The Flaming Luau of Death (9 page)

Witnessing their pain was difficult, but you don’t have to be Dr. Phil to know such a release is necessary, healthy even. Now she would be able to move through her grief. It was all about feeling her true feelings, giving herself up to the truth. But man, the truth in this case was hard.

And it was more than time for me to leave, despite the fact that so many of my questions would remain unasked. I whispered, “You can call me for anything,” and stood to go. Keniki would know how to reach me at the resort if she wanted to talk later.

Cynthia caught up to me at the door, put her hand on my arm. “Thank you for this. This is right. We needed this. It’s for the best.”

By now, everyone has watched enough
Oprah
to figure out what is best for everyone. I swear, that woman on TV does the world a great service.

“Look,” I said. “I’m wondering about something Keniki said.”

“Yes?”

“Can you just tell me what sort of politics?”

Cynthia stared at me, not comprehending, but I had to know just this little bit more. Just this one thing. “Kelly’s politics?” I stood with the front door open. “Local? Federal?”

“About the future of Hawaii,” Cynthia answered, still perplexed.

Our conversation had caught Keniki’s attention. She grew quieter, calming herself down. She called to me at the door, “They’re all probably meeting right now.”

I turned back to her, facing her red and swollen eyes. “Where?”

“At Bamboo, of course.”

“Oh, no. I think they probably canceled their meeting,” Cynthia said, but she didn’t say it with conviction.

Keniki shook her head, her long wavy hair shimmying. “They sent me a lovely plant, but I know these friends of Kelly. They are still having their filthy meeting today. Kelly should be there too. My Kelly…” But she couldn’t go on. She began choking on a new rush of tears, and Cynthia turned and went back to her.

Through it all, Dr. Margolis had stayed right by Keniki’s side, but he looked up at me as I put my hand on the doorknob, his dark brown eyes giving me a warm good-bye. And then I let myself out of the house, more confused about Kelly Imo than when I had arrived. Everything I learned about Kelly seemed to contradict everything else. But now I had a lead—a meeting at someplace called Bamboo. So I would have to keep digging for more. And if I was very lucky, I thought I might find it soon.

O
f course I still didn’t know if Kelly’s death was natural or not, but his death had to be considered suspicious. And it seemed Kelly had been involved with the people who were making threats to Holly. It was possible that they could be the same political people that Keniki had mentioned. The Bamboo Four. I was certain I could discover everything I needed to know if I could just find the political meeting that the Hicks sisters said might be in progress.

I pulled the rented Mustang out onto the main highway and decided to cruise through town. Hawi is an old city. Once bustling with growth in the 1800s and early 1900s, during the sugar boom, and then almost extinguished when the sugar plantation shut down in 1970, the town was now recast as a small artists’ way station. This same dismal economic theme played throughout Hawaii over the past thirty years, as the world price of sugar had plunged and the one industry that had sustained many island workers became extinct. Unemployment, depression, suicides. That was the legacy of a local industry gone bust.

Today, Hawi was trying to keep its original Hawaiian history intact, and many of the original buildings had
been preserved. I slowed down as I drove along the three blocks of downtown Hawi, noting a Kona coffee shop and a handmade-ice-cream shop amid a few other touristoriented stores, all set in mildly refurbished structures.

And right across the street from the ice-cream shop was a ramshackle three-story building from the old days. The pale green clapboards could use a fresh coat of paint, but atop the open double-door entry was a beautifully kitschy sign. Brightly painted bent bamboo, the yellow letters proclaimed:
BAMBOO.

Isn’t that interesting?

One had to love a small town. Could Kelly’s political meeting still be in progress, as Keniki had predicted, despite the loss of one of its important members? Or perh aps because of that loss? I had to stop and check.

I found a parking spot on the next block up and walked back. Bamboo, it turned out, was a charming restaurant and bar situated on the ground floor of an authentic plantation-era building from old Hawaii, with art gallery space upstairs.

I was greeted by an elderly hostess, but my eyes were scanning the place, looking for anyone who might fit the vague description of The Bamboo Four.

“Just one?” the old island auntie asked again.

I focused on her finally and spoke up clearly. “I was told there was to be a meeting here today. But I’m not sure I got the time right.”

“A meeting?” she asked, checking me out. I was wearing a neat pair of short white shorts with a pale lavender T-shirt, along with the de rigueur flip-flops. Lots of tan skin, my hair doing its corkscrew thing in the constant soft humidity. Not the sort of getup one would wear to attend a Republican caucus, I grant you, but I still had no idea into what sort of radical politics
Kelly Imo was mixed up. This was Hawaii. Everyone was laid-back, no?

