Mahu Blood Page 6

  I looked around the room, thinking. If Dex didn’t give Leelee enough money to live on, that was between them. It wasn’t something the police could get involved with unless she wanted to sue him for child support. I spotted the three koa bowls on the desk and got an idea.

  From what we could tell, Edith had no family beyond Leelee, which meant that the bowls now belonged to her. If I could get MAhu BLood 53

  her some cash directly, she wouldn’t have to tell Dex, and she’d be able to buy what she needed.

  “You willing to sell these bowls?” I asked, holding one up.

  “Just buss up old bowls,” she said. “Nobody pay for dem.”

  “I might have somebody who would. You going to be around this afternoon?”

  “Where I go?” From the house, we heard the baby cry again.

  I went outside and called my mother. “You know anybody who wants some big koa bowls?” I told her about Leelee and Aunty Edith.

  “I can’t say without looking at them. Would you like me to come down there?”

  “That would be nice. If you want them, it would help Leelee get through the month if you could give her some cash for them.”

  I paused. “You remember how to change a diaper?”

  My mother laughed. “Who do you think taught Liliha and Tatiana? What, this girl has a baby?”

  “Yeah, and she seems overwhelmed.”

  She said she’d drive right over, and I hung up feeling I had done a good deed for both of them. My father’s declining health had meant that my mother had to curtail a lot of her activities, including volunteering as a docent at the Bishop Museum, and helping Leelee would be a nice project for her. It could also keep her from going to any more rallies where she might get shot.

  I made a couple of notes, told Leelee my mom was on her way over and promised we would be back in touch. “Let’s go back to what we were talking about before,” Ray said, as we walked away from the house. “What do you think the burglar was looking for?”

  “She had a lot of old newspaper articles,” I said. “Now, I wish we’d taken all that stuff into evidence, but at the time it just looked like junk.”

  “You remember anything about what she had? Was it about 54 Neil S. Plakcy

  Kingdom of Hawai’i?”

  “No, it was all older stuff,” I said. “Genealogy. Some birth and marriage announcements. Like from her family. And there was some stuff about volcanoes, places destroyed by the lava flows.”

  “Didn’t the old folks say she came from some place that had been wiped out?”

  “Yup. So those could just be personal stuff, mementoes.”

  Ray thumped the steering wheel. “Maybe the burglar didn’t find what he was looking for—that’s why he ripped everything up and that’s why he took all those albums and folders.”

  “We should go back and see if Edith owned any property, had any bank accounts, that kind of thing.”

  We stopped at a Zippy’s for lunch on our way back to headquarters, and over teriyaki burgers Ray asked, “What do we know about Edith, anyway? People say she came from some little town on the Big Island, destroyed by lava. Convenient, isn’t it?

  You think that’s the truth?”

  “We can check it out. Leelee seemed to think all Edith had was her Social Security. If she still owned some property on the Big Island, the killer could be looking for deeds or bankbooks.”

  I made a couple of notes, and then we relaxed and ate. They were playing an album I recognized as Hapa’s Surf Madness from the late 90s, and I tapped my foot along to their ‘50s hipster version of the Hawaii Five-O theme.

  After lunch, we went back to headquarters, and I looked online for whatever the state had on Edith Kapana. The database of birth records indicated she had been born at home in 1935

  in a small town called Opihi. I searched map sites but couldn’t find it, eventually discovering, from an Star-Advertiser article in the online archive, that the town had been wiped out a year ago by an eruption of Kilauea.

  According to the article, Opihi was a tiny hamlet populated by a handful of Native Hawaiian families. They led a hardscrabble MAhu BLood 55

  life, farming and fishing. When their homes were destroyed their way of life went with it. They relocated or moved in with distant relations, like Aunty Edith did. In a much later article, a reporter who interviewed Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, the leader of Kingdom of Hawai’i, pointed out that he had been born there, though he had moved to O’ahu before the destruction.

