Here Today, Gone to Maui (16 page)

Martin finished his song and moved on to an old Simon and Garfunkel tune. The tension between my shoulders let up, just a little.

A sturdy Hawaiian man wearing a polyester shirt—the print matched Mary’s muumuu—came around the corner. I recognized him as the kind-faced man I’d seen working around the grounds.

“There you are,” he called to Mary with a smile. “Lying in the sun while I’m working my tail off.”

“Mm-hmm,” she said, smiling a little as she sipped her coffee. “Do me a favor, Albert, and go check the front office—make sure no one needs anything from me.” She peered inside her coffee cup. “And if you could make us another pot of coffee, maybe? I’m getting low.”

“How’s the banana bread?” he asked, coming toward us with a big grin.

Mary handed him a piece. “Better with macadamia nuts.”

“We were out.” He took a bite and shrugged. “Tastes good to me. I’ll get that coffee.” He shot Mary a sly look. “Your Highness.”

“He made the banana bread?” I asked when Albert left.

“Mm-hmm.” Mary put the last bite in her mouth and slapped the crumbs off her hands. The little birds went wild.

“Is he your boyfriend?”

She swallowed her banana bread and licked a crumb off her lips. “Husband. Four years in April.”

I snuck a peek at her but still couldn’t guess her age. Her brown skin was smooth, and her black hair showed no signs of gray. Still, she seemed too calm and wise to be really young. “You’re lucky to have someone like Albert.”

“I know,” she said matter-of-factly. “But it works both ways. I treat him good, too.”

It never seemed to work both ways for me.

“Was Albert your first boyfriend?” I asked.

She laughed. “Hardly.”

“Did any of the others ever cheat on you?”

“Nope,” she said confidently.

“How can you be sure?” I could only think of one of my boyfriends—Steve the ophthalmologist—who didn’t fool around, but maybe he did and I just never found out.

“I’ve got a good feeling for people, I guess,” she said. “I can tell the difference between what’s flashy and what’s real. Some guys who asked me out, they were good-looking, nice dressers, they could dance—but I could tell that they’d never like me half as much as they liked themselves. So I just said no.”

“You met Jimmy, right?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “I was here when he checked in. Worked a double shift that day.”

I paused before asking, “What did you think of him?”

Mary frowned in concentration, remembering Jimmy. Were his flaws obvious at first glance? Did she see something I had missed?

“I thought he had a nice ass,” she said finally.

When Albert came around the corner again, he didn’t have a pot of coffee. And he wasn’t smiling.

“There’s a message on the answering machine,” he said. “From the police.”

Mary and I both sat up abruptly.

“They want Miss Shea to call them,” he said. “They said it’s important.”

“We found Michael James,” Detective McGuinn said.

“Is he . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The image that flashed in my mind was so grisly, it made me dizzy. I sat down on a stinky green chair, afraid I would fall over.

“We’d like you to come down to the station,” he said.

 

 

Tiara, dressed in a buttercup-yellow halter dress, climbed out of a taxi just as I pulled up. Out of respect for her missing boyfriend, she wore flats instead of heels, and her glossy black hair was held back chastely in a clip—a rhinestone clip, but still. She pulled a tissue out of a big yellow bag dotted with metal studs and dabbed her eyes.

“They said that they found him,” she whispered. “They didn’t say he was dead, but . . .”

“I know.” I took a deep breath. “And it’s going to be hard to hold it together, but just so you know—people will be asking us questions. Not just the police.” I did a quick scan of the parking lot but didn’t see anyone hiding out with a camera. “Our pictures were in the paper today.”

“Really?” She spun her head to look at me, sounding more pleased than was appropriate under the circumstances. “How did I look?”

“You looked—fine.” Actually, she looked gorgeous, but that didn’t matter right now. “Did the police say anything else about Jimmy?”

“No. Just that I needed to come down here.” Her gaze grew distant for a moment. “Jane?”

“Yes?” I said, feeling a momentary bond: after all, we were going through the exact same thing.

“Did you save a copy of that newspaper? I’d really like to see it.”

 

 

The entire station went quiet when we walked in the door. Detective McGuinn came over to greet us. “Ladies.”

“You said you found Jimmy.” I couldn’t bear the suspense any longer. My eyes swept the room, searching for Jimmy, but of course he wasn’t there. A fresh wave of pain washed over me. In a dark, stupid corner of my brain, I’d been harboring a fantasy: Jimmy would be here, looking cold and confused but alive. And Tiara would see him and say,
No, no, there’s been a terrible mistake. That’s not my boyfriend. I’ve never seen this man before.

The detective scratched his cheek, considering. “Did I say we found him? What I should have said, I guess, was that Michael James found us.”

I stared at him. “Do you mean . . .”

“He’s alive?” Tiara gasped.

The officer looked across the room. “I have Michael James waiting in the interrogation room. Not that we’re interrogating him,” he explained. “Just—that’s our only other room.”

“Alive,” I said for confirmation.

“Very much alive,” he said.

I put my hand on my chest. “Thank God.”

Something inside me lifted, lightened. There’d be no happy reunion, I realized, immediately abandoning my two-different-Jimmys fantasy. And I wasn’t going to sit around hoping that Jimmy would choose me over Tiara. But at least now I could go home and hate him with a clear conscience.

