Here Today, Gone to Maui Read online

  “Don’t be silly,” Tiara said. “Detective McGuinn told me that the credit cards have, like, protection.” (Forgive me, but I immediately pictured a credit card encased in a condom.) “So, Michael won’t have to pay. Nobody will have to pay.” She lifted up her shoulders in a perky, no-worries gesture, bringing her star tattoo that much closer to my face.

  “Nice tattoo,” I said, partly because it felt like it deserved some kind of comment and partly because I didn’t feel like lecturing her about her financial responsibilities. I’d leave that pleasure to the Hyatt’s front-desk staff.

  “You like it?” She stroked the star lovingly.

  “It’s, um . . .” I tried to think of an appropriate adjective and finally just said, “It’s—yeah.”

  “I got it two years ago to remind me of what I’m going to be.”

  I waited for her to explain. When she didn’t, I asked, “What?”

  “A star!” She said. “See?” She stroked the tattoo again. “The shape, the letters—it’s like on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

  “You want people to walk on your breasts?” (Okay, that was mean of me and not even very clever. But, remember, I’d had a really bad week.)

  She pursed her lips and sipped her coffee without looking at me.

  “Kidding,” I said. Her eyes flicked to me and away. I was going to have to try harder if I wanted her to like me. Did I want her to like me? “Tell me more about it,” I said reluctantly.

  Good enough. She put her cup down, beamed and smiled: all was forgiven. “I know this sounds crazy,” she said, “but ever since I was a little girl, I’ve known I was going to be famous someday.”

  “Really,” I said, followed by an interested “mm” sound.

  “It was just this feeling I had.” She wiggled in her seat and fluffed her hair (it was down now) with long, shiny fingernails. “That I was special, somehow. And my mother? She told me later—this was, like, a couple of years ago—that she went to a psychic when she was pregnant. And you know what the psychic said?”

  “That you were going to be a star?” I ventured.

  “Yes!” She leaned over the table, her purple-rimmed eyes popping. “Isn’t that wild?”

  “Wild.” My iced latte was giving me a brain freeze, but the sooner I finished it, the sooner I could get out of here.

  “That article in the paper—did they say I was a model-actress?” Tiara said.

  “I didn’t read it that carefully, but . . . I don’t think so. Is that what you are?”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “I mean, I spend half my life at open-call auditions. And at the Anaheim auto show last year? I helped represent Toyota. I’ve got pictures in my room if you want to see them.”

  I smiled noncommittally. (Tiara. Pictures. Shudder.)

  “A modeling agency signed me,” Tiara said. “In L.A.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Some people say you shouldn’t pay for an agent,” Tiara continued, shaking a stray clump of hair off her face. “But at this point in my career, I’m really looking for a foot in the door.” She giggled. “I almost said ‘foot in the mouth.’ ”

  I peered at my cup: almost gone, thank God. “You shouldn’t pay for an agent.” That was as far as I was going to get dragged into this conversation.

  “The problem?” she said. “Is these.” She grabbed a breast in each hand. Nearby, a waiter almost dropped his tray. “Runway and catalog work are out—clothes don’t fit me. Everyone says I have a unique look, though, so I’m hoping that sets me apart.”

  “Did you grow up in California?” I asked, studying her ethnically unidentifiable face.

  She nodded. “Yup, I’m a Cali girl—second generation on my father’s side. My mother was an immigrant.”

  “From where?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  The latte went straight to my sinuses.

  “Oh—you mean before that?” she asked. “My mom’s parents were German-Norwegian. And my dad’s came from Cuba and the Philippines. So I’m pretty much a mutt.” Only someone who looked like Tiara could make the word mutt sound so sexy.

  She took a gulp of frothy coffee. “Anyway, working the auto show felt like a big career step, a chance to move on to bigger things, but that was a few months ago, and I haven’t gotten any more work.” She sighed. “I just really hoped I’d be able to quit my day job by now.”

