Surfing Detective 00 - The Making of Murder on Molokai

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 Zoning Board.
    Still no movement on Souza’s boat. The climbing sun sent bars of intense light between Waikiki high-rises, illuminating the drowsy harbor in jailbird stripes. Would Souza and his girl never crawl out of bed?

    I started to worry that this stakeout might drag on into my nine o’clock appointment with the woman from Boston. It was now nearly seven thirty. An hour and a half had gone by and, although other fishing boats chugged one by one out to sea, on the
Hokulani
nothing had happened. Nothing.
    If Souza didn’t show his scurvy face pretty soon, I might have to start something.

three
(1998 draft, revised)

    At twenty past eight, my patience wearing thin, a naked yellow bulb inside the slanting cabin of the
Hokulani
finally flashed on. Through the two portholes I saw movement. Tossing my crack seed into a planter of fragrant
lauwa‘e
ferns next to my teal Impala, I grabbed the manila envelope and strolled down the dock toward the rusty hulk .
    My Dockers shorts, polo shirt, new pair of Raybans, and rubber
zoris
would have fit in well with the yachting crowd–had they been out of bed yet.
    I wear a number of such outfits for protective coloration, trying not to stand out. At six feet even (well, almost) and one eighty, I have a fairly deep chest and well-developed shoulders and arms from surfing. Despite my year-round tropic tan, my skin looks light for a
hapa
. I seem to have inherited my sandy-haired father’s fair complexion and my brown-eyed mother’s