The Flaming Luau of Death (12 page)

I looked down the list and felt a sudden pang to see no check mark next to my own name. I had missed my Macadamia Nut Paka Facial? Aw. How cool did that sound? But now was definitely not the time. When I get to working on a problem, I find it hard to slow down. And, truth to tell, I would rather make headway on solving a problem than take time off to get nuts rubbed into my pores.

And this problem I was trying to solve just kept getting tougher. I noticed that Keniki’s sister, Cynthia Hicks, had originally been assigned to give an exotic foot treatment to Azalea. But of course Cynthia was
home and wasn’t coming to work today. Her name had been crossed off and replaced with Mimi’s name, which was written in in pencil. Seemed to me the spa management was still playing musical chairs with the staff to keep all their appointments covered.

Since some time had gone by, and still no receptionist had shown up to reprimand me for snooping, I turned the page. The list of men’s appointments under three o’clock contained fewer names. But before I could read even one, I heard the sound of my privacy evaporating.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” said the woman, a neat beauty with clear skin and hazel eyes. “Our receptionist is filling in as a facialist. Four of our aestheticians are gone. They just called me in on my day off! This is an impossible day to provide serenity to our guests, but we must try.”

I turned.

“You like men?” she asked me briskly.

I blinked. “Of course.”

“Good. Very good. We have Mr. Westcott patiently waiting in treatment room thirteen.”

Lucky Wes.

“You go change immediately. The staff room is in the back down this hall. And you know Lomi Lomi, correct?”

She thought I was a substitute masseuse. What damn fun. I nodded. Heck, the receptionist had just told me all about Lomi Lomi, hadn’t she? Elbows and forearms.

“Fine. The service told me your name but I’ve forgotten it. Barbie, is it?”

Barbie? Good grief. I just smiled, trying to look tranquil.

“I’m Paloma. Nice to meet you. Okay, scoot. Get into the sarong. You’ll find one hanging in the closet in the
staff lounge. And hurry. Mr. Westcott has been in his Hibiscus Herbal Wrap for seven minutes already, and I’m afraid the poor man may be beginning to shrivel.”

I stifled a smile. Indeed.

“And I still haven’t anyone to tend to room six and room seven. Not all our girls are comfortable working on men. I don’t know why. They are always perfectly respectful here at the Four Heavens. We have simply never had an incident of any kind.”

I hurried along the corridor to the staff room and found the proper Four Heavens sarong, the one with the pale pink and yellow hibiscus print that I’d seen all their spa staff wearing. I stripped out of my shorts and T-shirt and slipped the sarong over my head, figuring out how to tie it behind my neck. I looked in the mirror.

There was simply no way to wear a bra with one of these backless sarongs with halter-type ties. Off mine came, and I put my clothes into a spare locker. Wasn’t Wesley just going to die laughing? There he was, shriveling up in some herbal wrap, and here I was about to waltz in. I hoped he’d have his eyes closed, the better for me to sneak in, serenely of course, and surprise the heck out of him.

I twisted my hair and pulled it neatly back, fixing the end with a flower from a fresh arrangement on the table. Good. Done. I left the staff room and spotted myself in one of the dozens of full-length mirrors in the spa, pleased at how even an L.A. girl could blend into the spirit of aloha when dressed appropriately. I turned and checked myself out. The thin sarong fabric seemed to cling in all the right places. Island women can teach us all a lesson.

Only one problem. I forgot Wesley’s room number.

Quickly I skipped out to the reception area, but
Paloma was by then nowhere to be found. Never mind. I went back to my trusty appointment log and opened the green leather volume to the appropriate time and turned the page to look at the men’s appointment list.

There were three names, all with
X
s marking they had arrived. W. Westcott was in room 13—right! now I remembered—but wait. There was also another name that caught my eye. In treatment room 6, scheduled for a massage, was Ekeka. Cake? Oh, my. And in room 7, a Mr. M. Smith was also waiting for a treatment.

I was suddenly overcome with impish spirit. Standing there, in that resort-issue sexy sarong, to all the world nothing more than a temporary resort spa staffer, I felt it wouldn’t be polite if I didn’t go into room 6 and thank Mr. Cake for his flowery gift, that lovely string of orchids that was at that minute reviving itself in my hotel fridge.

I padded down the hallway in my flip-flops and found the door to room 6 unlocked. Heh.

I entered the treatment room to the sound of a flute duet piping lightly in the background. Several candles flickered softly, filling the small room with the scent of sandalwood.

