“Deal.” I stood up with her, cracking my back. “I got a good workout today.” I wanted to thank her for the information, but since I was playing it that I was helping her out all I could do was smile.
I left Melody and headed back to Hibiscus House, where I showered and ate my Pop Tarts, thinking about my day. I decided I had to learn more about Mexpipe, which meant I had to find someone who had surfed there. I pulled out the printout I’d made the day before at The Next Wave of the top finishers, and scanned the names, looking for any I recognized.
Pay dirt. My cousin Ben’s name was there. I made a point of keeping an eye out for him that morning at Pipeline, and when I saw him taking a break I went over to where he was hanging out on the beach with a couple of friends.
He’s good-looking, in a scrawny, surfer way. There isn’t an ounce of fat on his six-foot something body, and he wears his black hair loose, down to his shoulders. His father was a haole Aunt Pua married in a quickie ceremony in Vegas, who left her life, and our family circle, shortly after Ben was born. So, like me, Ben has just a slight epicanthic fold around his eyes, and his skin takes a tan well.
“Yo, cuz, how’s it going?” he said as I came up. “You guys know my cousin Kimo?” he said to his friends.
We nodded all around. “You got a minute?” I asked. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Sure.” He and I walked down the beach a little to a refreshment shack, where we both got bottles of water. “Your folks still upset about what happened to you?” Ben asked, as we sat down on benches overlooking the water.
“Pretty much. I talk to them every night and you know my mother, she’s full of ideas for me.”
He laughed. “Boy, I know that. You should hear my mother talk.”
“I never imagine Aunt Pua as the type to tell anybody how to run his life.”
“That’s because you’re not her son. That laid-back act is for the rest of the world. Not for me. She keeps telling me I could be teaching surfing at a resort and making good money.”
“My mother keeps telling me things like when the next LSAT test is. ‘You can still go to law school,’ she says. ‘Lots of people go back to school in their thirties.’”
“Man, those two will never change,” Ben said, shaking his head. “So what’s on your mind, dude?”
“You went to Mexpipe, didn’t you?”
“Sure. Did better than I expected, not as good as I hoped.”
“What’s it like?”
He took a swig from his water bottle. “Zicatela’s the beach that everybody surfs. Six to fifteen foot ground swells; lots of tubes. Wipeouts can be really bad. There’s this break called the Point, and you can get some long, fast, challenging rides.”
“How’s Mexpipe itself?”
“Lots of good surfers show up, and the waves can be awesome.” He shifted around on his bench. “Big party scene, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Toga party, bikini contest-I mean, they try to make it fun.”
“Lot of drugs down there?”
He nodded. “I don’t do anything more than pot, and never when I’m in a competition, but you could get anything you wanted there. Just had to walk around the town for a few minutes and somebody would try to sell you something.”
“I’m trying to track down some people who were there-maybe you knew them. Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora, Ronald Chang.”
Ben narrowed his eyes at me. It was obvious that he recognized the names and had an idea of why I was interested in them. “I thought you were done being a cop.”
I shrugged. “Old habits die hard.”
Ben considered that. “I knew Mike Pratt pretty well,” he said finally. “Interesting guy. Really good surfer-I think he was just about to make a name for himself. He got in with this weird crowd in Mexico, though.”
“Weird how?”
“This Christian surfing ministry-they run a cafe at the main surfing beach down there, and they have Bible study sessions at this place called El Refugio. Now, I’m not against any religion-I figure, you want to believe, man, more power to you.”
He stopped to take another swig from the water bottle. “But Mike, man, he really took it to heart. Then when we got back, he started bitching about his board not being right. You ask me, it’s his head that wasn’t right.”
“You ever see him hang out with Lucie or Ronnie?”
“A couple times, I saw him with Lucie. But you know, she didn’t really belong there-she wasn’t good enough. I think she was just there for the party. The other guy-Ronnie-I just met him once or twice because he was with other people from the North Shore. He was a total wannabe.”
He drained the last of his water. “I gotta get back. You gonna be around for a while?”
“For a while.”
“Cool. See you around, then.” He gave me a shaka and walked back toward his friends.
Ben had seen Mike and Lucie talking to each other at a party. It didn’t mean that they were best friends, or involved together in some way, but it was a start.
Coach Tex
I surfed all day Saturday, hoping to see Trish. Though I talked to a bunch of surfers, I didn’t learn anything new, and I was starting to get discouraged. Once I actually heard the word “faggot” muttered under someone’s breath-but I couldn’t tell who had said it. I was discovering information, but very slowly, and that was frustrating. By late afternoon, I was beat. Though I had surfed regularly in Waikiki, that was nothing compared to the punishment I was putting my body through. I couldn’t even keep my promise to get out for meals-I stopped at Fujioka’s and bought some takeout sushi, and nearly fell asleep eating it.
Sunday morning, I put on my wetsuit and walked out into the pre-dawn darkness, dragging my board with me. I couldn’t help thinking about the murders as I surfed. Usually the water is the place where I can put everything else aside, but knowing that all three victims had been surfers somehow connected the act of surfing with their deaths, making it impossible for me to forget them.
I surfed most of the day, resting between waves, scanning the sand for Trish and talking to whoever passed by. I had a burrito for lunch, bought from a roach coach that drove past around noon playing a complicated tune on its horn. By around three o’clock, I gave up, and after a quick shower back at Hibiscus House I drove over to The Next Wave, hoping that Dario had the day off.
Either he did, or he was holed up in his office the whole time. I was grateful, and it allowed me to focus on doing more computer searching. I already knew a lot about Mike Pratt, so I decided to spend some time on the other two. I knew it would be hard to zero in on someone with as common a name as Chang, but I wanted to give it a shot.
After a number of fruitless searches, I found a site from Lahainaluna High School in Lahaina which listed winners of a science fair. One Ronald Chang had won second prize for a case study of how one could hack into the school’s computer system and change student grades. Chang’s photo, which was close enough for my purposes to the one I’d seen in his dossier, clinched the deal for me.
There was a little note on the web page thanking Mr. Chang for his insight, which resulted in a total revamp of the school’s computer grading system. If Ronnie could do that at 16, I thought, what was he capable of at 25?
I went back to the dossiers on the dead surfers. Ronnie Chang was a computer technician for a firm in Honolulu, and the investigating detectives had spoken to his co-workers, but as far as I could tell, no one had spoken to his family or friends back in Maui. I wondered about that, and sent a quick email to Lieutenant Sampson asking if there had been a reason why not.
There was almost nothing online about Lucie Zamora, other than her name on the roster of a couple of surfing tournaments. The original detectives had run all three surfers through the police system, checking for arrests, warrants, and other malfeasance, and all three had come up clean.
My brother Lui emailed that he still felt bad about running the stories on me, even though both the series on gay cops around the country, which ran while I was suspended, and the series on coming out, which ran during my first week on the North Shore, got great ratings and great viewer feedback. He suggested that a big family luau at Waimea Bay Beach Park might make me feel better.