Mahu Fire

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I started to feel the heat under the tent, regretting having worn my suit. As I pulled at my collar, I glanced around, to see if anyone was looking at me as if they knew who I was. She had that knack, of making you think she was speaking directly to you, and I felt more like an impostor with every word.

  I wondered what would happen if someone recognized me. I’d seen crowd mentality at work first hand, when I was a patrolman. All it took was a trigger, and ordinary people would turn into a mob, capable of looting, rioting, and other violence that seemed to lurk unsuspected beneath all of our solid exteriors. I had no doubt this crowd would turn on me, hurt me if they could.

  I started to make my way out of the tent, slowly, politely squeezing between people. The sweat dripping down my back got worse as I tried to fold myself up as narrowly as possible. Behind me, I heard the minister’s wife continue. “We need to take action, friends. It’s up to all of us to make this the right kind of world for our families, for our children and grandchildren. It starts with each of us, when we make a commitment in our hearts to accept Jesus, to practice what he preached.”

  Then I was spotted. Our eyes met for a moment, and he looked away. My heart did a double back flip, but I knew that my own brother could not be the catalyst who could turn a crowd against me. Or at least I hoped so.

  Lui, my eldest brother, stood with his hands on his wife’s shoulders. She hadn’t seen me; her attention was focused on the woman at the podium. It was clear Lui wasn’t going to look at me again, so I continued to the exit, wondering. It was surprising to see him there, but even more so was the way he looked. He wore an aloha shirt, shorts and sandals, and had sunglasses on a chain around his neck.

  You have to understand, my brother wears a suit and tie to family luaus. I hadn’t seen him in an aloha shirt since high school, and I hadn’t often seen his bare legs since he reached puberty. He had always been the most precise of the three of us, the most formal, and his business degree and high-paying job seemed to suit his personality.

  He was in disguise, I realized, as I made it outside without further incident. Just like me, he didn’t want to be recognized. Lui was the station manager of KVOL, “Your Volcano Alert Station, Erupting News All The Time,” the scrabbling non-network station in Honolulu. KVOL concentrated on the most inflammatory stories, the ones on the dark side of the news. I wondered if he knew something about the Church of Adam and Eve, if he was there for professional reasons.

  Or maybe he just believed what they preached.

  THE DEATH OF HIROSHI MURA

  KVOL was headquartered in one of the gleaming high-rises downtown, and Lui’s position as station manager gave him access to the private club on the top floor, a white-linen place with stunning views of the airport and Honolulu Harbor. About a month after I saw him at the Church of Adam and Eve, he asked me and our middle brother, Haoa, to meet him for breakfast on a Monday morning, reason undisclosed. I’ll always be their little brother, younger than Lui by eight years and Haoa by six, so I agreed without question.

  Haoa and I met in the parking garage and rode up in the elevator together. We were greeted, as the doors opened, by a vista of sunshine and sparkling water. A flat barge was making its way past the end of Sand Island, surrounded by a couple of fishing boats heading out to deep water. All around us, waiters in white jackets hurried from table to table. My eldest brother, whose sad-looking features were often enough to turn any day gloomy, waited for us at a round table near the window.

  My family was a polyglot mix of Hawaiian, Japanese and haole, or white, and though my brothers and I shared the same genes we all seemed to have taken a different dip in the pool. Lui was the shortest, at just under six feet, and the most Japanese, both in features and bearing. Haoa was the most Hawaiian, tall and bulky, and his ‘uhane, or spirit, lies deep in the island soil. He has never left the islands, except for brief vacations. All three of us had dark, glossy black hair, though Lui’s was expertly cut, Haoa’s shaggy, and mine short and simple.

  I had the most pronounced haole features, though my skin was always tan and my eyes were just a little elongated. I was six-one and my build was slim but muscular. If Lui belonged in a glassy high rise and Haoa out working the land, then I belonged in the water. Line the three of us up and you could see we were brothers, but just barely.

