The Flaming Luau of Death (16 page)

O
kay,” I whispered, “I’m on it.”

I was whispering to
myself,
naturally, just strengthening my resolve, but I suppose an argument could be made that
if my
fairy happened to be hanging about and listening, she could hear my pledge as well.

Over in a far corner of the living room, I thought I saw a familiar face. I looked closer and recognized the wild Hawaiian-print shirt covering the middle-age spread on the rather short torso of Earl Maffini, the president of the Hawaiian Bamboo Association. He appeared deep in conversation with another fellow. The crowd was such that I couldn’t get a clear shot, so I worked my way over to Earl’s side of the room, detouring left and right to offer chicken lollipops to whomever I caught hungrily eyeing my tray. I stopped to serve a small group of somber young people near a grand piano, turning my back to Earl’s corner of the room, but close enough to overhear some of his conversation.

“…or I’ll lose another friend. Is that what you want?”

A familiar masculine voice answered him. “Of course not. But no one flies low over my property. I’ve taken care of all that.”

The dour young man in front of me, whom I had momentarily
forgotten, removed two lemongrass-chicken appetizers and said a baleful “Thanks.”

I nodded but kept my ear on the conversation behind me.

“You are taking a terrible risk!” Earl said, his voice now lower, but I was following every word. “Look, all four of us have got to hang together if we are going to pull this off. And Claudia isn’t a fool. If she knows about your crop, that will only give her more power.”

The crowd parted a bit and I turned. And as I expected, it was Cake whose voice I’d just heard talking to Earl. Cake was standing with Earl, looking fabulous as always. “A man has to make money on this island, right?” he was saying, smiling. “You worry too much, Earl.”

They both recognized me at the same time.

“Hi,” I said, almost shy now in Cake’s presence. It was such a girly emotion, this flush of excitement I felt. And I fought the weakness in my knees.

“Ms. Bean,” Earl called out, his tone of voice instantly hearty.

Cake’s eyes filled with surprise. “Maddie?”

“Care for an hors d’oeuvre?”

He looked me up and down, not missing the sheerness of my linen top, the tightness of my slacks, the tray I was carrying. “Every time I see you, you’re working.”

I blushed. “Well…”

“What an industrious spirit you have.”

“You two know each other?” Earl asked. “Why am I not surprised, Cake. I suppose you’d like your privacy. Well, I’ve got to go talk to some of the others. I see Ike has finally made it.”

“Could I have a word with you, Earl?” I asked quickly before he could get away.

“With me? Well, of course.”

“In private?” I asked, indicating he might follow me off to the side of the room where there was an open door to an office.

He smiled at me and then turned and gave a cheery little victory wave to Cake.

“I’ll see you later, then,” Cake said to me, his hand on my bare arm, his expression puzzled. “Right, Maddie?”

“We’ll see.”

A smile played on his full lips as he watched me walk away. “We’ll see,” he echoed.

For one thing, I needed to be rational now. This present knees-a’buckle feeling, caused by mere proximity to a dangerously handsome man with whom I’d shared a semi-intimate encounter, was ludicrous. And for another, I was certain the conversation I’d just overheard between Earl Maffini and Cake couldn’t be good news. Whatever Earl had been warning Cake about, it seemed mixed up with the Bamboo Four, whoever they were. And what sort of crop had Earl implied could get Cake in trouble if he wasn’t careful?

Earl followed me all the way to the office, his eyebrows raised.

“Thanks for giving me a minute,” I said, resting my empty platter on the desk, smiling at the fifty-year-old guy.

“Now that’s got to be the first time in history the pretty lady asked
Cake
to get lost so she could spend some private time with
me.”

“I can’t believe that, Earl.”

But flattery only worked on some of the men some of the time. And a few minutes of private conversation was as far as it was going to get me. He said, “So why don’t you tell me to what I owe this pleasure?”

Alas, he was not quite the fool I’d hoped he’d be. “Did
you hear about Kelly?” I asked. “They say it was murder. That he was shot.”

“That’s what I heard too, but I can’t believe it,” Earl said. “Kelly was a wonderful boy, wonderful. I can’t imagine what happened. We don’t get this kind of crime on our island. It makes no sense.”

