Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  “The FBI?”

  Ray continued, “Yup. They’re probably filing subpoenas right now. They’re not going to care about our murder victims, though.

  They’ll get your files, they’ll hold them up for a couple of years while they build their case.” He paused. “You know how that works. We’ll never get a conviction on any of these murders.”

  I watched Peggy’s body language. Her back stiffened, and she stopped biting her lip. Ray had played her perfectly, without anything more than a gut instinct. He thought she would care about seeing Adam’s killer brought to justice. And he was right.

  She sighed. “I can’t open up our files on my own. I’ll have to talk to one of the partners.”

  “We can wait,” I said.

  Peggy led us to O’Malley’s office. “Before you go, you guys must have some kind of program where you track billable hours, don’t you?” I asked her.

  “Why?”

  “Our first victim, Edith Kapana, who was killed at the KOH

  rally, had O’Malley’s business card. I’d like to know if she came in to speak with him and why.”

  She considered that. “I suppose we can look into that. I’ll get Sarah to help you.”

  While we waited for O’Malley’s paralegal, Ray and I prowled MAhu BLood 227

  the room, looking for evidence of O’Malley’s life. Like his apartment, his office was impersonal. His college and law school diplomas had been framed and hung on one wall, along with various certificates from legal seminars. Another wall was taken up with bookshelves filled with thick volumes of legal codes.

  He hadn’t even hung one of those ubiquitous landscapes or motivational posters.

  It was sad to think that so much of his life had transpired in such settings. What mattered to him? What was he passionate about? I couldn’t tell from anything around us. When we realized there was nothing else to see, we sat down in leather armchairs across from O’Malley’s desk.

  Sarah Byrne came in and went right to the computer.

  “Everything is online here,” she said as it booted up. “The database is searchable by attorney and client.”

  “You have O’Malley’s password?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t need it. Because I worked on cases with him, I have access to his client records.”

  As she typed her name and password into the database, she began to sing a little under her breath. I didn’t recognize the song, but then, most of what I listen to comes with slack key guitar accompaniment. Ray did, though.

  “Is that ‘My Attorney Bernie’? I love that song,” he said.

  She blushed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was doing that.”

  “No, you have a good voice,” Ray said. “I’m a big Dave Frishberg fan. ‘Bernie is a purist, not your polyester tourist,’” he sang. His voice was surprisingly good.

  “I sing with a jazz group,” Sarah said, hitting a couple of keys.

  “We do a lot of his songs. You should come by some time. You and your wife.”

  She was sharp, Sarah. I liked her.

  She looked at us. “We’re in. What are we searching for?”

  “Edith Kapana,” I said. “She was a volunteer for Kingdom of Hawai’i, and she had O’Malley’s business card.”

  228 Neil S. Plakcy

  “The woman who was killed at the rally,” Sarah said. “I read about that.” She typed and hit a couple of keys, and a single record popped up.

  “She met with him a couple of days before the rally,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Any idea what it was about?”

  She shook her head. “He has it coded new client consultation.”

  “Would there be a paper file? Maybe he dictated something about the meeting?”

  “I can check. Anything else while we’re in the database?”

  “How about Kingdom of Hawai’i?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that the file Peggy went to get for you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I think we should wait until she gets back to look up his appointments with regard to them.”

  OK, maybe Sarah was a little too sharp. She wasn’t going to let us do an end run around Peggy.

  She looked through the file folders on his desk and in his drawers but couldn’t find anything on Edith. By then Peggy returned to O’Malley’s office, carrying a couple of heavy green hanging folders. “I had to get Mr. Yamato’s permission, and he wasn’t very happy. Attorney-client privilege doesn’t end just because Adam is dead. Mr. Yamato gave me some latitude—if I think there’s anything in the file you should see, I can show it to you. But if you need any copies I have to clear it with him first.

  And you can’t use any of this in court.”

  “I know. And I appreciate this, Peggy,” I said.

