Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  “About a hundred grand.” Lui busied himself with his salad. I already knew the figure, so I didn’t stop eating, but my father put his fork down and stared at Lui. Then he shook his head.

  “I don’t have that much in my checking account,” he said. “I’ll have to sell some CDs, move some money around. It might take a couple of days.”

  We both gaped at him. I’d always known our parents were comfortable; my dad had his own construction business, and he and my mom had owned a couple of strip shopping centers and office buildings. But I’d never thought of them as the kind of people who had a hundred grand to throw around.

  “It will come out of your inheritance,” my father said.

  “Everything we have is divided equally between the three of you.

  Consider this an advance.”

  The waiter appeared and soundlessly slid away the salad plates and replaced them with our mahi-mahi fillets.

  “I didn’t,” Lui said. “I mean, I couldn’t.”

  “You did, and you could,” my father said, spearing a flaky forkful of fish. “But you aren’t going to gamble anymore.”

  “Dad, we’re not kids. You can’t just lock Lui up in his room.”

  “Lui?” My father looked at my brother, who hadn’t touched his fish.

  “There’s a chapter of Gamblers Anonymous in Honolulu,”

  he said quietly. “I’m going to a meeting tonight.”

  My father nodded and continued to eat. I sat there and looked at them. You can grow up with people, you can share blood with them and then they can still surprise you.

  “I appreciate the offer, Dad,” Lui said. “But like Kimo said, MAhu BLood 183

  I’m not a kid any more. I can’t count on you to bail me out.

  Tanaka says he needs me at this game to help him draw out some high rollers from Hong Kong. He’s going to stake me fifty grand.

  If I lose, it doesn’t get added to what I owe, but if I win, I can use that money to pay down my debt.”

  “Why is he offering you such good terms?” I asked.

  “Sounds like he thinks he can make a big score from these Hong Kong players. And like I told you, he’s getting ready to run, so he’s trying to accumulate as much cash as he can. He’s betting that I can help him. I’m a good player, I swear. I’ve just had a run of bad luck.”

  My father snorted.

  I explained what we knew about Jun Tanaka—the money laundering, the possible connection to two murders. “The FBI is after Tanaka, but they need to catch him red-handed, walking out of the game with cash. If Lui doesn’t sit in, we won’t know for sure that the game is running.”

  “You want to go to this game?” my father asked Lui.

  He looked at me. “I have to,” he said.

  I hoped that somehow Salinas would pull a brace of rabbits out of his hat and haul Jun Tanaka in before the game took place.

  But I was pretty sure that I’d stopped believing in magic back when I was a kid.

  When I got back to headquarters, Billy Kim from ballistics was in the detective bullpen, showing a piece of paper to Ray.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Billy came through,” Ray said. “The same rifle was used to kill Edith and to shoot at us in front of the Ohana.”

  Billy showed us the striations where the shell casings matched.

  When he left, Ray and I started brainstorming. “This tells us for certain that whoever killed Edith shot at us two days ago at the Ohana.”

  “No,” Ray said. “All it tells us is the same gun was used. We don’t have the evidence yet to say it was the same shooter.”

  184 Neil S. Plakcy

  “Picky, picky.”

  “We already had the feeling that Edith’s death was connected to the Ohana,” Ray said. “Stuey lived there, Ezekiel used to live there and Edith went there the day before she died. Jun Tanaka is on the Ohana’s board, and he’s also the money man behind KOH. We’ve got all that. But who killed Edith? Why? How are the two deaths connected to KOH?”

  We went back to the diagrams we had drawn, arrows showing the links between the cases, the people, and the organizations. “I think it all comes back to the money laundering,” I said. “That’s what ties everyone together. Let’s say Edith knew, from either Ezekiel or Dex, that Tanaka was using KOH to legitimize his gambling profits. She was angry about it, and word got back to Tanaka.”

  Ray continued, “He killed her, or had her killed, to protect his operation. And Stuey talked too much so he had to die. But there are still loose ends.”

  “Such as?”

