Mahu Blood Read online

  “He ever show a tendency to violence?” Ray asked.

  Mili looked horrified. “Oh, no, Ezekiel was always very sweet.

  When he got moody he’d go all quiet. That’s when I put him to work in the storeroom. Other times, he was the friendliest guy, 74 Neil S. Plakcy

  making conversation with the customers. When he left, I can’t tell you how many people asked after him.”

  We thanked Mili, finished our coffee and walked back out to Ray’s Highlander. “You want to try the group home, see if anyone would talk to us?” Ray asked.

  I shook my head. “Places like that, you need a subpoena for anything. And we have nothing to base a subpoena on. We’re fishing, at this point. Judges tend to frown on that.”

  “If you don’t go fishing, you never catch anything.”

  We got back to our desks around four. The evening shift was already there, taking calls, and we tried to stay out of their way.

  Ray started looking at everyone who belonged to Bunchy’s group to see if any of them had sharpshooting skills and a criminal record.

  The website for the Ohana Ola Kino wasn’t very helpful; it only listed the facility’s name and address. There was a link at the bottom of the page, though, to its board of directors, and that’s where I found my friend Terri’s name.

  Terri Clark Gonsalves has been my best female friend since we were in high school together at Punahou. Her family is one of the oldest haole ones in the islands, descended from the original missionaries. Her father was the chairman of Clark’s, the biggest independent department store chain in Hawai’i after Liberty House. When he retired, the chain was sold, dropping a big wad of cash into the family charity, the Sandwich Islands Trust.

  Terri, a widow with a young son, had taken over running the trust from her great-aunt. I wasn’t surprised to find her on the board of Ohana Ola Kino. She was a dynamo, determined to use the money in the Trust to help people wherever she could. I called her cell and asked if we could get together.

  “I’m swamped right now,” she said. “I have a federal filing deadline for the Trust coming up, and I’m about to go into a meeting with our attorneys. My mom is watching Danny for me so I can go directly from here to dinner with Levi. Why don’t you and Mike join us? Seven o’clock at the Golden Dragon.”

  MAhu BLood 75

  Levi was her boyfriend, a successful mainland entrepreneur who’d come to the islands to restart his life after a difficult divorce. I liked him and thought he was good for Terri. We made plans to meet at the Golden Dragon, a Chinatown favorite, and I called Mike to make sure it was okay with him.

  “It would have been nice if you’d asked me first, instead of committing us.”

  “I can cancel. I wanted to ask her some questions, and she said she was busy—she suggested dinner.”

  “Last night we had dinner at your folks. Tonight with Terri and Levi. Are we going to spend any time together?”

  “That’s why I moved in with you, isn’t it? So we could be together?”

  “Fine. Whatever you want.”

  “Mike.”

  “I’m busy now. I’ll be home around five thirty.” He hung up.

  “Asshole,” I said, to the dial tone.

  “Ain’t love grand?” Ray said.

  I looked over at him. “How do you do it? You’re always picking up special duty, Julie’s always studying. Don’t either of you ever get fed up?”

  He pushed the papers on his desk away in what looked like surrender. “We’re both Italian, you know. So we don’t hold back.

  I’d say we have at least one big fight a month, but it clears the air and we go back to business as usual.”

  “Really? I don’t remember my parents fighting more than a few times my whole childhood.”

  He shrugged. “Different strokes for different folks. We don’t let stuff build up. Last week, Julie was going on and on about this other grad student, this guy. He was so smart; he was so charming; he was so handsome. I told her that if he was so great, she was welcome to go marry him.”

  I laughed. “You didn’t say that.”

  76 Neil S. Plakcy

  “Sure I did. Then she threw a book at me. Hit me right in the chest.” He rubbed what I figured was the sore spot. “Big fucking book, too. The point is, I didn’t let it fester, start to go crazy over it. She loves me, I love her. We both know that. Everything else is just domestic drama.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said. “Are we giving up on this case?

