Bones of Hilo

by Eric Redman

  “No,” said Kawika. “I’m wondering who pays you. And I’m wondering what any of this has to do with the Māhele—with Fortunato’s title to the land.”

  “I’m coming to that,” replied Pohano. “I’m paid by other clients, ones who care about title to the land. A couple from California named Murphy. Perhaps you’ve heard of them?”

  Kawika and Tanaka stared at Pohano, then at one another. Meanwhile Carolyn wrote herself a note: Destroy Heiau = Federal crime?

  “The Murphys are bankrolling other people’s lawsuits?” Kawika finally asked, turning to Pohano again. “I thought they were suing Fortunato themselves.”

  “They are,” replied Pohano. “Their suit will show that KKL lacks title to the land. The defect goes back to the Great Māhele. The Māhele allocated the land to a chief named Ku‘umoku. But the chief’s heirs didn’t live on it—it was mostly hard lava—and someone else eventually claimed it. That family kept handing it down and finally sold it without ever gaining title. And eventually someone else, a Thomas Gray over in South Kohala, sold it to Mr. Fortunato.”

  “Didn’t anyone try to clear title in court?” Tanaka asked.

  Pohano smiled. “In fact,” he said, “the original seller tried that, but without giving proper notice to Ku‘umoku’s heirs. He knew who some were. But he never served them with papers. He just published a notice in the newspaper, and that’s not good enough. So it’s a showstopper. Without valid title Mr. Fortunato’s company can’t sell real estate. They can’t finance the development.”

  “They could pay the heirs to settle the lawsuit, couldn’t they?” Tanaka asked. “It doesn’t sound like Fortunato broke any law. He sounds like the victim: paid good money but didn’t get good title.”

  “Ah, but he did break the law,” Pohano replied. “The law against fraud. He knew the title was bad when he bought the land. And—here’s the fraud—he even promised to pay someone to expose that fact, on command, the moment he gave the order.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Mr. Fortunato was a crook. He had some crooked scheme in mind.”

  “How do you know this even happened?”

  “Because the woman he promised to pay if she exposed the bad title almost became my client. I’m not going to name her. The important point is that Mr. Fortunato was going to pay her to expose his defective title. Which means he was defrauding someone else, probably his investors. And that provides a motive for murder.”

  Kawika immediately became suspicious. “Were you in on this scam?” he asked.

  “Absolutely not!” Pohano insisted. “She didn’t tell me about her deal with Mr. Fortunato. She just said she was an heir of Chief Ku‘umoku and wanted to sue to invalidate KKL’s title. I knew her from HHH, Peter Pukui’s group. I trusted her. I thought it was all legit.”

  “How’d you learn it wasn’t?”

  “Well, as I’ve told you, I was preparing the Murphys’ suit. We’d already found an heir of Chief Ku‘umoku, a guy from Honolulu who’d be our lead plaintiff. We didn’t need any more Ku‘umoku heirs for the suit, but I told this woman she could become a co-plaintiff if she wanted, and the Murphys would pay for it. But I didn’t hear from her again—until Mr. Fortunato was killed, that is. Then she came back. She was afraid she’d be a suspect.”

  “Why would we suspect her?” Kawika asked. “We didn’t know anything about this.”

  “Mr. Fortunato had assaulted her, days before he died. She got treatment at the hospital. She thought the doctor would report it.”

  No one spoke for a moment. “Apparently the doctor didn’t,” Tanaka said, clearing his throat. “You’re going to have to tell us more, Mr. Pohano.”

  Pohano paused to pour water from a pitcher on the table. His hand shook; everyone could see. “After our first meeting,” Pohano began, “this woman apparently went straight to Mr. Fortunato and told him I already represented someone who would expose his faulty title. So her doing so would be redundant. Mr. Fortunato told her the deal was off, in that event. He refused to pay her—sort of a pattern with him. Anyway, there was an altercation. In Mr. Fortunato’s motor vehicle.”

  “That’s how she got injured?” Kawika asked.

