For a Song

by Morales, Rodney;

  We shook hands. I stood next to him. We both faced the street.

  “How’s the crime beat?” That was mildly surprising. Thought he of all people would have known about my surreal departure from the Star-Gazette.

  “Done with that shit. I’m a PI now.”

  “Sma’t move. Private is da way to go, braddah.” He pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and waved it like a baton. “People jes’ hang on to their fucking guvament jobs fo’ da pension, fo’ da security. Dat shit is fo’ da birds.” He popped the toothpick back in.

  I didn’t want to tell him that newspaper jobs are private industry, and that if I’d had a government job, I’d be singing tweet, tweet.

  “What kine investigations you do?”

  “The usual. Trying to find lost children, tracking horny husbands. Horny wives.”

  “Chee, maybe you can track my wife. I know da bitch stay giving it to someone, ’cause she sure ain’t giving it to me.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re giving it to all those bargirls.”

  “Yeah, but dey no count.”

  “Tell your wife that.”

  “I did.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  “What answer?”

  Why she ain’t giving it to you, you dumb fuck. I turned toward him. “By the way, you got any scoops on Josiah Kamana?”

  “Da senatah?” Blood literally left his face.

  “Yeah. What’s his thing?”

  “Whachu mean?”

  “I heard he likes his girls young. I mean real young … and Oriental.”

  “Oh man. No, no. Not him. He not li’ dat.” Aaron was practically blushing.

  “Sorry. You know those fucking rumors. Especially in politics. So damn malicious.”

  “Dass why you no see me running for office.” We shared a good laugh over that thought. Then he threw his chewed up toothpick in the gutter, near the drain, and pulled out a new one from the pocket of his Charlie Sheen bowling shirt.

  “By the way, remember Lino Johnson?”

  He pointed downwards. “Killed on this very street. Cheez Louise, why you stay asking about him? And Kamana. Braddah, what you stay digging into?”

  “Lino’s daughter is missing.” I pulled out her picture. He squinted at it.

  “Shit. How one guy like him gon’ get one daughter that look li’ dat?”

  I myself couldn’t square her dazzling beauty with my memory of Lino Johnson’s heavily pockmarked face.

  “His wife’s genes, maybe?”

  “Well, you know him. Always getting into some lady’s jeans.”

  “I didn’t know him.” Didn’t make him for a womanizer either.

  “Chee, da daughta missing?”

  “About two and a half weeks now.”

  “Fuck … lemme ask around. See if anybody heard anything.”

  “By the way, those braddahs still around, Joe and Curtis?”

  “Why?” He lost his color again. “You tink dey know something?”

  “Doubt it. Jes’ wondering whatever happened to those guys. I no see ’em around anymore.”

  “Oh, they still around. Joe, he stay hangin’ aroun’ Waikiki Beach, doing his beach boy shit. I not sure about Curtis, though. Who da fuck knows what da buggah stay doing nowadays. Eh, I should tell you, uh, Joe, he kinda funny in da head. You know, like those PSTD veterans.”

  “PTSD?”

  “Yeah, post-stress, uh, … whatchamacall … He not da same. Ja’like one surfboard wen’ hit his head o’ something.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” I didn’t think a surfboard could do any damage to that old bull. A train, maybe.

  “Good guy, though.”

  “Thanks, man.” I shook his hand and slipped a nicely folded pair of twenties into his shirt pocket, adding in a conspiratorial whisper, “About the missing girl, jes’ ask people you trust. Don’t want the whole world to know jes’ yet. Know what I mean?”

  My saying that guaranteed that every other lowlife would know in a matter of hours. I had always suspected some link between Aaron and Kamana and his scummy associates. It was time to ruffle some feathers, and yet watch out so they don’t tear out mine.