  I’ll find out what I can tonight about the Ohana, but I doubt that will get us much. I’m assuming you didn’t come up with anything on Ka Leo.”

  “Nope. But you never know what will come up tomorrow.”

  We called it quits. I hated a stalled investigation, but I didn’t know anything else we could do. I went out to my Jeep, where I pawed through the debris on the front seat to find the new Kalei Gamiao ukulele CD. As the music kicked in, I thought about Mike.

  I had believed that by moving in together, we could short-circuit a lot of our problems—neither of us ever being at home when we were together, missing each other when we weren’t, the sense that we couldn’t be committed to each other until we shared the same bed, night after night. Some of those problems had indeed gone away, only to be replaced with new ones.

  I was a slob, but there was a method to my messiness. Mike couldn’t see that. He obsessed over tiny spots on the kitchen counter but left his clean laundry piled on the dining room table until I put it away for him. Once we’d moved in together, he’d relegated me to the role of chauffeur, complaining that he had to drive all over the island in his investigations.

  We had a long way to go before our lives were fully integrated, before I could anticipate how he’d react to something as simple as dinner with friends. I could only hope we’d make it to that point without breaking up or killing each other.

  diNNeR iN chiNAtowN

  Mike was taking a nap when I got home, so I padded around the kitchen and the living room, cleaning up and then reading. He woke around 6:30 and came out of the bedroom in his underwear.

  Even after all the time that has passed between us, a sight like that still makes me hard. I love the way his white briefs contrasted with his tanned skin and black hair, the way I can see the muscles in his abdomen ripple as he walked. He yawned and scratched his balls. “What time do we have to leave for dinner?”

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “What time?”

  “Soon. You going to get dressed?”

  “No, I thought I’d go in my shorts.” He stroked his crotch a couple of times. “You like that?”

  I got up from the couch and walked over to him. Then I dropped to my knees, grabbed his ass and started licking his dick through his briefs.

  He groaned. “We’re going to be late for dinner if you keep that up.”

  I stopped licking for a minute to say, “You’re the one who has to keep it up.” He laughed and grabbed my head. The shorts came down, and his dick went into my mouth. An appetizer before dinner.

  As we drove down to Chinatown in my Jeep, I told him how frustrated I was that the investigation into Edith’s death was stalled.

  “I know, it happens. But that doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “It’ll come together when it’s time,” Mike said. “You know that. You just keep your head down, keep following your leads and something will break.”

  “I hope so. How was your day?”

  78 Neil S. Plakcy

  “Fire out in Waipahu last night. Mother, father, six kids living in this wood-framed bungalow must have been built fifty years ago. Place went up like tinder. They’ve been overloading the wiring, and last night the dryer shorted out while everybody was asleep.”

  “Anybody make it out?”

  “They all did. The dog woke them up, you believe it? Golden retriever saved the whole family. Started barking like crazy, ran around the house grabbing them and tuggin
g.”

  “That’s sweet. My brother’s station will get a lot of mileage out of a story like that.” My oldest brother, Lui, was the manager of KVOL, “Your Volcano Alert Station, Erupting News All The Time,” the scrabbling independent in Honolulu. KVOL

  concentrated on the most inflammatory stories, but I knew they’d love a heroic dog.

  “So I was talking to the dad today, as I’m poking through the ashes. He’s trying to save anything he can, a picture, a kid’s toy, because they’ve got nothing. And he’s totally bummed because he and his wife had a fight before they went to bed, and he feels like it was that bad karma that brought the fire down on them.”

  He looked over at me. “When we argue, you think you can make everything better by sucking my dick.”

  “It’s worked so far. Seriously, it’s better than fighting, isn’t it?”

  He had a devilish grin on his face. “Sometimes fighting can be fun.”

  I pulled into a parking spot a block from the restaurant. “Hold that thought, tiger,” I said. “We’ll get back to it later.”

  We ran into Terri and Levi on the street in front of the restaurant, and we all went in together. They made a nice couple.

