Mahu Blood (18 page)

“Dexter Trale, Leelee, Bunchy Parker, Maile Kanuha and Ezekiel Kapuāiwa.”

“David Currie at the Ohana. The receptionist and the counselors.”

We worked on the list all the way back to headquarters, but none of the women on the list matched that voice I heard, and it didn’t bring us any closer to finding out who had made the call.

At our desks, we went back to the pages Harry had given me and our diagram connecting people. When we finished, I
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said, “We’ve still got those pages Harry printed out in Japanese.

My mother is half-Japanese, but I’m almost certain she doesn’t understand written
kanji
. One of her sisters might know more, though, or one of my cousins. I’m going to call her and see if she knows anyone to translate.”

“Your family’s already in this case up to their butts,” Ray said.

He’d gotten his cheek patched up, but we were both pretty shaky after getting shot at, both of us spoiling for the fight we hadn’t had a chance at with our unknown shooter. “Your mom helping Leelee, your brother gambling. Let’s try and avoid drawing any more of them in, okay?” I was surprised that he didn’t knock out the idea of using the pages completely. I guess I’m having an influence on him.

“You have a better idea?”

“How about we do this the right way, get a department translator?”

“Okay.” I opened up my drawer and pulled out a requisition form. The department still hadn’t moved far enough into the 21st century to put multi-part forms on line; this one needed signatures from our lieutenant and his boss, as well as the assistant chief in charge of support services. We had to attach copies of all the relevant documents, as well as a detailed explanation of what we needed and how it related to an ongoing investigation.

“You get to fill out the form,” I said, handing it to him. “Last I heard there’s a three-week backlog for translators. Be sure to indicate that we don’t know where the pages came from. Call it an anonymous source. And maybe by the time we get a translator assigned, we’ll have enough evidence to make the connection between Tanaka and the murders.”

Ray took the paper from me and looked it up and down. He frowned, then said, “There’s a Japanese guy in Julie’s program. I can get her to ask him.”

“Make sure you get his name and social security number, so we can run a background check on him before we give him access to sensitive materials,” I said.

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“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“You want to run everything by the book. Just covering your back, brah.”

He slid the translator request in his desk drawer. “Call your mother.”

I asked how she was doing, and she told me she was in the living room, pruning a bonsai my grandfather had created. I knew it; that stunted pine that was older than any of our living relatives. I explained what I needed. In the background, I could hear the TV going, most likely KVOL, Lui’s station. That made me think about my big brother. It was one thing to pull him out of a pai gow game, but if he had a serious gambling habit that was a much bigger problem.

“Your cousin Ben,” my mother said, and it took me a minute to remember what I’d asked her.

“Surfer Ben?” The last time I’d seen Ben, I was working undercover on the North Shore, and he was a competitive surfer following the waves.

“He majored in business at U.H. and minored in Japanese.

Your Aunt Pua is always saying how he’s going to be a big businessman when he finishes surfing. I think she’s jealous that my sons are all so successful.”

“Yeah, we’re a bunch of princes. Any idea where Ben is these days? Surf ’s lousy on the North Shore.”

“I’ll call Pua and ask her. I owe her a call anyway.”

I wondered how my mother could owe any of her sisters a call, when it seemed like she spoke to each of them every day.

She was the oldest and Pua the youngest; Aunt Pua was an unreformed flower child, a hippie, far from my prim and proper mother. She was an aromatherapist at a posh resort in Hawai’i Kai and had been married and divorced three times. Ben was her youngest child.

When I hung up, Ray was pulling pages off the fax machine.

It was the report we requested on Bunchy Parker’s son Brian, the
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Army sharpshooter who had gone missing shortly after Edith’s death. “He hasn’t left Oahu by plane,” Ray said. “He could be on a boat, or he could be holed up somewhere.”

“Or he could be dead.”

“I called the morgue, but they don’t have any John Does who match Brian’s description.”

“Doesn’t mean he isn’t dead. Just nobody’s found the body yet.”

“You’re such a cheerful guy,” Ray said. “I’m going to do some more checking. I still think he’s a good suspect.”

“While you do that, I’m going down to Vice.”

I found Akoni at his desk and filled him in on what my brother had said about the other games—fan tan and 13 card, other Chinese gambling games and the video poker machines allegedly in the warehouse on River Street.

