Mahu Blood (9 page)

ohANA oLA kiNo

When we got back to the station, Sampson wanted to talk to us. “Tell me how you’re doing,” he said, when Ray and I walked in to his office. He was wearing a navy blue polo shirt, and his hair was getting shaggy. I wondered if I should suggest a haircut, but decided against it. You
can
be too gay on the job, after all.

“We’re looking into Ezekiel Kapuāiwa,” I said. “He’s the guy in charge of KOH. There’s something that doesn’t add up about him.”

“Yeah, but he’s just too squirrelly,” Ray said. “Even with Greg Oshiro’s suspicions. I can’t see Ezekiel convincing somebody to do the job for him.”

“So you say. But he grew up in the same little town where she lived, and he was in charge of the organization that ran the rally where she was killed.”

“But why kill her at the rally?” Ray asked. “It doesn’t make sense. Her death could cause big problems for his group.”

“Unless she knew something that could cause even bigger problems. I want to know more about him.”

“Play nice, boys,” Sampson said. “Any other leads?”

Ray said, “I’ve got my eye on a guy. Bunchy Parker.”

Sampson looked interested. I was sure he knew who Bunchy was.

“If Edith’s death was a means to discredit KOH, then Ka Leo, the group Bunchy runs, could become the most prominent of the sovereignty groups. That means Bunchy could someday be the elected King of Hawai’i.”

“I want a suspect, and I want one soon. Put in some overtime this afternoon if you need to.”

As we went back to our desks, Ray said, “I didn’t mean to sabotage you.”

70 Neil S. Plakcy

“Hey, a little creative dissent shows Sampson we’re actually working.”

“We’ll follow your hunch,” he said. “What do we know about Ezekiel Kapuāiwa? Did he ever hold a job?”

I called Karen Gold, who verified that Ezekiel Kapuāiwa had a Social Security card and a work record. “I’ll pull up what we have and fax it to you,” she said.

“How come none of your friends ever asks you for a subpoena?” Ray asked, after I hung up. “That guy at the division of business licensing. This girl at Social Security.”

“I’ve known Karen Gold since kindergarten. And Ricky Koele since high school. They’re part of my ohana.”

“You and
Lilo and Stitch
,” he said. “Ohana means nobody gets left behind.”

“Yeah, and all the dogs on the island are actually aliens,” I said. “Seriously, they trust me. And when we need something that has to hold up in court, we get a subpoena.”

By then, the fax had kicked in, and I retrieved the pages from Karen. “We couldn’t find a birth certificate for Ezekiel. How could he get a job without some proof of who he is? These days you have to hand over your Social Security card and photo ID.

Soon they’ll even be asking for vaccination records.”

“Maybe he has a birth certificate, it just never got filed with the state,” Ray said. “I had a great-uncle who was born at home, and nobody registered the birth. Got him out of serving in the Army.”

“I suppose. And they probably had a little community school back then. If the teacher knew his parents, nobody would ever ask for a birth certificate.”

He leaned over the page and pointed at a line. “It’s like he didn’t exist before 1990, when his Social Security card was issued, and he started working at the Kope Bean and started paying taxes.”

“You know what this sounds like?” I asked. “Somebody with MAhu BLood
71

a new identity. I can’t see Ezekiel in some kind of protected witness program, though. Not to mention that Edith knew him on the Big Island.”

“We know which store he worked at?” Ray asked. “There are a dozen locations, not to mention that warehouse where Dexter Trale works. You have a friend who works in their corporate office?”

“Nope. But they ought to be able to verify employment without a subpoena.”

Ray called the Kope Bean’s human resources department, while I thought about Ezekiel and wondered if he knew Dex and Leelee. It made sense that he would; Aunty Edith connected them both.

Ray hung up the phone. “He worked at the Kaneohe store from 1990 to 2005.”

We looked back at his records, which showed that starting in 2005, he began drawing a small salary from Kingdom of Hawai’i.

“You up for a second trip to the Kope Bean in one day?” he said.

“At least we’re going to a different branch.”

“Reading my mind, partner.” We drove up the Pali Highway and over the mountain to Kaneohe. We found the Kope Bean at the end of a strip shopping center, the kind my father used to build and own. The room was decorated with murals of coffee, which was appropriate since ‘
kope’
means coffee in Hawaiian.

