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, and 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 like 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.”
“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 people 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.
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.