Tiara covered her mouth with her hands and began to sob.

“There, there,” the officer said, folding her in a loose hug.

“I thought,” she sobbed, “I’d never”—
sob
—“see him”—
sob
—“again.” She gasped and blubbered some more.

Around the room, the other officers, along with a guy being booked for drunk driving, watched with expressions of misty sympathy, like they were witnessing the last ten minutes of a
Hall-mark Hall of Fame
special.

“Can we just get this over with?” I asked. The mistiness evaporated.

“Of course,” the officer said, releasing Tiara.

 

 

When you learn to scuba dive, the first thing they teach you is, never hold your breath. I didn’t even realize I’d stopped breathing until we entered the room and my chest began to hurt. I gulped air. And then I looked around. The interrogation room was small and rectangular, dominated by a long table. I scanned every inch of the room, even glancing under the table, but Jimmy wasn’t there—just another police officer sitting in a plastic chair and a tall guy with dark hair who was talking to himself. He looked upset by whatever he was saying. Then I realized: oh, a cell phone. He had one of those little earpieces that always throw me. Was he talking to Jimmy? Was Jimmy in the hospital—in the ICU, perhaps? The thought of Jimmy injured, Jimmy in pain, made me tremble despite all that had happened.

I’d wait till Jimmy made a full recovery, and
then
I’d start to hate him.

The guy with the earpiece frowned at us. “Don’t know,” he said into the air. “Complete mess . . . Unbelievable.” He spoke quickly, in clipped tones. No sooner had he turned off his phone than it rang again. “Yeah?”

Tiara entered the room behind me, mewing like an injured kitten.

The officer cleared his throat. The guy on the phone scowled and held up a finger as if to say,
One minute
. He was in his thirties, I’d guess, long and lean with square shoulders, dressed in khaki shorts and a black polo shirt. His dark hair was cut conservatively. His eyes were sharp and brown. Most of all, he looked really, really annoyed.

Finally, he pulled the receiver out of his ear, stuck it in his pocket, and folded his arms across his chest.

The detective motioned to the seated policeman. “This is Sergeant Hosozawa,” the detective said. “He works out of the Wailuki station.”

Sergeant Hosozawa rose out of his chair, his bearing erect and vaguely military. His black hair was so short his scalp showed through, and his mocha-colored skin was acne-scarred. His eyes were so dark it was almost impossible to tell the pupil from the iris. Just being in the same room made me suck in my stomach and stand straighter.

The sergeant held an arm out toward the tall man in the black polo shirt. “Ladies, I’d like you to meet Michael James.”

“That’s not Jimmy,” I said as steadily as I could. Tiara began to wail. The detective helped her into a chair.

“Have you ever seen this man before?” the sergeant asked us.

“No,” I said. Tiara made a gulping, gagging sound and shook her head.

The tall guy tapped his foot. “Can I go now?”

The sergeant ignored his question. “I take it you don’t know these women, Mr. James.”

“No.”

“It’s a different Michael James,” I told the detective evenly, doing my best to keep the “duh” out of my voice.

The officer cleared his throat. “Mr. James, can you tell us where you work?”

Before he could answer, his cell phone rang, the tone like a cat’s purr. Michael James pulled the phone out of his pocket and checked the screen.

“I gotta get this.” He stuck the bud back in his ear and pushed a button on the phone. “Hey . . . Yeah, I know—I just talked to him.” He grimaced. “My mother just about had a heart attack.” His eyes popped wider. “You’re kidding me. When? How much? . . . Oh, my God.” He ran a hand through his short hair.

“Mr. James owns his own business,” the sergeant said. “Scuba gear.”

“Just like Jimmy,” I said.

The sergeant cleared his throat. “Mr. James is thirty-four years old. His scuba company is located in Laguna Beach,” the sergeant said. “I think you know what it’s called.”

No. It couldn’t be. “Oh my God.” I put a hand on the table to steady myself.

“What?” Tiara squeaked.

“Jimmies,” I said, not making any attempt to keep the “duh” out of my voice.

She looked at Michael James, still talking on his phone, and said, “His company has the same name as Jimmy’s?” (I think I actually heard someone in the room say, “Duh,” but maybe it was just my imagination.)

The sergeant crossed his arms and pulled his shoulders up even higher. “Mr. James watched the news last night. He was kind of surprised to find out he was dead. Even more surprised to find that his American Express miles had been cashed in to pay for a room at the Hyatt.”

Michael James pulled the piece out of his ear. “Actually, I was more surprised to find out I was dead.” He shoved the phone back in his pocket and looked from Tiara to me. “Does either one of you know anything about a really expensive ring bought in a jewelry shop at the Hyatt a few nights ago?”

I instinctively covered the diamond with my right hand. I had tried to yank the ring off this morning—it seemed absurd to wear it at this point—but it was so tight I couldn’t get it off.

“No,” Tiara said. I didn’t say anything.

“I just talked to my assistant,” Michael James said.

“Ana?” I asked, hoping he’d say no, hoping that Ana really worked for Jimmy, that something he’d told me was true.

“Yeah.” He blinked. “How did you know that?”

We locked eyes. Something like dread spread over his face.

“This isn’t just about credit cards, is it?” he asked. I shook my head.

“What’s this about a ring?” the sergeant asked him.