  22

  ENTER THE SENATOR

  It was 6:45 in the evening when I met up with Mia at the Maunalua Bay parking lot, aka, Flats. Adjacent to the Hawaii-Kai and Portlock communities, Flats used to be a place where you’d bring your date to make out, stargaze, maybe score some drugs. That was back in the Dark Ages, before the city put in lights, covered the sand/dirt mix with asphalt, and added a boat-launching area and other accommodations, altering forever the ambiance of this convenient shoreline spot.

  The sun had just gone over Diamond Head in the far distance when she pulled up. It was a postcard sunset but not the one you think of when you think of Diamond Head. I took one last drag off of my cigarette and crushed it underfoot.

  I saw a Mini Cooper and got out of my car. It was Mia. “What you got for me?” I asked her when she stepped out of the Mini.

  Attached to the back of the copper Mini Cooper were two bikes, locked in tightly on a bike rack. It extended the tiny car by a good two feet. “I wanna show you something,” Mia unlocked the rubber straps and freed one of the bikes from this metal apparatus. She set this bike aside. It was a high-end road bike, something you had to break the bank to obtain. She then disengaged a second bike, a mountain bike. Then she removed two bottles from the bottle holder between the front seats and placed them in the bottle cages on the bikes. She rolled the mountain bike toward me.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Gonna show you something. Better if we ride there. On bikes.”

  “Why?”

  “So we’re less visible. And if getting some exercise is a by-product of this, hey, that’s even better.”

  “Will it help us find Kay? I can’t be wasting my time.”

  “Look—” She put her hands on her waist. “You think I would’ve asked you to come here if I didn’t have something to show you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you got a better idea, let’s have it. If you got other cases to solve, by all means, go. If you wanna find Kay—” It had already been a long day and I didn’t have a better place to be. I shrugged. “OK. Let’s try it your way.”

  Mia removed the bike rack, folded it up, opened the split rear barn doors, pulled out a pair of helmets from that well behind the back seat, then placed the rack in that same place. She handed me one of the helmets, saying it should fit, and put her own helmet on. Then she clicked the door lock button on her key.

  I used to do a lot of mountain biking, so I wasn’t going to be intimidated by this triathlete. Might even surprise her, I told myself.

  After a few minutes, I was paying for my arrogance. The headwind on Lunalilo Home Road was a force of nature. Worse, I could see a squall up ahead and I knew we were headed into rain. Worse even, Mia turned right into the steepest part of Hawai‘i Kai Drive. Oh shit. We were headed up the appropriately named “Heartbreak Hill.”

  I shifted to the easiest gear. It wasn’t too hard at first, and I gained a bit of confidence. But then it went on and on. And it began to drizzle. I had to keep going because you just don’t want to lose momentum on an uphill. Mia was pulling ahead, but slowed down when she saw me lagging.

  About halfway up I found a rhythm. The drizzle was working in my favor, keeping me cool. Plus, I remembered to slide far back on the seat so I could pump my legs harder. My quads were afire but I kept going. Then it got steeper. I tried shifting but there was no easier gear. I struggled to the top, standing on the pedals for the last stretch, the way those tour riders do.

  When I made it to the top it was oddly exhilarating. I stopped, grabbed the bottle Mia had placed on my bike, and took a few quick swallows. It tasted like watered down, fruit-punch-flavored Gatorade.

  It’s all downhill from here, I was thinking.

  Mia was thinking something else.

&nbs
p; “Let’s go a bit further up,” she said as she gazed at her watch, like there was a specific time to do something crazy like that.

  “We’re already at the top.”

  “No, we aren’t. We can go this way.” She got back on her bike, and after we rolled down the slight downhill for a hundred meters or so, Mia hung a left and then took another left and a right that led to an even steeper hill than the one we had been on. I had the temerity to follow.

  This was Kamehame Street. The slight rain had passed and I had to stand on the pedals just to move the bike forward. Exasperated, I finally hopped off.

  “It’s not that hard,” Mia said, riding circles around me, her ease with the bike in itself an ongoing taunt.

