Mahu Blood Page 9

  She grabbed a half-dozen pages from the printer and handed 84 Neil S. Plakcy

  them to me.

  Juanita had provided us with eight guys who had a history of dealing on Hawaiian homestead land. Back at our desks, we spent an hour looking into them. Two of the guys on the list were dead, and another three had been penal guests of the state of Hawai’i since well before Aunty Edith’s murder. With a few phone calls, we knocked one more out—he was a student at U.H. who’d been buying some Maui Wowie to distribute to friends back at the dorm.

  That left us with two brothers who lived in Papakolea. It was barely ten a.m., an hour when all serious potheads are tucked up in bed. We drove up to their address in the Jeep, with the side flaps rolled up, the fresh morning air cooling as we climbed uphill through the curving streets.

  “I thought you knew your way around this whole island,” Ray said, as another street turned out to be a cul-de-sac that didn’t go through where I wanted it to.

  I made a U-turn and said, “You like this neighborhood?

  Because I can drop you anywhere around here you want.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Two more U-turns later, I found the narrow street off Tantalus Drive where Leroy and Larry Campbell lived in a beat-up shack. Weeds grew around the foundation of the shack; it had once been white, but the tropical sun had faded it to the color of dried spit. One of the windows was broken and covered over with cardboard.

  Ray rapped on the door and called out, “Mr. Campbell. Police.

  Open up.”

  We waited, and Ray was about to knock again when the door opened. A fat Hawaiian guy with dark dreadlocks stuck his head out. “Help you?”

  “Mr. Campbell?” Ray showed him his ID. “Honolulu Police.

  Can you step outside?”

  We heard someone call out from inside the shack, and the fat MAhu BLood 85

  guy turned to answer. “It’s da kine police.”

  “That your brother in there?” Ray asked. “We’d like to talk to him, too.”

  I saw curtains flicking across the street, some nosy old kupuna keeping tabs on the brothers. After another minute or two, both of them came outside. They were both big guys, though Leroy was bald, and Larry was the one with the dreadlocks.

  They were typical stoners, slow to wake up and even slower to process our questions. They knew Aunty Edith, because of the trouble she’d been causing for them, but when Ray asked if they knew who had killed her, they laughed.

  “Yeah, man, we climb up on da roof and shoot her,” Leroy said, making a gun with his thumb and index finger. “Bang, bang!”

  He and his brother laughed like Santa Claus, their big bellies shaking. They pretend shot each other, each grabbing his chest and staggering around as if dying. “Yo, dude, a lady’s dead,” Ray said. “Have some respect.”

  They sobered for a minute, then started giggling again. I looked at Ray. I couldn’t imagine either of these idiots getting it together enough to come up with a plan to shoot Edith Kapana—no less carry it out. But I had to ask. “Where were you last Friday morning?”

  Leroy opened his hands like he had a pretend datebook in them and flipped the pages. “Last Friday. Dat da day we was knocking back beers wid da mayor?” he asked his brother. “Or wuz we climbing Diamond Head fo’ admire the view?”

  “Nah, bruddah, dat the day we wuz practicing da hula,” Larry said, waving his hands and swaying his hips.

  Both of them dissolved into laughter again.

  “Listen, jerkwads, you don’t have a good alibi, we take you downtown,” Ray said.

  Leroy sobered up. “What you want us tell you?” he asked. “We no wake up until noon any day. Only alibi I got is my bruddah.

  86 Neil S. Plakcy

  Plus, we ain’t got no car. You think we take guns on da Bus?”

  Ray and I looked at each other. “We may have more questions for you,” I said. “Don’t leave town.”

  Leroy pulled his shorts up on his thigh, kicked his leg and stuck his thumb out as if he was hitching a ride. He and his brother collapsed into laughter once more, and they were pretend shooting each other again as we walked away.

  We went across the street, and the nosy neighbor confirmed that the Campbell brothers rarely, if ever, woke before noon.

