Trouble in paradise, p.1
Trouble in Paradise, page 1
Trouble In Paradise
A Rick Bishop Novel, #3
Larry Darter
Fedora Press
Copyright © 2022 by Larry Darter
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Larry Darter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
The author and publisher have no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
ISBN 979-8-9859144-1-2
ISBN 979-8-9859144-0-5 (E-book)
Contents
Dedication
1. A Live One
2. The Lady in Teal
3. Fact Checking
4. Back at the Office
5. Never Not Working
6. Island Hop
7. The Widow Marks
8. Follow the Bouncing Check
9. The Con Exposed
10. A Con by Any Other Name
11. A New Angle
12. So Far So Good
13. Unfriendly Locals
14. Soap Opera
15. Invitation to Leave Town
16. Angel of Mercy
17. Payback
18. I Know What I Like
19. A Case of Mistaken Identity
20. Caught With Pants Down
21. Framed Like a Painting
22. Folsom Prison Blues
23. Prison Life
24. No Remorse
25. Closing In
26. The Art of the Deal
27. Misery Loves Company
28. Leaving on a Jet Plane
29. Bar Brawl
30. All is Forgiven
31. Another Angle
32. Cashing In
33. On the Way to L.A.
About Author
Also By Larry Darter
For Chief. Gone, but never forgotten. Rest in peace, brother.
Chapter 1
A Live One
The frosted glass door panel, lettered in flaking black and gold Pittman script, read: “Richard Bishop, Honolulu Confidential and Discreet Investigations.” It was a moderately shabby door at the end of a relatively untidy hallway on the second floor of a circa 1938 passably dilapidated building that housed a Chinese herbal store on the ground floor beneath the office. The door stood open for two reasons.
First, it encouraged impulse buyers in the market for a private investigator specializing in divorce cases. At least, that was Bishop’s hope. Second, the open door, along with the vintage black Hunter & Casablanca ceiling fan and the open window behind the shopworn, scratched wooden desk, also produced a tolerable degree of air circulation inside the stuffy non-air-conditioned office that permanently retained a damp, musty, pungent odor reminiscent of the smell of sweaty gym socks and rotting wood.
It was one of those rare mornings Hawaii infrequently gets with completely cloudless skies. Because the Pacific surrounds Hawaii and ocean water evaporates in the tropics, clouds form. Even when dark rain clouds don’t appear, there are almost always light clouds stretched out by high-altitude winds somewhere over the islands or offshore. The cloudless skies, warm and gentle trade winds, and mild temperatures made for a perfect morning even by the standards of Hawaii’s usual climate, arguably the best the world offers, which makes the islands such a popular vacation destination throughout the year.
Richard “Rick” Bishop sat bent over his desk, hard at work. Tired of going through his mail that always consisted almost only of past-due notices from his many creditors, Bishop labored over the Honolulu Star Bulletin’s weekly featured crossword puzzle. He pondered a ten-letter for “Misoyaki seafood” that started with the letter “b.”
“Aha,” Bishop said aloud when he thought of the correct word for the clue.
He touched the lead of the stubby yellow pencil he’d purloined from the Lucky Strike, a bowling alley on Ala Moana Boulevard, to his tongue and was about to fill in the word when the desk phone rang.
With a grimace, he reached for the phone with his left hand, picked up the receiver, and spoke into it.
“Honolulu Confidential and Discreet Investigations.”
“Richard Bishop, please,” said the caller.
“Hold, please,” Bishop said, laying the phone receiver down gently on the desk blotter.
Touching the pencil lead to his tongue once more, Bishop filled in the blocks for seventeen across with the ten-letter word “butterfish.”
Then the detective put the pencil down on the blotter and picked up the phone.
“Thanks for waiting. How may I help you?”
“Is this Richard Bishop, the detective?” asked the caller. It was a pleasant, well-modulated, and smoky feminine voice.
“I’m Bishop, the private investigator.”
“What do you charge for your services, Mr. Bishop?”
“What is it you want me to do?”
The voice became slightly petulant. “I’d rather not say over the phone. It’s—it’s very confidential. But to avoid wasting my time with a useless meeting, I need an idea—”
“My standard rate is three-hundred-fifty a day plus expenses. Unless it’s something minor like a skip trace, I can do for a flat fee.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s way out of line.”
“Sure,” Bishop said.
“We’ll need to negotiate that down a little.”
“Nope,” Bishop said.
“You won’t negotiate?”
“Nope.”
“Then I fear we can’t do business, Mr. Bishop,” the caller said.
“Okay,” Bishop said.
“That’s it? No discussion. No nothing?”
“You don’t sound like you’d be fun to work for, anyway,” Bishop said.
“Fun? You require fun to accept a case?”
“Fun or three-hundred-fifty a day plus expenses.”
After a pause, the caller said, “Are you prepared to begin right away if I hire you?”
“Sure. I’d be willing to juggle my current case load a little and shoehorn you in.”
