Paradise, Passion, Murder Read online

  “Did you see anything?”

  Lenny was tall with a large upper torso and a small head. He reminded me of a crime-fighting action figure in some ways. Of course, given his propensity for palaver, it was entirely possible he’d simply talk any wannabe villain into submission. I fully expected to receive an overly abundant and detailed description of what he and Judy had seen. He astonished me by simply staring at the ground.

  “Lenny? Did you see anything?”

  He squinted at his red fingers and hands. Finally, he said, “No, no, man. We went to the gardens first. Came right here from the church. You know, we wanted to check out the grave thing. Judy saw the body on the ground before me. I tried to check for a pulse, but had no idea where to put my fingers.” He swiped at his left hand with his right as though he could somehow brush away death. “I’m a stockbroker, man, not a doctor.”

  Oh, a stockbroker. That explained everything. He was used to having money, not common sense. He had the look of a Wall Street pro with dark hair, cut short and brushed back. He wasn’t overweight, but did seem like the kind of guy you’d find in the Big & Tall store. Of course, being a stockbroker, he probably had a private tailor, which would explain the perfect fit of his aloha shirt.

  Lenny was still going on about something or other. Nerves? Probably. I wondered if his tongue was this loose with his clients. Instead of letting him ramble, I held up my hands to form the letter T. Lenny seemed to get the concept right away. He’d received a Time Out. How many of those did he get as a kid?

  “So, what did you actually see, Lenny?”

  “Oh, uh, see? Me? Nothing important.”

  “Why don’t you let me decide what’s important?”

  “I’m a stockbroker, not a detective.”

  What was that, his standard response for everything? To the side, Benni was gritting her teeth. Lenny must be irritating her, too.

  “Cut the BS, Lenny. You said Judy saw the body first.”

  “Hey, there’s no need to get nasty. Who put you in charge, anyway? I don’t take orders from you. I’m a—I need to get this crap off my hands.”

  I dismissed his comment with a flip of my hand. “I know, I know. You’re a stockbroker.” You’re also a moron, I thought. “I’m only asking a question.”

  Lenny sneered at me. “We didn’t see anything. We just showed up and whacko there was laying on the ground. Come on, Judy. Let’s go back to the bus. I’ve got to get cleaned up.”

  Judy, whose eyes had a healthy glaze now, said, “I’ll be right there, Lenny. You go ahead.”

  Why had Lenny called Ramon a whacko? I hadn’t seen any bizarre behavior. Lenny marched off in the direction of what he called “the bus.” It was really a twelve-passenger van, something more intimate than a bus and capable of going where the full-sized behemoths couldn’t. When Lenny was about twenty feet away, he yelled over his shoulder. “I was only trying to protect you, Judy. You do what you want.”

  Judy

  I stared after Lenny as he disappeared from view. The guy was obviously hiding something. Had Judy witnessed the murder? Time to find out. I turned my attention to her. “What was that all about?”

  She rolled her eyes and let out a huff of exasperation. Under her breath, she swore. “Damn you, Lenny.”

  “Well?”

  Judy was about five-foot-four with fiery red hair. She had a sharp, well-defined nose, but soft cheeks and little pixie ears. She reminded me more of a Disney elf than someone whose anger could be taken seriously.

  She swayed as she spoke. It made the universe feel out of kilter—pixies didn’t get drunk. At least, not in public.

  “I’m done with him,” she snarled.

  The rest of the group, a half dozen curious rubberneckers trying not to seem the part, swarmed toward us.

  “Benni, can you hold them off?” I asked. “The less damage we do to this crime scene, the better.”

  She nodded and left me to question Judy while she kept the lookie loos at bay.

  Based on Lenny’s and Judy’s responses, I doubted that either of them was as innocent as Lenny claimed. I’d learned long ago how to prime the pump when asking for information. That practice worked especially well with the “guilty” people, those who had secrets eating away their souls. My plan was to let Judy talk about Lenny. Once she started talking, she might open up about herself.

  “Okay, then, what did Lenny do?”

