Mahu Surfer (16 page)

“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.

I also saw stacks of foam blanks in sizes from six feet up to ten-feet longboards, and cans of resin. When Palani looked up and saw me approaching, he turned the sander off, pulled down the mask and flipped up the goggles.

I introduced myself. “I remember you,” he said. “You used to be a pretty decent surfer. You still surf?”

It was amazing how good it felt to be remembered for something other than coming out of the closet. “Try to.”

“You looking for a board?”

I shook my head. “Information. About Mike Pratt.”

“Poor son of a bitch,” Palani said. “I wasn’t surprised to hear he died. Still a shame, though.”

He put the goggles and the mask down on a table and we walked behind the garage. The air was fresher there, a nice breeze coming up off the ocean. He pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, and offered me one, which I declined.

“Why weren’t you surprised?” I asked, as he lit his cigarette.

“He got himself in with the wrong crowd.” Palani took a deep drag on his cigarette. “I’m not opposed to recreational drugs. Hell, I smoked enough dope in my life to save a ward full of cancer patients. But the drugs these kids do today, they’re bad news. Crack cocaine and X and crystal meth.”

“Nothing like the heroin of the good old days.”

Palani laughed. “You got me there.” Then his face saddened. “But Mike got himself on the business end of the deal somehow. He was a good kid, you know, a real talented surfer. Had a feel for the waves you can’t train into somebody.”

“So I’ve heard. What made him go bad, then?”

“Money. Makes us all do things we shouldn’t sometimes. He was determined to be a real competitor, and to do that you need backing. Entry fees, travel, training time. Somebody offered him the money he needed, and he took it.”

“He ever tell you who that was?”

Palani shook his head, and his ponytail swung from one side to the other. “I didn’t want to know. But I knew he was in trouble.”

“Did he ever come up here with something wrong with his board?”

Palani looked at me. “You know a lot about him, don’t you?”

“I’ve been learning. Somebody asked him to smuggle drugs in his board, didn’t they?”

“Yup. Really pissed him off, because he loved that board. He customized it himself, right here in this shop.”

“The board wasn’t fixable?”

Palani laughed. “Not with the center of it cored out,” he said. “You can fix a broken plug, a stringer. Something simple. No way to fix something like that.”

“What I still don’t understand is how that could get him killed.”

“It was him complaining about it. I told him to shut his mouth, it was going to get him in trouble, but he kept on. I guess whoever it was got worried he’d bitch to somebody who would listen.”

We made small talk for a few minutes, and then Palani showed me around his garage. I’d done a little shaping when I was in high school, trying to customize my own boards, and it was cool to see a master at work. But eventually I had to tear myself away—I had the information I’d come for.

Leaving Palani’s place, I felt like I was getting somewhere. At long last, a real motive for Mike Pratt’s death. He was pissed off that his board had gotten ruined, and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about it.

I dragged myself back to Hibiscus House. I thought I might take a nap and then think about going over to see Brad, but my nap stretched all night, until I woke up Saturday morning as fingers of light were beginning to crawl through the window that looked out over the driveway.

The next morning, as I waited for waves, I couldn’t help trying to organize what I had been discovering. There were certain pieces of evidence. All three of the murder victims had been to Mexpipe, though that was the only thing, beyond surfing and murder, that seemed to link them. Therefore it was probably an important fact.

Mike Pratt knew Lucie Zamora. After a trip to Mexico, a trip Lucie had also made, Mike returned with the money for travel and entrance fees. Trish believed he’d gotten that money by bringing crystal meth back from Mexico, and that he’d used his board to hold it. Palani confirmed that a hole had been cored in Mike’s board. Shortly after he returned, after he’d complained about the condition of his board to anyone who’d listen, he was dead.

According to Jeremy Leddinger, who had a drug addict ex-boyfriend, Lucie Zamora sold ice, the powdered form of crystal meth. I had found a stash behind her medicine cabinet, and I doubted it had been left there by a previous tenant. Further evidence was provided by the cash she had to spend on designer clothing at Brad Jacobson’s boutique, Butterfly, and on shopping trips with Brad’s friend Larry Brickman.

Larry and George had also verified that Lucie knew Ronnie Chang, the computer nerd slash weekend surfer, who had also gone to Puerto Escondido for Mexpipe.  A sexy woman has been known to draw even the straightest guy into troublesome waters, and Jeremy had said Lucie led Ronnie around by his dick.

A huge wave washed over me and knocked me into the cool Pacific, reminding me that I was in troublesome waters as well. I kept on surfing, all day long, though I couldn’t stop turning over the questions I had about the three dead surfers. Whenever I was on the beach, I tried to talk to other surfers, looking for anyone who had known Mike, Lucie or Ronnie, or anyone else who had gone to Mexpipe. I didn’t have any luck.

That night, I thought about calling Brad, but I decided first to head to the Drainpipe, the Hale’iwa bar where Lucie’s one-time boyfriend Frank worked. I was hoping he could shed some more light on where Lucie got her drugs from, and how her dealing might tie in with her trip to Mexpipe. I wasn’t sure how much he could tell me, particularly if the bar was busy, but it was Saturday night and I was thirsty, and the Drainpipe seemed as good a bar as any.

Jeremy had said that dating Frank was just a cover so that Lucie could hang around the Drainpipe and meet up with customers. Perhaps someone there had bought from her—or someone had moved into her territory.

Frank wasn’t on duty, which was disappointing, but I got myself a beer and relaxed. I got roped into a darts game, talked to a couple of guys and girls, and remembered what my Saturday nights had been like before I came out of the closet.