, then when I looked back at him I rubbed my eyes and nose, body language that I knew conveyed disbelief. I let my voice get a little higher, and rushed the words out. “When did this happen?”

  “About a month ago. She was coming out of Club Zinc late at night, and somebody shot her.” He shook his head. “The police, of course, are clueless.” He smiled at me and touched my hand. “I’ll bet if they had you on the case, you’d already have the creep behind bars.”

  I took a deep breath, then put my hand up over my mouth, taking a moment to compose myself. I didn’t like faking emotions in front of someone as nice as Brad, but I had a role to play, and I knew that the better I played it, the more chance I would have of finding out information that could lead me to Lucie Zamora’s killer.

  “I’m sure the local guys did their best,” I said, finally. “They probably just haven’t released any results yet.” I put my hand to my cheek, a thinking gesture. “They must have talked to you, didn’t they?”

  He shook his head again. “Nope. And I mean, I wouldn’t say I was her closest friend, but, well, she was in here almost every week buying something. I knew her tastes almost as well as my own.”

  “She liked her labels,” I said, putting on what I hoped was a weary smile.

  “Absolutely. Armani was like her god. Manolo for shoes. Coach for purses and belts. I mean, I could go on and on.” He waved his arm around the store, encompassing all the expensive labels around us. Each designer had a niche, I noted, with just a few examples of each style. Soft lighting highlighted the three-way mirrors in the corners.

  “I’m surprised. I never saw her name in the money at tournaments,” I said. “I didn’t realize she had the money for such expensive clothes. She have a sugar daddy somewhere?”

  Brad shook his head. “I don’t think so. Most of our customers-the ones with the rich husbands or daddies-use plastic. But our Lucie was a cash basis customer, even though sometimes she’d spend a thousand dollars on a dress. She said she’d gotten in trouble with credit cards once, so she didn’t buy anything she didn’t have the cash for.” He smiled. “But there wasn’t much she couldn’t buy, I’ll tell you.”

  “It must have been strange to you, taking in so much cash at once.”

  Brad leaned back against his chair, looked around at the empty shop, and then back at me. “Well, between you and me and the lamppost, at first I thought she was somebody’s mistress. You know, she had a body that wouldn’t quit, and she liked to show it off. But she wasn’t much into sexy lingerie.”

  I let my voice catch. “I just can’t believe she’s gone.”

  He pushed out of the chair, squatted down next to me and took my hand. “You poor thing, you must be devastated,” he said. “I mean, to find out your only friend in town was murdered!”

  “It’s a shock.” I caught my breath, and then sighed.

  Brad nodded. “All her friends felt that way.”

  A bell started ringing in my head. “You knew her other friends?”

  “Well, more like she knew my friends.” Brad stood up and walked over to the cash wrap. It looked like he was getting ready to close up. “I know this group of guys, a
nd they all got to know her and like her.” He looked up at me sadly. “I guess that’s almost the same as having friends.”

  “Do you think I could, maybe, meet some of your friends?”

  Using this guy who had been so nice to me was making me feel more and more like crap, but I needed some insight into this case, and if his friends could help me get to know Lucie better, then I would do what I had to do.

  “I’m just going to meet them once I close up,” Brad said.

  Though I really wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and rest after a day’s hard surfing, I said, “Do you think I could kind of tag along? Like I said, I really don’t know anyone else up here.”

  Brad looked me up and down, hands on hips. “I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you could use a little cleaning up before you go out in polite society.”

  “I’ve got a room at the Hibiscus House. I could swing past there, clean up, and meet you wherever you want.” Finally, an emotion I didn’t have to feign; the eagerness I was showing was how I really felt.

  “I’ll follow you there.” He locked the door, and shooed me toward my truck. “You need serious help, mister, and looking at you, I know you’re not going to find it in your room at the Hibiscus House.”

