Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii by Goldberg, Lee (best large ebook reader .txt) 📗

foot traffic had worn trails around the squad room. The only color came from the aloha shirts on the two detectives and the cluster of multicolored pushpins stuck in a black-and-white map of Kauai on a bulletin board behind Kealoha’s desk.

Kealoha rose to greet us. “Hey, tanks for coming down.”

“No beeg ting, bruddah,” I said with a grin.

“Dat’s good,” Kealoha said.

“Do you have some new leads in the investigation?” Monk asked.

“Just mo’ dead ends,” Kealoha said. “The medical examiner confirms that Helen Gruber was killed sometime between eight and eleven A.M., which rules out Lance as her killer.”

“His alibi checks out?”

“Like he said, he was on a Snorkel Rob catamaran cruising the Na Pali Coast, whale watching and snorkeling.” Kealoha picked up a videotape from his desk. “Snorkel Rob has a crew member professionally videotape each trip; then at the end of the trip, they sell the tapes to the guests for fifty bucks each. I borrowed one.”

There was a TV/VCR combo on a rolling cart near Kealoha’s desk. The detective put the tape into the VCR and hit play. It was cued up to a scene on the boat. Lance was among a dozen tourists on deck watching the whales. Kealoha hit the fast-forward button, stopping at a shot of Lance ogling a young brunette in a tight surf shirt and G-string bikini bottoms as she dove off the boat. A few minutes further into the video, we saw Lance underwater, swimming amidst a school of tropical fish. Kealoha froze the image.

“Bummah,” he said. “I liked him for this.”

“The video could have been made days ago,” Monk said. “How do we know it was taken this morning?”

“I got a sworn statement from the guy who shot the video; plus I’m tracking down all the haoles on the boat to corroborate what he told me,” Kealoha said. “I’ve already talked to one couple from this video. They arrived last night from the mainland. So the video had to be made today. Dems da facts, brah.”

“Did the guests on the boat ever go ashore during the excursion?”

“There’s a couple of isolated beaches along the coast and they stopped at one of them for lunch. But if you’re thinking maybe Lance slipped away from the group, got to a car hidden somewhere, and drove back to Poipu to kill his wife, fo’gedda ‘bout it. What makes Na Pali so spectacular is that it’s a rugged coastline of jagged, four-thousand-foot cliffs that are inaccessible by car.”

“What about a helicopter?” I asked. “Don’t they do tours of the Na Pali Coast?”

“It’d be crazy to try landing on one of those beaches, and even if you did, you couldn’t do that without being seen by everybody on the boat,” Kealoha said. “He’s got a great alibi.”

“Almost too great,” Monk said. “I never trust people with great alibis. Or people who drink soda directly from the can. Or people who pierce any part of their bodies.”

“I have pierced ears,” I said.

“So do I,” Kealoha said. “Nipples, too.”

Monk shivered and pretended he didn’t hear us. “He could have hired someone to kill his wife.”

“I’ve talked to the Cleveland PD,” Kealoha said. “They are checking out Lance and his bank accounts, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cleveland cops try to wrangle a trip here to deliver their news personally.”

“So I guess that means there’s nothing for us to do but enjoy the island while we wait,” I said, hoping the Cleveland cops took their sweet time. “Shall we go, Mr. Monk?”

Monk drifted over to the map. “What’s this?”

“Don’t bother with that,” Kealoha said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “It’s stuff we’re never gonna solve.”

I wished he hadn’t said that. With those words and that simple gesture Kealoha had carelessly given Monk something else to obsess about.

“Why not?” Monk said.

“They’re residential burglaries in Poipu. Most of the houses hit are vacation homes and condos that are only occasionally occupied by the owners. They can be vacant for months at a time or rented out every week.”

“So by the time the owners notice something is missing, it could be days, weeks, or months after the crime was actually committed.”

“It’s jus li’dat.” Kealoha sighed.

“What about witnesses? Has anybody seen anything unusual?”

“That’s another problem. Lots of the neighboring homes or condos are either vacant or rented by one tourist after another. How do you know when somebody’s a stranger if you’re one too? We’ve asked the gardeners, mailmen, pool guys—the regulars—to keep an eye open, but they’re no better than the tourists at noticing da kine.”

“There must be at least a few cases where you have a rough idea when the burglary occurred. Didn’t any alarms ever go off? Didn’t anybody ever report freshly broken windows or jimmied-open doors?”

“A handful.”

“When and where did they occur?”

Kealoha opened a binder on his desk and passed it to Monk, who scanned the pages.

I thought it was awfully convenient that Kealoha had the information so readily available. I was beginning to suspect that this was all a setup, that Kealoha wanted Monk to ask about the burglaries all along.

“These burglaries all occurred in broad daylight on weekdays,” Monk said. “Why would the burglar take that risk?”

“I don’t know,” Kealoha said.

“This is odd,” Monk said, referring to something he was reading. “According to these reports, some of the burglaries even happened in gated neighborhoods and security buildings. How did the burglars get in and out carrying stolen goods without anyone noticing?”

“It’s a mystery.” Kealoha shrugged and winked at me conspiratorially.

But I wasn’t part of the conspiracy. I was a victim. He was practically confessing to unloading his cases on Monk and, by extension, making sure I had no opportunity at all to enjoy Kauai.

Monk pointed to a listing on the page. “An alarm was triggered three weeks ago at two fifteen P.M. at a house on Hoonani Road. Can you show me where that is on the map?”

Kealoha touched a pushpin on a road that ran along the coast on the southern