Free Surfing Detective 00 - The Making of Murder on Molokai by Chip Hughes Page B

an occasional glitch, this strategy works.
Usually.

two
(1998 draft, revised)

    Soon the rising sun cast its mango hue on two snapshots Mrs. Souza had given me: one of her ex-husband, the other of the baby-sitter.
    Leonard Souza was a scurvy looking fish with
salt-n-peppa
whiskers and shadowy circles under his charcoal eyes, the kind of scum you’d want to keep miles from your sister or daughter or girlfriend. Lei’s picture, autographed in her feminine teenaged hand “To Mr. & Mrs. Souza,” must have been taken at her junior prom. She wore an orchid corsage, frilly mauve dress, and an innocent smile. On her beauty-shop bun perched a rhinestone crown.
Queen for a day.
She was girlishly slim, with the telltale curves of a blossoming woman. Her pimple-faced boyfriend stood two inches shorter than his queen. From the nervous look in his eyes, she was obviously too much for him. Way too much.
    I looked up. Nothing doing on Souza’s boat. To stave off hunger and tedium I sucked on my favorite “crack seed,” a local delicacy. “Sweet Li Hing Mui” is a pungent, sweet-sour plum seed that puckered my lips with such intense flavor that I quickly forgot my appetite and boredom.
    Glancing again at the morning paper, I flipped to the weather page to check out the waves. Despite the confused shark at Laniakea who once mistook me for his lunch, I ride my longboard every chance I get. Surfing relieves the stresses of detective work and helps me explore the delicate balances that make up my job.
    Sherlock Holmes had his pipe–I have my surfboard. Floating on the glassy sea, scanning the blue horizon for the perfect wave, sometimes I drift into a kind of trance. Then I can disentangle the most intricate web. When my wave finally rolls in, an instinct takes over. In one fluid motion I swing my board around, stroke like the wind, and rise. Slip-sliding down the thundering cascade–perched on a thin slice of balsa and foam–I find a precarious balance.
    That’s what surfing (and my job) is all about: balance.
    The
Advertiser
forecast waves in Waikiki at two to three feet. Elsewhere, a paltry flat to one. To Waikiki I would go, once I served the affidavit on Souza.
    Then I remembered a nine o’clock appointment with a woman from Boston whose name escaped me. I don’t usually forget client names, but she had been referred during a long and rambling phone message from an attorney friend of mine.
    “Oh, Kai, Ms. So-and-so from Boston may stop by . . . ,” Harry had said offhandedly, as if he wasn’t sure she would. Then he added cryptically: “If she shows, you’ll be damn glad she did.”
    Whatever Harry’s meaning, I was stuck with the appointment. Surfing would have to wait.
    I glanced up again at the
H
o
k
u
lani,
portholes still black as night. A typical stakeout. Sometimes I sit for hours sucking on my sweet sour crack seed. But as I said,
balance
is the name of the game. Watching and waiting have to be as active as my moves, or I might miss something. Inevitably, when my vigilance slips, the case gets bungled. When my guard goes down, things turn dangerous.
    So I stayed alert as I flipped pages in the
Advertiser–
from that chilling story about the plunging death from a mule of Sara Ridgely-Parke–to the sports pages, checking the baseball playoff scores and sumo standings from Japan.
    After glancing at those alluring ads for tires and Korean hostess bars that follow sports–“ONO PUPUS & EXOTICGIRLS!”–I turned to the business section and checked out an artist’s sketch of a proposed Moloka‘i resort called “Kalaupapa Cliffs.” The resort loomed grand and blindingly white, an art deco Taj Mahal with marble spas and meandering pool and hundreds of ocean-view suites. “Kalaupapa Cliffs” promised to be a luxury palace designed for the super rich.
Like we really need one more of those!
Because of a technicality concerning the building site, the Moloka‘i resort’s construction awaited a vote of the Land