Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “That’s right, I haven’t seen him,” I said, and the lie made me wince a little. I hoped Akoni would just think it was the sun streaming in through the branches of the high trees. “That’s why I don’t have any preconceived ideas. Just because the guy was found behind a gay bar doesn’t make it a gay bashing.”

  Akoni looked at his notes. “Spider tattoo between thumb and forefinger of his right hand indicates possible tong connection.”

  “Tong connection,” I said. “Interesting. Wonder who owns this place.” I wiped my forehead again. It was going to be a bad day if it wasn’t even eight o’clock and I was sweating already.

  We saw the techs begin to pack up their gear and walked over to them. They’d picked up a few things but nothing looked that relevant. Larry Solas, the head tech, said, “Trail of blood leads back to that back door there. Seems pretty clear he got whacked just outside the door, then dragged out to the street. There’s a lot of crap out here, but not much of it seems relevant. We’re done.”

  I looked at Akoni and he shrugged. It wasn’t practical to leave the alley blocked off all day; there was already a line of trucks waiting to make deliveries. A clutch of drivers stood together on a shady corner across Kuhio Avenue, drinking coffee and grumbling about us. We pulled the crime scene tape down, though we isolated the small corner where the body had been found with cones and more tape.

  Dispatch was busy with a massive accident on the H1 at the Pali Highway exit, and we had to wait a few minutes for the radio chatter to subside before we could convey our status. We let Saunders and the other uniforms go.

  The drivers went back to their trucks and gunned their engines, and Akoni and I headed back to the station. We worked out of the Waikiki substation on Kalakaua Avenue, right in the heart of Waikiki, and ordinarily we would have walked back. But Akoni had driven in from home direct to the club, and his car, a Ford Taurus, was illegally parked down the block. It took us just as much time to drive to the garage where he parks as walking would have taken, between the slow lights and the even slower tourists. Waikiki is a small place, roughly one and a half miles long and a half-mile wide, and close to 25,000 people live here. Of course, there are also 34,000 hotel and condo rooms, and they are occupied close to 85% year-round. That means an average of 65,000 extra people crammed in on any given day. No wonder traffic’s so bad.

  We got into the office just after nine and started filling out the paperwork. Akoni called Mealoha and apologized again, then covered his mouth and whispered something to her. I snickered, just on general principles, and he glared at me. Sitting at my desk, which faced out toward Kalakaua Avenue, filling out forms, I could almost forget I had any personal involvement in this case. Almost.

  Kalakaua was swarming with tourists on their way to the beach. Honeymooners holding hands, elderly people walking with slow, arthritic gaits, busloads of Japanese tourists carrying Gucci shopping bags and talking fast. In the middle of them all were people handing out flyers for time-shares and restaurants with early bird specials. I called the medical examiner’s office on Iwilei Road, near the Dole cannery, and found that the autopsy was slated for two o’clock. “Just after lunch,” I said to Alice Kanamura, the receptionist there. “You guys schedule them deliberately like that?”

  “We got lots of sickness bags, you need,” Alice said. “I’ll put one aside with your name on it.”

  She was laughing merrily when she hung up. I guess you get your laughs where you can when you work for the coroner.

  There were no witnesses to interview, yet. Dispatch faxed us a transcript of the call I’d made, which did us no good. The 911 operators have a computer-assisted dispatch system now, which transmits emergency information direct to the radio dispatcher. The computer shows the address any 911 call is made from, along with the phone number and subscriber name. That way, in case somebody’s in trouble and can only dial the number, the police have a way to trace the call.

  On a whim, I dialed Motor Vehicles on my computer and checked registrations for a black Jeep Cherokee. There were thousands. I quickly disconnected when I saw Akoni coming over to my desk.

  “We got nothing on this case, you know?” he asked. “Nothing.”

  “We’ll have more this afternoon,” I said. “Let’s get the reports finished on yesterday before we get buried in this one.”

