Bet Your Bones (19 page)
Authors: Jeanne Matthews
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize this was someone’s office.” She started to leave.
“No need to rush off. I like to meet the new clients. Take a load off.” The deep-set black eyes behind the thick lenses of the hornrims practically pushed her down into the leather chair. “What’ll you have? Green tea? Carrot juice? Resveratrol concentrate?” He opened the credenza, part of which seemed to be a mini-refrigerator.
“Nothing, thanks.” She held up the bottle of MaHaLo water she still carried.
He took out a bottle of carrot juice, twisted off the cap, gave her an assessing look, and leaned his back against the door. “I saw you at Xander Garst’s party in Honolulu. What’s your name?”
“Dinah Pelerin. I’m a friend of his fiancée.” Her thoughts were racing. Even holding a bottle of carrot juice, Knack looked like a mafioso. She cinched her robe tighter. Was Peacequest a front for his illicit betting operation? She recalled the surprised look on Langford’s face when Lyssa named the spa where she’d spent the afternoon. Maybe the spa was a lawful enterprise and the employees didn’t know about his sideline. He could be funneling his gambling profits through the spa. It would be a perfect way to launder his dirty money.
“And what brings you to Peacequest?”
“Lyssa told me it was a great spa. I’m going to have a Zoku something.”
“Zoku Shin Do.” He took a sip of carrot juice while his impassive eyes seemed to pat her down. “Ever had your feet worked over before?” He made it sound like the treatment would include burning cigarettes.
“No.”
“Emily’s good. She knows all the right pressure points. Jessica at the front desk said you were interested in the phone call Raif Reid made to the spa before he died. Are you doing some kind of independent investigation?”
“No.”
“Don’t trifle with me, Dinah. Did Xander send you?”
“No.”
“Because I don’t want any trouble out of this Reid business. I don’t like the police coming around and roiling the waters. I don’t like anybody roiling the waters. Peacequest is a nice, quiet operation. I aim to keep it that way.”
She found what should have sounded threatening strangely liberating. If Knack didn’t want his waters roiled, he wasn’t going to work her over or do anything that would call attention to what went on in the back room of Peacequest. “Did Raif owe you a lot of money?”
“Raif liked the Tahitian black pearl scrub and the Hot Jade Stone Massage. They’re on the high end of what we offer. He always paid, although he hadn’t been as prompt the last few weeks.”
“I’m not the vice squad. You don’t have to speak in riddles.”
“I don’t have to speak to you at all.”
Dinah decided that the only way to extract any information from him was to roil. “Everyone knows that Raif gambled. I think he got in over his head and maybe you leaned on him when he was slow to pay. He’s been blackmailing Xander for a long time, but Xander was in debt, himself. If Xander turned off the spigot, or if Lyssa did, and if the cards were running cold for Raif, he wouldn’t be able to repay you before he went home to Virginia. Viewed in that light, the police could get the idea that you took drastic action.”
Knack’s black eyes bored into her. “I run a holistic health center. I pay my taxes and keep my nose clean. But say for the sake of argument that a client owes me money. It wouldn’t behoove me to kill him. I’d never get my money back. And if I killed him in my own backyard, the police would start poking around and business would suffer. So you see, killing a non-paying client is a lose-lose situation. Theoretically.”
“If you weren’t turning the screws on Raif, why did you show up uninvited at Xander’s party?”
“As a rule, I don’t get involved in my clients’ problems, but every so often there’s an exception. I went to the party to see another of my clients.”
“Xander owes you money, too?”
“I went to see Lyssa. She promised to retire Raif’s debts if I helped her take care of another matter. It seems Raif had been seeing one of my employees on the side and Lyssa asked me to put a stop to it.” He finished his carrot juice and tossed the bottle into a metal waste can next to the door.
The sound jangled Dinah’s nerves. Surely, Raif was too fond of Lyssa’s money to play around with somebody at the spa where she routinely came for lomilomis. “Is Tess Wilhite one of your employees?”
“That’s right. I asked her to cut Raif loose or see him someplace other than here on my turf.” His phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket and answered. “A lost client? I’ll have a look around. If I find her, I’ll send her to Emily.” He slipped the phone back in his pocket.
Dinah stood up and stepped around the desk. “Will Lyssa pay you now that Raif’s dead?”
He frowned. “What’s your angle?”
