Mahu Blood Read online

  “You won’t tell Liliha, will you?”

  For a minute there, I could see my brother Lui, maybe fifteen or sixteen, asking me to keep a secret from our parents. I don’t even remember what it was, but I didn’t tell then, and I wouldn’t now.

  “Go home. Your wife and kids love you.”

  We all stood up together, and my reserved brother, the one I almost never see without a suit and tie, hugged me. I hugged him back, my arms reaching around his broad back as if I could protect him from his own bad impulses.

  I yawned as Lui walked out. We hadn’t heard anything from Akoni, which meant the game was still going on.

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  “Big money,” Ray said. “And your brother thinks Dexter works for this guy called Tung. You think maybe he’s Mr. T?

  Tung? Not Dexter?”

  “Don’t know. But I think those nicknames stay in the game. I wouldn’t expect an outsider like Stuey to know that name.”

  “But what if Dexter called him that?”

  My cell rang. “Looks like the game’s breaking up,” Akoni said.

  “You out front?”

  We were, in a manner of speaking. “Yup. We’ll cover the front door. And tomorrow, brah, I gotta talk to you.”

  We saw a group of men exit, Dexter Trale among them. A couple were laughing and talking, while the others were silent.

  Winners and losers, I thought.

  One of the guys, Japanese by the looks of him, was wearing a bright aloha shirt with a pattern of ‘ilima flowers, the kind used in fragrant leis, and carrying a white canvas bag with a wooden handle.

  Ray and I had a choice. We could go after Dexter Trale or the guy with the satchel. It seemed a no-brainer to follow the money.

  I called Akoni, and he pulled up behind us as the guy in the

  ‘ilima shirt got into a Mercedes sedan. We traded off following him, one of us dropping back while the other stayed close, then reversing positions, until he led us to the Kope Bean warehouse.

  We both parked under a kiawe tree across the street and watched as the man with the satchel walked up to the warehouse building, punched a code at the front door and stepped inside. I dialed Akoni.

  “I’d love to know what’s going on in there. But I don’t see how we can. We don’t have a warrant, and we don’t have any grounds to get one, especially without some testimony by the late Stuart McKinney.”

  “Just adding data to the bank,” he said.

  I called the license plate in to the dispatcher, who put me on hold. When he came back he said the car was registered to a MAhu BLood 139

  corporation—Mahalo Coffee, LLC.

  “That doesn’t tell us much,” Ray said. “We’re at the Kope Bean warehouse, and we know Mahalo is the name of the corporate parent.”

  We sat there and watched and waited. There was a constant hum of traffic from the H1, a block away. Clouds moved across the dark sky, obscuring the quarter moon and whatever stars might be shining. A few minutes after midnight, a man walked out the front door. I pulled out my binoculars and adjusted the focus. It was Ezekiel Kapuāiwa.

  Akoni called. “You know who that is?”

  I filled him in on Ezekiel. “He used to work at the Kope Bean.

  Maybe somebody called him to help out now that McKinney’s dead.”

  Ezekiel walked over to the Mercedes and stood there. A couple of minutes later, the man in the ‘ilima shirt came out.

  Both got into the Mercedes, which pulled out of the parking lot.

  I called Akoni. “You ready to follow again?”

  “You take lead,” he said.

  We followed the Mercedes, which ducked under the H1

  freeway and continued up into Papakolea. Ezekiel got out in front of a house a few blocks from where Edith Kapana had lived, and the Mercedes returned the way it had come, getting on the H1 going Diamond Head.

  Akoni and I traded off position on the highway as we followed the Mercedes off the H1 and onto local roads all the way to Black Point, an exclusive neighborhood on the far side of Diamond Head. The car pulled up in front of a wrought-iron gate, which slowly swung open as we cruised past.

  We noted the address, and Akoni headed back toward the highway.

  “What’s going on here?” Ray asked, as we drove away. “Does Edith’s murder tie into the pai gow game? How could she have known about the game or the money laundering?”

