Mahu Blood (4 page)

we ask you some questions about her?”

The room remained silent. I went up to a grizzled old kupuna and said, “How about you, Uncle? You know Aunty Edith?”

Grudgingly, he nodded. He said his name was Israel Keka’uoha. “Aunty Edith, she good people, she like the kahiko way.”

Yeah, I wanted to say, we heard that from Leelee.

“You watch,” he said. “Wen Hawaiian people take over again, da kine police gon work fo’ us.”

At that, the room erupted in noise. Everybody agreed with the old man. They all wanted to complain about the sad state of Native Hawaiian rights, about past police abuse, about how we would have to look out when the Kingdom of Hawai’i was restored.

Patiently, Ray and I went around the room, listening to their litany of complaints. I told a few of them about the victim advocate’s office, and I used my cell phone to get updates on a couple of cases.

The youngest person in the room was a forty-something woman with jet-black hair and matching fingernails. She was the caretaker of an elderly woman in a wheelchair, who spent most of the time we were there asleep. She said her name was Ellen Jackson and that the woman was her mother. “Nobody else will tell you,” she said to me, in a low voice, “but Aunty Edith was making lots of
pilikia
.”

I whispered “trouble,” to Ray, then asked Ellen, “Pilikia for who?”

She looked around to make sure no one else was listening.

“These boys, they sell
pakalolo
,” she said, using the island word for marijuana. “They raise it up on the mountain. Aunty Edith threatened to call da kine police on them.”

“You know their names?”

She shook her head. “But you can see them, hanging out on Tantalus ‘round sunset.”

26 Neil S. Plakcy

I wrote down her name and phone number, and we continued talking to the kupunas. By the time we got back around to Israel, the mood in the center had thawed. I had a feeling there were a lot of hidden secrets out there, buried along the slopes of Tantalus along with the bodies of so many war dead. Just as the cemetery’s caretakers protected the grounds, so the people of Papakolea protected their own secrets. Was one of them the identity of the person who killed Edith Kapana? Only time would tell.

I was thanking Israel when he shook his head and said,

“Poor Aunty Edith.” He looked at me to make sure I was paying attention. “Not many people know, Aunty Edith
hanai tūtū
to Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, too.”

I remembered that Kapuāiwa claimed he was descended from Hawaiian royalty. “Really?” I asked. “He from the Big Island, too, uncle?”

Israel looked at me. “You
babooze
, brah?” he said, wondering if I was stupid. “He fo’real from
da kine ohana
.” He shook his head. “Aunty Edith, she love dat boy.”

“What about you?” I asked. “What do you think of Kapuāiwa?”

“Ezekiel strange boy.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think he babooze, sometimes
lolo
. But if people want follow him, make things fo’ real better for Hawaiian people, I say ‘kay den.”

I made a note of that. Israel turned back to his group, mumbling about da kine babooze police, and Ray and I went out to my Jeep.

In the parking lot, Ray said, “I thought it was going to get ugly in there at first.” He looked out the window. “I felt like I didn’t belong.”

“If I went to Philly, I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t belong.”

“But you’d always know that you were in America. I don’t even speak the language, like I’m in some foreign country.”

“Out here, you are in a foreign country. The Kingdom of Hawai’i.”

LoAdiNg dock

“Is there really a guy out there who should be king?” Ray asked as we drove back to headquarters.

“It’s complicated. There are three different royal houses, and each one thinks they should be in charge. I guess we should figure out who the players are.”

Though it was Saturday, our case was high-profile, and the reports from ballistics and the medical examiner were waiting when we returned to our desks. Ray reviewed them while I did some online research on the three lines that all claimed the right to rule the islands.

The House of Kamehameha ruled Hawai’i until the death of Kamehameha V in 1872. He died a bachelor, allegedly without issue, though there was a collateral branch descended from his eldest brother. Ezekiel claimed that that his great-great-grandfather was the king’s illegitimate son, raised in secrecy on the Big Island in a hanai family. He based this claim on records he swore had been kept by his grandmother, who would have been Kamehameha’s great-granddaughter.

I read more about the various houses, but it only made me confused. Who knew who should be king, if indeed Hawai’i should revert to a kingdom?

