Mahu Blood (33 page)

He told us about picking up guys at The Garage, letting them suck him off, sometimes tying them up or hitting them, then stealing their cash and jewelry. “So it was real lucky it was Thursday afternoon when Mr. T came over to the warehouse,

‘cause I was pretty sure this O’Malley guy would be at The Garage that night.”

Not so lucky for Adam O’Malley, I thought.

Dex flexed his shoulders like a rooster strutting. “I went over there looking for him, and sure as shit, he was right there at the
290 Neil S. Plakcy

bar.”

Ray and I shared a glance. Premeditation was always good to have on the record.

“I went up to the bar, chatted him up,” Dex continued. “He was all over me. It was easy as pie to get him back to his place.

And once we were inside, he was all mine.”

Dex grinned broadly, remembering. “I made him take all his clothes off, and I tied his wrists and ankles to the bed. The dude was squirming, he was so eager for it. But I told him he was going to have to cooperate with me if he wanted my dick.”

“Cooperate how?” I asked.

“I told him I needed those papers for Mr. T. That if he was a good boy and gave me what I wanted, I’d give him what he wanted. But he got all crazy on me. Said I didn’t know who I was messing with, that he’d drag my ass to jail.”

“That must have pissed you off,” I said.

“You bet. I went into the kitchen and got a knife from the drawer, and when I came back I held it to his balls. He caved like a little baby. Told me all the papers I wanted were in a folder on his desk.”

He looked at us. “After that, I couldn’t just let him go. I mean, what if he did try to drag me to court? Mr. T wouldn’t be happy about that. So I grabbed him by the hair and sliced his throat.”

Well, there went our premeditation. But it was still murder.

“I mean, if he’d cooperated, I’d have fucked his ass, grabbed the papers and walked out. But not after those threats. Anyway, I was pissed by then. So I dug around his drawers and found that big black dildo, and I rammed it up his ass so you guys would think it was just a sex thing.”

I felt bile rising in the back of my throat. I wanted to see Dex get locked up for a good long time, preferably with a big tough cellmate who’d make Dex his bitch.

It took us hours to get everything down on tape and to get the warrants issued for Dex and Tanaka for all three murders.

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We booked Dex, but Tanaka remained in federal custody while Salinas assembled his money laundering case.

It was after midnight by the time I got home. I was exhausted, and I wanted nothing more than to climb into bed and go to sleep. Mike, however, had other plans.

When I came in he was sitting at the kitchen table with a pad of paper, making lists. Roby was sprawled at his feet and barely looked up at me as I walked in.

“What happened? Where’s that blood from?” Mike said, looking at my shirt.

“Don’t worry, it’s not mine.” I thought it was pretty cool to have someone to come home to who cared about me. I leaned down and kissed his stubbled cheek.

He sniffed. “Smells like shit. Take it off.”

I smiled. “There’s a surprise for you underneath.”

I unbuttoned the shirt, showing off the fire department T-shirt, and Mike burst out laughing. “You’re joining my team.”

“Speaking of your team.” I told him about the EMT who knew I was his partner.

I was worried he’d freak out. But instead he said, “Yeah, I know him. Cool guy.”

Maybe I was just too tired. That didn’t sound like Mike. But instead of starting an argument, I sunk into the chair across from him and motioned to the pages on the kitchen table. “What’s all that?”

“I want to have a housewarming party.”

I yawned. “You’ve been in this house for years.”

“Yeah, but you just moved in. Look at this list of people I want to invite.”

He pushed a sheet of paper across the table to me. He’d included my parents and his, my brothers and their families, Terri and Levi, Harry and Arleen, Ray and Julie and a bunch of other people I didn’t know. I recognized some names as his coworkers
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and friends.

“You want to have this many?”

“I want to make a big luau. Haoa can dig the
imu
for us, right?”

An imu is a big pit in the back yard where you roast a pig.

“We have to make sure Roby doesn’t dig it up,” I said. Roby looked up from the floor as if my mentioning his name indicated there was a treat in his future. When he saw nothing coming, he slumped back to the tile.

“Yeah, dogs,” Mike said. “Everybody has to bring their dogs.”

