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.
The Plains of Africa
Larry and George had suggested I meet them at Kahuna’s, a surfer bar on the Kam Highway just south of Hale’iwa. I remembered the place all too well; it was where my buddies had taken me that fateful night after my fifth-place finish. How many more messages from my past were waiting for me, I wondered, as I parked my truck in the lot and walked up to the ramshackle thatched-roof bar, which was pulsing with the sound of The Beach Boys singing about the joys of California surfing.
I went to college in Santa Cruz, and I surfed up and down the California coast during the four years my parents thought I was studying the great works of literature, perhaps as a prelude to law school. There was hardly a break there that could equal any of a dozen spots on the North Shore.
Neither Larry nor George were at the bar when I arrived, so I went up and got myself a Corona. At the bar, I saw Melody, from the outrigger club, with the blonde who had been introduced to me as Mary. They looked very intimate, clasping each others’ hands. As I was getting ready to go over and say hello, I saw Mary kiss Melody, and decided they probably wanted to be alone.
I staked out a high-topped table with a view of the front door. Around me I saw a couple of guys I recognized from Pipeline, but for the most part the crowd seemed to be a tourist one. Nobody moved away from me or muttered insults, and for that I was grateful.
George arrived first. Since my gaydar still wasn’t very well developed, I never would have thought he was gay. He wore a sleeveless t-shirt that showed off his well-muscled biceps, a pair of khaki board shorts, white socks and work boots. He seemed to be a popular figure, high-fiving and laughing as he worked his way over to my table.
“So how did you know Lucie?” I asked, when he’d finally got himself a Heineken and come over to sit across from me.
“Met her at the gym. I’m a personal trainer and I work with a lot of surfers on conditioning. Another client referred Lucie to me.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Really tough. She could take whatever I dished out for her. Super motivated, didn’t understand a lot of the physics involved in surfing, so she didn’t know which muscle groups she had to work on, but she wanted to win and she was willing to do what it took to get there.”
“What can you tell me about Lucie that nobody else knows?”
George though for a minute. “She was nosey,” he said finally. “Always snooping around. At the gym, I caught her going through a guy’s bag once. She swore she wasn’t looking for cash, and I believed her. Whenever she was over at my place, she was always looking through my mail, my bills. I know she did the same thing to Larry and to Ari.”
“She ever find anything she wasn’t supposed to?”
“Not that I know of.” He drained his beer. “Gotta piss. I’ll be back.”
While George was in the rest room, Larry came in. Wheat blond hair, with a slim, but muscular physique, he was the kind of guy who attracted attention wherever he went. It seemed like every girl in the place swiveled her head toward the door when he walked in.
He saw me, and came directly over to the table, where he leaned over and hugged me. “It’s great to see you again,” he said. There seemed to be a genuine warmth there, and it surprised me. Of all the guys, I expected Larry to be the most standoffish, just because he was the most handsome. Wrong again, detective.
“I think it’s really cool that you care enough to look into what happened to Lucie,” he said. “Too often nobody cares about people on the edges of society.”
“Was Lucie on the edge?”
“She came from a poor family. She didn’t even finish high school. But she didn’t want anybody to know that, and sometimes she told people that her family back in the Philippines was rich, that they were bankrolling her surfing career.”
“Did she lie a lot?”
Larry shrugged. “Sometimes. Occasionally she shoplifted, and I know once or twice she picked up tourists, had sex back at their hotel rooms, and stole their wallets. I wouldn’t say she had a lot of morals. And even though she was pretty, and smart, and talented, she wasn’t successful yet, and she didn’t have rich or influential friends to make sure that the police investigated her murder.”
“They investigated,” I said. “A friend of mine showed me the report. They just couldn’t find anyone who would be honest with them about her.”
“It’s hard,” Larry said.
George reappeared, with Heinekens for all three of us. “You talking about sex already?” he asked Larry.
“Get over yourself, George,” Larry said. “I’m talking about Lucie. According to Kimo, nobody would talk to the police about her.”
“Nobody asked me,” George said. “Not that I had that much to say. Or that I’d trust the cops too much anyway.”
“George has had a couple of run-ins with the police,” Larry said. “He’s a little too fond of having sex outdoors. With strangers.”
“Up yours.”
“You’ve been there.” Larry turned to me. “Always with a condom, though. You don’t know where that thing has been.”
“How’d you know Lucie?” I asked.
“We used to go shopping together. I was at Butterfly one day, hanging out with Brad, when she came in. We totally hit it off. She had great taste in clothes. We’d go down to the outlet mall in Waikele together and look for bargains.”
“She didn’t strike me as the bargain hunter type,” I said. “Butterfly certainly isn’t a discount operation.”
“Lucie loved labels,” Larry said. “More than she loved a bargain. Me, all I can do most places is browse, but I can actually buy at Waikele. Lucie’d go with me, help me pick out what worked best for my coloring, my build.”
He was dressed beautifully, I had to admit. His linen slacks caressed his body, and the Dolce amp; Gabbana logo t-shirt he wore seemed almost to have been custom-made. He wore suede shoes that looked like they were fresh from the box.