  Brad drove a gold Toyota Camry with rainbow bumper stickers and a broken antenna, and he followed me as promised. I was embarrassed to let him into my room, which was a mess. There was no housekeeping staff, the furniture looked like it had come from the Salvation Army store, and I needed to do laundry, which was evident from various items of clothing strewn around on the floor.

  “Are you sure you’re gay?” Brad said, standing behind me in the doorway. “My God, I’ve seen straight men who clean up better than this.”

  “Well, if I’m not, then I’ve just knocked a big fat hole in my life for no reason,” I said. “I guess I should jump in the shower.”

  “Not here.” Brad walked into the room and pulled open the half of the sliding closet door that actually worked. There were still a couple of clean shirts and pants hanging there. “OK, this, and this,” he said, pulling out a pair of Ralph Lauren chinos my mother had bought me and a black t-shirt that was almost a clone of his own.

  He looked at me. “Boxers, right?” Without waiting for my assent, he walked over to the flimsy bureau and opened the top drawer. “Bad,” he said, holding up a pair with tropical fish on them. “Horrible,” were a pair spattered with ice cream cones, and “Awful” were a pair decorated with Santas and Christmas trees. “Jesus, you don’t get laid much, do you?” he asked. “Who would want to sleep with a man who wears these?” I didn’t want to admit to him that I liked those goofy boxers, and frankly, the few times I’d had sex with other guys, they’d come off so quickly they’d never been an issue. He finally found a striped pair that met with his approval.

  I watched his whole performance with a kind of baffled amusement. He reminded me of Gunter, a gay man in Honolulu I knew, except that Gunter mixed his attitude with an athletic physicality that was as sexy as it was intimidating. Brad was simply a guy with no tolerance for bad fashion. He found a pair of loafers and a leather belt on the floor, and then said, “All right. You come with me now.”

  I was eager to get to the bar to meet these other people who had known Lucie Zamora, but I had to humor Brad. He drove me to his apartment, a one-bedroom a couple of blocks off the Kam Highway, and led me without ceremony to his bathroom. “Strip, soldier,” he said. “Get in the shower, and don’t forget to moisturize.”

  Brad’s shower was big enough for two, and I thought for the first few minutes that he might be joining me, which was a prospect I thought would be interesting-if I wasn’t in such a hurry to get to the bar and meet his friends. Instead, though, I was left alone with a shelf of grooming products. Lavender-scented bath soap, lemon moisturizer, shampoo, conditioner, shave gel, and a host of other products whose function I did not understand.

  I used a disposable razor and a fog-free mirror in the shower to shave, and when I stepped out Brad was there with an oversized bath sheet. “Feel better?”

  “Almost human.” I wrapped the towel around my waist and faced the mirror.

  “Give me your hand.”

  Brad squeezed a dollop of lotion into my palm. “Massage that into your hair, from the back forward.” When I finished, he handed me a comb. “You have good material. But if you don’t take care of it, it’ll never last. How old are you?” He turned me to face him. “Thirty?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  He looked me up and down. “You’ll do. Your clothes are on the bed.”

  By then, even though I knew I had to get to that bar and meet Brad’s friends, I was starting to be disappointed. I didn’t expect every gay man I met to want to drag me into bed, but Brad obviously liked me, or he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble. Yet… nothing was happening.

  I shrugged, and got dressed. Ever since I admitted to myself that I was gay-which had been what, six weeks before-I had been horny as hell. I felt like a kid in a candy store who’d just been given his allowance, and permission to buy whatever he wanted. But it was getting difficult to balance those personal desires with my need to investigate this case. If I kept on thinking about having sex with every guy I met, I’d never make any progress.

  I took a deep breath before I walked back to Brad’s living room, willing myself to remember the three dead surfers, to focus on what I had to do. “Now you look presentable,” Brad said, eyeing me up and down. “Every caterpillar has a butterfly inside.” He looked at his watch. “Good. We’ve still got thirty minutes left of happy hour.”

