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  “Jeremy Leddinger, I am not your pimp,” Brad said. “I am not anybody’s pimp. And I’ll have you know, Kimo is my friend. Not my boyfriend.”

  “Then what’s with the Brad Jacobson makeover?” Jeremy asked. He leaned over to me. “Tell me you didn’t start out today looking like that.”

  “I didn’t.” I felt the way I thought a ping-pong ball must, in the middle of a tournament. I didn’t mind, though. It was flattering.

  “He needed a makeover,” Brad said. “I complied. End of story.”

  “Gee, I hope it isn’t the end.” I batted my eyelashes at him. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  The table roared, and Brad blushed. I felt a stiffening in my still-pressed chinos, and wondered if Brad was feeling the same thing.

  “So do you make over every guy you meet?” I asked, when I finally had a chance to talk to Brad again.

  “Just the ones who need it.” He looked at me and lowered his shoulders. “Okay, they all seem to need it. But you more than most.”

  He looked around, and then leaned in close to me. “You actually never met Lucie, did you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because I’ve been watching you, and you’re asking questions about things you would know if you really had known Lucie.”

  I looked at him in amazement. “Geez, you ever thought of becoming a detective, Brad? Cause you know there are departments on the mainland that take in gay cops.”

  “I figured as much. I’ll bet you think that if you can figure out who killed Lucie, those cops might take you back.”

  Give Brad points for seeing through me, though his take on the situation wasn’t quite correct. “I need to show them I’m still a good detective,” I said, thinking fast. That wasn’t far from the truth.

  “We can help you,” Brad said. “Larry is a shopaholic like Lucie was; they used to compare notes all the time. Ari owns an apartment building where Jeremy lives, and where Lucie used to. George swings both ways, and he slept with Lucie at least once that I know of, because I walked in on them. And Rik was really friendly with Lucie, always wanting to know where she was. I’m sure he spent a lot of time with her.”

  I was amazed yet again. It was just the kind of network that Sampson had hoped I’d tap into as a surfer. Behold the power of the homosexual.

  “Let me get things moving.” Brad sat back, and when there was a lull in the conversation, he said, “I was kind of teary this afternoon. We got some new Armani in and the first person I thought of was Lucie.”

  “Have they found who killed her yet?” Rik asked.

  Brad shook his head. “But I have a little news flash for you.” He motioned for everyone to lean in close to the center of the table. “We now have our very own cop. If we all tell him what we know, maybe he can find out what really happened to her and Lucie can rest easier in her grave.”

  “Our own Hawaii Five-O!” Jeremy said. “I still think Jack Lord is so masculine and handsome.” He sighed. “I wish they’d remake that show.”

  “We could be your-what do they call them on TV-your confidential informants,” Rik said.

  “You mean snitches,” George said, laughing.

  “If there’s anything you know, that you want to tell me,” I said, “I can guarantee that it will get into the right hands. I know for a fact the investigating detectives weren’t able to find out much about Lucie or the others who were killed.”

  “There were others!” Jeremy shrieked. “No one told us anything!”

  I immediately regretted that slip of the tongue. But Brad saved me. “See, Kimo already knows a lot about the case. I mean, none of us even knew that anyone else had been killed. So we have to help him.”

  “Who were the others?” Ari asked.

  “A championship surfer named Mike Pratt,” I said. No response from the crowd. “And a Chinese computer guy named Ronald Chang.”

  “Lucie had a friend named Ronnie,” Rik said. “He was a computer guy.”

  “Yeah, I met him once,” Brad said. “Is that him?”

  “I think so,” I said. “But I don’t know much about him either, so anything you guys know would be helpful.”

  They all seemed eager, and my date book filled up. Breakfast the next morning with Ari, the landlord. I could surf until about three, when chubby Jeremy, who was a fourth grade teacher at Sunset Beach Elementary, could see me after school. Then cocktails with butch George Olsen and cute Larry Brickman followed by dinner with skinny Rik. “What about me?” Brad pouted.