  “Your day job?” That caught my attention. What could it be: Hooters waitress? Erotic massage therapist? Strip-o-gram performer?

  “I’m a dental hygienist,” she said.

  Shit. Could life throw me any more disappointments?

  I saw someone out of the corner of my eye and was prepared to tell the waiter that we didn’t need anything else when I realized it was Michael.

  “It was too late to get a refund,” he said. “You want the tickets?”

  We had ten minutes to change our clothes and get back downstairs. Tiara offered to lend me a dress that she described as “adjustable.” I was about to take her up on it when I remembered the blue Hawaiian dress I had bought at Safeway. It was like this night was meant to be.

  Not that I was so excited about going to a luau, mind you. It would only remind me of the-week-that-would-never-be, my romantic interlude with Jimmy. Besides, a luau seemed a tad inappropriate under the circumstances—but no more inappropriate than, say, taking two women to Hawaii and then faking your own death.

  Still, it was better than sitting in my smelly unit at the Maui Hi, plus it would give me a chance to talk to Michael, to figure out how much of what Jimmy told me was real and how much he made up.

  That was the argument that convinced Michael to join us. He’d said no at first. “Take the tickets. I can’t use them. And I can’t stand poi.” But he, too, wanted to know how many of his personal details Jimmy had stolen.

  I changed my clothes in Tiara’s bathroom, staying in there for a little longer than was necessary to ensure that she’d be clothed when I came out. There was no mirror in the bathroom, but I glimpsed myself as I came through the separate vanity area. My dryer-deprived hair was still flat, of course, but my cheeks had a little color and my dress was downright adorable. Not bad, I thought. Not bad at all.

  And then I rounded the corner and saw Tiara. I stopped feeling cute immediately. Her hair was slicked back in a bun, an enormous, fragrant flower behind her right ear. (“They had a big bowl of them at the spa,” she told me.)

  Her eyeliner was a deep green, which brought out green undertones in her eyes. Her eyelashes didn’t look fake but had to be; I would have remembered if they’d been that lush before. Diamond studs glittered in her ears.

  Her sundress, not surprisingly, was low-cut, her star tattoo fully exposed. The dress, green with a pink hibiscus pattern, was made of silk, cotton, or some other natural fiber not stocked at Safeway.

  “Wow,” I said. “You got ready fast.”

  She shrugged. “Being a model, I’ve had practice.”

  Maybe a quiet evening at the Maui Hi wouldn’t have been so bad, after all.

  There were hundreds of people waiting to go into the luau. I kept checking faces, half expecting Jimmy to appear—though surely he had enough sense to avoid large crowds. Men, meanwhile, kept glancing our way—well, Tiara’s way. She noticed: you could tell by the way she flashed her smile and fluttered her fingernails. A path ran next to us, the white-sand beach and the Pacific beyond. The sun, falling low in the sky, made Tiara’s eyes and earrings sparkle.

  “Nice earrings,” Michael said when he saw the diamonds.

  “Thanks.” She touched them lightly.

  “Did I buy them?” he asked casually.

  She tilted her chin up. “No. They were a gift.”

  “From Jimmy?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes. “I think I already answered that.”

  Oops. “Right,” I said, shaking my head as if I hadn’t been following the conversation: better to look clueless than to seem bitchy, at least some of the
time.

  The line began to move forward. “The earrings were from my old boyfriend Mr. Robertson,” she said. “For Christmas.”

  “You called your boyfriend Mr. Robertson?” Michael asked Tiara.

  She touched an earlobe again. If she kept it up, she was going to knock one of the diamonds out. “He was real formal—a gentleman type. Kind of old-school. He told me to call him by his first name, but I just couldn’t.”

  I snorted. “He wasn’t old-school. He was just old. Like, eighty.”

  “He was fifty-nine,” Tiara said evenly.

  And I’m twelve, I thought.