“You mean HBA? No, no, you don’t want them, miss.”

“HBA?” I grabbed on to it. Hawaiian Birchers of America. Ew. Hawaii Break-Free from America? Hm. “My friend told me to come.”

“Well, that’s the only group here,” she said, smiling. “You like bamboo?”

I looked around the twinkle-lit interior, so charming, with old hardwood floors, framed Hawaiiana on the walls, and vintage bamboo decor. My kind of restaurant in an old refurbished building. I was dying to read the menu. “I love it,” I said.

“You love bamboo?” The woman, dressed in a floral muumuu, looked startled. “Then you come with me. HBA for you.”

Whatever that meant.

I followed her around the corner to the far section of the main dining room. There, a large round table held eight or nine people, all deep in serious conversation. They looked up as we approached.

“Who’s this, Mary?” asked a large, tan white man in his fifties. “You thinking of hiring a new waitress?”

“She with you HBAs,” said the hostess, pulling another chair over to their table.

I sat down and faced the stares. Eight men and one woman. All wearing aloha shirts in various hues and patterns. They had no idea who I was, naturally, but I just smiled. “Hello. I’m Madeline Bean. Keniki Hicks told me you would be here.”

“Keniki sent you here?” asked another man, this one very wiry but equally overtanned. “But why?”

“She was touched by all the plants and flowers that you sent. For Kelly.”

“Ah,” said the female member of their group, putting down her pen. “She’s here to sit in for Kelly. Is that allowed?”

“Not in our bylaws,” said the first man, sounding grim. “Absolutely not.”

“Earl,” said the woman, a trim blonde, in an exasperated voice, “we don’t have any written bylaws. I’ve been trying to get you guys to recognize how important it is to—”

“Thanks, Claudia,” said the man, shutting her down. He didn’t sound thankful.

“You can’t vote in Kelly’s place,” said the second man, the wiry one. Everyone else seemed to be alarmed by the idea as well, and I heard a lot of whispering as cross conversations sprang up at the far end of the table.

“Why can’t she?” asked Claudia. “We have no written bylaws, so—”

“This Modlin woman,” said Earl with a grimace to the wiry man beside him. “This is all she keeps harping about—”

“Look,” I said, trying to get their attention. “I have something to say.”

Claudia shushed them all.

Now what exactly could I say? I still had no flipping idea what this group stood for or why Kelly was at odds with them. “But first, can a girl order lunch around here?”

“Jeez,” said Earl. “Get this young woman a menu, will you, Claudia?” And then to me, he said, regaining his charm, “Look, we don’t mean to sound heartless. Jeez. I mean, no one here is sadder than I am that Kelly had that terrible accident. We even considered rescheduling our board meeting today.”

Ah. They considered it.

“But a lot of our group come over for this meeting from the other islands. We were already here this morning by time we got word of what happened. If I rescheduled, we’d lose a month, and none of us thought Kelly would want us to do that.”

I’m sure they were thinking of Kelly Imo foremost when making this decision.

Claudia returned to the table, holding out a menu. “Here you are, sweetie,” she said. I could tell she must be a great mom; she had that sort of offhand caring competence about her.

“Thanks. Say, why don’t you just continue on with your meeting while I get settled? We can talk about Kelly a little later, if that’s okay.”

I saw one of the men at the far end of the table nudge a buddy and whisper, “That Kelly. He had great taste in females.”

“Okay, let’s go on,” said Earl, figuring, I suppose, that making me leave would be too much of a disruption. Such a fuss would hardly be tactful, since I was invoking the name of a very recently deceased member. A member of
what,
I was dying to discover, but I figured if they were willing to hold their meetings out in public, they weren’t planning to overthrow the U.S. government. Most likely.

“Where were we?” he asked Claudia, who then consulted her handwritten notes.

“You were talking about Panaewa.”

“Right.”

I looked over the menu, wanting to take it all in as I always do, while at the same time trying to keep an ear out for mention of what this group’s politics really were. In truth, I was starving. The list of pupus, or appetizers, was heavenly. I considered quickly the chicken sate pot stickers, the Margaritaville prawns, or the kalua pork
quesadilla. The prawns were herb-grilled with fresh papaya, drizzled with a spicy tequila lime sauce. Yummy. While the pork was smoked in a traditional Hawaiian imu, or underground oven, and tucked into a grilled flour tortilla along with jalapeño jack cheese and topped with tropical fresh fruit salsa and sour cream. Equally divine.

