“So they lied.”
“So they lied,” she said. “Under oath. And you owe me for the suit.”
She fingered the lapels. “Nice, huh? Olive green looks good on you. And double-breasted is the only way to go for your build. Nice tie. Very classy.”
“How much?”
“I’ll put it on the bill,” she said. “Along with these drinks.”
We took a table at the window of the bar, which overlooked Ala Moana and part of the industrial section of the port. We couldn’t see the water from our table, and it was doubtful whether you could see a sunset from the restaurant, but it was comfortable inside, quiet and peaceful, and the drinks were generous.
Kimo joined us, another surprise. He smiled and clapped me on the back when he suddenly appeared at our table.
“Good to see you out of jail, man,” he said, loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to turn their collective heads in our direction. He looked at Felix, who nodded curtly, clearly uncomfortable to be in proximity to the big cop.
The waitress came to our table and asked if we’d like something to drink, as if we had come to a bar for any other reason. She was a young blonde dressed in a starched white shirt and black skirt.
“I’d say a bottle,” said Tala, her eyes challenging me.
“A bottle it is.”
“Champagne.”
“Fine.”
“Dom?”
“Of course.”
“That will cost a fortune.”
“Chawlie can afford it,” said Kimo, deadpan, glancing at Felix.
Tala nodded, and the waitress went away.
“Chawlie make the bail?”
I pointed toward Tala. “My attorney had the money in her purse. You’ll have to ask her.”
“Attorney-client privilege, Lieutenant,” she said, smiling sweetly.
“Don’t matter much to me,” he said.
“So what about Donna?” I asked.
Kimo looked again at Felix. “Don’t you have anywhere to go?”
“I’m fine,” said Felix.
“You don’t get it. I don’t want to talk in front of you.”
Kimo stared at the young man, who stared back, one immovable object in direct opposition to another. A challenge had been thrown down and answered.
“Felix,” I said gently. “Why don’t you take a walk?”
He looked at me, nodded silently, got up and carefully pushed his chair back into the table. I watched him walk out of the restaurant. He didn’t look back.
“That didn’t hurt, did it?” asked Kimo.
“You don’t like the kid, that’s your business,” I said, “but you don’t have to be rude to him.”
Kimo shrugged. “He’s a cockroach, Caine. Just because he’s your cockroach doesn’t hold much water with me.”
Tala leaned forward and put her hand on the big man’s arm. “He’s gone, Kimo. You were going to tell us about dropping the charges.”
He glanced at the door before answering. “The ME feels that the blows to the professor’s head could not have been made by a slight, short person such as Donna. And they didn’t get ceramic bits and pieces out of the wound as they originally thought. It seems they found broken bits and pieces of tiger shark teeth in the man’s head.”
The waitress came and showed us the bottle. We smiled. She smiled back, hers a little strained, having heard the last part of Kimo’s account.
She popped the cork and poured each of us half a glass.
“Tiger shark?” I asked after she had gone.
Kimo lifted his glass and toasted Tala. “To the best attorney on Oahu.”
I joined the toast and sipped the bubbly, the first alcohol in my system in some time, aware that it would quickly go to my head, and not caring even a little. I looked out the window to the bright Honolulu sunshine and felt vast gratitude for my Samoan champion and my Chinese patron.
“Hear, hear,” I said, with a little more feeling than I’d intended.
“Thanks, guys. It’s not every day that the arresting officer attends a bail party.”
Kimo smiled.
“You were talking about shark teeth,” I said, already feeling the bubbly rush.
“You ever go to the Bishop Museum?”
“Of course.”
“You ever see that old war club that Cook brought back to London after his first voyage here? It had been a gift of Kamehameha I. It had been kept in Buckingham Palace for a couple of hundred years. The Brits sent it back about fifteen years ago.”
“I know the one.”
“Somebody stole it while you were floating around off the Big Island. Big flap around the museum. It’s priceless, and they didn’t have adequate security on it.”
“Who would want to steal it?”
He took a sip of the Dom and smiled. “Guy could get used to this,” he said. “Who stole it is a stupid question. I don’t care who stole it. They got other detectives to investigate that. The point is that somebody did steal it. The question is, how does it relate to Professor Hayes’s killing?”
“And?”
“The professor died from blunt force trauma. Not easy to kill a big guy like that—crush his skull—if you’re just a little girl.”
Tala sniffed, and Kimo smiled at her, showing the edges of his straight white teeth. It reminded me of a shark opening its mouth, ready to gather in an evening meal. “Young woman,” he said. “That make you happy?”
Tala said nothing.
“Hard thing to do for a small-framed young female-type human person,” he said finally.
“So how do the two crimes relate?”
“Tiger shark teeth. It’s the bridge to both cases. Somebody wanted to have the mana that Kamehameha’s war club would give them. Did you know that somebody stole his pipe from a museum in Kailua? Happened about the same time.”
“Somebody is collecting Kamehameha memorabilia.”
“Amassing his mana, is what’s happening.”
“So how does this relate?”
