Maui Widow Waltz (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series) (22 page)

CHAPTER 30

I
got into my car lost in thought about the faulty surveillance video.  The
information had been passed down two or three times, so I wasn’t ready to take
it as fact. And even if the video was thrown out, maybe Lisa Marie’s lawyer was
being premature in his smug belief that the cops had no additional evidence
against his client. Maybe they had eye witnesses and fingerprints and a pile of
other stuff they were planning to throw at her in court. Then it dawned on me.
They didn’t. If they did, she’d already be cooling her Jimmy Choos in the
Wailuku jail.

Even Daddy Prescott’s considerable
means would be of little use to her if she was arrested and charged with
premeditated murder. Forget bail. She was a flight risk—literally—and wealthy
enough to shrug off walking away from even the most outrageous bail bond. With
no ties to the community, and a lifestyle that wouldn’t vary whether she lived
in St. Tropez or St. Louis, the judge would realize chances were slim to none
she’d bother returning to Maui for trial.

So now what? With no evidence
against Lisa Marie, and the cops unwilling to consider other motives, the
official investigation would soon sputter to a halt. A sad scenario played out
in my mind: Wong placing the puny amount of evidence they had—Kevin’s autopsy
report, the inadmissible videotape, and a few pages of interview notes—into a
white cardboard box labeled ‘cold case.’ In time, the box would get shipped off
to Honolulu where it would join hundreds of other forgotten white boxes in a dimly-lit
warehouse off Beretania Street. Todd Barker’s snide opinion of Hawaii’s police
work and judicial system was beginning to look regrettably accurate. Two deaths
in two weeks. Both questionable, both unsolved.

To be fair, unlike the other
forty-nine states, the seven major inhabited islands of Hawaii present unique
challenges for law enforcement. To start with, we’re completely surrounded by
water—three thousand miles of ocean in all directions. If a body is recovered
from the ocean, normal forensic work is nearly impossible. Salt water erases
the killer’s fingerprints, washes away blood spatter and DNA, and even messes
with toxicology reports. Tox reports generally are deemed “inconclusive” if the
victim gulped copious amounts of seawater before dying.

What’s more, if a killer dumps a
victim’s body into the ocean, chances are high it will never be recovered. The
ocean has its own ‘circle of life.’ A hunk of dead flesh—human or otherwise—is
like a Publisher’s Clearinghouse Prize for sea creatures up and down the food
chain.

I started my car and drove slowly
down the alley. As I waited to make the turn onto the Hana Highway I had to
yield to a yellow Maui County Fire engine as it screamed past me and took a
left on Baldwin. I pulled out and stayed back a few car lengths—I remember
something on the driver’s license exam about giving emergency vehicles at least
fifteen feet, or was it fifty?

It didn’t take fifty feet for me to
figure out where they were headed. Smoke billowed from under the eaves of the
Gadda-da-Vida and from a big hole in the roof over my shop. The police had
blocked off Baldwin at Akoni Place so I pulled over and jumped out to follow on
foot.

I was in an flat-out sprint when a
firefighter in full gear—SCBA tank on his back and plastic face shield
down—extended a gloved hand to halt my progress.

“Day bat,” he said behind the mask.

I squinted in confusion.

“Stay back,” he said, exaggerating
the words so I could read his lips.

“That’s my shop.” I pointed to the
roiling smoke.

“Sorry.” He took my elbow and
steered me toward a cordoned off area where a knot of bystanders had gathered.

“No, you don’t understand—”

With his big gloved hand he gave my
shoulder a slight push toward the yellow tape. I moved toward the onlookers,
all the while watching the oily black smoke engulfing the building. As I bent
to duck under the ‘caution’ tape, I heard the
click whir, click whir
of
a film camera with an automatic advance. 

“Hey,” it was Steve. He was
crouched on the ground, a few feet behind the tape. “You okay?”
Click whir,
click whir
.

“Have you seen Farrah?” I peered at
the front window of my shop. The glass was intact, but it looked as if it’d
been painted black.

“No, but Beatrice is out here
somewhere. She’s the one who called 9-1-1. You run into Hatch yet?”

“He’s here?”

