by Kay Hadashi
“My mother has a word for that in Italian, but it’s not very polite.”
“You speak Italian?”
“Not as well as my mother would like me to. She came from Italy to marry my father and always wanted my sister and me to learn fluent Italian.”
“She came as a picture bride?” Millie asked.
“The first time she was in Cleveland, it was as a study abroad student in high school. That’s when she met my dad. At the end of the year, she went home. I guess they wrote letters back and forth for a couple of years, until he splurged and went to Italy to visit her for a few weeks.”
“It’s a sweet story. When did they get married?”
“Not for a while. After coming home from Italy, Dad went to the police academy. Once his training was done and he had a full-time job, he went back to Italy on vacation and proposed. From the stories I’ve heard about it, he even asked her parents’ permission first, the old-fashioned way.”
“Nothing wrong with some of the old-fashioned ways,” Millie said. She fixed a small bowl of soy sauce for Gina to dunk her sushi ball. “Where was the wedding?”
“The big, white wedding was in Cleveland. But they had a secret wedding in Italy before she came to America. They never said anything to anybody in Cleveland about that. The only reason I know is that I found the registration paper for it once and asked my mother what it was. I had to make a lot of promises to keep my mouth shut about it, too.”
“You’ve just told me.”
“Yeah, well, I doubt the coconut wireless reaches all the way to Cleveland.”
“Not usually. Go ahead and try the tuna.”
“Now?”
“It has a mild flavor. You can tell it’s fresh by how red the color is. It’s okay.”
Gina took a bite and chewed carefully.
“Is it okay?”
“Actually, it’s pretty good. Not at all what I was expecting.”
That seemed to please Millie. “Do the police know anything about the man that was found at the house?”
“Not much. They’re thinking he was just a homeless guy that was using the front porch to sleep on, and that maybe he’d been living inside while the house was empty.”
“It was hard to keep them out, and we finally had to hire a night watchman. Once the house remodel started, we decided to have someone live there full-time.”
“That’s when you hired me?” Gina asked. She took another plate of the tuna.
“Right.”
“Okay, tell me the truth. Are you really trying to return the estate to its former state, or am I just being a glorified house sitter?”
“We’ve been wondering when you might ask that. Yes, we really do want to get the estate back in shape again. Maybe calling it an estate isn’t right, that calling it a farm would be better. But years ago, the media labeled it as the Tanizawa Estate, and it stuck. That’s what everybody calls it now.”
“It really is a beautiful piece of land. I guess I don’t understand why you hired me to lead the project? It’s not like I have much experience, especially anything to do with the tropics.”
“We’re hoping there’s more to you than meets the eye on your resume. Everything indicates that you’re a hard worker, and that you’re responsible.” Millie stacked their plates now that they were done with their meal. “You also underbid the other applicants for the amount you’d work for. Vastly underbid.”
“I didn’t know what to ask for.”
“You were probably thinking in Cleveland terms, rather than Honolulu terms.”
“I’m glad we’re having this talk, Millie. I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m going to work hard on the project. I’d really like to see it turn into something your family can be proud of again. I don’t know if it’ll be exactly the same, but every time I walk around the fields, I get a better idea of what it might’ve looked like a long time ago.”
“Which is exactly what you put on your original proposal. Frankly, we got better, more professional proposals from local landscapers, but most of them wanted to turn the place either into a theme park, or tear everything down and make something entirely different. You were the only one who made it sound like you cared enough to respect the family’s ideas and history. You were hired as much for that as you were for what we’re paying you.”
“Since I’m working so cheap, I get the pickup to use?”
“And such a large crew.”
“That’s why I have so many?” Gina asked.
The waitress tallied the amount to be paid and Millie handed over some bills. “They’ve all worked for us, some of them for quite a few years. Except one. We know they’re good workers, so we had Felix arrange for them to work at the estate instead of at one of our farms. One way or another, we’d be paying them to work for us.”
They went out to the parking lot. “Oh, you have other farms?”
“Sometimes it seems like too many. I’ll tell you about them some other time. Right now, you need to take me home. Know how to get to Saint Louis Heights?”
Gina started the pickup’s engine. “I don’t even know how to get back to the estate.”
“It’s not far from the estate, as the crow flies.” Millie pointed the way to her house, up a long, winding road. Not much of the house showed to the street, as most of it was below the ridge that it sat on.
“How do I get home from here?” Gina asked when she let Millie out.
“Follow this same street downhill until you get to Dole Street and turn right. Follow that until you get to East-West Road and turn right again. You’ll see the bridge from there.” Millie bit her lip for a moment. “Gina, our family has put a lot of trust and faith in you with the old Tanizawa farm. Gambatte, ne.”
“Gam…what?”
“Do your best.”
Chapter Eleven
On Tuesday morning, while her new coffeemaker brewed, Gina peeked out the front window wondering what to expect of the day. She was almost disappointed not to see someone sleeping on the porch.