  “I’m still an ADA at heart. I want you to find the bastard who killed Adam.”

  Peggy said it was all right for Sarah to pull up records of hours O’Malley spent on KOH and Kope Bean business, and the screen filled with a long list. “You weren’t kidding when you said they generated a lot of work for him,” I said.

  It looked like O’Malley spent at least twenty hours a week MAhu BLood 229

  on Tanaka’s business, mostly having to do with the Kope Bean and its intertwined companies. “I can see why he’d want to keep Tanaka as a client,” Ray said. “Twenty hours is half his workload.”

  Peggy laughed. “You don’t know much about how corporate lawyers work, do you?” she asked. “Twenty hours a week is just a drop in the bucket. We charge in fifteen-minute increments, so a good associate can generate at least five billable hours out of each hour of work. Make a two-minute phone call? That’s a fifteen-minute charge. While you’re on the phone, sign a set of documents for a different client. There’s another fifteen-minute charge. If you’re smart and you work hard, you can bill twenty-four hours a day.”

  We scrolled through the database with Sarah’s help, but all it told us was that Adam O’Malley racked up the hours. Then we let Sarah go, and Peggy looked through the paper files. From the way she was flipping through pages, it didn’t look like anything there could help us finger O’Malley’s killer.

  She was almost to the end of the folder as I started to wonder if maybe Ray was right. Suppose Adam O’Malley’s death had just been a terrible accident, unconnected to our case. He had gone to The Garage and picked up the wrong guy.

  “What’s this?” Peggy asked, snapping me out of my reverie.

  She was looking at two different sets of documents and moved them so we could look, too. Five pages, a list of handwritten names and dates, appeared to have been sliced from a book. The papers were very old, faded in some parts and water-stained in others. Without knowing what we were looking at, it was almost impossible to decipher.

  The other set comprised records of intake and discharge at the Hawai’i State Hospital, for someone named Ezekiel Lopika.

  “Why would this be in the KOH file?” Peggy said, leaning over my shoulder. I could smell her perfume. If it wasn’t the same one she’d worn in high school, it was a close match. “Who is Ezekiel Lopika?”

  “Maybe these records really belong to Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, 230 Neil S. Plakcy

  who’s the poster child for KOH,” I said. “You know who he is, don’t you, Peggy?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen him on TV a couple of times.”

  “If these are his records, they may be here because he’s the person Kingdom of Hawai’i proposes should be king if the monarchy is restored. He might have been hospitalized under a different last name to keep people from realizing he was crazy.”

  “Like that would be easy,” Ray said. “You said you’ve seen him, Peggy. Didn’t he strike you as kind of squirrely?”

  “There’s a big difference between being eccentric and being crazy enough to be hospitalized,” Peggy said. “And if these records really belong to him, it’s a lousy attempt at camouflage.

  Why change his last name but not his fi
rst? Ezekiel’s not a common name.”

  “I don’t know. But maybe this is what O’Malley was concerned about.” I looked over at Peggy. “Edith Kapana, the woman who was gunned down at the Kingdom of Hawai’i rally? She was from the same town on the Big Island as Ezekiel. She must have known him as a young man. People said she was his hanai tūtū.”

  I stood up and started pacing around the conference room.

  “Suppose she brought these records to O’Malley when she met with him,” I continued. “Somebody could have killed her to keep her from making his hospitalization public.”

  “You’re saying that’s why she went up to the Ohana?” Ray asked. “But why go up there to ask about his medical records when she already had the paperwork?”

  I stopped by the conference room door. “Maybe she was worried about Ezekiel, about the stress that being involved with KOH could cause him. She could have wanted to talk about that with David Currie, but he wouldn’t discuss Ezekiel’s condition with her.”

  Ray made me stop for a minute so he could fill Peggy in on Edith’s visit to the Ohana Ola Kino. Even though I was worried that I was spinning a fantasy without any proof behind it, I couldn’t help continuing my story once he’d finished.

