Here Today, Gone to Maui (17 page)

“Someone used my American Express to buy a diamond ring at the Hyatt a few days ago,” Michael said. “The same card was used at the ABC Store in Whaler’s Village.” (My muffin, I thought. My anklet.)

“And my frequent-flier miles are gone,” he continued. “Used for two first-class tickets.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I was going to use those for a dive trip to Australia.”

I held out my left hand. “This is the ring,” I mumbled, my head down.

Tiara swung around to look at me. “But you said you and Jimmy had been engaged a long time!”

I shook my head and blushed with shame.

“So when did he propose?” she demanded.

“I—he—” I looked at the faces around me and then back at the floor. “He never actually proposed. I found the ring later. In his luggage. After he disappeared.”

The room was silent for a moment. “So he may have bought the ring for me!” Tiara burst out happily.

“
He
didn’t buy the ring for anybody!” Michael James said. “
I
bought the ring.”

I pulled on the ring. It hurt. “You can have it back.”

“Thanks so much,” Michael muttered.

The sergeant spoke. “Before Mr. James—the other Mr. James, Jimmy—disappeared, did anything strange happen? Anything to indicate maybe he knew he was in trouble?”

I stopped pulling on my finger. The restaurant: of course. “We were out to dinner. They turned down Jimmy’s credit card.”

“How did he seem after that?”

I considered. “Upset. Distracted.”

“So he might have guessed he was in trouble,” Detective McGuinn said.

“Do you still have his personal effects?” Sergeant Hosozawa asked me. “His wallet, his license?”

“Yeah, they’re in my condo.”

“Would you mind if we took a look around?” He said this casually, but I felt like I’d been punched in my gut. If I said no, he’d look around anyway, but he’d need a few hours to get a search warrant.
Allegedly disappeared
.

“Of course not,” I said cooperatively.
I had nothing to do with this.

“Oh, and Ms. Shea?”

“Yes?”

“We’re still going to need that ring back.”

 

 

“I feel bad,” Tiara said when she walked into my condo. I’d driven back with two police cruisers in tow: Michael rode with Sergeant Hosozawa, while Tiara hitched a ride with Detective McGuinn. (“Can I try on your handcuffs?” I heard her say before she shut the car door.)

I was feeling bad, too. Well—obviously. But just when I thought I couldn’t sink any lower, I was hit with a new wave of humiliation. Having finally seen the Hyatt, the Maui Hi seemed even sadder than before. It made me feel shabby by association. Any fool could see which woman Jimmy preferred. Tiara was the five-star lover. I was the budget girl. I put the
ho
in HoJo.

Tiara sat down on one of the rattan chairs with the orange cushions, perching on the edge to minimize skin-to-fabric contact.

“The green ones are cleaner,” I said. “And they don’t, you know. Smell.”

“Oh!” She popped up and moved over to a green chair. I remained standing, as if I were hosting an impromptu neighborhood get-together. Sergeant Hosozawa dug through Jimmy’s duffel bag, emptying the contents onto the nasty brown carpet and running his fingers over every edge to check for hidden pockets. His latex gloves made me think of the kind of yearly doctor appointments that I dread for weeks beforehand.

Detective McGuinn, meanwhile, opened drawer after drawer even though I’d told him that Jimmy had never unpacked. He ignored me, digging uninterrupted through my bathing suits, T-shirts, and sensible cotton underwear.

“Can I get anyone coffee?” I chirped, disappointed when the police said no.

Michael stood outside the door, talking to himself again, like a well-groomed schizophrenic. With nothing left to do, I settled onto a green chair, noting almost subconsciously that it actually smelled just as bad as the orange ones.

“Jimmy didn’t invite me to Maui,” Tiara muttered, picking at her fingernails.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.

“He didn’t invite me. I kept expecting him to. I mean, your boyfriend tells you he’s coming to Maui and doesn’t even ask you to come with? I kept saying stuff like ‘We could make love in the ocean,’ and ‘I could lick piña coladas off your—’ Well, you know. But he didn’t pick up on it.”

“Perhaps you were too subtle,” I said, thinking,
Pina coladas?
Wouldn’t that be awfully cold and, you know, sticky?

