Here Today, Gone to Maui (31 page)

“Snorkeling was fun, though,” I said. “I’d even say it was the best part of my vacation.”

He turned to face me. “Better than the police interrogation?”

“Just a little.” We shared a smile. Then the light turned green, and we drove on.

 

 

It was weird saying good-bye at the airport. It felt like Michael and I had become friends in the last few hours, even though it seemed unlikely we’d ever see each other again.

“You want me to park the car?” he asked. “I can help you with your bags.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have that much. Plus, you can’t come past security, anyway.”

He pulled his car to the curb, hauled my bags from the backseat, and put them on the sidewalk.

“Good luck, Jane.”

“You, too,” I said.

 

 

I had a little time to kill before my plane left. Okay, I had almost three hours. Being there reminded me of Jimmy, of course, as if the spirits of our happy, carefree, hungover selves were still staggering around the baggage claim and thinking how terrible it would be if our suitcases had been mistakenly shipped to Oahu or Kauai.

I was anxious to get home, to hole up in my sterile little apartment with the blinds shut, but being there, too, would remind me of Jimmy. I’d be seeing him stretched out on my couch, facedown on my bed, singing in my shower. The crumbs from his last California breakfast, scattered under my coffee table, would be waiting for me. I tried to remember when he’d last spent the night and when I’d last done laundry. Would his scent still cling to my sheets? But, no: I’d changed my linens the night before I left so we’d have a clean bed to come back to.

If only he hadn’t died. I’d still be sad, of course, plus angry, hurt, and humiliated. But it would have been so nice to hate him purely, to wish him a crappy life and a million heartbreaks. Dead, he was not the Jimmy on the last day of his life but all of the Jimmys he had ever been: the cute waiter who’d seduced me on the beach, the man who’d fed me breakfast in bed.

Opposite the check-in counter was a little gift shop selling hula dolls, T-shirts, ukuleles, magazines, gum, and expensive bottles of water that would be confiscated at security. A display of tropical-print neck pillows stood near the entrance. I hesitated outside the door, considering. It would be nice to check in, unload my stuff, get through security, and then hit a gift shop. But what if the shops on the other side of security didn’t have neck pillows? Or what if they only had those nylon ones that smell funny? Of course I could always check my bag and come back here before going to my gate, but then I’d be backtracking.

Have I mentioned my tendency to overthink?

“Just buy the damn pillow,” I finally muttered. I plucked a blue one with white hibiscus flowers and set it on the checkout counter. Then, in a moment of unprecedented spontaneity, I added a packet of tropical-fruit Life Savers. Yeah, I was really getting a handle on that whole live-in-the-moment thing.

The young woman behind the counter was slim with black hair and café au lait skin. She wore a green polo shirt. She did not say “aloha.” California seemed closer already.

After she rang up my purchases (which came in under twenty dollars—not bad, really), I pulled out my credit card.

The girl squinted at her computerized register for a moment before shaking her head. “You got another card?” she asked. “This one’s not going through.”

“What do you mean it’s not going through? Is the magnetic strip worn?” I took the plastic back and looked at the back. The strip looked fine.

The girl shook her head. “They turned it down.” She shrugged.

“But—I . . .”

Oh, hell, I didn’t have time for this right now. With shaking hands, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet. Sergeant Hosozawa said I was no longer a suspect, but maybe my credit-card company hadn’t gotten the memo. Could they really freeze my account? Was I in some legal trouble now that the stalker thing had come out?

My purchase finally complete, I pulled my suitcase out of the shop and parked it by a wall. The evening was muggy, but the sweat gathering under my armpits was cold.

I called Visa, punching in my account number as instructed by the calm automated voice on the system. After slogging through a few menus, I got to talk to a real person with a southern accent. She sounded awfully perky considering that back east it was, what? Midnight?

She asked for my account number, which kind of annoyed me since I’d already punched it into my phone. And then, instead of telling me to stay put because an FBI agent was on his way to arrest my stalking, murderous ass, she said, “How kin ah help yew?”

“I just tried to use my card,” I said. “In the airport in Maui. And it got turned down.”

“Maui? Lucky yew! Let me just see here . . .”

“I know I paid my bill on time.”

“Mm-hmm, you did. But . . . it looks like you’ve exceeded yer limit.”

I thought through my recent expenditures: plane, condo, car rental. It was an awful lot.

“What’s my balance?” The credit-card company had recently upped my limit, but the number escaped me.

Over the phone, I heard some key tapping, and then: “Twenty-three thousand dollars.”

“What! There’s no way I’ve spent that kind of money!”

And then:
Of course!

“Can you tell me when the last charge was made on this card? And what it was?”

“I kin do that, ma’am . . . let’s see . . . the most recent charge was made this morning, from the pool bar at the Grand Wailea Hotel. Was it nice there?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Michael answered on the first ring.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Still in Kahului,” he said. “I stopped off at Costco.”

“Can you come back and get me?”

When we entered the plush hotel room, Jimmy was lounging on a king-size bed, wearing a white Grand Wailea robe and drinking a beer.
Cops
was on TV. The irony didn’t strike me until later. He had shut the sliding-glass door that led to his lanai (wouldn’t want to let in that clean, seventy-four-degree air). Overhead, a ceiling fan spun at full speed, and the air-conditioning vents gushed chilly air.

He looked surprised to see us. For a second, I thought we had the wrong room because he’d traded his tousled, surfer-boy look for close-cropped hair and trimmed facial scruff, making him unrecognizable from the fuzzy pictures broadcast over TV (and not just because he was less, you know, aroused). He still looked good, I had to admit, kind of like David Beckham. Maybe he’d pretend to own a soccer-equipment company next.