“Yeah. We caught the call on his
scanner. Got here about the same time the first engine pulled up.”
Click
whir, click whir
.

I scanned the crowd. No sign of
Hatch or Farrah.

Steve lowered his camera. “You
might try sneaking around back. Last I saw he was talking to a guy headed that
way.”

The access to the alley was blocked
by fire apparatus, but I glimpsed a three foot opening between the fire engine
and the alley fence. There was a guy working the pump panel on the near side of
the truck, but the rest of the firefighters had congregated along the hose line
laid out in front of my shop. The front door had been forced open and the
nozzle man was poised to enter. A guy in a white helmet yelled into his
walkie-talkie and the hose team marched through the door, lugging a fat snake
of khaki hose inside. 

After four or five minutes the
crowd control guy turned his back and I took the opportunity to slip away. I
wedged myself in the space between the fire engine and the sagging chain link
fence and crab-walked alongside the vibrating truck until I was behind the
building. I checked up and down the alleyway for a guy on a crutch. Or a
mu’u
mu’u
clad woman with a wide halo of frizz. Nothing.

I looked up. Farrah’s apartment
door stood open. No firefighters in sight. I bounded up the stairway, smelling
the bitter stench of burning wood and calculating how many bones I’d break when
the stairs gave way.

The smoky haze inside the living
room made it look like a black and white photograph. My eyes stung and quickly
filled with tears; my nose refused to suck in even a shallow breath of the
acrid air. An aluminum crutch was propped on one end of the sofa.

“Hatch? Farrah?” I don’t think I actually
said it out loud; it was probably just my brain screaming.

Hatch was on hands and one knee
behind the coffee table on the living room floor. His broken leg with the stiff
white cast was stretched out behind him. As I made my way over to him, he reached
out his hand and swept under the table as if trying to locate something.

I bent down so he could see me. By
now my lungs were beginning to feel starved for air, but I grabbed the back of
his shirt and nodded toward the bedroom. I probably should have stuck around to
help him get up, but I didn’t. I figured he wouldn’t leave until he’d found
what he’d come up there for, and I felt the same.

I scanned the bedroom and looked
under the bed. One good thing about a tiny apartment—it doesn’t take long to search. 

The box was in the bedroom closet,
right where it’d been when I’d first seen the pups. Lipton had positioned
herself over her puppies, so I couldn’t do a headcount. Her eyes looked
defiant, but she didn’t make a sound as I grabbed the box and roughly jostled
it into carrying position.

Hatch and I got to the door at the
same time. He gave me a little ‘after you’ wag of his crutch and I dashed down
the stairs, trying my best to avoid dumping mother and brood onto the pavement
below. Hatch thumped hard at my heels.

“Hey! What the hell are you two
doing?” It was the white helmet guy yelling from the end of the alley. He
sprinted toward us.

If I’d had any air in my lungs, I
might have answered. Instead, I sucked in huge gulps of oxygen and just held up
my hand in a
give me a minute
gesture. I tried to talk but only managed
to cough up sticky phlegm.

Meanwhile, Hatch busied himself
taking stock of the pups. He pulled them out one-by-one and checked their eyes
and then ran a finger inside their mouths. Lipton was still in the box. When he
got around to lifting her out, she drooped like a half-filled sack of rice. Her
eyes were glassy, her mouth slack.

Hatch laid her gently on the
pavement and bent over her. He gripped her head and put her nose and mouth into
his mouth, and blew in three quick breaths. Her torso expanded. He released his
mouth and pressed his palm against her chest, one-two-three.  

Hatch kept up the doggie CPR, even
though it appeared futile to me. Lipton’s chest rose and fell with Hatch’s breaths,
but other than that I saw no change. By then, three firefighters had entered
the alley through the back door of my shop. They’d flipped their face shields
up and I saw them shoot each other amused glances, but they said nothing.

Steve showed up just as Lipton’s
legs began to twitch.
Click whir, click whir
. Lipton lifted her head and
bicycled her legs as she tried to stand.

A firefighter came forward and
clapped Hatch on the shoulder. “Good job, man.” The guy had caught him on his
bad side, but Hatch didn’t flinch.

