Captain cooked, p.3
Captain Cooked, page 3
Not just anyone. A humongous man. Not fat. Not large. Gigantus. What was it, beyond Sumo wrestler size? This guy had to weigh over 300 pounds, maybe closer to 400 pounds. Definitely Hawaiian, not dressed in any costume, just casual in T-shirt and cargo shorts. Still, the fabric stitched to make his clothes alone could have made a circus tent.
And he was stuffing his face!
“Hey, if you don’t mind, that’s our lunch!”
Most of the food had been devoured, more torn apart. He turned to me, and I took a step back, fearful. Something was off. His eyes were wrong. They seemed glazed, twisting in his sockets. His head lolled back and forth on his shoulders. Whether in contempt or utter rudeness, he picked up a community bowl of a purple paste-like substance, the Hawaiian staple dish called poi. The bowl half-empty, he took his short-stubbed fingers in a big scoop, stuffing the remaining poi into his mouth with a slurping sound, followed by a guttural ugh of primal satisfaction. He faced me without seeing, his eyes rolling back into his head, and like in a horror movie, zombie white egg orbs stared out. He fell forward with a gigantic thud, King Kong high-diving from a skyscraper, bringing himself to the ground along with the entire table of food, all crushed and blended into garbage disposal gook.
I looked to the giant’s face, hidden behind a dark violet mask of poi.
Chapter 6
Pūpū Surprise
Struck dumb for the moment at the man’s collapse, instant recollection of my college swim team and life-saving classes kicked in. I dropped my equipment, shouted for help and ran to his aid.
Even with what athletic ability I thought I possessed, I couldn’t turn over the beached whale-like Hawaiian. He had to get over on his back, he just had to. I had to clear his breathing passage. If he stopped breathing, dare I consider it, would I have to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Yuck, could I do it? How much worse could that be from French-kissing my last boyfriend, his tongue tasting of cheap liquor and foul cigarettes, just before he puked over my only Donna Karan sheer black party dress? An a-hole, long gone and good riddance.
All these rushed thoughts as I pushed and shoved with no results. I grabbed at my camera tripod and attempted leveraging his body to flip him. Damn, only one large arm flopped and went nowhere. Desperate, racing toward panic when another set of hands pushed alongside me. Michael K. Teamwork.
Oh, Michael, you are so heroic. He shouted into his hotel walkie-talkie calling for paramedics. A final pair of hands supplied the last needed effort and the stricken man rolled onto his back. I looked to the new Samaritan and his strength, my father; two heroes side-by-side. I am privileged.
Thank the saints, I saw poi-colored air bubbles from the man’s mouth, and his chest was rising and falling, but perceptively shallow. I sensed, even for the man’s physique, he was not breathing to a normal rhythm, more jerky spurting to his normal lung flow. I cleared the man’s mouth of slimy obstructions. From deep within there was a hacking gurgle. His whole massive form shook, his body arched in rigidity and then went limp, back to a stomach slightly quivering and a chest whispering air in and out. My fingers stayed in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue.
The inner-hotel communications from Michael initiated a rush to the accident scene. The house doctor responded with hotel employees carrying some sort of portable defibrillator. I guess their first assumption was that some old fogey guest had keeled over. Michael gently eased me away while the professional caregivers took over.
Manager Cahill arrived and soon after the Cardoza woman, who to my surprise, burst into tears, and started mouthing in semi-hysteria, “Oh, my God, no. No. No. Not like this.” If it weren’t such a sorry situation, I would guess she was worried about the hotel’s PR image and potential liability. But that is crass of me. Next on the scene, an odd group of young people, three boys and a girl, very unkempt, a walking gallery of tattoos and body piercing. Trash-fashionable in scraggly black rag attire. And, if everything was not already surreal, two out of the four freaks, who you’d think would be joking cruelly at the big man’s illness, were themselves, like Ms. Cardoza, crying. What was going on?
