by Eric Redman
“Did he do time?”
“Nope. Beat the rap—charges dropped at trial. Government couldn’t agree with itself apparently. Justice Department called it a crime. Interior Department waffled, said the site wasn’t protected, wasn’t necessarily sacred anyway. Can’t desecrate something that’s not sacred, I guess. Anyway, Ralph’s company pleaded to false statements. That was it.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, but get this: the resort went under. Down the tube. Development company failed, went bankrupt. Ralph picked up, moved on, moved here. Sayonara. Aloha.”
“This is weird,” Kawika said. “I can’t believe he’d bulldoze the heiau after that.”
“History repeats itself,” said Tanaka.
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“It might,” Tanaka said. “Maybe he likes killing resorts more than completing them. Found the heiau, saw his chance. Old dog, old trick.”
“But why?”
“Don’t know,” Tanaka replied. “You’re the detective.”
“Thanks.”
“By the way,” Tanaka added, “We say ‘hui’ all the time, but out of curiosity I just double-checked it in the dictionary. ‘Group, union, association formed to pursue a common undertaking.’”
“Yeah, that’s what I said—could mean association, group.”
“Could mean something else, Kawika. How about ‘gambling club?’ Or ‘tong?’”
“Get outta here.”
“Just watch your back, that’s all I’m saying. You’re in Chinatown again.”
“The International District, Terry, the International District.”
“Whatever. Say hi to your dad for me. And tell him: guys fishing in our spot last night? Caught a hundred-ten-pound ulua.”
“Big one,” Kawika responded.
“Yeah,” said Tanaka. “Big one that forgot to watch its back.”
Tommy had overheard most of the conversation. “So,” he asked, when Kawika hung up, “Captain Tanaka, he’s like your uncle or something? Not like a real boss?”
Kawika laughed. “More like everyone’s uncle and everyone’s boss,” he said. “We don’t find the killer fast, you’ll see for yourself.”
8
Waipi‘o
Kawika wasn’t Tanaka’s only Hawaiian detective—or his only ambitious one. There was also Sammy Kā‘ai. Sammy was older than Kawika, rugged in appearance and much more experienced. He, too, sought Tanaka’s favor and resented what he considered Kawika’s unearned access to it. Sammy tended to misinterpret facts at the station; he imagined Kawika had received a plum assignment, for example, failing to see that Tanaka wanted his most experienced—and toughest—detectives to focus on Shark Cliff. But Sammy was a superb interpreter of facts in the field.
On the day Kawika flew to South Kohala, Sammy decided to revisit the rocky beach at Shark Cliff and take another look. He wanted the helicopter for transport but arrived at work to find it gone with Kawika. He asked for the police launch, the boat they’d taken the first time, but it was out rescuing a sailboat that had wrecked on Hilo’s breakwater in the night. Sammy couldn’t even get a four-wheel drive from the motor pool. In the end, he parked a police cruiser at the Waipi‘o Lookout and proceeded on foot—a mile down the steep road to the valley floor, then south along the boulder-strewn shore to the foot of the cliff.
By the time he got there, a light rain had begun to fall. There wasn’t any wind. The surf was heavy and loud from big swells. Sammy pulled up his hood and bent his face toward the beach, searching for any evidence—a wristwatch, a wallet, a ring—they might have missed before, preoccupied as they’d been with body parts and flesh.
What caused Sammy to look up was a pebble bouncing off his hood. He felt a whap, then saw the pebble skitter among the rocks at his feet. Other pebbles began to bounce nearby. It took Sammy a moment to realize the stones were falling from the cliff. He turned his face skyward, expecting a rockfall and already moving backward, trying to get out of harm’s way. What he saw instead was a body falling toward him—a body falling straight down, right next to the vertical cliff face. Sammy froze, his mouth wide in disbelief. A plummeting stone sliced his chin. He dove behind a boulder and missed seeing the body hit the beach, the actual impact, but he heard the sound—a percussive whoomph like a muffled explosion.
He didn’t hear a scream.
* * *
At the hospital in Hilo, Sammy received Tanaka’s undivided attention. They spoke while doctors X-rayed and bandaged injuries from his dive behind the boulder, and even while they stitched up his chin.
“Good work,” Tanaka said, patting Sammy on an arm wrapped in gauze and Ace bandages. Good work, though not Iiko, iiko.