Ray’s results were more concrete. The spent cartridge I’d noticed on the cornice matched one of the bullets recovered from Edith Kapana’s body. She had been shot three times, as we’d seen at the site. Death was the result of massive loss of blood.

For an older woman, she was in good shape, according to the autopsy. Varicose veins, a slightly enlarged heart and some nutritional deficiencies. But for the bad luck of those three bullets, she could have lived another ten or fifteen years.

Ray and I had no good leads and no real reason to try and
28 Neil S. Plakcy

stretch our overtime out. We called Sampson at home, and he told us to table the case until Monday.

Mike and I went out to dinner after I got home, and some of the tension I’d been feeling eased. He is truly my best friend, and I love spending time with him. And of course, sex always helps make things better, too. We cuddled up in bed and fooled around until we both drifted off to sleep.

When I announced I was moving in with Mike, my friend Gunter told me to put a dollar in a bottle every time we had sex during the first year. Then I could take a dollar out every time we had sex after that. The bottle would never be empty, he said.

I wasn’t doing it, but if I had been, the bottle would have been filling up fast.

Monday morning, Ray and I met with Lieutenant Sampson, who leaned back in his chair, his snazzy bright green polo shirt stretching across his stomach.

Ray took the lead, filling him in on what we’d learned about Aunty Edith and KOH. “You think this was random?” Sampson asked. “Someone trying to damage this Kingdom of Hawai’i group?”

“Or the whole sovereignty movement. My mother has been volunteering for the group, and I know for sure she’s going to back off, at least for a while.”

Lieutenant Sampson raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.

“We’re going to look into people who might have grudges against this group in particular or the movement in general. It’s a pretty wide net, but you never know what we’ll catch.”

Back at my desk, I phoned Leelee, since Dex hadn’t called me. There was no answer at her house. No answering machine, either, but I didn’t expect one. I hung up and called an old school friend, Karen Gold, who worked at the local office of Social Security. “Can you give me a work address on a Dexter Trale?”

“Got a social on him?”

MAhu BLood
29

“No, just the name.” I spelled it for her and heard her fingers clicking on her keyboard. “OK, here it is. He works for the Kope Bean.” It was an island-based coffee chain, a local Starbucks clone. Ray and I often got our caffeine fixes from the downtown branch.

“Which store?”

She gave me an address, and I scribbled it down. “Mahalo, Karen. See you soon, okay?”

If we were going out, I wanted to see if we could hook up with someone from KOH. There was no number listed for the group, though, and the home number for Maile Kanuha, the spokesperson quoted in the
Star-Advertiser
article, was unpublished. I would have to call the reporter who’d written the article to get in touch with her.

I had dealt with Greg Oshiro a few times in the past, and he wasn’t one of my favorite people. Of mixed Japanese and Hawaiian heritage, he was a big guy, tall and heavyset, with a fat belly always slopping over his belt. He had a dour expression, which I guessed came from working the police beat.

“News desk. Oshiro.”

“Hey, Greg. It’s Kimo Kanapa’aka. Howzit?”

“What do you want?”

He had written about a number of my cases and had the ability to turn even the most innocent information into something that sounds damning. He wasn’t anti-police; often his articles seemed almost fawning. But he’s had it in for me ever since I came out of the closet.

“I’m trying to get hold of Maile Kanuha. You got a number on her?”

“You working on Edith Kapana’s murder?”

“Yup. You know anything about it?”

“Didn’t you read my profile in yesterday’s paper? Hers was another death in a long line stretching back to 1893.”

30 Neil S. Plakcy

“I read it. Maile Kanuha. Her number.”

“Give me a quote for today’s follow up story.”

“This isn’t a quid pro quo, Greg. If you don’t cooperate, I’m sure I can find some reason to haul you in for obstructing an investigation.”

“You ever hear of the First Amendment?”

I handed the phone to Ray. “You talk to him.”

Ray gave Oshiro the statement he wanted, though it lacked much detail, and in turn Greg provided the number. Greg promised if he came up with anything in his profile that might be relevant to our investigation, he’d let us know. I wish I believed him. The only way I’d get anything from him was via the newspaper.