Michael at my side whispered, pointing to the prone man now fitted with an oxygen mask, “You know who this is?” I shook my head, not really in tune with anything, feeling claustrophobic, a descending panic as the grotto we stood in shrunk, filling with strange gawking people.
“That’s Oli Palalū.”
Now, above what I had been through, a real shock set in place. I whispered back.
“You mean that’s Oli?”
“Yes, he was to sing tomorrow night as part of the Lū‘au Challenge Opening Ceremonies. That’s his band over there.”
I looked to see, devastation in their eyes. I mean, I just had my fingers in the mouth of the most successful torch singer across the entire Pacific Ocean, certainly a megastar in Hawai‘i, if not to any music lover who appreciates island melodies. His style was similar to that of ballad crooners Don Ho or Israel ‘Iz’ Kamakawiwo‘ole. From what I had read, Oli was destined to be the next Iz, the late, venerated singer who had at one point weighed 750 pounds and died too young at 38. I knew somewhere in my CD pile back at my apartment was an Oli disk of him singing 1940 ballads, doing an over-track duet with Frank Sinatra, and another with sultry-throated Peggy Lee. Romantic melodies. Oli’s lyrics from one hit song rose quickly to mind:
Fathomless, deep is my love — To thee, my passion, my mate
Ah, on a future day, to sing that true to someone special. I took note of the onlookers, who I now realized were profusely worried about the singer’s condition. My eyes came to rest on something disturbing. My Father had his arm around sniveling Ms. Desi, patting there-there comfort.
The running arrival of the fire department paramedics changed the scene. Security guards, upon Manager Cahill’s command, started escorting everyone out of the secret garden enclosure. The paramedics discussed first response action taken by the house doctor. They ran protocol in their steps of stabilization not knowing what true illness had befallen this singing idol.
Milling in the spectator crowd away from the grotto I heard someone say the words, “Heart Attack,” and another person murmur agreement. Probably, with someone carrying that much poundage, I am sure his beating heart would strain under a lot of pressure. Most Hawaiian music fans know Iz died of respiratory failure. Having seen Oli’s collapse, I can say that it looked like some kind of seizure. Too much engorged food? Could my surprising him have been the long-awaited trigger of the seizure? No, by the time I arrived Oli seemed swaying, freaky in his expression, eating without focus, out of it. His convulsion was already in process.
More distant sirens. An ambulance arrived. Why two medical teams? Then, it dawned on me; I saw their dilemma of getting Oli and his dimensions safely to the hospital. How would they lift him? A regular stretcher gurney would not accommodate.
Could the ambulance even hold him? To that concern of logistics came Michael, and another man, both pushing large flat luggage dollies, but not from the hotel. The man with a scruffy beard looked seafaring, wearing a jumping-and-hooked marlin T-shirt, and the distinctive battered marina hat, white with gold-back braided scroll work. If he got too close I might smell week-old odors of sweat and chopped bait fish. He must have been from the hotel’s small harbor marina and I guessed the carts they pushed were for hauling fishing equipment and yacht luggage from shore to ship.
Placed together, side by side, both luggage carts made an adequate carrier of the ill singer. Within a few minutes, the paramedics, the doctor, and a squad of employees assisted the dual cart gurney up the path to an awaiting ambulance. Much of the crowd followed, all now silent, like a cortege in dirge march, a macabre scene in the midst of vacation brightness.
A policeman asked me to stay behind to make a statement. In a few minutes, I was ushered back into the garden hide-away. Deep harrow marks showed where the carts had etched tracks in the grass carrying away their precious human cargo.
Jeffrey stared at the mess strewn on the ground. At least, the perceived confrontation of munching the lomilomi salad had been put to rest. To move the singer the glop went through secondary foot mush blending. The sight brought a queasy feeling to my stomach. Two hotel maintenance personnel stood on the sidelines with shovels and trash containers awaiting orders to restore everything back to the pristine image of resort serenity. My father squatted and with a chopstick poked at the luncheon turned garbage. Pūpū poop.
Michael stood with a policeman and another man, one dressed in an understated off-white short-sleeve shirt and grey slacks. Michael beckoned me over and made the introductions.