He made a note on another piece of paper. “And the Greshams.

They’ll want to see how Roby is doing.”

The only way I could drag him away from the kitchen was to start stripping, there in front of him. I had the fire department T-shirt and my pants off, my dick poking out of the slit in my boxers, before he finally got the hint.

After Mike and I had licked and sucked and rubbed each other to orgasm, he went right to sleep, but I lay there in bed next to him for a few minutes, relishing the feeling, once again, of bringing down the bad guys and making things right with the world, even if only for a little while.

LuAu

The next morning, Ray and I were back in the rotation, but we made time, over the next few days, to pull together all the details. Once Dex was in jail, Leelee confessed that she thought Dex had done something with her uncle Amos. Dex and Amos had fought a lot, especially when Amos was drunk and Dex was high.

One day Amos didn’t come home, and Edith and Leelee had both been too frightened of Dex to say anything—not to mention the consequences from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs if the ownership of the property had to change to Leelee, who didn’t have the 50 percent Hawaiian blood to qualify to stay.

Edith had the blood but didn’t want the responsibility. So neither had done anything.

Though the pressure let up at work, as Ray and I handled a stream of simpler cases, it only got worse at home. When Mike got his mind on something, I couldn’t distract him. He spent the weekend making luau plans and fixing little things that had broken over the years. We argued and fought and then had make up sex, and I started wishing for an emergency to call me back to work. I was relieved when Monday morning came.

We recruited my mother, his mother and both my sisters-in-law to help us cook, and every day that week someone was ferrying foodstuffs over to our house. We filled up the extra refrigerator-freezer in the garage with fruits, vegetables and platters and spent our spare time cleaning the house from top to bottom. My mother even sent us her maid to scrub down the kitchen and the bathrooms and polish the furniture.

Mike and I both took Friday off from work. Haoa and his crew showed up to dig the imu shortly after 7:00 a.m., rousing us out of bed and sending Roby into a frenzy of barking, especially as the earthmover rolled down off the back of the pickup.

The imu had to be about 2’ by 4’, with sloping sides. Haoa
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brought a lot of twigs and other combustible material he’d been gathering from work sites for the last week, and Mike and I helped him and his guys place the kindling at the bottom of the pit. There was a separate pile of banana leaves, ti leaves and palm fronds, or
hali’i
, to put on top of the pig and the other food once the fire was going.

Mike and I positioned some big logs on top of the kindling, then a tier of stones on top of the logs. My parents arrived around nine, bringing with them a bunch of old woven
lauhala
mats and
tapa
cloths that we would use the next day, once the pig was in place, to cover the whole mess.

Tatiana and Liliha came over while their kids were in school to help set up the rest of the yard, putting up tables and chairs.

Mike hung decorative Japanese lanterns from the tree branches, and I kept busy running stuff back and forth.

Everybody left halfway through the afternoon, and Mike and I took a break with a couple of beers, sitting in the back yard with Roby at our feet, nibbling bits of roast chicken that Mike fed him when he thought I wasn’t looking.

“I never thought I could have this,” Mike said.

“A luau?”

“This,” he said, waving his beer to encompass the yard and all the preparations. “You. Me. Roby. A big luau like this with all our family and friends.”

“I thought I could,” I said. “But I always thought there’d be a wife and kids involved.” I sipped my beer. “When we first graduated from the academy, Akoni was dating this divorced woman, a few years older than us, with a couple of kids. I remember asking him how he would feel about raising somebody else’s kids. He said they weren’t that serious, they were just dating.”

I stretched my legs and leaned back in my chair. “I couldn’t understand that, dating a woman for fun. I thought the only reason to date somebody was so that you could get married eventually.”

Mike laughed. “That why you dated so many women? You MAhu BLood
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wanted to marry them all?”

“I kept hoping things would be different,” I said. “That I’d really, I don’t know, like it, you know? That I would feel that thing I felt when I looked at guys.” I reached over and squeezed his hand. “That thing I feel with you.”