Sammy had provided Tanaka something to go on. “Now we know the murders aren’t over—they’re still happening,” he said to Sammy. “The killers can act by day. Whoever this latest guy is, he’s a haole, unlike the others. And thanks to you, we know he wasn’t conscious when he hit.”
“Wasn’t conscious the whole way down,” Sammy insisted. Sammy had been a paratrooper in the Army. He’d pushed dummies out of planes to test the wind above a drop zone. The victim’s fall had been the lifeless fall of a wind dummy. “I think he was dead, Terry.”
“Dead or unconscious,” Tanaka replied. “It doesn’t matter. The others might have been knocked out too. The point is, this guy changes what we thought. He changes the pattern.”
“Not necessarily,” Sammy observed. “Maybe he isn’t part of the pattern.”
“Copycat, you’re thinking?”
“Maybe,” Sammy replied. “Or maybe he’s just a stray.”
9
Puakō
As a little boy in his father’s embrace, Kawika sometimes felt he could drown in flesh. Even now, Jarvis Wong’s huge arms engulfed his son. Kawika’s cousin, eleven-year-old Ku‘ulei, squirmed happily, waiting impatiently for the paternal hug to end. “Kawika, Kawika!” she exclaimed, over and over. She began to jump up and down.
The Wongs had reunited at Jarvis’s house in Puakō, the once-sleepy village where Kawika had spent summers as a boy. Back then, Puakō had been home to artists, beach bums smoking pakalolo—pot—and resort workers like his father. Now the money had begun to show up. Puakō was changing.
Kawika scooped up his cousin, nuzzling her with mock ferocity. She screamed in delight. Ku‘ulei’s mom was Kawika’s aunt, his dad’s unfortunate younger sister, a stoner down in the jungles of Puna on the windward and wet side of the island. Ku‘ulei lived with Jarvis now, attending private school in Waimea. The Mauna Kea Beach Resort, Jarvis’s employer, paid part of her fees through its employees’ scholarship fund, even though technically as a niece she wasn’t eligible.
“You’re working here?” Ku‘ulei asked. “Did something get stolen?”
“Someone got killed,” replied Kawika.
“Ooh,” Ku‘ulei said, turning thoughtful. “A bad person?”
“Bad? I don’t know,” Kawika replied, thinking, Desecration, adultery, who knows what else? “But even bad people shouldn’t be killed, should they?”
“Depends on how bad they are,” she answered sensibly.
Jarvis cooked a dinner of fresh fish outside on an old grate set on cinderblocks. Standing beside his father, a beer in one hand and his cousin tugging on the other, Kawika felt himself at home, yet growing ever more distant from his boyhood summers. The house still reflected Jarvis perfectly: a tin-roofed shack on stilts to keep the sea out when storms carried surf over the lava rock wall that Jarvis and Kawika had built together years before. A hibiscus border grew through cyclone fencing. The driveway was a patch of reddish earth surrounded by an irregular fringe of mongrel grass. Surfboards and fishing rods rested on rusty brackets on the street-facing wall. Kawika winced at the surfboards. He hadn’t surfed on the Kohala coast for a long time. He barely found time to surf near Hilo.
Kawika realized that with South Kohala’s skyrocketing real estate prices, even Jarvis wo
uld be tempted to sell his place sometime soon. This house would be torn down, sold to a Mainlander with money and an architect, someone who’d have fun designing a vacation dream house for a tiny oceanfront lot.
“Folks here are selling out,” Kawika said. “I see a fancy new place every time I come.”
“Nice people moving in, though,” said Jarvis optimistically. “Lots of activity. Always an interesting place, Puakō.”
For twenty years—most of Kawika’s life—Jarvis had been head groundskeeper at the Mauna Kea. Jarvis liked tending his trees and tropical plants, riding the tractor mower over familiar terrain; he was a supervisor who worked with his crew. The Mauna Kea indulged him in this and other ways. Smart management, Kawika always thought.
Dinner proved complicated. Ku‘ulei insisted on sitting on Kawika’s lap, as if she were five or six again. “We’re studying the gods in school,” she informed him. “Lono, right now. We’re making leis and ti leaf mats. We’re going to do an offering—poi and poke and stuff. Then we’re going to study Pele.”
“What about Kū?” asked Kawika, his mind on a god who demanded human sacrifice. “You gonna make offerings to Kū?”