He sounded completely sincere. But I knew he worked as a lobbyist in his previous career. He was a professional wheel-greaser. How hard was it for Earl to sound concerned when he really wasn’t? I tried another topic. “Earl, who are the Bamboo Four?”

“What?”

“You. Cake. Claudia.” I ticked three fingers.

“Who told you about the Bamboo Four?” he asked, amused.

“Keniki Hicks. She said Kelly was having trouble with the Bamboo Four.”

“Not at all. I explained this to you after the HBA meeting. Keniki was upset and she doesn’t understand. We were all, including Kelly, on the same page, just that Kelly wanted to read a little too fast for the rest of us.”

“So who is the fourth member of the Four?”

“That’s not something I’m at liberty to say,” Earl said in a gentlemanly way.

“You know I can find out from Keniki, if you insist.”

“Now, now, Ms. Bean. No one wants to go disturbing that poor gal today.”

I had to know. “The fourth member of the Bamboo Four, is it Marvin Dubinsky?” It all made sense to me. Dubinsky was the missing link. Dubinsky was living on the Big Island, involved in botanical research, and remained the elusive quantity throughout the entire weekend. It had to be.

Earl’s pleasant face instantly lost its jolly, politicking sheen. “You know Marvin?”

“Yes,” I said, certain I was right. “He’s married to my best girlfriend.”

“Marvin is married?” asked Earl. “I never heard anything about that.”

“So,” I continued before he decided to stop talking, “Marvin Dubinsky is part of the Bamboo Four.”

Earl cast his glance around, but no one was near the entrance to the office where we stood. “He likes to keep an extremely low profile, Ms. Bean. I can’t really confirm your suggestion. I think we understand each other.”

I understood nothing. “I’ve got to find him,” I said quickly. “My friend may be in danger. Please. I know you must have his address.”

“I do,” he said, his expression becoming totally mystified.

“Will you give it to me?” I pressed, no longer working the flirty angle at all. “Please.”

“You’ve got it.”

“What?”

“You’re here.”

I stared at him.

“This is Marvin’s home,” Earl said, speaking slowly, perhaps so I could comprehend what he was saying. “Right here. You’re in it.”

“I can’t believe this.” The shock of the news sapped me of words. And just then I noticed on the wall of the office there was a framed print featuring the Japanese kanji symbols for Mountain Hollyhock. Well, duh. I leaned against the desk to keep from falling.

“I told you you got it all wrong,” Earl explained patiently. “We were all Kelly’s friends. That’s why we’re here tonight, paying our respects at his final luau. Look
here, Marvin even came forward in the pinch to offer his home. You may not have heard, but this whole shindig had to be relocated because Kelly had so many friends who wanted to come. I called Marvin, and he didn’t hesitate to offer the plantation house here. So don’t get any crazy ideas about who his friends really are.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, still in shock. “So, okay. I better go find him. Thanks.”

“Well, that’s the thing. He’s not here, of course. Marv avoids parties. His property holdings here are pretty vast. He’s somewhere out there.” He gestured out the window toward the darkness beyond. “This property is bigger than you might imagine.”

And that one comment triggered an entirely new train of thought. What had I heard about each of the Bamboo Four? Earl, Claudia, Cake, and Marvin were not only horticulture freaks, they were also wealthy individuals who shared a compelling interest in land. Claudia had been secretive at first, but she finally admitted she had plans to acquire land, and that she had employed Kelly to help draw up likely parcels. Earl, I recalled from his business card, was also into real estate. And Cake and Marvin were both large landholders on the Big Island.

And this suddenly tied into what I’d learned at the HBA meeting this afternoon. The Four were opposed to the immediate announcement of Kelly’s big idea: his cockamamie scheme to transform the Hawaiian Islands from a sketchy tourist-dependent economy into some mythical filthy-rich bamboo empire. They were fighting for a delay.

It was suddenly clear. They needed time to lock up more land.

Land that was now worthless for agriculture might become a gold mine in the future, and the Bamboo Four
wanted more time to get their hands on it cheap. But could they ever pull this agricultural revolution off? Their whole plan seemed so completely nuts to me, but then they were the bamboo experts, and I could barely grow a houseplant. I also happen to believe that the distinction between crackpots and visionaries is nonexistent, so no matter how far-fetched their scheme seemed to me, I had to take their own resolve very seriously.