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  “Well, she lived with Dexter Trale, and Dex worked with Stuey at the Kope Bean warehouse. Maybe she overheard Dex talking to Leelee. Everybody said she was a nosy old woman.”

  “I can’t see Ezekiel playing pai gow; he doesn’t seem to have two nickels to rub together,” Ray said.

  “Suppose Edith knew money from the game was going to support KOH. She believed in the kahiko ways, the old-time beliefs. So she probably didn’t like gambling. Ezekiel told Edith, and she tried to either stop the game or stop the money coming to KOH.”

  We kept going back to her visit to the Ohana, where she had been asking about Ezekiel. What was that about? Was she trying to get in touch with him to confirm her beliefs about the pai gow game?

  By the time I dropped Ray off at his place and got back to Aiea, my brain felt like it had been disconnected. There were too many loose ends, and none of them led us back to Edith’s death.

  It was almost midnight, and all I wanted to do was collapse into bed. Roby was so excited to see me, though, that I had to stop and play with him for a minute. I was grateful that Mike was already asleep, so I didn’t have to tell him about my day or what I’d learned about Stuart McKinney’s murder. I stripped down, slid beside him and was asleep in minutes, lulled by the even rhythm of his breathing.

  uNkNowN NuMBeR

  The next morning, Roby stopped to sniff a trash can with a broken surfboard sticking up out of it. That reminded me that besides the outing with my nieces and nephews, I hadn’t been surfing much since I’d moved up to Mike’s house. I couldn’t just grab my board and walk down the street. And now that we had a dog who needed to be walked every morning, I had that much less time. I wondered if that was part of growing up—or if I was sacrificing something I loved in order to make life with Mike work.

  By the time Roby and I got back to the house, Mike was up, in the kitchen pouring cereal into a bowl. “What time did you get home last night?” he asked.

  I tried not to hear accusation in his voice. “After midnight.”

  I told him about the pai gow game and the results of our surveillance.

  “Your brother?” He stopped eating to look at me.

  “We’ve all got secrets. Look at the big one I kept for so long.”

  Mike didn’t say anything. His parents know he’s gay and so do at least a few of the guys he works with. But he believed that his sexual orientation was his own business. So it wasn’t actually a secret he was keeping, but close enough.

  I hurried on. “We got the coroner’s report on Stuart McKinney.

  He was knocked out with a blunt instrument before he was set on fire. And by the way, he wasn’t homeless—he was on his way back to the Ohana after work.”

  “Why are you on that case? I thought it was Hart and Kawika.”

  “Ray and I took it over.” I told him about our conversation with McKinney, about all the connections between victims, the Ohana and the Kope Bean.

  “I still think this was random. The guy was wearing three layers of clothes, he had shaggy hair and dirty fingernails. He 142 Neil S. Plakcy

  looked homeless.” He stood up, rinsed his cereal bowl and put it in the dishwasher. Then he turned to walk out of the kitchen.

  “Hey,” I said. “Kiss.”

  I was still sitting at the kitchen table, so he leaned down and kissed the top of my head, which wasn’t what I was hoping for.

  A minute later I heard the shower running, and I had a perverse desire to get up and run hot water in the sink, forcing cold into the shower and getting bac
k at him for walking out in the middle our argument about Stuey’s death. All that rampant testosterone in the house, I guess. We both felt like we had to win any battle.

  On his way out, Mike said, “Harry called last night. Said you weren’t answering your cell, but he had some information for you.”

  “Thanks.” I waved goodbye to Mike, then showered and dressed. On my way out the door, I called Harry. “Hey, brah, not too early to call?” It was about a quarter to eight.

  “Nope, Brandon started school yesterday. This household is officially on morning time. You want to stop by, see what I found on your guys?”

  “Be there in a minute.”

  It was only a couple of blocks downhill to their house, and I pulled up by the sidewalk. I saw Harry look out the front window and waved. Arlene had cleaned him up since the wedding; his hair no longer looked like someone had put a bowl over his head and snipped, and his ordinary black-framed glasses had been replaced with a funky pair that made him look like a ‘50s hipster.

