Surfing Detective 00 - The Making of Murder on Molokai

toward my office. Not wanting to keep a prospective client waiting, I started to jog.
Ouch!
My ankle stung. I slowed again to a hobble. Given the stares of passersby, I must have been a sight–even in this neighborhood. A homeless man curled on yellowed newspapers by a bankrupt cigar shop peered at me, rubbed his pink eyes, then spit in my direction. The urine reek of his grimy clothes quickened my halting pace up Maunakea.
    My office is easy to find above the corner shop called Fujiyama’s Flower Leis. Mrs. Fujiyama owns a decaying pre-war building at Maunakea and Beretania Streets that boasts dazzling ornaments of an Oriental cast–two-headed dragons, serpents, wild boars, and ancient Chinese characters spelling some (to me) mysterious message in red. The walls are riddled with enough cracks to keep a journeyman plasterer busy for months. The second, or top floor is divided into five tiny offices. Mine, the roomiest of the bunch, is a twelve-by-twelve cubicle with a window overlooking Maunakea Street.
    Trailing drops of sea water into the flower shop, I searched among the refrigerated display cases for the woman from Boston. Plenty of ginger, plumeria, tuberose,
p
i
kake,
and orchid leis, but no sign of her. The vivid floral scent of the shop raised the hair on the back of my neck–making me feel sort of spiritual, or just plain
l
o
l
o
.
    Mrs. Fujiyama’s establishment offers my clients both wonderful fragrances and a degree of anonymity. They can browse leisurely among the perfumy leis, then slip unnoticed upstairs. If detected, they can pretend to be patronizing one of the four other tenants: a free-lance editor, bookkeeper (who’s never in), passport photographer, or Madame Zenobia, a psychic. I wonder sometimes if any of these businesses are fronts, though I’ve never bothered to check.
    Fortunately, Mrs. Fujiyama didn’t see me trail sea water across her scuffed brown linoleum. But her youngest lei girl, a Filipino college student named Chastity, did.
    “Eh, Mr. Cooke,” said Chastity, stringing a pale yellow plumeria lei, “You’re so wet!”
    “Dawn-patrol surfah.”
I winked and headed up the orange shag stairs past the glass bead curtain and locked door at Madame Zenobia’s, who seldom does readings before noon.
    The smoky veneer hallway was empty by my door that says “SURFING DETECTIVE” beneath the graceful longboard rider hanging ten–as on my business cards. I unlocked the two dead bolts and the heavy mahogany door creaked open. I put in this solid wood door and the dead bolts myself because Mr. Fujiyama, when he built these offices, used hollow-core doors with cheap knob-locks. The locks were a joke. A common kitchen knife could spring them. As for the hollow-core doors, a little
keiki–
a mere child–could easily punch a fist through.
    The musty smell of the office floated through the opened door even before I stepped inside. But after my morning’s swim, the familiar whiff and disorder of the place felt reassuring. Atop a filing cabinet across from my battleship grey desk stood a tarnished trophy: Third Place–Classic Long Board–Makaha. My faded glory.
    When I was twenty-five, nearly a decade ago, I won this trophy in a local contest at Makaha. The infamous Makaha “bowls” were cranking up in the final round to fifteen feet.
And higher.
Boards were snapping like toothpicks. I got lucky. One teeth-rattling ride positioned me to win it all. Then on the wave of the day–the wave of my
life
–I kicked out to help a fellow surfer hit by his board going over the falls. Neither of us took home first prize that day. But the third place trophy, tarnished now by the years, still sits above my filing cabinet.
    I checked my watch again.
Five after nine.
Maybe the woman from Boston would be a few minutes late? I opened my lone office window, releasing the stale air, and took a quick look for her down on Maunakea Street. The sharp, competing smells of kim chee, espresso, rancid garbage, hot malasadas, and ginger leis wafted in.
    Across from the flower shop stood an old porno theater, recently converted to a Christian radio station. Last week I’d watched the new owners take down from the marquee two spicy titles–“Hot Rackets” and “Debbie Does It Again”–replacing them with “JESUS COMING SOON.” Nearby an old porno buff, unaware of the theater’s conversion, hustled to the ticket booth with visions in his X-rated mind of the man from Nazareth I shudder to contemplate.