Parking is another problem. There isn’t any. And due to the high crime rate there are police everywhere. They don’t put a dent in the crime rate, but they do notice illegal parking. The Honolulu PD doesn’t write parking tickets, it tows your car. I didn’t want to pay the mandatory two-hundred-dollar fine for towing so I searched for a legal parking spot, got lucky and found one two blocks away.
The morning sun had neared its zenith and was blazing on my back as I trotted along. By the time I reached the detective’s office sweat was pouring down the back of my shirt and dripping into my eyes.
The building was a small strip center with storefront businesses and enough parking for only the tenants. A Chinese CPA had the space nearest the street, a hair salon and an upholstery shop occupied the next two. Unit D, the address listed in the yellow pages for Robert W. Souza, Private Investigator, was vacant.
The door was locked so I peered through the glass. The office wore the shabby look of a place that had been unoccupied for weeks. There was no furniture. A white telephone rested on its side, the handset flung against the dark, soiled carpet like a broken arm. Letters, newspapers and business cards were piled beneath the mail slot. The one envelope I could read through the glass was addressed to Souza.
I went to the CPA’s office. The interior was shaded from the morning sun by miniblinds and chilled by powerful air conditioning. It was so cool my back felt cold immediately. I stood in a small waiting room that was dominated by an unoccupied secretary’s desk. There was a sign that said w. WONG, CPA over a blue door.
I noticed a bell on the desk, the kind you hit with your palm. I touched it gently. The bell produced a ring that carried a nostalgic trace of childhood school days with it. A man came out of the back room. He was of average height with a slender build. He had coal black hair and a thin mustache.
“Hello?” he said. There was some caution in his manner, as if he expected violence.
“I’m looking for Robert Souza,” I said. “I thought his office was here.”
“Unit D, yah?”
“Yes. Robert Souza, the private detective.”
“I understand he moved out about a month ago.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
“No. Not that I know of. Why don’t you contact the leasing agent?”
“Do you have his name?”
“Yah. Let me check. Wait here, please.” He held out his hand, palm down, as if warding off my advance.
He disappeared behind the blue door again and closed it behind him. I heard the lock click shut. I waited a full five minutes before he returned.
“Her name is Nagada. Laurie Nagada. Here’s her telephone number.” He handed me one of his cards with the name and number of the leasing agent scrawled across the back.
“Thank you,” I said.
He went back through the blue door and closed it without acknowledgment.
I let myself out.
Back out in the heat I took my cellular phone from my pack and tried the number. It was busy. I walked back to my parking space, hitting send over and over again, trying to get through. Her line was busy until after I’d found my Jeep, stowed the backpack away and pulled out into traffic. On impulse I tried it again. It rang.
I shifted the phone to my left shoulder as I steered and shifted my way through heavy traffic on McCulley while I waited for Ms. Nagada to answer. When she did she sounded harried.
“Hello?” Her voice was on the edge of hysteria.
“Hello, Ms. Nagada? My name is Caine. John Caine. I’m looking for—”
“I’m not interested,” she said. “And it’s Miss Nagada.”
“I’m not selling and I’m sorry about the ‘Miss.’ “
“So am I, brother. What did you say your name was? What’s that noise in the background? Are you on a car phone?”
“Sort of. My name is John Caine and I’m looking for one of your tenants, Robert Souza. He used to be at—”
“Old Magnum PI. I know where he used to be, that asshole. He left in the middle of the night. Took all his stuff and just moved out. He left owing, too. All that damage to the place, his deposit didn’t even begin to cover it.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“I can’t find him. It’s possible he left the island.”
“Certified letters with return receipt requested?”
“No forwarding address. And the other tenants are going crazy because strange people keep stopping by looking for this character.”
“I understand. Mr. Wong gave me your name and number.”
“Then you must be nice. He runs most of them off.”
“What kind of damage to his place?”
“Oh, you know. Papers strewn all over, holes in the walls and ceilings. Holes kicked in the doors. The medicine cabinet on the bathroom floor. There was even a hole in the ceiling big enough to crawl up to the attic space. Why he’d do that is beyond me, too. But who can figure? That’s the last time I’ll rent to a private eye.”
What she’d described was a thoroughly professional search.
“When did this happen?”
“About a month ago. Right when he disappeared. He didn’t pay his rent and I went around to collect or post the notice and I found his office that way. It’s been vacant ever since.”
I thanked Miss Nagada and hit the End button. Someone had moved Mr. Souza out. All the way out. Someone had also gone through his office, including the walls and ceilings, and they hadn’t wasted any time doing so. I made a bet with myself that Mr. Souza was feeding the fish somewhere offshore.
I called information and got a residential listing for a Souza, Robert W. The prefix was for Makiki, an old section of town not far from Waikiki and even more run-down. I phoned the number given and was told by the recorded message that it was disconnected and no longer in service.
If it was listed, the address would be in the directory. I spotted a phone booth with a directory hanging below on a chain and pulled in beside it. I found his address. It was on Young Street, near the old police station. I knew the area well. Souza’s place was within three blocks of the phone booth. I decided to walk.
