Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii (7 page)

“Fo’ what you mek ass doing look-see in da
puka
?”

Monk turned to me. “I think we’re going to need a translator.”

I understood the detective. He was speaking in thick pidgin, which is not so different from California surfer-speak. I’m not a surfer, but I grew up in Monterey and dated quite a few of them. They spoke pidgin because their Hawaiian surfing idols did.

“This is Lt. Ben Kealoha. He wants to know what we’re doing peeking through the bushes.” I turned to Kealoha and gave him my friendliest smile. “Mr. Monk is a detective consultant to the San Francisco police. He was just indulging in a little professional curiosity. Would you mind telling us what happened?”

“Ka den. Da
makule
haole in da pool. Da coconut dun drop and wen brok da noggin of da
momona wahine
. She wen sink in da pool li’ that,” he said. “Dass why hard. Bummah.”

I’d never heard pidgin spoken so fast before, and it didn’t help me any that he was mixing in some Hawaiian words, but I still got the gist of it. I turned to Monk.

“He says it’s an accident. The old woman was sitting in the hot tub, a coconut from the palm tree dropped on her head, knocked her out, and she drowned.” I turned back to Kealoha. “Yikes. Talk about bad luck. I won’t be sitting under any palm trees on this trip. We’ll be on our way now, if that’s okay with you.
Mahalo
.”

I started to go, but Monk didn’t move. He just shook his head. “That’s not what happened.”

All the joy I felt about spending a week in Hawaii evaporated in that instant—because I knew what Monk was going to say next and what it meant for me. I silently mouthed the words as he spoke them.

“This woman was murdered,” Monk said.

“Show me how you figga that, yeah?” Kealoha said, motioning us to follow him.

Monk went along eagerly, a smile on his face. He couldn’t have been happier to stumble onto a corpse on the first day of his Hawaiian vacation. I looked at it differently. I saw it as evidence that I was cursed.

Kealoha opened the gate and led us into the side yard, his flip-flops slapping against his heels. We passed twin air conditioners and a row of trash cans that reeked of spoiled food. We walked around a palm tree, stepped over some fallen coconuts, and came into the backyard behind the chaise longue.

I got my first good look at the kind of accommodations $5000 a night will get you. The bungalow’s spacious living room and gourmet kitchen were entirely open to the patio, thanks to interlocking panels of sliding glass that disappeared into pocket walls. High-end rattan furniture was arranged throughout the interior of the house and the patio, making it all one continuous open space.

Monk glanced back the way we’d come in, leaned over to one side and then the other, then went over to the chaise longue. He glanced at the hardcover book on the table, the sun hat, and then went over to the body.

He squatted beside the woman, sniffed her, and examined the flesh-colored hearing aids in each of her ears.

Monk extended his hands, framing the scene like a director, zeroing in on the coconut before his attention was distracted by three decorative lava rocks in the planting area, which he carefully rearranged according to their size, from biggest to smallest.

Kealoha watched Monk with amusement. So did the two coroners and the uniformed officer.

“He for real?” Kealoha asked me.

I nodded. “It’s his process.”

Satisfied with his rocks, Monk turned to Kealoha.

“She’s been dead two hours, judging by her skin and lividity, though it’s hard to tell since she’s been in the hot water and blazing sun. What’s her name?”

“Helen Gruber,” Kealoha said.

“How long have she and her husband been staying here?”

I almost asked Monk how he knew she was married, but then I spotted the diamond wedding ring on her finger. I don’t know how I missed it before. The diamond was the size of a marble.

Kealoha shrugged. “Mebbe a week.”

“A week?” Monk rolled his head, closed one eye, and held his hand out over the hot tub, palm up. “Where is her husband?”

Kealoha shrugged. “We’re lookin’.”

Monk frowned, stood up, and came over to us.

“She was hit on the head with a coconut and drowned,” Monk said.

“Das what I say,” Kealoha said.

“But it wasn’t an accident,” Monk said. “This entire scene was staged for your benefit. She wasn’t even in the hot tub when she was killed.”

Monk tipped his head toward the palm tree in the side yard. “The coconut came from
that
tree, not the one over by the hot tub. You can see the indentation in the dirt where the coconut was lying before the killer picked it up. There’s also a soft spot on the coconut where it was resting against the moist ground.”

Kealoha squatted beside the tree, examined the place where Monk said the coconut had been, then waved over the crime scene photographer.

“Aikane, make some snaps of dis. Tanks, eh?”

“The killer came in through the same gate we did, picked up the coconut, and sneaked up behind her inside the house,” Monk said.

“In da house?” Kealoha said, standing up. “How you figga?”

“She’s not wearing any suntan lotion. The book on the chaise longue is a large-print edition, so she obviously needs reading glasses. So where are they? The killer put out all these props and he did it in a hurry. Who found her?”

