O'ahu Lonesome Tonight? (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series #5) (20 page)

“What’s that
mean? I thought your brother fell into the
Ala
Wai
Canal.”

“Yeah.
Well, that canal is now contaminated with tons of raw
sewage. He got infected by the flesh-eating bacteria in that water.” I was
starting to sound like Wendi Takeda.

 
“Seriously?
Look
Pali
, I want you
outta there. I want you to go back to Maui ASAP.”

“I’ll go home
as soon as I can,” I said. “But I’ve got to stick around to help with the
funeral.”

“I thought
you’d be the one nagging me to be careful. Now I’m the one nagging you.”

“That doesn’t
get you off the hook,” I said. “You stay safe out there, okay?”

“Will do.”

“It’s weird
isn’t it?” I said.

“What?”

“We’re battling
opposite problems: raging fire and filthy water.
Seems
whichever way you turn, the world just isn’t a safe place to be anymore.”

  CHAPTER 27

By eight a.m. I
still hadn’t heard back from Natalie. I called again but didn’t leave another
message. Where could she have gone?
Church?
She didn’t
seem like the church-going type, but under the circumstances anything was
possible.

Moko’s
wife called me and offered to handle the funeral
arrangements. I thanked her profusely and promised I’d help out any way I
could.

“You’ve already
done so much,” she said. “I don’t know what
Moko
would’ve done without you.”

The funeral was
set for Wednesday. It
creeped
me out that we had a
funeral date before we’d even notified the widow, so I called the bell desk and
asked to have my car brought around. I decided I’d camp out at Natalie’s until
she showed up. Or maybe the sister/maid knew where she was. In any case, I
wasn’t going to rest until Natalie had been brought up to speed.

The maid
answered the door with a small smile playing across her face. She looked like
the proverbial ‘cat
who
ate the canary.’

“Is Natalie
here?” I said. I wanted to ask her what she found so amusing the morning of her
employer’s death, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

“No.
She out.”

I remembered
I’d only heard the woman speak Chinese. Apparently her English was limited. I
tried to get more information out of her anyway.

“Do you know
where she is?”

The maid shook
her head ‘no.’ I wasn’t sure whether the head shake meant she didn’t understand
my question or she didn’t know where Natalie was, so I pressed on.

“When will she
be back?”

This time I got
a shoulder shrug. I took that to mean she understood my questions, but she
wasn’t in a chatty mood. Or maybe Natalie was in the habit of coming and going
without telling her anything.

“Mind if I wait
here?”

She stepped
back and allowed me to enter the foyer. The smile was back on her face.

***

I waited until nearly
noon. The maid brought me coffee and some yummy pastries at about ten, so I was
pretty comfortable, but I was bored out of my skull. I couldn’t imagine where
Natalie could be.

I went into the
kitchen and for no reason that makes any sense whatsoever, I began telling the
maid the story of how Stu fell into the canal and contracted a massive
infection and that he’d died that morning. She shot me a tentative smile and
kept nodding as if I were regaling her with silly tales from my college days.
Even though I knew she couldn’t understand what I was saying, I couldn’t stop
talking.

Finally, when I
got to the part about
Moko’s
wife being kind and
offering to handle the funeral arrangements, she put up her hand. Like a cop
signaling ‘stop.’

“
Kepola
,” she said.

“Pardon me?”

“You’re
sister-in-law’s name is
Kepola
,” she said in English
with only a trace of accent.

“I’m sorry. I
didn’t realize you spoke English.”

“Then why have
you been talking to me for the past fifteen minutes?”

“Look. I’m so
tired and stressed I don’t know why I’m doing anything I’m doing. I probably
shouldn’t be allowed to operate dangerous machinery for the foreseeable
future.”

She smiled.
“Yes, probably not.”

“Do you know
where Natalie is?”

“I’m not sure;
but I have a good idea.”

“Where?”