“This is Detective David Kee. He’s in the Investigations Department. He’ll be the police department’s community liaison. Needs to make sure this accident doesn’t become some sort of tabloid frenzy.” The men exchanged sly smiles of unstated secrets and Michael saw I had noticed. “You should know Detective Kee is my cousin, second or third cousin, on my mother’s side.
“And this is Officer Kinkaid. He will take your initial statement of what happened. Try to remember everything.”
“Yes, I understand.” I said demurely, bowing to officialdom. I found it interesting that both men deferred to Michael, and didn’t throw around their cop weight. I relayed my story as Officer Kinkaid took notes. Detective Kee scribbled bullet points in his own notebook, making me nervous about what I had said that might stand out as extraordinary beyond a straight story.
I found it odd Detective Kee, being of Chinese ancestry, did not look like a relative of Michael’s. Where Michael was all Hawaiian except for his eyes, Detective Kee, a good ten years older than Michael, stood short, his face shaped like a valentine heart, but pushed in and narrowed. If I were doing a studio photo shoot, a period piece, I would dress him in costume as a gaunt nineteenth century opium den smoker. I thought this because his yellow-dark skin had a pasty pallor suggesting a long-time chain smoker. He drummed his pen on his notebook and chewed gum in staccato bites, the signs of nicotine cold turkey. I knew the clues well, my own nasty habit two years behind me, knock on koa wood.
After giving preliminary who I was, why I was on the scene, we arrived at the expected what I had witnessed of this medical accident. “And you feel,” asked Officer Kinkaid, “Mr. Palalū had been at this table quite some time before your arrival?
“Yes. I glanced at the table and saw most dishes were half-eaten. Like he tried each dish but only consumed a portion.”
“And when you saw him, he became sick?”
How rude. He could have worded the query slightly differently. Sounded like he implied my looks caused the singer’s illness. Like really.
“Probably from inhaling the food. Yeah, grazing at that speed I saw anyone, including him, might have consumed too much, too quick.”
Michael helped as he could. “I think the officer is trying to ask: was he sick a few moments after you arrived and confronted him, or did he seem sick the minute you saw him?” They were splitting hairs.
“I’m pretty certain he had been getting sick before I arrived. He looked ill, and after eating the poi, he immediately collapsed. If you want a guess, his convulsion started prior to my arrival.”
“Miss Dayne,” offered Detective Kee. He spoke slowly as if I needed to translate his English, which he spoke perfectly with no dialect. “You see, Oli, Mr. Palalū, had been sick the last several weeks, from what we so far gathered. Perhaps the flu. We feel he could have had a relapse, and the fall started the seizure.”
I dug into my memory. “No, it looked like a convulsion just as I arrived, before he fell.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dayne, for the clarification.”
When I completed a few more background questions, as to estimated time of my arrival, what room I was staying in, things like that, they seemed satisfied and put away their note pads. Only then did Jeffrey ask as he circled the food dump, “Is anyone going to test the food?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” said Detective Kee. “Everyone has the highest respect for Chef Lorenzo’s cuisine, including myself. Besides, I think we are reaching the conclusion Mr. Palalū had an episode from his earlier illness.”
“You certainly can reach that conclusion, Detective. But see that pile of pink food? That’s the Lomilomi Salad presumably made from my recipe, out of my cookbook.”
“Presumably?” countered Detective Kee.
“Well, if it was made to my recipe’s ingredients, they got it wrong. There are garnishments that I did not use. And did anyone notice the poi?”
We all looked to him. Jeffrey Dayne bristled, disgusted. Not at the mess, not at the crisis of the very sick man who ate his luncheon snack, but that the kitchen might have adulterated his creation, a high crime to any artist. You don’t enhance a Mona Lisa with an added mustache. We looked at him, the police officer with irritation.
“About the poi?” queried Detective Kee, accepting he was playing straight man to what Mr. Dayne saw as the obvious.
“Like the Lomilomi, there are green flecks in the poi. One doesn’t add green sprinkles to poi.”
