O'ahu Lonesome Tonight? (Islands of Aloha Mystery Series #5) (23 page)

“I saw plenty
of it when I went to Homeland training.”

“That was New
Jersey, in the winter, with the feds calling all the shots,” he said.
“Doesn’t count.”

“Can we talk
about this some other time? I’ve had a tough day.”

We went through
the ‘love you; love you too’ ritual and then I hung up. I only had three more
days. I wasn’t going to spend even ten minutes fretting about Hatch’s crazy
notion of moving to the mainland.

***

My cell rang
early Tuesday morning. “Are you up yet?” said Wendi Takeda. She didn’t wait for
me to answer before she said, “I think I’ve got a lead on the Good Samaritan.”

I looked at the
bedside clock. “Wendi, it’s five-thirty in the morning.”

“I know. But I
couldn’t sleep. This is the kind of story that jump-starts a career.”

“You realize
you’re talking about the death of my brother, right?”

“Sure. And I
sympathize. But with every day that passes we lose momentum. And witnesses
become less reliable. We need to find this guy.”

“I’ll meet you
at Starbucks at six,” I said.

“Which one?”
she said.

I wanted to get
snotty and remind her how she’d been so patronizing before, but it was just too
early for snotty.

“Same as last time.”

She hung up without
saying good-bye.

I caught her up
on events of the past two days but left out mentioning the insurance policy
until I could check it out.

“Wait a
minute,” she said. “You think this ‘BT’ guy may have thrown your brother in the
canal over an affair with the wife?”

“Doesn’t seem reasonable.
But I’m not ruling anything out.
What’d you find out about the Good Samaritan?”

“The reason the
EMTs only wrote down one name is because they know the guy. He’s a homeless man
who hangs out in
Ala
Wai
Park. His name’s ‘Norman’. Seems nobody knows if that’s his first name or his
last name, but everybody knows who he is.”

“Do you think
he’ll talk to us?”

“He saved your
brother’s life. Well, he tried to anyway. He’d probably like it if you came by to
say ‘thanks’, don’t you think?”

We found Norman
sifting through a garbage bin at the far end of the park near Magic Island. He
looked up as we approached, but when he determined we weren’t cops or bum
rollers he went back to digging through the trash. He pulled out a Jamba Juice
cup and shook it to see if there was any left.

“Norman?” Wendi
said.

Norman looked
wary, but he nodded.

“There’s
someone here who’d like to talk to you,” she stepped back so I’d be front and
center. She made the introductions, pausing after Norman’s name to allow him to
fill in either the missing first or last name but he said nothing.

 I stuck
out my hand. Norman put down the juice cup and wiped his hands on his shorts.
Then he gently tapped a fingertip to the back of my outstretched hand.

“I want to
thank you for getting my brother out of the canal last week,” I said.

“That was your
brother? I’m sorry. I heard what happened. Everybody out here’s talking about
how they’ve put all that dirty stuff in the canal.”

“Yeah.
It isn’t good. But you were brave to fish him out of
there and I appreciate it.”

He eyed me as
if waiting for some tangible proof of appreciation.

Wendi broke in.
“Would you mind answering a couple of questions for us? Mr. Wilkerson’s
memorial service is tomorrow and the family would like to have closure.”

Norman shifted
his eyes from Wendi to me and then back again.

I spoke up.
“And our family would like to give you a small reward for your efforts. We
really appreciate how you tried to save him.”

Norman’s face
softened.
“It wasn’t
nothin
’.”

“Well, thank
you anyway,” I said. “My brother didn’t know how to swim. So getting him out of
there was really kind of you.”

Wendi took
over. “It was around midnight when you heard the splash and the scream, right?”

Norman nodded. “I
guess. I don’t have
no
watch.”

“And then you
jumped in and pulled her brother out?”

