Bones of Hilo

by Eric Redman

  But once the Fortunato case was closed, and despite his earlier threats, Tanaka never bothered with the Murphys, nor did he expose their lawyer Ted Pohano as Ted Pohaus from LA. He simply despised them.

  After waiting a while, just to be safe, the Murphys quietly reached an accommodation with the heirs of Chief Ku‘umoku through Pohano. They bought KKL’s land out of bankruptcy for a fraction of what Fortunato paid. The Murphys gave the property to a local land trust, and for tax deduction purposes they treated the corruptly inflated purchase price Fortunato had paid as the unassailable measure of the donation’s value. Although by now the legacy of fraud clung to the property like a curse, the IRS never looked into that tax deduction.

  The hunters group, too, lost interest once KKL was dead. It was rough country, that land, and never had much game to speak of.

  Kawika continued to work for Tanaka, but he never had to menace a druggie at Shark Cliff. The great Shark Cliff development was that Sammy Kā‘ai managed to solve the case—most of it—and rescue Peter Pukui at the same time, thanks to help from an alert Waimea cop. The night after Tanaka’s press conference, the cop stopped a car traveling without lights on the dead end road from Honoka‘a to the Waipi‘o Lookout. The driver and his two passengers couldn’t explain why the fourth man in the car, the terrified one on the floor, eyes wide in the beam of the officer’s flashlight, was bound and gagged, with his mouth taped shut for good measure.

  The fourth man was Peter Pukui. Fortunately, the Waimea officer had approached the driver’s window with his gun drawn; there was no resistance. He ordered the three young men to lie face down on the pavement, disarmed and cuffed them, and radioed for backup.

  Sammy Kā‘ai got to take the Hilo Major Crimes helicopter this time. Once again, Sammy wrapped Peter Pukui in a blanket to keep him from going into shock. Then Sammy joined the Waimea cop in standing over the prone young men. With police pistols pointed at their nineteen-year-old heads, in quavering voices the three admitted being heroin dealers, Peter Pukui’s suppliers and kidnappers, the ones who’d brought cash to Hilo for Peter’s bail. Finally, still lying on the road, and even after receiving their Miranda warnings, they also confessed to being the Shark Cliff murderers.

  By that point they were all in tears, shaking with sobs. One had urinated all over himself. “The notorious crybaby killers,” Sammy said with contempt. “Pathetic.”

  At the station, where Sammy separated them, the leader of the three turned out to be the bad penny grand-nephew of the granny who’d fled the lava flow threatening Pāhoa. He’d been smart enough to change plates on granny’s car, but not lucky enough to get Peter Pukui all the way to Waipi‘o Lookout without being stopped. He admitted they’d been holding Peter captive in Honoka‘a, waiting for Melanie Munu to arrive with money extorted from Michael Cushing. But then they’d watched Tanaka’s press conference on television and learned Melanie was dead, her body exhumed at Waiki‘i Ranch. At that point they had decided just to toss Peter off the cliff.

  The earlier Shark Cliff victims, the killer said, weren’t meth war casualties, just druggies he and his buddies thought knew Peter, and from whom they’d tried to learn his hiding place. They’d finally been told by another druggie—the one Sammy had turned loose when Peter had climbed up out of Waipi‘o Valley—that the Hilo cops had Peter in custody. That’s why they showed up in Hilo to assure Peter’s release on bail.

  Even at the station, though, the three Shark Cliff killers vehemently insisted they knew nothing about the other victim, the one Sammy had dubbed the Handcuffed Haole. To Sammy, the Shark Cliff investigation seemed incomplete as a result.

  Eventually, the Handcuffed Haole turned out to be a man named D. K. Parkes, a for-hire boat captain who’d sometimes skippered the Mahi Mia for Thomas Gray out of Kawaihae Harbor. Sammy patiently established this, working from the man’s anchor and fishhook tattoos and finally showing the flyer around Kawaihae. But that was as far as Sammy could get with the Handcuffed Haole. He’d discovered the man’s identity, but not the motive for his killing. No one who knew him thought D. K. Parkes was a druggie.