“Ah,” said Cake from the treatment table, responding to the slight whoosh as the door closed behind me, and the expectation of a delayed masseuse. “You’re here? Lovely.” He lay there completely relaxed, his eyes covered with slices of cucumber.

Still unseen, I walked up to the high treatment table. He was covered in only a large white sheet, and if all massage treatments were created equal, he had no clothes on at all underneath. No shorts. No nothing. It was a most erotic thought. I remembered Cake’s tanned
and well-muscled chest from the night before. My eyes had by this time adjusted to the dancing candlelight, and I confess, they wandered to check his entire, um, form.

“Sorry for the delay, sir,” I said, acting the part a little longer, wondering if my voice would be easily recognized. Would he suddenly swipe off those cucumber slices and check out who was actually here with him?

“No trouble,” he said lazily. “I’ve been having the best fantasy, just lying here dreaming.”

“Of a young woman?” I asked, moving right up to the table, my body brushing up against one of his arms.

“How did you know?” he asked, his voice dusky and low.

“I had…” Oh, man. I couldn’t stop myself. I was only barely able to resist a giggle. “…hoped.” And before he could express any surprise at the forward nature of the conversation, I pushed a small stool up next to the table. With a quick gymnastic hop, I was on the table too.

That did it, of course. No matter how long you study the ten-page list of exotic treatments provided by the best luxury spa on the planet, you won’t find one that includes the friendly aesthetician straddling you on the table. Not at the Four Heavens, anyway.

I had to hand it to Cake. He wasn’t an easy guy to shock.

In an instant his eyes were open and he was laughing. “Can this be?” he asked, laughing even louder. “Madeline?”

“You like?” I asked, gesturing to the sarong.

“What the hell happened? No, don’t tell me. You couldn’t pay your room charge and they put you to work.”

I was overwhelmed with my own craziness. What was in this island air? I couldn’t stop laughing.

Cake pulled me down gently until my face was inches from his. “It’s like my fantasy has come true.”

“Lucky you.” I couldn’t help myself. He was such a good sport about it all. And so completely handsome, his thick long hair down around his shoulders, his dark eyes now on me. He smelled clean, and there was the scent of herbs and musk there too. I slowly lowered my face closer until my lips were not more than a quarter of an inch above his.

“What are you up to? Some new kind of resistance therapy?” he asked, breathing up at me. “Like spa…torture?”

I stretched myself slowly over the sheet across his body. From my on-top position, I had reassuring evidence of how exciting my improvised “treatment” actually was. “Are you comfortable, sir?” My lips were still only a fraction from his.

“Call me Cake,” he said, his voice very low.

“Ah,” I said, mimicking my best version of a concerned masseuse, “I think I feel a little tension and, um, stiffness…Cake.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said, slowly reaching his hands up to my hair, pulling me down just that quarter inch until our lips touched. It was a long, soft, most un-spalike kiss.

“This treatment promotes relaxation,” I whispered, pulling back just a bit.

“Says you,” Cake said, shifting me a little, brushing his hands all the way down my back and up again, and pulling my hair out of its neat pins.

I kissed him again. And again. Each time very slowly
and very gently. As a good spa client, he let me take the lead and simply waited for the next kiss and the next. His lips were surprisingly soft, and they retained a hint of a smile. He tasted like a blend of smoke and herbs.

“Do you smoke?” I asked.

Cake reached up for the ties of the sarong. I knew I had to stop this impromptu spa treatment soon, or we would be at the point of asking personal questions about contraception. I smiled, wondering how it would feel to have a vacation fling, if I was free enough to allow the flirtation to go too far.

He must have been reading my thoughts. “Wouldn’t it be fun?” he asked. “Wouldn’t we have a memory?”

And how often does a young woman get to Hawaii? How often does she stumble across a man who sends her a flower necklace made out of seven hundred orchid petals? How many times would she have the chance to get impressively naughty on top of a massage table? It appealed to all my free-spirit desires.

Cake kissed me one more time, patiently offering one last persuasion.

But I never got a chance to decide how truly naughty I could be. There came a soft tap on the door to the treatment room. Then another.

“You locked it,” Cake asked. “Right?”

The knob began to turn.

“Um.” The door opened silently. Oops. “No.”

“Barbie!”
Paloma’s voice rang out, more than shocked. “Barbie,
no
!”

Busted. Busted big-time. And I was pretty sure the pitch of Paloma’s voice was at this point a few million decibels shriller than the staff handbook must recommend for optimum serenity.