A waitress, a young girl with her hair swept up tight on her head, materialized. Decisions, decisions. I looked up, and Claudia Modlin met my eyes. She whispered, “The kalua pork.”

I smiled and ordered.

Meanwhile, the gang of Hawaiian-shirted men was deep in discussion. When I heard the word
dying,
I paid keen attention once more to the conversation.

One of the men, a very old Asian fellow with white hair, was speaking with a froggy voice. “This is why they die,” he was saying. “He chews and he pisses.”

Ahem?

“Yes, Ike,” another man said, as if he had been down this road before.

Who dies? Who chews? Who…well, who? I sipped my water and tried to become invisible as I waited for my food.

“The
T. siamensis
has been chewed, true,” said Earl, sounding weary. “But it’s still hanging in there.”

“Maybe yes,” said Ike, “maybe no. But the
B. multiplex
was not so lucky. It’s dead!”

“The fern leaf again,” Earl said. “Yes, we know all this, Ike. We need to move on now. What do you expect? It wasn’t planted on the tiger’s path, but a tiger cannot be controlled. It’s going to chew. It’s going to piss. We can’t control that.”

I must have looked as perplexed as I felt. What sort of political group was this?

“The zoo,” Claudia explained, correctly interpreting the furrows in my brow, “over near Hilo. We planted bamboo in the new white tiger habitat. There’s been some worry about how well the plantings may thrive with the tiger taking such a keen interest in them.”

“Ah.” My kalua pork arrived before I was expected to react to this news. Thank goodness. I mean, what could I possibly add to a conversation about tiger piss?

“May we move on?” Earl asked the group.

So their big topic of conversation was dying plants? HBA. Hawaiian
Bamboo
Association?

I ate as they moved on to discuss sales of T-shirts. New association T-shirts that featured a stylized block print of…I waited as one of the club members fumbled with a drawing and then held it up. Bamboo. Oh! I was so good. I was so right.

But hey, what was really going on here? Had I in fact just boldly crashed a luncheon for avid bamboo lovers? Or was there possibly something more sinister involved? Keniki Hicks had come unglued when she talked about Kelly’s political foes. Were these folks them? Could all of Keniki’s anger really have been aimed at a group of bamboo fanciers? I had expected some answers here, possibly as to why Kelly wound up dead. I nibbled my insanely good quesadilla and figured, at least until I got my butt kicked out of the meeting, I might as well continue listening.

“And now, finally, we are up to the new business,” Earl stated, looking at me warily.

“About time,” said a muscular man who was called Brian. “I’ve got a proposal.”

“No, you don’t,” argued Earl. “You never sent me notice of any new business, so it will not be—”

“Now, maybe I didn’t,” Brian said testily, “but you know damned well Kelly did. He was going to raise this issue today, and so I am doing it in his place.”

“That’s out of order,” Earl said. “You are not recognized, Brian.”

“Is that right?” Brian asked, his voice going up half an octave in outrage, looking over at Claudia.

“We need to have a set of written bylaws,” she started up again, sounding pleasant between the loud bickering.

“To hell with that,” said Brian. “If I can’t raise the issue, then let this girl do it. She’s sitting here for Kelly. He’s the one who got the motion together, right? So let her do it.”

I had just raised my lovely half-eaten quesadilla to my lips as I noticed everyone at the table had now turned to me. “Me?” I asked, talking around the tortilla.

“It’s unheard of,” fumed Earl.

“Go ahead, sweetie,” suggested Claudia, her pen up.

What the hell had Kelly been going to propose to this group of agitated bamboo fiends? A new planting in the zoo? Not likely, because I noticed old Ike was less interested now. What, then?

“Let her finish her sandwich in peace,” Earl suggested. “We can take all this up next month.”

“No!” yelled Brian.

“Let’s all just be patient,” said Claudia calmly.

I swallowed. “Look. I am not a regular member of your group, um, obviously.”

They looked at me, waiting.

“But let me say this. I feel it would be best if Brian put the proposal into actual words, as it were. And then, you
know, to satisfy Earl here, I can make the official motion on Kelly’s behalf.”

“That’s right,” Brian said, standing up, “that’s fair.” And then he launched into a ten-minute description of Kelly’s master plan for how bamboo could save the Hawaiian Islands.