  Kawika, on the other hand, asked Corazon Fortunato about Parkes, once his identity became known and Kawika had a photo of him to show her. She confirmed that her husband had sometimes fished on Mahi Mia with Thomas Gray and this Mr. Parkes. Kawika then had no doubt who’d killed Parkes: someone who killed killers. Someone who’d killed Fortunato and the Duct Tape Mummy. Someone who’d gone to the blackboard to spell the word banana and hadn’t known when to stop.

  So Kawika identified D. K. Parkes as Fortunato’s probable accomplice in the Thomas Gray murder—and the third victim of Kimaio’s vigilante justice. But Kawika didn’t report his discovery officially or tell Sammy. Instead he just told Tanaka quietly, “For Shark Cliff, this D. K. Parkes, the Handcuffed Haole, is a stray—just what Sammy first suspected. He helped murder someone, but that case is unrelated to Shark Cliff. And in that other case, the killer’s dead too. Trust me.” Tanaka, seemingly incurious, did precisely that, somewhat to Kawika’s surprise. It was as if Tanaka already knew.

  Soon, Kawika recognized, Tanaka would begin hinting that the time had come for Kawika to advance his career in Honolulu. So Kawika flew to Honolulu for a day, ostensibly to check out a job but really to question Cushing before he was transferred to Walla Walla. “What happened between you and Joan Malo?” he asked. “The night before she died, I mean.” With his lawyer present, Cushing was eager to talk. He insisted his story would prove someone else had murdered Fortunato.

  “That night, I was completely freaked out,” Cushing said. “Someone had just killed Ralph in the exact spot and with the exact type of weapon I’d planned. But it wasn’t Rocco, and I still had in storage the ihe I was going to give him; it was an untraceable one. Yet whoever did it stole my ihe, the historic one, to kill Fortunato in order to frame me, and somehow they knew my plan.”

  “You thought Joan Malo knew your plan?”

  “I had no idea,” Cushing said. “Maybe she’d somehow overheard me when I called Rocco. Maybe she’d told Shimazu about it in Tokyo, trying to appease him. Maybe it gave Shimazu a bright idea, how he could kill Ralph and not be suspected.”

  “Did Joan really tell you about Shimazu and his friends? What they’d done?”

  “Joan?” Cushing snorted. “No way. Ralph told me. He bragged about it, saying he’d used Joan to buy time with the Japanese. Told me it would let us both get more money out of KKL. That’s when I realized he was flying the plane right into the mountain. He had no intention of pulling up in time.”

  “And so? What happened that night with Joan?”

  “That night with Joan, I was scared,” Cushing said. “Really, really scared. I figured someone must be on to me. I went completely nuts. I demanded to know what she knew. I threatened her, told her I’d tell Kai about her and Ralph. About Shimazu and his friends. Told her Shimazu gave Ralph copies of the photos.”

  “Photos?”

  “You didn’t find them?”

  “No,” Kawika said. “No, we never found photos. We never knew they existed.”

  “They existed, all right. Ralph showed them to me. I told Joan I’d seen them.”

  “So you—?”

  “So I … I got a little out of control. A lot out of control, actually. I wanted to force her to tell me what she knew. I’d always wanted to, uh, have her, I guess. And now I was really angry, really scared—like I said, I just sort of went crazy. And the awful part was this: it turned out Joan didn’t know who killed Ralph, or why.”

  “You’re right, she didn’t,” said Kawika. But that wasn’t the awful part.

  “I still don’t know,” Cushing said. “Do you?”

  “Well, you pleaded to it in court,” Kawika replied. “Rocco’s confession fingers you directly. You owned the murder weapon. Captain Tanaka says you did it. He’s my boss, and the case is closed.” That’s what’s true, Kawika thought. The whys don’t matter.


  Flying home to Hilo, Kawika took a window seat so he could gaze down at Kaho‘olawe, an intensely colored long rock with yellow grass set in a white-capped, blue-green sea. Empty, the island seemed lonely and definitely bare—yet perhaps not barren, not forever.

  A few months later, Kawika saw a death notice in the paper: Frank Kimaio’s. On the printed page, Kimaio’s name looked somehow unfamiliar. Kawika had seen it many times on his computer screen and in his reports. He’d never seen it in newspaper type. Kawika opened the Kohala phone directory and looked at Kimaio’s name in type again. Still something odd about it. Kawika booted up his office computer and did a search for the name Kimaio. Nothing.

