Mahu Blood (7 page)

Why did Aunty Edith have his business card? Was she a defendant in a law suit, or a plaintiff? Perhaps O’Malley had written her will or was handling some property transfer. I slid the card into my pocket.

Ray called for a crime scene tech. With luck, the burglar had left behind a fingerprint that might give us a lead on Aunty Edith’s killer. Leelee came by to check on us while we waited, the baby still crying. Ray said, “You need a hand changing him?”

Leelee looked at him like he was crazy. Ray put his fingers up and squeezed his nose, and Leelee said, “Oh.”

“I did a lot of babysitting as a kid,” he said. “Come on, show
52 Neil S. Plakcy

me the diapers.”

“Better you than me, brah,” I said under my breath, as Leelee led Ray back to her part of the house. Ryan Kainoa, a vampire-pale crime scene tech with long black hair pulled into a ponytail and shoved under a baseball cap, showed up while they were gone, and I explained what we were looking for.

Ray returned as Ryan was dusting for fingerprints. “That girl needs help,” Ray said. “She had the wrong kind of diapers, and she didn’t even know how to change them right.”

I didn’t know what to say. As a cop, I can do a lot of things, but changing diapers is outside my realm of expertise.

Ryan found a lot of fingerprints, but most of them looked the same, probably Aunty Edith’s or Leelee’s. Before we left, Leelee came back into Aunty Edith’s room, this time without the baby, and asked if there was any kind of victims’ fund that might compensate the family for Edith’s loss.

“She give us her Social Security every month for food and diapers,” Leelee said. “Now we got none.”

“You talk to the Department of Human Services?” I asked.

“They have programs to help people with kids.”

“They say Dex make too much money. But he don’t give me hardly anything for the house or the baby, playing
pai gow
. That where most of the money goes.”

Pai gow
is a Chinese gambling game played with dice, popular in unsanctioned casinos in Chinese communities. I was surprised that a haole like Dex played pai gow but figured his money was good as anyone’s.

I looked around the room, thinking. If Dex didn’t give Leelee enough money to live on, that was between them. It wasn’t something the police could get involved with unless she wanted to sue him for child support. I spotted the three koa bowls on the desk and got an idea.

From what we could tell, Edith had no family beyond Leelee, which meant that the bowls now belonged to her. If I could get MAhu BLood
53

her some cash directly, she wouldn’t have to tell Dex, and she’d be able to buy what she needed.

“You willing to sell these bowls?” I asked, holding one up.

“Just buss up old bowls,” she said. “Nobody pay for dem.”

“I might have somebody who would. You going to be around this afternoon?”

“Where I go?” From the house, we heard the baby cry again.

I went outside and called my mother. “You know anybody who wants some big koa bowls?” I told her about Leelee and Aunty Edith.

“I can’t say without looking at them. Would you like me to come down there?”

“That would be nice. If you want them, it would help Leelee get through the month if you could give her some cash for them.”

I paused. “You remember how to change a diaper?”

My mother laughed. “Who do you think taught Liliha and Tatiana? What, this girl has a baby?”

“Yeah, and she seems overwhelmed.”

She said she’d drive right over, and I hung up feeling I had done a good deed for both of them. My father’s declining health had meant that my mother had to curtail a lot of her activities, including volunteering as a docent at the Bishop Museum, and helping Leelee would be a nice project for her. It could also keep her from going to any more rallies where she might get shot.

I made a couple of notes, told Leelee my mom was on her way over and promised we would be back in touch. “Let’s go back to what we were talking about before,” Ray said, as we walked away from the house. “What do you think the burglar was looking for?”

“She had a lot of old newspaper articles,” I said. “Now, I wish we’d taken all that stuff into evidence, but at the time it just looked like junk.”

“You remember anything about what she had? Was it about
54 Neil S. Plakcy

Kingdom of Hawai’i?”

“No, it was all older stuff,” I said. “Genealogy. Some birth and marriage announcements. Like from her family. And there was some stuff about volcanoes, places destroyed by the lava flows.”

“Didn’t the old folks say she came from some place that had been wiped out?”

“Yup. So those could just be personal stuff, mementoes.”