  She stared at me with piercing blue eyes reminiscent of glacial ice. “It’s what he hasn’t done. I have no patience for men who can’t make up their minds. I thought Lenny was ‘the one.’ You know, the guy I was meant to be with. Instead he’s just a loser with a capital L.”

  “Right,” I said. Lenny the Loser. Having spent several years feeling myself a part of that category, her venom made me uncomfortable. Forget the whole pixie analogy, too. This was like talking to Judy, the Queen of Anger. What the hell did any of this have to do with my question? There was only one way to find out. “Yeah, I can see that. He doesn’t have much on the ball, does he?”

  “Are you kidding me? My biological clock is ticking and Lenny waits four freaking years to tell me he’s not ‘the dad’ type. I can’t believe I gave some of my prime childbearing years to a loser who doesn’t want a family.” She glared in the direction Lenny had gone. “All he wants is money, money, money. I should have seen it in the beginning.”

  So, Lenny’s title was growing—Lenny the Loser, Money-grubbing Stockbroker, Not a Human Being or the Dad Type. In the midst of that thought, I remembered overhearing this same conversation with Benni. It had happened at the Ke‘anae Peninsula while I’d been waiting for her outside the women’s restroom after a walk along the spectacular rocky shore. There I was, the loitering pervert hanging around the entrance when Judy launched into a rant about periods and timing.

  As the exiting women eyed me, I stammered, “I’m waiting for my girlfriend.” My excuse probably made me seem more like a pervert than my actual presence.

  Finally, Benni and Judy emerged together engaged in a deep conversation of reproductive cycles and fertility. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but Benni gave Judy a big hug and encouraged her to “keep trying.”

  When I asked if everything was okay, Benni replied, “Just girl talk. You don’t want to know.”

  But, now I did know. “So Lenny doesn’t want a family and you do. Is that why you’ve been drinking today?”

  “He told me this morning.”

  My jaw dropped. “Whoa. This morning? Right before the tour? That’s when he broke up with you? That’s cold.”

  “He doesn’t want to break up. He doesn’t want to commit, either. All his talk about the future was just a load of crap.” Judy glared at the space where Lenny had been standing moments before. “Lenny would be perfectly happy with a hooker on retainer.”

  Okay, that was awkward.

  It took me a couple of seconds to come up with a response. Even if Lenny did deserve the full title. Now what? “Judy, was he lying to me? What did you see when you got here?”

  She buried her face in her hands. Her fingertips were stained with red.

  “Let me rephrase my question. Did you touch the body?” I pointed at Ramon.

  Judy’s eyes teared, her lower lip trembled, and she gripped her sides. “No. He was just—there. On the ground. I knelt down, but the grass was all wet and sticky.” She wrung her hands as though she could remove the stain. “There was blood everywhere. I tried to wipe it off. That just made things worse. I know, it was stupid. I didn’t kill him. He was dead when we got here.”

  I wasn’t about to quibble over technicalities, but Ramon had been alive when these two arrived. I doubted Judy or Lenny the Loser could have done anything to save the dying man, so it made little sense to burden Judy with more guilt. Her eyes drifted closed for a moment and I wondered why s
he hadn’t cancelled the trip after Lenny’s morning bombshell. “How much have you had to drink today?”

  “I had a couple of bottles stashed in my bag. I wanted this to be a good day, and Lenny totally screwed it up. When we got here, I split up with him and found a quiet spot in the garden. I was just going to get drunk and say to hell with it all when he showed up. He said he’d been watching me. He decided he’d made a mistake and proposed on the spot.”

  The last thing I cared about was whether these two were making wedding plans, but if they hadn’t been together, maybe Lenny didn’t have the alibi he claimed. “Was he there the entire time? Watching you, I mean.”

  “I don’t know.” Judy seemed to be having a hard time focusing. She gave her head a slight shake. “I’m glad I told him to go to hell.”

  “Why? You were getting what you wanted.”

  “I want a marriage, not a pity party. As for Lenny, I really don’t know how long he was watching me before he showed up.”