“The ME said that he found koa wood splinters in the wounds on Hayes’s head in addition to the teeth. Fresh wood. Don’t ask me how he can tell the difference, but he says he can. Koa wood splinters and tiger shark teeth bits and pieces equals a newly minted war club.”
“So he was killed with a replica?”
“They wouldn’t have wasted the original.”
“You’re going to use this to get the DA to drop the charges against Donna?”
“Going to try. Going in Monday to lay out the new evidence. I think he will once he sees what I see.”
“Anything else?”
“Lots. Found other stuff in the professor’s apartment that made it appear that he had been killed by someone else.”
“Like?”
“Forget it. You don’t need to know.”
“He’s my investigator on the case, Kimo,” said Tala quietly.
“Then he can get the information through discovery. If it ever gets that far.”
“So you think she can really get out of jail?”
“We’ll see. I got another lead that I can’t talk about. Not yet.” He took another sip of the champagne, closed his eyes as it fell down his throat and appeared to be enjoying the charge. But when he opened his eyes he didn’t look happy. “Uncovered something that might be a direct line to the doer or doers.”
“Which you think will clear Donna?”
He nodded and sipped the champagne again, finishing off the glass. His silence seemed to be reluctant, as if he really wanted to talk to us about it, but couldn’t. Something profoundly bothered him.
“Did that Internet stuff have anything to do with it?”
He nodded.
“So you think Silversword did it.”
He poured himself another glass, drank it down in one gulp, and looked at us. “Do you guys know the real meaning of mahalo?”
“What?”
“Mahalo. You know, every time you walk into a touri
st shop and buy something, or if you go to a tourist bar or restaurant, or when you get off the airplane at the airport, the flight attendant always smiles and says, ‘mahalo.’”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what it means?”
“It means thank you.” It was a fun word to say. I liked the way my mouth moved when I said it.
He shook his head. I could tell that the fizzed alcohol had gone to his head a little, not easy to get a buzz on two glasses of champagne if you’re close to three hundred pounds. But then, this was Dom. “That’s what they want you to think,” Kimo said. “That’s not it.
“When the first Europeans came here, when the whalers brought syphilis, gonorrhea, typhoid, tuberculosis and measles, diseases that killed us by the thousands, when they introduced the flea, the mosquito, the cockroach, and the Norwegian rat, the old Hawaiians told them, ‘mahalo.’ When the missionaries came and forced us to wear heavy wool clothing to hide our nakedness and their shame, clothing that made us itch and sweat and gave us rashes, and when they introduced the kiave trees with their thorns to make us wear shoes, we smiled and said, ‘mahalo.’
“When the missionaries decided that we needed a written language so they could steal our island legally through written contracts, and they assembled the first Hawaiian dictionary, the word mahalo became the word for ‘thank you.’ The missionary who wrote the dictionary wasn’t a bad man and the people couldn’t bring themselves to tell him what they had really been saying to him, so the definition passed into writing.
“When Dole and his band of haole businessmen assumed the kingdom for themselves we really started saying ‘mahalo.’ Every chance we got, we’d say ‘mahalo.’
“And so now, when the waitress brings the check and says, ‘mahalo,’ to you with a smile, she really isn’t saying thank you. Even if she doesn’t know it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now I’m curious.”
“Whenever a Hawaiian says mahalo to a haole, it doesn’t mean thank you.”
“I get it,” said Tala, covering a smile.
“What?”
“It means ‘fuck you.’”
“And this has something to do with Silversword?”
“Mahalo. Fuck you, Caine. Just … fucking … mahalo. I can’t tell you and I won’t.”
Tala looked at me, her black eyes huge with concern.
Two tracks of tears ran down Kimo’s cheeks.
29
Kimo shoved his chair back and started to get up, his face contorted, as if he were trying to flee. Then something changed in the man, as if a mechanism had broken inside of him. He just sat there, his great shoulders slumped, his hands in his lap, studying the floor as if searching for something down there.
“Kimo—”
“Hush, Caine,” said Tala. “Let him alone.”
She gave me a look that told me I had blundered. At the same time, the look told me that I was not alone in my social incompetence, that almost all men should be lumped into the same group. We just don’t know what to do when one of us crumbles.
She might have been right.
But how did she get all that into just one look?
We waited for him to pull himself together again. Life in the restaurant swirled around us with conversation and noise. We remained under a cone of silence, a frozen tableau. The waitress didn’t approach. The busboy left us alone. People avoided our table, sensing that something was happening here that had nothing to do with them. It’s the herd instinct, I suppose. Let one of us stumble, the others will avoid the scene, hoping that by keeping away from the one in trouble they will not be so infected.
I sipped the champagne while I waited. It was too good to waste.
“I’m all right,” said Kimo after a long silent consultation with the floor.
“Want some coffee?” asked Tala.
“Naw. I’ll just get on home.” He raised his eyes to mine, smiling a sad, lopsided smile. “Glad you’re out of jail, Caine.”
I nodded.
“Try to stay that way. It was kind of lonely out here without you.” Kimo rose to his feet, supported by the chair. Tears still tracked his cheeks, but he refrained from wiping them away, letting them flow.