  “Yes. Mr. Fortunato stopped the car—this was on the Queen K—and pulled her out. He struck her several times, causing facial injuries. Another motorist pulled over and took her to get medical attention. Mr. Fortunato jumped back in his car and drove off.”

  “So someone knew Fortunato had beaten her,” said Kawika. “That’s why she figured she’d be a suspect in his murder?”

  “Exactly,” Pohano said. “But, uh, she would not have killed Mr. Fortunato. Believe me. She was in a relationship with him—a physical relationship.”

  “Yeah, getting beaten,” Tanaka said. “Pretty physical.”

  “No,” said Pohano. “You know what I mean. They’d conspired together and somehow they’d become close.”

  Poor Joan, thought Kawika. Poor Corazon. Ralph was cheating on them both. Uncomfortably, he remembered that he’d become something of a cheater himself.

  “The names,” Tanaka prompted. “We need the names.”

  “Well, the motorist was a doctor who took her to the hospital in Waimea,” Pohano responded.

  “And—let’s see—the doctor just happened to have medical privileges there,” Kawika said. “Dr. Terrence Smith.”

  Pohano seemed surprised. “How did you know?” he asked.

  “A wild guess.”

  “She asked him not to report it.” Pohano repeated. “She was afraid.”

  “And the woman’s name? You can tell us now.”

  Suddenly Carolyn interrupted. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I bet I know. It’s Melanie, isn’t it? Melanie Munu.”

  Pohano, startled, turned to Mele Kawena Smith.

  “C’mon,” Carolyn insisted. “You told us you knew her from Peter Pukui’s group. That kinda narrows the field, Counselor. It’s not a group with a lot of women. Plus Melanie’s one of your founders here too, right? An old bud of Mele Kawena? What could possibly be the reason you didn’t mention that just now?”

  Mele Kawena Smith glared.

  “Melanie Munu is Peter Pukui’s girlfriend,” Carolyn said distinctly, looking directly at her.

  “Sort of,” admitted Mele Kawena Smith.

  “Ah!” exclaimed Carolyn. “The orator speaks!”

  “Wait a minute,” Kawika said. “I thought Melanie Munu was Maori. She’s Hawaiian, descended from a chief?”

  “Hawaiian enough,” replied Pohano.

  Carolyn pushed back from the table in disgust. “You guys don’t need me anymore,” she said to Tanaka. “I’m outta here.”

  23

  Hilo

  Carolyn’s abrupt departure left a sudden void, an awkward silence. Without words spoken, it seemed the meeting had come to an end. Without ceremony and with jaws set, the S&R delegation silently followed Carolyn out the door. Tanaka and Kawika watched them go, but didn’t linger. They went to check their messages. Kawika had one from Patience and one from Tommy.

  “Detective Wong,” the voicemail from Patience began, “I saw something today I thought you might want to know about. I went to Waikoloa Village for groceries, and as I parked, a car with the KKL logo pulled in beside me. A tall white guy in an aloha shirt got out and took a piece of office equipment from the trunk. I thought it was a printer. Then he went up to the KKL office, above the shops, two steps at a time, in a hurry. I thought about following him, telling him I’m a journalist, asking him questions, but I’ve promised not to sleuth. So I went into the Village Market, and as I was handling a Maui sweet onion, the outer skin—you know, the papery part—fell to pieces, just disintegrated in my hand. And then I realized: that wasn’t a printer the KKL guy had—it was a shredder. Anyway, like I said, I thought you’d want to know. That’s all. Okay, goodbye now.”

  Michael Cushing with a shredder? Why? Kawika wondered.

  Tommy’s voice mess
age asked Kawika to give him a call. “Hey, man,” Tommy said when Kawika reached him. “Just want to update you on tracing the ihe. We’ve checked with museums and dealers throughout the state, but nobody’s missing theirs. I thought we were close at Kohala Historical—after all, it’s the museum closest to the crime scene. But we struck out there too.”

  “What happened?” Kawika asked.

  “The assistant curator, a woman named Kiku Takahashi, looked at the photos of the murder weapon, and she oohed and ahhed over it. Said it’s really old and valuable, definitely dates from Kamehameha’s time. She said the museum has one that’s really similar. So she took me to the display case to see it, but it wasn’t there.”

