“It’s tough losing somebody you care about,” I said, when Trish had recovered enough to sit up. “How long did you know Mike?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and got a smudge of sand on her right cheek. “About two years. But he had this girlfriend back in New Jersey, and he didn’t break up with her until last year. Then it was another couple of months before we hooked up.”
“Did you go to Mexpipe with him?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t. I had to work. But I know something happened down there.”
“What do you think?”
“I couldn’t say exactly, but I knew him, and I knew something was wrong. He kept complaining about his board, about how his rhythm was off. Whenever I’d press him, he’d say I didn’t want to know about it.”
“But he never told you what was wrong?”
She shook her head. “When they came to take him away, I talked to the cops. I told them I thought there was something funny about his board, and that they should take it into their office and look it over. But this fat cop just laughed.”
“I’ve heard Mike was having problems with his board. What happened to it after that?”
“I took it to my house, and I left it outside, along the wall, with my boards and my housemates’ boards. But then the next day when I was at work, somebody walked off with it. That’s when I knew there was really something funny. I mean, whoever it was didn’t steal any other boards-just Mike’s.”
“Did you report the theft to the cops?”
“I wasn’t talking to those jerks again,” she said. “They care more about donut shops than about what happens out here.” She turned to me. “Look how they treated you. Assholes.”
“Some cops are better than others. I worked with a lot of good ones. A few bad ones, too, but you get that anywhere. Even surfing.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Trish lapsed into silence, hugging her knees close to her and staring out at the waves. This was about the time when Akoni, would start to get frustrated, thinking that Trish didn’t really know anything specific. But me, I was just getting started. I had all day to hang out under the sunshine and the blue skies, watching the surfers and the waves, and waiting for Trish to talk. “You have any theories about what was going on with Mike?” I asked.
“You won’t believe me either.”
“I know you don’t really think that. Or you wouldn’t have been trying to tell me this for the last couple of days.”
She was still wavering, so I stood up. “Come on, let’s see what the waves are like from the other side of the breakers.”
Reluctantly, she followed me. We duck-dived through the incoming water and then sat on our boards near each other, waiting for waves. I caught one first, and then she did, and we surfed like that for almost an hour before she dragged her board back up to the sand where we’d been sitting. I followed her.
“Have you decided that I’ll listen to you?” I asked, sitting next to her.
Most of the people out at Pipeline were in the water, so we had the beach almost all to ourselves. The photographer couple had packed up and left. There were some kids up by Ke Nui Road, and a grizzled old guy asleep on the beach a few hundred yards away from us, but that was about it. The sun was high in the sky and it felt good to dry off in the hot sun. Overhead, a few cumulous clouds floated lazily past, and the shrieks of seagulls mixed in with the roar of the waves pounding against the beach and the occasional cries of a surfer who’d either caught or lost a good wave.
“I think he was smuggling drugs from Mexico in his surfboard,” Trish said finally. “I know, it sounds like something out of a bad movie.”
“Actually, it sounds pretty close to what I think was happening.” I turned to her. “There have been three surfers shot so far, and all three of them were at Mexpipe. They were all shot within a few weeks after they got back. So it’s likely that the trip to Mexico was somehow related. I heard Mike was having problems with his board, and I know the girl who was killed sold drugs, but I never thought of smuggling drugs in a surfboard. What made you think of that?”
“I just put it together. I never asked him about it. He was dead by the time I figured it out.” She ran her hand through her wet hair, pushing loose blonde strands back off her face. “He had, like zero money. Everything he made went for paying his basic bills and for travel to surfing competitions. Then he got back from Mexico, where he didn’t win very much, but he suddenly had enough to pay entry fees and air fare to this tournament in Tahiti.”
“And you thought he’d made that extra money from smuggling?”
“Not at first. But then he told me something was wrong with his board. That it had gotten a hole drilled in it.”
“So you assumed the hole was for smuggling drugs.”
She squared her shoulders and turned away from me. “You’re talking like one of them.”
“Like a cop? But isn’t that why you came to me in the first place? Because you knew I used to be a cop? People don’t change, Trish. At least not so fast.” I watched her back for a minute, and thought I saw the pressure on her shoulders lessen just a bit. “Another thing that hasn’t changed about me is that I care about catching criminals. I want to do what I can to make sure that the person who killed Mike gets put away for it. But I have to ask questions in order to do that.”
She turned back. “I know I sound paranoid. But something’s just not right.”
“It’s not that I doubt you, Trish. I believe you. I just have to learn everything I can.” I paused. “The girl who was killed after Mike appears to have been an ice dealer. He didn’t use drugs, did he?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know if he knew a girl named Lucie Zamora?”
“Sure. Most of the pretty decent surfers know each other. Is she the one who roped him into smuggling?”
“I don’t know. There may be somebody above Lucie, who put it all together.”
She fingered a gold surfboard on a thin gold chain around her neck. “What are you going to do now?”
“Keep asking questions.” The sun passed behind a cloud bank that was rolling in off the Pacific, and it got suddenly chilly on the beach. I stood up. “I’m going back in the water. You coming?”
She shook her head. “I gotta work in an hour. But I’m out here most mornings. If you hear anything else, will you tell me?”
“Sure.”
I walked her back up toward Ke Nui Road, and watched her drive off toward Hale’iwa. I remembered that Mike Pratt had worked for a board shaper when he first came to the North Shore, and put that together with the fact that something had gone wrong with his board after coming back from Mexico. It made sense to me that before throwing the board away, he’d try to salvage it. And who better to go to than his old boss? The shaper was an old hippie named Palani Anderson; I’d read about him but had never met him. Maybe it was time I did.
The Old Hippie
I found Palani’s workshop in Mokule‘ia, just off Pu‘uiki Beach. The first thing that struck me was the aroma of polyester resin, which I could smell from a block away. When I approached the open garage, I heard the noise of an orbital sander, and I saw Palani standing in front of a shaping rack, working on what looked like a nine-foot board. His white hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and he wore goggles and a dust mask.
The room behind him was painted black, with lights mounted on the walls just above the shaping rack to highlight any bumps in the white foam. Scattered around him, on the floor and on shelves along the wall, were the tools of his trade: a dozen different types of planes; a spokeshave, used for shaping curved work; a Japanese curved planer; several different kinds of surforms (used to shape noses, tails, and rails); and piles of different grades of sandpaper.