Hotel Street used to be the center of Honolulu’s red-light district. During World War II there were no fewer than a hundred and fifty houses of prostitution within the ten square blocks of Chinatown. Now the area is mainly a tourist attraction with lei stands, Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese restaurants, and not a red-light house in sight. They’re still there. You just have to know where to look.
The man I wanted to see was around the corner on River Street, a wandering road named for the meandering stream called Nu’uanu that bordered Chinatown’s western edge. I don’t know his real name. He’s known to me only as Chawlie. Chawlie can be found every night on a hard plastic chair in the foyer of the small restaurant facing the bronze statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, fifteen paces from the Nu’uanu Stream.
Most people seeing the old man in the threadbare clothes might think he is there to share the rice bowl of the restaurant, an uncle fallen on hard times perhaps, living off the largess of a successful family. In reality he owns the rice bowl, the restaurant and possibly half of Chinatown. Chawlie knows everything that happens in town, both above and below the legal lines. Most recent politicians from the City and County of Honolulu have come to him for substantial financial help in their campaigns. There is an understanding, of course, that Chawlie will get whatever he wants in the way of city assistance for rezoning or building permits or whatever else he wants whenever he wants it. Chawlie doesn’t speak Latin but he understands quid pro quo.
I heard somewhere that Chawlie’s net worth approaches two hundred million dollars.
Chawlie likes me. I don’t see him much, maybe that’s why. A couple of years ago he had a delicate problem he couldn’t resolve without outside help. A “professional” woman got her hooks into him and tried to shake him down in return for what she had learned about the old man’s bedroom habits. He’s a proud man. Going to one of his many lawyer nephews might have solved the problem, but would have exposed a weakness. Seeking help from a haole lawyer was even worse. Reporting the extortion to the police was unthinkable. He needed to get the woman off his back in the quickest and most discreet way possible. Someone recommended my services to him. I’m an outsider, not of the clan. Somehow he found that reassuring.
For a small fee I handled his problem. The lady left the island, happier and somewhat richer than she had been before, but not as rich as she had planned. Nobody ever knew what it was Chawlie liked that got him in trouble. No one found the one piece of information that might have started his empire crumbling. I think at first he expected me to come back to him for more than just my fee, to exploit what I alone knew about him. It didn’t happen. Now Chawlie introduces me as” … John Caine. He haole, but he okay.” It’s his highest accolade.
I found him perched primly on an orange plastic chair, gazing into the night.
“Good evening, Uncle,” I said respectfully.
Almond eyes tracked my approach, no expression on the face they inhabited.
“I see you, John Caine,” said Chawlie, finally acknowledging my presence. “How are you feeling?”
“My health is good, Uncle.”
Chawlie looked me up and down, as if appraising the veracity of my claim. At last he pointed to another chair, a companion to his own.
“Sit,” he commanded. When I obeyed, he smiled. “You no come see me. Two years you go away from this place and not return. I know you here on island. All time I wait for you to come and ask me what about this, what about that. I know what you do and I know you need my help. I say to myself, This John Caine, he will want something someday. He come to me then.” The eyes twinkled with merriment. “So. What you want, haole? You need money?”
“No, Uncle,” I said, shaking my head. “I have no need of your money.”
“Everybody need money. But that’s good you not want any because I no loan money to you. You not live so long, I think. You let people shoot you. Somebody kill you next time, you no pay me back.”
“I need a file. A police file.”
“You think I can get police file? Are you stupid?”
“I know you can, Uncle. If you want to.”
Chawlie studied me, his face impassive. I leaned back in my chair and waited.
“What kind police file?” he said after a while.
“Homicide, Uncle.”
“Oh, homicide! Something simple! Homicide police file! You know I cannot get a police file. And a homicide file! You must think Chawlie can do anything!”
I nodded. “Yes, Chawlie. In this town I think you can.”
The face remained impassive but I knew I’d pleased him. “It is big problem.”
He watched my face for a reaction. I gave him nothing.