  Terri was tall, slim and tanned, wearing a floral print dress with a strand of pearls—you might take her for a pampered wife, if you didn’t know that she’d been trained since birth for a life of public service.

  Levi was about ten years older, a couple of inches taller, with MAhu BLood 79

  the bearing of a corporate executive. His face was deeply tanned from hours spent on his sailboat, and he’d given up suits in favor of striped shirts and khakis.

  The Golden Dragon’s plate glass windows were cluttered with menus and posters of local events. The inside wasn’t much, either, just a big aquarium with tropical fish, a bunch of rundown booths and rice paper calendars and pictures of China on the walls. But the food was terrific; my friends and I had been going there since high school. Some of the elderly waiters and waitresses had been there that long, and sometimes I thought they’d still be there long after we had passed on.

  After we’d been seated, made some conversation and had our orders taken, Terri asked, “So, what did you want to know?”

  “You’re on the board of the Ohana Ola Kino, right? What kind of place is it?”

  “It’s a halfway house for men and women transitioning back to the community after treatment in a residential mental health facility,” Terri said. “Mostly the Hawai’i State Hospital. Patients who don’t have a support system go to the Ohana for a place to live, job training and so on. They have residential space for thirty clients and serve another hundred or so with counseling and programs.”

  “What’s your interest?” Levi asked.

  “Do you know a man named Ezekiel Kapuāiwa? He lived at the Ohana for a while a couple of years ago?”

  The waitress brought out a platter of crab rangoon and bowls of won ton soup, and we dug in. Terri said, “I joined the board of the Ohana about five or six years ago. I spent a lot of time there at first, getting to know the staff and some of the clients. I met Ezekiel then.”

  She speared a piece of crab with her chopsticks and lifted it to her mouth. When she finished chewing, she said, “You have to understand, the clients at the Ohana all have problems. So Ezekiel didn’t stand out. But then one day, we were having a benefit lunch, and I happened to sit at a table with him and a man 80 Neil S. Plakcy

  named Jun Tanaka, who we were cultivating to join the board.”

  “I don’t trust Tanaka,” Levi said. “There’s something shady about him.”

  “Levi is determined that Jun Tanaka has some devious interest in the Ohana,” Terri said.

  I finished my soup and pushed the bowl away. “If you think he’s involved in something criminal, I want to hear about it. But first, I need to focus on my case.”

  Terri continued. “At this lunch, with Jun Tanaka, Ezekiel started bragging about being descended from King Kamehameha, and honestly, I wasn’t paying him any mind. Delusions of grandeur, you know. I figured it was part of whatever was wrong with him.

  But Jun was fascinated. He kept Ezekiel talking, and then a week later Jun agreed to join the board. I didn’t make the connection until I heard that Ezekiel had started the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and Jun was one of his backers.”

  The busboy took away the empty dishes, and on his heels the waitress brought platters of honey garlic chicken, pepper steak, sizzling shrimp, and big metal bowls of white rice. When we’d finished serving ourselves, Terri picked up the story.

  “Jun Tanaka is a Japanese businessman. His grandfather came here before the Second World War and then was interned at Honouliuli.”

  “There were internment camps in Hawai’i?” Mike asked, between bites of chicken. “I thought the camps were all on the mainland.”

  “Most of them were,” I said. “They couldn’t intern all the Japanese-Americans in the islands because there were too many of them, and the economy would have fallen apart. I think they only locked up the people they thought were dangerous.”

  “My point exactly,” Levi said.

  “You can’t blame Jun for something his grandfather may or may not have done,” Terri said. “Look at all the things people accused my grandfather of.”

  MAhu BLood 81

  Terri’s grandfather had built Clark’s from a single store in Honolulu to a chain throughout the islands. I knew there were stories about other merchants he forced out of business, landowners he bought from cheaply. But I also knew that he had fought against statehood because he wanted the islands to retain their independence, started the Sandwich Islands Trust and challenged his family to do good works.