  Edith didn’t have any bank accounts that we could find, and she only owned a small piece of land in Opihi which once had a small house on it. The record indicated the property had been condemned after the lava destroyed it. She had one brother, who died years before. I tracked his life, discovering that he had moved to Honolulu in 1958, married and bought the house in Papakolea. He and his wife had two children: Elizabeth, born in 1959, and Amos, born in 1960.

  Elizabeth Kapana died in 2007; I found an obituary for her online, which listed her brother and daughter, Leelee as survivors.

  There was no birth certificate for Leelee in Hawai’i, so I did a national search, discovering she had been born in Las Vegas in 1992. No father was listed. But that did make her eighteen, despite her younger looks.

  Amos Kapana was the legal owner of the house where Edith, Dex, Leelee and the baby lived. But where was he? Leelee said he didn’t live there anymore. I put in a request for his work records from Karen Gold at Social Security and kept hunting. There was no death certificate on file for him, but he had not renewed his driver’s license when it expired in January.

  Karen faxed over Amos Kapana’s sketchy work record a little later. His last job had been over a year ago, with a temp agency that farmed out manual laborers. The woman there told me he had never picked up his last paycheck.

  “He was a drunk,” she said. “Very unreliable.”

  While I was working on Edith, Ray did more research on Bunchy. “Listen to this,” he said, as I made a note to tell Leelee about the paycheck. “Bunchy has three sons. The youngest one, Brian, served a tour in Iraq, and he’s living with his dad.”

  56 Neil S. Plakcy

  “What did he do in Iraq?” I asked. “You think he’s qualified on rifles?”

  “I’ve got a friend who works in Army intelligence,” Ray said.

  “I’ll give him a call, see if the name Brian Parker means anything to him.”

  I was intrigued by the links between Ezekiel Kapuāiwa and Aunty Edith. She may have been more influential in KOH than we had thought.

  “I think it’s time we talked to Ezekiel,” I said, when Ray finished his call. “Maybe he knows something.”

  I phoned Maile Kanuha and asked how I could get hold of Ezekiel. “He’s not strong,” she said. “The appearance at the rally took a lot of out of him. He’d rather be left alone.”

  Her evasiveness was suspicious. “Whether he wants to or not, we still need to talk to him.”

  “I’ll have to get in touch with him and see what he says.”

  “Maile, we’re the police. When we want to speak to somebody, they don’t have much choice.”

  “I know, Detective. I’ll still have to get back to you, though.”

  Next, I called Adam O’Malley, the attorney whose card we’d found in Edith’s desk. His secretary said he was in court on the mainland, and took a message.

  By the end of shift, I was frustrated. We had no leads, and it felt like we were sitting on our hands waiting for information or new developments. I didn’t like that and knew that if I went straight home I’d fuss around, get even more agitated and then probably pick a fight with Mike just to let off steam.

  So instead I made a detour up to my parents’ house in St.

  Louis Heights, a steep, mountainous suburb of twisting streets and houses more expensive than any Mike or I could ever afford.

  “Howzit, Mom?” I asked when my mother answered the door. I kissed her cheek. “You go see Leelee?” />
  “That girl needs help,” she said. “I don’t see why her neighbors MAhu BLood 57

  aren’t doing anything for her. She even had the wrong kind of diapers.”

  “Yeah, I heard that from Ray.” I followed her to the den, where my father was watching a nature special on sharks. I leaned down and kissed the top of his head, then sat across from him.

  “You buy the bowls from her?”

  “Those bowls,” she said, sitting across from my father. “Kimo, you have no idea.”

  “What? They looked valuable to me.”

  “Those are beyond value. You know how rare it is to have koa wood bowls that large?”

  The three big bowls sat on the armoire beyond the TV. My mother picked one up and brought it over to show me. “Ones this size were restricted to the royal family,” she said. “See how it hasn’t been turned, but scooped out instead?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  She turned the bowl upside down. “And see these repairs?”

