Mahu Blood (30 page)

“Think it was a military injury?” Ray asked.

“Wonder if he’s getting any treatment at Tripler?” I asked.

That was the Army medical hospital in Honolulu where Mike’s parents worked, but I didn’t think I could ask either of them to pry into Dex’s records.

“Actually I have something that might relate to that,” Harry said, showing us a printout from a pharmacy a few blocks from the Kope Bean warehouse.

I groaned. “I don’t even want to look,” I said, but I looked anyway. “You know, you’re making Ray and me crazy with this. It is so illegal to go into someone’s medical records without a court order.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “So forget for the moment how I might or might not have gotten hold of this information. He has prescriptions for propranolol and primidone. I was curious to see what those are for, so I did some research. Propanolol is a beta blocker; doctors prescribe it in conjunction with primidone when a patient has a condition called Essential Tremor, ET.”

“Phone home,” Ray said, holding an imaginary phone to his ear.

“This ET condition would explain why his hands shook?” I asked.

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Harry sat back in his chair. “Yeah. And taking his meds would block adrenaline in his system, calm him down enough so that he could shoot.”

“Tanaka has the motive for all three killings—to protect Ezekiel’s position as the KOH figurehead, because KOH is essential to the money laundering operation. And now we can see that he had the means—Dex.”

I got up and started pacing around, just like I’d done back at Fields and Yamato. For some reason that helped me think.

“Dex was in the military, so we could get a subpoena to determine if he was qualified on the M16A4 rifle with sniper scope,” I continued. “Which would give him the training to kill Aunty Edith and shoot at us outside the Ohana. And as long as he took his medication, his hand wouldn’t shake and he should be able to fire a rifle accurately.”

“And cut Adam O’Malley’s throat,” Ray said.

I looked through the paperwork on my desk until I found the images we’d captured from the video at the Honolulu Sunset.

The face of the guy with O’Malley never showed, but there was one good shot of the guy’s lower left arm, with a tattoo of a grinning skull there. It matched the skull tattoo we could see on Dex’s arm in the porno pictures.

“Suppose we go out to the Kope Bean warehouse and talk to Dex about his extracurricular activities?” I asked.

“Fine with me,” Ray said. “But if he starts striking poses I’m leaving the conversation up to you.”

he weN BAg

Harry left, and Ray and I went in to see Sampson. Fortunately we still hadn’t gotten a new case handed to us.

“Everything we’ve found in the three murders we’re investigating ties back to Jun Tanaka,” I said. “He was the biggest backer of Kingdom of Hawai’i, which he used as a conduit for money laundering. The figurehead for KOH is Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, and we believe that Edith Kapana, the first victim, was going to expose Ezekiel’s hospitalization.”

I showed him the copies of Ezekiel’s records. “She gave these pages to Adam O’Malley. That made them both a threat to Tanaka’s investment in KOH. Stuart McKinney was a witness to the large amounts of cash passing through the Kope Bean warehouse. Tanaka couldn’t afford to have that information get out.”

“And Trale connects how?”

“He played in Tanaka’s card games,” Ray said. “He worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean and also did other jobs for him, like driving Ezekiel around.”

I continued, “He lived with Edith Kapana, the first victim.

He worked with Stuart McKinney, the second victim. He fits the description of the man who went home with Adam O’Malley, the third victim.”

“Means?” Sampson asked.

“Dex served in the military,” I said, handing him a printout of what Ray’s friend had e-mailed. Sampson knocked the miniature cannon on his desk back and forth a couple of times as he thought.

Ray jumped in. “We have a witness who will testify that Dex picked him up at a gay bar called The Garage, then mugged him.

We think we can make Dex as the guy who left The Garage with O’Malley the night he was killed.”

266 Neil S. Plakcy

“Opportunity?” Sampson asked.

“We’re waiting on fingerprint comparison to see if we can place Dex in O’Malley’s apartment,” I said. “We’re going to find Dex and talk to him, see if he has an alibi for the times of the three killings.”

“Okay,” Sampson said. “If Trale doesn’t have an alibi, I think you’ve got enough to pull him in.”