  “Where is it then?”

  “A little card in the case says it’s on loan to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. She hadn’t known that. But she says it can’t be ours anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Theirs has a different number of barbs. She showed me a picture. They don’t have one with three barbs, like the murder weapon, and all the other museums and dealers, if they do have any three-barbed ones, they’ve still got those. No one is missing any. They all checked.”

  “Hmm. So, close but no cigar with Kohala Historical?”

  “Right. But she did make a good suggestion. She said we should check with private collectors too, not just dealers and museums.”

  “Okay, how are we going to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy replied. “But we’ll figure it out.”

  A few moments later, just as Tommy said goodbye, Tanaka walked into Kawika’s office, smiling but shaking his head. “Got a call back from our friend Shimazu-san,” Tanaka said. “He left me a nice long voice message. I thought my Japanese was pretty good. Not good enough, it seems. I’ll have to call him back, test his English. Why do I suspect his English language skills will disappear suddenly?”

  “Well, he does seem skilled in sudden disappearance,” Kawika replied.

  24

  Hilo

  Kawika awoke feeling cheerful and knowing why: S&R hadn’t proven so scary after all. He rolled over and found Carolyn awake, lying on her stomach, her face resting on her smooth brown hands. She was gazing into the distance—although the distance was limited to palm fronds rattling against her louvered window—and looking past him with a countenance so profoundly sad that his spirits sagged.

  He summoned his mother’s wisdom: “How she feels depends on what she’s thinking.”

  “What are you thinking, Carolyn? You look so sad.”

  She blinked, re-focused, forced a small smile, reached out and stroked his hair. “I love you so much,” she said. Looked into directly, her eyes seemed even sadder.

  “That makes you sad?” Despite his sudden unease, he tried to tease her into a laugh.

  “No, loving you doesn’t make me sad—usually.” She smiled again, a little less wanly. “But that wasn’t what I was thinking. Not just that, anyway.”

  “Then tell me,” he said. He wondered if she’d say, “I was thinking Peter Pukui did it.” That might explain her sadness. But crime was his preoccupation, not hers. They’d met randomly during his first week in Hilo, when he’d found and returned her snatched purse. Even then she didn’t care much about the theft. What intrigued her was a Hawaiian guy moving from Seattle to the Big Island instead of in the opposite direction—and to Hilo, even. Plus those hazel eyes and that smile and everything that went with them. She’d wanted to learn more.

  “Well,” she began, “First I was thinking about Hawai‘i. About what’s been lost—everything, really. Everything’s lost. I wondered if Kamehameha should have killed the haoles instead of relying on them and their guns. He probably couldn’t have conquered the other islands. He didn’t need the haoles for anything else, really. But that could’ve been okay, each island with its own royalty.”

  Kawika started to speak, but she spoke for him. “Then I realized, of course, the haoles could have found another chief on another island, or he could have found them. They would have armed that chief, who would’ve achieved the same result. And the haoles would still have come.”

  “So Hawaii had no escape? That’s what’s making you sad?”

  “No escape from haoles,” she replied. “Of course that makes me sad. But what’s the point? We’re practically all hapa now; even you and me, hapa haole. And nothing could have been done about it. Not really.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  “Still, the haoles could have done a better job here. Everything else aside, still, all this development—all this tourism, real estate, resorts, shopping centers—it’s all gone too far, Kawika. Way, way too far. It doesn’t have any boundaries. None. It’s pushing us into the sea.”

  She got up, pulled on a short robe, gathered and pinned her shining hair. Her movements briefly exposed her leg tattoo, the dark black ala niho running from ankle to hip, the tale of her life in permanent ink, from her ancestry all the way to her future, the ala niho ending in symbols for land, ‘āina, and restoration. Kawika loved that black tattoo. He considered it part of her beauty, both visually and symbolically. He could have gotten one himself. But after his night with Patience, an ala niho stood on the other side of a Hawaiian cultural chasm he didn’t know how to cross now, didn’t know if he was worthy to cross.