  “Did you talk to your credit-card companies this afternoon?” I asked Michael.

  He nodded. “Yeah, they were cool about it—everything will end up covered. I was a little worried because some of the charges went back all the way to September—nothing big, just some dinners out—but they said it was okay.”

  “You had fraudulent charges that far back and you never noticed them?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t have time to look over every little detail on my credit-card bills.”

  “Wow,” I said, because, really, that was all I could say.

  Early on, Jimmy had taken me out a few times. There was a Mexican spot overlooking the Pacific, a pizza place overlooking a Wal-Mart. How odd to realize that he could have taken me anywhere—he wasn’t paying, after all—and that’s what he chose. I almost asked Michael James if he remembered any of the restaurants listed on his credit-card bill, but I decided against it. If Jimmy had gone to other, nicer places, I would just wonder whom he had taken.

  We reached the front of the line, and a young, lean, Hawaiian man in a flowered shirt gave us a bright white smile, an “aloha,” a string of shell beads, and a mai tai in a plastic cup. Another young man led us past rows of long white tables that were filling fast. The tables were in a vast, flat pit surrounded by lava rock and vaguely reminiscent of a volcano (not that I’d ever seen one). Around the perimeter, torches burned brightly even though it was still daylight. A big stage rose on one side, empty for now.

  “Jimmy would have loved this,” Tiara sighed as we sat down in plastic patio chairs, Michael on one side of the table, Tiara and me on the other.

  “No doubt,” Michael said. “Especially if I were paying.” He slipped on a pair of aviator sunglasses. With his short hair, sharp cheekbones, and erect posture, he looked like an FBI agent in a TV show.

  “There’s a luau in Lahaina where you get real flower leis,” Michael said. “But that one’s even tougher to reserve.”

  “You’ve been to a lot of luaus?” I asked.

  “More than I’d like. I’ve hit every one around here at least twice. Never been to a real pig roast, though—you know, like the locals do. They dig a big pit in the ground, roast a pig all day, then have a giant feast at night. That I’d like to see.”

  “All the time you spend on the island, you’re bound to get invited to one sooner or later,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Nah, I’m haole—white. I don’t live here, not that it would matter if I did. This is their island—they just let us use it. But some things they get to keep for themselves—the pig roasts, some hidden beaches. You can’t really blame them.”

  A young woman took our drinks order; we went for another round of mai tais. A large group filled up the rest of our table. Fortunately, they showed no interest in saying more than a casual hello to us. On the stage, the chief luau guy briefly welcomed everyone—and then asked that all guests turn off their cell phones. Something like panic crossed Michael’s face. He pulled out his phone, stared at it as if it were a beloved old relative he was about to send out on an ice floe, and pushed the power button.

  “So, you’ve got all your accounts straightened out, then?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Well, my credit cards. And I called my bank—they’re changing my account number and my PIN. The airline’s moving a little slower, but I think they’ll eventually reinstate my miles. My real concern is that this Jimmy guy could be opening up new accounts under my name, taking out loans—who knows? It could really do a number on my credit rating.” He shook his head in disgust.

  “Unless he’s dead,” I said.

  “It would make things easier,” he said, a little too matter-of-factly.

  “Have you figured out where he got your information?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’ve never been to the restaurant where he works. And the mailboxes in my condo complex are locked at all times. I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Do you have a roommate?” I asked. Maybe someone had gone through his things while he was away from home.

  “I’m a little old for roommates,” he said. I thought of Jimmy’s dark and dirty little room. He was a little old for roommates, too.

  “Oh, by the way,” Michael said. “The police called me—they got hold of your boyfriend’s roommate.”

  “Bryan?” I pictured Bryan in the filthy kitchen, hunched over the laptop and barely visible through the cloud of marijuana smoke.

