[Fiction] Banzai Pipeline

 By Michael Bracken

The maniacal laughter and the sound of Wally Wailani’s surfboard breaking in two was enough to send chills up the spine of everyone who heard it, and we only heard it because the film crew had a high-powered parabolic microphone pointed directly at Wailani when he wiped out.

That laughter was the last sound Wailani made that anyone ever heard.

#

The entire thing was shown on newsreels at movie theaters across Middle America. The inaugural TansAction Invitational Surfing Competition had drawn top surfers from around the world to surf the Banzai Pipeline at Waimea Bay on Oahu’s North Shore, where weeks of competition would determine the sport’s greatest surfer. Going into the competition’s final heat on the final day, the field had been reduced to three—Australian Peter Anderson, South African Torsten van den Heever, and local favorite Wally Wailani. Anderson and van den Heever, neither of whom were as familiar with the surfing conditions on the North Shore as Wailani, had been impressive throughout each heat leading to the finals. But so had Wailani, and local bookmakers had him the odds-on favorite.

Then, after catching his first wave during the final heat, Wailani had wiped out. Neither he nor his board survived, each broken and unrepairable. During footage of the ambulance taking Wailani’s body away, the newsreel commentator called it a tragic accident.

That afternoon, Peter Anderson received the event’s championship trophy, Torsten van den Heever was awarded second place, and, posthumously, Wailani was awarded third. Within a month, Anderson began appearing in TansAction’s advertising, the fair-skinned surfing champion touting the benefits of the company’s titular product.

#

“It wasn’t an accident,” Sandy Jones insisted. “Wally’s surfboard was sabotaged.”

The bikini-clad, blue-eyed blonde sitting on the far side of my desk was as earnest as any twenty-two-year-old convinced of the righteousness of her cause. Sun-bleached hair parted in the middle had been pulled back into a ponytail that bounced as she tried to convince me to take her case. That wasn’t all that bounced, but I kept my attention focused above her shoulders, ignoring her natural flotation devices and a thickening at her mid-section that may have been the result of too many luaus.

I didn’t surf—didn’t even get close enough to the ocean to wet my toes—and the little bit I knew about the sport came from watching Gidget and Beach Blanket and all the spin-offs and imitators. What I knew well was cheating spouses, and that’s how Bill Decker Investigations paid the bills. Catch a guy making time with a philandering female and the aggrieved wife paid a pretty penny for the photographs. Sometimes the philandering husband offered even more to keep the photos from her. Either way, I hadn’t done all that much actual investigation since moving to Hawaii and setting up my own shamus shop. I didn’t try to explain any of this to the earnest young blonde. Instead, I said, “So, what do you think I can do for you?”

“Find out who sabotaged Wally’s board.”

“Take a good look at me,” I said. Thick, squat, and sporting a graying flattop, I look like what I am—an ex-cop gone to seed. “Do I look like a guy who can hang out with surfers?”

“No,” she said. “You look like a guy who can ask questions and get answers.”

There was a time when that would have been true, but those days were behind me. I’d walked a beat in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Detroit, and I hadn’t taken guff from anyone. Then one day I stumbled into an armed robbery and found myself outmatched by two masked thugs who turned my service revolver against me and left me bleeding, broken, and beyond ready for the retirement foisted upon me by the department. Hawaii had been a state for less than a month when I cashed my final paycheck, and I was eager to escape my past. What didn’t fit into the two pieces of Samsonite remaining after my divorce a decade earlier, I left behind in Detroit when I flew halfway around the world to start a new life. “So, who do you expect me to question?”

“Like, everybody. His friends. The other competitors. Anybody who could have touched his board before or during the competition.”

I had nothing better to do, so I pulled a contract from my top desk drawer and pushed it and a pen across my desk. As Sandy signed it, I said, “I’ll need a retainer.”

She pulled two sweat-dampened hundred-dollar bills from the left cup of her bikini top and dropped them on top of the contract. “That enough to get you started?”

Not wanting to seem desperate, I left the money where she’d dropped it. I pulled a legal pad in front of me, retrieved the pen she’d used to sign the contract, and said, “Give me some names, people I can talk to.”

#

I started my investigation with a visit to the morgue, and I followed up with a visit to the Honolulu Police Department. Neither the coroner nor the detective I spoke with were inclined to consider Wailani’s death anything more than the accident it appeared to be. His board had broken during the competition, and he had drowned, end of story.

Then I began working my way through the list my client had provided, beginning at Kai’s Surf Shop, where Wailani had worked on-and-off. A brown-skinned man half my age and several shades lighter than Wailani greeted me by asking, “You lost?”

“You Kai?”

When he nodded, I said, “Then I’m in the right place. I have a few questions about Wally Wailani.”

Muscular, with broad facial features and wavy black hair, Kai might have been native Hawaiian. I wasn’t certain, and I knew better than to ask.

“You knew him?” he asked.

“I’m working for someone who did.”

“You must be the haole Sandy hired,” he said. “I told her not to waste her money.”

“Why’s that?”