“I always admire your people skills,” Ray said, hanging up the phone.

“Greg Oshiro’s not a person, he’s a reptile.”

“Or a valued member of the fourth estate. Depends on how you look at it.”

I growled at him, and he laughed, turning to his computer to check out the agency where Maile worked, the Department of Agriculture Quality Assurance, whose offices were not far from police headquarters.

“You want to get some coffee?” I asked Ray. “How about we pay a visit to Dexter Trale at the Kope Bean, then go see Maile?”

“Somehow I don’t see this guy as a barista.”

We hopped in the Jeep and took the H1 to the airport exit, navigating the local streets to find the address Karen had given us. It was a long, single-story building in an industrial park. A small sign over the front door read “Kope Bean Receiving.”

“Guess you were right. Dex is not a barista.”

There was no one in the reception area, and though the desk was cluttered with papers, it didn’t look like anyone regularly sat there. I pushed the door open into the warehouse, and the MAhu BLood
31

pungent aroma of roasted coffee beans swept out over us.

“Should have stopped for coffee before we got here,” Ray sighed.

The ceiling was about ten feet high, and all the ventilation ducts were exposed below the flat roof. Pendant light fixtures hung every twenty feet or so. The walls were lined with wooden pallets, stacked with boxes of coffee cups, napkins, sugar and so on. There was some classic Hawaiian music playing softly in the background, the kind of stuff my parents used to listen to when I was a kid. I thought it might be Sonny Chillingworth, but I wasn’t sure.

Along the right-hand wall, a middle-aged Thai woman sat at a computer terminal, with a phone headset, talking and typing.

“Let me repeat the order back to you,” she said. “One carton of stirrers, four cartons of napkins, two bottles of macadamia nut syrup and your regular order of beans. You know we’re having a promotion on the logo mugs? Can I send you a box of them for display? Great. Talk to you tomorrow.”

She pulled the headset off and turned to us. “Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for Dexter Trale.”

“He’s the skinny haole over there by the loading dock.” Her phone rang, and she popped the headset back on. “Thank you for calling the Kope Bean central distribution center.”

We looked in the direction she had pointed, where a tough, wiry haole was arguing with a big Samoan guy. “Mr. Trale?” I interrupted. “Honolulu police detectives. Can we have a word with you?”

The Samoan slapped his hands together, said, “Your problem now, brah,” and walked away, toward an open loading dock door.

As we showed Dex our IDs, the Samoan slammed the back of his truck closed, got in and drove away.

“Thanks a fucking lot,” Dex said. “Now I’ve got to explain why that delivery was short.”

“Sorry, brah. Bad timing. But we’ve got some questions for
32 Neil S. Plakcy

you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

I doubted that was true. But he shrugged, and said, “I need a smoke. You want, you can follow me.”

A guy on a pallet jack zoomed past us, carrying a load of boxes. He stopped under a sign that read “Store #3” and began offloading as we walked past him.

“You the boss here?” I asked Dex.

“You could say that. We handle the distribution for all the Kope Bean stores on O’ahu.” We came to the row of open doors on the loading dock. “The store managers call their orders into Tuli over there, and she puts them into the computer. That generates tickets for the pickers and packers in the back. They put together the pallets, and the jockey brings them up here and lines them up for the trucks. Me, I just stand around and make sure nobody fucks up.”

He pulled a pack of cigarettes from its place under the sleeve of his snug T-shirt. He was a guy who liked to show off his body; if that shirt had been any tighter you’d have called it another layer of skin. His faded jeans were just as snug, cupping his ass; the back pocket was artfully ripped to show a glimpse of what looked like red satin boxers.

He jumped lightly from the dock to the ground, and I pulled my attention back from Dex’s ass to do the same. He took a lighter from his jeans pocket, but the wind was kicking up so it took him two tries. When he got it lit, he peered at both of us.

“We’re looking into the murder of Edith Kapana,” Ray said.

“Want to tell us about her?”

“She was some kind of aunt or cousin of my girlfriend’s. Last year, her house got knocked out on the Big Island, so she came to live with us.”