  We ordered quickly and then Lui said, “Look, I know you guys don’t have much time, so I’ll get to the point. Mom says Dad is sick and he refuses to see a doctor. She wants us to lean on him.”

  “Dad’s sick?” I saw my parents every couple of weeks, and they never seemed to change. We’d had dinner in Waikiki about a week and a half before. My father had been uncomfortable, I remembered, but had passed it off as something bad he’d eaten.

  Lui nodded. “He’s been down for a while, upset stomach, general blah feeling, Mom says. But he’s grouchy and all he wants to do is complain.”

  “Like that’s a change,” Haoa said.

  “Did you ever know him not to do what she says, though?” Lui asked. “That’s the scary part.”

  My dad had a strong personality, and he was always the one to enforce discipline among us boys. But my mother was the one who made our family go, the one who pushed me and my brothers through school and college. She managed the money, decided on major purchases, and bullied us all when we needed it.

  “Tatiana’s dad had prostate cancer two years ago,” Haoa said. “They got it early but still, she was freaked.”

  “Don’t even say the word.” Lui sat back as the waiter delivered his eggs. “Dad’s always been as healthy as a horse. That’s why I think he’s scared.”

  Lui’s news was enough to put all of us off our appetites. I picked at my macadamia nut pancakes and drank some orange juice, but by the time we were done there was a lot of food left on our plates. If our mother had seen that, she’d have wondered if we were the three boys she’d raised. When I was growing up, there was never any such thing as leftovers.

  “I think if we all gang up on him, we can force him to see the doctor,” Lui said. “Let’s make some time Wednesday night, at the party.”

  “If that doesn’t work maybe we can get Kimo to arrest him and take him to the doctor in handcuffs,” Haoa said. For once Lui and I were united against him; we both gave him the same dirty look.

  “I thought Liliha didn’t want to go to the party,” I said. It was a fundraiser for the Hawai’i Marriage Project, and my friend Harry had bought a bunch of tickets because his girlfriend’s cousin worked there. He’d invited me, my parents and my brothers and their wives. I was surprised that Lui and his wife would consider going, after having seen them at the Church of Adam and Eve.

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “We have to go to a lot of social occasions for my job, and I wasn’t going to force Liliha to go to something that wasn’t a command performance. But if we’re all together, it gives us a chance to gang up on Dad. I put my foot down, told Liliha she didn’t have a choice.”

  “Wonders never cease,” I whispered to Haoa, and we both smirked. It was no secret that Lui had married a woman just like our mother, and that it was rare enough for him to stand up to her. He just glared at us, and then a cell phone rang at our table.

  We all started fumbling. The phone bleated again, and I said, “It’s mine.” I answered, listened for a minute and said, “I’m on my way. I’m downtown, so I can be there in about fifteen minutes.”

  I snapped the phone shut. “Sorry, murderers always have bad timing.”

  “You know you’re getting old when your little brother is busier than you are,” Lui said.

  I had hoped to get to my desk at eight-thirty and catch up on paperwork. I’d been stationed in District 1, at the Honolulu Police Department headquarters on South Beretania Street, for about six months by then, after two years at the substation in Waikiki and a brief stint undercover on the North Shore. It seemed that there was a lot more paper moving around downtown than there had been in Waikiki, but maybe t
hat’s because I had a partner there to share it. I’d been promised a partner downtown, but there hadn’t been anyone available, so I was still working solo. I didn’t know if it was because no one wanted to work with the new guy—or with the gay cop.

  Along with the arsons, there’d been a rash of murders lately, all over the city. Another thing to chalk up to El Niño, maybe, like the hot, dry weather. The hills were turning brown and catching fire. Even the hibiscus hedge outside the station was looking limp.

  The media was calling it a ‘hot wave,’ playing up the combination of the weather and the crime. The department was under a lot of pressure to clear cases quickly, and to increase the local police presence so that the rush of homicides might slow down. So far, nothing much was working. I had half a dozen unsolved cases on my desk, the kind that started out with no clues and never developed any.

