“But if the bartender can’t say for sure it was Dex who left with O’Malley we don’t have a connection,” Ray said. “And the concierge at the Honolulu Sunset didn’t see the guy who came in with O’Malley.”
“We can run Dex’s prints. See if they show up at O’Malley’s.”
Thanh Nguyen, the fingerprint tech, was backed up because of the holiday weekend, as was the ME’s office. I wanted to go out and shake somebody, because I felt like we were so close to understanding. “I think you’ve been drinking too much coffee 246 Neil S. Plakcy
on this case,” Ray said. “Calm down. We’ll get everything figured out.”
Sampson called us in to his office as I was pacing around Ray’s desk.
“Where are you with the lawyer’s murder?” he asked, as we sat down across from him. He’d gotten the haircut he needed over the weekend and a little sun, too. There were red patches on his cheeks and forehead, and his nose was peeling. I thought that his maroon polo shirt was a good choice that morning, because of the sunburn, but instead of commenting on it I plunged into a status update.
“I found a guy who picked up a trick at The Garage who mugged him. The victim pulled Dexter Trale’s photo out of an array and fingered Dex as his attacker. Dex lived with Edith Kapana and worked with Stuart McKinney, so we think that now we can connect him to all three murders. We’re waiting on a fingerprint comparison with the prints we found in O’Malley’s apartment. And we’re waiting for the autopsy results. Both offices are backed up because of the Labor Day holiday.”
“Death doesn’t take a day off,” Sampson said. “What’s your plan?”
“If we get something from either the prints or the autopsy that implicates Trale, we’ll pick him up,” Ray said. “Otherwise we’ll just keep looking for evidence.”
“Not exactly the kind of plan I was hoping you’d have. But it’ll have to do. Let me know what you find. And remember, Donne, you’re responsible for keeping Kanapa’aka from breaking too many laws.”
Ray gave Sampson a two-fingered salute and said, “Will do, chief.”
“Let’s call Salinas,” I said to Ray as we left Sampson’s office.
“I want to know what he pulled out of that game on Friday night.
See if we can figure out how Dex and Tanaka work together.”
Salinas’s secretary said that he was in court but would be back by two. I asked her to leave him a message that my partner and I MAhu BLood 247
would be there then to see him. Then I called Peggy, and she said that the partners were meeting to discuss our request.
“We’ll come over,” I told her, knowing it’s always harder to refuse a cop something to his face than it is over the phone.
fAded docuMeNts
“You think Peggy will come through with those documents?”
Ray asked, as I scooted through a traffic light that started out yellow. “And that was a red light, you know.”
“You’re taking the job of being my conscience seriously, aren’t you?” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’re relevant to our case.”
Peggy met us in the reception area and said, “The partners have agreed to let you have the copies. Sarah is putting them together now.” She led us back into the conference room and sat down across from us. “The partners are going to want to know if these files are related to Adam’s death. You know lawyers.
They’re worried about liability.”
“Right now we’re just developing our case.” I sketched in our thoughts about Tanaka as Sarah Byrne brought in the copies of the hospitalization records and the originals of the other sheets we had found in the folder.
“These old pages are too old and faded to get decent copies,”
she said, showing them to me.
“Can we take the originals?” I asked Peggy. “We’ll get them back to you, I promise.”
“I’ll ask Mr. Yamato.” She walked out, and Sarah stayed behind.
“Did you have something else you wanted to tell us?” I asked her.
She pursed her lips, deliberating. “I saw that these materials relate to the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and I wondered if you spoke to Akamu when you were here on Saturday.”
“Akamu?”
“Our student intern. I know he’s a volunteer with KOH.”
I looked at Ray, my eyebrows raised. “No, we didn’t speak to 250 Neil S. Plakcy
him,” he said. “Is he here now?”
“It’s his last day. I think he’s in the law library.”
Peggy came back in then. “Who’s in the library?” she asked.
“You have a student intern here who’s also a volunteer with KOH?” I asked.
She looked from me to Sarah. “Yes. Akamu Hastings. But he doesn’t have access to any case files.”
“Even so,” I said. “We’d like to talk to him.”
Peggy nodded toward Sarah. “Can you ask him to come in here? But don’t tell him why.”
Sarah left. “You think Akamu is connected to Adam’s death?”
Peggy asked.
“I don’t know, Peggy. But it’s certainly an interesting coincidence, don’t you think? O’Malley agrees to meet me and talk about KOH, and then he’s killed. And you have somebody in your office who volunteers for KOH.”
Peggy was about to argue when Akamu came to the door. I could tell from his eyes that he recognized us as the cops from Saturday.
“You wanted to speak to me, Miss Kaneahe?”
“Come in and sit down,” she said, pulling out a chair for him.
I could only imagine what she was thinking then. Adam O’Malley had been her friend, and he was dead, and it was possible that this kid was involved somehow. I wondered whether she’d revert to her prosecutor stance or be the kid’s advocate, as a representative of Fields and Yamato.
She introduced Ray and me. “The detectives have some questions for you about your involvement with Kingdom of Hawai’i,” she said. “I want you to be honest with them, okay?”