His apartment was on the third floor of a concrete-block building that looked as if it might survive a hundred hurricanes. It had all the charm and architectural appeal of a bomb shelter. There was a small hand-lettered sign that said the manager was in the back apartment, second floor, no vacancy. I went up a set of concrete steps and found her.
She was an ancient, bent Japanese woman wrapped in layers of sweaters despite the midsummer heat, the kind of wonderful, revered creature the Hawaiians call kapuna. Her brown, wizened face peered up at me through thick lenses, making me think of an apple left too long in the sun. She wore a quizzical expression.
“Hello?” Her voice was tremulous and uncertain.
“Hello, Auntie,” I said, dropping into the Islander′s habit of referring to any woman over sixty. “I am looking for one of your tenants. Mr. Souza?”
A curious calm came over her and she straightened, staring at me through the clear lenses of her glasses, her eyes magnified to twice their normal size. Her gaze was intense.
“He is dead,” she declared.
“I’m sorry.” It was all I could think of to say. Her response had not been one I’d anticipated.
“He kill himself, they say, but I know different. They come for him, that’s why. In the middle of the night. Two men. They knock on his door. He let them in. They go inside. Hour later, they go out. Next morning, he dead.”
Wondering at her narrative, I nodded.
“They say he call police and tell them he going to kill himself. And that he did. Overdose of da kine drug. Bad ‘ting, that. He leave a note. They say he kill himself. Two men, they kill him. They did it and blame him, that’s why.”
“Who said he killed himself?”
“The police. I tell them what I saw. They don’t believe me. I’m an old woman, but I watch. I don’t sl
eep. So I watch. I know my building.”
“How long ago was this?”
“One month. Just before rent due.”
“Have you rented the apartment?”
She shook her head. “He leave big mess. Police make even bigger mess. Have to paint, that’s why. Move out his stuff. It takes me long time to paint da kine apartment. My fingers hurt, that’s why.”
“May I see the apartment?”
She studied me again, her scrutiny extending from the top of my haole head to my sandaled feet. I was dressed as a local in shorts and T-shirt. “I give you key, you bring it back?”
“Of course, Auntie.”
She went inside and brought out a ring of brass keys that must have weighed ten pounds. “This here every key. His was eight, on top floor in the back. I can’t see that key but it’s here.” She handed me the cluster of keys, the means of entry to every door in the building.
“You bring it back, you hear?”
“I will, Auntie,” I said. I had not even told her why I wanted to find Souza. This lady remembered Hawaii as it used to be.
The third floor was a repetition of the second. Eight was in the back, concrete block walls interrupted only by a window and a door. I found a key with “8” stamped in the brass and tried it.
The door opened out. A musty emanation, the lingering scent of a protective ghost, came out to greet me along with a blast of superheated air. I stepped inside and looked around in the gloom. Curtains were drawn on every window. A tiny kitchen, little more than an extension of the entry, was to the right of the door, a bedroom and a bath on the left. The living room was directly in front of me. I flicked a switch. No light came on.
I left the door open for both light and air and started across the room. I banged my knee painfully on a file drawer that was pulled out of a metal cabinet against the wall. I closed the drawer and started across the room again, this time with greater caution. Piles of manila file folders and reports were tossed carelessly on the furniture and the floor. I opened the sliding glass door that led to a tiny lanai and pulled the curtains back. Now I could see. In a little while I hoped to be able to breathe.
It didn’t take long to see that whoever encouraged the late Robert Souza to shuffle off this mortal coil had also gone through everything the same way they did in his office. My guess was that they came here first, then took his keys to his office and ransacked that place. The police wouldn’t have made this kind of a mess. It was as if someone had intentionally done this. It was like spitting on a grave.
It began to look as though Souza had found something he should not have found. If he had anything solid about Mary MacGruder’s murder, someone had beaten me to it. By about a month. I didn’t expect to find anything now. The trail was cold. Souza wouldn’t have expected any trouble resulting from that case. It was pretty straightforward. If he had, would he have hidden whatever it was that he found out? Would he have understood its value? And would they have found whatever it was they were looking for? Whoever they were.
There wasn’t any reason to look through the files on the floor. Everything that could be learned had already left this sad place.
I closed the sliding glass door and the curtains and locked the entry door again. I returned the keys to the little kapuna downstairs and walked back to my Jeep. On impulse I called Katherine Alapai, the lead investigator on the case, and got lucky. She agreed to meet me in twenty minutes.
9
Detective Alapai suggested we meet at Kelly’s, a localsonly, twenty-four-hour coffee shop on Nimitz Highway near the airport. Kelly’s is fluorescent bright, always open and anonymous. Visibility is high. I gathered she wanted to meet there because it was safe.
She’d demanded that I describe myself, including what I was wearing and what I was driving, so when I parked the Jeep in Kelly’s lot I understood that my movements would be watched. No one accosted me as I entered the restaurant, looking for the detective. She had not described herself.
“Mr. Caine?”
