He looked at the clock. “Gotta get back behind the bar. You think of anything else, just ask me.”
“Okay.”
He stood up and walked back behind the bar. Based on what Rik had told me, I needed to talk to Ari. I looked at my watch. It was just nine o’clock; I could probably make a stop by Sugar’s and not seem like I was stalking Brad.
I drained my beer, waved at Frank, and drove the mile or two to Sugar’s. Like the Drainpipe, it was quiet, but I was lucky to see Ari sitting alone at a table by the window, sipping something that looked like a Cosmopolitan and making notes on a Palm Pilot.
He looked up as I got close to his table, and said, “If you’re looking for Brad, he’s already gone.”
“I was kind of looking for him. But for you, too. Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Let me just get a beer.” I got another Kona ale, and sat across from Ari.
“So Brad found out about your little dalliance?” Ari asked, tilting his head toward me.
“Yup. I didn’t realize it would bother him. I mean, I hardly know him. He was really nice to me, getting me cleaned up, and we had sex a couple of times. But it’s not like we had any kind of relationship.”
“He’s a little sensitive,” Ari said. “And this isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“So why’d he come yell at me? Why not go after Larry and George?”
Ari crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “Because we all live here, and we see each other all the time.”
“Okay. Doesn’t make much sense to me, but I can see it.”
He closed his Palm Pilot and put it away in the briefcase by his side. “So what did you want from me?” he asked, as he looked back up.
“I wanted to ask you about Lucie. I’ve been hearing that she was trying to get away from selling drugs, go legit. She got a real estate license.”
“Yup. I told her that if my project went through, I’d hire her to work for me, selling units. And she’d have been good at it, too. She was hungry, and hungry people make the best salespeople.”
“By hungry you mean…”
“She had a big appetite for life,” Ari said, waving his right hand around. “She liked designer labels and expensive meals and traveling to surf competitions around the world. She had been brought up poor and didn’t want to be poor any more. Somebody with that kind of motivation will do what it takes to close a deal.”
I took a drink of my beer. It was just as good as the first two had been. “You think she would have given up dealing drugs if she came to work for you?”
He shrugged. “I hoped so. I had a feeling she was heading for trouble. I guess she didn’t get ahead of it fast enough.”
“Is there any possibility that whoever she worked for might have resented her wanting to get out, or that she knew more than she should have?”
“Always possible,” Ari said. “It wasn’t like we sat around and talked about her dealer or anything. I deliberately didn’t talk about any of that stuff with her, because I didn’t want to know.”
I nodded. I didn’t have anything else to ask, but I was happy enough to sit there with Ari drinking my beer. By the time I’d finished it, though, he’d finished his Cosmopolitan, and we both stood up around the same time. “Give Brad a day or two to simmer down,” Ari said. “That is, if you’re still interested.”
“He’s a nice guy. I don’t want to hurt him.”
“I’m glad.” We walked out to the parking lot together, and he hugged me before we parted. “Take care of yourself.”
“You too.” I got into my truck, and felt the accumulation of all my surfing and my late nights. I drove back to Hibiscus House and fell promptly and soundly asleep, not waking until six the next morning.
I woke feeling refreshed, yet somehow very sad. Seeing my family the day before had made me realize how much I missed my old life in Honolulu, my friends, my job. But the only way to get back there was to solve the three murders, and I had to keep on surfing, and pretending to be a disgraced former detective who had nothing better to do than hit the waves.
It was enough to make you crazy. And when I get crazy, I surf-that’s how I let go of what’s bothering me and clear my head so I can get back to work. I knew I needed to think about Brad and what had happened on Saturday night and then on Sunday, and I hoped that I could work it all in between waves. Which led me to Pipeline, just a little while before the bodies were found.
Bodies in the Sand
It was about half an hour before sunrise when I slipped into the water, and the sky above Hale’iwa was already lightening from black to gray. Around me, inky silhouettes of surfers in wetsuits paddled their boards out beyond the breakers, the slap of their hands in the cold water an intermittent counterpoint to the crashing waves. I lay flat on my board and tried to feel the water.
I saw a wave coming, knew intuitively that it was my wave, and started paddling, fast, as the motion of the water thrust me forward. As soon as I could, I stood up, and then I wasn’t thinking any more, I was part of the wave, holding on to it, following it, running with it, first toward the shore, then parallel, surfing the curl, sliding along the crest as the wave and I made our way toward the moment when it threw itself onto the shore in its final dance with death.
I cheated the shore’s embrace just in time, sliding away and dunking myself in the cold water again. For about three minutes, I had forgotten everything about my life, what was right and what was wrong, and just lived in the moment. That was why I loved to surf, why for four years as a patrolman and then two as a detective, surfing most mornings had been the way I made it from day to day with some piece of myself still intact.
The sun finally peeked over the Leilehua Plateau, and the dark shapes around me began to become recognizable. I kept on surfing, pushing myself as much as I could. If I couldn’t be a cop for a while, and had to be a surfer again, then at least I was going to be the best damn surfer I could be.
I had just mounted a mid-sized wave when I heard the scream. It was far away, and the surf was roaring, but something about the pitch or the urgency in her voice penetrated my consciousness. From my peak, I could see her-a young girl, late teens at most, dragging a wide board down the sandy strip from Ke Nui Road. Something had stopped her in her tracks, kept her screaming, hiccupping and finally crying by the time I’d surfed in and run up the beach to her.
I saw what the morning light had revealed to her, in a hollow of sand: two naked men, in the act of embracing, both of them quite clearly dead from bullet wounds to the head. The blood had run downhill and what had not yet sunk into the sand was pooled around their feet. Though one body was unfamiliar to me, I was able to recognize the other immediately, and I felt my heart rate accelerate and sweat begin to accumulate on my forehead and under my arms.
There was already a small crowd standing around, staring at the bodies. “Anybody got a cell phone?” I asked.
A blond haole guy in surfer shorts that revealed a cast on his right leg held one up. “Call 911,” I said. “Everybody get back. Try not to disturb anything.”
“You’re that cop, aren’t you?” a dark-haired girl said. “The gay one.”
“Still gay, but not a cop any more,” I said, as I tried to get everyone to back away. I shrugged. “I guess old habits die hard, though.”
I couldn’t see either of their faces, but the naked man I did not recognize was lithe and trim, a true surfer’s physique. The man I knew was a little older, a little out of shape, but still handsome. I resisted the impulse to kneel down and touch Brad Jacobson because I knew I would only be contaminating the crime scene.
I calmed the screaming girl down, and a girlfriend of hers volunteered to keep an eye on her. Everybody else was eager to get back to the waves, and I had no right to keep them around. While I waited for the cops, I practiced bringing my breathing and my pulse rate back to normal. I had seen a lot of dead bodies, and I tried to remind myself that whatever essence had lived in both of them was now gone, leaving behind only an empty shell.