Sergeant Hosozawa held up his badge. “James Studebaker, you are under arrest for fraud, identity theft, and impeding a police investigation.”

Jimmy’s expression changed from surprise to dismay. He dropped his head. So much for a future in soccer equipment.

I’d called Sergeant Hosozawa as soon as I’d gotten off the phone with Michael. The sergeant had asked me to meet him at the Grand Wailea Hotel to confirm Jimmy’s identity. In the lobby, next to a stupendous fountain filled with koi and mermaid statues, the sergeant filled me in on a few details.

Like: right before Slaughterhouse Beach, there is a little turn-off in the road and a rough, extremely steep trail down to the water. The day after Jimmy disappeared, police noticed that the hillside had been disturbed, as if someone had recently scrambled up it with some heavy items.

And: early on the morning of Jimmy’s disappearance, a bicycle was reported stolen from a condo complex a few doors down from the Maui Hi. Two days later, the bicycle was recovered in a parking lot in Kihei. The police figure that Jimmy stashed it on the hillside on the morning of his disappearance in preparation for his getaway. Since then, police had been showing Jimmy’s photo around local hotels and condos, hoping to get a lead. (No, not Tiara’s sex picture—once Jimmy’s real identity had been discovered, they’d tracked down his DMV photo.)

And: Jimmy withdrew three hundred dollars from an ATM in Lahaina the morning he disappeared.

Finally, the clincher: Jimmy
wasn’t
the only man who’d gone missing recently. A young blond man from Kahana with a history of alcohol abuse and domestic violence had gone fishing with his wife but had never returned. The wife said he’d gone to visit friends on the other side of the island. The friends said otherwise. She was now being held at the Wailuku station, charged with murdering her husband and dumping his body into the ocean.

“Why did you tell us that Jimmy was dead, then?” I asked.

“I never said that. I just said a man matching his description had been found.”

“So you never thought I’d killed him?” I asked, remembering the suspicious glares he’d cast my way.

“No.” The sergeant snickered at the absurdity, which I thought was insensitive under the circumstances. “But I wasn’t sure how you’d react if he contacted you. I thought you might cover for him.”

“I’m stupid,” I said. “But I’m not that stupid.”

The police didn’t have to break down Jimmy’s hotel-room door, which was kind of disappointing, though I’m sure the folks at the Grand Wailea appreciate a tasteful arrest. Also, while the sergeant drew his gun before he stepped in the room, he quickly put it back in his holster when he saw that Jimmy couldn’t possibly be packing anything in his girlie geisha robe. Besides, there was plenty of police backup. Detective McGuinn was there, along with two other officers from the Wailuku station, one of whom kept gawking at the room and saying, “Check it out! Three phones in the room! How much do you figure a place like this costs?”

“Eight hundred bucks a night,” I said. “Plus a twenty-five-dollar resort fee.”

“Sorry about that, Jane,” Jimmy said. “I woulda gone for a garden-view room, but they were booked.”

I forced myself to look at him and tried—not entirely successfully—to keep my voice steady. “I can’t believe you stole my credit-card number. That was really low.” That may seem to be a petty thing to seize on in light of the circumstances, but for some reason it was really pissing me off right then.

Jimmy blinked his long lashes at me. “Sorry, baby, I had no choice. It would have set off alarms if I’d used any more of that Michael dude’s cards.”

“That would be me.” Michael stepped forward, arms crossed. “I’m that Michael dude.”

Jimmy flashed Michael a grin, as if he thought his charm would earn him a “get out of jail free” card. “Sure—you look like your pictures on TV.” That would be the grim driver’s-license photo. “Plus, I saw you at Fisherman’s Cove once. You know—in Laguna. You shouldn’t leave all your stuff out like that when you go diving. You’re practically begging someone to rip you off.”

“How many times have you stolen people’s account information at the beach?” Sergeant Hosozawa asked.

“Never!” Jimmy said. “Well, you know, except for that once. I was standing nearby, suiting up, and I hear him on the phone, and he keeps saying, ‘Jimmies, Jimmies, Jimmies.’ Like he was calling for me, or something. Like the stuff was supposed to be mine.”

“There was no apostrophe,” I said. (Everyone ignored me.)

“Did you use my information to get any new credit cards?” Michael asked. “Or to take out loans or anything?”

“No!” Jimmy said. “That would have been so, like, wrong. I just copied the numbers you already had, and had this guy I know made up duplicate cards. I hardly even used them at first, but then there was this whole big Maui trip coming up, and I wanted to do things up right, you know?”

“Where did you unload the scuba gear?” the detective asked Jimmy.

“Flemings Beach,” Jimmy said helpfully. That was the next beach down from Slaughterhouse. “I’d hidden a plastic bag there with a change of clothes.” (If only Jimmy had a packing list, I would have noticed a missing outfit.) “I left all my gear on the beach, figuring someone would steal it.”

He looked at Michael again. “Seriously, dude, you cannot just leave your stuff out like that.”

For someone who spent so much time watching police and detective shows, Jimmy wasn’t holding much back. Was he not paying attention when Detective Hosozawa read him his Miranda rights?

Jimmy tilted his chin up. His lip quivered, just a little—going for the sympathy vote. “I just wanted to give you a nice vacation, Jane.”

“Who was the ring for?” I asked.

Before he could answer, Tiara burst through the door, looking like she had just come from a two-hour hair-and-makeup session—which, come to think of it, she probably had. “Oh my God, Jimmy, you’re alive!” Behind her was an entourage: Suzy Lee, the talk-show woman; a cameraman; and a couple of other people who looked vaguely news-y.

Tiara lunged for Jimmy; Sergeant Hosozawa blocked her way. “Stand back, please, Miss Cardenas.” He snarled at the newspeople. “And the rest of you—out of here! Now!”