“It would cost much money. If I could get one for you.”
“How much money, Uncle?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“When can you get it?”
“I never say I get it. Did I say I get it?”
“I can have five thousand dollars here by tomorrow noon.”
“Tomorrow night. Here. Same time.”
“Midnight.”
He nodded. “What name is on the file?”
“The victim’s name is MacGruder. First name Mary. A young female. She was killed and left near Waianae about three months ago. I don’t know anything else about the case. I was hoping the file would enlighten me.”
“Take more than police file to enlighten you.”
I had been dismissed.
“Thank you, Uncle.” I got up to leave.
“John Caine!”
I turned. The old man was sitting as still as a statue.
“Stay awake tonight. Mebbe somebody will come to your boat with a package.”
“I’ll be awake.”
“And you be here tomorrow night with the money.”
“I will, Uncle. Midnight. I’ll bring the money.”
“Cash!” said Chawlie, the trace of a smile dancing across his lips. “No checks!”
“Cash,” I repeated.
“And don’t let anyone kill you before you pay!”
3
Dawn was still an hour away when a subtle shift in Duchess’s motion woke me from a dreamless slumber. My visitor was awkward and clumsy, and from the sound of the hard soles scuffing my teak deck, a stranger to a marine environment. I opened the hatch and invited the intruder in.
My visitor carefully climbed down the ladder, putting both feet on each step before attempting the next one. That was about all she could do in a skintight silk dress and four-inch spike heels. As she descended, it was obvious her dress contained a spectacular body.
“You are Mr. Caine?” She had a face to match her body and a voice to melt butter. This was a real dragon-lady-bitch-goddess.
“I am.”
“This for you.” The tiny goddess handed me twelve inches of photocopied pages. Chawlie had been as good as his word.
“Thank you. Chawlie sent you?”
She answered the question by alighting on the lounge settee and adjusting her stockings. They were honest-to-God stockings, not panty hose—I could see smooth flesh. She was exquisite in dress and feature, a rich man’s toy, and the business with the stockings had been an intentional act. Not an invitation, just a demonstration: I am unattainable for one such as you. But I can show you what you are missing. Slouched against the bulkhead in cutoff sweatshirt and shorts, I felt like a peasant. When she stood and reached her full height I noted that the top of her head barely reached the middle of my chest. God knows what she’d been told about me, but she’d been expecting rape or worse.
“Uncle say to be careful until tomorrow night. He will be waiting for you. I go now.” English was not her native tongue. I wondered if Chawlie had smuggled her into the country for his private consumption or if she was a prime choice from a regular load. I decided she must have been handpicked for the old man from the beginning; she was too perfect.
I extended my hand to assist her as she addressed each step of the ladder
and I followed her up on deck to make sure she made it safely to the dock without falling overboard. When her spike heels touched the relatively stable surface of the dock she took off like a rocket. I watched her until she disappeared beyond the darkened restaurant, the sound of her hard little heels tapping a staccato beat against the concrete. I heard a car door shut and saw the profile of a large, dark sedan leave the parking lot.
One of Chawlie’s women. She would be heading back to his bed, escorted by a keeper or two. She would report, and would be rewarded for her courage in entering the haole’s lair.
It’s a tossup who’s more racist, the Japanese or the Chinese. Either one makes the KKK seem as innocuous as Barney. My vote is for the Chinese. They view themselves as the only human race. The Mandarin word for the Chinese people is han, meaning “human beings.” No one else qualifies. And yet they have been discriminated against throughout the rest of the world. Most people do not know that the Vietnamese boat people of the late seventies were nearly all ethnic Chinese, descendants of a great diaspora eight hundred years earlier. Though they had lived in Vietnam for eight centuries, they had not intermarried and had retained their ethnic and cultural identity. The Chinese have a strong sense of family and a great appreciation of education, and they became entrenched in the arts, in medicine, in the bureaucracies. And they were sorely hated by the Vietnamese. The feeling was mutual. Chinese do not like outsiders. Chawlie deals with me only because I have a commodity he can acquire nowhere else: absolute trust.
