Beyond him, I saw the azure sea and the frothing surf and all the people in the water, having fun bodysurfing, swimming, and just getting knocked around by the waves. It looked so inviting, especially after spending an hour with my heartbroken friend. I wanted to run right past Monk into the waves and forget all my troubles.
But I didn’t. Like most people, I’m a lot more carefree in my fantasies than I am in my life. I wondered, for a moment, if maybe Monk was the same way. Did he ever have the impulse to roll up his sleeves? To take off his loafers and walk barefoot in the hot sand?
Monk looked back at me and then shook his head. “Unbelievable, isn’t it? How can people do that?”
I nodded in agreement. We hadn’t seen each other since I left the aborted wedding to comfort Candace, so we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it. “I don’t understand how a person can claim to love someone and then deceive them so completely.”
“Oh, I understand that.” Monk started to stroll along the path following the beach going toward the private bungalows. “What makes no sense to me is swimming in the ocean.”
“It’s hot out, we’re at the beach, and the water is warm and inviting,” I said. “It’s what people do in Hawaii.”
“Don’t they know that thousands of creatures live, eat, and empty themselves in there?”
“Empty themselves?”
“Fish don’t have indoor plumbing,” Monk said. “They swim around in their own excrement. And when we flush our toilets or wash something down the drain, where do you think it goes? Out there.”
When he put it like that, even I had second thoughts about taking a swim. Two women in bikinis walked toward us. Monk lowered his gaze to his feet until they passed.
“How’s your friend?” Monk asked his feet.
“Gone,” I said. “She packed her bags and went straight to the airport.”
“Why did she do that?”
“She’s hurt, angry, and humiliated, Mr. Monk. She feels like a complete fool. You could have spared her the embarrassment if you’d told me that Brian was a fraud before the ceremony.”
Monk raised his head again and was startled to see three women in bathing suits coming toward us. Instead of lowering his gaze, he looked over their heads.
“I didn’t realize it until I was sitting there,” Monk said, eyes on the sky.
“But he told you all that stuff yesterday.”
“I heard what he said but I didn’t recognize the significance in my altered state. That’s why you should just say no to drugs,” Monk said, glancing at me after the women walked by. “Are you mad at me?”
I was and I wasn’t.
“I wish you could have found a way to expose Brian without humiliating Candace in front of all her friends. But you saved her from making a terrible mistake, and for that I’m grateful. Maybe someday she will be, too.”
We approached a fork in the path. Two couples were walking toward us. The women were in bikini bottoms and wet T-shirts, the men in Speedos. Before we could pass one another, Monk yanked me onto the other path as if saving me from being run over by a truck.
“Does this mean we’re going back to San Francisco today?” he asked eagerly.
“The tickets and reservations are nonrefundable, so Candace said I might as well stay and enjoy myself. You’re welcome to go home if you like.”
Monk stopped and cocked his head, looking at something. I’m not sure he even heard what I’d said.
I followed his gaze. We’d stopped in front of the private bungalows, which were shaded by lazy palms and shielded from prying eyes by a wall of greenery and flowers. The path we were on cut between two of the homes and ended in a tiny cul-de-sac, where I could see a black van marked Medical Examiner and two police cars.
Oh, hell, I thought.
“I wonder what’s going on,” Monk said.
“It’s none of our business.”
“Someone is dead.”
“People die all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s murder.”
“But it could be.” Monk jumped up, trying to see over the hedge of bougainvillea, hibiscus, and heliconia into the backyard of one of the bungalows.
“Even if it is, so what?” I said. “We’re on vacation.”
“You told Candace when we arrived that this was a working vacation.” Monk crossed in front of me to the opposite hedge.
“I lied,” I said.
“And you still don’t understand how people can deceive the ones they love?” Monk jumped up a couple of times. “This is the house.”
He squatted down and separated the hedge to see into the yard. I crouched behind him and looked over his shoulder.
On the other side of the hedge was the hot tub, which doubled as a fountain, water spilling over the edge and splashing down some large lava rocks into the black-bottomed, pebbled lap pool.
The dead woman was floating faceup in the hot tub. Her eyes were wide-open and her skin was unnaturally white. Her lips were stretched in a taut rictus of a grin, her artificially red hair fanned out in the water like an Afro. She looked like an obscene parody of a circus clown.
She must have been in her late sixties and wore a one-piece bathing suit, the kind with an industrial-strength bra to hold up an enormous, sagging bosom and a skirt to hide the butt. My grandmother had a suit like that. The instant a woman puts one of those things on she’s transformed into one of the elephant ballerinas from Fantasia. There should be a warning label sewn into those suits.
Two Hawaiian morgue assistants in short-sleeved white uniforms lifted the corpse out of the hot tub and laid it on a body bag on the patio.
A crime scene photographer took pictures of the dead woman and a bloodstained coconut on the patio, not far from the palm tree that shaded the hot tub.
A