“So, anyways,” she continued, “I’d just been reading this article in
Cosmo
about how guys really like it when a girl takes the initiation.” (I didn’t correct her. I think I get points for that.) “So I bought my own plane ticket and checked into the Hyatt. I wasn’t even going to tell him. I was just going to wait for him in the room—naked, you know.”

“With a piña colada,” I said.

“Or Jet Puff. You know the marshmallow spread? One time we—you probably don’t want to hear about it.”

“Not so much,” I said. “So . . . when did Jimmy find out you were here?”

“He called me from the airport. Said he’d just landed and was missing me and wishing I was in Maui with him. I was so excited, I just couldn’t keep the secret, so I said, ‘Baby, I have a big surprise for you.’ ” She sniffled. “We called each other baby.”

“What did he say when you told him you were here?” I couldn’t believe I cared. I didn’t want to care.

“He was, like, totally bummed—saying, ‘You’re putting me on, right? Tell me you’re putting me on.’ ”

“Really?” I sounded too pleased, I realized, making an effort to lower the timbre of my voice. “I mean—you must have been hurt.”

“Well—yeah! I mean, especially considering that the last time we’d been together we didn’t leave my room for, like, eighteen hours. My mother was all, ‘Are you guys going to stay in there all day or are you going to come out for something to eat?’ ”

“Your
mother
was there?”

She shrugged. “A lot of people my age live at home. It’s not like she was in the bedroom with us. She totally respects my boundaries.”

“Did someone say something about coffee?” Michael James, off the phone at last, entered the room.

“Yes!” I hopped out of my chair. “It’s Kona coffee—pretty good, actually.”

He followed me over to the coffeemaker. “And, if you have any painkillers—aspirin, Aleve. Morphine.”

“Headache?”

“Mm.”

I started the coffeemaker and then went into the bathroom, but the detective had taken my cosmetics bag into the main room.

“Um, Detective—have you seen a bottle of Aleve?”

He tilted his head to a spot next to the bed. “On the floor over there. Between the diaphragm and the condoms.”

“Thanks ever so much.” I snatched up the bottle and crossed the room to Michael.

“You’re pretty prepared.” We both knew he wasn’t talking about the Aleve.

“Yeah, well, I don’t like surprises. By planning ahead, I can make sure nothing goes wrong.”

He snorted with laughter and then rubbed his head, as if the strain had worsened his agony. He popped open the bottle and swallowed a couple of tablets dry.

“I guess this is stressful for you, too,” I said, just as his cell phone rang. He checked the number and stuck the phone into his pocket.

“Probably not as bad as it’s been for you, but, well—yeah. I’ve spent half the morning answering calls from people who want to know if I’m really dead and the other half calling people to let them know ahead of time that I’m not dead.”

I poured his coffee into a blue mug with white hibiscus flowers. “What do you say, exactly? ‘Just calling to tell you I’m not dead?’ ”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“I’m sorry about upsetting your mother.” I handed him the mug. “Milk or sugar?”

“Thanks—black is good.” He took a careful sip of the coffee, which was lukewarm at best. “My mother said you were nice about it.” A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “And she’s really looking forward to our wedding.”

Could I sink any lower? And then I remembered: “Oh. By the way, she needs to know if you’re going to your father’s birthday party.”

“Oh, crud.” His eyes widened. “I completely forgot about it. When is it?”

“She didn’t say,” I answered stiffly. What was I—his secretary? But then I thought about his mother and how upset she’d been. “It’s got to be pretty soon, though. You were supposed to let her know by last week—the caterer needs a head count.”

He bit his lip, thinking.

“You should really try to make it,” I said, pouring myself some coffee. “It’s his seventieth.”

Sergeant Hosozawa strode over, Jimmy’s wallet in his latex-gloved hands. The wallet was two-toned blue canvas, frayed at the edges, with a Velcro clasp. Clearly, this was a wallet no businessman would carry—it would be far too embarrassing to pull out. I’d seen the wallet countless times before. Why didn’t I realize something was off?

“I’ve got Jimmy James’s credit cards here,” the sergeant told Michael. “You got yours?”

