Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Nothing was damning, but Al was a good detective. He’d been assembling small clues for a while. “Anything else?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t let me talk to Vice. Got all angry. Said he’d handle it. Like he didn’t trust me. That’s not like the old Kevin. Jesus, I was best man at his wedding.”

  “You talk to Vice anyway?”

  He looked down at the table. “Nope. I didn’t want them to get suspicious. I was thinking maybe you could.”

  “Al, I’m undercover. Nobody’s supposed to know I’m working these cases. Not even you guys, until a couple days ago.”

  His head popped up suddenly. “You think Sampson suspected something?”

  I shrugged. “I know he was suspicious that you guys couldn’t come up with anything. Not surprising if it turns out Kevin was hiding stuff.”

  “What can we do?” Al asked.

  The waitress appeared with our burgers. “We can eat,” I said.

  We ate in silence, and then finally I said, “I got called down to headquarters tomorrow for a meeting with Sampson.”

  Fear immediately jumped into Al’s eyes. “You think he knows something?”

  I shook my head. “I had the same suspicions about The Next Wave that you did, only I tried to ignore them because I know the guy who owns the place. We used to surf together years ago.” I figured that was all Al Kawamoto really needed to know about my relationship with Dario. “I finally emailed Sampson what I was thinking.” I took a drink of my beer. “Plus somebody shot at me yesterday at Pipeline.”

  “Jesus!” Al dropped his fork on the laminated table.

  “Probably wasn’t him shooting at me,” I said. “I’m sure he could use thunderbolts or a plague of frogs or something. I found a couple of shell casings on the beach; I’m taking them with me.”

  “Are you going to tell Sampson about Kevin?”

  “What do you want me to do? He’s your partner.”

  Al didn’t say anything for a while. I could only imagine how he was feeling; a partnership is like a marriage in many ways, and you cover for each other, you support each other… but that only goes so far, and I could see Al knew it.

  “You gotta tell him.” He reached down to the floor and picked up a briefcase he’d brought in with him. Opening it, he pulled out a file folder. “Copies of everything we found. You can read between the lines, you’ll see what Kevin didn’t want to follow up. You can point that out to Sampson.”

  That must have been hard for him, photocopying that file on Sunday afternoon, knowing exactly what he was going to have to do with it. I was starting to feel sorry for Al—and I hate it when somebody I don’t like starts to get me on his side.

  We finished dinner, and Al picked up the check. “No arguments,” he said.

  “All right.” I took the file back home with me to Cane Landing and read it over, and then read it through a second time, taking notes. I already knew almost everything in it; what I was interested in was what Ruiz knew when, and what he chose to ignore.

  It was almost eleven when I closed the folder and went to sleep.

  Road Trip

  By the time I got out of the shower the next morning, the sun was up, and the air was bright and fresh. Perfect surfing weather, and the North Shore beaches were still unusually empty. A siren song, but I had to ignore it.

  Traffic picked up when I connected to the H2 around Wheeler Army Field. At least it kept moving, and I made it to police headquarters on South Beretania Street in downtown Honolulu with a few minutes to spare.

  As I sat for a minute in my truck with the radio playing the Hapa version of the Hawaii Five-O theme, I couldn’t help remembering the last time I had been to headquarters, almost a month before. At the time I’d been nervous, reporting to a new boss for a new job. I’d had no idea that the job would be undercover, and that I’d be immediately plunged into such a difficult case.

  I fed the meter and walked up to the front door, past the memorial to officers killed in the line of duty. It was a place I never wanted to see a familiar name, but I stopped, like I often do, to scan it, letting all that sacrifice sink in. Another cop bumped into me as I turned to go in, and he started to excuse himself, but stopped when he saw who I was.

  I didn’t recognize him, but I smiled and said, “Sorry.” He bowed his head a bit and continued inside without saying a word. The aide at the metal detector was joking with everyone who came in, but didn’t say a word to me. Everywhere I went, it seemed like people stopped talking as I approached. I’m sure it was just my paranoia, though I worried what it would be like to deal with people like that every day, if I ever solved this case and got off the North Shore, and returned to work at headquarters.