“Who’s Kū?” asked Ku‘ulei, turning to Jarvis.
“The god of war,” Jarvis told her. “Kūka‘ilimoku, but Kū for short.”
Facing Kawika again, Jarvis said, “Nowadays they don’t study Kū at her age. Kū comes later.”
“Lono, Pele, but not Kū,” said Kawika, smiling at his cousin. “Just the cuddly gods.”
“Pele’s not cuddly,” Jarvis admonished.
After Ku‘ulei had been tucked in, the men sat facing the sea in plastic lawn chairs, resting their feet on the low lava rock wall. When Jarvis asked about the case, Kawika told him what he knew, but didn’t mention KKL’s receptionist Joan Malo, Fortunato’s married lover. Kohala’s a big district but a small place, Kawika reasoned.
Listening, Jarvis grunted from time to time, then asked more questions. “I can tell you one or two things,” he finally offered. “Might help a bit.”
Kawika nodded. “Please,” he said.
“Okay. Then first, your Mr. Fortunato? Lives up there in a Parker Ranch house. Works hard at fitting in. Wants people to think he’s a nice guy. But there’s something funny about that resort. The money’s from Japan, right? So where’s the resident Japanese guy? And where’s the money actually going? You should check.”
“The Japanese guy’s not resident,” said Kawika. “Just seems to fly in and out.”
“Huh. Usually these Japanese developers, they’ve got someone here to keep an eye on things.” Jarvis shrugged, then continued. “Well, anyway, next, your Peter Pukui? An angry young man. He’s in his forties now, I guess. Drug user, like his daddy. Daddy wrecked his car on Highway 19, the Queen K nowadays, got himself killed. Peter’s mom, she’s a haole and a drunk. Wrecked a few cars herself. Now she’s in an old folks’ home.”
“Think he’d kill Fortunato?”
“Like I said, he’s angry and a druggie. Could kill someone, yeah?”
“Yeah, and he’s disappeared. Looks bad.”
Peter Pukui had wanted something to believe in, Jarvis emphasized—something to make him more Hawaiian—so he’d seized on the heiau. “He grew up here,” Jarvis continued. “We’ve got some big heiau. Then Fortunato finds another one up at KKL. So Peter starts his own movement. They meet below Pu‘ukoholā, down where the old Hawaiians sacrificed guys to the sharks. You know that leaning stone, the big pohaku, where the priests watched the sharks feed? That’s where Peter’s group meets.”
Jarvis moved to face his son. “You’ve gotta understand,” he said. “Peter’s group, they’ve got an agenda. They’re not into hula or old ways of catching fish. They’re not like other Native groups, trying to preserve some of the culture. No, they want to bring back the old religion.”
Kawika knew this part of his Hawaiian history: haoles stole the Kingdom, but the Hawaiians themselves overthrew their old religion seventy-five years earlier, right after Kamehameha died and before any missionaries reached the islands. Ka‘ahumanu, the king’s most forceful widow, and his son the new king took the lead. “And God bless ’em,” said Jarvis. “Because the way the old Hawaiians worshipped, they were a bloodthirsty bunch. And Peter’s group, they want to be born-again Hawaiians. They’re in love with the old ways. It’s magic to them. Power. Mana.
“I hope Peter didn’t do this,” Jarvis added. “I hope it was some jealous husband”—So he knows, Kawika thought—“or some Japanese investor. Or folks at the Mauna Lani? They hate Kohala Kea Loa. Folks at Waikoloa Village feel the same. They don’t want the traffic, don’t want the people, don’t want their views messed up. So maybe you wanna check some of those folks too, yeah?”
“Geez, Dad,” replied Kawika. “Think someone from the Mauna Lani would sacrifice a guy on the championship tee box of their signature hole? Doesn’t sound like folks at the Mauna Lani.”
“What folks you know at the Mauna Lani?”
“Well, just the woman who found the body. Interviewed her today.”
“Tourist?”
“Part tourist, part kama‘aina. She owns a condo at the Mauna Lani Point. Patience Quinn.”
Jarvis let out a whoop. “Patience Quinn? From San Francisco?”
“You know her?”
“I know the whole family. They used to stay at the Mauna Kea. Big-money folks, but friendly, lots of aloha. They still golf on our course. Patience Quinn—I don’t believe it. You two played together at the beach when you were kids.”
