Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  Around nine o’clock, Mike asked me for a foot rub, and I sat 20 Neil S. Plakcy

  at the end of the sofa, his feet in my lap, rubbing them with shea butter. After ten minutes or so, he said, “I feel some slack key guitar coming on.”

  That was our little code. I swayed my hands in some vague hula-like movements, and he flipped a Keola Beamer CD in the player, trying to keep his parents on the other side of the wall from hearing what we were up to. We went into the bedroom and got a head start on working off those calories.

  y y y

  As I got home after my morning surf session, I saw Mike’s parents getting into their car. We waved at each other but didn’t speak. Because of the way Mike and I split up that first time, his father sees me as the guy who broke his son’s heart and drove him to drink. His mother is more polite, but there’s still a chill in her attitude.

  I picked up the Honolulu Star-Advertiser from the driveway, and over a quick breakfast I read the first-page article on the shooting, the march and the mayhem that ensued after the shots were fired. There were the usual quotes from civic officials, who assured everyone that it was safe to walk the streets, as well as an outraged squawk from Maile Kanuha, a spokesperson for KOH, sure the shooting was motivated by the movement’s enemies.

  Mike woke up as I was finishing. We kissed, and he poured himself some cereal as I went into the bathroom. After a quick shower, I left for headquarters. He was at his computer researching a case of his own, and I promised I’d make it home for dinner.

  Ray and I divided the sign-in book and the tenant lists Gary and Lidia had assembled between us. We cross-referenced them to anyone who’d been involved in Hawaiian nationalism based on group membership, letters to the editor of the Star-Advertiser and so on. It was slow, tedious work.

  A woman on the office building’s third floor had contributed to several groups, but Ray found she had a handicapped permit for her car based on a leg injury that required her to use a cane.

  MAhu BLood 21

  A guy at the advertising agency on the fourth floor had done pro bono work for one of KOH’s rivals. He had no listed home number, so I jumped through a few hoops and found his cell number. When I reached him, he said he was on vacation in California, had been there for nearly a week. A friend of mine at Hawaiian Airlines verified his outgoing flight and his return reservation.

  Every possible suspect either had an alibi or something else that ruled him or her out. By noon we were ready to get out of the office and drove out to Papakolea for background on Edith Kapana.

  The address on her ID card was a ramshackle house on Hawaiian Homestead land—not a reservation for native people, like on the mainland, but something close. Civic leaders would tell you it was a way of preserving the land for descendants of its original inhabitants, but one of my teachers at Punahou, the private high school President Obama had also attended, had called it a modern-day ghetto, citing the socio-economic issues, including drug abuse and alcoholism, that were rife there at the time.

  As we climbed toward the Cemetery of the Pacific, the houses around us shifted from well-kept gated properties to ramshackle structures clinging to the side of the mountain. Beat-up cars were parked by yards where hibiscus and bougainvillea ran wild.

  Though the government was taking steps to improve conditions, those initiatives hadn’t reached the house where Edith Kapana lived.

  It was only a single story, but it looked like several sections had been added on at different times, because the roof angles didn’t match and the paint on each section was at different stages of fading. There was no doorbell, so we knocked.

  A teenage girl came to the door, carrying a squalling baby on her hip. She was thin, with mocha skin, slack dark hair, and bags under her eyes. I introduced us and asked if she knew Edith Kapana.

  “Aunty Edith? She wen maki.”

  22 Neil S. Plakcy

  “Yes, we know she’s dead. That’s why we’re here.”

  The girl shivered. “I wen get all chicken skin when I heard.”

  As usual, Ray was baffled by the pidgin reference to goose bumps, but he nodded along. “How’d you know Edith?” I asked.

  The girl, who told us her name was Leelee, shrugged. “She da kine hanai tūtū. Maybe year ago, her house on the Big Island get buss up, she come live here.”

  I could see Ray getting frustrated. “A hanai relative is one you adopt,” I said to him. “Or maybe somebody you always think of as a sister or a cousin. So Aunty Edith’s not her real grandmother.”

