Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  It stuck out from the building a foot or so, with a flat part on the top. Shining up at me in the morning light was a round piece of bronze-colored metal. It was hard to tell without field glasses, but I thought it was a spent rifle casing.

  “Down there,” I said, pointing. “What’s that look like to you?”

  “Looks like we need a crime scene team out here.”

  As I was about to make the call, my radio crackled, and dispatch notified us that we’d been assigned to a homicide. From our vantage point, I realized that the crime scene we’d been called to was right in front of us. A few hundred feet away I saw a body laid out on the street, two uniforms standing guard over it.

  My problems had gotten a lot bigger than a sweaty polyester uniform.

  edith kAPANA

  “We’re right on it,” I told the dispatcher. Ray remained on the roof until I could get a uniform up there to replace him, and I took the steps in the dark, damp stairwell two at a time, swinging around the turns in my eagerness to get outside.

  The security guard had the lobby organized by the time I got there, leaving a narrow aisle from the elevators to the front door.

  People clustered at the front windows, talking and pointing at the police activity outside.

  The two uniforms guarding the body were Lidia Portuondo and Gary Saunders, and I’d known them both for years. Lidia, a slim woman who wore her dark hair in a French braid, stood over the body of an elderly woman in a flowered holoku. I realized with a shudder it was similar in color and style to the one my mother wore.

  Saunders, a big blond guy with more brawn than brains, kept the curious at bay. As I walked up, another pair of uniforms arrived, and I dispatched them to relieve Ray.

  “What have we got?” I asked.

  “Saunders and I were stationed over there.” Lidia pointed a few hundred yards in the opposite direction from where Ray and I had been posted. “We heard the shots and started crowd control. When we heard the women screaming, we came over to take a look.”

  A group of older ladies, all in holokus, stood a few feet away.

  “We discovered the victim, saw the blood and the bullet holes, checked for vital signs and called it in.” She looked at me. “How’d you get here so quick in this crowd?”

  I told her where we’d been posted and then leaned down to take a look at the woman, careful not to touch her until the medical examiner’s team and the crime scene guys arrived. The streets were jammed with protesters and police, so I figured it 10 Neil S. Plakcy

  might take them a while.

  Blood had pooled on the pavement under the woman, who looked to be in her sixties or seventies. She was Hawaiian, with a shock of white hair and skin a couple of shades darker than mine. A small handbag made of quilted fabric lay by her side, where it appeared she had dropped it.

  “Anybody else hurt?” I asked.

  Lidia shook her head. “A bunch of the kupunas were shook up,” she said, referring to the elderly women, “but none of them were hurt. We only heard three shots, and… well…” She pointed to the victim on the ground, where I could see the bloodstains from three separate bullet wounds.

  Ray arrived, and I asked if he had any gloves on him. I’d been so obsessed with getting the uniform together that morning I hadn’t brought any of the usual stuff I carried—evidence bags, rubber gloves and so on.

  “Call me a Boy Scout,” Ray said, handing me a pair. “Always prepared.”

  While Lidia filled him in, I picked up the woman’s handbag.

  All she had inside were a pair of reading glasses, a wallet and less than a dollar in change. She didn’t have any credit cards, family pictures or the rest of the usual debris we carry around with us. A Hawai’i state identification certificate, the kind people use when they don’t have driver’s licenses, said her name was Edith Kapana.

  Like a license, it had her height, weight, hair and eye color, along with her address and ID number. She lived in what I thought was Hawaiian homestead land in Papakolea, a neighborhood clustered around the base of Tantalus, on the other side of the H1 freeway. Ray leaned down to take a look at her. “Who would kill an innocent old woman?” he asked.

  “We don’t know how innocent she was.” I shivered again.

  Suppose Edith Kapana had been a random target chosen by someone trying to disrupt the march? My mother had been only a few hundred feet away; the shooter could just as easily have MAhu BLood 11

  aimed at her and my nephews.