  “Jun’s father was born in Honouliuli, and then the family was deported to Japan after the war,” she said. “His father became a successful businessman in Japan, but he held onto his US

  citizenship. He arranged for Jun to be born in Honolulu, and then he sent Jun here to expand the family’s business interests.”

  “I think the man’s a crook,” Levi said.

  “How do you know him? And why do you think he’s a crook?”

  I asked.

  “Terri asked me to help out,” he said. “I’m not on the board officially, but I go to meetings and look over the financial statements. And I get a bad feeling from Tanaka. He’s shady about where his money comes from. Maybe it’s that Ezekiel is so patently crazy that I think there’s got to be something behind Jun’s backing him.”

  Levi didn’t have any evidence to support his accusations, but I promised I’d look into Tanaka, and we moved on to coffee and dessert. “Do you know why Ezekiel left the Ohana?” I asked Terri.

  “It’s not supposed to be a lifelong residence,” she said. “He had a job, at a coffeehouse, and eventually he found an apartment.

  There are always new clients ready to take any places that come open.”

  The conversation shifted to more social topics, and the evening became a fun dinner with friends. I was glad to see that Terri and I had been able to integrate Levi and Mike into our friendship without anything changing between us.

  I insisted on paying for dinner, even though Terri and Levi could have bought and sold Mike and me a dozen times over.

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  They’d taken us out many times, at more expensive restaurants.

  “Get what you needed?” Mike asked, as we drove home.

  “You know the drill. You don’t know what’s important until you put all the pieces together.”

  “I’ve seen this Ezekiel guy on TV a couple of times. Now I understand why he sounds nuts. I mean, come on. Hawai’i secede from the US?”

  “Just because he’s crazy doesn’t mean he doesn’t make some good points. The US took down a sovereign government so that some American businessmen could make money.”

  “And the US hasn’t been good to Hawai’i?”

  “You ever go out to Papakolea?” I asked. “To
the Hawaiian homestead land? You think those people are benefiting from the way the land was stolen from their ancestors?”

  “Don’t tell me you believe that crap.”

  “It’s not crap. My people were here for centuries before the missionaries got here and everything started.”

  “Your people? Wasn’t your dad’s mother a haole teacher from Montana?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Yeah, it is the point. You’re full of shit.”

  I pulled the Jeep into the driveway. “Yeah. Thanks for your opinion.” I slammed the door and stalked in the house.

  MoRNiNg stoNeRs

  There was a well-defined space between Mike and me in bed that night. In the morning, we kissed and wished each other a good day, but I felt the residue of our arguments simmering under the surface.

  At headquarters later, I told Ray what I’d learned from Terri.

  “Yeah, it’s all interesting,” he said. “But how does it relate to Edith Kapana’s death?”

  “I just have a feeling. Levi thinks there’s something illicit going on with Jun Tanaka. And I keep thinking that there’s some correlation between the Ohana and Edith’s death.”

  We pulled out the case files and started thumbing through the pages. “Remember that woman at the community center who told us Edith was making trouble for pakalolo dealers?” I asked.

  “You want to go downstairs with me? Maybe Vice can tell us something.”

  We took the elevator down to the B1 level, the first of two levels below ground. The photo lab, narcotics and the special investigations section, where they do research on evidence, are down there, along with Vice.

  Lieutenant Kee’s secretary, Juanita Lum, is a heavyset, no-nonsense Filipina, with lustrous black hair and skin so smooth she could do soap ads. From her wedding picture, which sat in a heart-shaped frame on her desk, you could see she’d been a real looker when she was younger.

  “Howzit, Kimo?” she asked. “Morning, Ray.”

  I explained what we were looking for.

  “Let me see what I can dig up for you.” She turned to her computer, and her fingers, with their long pink nails, flew across the keyboard. Pages started spewing out of the printer next to her desk. “I pulled up everybody with intent to sell in that area.”