Michael put down his mug, reached into the back pocket of his crisp khaki shorts, and pulled out a silver money clip. He fished out a few cards and handed them to the sergeant. “I’ve already canceled two of these.”

“You’re sure I can’t get you some coffee, Officer?” I chirped. If Hosozawa said yes, it would mean he didn’t suspect me of anything: murder, identity theft, or a cover-up.

He looked up from the cards briefly and shook his head. Oh, crap.

“The American Express is a match,” he told Michael. “But we figured that since it’s the card he used to buy the ring.”

Without thinking, I rubbed my left thumb against my naked ring finger.

“What’s this other American Express?” the sergeant asked, holding up one of Michael’s cards.

“That one’s for personal expenses. It’s the only one I haven’t canceled.”

“I don’t see a match in Jimmy James’s wallet. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. Miss Shea, do you remember what card he tried to use at the restaurant?”

“It was a Visa,” I said. “I remember he said he had another card back at the room. I assumed he only had the one Amex, but I don’t really know.”

“Oh, great,” Michael moaned. “That means I have to cancel this card, too, and it’s the only one I’ve got right now.”

“Don’t,” the sergeant said. “Not just yet.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I doubt Jimmy James would try to use the other Amex. It’s already been turned down once. But if he gets desperate enough, he might try to use the Visa number, even without the card—or, who knows? Maybe he has your other Amex account. Or your ATM card, even.”

“Wait a minute,” Michael said.

I stared at the policeman. “Are you saying . . .”

Sergeant Hosozawa shrugged. “Maybe he really did drown. The currents were strong that day, and nobody saw him come ashore. Still, given this new twist, we have to consider the very real possibility that he faked his own death, snuck off somewhere. If he’s hiding, he’ll need money eventually.”

“Jimmy might be alive?”
Tiara yowled.

The sergeant narrowed his eyes. “Yes. I just said that.”

She shook her head violently. “No. He wouldn’t fake his own death. I know Jimmy better than that. He’d never do anything to hurt me.”

We all paused and then silently agreed to ignore her.

“I think we’re done here,” Sergeant Hosozawa said. “Detective?”

“I’m through.” He crossed the room and peeled off his gloves. “And I’d love a cup of coffee, if there’s any left.”

Michael’s phone purred. He checked the display. “It’s the second time he’s called. I’m going to have to . . .” He opened the phone without finishing the sentence.

“Hey, Rick, how’s it going?”

The guy on the other end was so loud, we could hear him yelling, though we couldn’t make out the words.

I poured coffee for the detective. I apologized for the absence of Sweet’n Low; he apologized for using up my milk.

Michael closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck. “It wasn’t me,” he told the person on the other end of the phone. “Some guy stole my credit-card numbers and, well, kind of my identity and—
what?
” His eyes popped open. “What channel?”

Seeing him scanning the room for a television, I pushed the power button on the little set and handed him the remote.

There he was on the set, poorly lit and unsmiling: Michael James—the real Michael James, that is—under the caption MAN LOST OFF MAUI COAST.

“We’ll keep you updated with any new developments,” the newscaster said.

Michael flipped to another station. There was his unflattering photo again—he looked seriously cranky—next to a shot of Slaughterhouse Beach. The caption this time: SPECIAL REPORT: SCUBA TRAGEDY. A newscaster was in the midst of his narration: “According to the coast guard, the beach is known for riptides and dangerous currents. Search crews continue to comb the area, though officials admit that it is unlikely that they will find Mr. James alive . . .”

The next station Michael checked had a soap opera that couldn’t even begin to compete with real life. Within a minute, all of the stations had resumed their regular programming. Michael ended his phone call and turned off the TV, but we all stood there silent for a moment, just staring at the blank set.

“Do you think they mentioned my name?” Tiara asked.

“You looked pretty unhappy in that photo,” I said to Michael, trying to lighten the mood.

“I was unhappy. I’d just spent three hours at the DMV. It’s my driver’s-license photo.” He was still staring in disbelief at the blank television.

“Since neither of you ladies could provide a photo, we contacted the California DMV,” Detective McGuinn said casually. “Good coffee, by the way.”

“It’s Kona,” I said.