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.