  “It’s not just the environment that’s been destroyed,” Carolyn continued. “Not just the scenery, the native species—even the native people. It’s the way people act that’s wrong now. Development—all the money, the greed, the corruption, all the reaction and the radicals on power trips—it’s ruined the society, Kawika. Turned everyone into phonies and crooks and sluts and scumbags.”

  “I can see how all that might make you sad,” Kawika said, forcing a small laugh. “The end of Hawaiian civilization. That’s a lot.”

  “But for me, it was just the beginning,” she said, laughing at herself a little now too. “Because then I started thinking about your work. You and your work, really.”

  “Me and my work?”

  “Crooks and scumbags are who you spend your days with, Kawika. And you’re going to do it for the rest of your life.”

  “Whoa,” Kawika protested. “Someday I’m going to retire.”

  She smiled but didn’t slow down. “For the rest of your working life, okay? And that’s a long time. Unless you get killed.”

  “Uh … did you dream about a whacked-out kanaka taking a shot at me?”

  She nodded solemnly. No trace of a smile now. “Yes, but I’ve thought about that before. You’re a cop, you take risks. I just never thought about the scumbag part—not until yesterday with S&R.”

  “I’m not a scumbag,” he said, worried that a one-night stand in South Kohala might have just made him one. “And I don’t spend all my time with scumbags. C’mon, Terry’s not a scumbag.”

  “No, but Terry has his Japanese roots and culture to anchor him or hold him up—otherwise he might be a scumbag too. You’re not Japanese, Kawika. What’s a lifetime of this work going to do to you? A professional lifetime, I mean.”

  She paused, looking at him mournfully. He couldn’t say what he knew she needed to hear: You anchor me; you hold me up. A few days earlier it would have been easy.

  “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas—that what you mean?” he tried. “Tanaka’s got flea powder and I don’t?”

  “Something like that,” she said, turning away.

  “Wow, babe. That’s heavy-duty stuff. On top of civilization coming to an end.” He was still trying to jolly her out of it, and not succeeding. He put his arms around her, but she drew away gently, wrapping herself in her own arms.

  “That’s not all, Kawika. Thinking about your work got me thinking about my work.”

  “And?”

  “Kawika,” she pleaded. Her eyes brimmed. “You have no idea how much I just want to get my degree, switch to forestry, get over there to Kaho‘olawe, start planting trees. Can you even imagine how much I want
that, Kawika? I need an escape from the scumbags. There’s some sort of purity in planting things. Restoring something, saving something.”

  “I know, I know. I understand. I support you—you know that.”

  “You don’t understand,” she insisted. “I don’t want to be alone, Kawika. And there isn’t any police work on Kaho‘olawe. There aren’t any people on Kaho‘olawe.”

  “Hey, there’s bomb disposal work,” he joked. The island had long been a Navy bombing range. That’s why it needed restoration—and why restoration would be difficult.

  In frustration, she hit him on the arm—not hard, but not in jest either: Take me seriously.

  “Okay,” he said, deciding to spin out a future they hadn’t discussed, and now might never discuss. “We’ve got options. We can live on Maui or O‘ahu. You have to commute to Kaho‘olawe anyway—there’s no housing out there.”

  “There will be housing. There’ll be a workforce.”

  “So you could stay out there on weeknights only, right?”

  “We’d be apart all week.”

  “Not on weekends, though.”

  “Kawika. Two days out of seven? Three nights?” Kawika had never considered what portion of a week a couple should spend together. Apparently Carolyn had.

  “Okay. Second option, then. You work there for a year or two. Earn your stripes. We have weekends, vacations, breaks. Then you take your experience and your credentials and get some big forestry job back here.”

  “Oh, God, Kawika, you really don’t understand. The Big Island, O‘ahu, Maui, Kaua‘i—I’d be living with all these scumbags again.”

  As she’d poured out her heart, he’d tried using logic’s leaky ladle to refill it. It wasn’t working. He changed his approach.

  “Third option: I become the constable of Kaho‘olawe,” he joked. “Maintain order among restoration workers and bomb squads. Keep an eye on saloons and whorehouses. That sort of thing.”