  “What was Edith doing at the Ohana the day before she died?

  She wasn’t looking for Ezekiel, because he hadn’t lived there for years.”

  “Stuey?”

  “We have no evidence that she knew him,” Ray said. “David Currie, the administrator, said she went up there to ask about Ezekiel.”

  “Suppose he was lying,” I said. “Maybe Ezekiel told Edith that Tanaka was making cash donations to KOH, and she wanted to see if he was still crazy or he could be trusted.”

  “It’s a theory. Should we pull Currie in for more questions?

  Try and convince a judge to sign a subpoena for the Ohana’s financial records?”

  “There’s that pesky ‘j’ word again,” I said. “Judge. I still don’t think we have enough to convince one. We don’t have a single thing that actually connects Tanaka to either murder. And we MAhu BLood 185

  don’t have another strong suspect.”

  Ray closed the case book with a thud. “That’s the sound of these murders getting shunted to the cold case files. Unless we get a major break in the next twenty-four hours.”

  RecRuitiNg

  When our shift ended, I drove up to Aiea for dinner with Mike. I didn’t tell him that Ray and I were going to meet Adam O’Malley at his apartment the next morning, though I should have. Mike’s the jealous type and even knowing that Ray would be going with me, he would have made a big dramatic scene about me meeting some other gay guy in his apartment.

  Friday morning, Sampson wanted to see us. He was wearing a black polo shirt and gray slacks, and his mood matched his clothes.

  “Remember, I’m putting you back in the rotation right after Labor Day unless you convince me otherwise today.”

  Ray and I both shifted uncomfortably on our feet. Sampson hadn’t invited us to sit, so we stood there in front of his desk like schoolboys called before the principal. “You have two open cases right now. Edith Kapana, the old woman killed at the rally. Stuart McKinney, the homeless man who got torched.”

  He saw me start to argue and said, “Yes, I know he wasn’t technically homeless. You’re trying to connect them to this pai gow game, right? And money laundering? What did the FBI have to say?”

  When he’s in a mood like that, best to keep it short and simple. “Francisco Salinas from the FBI has taken over the pai gow investigation, but we’re following a bunch of leads which indicate that there are definite links between the sovereignty movement, the deaths of Edith Kapana and Stuart McKinney, the pai gow game and money laundering through the Kope Bean chain.”

  For the first time that morning, Sampson smiled. “I think that’s the most concise statement I’ve ever heard you give, Detective. Now prove it.”

  “Yes, sir,” we both said.

  188 Neil S. Plakcy

  Sampson picked up his phone. “You can go.”

  It was barely eight o’clock, and we had two hours until our meeting with Adam O’Malley, the attorney for Kingdom of Hawai’i, at his apartment. We spent the time looking back at everything we had on KOH, preparing our questions.

  “We need to know if there’s an accountant for KOH,” Ray said. “Or what O’Malley knows about the money trail.”

  “I want to know who’s really in charge of that group. Is it Ezekiel, or is he just a figurehead? Is Tanaka pulling his strings?

  And why?”

  A few minutes before t
en, we headed over to O’Malley’s building, a fancy tower off Ala Moana Boulevard called the Honolulu Sunset. Tourists cruised the area in top-down convertibles, and teenagers who weren’t back in school yet giggled and teased each other in packs.

  The concierge, a balding older black guy named Malik Jefferson, called up to O’Malley’s apartment and got no answer.

  “We have an appointment with him,” I said, showing him our ID.

  “You have any idea if he went out today?”

  Jefferson shook his head. “I came on at seven this morning. I know Mr. O’Malley, and I know he hasn’t left.”

  “Anyone else come to see him today?”

  He shrugged. There was security in the building, he said; you were supposed to come in the front door and get buzzed through to the elevator bank. But there were a couple of loopholes. If you came in with a resident, even just tagging along behind, you could slip in without anyone noticing.

  At our insistence, Jefferson led us to O’Malley’s apartment on the sixteenth floor. As we rode the elevator I wondered what we would find. Had O’Malley chickened out on our meeting and left?