“With her boyfriend.”
She said the last word with so much
disdain I wondered if Natalie had stolen the guy away from her.

“You know, I
just realized I don’t know your name. I’m
Pali
Moon,”
I reached my hand across the counter to shake hers.

“I’m Yvonne,”
she said. “I know. It’s not the right name for me. But my sister started
calling me that when she brought me here. Now I’m sort of stuck with it.”

“So, back to the boyfriend.
Do you know who it is?”

“No idea. He
never calls; he just texts. I sneaked a peek at her phone once but she’s got
him in her contacts as just ‘BT’.”

I ran the
initials through my mental data bank but came up blank.

It was barely
noon but already the day was shaping up to be more than I could handle. I
thanked her for putting up with me for the entire morning and I gave her my
cell number.

“Please call
when Natalie comes back.”

“What will you
do if she doesn’t come back?” Yvonne said.

“Do you think
that’s a possibility?”

“I’m from
China. To us, anything is possible.”

***

I got back to
the apartment and flopped down on the bed. It seemed I was becoming nocturnal.
I normally never slept in the middle of the day but now all I wanted to do was
shut my eyes and hide from everything that had transpired in the past twelve
hours.

But I couldn’t sleep.
A parade of disturbing thoughts marched across my brain, thumping out any
effort I made to relax and drift off.

Natalie was
having an affair. Who was the mystery man? I considered Jason; he certainly
would be my first choice. But then I recalled seeing them in the courtyard
together. Natalie certainly didn’t treat him like a lover. She put him down at
every opportunity. Like he was an irksome employee she didn’t have the
authority to fire.

And what about Wendi Takeda?
Was she right? Had Stu been the
victim of a public relations cover-up by the City of Honolulu? Did I have an
obligation to play the outraged family member and demand they own up to their
role in my brother’s death? Maybe a lawsuit was in my future after all.

I scrunched my
pillow under my neck and tried a new position but after a few minutes I knew it
was hopeless. I wasn’t going to get to sleep. 

I dug through
my purse and found Wendi’s card. When she answered, I apologized for calling
her on her day off.

“We just saw
each other ten hours ago,” she said. “And, for the record, I don’t have days
off. News happens twenty-four seven.”

I thought it
sounded like a TV news tagline but I knew better than to tell her that. After
all, she was a ‘journalist’, not a lowly TV reporter like her twin sister.

“My brother’s
funeral is Wednesday,” I said. “I don’t want this to blow up into a media
circus that overshadows our family’s grief.”

“Too late for
that, I’m afraid.”

“What do you
mean?”

“Haven’t you
seen this morning’s
Journal-Dispatch
? It’s the lead story. And it’s been
picked up by all the major news outlets: Reuters, Blumberg,
the
AP.” She said it with the same pride as a mother pointing to a “My Kid Is
An
Honor Student” bumper sticker on her mini-van.

“Oh no.”

“
Pali
, this is good. Your brother shall not have died in
vain.” Now she’d lapsed into preacher-speak. Oh joy.

She continued.
“I’ll meet you wherever you want. Your place, a coffee shop, you name it.”

It grinded on me that she sounded so chipper, but I wanted to learn
what information she had so I had to play along.

“How about
meeting at the Starbucks in Waikiki?
The one down on
Lewers
.
It’s a block
makai
from
Kalakaua
.”

“Give me some
credit,” she said. “I know where the Starbucks is. I’ll see you there in
fifteen minutes.” She hung up.

Well, missy
,
I thought.
Give
me
some credit. There’s at least three Starbucks in
Waikiki. How would you know which one I was talking about
?

I washed up and
put on a little lipstick. No sense in looking as bedraggled as I felt. I made
my way up to the Starbucks and ordered a large coffee. I thought about getting
espresso, but then I’d probably never get to sleep.