“Keep calm thoughts, Paloma,” I suggested.

Paloma caught herself, lowered her voice, but continued, just as exasperated as before. “We don’t do this sort of massage here at the Four Heavens, Barbie!
Get down off our guest at once!
”

T
he magic incantation that saved my butt from getting shipped straight to some aesthetician penal colony for spa-technicians of fallen virtue, or worse, enduring the outrage of a totally flipped-out supervisor was a word more powerful than abracadabra or hocus-pocus. It was that glorious five-letter word:
guest.
After only a few more
“No, Barbie! No!”s,
I quickly and loudly asserted that I was in fact really a (cue heavenly choir)
guest
of the Four Heavens. As soon as spa dominatrix Paloma realized she was not dealing with a freelancing employee, but instead, a couple of consensual, if overly hormonal, spa patrons, she calmed right down. After all, the guest is
always
to be indulged at the Four Heavens. Isn’t that nice?

An hour after the spa fiasco, I filled Wesley in and tried not to leave out too many juicy details so he could get the chuckle. “Cake, of course, just kept smiling. I think he wanted to be banned from the spa for life.”

Wes thought that one over. “Because of the mythic quality it would add to his romantic reputation on the island?”

Wes understood the competitive male thing. “You are a student of human nature, Mr. Westcott.”

“Just figures,” Wes said modestly. “That guy is pretty full of himself.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, on the defensive.

“Here we go…” Wes gave me an affectionate look that I instantly detested. It was always this way. Wes always disapproved of the men to whom I was most attracted, although he never came right out and said so. The fact that his opinion so often turned out to be justified only made it worse. And it still did not make me particularly eager to follow his advice the next time. That I would keep ignoring his good sense was what drove him insane, which in turn was what I loved.

I decided to further goad him. “Cake said—”

“Cake. That name.” Wes shuddered. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

I smiled and shook my head. “You ask that question of a woman who is known as ‘Mad’?”

“Yes. I do,” Wes said, refusing to be shut down. At present, he and I were in the kitchen of the Four Heavens’ Presidential Bungalow, pulling out bowls and surveying the stockpots. “Mad is simply short for Maddie, which in turn, is short for Madeline. Perfectly proper name derivation. Cake, however, is the self-conscious nickname of a preening, ego-inflated, shifty, untrustworthy—”

“…sweetie?” I asked.

“Maddie. This ‘Cake’ of yours just tried his hardest to get you in trouble. Even after the spa requested you both leave. He
asked
to be reprimanded.”

I laughed. There I was, no way innocent in this scarlet affair, having pretended to be a spa pro and messing around in a treatment room with an incredibly sexy man I barely knew, but Wes only saw fit to blame the other guy. Never my fault, in his eyes. I took back all my grouchiness. I loved Wes.

“You laugh,” he continued, returning my smile, “but think about it. You are a sweet, innocent girl, and he’s a
scoundrel. A story like this will make him an island sex legend.” Wes shuddered again. “Cake.”

“It’s short for Ekeka,” I reminded him. “A noble Hawaiian name. You know, deep respect for island culture. You have to admire that.”

Wes shook his head at me but kept smiling. “I’m thankful, at least, the spa didn’t decide to ban
all of your friends
for life. Imagine that.”

“No more lotus wraps for my darling Wes!”

“That would be a true disaster.”

Paloma had calmed down immediately once she realized I had nothing to do with the temporary agency she had called. Well, that, and once she saw the incredibly huge tip Cake handed her. In cash. But she did ask Cake and me to please take our private relationship somewhere private.

The thing was, every wild, spontaneous moment has a shelf life—the wilder, the shorter—and by the time Cake counted out two hundred dollars for her trouble, our wild moment had already expired.

We said good-bye, and then I got back to business. I had no time, really, for strange interludes with handsome strangers. I found Wes and told him about the memorial luau for Keniki’s boyfriend, Kelly. And the two of us decided we needed to bring something to the luau that was our own and home-cooked. It was our way.

Wesley and I headed for the resort’s premier restaurant, Ben A’s, and introduced ourselves to the chef, Ben Anderson. It was standard procedure among us in the culinary biz, and we talked about whose new restaurants were taking off on the islands and in L.A., and with which chefs we had worked in common and other fun industry gossip.

“We are going to need some cooking space,” Wes
said, looking around. But the kitchen at Ben A’s was too crowded and busy to allow a couple of mainland cooks like us enough room in which to work.

