My Kind of Town
Don Chapman
Just blessed
>> Pearl City
HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes, in his '71 Barracuda, was turning into visitor parking at the Pearl Palms when his cell went off again.
"Yo, Sherlock, Jake Peepers here. You have a minute? I got a cheating husband case that's crossing over into your kuleana."
Not all P.I.'s were so cooperative, but Peepers was a former Marine MP who knew the value of having an ally on the legal side of the street. Gomes appreciated that. "How you been, Jake?"
"Busy. Guess I'm just blessed that there's a never-ending supply of infidelity in the world today."
Gomes had to chuckle. People acting like people is what kept them both in business. "So what you got?"
"Distressed wife asks about me tailing her husband, then gets cold feet.
Then this morning I get a call. She's on her way to Waimea Bay for The Eddie, stops at a fruit stand by Turtle Bay and sees her husband's vehicle turning into the resort, with some young bim in the passenger seat. So she calls me. Fortunately, I'm in Haleiwa at the time, on my way to The Eddie."
"So bingo bango bongo, no problem."
"Should've been, but not quite."
Peepers explained how he'd fired off 50 shots of the couple with his digital, in the hotel, in the parking lot, including some pretty juicy stuff when they started kissing and he did some serious groping.
"They didn't get a room?"
"Nope, they left."
"But you got 50 shots, and the problem is?"
"Not one turned out, Sherlock. Not a damn one. Nothing but gray fuzz. And then a little later over at The Eddie, the camera's working fine. What the heck's going on? So I call Turtle Bay security ..."
"Abe Kunia?"
"Yeah, your old compadre. Anyway, he says the same thing happened to their security cameras. From roughly quarter to 12 until quarter after 1, all their cameras were on the fritz. Which happens to be the same time my client's husband and his friend were there for lunch."
"Strange. Any explanation?"
"Abe says he called their supplier. Somebody used some kind of scrambler that broke down the system's firewalls. Very sophisticated. And just for what it's worth, Abe says his guy told him the same thing happened at a condo in Pearl City this morning."
"You happen to remember the name?"
"Sure, Pearl Palms."
"You don't say. By the way, Jake, what's your happy couple's names?"
"My client's Meg Choy Primitivo."
"Wife of the computer magnate Victor Primitivo?"
"One and the same."
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com