With just the right property acquisitions, these wouldbe bamboo barons must have figured they could control a potentially explosive new industry. Like the missionaries that came to Hawaii almost two hundred years before and controlled the sugar plantations.

“Whoa,” I said, suddenly groggy with insight. I had to ride this train to the end of its logical tracks. Kelly loved the plants, loved the people of Hawaii. But Claudia and Earl? What did they love most? What about Cake and Marvin? Was it money? Did one of the Bamboo Four kill Kelly Imo? Did someone shoot Kelly and dump his body in the bay in order to keep the lid on these bamboo pipe dreams just a little while longer, while these monopolycrazed bamboozlers got their hands on more land?

I didn’t have a shred of evidence to support nine-tenths of my theory, but at least some of that had to be true. I felt certain of it.

“Earl,” I said, suddenly feeling ill, “did Marvin agree with Kelly’s plans for bamboo farming?”

“Oh, heck, no,” Earl said, looking at me weird. Could he read my thoughts? “Marvin thought we were all a bunch of morons!” He laughed.

“What?” I was totally thrown. “Didn’t he love bamboo just as much as the rest of you?”

“Marvin? Oh, he likes the stuff for landscaping.
That’s about it. He thought Kelly was off his rocker about introducing the construction industry to using bamboo products.”

“But I thought Marvin was a big plant genius.”

“He is,” Earl agreed. “He is. But he couldn’t care less about farming. He’s more into immuno-whatzits. Using plants for medical research, all that sort of fancy stuff.”

“So he didn’t want to grow bamboo?” I felt my entire theory deflate.

“Not really, no. Why?”

“I’ve got to talk to him,” I said urgently. “Right away.”

“He’s probably out at his foreman’s house, back on the property,” Earl said. “His foreman doesn’t live there anyway, so Marvin sometimes uses that old house when he wants some privacy to think.”

“Where is it?”

Earl explained how to get there, following the private drive about two miles along the coast.

I ran out of the office and scanned the huge crowd, searching for Wesley. He wasn’t in the dining room or living room, and the housekeeper told me he hadn’t been in the kitchen for fifteen minutes at least. I ended up taking out my cell phone and calling Wes’s cell. I listened to the ringing and then heard his voice mail announcement. I described my discovery, that Marvin Dubinsky was not far away, and how important I felt it was to contact Dubinsky in order to protect Holly from any further threats.

Then I called the police. It was almost nine-thirty on Saturday night, so there weren’t any detectives available, but I left a message about my encounter with the gunman at the Grand Waikoloa.

Finally, I tried calling Chuck Honnett, but again, there was no answer. Why was no one ever near their phones when you needed them? And what was Honnett up to? It was half past midnight in Los Angeles. Why was he out so late on a Saturday night? I felt the true pang of jealousy over some unknown woman he was probably sharing a drink with. But I had no right. Hadn’t I been pushing Honnett away for weeks? Hadn’t he given me every chance in the world to start over?

“Madeline, hello. Here you are!” said Keniki, reaching her arms out, letting me give her a comforting hug. Her long hair had the gentle scent of coconut. “Look who’s here,” she said to the big yellow dog by her side. Dr. Margolis’s tail thumped the glossy hardwood floor.

“Dr. Margolis,” I said, bending down to pat his square head. “How are you?”

“He’s well,” said Keniki. “But I’m falling apart. Have you heard?”

I nodded. Kelly’s death was no accident. It was murder. I could see it was wearing her down. “Try not to think about it too much,” I said. “Things will get clearer as the days go by. The police will sort it out.”

“But what if the police suspect
me
?” Her eyes had a glassy appearance.

“I’ll help you, Denise,” I whispered, concerned about her.

“You are so sweet,” she said and attempted a half smile. “The doctor gave me a pill. I can hardly feel anything now. Don’t worry, Madeline.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just hugged her again.

“And I like it how you called me Denise,” she said, moving away to greet other guests. “Not everyone knows how much I like that name. That’s what my mother used to call me.”