He nodded. I could see his right hand shaking a little on the big wooden table.
“It’s okay, Akamu,” I said. “Nobody’s in trouble here. We just want to ask you a couple of questions, all right? Peggy said MAhu BLood 251
you’ve been volunteering with KOH. What kind of stuff have you done?”
“Nothing major,” he said. “Mostly I’m like a gofer, kind of like I am here. I run errands, I help out at rallies and stuff.”
“That’s good. It’s important. My mom volunteers for KOH
sometimes too.”
“Oh, yeah, Mrs. Kanapa’aka. I know her. She’s really smart.”
“Thanks. I’ll tell her you said so. So is that how you got the internship here? Through KOH?”
“Sorta. A couple of times I drove around Mr. Kapuāiwa, and through him I met Mr. Tanaka. I told him I wanted to be a lawyer, and he said maybe he could help me out.”
I looked at Ray and Peggy. Ray kept a poker face, but I could see Peggy’s mouth setting into a grim line.
“Mr. Tanaka, huh?” I asked. “Jun Tanaka? From the Kope Bean?”
“Yeah. He’s super nice. He’s taken a real interest in me. He’s always calling me up and asking how things are going. A couple of times he even took me out to dinner.”
“I guess you heard about what happened to Mr. O’Malley,” I said. “How he was murdered last week.”
“Oh, man, I felt so bad. He was a nice guy. I was talking about him to Mr. Tanaka just the other day, how Mr. O seemed really committed to helping out KOH.”
Suddenly his mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh my God, oh my God.” He started shaking. “It was his meeting. The meeting he was talking about.”
Peggy reached over and took the kid’s right hand and squeezed.
“It’s going to be okay. But you have to tell us what you know.”
He took a deep breath, his teeth chattering a litt
le. “It was Thursday afternoon. Right after lunch. I was walking past Mr.
O’Malley’s office, and I heard him on the phone. He was talking 252 Neil S. Plakcy
about meeting someone the next day to talk about KOH stuff. I thought that was so amazing of him, you know? I mean, he just got back from this big case on the mainland, and he was going to have some meeting about KOH on his day off.”
He looked from me to Ray. “That must have been who killed him, right? That person he was meeting with.”
I shook my head. “He was supposed to meet with us, Akamu.
But when we got to his apartment he was dead.”
“With you? With cops? But that’s not what… oh my God.”
“What?”
“Mr. Tanaka called me Thursday afternoon, just kind of to say that he had heard I did a really good job this summer, and he wanted to keep in touch with me in the fall. I think I… I mean, I didn’t even think about it, you know?”
“You think you what?”
“I told Mr. Tanaka that Mr. O was having a meeting the next day about KOH stuff.” He looked from me to Ray and back again. “I didn’t know he was meeting with you or that there was anything strange going on. I just thought it was great of him to do it on his day off, you know?”
The pieces clicked in place. Tanaka knew that Adam O’Malley was meeting with someone on his day off, to discuss KOH
business. Even if Tanaka didn’t know Adam was meeting with the cops, he’d have been right to be suspicious. And maybe even to have ordered his attorney’s death.
We got Akamu’s contact information, and he left the conference room. “Tanaka has to be connected to Adam’s death,” Peggy said.
“Looks like it,” I said.
“If you find out anything that compromises Fields and Yamato, will you give me a heads up? As a favor to an old friend?”
“Of course.”
I signed a receipt for the old faded documents Sarah had been MAhu BLood 253
unable to photocopy, and we left the law firm.
“Harry might be able to do something with these,” I said to Ray. “Mind if we swing by his place?”
“No prob.” As the elevator doors closed, he said, “So how long did you date her?”
“What?”
“The attorney. Peggy. You did date her, didn’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m a detective, dude. I look at the way people interact with each other. And you two have failed booty call all over you.”
“I guess you could call it that.”
We reached the ground floor, and I called Harry and said we were on our way over. We walked back to my Jeep, and I told Ray the whole sad story, from those make-out sessions in Peggy’s bedroom to the way she had tried to screw me after I came out of the closet.
“And all that time, you didn’t know?” Ray asked. “My cousin Joey, he couldn’t even talk about sex with girls. He’d get this weirded-out look on his face and squinch up his nose like he smelled something bad.”
“I was clueless, what can I tell you?” We got in the Jeep, and I backed out of the parking space and turned onto the street. “I look back at it now and wonder what I was thinking, but at the time, I thought everybody felt the way I did. That everybody was, you know, bi to some extent. I figured once I met the right girl I’d stop thinking about guys.”
“Do you still think about girls?” he asked. “Seeing Peggy again, that do anything for you?”
I thought about it as we waited at a red light. “I look at her now, and there’s so many things going on, you know? I remember high school and stuff we did. But it doesn’t make me want to get in her panties again. Not at all.”
“Other women?”
254 Neil S. Plakcy
“I can appreciate a good-looking woman. And if you want to know the truth, I could probably have sex with a woman again, if I wanted to. I just don’t anymore.”
Ray nodded. “Joey and I used to talk about this all the time.
We finally decided we were just wired differently. He’d talk about how cute some guy was, and I’d see it but not in the way he did.”