I could have given the woman the money to take to Chawlie, but I wanted no one to know I kept that kind of cash aboard. I don’t trust anyone that much. I’d see him at midnight and make a show of going to the bank before. But nearly everything I owned was on this boat, ready to leave in a moment’s notice.
The stack of photocopied files lay on the lounge table demanding my immediate attention. I made a pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain as the sun rose over Makalapa Hill, and started working.
So how do you find a murderer? Police will tell you nearly every homicide is the result of a dispute between people who knew each other. Lately Hawaii has experienced more of the random violence that is engendered in the squalor of the big mainland cities—serial killings and drive-by shootings—strangers killing strangers. This didn’t feel like that kind of killing. There hadn’t been anything in the newspapers about a local serial killer and it may not have been random. The chances were good the killer’s name was contained in the file, or that there was a lead to the man who did it.
I found the medical examiner’s report. There was semen in the vagina, type AB positive, not the rarest of blood types, but not common either. It is less rare in Asians. There was evidence of bruising of the external genitalia, but that didn’t mean anything either. Pubic hairs combed from the body were found to be ovoid in shape and therefore Asian. There were ligature marks on the wrists and ankles, tight enough to have broken the skin. Lacerations on the buttocks, elbows and upper back, with splinters of Wolmonized Douglas Fir embedded in the flesh, was evidence the victim had been tied to a cross-brace formed like a giant X. One page showed a detailed drawing of such a construction. The depth of the strangulation cord, up to a half inch deep into her flesh, told how she died. It was an ugly picture. A young, vital woman used up and thrown away, decades of bright future squandered. And for what?
There is never an answer to that question. Never a satisfying answer, anyway. Too often, it comes back simply: Because.
I put the medical examiner’s report aside. I quickly sorted through the copies of photographs that went with it. They did not make me want to linger. A blood-darkened face with the jutting black tongue gave no hint of the beauty that must have been there. I shuddered, imagining what kind of horrors these pictures must have given MacGruder had he seen them. He had bounced this nightmarish thing on his lap when it was a golden-haired pixie with big blue eyes; had been there when the tot cut her first tooth; had looked on in awe when she spoke her first word. And now this. I hoped he had been shielded from these photographs. They were enough to make a man stop believing in a god but not enough to make a man stop believing in the devil.
I turned the photographs over. They could tell me nothing now.
I read through all of the detectives’ narratives. There was a faint whiff of a suspicion of narcotics somewhere in the investigation, but nothing definite. I went back to the forensic file.
Examination of the knots was inconclusive. The knots used on her hands and arms were square knots, different from the ones on her ankles. Those were granny knots, indicating that the person who tied the cord at her feet was either untrained or had been a different person from the one who tied her hands, or both. The direction of the knots hinted that the one who tied her hands may have been left-handed. Toxicological tests came back negative for drugs. There was only a trace of alcohol. I didn’t see where drugs could be involved. Perhaps it was because there wasn’t any evidence directly relating to drugs. Perhaps it was because I’ve learned that where there’s smoke, there could be a smoke screen.
I poured my last cup of coffee and went out on deck. The sun was shining proudly behind a low band of clouds scudding across the sky. Rain in the mountains above Pearl Harbor gave me a rainbow, arching over Pearl City and Makakilo. The clouds would go away and the sun would stay, and it would be another perfect, beautiful day.
What did you do, little girl, I thought, that got you into so much trouble? Who were you running with that did that to you? There were no answers. There was only the breeze, slapping the rigging against the mast.
Someone had profited from her death. That was an assumption, a logical place to start. No one but a thrill killer does this unless there is a profit. Could the profit have been pleasure? It was plausible. There are some sick people out there and she had been ill-used before her death. Could it have been a rough game gone bad? Perhaps. She was young and strong, and I could not imagine how a man could have forced her to get on the X-brace without her cooperation. Even two men. Could the profit have been something else? Something like guaranteed silence? Protecting what? Nothing in the file specifically stated anything about her behavior. But implications were everywhere.