He shook his
head. “No, it didn’t go like that. I saw two people near the wall. Next thing I
know, I hear a splash and I hear someone
yellin
’. I
went over and gave him a hand and he got his leg up on the side and crawled
over. Wasn’t
no big rescue or
nuthin
’.”

“And you saw
the other person run away?”

“
I
seen
a guy in a hat. I think it
was a baseball-type hat, but it was real dark so I couldn’t be sure. The guy
was skinny.
Coulda
even been a teenager, I ‘
spose
. We got lots of teenagers out here most nights.”

“Well,” I said.
“We appreciate what you did. My family would like to give you five-hundred
dollars to thank you. Do you have a cell phone? I’ll call so we can set up a time
to meet tomorrow.”

He laughed.
“Thanks for the money, but I don’t
got
no phone. Don’t
got
nobody to call. But you can always find me here at
the park.”

“Great. I’ll
come by tomorrow morning.”

We walked back to
Wendi’s car. “That wasn’t very helpful,” she said.

“Yeah,
actually, it was.”

She looked over
at me.

“No one on this
planet would describe Barry Salazar as ‘skinny.’
The guy’s
six-two, at least two hundred pounds.
He may have hired someone, but it
wasn’t him. Also, Norman doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“Yeah, well
he’s homeless. That’s to be expected.”

“Then who do
you think called 9-1-1?” I said.

CHAPTER 32

Stuart’s
memorial service on Wednesday morning was the largest event I’ve attended since
my college graduation. It was held in the Honolulu Convention Center and there
were literally thousands of people there.

I was seated in
the family section, but aside from
Moko
,
Kepola
, and Natalie I didn’t recognize anyone else sitting
there.
Moko’s
son, Kiwi, and the other kids had been
granted a ‘bye’ on attending the big service. They’d be attending a smaller
family gathering later that week.

Various city
officials gave eulogies along with friends and family members recounting
poignant and sometimes funny stories about Stuart.
Moko
had asked me if I wanted to offer a few words but I declined. I’d only known my
step-brother for a week; and for most of that time he’d been unconscious.

I kept going
back to Stu’s final words:  asking me to bring Natalie to see him. He’d
been so anguished about wanting to see her. It broke my heart I hadn’t been
able to grant his final wish.

After the
service I went down to the park and gave Norman five one-hundred dollar bills.
I’d had to go to the bank to get the money out of my account, and I hadn’t told
anyone in the family what I was doing. I had a bad feeling Stu had been killed
over money so explaining why I felt the need to make things right with the guy
who’d tried to save him wasn’t something I wanted to do.

I found Norman
at the beach end of the park this time. He was camped out under a tree, his
shopping cart parked companionably near-by.

“Hey, Norman,”
I said.

“Aloha, Ms. Moon.”
He
struggled
a
little to get up. It appeared Norman had been celebrating getting his reward money
even before he actually had it in hand.

“Here’s your
five hundred,” I said. I counted out the hundred dollar bills as I laid them in
his palm.

Norman’s face
darkened.

“Something wrong?”
I said.

“Nah.
It’s okay, I guess.” His voice told me it definitely
wasn’t okay.

“What’s the
problem?”

“I don’t know
what to do with these,” he said. He tapped Benjamin Franklin’s face on the top
hundred dollar bill.

“It’s money,
Norman. You spend it.”

“No, I mean,
it’s nice of you and all. But nobody’s
gonna
take a
big bill like that from the likes of me.”

“Oh. Would it
be better if I got these broken down into smaller denominations?”

His face lit
up. “That’d be nice. I can’t go walking into no bank or
nothin
’.
They’d throw me out; think I
was
wantin
’
to use their wash room or
somethin
’.”

I nodded and
turned to go. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

“
Oh,
and when you get back, I’ll tell you something I forgot
to say yesterday,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You go get
that money changed and I’ll tell you about it then.”

I got the
feeling I was being played by a guy who drove a shopping cart and had a
hankering for Jamba Juice.