  He’d said he was frightened by someone involved with KOH.

  Or had he simply gone out on an errand and run behind schedule?

  At the door, Jefferson knocked and called out. And then he MAhu BLood 189

  stepped back, wobbling, as all three of us got a whiff of what was behind the O’Malley’s door. Blood and death.

  I could tell from his behavior that Jefferson recognized the smell. Without further argument, he opened the door with his master key. It was locked, but the security chain hadn’t been engaged. With the door open, the odor was even stronger.

  Jefferson stepped back and let Ray and me walk into the apartment ahead of him. We both drew our guns and prowled silently ahead. Ray went to the right, and I went left.

  I drew the lucky straw. The master bedroom was to the left, and the body of a Caucasian male was in there, lying on his chest on the bed, naked, with an extra-large black dildo protruding from his ass. His hands and legs were secured to the corners of the four-poster bed with what looked like silk ties. His head was bent back, resting on a satin-covered pillow, and his eyes were open.

  Blood soaked the sheets, and his throat had been slit.

  “Bad?” Ray asked, coming up behind me.

  I nodded, then went back to the living room. “I hate to do this to you, brah,” I said to Malik Jefferson. “But I need you to take a look at the body and see if it’s Mr. O’Malley.”

  Jefferson gulped and then nodded. I led him down the hall; he ducked his head in the room, took a quick look and said, “That’s him,” in a strangled voice. Then he hurried back to the living room.

  Ray was looking around in the bathroom as I called dispatch and notified them of the body. Then I took a set of digital pictures of the victim and the room. I had to struggle to breathe through my mouth because the smell of the congealed blood was playing havoc with my stomach.

  When Ray came out of the bathroom, he was wearing rubber gloves and carrying a tub of Vicks VapoRub. “Fortunately Mr.

  O’Malley had a well-stocked medicine cabinet,” he said. He handed me a pair of gloves, and then the open tub.

  190 Neil S. Plakcy

  I smeared some on my upper lip. “Lemon,” I said. I took a deep breath through my nose and felt a little better.

  “We’ll see if it works any better than the menthol.”

  We went back to the living room, where Malik Jefferson was waiting, looking sick and rubbing his stomach.

  “We’re going to need to see the tapes from your security system for the last twenty-four hours,” Ray said. “Why don’t you get started on that, and we’ll call the medical examiner.”

  “This is a good building. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen here.”

  “They happen everywhere.” Ray put the VapoRub on the kitchen counter. “Go on, get the tapes,” he told Jefferson, who backed out of the room and closed the door gently behind him.

  “Turns out to be a good thing you came with me,” I said. “I can imagine how it would look, me going to see some gay guy at his apartment, him ending up dead. People would think it was some kind of hook up.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Just because you’re cool doesn’t mean the rest of the world is.”

  We searched the living room, but it was strangely impersonal—

  no family pictures or souvenirs from vacations. It was as if he’d rented the place furnished and never bothered to add any personal touches.

  By the time we finished the ME’s guys were there and the crime scene techs, and the apartment was buzzing with people and equipment. Ray pointed the techs toward a kitchen knife in the bathroom that had been wiped clean of prints; it looked like it was going to be our murder weapon. There was blood in the shower drain, perhaps the killer cleaning up before leaving.

  Once the ME had taken the body away, we turned the AC

  on high, rubbed some more Vicks under our noses and started to search the room carefully. It still smelled pretty bad, but we managed. A T-shirt, jeans and bikini briefs were tossed over a MAhu BLood 191

  chair by the bed, and we packed them up to check for fingerprints.

  A mahogany jewelry box on O’Malley’s dresser was empty, and we couldn’t find a wallet anywhere. I assumed that a busy attorney would have a cell phone, a PDA and a laptop computer, but there were no personal electronics at all, though we found chargers for a couple of different pieces of equipment in the drawer of an antique roll-top desk along one wall of the bedroom.