Just as she was finishing her second mug of coffee, the first of her work crew showed up, that of Felix. She went out to meet him. Today, his smile wasn’t as broad as usual, and he stayed near his truck.
“Everything okay?” he asked as she walked up to him.
“Fine, why?”
He nodded toward the house thirty feet away. “Anybody…”
“Glad to announce that there are no dead bodies on the front doorstep today.”
He looked relieved and his usual smile returned.
One by one, the crew arrived, Clara once again coming with Flor and Florinda. Carrying two shopping bags in her hands, she went toward the house but stopped at the steps to the porch. After looking at the porch for a moment, Clara went around the house to the backdoor to go in. In a way, it was charming to see the girl’s superstitious reaction. In another way, Gina just wanted everybody to forget about what had dominated the day before and move on. She also knew that would take a while for herself.
***
When pau hana time came, her crew packed up and left, promising to come back in the morning. While Flor and Florinda waited for Clara to come out from the house to go home with them, a blue sedan drove in.
“There’s trouble,” Flor said.
“Why?” Gina asked. She watched Detective Kona come to a stop at the front of the house.
“Any time a cop shows up when he hasn’t been called, it’s trouble.”
Gina chuckled. As far as she knew, most of her work crew still didn’t know she’d worn a shield in the past. “Maybe.”
Detective Kona came straight for Gina, only nodding to Flor and Florinda. “Miss Santoro, howzit?”
“Pardon?”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thanks. Did someone call you?” she asked.
“No.” He made a show of looking around the area. “Am I in the way?”
“No, not at all. Is there something I can help you with?”
; “I have a few questions, and an update in the case, if you have time?”
“Of course. I’d like to hear what you’ve learned since yesterday,” she said.
Instead of answering her, Kona looked off toward the house. Clara was coming from the back, carrying a bag of leftovers from their mid-morning meal. When she noticed the rest of them, she looked at Detective Kona the longest. With a wary eye, she took a wide berth of travel around him to get to where Florinda was waiting next to the truck.
Gina noticed that as much as Clara tried to avoid them, Detective Kona watched her go by. He continued to watch as the trio drove out and were across the little bridge.
“Everything okay?” Gina asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“You seemed particularly curious about Clara.”
“No more than anyone else in your team. You know her last name?”
“I don’t know any of their last names. I’m still trying to learn some of their first names,” Gina said. “What did you have to ask me?”
“Let’s see…” He flipped from one page to another and back again on his yellow legal pad. “First, I need to take a look at all of your shoes, something the CSI techs neglected to do yesterday.”
“Fine with me.” Gina knew it was to compare her shoe prints with the prints they found in the soft dirt the morning before. In fact, she and her crew had to wait until all the prints had plaster casts taken of them by the techs, and then have their shoes photographed for comparison later. Shoes prints were much like tire tread prints, almost as reliable as fingerprints for identifying people who have entered a crime scene. She led him to the front door, and after stepping into the house, she went back out to take off her shoes. “We’re supposed to leave our shoes on the front porch.”
Kona took a pair of paper shoe covers from a pocket and slipped them over his shoes. “These’ll be good enough.”
He followed her to the bedroom, and after nudging her out of the way, took photos of all of her shoes from several angles, including the soles, and took copious notes for each.
“Do they match any of the print impressions your team got yesterday, Detective?”
“Not even close. Wrong size, different tread patterns.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“Find anything else in the weeds?” he asked.
“Like another Rolex?” Gina shook her head. “A couple of rusty tin cans half-buried in the dirt, the blade from an old scythe, a rusty nail.”
“Still got it?”
“Yeah, out on the picnic table. I thought you might want to see them if you ever came back.” She took him outside to the back of the house where the picnic table sat in the shade of a large avocado tree. “You can see how the cans were opened with one of those old-fashioned pointy openers. I guess they were beer cans. The scythe doesn’t even have its handle, and the blade is bent over and covered with rust. When I found it, it was half-buried in the dirt.”
Kona seemed most interested in the nail. “Did you clean this?”
“No, but I think it’s old. See how it was square rather than round? I think that’s how they made nails a long time ago.”
He looked at the length of it with a tiny magnifying glass, one that he clutched to his eye socket by squinting, similar to a jeweler’s loupe. “You haven’t cleaned this?”
“No, why?”
“Where’d you find it exactly?”
“Along one side of the gravel driveway halfway to the bridge.”
Putting the lens away, he got a small kit from his pocket. In the kit were a couple of small squirt bottles of fluid, and several small cards. He scraped some of the rust from the tip of the nail onto a card and dribbled a few drops of fluid on it.
“Hemoglobin test kit?” Gina asked, watching for a reaction.
“Right. Doesn’t always work so well when there’s rust involved.”
Even after waiting a full minute, they didn’t get the reaction they would expect if blood had been present on the nail.
“Nothing,” he said.
“You thought it might’ve had the dead man’s blood on it?” she asked.
“Someone’s blood, anyway.”
“Does that mean you’re classifying the death as a murder?” she asked.