  A Little Sugar

  As Brad drove us down the Kam Highway, I asked him what had brought him to the North Shore. “You a surfer on your off hours?”

  “Not at all,” he said, shaking his head violently. “The closest I get to surfing is looking for gay porn on the Internet.”

  “Then what are you doing up here?”

  “It’s a very ordinary sort of story,” he said, sighing. “I fell in love with a surfer boy and followed him up here. Of course it didn’t work out, and he moved on, but by the time he did I had started to work at Butterfly. The woman who owns the store lives in LA and only comes up here once a year, so I’m the de facto manager and I can do as I please.”

  “Great gig.”

  “She’s a friend of my parents,” he said. “I grew up outside LA, and no, I do not have any family members in the movie business.” He looked over at me. “That seems to be what every gay man asks me when he hears I’m from LA. Like if my father was some big movie producer I’d be selling ladies’ shmattes in a strip mall.”

  “The question would never have occurred to me.”

  “I can see that,” Brad said dryly. “Just from your underwear selection. Anyway, after Francisco dumped me, I looked up, saw that I was making decent money and I had a bunch of friends, so I figured I’d hang around and see what happened next.” He smiled. “And then you came up to the store.”

  He pulled in to the parking lot of a nondescript bar called “Sugar’s: The Sweetest Spot in Town” in a strip shopping center just before the Kam split off to head inland. From the outside, it wasn’t very appealing; the building needed paint, and it was shaded by a single half-dead palm tree. A police cruiser sat at the edge of the parking lot-tracking homos or anticipating bar fights. The wind was picking up, moving dark clouds across the sky and tossing trash around the lot.

  “Here we are, hon,” Brad said. He took my hand. “Now I know you’re upset about Lucie, but we all have to move on. I’m sure once you get a colorful cocktail in front of you, you’ll cheer right up.”

  The bartender wore a George Bush mask, and there were black and orange streamers hanging from the walls. Judging by the chorus of hellos that greeted us as we walked in the door, Brad was a regular. He steered us to a big round table at the back of the bar, in front of sliding glass doors. Outside, I could see a deck overlooking what looked lik
e a small pineapple plantation, endless neat rows of spiky bromeliads, many already with a tiny pineapple nesting in their centers.

  Five guys sat around the table, and I tried to connect their names to their characteristics as they were introduced to me. Jeremy was chubby, Rik was skinny, Larry was cute, and George was butch. The last guy, older than everyone else by at least ten years, was Ari. Everyone was gay, though; I figured that out. As was pretty much everybody else in the place. But there wasn’t the desperate, sex-based atmosphere I’d seen in gay bars in Honolulu; this was more like a place that friends got together for a couple of drinks. How it might change as the evening wore on, though, I couldn’t say.

  I felt a wave of excitement building in me, almost as good as being out on the water, as each of the guys was presented. It was just as I had hoped when I convinced Brad to bring me-this network of men could be just the entree I needed, and I could begin mining each of them for information about the murders.

  “Guys, this is Kimo,” Brad said. “For those of you who are totally unaware of current events, he used to be a cop in Honolulu until they figured out he was gay. Now he’s like, totally a surfer dude.”

  “You know we shun people who use that kind of language,” I said, only half joking. Most of the real surfers I knew could speak just as well as any college professor, though there are always a few really dumb ones who perpetuate the stereotype.

  “Why, Brad’s a genius,” Jeremy said. “We all find ourselves, from time to time, though we know it’s fruitless…”

  “Literally speaking,” his skinny friend Rik interrupted.

  “Though we know it’s pointless,” Jeremy rephrased, “pining after straight surfer boys. But you’re the antidote to all that-a gay surfer boy!”

  “Hardly a boy,” I said.

  “Metaphorically speaking,” he said. “So as long as Brad is willing to share, we can pass you around amongst ourselves, whenever we feel that surfer-boy urge.”