A big hand gripped me and a beefy, middle-aged local crowded me from behind, violating my space. He pinioned my shoulder with one hand and expertly frisked me with the other. Satisfied, he backed away and smiled.
“I’m Lieutenant Kahanamoku, Honolulu PD. What’s in the pack, bruddah?”
“Take a look.” I shrugged it off my shoulder and handed it to him.
“Why not?” He unzipped the compartments and looked through them, finding my bandanna and a copy of Michael Crichton’s latest paperback and not much else. The cop sniffed at my cellular telephone and my knife, a Buck Folding Hunter, and tossed them back. “No firearms?”
“Now why would I do that?”
He smiled and handed the bag back. “Some people just don’t have da good sense God geeve ’em, Mr. Caine. Come on. She’s in here.”
He led me past the counter to the last booth against the back wall. A small woman with lustrous black hair and pale skin watched me. She would have been beautiful but for a hard shell around her that she wore like armor, visible to anyone who cared to look deep enough. She nodded, acknowledging my presence. The big cop took up residence at a table out of earshot, but continued watching me like a pit bull on point.
“Detective Alapai?”
“Have a seat, Mr. Caine. I ordered you coffee, courtesy of the City and County of Honolulu. You want anything else you’ll have to pay for it yourself.”
“Coffee’s fine.”
“Do you have some identification?” I handed over my Hawaii driver’s license. She glanced at it and tossed it back. She already knew who I was. That’s why I was frisked coming into the restaurant. “Okay, you’re a citizen. You called me. What do you want?”
“I’m looking into the death of Mary MacGruder. I understand you are the detective in charge of the investigation.”
Detective Alapai stared at me through fathomless black eyes. She seemed to say, So what? She continued to look at me, waiting for my next statement.
“There is no suspect in the case?”
“No.” A flat statement, unembellished by facial movements or other body language.
“There is some information you may not have. I wanted to share it with you.”
“Who are you working for, Mr. Caine?”
“Her father, Vice Admiral Winston MacGruder III, is my former commanding officer. It is his interests I’m most concerned with.”
“You are a licensed private investigator?”
“I’ve got a license.”
“Who’s your client here?”
“I’m a friend of the family.”
She frowned. She knew she couldn’t go further than that. Licensed private investigators have nearly the same privacy privileges as attorneys in this state.
“You seem to have turned up in our files before. The last time was about three months ago.”
“The Greek dope thing, you mean?”
She nodded. “You were shot during that ’Greek dope thing.’ What was it? Bounty hunting?”
“Nothing so glamorous, Detective. I got in their way and they got in mine. DEA’s got a file.”
“I’ve read it,” she said. “And I read your life history, according to what they faxed over. I found it fascinating how a federal agency could get tied up with someone like you. But you didn’t answer my question. What exactly do you do for a living?”
“I’m a licensed private eye, but mostly I do protective services. I’m also a diving instructor. That’s on my tax return. Mainly I do favors for friends. Think of me as a retriever.”
“It makes you sound like a big dog, Mr. Caine, which you are not. Dogs are friendly. Dogs are helpful. Dogs are obedient. Why do I get the feeling you are none of the above? And what are you doing messing around in my homicide investigation?”
“Same thing you are. Trying to find the killers.”
She flinched. “What makes you think there was more than one?”
“At least two. And I’d bet on a van. I look
ed at the Shark Cave yesterday. That’s pretty deserted country up there, but cars pass by at decent intervals. Dumping a body looks like dumping a body, nothing else. If the person didn’t want to be caught he’d need help.”
“You’ve read the file.” It was an accusation.
“I have.” I didn’t want to be caught in a lie with this woman.
“The complete file? Photos? Field notes? Everything?”
I nodded.
“Shit.”
The consequences of a police file copied and sold to a civilian were immense. I would not have volunteered that I had seen the file, but she’d asked. She got it out into the open like a dog going for a bone. This detective was good. And she was dangerous.
“Where did you get the idea about the van?”
I explained my hypothesis, postulated while walking the site.
“If you’ve seen the file, then you have everything we do.”
“Maybe something you don’t.” And I told her about the private investigator who had died in Makiki, and how it looked like a related homicide. “He was working on this case, following up your own investigation, and he crossed the wrong path. Someone canceled him out.”
“What else do you have?”
“Souza’s apartment was thoroughly searched. So was his office. They even kicked holes in the walls and cut a hole in the ceiling a man could crawl through. I’m willing to bet both events took place on the same night. I’d also give you odds that the keys to his office were not among the items inventoried on his person.”
She nodded, thinking. “Okay, I’ll buy that. Anything else?”
For some reason the name of Mary’s landlord popped into my mind and a little voice told me to keep it to myself. If Chawlie had a reason to find Thompson interesting, and if Thompson was involved in this case in even a small way, it might be counterproductive to even hint to the police about him. The information I’d gleaned from the waitress was mere gossip and it was unflattering to Mary’s memory and therefore dangerous to the admiral.
“Not much. I’ve just been on this for a few days.”
“Do you want to tell me where you got the file now, or should I arrest you and have you explain it to my captain?”
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