  Sampson had somebody in his office with the door closed, so I had to hang around outside waiting for him to finish. I saw a couple of detectives I knew and said hello, and they were all pleasant enough. Still, I felt very conspicuous standing out there, and was glad when Sampson opened the door. I was quite surprised, though, to see my old boss from Waikiki, Lieutenant Yumuri, come out.

  He was just as surprised to see me. “Lieutenant,” I said, nodding.

  “Kanapa’aka.” He turned back to Sampson. “I’ll call you later,” he said, and walked past me.

  “Come on in, Kimo,” Sampson said. I wanted to ask him what Yumuri had been doing there, but I reminded myself the world didn’t revolve around me, and they probably had some other business. Still, the reception I’d gotten downstairs, and seeing Yumuri again, didn’t put me in the best mood.

  I sat down across from Sampson, noticing again the crowd of personal photographs on his desk, the miniature cannon on the shelf above. “Sounds like you’re getting close,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “But I want you to be careful. I don’t like the idea of anybody shooting at my detectives.”

  “I’m not that fond of it myself.” I pulled out the folder Al Kawamoto had given me, and explained how I’d gotten hold of it.

  A shadow passed over Sampson’s face. “I was afraid of something like this. Let me take look.”

  I handed him the folder and he skimmed through it. While I waited, I thought about what it would be like to work at headquarters, to report to Sampson on a daily basis. I liked him and thought I could work for him, but the rest of the force… I wasn’t so sure.

  Could I work in an environment where people didn’t like me, where they talked behind my back and went silent when I walked in the room? Maybe the force wasn’t the right place for me after all. I could move to the mainland, become a cop in a place like LA. Or I could stay in Honolulu and become a private eye.

  What would that be like, I wondered. How would I get clients? Would I be stuck on the sleazy underbelly of the law, chasing deadbeat dads, photographing illicit trysts?

  “What’s your take on all this?” Sampson asked, startling me out of my reverie.

  I’d been thinking all the way from Hale’iwa to Honolulu about how I’d answer that very question. “I like Kevin Ruiz,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “He seems like a stand-up guy. And after what I’ve been through myself, I hesitate to put the finger on anyone, to make them go through what I did. But I have to listen to my gut, and to his own partner. I think he merits some investigation. His case leads the same place mine does—to The Next Wave. He wouldn’t follow that lead, and when you couple that with Al Kawamoto’s suspicion that Kevin might be using himself, you’ve got a bad situation.”

  “I’ll have to read this over carefully,” he said, closing the folder.

  “Somebody has to talk to Vice. I told Al Kawamoto I thought that had to be him. We have to know what they have on The Next Wave. They may have their own investigation going, and we don’t want to step into it.”

  I handed him a plastic bag holding the shell casings I found at the beach. “Can you send these downstairs to the SIS lab and see if they can match the markings to the gun that shot Mike Pratt and Lucie Zamora?”

  He nodded. “And I’l
l get hold of Al and make sure he knows I’m behind him.” He made a note on his Palm Pilot. “I want you to keep a low profile for the next couple of days.” He motioned to the folder on his desk. “Let me get this stuff squared away, and let’s try not to give this shooter the chance to take any more pot shots, for your sake and for the sake of the general population on the North Shore.” He looked up at me. “Anything you think you can do?”

  “Go surfing?”

  “Hold off a day or so,” he said. “Go back to your own apartment. Check with me tomorrow morning.”

  It was strange to pull up in my own parking lot, walk up the outside steps to my own little studio apartment. My whole place would have fit into the living room of the house Ari was lending to me, but it was home, and I was glad to see it. The place had a musty, closed-in smell, and I opened the windows and turned on the fan to air it out.

