Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  “He was such a sweet man.” She lowered her voice. “A little crazy, but then who isn’t? Especially here.”

  Ray and I stood in front of her cheap metal desk. There were no personal touches—no family pictures, candy dish or decorative paperweights. “Tell us about this place. People come here directly from the hospital?”

  She nodded. “That’s how I did. After my husband died, I was very sad. We never had any children, and we kept to ourselves so we didn’t have a lot of friends.” She held out her hands, palms up, and I could see the scars on her wrists. “After my neighbor found me, they took me to the hospital. I lost my apartment and my job, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go. The Ohana took me in.”

  The industrial look of the receptionist’s desk was repeated in the rest of the lobby. There were two hard plastic chairs along one side of the room and a couple of amateur landscapes, most likely painted by Ohana clients.

  “This is a good place, Detective. Mr. Currie, he’s the kindest person you could ever want to meet.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “But Mr. McKinney?”

  “He came here about six months ago.” She twisted the tissue in her hand. “We have a job placement program, you know, but you have to wait a month for a complete evaluation before you can be placed. He talks a lot, so he didn’t work out at the first place. But this job at the Kope Bean warehouse was perfect for him. He was the only one there, so he could talk all he wanted.

  And he’s an obsessive compulsive, so he’s very meticulous about his job.”

  She started to cry again.

  “Who knew about his work schedule?” I asked, when she’d dried her eyes.

  118 Neil S. Plakcy

  “There’s a roster in the community room with all the client names and their work and therapy hours. Anybody here could have known.” Her mouth dropped open in horror. “You’re not suggesting…” she said. “I thought it was just some horrible random accident.”

  “We don’t know anything yet,” I said. “It could have been.”

  David Currie came in then, somber in a dark suit, seeming even thinner than he had the last time we were there. He looked unhappy that the receptionist had been talking to us. He led us into his office, once again. “I assume this is a formality.”

  “Too early to assume anything,” I said. “I understand from your receptionist that anyone here in the Ohana could have known about Mr. McKinney’s schedule?”

  “She shouldn’t have told you that.”

  “And why not?” Ray asked. “Is there a reason why you would want to hinder our investigation? Something shady going on up here you don’t want the police to know about?”

  “I resent that, Detective.” Currie crossed his arms in front of him and sat back in his chair.

  “You have to admit, it looks pretty suspicious. This is the second time we’ve come up here for a homicide investigation, and you’ve been reluctant to cooperate. We’re beginning to wonder what you’re hiding.”

  “I’m not hiding anything. I’m protecting the privacy of our clients.”

  I shook my head. “You can’t do that, sir. Not when one of your clients could be guilty of murder. If you want, we’ll get a subpoena for the records on every client here. Any of them have problems with anger management? Any arsonists? Firebugs?

  We’ll dig through all your secrets until we find what we need.”

  It was as if we’d stuck a pin in him, and he deflated. “Let me get Mr. McKinney’s file.” He swiveled around to the file cabinet and pulled out a hanging folder. Then he turned back and pulled out three others.

  MAhu BLood 119

  “I have to ask you to read this material here,” he said. “Just showing you these files without the appropriate court order could be enough to get my license to run this place revoked.

  But I’m trusting you and trying to balance my own liability with protecting my clients.”

  “Works for us,” I said.

  Ray and I read McKinney’s file together. He was born in Nebraska and had a degree in accounting. He worked in Nevada and California, and then, according to the case worker’s report, he came to Hawai’i on vacation and had some kind of psychotic break. He was kicked out of his hotel for non-payment and became a street person.

  After an incident with a bus driver (there was that bus motif again) he was hospitalized, with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He had been discharged from the Hawai’i State Hospital six months before and had been living at the Ohana since then.

  He argued with some of the other residents, but the case manager indicated that he always submitted to dispute resolution.

  She hoped that within another six months he would be able to live independently, as long as he continued with therapy and maintained his job at the Kope Bean warehouse.

