Man, I thought as I left, I’ve got to get my gaydar working.
Lahaina Harbor
I drove slowly down into the center of Lahaina, thinking about what Victor Texeira had said. I pulled into a parking space in the quaint downtown area, and before I got out of the car I looked back at Ronnie Chang’s dossier. He had attending UH for two years, leaving without a degree to work for the company that let him telecommute from the North Shore. Even though the original detectives had been there, I figured they would be worth a stop, deciding that I’d sleep in my own bed again that night, visit them the next morning, and then head back to Hale’iwa.
It was just lunch time, and the restaurant owned by Ronnie’s parents, Wok ‘n Roll, was crowded, so instead of going in I went for a walk through Lahaina. By the time I’d strolled through the harbor, I’d built up an appetite.
Ronnie’s mother, Yee Chang, was working the register, his father Lan behind the stove cooking. Though I’d never met them, their pictures had been included in my dossier. Yee had lost weight since the picture was taken; grief will do that to you. I waited until there was a break in the crowd, and walked up to introduce myself, with the same story I’d given Victor Texeira.
She looked like she might cry. She reached out and took my hand. “We are so happy you investigate who kill our son,” she said.
“I’m doing my best.”
“Eat first, then talk,” she said. “What you like? Honey chicken very good today. My husband make everything fresh. Lan! Make honey chicken special for detective. Give extra rice!”
She wouldn’t take money from me. I took the plastic cup she handed me, filled it with ice and lemonade, and waited for Lan to serve up my chicken, reminding myself why I didn’t like to interview the parents of the deceased. They almost never had anything bad to say about their child, and though occasionally they could point you in the direction of a bad influence, the dead child was almost always blameless, an innocent victim. Even when the deceased had a laundry list of warrants, arrests and convictions, his parents always believed the best of him.
I had almost finished my chicken when Yee had a young girl replace her at the register so she could come sit with me. The dining room was bright and airy, spotlessly clean, looking out on Front Street and the harbor. It had to be expensive real estate, I thought, which meant that the Changs were doing well.
My father’s best friend, Uncle Chin, is Chinese, so I was very familiar with Chinese culture. I began by telling Mrs. Chang how sorry I was about her son’s death, and how I knew it was impolite of me to ask questions about him, but that I believed it was important to bring whoever killed him to justice.
She nodded eagerly. “His spirit very restless. Must have peace. You can bring my son peace?”
“I can try.” I paused for a minute, then began asking simple questions. She did not know much about his life on O’ahu, but she knew that he loved to surf. He did not have any enemies that she knew of, no one who held a grudge or had any reason to dislike him.
“How about his friends,” I said. “Did you ever meet any of them?”
The few names she gave me were already in his dossier. “And his fiancee, of course,” she said.
“Fiancee?”
“We never meet her, you know, engagement too soon before he died. And not Chinese girl either.” For a moment a frown crossed her face. “But she make Ronnie happy.”
“What was her name?”
“Filipina girl. Lucie…”
“Zamora?”
“That’s it!” she said. “She must be so sad, to lose Ronnie.”
“I’m afraid she was killed, too, Mrs. Chang. Around the same time Ronnie was.”
Her mouth opened into a wide O, and her hand flew up to cover it. Her surprise mirrored my own. I had a feeling that there was no formal engagement between Ronnie Chang and Lucie Zamora; if there was anything between them at all beyond friendship I thought it was either a figment of Ronnie’s imagination, or Lucie was playing him for something.
Mr. Chang came out from behind the stove, and his wife quickly told him, in Mandarin I only partially understood, that Ronnie’s fiancee had been killed, too. His surprise was less visible than hers, but it was clear he hadn’t known.
I thanked both Changs again for the delicious lunch, and walked out onto Front Street, which was busy with tourists in matching aloha shirts, slippas, and uneven tans. I strolled down Front Street, looking for Totally Tubular and Will Wong. The surf shop was a little hole in the wall near the marina, with nowhere near the selection you could find at The Next Wave. But they were doing a good business, and I had to wait a few minutes before the exceptionally tall Chinese guy I assumed was Will Wong could talk to me.
He must have been six-four or six-five, at least, and he was skinny as a rail. I was surprised he wasn’t playing basketball for some mainland team. That is, until he stumbled over a boogie board on his way to talk to me and knocked over a rotating display of sunglasses.
After I introduced myself, we sat outside in the sunshine to talk about Ronnie Chang. “We were tight in high school, man,” he said. “Ronnie was like, awesome with computers. Crappy surfer, but man, he could figure out a way into any system.”
“He still a crappy surfer when he died? I know he went to a tournament in Mexico.”
“That was a joke, man,” Will said. “He only went because he was chasing some girl, and she said she’d party with him down there.”
“And did she?”
“He was pretty cagey when he got back,” Will said, sitting back on a bench and stretching his long legs out across the sidewalk. “He came back with a whole lot more money than he left with, and I know he didn’t win it.”
“What do you mean?”
A noisy bunch of Japanese tourists passed us, on their way to a whale-watching excursion, or at least that’s where I guessed they were going, from all the whale paraphernalia they were either wearing or carrying; a half dozen of them wore paper crowns that looked like whale’s tails. When they passed, Will said, “He really wanted this top of the line board, but he didn’t have the dough, especially with buying presents for this chick and paying for the trip to Mexico-for both of them, by the way.”
“You know this chick’s name?”
“Sure. Lucie. He used to make a joke about it, you know, I Love Lucie.”
“And when he came back, he had the money for the board?”
“Right on. He ordered it through me, and I had it shipped to him in Hale’iwa. He only had it like a week before he got killed.”
“Bummer.”
Will nodded. We talked for a couple more minutes, and then he said that his break was over and he had to get back to work. That was fine with me, because I had to catch my flight to O’ahu. I drove to the airport, thinking about what I’d heard. Lucie Zamora and Mexpipe connected Mike Pratt and Ronnie Chang, and something had happened in Mexico that upset Mike and brought Ronnie cash.
Could Ronnie have rigged the results at Mexpipe, moving Mike’s position up so he could win more money, by hacking into a computer? Or perhaps Ronnie had rigged Mike’s board with some kind of computer sensors that gave him an edge-that would explain why Mike had been bitching about his board after he returned.
Then Mike had joined up with the Christian surfers at El Refugio, making him regret what he’d done. Or perhaps he was just angry that his board didn’t work right any more.
I fell asleep almost the moment my butt hit the airplane seat, and didn’t wake up until we were just about to land. I was so tired I could barely drive back to my apartment, and after scarfing down a quick dinner I went directly to bed.
The next morning, Tuesday, I slept late. Sure, I could have gotten up at dawn and surfed Kuhio Beach Park, but I was getting spoiled by those big North Shore waves. And since the park was right next to the police station where I had worked for six years, there was a good chance I’d run into an old colleague or two, people I didn’t want to have to explain myself to at present.