  We spent the rest of the morning writing our reports on the failed drug bust. Neither Pedro nor Luz Maria were registered at the colleges they pretended to attend, and Luz Maria had a drug related rap sheet as long as her sleek black ponytail. We didn’t find any priors on Pedro, but that could have meant he’d been more careful, or maybe he’d given us a false ID. They’d been held downtown overnight and released when there was no physical evidence to tie them to any crime.

  At 12:30 we walked up the block for a lunch of saimin, Japanese noodles in a broth flavored with chicken or beef. “Good choice, brah,” Akoni said as he slurped his from a paper bowl. “Easy going down, easy coming back up if the autopsy a bad one.”

  The noodle shop was tucked into a corner of a building on a side street just makai of Kuhio Avenue, and we stayed back against the building to take advantage of the meager shade. In Honolulu, we don’t use north, east, south and west. We say something is mauka, meaning toward the mountains, or makai, meaning toward the sea. That’s roughly north and south. West is Ewa, pronounced like Eva Gabor, after a town beyond the airport. The other direction, toward Diamond Head, we simply call Diamond Head.

  The sun was high in the sky and the shadows of the palm trees were nearly symmetrical around their bases. There was a light trade wind, though, so out of the direct sun the temperature wasn’t too bad. Around us swirled the constant parade of tourists, beachgoers and store workers who make up the daily population of Waikiki, including a tall Hawaiian guy in a red feathered cape and traditional curved headdress, passing out flyers for Hawaiian heritage jewelry. A rainbow covey of tiny kids, each wearing construction-paper name tags and holding hands in pairs and threes, passed us on their way to the IMAX theater, chirping and laughing.

  “You want to go back to your place for your truck or take my car?” Akoni asked. Detectives drive their own cars in Honolulu, though we get an allowance from the department to help subsidize the cost. The department has to approve our choice of vehicles, and requires certain minimum standards—size of engine, ability to install a radio and so on. My truck was a hand-me-down from my father, and its black paint was pitted with dings and dents and the effects of salt water. The back windshield was cluttered with surf decals and the back end sagged a little, but I could carry as many surfers and their boards as I wanted, and it was comfortable and didn’t cost much to run.

  Something about Akoni’s comment stung me, and it took me a minute to register why. I wondered how long I would associate going back to my apartment with running away from my troubles. I said, “We can take yours.”

  Medical-Legal Autopsy

  There are a couple of reasons why detectives witness autopsies. Often evidence, such as bullets embedded in a victim, is removed during the autopsy and transferred to police custody. The detective’s presence makes the chain of possession simpler. Going to the autopsy yourself means you find out the results much quicker than if you had to wait for the formal report. And most important, if you go to the autopsy, and force yourself to pay attention, you may find out information you didn’t even know you needed.

  At the autopsy of an elderly woman who had been strangled while visiting Honolulu on vacation, the medical examiner, Doc Takayama, had mentioned she showed signs of high blood pressure and undoubtedly had taken medication to control it. I wrote that down, and later that day, going through her hotel room one last time, I’d looked for her medication. Hadn’t found it.

  A check with her son on the mainland, and her doctor, revealed that she took Prinivil, a blood pressure regulator, and wouldn’t spend a night without it. I filed that information under “unsolved mysteries” until a couple
of days later when an elderly man showed up at the station asking questions about her. He wanted to know how to contact her next of kin about money she owed him. I was suspicious enough of him to get a search warrant, and surprisingly, found her Prinivil in his medicine cabinet. He admitted romancing her, and finally killing her.

  Akoni and I took Ala Wai Boulevard to the Ewa end of Waikiki, then connected to Ala Moana Boulevard, which took us past the mall and finally connected to Nimitz Highway, sliding us into the flow of traffic along the edge of downtown. Past the Aloha Tower Marketplace and Chinatown, over Nu‘uanu Stream, and into the more industrial district that surrounds the airport. The medical examiner’s office is on Iwilei Road, just off Nimitz, in a two-story concrete building with a slight roof overhang. The paint on the building is peeling and the landscaping is overgrown—after all, the dead don’t vote. The building is between the Salvation Army and a homeless center—something I always thought was an ironic comment, but maybe was intended as an object lesson to those less fortunate. You never know what the city fathers are really thinking, after all.