I walked back to our desks with Ray, who held out his hand for a fist bump, and I knocked my hand against his. “You and me, brah,” I said. “You and me against the world.”

“Okay, quoting Helen Reddy is just a little too gay, even for me,” Ray said, and we both started laughing.

We drove to the warehouse under cloudless skies the color of the light-blue porcelain floor tiles in my parents’ kitchen.

My mother used to say that when she was stuck in the kitchen cooking for her husband and three sons, at least she could feel like she was outside, walking on air.

The white pickup registered to Dex wasn’t in the Kope Bean parking lot, but we still made a circuit of the property, looking for Dex on the loading dock, before we went inside.

Tuli was at her computer, taking orders, when we walked in, but Dex wasn’t there.

“He was supposed to be here Labor Day and yesterday,” she said, taking off her headset. “People don’t stop drinking coffee just because it’s a holiday, you know. But he didn’t show up.” She shook her head. “First Stuart McKinney, now Dexter Trale. It’s hard to get good help these days.”

“You haven’t heard from him?” I asked.

“Not since he left on Friday afternoon.”

We thanked her and drove out to the house in Papakolea where he’d been living with Leelee and her family. She answered the door, the baby attached as always to her hip. Her right eye had been blackened a few days before; the skin around it had turned yellow and purple. Her hair hung in greasy strands around her MAhu BLood
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face.

“We need to see Dex,” I said.

She started to cry. “He
wen bag
.”

“Left,” I whispered to Ray.

“Friday. He fed up wid the keiki crying,
hana hou, hana hou
.”

She was wearing a shapeless T-shirt with what looked like baby vomit on it, a pair of shorts and rubber slippers. She looked so young and vulnerable, and I felt bad for her, stuck in such an awful situation without anyone to help her. Her shoulders shook.

“I don’t know why the keiki cry. Aunty Edith only one who make him
pau
.”

I dug a tissue from my pocket and gave it to her. Ray took the baby, who was crying, too. “I’m going to get him fixed up,”

he said.

Leelee led me into the kitchen. She hadn’t been cleaning up for a couple of days; dirty dishes and baby bottles were stacked in the sink, and ants crawled over an open package of crackers on the counter.

I felt out of my depth. Ray babysat as a teenager, so at least he had a handle on how to look after the keiki. I may be in my mid-thirties, but in some circumstances the first thing I think to do is to call my parents.

Leelee sat on the sofa, looking dejected. I walked into the kitchen and called my mother. “Mom, you remember Leelee,” I said, when she answered.

“Oh, no. What’s happened to her?”

I started washing the dishes, holding my cell phone against my shoulder as I gave her the quick rundown.

“You can’t call Social Services,” my mother said. “You know the first thing they want to do is take away the baby. Your father and I will come over now and help get things cleaned up.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“We’re all ohana,” she said.

268 Neil S. Plakcy

By the time I finished washing the dishes, Leelee had calmed down. “Dex come home Friday from work,” she said, when I found her back in the living room. “Maybe six, seven o’clock, in bad mood. I say, ‘Kay den, Dex, no make like dat.’”

She blew her nose. “He get all stink on me. He start grab his stuff, I was all like, wat doing? No leave me! Dat when he hit me.”

“You know where he went?” I asked.

She shook her head. She had gone to look for him on Saturday, walking all over the neighborhood, but no one had seen him. Or at least, no one would tell her if they had. After that, she’d stayed home, hoping he would show up. But she hadn’t been able to do much more than get out of bed and heat up some bottles of formula for the baby.

Ray came back in with the baby; he’d given him a quick bath and changed his diapers. “Not exactly what they’d call police work back at the academy,” he said, handing the baby to her.

“Keiki smell so
ono
!” Leelee said, snuggling her nose into the boy’s chest, and he giggled.

“Any chance Dex is going to come back here?” I asked Leelee.

She started to cry again. “He say he no come back, evah.”

Ray put out a BOLO on Dex’s license plate, warning that he might be armed and dangerous, while I called my brother.

“Hey, Lui, your buddy Lan Long did a runner. You know if he was friendly with any of the guys in your pai gow game?”

“Don’t think so. Tung was the only guy he ever really talked to. Though he bragged a lot to us about his time in the army, all his shooting skill and so on.”

