Unknown Victim

by Kay Hadashi

  The last circle was for the black cat that had been hanging around each day. It had brought a rat with it on the day of Danny’s death, plus one other time, so the cat couldn’t have had anything to do with his death.

  “Unless the cat was Danny’s pet? Is the cat still hanging around, waiting for Danny to come back to it?” She drew a large X through the cat’s circle. “Don’t be absurd. It’s just a stray.”

  Gina was just going back to her garden sketches when a sedan came across the bridge and parked at the side of the house. She wasn’t sure if she should smile at Detective Kona, or if he was about to give her a lecture about sticking her nose in his investigation.

  “Detective Kona, what brings you to the Tanizawa estate? Do you normally work on weekends?”

  “I try not to, but I feel compelled to follow up on a couple of leads in an investigation.” He sat on the top step of the front porch next to her. “You and I need to have a talk.”

  “I was half expecting you to drop by sometime.”

  “First, let me remind you that you’re no longer a police officer, not back in Ohio, and especially not here in Honolulu.”

  “Yes. I…”

  He put a hand up to quiet her. “You have no shield, not private investigator’s license, and no reason to run any sort of investigation of your own, other than what to grow in this ten acre plot of dirt. Is that fully understood?”

  He had a great way of sounding like a father handing out a lecture to a teenager. She doubted she’d get any further with him than she would’ve with her father fifteen years before. “Yes, Sir. I apologize for interfering in your investigation.”

  “It’s less a matter of you interfering, and more a deal of making sure the public doesn’t get hurt, and that includes you.”

  “I know. But I’ve been safe whenever I’ve interviewed…asked someone questions.”

  “Safe how? Are you carrying a weapon that I don’t know about? Because I’ve checked, and you have no concealed carry permits for either here or in Ohio.”

  “I don’t have a gun. I haven’t touched one since, well, I’ve told you about that already.”

  “I’d also prefer you didn’t carry a knife with you. Our laws concerning those are just as strict as firearms.”

  Gina was getting cornered by him, and felt a little embarrassed by what she had to admit. “I don’t take weapons, knives or anything else, with me when I go out.”

  “You were at Bunzo’s alone last night without any sort of protection?”

  “I wasn’t planning on getting picked up,” she said.

  “Not what I meant, and you know it.”

  She set aside her drawings. “I know. Everywhere I’ve gone, I wish I’d had a partner with me watching my back. When you showed up last night, I actually felt a sense of relief, even though I knew I’d get this lecture eventually.”

  “You felt safe at Kapalama Park this morning?”

  “Mostly. There were only two men awake at the time and neither were armed that I could tell.”

  “What about the woman at the park?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know about her? Kinda loud and obnoxious, but not terribly threatening.”

  “Maybe not to you when she was still waking up, but someone’s in the hospital because of her.”

  “Oh no! What happened?” she asked.

  “Paramedics were attending to the OD you called me about, when she took it upon herself to try and protect him. The officers that had responded pulled her back. That’s when she pulled a knife on them.”

  “That guy OD’d?” she asked.

  Kona nodded. “They gave that Narcan stuff while they got him ready to transport.”

  “What about the woman? Did she knife one of the officers?” Gina asked.

  “Never had the chance. While she aimed her little pinpricker at one of them, the other subdued her.”

  “What was the problem then?”

  “She bit the officer that subdued her, hard enough to raise blood. That meant he needed to be admitted and is getting antibiotics to fight whatever infection that might start. Human teeth aren’t exactly clean, Miss Santoro.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. What about the OD?”

  “He should be fine. Apparently, he walked away from his halfway house where he’d been living for a while and fell into some trouble. Once he’s done in detox, he’ll go back to the halfway house. But thanks to you, he’s alive.”

  “There’s that, anyway. I have a question about him, if you don’t mind?”

  Kona sighed heavily. “Yes?”

  “Did he have an old scabs that might’ve been knife wounds on his body?”

  “You’re trying to link him to the dried blood that was found on the pocket knife in Danny’s pocket?”

  “Right.”

  “Even though you’re being a pain in the butt running your own investigation, you have good ideas. I had a CSI tech collect a tube of blood from Jon-Jon and compare it to what we found on the dead man’s knife. No match. Sorry.”

  “Rats,” Gina mumbled. “Wait a minute…”

  “To answer that question, yes, the blood on the knife was human, and from a male. Not from your pet cat or rats, mongooses, or any other little beasts hanging around the estate.”

  “It was a thought.”

  “Okay, that’s the official lecture,” Kona said. “Now that that’s out of the way, tell me what you have on the dead man.”

  Gina was surprised by his request and wondered if there was a ploy behind it. “You want to know what I’ve found?”

  “Unofficially, you’re a trained professional and you’ve been investigating. From what I’ve heard, you’re a step ahead of me.”

  “I’m a professional landscaper and horticulturist, a lawnmower as my family puts it.”

  Detective Kona nodded in the direction of the yellow pad. “Are you going to share with me what you’ve found or not?”