  It wasn’t like you see on TV, where somebody gets killed before the first commercial break, and by the time the credits roll the detective has tracked down the murderer and seen him safely behind bars. Instead of pursuing those old cases in the hopes of clearing one, I was on my way to a new homicide, with its own already accumulating file of paperwork.

  On the way to the crime scene in Makiki, a residential neighborhood outside downtown, I phoned the department secretary and told her I was responding to a report, that I’d have my cell phone on. It was still early enough that most of the traffic was heading into downtown, and the drive outbound was relatively easy.

  The address I’d been given was a small frame house on a corner a few blocks mauka (or toward the mountains, as we say in Hawai’i) of the H1 freeway. I saw, across the street, a beat cop I knew named Lidia Portuondo standing guard next to a little shack of cardboard and palm fronds. I didn’t have to look much further to see the body at her feet.

  I worked with Lidia in Waikiki, where she’d dated another beat cop named Alvy Greenberg. I asked Lidia to sit in on the taking of a witness statement, and she figured out from the questions I asked that I was gay. She told Alvy, who told the rest of the squad. I got a temporary suspension and Alvy got promoted to detective.

  The Lieutenant found out about Lidia and Alvy and decided they needed to be split apart. She’d spent a couple of months in Pearl City, but when the papers played up the shortage of female cops downtown, she ended up driving a patrol car through the outlying neighborhoods, or sometimes on foot patrol around the capitol.

  I didn’t bear Lidia any grudge. It had been hard for both of us, adjusting to our new posts. I considered it a mark of my fellow officers’ comfort level with me when they were able to return to treating me as just another cop, when people stopped whispering and pointing and spreading rumors about me and my position in the department.

  There were similar rumors about Lidia, after her transfer from Waikiki. She’s a good-looking woman, about twenty-six, with long brown hair she keeps pulled up into a bun when she’s on the job. In uniform, as she was that morning, she looked tough and competent. Nobody was going to mess with that body while she was on duty.

  “What’ve you got?” I asked, walking across the street to her.

  “Japanese male, approximately mid-fifties, one bullet hole to the head. Looks like a street person. I think this is his place.” She nodded to the hut behind her. “Since there’s some powder and tattooing around the wound, it looks like somebody held the gun right up to his head, almost execution style.”

  I nodded. “Good. Got any suspects yet?”

  She smiled. “Thought I’d leave that part for you.”

  “Gee, thanks. Medical examiner on the way?”

  “Should be here any minute. Crime scene tech, too.”

  I leaned down to look at the corpse, who was as Lidia had described. He was slumped against the base of a mahogany tree, its long thin branches creating a shelter for his little shack. At the base of the tree a baby gecko poked his head out, looked at me, and then skittered away. He wore a torn beige T-shirt from the Great Aloha Run a few years back, tattered plaid board shorts, and a pair of bright pink rubber slippers. His skin was dark and leathery, his fingernails and toenails ragged and dirty.

  I stood up again. “There wouldn’t happen to be any witnesses, would there?”

  She pointed over toward the house where I’d parked. “Neighbor over there called it in. Heard the shot, but didn’t think anything of it until she looked out the window a little later and saw the guy slumped over.”

  “I’ll talk to her. You’ll wait for the M.E.?”

  “All things come to she who waits.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I wished I’d stopped for a cup of coffee on the way over. I was starting to regret my lack of appetite at breakfast, more so as I approached the front door of the house and smelled bacon frying.

  My knock was answered by a plump, elderly haole woman with thinning white hair. Lidia had told me her name was Rosalie Garces and she lived alone. I showed her my ID and asked if we could talk.

  “Certainly, detective. Come on in. Have you had breakfast?”

  “Well...”

  “Sit down. You like your eggs scrambled?” She patted her floral-print housecoat as if looking for her glasses, then realized they were on top of her head.