“The only thing I care about is making sure that my friend and her fiancé aren’t framed for murder. Do you know who played poker with Raif yesterday?”
“If he had a game, I don’t know anything about it. Like I told the police, I’ve heard that a lawyer here in town hosts a game from time to time. They might play for money or for matchsticks. I wouldn’t know.”
Dinah so wished he hadn’t said that. She told herself that Pahoa must be teeming with lawyers. “Will you tell me how much money Raif owed you?”
Knack walked around her to the credenza, pulled out a slim little notebook computer, and sat down at the desk. He opened it, hit a few keystrokes, and took a pen and paper out of the desk drawer. He scribbled a note, folded the paper, ripped off the bottom half, and handed it across to her. It said $80g/w/vig.
“Raif owes you eighty thousand with the vigorish. That’s the interest, right?”
“You can decipher it however you like. I’d probably say it meant an eighty dollar grapefruit sugar scrub followed by a vigorous herbal oil treatment.”
“How is it that so many people know that you’re a bookmaker and the authorities don’t do anything about it?”
“Gambling’s illegal in Hawaii. If you’re interested in what we do here, I’d recommend the Laa hot stone-cold marble treatment. It’s relaxing as a coma and I’d consider giving you a discount.”
Dinah decided to pass on the Zoku Shin Do treatment and the interview with Emily. She dressed in a hurry and returned to the car convinced that George Knack, for all of his malevolent posturing, didn’t kill Raif. He had too much to lose. He might not take a welsher’s bet again if he didn’t pay, but he would eat a loss if he had to in order to remain under the police radar.
She spotted a food mart on Main Street and stopped off for a sandwich. At the cash register, she asked a bald man with spectacular full-sleeve tattoos on both arms about Kalapana. She had no idea what the scene of the crime might tell her, but for some reason, she wanted to see it.
“Can’t get there. You want chips?”
“Yes, please.”
He threw a bag of Hawaiian taro chips into her lunch sack. “That’ll be four-eighty.”
“Why can’t I get to Kalapana?”
“Lava’s severed the road. The new flow took out two houses, one of them new. Kalapana Gardens subdivision’s still there, but people are evacuating. This flow isn’t as bad as the one back in ninety. A hundred houses destroyed then and Kaimu buried under fifty feet of lava. But what you gonna do? Pele’s raising hell again.”
“Can I get to the place where the man was murdered yesterday?”
“If that’s the kind of thing you’re into.” He showed her a ghoulish grin. “It happened this side of the flow. But if I was you, I’d be careful.”
She took her ham and cheese sandwich to the car and ate it, but her appetite had flagged along with her courage. Did she really want to go jaunting about in an area where hot lava could sever the road at any minute? But she didn’t intend to linger at the scene of the crime. All she wanted was to nip by for a quick look and anyway, lava must move like molasses. Princess Ruth had time to sail from Oahu to Hilo before the stuff reached Hilo.
Putting Pahoa in the rear view mirror, Dinah rejoined Highway 130 and drove south. She noted the time and mileage leaving Pahoa. The road was undistinguished except for one area along the shoulder where the trees and shrubs had been blackened by fire. She drove ten miles until she reached a large
Restricted Access, Authorized Personnel Only
sign across the road. There was a parking lot off to the side and she nosed the Wrangler into an angled space and cut the engine. A towering column of steam rose in the distance where the hot lava was entering the water and building a brand new beach.
She got out of the car and walked between a gauntlet of cautionary signs.
Visitors are reminded to stay away from the steam which contains hydrochloric acid, glass particles, and explosion ejecta.
Remain within permitted areas only. Lava beyond the rope barricades is extremely unstable and can collapse at any time.
Beware hot rock falls.
Hawaii was a hotbed of bewares. Akahele. Watch your step ye who travel here.
She stepped lightly across the pavement, imagining subterranean rivers of lava coursing beneath her feet. The air smelled like a struck match, but nothing felt hot underfoot and she continued walking. Where the pavement ended, a well-beaten path led through a copse of scorched trees. Another sign warned
Viewing Area Closed. Ground Unstable.
And then she saw the bright yellow crime scene tape strung between two charred trees. Why would Raif have come here? This was no place for a tryst. Had someone held the gun on him and forced him to walk back here or had he been murdered in Pahoa and his body driven here and dumped?