  Gina got her pad of notes and assembled her various Venn diagrams at the top.

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “You’ve worked hard on this.” Kona sorted through the pages and sheets until he got to her list of evidence. “Were you planning on coming to me with any of this?”

  “Please understand it all started with simply wanting to know who the guy was, that’s it.”

  “Did you find out?”

  “Danny, or maybe Danny boy. That’s what the stoned guy told me before he passed out.”

  He looked up from the notes. “You’re sure he said Danny?”

  “Danny boy, but I wasn’t sure if he said that because he recognized the face or if he was simply high and his mind was making things up. Why?”

  “There used to be a pimp known as Danny boy that worked the Kapalama area.”

  “Used to be?” Gina asked.

  “We picked him up after a particularly bad night a year or so ago. A couple of his girls got roughed up pretty bad. Because of that, there’d been two shootings in Kapalama that night, leaving one dead. When we picked him up a few days later, he still had the gun. Bad move on his part, because that was the only solid evidence we had on him. Got a life sentence out of it.”

  “If he’s in prison, who’s the guy that I found on my porch?”

  “Could actually be Danny.”

  “I don’t understand,” Gina said.

  “The guy we sent away got shivved not long after he got to prison. When the warden tried to figure out who did it, several inmates said he wasn’t the real Danny boy. He looked like him, but he had a small scar on his cheek that the real Danny didn’t.”

  “But what about fingerprints?” Gina asked. “The police didn’t get a positive ID during booking after the original crime?”

  “We took his prints, but neither he nor the real Danny had ever been printed before. We had nothing to compare to. The fingerprints from guy who was shivved in prison were the ones we entered into the database as Danny.”

  “What was his last name?” Gina asked,
finally getting an answer to that question.

  “He refused to give it, so he was tried and convicted as Danny Doe.”

  And her frustration continued.

  “You had no one that could identify him in a lineup? None of his girls from his days as a pimp?”

  “After his body was transferred to the county morgue, we brought in a few of his old girls. They refused to look at him, except one. She was still just a kid, and was shaking in her shoes during a lineup. All we got out of her was a shake of her head. The investigator barely noticed, and the ADA wasn’t present at the time. When the investigator pressed for a verbal answer, the girl clammed up. As you know, we need a verbal commitment from a witness, not just a nod or shake of the head.”

  “That’s pretty typical of hookers, isn’t it?” Gina asked.

  “Very. They clam up tight as soon as police come around. Their lives are tough, and they know who protects them. They’re going to do nothing to screw that up.”

  “Let me see if I got this right. A known pimp named Danny boy had a couple of his girls roughed up one night, and went after the dudes that did it in revenge? When he ended up killing one of them, he was arrested a few days later with the gun still in his possession. He was convicted of murder and sent away, where he was stabbed to death by another inmate. But the inmates said the guy that got stabbed in prison wasn’t actually Danny, but someone else that looked a little like him. The only one of his girls that had been willing to look at the body shook her head that it wasn’t Danny’s body, but the investigator couldn’t get a verbal affirmation from her. Right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “Pretty shady ADA, to go after a guy that couldn’t be identified. What was the evidence?”

  “His prints on the gun, and on the shell casing that had been found at the scene. He had no alibi for his where-abouts during the time of the crime. He got five to ten for manslaughter, since he’d been defending himself at the time. He’d been lucky enough to get knifed before he shot back. He would’ve been out in a couple of years for good behavior.”

  “If he hadn’t been shanked first,” Gina said. “It sounds like he took a fall for the real Danny boy. Go do some dirty work for his friend the pimp, and when real trouble found him, he took the blame and went to prison, thinking he’d be out in a couple of years.”

  “That’s what the investigator always thought.”

  “Some investigator, to allow something like that to go to court without positively ID’ing the perp on trial.”

  “I was that investigator, Miss Santoro.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. That’s been bothering me ever since.”

  “Why did you let it go forward?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. The ADA took it and ran with it. She needed a conviction of anything big.”

  “Oh, I get it. Somehow it became political?” Gina asked.

  “In a way. She’d been losing too many cases and needed a conviction to keep her out of the doghouse.”

  “We have a couple like that back home in Cleveland.”

  Kona shuffled papers again. “Tell me what’s going on with your diagrams.”

  “Probably a mess. Ever since you told me how you use them to organize evidence, I thought I’d give them a try. That one you’re looking at is today’s.”

  “Bottle cap, windbreaker, Rolex. Looks good. What’s with the cat with a mouse?”

  “On the day the dead man was found, the cat had a rat. Ever since, I’ve been trying to make sense of that, of how the dead rat might have something to do with a dead body. Other than both of them being dead, I can’t find any connection.”

  “I still doubt there’s anything to the rat. What’s this circle labeled as grass clippings?” Detective Kona asked.

  “This might be the part of my investigation that irritates you the most.” She tried smiling, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. He was waiting for an answer. “One blade of grass might’ve come loose from the sole of a shoe when no one was looking.”