“We’ve been hearing rumors about those,” Akoni said.

“Nobody would say where they were, though. You get an address?”

“Just River Street.”

“You think you could convince your brother to express an interest in them?” Akoni asked. “Get some more information?”

“I can try. He’s spooked right now. You know, he’s always been number one son, and nothing ever goes wrong for him.

Last night was a wakeup call.”

Akoni promised to keep me in the loop if he found out anything that might relate to my case, and I promised the same thing about his. When I got back upstairs, Ray and I ran the cases down for Lieutenant Sampson.

Behind him, I saw a photo of his stepdaughter Kitty, in her dark green U.H. cap and gown, holding her diploma case against her side, with a collection of leis around her neck. I wondered if her mother, who had abandoned her to Sampson’s care years before, had come to her graduation, and for a moment I lost the thread of our conversation. When I snapped back I realized Ray MAhu BLood
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was talking.

“What we saw last night outside the Wing Wah supports what Stuart McKinney told us—that a guy called Mr. T brought a satchel of money to the warehouse at night. At first we thought it was Dexter Trale, but now we believe it’s Jun Tanaka.”

Sampson leaned back in his high-backed chair. His polo shirt for the day was an olive green, which looked good with his chocolate-brown slacks.

I threw in what Levi had told us about suspecting Tanaka.

“Mr. Hirsch is a savvy businessman. I believe there’s something fishy going on.”

“So you think someone killed McKinney because he blabbed about the money?” Sampson asked.

We both nodded.

“And how does this tie into the woman’s death at the rally?”

“That’s the part we’re not sure about,” I said. “But there are so many links.”

“Sounds like you’re making a lot of very tenuous assumptions.”

He sat back at his desk and steepled his fingers, and I felt like a kid who’d been called in to the principal’s office. “Is there a single thing in your file we could take to the DA?”

I resisted the urge to open my mouth and start talking. Ray didn’t, though. “We’re making a lot of progress,” he protested.

“How do you even know these murders are connected?”

Sampson asked. “You have no direct link between the woman who was shot at the rally and the homeless man who was beaten and then set on fire.”

“He wasn’t homeless, just crazy.” I started ticking things off on my fingers. “Stuart McKinney worked with Dexter Trale, who shared a house with Edith Kapana. Stuey lived at the Ohana, in Kaneohe, and the day before she died, Edith went up there to ask about Ezekiel Kapuāiwa. Ezekiel lived at the Ohana for a while and worked at the Kope Bean—where Stuey and Dex worked and which is owned by Jun Tanaka. Tanaka is the backer
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behind the Kingdom of Hawai’i, which Ezekiel leads and which sponsored the rally where Edith was killed. And somebody who knows the Ohana is involved in this case thought we were getting close enough to call us into an ambush this morning.”

Ray jumped in. “Bunchy Parker runs a rival group to the Kingdom of Hawai’i. His son Brian was a sharpshooter in the Army. He could have shot Edith. And Stuey’s murder could be tied into money laundering at the Kope Bean warehouse, money that could be funding KOH. Maybe Stuey told Brian or Bunchy about the money.”

“That’s what I mean,” Sampson said. “You guys are all over the place. So essentially you’ve got nothing. However, you have gotten somebody scared enough to take some pot shots at you, which means you must be getting close. You have two more days to show me some progress, or I’m putting you back in the rotation.”

“Two days,” Ray grumbled, as we walked out of Sampson’s office. “How much are we going to figure out in two days? We’ve had a week and a half so far, and we still don’t have a strong suspect or a smoking gun.”

“Then we’ve got work to do.”

Night VisioN

My cell rang as I reached my desk. Jimmy Chang was a beat cop I’d known for a while, who had recently been transferred downtown from Mānoa.

“Aloha, brah,” he said. “We’ve got a visual on that Dodge pickup you were looking for. Plates match the BOLO.”

It took me a few seconds to realize he meant Brian Parker’s truck. “Where are you?”

“Across from a convenience store two blocks ewa from Ala Moana Mall.”

“On our way.” We got there about five minutes later, pulling up next to Jimmy’s cruiser. He was leaning against the car, talking to an officer in uniform I recognized as Kitty Cardozo, Lieutenant Sampson’s stepdaughter.