He turned toward me. “I guess I had this idea of you, being like Joey. And then seeing you with Peggy, it was kind of like, whoa.
You don’t mind that I get so personal, do you?”
“I spend more hours in a day with you than I do with Mike. If we didn’t get personal with each other life would be pretty dull.”
It started to pour as we got on the H1, gray clouds scudding across the sky and palm trees tossing restlessly in the wind. The battered old Toyota in front of us threw up rooster tails that splattered my windshield. We passed a pickup truck festooned with plastic leis in every color, so many that you couldn’t see the rails, with a battered statue of King Kamehameha propped up in the back.
“Dex worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean,” I said, the wipers sloshing against the windshield. “Could he have sent Dex to The Garage that night to find Adam and kill him?”
“Why would Tanaka think Dex could be a killer, though? As far as we know right now, he’s just a dude who works at the warehouse, who plays in the pai gow game. And even if he did hire Dex, how would Dex know that O’Malley would be at the bar that night?”
“Maybe Dex staked out O’Malley’s apartment. Followed him to the bar, saw his chance.”
“That part works,” Ray said. “But I still don’t know why Tanaka would look to Dex. He has those yakuza connections.
Why not just call in a professional hit?”
We both mulled that over as the rain eased and we switched to the Moanalua Freeway. By the time we began climbing Aiea Heights Road, the sun was back out. That’s Hawai’i weather. If you don’t like it, hold your breath for a minute, and it’ll change.
MAhu BLood 255
Arleen answered the door and led us to Harry’s office, where I handed him the documents. “Can you do anything to enhance these?”
Harry held up one of the pages, which had writing back and front. I could just make out the lines and the margins of the original paper. But all the writing had been done by hand, and the ink had faded almost completely. Arleen came in as we were peering down at them, with glasses filled with pink-orange liquid.
“Pineapple orange guava,” she said. “It’s all Brandon will drink these days.”
Harry had adopted Arleen’s son Brandon when he married her and both had changed their last name from Nakamura to Ho.
Brandon had asked if he could change his middle name to Tally, but both Harry and Arleen had refused. Brandon had turned nine the previous spring, a smart kid who had blossomed under Harry’s supervision.
“I went through a phase like that.” I flashed back to my childhood, drinking juice and flipping pogs with Harry.
Harry held up one of the pages to the light. “These look like church records to me.” He had been brought up in the First Chinese Church of Christ, though like me, he wasn’t big on organized religion. “We had an old book like this at my church, where they wrote all the births and deaths and baptisms.”
He found a big plastic magnifying screen, and laid it down over the first page. With the magnification we could make out the words “Opihi Baptist Church” on the top line, printed in a strong hand with ink that had remained dark. The rest of the lines were in a mix of cursive and print writing, from many different hands, and it hurt my eyes to look at them for too long.
A quick Internet search showed us the Opihi Baptist Church had been destroyed when the lava surrounded Opihi and Kalapana on the Big Island.
“Why would old church records be in the file on Kingdom of Hawai’i?” Ray asked.
“The book at my church tells you when people are born 256 Neil S. Plakcy
and died,” Harry said. “And who their parents are and their godparents and so on.”
“It’s like a family tree,” I said. “Telling us if Ezekiel really is descended from Kamehameha.”
; Harry said, “Let me play around with some image enhancement tools and see what I can do with these pages.”
“We need it ASAP, brah.”
“Hey, why not? Anything else you need while I’m working for you? Want me to pick up your laundry? Walk your dog?”
“I might take you up on the dog thing,” I said.
gAy foR PAy
Ray and I walked out to the Jeep. “Salinas is supposed to be back from court by now,” I said, looking at my watch. “Suppose we pay him a visit and see what he’s willing to share about Tanaka.”
We grabbed a quick lunch and got to the FBI office on Ala Moana just as Salinas was walking up to the front door. The sun was directly overhead and bounced off car windshields in harsh shards. I hailed Salinas and said, “Got a lot to talk to you about.”
“You can talk. I’ll listen.”
“Can you ask Tanaka about Dexter Trale?”
“Slow down, Kimo,” Ray said. “Say hello to the nice G-Man.
Hi, Francisco, how are you today?”
Salinas laughed. “I’m good, Ray. What’s new in the world of Honolulu homicide?”
He led us up to his office, chatting in the elevator about the weather and a new energy drink he’d found that gave you a boost without caffeine. He took us directly into a small conference room off the lobby, and I couldn’t help comparing the simple round, wooden table and metal chairs to the furnishings at Fields and Yamato. The walls were hung with government directives in plain frames instead of original landscapes of Honolulu and the North Shore.
“What can you tell us about Jun Tanaka?” I asked, when we were sitting.
“He’s the subject of an ongoing investigation.”
“Yeah, I got that part. Has your investigation turned up anything that ties him to any of our homicides—Edith Kapana, Stuart McKinney or Adam O’Malley? We have a witness who says he told Tanaka that O’Malley was having a meeting on his day off about KOH business. On Thursday afternoon, just a few hours before O’Malley was killed.”
258 Neil S. Plakcy
He shook his head. “None of those names has come up.”
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