  We looked through the papers in the desk, but all we found were a few unpaid bills, an Out magazine still in its plastic wrapper and some unopened junk mail. In a box on the top shelf of the closet we found an old address book, from the time before digital contacts, along with some explicit gay comic books and erotica anthologies, including one called Skater Boys. I flipped through the books, and it was clear the kind of guys who turned O’Malley on. Hoodlums, thugs, skateboarders, soldiers, men with muscles and tattoos.

  While we waited for the crime scene techs to finish, we went downstairs to Malik Jefferson, who led us into a back room set up with a bank of monitors and introduced us to the security guard there, a tough-looking haole with dark curly hair and a nose that had been broken at some time in the past.

  “Carl can show you the tapes.”

  Carl shook our hands and then sat down and fast-forwarded through the grainy black and white footage, slowing down at a frame time-coded 5:38 PM. “That’s Mr. O’Malley,” he said, pointing. “Camera on the fourth floor of the garage. Mr.

  O’Malley parks in space 421.”

  O’Malley looked like an ordinary businessman, wearing a suit and carrying a leather satchel, his tie slightly askew. He approached the camera, which was focused on the elevator, stood there for a moment, then entered the elevator and exited the frame.

  Carl turned a couple of knobs on the monitor and the footage zoomed ahead. Shortly after eleven at night, we saw O’Malley exit the garage elevator, this time dressed for clubbing, in the body-hugging black T-shirt and tight jeans we’d found strewn 192 Neil S. Plakcy

  next to his bed.

  “You only have cameras in the garage?” Ray asked.

  “Each floor of the garage, by the elevator,” Carl said. “We have a couple in the health club on the garage roof and another set in various parts of the building—mail room, card room and so on. Nothing in the main lobby; the concierge is always on duty there. So the only way to track Mr. O’Malley’s movement is through the garage cameras or anything the concierge saw.”

  We both nodded, and Carl continued ahead to two a.m., when O’Malley walked back into the frame of the garage camera. He was accompanied by another guy, who was careful to avoid getting his face on the camera, always staying a bit behind O’Malley.

  “I’m thinking he’s been in this building before and knows
where the cameras are,” Ray said.

  “Could be. Or he’s the kind of guy who’s accustomed to hiding,” I said.

  We could only make out he was a skinny haole in a white T-shirt and jeans, a few inches shorter than O’Malley, who was about five-ten. For a brief second we got a shot of the guy’s tattooed lower right arm.

  “Think that could be Dex?” I asked.

  “Dex is straight, though, isn’t he?” Ray asked. “He’s got Leelee. What would he be doing picking up gay men in bars?”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said.

  Once O’Malley and his visitor were in the elevator, we lost them. There were no cameras on the individual floors, so no way to see if the mystery man had been with O’Malley and gone into his apartment with him, or simply had been using him to get into the building.

  “Mr. O’Malley often bring guys home?” I asked.

  Carl shrugged. “We watch the cameras for suspicious activity, not to spy on the residents. I couldn’t tell you who comes to see who. That’s the concierge’s job.”

  MAhu BLood 193

  We went back out to the front and found Malik Jefferson behind his desk, a big semi-circle with a sign-in book for guests.

  We asked him the same question. “I don’t usually work the late shift, and even if I do, I’m not always paying that close attention.”

  Gunter is the concierge at a fancy building in Waikīkī, and he knows everything that goes on—who gets packages from fancy stores, who has late-night visitors, who has an illegal cat. So I doubted that Jefferson was telling the truth.

  “We can put you on the witness stand,” I said. “You willing to go on record that you aren’t paying attention to who comes and goes in this building? You think your boss, and the residents, will appreciate that?”

  He looked down at his desk.

  “The man is dead. Do you understand that? If he had a pattern of doing things like this, then that may help us find out who killed him. If he didn’t, that sends our investigation in a different direction.”

  Finally, he said, “Sometimes, on Friday mornings, I see guys leaving, look like that guy there. Tough guys, not the kind you normally see in this building. The night man, he said sometimes Mr. O’Malley would bring them home. Sometimes they’d show up, late night, early morning, ask for him.”