For a Song

by Morales, Rodney;

  “Your friend not pau yet,” the taxi driver said as I got out, paid him, and added a decent tip.

  I didn’t even try entering Cinnabar earlier because I didn’t have my disco duds. On the other hand, I was quite appropriately dressed for this place.

  I gave Aaron a few minutes, then walked in. I ordered a drink and fended off a woman who offered me the world for a couple of Benjamins. I said no thanks. Aaron was ensconced in a corner booth. He sat with a woman who was all over him, her hands doing something under the table.

  His booth was the nearest to the restrooms and I had to take a piss. I figured it would be a good time to accidentally run into this dear acquaintance.

  Our eyes met. It took him a couple of seconds. He drew the toothpick out of his mouth with his left hand, and offered his right. I shook it.

  “Learn anything yet?” I asked him.

  “No, but I put da word out. No worry, brah. We gon’ find her.”

  “Hope Kamana and Blankenship not involved. Like with that girl in Tinian. Gotta hit the head.” I pointed at the door labeled KANE, which made me think of Amber, then I looked back at Aaron. He looked as if he had seen Lino’s ghost. Maybe he had.

  Game on.

  After I peed and scrubbed my hands, I exited the restroom and saw that he was no longer there.

  I got another cab and told the driver to take me back to the Sheraton. I needed to get my car.

  When the valet drove up with my nondescript vehicle, I tipped him well. He was the same guy who had delivered Aaron’s vehicle earlier.

  “You know that guy who left in the black Ford minivan,” I asked him, “’bout an hour ago? Hair dyed black and combed back?”

  He appeared to be confused. Had probably parked a hundred vehicles during his shift.

  “Wrinkled face. Jowls … toothpick in mouth?”

  “Oh, him. Yeah. He’s a regular. Shitty tipper.”

  “He’s an even shittier human being.”

  • • •

  It was almost 1:30 a.m. and my phone was going off. A restricted number. Though I wanted to get some sleep, I had to answer.

  “I had nothing to do with what happened, believe me.”

  “Amber?”

  “I am so … so sorry,” she managed between sobs.

  “Where are you? Let me—”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. It wasn’t, it wasn’t supposed to … turn out … that way.”

  Click.

  It had been way too long a day and I fought to stay awake during my five-minute drive home. I slept with my street clothes on, dreaming restless dreams involving guns and spinning wheels and Brenda and corridors in houses that I couldn’t place.

  36

  (Day 10—Wednesday, May 30)

  Whole Foods Arriving Next Year

  By Eloise Gomez

  elogo@star-tribune.net

  May 30, 2007

  It was announced yesterday that Whole Foods, the natural foods grocery chain, will be opening a store at the mall early next year. Val Morgan, spokesperson for the Texas-based supermarket chain, said that the store will take over the venue vacated by Star Market, an anchor tenant since the mall first opened in 1961. This fills the void that occurred when Times Supermarkets, Inc., which had bought up all the Star Markets on Oahu, chose to close the Kahala store. Other mall shops will be closing as well, to make room for a 26,000-square-foot facility, according to mall spokesperson Virginie Hsu.

  The Kahala Mall Whole Foods store will be the company’s second on Oahu. The other Whole Foods store will be the anchor tenant in the redeveloped Ward Village Shops in Kakaako.

  The company was first established….

  I stopped reading and folded the paper when Minerva arrived. It was a few minutes past 8 a.m.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “You too.”

  She looked at my coffee, and motioned that she was going to get some herself. I sipped the drink I had purchased from the mall’s Starbucks and watched her get in line. I could tell from the way her shoulders sank that she wasn’t holding up all too well. I didn’t know if she knew Gerard Plotkin and I wasn’t going to bring up his name unless she did.

  I was seated at one of the tables in the Kahala Mall’s center area, surrounded by stores and food establishments. She sat down across from me.

  “When we had the store here I always picked up one of these,” she said, indicating her cup. “What’s that?”

  “Caffè americano. Got hooked on the stuff.”