“Oh, very well,” she said.
“So, since you won’t discuss over the phone what it is you want me to do, are you coming to me, or do you want me to come to you? Once we’ve talked, if you’re in my kind of trouble, I’ll be able to give you an idea of how much—”
“Yes, I must meet you before making my final decision about hiring you. It’s a very delicate matter. I can’t trust just anyone. Do you drink Mr. Bishop?”
“Well, now that you mention it—”
“Social drinking is fine,” the woman said, “but I won’t hire a drunk, and I’ve heard private detectives often drink to excess. Also, I don’t approve of men who use tobacco.”
“Would it be all right if I had an occasional coconut shaved ice?”
The caller took in a sharp intake of air.”
“You might behave like a gentleman if you expect to work for me.”
“Better try Honolulu Night Moves over on Kapiolani Boulevard,” Bishop said. “I’ve heard they have gentleman over there most every night. It is a gentleman’s club, after all. But I’m not sure they’ll be interested unless you look as good as the strippers.”
Bishop hung up and went back to the crossword. The clue for nineteen across was “arrange” and required a four-letter word. But since ten down still stumped him, he didn’t have the first letter.
Hanging up on the snobbish caller had been a step in the right direction, but Bishop hadn’t gone far enough. He should have taken the receiver off the hook because the phone rang again immediately. Bishop sighed, picked it up, and put the receiver to his ear.
“It’s not professional to hang up on a prospective client, Mr. Bishop,” said the caller. You should be ashamed. How do you stay in business with your horrid manners?”
Rather than pleasant, well-modulated, and smoky, the voice now sounded exasperated, scornful, and annoyingly assertive.
“Sure, my manners are pretty bad sometimes, and I brood over it during lonely long summer nights,” Bishop said. “I’m just too proud to show it.”
“You’re insufferable,” the woman said.
“Yes, I know,” Bishop said. “Everyone says that. Now, is there some reason you called back other than to critique my manners?”
“I accepted your terms before you hung up on me. I want to arrange an appointment to determine whether to hire you.”
Bishop found it astonishing the woman still considered hiring him after how poorly the conversation had gone.
“Sure,” he said. “You need my office address? While it’s the busy season here, I can probably squeeze you in later this morning or mid-afternoon.”
“I don’t want to meet at your office,” the woman said. “Are you familiar with the coffee shop inside the Hyatt Regency’s Pualeilani Atrium off the hotel’s Uluniu Avenue entrance?”
“Yeah, across from the waterfall?”
“Yes, can you be there at eleven this morning?”
“Sure, and your name?”
“I don’t care to tell you that until we’ve spoken.”
“Ah, just kicking the tires, huh?”
The woman ignored the comment. “I’ll be wearing a teal dress with a matching wide-brimmed hat.”
Teal? Was that a shade a green, Bishop wondered? Why couldn’t women limit themselves to using the reliable primary colors names instead of fancy words like teal and magenta?
“Okay, I’ll be there at eleven,” he said.
“Fine,” the woman said, and then she hung up.
Bishop looked up at the vintage clock on the wall and saw it showed just after ten-thirty. Since the old clock was reliably five minutes slow, he got up from the desk and walked to the office door. Then, taking his light blue sports coat off the coat tree beside the door, he shrugged it on and went out the door. After locking up, Bishop descended the stairs and walked outside to where he’d parked the Corolla.
On the sidewalk, he saw his intractable elderly landlady, Mrs. Wong. She was busily sweeping the sidewalk in front of her store with her odd, stubby-handled fan-like broom. Rick couldn’t imagine why the old woman swept the sidewalk so often. She probably hadn’t had more than a dozen customers in her herbal store since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Luckily, Wong had her back to him, so he hot-footed it across the street to his car before she noticed him and unleashed one of her habitual unprovoked verbal salvos. Bishop suspected that the Marxist-feminist supremacist moron Rachael Mad Cow who Mrs. Wong watched religiously on the MSLSD cable propaganda channel had radicalized the old lady, turning her into a misandrist racist who hated white guys. But Bishop wasn’t about to let any of that ruin such a beautiful morning. He was on his way to reel in a live one.
Chapter 2
The Lady in Teal
Bishop turned off Uluniu Avenue into the hotel’s driveway. The brakes made disturbing grinding noises when he stopped the 1996 Toyota in front of the entrance. The old car was on its last legs, and Bishop knew it. He’d bought it for nine hundred in cash from a friend after wrecking his late-model 4Runner while on a past case. Bishop’s shade tree mechanic, Tommy Mahelona, his girlfriend’s brother, did yeoman’s work keeping the car running. But because the engine was shot, the car belched blue smoke from the exhaust like a coal-burning locomotive. The motor also knocked and rattled and always backfired loudly when Bishop started it. The valet, a young guy, wearing a yellow aloha shirt with gray print over black slacks, eyed the Toyota dubiously before braving the obnoxious cloud of blue smoke to walk to the driver’s side. Bishop got out, smiled, and pressed a wrinkled dollar bill into the guy’s hand before snatching the claim check.
