Mahu Surfer (10 page)

“I appreciate everything you’ve said, and I’ll keep it in confidence.” I stood up, and Victor Texeira stood with me. “Thanks for your help. I appreciate your candor.” I paused before walking out the door, though. “Is there anyone here in Maui who might know more about Ronnie as an adult?”

Texeira thought for a moment. “There’s a guy named Will Wong who was a classmate of Ronnie’s. He works in a surf shop in downtown Lahaina called Totally Tubular.”

“Great. Thanks.” We shook hands, and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought he held my hand a little longer than he should have, and looked a little too directly into my eyes.

Man, I thought as I left, I’ve got to get my gaydar working.

Lahaina Harbor

I drove slowly down into the center of Lahaina, thinking about what Victor Texeira had said. I pulled into a parking space in the quaint downtown area, and before I got out of the car I looked back at Ronnie Chang’s dossier. He had attending UH for two years, leaving without a degree to work for the company that let him telecommute from the North Shore. Even though the original detectives had been there, I figured they would be worth a stop, deciding that I’d sleep in my own bed again that night, visit them the next morning, and then head back to Hale’iwa.

It was just lunch time, and the restaurant owned by Ronnie’s parents, Wok ‘n Roll, was crowded, so instead of going in I went for a walk through Lahaina. By the time I’d strolled through the harbor, I’d built up an appetite.

Ronnie’s mother, Yee Chang, was working the register, his father Lan behind the stove cooking. Though I’d never met them, their pictures had been included in my dossier. Yee had lost weight since the picture was taken; grief will do that to you. I waited until there was a break in the crowd, and walked up to introduce myself, with the same story I’d given Victor Texeira.

She looked like she might cry. She reached out and took my hand. “We are so happy you investigate who kill our son,” she said.

“I’m doing my best.”

“Eat first, then talk,” she said. “What you like? Honey chicken very good today. My husband make everything fresh. Lan! Make honey chicken special for detective. Give extra rice!”

She wouldn’t take money from me. I took the plastic cup she handed me, filled it with ice and lemonade, and waited for Lan to serve up my chicken, reminding myself why I didn’t like to interview the parents of the deceased. They almost never had anything bad to say about their child, and though occasionally they could point you in the direction of a bad influence, the dead child was almost always blameless, an innocent victim. Even when the deceased had a laundry list of warrants, arrests and convictions, his parents always believed the best of him.

I had almost finished my chicken when Yee had a young girl replace her at the register so she could come sit with me. The dining room was bright and airy, spotlessly clean, looking out on Front Street and the harbor. It had to be expensive real estate, I thought, which meant that the Changs were doing well.

My father’s best friend, Uncle Chin, is Chinese, so I was very familiar with Chinese culture. I began by telling Mrs. Chang how sorry I was about her son’s death, and how I knew it was impolite of me to ask questions about him, but that I believed it was important to bring whoever killed him to justice.

She nodded eagerly. “His spirit very restless. Must have peace. You can bring my son peace?”

“I can try.” I paused for a minute, then began asking simple questions. She did not know much about his life on O’ahu, but she knew that he loved to surf. He did not have any enemies that she knew of, no one who held a grudge or had any reason to dislike him.

“How about his friends,” I said. “Did you ever meet any of them?”

The few names she gave me were already in his dossier. “And his fiancée, of course,” she said.

“Fiancée?”

“We never meet her, you know, engagement too soon before he died. And not Chinese girl either.” For a moment a frown crossed her face. “But she make Ronnie happy.”

“What was her name?”

“Filipina girl. Lucie…”

“Zamora?”

“That’s it!” she said. “She must be so sad, to lose Ronnie.”

“I’m afraid she was killed, too, Mrs. Chang. Around the same time Ronnie was.”

Her mouth opened into a wide O, and her hand flew up to cover it. Her surprise mirrored my own. I had a feeling that there was no formal engagement between Ronnie Chang and Lucie Zamora; if there was anything between them at all beyond friendship I thought it was either a figment of Ronnie’s imagination, or Lucie was playing him for something.

Mr. Chang came out from behind the stove, and his wife quickly told him, in Mandarin I only partially understood, that Ronnie’s fiancée had been killed, too. His surprise was less visible than hers, but it was clear he hadn’t known.

I thanked both Changs again for the delicious lunch, and walked out onto Front Street, which was busy with tourists in matching aloha shirts, slippas, and uneven tans.  I strolled down Front Street, looking for Totally Tubular and Will Wong. The surf shop was a little hole in the wall near the marina, with nowhere near the selection you could find at The Next Wave. But they were doing a good business, and I had to wait a few minutes before the exceptionally tall Chinese guy I assumed was Will Wong could talk to me.

He must have been six-four or six-five, at least, and he was skinny as a rail. I was surprised he wasn’t playing basketball for some mainland team. That is, until he stumbled over a boogie board on his way to talk to me and knocked over a rotating display of sunglasses.

After I introduced myself, we sat outside in the sunshine to talk about Ronnie Chang. “We were tight in high school, man,” he said. “Ronnie was like, awesome with computers. Crappy surfer, but man, he could figure out a way into any system.”

“He still a crappy surfer when he died? I know he went to a tournament in Mexico.”

“That was a joke, man,” Will said. “He only went because he was chasing some girl, and she said she’d party with him down there.”

“And did she?”

