Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  Or so Leelee said. What if Dex was systematically wiping out her family?

  We had never searched the part of the house where Dex and Leelee lived. I wondered if we’d find a gun if we did. But we still didn’t have enough for a search warrant, and even if Leelee gave 106 Neil S. Plakcy

  us permission to search when Dex wasn’t home, I wasn’t sure the results would stand up in court without probable cause.

  Dex didn’t know or wouldn’t say, anything more about Aunty Edith, so we gave up. “You think he was telling the truth?” I asked as we walked to the Highlander.

  “I don’t think Dexter Trale would know the truth if it bit him in the ass,” Ray said.

  “And we’d certainly see the bite through those tight jeans.”

  “Speak for yourself, pal.” We walked out the front door, and he said, “Hey, look, over there. It’s your buddy.”

  It was the crazy guy I’d met the day before at the bus stop by the Ohana. So he did work at the warehouse after all. He walked up toward me, head down, muttering, then looked up and spotted me. “Hey, it’s you. The guy from the bus. I take the bus to work.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember you.”

  Though he lived at the Ohana, he looked like he was homeless—not just the strange look in his eye, but the layers of clothes—a white T-shirt, a plaid shirt, and then a sweater and a scarf over it, as if he carried his whole wardrobe with him wherever he went.

  “I’m Kimo,” I said, reaching out my hand. “This is my buddy Ray.”

  “I’m Stuey.” At first I thought he said he was screwy, which would have made sense. He made no attempt to shake my hand, though, so I pulled it back.

  “You work here?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I have to be there on time, or Mr. T, he gets mad. I work with Mr. T. Mr. T, he’s the boss.”

  Dexter Trale. Mr. T. “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I check the lists, the lists have got to be right,” Stuey said.

  “The stores have to get what they need. They need the stuff every day.” He tugged at the scarf around his neck, and I wondered MAhu BLood 107

  that he could wear so much clothing when it was so hot outside.

  It was going on three o’clock, and the morning trade winds had disappeared, leaving us to broil under the sun.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much coffee they go through,”

  Stuey continued. “Ground coffee. Coffee beans. Boy, it smells here, you know. It smells like coffee.” He sniffed the air. “Even out here, you smell it. The coffee.”

  I nodded. Stuey was on a roll. “I don’t touch the money, though. Mr. T always says, ‘Stuey, you don’t touch the money.’

  So I don’t.”

  “What kind of money?” Ray asked.

  “The money,” Stuey said. “Mr. T brings it in a big satchel bag, and he runs it through the machine. The machine counts the money.”

  I was trying to figure out how to get Stuey back on track, when he said, “Mr. T wraps the money up and takes it to the bank.” That threw me. Who would give a guy like Dexter Trale, a man with a gambling problem and a criminal record, access to piles of cash? There had to be something wrong.

  Oh, yeah, Stuey was crazy.

  “I gotta go,” he said, suddenly changing track. “I gotta get to work. Mr. T don’t like it if I’m late. Even if the bus is late, I’m supposed to be on time.”

  “What time you work?” Ray asked.

  “Three to twelve,” Stuey said, over his shoulder, as he rushed away from us.

  I looked back and saw Dexter Trale standing at the door of the warehouse. Stuey climbed the steps two at a time and disappeared inside, his scarf flapping behind him.

  “Mr. T,” Ray said. “Guess that makes us The A Team.”

  sAtuRdAy scuffLes

  “What do you think Stuey meant when he was talking about the money?” Ray asked, as we walked back to the Highlander.

  “They must bring the receipts from the stores in to the warehouse, count it all up before they take it to the bank.”

  Ray shook his head. “That doesn’t sound right. I worked at this pizza place when I was in college, and the manager took the cash to the night deposit as soon as we closed.”

  “Was the pizza place a chain?”

  “Nah, just a local shop.”

  “Well, maybe they need to make one big deposit.” I’d never worked retail; I’d always done construction for my dad or taught surfing, until I went to the police academy.