  We talked for a couple minutes about the article I had just read and the impact Whole Foods would have on the mall. Then she apologized for not telling me sooner about Sally being Lino’s sister and again explained that she did not see it as being relevant.

  I was waiting to hear about the song, the whole mystery behind it, the story she couldn’t, wouldn’t tell me over the phone. After Minerva took a sip from her cup, she looked around, as if to see if we were being watched, then proceeded with her tale.

  “When Lino and I first got together we were always checking out the music scene. We’d go to see Olomana, back when it was Jerry Santos and Robert Beaumont. Whenever Country Comfort played in Waikiki or anywhere townside, we’d be there. Same thing with Makaha Sons. Lino was friends with all those guys. He sometimes joined them on stage. When they’d come and sit with us the subject was always songwriting. Originals, they’d always say. We need originals…. More often than not it was about Lino writing songs for them. He sometimes brought tapes. Reel-to-reel. I’m sure some are still floating around somewhere, gathering dust.”

  When Minerva paused to sip her americano, I wondered where this was all going. I pulled out my notebook and a pen and began etching out doodles and notes as she spoke.

  “You know the song ‘Ku‘u Leialoha Pikake’?” she said.

  Yes, and I know it made your daughter cry, was my thought. What I said out loud was, “Who doesn’t? Aren’t there, like, thirty covers of that song?”

  “What a lot of people don’t realize is, back then, production was often sloppy and the packaging was sometimes terrible. For one thing, on a lot of albums there were no songwriting credits. None. Zero. This guy, Jerry Herblach….”

  A poker face comes in handy sometimes.

  Minerva went on to tell me that Jerry Herblach—of course, the same Jerry Herblach—had invested, back in the late seventies, in a portable four-track tape machine. A young malihini, fresh from New Jersey, he came to love Hawaiian music, so much so that he began to record performers at parties and impromptu backyard sessions, just so he could make his own cassette tapes and play them in his car. Then he had a vision. He took out a loan, and with the help of recording engineer Warren Ross, a guy he convinced to work for him for next to nothing, with the promise of later riches, riches he never delivered on, Herblach leased some retail space in Wahiawa and turned it into a recording studio. There he began producing songs for musicians eager to cut their songs on disks. One of the albums he co-produced, Na Pili Coasters Sing Live!, became his first big seller. Meaning it sold in the tens of thousands. Not much when you compare it to the really big stars, but it was something he could build on.

  Herblach got to know Lino quite well, Minerva explained. Back then he was always recording Lino when he played on the beach, as if he were an ethnomusicologist. While Herblach couldn’t play an instrument and could not sing to save his ass, he did have an ear for a good song. One day Herblach got his engineer to transcribe one of Lino’s songs. He showed the chart to Na Pili Coasters and played for them his recording of Lino singing it, and with Warren Ross’s help this all-girl band came up with their own arrangement and recorded it for their second album. It became the most popular song on the album. Then Mililani Onaga recorded the song, and it really took off. Her success spawned more recordings of the song.

  Back then Herblach never bothered with song credits, unless somebody came after him. And when that happened he’d offer to share royalties or cut some kind of dea
l. Because things were done this way, there was often some mystery as to who wrote certain songs.

  Some in the local music community were very wary. The Hawaiian Renaissance, which was in full swing by then, brought a more acute sensitivity to “doing things right.” With some songs, there was a genealogy as well as a sacredness attached, like “Sanoe,” written by Queen Liliu‘okalani, or Ellen Prendergast’s “Kaulana Na Pua.” Culturally speaking, it had become very important to give credit where credit was due. So even Herblach gave in to this new way of doing things. He began to make sure that the composer’s names were listed on any CDs released by his record company, Molten Lava Music.

  But Herblach, like many music producers back in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, was never averse to putting his own name on a song, if he could get away with it. They call this a cut-in. The most egregious example was “Ku‘u Leialoha Pikake,” which he claimed composer credit for. He had sent in the copyright form, the fee, and a cassette recording of the song to the Library of Congress, and he was the one collecting royalties. With his success in the industry he had enough money to purchase a bigger but rundown studio in Kaka‘ako and, again with Warren’s help, he turned it into a state-of-the-art recording facility. It became the go-to place in Hawai‘i if you wanted top-quality sound and top-quality engineering. After a few years, Herblach supposedly sold this studio for some major bucks and began to invest in film production.

