Can You Hula Like Hilo Hattie?

Prologue“Oopsy.” “That would be an understatement.” The three of us peered down at the slim, twisted, bloodied body of a previously pretty woman. A once painstakingly maintained and expensively sculpted face was now a mass of broken skin and bones. Long chipped salmon-pink nails on the right hand appeared to be gripping a jagged rock while those on the left were twined in tendrils of seaweed. Perfect, plump lips that many women would give their eye teeth for were retracted in a macabre smile while formerly merry eyes, the color of the ocean, stared unseeingly upward. A grim gruesome death mask had replaced a vibrant visage. The gentle breeze that had been blowing all day was quickly evolving into offshore winds and cracking surf while the September sky was growing dark with giant cumulonimbus clouds. Thunder and lightning weren’t far off. It had started out like any Hawaiian Wednesday morning: sun-drenched and dazzling. A vivid rainbow had curved over Ala Moana Beach Park as The Bus transported people to work and school, and tourists to Pearl Harbor and the Aloha Stadium Swap Meet. As they did every day, trolleys and shuttles traveled to various hotel pick-up points and Hilo Hattie’s while cabs and cars were navigated to planned destinations. Who’d have expected our first official paying private investigation case to take such a drastic detour—to the brutal murder of the young wife of our wealthy philanthropist-client? We were at the “Peering Place”, a rocky cove situated near the Halona Blowhole that was as beautiful as it was dangerous. The small sandy beach within the cove was well known as the beach in the 1953 movie From Here to Eternity. At the moment, though, it didn’t exude the romance it had when Burt and Deborah had graced the sands. We’d only had to demonstrate she was a cheating spouse who possessed a secret that could prove of value to her husband and help dissolve a four-year marriage. All that had been required: surveying the woman, taking photos as necessary, and delivering nightly reports. Easy-peasy. Not. What we’d unearthed in the preceding days extended to the sordid world of drugs and gambling, two ugly and dangerous addictions that could drag you under and far like the Molaka’i Express, which was the crossing of the Kaiwi Channel from volcano-formed Molaka’i, Hawaii’s fifth largest island, and possessed exceptionally strong currents. If the vice didn’t batter you, the enabler—the human component—was there to ensure you remained dependent, paid up and/or stayed high, and never screwed him or her. “Man, she must have really pissed someone off.” “Big time.” I peered across the darkening Pacific and reflected on that which had brought us to Hawaii: a desire to open our own P.I. agency. But the body sprawled across rough wave-soaked rocks begged one crucial question: what did a meteorologist, actress, and scriptwriting assistant know about detecting? So what if they’d played amateur sleuths several months ago during a murder-filled week at an eerie Connecticut mansion? That didn’t grant them the expertise or street smarts to manage a bona-fide case. . . . But maybe the more imperative question at the moment was: how were they going to explain a simple undercover-case gone terribly wrong?