Surfing Detective 00 - The Making of Murder on Molokai

knocked on “309-F” and listened with anticipation to oddly heavy footsteps approaching the door. A smile tightened on my face.
“Niki–Niki–Niki.”
I uttered the mantra under my breath. The dead bolt cranked and the door swung open. My smile fell.
    Standing before me was not my lovely Niki, but a pink-eyed, stubble-cheeked airline pilot in his mid-forties who looked as if he had just crashed-landed on an overnight flight. His pilot’s uniform was wrinkled, his ruddy face was shadowed by those mostly gray whiskers, and his eyes on closer inspection appeared not just pink, but bloodshot.
    “Who are you?” I asked, more than a little curious.
    “Captain Jacoby,” he said in a gravelly, brusque voice. “Who the hell are
you?”
    I glanced inside the dark and disordered apartment. “Where’s Niki?”
    “Flying to Denver.” The bedraggled pilot looked me up and down. “Why do you want to know?”
    “Niki is . . . .” I hesitated. “She’s an old friend.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” he smirked.
    The more this rumpled pilot talked, the less I liked him.
    My fists involuntarily clenched.
Like beef?
    “Niki doesn’t pick up guys on airplanes anymore,” the pilot glowered. “She’s mine.”
    “What makes you think she picked me up?” I shot back.
    “Look, you’re not the first lovesick puppy to come sniffing after her.” His stance spread. His arms hung loose, ready to fight.
    “Lovesick puppy!”
I puffed up my chest. About to swing on him, suddenly I saw myself being played like a chess pawn. The image looked comical.
What a stupid gremmie I’ve been!
I began to feel more sorry for this red-eyed pilot than for myself. After all, my worries about Niki were over. His worries, well, had maybe just begun.
    “How long have you two been a couple?” I asked in a more conciliatory tone, expecting to hear:
“Only a month . . . .”
Or a few days, more or less.
    “A year this November.” The pilot’s fists remained clinched.
    “A
year?”
Suddenly I lost my wind.
So she’s been sleeping with the two of us all along? The whole six months I’ve known her?
    “When did you meet Niki?” Captain Jacoby kept in his fighting stance.
    “On Maui,” I said wistfully. “Long ago–so long I can’t recall.”
    The pilot relaxed his stance and grinned. I was no longer a threat. “Who should I tell her stopped by?”
    “Never mind.” I turned and started walking down the stuccoed hall. “She probably wouldn’t remember me anyway.”

IX: Chapter Thirteen: Surfing at Canoes

    When Kai lands in Honolulu after his brief trip to Los Angeles, he returns to his studio apartment and finds a
Star-Bulletin
story about a missing fisherman, who turns out to be the victim’s assistant, Baron Taniguchi. In earlier drafts, however, Kai goes surfing at Canoes to unwind. This nearly three-page interlude contains Kai’s painterly description of a sunset in Waikiki. Though an amateur painter at best, he tries to convey the glow on the water that he also feels inside himself. The last line containing “Missing Fisherman’s Tackle Found” is the point where the passage would have connected to the published version.

(cut from)
thirteen

    My plane landed in Honolulu at five. I knew only one way to clear my head. I rode a shuttle into Waikiki, dumped my bag in my apartment, then toted my longboard to the beach. The sun hung low over the teal horizon–slipping slowly toward the surf.
    I paddled out by the Moana Surfrider to that fabled wave-riding spot called Canoes. Catamarans, outriggers, and booze cruise boats having already cast off for their sunset sails, the beach lay empty except for a few late swimmers near shore. The ocean and air temperatures were the same–about eighty
A warm bath.
    As the sun dipped into amber tinted surf, the shimmering sea actually glowed. When I gazed toward Diamond Head, luminous in the flood of golden light, the rolling swells next door at Queens reflected like mirror. Only a few dapples on the liquid glass from a Trade Wind breeze proved I wasn’t dreaming.
    As this amber calm settled on the lineup, I became one small figure on a vast impressionist canvas of glowing ocean and surf and sky–a sunset scene rendered in warm, passionate hues worthy of Renoir or Monet.
Awesome.
To me, each wave rolling in was an incredible gift. Sets of two and three welled up over the reefs, each comber luring a half dozen surfers. The swell rose slowly, feathering rather than