  “Ahh, you and I have tonight,” I said, taking his hand.

  Brad blushed and the table cheered. The party broke up a little later, the rest of the guys going off wherever, leaving me and Brad at the big table at Sugar’s. I felt that I had made a lot of progress that evening, and I deserved a chance to put aside the homicide detective for a few hours and just be who I was-a lonely, horny gay man who had only recently admitted his sexuality, and who had no idea how to manage the feelings that kept welling up inside. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you earlier,” I said to Brad. “I really appreciate everything you’ve done, and if you’re not into me, I totally understand.”

  Brad nearly spit out the last of his strawberry daiquiri. “Not into you!” he sputtered. “You have the face of an angel and the body of death.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, the guys are just lining up to date me.” I stood up. We’d already settled the check. “I just need a ride back to my truck, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, honey,” Brad said, standing up too. “I’m giving you a ride, don’t you worry about that.”

  And ride me he did, once we got back to his apartment, where he massaged my back and certain other body parts. I don’t know why I pursued him as I did; he seemed grateful enough for the chance to be nice to me, to be able to present me to his friends. Maybe that’s why I did it, because I thought he ought to know that wasn’t enough. That he deserved somebody to be nice to him for a change.

  Not that he was any kind of charity case. Under the designer pants and form-fitting black t-shirt was a body any Waikiki boy would be pleased to call his own, or to use for an evening of passion. While his abs might not have been rock solid or his biceps bulging, he had a mouth, a dick and an ass, and he knew how to use all three.

  “Mmm, you know what’s the best part about this,” Brad said, snuggling his backside up against my groin, where my penis was too tired to even consider responding.

  “What’s that?” I asked, leaning over and kissing his shoulder.

  “I can spoon up against you and fall asleep, and though I know you won’t be here in the morning, at least I know my wallet and my stereo will be.”

  On that terribly sad note, I let Brad fall asleep, and then, as he expected, crept out the door and back to Hibiscus House.

  Brad’s Newest Project

  I was at Pipeline at six, about half an hour before sunrise. It was creepy moving across the beach in the pre-dawn darkness, but nothing I wasn’t accustomed to. I caught a couple of five-foot waves, letting me practice barrels and tubes, but by seven the swells were getting bigger and it was time for me to pull out.

  I met Ari at seven-thirty at Rosie’s Cantina, a little Mexican place known for its surfer breakfasts, and when I sat down opposite him I suddenly felt a week’s worth of hard surfing, the night before with Brad, and my lack of sleep swell up inside me. I yawned when I shook his hand and took the card he handed me, which read Aristotle Papageorgiou, President, North Shore Real Estate Investments. “You see why people call me Ari,” he said.

  “It’s not you,” I said. “I really need to get more sleep.”

  Ari simply raised his eyebrows and smiled. Coffee revived me a bit, and we ordered breakfast. “So what kind of real estate investments?” I asked, fingering the card. “Brad said you owned the apartment building where Lucie lived?”

  Ari nodded. “I went to college in Minnesota, and while I was there I got interested in real estate. I saw p
eople buying houses near the college, living in them while they were in school, then reselling them after graduation. I convinced my dad to front me the money for a down payment, in lieu of paying for a dorm room, and while I lived there I rented out rooms to other students. By the time I graduated I was able to pay my dad back and make a nice profit.”

  “A mogul in training,” I said.

  “Not quite Donald Trump, but it was a start. I wanted to get the hell out of Minnesota, though, so I came to Hawai‘i and started looking for property to fix up and resell. I found a niche up here on the North Shore.”

  “That’s what you do-buy houses and then fix them up?”

  “Among other things.” The waitress brought our breakfast and we dug in. “I bought a run-down apartment building a couple of years ago. The place was full of drunks, drug addicts and surfers, and I can’t tell you which were the worst tenants.”