  Sampson was still at Honolulu Hale, so we clocked out for the weekend. With luck, something would break by Monday, and we’d be able to stay on Edith’s murder. If not, the case would get shelved, and we’d move on. I didn’t like that, but it was the way of the world. You do your best with each case, and the ones you can’t solve stay with you.

  I wore myself out on the drive home trying to find an angle we hadn’t explored, a lead we hadn’t followed. By the time I got home, all I wanted was to get a beer and collapse on the sofa. But Mike wasn’t home yet, and the dog went crazy when he saw me, jumping up and down like I was his best friend, and he hadn’t seen me for years.

  I sighed, grabbed the leash and a bag, and we went for a walk. Down the hill, around the corner, back up another street, eventually making a big circle. Roby was fascinated by every tree and bush and street sign, stopping to sniff, sometimes even licking the grass.

  “Stop that,” I said, jerking on his chain. “That’s gross.”

  110 Neil S. Plakcy

  He peed copiously. By the time we got home I wondered that he had any fluid left in him at all. And of course, Mike was home by then, sitting on the sofa as I’d wanted to be, his shirt off, a Kona Fire Rock Ale in his hand. As soon as I let him off the leash, Roby deserted me and rushed over to Mike, jumping up on the sofa and licking Mike’s face.

  “I thought he was supposed to be your dog,” I said, dropping the leash on the kitchen counter with a clank.

  “He is,” Mike said, rubbing the golden dog behind his ears.

  “Then why am I the only one who does anything to take care of him? I fed and walked him this morning, and I walked him now.”

  “Don’t whine.” Mike got up from the sofa. “You want some bowl food?” he asked Roby. “Come on, Daddy will feed you.”

  “Daddy? Give me a fucking break.”

  “You know what? Fuck you,” he said. “I’m getting tired of this spoiled baby act. The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.”

  “Fuck you, too.” I grabbed a beer and stalked into the bedroom.

  I heard Mike’s truck start up a few minutes later, and when he pulled back into the driveway I saw him carrying a takeout bag from the Zippy’s down the hill. “Asshole,” I muttered.

  I sat down at the computer and surfed for a while, ending up at a gay chat room. I logged in, but I didn’t type anything; I just sat there and watched other guys communicate. It was Friday night, and guys were comparing plans for clubbing.

  I kept running over in my head how stupid I had been to give up everything I had in Waikīkī to move in with a selfish, self-involved jerk like Mike. By the time he came in, I was in bed pretending to be asleep.

  No tossing and turning for him, though. Within a few minutes he was snoring gently, his lips flapping. The dog came in and settled on the floor next to me again, and soon he was snoring too.

  MAhu BLood 111

  I must have dozed off, because I woke up to the sound of Mike’s beeper going off. As the fire investigator for his district, he’s on call 24/7 for any fires of suspicious origin. Fortunately, he didn’t get beeped much in his off hours.

  He got out of bed and stumbled over to the bureau, where the beeper was vibrating, stubbing his toe on one of Roby’s rawhide bones on his way and swearing. I snickered into my pillow.

  His side of the conversation was quick and simple. He got the location of the fire and said that he was on his way. I sat up and yawned as he was getting dressed.
<
br />   “Sorry I woke you,” he said. “I’ve gotta go out to a fire.”

  I believe in karma, and I was damned if I was going to let him go off to some dangerous situation with things bad between us.

  “Be careful,” I said, stifling another yawn. “I love you.”

  “Love you, too.” He kissed my forehead, and I drifted back to sleep.

  He didn’t get back until Saturday morning, when I’d already gotten up and walked and fed the dog. He handed me a macadamia latte in a Kope Bean cup, kissed my cheek, and then went back to bed.

  “Guess it’s just you and me,” I said to Roby. He looked up, his ears perking.

  My brother Haoa has four kids and a beagle mix, so I took Roby over there for a play date while Mike slept. Somehow my fourteen-year-old niece, Ashley, roped me into taking her out to Makapu’u Point for some surfing, and before I knew it her brother Alec and her cousins Jeffrey and Keoni were piled into my Jeep, a gaggle of surfboards sticking out the back.