I met Kitty soon after I started working for Sampson, and she came out to me as a lesbian a few months later. The lieutenant wanted her to go to law school after she graduated from U.H., but Kitty was determined to go to the police academy. I knew from the lieutenant that she had graduated at the top of her class, but I’d never seen her on patrol before.

“Kimo!” She kissed my cheek and hugged me. “It’s great to see you.”

Jimmy looked at me. “You two know each other?”

I looked at Kitty. “He doesn’t know?”

“I didn’t want to tell anyone,” she said. “I didn’t want anybody to think I was riding on my dad’s coattails.”

Jimmy was looking confused, though I had an idea that Ray recognized her from the pictures in Sampson’s office. Kitty turned to Jimmy and said, “Lieutenant Sampson in CID is my stepfather. Sorry. I guess I should have told you.”

Jimmy did not look happy. “Cardozo’s in the FTEP,” he said
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to us. FTEP stands for Field Training and Evaluation Program; newly graduated recruits were partnered with experienced officers so they could apply the theoretical knowledge they gained at the academy to hands-on field training.

I understood why Jimmy wouldn’t be happy. He was young, in his late twenties, though he’d been on patrol long enough to qualify as Kitty’s supervisor. If I were him, I’d worry that every screw-up, every shortcut, would end up filtering back to Sampson.

“Congratulations,” I said to Kitty. “And you, too, Jimmy. You won’t find a smarter, more dedicated trainee.”

“And I don’t tell my dad anything that happens on the job,”

she said.

Jimmy seemed to relax. “You see who was driving that pickup?” Ray asked, pointing to the truck we thought belonged to Brian Parker. Just as he did, though, a guy who matched Brian’s description exited the convenience store and headed for the truck.

Ray and I cut him off. “Mr. Parker?” I asked, showing him my shield. “Honolulu PD. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Brian looked around as if mapping out an escape route and saw Jimmy and Kitty behind us. “What’s up?”

He had a super-sized soda in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. I wondered if he’d been smoking pakalolo, but his eyes weren’t red. “We’ve been looking for you for a couple of days,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

“Just chilling.” He was a skinny guy, a couple inches under six feet, with what looked like military tattoos on his arms.

“You still pretty good with a rifle?” Ray asked. “You were some kind of marksman in the Army.”

Brian shrugged and took a drink of his soda. “I get out in the country and practice sometimes. No law against that, is there?”

“How do you feel about Hawaiian nationalism?” I asked.

“Your dad’s pretty involved in it. How about you?”

“What’s this all about? Is my dad in trouble again?”

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“We’ll ask the questions for a while, how’s that?” Ray said.

“We ask, you answer.”

Brian took a long sip from his soda, then said, “The whole nationalism thing, it’s my dad’s gig. Me, I could care less.”

I nodded. “Want to tell us where you were on Statehood Day, eleven in the morning?”

He bit his lip. “You won’t tell my father, will you?”

I knew from his army records that Brian Parker was nearly thirty. Old enough that his father’s opinion shouldn’t matter. I wondered what he was hiding and why. “Not unless we have to,”

I said.

“I have a girlfriend,” Brian said. “She’s haole, though, and my dad don’t like us to mix. So I haven’t told him.”

“You were with her that Friday morning?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ve been working private security at night, off the books, for this rapper dude over from the mainland to work on an album. Days, I’m at her house.” We got her name and address, and Ray stepped away to call her and verify the alibi.

“You know anybody involved with your dad’s group, or any group for that matter, who might have had a reason to disrupt the KOH rally, kill that old lady?”

Brian relaxed and leaned back against his truck, tearing open the bag of chips. He offered it to me but I shook my head.

“My dad’s got a temper, you know that,” he said, grabbing a handful of chips from the bag. “But he’s not the kind of guy to plan out killing someone, certainly not an old lady.”

He chomped noisily and then drank some soda. I stood there in the sun, my patience wearing, as Kitty and Jimmy stood at ease in the background.

“Most of the people in my dad’s group, they’re the same way,”

Brian said, crumpling the top of the chip bag. “More interested in culture than violence. You ask me, the real nuts are the guys from KOH. You ever seen that Ezekiel dude, the one who says he’s descended from Kamehameha? He’s seriously crazy.”

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“Yeah, I got that idea myself.”

Ray came back to us, and I could see from the disappointment on his face that Brian’s alibi stood up. And after talking to Brian, I thought he wasn’t involved, but I took his cell number, in case we needed him again.