  That’s when the past caught up with him. For years word had gone around among musicians that Lino had been screwed, that he had written the song that Herblach had built his career on. It had been easy to screw over Lino when he drank too much and hung out with the so-called criminal element, but this was a different Lino, a solid standing, sobered-up Lino.

  “He approached Herblach,” Minerva was telling me, “trying to be nice at first, asking for song credit, nothing more, and Herblach told him to get lost. But Lino was stubborn. He told Herblach he would take him to court….”

  Minerva stopped. Picked up her coffee cup, but didn’t drink. She just looked at it.

  “Hence the lawsuit against the ‘music impresario,’” I said, mostly to myself.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing. Go on.” I twirled the pen like a drumstick.

  “At this point, I learned later, Jerry started to write a check for five hundred bucks. Hmmph.” She reached for her coffee, then stopped. “Thought that would make Lino go away. But Lino told him, ‘no,’ told him he’d get a lawyer, if necessary, said he would claim ALL royalties derived from that song. He told Herblach it wasn’t about money. It was about pride, self-respect. He told him that he had written the song on the occasion of Caroline’s first birthday, and also in homage to Chick Daniels’ song, ‘Lei Aloha.’”

  “Almost the same title,” I said to Minerva. “I don’t know that song.”

  “Not too many people know it. Lino also told Jerry Herblach that there were kaonas in the song that he would never understand…. This was stuff Lino could have easily proven in a court of law. I found out, much later, that Herblach told him to go to hell. Of course he’d say that. He could afford the best lawyers. They could muddle up the proceedings, delay the matter forever. Lino didn’t stand a chance. But he wouldn’t back down. Someone told me that Lino, when he was in Herblach’s studio office, he pulled one of the guitars off of Jerry’s so-called ‘Wall of Fame’ and told him, ‘Play it. You say you wrote the fucking song, I wanna see you play it.’

  “Jerry couldn’t, of course. I don’t know, he might have learned to strum a few chords on the ‘ukulele over the years, but there was just no way he could play something as musically complex as ‘Ku‘u Leialoha Pikake.’ Later on, at Lino’s funeral, Barney Isaacs told me he was with Lino when he was working out the chord changes. He told me Lino had started with the first three notes from ‘Hawai‘i Aloha’ and then took the melody elsewhere, based around jazz chords—you know, major sevenths, diminished chords … Hawaiian jazz.

  “Anyway, after Lino’s confrontation with Jerry, weird things started happening.” Minerva reached for a napkin. “Lino came home one day, all beaten up. First he said he fell, but later admitted he had been worked over by guys he didn’t know. That’s when I told him, ‘Let’s leave, let’s just get out of here.’ And he got really pissed. He shouted at me, ‘This is my home! Hawai‘i’s my home! This is a fight I gotta finish.’ He turned to Joe Sperry for help, and from what I heard, Joe told him, ‘Can’t help you, brah.’

  “When he told me what Joe had said, I was like, What is going on? They were like best buds. I mean, who had the power to make a guy like Joe look the other way? Whoever had sicced these goons on him had a lot of power and wasn’t foolin’ around.”

  Minerva looked more and more frazzled as she relived those moments.

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, Lino started trying to undo what he had set in motion. Bad enough he was in danger. When it dawned on him that his family might be in danger, he backed off. He sent a note to Jerry—’cause by now, Jerry refused to meet with him in person—he sent a note saying he didn’t wanna sue, maybe they could make a money settlement or something.

  “That’s when he was shot dead.”

  Listening to all this, my coffee gone cold, I couldn’t help but think of Sal. Back when he was in Homicide, why did he stop pursuing the killer or killers? Or did he? We all made mistakes then, he told me the other night. Was he just following orders? The guy he worked with then, Lieutenant Tyler Froom, was promoted to captain and went on to head the Homicide division, and then was dispatched to form CIS. That’s the guy that Sal followed into what became a controversy-ridden unit, one where some of its members had become too cozy with the criminals they were purportedly after.