  By the time we got back, the kids were jumping off the walls, I was beat and Roby was asleep in the back yard with the beagle’s head resting on his stomach. My sister-in-law Tatiana wanted us to stick around for a barbecue, but I figured I had to get back to Mike, who’d already complained about not enough “us time.”

  I’d left my cell phone at Haoa’s house when we went surfing, 112 Neil S. Plakcy

  and I didn’t look at the display until I was already heading home.

  There were five missed calls, all from Mike, and one very angry message. “If you took my dog to the pound, don’t even think about coming back here.”

  He came to the front door as I pulled up in the driveway, and Roby jumped over me in his excitement to get to Mike. “Hey, boy,” Mike said, ruffling the dog’s ears and scratching his belly, as he rolled around on the ground in ecstasy. Then he looked up at me. “Where the fuck have you been? And why weren’t you answering your cell?”

  “I took Roby over to Haoa’s to play, and then I went surfing with the kids. I thought you’d appreciate the chance to sleep.”

  “Yeah, you thought,” Mike said. “You thought you’d do just as you pleased.”

  “You want to argue out here in the front yard?” I asked.

  “Because we can. Maybe get your parents in on it, too. They can tell us both what a big fucking mistake this was.”

  Suddenly, it was like someone had let the air out of the argument. Mike said, “I’m sorry. Come on in.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said, following him inside.

  LiABiLity ANd PRotectioN

  Mike sat down on the sofa, his back against one arm, and I sat next to him, turned sideways so we could face each other.

  “It scares me when we fight because it makes me think we’re not getting along,” he said. “I love you, and I want to make this work.”

  Roby paced nervously around the sofa, finally sprawling on the tile floor between us. “Ray said he and Julie fight all the time, because they’re letting their feelings out and clearing the air.”

  “That’s not the way I grew up. You’ve seen my dad. He’s the master of control, and my mom has that whole Asian inscrutable thing going on. The two of them never raise their voices, never use a curse word.”

  “We’re never going to be like that,” I said. “When I was a kid, my dad was always yelling and blustering, and my mom would just let him run out of steam. I know I inherited his temper, and I have to work harder not to let little things irritate me.”

  “We’re both Type A personalities,” Mike said, smiling. “And we’ve both been living on our own for a while, and we’re both accustomed to getting our own way.”

  I wanted a beer, but I didn’t get up from the sofa. “We need to communicate more. I should have asked you before I committed us to dinner with Terri and Levi, and you should have asked me before you brought the dog home.”

  “We’ll make a schedule. Some days I walk and feed him, some days you do.”

  “We don’t have to be that rigid. Some days I’ll be out late, some days you will be. As long as we work together we can figure things out as we go.”

  He took the dog out while I showered and rinsed off the ocean salt, and then we went to dinner at an Italian place, Frank Sinatra singing about amore. Over antipasto, Mike told me about 114 Neil S. Plakcy

  the case he’d been called on when he left so early in the morning.

  “Arson homicide,” he said, as we ate garlic rolls and drank red wine. “Somebody torched this poor homeless guy out in a warehouse district near the airport.”

  “Wow.” I shook my head. “What do you think it was? Kids?”

  There had been a rash of incidents where teens and young men had beaten up homeless people, though this was the first time someone had been set on fire.

  “Don’t know. Steve Hart caught the case.”

  Steve was another homicide detective in my district. He and I had a complicated history; I’d taken away one of his first big cases, and he’d had a chip on his shoulder about me ever since.

  “Any evidence?” I asked.

  “Looks like they used a Molotov cocktail. Glass bottle, with a rag soaked in gasoline in the neck. Poor guy didn’t have a chance.

  I talked with the guys from ATF; none of them know anyone using that MO.”

  By the time we stumbled home, stuffed with pasta and tiramisu, it was as if our argument had never happened. We started kissing in the living room and left a trail of clothes from the front door to the bedroom. Roby tried to get in on the fun, but we pushed him away. He settled into a corner of the floor and went to sleep.