“Doesn’t mean she isn’t covering for him,” Ray said, as we got back in the Jeep. “Brian’s girlfriend.” But I could hear in his voice that he had given up.

We were frustrated. We had only two days to solve two murders, and no leads. And yet, we must be getting close, or why would someone shoot at us?

By the time we got back to headquarters it was time to clock out, and we had no reason to stick around and rack up overtime.

Mike was already home by the time I got there, and he’d walked and fed the dog. They were sitting on the sofa in the living room reading the newspaper. At least Mike was; I think Roby was just looking at the pictures.

Mike suggested we go out to dinner, to the little Italian place down the hill that we’d developed a fondness for. We talked out our current cases, and some of my frustration eased just being with him and being able to share what was going on in both our lives. When we got back home we ended up in bed, and I felt pretty good about the way things were working out between us.

RottiNg BeANs

I overslept, and by the time I woke up Mike had already left for work. There was a note on the kitchen table—“I fed and walked the dog”—with no signature. Since we had no
menehunes
, little Hawaiian elves, living with us, I figured it had come from him. There was a happy face at the end of the note.

When Ray and I met up at headquarters, he said, “I’ve been thinking. This case keeps coming back around to the Kope Bean.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down at my desk and leaning back in my chair. We’d been to the distribution center where Dex and Stuey worked, the branch in Kaneohe where Ezekiel had been a barista, not to mention various places we’d gone just for coffee, like the Chinatown store on Hotel Street, where we’d talked with Akoni and then with my brother Lui.

“If there’s money laundering going on, you’d think someone at the store level might know about it,” Ray said, drumming his fingers on his desk.

“I don’t know. Usually the baristas are teenagers. But there was that older woman we talked to. What was her name? Mili? We could go look her up again.”

“Sounds like a good place to start.”

I called the Kope Bean store and found out that Mili no longer worked there. “You know her last name?” I asked.

The girl put me on hold. I got to listen to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole while I waited, but by the third song I was ready to reach through the phone, grab his ukulele, and use it to bludgeon the clerk who’d left me on hold for so long.

When the girl came back, she said, “France.”

“Excuse me? She went to France?”

“No, it’s her last name,” the girl said. “Mili France. Listen, I got customers. I gotta go.”

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She hung up on me, which didn’t improve my disposition toward her. But at least we had a last name on Mili, and it wasn’t Peed or Meter. I looked Mili France up in the phone book, and found an address in Kaneohe, a few blocks from the Kope Bean.

I called the number, but there was no answer and no machine.

My cell rang. “I couldn’t get hold of Pua until now,” my mother said. “She has a new boyfriend.” The ice in her voice could have chilled Kilauea.

“And?”

“Your cousin Ben is at Pua’s till tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Mom. Love to Dad.”

I hung up and dialed my Aunt Pua’s condo. Ben had just gotten in from surfing; he said he could hang around and wait for us to stop by.

“Change of plan,” I told Ray. “Let’s swing out to Hawai’i Kai before we look for Mili, see if my cousin can read any of the Japanese stuff Harry found.”

My aunt’s condo was in a two-story building on a canal with a lanai overlooking the water. I figured aromatherapy must pay well, or else she had some good alimony coming in from one or more of her previous husbands.

Ben greeted us at the door. He’s good-looking, in a scrawny, surfer way, but he had a soul patch on his chin that made me want to hand him a razor. There didn’t look like an ounce of fat on his six-foot something body, and he wore his black hair loose, down to his shoulders. His father was a haole Aunt Pua married and divorced in Vegas, and none of us ever met him. Like me, Ben looks a little Asian around his eyes, and his skin takes a tan well.

He offered us beers, which sadly we had to decline, though he indulged. He led us out to the lanai, where we sat down amid a forest of purple and white Vanda orchids, the music of the current in the waterway behind us.

“Can you read some Japanese stuff for us?” I asked.

“I can try.”

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I showed him the printouts Harry had found online.

Ben scanned them for a couple of minutes, as I leaned back in the comfortable armchair and looked at the water. A hedge of yellow hibiscus ran alongside the bank, and its blossoms were like a scattering of tiny suns. The orchids perfumed the air, and somewhere in the distance wind chimes tinkled.