I made a mental note of that. Dex really could shoot, and Tanaka knew it.

“You hear anything from the FBI after the raid?” Lui asked.

“Nothing. Listen, brah, you call me ASAP if Dexter Trale contacts you. Lan Long, that is. He’s very dangerous.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Lui said.

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Ray sat on the sofa next to Leelee and asked if there was any place she thought Dex might go. “He have any friends? Family?

A place he could hide out?”

“I never met no family. He said his parents die long time ago.”

“Where did he live before he moved in here?” Ray asked.

She looked as if we’d asked her one of those analogy questions from the SAT, the kind that used to boggle my mind.

“Don’t know.”

“Come on, Leelee, you’ve got to give us something,” I said.

She started to cry again. “Don’t know. He just show up. I think he work with Uncle Amos on some job. He come over one day, and then he move in.”

I heard my mother’s car in the driveway and went to meet her. “Your father’s pressure is up so I left him at home,” she said, kissing my cheek. “How’s Leelee?”

“Getting better.” I led her into the kitchen, where she looked around.

“At least she has some diapers and some formula. So things haven’t fallen apart completely.” She shook her head. “After we get organized I’ll see if I can talk to the neighbors about helping her.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

Ray and I drove around the neighborhood looking for information on Dexter Trale. Everybody we found, though, was glad that he was gone. One old lady at the community center called him a
pilau moke
, a dirty crook.

“Is he why nobody helps Leelee?” I asked.

“Dat girl babooze to stay wid him. But now he gone, I make her some sticky rice.”

“That would be very nice of you, Aunty.”

I figured it was up to us to make sure that Dexter stayed gone.

tRANsMissioNs

“Sticky rice,” I said, as we walked away from the old lady and climbed into the Jeep. My stomach grumbled. “What do you say we stop for some lunch on our way back to work?”

Ray was all for that plan, so I swung past a Zippy’s, where we both ordered bowls of chili. We stood around in the tiled lobby of the restaurant, hovering like everyone else until the server called our numbers.

“Edith Kapana was a nosy old woman,” I said. “She knew about Ezekiel’s stay at the mental hospital, and that could destroy the foundation of KOH. Who’s going to choose a crazy man as king of Hawai’i?”

“Dex worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean. He told Tanaka about Edith, and Tanaka hired him to kill Edith, to protect his investment in KOH. And when Stuey started talking to us about the money being sorted at the warehouse, Dex killed him, too.”

The server called our numbers, and we carried our food to a table by the window.

“A skinny guy with tattooed arms picked up Adam O’Malley at The Garage,” I continued as we sat down. “That was Dexter Trale. Dex has been picking up extra cash posing for naked pictures and rolling gay men he picks up in bars. He went home with O’Malley, slit his throat, then staged the scene to make us think it was a sex crime.”

Ray sighed. “We still don’t have any concrete proof we could take to a DA.”

“We need to connect Dex to Jun Tanaka, because Tanaka is the one who benefits from the murders,” I admitted. “It’s not enough that Dex worked for him and that my brother heard Dex talking about his marksmanship skills at the pai gow game. But with Dex in the wind and Tanaka with the FBI, we don’t have any place to go.”

272 Neil S. Plakcy

My phone rang as we were leaving the restaurant. I looked at the display and saw it was my mother’s cell. “Hi, Mom, what’s up?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, I heard voices in the background, as if she’d dialed my number accidentally and I was overhearing her conversations.

I was about to hang up when I heard someone say, “Please, Dex.” It sounded like Leelee’s voice.

I turned the phone so Ray could listen. We walked to a shady spot by the side of the building, away from the noise of traffic.

“Stupid damn bitch,” a man’s voice said.

The idea that Dex was anywhere near my mother was pretty scary. The sound faded, and I pressed the phone to my ear, trying to hear more. Ray handed me his phone and mouthed, “Call your father. Where’s your mother?”

He took my phone from me and walked a few steps away.

My father answered, yawning as if I’d woken him.

“Dad, where’s Mom?”

“Still at that girl’s house, I guess. My blood pressure was up this morning so she made me stay home. What’s up?”