  I hadn’t been home for more than a few minutes when my cell phone rang. It was Harry, with a plan for the evening. He would pick me up around six, we’d get some take out Chinese and a six pack of beer, and head to Terri’s house in Wailupe. I’d get to see her son, Danny, who was still traumatized from his father’s death, and then the three of us could hang out and talk.

  I made one change in the plan. I had to swing past my parents’ house late in the afternoon, to see them, so I said I’d get the beer, and leave Harry in charge of take out, meeting him out at Terri’s house.

  Due to the way the buildings stack up between me and the beach, I’ve got a decent view of the ocean from the big picture window in my living room, and after I hung up on Harry I walked over and looked out toward the Pacific.

  A lot had happened to me during the past couple of months, and I hadn’t had much time to process it. Watching the surf dash itself against the shore gave me a minute to stop and think. The pace of my life seemed to have accelerated lately; I had moved much farther in the last few weeks, in many ways, than I had in several of the years before. It was enough to make a guy dizzy.

  I imagined running into a friend who’d been off island for a couple of months. “Hey, what’s new, Kimo,” he’d say.

  “Well, I caught a really tough case and nearly got killed solving it,” I’d say. “Came out of the closet, nearly lost my job, saw my life splashed all over the media, fought with my brothers and my parents, saw a friend die and killed a man myself, went undercover and had to be nice to a guy who basically raped me ten years ago. I’ve been pretty busy.”

  It was a wonder I hadn’t started knocking back shots, or popping pills or smoking Maui Wowie. I stared at the water for a while, trying to think of what else I had to do. I had my laptop with me, so I plugged it in, got online, and looked for information on The Next Wave. There had been a few police reports to the property, including the time Rich Sarkissian punched out that customer, but nothing in the police system about drug connections there.

  I read about the store’s involvement in the community, sponsoring a softball team, collecting funds for an injured surfer, and donating merchandise for charity auctions and raffles. Dario had been a good citizen. I read about Ari and his meetings before the zoning boards. Finally, around noon, I ran out of research. It reminded me of a page Harry Ho had referred to me to once. It read “You have reached the end of the Internet. Go out and have a life.”

  So I went surfing. I didn’t want to go to Kuhio Beach Park because of its proximity to the Waikiki station, so I drove out to Black Point. I surfed for a couple of hours, trying to clear my head enough so that everything about the case would come together—but I didn’t have much luck. Eventually I gave up, went home, showered, changed, and drove up to my parents’ house.

  My mother did not kiss or hug me when she opened the door, before I had a chance to fish out a key or even ring the bell. “Tell your father he is a silly old man with a heart condition,” she demanded.

  “No.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Nice to see you, mother.”

  “Maybe he’ll listen to you, since he won’t listen to me.”

  “Quiet, old woman,” my father said. He enveloped me in a big bear hug. “You’ve been gone too long, Keechee.”

  My father has nicknames for all three of us boys. Lui is Lulu, Haoa is Howgow, and I’m Keechee. Unless he’s angry, in which case I’m James Kimo Kanapa’aka, my full legal name. Each of us has an English first name and a Hawaiian middle name, because until 1962 it wasn’t legal to give a child a Hawaiian first name. Paperwork is complicated in my family, as you can imagine.

  “Tell your son what you did today, Al,” my mother said. We were standing in the foyer of our house, a modified ranch with a single story set on a sloping piece of land.

  “Can we go into the living room?” I asked. “Or at least the kitchen?”

  “Your mother’s a little upset,” my father said.

  “Duh. I got that part. Why?”

  “I told you I didn’t want to tell Kimo about it, Lokelani. But you insisted.” My mother’s name means Heavenly Rose, and at the moment she was definitely showing her thorns.

  “Tell me about what? Will you two stop arguing long enough to let me in?”

  “A man at the doctor’s office said a bad thing about you,” my father said. “So I hit him.”

  I put my head in my hands. “Ai yi yi,” I said. “Did he call the police?”