  They were lazy, no-account pakalolo dealers, she said, and she thought we should lock them up just on general principles.

  “I wish we could,” Ray said. We thanked her for her help and went back to the Highlander. By then Leroy and Larry had gone back in the shack, and I could sniff the pungent aroma of Maui Wowie wafting out of the front window.

  “I think you had the right idea yesterday,” I said, as I backed down the driveway. “Going over to the Ohana Ola Kino. Even without a subpoena for medical records, we could nose around the facility, see what we can find out.”

  “Can’t work out any less useful than this was.”

  We took a couple of winding roads over the mountains and into Kaneohe. The Ohana was a one-story building that hugged a hillside a few blocks from the Windward Mall, just down the street from the Kope Bean branch we’d visited the day before.

  It looked like a nursing home—a central foyer with a reception desk and an office, and two wings of client rooms on either side.

  A couple of strip shopping centers and an empty lot were its closest neighbors.

  The receptionist was an elderly Japanese woman. Ray and I showed our IDs and asked if we could talk to someone about the facility.

  That flustered her. She muddled and dithered for a while, then called a tall, slim haole from the office behind her. “I’m David Currie,” he said. “I’m the administrator here. How can I help you?”

  MAhu BLood 87

  He led us into his office, which was cluttered with books and papers and photos and certificates on the walls. “We’re here about Ezekiel Kapuāiwa,” I said. “I understand he was a client here?”

  “I can’t give you any information about our clients without a warrant. All our records are confidential.”

  “We don’t have a reason to get a warrant,” Ray said. “We want to learn about Ezekiel. Whatever you feel you can tell us without compromising his privacy.”

  Currie pursed his lips and thought for a while. Then he said,

  “Ezekiel is one of our success stories. He reintegrated with the mainstream very well, and indeed, he’s become a community leader. I’d like to think that whatever is in his past should stay in the past.”

  “I’d like that, too. But sometimes the past has a way of catching up to us.”

  He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us anything about Ezekiel’s diagnosis or hospitalization. “I can tell you, though, that you’re not the first person to come up here asking about Ezekiel’s mental health.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “An elderly woman was here last week. She said they came from the same town on the Big Island. She was worried about him.”

  “You get a name for her?” Ray asked.

  He looked around on his desk. “I told her I couldn’t say anything, but she insisted on leaving me her phone number in case I changed my mind.” He pulled a piece of paper out and handed it to me. “I recognized the name when I saw it on the news the other day.”

  The name was Edith Kapana.

  I showed it to Ray, trying not to give away anything in front of Currie.

  I picked up the questioning then, following up on Levi’s suspicions the night before. If Tanaka was a backer of KOH, 88 Neil S. Plakcy

  he could be connected to the case. “How about Jun Tanaka?” I asked. “What can you tell us about him?”

  “Mr. Tanaka is one of our board members.”

  “How about his relationship with Mr. Kapuāiwa? Would you call them friends? Business associates? I understand Mr. Tanaka is one of the backers of Kingdom of Hawai’i.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Currie said. “It’s not uncommon for a board member to t
ake a special interest in the rehabilitation of a client. Many of our board members provide jobs, housing or other assistance to clients. That’s why they get involved with us in the first place. So they can help people.”

  “But you don’t know what kind of help Mr. Tanaka has provided?”

  “We have twenty-five to thirty clients living here at any one time,” Currie said. “The average stay is anywhere from six months to two years. We also provide outpatient services to another hundred clients. That’s a lot of people for me to keep track of.”

  Because of all the laws about privacy, health care and education are the hardest places to get information from without a subpoena, so we knew that there wasn’t much else we could get from David Currie. We gave him our cards and asked him to call if he recalled anything we should know.

  “Well, that was a useful visit,” Ray said, as we walked out. “Too bad we can’t subpoena his ass and look at the records ourselves.”