  Jerod

  As far as I was concerned, Judy was doing a good job all on her own of turning this trip into a pity party on wheels. So she stayed with the wrong guy too long and got bad news on a day when they would be stuck together for ten hours. Was that a reason for her to drown her sorrows in cherry-flavored whiskey? Who was I to judge? I’d done worse. Or, did that give me the right to be critical?

  Our driver, Jerod, pushed past Benni and the five people she had in a holding pattern. He bellowed, “What’s goin’ on here, brah?”

  His strong island dialect had me envisioning Jerod Hayworth as the kind of guy who could laugh and joke with his friends in Pidgin while simultaneously holding a conversation in English with tourists.

  I didn’t answer him right away. I was trying to account for the members of our group. Benni plus her five made six. I’d already talked to Lenny and Judy. That was eight. Add in Ramon, Jerod, and myself, and that accounted for eleven. Two people were missing.

  “Well?” asked Jerod.

  “Oh, sorry. Judy was just telling me how she and Lenny found the body.”

  Judy gripped her sides. Tight corded muscles bulged against the skin of her jawline. “Can I go?” she asked. “I don’t feel good.”

  “Maybe you wanna go rest in the van, yah?” Jerod took her arm by the elbow, looked straight into her eyes. “First aid kit’s behind a panel near the fire extinguisher inside the door. Just in case.”

  Did he have caffeine shots in that kit? At least then she’d be a wide-awake drunk. When Judy left, I recapped what I knew. Jerod’s face remained grim throughout my description. A couple of times he shook his head as he watched Judy weave away. He squatted next to Ramon. Was he taking stock of the situation? Getting ready to tell me to mind my own business?

  “I gotta report this. You kinda taken charge. You ain’t a cop, yah?”

  “I’ve done some work with a PI back in Honolulu.” Would I go to hell for lying in a cemetery? It wasn’t a full-fledged lie. Sort of a stretch of fourteen strands of truth. For starters, I was never hired by Chance Logan. Did it matter that Chance was really just a young PI wannabe? His education consisted of courses from the Phillip Marlowe Online Detective Agency. I suspected the “agency” was a straight-out scam, but that was Chance’s problem to deal with, not mine.

  What the hell? Jerod nodded, apparently accepting my status as an official member of law enforcement. Worked for me. No harm, no foul. “How long will it take the police to get here?”

  “Nearest station is thirty miles in Hana.”

  The road to Hana was about as rural as you could get. We’d travelled through rain forest, seen towering mountains on one side, and jaw-dropping coastline on the other. One-lane bridges were the norm here. Of course, the road to Hana was just the warm-up, the truly nasty part was yet to come.

  Jerod gazed around nervously. He was probably more comfortable on a hairpin turn behind the wheel of his van than in front of a crowd. The one thing I knew for sure was that the collective anxiety level in our little group was rising fast.

  “Everybody needs some kind of guidance,” I said.

  “You kinda like a cop. You handle ’em while I radio dis in.”

  I stared at his face for a moment. The poor guy was petrified. “Sure,” I said. “Before you leave, what happened after we got here?”

  “Brah, I no got time fo’ stand ’round.”

  He started to walk away, but stopped when I rested a hand on his shoulder. “I understand you don’t want to answer a lot of questions. But, this is important. And you’re pretty upset. I can see it on your face.”

  Jerod stared at Ramon’s body. “Brah, dis no boddah me. I seen dis kine thing all da time in Nam. Thing is, might get me canned when boss find out. No look so good if tourists get killed on tours.”

  Judging by how deeply Jerod had slipped into Pidgin, I suspected the stress had him on overload. I’d seen the pattern many times. “Wait. Did anyone stay behind? On the bus?”

  Jerod’s eyes darted from side-to-side.

  Odd, I thought. It seemed like an easy question.

  He jabbed me in the chest with a finger. “No touch nothing. Company ain’t gonna be happy on dis.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “And, no. Nobody else on da bus.”