“Da maids,” Kealoha said.

“When?”

“An hour or so.”

Monk squinted up at the sun, looked at the hot tub again, then went into the house. We followed him. The bungalow had an open floor plan, the kitchen open to the living room, which was open to the patio. Only the bedrooms had doors. The high-pitched ceiling had exposed beams, the fans mounted on them spinning hard in a futile effort to circulate the cool, conditioned air around the house before it escaped outside.

Monk took a napkin off the marble counter in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was empty. He opened several of the cupboards, which were full of dishes, pots, and pans that looked as if they’d never been used. He leaned into the sink and peered into the drain.

“She was killed here,” Monk said.

“How you know dat?”

“The victim has a slight horizontal bruise right below her collarbone,” Monk said. “Based on her height, that’s exactly where she would have hit the counter when she fell forward.”

“You could be mistaken,” Kealoha said, dumbfounded. So dumbfounded, in fact, that he was speaking perfect English.

Monk shook his head. “No, I couldn’t.”

Kealoha looked at me.

I nodded. “If Mr. Monk says it’s murder, it is. Ask Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer on the SFPD; he’ll tell you the same thing.”

“I know this may seem like a strange accident to you, but that’s the nature of island life. These kinds of things happen here all the time,” Kealoha said. “Murders don’t.”

“They do now,” Monk said.

Kealoha sighed, took a notepad out of his back pocket, and scribbled something on a page. He motioned to the uniformed officer.

“Kimo, call in some more officers. This is a crime scene; I want it secured until SID can get here, eh? Find Dr. Aki; tell him we got a body that needs cuttin.’”

“He’s fishing today, brah,” the officer said.

“Ka den, call the coast guard, tell ’em to bring him in, yeah?” Kealoha tore the page out of his pad and gave it to the officer. “Here’s my contact over there.”

The officer went outside to make his calls. Monk folded the napkin he was using and put it in his pocket.

“You’ve slipped out of character,” Monk said.

“You mean da pidgin stuff?” Kealoha said. “The haole like their Hawaiians to be Hawaiian, so I do my part. It’s good for tourism and blows off people I no wanna to talk to anyways.”

I looked at Monk. “Why don’t you tell Lieutenant Kealoha who killed Mrs. Gruber and let’s go. It’s noon and I’d really like to get to the beach today, take a swim, and try one of those tropical drinks stuffed with fruit and tiny umbrellas.”

“I don’t know who killed her yet.”

“Yet?”
Kealoha said.

“But I will,” Monk said. “I’m on the case.”

I was afraid of that, though he was only confirming what I knew was true the moment he peeked through the hedge. Monk wouldn’t rest until the murder was solved, which meant, by extension, that neither would I.

Some vacation, huh?

“Let’s grab a plate and talk story. I’ll tell you everything I know about the dead lady,” Kealoha said.

“A plate?” Monk asked.

“Lunch,” Kealoha said, striding out of the house.

We piled into Kealoha’s Crown Victoria, the standard transportation for cops everywhere, and he drove us a couple of miles inland to Koloa and what remained of the first sugar-plantation town in the islands. On the way he told us that Helen Gruber came from Cleveland, where her late first husband made his fortune in the paving business. She recently married Lance Vaughan, who’d been her personal trainer and was about thirty years younger than her.

Good for her,
I thought.
If rich men can have trophy wives, why can’t wealthy widows have their boy toys?

Frontier-style wooden storefronts lined one side of Koloa Road; on the other were the ruins of the old sugar mill. The storefronts looked as if they hadn’t changed much since the 1830s, except now they were selling eight-dollar scoops of ice cream and sixty-dollar T-shirts to tourists instead of taro and supplies to the fieldworkers.

We parked in front of an old cabin at the far end of the road, on the edge of a field of tall weeds and neglected sugarcane. There was a peeling sign out front that announced the place as Cokie’s Grill. The restaurant had a sagging porch, screened windows, and a rusted corrugated-metal roof covered in green moss.

We got out, scattering a group of roosters that sought refuge under the porch and clucked at us. Monk stared at them as if they were alligators.

“What is this place?” Monk asked.

Kealoha stepped up onto the porch. “This was a camp house for the sugar-plantation workers. It’s hardly changed, yeah?”

“It should be condemned,” Monk said. “Why are we here?”

“Fo da boss grines,” Kealoha said, opening the rickety screen door and ushering us in. “Best plate lunch on Kauai.”

Monk turned to me, the color draining from his face. “Wipe.”

I reached into my purse and handed him one as we went in.

The cramped little cabin still felt more like a home than a restaurant, though the smell of fried food and fish was everywhere. The white walls were peeling and yellowed with age and the hardwood floors creaked under our feet with each step.