I went below and forced myself to look at the photographs again. She had been discarded on the rocky coastline near the mouth of the Shark Cave, north of Makaha. That’s rough country, rough in the sense that blond haoles like me just do not go there at night. It’s also Hawaiian Homelands, rural slums set aside for descendants of the original inhabitants of these islands. Was someone trying to shift the blame to the people who lived out there?
Years back, a band of Samoans rampaged through the area, killing haoles sleeping on the beach, but they had been an aberration and were quickly caught and convicted. This was not that kind of thing. Mary had been killed somewhere else and dropped there. And the location had been for a reason.
I dug out my map book of Oahu. The Shark Cave is a legendary lava tube halfway between Makaha and Kaena Point, the end of the road. There is no way even a sturdy four-wheel drive can make it around the point to the other side anymore. The roadway used to be the route of the old cane railway, but the tracks were removed more than fifty years ago and the roadbed eventually washed out. It’s as close to nowhere as you can get on this island.
The file had not been illuminating. The interviews and narratives were too vague, filled with sparse and unintelligible references to files not available to me. There was something going on here, but I couldn’t afford to ask for more files from Chawlie. I needed to speak to the lead investigator on the case. But first I needed to see the place where the body had been found.
I did my morning exercises and took a quick shower, washing away the cobwebs. Lately I’d dropped to my fighting weight of 190 pounds. I’m not a heavyweight. I don’t have the bone structure. For most of my adult life I’ve drifted between 185 and 210 pounds. Once or twice, when I got real lazy, I ballooned up to 220. The effort to get back to my
prime weight gets harder every year. The effort to maintain it is less difficult than allowing myself to lose control and get sloppy again. Staying in shape is actually taking the path of least resistance. When I finally give up and get totally out of shape I’ll have to retire. There’s no way I can stay in this business and not be in top physical condition. Not with the creatures out there I have to deal with.
So at my age I tend to stay close to my optimal weight, watch what I eat and restrict my alcohol to two glasses of wine a day. And I don’t drink those unless I’ve earned them. To earn them I have to do my MDR—minimum daily requirement—of two hundred push-ups, two hundred sit-ups and an eight-mile run. I like to eat the rare steaks and I like the sauces the good chefs make, and if I don’t do the exercise I start to get soft within two weeks.
That’s my biggest fear. I hate being soft. All my life I’ve been the guy people instinctively run to for help. It wouldn’t fit my self-image to have to run to someone else. So I do the reps every morning and I pay my dues at sundown every night. Psychologists would have a field day with me until they found out why I do it. Then they’d be out there with me, pushing me for that extra mile.
4
Other than Duchess and a ten-speed bike, my only transportation is an ancient, military-issue, World War II Jeep. Four-speed, four-wheel drive, it’s a 1944 Willys. Not a Chrysler. Not even American Motors. This is the original gosh darned Jeep. The only concession to its civilian status is its battleship gray paint. It gets thirty-four miles to the gallon and has a top speed of fifty-six miles per hour, which is perfect for this island. If you go any faster, you’re in danger of driving off land’s end.
It was a long drive past Makaha on the Leeward Coast. Oahu is a small rock in the middle of a big ocean. Most of the state’s population resides on this island, and most of them are in Honolulu. Away from the population center Oahu is just like the rest of the state: rural, agricultural, and with notable exceptions, relatively poor. The Leeward Coast is one of the poorest on the island. Little rain falls there. The rain-giving clouds drop most of their moisture on the eastern slopes of the Waianae Mountains. That’s good for Dole and C&H Sugar, but it’s bad for the residents of Waianae and Makaha. Most of the Leeward Coast resembles a slum in the desert. A desert possessed of the most beautiful and uncrowded beaches on this planet, but a desert all the same.
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