  I asked Minerva, after hearing the story, “You think any of what you just told me could have anything, anything at all to do with Kay going missing?”

  Her elbows were on the table, her hands clasped, as if in prayer. Then she raised her index fingers and pressed each side of her nose-bridge. She stayed quiet for a moment, then said, “I don’t know.” She shut her eyes.

  When she opened her eyes Minerva stared into her coffee cup. Then she looked at me and said, “There was a break-in.”

  “A break-in. Where?”

  “In the tiny apartment where Caroline and I lived. About a year after Lino died. They stole some cheap jewelry, a tennis racket, but it seemed the thieves were after something in Lino’s tape collection. His tapes were in boxes and I kept meaning to go through them. Anyway, when I came home one day—Caroline must have been in school—the cassette tapes were all over the place, both the store-bought ones and the ones with Lino’s rough demos. Back then I thought the burglars were looking for some juicy originals; you know, more songs to steal. Took me about a decade to realize they were actually looking to destroy a tape.”

  She looked at me, her eyes suddenly abrim with tears, and threw her hands halfway up.

  “Your americano must be cold.” I put down my pen, grabbed both our cups, and, after dumping the cooled liquid in the lined trash container, went to get refills. Thought I’d give her some time.

  When I returned with the two replenished cups I saw that she was dry-eyed. I said, “Drink.”

  She said, “How is it that a decade can seem to go by in a wink?” Then she drank.

  When she put her cup down I repeated her words, only as a question:

  “Destroy a tape?”

  “You know the guy Warren Ross?”

  “The engineer….”

  “Yeah, another guy Jerry had taken advantage of, the way he’s been taking advantage of people, like, forever. You see, Warren knew he was being screwed, and he definitely knew that Lino had been screwed. What I didn’t know until later, much later, was that Warren had secretly recorded some of his conversations with Herblach. And he had given an edited copy of his recording to Lino. I stumbled upon this tape one day; it was at the bottom of a box
we had in storage, mostly Lino’s things. I went and bought a microcassette player at Radio Shack and listened to it. It was chilling. First there was just rumblings, mechanical noise. I thought the tape was no good. And then I heard Warren’s voice, loud and clear, saying, When you gonna pay me, brah? Warren is saying this in, like, a joking way. And this other voice, which I came to understand was Herblach’s, responds with something like, Oh, the money’s tied up right now, but you’ll get a good return…. Then there’s some clicks and another conversation, where you hear Warren telling Herblach, Hey, why don’t you give Lino Johnson songwriting credit? His family could use the money. Herblach’s response is He didn’t get it copyrighted; I did. He didn’t get Na Pili Coasters to record it; I did. He keeps going on until Warren finally says, But the guy wrote the song. How about a shared credit? And Herblach says, You know how it is. Can’t happen.”

  “So this was a tape Warren had given to Lino?”

  “I assumed.”

  “And you’re saying he hid it, and it wasn’t among the tapes the burglars went through, and you just stumbled on it one day.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where is this tape now?”

  “Hmph.” The look in her eyes, combined with her smirk, suggested utter jadedness. “There was a second break-in. Soon after I had moved in with Stan. He called me over to look at a window he was cleaning and showed me the wood damage on one of the window frames, like it had been pried open. But then, nothing seemed to have been stolen.”

  “A burglary with nothing stolen. That’s one for the books.”

  “But I didn’t say that nothing was erased.”

  “O-o-oh, shit.”

  “One evening, Stan put in a VHS tape, a recording of some show he had taped earlier. There was nothing on the tape. One after another, we found nothing on our tapes. We still didn’t get it. But when I tried to play a cassette one day—I wanted Sally to hear her brother singing a song he may have written about her—that tape was blank. It was as if someone had run a super-magnet along all our tapes—” Minerva waved her open hands from left to right. “Everything analog, and—well, all gone.”