  “But we did find a connection to Edith Kapana. Why do you think she was interested in Ezekiel’s mental health?”

  “She was volunteering for the KOH,” Ray said. “Maybe she saw Ezekiel acting crazy, and she wanted to know what was wrong with him. People said she was a nosy old woman.”

  We stopped in front of the Jeep, in the small parking lot in front of the Ohana. Flat cirrus clouds hung over the horizon, and there wasn’t even a hint of a breeze.

  “She knew him back on the Big Island. Suppose he was crazy back then, and she knew it. If she started telling people that he MAhu BLood 89

  was nuts, that he’d been hospitalized, it could destroy KOH’s chances to run Hawai’i.”

  “You keep assuming that this is a real possibility,” Ray said, leaning against the back of the Jeep. “You think any of these groups have a chance at seceding from the US?”

  “I don’t think Hawai’i will ever secede. But I do think there will be a financial settlement someday. Reparations. Whoever’s on top has the chance to control that money.”

  “How about those papers that were stolen from her room?”

  Ray asked. “You think any of them could have been from the Hawai’i State Hospital? His records?”

  “I wish I had looked closer. I suppose. Edith was his hanai grandmother, after all; she might have been the person who had him committed.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have the paperwork herself,” Ray suggested, and I turned back to look at him. “So she came up here to get some proof, but Currie wouldn’t give it to her.”

  “We should call the hospital. See if they can confirm Ezekiel was a patient there without a subpoena.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Across the street, I saw a middle-aged haole waiting for the bus. He was wearing a faded blue baseball cap and a cheap windbreaker, smoking a cigarette. “See that guy over there,” I said to Ray. “You think maybe he’s a client here?”

  The guy was nodding his head to an unseen beat, and his right leg shook. “Looks crazy to me. But I think that about half the population of Honolulu.”

  “I’ll meet you back here. I want to see what I can find out.”

  I waited until there was a break in traffic, and then walked over to the bus stop. The bus route sign had been painted over with graffiti, so I asked the guy, “Bus go into Honolulu from here?”

  “Yeah, the bus goes from here,” he said. “But the bus doesn’t go that often. When the bus goes, it goes. But it doesn’t always go when you want it to.”

  90 Neil S. Plakcy

  Okay, so the guy probably was a client at the Ohana Ola Kino.

  I watched as he lit another cigarette with the butt of the first one, and said, “They want me to go live across the street. So I gotta know that I can get the bus here.”

  “I live there,” he said. “And I take the bus every day. Every day, I wait here for the bus. The bus goes to my job.”

  “Really? What kind of job?”

  “I sit with the coffee,” he said. “At night. In case anybody comes for it. I take the bus every day, to sit with the coffee.”

  “You know a guy at the Ohana named Ezekiel?”

  He shook his head violently. “They’re all crazy there,” he said.

  “I don’t talk to nobody if I can help it.”

  “How about this woman?” I asked, pulling out a picture of Edith. “You ever see her around?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.” He rocked back and forth, puffing on his cigarette. “Is this some kind of test? I don’t like it when they make me take tests. I never know the answers.”

  I went back to pretending I was going to live at the Ohana and wanted to know about it. We talked for a couple of more minutes, but it was all variations on the same theme. He sat around with coffee, babysitting it somehow, and he took the bus to get to work.

  “I guess I have to get a job,” I said. “They fix you up with this coffee job back there?” I nodded toward the Ohana.

  He nodded. “Lotta people work with the coffee. But not like me.”

  Then the bus pulled up. “Mahalo,” he said, even though there wasn’t anything to thank me for, other than for keeping him company while he waited. I stayed on the bench, and as the bus drove away, he pushed his face against the window and watched me.

  I admired people who devoted themselves to taking care of others. People like David Currie, who protected the clients at the Ohana. And Terri, who used her position and her family’s money MAhu BLood 91

  to better the community. Sometimes, as a cop, you get the sense that you are doing good—protecting the people, putting away the bad guys. Most of the time, though, you feel like you’re butting your head against a wall, that nothing you do will ever lead to change. I was having one of those kind of days.