  He took a forkful of eggs. I figured him for about forty, and it looked like he’d been at least moderately successful-Ralph Lauren shirt with the little polo player over the left breast, thick gold chain around his neck, gold coin pinky ring. His hair was immaculately groomed, his fingernails clearly manicured. In contrast, I was still in full surfer mode, in board shorts, slippas, and a Banzai Pipeline t-shirt with an incongruous bird of paradise superimposed over a picture of a monster wave.

  “Lucie moved in as I was trying to upgrade the quality of tenants,” he said. “Pretty girl, you know, very athletic, great sense of style.”

  “She have a job that you know of?”

  “Yeah, she was working at the time at The Next Wave-you know it?”

  I nodded.

  “Guy who runs it, Dario Fonseca, he’s a business partner of mine. He recommended her.”

  Interesting, I thought. I never mentioned my interest in Lucie, or any of the dead surfers, to Dario. We had too much old ground to cover. “Dario invests with you?”

  “I’ve got this project in the works,” Ari said, pushing aside his empty plate. “Up on a ridge overlooking Kawailoa Beach. Quirk in zoning lets me build a multi-family property up there.”

  “Condo?”

  He nodded. “Nothing too tall, you understand. Even so, I’m fighting against a community organization.” He shook his head. “Idiots don’t want any development. I’ve got mine, the rest of you get the hell out. You know the attitude.” I saw him tensing up. “They cloak themselves in this false environmental shit. Preserve the open space, keep the old Hawai‘i. Well, I got news for them. Time moves on. That’s my land, and I’m going to build on it.”

  “Dario must be doing pretty well if he’s a partner with you on that.”

  “He’s one, among others. Right now, the property’s tied up in litigation, but as soon as I get rid of these Save Our Scenery jerks I’m breaking ground.”

  “Lucie involved in any of that sort of thing?” I asked casually. “Protest groups, anything like that?”

  He laughed. “Not Lucie. She had her eye out for Lucie only. She wanted to surf, and she wanted nice things.”

  “You can’t make much money working in a surf shop.”

  “She quit The Next Wave a few months after she moved in. I never found out what she was doing for money, but her rent always came in on time.”

  “Cash?” I asked, as the waitress approached to refill our coffee.

  Ari smiled at her, and she smiled back. “How’d you know?” he asked, when she’d left.

  “Just a hunch.”

  “You think she was doing something illegal?” he asked. “I swear, I didn’t know anything about it. Only reason I really knew her at all was first, because of Dario, then I knew she dated George for a while.”

  “George is bi?”

  He laughed again. “George is a little bit conflicted. He can pass for straight, six days out of seven, so every now and then he tries a little pussy just to remind himself what he’s missing. Lucie had a trim little body, turn the lights off and stay away from the front, you could almost imagine she’s a boy. My personal belief, that’s the only way George could do her. But what do I know? Forty years old and I’ve never been with a woman. Never wanted to.” He eyed me. “You?”

  “I was conflicted myself. For a long time.”

  He leaned in close. “And you could-get it up?”

  “I could.” I shrugged. “And I did, more times than I can count. But I always knew something was wrong. Just took me a long time to figure out what.”

  We both sipped our coffee for a minute or so. Finally, I asked, “What happened to Lucie’s stuff?”

  “Her mom and her younger brother came up from Honolulu to pick it all up,” he said. “They were both pretty broken up. You could tell they had no idea she was into anything illicit. Kept talking about her being such a good girl.”

  “Our parents never really know us,” I said.

  “You’re right about that.” He drained the last of his coffee and signaled for the waitress. “The apartment’s still vacant, if you want to take a look at it.” He wrote the address down on a post-it note he took from a little leather case. “I’ve got a lock box on it so brokers can show it. I wrote down the code for you. She covered the walls in surfing posters and I didn’t take them down-I thought maybe they might help rent the place.”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  He took the check from the waitress and wouldn’t let me even leave the tip. “This one’s on me,” he said. “Hell, I can’t say I knew Lucie all that well, but consider this my way of saying thanks for looking out for her.” He frowned, and in that moment he looked all of forty, and more.