She stood staring at the trail on the other side of the tape. It wasn’t lava. It was dirt. Trees had grown out of it. How dangerous could it be? She laughed. That had to be the question that winners of the Darwin award asked themselves just before they did some ludicrous thing that permanently removed their idiot genes from the gene pool. But the park rangers who’d discovered Raif’s body had walked here and they’d had horses. And the police had walked here, too.
She ducked under the tape and, very gingerly, inched forward one baby step at a time along a trail fringed by scorched trees. Five feet, ten feet. Her cat-killing curiosity impelled her forward. After maybe twenty feet, the trees ended abruptly and a barren tract of lava stretched out in front of her. According to the map, this was part of the East Rift Zone and the Keauohana Forest Reserve. A few steps to her right, a lurid red glow emanated from a depression about the size of a coffin. That must be the skylight where Raif died. The person who shot him might have stood where she was standing now.
What kind of a man, or woman, could have dispatched a fellow human being into that inferno? It would make Dinah feel more favorably disposed toward the human race if she could lay off the cruelty on the caprice of a mythical goddess. But however cruelly the fire had seared Raif’s body, Pele hadn’t pulled the trigger.
Something tickled Dinah’s neck and she gasped. Mosquitoes. And whether it was her imagination or surging magma, the soles of her feet begun to feel warm. Swatting madly at the hungry horde that buzzed around her face and eyes, she hotfooted it back to the car and drove north toward Kapoho and the stately pleasure dome called Xanadu, the house where Xander and Claude Ann planned to live after they were married. She didn’t have the address, but she would find it. She had no idea what the house could tell her about Xander, but hadn’t Jon mentioned a gardener? Maybe he could tell her something useful. Maybe he’d been hunting rats when Xander arrived yesterday and could substantiate his alibi for part of the afternoon. As Fujita had said, the medical examiner could only guestimate the time of Raif’s death. It couldn’t hurt to establish the fact that between the hours of X and Y, Xander couldn’t have shot him.
She phoned Claude Ann for directions to Xanadu. Claude Ann was in a tizzy. Hank had been calling her repeatedly. She hadn’t answered, but had alerted Lt. Langford. She didn’t know where Xander was, but he and Jon must have taken Lyssa with them because she was gone, too. Xander was in torment for fear that Lyssa would commit suicide. Phoebe was acting strange and Raif’s father had gotten grumpy when Claude Ann informed him that the memorial service he’d arranged for Raif had to wait until after the Uwahi closing tomorrow morning. Dinah said something bromidic and encouraging and Claude Ann said she would phone the security guard at Kapoho Beach and authorize him to let her in.
Kapoho Beach Estates was a gated community on the easternmost tip of the island. By the time Dinah tooled through the gate, it was three o’clock. None of the multi-story homes were what she would have described as palatial, but they all had picture postcard views of the ocean. Many had their own private lagoons and tidepools, some had exquisitely manicured Japanese gardens, and all of them were set amidst palm trees and verdant tropical foliage.
Like a great white egret poised for flight, Xanadu stood alone on a promontory overlooking the water. The style was South Seas colonial, with a green winged roof and a wraparound porch on each of its three, rather narrow stories. On either side of the white pebbled drive, six-foot tiki totems with fierce faces stood guard and at the end of the drive, directly in front of the green garage doors, sat Xander’s gold Lexus.
Oh, brother. This was an interview Dinah would rather kick down the road or at least wait until Claude Ann was present. She had neither the standing nor the chutzpah to ask him what went on between him and Tess and her instinct about Xander was hazy in the extreme. Maybe he’d brought Lyssa with him, which would make any reference to Tess radioactive.
Deciding to play it by ear, Dinah left the car and walked through a side garden toward a tiered wooden deck overlooking a natural, kidney-shaped tidepool at least eighty feet long. Xander slumped in a green-striped deck chair staring out at the white combers skirring toward the black sand beach below.
She said, “It’s an inspiring sight.”
He looked up from his reverie. “The view from here has always lifted my spirits. Not so much today.”
“Claude Ann told me that you’re worried about Lyssa.”
“She’s distraught. She feels cursed.”
“Where is she?”
“With Jon. She’d rather he look after her.” He stood up and eked out a thin smile. “I’ll show you around if you like.”
“Later. I’ll sit with you for a while if you don’t mind.”
“Please do.” He sat and gestured her into a chair. “I’d welcome any comfort or counsel you have to offer.”