  “You’re fucking crazy. How’s this supposed to help me find Kay?” This was supposed to be a hot lead and here I was walking a bike up a hill. Never again, I kept muttering to myself.

  “Thought you wanted to get in shape.” Mia got up from her slender seat and slammed her well-defined legs to get over a very steep section. I kept walking the bike.

  “I am in shape,” I declared.

  “Well, if you can’t make it up here I can’t show you his house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Senator Kamana’s.”

  I stopped, flustered. “He lives in Pearl City. He represents the Pearl City district. If I wanted to look at houses—”

  “He has more than one house.”

  I said nothing. I wanted to say, let’s just get back to the cars and drive up and say hello but it was a pointless argument.

  “Follow me.” Mia was balancing on the bike by twisting the handlebars back and forth, a skill known as tracking. Quite different from my kind of tracking, where the goal is to get somewhere.

  I walked the bike until we got to a more level plane, then got back on. I stood up on the bike and put all my weight into the pedals and, amazingly, caught up with her.

  “Follow me.”

  “You gotta stop saying that.”

  Mia turned down a side street. It was mostly downhill. So I did follow.

  At the bottom she got off her bike and walked into a park with a sign that said Private—For Residents Only. Mia walked her bike past that sign, so I did the same. I followed her till we came to the edge of a cliff.

  “That’s his house.” She was pointing at a large, dimly lit dwelling built against a hill—carved into it, actually. It featured a long Ushaped driveway. If you drove from the house and followed that U-shaped road, you’d come to a newly paved main road, and if you drove along that road, you’d see the asphalt arteries that emanated from it. The land around it had been recently cleared. Signs of more development to come.

  “Kamana’s?”

  “Yep.”

  A few men were milling about. Younger, leaner looking ones wore white shirts and bow ties. A couple men, huge guys, were wearing aloha attire. “That’s quite a spread. What does it take to live like that?”

  “Note that there are no other houses around. Yet.” She looked straight at me. “Tell me, how did he get permission to build before anyone else?”

  “Good question. I don’t know the answer.”

  “Last year it was the cabins.”

  “Cabins?”

  “Yep. You see across the way, all that green?”

  I saw both landscaped green and rough terrain. “The golf course?”

  “Well, right above it, where there’s all those trees and wild growth, that’s where they wanna build them.”

  “Does this have something to do with Kamana?”

  “This has everything to do with Kamana. He’s a quiet partner in the hui that’s leveraging development on two huge parcels, Mau‘uwai and Queen’s Rise. They’re calling them cabins, even though they would actually be upscale townhouses.”

  “And why are they calling them cabins?”

  “To get around having the land rezoned. It’s preservation land.”

  “How do you know Kamana’s involved?”

  “Kay told me. She got suspicious when the hui’s representative turned out to be Chauncey Derego.”

  Derego, of the law firm, Derego, Dubin, Matsumura, & Jameson. “I’d be suspicious too.”

  “You know that Derego represented Bishop Estate when they tried to develop Ka ‘Iwi shoreline?”

  “I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that they lost, big time.”

  “Yeah, but now Derego’s firm has teamed up with Kaiser Development and they’re holding the City Council hostage with the threat of a hundred million dollar lawsuit.”

  “That’s a lotta nickels….”

  “Enough to sink a fleet of ships.”

  I thought about Ka ‘Iwi shoreline: spectacular scenery, rugged terrain, from Hanauma Bay to Blow Hole and then Sandy’s. Then more rugged coastline and then the field of large boulders, the excess from Kaiser’s dredging of the six thousand acres that became Hawai‘i Kai. From there the road veers northward and ascends till it crests at Makapu‘u. High, rugged cliffs on your left, turquoise ocean on your right, plus that heart-stopping view of the Windward Coast….

  Of course they’d want cabins.