“The medical examiner did the autopsy today. Most of the blood and body fluid test results are still outstanding, but he was able to determine that cause of death was a stab wound to the abdomen.”
“Stab wound?” Gina shook her head. “I was there when the responding officer lifted his shirt to look at his abdomen and back. He had no wounds.”
“Did you notice a Band-Aid on his belly?” Kona asked.
“Yes. The big cop named Iosefa lifted one side and said it looked like a cane spider bite, and stuck it down again.”
“Officer Iosefa is not a coroner, nor a trained CSI tech, and you can be sure I’ll remind him of that the next time I see him. The mark that you saw, the one that Iosefa said was a spider bite, was in fact a stab wound, likely made by an ice pick or similar weapon. Upon close examination by the coroner, the wound track was square in cross section, not round. That’s why I was interested in running that test on the nail.”
“I’ve seen jabs and slashes that had been made by ice picks, but can one do enough damage to kill someone?” she asked.
“The shafts of those are five to six inches in length, plenty long enough to reach deep into the liver, especially for someone as slender as the victim. According to the coroner, whoever stabbed him, knew what he was doing. He swept the weapon back and forth, and up and done through the liver, shredding it. That was as much of an injury as if he, or she, had used a knife, but left only a small puncture wound on the surface of the skin. The ensuing bleeding would’ve remained internal.”
“That’s nasty. And because the external wound was so small, there was little external blood loss?”
“Exactly. At first, he probably thought he was fine, that all he needed was a Band-Aid. The internal bleeding was slow enough that he lived for a while. According to the ME, his only pain would’ve been from where the skin and muscle had been pierced, and not from internal injuries. That’s why I’m back here today. Both the ME and I are seriously considering his death a murder.”
Gina gave the scene and the evidence some thought. “Why not a suicide?”
“It doesn’t seem like he would’ve killed himself on your porch. That doesn’t make sense to me. There was no weapon on him that matches the description the ME provided, and why would the man put a Band-Aid on a self-inflicted wound?”
“He could’ve flung the weapon away,” Gina said. “Like the nail I found in the dirt. Now I see why it was so important to you.”
Detective Kona continued to take notes. “It still doesn’t explain the Band-Aid.”
“There are a lot of unexplained things,” she muttered. “Is that why you had the CSI techs come back yesterday with metal detectors?”
“At that time I was still interested if anything unusual might be found. Even when a situation seems benign, we still need to investigate, just in case we find evidence later that indicates foul play. That happened today when the ME discovered the vic’s liver had been shredded.”
“Okay, let’s say he was stabbed with something long and slender by someone else,” Gina said. “Wouldn’t the perp have tossed the murder weapon into the stream instead of leaving it near the body or the scene of the crime?”
“That’s what I would do. But I’d also come back to look for my Rolex if I lost it. Because of that, I’m beginning to think the Rolex was being worn by the assailant, rather than by someone on your crew.”
“Why not by the dead man?” she asked.
“A man with nothing to his name other than a bottle cap and a broken pocket knife wouldn’t be wearing a Rolex.”
“I guess not. But would someone who can afford a Rolex have anything to do with someone like the dead man? He seemed ho
meless. Those are two different worlds that just don’t seem to collide in ordinary circumstances,” Gina said.
“I think collide is the operative word, Miss Santoro, and there’s nothing ordinary about stabbing someone in the liver. You’ve also forgotten one important fact.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“He might not have been stabbed on your porch. It almost seems more likely that he was stabbed elsewhere and either came or was brought here later. Did you hear anything during the night? Any noise come from outside at all?”
“There’s all kinds of creepy noises here every night. Someone at the hardware store said the place might be haunted.”
That seemed interesting to the detective and he made a note about it. “I wasn’t aware hardware store employees were experts in things that go bump in the night.”
“What about footprints in the dirt?” Gina asked. “Any of those match his shoes?”
“Once again, not even close. Another dead end.”
“What if he crossed through the stream and walked through the grass, avoiding the soft dirt? Or maybe he arrived before the rain made the dirt soft enough to leave imprints?"
“You’re thinking like an investigator, Miss Santoro.”
Gina exhaled. “Sorry. Just yesterday you warned me not to allow my police training to interfere, and to stick to being the gardener.”
“Fuggitaboutit,” he said. “Do Italian people really say that?”
“Maybe in New York. I’m from Cleveland. Could he have crossed the stream instead of take the bridge?”
“Not likely. His shoes were dry.”
“They could’ve dried during the night.”
“It was a rainy night, which makes that pretty unlikely. Plus, there was no sand in his shoes, as if he’d waded through moving water.”
“And he had that grass stuck to the soles of his shoes, too,” Gina said. “That would’ve washed off if he’d walked through the stream.”
“What do you know about that?” he asked.
“Nothing. I just happened to notice grass clippings stuck to his shoes this morning.”
He checked some notes again. “All I can make out is that he might’ve been killed elsewhere, and brought here by someone, and left on your front porch for whatever odd reason. You have no idea why any of that might’ve happened?”