There were just four tables inside, each covered with a red-checked tablecloth. The ladder-backed chairs were faded red, and smooth from years of use.

The only other customers were two impossibly old Hawaiian men in aloha shirts that hung on their bony frames, their skin dark and wrinkled, as if all the moisture had been wrung from their bodies. They sat at a table for three, playing cards and nursing Cokes.

The menu was a chalkboard mounted on the wall beside the open doorway into the kitchen, where an old woman in a
mu’umu’u
and an apron, her gray hair tied back into a bun, supervised three other similarly dressed, but younger, women at the grill. There were only three items on the menu:
PLATE LUNCH $5
.

DRINK $1
.
SLICE PIE $2
.

A zapper hung like a lantern in the far corner of the dining room, crackling every few seconds as another flying insect flew into the electric grid. Its wire grate was blackened with charred bugs and dismembered wings. Every time the zapper snapped, Monk winced with revulsion.

“Three plates, momma,” Kealoha yelled, then led us to a table with three chairs.

I took a seat. “Is that your mom?”

Kealoha shook his head and sat down. “She’s
kama’aina
. She’s been cooking so long, they say even the Menehune when eat da grines here.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Hawaiian elves,” Kealoha said. “They lived here for thousands of years, working only at night and building many great things, before they sailed away forever on their floating island. But some are still around, doing their mischievous magic and da kine in the night. They steal my car keys all the time.”

Monk stood over us.

“Please sit down, Mr. Monk,” Kealoha said.

“I can’t,” Monk said.

“Why not?” Kealoha asked.

“This table is wrong.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

I figured it out and stood up. “There are only three chairs.”

“And there are three of us,” Kealoha said. “We each have a place to sit.”

“But three is an odd number,” I said.

“So?” Kealoha said.

There was no point trying to explain it all to Kealoha, so I just got up and sat down at the next table, which had four chairs. After a moment so did Kealoha, a bewildered expression on his face. But Monk remained standing, staring at the table we’d left.

“We can’t just leave it that way,” he said.

Monk looked around. The other empty table had four chairs, too. If he took a chair from that table, it would also be uneven. He turned to the table where the two old men sat and motioned to their empty third chair.

“Do you mind?” He took hold of the chair with a wipe in his hand, dragged it over to the table we had abandoned, and organized the seating so everything was evenly spaced.

Kealoha looked at me and whispered, “Is he okay in the head?”

I deftly avoided the question. “He’s a brilliant detective.”

Monk came over to our table and was about to sit down when he gasped and staggered back in horror.

“What is it?” I asked.

He pointed at his chair, his finger shaking. Kealoha rose from his seat and peered over the table. I looked down at the seat.

A tiny green lizard was on the chair.

Kealoha grinned. “That is our friend the gecko.”

“He’s not my friend,” Monk said.

“They are good luck,” Kealoha said. “They eat the mosquitoes and the cockroaches.”

Monk shuddered. “There are cockroaches here?”

“Not when there are geckos,” Kealoha said. “That’s why we’re glad our friends are everywhere.”

I looked around, and so did Monk. I hadn’t noticed them before, but the geckos were
everywhere
: on the ceiling, crawling on the walls, and huddled on the ground beneath the bug zapper. The gecko scampered off Monk’s chair, but I knew there was no way he’d ever sit there, or anyplace else in this restaurant.

“Sweet mother of God,” Monk croaked.

As if on cue, the old woman shuffled out of the kitchen with a tray containing three Styrofoam boxes and three Cokes without ice in plastic glasses. She passed around our drinks, then set the boxes down in front of us and opened them with a flourish. The entrées were in their individual divided sections, like frozen dinners. She set one of the boxes down in front of Monk’s empty chair, gave him a cold look, and returned to the kitchen.

“Mahalo nui loa,”
Kealoha called to her appreciatively, and dug into his food with gusto.

I regarded my meal. There was some kind of meat covered in a thick brown gravy, a ball of white rice, a square of purpleish pasty stuff, and a mound of what looked like relish.

Monk peered at the entrées as if studying a specimen in formaldehyde. “Is that rooster?”

“No, it’s pork ‘n’ gravy, a scoop of rice, and poi,” Kealoha said, while taking a piece of meat and running it through the rice and relish before putting it in his mouth. Mixing foods like that was a definite no-no in Monk’s book.

“It looks like rooster to me,” Monk said.

“How would you know?” I said.

“The chef doesn’t strike me as someone who would go far looking for the best cut of meat.”

“Have you ever eaten rooster?”

“Hell, no,” Monk said.

“It could be delicious,” I said. I cut some of the meat, stabbed it with my fork, and ate a bite.