of real estate investments?” I asked, fingering the card. “Brad said you owned the apartment building where Lucie lived?”
Ari nodded. “I went to college in Minnesota, and while I was there I got interested in real estate. I saw people buying houses near the college, living in them while they were in school, then reselling them after graduation. I convinced my dad to front me the money for a down payment, in lieu of paying for a dorm room, and while I lived there I rented out rooms to other students. By the time I graduated I was able to pay my dad back and make a nice profit.”
“A mogul in training,” I said.
“Not quite Donald Trump, but it was a start. I wanted to get the hell out of Minnesota, though, so I came to Hawai‘i and started looking for property to fix up and resell. I found a niche up here on the North Shore.”
“That’s what you do-buy houses and then fix them up?”
“Among other things.” The waitress brought our breakfast and we dug in. “I bought a run-down apartment building a couple of years ago. The place was full of drunks, drug addicts and surfers, and I can’t tell you which were the worst tenants.”
He took a forkful of eggs. I figured him for about forty, and it looked like he’d been at least moderately successful-Ralph Lauren shirt with the little polo player over the left breast, thick gold chain around his neck, gold coin pinky ring. His hair was immaculately groomed, his fingernails clearly manicured. In contrast, I was still in full surfer mode, in board shorts, slippas, and a Banzai Pipeline t-shirt with an incongruous bird of paradise superimposed over a picture of a monster wave.
“Lucie moved in as I was trying to upgrade the quality of tenants,” he said. “Pretty girl, you know, very athletic, great sense of style.”
“She have a job that you know of?”
“Yeah, she was working at the time at The Next Wave-you know it?”
I nodded.
“Guy who runs it, Dario Fonseca, he’s a business partner of mine. He recommended her.”
Interesting, I thought. I never mentioned my interest in Lucie, or any of the dead surfers, to Dario. We had too much old ground to cover. “Dario invests with you?”
“I’ve got this project in the works,” Ari said, pushing aside his empty plate. “Up on a ridge overlooking Kawailoa Beach. Quirk in zoning lets me build a multi-family property up there.”
“Condo?”
He nodded. “Nothing too tall, you understand. Even so, I’m fighting against a community organization.” He shook his head. “Idiots don’t want any development. I’ve got mine, the rest of you get the hell out. You know the attitude.” I saw him tensing up. “They cloak themselves in this false environmental shit. Preserve the open space, keep the old Hawai‘i. Well, I got news for them. Time moves on. That’s my land, and I’m going to build on it.”
“Dario must be doing pretty well if he’s a partner with you on that.”
“He’s one, among others. Right now, the property’s tied up in litigation, but as soon as I get rid of these Save Our Scenery jerks I’m breaking ground.”
“Lucie involved in any of that sort of thing?” I asked casually. “Protest groups, anything like that?”
He laughed. “Not Lucie. She had her eye out for Lucie only. She wanted to surf, and she wanted nice things.”
“You can’t make much money working in a surf shop.”
“She quit The Next Wave a few months after she moved in. I never found out what she was doing for money, but her rent always came in on time.”
“Cash?” I asked, as the waitress approached to refill our coffee.
Ari smiled at her, and she smiled back. “How’d you know?” he asked, when she’d left.
“Just a hunch.”
“You think she was doing something illegal?” he asked. “I swear, I didn’t know anything about it. Only reason I really knew her at all was first, because of Dario, then I knew she dated George for a while.”
“George is bi?”
He laughed again. “George is a little bit conflicted. He can pass for straight, six days out of seven, so every now and then he tries a little pussy just to remind himself what he’s missing. Lucie had a trim little body, turn the lights off and stay away from the front, you could almost imagine she’s a boy. My personal belief, that’s the only way George could do her. But what do I know? Forty years old and I’ve never been with a woman. Never wanted to.” He eyed me. “You?”
“I was conflicted myself. For a long time.”
He leaned in close. “And you could-get it up?”
“I could.” I shrugged. “And I did, more times than I can count. But I always knew something was wrong. Just took me a long time to figure out what.”
We both sipped our coffee for a minute or so. Finally, I asked, “What happened to Lucie’s stuff?”
“Her mom and her younger brother came up from Honolulu to pick it all up,” he said. “They were both pretty broken up. You could tell they had no idea she was into anything illicit. Kept talking about her being such a good girl.”
“Our parents never really know us,” I said.
“You’re right about that.” He drained the last of his coffee and signaled for the waitress. “The apartment’s still vacant, if you want to take a look at it.” He wrote the address down on a post-it note he took from a little leather case. “I’ve got a lock box on it so brokers can show it. I wrote down the code for you. She covered the walls in surfing posters and I didn’t take them down-I thought maybe they might help rent the place.”
“I’ll check it out.”
He took the check from the waitress and wouldn’t let me even leave the tip. “This one’s on me,” he said. “Hell, I can’t say I knew Lucie all that well, but consider this my way of saying thanks for looking out for her.” He frowned, and in that moment he looked all of forty, and more.
The wind was still up, throwing a chill into me as I left the restaurant, and I knew that meant Pipeline and Banzai Beach would be almost unsurfable for anyone but the best, so I ended up at Chun’s Reef, a much easier break. A guy picked up his stuff and moved away when I dropped my towel near him, and a couple of girls giggled and pointed at me. One asshole even said, “Out of my way, faggot,” as he cut across me on a wave, but overall the atmosphere wasn’t any worse than Pipeline on a bad day. I surfed until three, when I made my way to Sunset Beach Elementary.
Jeremy Leddinger had obviously been the class clown growing up, from the sarcastic tone I’d heard him use the night before. A chubby gay kid who defended himself with a rapier wit, who depended on being able to make his tormentors laugh to save his hide.
I found him in a classroom decorated with posters of the solar system, grading homework assignments at a wooden table at the front of the room. I wasn’t sure what he could tell me; I knew that he had once lived in that same apartment complex where Lucie lived.
“So, Brad’s newest project,” he said, when I walked in the door. “I have to admit, you clean up well.”
“Brad’s the kind of guy who picks up strays?”
He laughed. “Unfortunately, it’s a problem I share with him, so I can’t criticize too much.”
“You lived in the same building as Lucie,” I said. “Sounds like a rough kind of place. What were you doing there?”
“I was in the first wave of Ari’s gentrification effort,” he said. “But I have an unfortunate taste for bad boys. The kind who lie to you, steal from you and give you unpleasant diseases. So putting me in there was like giving crack to a junkie.”
If Jeremy lost about fifty pounds, I thought, he’d be pretty cute. But the weight was probably tied up with his self-image, with the little boy inside looking for attention and only accustomed to getting it packaged around abuse. “How’d you get to know Lucie?”
“I was in lust with a little Filipino with a big ice habit,” he said.
Ice is the smokable form of crystal meth, a real scourge in the islands.
Jeremy leaned back against his chair. “He and Lucie used to get together and jabber away in Tagalog. Eventually he stole too much from somebody who wasn’t interested in his dick or his ass, and he got sent away to do some time. I still used to see Lucie, so I’d say hello.”