  “And you might’ve saved it?”

  “It might be in a ziplock bag in the kitchen.”

  “You don’t consider that tampering with evidence?” he asked.

  “Maybe according to the letter of the law, it might in a way be considered not entirely honest. But in my defense, there were at least a dozen other blades of grass still stuck to his shoes for your CSI techs to look at.”

  “Fortunately for you, they were all the same type of grass. Did you determine the location of the lawn he’d walked on?”

  “I collected more lawn clippings from Kapalama Park this morning while I was there. They match. But I looked at the grass at a couple of other municipal parks, and those are a match, also.”

  “That’s what my CSI guys determined.”

  “But there’s more. I found out from interviewing…talking to one of the guys at the park this morning that the city mows Kapalama Park once a week, on Fridays. But because these last two weekends were holidays, they mowed on Sunday.”

  “Big deal,” Kona said. “I mow on Sundays, also.”

  “Except that the body was discovered early on a Monday morning, and the clippings stuck to his shoes were still fresh and supple. They hadn’t dried out yet. That means to me that he would’ve had to walk through lawn grass that had been mown only a few hours before, and at a city park that was on a Friday mow schedule, but was actually mowed on a Sunday. Kapalama Park is one of them.”

  “There are quite a few parks in Honolulu, along with planting strips along streets, that need mowing. Kapalama can’t be the only one that got mown last Sunday.”

  “It’s the only one within walking distance of Bunzo’s.”

  “And because Bunzo’s serves Tuyo beer, you’re connecting those circles on your diagram?”

  “Right. I have more.” She watched as Kona tore a sheet from her pad to write on. “After I left the park this morning, I went back to Bunzo’s.”

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  “Yeah. They make crappy virgin margaritas.”

  Kona snickered. “Anything useful to the investigation?”

  “I talked to the daytime bartender when he was outside getting rid of trash. At one point, he pushed his sleeves up. On his right forearm was a long scab, kind of crusty as though it was healing and starting to peel off.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Hughes. He gets off at five. He wants me to join him when he does.”

  “I’m sure he does,” Detective Kona said.

  “I have more. When I first started talking to him, he was using a box cutter to flatten cardboard boxes, but after I showed him the picture of the victim, his demeanor changed.”

  “How?”

  “He quit cutting them apart and began stomping them flat, even the larger ones. The more I talked to him about the vic, the harder he stomped.”

  “That might’ve been a good time for you to leave, but I get the idea you didn’t?”

  Gina shook her head. “When he finished sweeping the area around the dumpsters, he asked if there was anything else I wanted. I took him up on the offer and had him make me a margarita.”

  “That wasn’t a good idea, to go inside with him, Miss Santoro. Were there any other customers there at the time?”

  “Completely empty. Once he started making the drink, I was regretting it. He was still kinda angry, his hands shaking, that sort of thing. But I did notice something else that might be interesting. Might not be evidence of anything, but interesting.”

  “A cat with lawn clippings on its paws while wearing a windbreaker and Rolex watch with a rat in its mouth came in and asked for a Tuyo?”

  Gina started to flick her fingers under her chin, but thought better of it. “He used an ice pick to break up ice in the bar’s ice tub to put into the blender.”

  “And that means?”

  “Didn’t you say the murder weapon was something similar to an ice pick?”
<
br />   “By any chance, did you see any blood smears on it?” he asked.

  “No, but it was fairly long and seemed to have a square cross section. At least it looked that way from where I was sitting on the other side of the bar.”

  “Pretty circumstantial, Miss Santoro. Every bar will have an ice pick next to its ice tub. Every supermarket with a fish counter, every fishing boat, anyone who deals with ice on a daily basis will have an ice pick somewhere nearby.”

  “What about the healing scab on his forearm?”

  “Again, circumstantial. He could’ve scratched himself a few days before with the box cutter you said you saw him use.”

  “A nervous bartender with a scratch on his arm using an ice pick at a bar that serves Tuyo beer near a park that we think the victim frequented? That seems more than circumstantial to me, Detective.”

  “A bartender in a hurry to get an unpleasant morning chore done happened to scratch his arm with a box cutter a few days before, working at a bar with an ice pick next to the ice tub, near a park you think the victim frequented, is how a defense attorney would frame that. Everything you’ve given me is circumstantial, Miss Santoro. I need hard evidence, fingerprints, bloodstains, something like that. Even an eyewitness with corroborating photographs or video. And that evidence needs to be collected by police officials to be admissible in court. You know that.”

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Detective, if it’s okay to tell me, what did the victim’s autopsy show?” Gina asked Detective Kona as she walked him to his car.

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d get around to asking me that. His only injury was the stab wound to the liver, like I already mentioned. No drugs or alcohol in his blood system, and his stomach and upper intestines contained only what had looked like a cheese sandwich. Other than being in a state of malnourishment as the coroner put it, which many homeless people are, he wasn’t in too bad of shape.”