  “He wasn’t really hurt,” my mother said. “The nurse took him into the examining room, cleaned him up and put a bandage on him. She was very nice. She put us into another room right away.”

  “Probably to keep Dad from beating up the rest of the patients.” I turned to him. “Don’t I remember you saying, ‘Violence is the never the answer’ when one of us wanted to beat somebody up?”

  “I was wrong. Violence is the answer sometimes.”

  “Did they take your blood pressure at the doctor’s office?”

  “Two hundred over one-twenty!” my mother trumpeted. “We have to go back again tomorrow for another reading, but your father had to promise the nurse he wouldn’t hit anyone else.”

  I sat down on the sofa. “This is all my fault. I should move to the mainland. I heard the LAPD is hiring.”

  “No!” my parents both chorused at the same time.

  “No one is chasing you away from your home,” my father said. “Not while I’m your father.”

  “Dad, give it a rest,” I said. “You’re sixty-three years old, you have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. If I hear about you punching anybody else, whether you’re sticking up for me or Lui or Haoa or some neighbor down the street, I’m going to call in favors and get you locked up. You understand me?”

  “See?” my mother said. “Your son talks sense. You should listen to him.”

  The whole encounter was surreal. Usually my mother rules our household with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. My father might raise his voice occasionally, but all it takes is a look from my mother and he turns into a penitent schoolboy. Now, though, he was looking sullen and openly defiant. “Don’t make me call my brothers,” I said. “You don’t want all three of us ganging up on you.”

  “I’m your father. I have to protect you.”

  “No you don’t. I’m younger than you are and stronger than you are. I have self-defense training and weapons training, and I know a little kung fu. If you really want to protect me, you’ll take care of yourself and protect me from ever having to bail you out of jail or visit you in the emergency room.”

  “How about some lemonade?” my mother asked, satisfied now that my father had been suitably chastened.

  “One glass,” I said. “I can’t stay long, but I couldn’t come to town without seeing you.”

  When my mother went into the kitchen, I leaned over and kissed my father’s grizzled cheek. “Thank you for standing up for me.”

  “You’re my boy.”

  My mother came out with the lemonade, and I knew I had to tell them. It wasn’t fair to keep them in the dark any longer. “I have a
confession to make,” I said, running my finger through the condensation on the side of my glass. “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

  I saw my parents exchange a look. I could only imagine what fresh horrors they were imagining. “Dad, remember when I told you Lieutenant Sampson wanted me to do something for him, something that would make me lie?”

  My father nodded. “I did it. I lied.” I took a deep breath. “I lied to you both. I never left the police. I’ve been working undercover on the North Shore, trying to solve a series of homicides.”

  “The surfers who were killed?” my father asked.

  “Yes. Sampson didn’t want me to tell you, because he didn’t trust Lui. He was afraid that if you knew I was still a cop, eventually you would tell Lui, and he would make news out of it.”

  My mother opened her mouth to protest, but stopped herself. I guess she knows her oldest son well. “I think the case is going to break open soon, and my cover will be blown. I wanted you to know before that happens.”

  “I knew it!” my father trumpeted. “I knew you wouldn’t quit.”

  “What your father means is that we both know how much being a detective means to you,” my mother said. “What will happen when this case is solved?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll probably go back to headquarters, though I know there are people there who don’t like me.”

  “Which people?” my father demanded.

  “You don’t need to go down there and start smacking people around, Dad, though I appreciate the thought. Whatever happens, I’ll work it out.”

  “I don’t like what’s happening here,” my mother said. “You lying to us to keep information from your brother. We are family, Kimo. You must remember that. When the police suspended you, who was on your side? Your family.”

  An acid taste began creeping up my throat from my stomach. “I know, Mom, and I appreciate it.”

  “Do we have to prove something to you, Kimo? How do we know when to believe you now?”

  “We accept what he tells us,” my father said. “Kimo is a grown man, with his own secrets. He is not a child who has to answer to his parents.”