“Nobody tampered with Wally’s board. Nobody could have,” Kai said. “His wipeout was an accident and nothing more. Return Sandy’s money and go back to peeping motel rooms.”

I looked past him at the dozens of surfboards lined up along the wall. “Wally was too good for what happened.”

“He was,” Kai said, “but the Banzai Pipeline doesn’t care.”

#

Several of the other people on Sandy’s list—the ones who would talk to me—shared Kai’s assessment of the dead surfer and the ocean’s callousness. After a week spent tracking down surfers a third of my age who often had no fixed address and who were just as likely to be out in the water as somewhere I might find them, I shifted gears.

Two hundred dollars is a lot of walking-around money for a twenty-two-year-old, so between visits to the people on Sandy’s list, I learned more about the young blonde. Even though she spent most of her time at the beach, her official residence was with her father in an estate up in the hills. One afternoon, I found her family’s home, parked in the circular drive, and rapped on the door.

Though Jones wasn’t a common surname in Hawaii, it would have been hard to spit in Detroit without hitting at least one person sporting that moniker, so I hadn’t made the connection until Allen Jones jerked open the door and glared at me. The thickset, balding man had made a great deal of money during the post-war housing boom, building cheap tract houses in the Detroit suburbs for returning GIs, and he had moved his family to the island several years earlier to avoid legal problems at home.

Allegations were that he sold substandard houses to Black veterans at inflated prices.

I offered him my card and introduced myself. Before I had a chance to explain why I wanted to talk to him, Jones said, “I know who you are, Decker. You took photos of a colleague of mine, and it cost him a pretty penny to keep them out of his wife’s hands. Well, you got nothing on me, so you can bugger off.”

As he pushed the door closed, I said, “Your daughter hired me.”

The door reversed direction.

“Why?”

“She thinks someone killed her boyfriend.”

“I told her to let things be,” he said. “I left Detroit to get away from people like Wailani, and I didn’t come all this way for my daughter to take up with one of them.”

“Surfers?” I asked. “Or Hawaiians?”

He glared at me. “She said that boy was Hawaiian, but he looked like a n—”

I didn’t let him finish.

#

TansAction didn’t have offices in Honolulu, but the local promotor of the TansAction Invitational Surfing Competition did. I sat with Fred Tarlack, an unctuous man who would have been at home preaching redemption on a UHF station back home in Detroit. He wore a blue check sport coat over a canary-yellow button-front shirt and skinny blue tie, and he hadn’t bothered to rise when his girl led me into his office. He’d been on the phone and had waved me into one of the two guest chairs while he wrapped up his call.

“Now, don’t get me wrong,” he explained after I told him who I was and why I was there, “what happened to that boy was a tragedy, and no one would have ever wished for him to die, but it would have been a disaster for TansAction if he had won the competition. They had their eye on Peter Anderson from the start—handsome young man that every girl wants and every boy wants to be, the kind of fellow a young woman can take home to her parents. They couldn’t put Wailani’s face in their ads. Everyone would have thought they were pushing a”—he hesitated as he struggled to find an acceptable word—“an ethnic product, and people who look like Wailani certainly wouldn’t need to buy TansAction.”

“You saying TansAction rigged the competition?”

“Oh, heavens no, the competition was on the up-and-up. Those young men earned their scores, there’s no doubt about it. No doubt at all, but if maybe someone suggested to Wailani that it was in his best interest not to win then maybe he would have done something he shouldn’t have done.”

“Like kill himself?”

Tarlack held up his hands, palms forward. “That’s not what I’m saying. No. Nothing like that. No one would want that. But it worked in TansAction’s favor that he died.”

#

I’d never watched competition surfing, and I hadn’t seen the newsreel footage, so I slipped a few dollars to the Bijou projectionist, and he played it for me one weekday afternoon when the theater was closed. The seventh time through, he came out of the projectionist’s booth and asked what I was looking for. I told him I didn’t know and then asked, “You surf?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why’d you stop?”

“I was never good at it,” he said. “I didn’t trust my gut. I hesitated once too often, and the last time I tried to swallow the entire Pacific Ocean. After that my wife made me quit.”

“Made you?”

“It didn’t take much convincing,” he said. “I had a son, just born. I wanted to see him grow up.”

“So, watch this with me. Tell me what you see.”

“I can’t run the projector from here.”

I followed him into the projection booth, and he ran the newsreel footage an eighth time, the sound off so he could give a Disney-documentary voiceover about what I was watching. He explained reef breaks, and he explained how the Pipeline’s huge waves break just above a sharp and cavernous reef. Partway through, he stopped the film, ran it backward and then forward again until I could see what he saw: Wailani’s moment of hesitation.

The projectionist said, “That looks intentional.”

“You think he hesitated on purpose?”

“Whether he did or not, the Banzai Pipeline doesn’t forgive mistakes.”

#

I returned to the promotor’s office and didn’t wait for his girl to let me in. Tarlack wore the same garish clothing as before, but the black eye, broken nose, and swollen lip were new. I asked, “What happened to you?”

“Disagreement with a surfer.”

“Over what you did to Wailani?”

“I didn’t do a damn thing to that kid.”