  Though why three shots to the same woman? If someone really wanted to cause trouble, why not shoot randomly into the crowd? And if the shooter had a semi-automatic weapon, why fire only three times?

  We left Lidia to guard Edith Kapana’s body and walked over to the group of women who stood behind Gary Saunders. We introduced ourselves and began interviewing them, one by one.

  Ray has a lot more patience for that kind of thing than I do; he liked to empathize with witnesses, bond with them, while I just wanted to find out what they knew and move on.

  The chattiest of the old ladies was a hapa woman of about Edith’s age. Hapa means half in Hawaiian, and we use it as slang for anyone of mixed blood. Since I have Hawaiian, Japanese and haole, or white, ancestors, I could be called hapa, too. Maria Concepción Freitas looked like she had a lot of Hawaiian blood, and her last name connected her to the people of Portuguese ancestry who first came to the islands in the nineteenth century to harvest sugar cane.

  Maria Concepción’s hair was dyed an artificial black, and she wore more makeup than your typical Waikīkī prostitute. She started to tell Ray about her grandfather, who came to Hawai’i in one of the first waves of immigrants from the island of Madeira, but I interrupted and asked her to cut to the chase.

  “Did you see anything today?”

  “Poor Aunty Edith,” she said, tears streaking her mascara. I doubted that Edith was really her aunt; “aunty” was a term of respect we all used for older women.

  “You knew her?”

  “Just to say hello,” Maria Concepción said. “She was from the Big Island, but she lost her home, so she came to live here with family.”

  She had been walking a few feet from Edith when she heard the shots and saw Edith fall to the ground. “We could have all wen maki,” she said, using the pidgin for dying. “Where da kine police 12 Neil S. Plakcy

  wen dat wuz happen?”

  Ray looked at her like she was speaking a foreign language, which to him, she was. He and his wife had moved to Hawai’i almost two years before, so Julie could enroll in a graduate program at the University of Hawai’i. He’d been my partner for almost as long, though he had yet to fully understand Hawaiian Pidgin, the polyglot mix of English, Hawaiian, Portuguese and Cantonese most locals grow up speaking.

  I ignored Maria Concepción’s jibe and asked how she knew Aunty Edith. She and the other women had met her at the community center in Papakolea or at Kingdom of Hawai’i meetings, and no one knew any reason to kill her.

  The ME’s team showed up as we finished our interviews.

  Edith had been shot three times: once in the head, once in the shoulder and once in the leg. The assistant ME’s preliminary guess was that she had bled out from the wound in her leg, which appeared to have hit the femoral artery, but the shot to her head could have been the fatal one.

  As they loaded Edith Kapana’s body on a stretcher, the elderly women, led by Maria Concepción, began to wail again. While I ushered them toward a KOH-chartered bus, Ray volunteered to get us some beverages. Once the women were on board, Lidia helped me scour the area for evidence, but we didn’t find anything.

  Ray returned a while later with two bottles of cold water. I wanted to pour mine over my head, but instead I drank it in about three gulps. The crowd had dissipated by then, leaving the streets littered with paper fans, empty water bottles and signs on wooden sticks. Uniformed cops guided people back to waiting buses or toward the Aloha Tower. The usual street denizens harangued the trees
as oblivious tourists wandered past, looking for photo opportunities in front of the Iolani Palace or by the statue of King Kamehameha.

  Larry Solas, a crime scene tech I’d worked with before, showed up with another tech, and they took another look up and down the street for evidence. When they finished I led him MAhu BLood 13

  upstairs and over to the parapet.

  Larry, a skinny Hawaiian in an untucked aloha shirt, looked down at the cartridge, then out at the street. “You think the shooter was up here?”

  “I don’t know. I saw a flash of light around the time I heard the shots. We came up here to check it out.”

  He had to call in for some special equipment, and Ray and I went downstairs to interview the building security guard, an older guy in an ill-fitting dark suit with features that reminded me of Mike’s Korean relatives. “You see anyone unusual come through this morning?” Ray asked.