  The other three folders were about Ohana clients with a history of violence. When we’d finished reading them, Currie said, “We have a key card reader on the front door. At eight o’clock we lock the door, and the only way in or out is to swipe a card.” He turned his computer monitor around to us.

  “This is the record for Friday night. You can see that all our residents were checked in by the time Mr. McKinney was killed.”

  “Except him.”

  Currie nodded. “We instituted the key card system because some of our clients had night jobs. We couldn’t just lock the door or do a bed check.”

  I looked at the display on the screen. It listed every resident at the Ohana, along with the record of his or her card transactions 120 Neil S. Plakcy

  from midnight Thursday to midnight Friday. Every listed resident had clocked in by 10:00 p.m. except Stuart McKinney.

  “What about staff?” Ray asked. “You all have to clock in and out as well?”

  He shook his head. “The staff goes home at five. One of our residents acts as the night guard from five to eight, and locks the door at the end of his shift. If there’s an emergency, I have a key card for the front door, but because I’m not a client, there’s no record kept of my coming and going. Before you ask, I was at an orientation program for incoming freshmen at Farrington High on Friday night with my wife and daughter. The program ended around nine, and then we all went home together. My daughter went to bed at ten, and my wife and I watched David Letterman, then went to sleep.”

  He introduced us to the two counselors and the nurse. None of them had much to say about Stuey, and none of them knew any reason why someone would want to kill him. One counselor had a second job as a security guard at a condo complex, and he’d been at work when Stuey was killed. The other had been out to dinner with his wife, then back home by nine. The nurse, who lived on the premises, had gone to the movies with a girlfriend and been back by ten.

  When we were finished we stopped at Currie’s office. “Thank you,” I said. “We appreciate your help. We’ll be back in touch if we have any other questions.”

  He stood in the door of his office as we left, perhaps to make sure that the receptionist didn’t tell us anything else. Or maybe he was just being polite.

  PAi gow

  We spent some time sitting in the Ohana parking lot, making calls to confirm the alibis of Currie and his staff, even though we didn’t consider any of them suspects. Then we headed over to the Kope Bean warehouse. Maybe one of Stuey’s co-workers got tired of his endless chatter and decided to torch him. It could be that simple; you never know.

  I parked at the front of the building, and we went back over our conversation with Stuey on Friday afternoon. Thinking out loud, I said, “Why would somebody bring a lot of cash to the warehouse and trust Dexter Trale with it?”

  “Why not take it directly from the store to the bank?” Ray asked.

  It was like a light bulb went on over my head. “Maybe it’s making a detour on the way,” I said. “Remember how Leelee said that Dex played pai gow?”

  Ray nodded. “A game like that takes in a lot of cash,” I went on. “What can whoever’s runnin
g the game do with it? You can’t go directly to the bank, because they track big deposits.”

  “But the Kope Bean takes in cash every day,” Ray said.

  “Dexter could mix the cash from the game with the day’s receipts from each store. The bank would notice a separate deposit of ten grand or so, but they wouldn’t notice a grand extra from each store.”

  “That assumes that whoever runs the game also owns the Kope Bean.”

  “And who does own the Kope Bean, anyway?” Ray asked.

  “What an excellent question. I see why you’re a detective.” I looked through our notes and found that Greg Oshiro had only been able to trace the ownership of the chain back to a Japanese corporation. But Greg didn’t know Ricky Koele.

  Unfortunately, the Division of Business Licensing was 122 Neil S. Plakcy

  suffering from the same economic problems as the rest of state government, and the office was closed that day, the employees on unpaid furlough.

  “You can get your buddy to track the corporation’s ownership tomorrow.” Ray paused. “When we were talking to Stuey on Friday, Dex was watching him from the door of the warehouse.

  Was he just waiting for Stuey to show up? Or did he overhear Stuey talking to us?”

  “Only one way to find out,” I said. We walked around to the loading dock, where we found Dex watching the pallet jockey unload a truck.