Ray thumped the steering wheel. “Maybe the burglar didn’t find what he was looking for—that’s why he ripped everything up and that’s why he took all those albums and folders.”

“We should go back and see if Edith owned any property, had any bank accounts, that kind of thing.”

We stopped at a Zippy’s for lunch on our way back to headquarters, and over teriyaki burgers Ray asked, “What do we know about Edith, anyway? People say she came from some little town on the Big Island, destroyed by lava. Convenient, isn’t it?

You think that’s the truth?”

“We can check it out. Leelee seemed to think all Edith had was her Social Security. If she still owned some property on the Big Island, the killer could be looking for deeds or bankbooks.”

I made a couple of notes, and then we relaxed and ate. They were playing an album I recognized as Hapa’s
Surf Madness
from the late 90s, and I tapped my foot along to their ‘50s hipster version of the
Hawaii Five-O
theme.

After lunch, we went back to headquarters, and I looked online for whatever the state had on Edith Kapana. The database of birth records indicated she had been born at home in 1935

in a small town called Opihi. I searched map sites but couldn’t find it, eventually discovering, from an
Star-Advertiser
article in the online archive, that the town had been wiped out a year ago by an eruption of Kilauea.

According to the article, Opihi was a tiny hamlet populated by a handful of Native Hawaiian families. They led a hardscrabble MAhu BLood
55

life, farming and fishing. When their homes were destroyed their way of life went with it. They relocated or moved in with distant relations, like Aunty Edith did. In a much later article, a reporter who interviewed Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, the leader of Kingdom of Hawai’i, pointed out that he had been born there, though he had moved to O’ahu before the destruction.

Edith didn’t have any bank accounts that we could find, and she only owned a small piece of land in Opihi which once had a small house on it. The record indicated the property had been condemned after the lava destroyed it. She had one brother, who died years before. I tracked his life, discovering that he had moved to Honolulu in 1958, married and bought the house in Papakolea. He and his wife had two children: Elizabeth, born in 1959, and Amos, born in 1960.

Elizabeth Kapana died in 2007; I found an obituary for her online, which listed her brother and daughter, Leelee as survivors.

There was no birth certificate for Leelee in Hawai’i, so I did a national search, discovering she had been born in Las Vegas in 1992. No father was listed. But that did make her eighteen, despite her younger looks.

Amos Kapana was the legal owner of the house where Edith, Dex, Leelee and the baby lived. But where was he? Leelee said he didn’t live there anymore. I put in a request for his work records from Karen Gold at Social Security and kept hunting. There was no death certificate on file for him, but he had not renewed his driver’s license when it expired in January.

Karen faxed over Amos Kapana’s sketchy work record a little later. His last job had been over a year ago, with a temp agency that farmed out manual laborers. The woman there told me he had never picked up his last paycheck.

“He was a drunk,” she said. “Very unreliable.”

While I was working on Edith, Ray did more research on Bunchy. “Listen to this,” he said, as I made a note to tell Leelee about the paycheck. “Bunchy has three sons. The youngest one, Brian, served a tour in Iraq, and he’s living with his dad.”

56 Neil S. Plakcy

“What did he do in Iraq?” I asked. “You think he’s qualified on rifles?”

“I’ve got a friend who works in Army intelligence,” Ray said.

“I’ll give him a call, see if the name Brian Parker means anything to him.”

I was intrigued by the links between Ezekiel Kapuāiwa and Aunty Edith. She may have been more influential in KOH than we had thought.

“I think it’s time we talked to Ezekiel,” I said, when Ray finished his call. “Maybe he knows something.”

I phoned Maile Kanuha and asked how I could get hold of Ezekiel. “He’s not strong,” she said. “The appearance at the rally took a lot of out of him. He’d rather be left alone.”

Her evasiveness was suspicious. “Whether he wants to or not, we still need to talk to him.”

“I’ll have to get in touch with him and see what he says.”

“Maile, we’re the police. When we want to speak to somebody, they don’t have much choice.”

“I know, Detective. I’ll still have to get back to you, though.”

Next, I called Adam O’Malley, the attorney whose card we’d found in Edith’s desk. His secretary said he was in court on the mainland, and took a message.