“You convinced him to throw the competition.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“So, whose was it?”

“A couple of corporate types from TansAction. The night before the final heat they took Wailani aside and let him know it was in everyone’s best interest that he not win. They were damned blunt, too. If he won, all he would get would be the prize money. He wouldn’t get the endorsement deal or anything else. That was the stick. Then they dangled the carrot: They would give him double the prize money if he didn’t win.”

“So, where’s that money now?”

“Excuse me?”

“He didn’t win. Who gets the money?”

“Despite what those surfers thought,” Tarlack said, “It sure as hell isn’t me.”

#

I knew a bookie who worked out of the back of the Pineapple Lounge, a dive bar not far from my office, who always took my bets on the Detroit Lions, a team suffering through the sixties despite my fanatical support. The day after watching the newsreel footage of Wailani, I visited the Pineapple Lounge to put five dollars on the Lions to win their next game, and I asked about betting on surfing competitions.

My bookie laughed. “You don’t look the type.”

“I’m not,” I assured him. “I just had a few questions about the TansAction.”

“Tragedy,” he said. “Hometown boy was odds-on favorite. When Wailani wiped out and that Australian won, it set a few people back.”

“How bad?”

“Three-to-one, not enough to break the bank.”

“Any big winners?”

He responded with a familiar name.

The next morning, I visited Kai’s Surf Shop. My client was vomiting in the restroom.

“Morning sickness,” Kai said.

I glanced at his bruised knuckles and then toward the restroom door. “She’s pregnant? With Wailani’s kid?”

He nodded. “Sandy told her father, and he kicked her out. She’s been staying here the past few days.”

Before I had a chance to ask Kai the questions I had for him, Sandy stepped out of the restroom, wiping her mouth with a wet towel. When she saw me, she said, “You talked to my father.”

“I don’t think he approved of your boyfriend.”

“He doesn’t approve of anything I do.” She led me to the back room, where Kai had strung a hammock in one corner and set up a couple of deck chairs. Nothing about the corner looked comfortable, but I settled onto one of the chairs and my client settled onto the other.

I started with the answer to the question she had hired me to answer. “No one sabotaged Wally’s board.”

“But—”

“He hesitated when he shouldn’t have, and the Banzai Pipeline doesn’t forgive mistakes.”

“My Wally killed himself?”

“Not intentionally, no. There’s no reason to believe that he did.”

“So, my baby’s going to grow up without a father. Without anything. Wally told me we’d be set after the competition. The prize money would be enough to rent a little apartment, buy some things for the baby, but now? And my father—”

“I heard,” I said. “Maybe once the baby’s born and he sees his grandkid, he’ll have a change of heart.”

“I don’t think he will.”

I didn’t know what else to tell my client, and we sat in silence for several minutes. Finally, she said, “Thank you. At least now I know what happened.”

My client knew how Wailani had died, but she didn’t know why, and I didn’t feel I should be the one to tell her.

Kai walked me out, and we were standing next to my car when I said, “You bet against Wailani.”

“I knew Wally was going to throw the competition. We talked about it after those TansAction thugs threatened him. They never planned to pay him off, and it was the only way to ensure he had money for Sandy and the baby.”

“Does she know about the money?”

“Not yet, but it’s enough to take care of her and the baby for a while, and we take of our own. Wally had friends up and down the beach who will help ensure his kid has what it needs as it grows up.”

I drove to Banzai Beach, the site of the inaugural TansAction Invitational Surfing Competition, kicked off my shoes, peeled off my socks, and rolled up my pant legs. For the longest time I watched the waves breaking over the tabletop reef.

TansAction couldn’t let Wally Wailani win the competition because, in addition to the prize money, the winner received a year-long contract to be the brand’s spokesman. How would that play in middle America—a Middle America that watched Gidget and Beach Blanket and all the spin-offs and imitators, and who thought all surfers looked like James Darren and Frankie Avalon; a Middle America that spent hours in the sun darkening their skin but treated those with naturally dark skin as somehow lesser; a Middle America clinging to the fifties even as the sixties brought the Civil Rights Movement and a wave of change.

But TansAction didn’t kill Wailani.

Not directly.

They simply created an environment where it was his best interest to be a runner up, not the winner, and he’d made a fatal mistake.

I could break the story to the local papers and cause outrage among islanders, but it was unlikely anyone on the mainland would give a damn. And if I did break the story, how would that benefit Sandy Jones and her child?

As the sun touched the horizon and began sinking behind it, I walked across the warm white sand until I was ankle deep in the Pacific Ocean. I wouldn’t go any further—not with the case and not into the water because neither the average American nor the Banzai Pipeline gave a damn about what happened at Waimea Bay on Oahu’s North Shore.

Michael Bracken (www.CrimeFictionWriter.com) is an Edgar Award and Shamus Award nominee whose crime fiction has appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, and many other publications. Additionally, Bracken is the editor of Black Cat Mystery Magazine and several anthologies, including the Anthony Award-nominated The Eyes of Texas. In 2024, he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his contributions to Texas literature. He lives, writes, and edits in Texas.