  “Afternoon, Dex,” I said. “We talk to you?”

  He frowned, but he waved at the pallet jockey and then jumped down into the parking lot with us.

  “This has gotta be quick,” he said. “The night guy bailed on me so I’ve got to check every goddamn pallet before I can leave.”

  “Yeah, it’s about the night guy. You know him?”

  “Screwy Stuey? Just to turn things over to him. The guy’s a flake. I’m not surprised he quit. Tuli got a call this morning from the nut house where he lived, said he’s not coming back any more. No explanation. ” He shook his head.

  “So you didn’t know he was dead?”

  Dex stopped in the middle of lighting his cigarette, and I noticed his hand wasn’t shaking. “What do you mean, dead?”

  “Dead means dead. Somebody set him on fire on his way home from work. You know anything about that?”

  “Jesus,” Dex said, and I noticed his hand start shaking again.

  He had to cup the flame in his hands in order to light the cigarette.

  He took a deep drag. “You’re not shitting me? Somebody lit him up? Why?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Dex said. “He showed up here on Friday right before three. I went over the manifests with MAhu BLood 123

  him, then clocked out. You can check my time card.”

  “So what goes on here in the evening?” Ray asked. “Stuey run the shift like you do?”

  Dex shook his head. “Everybody but Tuli leaves at three. She stays ‘till five to take orders. Stuey’s just like a caretaker, see, a warm body. He used to be some kind of accountant, I guess, so he checks the manifests against the pallets and signs them out to the drivers. Then, I don’t know, he sits around and plays with himself until midnight.”

  “We saw you looking out the front door Friday afternoon as we were talking to Stuey,” I said. “He was talking about money.

  You counting money and bundling it up. What’s that all about?”

  “What the fuck? I don’t touch any cash. Everything’s on the manifest, they charge the stores directly.”

  “That’s not what Stuey said.”

  “Stuey’s nuts. You know that.”

  That was true. But it didn’t mean he was making up his story.

  I changed direction, hoping I could trip Dex up. “So where do you go when you leave here?” I asked. “Chinatown? Pai gow?”

  He took one last drag and stubbed his cigarette out. I could see he’d been smoking a lot out there. “What’s it to you? What I do on my off hours?”

  “I’m thinking you go play some pai gow,” I said. “And then you bring the cash from the game back here. Who do you work for, Dex? Who would want to keep Stuey quiet about that money?”

  “Shit, I don’t know what the fuck you guys are talking about,”

  Dex said. “The only pai gow money I win goes right back into the game. And sure as shit, nobody gives me any cash to bring back here.”

  “Where were you Friday night?” I asked. “After midnight?”

  “Home. With Leelee. I went out for a while after dinner, had a couple of drinks. But by midnight I was tucked up in bed. You ask Leelee. She’ll tell you.”

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  Leelee would tell us whatever Dex told her to, but I wrote the alibi down. I didn’t know why Dex would kill Stuey, but I was sure there could be a reason.

  Dex jumped back up onto the loading dock. He was a wiry guy, with strong arms that could have wielded whatever bashed Stuart McKinney’s chest in. “I gotta get back to work,” he said and disappeared into the dark warehouse.

  “He sure freaked when he heard Stuey was dead,” Ray said.

  “Yeah. That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill him, though. You look at those arms?”

  “First the guy’s ass, now his arms,” Ray said.

  “He has the upper body strength to cave in Stuey’s chest.

  And I’m sure he knows more about that pai gow game than he’s letting on.”

  We followed Dex into the warehouse, where we interviewed a couple of pallet jockeys and Tuli, the Thai woman who worked the switchboard. The warehouse workers left at three, just as Stuey was arriving; none of them even knew his name.

  Tuli was with Stuey until five, but she said she was on the switchboard most of the time, and when he started to talk she just tuned him out. None of them seemed to have a motive, and they all had alibis which needed to be verified.

  “Considering I’m fresh off the boat from Philadelphia,” Ray said, as we drove back to headquarters. “You want to tell me what this pai gow thing is?”