By the end of shift, I was frustrated. We had no leads, and it felt like we were sitting on our hands waiting for information or new developments. I didn’t like that and knew that if I went straight home I’d fuss around, get even more agitated and then probably pick a fight with Mike just to let off steam.

So instead I made a detour up to my parents’ house in St.

Louis Heights, a steep, mountainous suburb of twisting streets and houses more expensive than any Mike or I could ever afford.

“Howzit, Mom?” I asked when my mother answered the door. I kissed her cheek. “You go see Leelee?”

“That girl needs help,” she said. “I don’t see why her neighbors MAhu BLood
57

aren’t doing anything for her. She even had the wrong kind of diapers.”

“Yeah, I heard that from Ray.” I followed her to the den, where my father was watching a nature special on sharks. I leaned down and kissed the top of his head, then sat across from him.

“You buy the bowls from her?”

“Those bowls,” she said, sitting across from my father. “Kimo, you have no idea.”

“What? They looked valuable to me.”

“Those are beyond value. You know how rare it is to have koa wood bowls that large?”

The three big bowls sat on the armoire beyond the TV. My mother picked one up and brought it over to show me. “Ones this size were restricted to the royal family,” she said. “See how it hasn’t been turned, but scooped out instead?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

She turned the bowl upside down. “And see these repairs?”

“Yeah. Don’t they make the bowl less valuable?”

She shook her head. “I took a class at the Bishop Museum.

They stopped doing this kind of repair before 1900. That means these are very old, in addition to being very large.”

“So how much did you give her?” I asked. “For the three of them.”

“I didn’t buy them. I said I would take the bowls to the museum, then come back and tell her what they’re worth. She’s just a child. And she said that boyfriend of hers spends every penny, drinking and playing pai gow.”

“We took her shopping,” my father said. “To Costco.”

“I’m confused.”

“We bought her diapers, formula. Some clothes. Food. I showed her how to change the baby. Apparently that poor woman who died took care of the child.”

“Wow. That was so nice of you. I didn’t expect you to do so
58 Neil S. Plakcy

much.”

My father grumbled.

“You have to help where you can,” my mother said. “It’s ohana.”

Although the strict definition of ohana is family, in Hawai’i it means more—things like the way that a community comes together to take care of those in need. I wondered why the people of Papakolea had not been taking care of Leelee when she was one of their own. I asked my mother that.

My father grumbled again.

My mother sighed. “It sounds like the boyfriend treats her badly, and he’s rude to the neighbors. And the girl, well, you saw her. She doesn’t seem to care about anything.” She stood up. “I’m going to take the bowls to the museum tomorrow. If they’re as valuable as I think, they’ll want to talk to her.”

She asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. I called Mike, who was on his way home. “Want to detour up here?”

My parents have liked Mike since the first time I brought him home, and even when we were broken up, they never said a word against him.

“What’s for dinner?”

“Like you care. As long as somebody else cooks it.”

Mike laughed. “You’re right. I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”

the Book of ezekieL

The next morning, I called Maile Kanuha again. “You never called me back yesterday, Maile. We really need to speak to Ezekiel. If he won’t come in we’ll come out and get him.”

“I can bring him over to you around noon. It’s my lunch hour,” she said, like that was supposed to make me feel bad.

While we waited, I checked with my friend Ricky Koele, who works at the Division of Business Licensing. Even non-profit groups were required to register, and I asked him to pull up any records he had on Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Ricky was two years behind me at Punahou, and I did him a favor a couple of years ago when his brother was murdered.

Since then, he’s been happy to help when I need something from his department. After leaving me on hold, he returned to the line and said, “I’m printing the records. I’ll fax them to you.”

“Thanks, brah. I owe you.”

“No, Kimo,” he said. “I’m always going to owe you.”

The pages came through the fax a couple of minutes later.

Kingdom of Hawai’i was registered as a 501(c)(4) organization, a charitable non-profit, able to collect tax-deductible contributions but also allowed to lobby for legislative change. One of the main distinguishing factors between it and the more common 501(c) (3) was a restricted membership—in their case, limited to those people who could trace at least partial ancestry to the original inhabitants of the islands. The Hawaiian term is
kanaka maoli,
and I’d seen that on posters in the background of the video of Bunchy’s demonstration at the Wizard Stones. It was often used among Hawaiian sovereignty groups.