I ended up at the top of Mount Tantalus, overlooking Honolulu. It was a real tourist office day, temps in the low 70s, trade winds off the ocean, just a few puffy white clouds floating across the sky to add interest to what otherwise would have been an unbroken expanse of light blue.
From up there, I could see all the way from the extinct volcano of Diamond Head to the naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was only about a dozen miles, but it was a trip that ran from the origin of the island all the way to the latest innovations in military technology. I looked out at the city for a while, saw the line of surf where waves broke against the shore, planeloads of tourists landing and taking off from Honolulu International, the steady traffic of tiny cars along the ribbon of the H1, the highway the federal government requires us to call an interstate. I guess subconsciously I’d hoped that coming up there would allow me to put all my troubles into perspective, see myself as just one of those infinitesimally small people below me, going about their daily lives.
I’m not sure it worked, but I did get out of the truck, sit on a bench, and start to read the dossiers, as Sampson knew I would.
Though there was a lot of paperwork-crime scene reports, interviews with witnesses, friends and relatives-there wasn’t much information. There was no thread that tied together all three victims other than the fact that all three were surfers. Michael Pratt was haole, or white, a mainlander who lived in Hale’iwa when the surf was high, traveling around the globe to compete, from France to Australia and Costa Rica to South Africa. He usually finished in the money in surfing championships, and supplemented his income by teaching surfing at clinics and exhibitions.
Nineteen-year-old Lucie Zamora was a Filipina who had moved to Honolulu at age ten when her mother, a maid at a Waikiki hotel, sent for her and her younger brother. She had been living on the North Shore for the last two years, working as a clerk and waitress while struggling to become a professional surfer. She had a couple of high finishes in local tournaments, but was nowhere near Pratt’s caliber.
Ronald Chang was twenty-five, a computer technician and weekend surfer. Born in Hong Kong, he had grown up on Maui, where his parents ran a Chinese restaurant. Like me, he’d been surfing most of his life, and like me, too, he had a full-time job. But he’d never placed in the money at a surf competition.
Though Zamora and Chang knew each other, neither seemed to know Pratt. Zamora and Pratt were shot with the same gun, and Chang had disappeared earlier on the day that Zamora was shot. There had to be a connection between these three that had led to their deaths, but the detectives on the case hadn’t been able to find it. Did I think I was better? No. I knew I was good, but almost every detective I’d met on the force was as smart, or as dogged, or as lucky, as I was. Sampson believed that because I was a surfer, I’d have some special entree to the world of North Shore surfing that would provide the missing clue. But was it worth lying to people I cared about-and the general population as well-and putting my life on hold to find out if he was right?
That phrase struck me. Putting my life on hold.
Michael Pratt’s life, Lucie Zamora’s life, and Ronald Chang’s life had been put on permanent hold. How many others would suffer the same fate if I didn’t do anything?
I closed the dossiers and looked out at the landscape again. Those big puffy clouds had multiplied and were massing over Diamond Head. O‘ahu is an island of microclimates-it can be gloriously sunny in Kahala, but rainy in Manoa, just a few miles away. Partly sunny in Pearl City, windy in La’ie, cool in Hale’iwa. And yet, they say if you just stay where you are, the weather will change soon.
I felt as unsettled as the weather, and equally vulnerable to being blown one way or the other. So I decided to get my father’s advice.
Telling Lies
My dad has spent most of his career as a general contractor, building the homes, stores and offices where the people of our island live and work. He has always impressed upon me and my brothers the honorable nature of hard work, the need to put others before yourself, the importance of remaining true to your ideals no matter what pressure is brought to bear on you.
When I was born, he was working as a construction supervisor for Amfac, one of the “Big 5” companies in Hawai’i. At night and on weekends, he was building a small house on a piece of land his friend Chin Suk had given him. When the house was finished, he planned to sell it, and use the money to start his own construction business.
But it was tough providing for a family of five on a superintendent’s salary, and he often had to wait weeks before he could afford to buy the materials he needed. One day, a man from a mainland company offered him a thousand dollars to approve a lucrative contract that would have been very costly to Amfac. That thousand dollars would have been enough to buy the rest of the materials my father needed, and get his business launched. But he turned the money down, and reported the bribe to his boss.
The house wasn’t finished for another six months, but my father made up for it by working harder and working smarter, avoiding waste and watching every penny. He has always held that up to us as an example of how a man must listen to his conscience and not take the easy way out.
Now, toward the end of his career, he worked out of an office above a small shopping plaza he owned in the industrial neighborhood of Salt Lake, near Pearl Harbor, and I knew if I hurried I could make it there just in time for lunch. I pulled into the parking lot just as he was descending the exterior stair.
He has lost a little height, the osteoporosis compressing his spinal column in tiny increments, and his hair is flecked with silver. As my mother often points out, though, he is still as handsome as he is in their wedding picture, framed in our living room. She keeps him on a strict diet, but he’s a big man, broad-shouldered and a little paunchy in the gut. If I age as gracefully as he has, I’ll be glad.
“Kimo!” he said, when I pulled up next to him and leaned out my window. “This is a nice surprise. How’s the first day back at work? You on a case out this way?”
“Not exactly. You have lunch plans?”
“I’m having lunch with you. Come on, I’ll buy you a plate lunch.”
A plate lunch is an island tradition, developed to serve to plantation workers who needed to keep up their strength through long days. A main course, usually fish or chicken, two scoops of rice, a scoop of macaroni salad, and some shredded lettuce. As we walked past the storefronts, I noticed an odd pattern in the flooring-random tiles with unusual patterns. “Hey, Dad, what’s with the floor here? Surfboards? Footballs? Movie cameras?”
As I walked I figured out the pattern. The tiles came in groupings of threes, scattered down the walkway as if tossed there. “Not movie cameras, TV cameras,” my father said. “For my sons. I wondered which of you would be the first to see the pattern. Haoa comes here a couple times a week, but he never looks down. Lui even came once or twice, but he never saw. This is the first time you’ve noticed.”
“For your sons,” I repeated. The TV camera for Lui, the football for Haoa, the surfboard for me. While we had been going on about our lives, leaving our parents behind, our father had been memorializing us in tile. “I hope you have the same number of each tile. You don’t want us to get jealous.”
“Always the same for each of my sons. No difference.”
We walked into my father’s favorite restaurant, a hole in the wall at the far end of the shopping center called Papa Lo’s. I didn’t know if there was a Papa Lo; if there was, I’d never met him. Instead the place was staffed by eager Vietnamese women who spoke only enough English to take orders and make change.
While we sat at a linoleum-topped table and waited for our food, I said, “I met with my new boss today, and things aren’t going to be as easy as I expected.”