Dinah gnawed her lip and watched a long comber curl sideways across the water and crash onto the beach. The only counsel she could offer was to get out ahead of the tide of bad news. Maybe she should prod him. If she prodded him now, he’d be better prepared to answer questions from the police. And from Claude Ann. “Xander, why didn’t you tell the police that you’d met with Tess Wilhite yesterday afternoon?”
He kept his eyes resolutely on the next wave. “How did you know?”
“Someone saw you together. I talked with Tess a few hours ago. She didn’t know that Raif had been murdered.”
“How did she take it?”
“I’m not sure. She seemed overwrought at first, and then she turned to ice and said she was going to the police. She thinks that you killed Raif. That you might kill her.”
“I’ve thought about killing Raif. He was a heartless bastard. He had Lyssa hypnotized. I couldn’t believe she didn’t see how promiscuous he was. Now, it seems he was destined to break her heart one way or another.” Xander got up and walked to the edge of the deck. With his back to her, he said, “I didn’t kill him.”
Ordinarily, Dinah didn’t like talking to a person’s back, but in this case maybe it was easier on both parties. “I made a few inferences while talking with Tess. She and Raif were lovers, weren’t they?”
“Oh, yes. She wasn’t his only dalliance, but Raif and Tess were uniquely suited to each other. Neither was capable of love.”
Dinah made no inferences about love. “Was there ever anything sexual between you and Tess?”
He turned around and met her eyes. “No.”
“Did I guess wrong then? Were they not blackmailing you?”
“Oh, yes. Raif gambled that I wouldn’t tell Lyssa about his relationship with Tess, or if I did, he could convince her that I was only trying to malign him and destroy his marriage. He held it over my head that Tess’ false charge could be renewed. He had already poisoned Lyssa’s mind with so-called rumors of a girl I raped, rumors he said he picked up from his Punahou chums. He didn’t tell her it was Tess making the claim. Lyssa hated Tess for the shameful way she’d treated Jon.”
“But Xander, if it was all a lie, why did you pay?”
“Because she’s insane. And frighteningly believable. I couldn’t have her go back to Jon with more of her lies. I couldn’t risk being estranged from my son. Jon says he believes my denial, but he loved her. In his heart, I think he’s still unsure. She could twist him around her little finger again. So I paid to keep her quiet until last week.”
“Let me guess. Last week Raif presented you with a demand for eighty grand.”
“How did you know that?”
“Nevermind. Did you give him the money?”
“I couldn’t. I told him I was tapped out. He’d have to wait until after Uwahi closed. He said he couldn’t wait. He showed me some pictures he’d doctored with Photoshop and said he’d show them to Claude Ann and Jon if I didn’t give him the money as soon as we got to Hilo.”
“What did you do?”
“I had no choice. I told Claude Ann everything and I told Jon.”
“You told Jon that Tess and Raif were lovers?”
By his frown, she supposed he realized he’d just given Jon a motive for murder. “No. No, what I told Jon…I told Jon that Raif was blackmailing me, but I didn’t tell him that Raif and Tess were lovers.”
Dinah’s truth meter was far from infallible, but that was a particularly bumbling lie. She wondered if the call Jon received just before he left her alone on the day of the murder was a call from Xander. Jon could have called him back on the way to the Observatory and Xander’s revelation sent him roaring off in search of Raif.
Weeping Jerusalem. With such a surplus of suspects, why did the only two men she’d found attractive in the last six months have to land on the list? “What about Avery? Weren’t you afraid Tess would tell him if you stopped paying and he would back out of the Uwahi deal?”
“Avery has been a good friend over the years. I would hate to have him think that I raped anyone, certainly not his daughter. But at this point, he needs Uwahi to succeed as much as I do. Tess has always been a strange girl, reckless and devil-may-care. If Avery knew for a fact that I raped her, he’d rationalize and say she’d asked for it. He’d show up at the closing tomorrow and sign the papers with a smile.”
“How can Avery be that callous? Or that desperate? He’s your primary investor. I thought he had gobs of money.”
“He thought so, too. Unfortunately, he invested most of it in Bernard Madoff’s hedge fund. As I’m sure you’ve read, that fund turned out to be a massive Ponzi scheme. Avery’s hemorrhaging money and it’ll be years before he recovers anything from the Madoff bankruptcy trustee. Uwahi is triage.”