Score another point for the dolphins.

I opened the door and looked up the road. It was more than past time I jumped in the Mustang and took a little trip looking for Marvin Dubinsky.

I
started up the Mustang and slowly pulled away from the large plantation house onto the back path, hearing the crunch of lava rock gravel under my tires.

The top was down, of course, and the night sky was brilliant, filled with billions of stars. The farther I drove away from the main house with its huge floodlights out in front, the more breathtaking the sky became. The moon was full tonight, but at the moment he was hiding behind clouds, like a self-confident hero allowing his astral rivals their chance to shine.

The private road skirted along the coast, permitting glimpses now and then of the night-black Pacific beyond. The road was only one lane wide and meandered, weaving along the contour of the coast; thick roadside foliage masked what was coming around each bend. I had checked the Mustang’s odometer when I got into the car, keeping watch that I not go too far. Earl had said two or three miles from the house. It would be a long walk, too long for anyone dressed in high heels like me, but no trouble for the only guest at the party who had managed to sneak her car inside the security perimeter. I was pretty proud of myself.

The Mustang turned a bend, and I saw light up ahead in the distance. Soon I could see a house—the foreman’s house. It looked like your average San Fernando Valley ranch home, nondescript and low. The lights were a good sign. Marvin must be home.

The terrain was markedly different up here. Outcroppings of brush petered out abruptly, and vast fields of black lava rock spread in most directions away from the shore. However, down closer to the ocean, a large system of PVC pipes crisscrossed neat semi-submerged fields. A dense leafy crop was growing behind an additional barrier of razor-wire fencing.

The road eventually brought me to the backside of the foreman’s house, and still crunching on black gravel, I parked the Mustang near the back door. However, I felt it was only respectful to walk around and approach the dwelling from the front. The sidewalk took me past a neatly swept rock garden, where masterful designs were arranged out of coral, to a sliding glass door. The interior of the house was illuminated but masked from view by a closed curtain. I stepped up and pressed the doorbell, which I could hear ringing throughout the house in the night’s silence.

“Hello,” a voice called.

“Hello,” I called back. “I’m Madeline Bean. Holly Nichols’s friend. May I come in and speak to you?”

The floor-length white curtain was pushed aside, and standing behind the sliding glass door was Marvin Dubinsky. Marvin Dubinsky, found at last.

“You’re Holly’s boss,” Marvin said, beaming at me. “Wow. What are you doing out here? I mean, wow. This is blowing my mind. But wait. I mean, come on in.”

First hurdle jumped. He remembered who Holly was.
I had no idea what her name might mean to him after all the years that had passed, but I suppose a wife is hard to forget.

And, second thought, he knew who I was too. Now that was unexpected.

I walked into the house and turned to take a good look at my host in the strong light. In no way did he now resemble the Marvin Dubinsky that Holly described.

For one thing, a growth spurt had obviously come to a very last-minute rescue. Marvin stood a towering six foot four, if I could guess from standing next to him. He was also attractively free of any skin problems or braces. The Marvin Dubinsky before me now was an extremely tall, messy-haired, deep-voiced, cute geeky-god.

“You look nothing like I was expecting, Marvin,” I said, still checking the guy out rather closely.

“Holly told you about me?” he asked eagerly, his voice getting an excited bounce.

“She did.” He still seemed to have some feelings for Holly—go figure?—so I figured I’d better let him down softly. “Well, you have been on her mind ever since she began to get these threatening e-mails. And she began to worry that someone might try to kill her if she didn’t tell them everything she knew about where to find you. Which, of course, she had no freaking idea.”

“Damn those idiots,” Marvin said, abruptly losing his temper. “They had no right to upset Hollyhock.”

“What idiots?”

He sighed and pulled his hand through his thick hair. “It’s a long story. Say, where are my manners?” he asked, startled at himself. “Sit down. Here.” He moved a notebook computer from a cushion on the yellow sofa. “I’m doing some research on the Internet. Just love the Internet,” he said.

I sat down. “So just what is all this stuff about Mountain Hollyhock, anyway?” I asked more directly. “Are you still in love with Holly?”