Wendi showed up
a few minutes later. One good thing about her was she was easy to spot in a
crowd. Everyone else in Waikiki wore bright colors and flowered prints so
Wendi’s black and white get-up really stood out. She looked like a bartender at
a bar too cool to acknowledge it was in Hawaii.
Like it was
trying to channel a New York vibe for tourists who’d grown tired of
mai
tais
and
ukulele
music.

“Good,” she
said. “You’re here. I didn’t know if you’d keep me waiting.” She shot me a
shaka
sign. “You
know,
island-time.”

“Let’s dispense
with the stereotypes, okay? I’m a wedding planner over on Maui. I own the
business as well as my own home. And, I’m trained in martial arts. You treat me
with respect and I’ll do the same for you.”

“Got it,” she
said. She pulled out a reporter’s notebook and pen and then laid a tiny black
machine about the size of a cell phone on the table. “Do you mind if I record
this? It helps later if I want to pull quotes.”

“Wendi, let’s
get one thing clear. I’m not here to further your career. I’m here to find out
what happened to my brother and see if there’s anything I should do about it.”

“Fair enough.
But, let me also be clear. While I sympathize
with your loss—and I do—I want you to understand that I’m willing to help you
only if you help me. This isn’t going to be a one-way street.”

We stared at
each other for a few seconds. I picked up my coffee and took a big gulp.

“So,” she said.
“You okay with the recorder?”

I nodded and we
got down to business.

CHAPTER 28

Wendi and I
reviewed what each of us knew about my brother’s accident. I kept calling it an
‘accident’ while she referred to it as ‘the precipitating event.’ I stuck with ‘accident’
because it took less effort to say.

In the end, we
both added information to piece together a more-or-less complete scenario. My
brother had gone to the yacht club for a meeting with his business partner and
had ended up closing the place down. He’d driven to the meeting, but apparently
he hadn’t made it back to his car before he was either pushed or fell into the
Ala
Wai
Canal at around midnight.
Wendi told me a passing Good Samaritan had heard the splash and a scream and
had called 9-1-1. There’s no record of whether the citizen had fished my
brother out of the drink or if he’d managed to get out on his own, but the
paramedics told the hospital staff that the witness had mentioned seeing a guy
in a dark-colored baseball cap running from the scene.

“Did the
paramedics get the name of the Good Samaritan?” I said.

“Seems they only got a first name.
Anyway, that’s all there
is on the incident report.”

“How’d you see
the incident report? Isn’t that police business?”

“It is. And
it’s going to cost me some big-time payback. But any good investigative
reporter’s got eyes and ears at the police station and in the hospitals.”

I told her
about meeting Stu’s business partner and hearing from
Moko
that the boat yard was in some kind of financial trouble.

“What’d you
think of the partner?” she said.

“He seems like
a guy who’d eat his young to make a buck,” I said. I immediately regretted it
and glanced down at the recorder.

“Don’t
worry,
I don’t want to get sued for libel. That’ll never
make the paper.”

“The guy was a
good friend of Stu’s dad. Actually, Stu’s dad and my dad
were
the same guy, but I didn’t know it until after my father died. Seems when our
father got sick, Stu stepped in and got involved with the boat yard business.”

“Okay, let me
see if I’ve got this right. Your father was Phil Wilkerson?”

I nodded.

“Mr. ‘Got
Bucks’ Phil Wilkerson?”

Again, I
nodded.

“But you didn’t
know it.”

I shook my
head.

“Seems like you
don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

I let my
silence speak for itself before going on. “Anyway, Stu started working with
Barry Salazar—that’s the partner—when his father, that is,
our
father,
was diagnosed with terminal cancer. About two years ago.”

“And your other
brother, the one who was with you at the hospital—”

“
Moko
.”

“Yeah,
Moko
,” she said. “He told you the boat yard’s in financial
trouble.”

“Correct.”

“So, back to your brother, Stuart.
Has the hospital
admitted, either verbally or in writing, that they’ve linked your brother’s
infection to the sewage in the canal?”

I thought back to
what the doctor had said. Nothing came to mind.