  The next morning, we slept late, then took Roby out into the mountains with a Frisbee, and we tired him out running and catching it, then bringing it back for more. When we got home, Mike said, “I told my dad I’d help him clean out his garage this afternoon. You want to help?”

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said, even though I knew I ought to make more of an effort to get along with Mike’s dad. I went out and ran some errands. By the time I got home, Mike was back, and we went out to dinner together.

  Monday morning, Ray was at his desk when I arrived. “Bad news,” he said. “You see what happened over the weekend?”

  MAhu BLood 115

  “Brah, I just walked in.”

  He showed me a report for the arson homicide Mike had been called to on Friday night. “Take a look at the victim’s ID.” Like Edith Kapana, the homeless man had a Hawai’i state identification certificate, which had survived the fire.

  Only he wasn’t homeless; he lived in Kaneohe. “It’s the address of the Ohana Ola Kino,” Ray said. “I checked.”

  “Wow.”

  “Look at the name.” It was Stuart McKinney. “I called up there, too. There was only one client named Stuart. So that makes him that guy you talked to, Screwy Stuey.”

  We looked at each other. “Holy fuck,” I said.

  “You can say that again, brah.”

  We went in to see Lieutenant Sampson and laid out our idea that Stuey’s death was connected somehow to Aunty Edith’s.

  “This McKinney knew your victim?” Sampson asked, pushing aside a pile of department paperwork.

  “We don’t know that. But there are a lot of links between them. He lived at the Ohana, where Edith visited just before she died, asking for information. He works with Dexter Trale, who lived with Edith.”

  “And we spoke to him Friday afternoon, just a few hours before he died,” Ray added. “He was crazy, for sure, but he was talking about money moving through the Kope Bean warehouse.”

  “Edith might have known about whatever is going on there through Dex,” I said.

  “All right, all right,” Sampson said. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll transfer the case to you from Hart and Kawika. But I expect you to go full out on this, even if you find it doesn’t connect to your other case.”

  Back at my desk, I called over to the medical examiner’s office and asked to have the autopsy
results sent to me.

  “Mike found residue from a Molotov cocktail,” I said to Ray.

  116 Neil S. Plakcy

  “So it’s possible that some kids or other idiots were out looking for trouble, they saw Stuey and they lit him up.”

  The fax machine began spitting out the pages of the autopsy report. “Look at this,” Ray said, pointing. “Someone cracked Stuart McKinney’s sternum before they set him on fire.” The report indicated the weapon was a blunt object similar to a baseball bat.

  “This doesn’t look like a random attack. Look where it happened. That’s a couple of blocks from the Kope Bean warehouse.”

  “And it was called in right after midnight,” Ray said. “The poor guy must have just gotten off work.”

  I sat down at the computer and pulled up the schedule for TheBus. There was a stop a block farther from the warehouse; Stuey had probably been on his way there when he’d been assaulted and then set on fire.

  “Somebody is seriously sick,” Ray said. “I mean, why set the poor guy on fire, when they’d already bashed his chest in?”

  “Insurance?” I asked. “Send a message to somebody?”

  “But who?”

  “Hey, that’s why we’re the cops. We figure this stuff out. My gut tells me this is connected to our case. He lived where Ezekiel used to, he worked at the Kope Bean.”

  “But he didn’t know Edith. He didn’t live at the Ohana at the same time Ezekiel did. The only connection is that he worked with Dex, and Dex lived with Edith. That’s a pretty slim coincidence.”

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence when it comes to homicide,” I said.

  “The next logical place to get information about Stuey is the Ohana,” Ray said. So we drove up to Kaneohe, and the same Japanese woman was at the Ohana’s front desk, her eyes red and her cheeks damp. We asked for David Currie. She said he was out at the funeral home, making the arrangements for Stuey, but he’d be back soon.

  MAhu BLood 117

  “Did you know Mr. McKinney?” I asked.

  She nodded and pulled a tissue out of the pocket of her pink knitted sweater. As she dabbed her eye, I asked, “Know any reason why someone might want to kill him?”