  The wind was still up, throwing a chill into me as I left the restaurant, and I knew that meant Pipeline and Banzai Beach would be almost unsurfable for anyone but the best, so I ended up at Chun’s Reef, a much easier break. A guy picked up his stuff and moved away when I dropped my towel near him, and a couple of girls giggled and pointed at me. One asshole even said, “Out of my way, faggot,” as he cut across me on a wave, but overall the atmosphere wasn’t any worse than Pipeline on a bad day. I surfed until three, when I made my way to Sunset Beach Elementary.

  Jeremy Leddinger had obviously been the class clown growing up, from the sarcastic tone I’d heard him use the night before. A chubby gay kid who defended himself with a rapier wit, who depended on being able to make his tormentors laugh to save his hide.

  I found him in a classroom decorated with posters of the solar system, grading homework assignments at a wooden table at the front of the room. I wasn’t sure what he could tell me; I knew that he had once lived in that same apartment complex where Lucie lived.

  “So, Brad’s newest project,” he said, when I walked in the door. “I have to admit, you clean up well.”

  “Brad’s the kind of guy who picks up strays?”

  He laughed. “Unfortunately, it’s a problem I share with him, so I can’t criticize too much.”

  “You lived in the same building as Lucie,” I said. “Sounds like a rough kind of place. What were you doing there?”

  “I was in the first wave of Ari’s gentrification effort,” he said. “But I have an unfortunate taste for bad boys. The kind who lie to you, steal from you and give you unpleasant diseases. So putting me in there was like giving crack to a junkie.”

  If Jeremy lost about fifty pounds, I thought, he’d be pretty cute. But the weight was probably tied up with his self-image, with the little boy inside looking for attention and only accustomed to getting it packaged around abuse. “How’d you get to know Lucie?”

  “I was in lust with a little Filipino with a big ice habit,” he said.

  Ice is the smokable form of crystal meth, a real scourge in the islands.

  Jeremy leaned back against his chair. “He and Lucie used to get together and jabber away in Tagalog. Eventually he stole too much from somebody who wasn’t interested in his dick or his ass, and he got sent away to do some time. I still used to see Lucie, so I’d say hello.”

 
“You think your boyfriend got his ice from Lucie?”

  Jeremy nodded. “I don’t know where she got it, though. But I’m pretty sure that’s how she was able to afford the designer clothes and the trips to surf contests.”

  “She wasn’t the kind of girl who’d use sex to get what she wanted?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “She wasn’t trying to sell it to me, that’s for sure. But that guy you mentioned-what was his name-her friend, the computer guy. Ronnie. She led him around by his dick.”

  “He was her boyfriend?”

  Jeremy laughed. “What a quaint expression to use regarding Lucie. She didn’t “do” the whole boyfriend thing. Even that bartender she was sleeping with when she died-Frank-she was just using him. An excuse for her to hang out at the Drainpipe, so her customers would know where to find her.”

  He neatened the corners of some papers on his desk and then looked back up at me. “But what do I know? I didn’t even know Georgie boy was doing her until it was all over.”

  Something in Jeremy’s eyes told me the thought of anyone else having sex with George made him very unhappy. “Well, thanks for your time,” I said. “I hope you find someone who treats you the way you deserve.”

  “Oh, I’ve found him a bunch of times.”

  I looked him right in the eye. “No, you haven’t.”

  “I don’t suppose there are any more at home like you.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got two brothers, but they’re both straight.”

  “Brad’s a lucky guy.”

  I held my hands up. “Brad and I had a little fun, that’s all. Maybe we’ll have some more fun, maybe we won’t. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be up here, anyway.”

  Jeremy smirked, and I left him to his grading. The wind was still up, so I decided to head over to the apartment building where Lucie had lived. Though Ari said he had cleaned it out, if felt like a loose end I should check out.

  On my way, I stopped at Fujioka’s and bought some rubber gloves and plastic zip-lock bags. In case I found anything there, I didn’t want my prints getting in the way. The building was just off the Kam Highway, on the south side of Hale’iwa, a two-story U with parking around the edges of a grassy square.