“No sense letting things die,”
Hatch said. It looked like he might have had tears in his eyes, but smoke does
that.

Farrah arrived at the entrance to
the alley only minutes after Lipton’s return from the Great Beyond. I ran to
her.

“What happened?” she said. “I went
out to look at rentals and the next thing I knew there were sirens everywhere.”

I hugged her and we both took in
the scene. The back doors to both her store and my shop stood open. Dark gray
water trickled over the threshold of my shop, but the store was dry—just a veil
of smoke wafted outside.

Before I could say anything the
white helmet guy came forward. “You the occupant of these premises?”

“That’s my shop,” I managed to
rasp.

“Yeah, and that’s my store. And my
home.” Farrah pointed to the stairway.

“Well, turns out we didn’t need to
send any crews over there. Got it knocked down before it could spread.” He
turned to me. “Any idea how this got started?”

I didn’t say anything. Wasn’t
figuring that out his job?

As if he read my mind, he went on,
“So far, we’re not ruling out arson. First-in team noticed a slight accelerant
smell and what appeared to be an intentional fuel load in the back—a pile of
lumber. But it doesn’t take much; one spark and these old buildings go up like kindling.
I’m calling in the fire investigator.”

“What should we do now?” Farrah
said.

“Well, you might want to consider a
fire sale.” He grinned at his own lame joke, then looked around and saw nobody
else sharing the humor. “Seriously, you have some pretty extensive smoke damage
in there. I think you should call your insurance company. But you came out
better than your neighbor here. I’m estimating that side of the building at a
near total loss.”

He glared at me as if hoping I’d
clap my hands and say, ‘
Goody’,
so he could be the star witness at my
arson trial. 

“I’ve run a successful business
here for over two years,” I said.

 “Well, the investigator’s on
his way from O’ahu, so I’m not going to speculate. And, like I said, old wiring
and ancient wood’s a bad combination.  We get calls on these
plantation-era buildings all the time.”

“Can I go in and look around?” said
Farrah.

“I’d rather you wait until the
investigator’s had a chance to get here, but if you need to go upstairs to pick
up a few personal effects, I can have a firefighter go with you.”

I lobbied to go into my shop as
well. Since I’d pretty much cleared out everything on Friday, I wouldn’t have
lost much, but I wanted to grab my address book and my box of vendor files.

“Wait ‘til we can escort you.”

When Farrah was finished upstairs,
the firefighter asked me what I needed from my shop.

“I’d like to go in and get some
things from my desk.”

“Still too hot in there. Tell me
what you need and I’ll get it.”

“Okay. I need the cardboard box
from the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk. And if my address book is still
on the desk, I’d appreciate it if you’d grab that too.”

He put his plastic face mask back
on and went in. When he came out, he handed me my address book—soot-covered and
wet, but intact. He flipped up his mask.

“Thanks, I said. “But what I really
need is that file box.”

“There’s no box in the desk.”

“The right bottom drawer,” I said.
“It’s the big one—a file drawer.”

“Nothin’ in there.”

We stood there, staring each other
down, until he blew out a breath and flipped his mask back into place. Then he
went inside. When he did, I peeked in behind him.

The odor knocked me back on my
heels. I’d expected it to smell like a luau pit or maybe a bonfire, but it
didn’t. The wet charred wood smelled dank and sulfurous. The air swirled with
particles and with the windows smoked over it was dark as night. There were
plate-sized holes punched in the walls.

The firefighter came out lugging
two file-size drawers—one in each hand. He dropped them at my feet. They were
both empty.

He flipped up his mask. “Anything
else?” His tone said he was done playing fetch for me.

“That’s all,” I said. “And I really
appreciate you looking.”

Farrah came over and put an arm
around me. “You get what you needed?”

“No, and it doesn’t make sense. The
drawers were both in pretty good shape. How could everything inside them just
burn up?”

 “Maybe the investigator guy
can tell you.” We walked over the small pile of clothes and personal belongings
she’d piled up near Lipton’s box. “Steve says Hatch rescued Lipton. Is that
true?” 

“Yep. Pulled her and the pups out
of your closet and then gave Lipton mouth to mouth once they got outside.”