Pua had owned the place for years, buying in long before prices rose to the stratosphere. If one of us won the lottery, I could see Mike and me living in a place like that someday. I wondered if the homeowner’s association allowed dogs. Roby, after all, had become part of our family.

Ben looked up. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“Tell us what it is.”

“As near as I can tell, it’s a report about yakuza action in Yokohama,” he said. “From some official agency with a long title.”

“Any mention of a guy named Jun Tanaka?” Ray asked.

Ben nodded. “It looks like they knew he was involved in gambling and something else I can’t understand, but they had no way to prosecute him.”

He pushed the pages back to me. “I studied business Japanese.

Sorry, there’s a lot there I don’t understand.”

“Thanks, brah, I appreciate it. So where’s the surf good these days?”

“I got back from the Billabong Pro in J Bay. Surf was awesome.”

“Jeffreys Bay is in South Africa,” I said to Ray. “Some of the most consistent waves on the planet.”

“And how,” Ben said. “It’s a pain to get to—you’ve got to fly to Cape Town and then go another couple hundred miles to Eastern Cape Province.”

“How’d you do?” I was already jealous; I’d never been a good enough surfer to get invited to a foreign tournament, and Jeffreys
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Bay was one of those sites I’d always wanted to surf.

“I came in fifth. Kelly Slater and Mick Fanning were both on fire.”

We talked surf for a while. Ben was leaving for Mundaka, on the Basque coast of Spain, for another Billabong tournament. I was glad for him, but I still wanted to knock him on the head, grab his board and take his place.

We left Ben starting to wax his board before the afternoon’s surfing. As we walked back to the Jeep, I said, “I can see Tanaka putting out a hit on Stuart McKinney because he talked too much about the money at the Kope Bean warehouse. He’s got the connections.”

“But how can we tie him to Edith Kapana’s shooting?”

“Not sure. But I feel in my bones that he’s involved in it somehow.”

From Hawai’i Kai I drove us up to Kaneohe to look for Mili France. We parked in front of her apartment building and rang the bell. She was home by then, and after we’d identified ourselves, she buzzed us inside.

She wore khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt with capped sleeves. She was apprehensive when she answered the door, worry etching lines in her forehead. With her close-cropped gray hair, though, she exuded a no-nonsense air.

“What can I do for you, Detectives? Are you still asking questions about Ezekiel?”

“If we could come in?” I asked.

Hesitantly, she stepped back and ushered us into the living room. The furniture was simple, but good quality, solid wood chairs and a sofa covered in a tropical floral pattern, hibiscus and bird of paradise against a green background. A galley kitchen took up the back wall.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions about the Kope Bean.

You’re not working there anymore?”

She shook her head. “I was let go on Friday. No notice. No MAhu BLood
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reason. Just so long, sayonara and aloha.” There was a bitterness in her tone that I hadn’t heard when we spoke before.

“I’ll be frank with you, Mili,” I said. “We’re looking into some unorthodox business practices there, and we were hoping you could fill in some details.”

“With pleasure. I’ve been around the block a few times, Detective. I know when something stinks, and it’s not rotting coffee beans.” She paused. “Did you ever know the Kaplans?”

she asked, and we shook our heads. “Lovely people. Hyman and Sara Kaplan. They started the Kope Bean with a single store in downtown Honolulu. They had twelve locations by the time they sold to Mr. Tanaka.”

I pulled out my notebook and started writing. “About five years ago, things started to change. Little things, at first. New machines that brewed with fewer beans. The coffee was weaker, but nobody noticed except some of the regulars. Then we started hiring from the Ohana.”

She looked at us. “Where are my manners?” she asked. “I never even offered you something to drink. I still have a stash of good beans.”

I looked at Ray. “I could use a cup of coffee,” I said, and he nodded.

She stepped over to the galley kitchen and pulled a bag of the Kope Bean’s signature blend of arabica beans and macadamia nut flavors from her freezer. I remembered a similar situation with Maile Kanuha at her office, when she brewed coffee for us from beans she swore by. I hoped Mili’s beans were better.

We didn’t talk while she ground the beans, but once the coffee was brewing she came back to us. “I have nothing against the handicapped,” she said. “Some of the staff we hired were lovely people. Sometimes a little slow, to be sure, and a couple did have anger management problems and had to be let go. But…”

“But what?” Ray asked.