  Arleen had left to take Brandon to school and then go grocery shopping, so Harry and I had the house to ourselves. We sat at his dining room table as he showed me what he’d found. “Your Jun Tanaka is a slippery guy. Took me a while to find anything on him. But nobody hides from me for too long.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re a super hero. What do you have?”

  “I got interested, so I started digging,” he said. “Most of this comes from legal sources, places you could go yourself if you MAhu BLood 143

  knew where to look. So it’ll hold up in court if you have to go there.”

  “Most?”

  “I’ll get to that part.”

  Ray would be happy with the legitimate stuff, but I knew he wouldn’t want to touch anything Harry got by hacking. Ray was my conscience when it came to cutting corners. He was a by-the-book cop, always remembering that anything we did had to follow the letter of the law. I was more like a bull in a china shop, trying anything I could to get the job done and catch the bad guys. We made a good team. I’d see what Harry had before making any judgments.

  Harry pushed a couple of printouts toward me. “Tanaka started making regular trips to the States years ago. There’s a possibility that things got hot for him in Japan around that time; I found some documents, but Arleen can only speak the language, she can’t read it that well. If it matters, you’ll have to get a translator.”

  “OK,” I said. “Next?”

  “He owns a holding company called Tanaka Investments,”

  Harry continued. “There’s a complex web of interlocking companies, but I figured out that it’s the corporate parent for the Kope Bean chain of coffee shops, as well as a bunch of other businesses.”

  “The Kope Bean.”

  “Yeah. Since you mentioned Kingdom of Hawai’i I did a cross-reference. The Kope Bean is the largest single donor to KOH, according to an annual report they filed with the state. A couple of other companies under Tanaka Investments are also big donors.”

  Threads were starting to come together. Tanaka’s companies contributed heavily to Kingdom of Hawai’i, and Edith Kapana was murdered at a KOH rally. Stuart McKinney and Dexter Trale worked for the Kope Bean, which meant there might a link between Stuey’s death and the pai gow game in Chinatown. But 144 Neil S. Plakcy

  those were tenuous associations; we had no smoking gun, no motive for either death. Just cop intuition.

  I told Harry about McKinney’s murder and all the connections between the Kope Bean and the Ohana.

  “Makes sense,” he said. “If he’s on the board of this Ohana place, then he’d want to help out, right? He’d be willing to hire some of their clients.”

  “I hope that’s all it is.” He handed me a few pages of corporate mumbo jumbo, and I put it aside to look at more carefully later.

  “Anything about him personally? Other than his involvement with the Ohana?”

  “He has a wife and a son back in Tokyo, but he hasn’t been to Japan in at least five years, which makes me think he might not be welcome there anymore. Now here’s where it gets interesting.

  His father is a guy named Hisoshi Tanaka, and from what I can tell he’s a big time criminal.”

  I struggled to remember my conversation with Terri about Tanaka’s background. “Was his father born in an internment camp?” I asked.

  “That’s him. Hisoshi was born in the Honouliuli camp, up near Schofield Barracks, then sent back to Japan with his family when he was a kid. He was arrested for gambling and prostitution in Japan, when he was young, but then it looks like he got smart.

  The papers call him a crime boss, but he hasn’t been in jail in years.”

  “And Jun Tanaka is his son.”

  “Yup. The old man started buying property in the US in the

  ’70s. He was connected to a toxic waste dump near Waianae and a sweatshop in Chinatown. Jun sold those businesses and reinvested in legitimate stuff, under the radar. But he still sounds shady to me—I never trust somebody who tries so hard to hide his identity and his interests.”

  “Good stuff. I appreciate all the work, brah.” I hesitated. “So what part of this isn’t quite kosher?”

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  “The printouts in Japanese,” he said. “They might come from a computer that’s connected to the Japanese national police.

  So you’d have to make an official request to them for criminal records on both Tanakas if you need them.”

  Might come, I thought, as I packed up the records. At least I knew what I could and couldn’t use.