  “Chinese domino game. I don’t know all the rules, but you start out with four tiles, and the goal is to group them into two pairs. If you bet on the game, you can win big or lose big. I’ve heard about games where ten or fifteen grand changes hands over the course of the evening. My godfather used to play, and I watched him sometimes.”

  “That the old tong guy?” Ray asked.

  I nodded. My father’s best friend, and my godfather, was a man I knew as a child as Uncle Chin. It was only when I became a MAhu BLood 125

  cop that I discovered Uncle Chin was also a leader of one of the Honolulu tongs, or Chinese gangs. He was retired by that point, so I was never forced to investigate or arrest him, but by the time he passed away I had learned more than I wanted to about his criminal past.

  We speculated for a while. “My mother told me that Leelee complained about Dex playing pai gow,” I said. “Maybe we’ve been looking at Edith’s death all wrong. Suppose she knew something about the game from living with Dex, and he killed her because of it.”

  “And then when Stuey started to talk about the money to us, Dex had to kill him, too,” Ray said.

  “We need to know more about this pai gow game. If it really is at the center of the case.”

  We got back to headquarters, where Steve Hart wasn’t happy to learn that Ray and I had taken over Stuart McKinney’s murder from him and his partner. The chip on his shoulder seemed so heavy he was listing to one side. If he wasn’t so damn tall he would have tipped over.

  “We think it’s related to the old lady shot at the rally,” I said, trying to be patient. “We interviewed McKinney the afternoon before he was killed.”

  “It’s a loser case.” He looked at me like he was trying to figure out what my angle was, why once again I was trying to shoulder him out of an investigation. “You think you know who did it?”

  His eyes opened wider. “Hey, that fire investigator,” he said.


  “Riccardi. He’s a buddy of yours, isn’t he? Wasn’t he like, your boyfriend or something? That why you want this case? He giving you some information he wouldn’t give to me?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “He agrees with you, thinks it was just a random thing.”

  “That’s what you’re going to find. That it was just kids preying on a homeless guy.”

  “He wasn’t homeless,” I said. But it was useless to argue with 126 Neil S. Plakcy

  Steve. He handed over the notes he had, and I took them back to my desk to go over with Ray.

  Despite the fact that I thought Steve Hart was a jerk, he was a competent investigator, and his notes were thorough. He had sketched the area where McKinney’s body had been found and recorded his interview with Mike, whose last name he had misspelled.

  He and Kawika had attempted a canvass, but it was an industrial neighborhood, and the offices and warehouses had all been closed. Ray and I split up the alibis for the Kope Bean warehouse workers and started making calls. It didn’t take long to discover that they all checked out. Leelee said Dex had been with her all night, which didn’t match his story, but did place him in Papakolea at the time of Stuey’s murder.

  When I hung up with Leelee, I called my old partner from Waikīkī, Akoni Hapa’ele, who had transferred to Vice after both of us moved downtown. “We’re looking for information on a pai gow game in Chinatown. You know anything about it?”

  He yawned. “I know a little. You want to meet me at the Kope Bean on Hotel Street? I’ve got a serious caffeine jones going. The keiki kept us up all night.”

  Akoni and his wife, Mealoha, had a baby boy, and after years of protesting that he didn’t want to bring a kid into this lousy world, he’d become the most devoted father I’d ever seen.

  We were drowning in coffee in this case, and it all seemed to revolve around the Kope Bean. Ray and I drove into the heart of Chinatown, parking in a garage on Pauahi Street, named for one of the royal families of Hawai’i.

  Chinatown used to be an exotic location, a place where GIs on R&R from Vietnam found comfort in the arms of prostitutes.

  But now the streets are dirty, with old soda cans, shriveled dog turds and shreds of newspaper rustling in the wind. Most of the storefronts are shuttered, and many are scrawled with graffiti; the prostitutes only come out at night, along with the ice dealers, and there’s nothing much Chinese about it.