“He was pretty cagey when he got back,” Will said, sitting back on a bench and stretching his long legs out across the sidewalk. “He came back with a whole lot more money than he left with, and I know he didn’t win it.”

“What do you mean?”

A noisy bunch of Japanese tourists passed us, on their way to a whale-watching excursion, or at least that’s where I guessed they were going, from all the whale paraphernalia they were either wearing or carrying; a half dozen of them wore paper crowns that looked like whale’s tails. When they passed, Will said, “He really wanted this top of the line board, but he didn’t have the dough, especially with buying presents for this chick and paying for the trip to Mexico—for both of them, by the way.”

“You know this chick’s name?”

“Sure. Lucie. He used to make a joke about it, you know, I Love Lucie.”

“And when he came back, he had the money for the board?”

“Right on. He ordered it through me, and I had it shipped to him in Hale’iwa. He only had it like a week before he got killed.”

“Bummer.”

Will nodded. We talked for a couple more minutes, and then he said that his break was over and he had to get back to work. That was fine with me, because I had to catch my flight to O’ahu. I drove to the airport, thinking about what I’d heard. Lucie Zamora and Mexpipe connected Mike Pratt and Ronnie Chang, and something had happened in Mexico that upset Mike and brought Ronnie cash.

Could Ronnie have rigged the results at Mexpipe, moving Mike’s position up so he could win more money, by hacking into a computer? Or perhaps Ronnie had rigged Mike’s board with some kind of computer sensors that gave him an edge—that would explain why Mike had been bitching about his board after he returned.

Then Mike had joined up with the Christian surfers at El Refugio, making him regret what he’d done. Or perhaps he was just angry that his board didn’t work right any more.

I fell asleep almost the moment my butt hit the airplane seat, and didn’t wake up until we were just about to land. I was so tired I could barely drive back to my apartment, and after scarfing down a quick dinner I went directly to bed.

The next morning, Tuesday, I slept late. Sure, I could have gotten up at dawn and surfed Kuhio Beach Park, but I was getting spoiled by those big North Shore waves. And since the park was right next to the police station where I had worked for six years, there was a good chance I’d run into an old colleague or two, people I didn’t want to have to explain myself to at present.

By ten o’clock I was on my way to Aloha Security, the company where Ronnie had worked. His boss, a haole named Pierre Lewin, was a reformed hippie with a French accent and brown hair in a ponytail halfway down his back. His office was filled with posters, half of them from rock concerts and the other half advertising computer software.

I gave him the same story, that I’d been asked to look into Ronnie’s death, and he didn’t question me. “Ronnie was a gifted hacker,” Lewin said. “You know what that is?”

“Somebody who breaks into computer systems?”

Lewin nodded. “And what we do here is consult with folks who don’t want anyone to break into their systems. Ronnie’s job was to do his best to exploit all the weaknesses in customer systems. Then we’d come up with ways to block those holes, and he’d test again. We have a lot of very big clients—none of whom I can mention because of security issues.”

“That’s fine. So Ronnie could probably break into any system he wanted to?” Even the one tabulating the scores at a surfing competition, I wanted to add.

“Anyone other than one of our established clients,” he said, leaning forward.

“That’s a pretty dangerous skill, isn’t it?”

He laughed. “We’re not talking about Tom Cruise in
Mission Impossible
, dangling from a wire into somebody’s computer bank. Ronnie mostly worked from his apartment in Hale’iwa.”

“You ever have the idea that he was breaking into other systems—ones you weren’t paying him to test?”

“Our employees have to undergo rigorous background checks. They’re bonded, and they know there are dire consequences for anybody who circumvents the law.”

Yeah, right, I was thinking. We talked some more about computer security and hacking, and then I left. I wondered how seriously Ronnie had taken those consequences. Clearly, he hadn’t recognized how bad they might be.

I decided I’d swing past the Prince Kuhio, the hotel on Waikiki where Lucie’s mother worked, and see if I could talk to her. I knew the Kuhio well; it was only a couple of blocks from my apartment, so I stopped back at my place for a few minutes, to read through the file on Lucie one more time.

The investigating detectives had talked to Mrs. Zamora, and to her son, Frankie. Neither of them had any idea why someone would want to kill Lucie—she was such a sweet, kind girl. She went to church every Sunday, her mother said.

Knowing what Ronnie Chang had told his parents about Lucie—that she was his fiancée—I wanted to know if she had told her mother about the engagement. She hadn’t, I discovered. Mrs. Zamora, a petite, trim woman in a gray and white uniform, was able to meet me on her break, in a garden just off the hotel’s lobby.

She’d never even heard Ronnie’s name. The investigating detectives hadn’t mentioned him or his murder, and Lucie had never told her mother they were engaged. “You’re sure my Lucie knew him?”

I nodded. “They had friends in common. And he spoke of her to his parents.”

“He was a good boy, this Ronnie?”

“I think so,” I said. “He had a good job. Their friends say he took Lucie out, and bought her gifts.”

“She no tell me anything after she move to Hale’iwa,” Mrs. Zamora said sadly. “She only say what she know I want to hear. Yes, Mama, I go to church. Yes, Mama, I marry nice Filipino boy. Yes, Mama, I make you proud of me.” Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes, and she dabbed at them with a tissue. “She give me money so her brother can go to college. Every week, she send me an envelope with a hundred dollars, cash money. I tell her no send cash through the mail, but my Lucie, she so honest. She say no one steal the money. She say she make lots of money soon, she buy me a house, let me stop work.”