However, Ben and his kitchen staff knew Keniki Hicks. Most had met her fiancé, and they all wanted to help out. In addition, there is a professional courtesy among the culinary community, and Ben, like all successful chefs, was a problem solver. A few minutes of conversation with the front desk was all it took for Chef Ben Anderson to clear our path, and soon we were invited to pick up the key card to the hotel’s Presidential Bungalow.

Wesley and I just blinked when we saw it. And then melted. The Presidential Bungalow was an incredible residence, the ultimate Four Heavens extravagance, the most heart-stoppingly luxurious accommodations available at a super-top-end resort. And the front desk had just tossed us the key, gratis.

The five-bedroom mansion, complete with its own dipping pool, normally rents out for $5,000 per night, but as our luck had it, a rock-and-roll heartbreaker checked out early in the
A.M.
, and a Silicon Valley half-a-billionaire had delayed his arrival until tomorrow, leaving the luxury dwelling free for just this evening.

The Presidential Bungalow was really a mini-mansion set apart from the rest of the guest rooms and suites. In addition to five enormous bedrooms, it had seven bathrooms, and a fully stocked library of over two thousand books. When we were looking around earlier, I had picked up several pristine volumes in awe.

“Looks like this is the only book anyone has actually read, though,” said Wes, replacing
The Da Vinci Code
on a shelf.

Figured.

The Presidential Bungalow offered a stocked wine cellar, a koi pond, and a three-thousand-square-foot lanai. But the most desirable features to us by far were the two fully equipped gourmet kitchens, one indoors and one located out on the lanai. We were like Paris Hilton in a Prada factory-outlet store, Wesley and I, and we eagerly accepted the hotel’s offer to use these kitchens as we wished.

“If we had the time,” Wes mused, “I would love to make the honey garlic ribs recipe I got from those two fabulous guys I met in the bar. Those professional wrestlers. What were they called, again?”

“The Hawaiian Gods of Destruction,” I reminded him.

“Ah, yes!”

“The H-Gods, for short.” I shook my head at him, amused as always.

Wes liked to collect authentic local recipes wherever we traveled. He met folks. He talked food. He often wangled invitations to sample great regional dishes by proud home-cooks the world wide. These wrestlers, however, the Hawaiian Gods of Destruction, were an unusual source for culinary inspiration, even for Wesley.

“Exactly. Good fellows. Tiki and Bruiser.” Wes had run into them at the resort bar late last night, after our luau. “You have got to meet them, Maddie. They have an authentic island…”

I looked up from the drawerful of brand-new spatulas I’d been rooting around in, in my survey of the kitchen’s batterie de cuisine.

“…charm,” he finished.

“And you make fun of my new friend,” I said. “So this Tiki and Bruiser can cook?”

“Oh yes. They are Food Channel junkies, apparently. Anyway, we got to trading recipes. You know how one thing leads to another…”

I nodded.

“…and I thought these boys’ ribs might be perfect for our gathering tonight. Unfortunately, the recipe calls for preboiling the ribs for three hours.”

“It’s not to be,” I agreed. “If we had that much time, I would have loved to try preparing authentic laulau.”

“The dish with the taro leaves?”

I nodded. Taro is the staple of the Hawaiian diet and gave the name laulau (which means “taro tops”) to the traditional Hawaiian feast. “It sounds fabulous. You bake the taro leaves with coconut cream and octopus.”

“But according to tradition, the leaf-wrapped bundles of laulau must bake and steam for six hours, right?” Wes asked.

“Right. And today we need something quick.”

Wesley looked around the kitchen, pulling a large black platter from one of the cupboards. “Ben is great. I don’t know how he got us into this bungalow.”

I nodded. The executive chef at the Four Heavens on the Big Island carried a lot of weight.

Wes pulled out a second large black platter. “He said every one of the kitchen staff knows Keniki. The ones who have the night off tonight are going to the luau near Hilo. So whatever ingredients we need, they will provide.”

“Very generous.” I walked over and gave Wes a hug. “Let’s make something special, Wes. It will do me a lot of good if I can cook something really magical for Keniki.”

“So let’s create a new recipe for her.”

“That’s perfect. I want this dish to remind her of the sweet things in life.”

“Should we devise some sort of dessert? Using something…let’s see, what’s local? Coffee? Or pineapple?”

“How about an appetizer? Something to pass around and share when we arrive.”

“Good thought.”

“Hey,” I said, looking up at Wes, inspired as I always was by getting together with my best friend over food talk, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s use raw sugarcane.”