“Don’t hot-rod it,” the detective warned, and then strolled into the hotel lobby.
Even if he’d been wrong about teal being a shade of green, Bishop wouldn’t have had any trouble recognizing the woman from the phone call. She was the only woman in the seating area outside the coffee shop wearing a hat. She was tall, rather voluptuous, with straight shoulder-length, blunt-cut brown hair and an open oval-shaped face, and looked mid-thirties. The woman wore a short and lean dress, which hit well above the knees, subtly accenting her feminine curves and showcasing her long, slender legs. A classic square neckline and half sleeves balanced the bodycon fit of the dress. The wide brim of the round crowned hat shaded the woman’s eyes. Since she already had a paper cup topped by a white plastic lid on the table in front of her, Bishop paused at the counter and ordered a black coffee. After paying, he walked to the table next to the low, painted wall that kept the vacationing rubes from Omaha from wading in the pool beneath the indoor waterfall. The woman reclined languidly in her chair with a look of boredom on her attractive face.
When Bishop arrived at the table, the woman looked up and gazed at him with carelessly observant hazel eyes. She had a prominent but otherwise straight and elegant nose, graceful upturned chin, wide sensual mouth with full lips, and thick, expressive eyebrows.
“Mr. Bishop, I presume?” the woman said.
“I’m sure not Dr. David Livingstone,” Bishop said with an affable grin as he pulled out a chair and sat down. "And you don’t look like anything like Henry Morton Stanley. Care to tell me your name now?”
The woman smiled thinly.
“Gemma Nelson. Thank you for coming.”
The woman’s tone was now calm, collected, and business-like.
“So, what’s the trouble, Ms. Nelson?” Bishop asked with an encouraging smile.
“The attorney who recommended you told me you are a former police detective, Mr. Bishop.”
“True.”
“I need someone to investigate a murder.”
“Then you need the cops, not a private investigator,” Bishop said. “State law prohibits us from working on active criminal investigations.”
“This concerns an inactive investigation where the police classified a man’s disappearance as a missing person case and determined at the time there was no evidence of foul play.”
“Okay, well, that’s a little different. And you think someone murdered this individual, that he’s dead and not only missing?”
“Yes, I believe his wife killed him or paid someone else to do it.”
“Okay, tell me the story, then I’ll know whether it’s something I can help you with.”
“The man, Jeffrey Adam Marks, was my lover,” Nelson said. “He disappeared a little over six years ago. Last month, a Maui Circuit Court judge granted a petition filed on behalf of his wife Jasmine Marks, declaring Jeff legally dead.”
“Yeah, I recall the name now that you mention it. In connection with the disappearance, I mean. I was still with the Honolulu cops when it happened. Wasn’t he a real estate developer or something like that?”
“Yes, he owns... owned Marks Land and Developments here in Honolulu.”
“I’m a little fuzzy on the details of what happened to him. It wasn’t a case I had anything to do with.”
“In November 2016, Jeffrey went out to a Laie Point subdivision his company was developing to check the construction progress. He got his car stuck in a patch of mud on the construction site, and called an employee at the office for help. Unfortunately, when the employee arrived, he couldn’t find Jeff. The phone call for help was the last time anyone heard from him.”
“I’m sure the cops mounted a search of the area,” Bishop said. “That’s standard procedure. So, I assume they found nothing suspicious?”
“The police, along with Jeff’s friends and family, mounted an exhaustive search,” Nelson said. “They combed the entire property, including the area along a nearby shoreline. Their efforts only turned up one of his shoes on the construction site two days after Jeff went missing. Then searchers found the other shoe a day later about a mile and a half away, near a shoreline access point.”
“Why would he walk a mile and a half away instead of waiting a few minutes for somebody to come and help him get his car out of the mud?”
“That’s a question no one has answered. I only know the police said Jeff’s mobile phone records showed the call he made to his employee asking him to come and help him get the car unstuck.”
“So, what makes you think someone murdered Jeff? And why do you believe his wife killed him?”
“I believe Jasmine killed Jeff out of jealousy. He intended to divorce her and marry me. Jeff must have finally told her, and she killed him for it so she could get her hands on his money. Jeff had no reason to walk away from his car. He had already reached the employee who was on his way to help. And Jeff would never have disappeared on his own.”
“Did your boyfriend have any health problems or financial difficulties? If he had argued with his wife about the divorce or suffered some business setback, he could have been under a lot of stress. That they found a shoe near the ocean might suggest—”
“Jeff didn’t walk into the ocean and drown himself, Mr. Bishop,” Nelson said dismissively. “His doctor diagnosed him with attention deficit disorder years ago, and he took medication for that. Otherwise, Jeff was healthy. He wasn’t depressed, much less suicidal. Jeff owned a successful company with millions per year in gross receipts. He had no financial problems.”