  “She real kahiko,” Leelee said. “Always want to sit around, talk story.” She hefted the baby on her hip. For a moment, he stopped crying and stared at us.

  Leelee gave us permission to take a look around the room where Edith had lived, in what had once been the garage. “What was that she called her, kahiko?” Ray asked when we were alone.

  “Old-fashioned. Someone who likes to do things the old way,”

  I said, snooping around the piles of newspaper clippings and photocopies of legal documents on the desk. There was nothing much else in Edith’s room other than some cheap furniture, a few books about Hawai’i, family snapshots thumb-tacked to the walls and a couple of photo albums.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone killed her for her money,” Ray said.

  I agreed. When we went back to the living room, Leelee said the house belonged to her uncle, but he was often drunk and didn’t come home much. Her boyfriend, Dex, was at work, leaving her with the baby. I asked Leelee for Dex’s full name, as well as her uncle’s name.

  “What you want that for?”

  “We need to talk to them. My boss will look at stuff like that.

  You know how it is with paperwork. He wants every ‘’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed.”

  Leelee looked like punctuation wasn’t her specialty. She toed the carpet for a while, then said, “My uncle don’t live here no MAhu BLood 23

  more.” She met my eyes. “But you can’t tell da kine people from the OHA. Me and Dex, we don’t qualify for homestead.”

  The Office of Hawaiian Affairs controlled housing on homestead land. “Don’t worry, Leelee, we won’t rat you out.”

  Her body relaxed. “Trale. Dexter Trale.” She spelled it for us, though I could see it was an effort.

  “Here’s my card, with my cell number. You have Dexter call me, all right?”

  She took the card, and the baby started crying again. I wondered if Leelee ever changed him—because he smelled ripe when we arrived, and he still did when we left.

  “How old do you think she is?” Ray asked, as we walked down the driveway.

  “Fifteen, sixteen.”

  “She looked pretty overwhelmed.”

  “I’ll bet Aunty Edith helped her with the baby. She’ll have to get some other aunty to help out now.”

  “You think we ought to call social services?”

  “The baby didn’t seem to be in any danger. Sure, Leelee’s a kid herself. But half the people on this homestead are probably related to her. They’ll help out. Hawaiians take care of their own.”

  We drove around the neighborhood, stopping to talk to anyone on the street, in yards or on porches. We didn’t get the warmest reception; most of the time when the cops come to Papakolea, they’re looking to arrest someone. People tried to ignore us, and when they spoke, it was only to me. Ray’s white skin rendered him invisible.

  It took a lot of persuading, but a few people admitted knowing Aunty Edith. Leelee’s uncle was either Edith’s nephew, her cousin or her husband’s grandson, depending on who you talked to. There was general consensus that she had lived on the Big Island, somewhere on the slopes of Kilauea, until her house had been swallowed up by the pahoehoe.

  24 Neil S. Plakcy

  “A kind of lava,” I told Ray, as we walked back to the Jeep.

  “Real smooth, billowy. The rocky stuff is called ’a’a.”

  “You’re a fountain of information,” Ray said. “They don’
t know how she’s related, but they all knew what kind of lava knocked out her house.”

  “What can I say? They’re Hawaiian. You know how the Eskimos have all those words for snow? We have a bunch for lava.”

  “I know the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal,” Ray said. “And the name of the three rivers that come together in Pittsburgh.”

  “Good to know. In case it ever comes up.”

  We stopped at the community center, where posters for the KOH rally were plastered on the walls. Many of them read ‘ Ku I Ka Pono: Justice for Hawaiians.’ It was hard to disagree with a slogan like that—unless of course, you were not ethnically Hawaiian and that justice would come out of your pocket.

  The community center was a simple two-story building with a set of steps up to the front door and a zigzag handicap ramp. We parked in the lot and took the stairs up, pausing outside to look at some pictures posted there.

  Little kids performed at a hula recital, neighbors picked up trash along Tantalus Drive and senior citizens peered at computers. It looked like the center provided a lot of service to the community.