  “Yeah. Don’t they make the bowl less valuable?”

  She shook her head. “I took a class at the Bishop Museum.

  They stopped doing this kind of repair before 1900. That means these are very old, in addition to being very large.”

  “So how much did you give her?” I asked. “For the three of them.”

  “I didn’t buy them. I said I would take the bowls to the museum, then come back and tell her what they’re worth. She’s just a child. And she said that boyfriend of hers spends every penny, drinking and playing pai gow.”

  “We took her shopping,” my father said. “To Costco.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “We bought her diapers, formula. Some clothes. Food. I showed her how to change the baby. Apparently that poor woman who died took care of the child.”

  “Wow. That was so nice of you. I didn’t expect you to do so 58 Neil S. Plakcy

  much.”

  My father grumbled.

  “You have to help where you can,” my mother said. “It’s ohana.”

  Although the strict definition of ohana is family, in Hawai’i it means more—things like the way that a community comes together to take care of those in need. I wondered why the people of Papakolea had not been taking care of Leelee when she was one of their own. I asked my mother that.

  My father grumbled again.

  My mother sighed. “It sounds like the boyfriend treats her badly, and he’s rude to the neighbors. And the girl, well, you saw her. She doesn’t seem to care about anything.” She stood up. “I’m going to take the bowls to the museum tomorrow. If they’re as valuable as I think, they’ll want to talk to her.”

  She asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. I called Mike, who was on his way home. “Want to detour up here?”

  My parents have liked Mike since the first time I brought him home, and even when we were broken up, they never said a word against him.

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “Like you care. As long as somebody else cooks it.”

  Mike laughed. “You’re right. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

  the Book of ezekieL

  The next morning, I called Maile Kanuha again. “You never called me back yesterday, Maile. We really need to speak to Ezekiel. If he won’t come in we’ll come out and get him.”

  “I can bring him over to you around noon. It’s my lunch hour,” she said, like that was supposed to make me feel bad.

  While we waited, I checked with my friend Ricky Koele, who works at the Division of Business Licensing. Even non-profit groups were required to register, and I asked him to pull up any records he had on Kingdom of Hawai’i.

  Ricky was two years behind me at Punahou, and I did him a favor a couple of years ago when his brother was murdered.

  Since then, he’s been happy to help when I need something from his department. After leaving me on hold, he returned to the line and said, “I’m printing the records. I’ll fax them to you.”

  “Thanks, brah. I owe you.”

  “No, Kimo,” he said. “I’m always going to owe you.”

  The pages came through the fax a couple of minutes later.

  Kingdom of Hawai’i was registered as a 501(c)(4) organization, a charitable non-profit, able to collect tax-deductible contributions but also allowed to lobby for legislative change. One of the main distinguishing factors between it and the more common 501(c) (3) was a restricted membership—in their case, limited to those people who could trace at least partial ancestry to the original inhabitants of the islands. The Hawaiian term is kanaka maoli, and I’d seen that on posters in the background of the video of Bunchy’s demonstration at the Wizard Stones. It was often used among Hawaiian sovereignty groups.

  The incorporation documents didn’t list anyone with the organization; the contact of record was the Honolulu law firm which had filed the paperwork in 2005 with the Hawai’i Secretary of State’s office, Fields and Yamato.

  60 Neil S. Plakcy

  I sat back in my chair. Adam O’Malley, whose business card I found on Edith’s desk, worked for that firm. Had she come in contact with him through her volunteer work for the organization?

  I called his office again and left another message for him. “Please tell him it’s regarding an ongoing police investigation.”

  “I will, Detective,” his secretary said. “But it’s a very important case, and with the time difference between here and Washington, DC he probably just hasn’t had a chance to get back to you.”

  “Does this case involve Kingdom of Hawai’i?” I asked.

  “You’d have to talk to Mr. O’Malley. It’s our firm’s policy not to discuss clients or ongoing litigation.”