  MAhu BLood 231

  “Maybe it wasn’t even a threat. She might have thought that by releasing his records she was protecting him from another breakdown. But Jun Tanaka wouldn’t feel the same way. Ezekiel’s his main man when it comes to KOH.”

  My brain was racing so fast my mouth was having trouble keeping up. I had to start pacing around the conference room again just to slow myself down. “Somebody broke into Edith’s room a couple of days after she was killed and stole a lot of papers and photos she had there,” I said to Peggy. “Whoever it was could have been looking for these records, but she’d already given them to O’Malley.”

  “I’m confused,” Peggy said. “I thought you said the FBI was investigating Tanaka for money laundering. How would these hospitalization records have any bearing on that case?”

  “If Tanaka is using KOH as a front for the money laundering, then he’d want to do anything to protect his investment. If Edith’s revelation threatened him he could have had her killed.”

  “If this is what he wanted to tell us about, why is this material here and not at O’Malley’s apartment?” Ray asked. “We didn’t find anything about KOH at there.”

  “Maybe he was going to bring us here. And if he did have copies with him at home, the killer would have taken them away.”

  Peggy said, “It’s our firm’s policy not to let original documents leave the office. He probably made copies to show you.”

  “See?” I asked Ray. “He couldn’t bring the originals home with him.”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Ray said. “It would be nice if you had even a shred of proof to back any of this up.”

  Peggy stood up. “I’m glad I’m not an ADA any more. Life is a lot simpler here. I’ll see if I can get copies of these for you.” She took the papers and walked out.

  While she was gone, Ray and I went back and forth. I felt like a big hot air balloon, struggling to take off, while he held down 232 Neil S. Plakcy

  my guide rope. I knew that one of us had to be the rational one, but it was still frustrating.

  “It’s a motive,” I insisted. “In addition to protecting his money laundering operation, Tanaka could be looking after his investment in KOH. Whoever controls KOH could be in line for a whole lot of money.” I leaned forward. “You’ve got to admit it’s starting to make sense. What if Dex told Tanaka that Edith went to the Ohana to research Ezekiel’s hospitalization? Killing her at the rally could have been a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning the real motive.”

  Peggy came back to the conference room. “I spoke with Mr.

  Yamato. I can’t give you copies of any of this material until he’s had a chance to look at it himself and talk with the other partners on Tuesday.”

  I wanted to argue, pound the table, demand cooperation. But I knew I had no legal right and so I reined myself in.

  While I was mastering my emotions, Ray said, “Thanks.

  You’ve already helped us a lot. More than we expected.”

  “I’ll call you Tuesday,” Peggy said.

  We stood up to go. “It was good to see you again, Peggy,” I said.

  “You too, Kimo.” She leaned up and kissed my cheek, and just for a moment I remembered kissing her in her parents’ den and how much my life had changed since then.

  the oLd swiMMiNg hoLe

  By the time we got back to the station after our visit to Fields and Yamato, it was the middle of Saturday afternoon, and our investigation had run out of juice. We wouldn’t get the autopsy results until Tuesday, and we couldn’t get the copies from Peggy until then, too. We had no new leads on Edith’s shooting, Stuey’s death or even the sniper attack on us at the Ohana. It was frustrating, and I didn’t look forward to telling Sampson we had made no progress. I also didn’t want to ship the cases to cold storage and move on.

  But despite that desire, we called it quits for the rest of the weekend. Ray was on special duty on Sunday and Monday, picking up some extra cash toward a down payment for a house.

  “I’ll swing by that Māhū Nation picnic tomorrow afternoon. See if any of those guys knew O’Malley or had the same kind of experience, picking up a guy at The Garage and having things go sour.”

  “Mike won’t be happy about that,” he said. “You going to a party full of gay guys.”

  “I’ll just have to convince Mike to go with me.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  When I got home, Mike was vacuuming the living room and running a load of laundry. “How was your day?” I asked Mike, after a quick kiss hello. “You and Roby have fun?”