Officer Kinkaid’s side radio crackled. Detective Kee’s cell phone buzzed.
“Call for backup,” barked the police officer. “Arrest everyone who gets close to the hotel.” He looked to our curious faces. “The crowds outside the gate saw the ambulance rush out and heard Oli had been injured. They got it all wrong. Yelling that the hotel is at fault. They’ve broken into the grounds and are headed this way. I don’t know if I have enough personnel to control them.”
Detective Kee ended his phone call. “Oli Palalū died on the way to the hospital.”
“Madison.” In the midst of individual tragedy and civil uproar, my father turned back to his food rummaging and said quite nonchalantly, “Run to the hotel kitchen and find me at least two or three half-pint plastic bowls with tight lids.”
Chapter 7
Recipe for Fear
I returned from my so-called life-or-death task carrying a lumpy sack of storage containers. I felt demoted to waitress-in-training. In my walk to the grotto, I passed a lot of tossed and tumbled action. Security guards chased orange and green-shirted trespassers. Some chases were comical with hedge-jumping or tag games, like trying to lasso scattering rabbits. Others suggested frustrated anger as security guards and interlopers, most with orange shirts, exchanged punches and in turn were maced or jabbed with batons and kicked when the subdued cringed on the ground. Any dissenter philosophy of pacifism may have forever vanished. It would be a ‘them or us’ line drawn in the beach sand. I did not see any white shirted protestors running helter-skelter and guessed civil disobedience was not included in their job description. I clicked off a few digitals with my palm camera.
Not my fracas. To hell with local political squabbling over lost causes. With the short week ahead, my priorities were clear: shooting foodie footage, B-roll pics of Hawaiian touristy sunsets, foamy waves, volcano lava spurting, maybe a jungle waterfall, carve out my own time for scuba dives, searching among the coral reefs for Nemo fish. I’d find a private cove where, topless, I could baste my skin in coconut oil until I was SPF 4 tolerant. To hell with eroding ozone layers and UVB rays; they’re for sissies.
I could see with Oli’s death the grotto garden had been sanctioned an official ‘investigation accident site.’ Michael wisely secured rope, looking like white sail rope, probably from his buddy, Barnacle Bill, the sea captain honcho, since both men were stringing the lines from palm tree to tree, roping off the grotto. Hotel employees, beefy and heft, maybe from the marina and valet staff, stood as uneasy guardsmen. Following Michael’s direction, the curious hotel guests or sullen orange-green shirters were asked to bear respect for Oli Palalū. Still, the morbid hung back on the fringes exchanging speculative gossip.
I returned to find my father and Detective Kee in a turf battle.
“You are informing me it will take ten days for your Honolulu lab to return an analysis of the food this lū‘au singer ate? That won’t do. Won’t do at all.”
“Maybe in a week since they know who it concerns?” Meaning Oli the singer, not my father’s own niche popularity. And Dad, Oli Palalū, known as Oli, is famous worldwide, not some Tiki lounge lizard.
“And the autopsy? Another week?”
“No, that might be as soon as tomorrow. A separate agency, not County Health. Considering the victim’s immense girth and how this might be accomplished I don’t know if staff here are adequate. We may fly in more qualified people from O‘ahu.”
“Immediate lab analysis is essential. I don’t want to be the cause of false rumors,” stressed my father. “I can express mail out my samples to the Illinois Bureau of Investigation. They can give me telephone results by tomorrow night.” He took the plastic containers from me.
Detective Kee felt no civilian should be giving orders, especially a tourist. By right he did have concerns of the public welfare in mind.
“It’s better to shut down all food services at the resort than have food poisoning hit elsewhere.”
“Food poisoning,” was my surprised comment. Like everyone else, the crowd vote was for an accident based on Oli’s past medical history; the autopsy diagnosis certain to be heart attack or brain aneurism, something like that, with body weight a contributing factor.
My father warned me to silence with a frown. I had seen that parental look before when my curiosity interfered with his mental gymnastics.
