Crime of Privilege by Walter Walker

Author:Walter Walker
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Legal, Thriller, Fiction
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2013-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

2.

THE PROBLEM WITH LOCATING CAPTAIN HOWIE WAS THAT HE was no longer where Ki’anna had known him to be. Not to worry, she assured me. She had gone to school with some of the island’s policemen and she would make some calls.

It took more than a day to find him in Poipu Beach, on the opposite side of the island, about as far away from Princeville as he could be. He had been a boat captain once. Now he ran a small condominium complex that provided units as vacation rentals.

The Hana Palms was three stories high, built of nondescript stucco and situated directly above a rocky beach. It had a parking lot in front and a small fenced-in swimming pool with a concrete deck between the lot and the building. Although there were a few cars in the lot, there did not appear to be any people around at all.

A breezeway led to the ocean side, where a green lawn looked nicer than it felt on bare feet. I retraced my steps and saw what I had missed on my first pass, a living quarters off the breezeway that doubled as an office. I opened a screen door in which part of the screen was separated from the frame. A bell tinkled above my head and a minute later a shirtless man appeared at a counter set up in the front room.

“Aloha,” he said, as if he was challenging me to a fight.

I figured I had my man. I asked if he was Cap’n Howie, just to make sure.

“Some call me that.”

“You also known as Detective Landry?”

The man’s eyebrows rose as slowly as an elevator.

I went right to the point. “Chief DiMasi told me I could find you here.”

I showed him my card. He inspected it and said, “You wanna rent a condo?” There was just a bit of hope in the question.

“No. I need to talk to you about a case you worked on years ago.”

The man put his hands on the counter and tilted back like a water skier. He had a long, lean torso, with white hairs sprouting from his chest and a few from his shoulders. He was clean-shaven, but the hair on his head was sparse and blown about at various angles. He could have been seventy. He could also have been no more than sixty. “Got telephone service. Got email. Even got teleconference things these days. No need to fly all the way here just to talk to me.”

“This is a special case.”

Howard Landry could have done a lot of things at that moment. My own options were limited. If he had told me to get lost I probably would have had to go back to Princeville and drink whatever Primos were still available at the bar. But he spared me that. He asked if I wanted a beer right there.

WE SAT ON LOUNGE chairs facing the ocean. The lawn chairs had plastic cross-straps, some of which were broken. Ahead of us, the water was rough and sapphire blue.

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