  I did a quick Google search on Adam O’Malley and Fields and Yamato, trying to figure out what sort of case might have taken him to Washington. The firm specialized in land use issues, but I couldn’t pull up anything on a specific case that was going on in DC at the moment.

  When I saw Ezekiel up close I was surprised to see that he was older than I’d expected, or maybe it was that life had treated him harshly. Although he was only in his forties, his hair was graying, there were bags under his eyes and his left eye twitched.

  He wore a faded blue polo shirt and cheap jeans, the kind that always look too shiny no matter how much you wash them.

  “Thanks for coming in,” I said.

  “I don’t have much time,” Maile said. She treated Ezekiel as if she were his mother, though I doubted she was much older than he was. Maybe I just got a motherly impression from her dowdy clothes and old-fashioned pin curls. “My boss is coming down on me for the time I’ve been spending on KOH.”

  “You can wait out here,” I told her. “We’ll try and get Mr.

  Kapuāiwa in and out as fast as we can.”

  “I’d rather stay with Ezekiel.”

  “Sorry, that’s not the way we do things here.” I put my hand on Ezekiel’s shoulder and turned him toward an interview room.

  We sat down across the table from him, after he’d declined our MAhu BLood 61

  offers of coffee or soda.

  “We’ll make this quick,” I said. “Mr. Kapuāiwa, did you know Edith Kapana?”

  He nodded. “Growing up, on the Big Island. Aunty Edith lived in our village.”

  “That would be Opihi?”

  “Yes. Madame Pele was not kind to us, and our houses were destroyed by Kilauea.” From the casual way he talked about the goddess of fire, whom ancient Hawaiians thought controlled volcanoes, you’d think she was a neighbor back in Opihi just like Edith Kapana.

  He spoke in an oddly stilted way, as if he were reading a script and didn’t understand the words himself. “Did you and Edith both move here to O’ahu at the same time?”

  He shook his head. “I had already left Opihi some time before.”

  “But you had been in touch with her recently?”

  He looked down at the table. “Aunty Edith was a volunt
eer for Kingdom of Hawai’i,” he said, in his strange monotone.

  “She was very kahiko, a great reservoir of information about the Hawaiian people.”

  “This information. Was it written down? Records of some kind?”

  He looked back up. “Not that I know of. It was more like history and lore than actual records.” His eye twitched rapidly, and he clutched the edge of the table. His fingernails were ragged, and his knuckles were scarred.

  “Do you know any reason why someone might want to kill her?”

  He pursed his lips together and blinked his eyes rapidly. “No, not at all.”

  “How about why someone might break into her room and tear it apart?”

  62 Neil S. Plakcy

  His hands started to shake. “No, no,” he said.

  I looked at Ray. I was afraid Ezekiel would have some kind of nervous breakdown or epileptic fit if we kept going. Ray nodded, and we both stood.

  “We may have some more questions for you later, Mr.

  Kapuāiwa. Thank you for coming in.” We led him back to the reception area, where Maile glared at us and took charge of him, hustling him out.

  “The guy’s a little squirrely, isn’t he?” Ray asked after they’d left. “And what’s she, like his keeper?”

  “Don’t know. There is something strange going on, though.”

  I remembered that Israel at the community center had said sometimes he thought Ezekiel was babooze, stupid, and sometimes lolo, crazy. I wondered which it was. I was surprised that someone so odd could be the leader of an organization and a public figure, but perhaps he looked better on TV or behind a podium.

  “Ezekiel couldn’t have shot her, because he was in the parade.

  But she did know him, and he seems nutty enough that he could have taken a dislike to her and gotten somebody from his group to kill her.”

  “I don’t see him having that kind of power. I mean, all you have to do is talk to the guy for a few minutes to see that he’s off his rocker. Maybe he’s some kind of figurehead. They just trot him out to wave at the crowd.”

  “Possible. He has the lineage, but there could be someone else behind him pulling the strings.”