A heavyset haole woman sat in the front window, knitting what looked like a very long scarf with bright red yarn. She kept looking around, furtively, as if a cat might appear from under one of the armchairs and steal her ball of yarn.

“Madame Defarge over there looks like a long-time customer,”

I whispered to Ray. “I’ll get the coffee if you talk to her. See if maybe Ezekiel still comes in here, for old times’ sake.”

“You know her name?”

I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

He looked at me.

72 Neil S. Plakcy

“Called
A Tale of Two Cities
, by Charles Dickens. There’s a character in it named Madame Defarge, who knits.”

“English major,” Ray snorted, but he headed over to the woman.

I ordered our macadamia lattes from the barista, a teenager with a big bush of blond hair spilling out the back of his ball cap, and after he’d rung me up I showed him my ID and said, “Can I ask you some questions?”

There were no other customers, so he shrugged and said,

“Sure.” Leilani Rivera Bond was singing a love song in a Tahitian dialect through the store’s speakers. Ray was sitting with the knitting lady, smiling and nodding.

I showed the clerk a picture of Ezekiel. “You ever see this guy come in here? He used to work here.”

“Don’t recognize him. But I’ve only been here six months.”

“Anybody who’s been here longer?” I asked.

“Mili,” he called toward the back. He started making our coffees, and Ray joined me at the bar.

“Mrs. Defarge up there didn’t recognize the picture,” he said.

“But she did offer to make me a scarf.”

A short gray-haired woman came out from the back office as the barista was handing us our coffees. He said, “These guys want to know about some dude worked here years ago.”

“Years ago is my specialty,” she said. “How can I help you?”

Ray introduced us and asked if she knew Ezekiel Kapuāiwa.

“Of course. Ezekiel worked here for quite a while.”

She took us over to a leather sofa faced by two armchairs, and we sat down, Ray and I holding our coffees. “Is Ezekiel in some kind of trouble?”

“What makes you ask that?” Ray asked.

She sighed. “Ezekiel is—special. Sometimes he’s not all there, you know? I worried about him when he left. He said he was going to be the King of Hawai’i.” She smiled. “I thought maybe MAhu BLood
73

he had stopped taking his medication, but no, he said there was a whole organization, wanted to throw off the chains of oppression by the United States and make him the new king of the islands.”

“Kingdom of Hawai’i,” I said.

“That’s it. I have trouble keeping track of all those groups.

There are so many, and each one thinks they should be in charge.”

I remembered the big koa bowls we had found in Edith Kapana’s room and how my mother believed those bowls had been restricted to members of the royal family. Maybe there was some credence to Ezekiel’s claim—what if those bowls had been part of his claim to royal descent, held for him by someone he trusted?

I realized Ray was still asking Mili questions and put aside the bowls to focus on what she was saying.

“You mentioned some medication,” Ray said, making notes.

“Do you know what that was for?”

“He had his good days and his bad days.” Mili had very pale skin, as if she never went out in the tropical sun, and her bony hands were stained with liver spots. “I never asked what was wrong with him, but when he started working here he was living at the Ohana Ola Kino, so there had to be something wrong.”

“What is that?” I asked. “The Ohana Ola Kino?” Ohana means family, and
ola kino
means healthy. So it could be anything from a nursing home to a rehab center to who knows what.

“Sort of a group home,” Mili said. “I never asked him why he was there or what was wrong with him. It’s just down down the street, and a lot of their residents, like that lady there, come in here.” She nodded toward the knitting woman. “We just give them ice water and let them sit, as long as they don’t make trouble.”

“He ever show a tendency to violence?” Ray asked.

Mili looked horrified. “Oh, no, Ezekiel was always very sweet.

When he got moody he’d go all quiet. That’s when I put him to work in the storeroom. Other times, he was the friendliest guy,
74 Neil S. Plakcy

making conversation with the customers. When he left, I can’t tell you how many people asked after him.”

We thanked Mili, finished our coffee and walked back out to Ray’s Highlander. “You want to try the group home, see if anyone would talk to us?” Ray asked.

I shook my head. “Places like that, you need a subpoena for anything. And we have nothing to base a subpoena on. We’re fishing, at this point. Judges tend to frown on that.”

