Surfing Detective 00 - The Making of Murder on Molokai

me trailed a thin stream of blood.
Hungry sharks?
I wondered.
    Coming up for air, I looked around to get my bearings. The
Hokulani
lay thirty feet away. My rubber zoris bobbed nearby on the water like two planks adrift. Souza glared at me from the stern.
    “Fuckah!”
He waved the court order angrily. The long legal pages flapped in the air.
    I dove down deep and swam under water again. When I rose for another breath the rusty boat looked smaller, less menacing. Souza was nowhere in sight. I swam on the surface to the nearest dock, patting my shorts for my wallet and keys. Luckily neither had gone south with my sunglasses.
    Climbing onto the dock planks I limped barefoot and dripping to my car. The
zoris
I simply left floating by the
Hokulani.
My bleeding ankle stung. Like a shallow coral cut, the wound thankfully went just beneath the surface.
    At the harbor’s edge I glimpsed again those aqua towers of the Ilikai Hotel where Jack Lord flashed his steely eyes at the opening of
Hawaii Five-0.
I tried to recall if his Detective McGarrett ever served papers on a deadbeat or got attacked by a gaffe.
Doubtful.
Or did I miss that episode?
    I checked my watch. Quarter to nine. Fifteen minutes till my appointment. It would take me nearly that long in traffic to drive–soaked and bleeding–to my Maunakea Street office. Then ditch my sodden clothes.
    I wished I’d never agreed to meet with that woman from Boston.

four
(1998 draft, revised)

    My Impala crawled along the waterfront on choked Ala Moana Boulevard past the soaring Aloha Tower. Both long white hands of the tower’s Big Ben-like clock, a dozen stories above the harbor, pointed to a black Roman nine.
    Beneath the Aloha Tower the nautical flags of a Norwegian cruise ship–crimson, mustard yellow, and navy blue–barely rippled in the slack trades. My clothes dripped like wet laundry begging for the spin cycle. The beach towel I always carry for surfing lay under me drenched, not doing much to keep the driver’s seat beneath it from growing soggier by the minute. Blood trickled from my stinging ankle.
Damn that Souza!
    I wasn’t too happy about the salt water and blood dripping in my Impala. It’s sort of a classic.
    I bought the teal blue ‘69 Chevy from a widow whose late husband purchased it new at Aloha Motors, a defunct dealership formerly on the site of the Hawai‘i Convention Center. With less than 50,000 original miles, the Impala’s three hundred horse V–8 still really rocks. And with the back seat removed, my longboard slides right in.
    Wheeling the Impala downtown between steel and mirror office towers that hid all but a sliver of the grass green Ko‘olau Range, I wondered again about the woman from Boston. What did Harry mean: “If she shows, you’ll be damn glad she did”? Despite my six years in the business I still feel a little queasy when meeting new clients. You never know what you’ll get.
    I turned onto Maunakea Street, a slice of old Honolulu bordering Chinatown’s teeming, mismatched buildings and pungent aromas. Along the half mile the two-lane drag runs makai, or seaward, from Foster Botanical Gardens to the harbor, Maunakea intersects notorious Hotel Street–a strip of raunchy bars, porno houses, flea bag hotels, prostitutes, and drug dealers.
    The boys in blue at the HPD sub-station try occasionally to weed out these bad elements, but they always spring back like the flamboyant night-blooming cereus up the street at the botanical gardens. Me, I don’t mind. You’d be surprised how helpful these neighbors can be on certain cases.
    Maunakea Street’s hodgepodge of crumbling buildings brought to mind that young “Ecofeminist” attorney who had tragically lost her life on Moloka‘i.
What would she have thought of my funky digs?
This is not the part of town where you’d expect to find a P.I. with ambitions. Truth is, a half dozen years back when I was just starting out I had higher expectations. My first office in a swankier part of town–Bishop Street, no less–cost me most of what I could make. But that’s another story. When I figured out I was giving up too much wave riding just to keep an address, I moved here to Maunakea.
    Things are simpler now. These days I maintain only two rules for business: don’t starve and don’t get drilled. Oh, and a third rule for pleasure:
Plenny time fo’ surf!
    At five minutes to nine I pulled into my garage, then hobbled shoeless and dripping along the crumbling sidewalk