  “They didn’t tell me his name. And they said it was hard to get much information out of him because he was stoned out of his mind.”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “The police said Jimmy’s just been living with him since July—it’s Bryan’s house, not Jimmy’s. They met partying at a bar. Jimmy needed a place to stay. Bryan had a spare room and he needed the money. Jimmy always paid his rent in cash—Bryan didn’t even know his last name.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay?” he asked, confused.

  “It makes sense.” In my mind, I ran through more incidents when Jimmy’s behavior didn’t make sense. “When’s your birthday?” I asked abruptly.

  “October.”

  “The twenty-first?”

  “Oh God.” He sounded worn out. “So he knows that, too.”

  I nodded. “When we were first dating, I asked Jimmy when his birthday was. He looked confused for a minute, like he couldn’t remember.”

  It was late on a Saturday morning. Jimmy and I were in bed, eating pancakes. There were crumbs and syrup on my sheets, and I didn’t even care.

  “And then he finally blurted out October twenty-first,” I continued. (After he said that, he jumped out of bed and headed for the shower.) “I should have known something was up.”

  “Just from that?” Michael shook his head. “You couldn’t possibly know.”

  But it wasn’t just that. What I didn’t tell Michael was that when October 21 came around, I got up early to make Jimmy a three-layer chocolate cake with whipped-cream frosting. We hadn’t discussed his birthday; in fact, I had pretended to forget it (which would have been completely out of character). When he walked into my condo that evening, he saw streamers and balloons hanging from the light fixtures and candles flickering on the tables.

  He froze in the doorway, completely baffled. He was wearing soft blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and flip-flops. It was drizzling outside, so he was a little damp, his hair curling at odd angles. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

  “You thought I forgot,” I said.

  He shook his head in confusion. I overdid it, I thought. He thinks I’m getting too serious.

  “At work, I’m known as the birthday queen,” I babbled. “I always make the cake and buy the card and get everyone to sing. I just think it’s nice to feel special for a day.”

  He peered around the room, and his face finally softened. “You did this for my birthday.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement—an oddly obvious thing to say, in retrospect. It never occurred to me that he’d lie about his birthday. But then, it never occurred to me that he’d lie about a lot of things.

  He stood there for what felt like a really long time, his mouth slightly open, just looking at the room. Finally, he took me in his arms. “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” he whispered.

  Now, at the luau, Michael asked, “Did Jimmy s
ay or do anything else that seemed weird?”

  I thought back over the past few months. “I kept trying to talk to him about his business and offer suggestions, but he didn’t want to hear it. I thought it was because he didn’t value my opinion.”

  “Like—what kind of suggestions?” Michael asked.

  “Well, to start with, there’s the name. Nothing wrong with it, really, just . . .”

  I hate correcting grammar and punctuation, I really do. It makes me sound so schoolmarmish. But—he asked. So, I sat up straight and continued. “There should be an apostrophe. J-I-M-M-Y -apostrophe-S.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t name the company after myself. I named it after the sprinkles you put on ice cream. I thought it sounded colorful and, you know, just fun.”

  I hadn’t heard anyone call sprinkles “jimmies” since I’d gone to college in Boston. “Let me guess,” I said. “Your prep school was in Massachusetts. Or—you summered at the Cape.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  He shot me a side glance, fighting a smile. “Both.”

  “Ha!” I said triumphantly.

  “Okay.” He laughed. “Now that we’ve got that cleared up, what were your other suggestions?”

  “Your Web site has been down for at least five months,” I said.

  He blinked at me, and then shook his head (quickly, anxiously). “It hasn’t been that long. A month and a half, maybe. Two months, tops.”

  “Five months,” I said. “I met Jimmy in September,” I said. “It is now February. Your Web site has never worked in all that time.” He didn’t need to know that I’d checked it at least once a week.

  “Really?” He looked stricken. “Yikes.”

  “You should put one of your tech people on it,” I said. “Or all of your tech people. Have them make it the top priority.” The waitress put another mai tai in front of me.