We got up and finished the preparations, nibbling on the platters for dinner, trying to artfully rearrange the cold salads so that it didn’t look like we’d been at them. We spent the evening hanging out, Mike watching reruns on TV and me playing a computer surfing game that alternated between fun and frustration.

We were up at six lighting the fire, and it was ready by the time Mike’s father got back from the butcher in Ewa Beach with the pig, which would take about eight hours to cook. Roby was so excited he kept dancing around the car and then us.

As Mike and I dragged the pig out of the car, Haoa showed up to supervise. “More hali’i
,
” he said, from the sidelines, as Mike and I piled on the banana leaves. “You want the pig to steam, not to burn.”

We were both sweaty and tired by the time we had the pig in the pit, the hali’i piled on top, then the lauhala mats over it all, covered with a layer of dirt. Haoa left, and we took the opportunity to take showers and eat some breakfast before the next wave of people showed up.

Our kitchen was commandeered by my mother, working with Tatiana, while Liliha went next door and helped Mike’s mother.

They prepared platters of chicken long rice, poi, shark-fin soup, sweet and sour spareribs and Portuguese sausage and beans.

There were Korean dishes, Chinese ones, even a boat load of Russian pierogies from Tatiana’s mother’s recipe.

My mother and Tatiana had been baking cakes and pies and cookies all week, which they piled on the tables along with platters of fruit, tubs of mango sherbet and chocolate ice cream in coolers and about ten different types of crack seed.

The smell of the pig roasting began rising from the pit, and
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Roby positioned himself right at the edge, alternately leaning forward to sniff and backing away from the heat. By noon, the yard was full of kids and dogs. Roby pretended to be the big shot, barking at every newcomer then jumping up to be petted and adored. We set up speakers in the yard and played The Makaha Sons, Keola Beamer and Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu and the Kamehameha School Children’s Chorus singing
Hawaiian Roller
Coaster Ride
. It was just like something out of
Lilo and Stich
, only without the space alien.

I worried about the different groups of people we invited.

Would the cops, like Ray, Kitty and Lieutenant Sampson mingle with my gay friends from the North Shore? How about Gunter, who brought a couple of guys from Māhū Nation? I had spoken with Peggy Kaneahe and invited her, and she’d asked if she could bring some attorneys and paralegals from her firm, who wanted to thank me for arresting Adam O’Malley’s killer. Would they get along with everyone else?

My fears were unfounded. When Mike’s old boyfriend, the one who worked at the Halekulani, arrived with his new sweetheart, they bonded with Harry and Arleen. Greg Oshiro showed up with his two-year-old twins, and every mom in the place gathered to coo over them. Peggy and a male lawyer from her firm played croquet with Jimmy Ah Wang, a kid I had met on a case years before, and a college friend of his from Chicago. The Gresham kids played with Roby and my nieces and nephews.

By the time we opened up the pit and pulled out the pig, the party was in full swing. My cousin Ben was the focus of an adoring group of kids who realized that they had a champion surfer in their midst. Uncle Kimo, usually the fountain of all surf wisdom, was relegated to the sidelines. My mother and Aunt Pua, Ben’s mom, were getting along, the two of them talking story in a corner of the yard with their other sisters. Miscellaneous cousins renewed old friendships and feuds, with Lui’s son Jeffrey and Haoa’s daughter Ashley organizing a touch football game that ended with the ball on our roof and Mike climbing up there to retrieve it.

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My dad and Mike’s were turning into fast friends, regaling each other with stories of how badly each of us had behaved as keikis. Gunter and Jimmy began planning a Māhū Nation party at the U.H. campus, in conjunction with the GLBT group there. It was much more than just a luau; it was a meeting of worlds, and just as Rodney King would have wanted, we were all just getting along.

Late in the afternoon, Harry came over to me carrying a manila folder. “I managed to enhance those birth records you gave me. Want to take a look?”

“Sure.” I called over Ray and Lieutenant Sampson, and we added Peggy Kaneahe and Sarah Byrne since the materials had come to us through Fields and Yamato. I explained that to Sampson as the six of us sat down at the picnic table.

Starting with the most recent page, I traced my finger down the list. “Look here,” I said. “1968. Ezekiel Kapuāiwa Lopika.