  Conchita

  The small cemetery consisted of a large expanse of overgrown lawn dotted with grave markers. Periodic tropical plantings consisting of ornamental figs, ti plants, and small shrubs surrounded by volcanic stone walls rounded out the landscaping. This was a place of peace and tranquility. It was where the dead should rest. Not a place where lives should be taken.

  With only one tree near Lindbergh’s grave, securing the area with crime-scene tape, rope, or braided ti leaves was impossible. The best thing I could do for Ramon was keep the masses away and hope his killer faced justice.

  The inscription on the simple gravestone read, “Charles A. Lindbergh Born Michigan 1902 Died Maui 1974.” Footprints from the day’s visitors had matted the turf, reducing the possibility of retrieving even one footprint. Blood spatter stained the otherwise green carpet. Did the evidence corroborate Judy’s statement about kneeling down near the body?

  Based on positioning—head against the rocks, the rest of the body stretched out with arms wide on the grass—it wasn’t hard to imagine scenarios in which Ramon had fallen, been pushed, or had someone smash his head against the rocks.

  Grumbling from Benni’s group caught my attention.

  Jerod was practically begging them to remain calm. Help would be on the way soon. He didn’t tell them it could take an hour for that help to arrive. A chorus of complaints arose when he said I would be investigating Ramon's death, but none was louder than the obnoxious Conchita Brunet.

  I screwed up my courage and made my approach.

  Conchita was a big-boned woman. Though a few inches shorter than me, she was a solid size sixteen. It was a fact I’d learned within ten minutes of this morning’s introductions at the breakfast buffet when a sweet and charming Conchita commented on Benni’s “cute top.” Almost immediately, she launched into an annoying diatribe about prejudice in the fashion industry and how “full-bodied women” didn’t have the selection available to “women like you.” The whole thing sounded almost vicious and left me wondering how many personalities Conchita had.

  While walking back to the van after breakfast, I asked Benni if she’d taken offense at Conchita’s jab.

  She smiled and said, “No. She’s a Libra.”

  Being an expert in the art of misunderstanding women, I nodded as though I understood and returned her smile. Right now, it appeared I’d be dealing with Conchita’s pushy side. Well, I could get pushy, too. I approached her and asked, “Can you help me out?”

  Conchita smiled, bringing out the same bubbly personality we’d seen before the body-size discussion. “Sure. What do you n
eed?”

  I strolled away from the crowd with Conchita dutifully following until we stood side-by-side next to Ramon’s body. “Here’s the thing, Conchita. From what I can see, none of these people ever met prior to this tour. And yet, we have a dead guy in a cemetery right near the grave of Charles Lindbergh. Maybe there’s no connection, but it might mean something. Do you have any ideas?”

  “I do.” She stuck her chin out, then glared directly at me. “You’re dealing with this thing?”

  “I’ve been volunteered in a way.”

  “Good. You can be our representative. This is absolutely unconscionable. The company should never have let this sort of thing happen on one of its tours. You need to tell them we’ll go to court, if necessary. There are others who feel the same way. We need to get our money back.”

  I blinked, unable to believe what I’d heard. She was worried about a refund? Now? Shouldn’t she be more concerned about her own safety? A killer was on the loose, after all. “That’s not really what I’m concerned about right now, Conchita.”

  “Well, you should be.”

  She shifted her bulk. Perhaps a beautiful woman in her younger years, the curl of her lip now gave her an intimidating presence. It was like watching a rhinoceros shift from sedentary to first gear. No need to wonder how much damage an impact might cause, you just wanted to get the hell out of the way.

  “My immediate concern is finding out who killed Ramon.”

  “I can help you with that, too.” She smirked as she dismissed any concerns with a wave of her hand.

  “Then maybe you could enlighten me.” I nudged her elbow. “Help me wrap this up.”

  Conchita licked her lips and her smile faded. I was half expecting Crabby Conchita to return, but she was rational when she spoke.

  “There were a lot of questions about Lindbergh while we were here. A couple of the really young ones had no idea who the man was. And, among the older ones, only a few knew he crossed the Atlantic, not the Pacific.”