“What?” he asked, again looking startled. “Oh, that. Oh, yes. Of course.” He looked embarrassed. “I’ve always loved Holly.”

“This is seriously strange, Marvin,” I said. “You haven’t talked to her in, like, eight years! If you loved her, why did you just disappear off the face of the earth?”

“I’m…” He looked at me, an appealing man without much experience socially, by the look of him. “I’m just shy,” he said. “Too shy. I know. But when I left town after graduation, Holly was already on her way, dating another guy.” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “Look. Hollyhock was the most popular girl in our class. I knew I was lucky to have had that one perfect night with her. I just sort of crept away. Off to college. You know.”

“And then?”

“Then? Well, I expected I’d hear from her. Every week I just knew she would get in touch. To annul our marriage. You know. Or get a divorce. I expected she would be getting in touch very soon. But she never did. So I kept hanging on to the hope that she had some feelings for me after all.”

“But you never called? You never came over to see her?”

“I wrote her letters,” he explained. “I told her I loved her in the letters. I sent her poems. But I told her of course I would sign any papers she wanted me to in order to let her out of our marriage. After all, it was just a mistake to her. I understood. But she never answered the letters. I figured she would when she was ready, so I didn’t want to rush her.”

“Marvin,” I said, a little lost, “whoa. Stop. I don’t
think Holly has ever gotten your letters. She would have mentioned them to me. I’m positive. Were they e-mails?”

“No. I sent real, regular mail letters.”

“Where did you address them?”

“To her home. I mean her parents’ home.”

I wondered if Holly’s parents had conveniently forgotten to deliver them to Holly. I would have to check with Holl to see if her parents approved of Marvin way back when.

“And you never just picked up the
phone,
Marvin?”

He looked uncomfortable. “And said…what?”

I could think of a million things. But the point was, of course, this lovesick dweeb couldn’t. “So that’s why you call this place Mountain Hollyhock? Why you have the kanji for Mountain Hollyhock on your wall. And on T-shirts.”

“Well, yes and no,” Marvin answered, taking a seat opposite me in one of those odd rocking chairs that have gliders on the bottom. “See, I became fascinated with a certain plant when I was away at school.”

“Where did you go to college?”

“Berkeley first,” he said. “They were eager to let me design my own major.”

“Which was?”

“I wanted to combine ethnobotany and phytomedicinal prospecting, actually.”

“Oh. Right.” This guy was either crazy-smart or just crazy. “What’s that?”

“Okay, well, ethnobotany is studying the historic uses of plants as medicines. Mostly it’s digging into the medicinal traditions of Europeans, Chinese, Egyptians, American Indians, and like that. I was intrigued at first by what could be learned from more recently discovered cultures. I did field studies with shamans in Amazonia
and Belize, for instance, but then I suddenly got interested in Japanese culture and took a different route.”

“And phytomedicinal prospecting?”

“Good retentive memory,” Marvin said, flashing a quick smile. “See, once you discover the plants that have been used as medicines by primitive cultures, you need to screen the plants for biological activity.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can follow that.”

“Huge projects are currently under way by such organizations as INBio, Costa Rica’s National Institute of Biodiversity. INBio is cataloging all species of plants and animals in the country—estimated to be around five hundred thousand! I spent some time down in Costa Rica helping them train what we called ‘community taxonomists’ to identify plants and animals.”

“Sure,” I said, almost keeping up.

“Anyway, I had some laughs, made a few discoveries, started a few companies, and turned them over to doctors to run—you know, the usual postadolescent fun.”

“Marvin, you are one strange dude,” I said, marveling at the guy my Holly had married.

“Yeah, well,” he said bashfully. “Anyway, I had theorized there was a class of medicinal roots that were like the antibiotics of the plant kingdom, with healing properties like no other. I’d been doing the biological activity studies on a class of plant found in Asia, and I suddenly fell in love with my first root. The specific variety I needed was only grown in Japan, a semiaquatic member of the cabbage family, but the medicinal properties of this plant are phenomenal. Anticarcinogenic. Antitoxin. It was, like, absurd, this root was so wonderful. The only problem was, the Japanese growers refused to let me have samples to grow in my lab so I could continue my studies.”