  Inside, a group of elderly men and women drank coffee, nibbled on malasadas and talked story, with what sounded like the classic Hawaiian music of Alan Akaka playing in the background.

  Everybody shut up when we walked in; just the music kept going.

  I wondered if I should have left Ray in the car, but we were partners, and I’d had enough of being considered second-class myself, because of my sexual orientation. I wasn’t going to do that to anyone else.

  “Aloha,” I announced to the room. I introduced myself and Ray. “We’re investigating the death of Aunty Edith Kapana. Can MAhu BLood 25

  we ask you some questions about her?”

  The room remained silent. I went up to a grizzled old kupuna and said, “How about you, Uncle? You know Aunty Edith?”

  Grudgingly, he nodded. He said his name was Israel Keka’uoha. “Aunty Edith, she good people, she like the kahiko way.”

  Yeah, I wanted to say, we heard that from Leelee.

  “You watch,” he said. “Wen Hawaiian people take over again, da kine police gon work fo’ us.”

  At that, the room erupted in noise. Everybody agreed with the old man. They all wanted to complain about the sad state of Native Hawaiian rights, about past police abuse, about how we would have to look out when the Kingdom of Hawai’i was restored.

  Patiently, Ray and I went around the room, listening to their litany of complaints. I told a few of them about the victim advocate’s office, and I used my cell phone to get updates on a couple of cases.

  The youngest person in the room was a forty-something woman with jet-black hair and matching fingernails. She was the caretaker of an elderly woman in a wheelchair, who spent most of the time we were there asleep. She said her name was Ellen Jackson and that the woman was her mother. “Nobody else will tell you,” she said to me, in a low voice, “but Aunty Edith was making lots of pilikia.”

  I whispered “trouble,” to Ray, then asked Ellen, “Pilikia for who?”

  She looked around to make sure no one else was listening.

  “These boys, they sell pakalolo,” she said, using the island word for marijuana. “They raise it up on the mountain. Aunty Edith threatened to call da kine police on them.”

  “You know their names?”

  She shook her head. “But you can see them, hanging out on Tantalus ‘round sunset.”

  26 Neil S. Plakcy

  I wrote down her name and phone number, and we continued talking to the kupunas. By the time we got back around to Israel, the mood in the center had thawed. I had a feeling there were a lot of hidden secrets out there, buried along the slopes of Tantalus along with the bodies of so many war dead. Just as the cemetery’s caretakers protected the grounds, so the people of Papakolea protected their own secrets. Was one of them the identity of the person who killed Edith Kapana? Only time would tell.

  I was thanking Israel when he shook his head and said,

  “Poor Aunty Edith.” He looked at me to make sure I was paying attention. “Not many people know, Aunty Edith hanai tūtū to Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, too.”

  I remembered that Kapuāiwa claimed he was descended from Hawaiian royalty. “Really?” I asked. “He from the Big Island, too, uncle?”

  Israel looked at me. “You babooze, brah?” he said, wondering if I was stupid. “He fo’real from da kine ohana.” He shook his head. “Aunty Edith, she love dat boy.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What do you think of Kapuāiwa?”

  “Ezekiel strange boy.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think he babooze, sometimes lolo. But if people want follow him, make things fo’ real better for Hawaiian people, I say ‘kay den.”

  I made a note of that. Israel turned back to his group, mumbling about da kine babooze police, and Ray and I went out to my Jeep.

  In the parking lot, Ray said, “I thought it was going to get ugly in there at first.” He looked out the window. “I felt like I didn’t belong.”

  “If I went to Philly, I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t belong.”

  “But you’d always know that you were in America. I don’t even speak the language, like I’m in some foreign country.”

  “Out here, you are in a foreign country. The Kingdom of Hawai’i.”

  LoAdiNg dock

  “Is there really a guy out there who should be king?” Ray asked as we drove back to headquarters.

  “It’s complicated. There are three different royal houses, and each one thinks they should be in charge. I guess we should figure out who the players are.”

