Surfing Detective 02 - Wipeout

One

    “Are you the Surfing Detective?” she asked in a voice as soft as trade winds whispering in bamboo.
    “Yes . . .” I wondered if this was yet another crank call.
    “Good, because you’re the only one who can help.”
    That got my attention.
    She kept details to a minimum, then made an appointment and promised an advance.
    A few mornings later I waited for her in a red vinyl booth at the second-floor Denny’s in Waikiki. The aroma of lattes and espressos wafting up from the Starbucks below made me wish I was down there on Kapahulu Avenue, or on my way to a morning surf session.
    But she had chosen Denny’s. She didn’t say why. And she was late.
    I sat there in my most flamboyant aloha shirt—
hula
dancers, Diamond Head, swaying coconut palms and, yes, surfers—watching the sun shimmer on glistening Kapi‘olani Park and the damp, cocoa-colored sands of Waikiki Beach. The campy aloha shirt was to help her recognize me, along with the mostly true description of myself I had given: sun-bleached brown hair, six feet even (a stretch), and a perpetual tan from surfing. I didn’t mention my age, thirty-four, nor did I claim Hawaiian ancestry. Though my name, Kai, means “sea” and though I was
hanaied,
or adopted, by a Hawaiian family when I was eight, my Cooke ancestors were about as New England as you can get. Anyway, all my client seemed to care about was that I was both a surfer
and
a detective.
    By 10:15 most evidence of the morning showers had vanished, but the pavement on Kapahulu still ran blacker than usual to the beach. There were few surfers out today. This morning’s gloomy grey canopy—coupled with small surf on the South Shore—had kept all but the diehards at home. Most had gone up to the North Shore, where a huge winter swell was thundering in from storms in the North Pacific—off Japan, off China, off the Aleutian Islands, off who knows where in that immense, blue, fathomless ocean.
    We’d had some enormous days in December and January. Twenty-five feet. Thirty feet. February figured to bring more really big ones.
    Today was Monday, February third. I stared through the steam swirling up from my coffee. If I were a smoker, I would have lit up about now. Instead, from the pocket of my aloha shirt, behind a swaying palm, I slipped a
Sweet Li Hing Mui
crack seed onto my tongue and instantly the sweet-sour plum pit exploded with pungent flavor.
    Glancing up I saw a woman who was very
hapai
, very pregnant, at the entrance. She caught my eye and made her way toward me in a pale lavender maternity dress. I ditched the crack seed in my napkin.
    “Summer?” I stood and clasped her trembling hand, whiffing the flowery scent of her perfume. She nodded as she slipped her hand from mine and edged slowly into the booth.
    “Want some coffee?” I peered into her eyes. They were violet—not blue, but intensely violet like orchids. Then I gazed at her protruding tummy. “Uh . . . Orange juice? Milk?”
    “Nothing, thank you,” she replied in that whispering voice I’d heard earlier on the phone. I leaned toward her so I wouldn’t miss a word.
    Summer’s hair was blonde, wheat blonde, turned under in the golden roll of a pageboy. She had a cute cheerleader nose and a dimple in her chin. Back in California, she would have been that knockout in high school every guy had a crush on at least once.
    “How difficult this must be for you,” I said. “I’m very sorry about your husband.”
    She tried for a smile that didn’t even reach the corners of her mouth. Her delicate hands were folded neatly on the tabletop. Her violet eyes looked misty.
    “You said on the phone you wanted me to look into his death?”
    She nodded.
    “It happened in December at Waimea Bay?” I prompted.
    “Yes, on the day before Christmas at sunset, almost Christmas eve.”
    “Did you see him wipeout?” I recalled the incident from news coverage. Corky McDahl had been pounded by a succession of twenty-foot waves and not seen again.
    “No,” she glanced down at her tummy. “We thought with the baby due soon and all . . . .“
    “So you stayed behind in . . . . Where is it you live again in California?”
    “Newport Beach.”
    “And you didn’t mind staying home while he surfed in Hawai‘i?”
    “I’m very independent. So was Corky.” She pulled from her purse a snapshot and handed it to me. “My husband.” She introduced him as if he were still alive and sitting with us in the booth.
    I glanced at the