  The guard hadn’t noticed anyone out of the ordinary, and he told us the fire exit at the back of the building was locked from the outside. “Here’s the sign-in book,” he said, pushing it across the wooden counter top toward us.

  There were only about a dozen names, and we copied them all down, along with the offices where they’d been headed. “Things are slow this morning because of the march,” the guard said.

  “You keep a record of the tenants who come in and out?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Most of them, I know by sight.”

  We called Lidia and Gary in and asked them to go from floor to floor and ask about unusual or suspicious visitors, taking down names and contact information for everyone they spoke to. Then we went back up to the roof, where Larry Solas had found some trace fibers near the parapet.

  “Looks to me like someone was lying flat here,” he said, indicating what he’d found where. “But I can’t say for certain the shooter was aiming at your victim.”

  Ray said, “She could have just been a sacrificial lamb. There’s nothing like the death of a sweet old lady to bring up a public outcry.”

  By the time the bucket lift showed up, Lidia and Gary reported that none of the tenants they spoke with had anything 14 Neil S. Plakcy

  to contribute, and I sent them out to clear the area around the front of the building. Larry rose up to the level of the cornice and collected the spent cartridge, and we all went back to headquarters.

  I spent three years on patrol in polyester, but I couldn’t remember ever feeling as uncomfortable as I did that afternoon, hitching a ride back downtown with Larry Solas. My hair was plastered down on my head, and my whole body felt slimy. And I couldn’t shake a vision of Edith Kapana, lying dead on South King Street, and the knowledge that it was up to Ray and me to find out who had killed her.

  We met with our boss, Lieutenant Sampson, as soon as he came out of a meeting with top brass. “You want us to work this weekend?” Ray asked him. “Go hard on this?” Ray was always up for overtime or special duty assignments, because he and Julie were building a nest egg for a house.

  “You have any leads?” Sampson asked.

  The lieutenant’s a big guy, tall and broad-shouldered, and he favors polo shirts with khaki slacks rather than a shirt and tie.

  Today’s shirt was a royal blue, with a polo player emblem. There was a loose thread on his sleeve, but I didn’t reach over and pull it off. As the only openly gay detective working homicide, I had to be extra careful about stuff like touching other guys. Even a totally cool boss like Lieutenant Sampson.

  “Not much.” I laid out what we had: the witness statements, the list of tenants and visitors to the building, the forthcoming reports from the medical examiner and ballistics. Sampson fiddled with the toy cannon on his desk, flipping it back and forth as I talked.

  “My budget is slammed, just like every other government office in this state,” he said, “but I can authorize some overtime for tomorrow. I have a feeling the newspapers and TV stations are going to be all over this story, and the chief is going to want results ASAP.”

  He looked up at us, and I felt the weight of his trust and MAhu BLood 15

  the responsibility to find Edith’s killer. “If you don’t have any immediate leads, go home, get some rest. Let’s talk at the end of the day tomorrow and see what you’ve got.”

  Sampson’s mention of the media reminded me of how I’d been outed a few years before, the papers and TV stations hounding me for interviews. I didn’t look forward to that starting up again, especially when we had so little to go on.

  hAwAiiAN hoMesteAd

  I walked out to my Jeep, where I stripped off my uniform shirt and the T-shirt under it and flapped the air around me, trying to cool down. Leaving the headquarters garage, I switched CDs, and as Jake Shimabukuro’s ukulele began to stream through my speakers, I had to remind myself to point the Jeep up toward Aiea rather than to Waikīkī.

  I was having trouble thinking of Mike’s house as my home, even after living there for nearly two months. When we met, I had a studio apartment a couple of blocks from Kuhio Beach Park, and he owned half of a duplex in Aiea, where he’d grown up. We dated for six months, broke up and stayed apart for a year, then got back together when a case forced us to work with one another.

  After about a year commuting between his house and my apartment, Mike and I went to Maui for a sexy weekend. Late one afternoon at the beach there, Mike said, “It seems dumb for you to keep paying rent on your apartment, when I’ve got a whole house. What do you say you come live with me?”