  Though it was Saturday, our case was high-profile, and the reports from ballistics and the medical examiner were waiting when we returned to our desks. Ray reviewed them while I did some online research on the three lines that all claimed the right to rule the islands.

  The House of Kamehameha ruled Hawai’i until the death of Kamehameha V in 1872. He died a bachelor, allegedly without issue, though there was a collateral branch descended from his eldest brother. Ezekiel claimed that that his great-great-grandfather was the king’s illegitimate son, raised in secrecy on the Big Island in a hanai family. He based this claim on records he swore had been kept by his grandmother, who would have been Kamehameha’s great-granddaughter.

  I read more about the various houses, but it only made me confused. Who knew who should be king, if indeed Hawai’i should revert to a kingdom?

  Ray’s results were more concrete. The spent cartridge I’d noticed on the cornice matched one of the bullets recovered from Edith Kapana’s body. She had been shot three times, as we’d seen at the site. Death was the result of massive loss of blood.

  For an older woman, she was in good shape, according to the autopsy. Varicose veins, a slightly enlarged heart and some nutritional deficiencies. But for the bad luck of those three bullets, she could have lived another ten or fifteen years.

  Ray and I had no good leads and no real reason to try and 28 Neil S. Plakcy

  stretch our overtime out. We called Sampson at home, and he told us to table the case until Monday.

  Mike and I went out to dinner after I got home, and some of the tension I’d been feeling eased. He is truly my best friend, and I love spending time with him. And of course, sex always helps make things better, too. We cuddled up in bed and fooled around until we both drifted off to sleep.

  When I announced I was moving in with Mike, my friend Gunter told me to put a dollar in a bottle every time we had sex during the first year. Then I could take a dollar out every time we had sex after that. The bottle would never be empty, he said.

  I wasn’t doing it, but if I had been, the bottle would have been filling up fast.

  Monday morning, Ray and I met with Lieutenant Sampson, who leaned back in his chair, his snazzy bright green polo shirt stretching across his stomach.

  Ray took the lead, filling him in on what we’d learned about Aunty E
dith and KOH. “You think this was random?” Sampson asked. “Someone trying to damage this Kingdom of Hawai’i group?”

  “Or the whole sovereignty movement. My mother has been volunteering for the group, and I know for sure she’s going to back off, at least for a while.”

  Lieutenant Sampson raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.

  “We’re going to look into people who might have grudges against this group in particular or the movement in general. It’s a pretty wide net, but you never know what we’ll catch.”

  Back at my desk, I phoned Leelee, since Dex hadn’t called me. There was no answer at her house. No answering machine, either, but I didn’t expect one. I hung up and called an old school friend, Karen Gold, who worked at the local office of Social Security. “Can you give me a work address on a Dexter Trale?”

  “Got a social on him?”

  MAhu BLood 29

  “No, just the name.” I spelled it for her and heard her fingers clicking on her keyboard. “OK, here it is. He works for the Kope Bean.” It was an island-based coffee chain, a local Starbucks clone. Ray and I often got our caffeine fixes from the downtown branch.

  “Which store?”

  She gave me an address, and I scribbled it down. “Mahalo, Karen. See you soon, okay?”

  If we were going out, I wanted to see if we could hook up with someone from KOH. There was no number listed for the group, though, and the home number for Maile Kanuha, the spokesperson quoted in the Star-Advertiser article, was unpublished. I would have to call the reporter who’d written the article to get in touch with her.

  I had dealt with Greg Oshiro a few times in the past, and he wasn’t one of my favorite people. Of mixed Japanese and Hawaiian heritage, he was a big guy, tall and heavyset, with a fat belly always slopping over his belt. He had a dour expression, which I guessed came from working the police beat.

  “News desk. Oshiro.”

  “Hey, Greg. It’s Kimo Kanapa’aka. Howzit?”

  “What do you want?”

  He had written about a number of my cases and had the ability to turn even the most innocent information into something that sounds damning. He wasn’t anti-police; often his articles seemed almost fawning. But he’s had it in for me ever since I came out of the closet.