  “Scrambled would be fine.”

  While she cooked, Rosalie Garces told me that sometime around six that morning she’d heard a loud noise outside. “I guess it was probably a gunshot, but you never know. Some of the people in this neighborhood, they drive cars that aren’t that great. You hear a lot of backfires and noisy mufflers. After a while I just take those sounds for granted.”

  She poured some runny scrambled eggs onto my plate and passed me a platter of fresh bacon draining on paper towels, then sat next to me to eat. “How’d you know I like my eggs just like this?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I raised a houseful of kids, detective. I know a few things.” She’d gone out around seven-thirty to the store, but hadn’t noticed anything unusual then. “No, I don’t often go out that early, but I’d been feeling a little poorly yesterday and I never got to do my shopping. I didn’t have what to make for breakfast.”

  She paused to eat for a minute. Her hands were skinny and speckled with liver spots. “When I go out, I back out and go the other way. I wouldn’t have noticed Mr. Mura anyway, what with my back to him.”

  “That was his name? Mura?”

  She nodded. “Hiroshi Mura. He used to live in a house there, where his shack is. Him and his wife and his daughter. His wife, she got cancer when the girl was still little, and she died. The girl grew up kind of wild. I don’t know that Mr. Mura was all there even back then, when things seemed to be going all right.” She took another mouthful. “She was just sixteen, I think, when it happened. She was hitchhiking, meeting boys, doing drugs. They found her body out by Diamond Head one day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded. “It hit him hard. He let the house go, and the neighbors started to complain and then they had to have it condemned. He picked up a few things and built that little shack. He always thought his daughter Patty was going to come back. He was waiting for her.”

  “You know anybody who’d have a reason to kill him?”

  She looked surprised. “Who’d want to kill him? I mean, he was a little crazy, but he was harmless. Sometimes he’d go through people’s garbage, and I know there’s some in the neighborhood who didn’t like that, but that’s no reason to kill someone, is it?”

  She looked so worried I had to say, “No, no, that’s no reason at all,” though I knew from experience people had been killed for a lot less.

  When I got back outside the medical examiner, Doc Takayama, was already there, looking at the body. Just my age, he graduated from UH’s medical school at twenty-two and went into pathology to avoid the inevitable comments about his youth. He looked about fifteen, particularly when he grinned, as he often did around Lidia Portuondo.

  He pointed a gloved finger at the bullet hole
in the man’s temple. “Single shot, fired from close range, as your officer here has already pointed out.” He smiled a little.

  I sensed something going on between him and Lidia. They often exchanged covert glances or stood a little too close to each other for casual colleagues. I thought he’d be a good match for Lidia, both of them smart and dedicated, and they would both understand the demands of law enforcement. After the messy breakup of her affair with Alvy Greenberg, it was time for her to start dating again.

  “Any idea as to caliber?”

  “Looks like a .38. Won’t know for sure until I pull the bullet out.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  Doc shook his head. “Not much to say. From the blood it seems pretty clear he was shot right here. Death would have been fairly instantaneous.”

  I looked up. One of the techs, a skinny haole named Larry Solas, was already going over the ground. “Guess that means I start canvassing the neighbors.”

  “You’re in luck,” Lidia said. “Here comes one right now.”

  A man had emerged from the house across from Mrs. Garces’s, caddie-cornered to the site of the old man’s shack. As the neighbor got closer, I saw he was Chinese, somewhere around middle age, and very agitated.

  “You here for shooting, no?” he asked Lidia.

  “This is Detective Kanapa’aka,” she said, pointing to me. “He’s the investigating officer.”

  “You know anything about this, sir?”

  “’Nother shooting, same morning,” the man said. “You come see. Somebody shoot my cock.”

  I looked at the man’s crotch. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. I stole a glance at Lidia and immediately had to look away. She and Doc were looking at each other, and both of them seemed on the verge of laughter.