Somehow, as Marvin Dubinsky waxed rhapsodic about roots, I was certain I knew where it was all heading.

“Marvin, are you talking about wasabi?”

“Of course,” he said, looking incredibly happy with me.
“Wasabia japonica.
You know it’s been served with raw fish for centuries, not simply because the taste is pleasing. Because it actually counteracts food poisoning.”

I shook my head. Imagine that.

“Mountain Hollyhock! That’s the kanji for wasabi. Don’t you see how perfect it all is? I fall in love with a girl in high school named Mountain Hollyhock, and years later I discover the most medicinally significant plant known to humankind, and its historical Japanese kanji from the tenth century translates as Mountain Hollyhock. How could I not leave my postdoc position at Harvard then? This was more than fate, Miss Bean. It was about destiny, I think.”

“So what happened?”

“I still had this problem with the Japanese growers. They were becoming more and more suspicious. I tried to buy larger quantities of their finest specimens of wasabi, but they balked. They traditionally sell in only very small quantities to a set list of buyers, mostly upscale restaurants in Asia, and they couldn’t make an exception for me, the guy who was about to cure bloody cancer. I mean, really! I wanted to grow my own, but of course they wouldn’t let me.”

“So you stole some specimens. You stole them from the Japanese farms and began growing your own wasabi here in Hawaii.”

“Well,” Marvin said, sheepishly. “Yeah.”

That explained a lot. The razor-wire security fencing and electronic gates. The enormous security guards. The
secrecy. The crop fields I had just seen. The perfect specimen of fresh raw wasabi our sushi chef, Mori, had produced. I guessed Mori must be connected to this ranch in some way and was slipping out his own samples for lessthan-medicinal purposes.

I was pretty upset. I stood up. “And now some angry hairy-fisted goons have been sent from Japan to retaliate because you stole their precious plants, the secrets about which they have been protecting for ten centuries.”

Marvin looked completely forlorn. “That’s about it, yes.”

“This just sucks.”

“Look, I’ll take care of it,” Marvin said, trying to calm me down a bit. “I’d never let anything happen to my Hollyhock.”

I glared at him. Men. They think they are invincible. But he hadn’t had to stare down the barrel of a gun, like I had. And what had happened to Kelly? I had been sure Kelly’s death was wrapped up with some deep dark bamboo plot, but now I was no longer so sure.

“What happened to Kelly?” I asked.

“Please sit down, Miss Bean,” Marvin pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

I sat back down and waited.

“Now this first part is the difficult part. I’m going to ask you to just hear me out and not scream or get freaky, okay?”

I tried to keep my cool. If it turned out that Marvin was about to confess that he had murdered Kelly Imo, I did not know what I could do. I put my hand nonchalantly into my navy bag and found my cell phone, resting my hand around it. Just in case I ever had the chance to use it again, at least I had it near.

“Look, this isn’t as bad as it’s going to sound,” Marvin said, his hand going through the motions again, finger combing through his bushy black hair. “I already told you I’m in love with Holly. I always have been. I always will be. It’s my destiny. I told you that.”

“Yes.”

“So I just couldn’t go on living without her. I know what you are going to say. I’d written to her, and she rejected me. I needed to give up. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I needed to see her in person one more time. To plead with her for another try.”

Oh my God. I suddenly saw it all. Marvin was the one who “arranged” to have us throw our party for Holly on the Big Island. He’s the one who put ten thousand dollars in cash down to cover the cost of our stay at the Four Heavens.

“Marvin, did you arrange our entire trip?”

He nodded and hung his head. “I had been keeping tabs on Holly. I hired someone to let me know if she was doing okay. I travel a lot. I just wanted to get word every so often that she was fine. He told me Holly was going to get married again. And I just needed to see her one more time before then. I mean, either she would look at me and not even remember me, or she might need to get that annulment, so she wouldn’t mind, I thought.”

“Or maybe she’d still have feelings for you?” I could imagine what he had dreamed; it was clear in his sad eyes.

“I could have come to the mainland, but I had the idea I might look a little better to Hollyhock if she saw me here.” He gestured beyond the window, to the large compound he owned.

“You brought us all to the Big Island.”