  We pulled into the small parking area in the center of the building, and walked in the glass block entrance, where Alice Kanamura greeted us with a renewed offer of sickness bags. “I’ll get back to you on that,” I said. “Doc ready for us?”

  She buzzed him. “He’ll be right down.” Doc Takayama was the Medical Examiner for Honolulu City and County, though he looked barely old enough to have graduated medical school. He was a kind of whiz kid, graduated in record time from the U of H, and he told me once he went into pathology because he didn’t have to worry if the patients would trust him. He came into the vestibule to meet us, patting down the pockets of his white coat for his tape recorder.

  “Good, I’m glad you’re here. We can get started.”

  We followed him up the stairs to a white-tiled room where we all put on surgical scrubs, paper booties over our shoes, and paper shower caps. You can’t be too careful today, especially with an unidentified corpse. The scent of formaldehyde and death wafted around us, but Doc Takayama was oblivious to it.

  We walked beyond the white room into another, where the body was laid out on a metal table, ready for the medical-legal autopsy. That’s a special kind of exam, ordered by the authorities in the case of deaths which may have legal implications. Suspicious deaths, like murders and suicides, or unexpected sudden deaths without clear causes.

  Doc’s assistant, Marilyn Tseng, was taking photographs. On the wall beyond us, against lights, were a set of x-rays of the guy’s head. From where I stood, I could see a bloody matted place on the back of the head, where he’d been hit. I hadn’t seen that the night before—it was the side that had rested against the ground.

  The guy looked paler than he had the last time I’d seen him. Then, it was probably only an hour or less after he’d been killed, and the skin on his face had been waxy and blue-gray. His lips and nails had seemed pale in the limited light available to me then. He was still pale, though where the blood had settled at the back of his neck I could see a lot of post-mortem lividity.

  “The body is that of an Asian male approximately forty-five years of age,” Doc began narrating into his tape recorder. “Black hair and brown eyes. The body shows signs of good nourishment and care, is seventy inches long and weighs 165 pounds. Death was pronounced at 2:55 this morning by an emergency medical technician. Preliminary finding, based on initial examination of the body and x-rays of the skull, is that death occurred due to blunt trauma of the head.”

  He clicked off the recorder. “Take a good look before we undress him, boys.”

  Akoni and I looked. It wasn’t so bad yet, before they cut him open. He could have been sleeping, except for his pale color and that matted wound on his head.

  “It’s clear he was killed up by the door to the office,” Doc said. “The techs found blood spattered around him for as much as a meter. Head wounds are real bleeders.”

  Doc Takayama dictated a few more things about the general condition of the body and then Marilyn turned the lights off and began surveying the corpse with some kind of black light device. That went on for a while, as she and the doc took fibers off the guy with tweezers, rolling him over to do his back as well. They’d be examined, and then matched against the fibers found in the alley.

  Finally, the doc was content. Marilyn turned the lights back on and started cutting off the guy’s clothes. “From the condition of the body and the head wound I’d say he was killed almost immediately before he was found,” Doc said.

  Marilyn continued putting the pieces of the guy’s clothes into larger plastic bags, labeling everything carefully. He was wearing a heavy gold chain around his neck, expensive shoes and good quality clothing. He would be missed, eventually, and then we would know who he was. That was the first step in figuring out who killed him.

  We stood and watched as the doc and Marilyn worked. The only identifying mark on the body was the spidery tattoo on his right hand, and we knew that meant he was somehow connected with a tong. They’d already taken dental x-rays, which we could use to confirm identity if we couldn’t find someone who knew him. “Any news from missing persons?” Doc asked as he worked.

  I shook my head. “You know the drill. No one is really missing unless he’s been missing twenty-four hours.”