“Sugarcane.” Wes started a shopping list on his Palm Pilot.

“It’s got that stiff texture, right? Maybe we can carve the cane?”

“Wow.” Wes nodded, happily in thought. “I love that. But there is a time factor…”

“Okay, we carve the sugarcane into something fairly simple”—I made a few chopping gestures in the air—“like lollipop sticks.”

“You go, Maddie.”

Wes and I brainstormed for five more minutes and came up with an outrageously cool plan. We phoned over to the resort kitchen, and soon, thanks to Chef Ben, all the ingredients we asked for, even a pile of sugarcane stalks, came over on a motor cart, fresh and ready for us to prepare. A young man helped unload the items and brought them through the bungalow and out to the lanai kitchen where we had set up. I mean, if you could cook anywhere in the world, wouldn’t you pick an outdoor patio right on the sand by the blue Pacific Ocean?

“Heck, Wes.” I picked up a handful of fresh green stalks about two inches in diameter. “They even had the cane.”

“Actually,” the guy said, bringing the last box of provisions out to us, “I just stopped in our field out there and cut some down for you. If you need more, just let me know.”

“Thanks.”

“And,” he said, laying down a silver tray holding two chilled mai tais in icy glasses, “compliments of the chef.”

Heaven, I suspect, is most likely alcohol free, so I now had to figure we had one-upped even Paradise.

Wesley handed the young guy a large tip. Not, I noted, quite as glaringly large as the tip Cake handed over to Paloma, but sufficiently generous as to reward the fellow for hacking around in the cane fields for us.

“Let’s do it,” Wes said, smiling at me, clinking glasses.

I began to strip the individual sugarcane stalks of their outer leaves. Meanwhile, Wes walked over to the bungalow’s impressive sound system and popped in a CD. Ukulele music. Fabulous uke music. I looked up, and Wes held up the CD case:
Tropical Swing.
Bill Tapia was the legendary, barely remembered ukulele jazz genius that had suddenly, brilliantly, been rediscovered and had improbably just recorded his first ever CD. At age ninety-six. I smiled. Perfect.

Wes and I carefully selected the right knives from a pretty impressive collection and, still sipping our drinks, got straight to work. Other tourists could lie about in the sun if they wished, or splash in the waves, but the two of us had our own kind of superb relaxation. Ocean view. Fabulous kitchen. “My Little Grass Shack (in Kealakekua, Hawaii)” on the CD player. And a brand-new recipe about to be born.

We began by trimming the leaves from the stalks and then slicing through the thick cane, carefully whittling each one down to a pile of four-inch-long sticks, one-quarter
inch by one-quarter inch thick, making thin skewers out of the hard and fibrous sweet raw cane. We needed two hundred skewers, quite a lot of work, but then we couldn’t resist sampling our booty, relishing the odd texture, noting how juicy the freshly cut cane was, and remarking on the tangy flavor that colored the pure sweetness.

“This could become addictive,” I said, popping a second slender sliver of cane into my mouth and biting down.

For all his artistic flare, Wes was a kitchen workhorse. He carved up the cane so neatly and efficiently we were almost two-thirds through the pile before I began to tire. He hadn’t even broken a sweat. While we worked, I told him about Keniki and her sister, Cynthia. I told him about Liz Mooney and Marigold. I told him about the HBA and their amazing plan to save Hawaii. I told him about Claudia Modlin and Earl Maffini. And I told him that our entire trip was being comped by some mysterious person who was
not
my old pal Jennifer Sizemore. He didn’t say a word, just heard me out.

“You start the chicken,” he offered, “I’ll finish the carving.”

Exactly. When in doubt, cook.

Our idea was to produce lemongrass chicken on sugarcane. I started with about eight pounds of chicken, which Ben’s chefs had thoughtfully sent to us freshly ground up in the resort kitchen. It was much easier to prepare a large batch of food when one had the benefit of professional kitchen equipment. And I smiled when I saw the added gift Ben had sent out to us from the restaurant. I said a prayer of thanks for industrial-size Cuisinarts, and minced several small red onions and half a dozen peeled carrots. Then, by hand, I finely chopped two large bunches of lemongrass, about fifty stalks in
all, along with a bunch of cilantro and a bunch of basil. The perfume of the herbs was intoxicating, bewitching. All the vegetables must have just been picked from the resort’s own kitchen garden, because every chef knows that the freshness of one’s ingredients makes all the difference in the glory of the final dish, and every great restaurant has access to the freshest produce.