The teller
counted out ten twenty-dollar bills and thirty ten-dollar ones. She smiled but
still asked to see my ID. I didn’t understand why ID should be necessary to
change one form of cash into another, but maybe she thought my hundreds were
drug money or lap dancing tips and I was attempting to launder them into
something more respectable.

I headed back
to the park and Norman was right where I’d left him.

“You did that
real
quick
,” he said. He smiled and I saw he had an
incisor missing. I guess the homeless don’t go in for semi-annual dental
check-ups and cleaning.

I handed him
the thick envelope of cash. He thumbed through the bills, probably counting
them as he went.

“That’s
mo
’ better,” he said. “Much obliged.”

“Now, what was
it you were going to tell me?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, I
nearly forgot again.”

If the guy was
thinking he’d get another pay-off visit from me, he was out of luck. One’s my
limit.

He rubbed his
chin. “You ‘member me telling you about the skinny man I saw running away?”

I nodded.

“You ‘member me
saying he had a hat on?”

Again, I
nodded.

“I got a better
recollection of it this morning.”

“You can describe
the guy?”

“No, not so much that.
But the hat.
It was one of them baseball hats. You know, with the brim only in the front? I
never cottoned to them myself. They don’t keep the sun off your neck.”

I waited. I’d
already figured it was a baseball cap.

“Anyways, the
dude had one of them on and when I yelled at him to
come
help me, he turned around.
Jus’ for a second.
Not long
enough for me to make out a face or
nuthin
’.”

I was growing
impatient. The reward money wasn’t really about buying information. I’d already
decided to give it to Norman anyway. It was the right thing to do. But this was
my last day on
O’ahu
. I resented Norman taking my
time more than taking my money.

“Like I said,
when he turned around I saw the front of the hat, real clear.”

“Did it have
something on it? Like a logo or writing?”

“Yep.
That’s what I ‘membered. It had a kind of star. Like a
three-pointed star.” Norman held up a fist. Then he spread his thumb and first
two fingers as far as they’d go. “Like that there.”

“A three-pointed star.”

“Yep.
With a circle around it.
It
was white. The hat was a dark color but the star with the circle was white.”

***

I trotted back
to my car and called Wendi Takeda. “Can you meet me at Starbucks?”

“I’m waiting on
my editor. He’s in the building, but not at his desk. Give me ten minutes.” She
paused as if she was about to hang up, then she said, “You got something for
me?”

“Yep.”

“Something big?”

“Yep.”

“See you there
in ten.”

When she got to
the table I’d already gotten us each a coffee. I was in a celebratory mood.

“
Mahalo
for the coffee,” she said. “So, what’s your
news?”

“Our pal,
Norman, came through for us,” I said.

“How so?”

“He remembered
the baseball cap the guy was wearing.”

“The guy who
pushed your brother in the canal?” she said.

“Yeah.
Who most probably was also the same guy Stu had a
run-in with earlier in the bar. Robert
Torstrick
, the
car dealer. Jason said Stu and
Torstrick
had gotten
into a shoving match earlier that night.”

“That’s
fantastic. What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to
go out and see Natalie. I’m going to tell her everything we know and try to get
her to go to the police. The way I’m figuring it is that maybe
Torstrick
acted alone or maybe he was sent there by Barry.
Either way, the cops need to talk to him.”

“Why don’t you
go to the police yourself? Why do you need Natalie?”

“Because she’s the grieving widow who just buried her husband
yesterday.
And she’s a Wilkerson and a Honolulu resident. They’ll be
more likely to listen to her.”

 “But you
know that’s only half the story,” she said.
“Maybe not even
half.
Maybe like a quarter.”

I took a sip of
coffee.

“The real story
is what ultimately killed your brother.
The flesh-eating
bacteria.
Now that you’ve solved the part about who shoved him in, it’s
my turn to rattle some cages about who’s responsible for his grisly death.”

I wasn’t
thrilled to hear her describe Stuart’s death as ‘grisly’ but there was no way
around it. It had been.