  Doc fingerprinted the guy, rolling the tips carefully across the pad just as we’d been taught to do with live subjects, and put aside the prints. We’d run them through our computer, and with luck we’d find a match, because based on the tattoo he was likely involved in something illicit. There are also a few reasons why law-abiding citizens have their prints on file; for example, some states required fingerprinting for licensing, and once in a while you’ll find a match with a real estate broker or stock dealer.

  Doc carefully examined the guy’s fingernails and hands, looking for any signs he might have grappled with his assailant. Often they can find microscopic elements under the fingernails which could lead to the killer, but in this case it was pretty obvious to all of us that the guy had been hit from behind and hadn’t had a chance to fight. Doc made a detailed record of the condition of the body, noting a small mole on the chin and a tiny scar on the left ring finger. It made me wonder if the guy had been married, because I’ve seen men who wear wedding rings cut themselves when their rings get caught on something

  The room went dark again for a while as Marilyn shone a light all over the guy’s body. “Since he was dragged down the alley, we may get lucky and find some fingerprints on him,” Doc said. “This scope helps us find them.”

  Akoni nudged me. “How you holding up, man?”

  “Okay. You?”

  “I’ve felt better.”

  When we turned back, they were lifting prints from his skin. “Not much luck,” Doc said. “We might get a good one from his hand. And there’s a nice clean one up by his neck. Somebody taking his pulse, probably.”

  Marilyn turned the lights back on. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I chalked it up to my general discomfort level. While Doc and Marilyn made the Y-incision down the guy’s body, Akoni and I stepped back. I had seen this before and it wasn’t pretty. Since the guy had died of a head trauma, I didn’t think there was much his insides could tell us, and I didn’t really want to lose my saimin if I could help it. Akoni was already looking pretty pale.

  Doc cut the poor guy open and removed his internal organs, weighing them and remarking on them. “Too much fatty foods,” he said at one point. “That can kill you.”

  Akoni and I looked at each other. I waited until the sound of the saw had stopped before I turned back. That’s always the worst part to me, cutting the top of the head off and removing the brain. “You want to see the blood vessels?” Doc asked.

  “We’ll take your word for it, Doc,” I said.

  “Death definitely occurred as a result of blunt trauma to the head. Almost instantaneous. Probably no more than an
hour before he was found. Maybe even less.”

  Doc promised to fax over a final report within twenty-four hours. We collected our evidence and went down to the car.

  “Well, I can’t say we know much more than we knew when we went in there,” I said. “He confirmed what we thought, though.”

  “That still doesn’t give us much of a place to start,” Akoni said.

  “Well, we’ve got a guy with tong connections, and he was killed outside a gay bar. Tongs own any of those bars, you know?”

  Akoni shook his head. “No clue.” I handed the evidence bag to him so I could fish out my keys, and the zipper lock popped open, the guy’s gold neck chain spilling out. Akoni reached for it. “Hey, careful, we don’t want your fingerprints on it, too,” I said.

  Then it hit me. Fingerprints. There was a clean print on the guy’s neck, where somebody had tried to take his pulse. Suddenly it felt like I hadn’t eaten in days, a big hollow place in my stomach. I knew whose fingerprint it was. Mine.

  Incident at the Makai Market

  We parked Akoni’s car and walked back toward the station. On the way, we passed the Makai Market, the food court. The time I had been avoiding couldn’t be put off any more. I knew I needed to tell Akoni everything. He deserved it; after all, it was his investigation too. “You want a coffee?” I asked. “I could use one.”

  I chose a table for us at the edge of the traffic, private enough so no one would overhear us. The food court was shaped like an L, with one end open to the covered parking lot. Little birds flew in, swooped around the rafters, and pecked for crumbs on the tile floor. Like in much of Hawai’i, there was a strong contrast between light and shadow—it’s bright in the area under the skylight, but dark in the corners. I wanted to be in the dark.

  We sat down with our coffees. Akoni put cream and sugar in his. I just stirred mine for a while until it cooled off. With Akoni, it had always been an us versus them thing, and we were the good guys, the mainstream, the keepers of the peace and the representatives of the population at large. I was about to cross over from us to them, and I wasn’t sure how he was going to take it.