  I looked across the street and saw Ray leaning against the side of the Jeep. “You waiting for a ride?” he called. “Or you just going to sit there?”

  the goLdeN Boy

  Riding back to headquarters, I told Ray what the crazy guy had said. “Coffee?” he asked. “You ask him where?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where he babysits the coffee,” Ray said, real slow, like I was a child or a client at the Ohana. “You think he works at the Kope Bean?”

  “Shit. I was so focused on asking about Ezekiel and Edith and the Ohana I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Just seems like there’s a lot of coffee floating around in this case,” Ray said. “And it all circles back to the Kope Bean.”

  “He said a lot of people from the Ohana work with the coffee.

  Edith knew both Dex and Ezekiel. And both of them worked for the Kope Bean. But Ezekiel was a barista, and Dex works in the warehouse.” I flipped through our notes. “But look here.

  Ezekiel stopped working at the Kope Bean in 2005.” I turned to a different page. “According to Leelee, Dex didn’t move in with her and her uncle and Edith until 2007.”

  “So it’s not like Ezekiel got Dex the job,” Ray said. “And Currie said the clients move in and out, so it’s not even likely that the crazy guy and Ezekiel lived in the Ohana at the same time or worked at the Kope Bean at the same time. It’s probably just some kind of placement deal. The Kope Bean has a bunch of minimum wage jobs, and they hire clients from the Ohana. May even get tax credits for it, you know, hiring the disabled. I know a place in Philly used to work that way.”

  When we got back to our desks, Ray called the Hawai’i State Hospital to ask about Ezekiel. I went back to our notes looking for loose threads and found that we hadn’t followed up on Bunchy Parker’s son Brian, the Iraq veteran who might have some sharpshooting skills.

  I called Bunchy, who said Brian was out. “I’m not his secretary, 94 Neil S. Plakcy

  brah,” Bunchy said. “He don’t tell me where he go.”

  “Has he been home at all since we talked to you two days ago?”

  “No.”

  “He usually stay away from home that long?”

  “He’
s a grown man,” Bunchy grumbled. “He don’t care about his father no more.”

  “Tell him to call us when you do see him.” I hung up, wondering what Brian Parker was hiding from or running away from.

  Ray had about as much luck with the hospital. They wouldn’t confirm or deny anything about a patient without a subpoena for records. Though we felt there had to be a tie to Edith’s death, because of their history together and her death at the rally, I didn’t see a judge considering our argument strong enough to violate Ezekiel’s right to privacy. And we didn’t know for sure that his mental health was connected to her death, at least not yet.

  Jun Tanaka’s name was on the incorporation papers for the non-profit and in an annual report we found filed with the state.

  But he was never quoted in any of the newspaper articles on KOH, and doing an online search for “Kingdom of Hawai” and

  “Tanaka” together gave us no results.

  There were a couple of Jun Tanakas in the system, but none of them matched the few details we had. Since that exhausted my computer skills, I called my best friend since high school, Harry Ho.

  At Punahou, Terri Clark, Harry and I were an invincible trio.

  Terri provided emotional insights that escaped testosterone-based life forms like Harry and me, and Harry was able to use his computer skills to find information that would defeat lesser brains. I was never quite sure what I brought to the equation, other than determination and loyalty.

  “Howzit, brah?” I asked. “Think you could pull yourself away for a few minutes to do some searching for me?”

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  Harry and his girlfriend, Arleen, had gotten married a couple of months before. Terri was the maid of honor, and I was the best man. After a long honeymoon in Japan and China, they had settled into a cute little house in Aiea, a couple of blocks from Mike and me.

  “I could use a break,” he said. “What do you need?”

  I told him about Jun Tanaka and Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, about their connection to KOH and our suspicions. “Can you see what you can find about them both?”