  “Hello, hello,” Mia was saying, trying to get my attention. “Did you know that Ka ‘Iwi coast was once designated urban?” I’d forgotten that she was there.

  “Fuck no.”

  “Fuck yes, my dear private detective.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few years ago. That’s how I met Kay.”

  “Thought you met her in school.”

  “I used to see her at school. But didn’t really know her till we worked together. Last year, Kay, Matt, and I went to a neighborhood board meeting out here. Remember the Save Sandy Beach group?”

  “Yeah, of course. I still have my Save Sandy Beach t-shirt.” Buried in one of my boxes.

  “Well, there’s a new incarnation of that group, Livable Hawai‘i Kai. Farming was their big issue, initially.”

  “Farming?”

  “Yeah, back of the valley? Bishop Estate owns the land. They’ve been leasing to the farmers, like forever. Then all of a sudden they want to increase the lease amounts ten-fold.”

  “Ten-fold?”

  “Yeah. This is gonna drive out all the farmers and open the way for more development. The Livable Hawai‘i Kai Hui is working to stop all this.”

  “You mentioned a neighborhood board meeting.”

  “It involved the neighborhood board.” Mia laid her bike down and sat in the tall grass. I did the same, and as I sat I leaned back on my elbows. “It was a public hearing regarding the cabin proposal. This was at the Haha‘ione Elementary cafeteria. It was standing room only, and the only people who spoke in favor of the proposal were Derego and his people. They brought multi-panel displays, a slick video…. Every person from the community who testified spoke against it. Every neighborhood board member was against it.”

  “That’s good to hear. I mean, when is any community unanimous about anything?”

  “Well, Derego was trying to finesse the plan. He started talking about a golf academy. He said apprentice golfers would come for intensive training. He said the cabins, which we found out were not cabins, but resort condos, he said they would be the perfect place for them to stay.”

  “How perfect.”

  “Then he claimed that Queen’s Rise was not part of Ka ‘Iwi coast.”

  “Uh, how could he claim that?”

  “His claim was that it’s inland. He actually said that. He said, ‘How can it be coastal if it’s inland?’” It sounded like Mia was mimicking his voice.

  “That’s pretty clever.” I wondered where this was all going. Wondered why Mia had brought me here.

  “Right after Derego made his case, Kay got up and testified that Queen’s Rise was one of the most sacred places on the island. She gave everyone a lesson on Hawaiian mythology, talked about Kamapua‘a and Kapo-kohe-lele in relation to that area.”

  “That’s the whole Koko H
ead thing, right?” My own knowledge of Hawaiian mythology was superficial at best, but even I knew this story, which involved a detachable vagina as a lure, ostensibly to save Madame Pele from the ravenous pig god.

  “Yeah, and not many people in the audience seemed to know what she was talking about, but they were enthralled, either by what she was saying or by her presence. They gave her a standing ovation and by then you knew that the cabins weren’t gonna happen.”

  “So she put herself on display. Still, I don’t get how she’d register even a blip on Kamana, even if she’s citing legends about Superman pigs and flying vaginas.”

  “I don’t think she was on his radar then.”

  “And she is now?”

  “I have little doubt.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The film.”

  “I’m missing something here.”

  “OK. You see, since the public hearing last December, Kay began receiving a lot of attention because of her film. It won an audience award in Toronto. There were write-ups in the Tribune, The Weekly. I’m not saying Kamana read about her in the papers. How would I know what he reads? What I am saying is they met, face-to-face.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “It began with Kay and Matt looking for money for marketing and distribution. They were broke, maxed out on their credit cards, so they did what they had to do. They made contacts with people who knew people, went to private gatherings attended by the rich and famous, and they began to schmooze. One of the gatherings was at this very house.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was here with them.”

  “What happened here?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but a couple days after the party, Kay called me and she was simply ebullient.”

  “Ebullient.” Who uses that word?

  “She said they got the funding, and hinted that it had to do with whomever they talked with that night.”