I wished I could have helped, but I wished more that he could have shared his grief, because grief was what I was witnessing. But he had his reasons for keeping the source of his wounds private, and there was nothing I could do about it until he saw fit to tell me.
I could have guessed, given what I knew, but guessing is bad sport, nothing more than building paper tigers and tearing them down. Not satisfied with wasted efforts, I would wait until he told me what it was that hurt him.
I watched my friend lumber from the bar, a huge and unhappy man, battling his demons.
“So what’s bothering him?” I asked Tala.
“The Hayes case. He knows what’s happening. He knows who’s responsible. He doesn’t like to learn the things he’s learning.”
“Silversword?”
She nodded.
“What’d I miss?”
“One of the newspapers received a letter signed by Silversword threatening to bomb one of the Waikiki beach hotels. Kimo reasons that the threat is similar to one received by the professor just before his death. Both are written. Both contain similar grammatical and spelling errors.”
“Hayes received a threat from an illiterate? So why arrest Donna?”
“Kimo told me he couldn’t rule her out. At the time all of the evidence pointed to her.”
“The note could have been faked.”
“Exactly. And when the second note came we both thought it would clear her. It looks like the same paper, the same computer font, the same grammatical errors, too. The spelling is abysmal. The paper is the same as that used at U of H. The font is a Microsoft Word font. Taken together they mean nothing. HPD uses the same paper. Kinko’s uses it, too. But too many things point toward the university. That’s where Kimo thinks Silversword is based. There’s always a radical element at the university. It’s part of its history. It’s natural for new and old ideas to be taken to the extreme in that kind of an environment.”
“Terrorists at Manoa?”
“Someone who works there, maybe. Or is a student with access to the storage closet or computer lab. But who knows? It’s not necessarily there, but evidence is starting to build.”
“So it may not be significant?”
“Just a small piece of the puzzle. But it will help our case. That’s really all I care about.”
“Point taken.”
“Kimo told me that the strange thing about these native Hawaiian groups is that they’re just no Hawaiians left anymore. Look at me. I’m Samoan, not Hawaiian, although a tourist walking in the door would naturally assume that I’m from this island. There are two dominant Hawaiian rights groups, and they can’t work together because of a basic disagreement as to what a Hawaiian really is. What’s the definition? They began arguing that a Hawaiian is a person with at least 50% Hawaiian blood, but nobody in either group was 50% Hawaiian, so they dropped it to 25% and argued passionately. Few of either group could boast 25%. The best any of the groups could muster was 12.5%, and they argued about that because that wasn’t a clear majority, either. It’s like the old south. You were a slave even if you were only 1/64 part African. You may have had blond hair and blue eyes, but according to the old laws you could still be a slave because of that 1/64. It’s the money. It’s always been the money.”
“What do you mean?”
“The federal government owes the Hawaiian people—not the state, the people—hundreds of millions of dollars in rent and reparations. The President of the United States made a big apology back in 1996, and then nothing happened while the Hawaiian groups tried getting their collective gear together. They couldn’t. So they can’t get their money. It remains in trust, gathering interest. More millions get dumped in every month.
“The State of Hawaii is holding even more money—more hun
dreds of millions. Those accounts are frozen, too, until some responsible and recognized group comes forward.”
“But isn’t Kimo Hawaiian?”
“Neolani is 100%, but Kimo is 75%, so their children—their natural children—are 87.5%. But nobody’s asked them to join one of these groups and it’s unlikely they would ask to join. This whole thing is not about what’s right, it’s about recognition. And about money.
“I honestly think someone would have asked Tutu Mae to head up one of these organizations if they were legitimate. She’s the ranking expert on all things cultural and historical, she works closely with the U of H and the Bishop, and she is 100% Hawaiian. That tells me everything I need to know about the groups seeking recognition.”
“Cui bono?”
“Who benefits? You bet it’s cui bono. That’s all it is. It’s always the case. As with the professor’s murder.”
“Does Kimo have a suspect?”
“He doesn’t say, or he won’t say, but something’s eating him. Whatever’s happening is starting to accelerate. I think Kimo feels it’s about to spin out of control.”
“Because?”
“Because that’s what I think. Because while you were in jail somebody set fire to one of the beach hotels. Nobody was hurt and property damage was minimal, but add arson to murder. Then two tourists got mugged in Ala Moana Park. They weren’t seriously hurt, but their attackers, described as big, young and Polynesian, thank you very much, shouted ‘Hawaii for Hawaiians’ before they ran off.”
“Kimo loves this place—”
“Of course he does. But so do I. So do you. Neither of us is Hawaiian, according to those neoteric ethnic cleansers.” Tala took a last swallow of the champagne. “And therefore our opinions do not count. I think Kimo feels responsible for these guys. That would explain a lot.”
It would not explain the depth of feeling that my old friend demonstrated in that now empty chair, but I didn’t say anything. I drained my glass. The bubbly had gone flat. So had my celebration. Neither of us had anything left to say.
“I was going to tell you to go home, John Caine, but I’m afraid you can’t.”
“I’ll bunk at the Royal.”
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