“Really? I don’t remember. You seen her since she was a girl?”
“Sure,” Jarvis answered. “Once a year at least. She’s a magazine writer, yeah? Did a big story some years back about the fight over the Hapuna Prince Hotel, getting that thing built. Sent me a copy—New York Times, that one. My, my. Little Impy Quinn found the body, eh?”
“Impy?”
“Lots of energy,” Jarvis explained. “Couldn’t sit still. Her mom said, ‘Should’ve named her Impatience.’ They called her Impy for short. She had attention issues, they said. I called her Flea, though. She’d hang on me like Ku‘ulei hangs on you. I’d pretend to scratch at her. I’d shout, ‘A flea! A flea! Gotta scratch this darn flea!’ She’d laugh so hard, she’d finally fall off.” Jarvis chuckled. “She grew up, she married a doctor, like her daddy,” he said. “Nice young fellow.”
“They’re separated now, apparently,” Kawika told him.
“Sorry to hear it.” Jarvis frowned. “Well, if you see her again, say hello for me.”
“I might see her in the morning,” Kawika said, and heard the too-casual note in his own voice. “That reminds me,” he added quickly, “Terry said to tell you, some guys fishing in your spot last night? Caught a hundred-ten-pound ulua.”
Jarvis waited a moment, then spoke.
“How’s Carolyn?” he asked.
10
The Mauna Lani
“Do you prefer Impy or Flea?”
Patience Quinn looked astonished, then embarrassed. “Oh my gosh,” she exclaimed. “Detective Wong; Jarvis Wong. I didn’t put it together. You said you were from Hilo—”
“Don’t we look alike, Dad and me?” he teased.
“Not much alike,” she replied, and laughed. “He’s the biggest man I’ve ever seen.”
Kawika laughed. “Can we take a walk?” he asked. She nodded, stepped outside, and slipped her sandals on. Kawika turned to Tommy. “Mind picking me up in an hour? At the hotel?”
Tommy blinked. “Yes, boss,” he replied, and turned back.
Kawika and Patience set out toward the Mauna Lani Bay Hotel. With their first steps, they left behind the elevated tee box on which Ralph Fortunato had died the day before. Groundskeepers were busy replacing sod the blood had soaked.
Their route took them along well-maintained walls of greenish fishponds spared from ancient lava flows. They found some shade on a small beach and sat down.
Kawika again noticed her well-defined muscles, this time of her neck and arms. She’s incredibly fit, he realized. She slipped off her sandals, dug her toes in the sand. Kawika kept his shoes on. He wore a soft green and blue aloha shirt, nicer than the one he’d worn the day before, thanks to a few things he kept at his dad’s.
Jarvis had told Kawika a bit about Patience. Now she asked about him. His parents had met at Hapuna Beach, he told her. “Dad had the day off; Mom had come from the mainland to work at an observatory.” Kawika had been born a year later. “Mom raised me in Seattle after the divorce,” he said. “I spent summers here. Dad says you and I played together when we were little.”
“I don’t remember that, but I sure remember Jarvis from back then,” she said, laughing. “He’d take me out in the waves. I’d hold tight around his neck; I couldn’t get my legs around his back.” Her parents had met Jarvis on the Mauna Kea golf course, she said. “Daddy lost his tee shot in the sun,” she explained. “When he got to the green, Jarvis was standing there laughing. Daddy had hit a hole in one—his first and last. I don’t know, maybe Jarvis gave it a nudge. Anyway, Jarvis handed Daddy a beer from his cooler. I think later they went out and got drunk. They still make a point of seeing each other whenever Mom and Dad are here.”
“Aloha,” Kawika said, smiling.
“Aloha,” she agreed with a laugh.
“And you’ve been coming here ever since?”
“Yup,” she replied. “My parents love the beach at the Mauna Kea, but Daddy wanted this condo here at the Mauna Lani Point. He loves sitting with a drink, looking out at the ocean and the sunset and the championship tee—” She hesitated for a second, then pressed on. “And that over-the-water par 3. Though he’s practically filled the little bay there with his tee shots—plus a five-iron he tossed in there once. The fish must hate him.” She chuckled. “Anyway, when I got married, they gave me the condo as a present. I’m there a lot, sometimes for months when I’m writing. But honestly, after the divorce I’ll sell it in a minute if I can get a nice place at the Mauna Kea. The beach there—I mean, you know.”