  We stood naked together in the incoming surf, our bodies pressed against each other. The sun glinted off the wave tops, and a couple of cormorants circled above us. It seemed like nothing could go wrong between us.

  “I can walk to the beach from my apartment,” I said, only half joking. “You want me to give that up?”

  I’m no lightweight; I weigh a hundred-eighty dripping wet.

  But Mike picked me up in his arms as if I weighed nothing and said, “You bet your life I do.”

  There were arguments pro and con. If we lived together, we’d sleep side by side every night. We could have sex without making appointments, eat together as a routine rather than a special occasion.

  18 Neil S. Plakcy

  But I loved my apartment, with its picture window that looked down Lili’uokalani Street to the ocean. I could roll out of bed and be in the surf within minutes. I was in walking distance of my favorite gay bar, and there was a convenience store at the corner that sold a Japanese candy I loved. And I didn’t want to move into his house because I thought his parents didn’t like me.

  We considered selling his place and buying something else, but even with our combined incomes and savings, the cheapest house we could find was miles farther from the beach and from our jobs. After some soul-searching, I gave up my lease and borrowed a truck from my brother Haoa. I loaded it up with my clothes, my books and my athletic equipment, then drove it up to Mike’s house.

  It was an easy move but a tough transition. By Statehood Day, things were tense between Mike and me. I didn’t feel like there was a single corner of the duplex that belonged to me. My books were still in their boxes, and though Mike had carved out space in the closet for my clothes, they were cheek by jowl against his, often getting mixed up.

  Sometimes I thought I’d made a huge mistake, and other times I couldn’t see myself anywhere but by Mike’s side for the rest of my life. For the most part, I tried not to think about the situation. And between the demands of my job and keeping track of my family, that wasn’t hard to do.

  While I was stuck in traffic on the H1, I called my mother to make sure she and the boys had gotten home. Once the ban on using cell phones in a moving vehicle went into effect, Mike and I both bought Bluetooth earpieces with voice dialing, which we kept in the car. I stuck mine in my ear and said “Call parents.”

  When my mother picked up, I heard my father raging in the background, and though she told him to be quiet, I heard a tremor in her voice. “No more
demonstrations for a while, okay, Mom?” I said. “I don’t need to worry about people shooting you.”

  “Now you know how I feel about you being a police officer,”

  she said, and I was glad to hear her feistiness returning.

  MAhu BLood 19

  Traffic eased, and I climbed the hill to Mike’s house. When I got there, I shucked the rest of the uniform and took a long, cool shower. By the time Mike got home, I was standing in the living room in a pair of clean boxers, with a fan blasting cool air at me and a Longboard Lager in my hand.

  “You get caught up in that riot at the march?” he asked, peeling off his aloha shirt while crossing the living room toward the kitchen.

  “And how.” I followed him, leaning against the wall as he got himself a beer. I told him about the flash on the roof, how the crowd had reacted after the gunshots.

  “How close was your mom to the shooting?”

  “Too close.” We walked back to the living room, where he stripped to his y-fronts and stretched out on the sofa. “As soon as I could I rounded her and the boys up and got them out of the way.”

  He patted the sofa next to him, and I sat. Have I mentioned how handsome and sexy he is? Six-foot-four of muscle, body hair and sly grin? He has a dark mustache, and green eyes that look just a bit Asian.

  “We didn’t even know someone had been shot until dispatch called.” I shook my head. “This poor woman.” I could still see her, splayed out on the ground, blood flowing from her wounds.

  Mike took my hand in his. “You’ll find the guy who did it,”

  he said.

  I smiled at him. “Overtime tomorrow. Ray’s psyched, as usual.”

  “We’ll just have to make the best of tonight, then.” Mike leaned over and kissed me. We ordered a ham and pineapple pizza, Mike’s favorite, and then vegged out in front of the TV.

  I hadn’t been surfing as much as when I lived in Waikīkī, and I promised myself I’d surf the next morning and work off the calories from the pizza and beer.