  I felt that we’d wandered far away from Aunty Edith’s murder, and as I drove downtown and listened to Paula Fuga’s smoky voice streaming from the Jeep’s CD player, I tried to figure out how we’d gotten to this point—tracking Jun Tanaka and a mysterious pai gow game—when we’d started with a single shooting.

  Ray was on the phone at his desk when I walked in. “The house in Black Point where the man in the aloha shirt went last night belongs to Mahalo Coffee,” he said. “And I got the plates of the Mercedes tracked to that same address, same corporate ownership.”

  I showed him the material I collected from Harry. “And this is all legit, by the way, in case you were worrying. Except for the stuff in Japanese, which we can’t read anyway.”

  He tidied the corners of the Japanese printouts and put them aside without saying anything. Then he pulled out a pen and a piece of paper and we started to draw lines between people and organizations.

  “At least we don’t need to call your buddy at the Division of Business Licensing to figure out who owns the Kope Bean,”

  Ray said, when we had it all laid out. “It’s Mahalo Coffee, which means that guy we saw leave the game was probably Tanaka.”

  “And Tanaka is connected to every person and every organization in this case,” I sad. My cell phone rang, the display reading “unknown number.”

  “This is Kimo,” I said.

  “The detective?” a woman asked.

  “Yes, it is. Who’s this?”

  “I know who killed Stuey,” she said, her voice rushing so fast 146 Neil S. Plakcy

  she was stumbling over the words. “And I’m scared.”

  There was something odd about her accent, or perhaps it was just the speed or the whistling way she spoke. “OK, calm down.

  Tell me your name.” I turned the phone so Ray could hear, too.

  “I need to see you. I live at the Ohana. Can you come up here right away?”

  “We can. But who do we ask for?”

  “I’ll find you. Just come now. Please.” She hung up.

  “What do you think?” I asked Ray.

  “She sounds either frightened or crazy,” he said. “Because she lives at the Ohana, I’m going with crazy. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to go up there.”

  It took us close to forty-five minutes to make it up the Pali Highway, over the mountains and down into Kaneohe. As I pulled the Jeep into the Ohana parking lot we
both looked around, hoping that there would be a frantic woman waiting for us at the front door.

  Nothing.

  There were a couple of cars in the lot—I assumed they belonged to staff—but no one out on the front lawn or by the glass door that led inside. We both got out of the Jeep and walked together toward the door. I was holding my keys in my hand, and I fumbled them, trying to get them in my pocket. They fell to the ground, and both Ray and I went down to retrieve them, nearly bumping heads as we did.

  I guess that’s how the shots missed us.

  We both sensed the bullets whizzing above us before we heard the sound of the shots, and we tumbled to the blacktop, scrambling around to the far side of the Jeep. Both of us drew our guns, caught our breath and waited.

  Traffic whizzed past on the street in front of us. No one came running out of the Ohana, and none of the shoppers going in and out of the neighboring strip centers seemed to have heard the sound of the gunshots.

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  “I counted four shots,” Ray said, panting a little. He’d scraped his cheek on the rough pavement, and there was a trickle of blood curving around his jawbone.

  “Me, too.” I grabbed my phone and dialed dispatch, reporting the shots and requesting backup. As I did, Ray pulled himself up and peered over the hood of the Jeep.

  “I figure the shooter was up on the hill there,” he said, pointing, as I joined him. The Ohana and its neighbors all butted up against a hillside. A few trees and some low bushes stood just behind and above the strip shopping center next door, on a small outcropping.

  We heard a siren in the distance and assumed that was our backup. “Think he’s gone by now?” I asked.

  “Only one way to tell,” Ray said, and stood up, walking around the front of the Jeep. He had his gun drawn, though it wasn’t going to be much good against a rifleman under cover at least a few hundred yards away.

  There were no more shots. I joined Ray, and we looked around. One of the bullets had lodged in a tree just beyond us, the second and third in the stucco exterior wall of the Ohana.

  The fourth had embedded itself in my bumper.