  That night, Kawika awoke violently. He was thinking hard. Thinking about his own name: Kawika, a transliteration of David. Thinking about Keanu Reeves being named for Uncle Keanu, about telling Ku‘ulei that perhaps the uncle’s real name was Dean. And he remembered Carolyn dismissing Mele Kawena Smith: “I bet she was born ‘Mary Devine.’” Kawika pulled on some clothes, drove to the station, and searched again, this time for Frank Dimaio, not Frank Kimaio.

  And there it was on the screen: lots of hits on the name Frank Dimaio. A century earlier, it turned out, Frank Dimaio had been the Pinkerton detective who traveled to Argentina and traced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to their ranch in remotest Patagonia. By finding them, Dimaio destroyed their refuge, forced them out, and eventually they were hunted down and killed in Bolivia. Dimaio had devoted himself to avenging the lawmen who’d died at their outlaw hands. In transforming himself and choosing a new name, Frank Carlson—despite misspelling “Kawika” when typing Rocco’s confession and mispronouncing Ka‘ū—hadn’t made a Hawaiian linguistic error after all.

  Kawika drove home and slept with troubled dreams.

  In the wakeful world, the world beyond dreams, the last words very nearly belonged to Leonard Cohen. One night, after he’d finished cleaning up, Dr. Terrence Smith headed for the door of the makeshift mortuary at his hospital. As he reached to turn off the light, he sang softly to himself:

  And quiet is the thought of you,

  The file on you complete,

  Except what we forgot to do

  A thousand kisses deep.

  He stopped abruptly, remembering something. He walked back to a cooler where he stored specimens. He rummaged a bit and retrieved a small bag. Crossing the room, he lifted the lid of a container marked “Biohazard—Medical Waste” and dropped the bag inside. Then he switched off the light as he left. The little bag, which he’d tossed in the trash with a satisfying plop, contained two testicles—the last earthly remains of Ralph Fortunato.

  In pace requiescat.

  That was nearly the end of it, but not quite. In pace requiescat—“rest in peace,” Poe’s final words in “The Cask of Amontillado”—weren’t the only valedictory words Kawika pondered that winter. His mother, separated from her son by half an ocean and worried about his well-being, sent him a quotation from her favorite writer, John Fowles. It had always meant a lot to her, she said, and she thought it apt:

  Life is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after one losing throw of the dice.

  He thought long about this. As if to confirm its wisdom—another riddle, another opportunity to guess it—the real meaning of In pace requiescat finally yielded itself to him. It is not the dead who need a benediction, he realized: they rest in peace no matter what. It is we the living who must find peace. The dead do not demand we make human sacrifices of ourselves. That is their benediction to us.

  Eventually, Kawika allowed himself to hear that benediction. Eventually, he let life inhabit new faces and gathered the dice for another throw—and, he promised himself, for another and another, if need be.

  So it was that one day Kawika decided to call Tommy—his own Waimea cop, his partner. “Tommy,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s get Terry and my dad to teach us shore fishing. You and I would make a good team, I bet. Not as good as them, maybe. But still, quite a team.”

  “That would be great,” Tommy replied. “I’d really like that, Kawika. It would be nice to spend time with your dad. And I haven’t seen Captain Tanaka for a long while—not since right after the press conference, when he was here in Waimea having dinner with our division chief and Frank Kimaio.”

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY ERIC REDMAN

  The Dance of Legislation

  Author Biography

  Eric Redman is a Seattle-based writer, lawyer, and climate activist who for decades has loved the Big Island of Hawaii, its history, and its people. He is a former contributing editor of Rolling Stone and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and many other publications. He wrote the nonfiction best-seller, The Dance of Legislation. This is his first work of detective fiction.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events or persons, living or dead, other than historical events and persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Eric Redman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  “A Thousand Kisses Deep”

  Words and Music by Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson

  Copyright © 2001 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and EMI April Music Inc.

  All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219

  International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

  Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

  Maps by Karen Schober

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-702-2

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-703-9

  Cover design by Patrick Sullivan

  Printed in the United States.

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

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  First Edition: June 2021

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