  He shut off the machine, and Roby came running out from the bedroom.

  “Nah. Just cleaned up and ran errands. How was yours?”

  “Frustrating.” I told him about all the dead ends we had run across. “And you won’t believe this. I found Gunter’s name in O’Malley’s address book. So I had breakfast with him at the Beachfront Broiler. He confirmed that O’Malley liked rough trade.”

  234 Neil S. Plakcy

  “I believe Gunter’s name is in the address book of most of the gay men on this island,” Mike said. I couldn’t tell if the tone of his voice implied disdain or envy.

  “Gunter suggested I go up to this picnic tomorrow with this group of gay guys he belongs to called Māhū Nation. One of them might know about a guy picking up marks at The Garage and mugging them.”

  Mike crossed his arms over his chest, and I readied myself for a fight. “I’ve heard of them. They do these nudie swim things up in the hills. But neither of us are taking our clothes off.”

  “You’re going?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not letting you go some place full of naked men by yourself.”

  That wasn’t the fight I was expecting. Common sense told me to shut up, and for a change, I did. I kissed Mike’s cheek, stripped down to my boxers, and started cleaning with him.

  We grilled some steaks for dinner and spent the evening on the sofa watching Shock to the System, a TV movie made from one of Richard Stevenson’s gay mysteries.

  Sunday morning I couldn’t concentrate on the paper or the crossword puzzle. I took Roby out in the back yard and tossed the Frisbee to him, but he had forgotten the concept of “fetch.”

  He grabbed it and settled down on the lawn to chew it. Once I wrestled it back from him and tossed it again, he took it and hid under the hibiscus hedge.

  “You’re not very cooperative.” I wanted to ask Mike to go for a bike ride or run, anything to work off some nervous tension, but when I went back inside, he was napping on the bed, his white briefs a contrast to his tanned skin and black hair.

  I put on a T-shirt and a pair of board shorts and drove down to Makapu’u Point, where I surfed unt
il my arms and legs felt like jelly. As I was walking back up the beach with my board, I passed a shirtless twenty-something haole with long blond dreadlocks.

  He was waving a fist in the air and yelling at a woman with him.

  I was worried he might be threatening her, so I stopped MAhu BLood 235

  nearby, planting my board in the sand and pretending to examine it for dings.

  “See, that’s the beauty,” he told the woman, a petite blonde in a bikini that did little to cover her ample endowments. “We wait until no one’s home. So there’s no chance anybody gets hurt.”

  Oh, Jesus, I thought. What was this guy planning?

  “I’m telling you, that’s my dog,” he said. “I’m getting that dog back no matter what.”

  I picked up my board and continued back to my Jeep. At least he wasn’t threatening the woman or setting up a home invasion robbery, I thought. But people with crime on their mind should keep their voices down. That reminded me of Stuart McKinney, talking so loudly to Ray and me outside the Kope Bean warehouse.

  What if Dex, standing in the doorway waiting for him, had overheard him talking to us about the money Mr. T brought in at night? Could that have signed Stuey’s death warrant? And could that be the connection we needed to make Stuey’s murder fit into the story we were constructing?

  I pushed thoughts of the case out of my head as I drove back up to Aiea. I called Gunter and got directions to the picnic, and an hour later, Mike and I followed them up Waimano Home Road, through the center of Pearl City and then up into the Ko’olaus.

  We parked on a cleared piece of land just off the road, along with a jumble of cars old and new, everything from gleaming luxury SUVs to beat-up Hondas and Nissans. I made sure my gun and badge were securely locked in my glove compartment before we left the Jeep.

  A narrow, overgrown path led down the hill toward the natural pool at the bottom of the valley. The sound of Jason Mraz singing “I fell right through the cracks, and now I’m trying to get back,” from the song I’m Yours, floated up toward us.

  I felt really happy being there with Mike, as if both of us had come back from tough times and were lucky to be together. But maybe it was just the second-hand pakalolo smoke, mixed with the aroma of a charcoal grill.