“If you don’t go fishing, you never catch anything.”

We got back to our desks around four. The evening shift was already there, taking calls, and we tried to stay out of their way.

Ray started looking at everyone who belonged to Bunchy’s group to see if any of them had sharpshooting skills and a criminal record.

The website for the Ohana Ola Kino wasn’t very helpful; it only listed the facility’s name and address. There was a link at the bottom of the page, though, to its board of directors, and that’s where I found my friend Terri’s name.

Terri Clark Gonsalves has been my best female friend since we were in high school together at Punahou. Her family is one of the oldest haole ones in the islands, descended from the original missionaries. Her father was the chairman of Clark’s, the biggest independent department store chain in Hawai’i after Liberty House. When he retired, the chain was sold, dropping a big wad of cash into the family charity, the Sandwich Islands Trust.

Terri, a widow with a young son, had taken over running the trust from her great-aunt. I wasn’t surprised to find her on the board of Ohana Ola Kino. She was a dynamo, determined to use the money in the Trust to help people wherever she could. I called her cell and asked if we could get together.

“I’m swamped right now,” she said. “I have a federal filing deadline for the Trust coming up, and I’m about to go into a meeting with our attorneys. My mom is watching Danny for me so I can go directly from here to dinner with Levi. Why don’t you and Mike join us? Seven o’clock at the Golden Dragon.”

MAhu BLood
75

Levi was her boyfriend, a successful mainland entrepreneur who’d come to the islands to restart his life after a difficult divorce. I liked him and thought he was good for Terri. We made plans to meet at the Golden Dragon, a Chinatown favorite, and I called Mike to make sure it was okay with him.

“It would have been nice if you’d asked me first, instead of committing us.”

“I can cancel. I wanted to ask her some questions, and she said she was busy—she suggested dinner.”

“Last night we had dinner at your folks. Tonight with Terri and Levi. Are we going to spend any time together?”

“That’s why I moved in with you, isn’t it? So we could be together?”

“Fine. Whatever you want.”

“Mike.”

“I’m busy now. I’ll be home around five thirty.” He hung up.

“Asshole,” I said, to the dial tone.

“Ain’t love grand?” Ray said.

I looked over at him. “How do you do it? You’re always picking up special duty, Julie’s always studying. Don’t either of you ever get fed up?”

He pushed the papers on his desk away in what looked like surrender. “We’re both Italian, you know. So we don’t hold back.

I’d say we have at least one big fight a month, but it clears the air and we go back to business as usual.”

“Really? I don’t remember my parents fighting more than a few times my whole childhood.”

He shrugged. “Different strokes for different folks. We don’t let stuff build up. Last week, Julie was going on and on about this other grad student, this guy. He was so smart; he was so charming; he was so handsome. I told her that if he was so great, she was welcome to go marry him.”

I laughed. “You didn’t say that.”

76 Neil S. Plakcy

“Sure I did. Then she threw a book at me. Hit me right in the chest.” He rubbed what I figured was the sore spot. “Big fucking book, too. The point is, I didn’t let it fester, start to go crazy over it. She loves me, I love her. We both know that. Everything else is just domestic drama.”

“Speaking of which,” I said. “Are we giving up on this case?

I’ll find out what I can tonight about the Ohana, but I doubt that will get us much. I’m assuming you didn’t come up with anything on Ka Leo.”

“Nope. But you never know what will come up tomorrow.”

We called it quits. I hated a stalled investigation, but I didn’t know anything else we could do. I went out to my Jeep, where I pawed through the debris on the front seat to find the new Kalei Gamiao ukulele CD. As the music kicked in, I thought about Mike.

I had believed that by moving in together, we could short-circuit a lot of our problems—neither of us ever being at home when we were together, missing each other when we weren’t, the sense that we couldn’t be committed to each other until we shared the same bed, night after night. Some of those problems had indeed gone away, only to be replaced with new ones.

I was a slob, but there was a method to my messiness. Mike couldn’t see that. He obsessed over tiny spots on the kitchen counter but left his clean laundry piled on the dining room table until I put it away for him. Once we’d moved in together, he’d relegated me to the role of chauffeur, complaining that he had to drive all over the island in his investigations.