by Neil Plakcy
As I’d pointed out to Anna, what had happened at the house on Lopez Lane was a burglary, not a robbery. The simplest way to break down the difference was to begin with theft – taking the property of another. That was the same as larceny.
When you add the threat of violence, you’ve moved up from theft to robbery. And when you enter a room or building with the intent to commit theft, that’s burglary. So we had a homicide committed during the act of burglary at the residence on Lopez Lane.
All three crimes had been on the rise in the neighborhood where Zoë Greenfield lived, a group of small homes in the shadow of the H1 expressway. A simple check of real estate prices told me that it was a depressed neighborhood. Driving around it earlier in the day had confirmed that impression, and in areas that are plagued by poverty, crime rises. The criminal element takes on all the power, and the ordinary folks who live in the area pay the price. It’s an unfortunate corollary to Darwin’s laws of evolution. The strong survive and the weak suffer.
Part of the problem was political. The businesses and other large landholders in the area, like Honolulu Community College, got the attention, and the poor folks were overlooked.
Mike and I lived in Aiea Heights, a few exits down the highway from Lopez Lane, and farther from downtown. The property values were higher up there, but in the current economic climate, with people losing jobs and banks foreclosing on mortgages, nobody was safe from financial disaster. There was nothing to keep folks from poorer neighborhoods traveling a few miles to victimize ours—or our own neighbors from seeing us as prey.
I’d always felt safe there; the neighbors knew that Mike was a fireman and I was a cop. Anyone looking for a good mark might see that our house looked well-kept—but we had secured the property, and there were better pickings higher up on the hill. Nonetheless, the statistics were uncomfortable.
Could what had happened to Zoë Greenfield happen to us? Would I come home from a police conference, and find Mike dead in our living room? Or would we return from a getaway weekend on Maui to find our house ransacked, our dog lying dead on the floor? And what if we did have kids—I was sure I would always be worried about them, and their safety.
I remembered there was another set of parents involved in this case, and I picked up the phone to call Zoë Greenfield’s, and let them know what had happened to their daughter.
SUNSHINE AND COLORADO
The number I’d been given for Zoë’s parents, in Mendocino, California, was some kind of community phone, and it took a few minutes for a woman to come on the line. “This is Sunshine,” she said.
“Mrs. Greenfield?”
“You can call me that if you want. Who’s this?”
I told her my name and rank. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your daughter Zoë died over the weekend.” I explained that it appeared someone had broken into the home, possibly for the purpose of robbing it, and killed Zoë.
“We haven’t been in touch with her for some time. She was still in Honolulu?”
“Yes. But the good news is that her daughters weren’t in the house when she was killed.”
“Daughters? Plural?”
“Yes. I thought they were twins?”
“I didn’t even know she had children. How old are they?”
I had to call over to Ray and then come back to her. “They’re two years old,” I said. “Sarah and Emily.”
“Sarah,” she said. “That was my name, once. A long time ago. Are they with their father?”
“Zoë was involved with a female partner at the time the twins were born,” I said. “Although they aren’t together any more, they shared custody of the girls, and right now they’re with her.”
The news that her daughter had been in a lesbian relationship didn’t seem to bother Sunshine, and I wondered if perhaps I had hit her with so much that she wasn’t processing it all. Or maybe she had always known that her daughter was gay. In any case, I found her lack of emotion troubling. But there was no way she could have killed her daughter in Honolulu and made it back to northern California, where the nearest airport was hours away.
She sighed. “When Zoë left for college, she left her family behind. We disagreed on just about everything—politics, economics, the way we eat and the way we dress. Zoë chose to buy into the business and government power structure, which my husband and I rejected. But even so, we would have gone to her graduation, if she’d told us about it.”
So the roots of Zoë’s problems with her parents ran deep. It was interesting to see the ways in which parents exerted power, in small and large ways. You have to eat your vegetables. You have to go to school. All that. But there are more subtle ways in which parents control their kids.
Mine made me, and my brothers, go to Hawaiian school, where we learned bits and pieces of the language and culture. By the time I was thirteen I could repair an outrigger canoe, speak enough Hawaiian that it became a code with my friends, pound out a couple of rhythms on an ipu gourd, and weave a decent lauhala mat to use when my dad dug an imu in the backyard to roast a pig.
I did all that because my parents made me. Of course, I rebelled in small ways, refusing to eat poi, sneaking out to go surfing when I was supposed to be doing homework, and so on. But when it counted—when I was dragged out of the closet and I needed their help and support—they were there for me.
“Ever since she was a little girl, Zoë was different,” Sunshine said. “When she was six years old, she told us that she didn’t want to be called Fallopian any more. She picked the name Zoë out of a book.”
I couldn’t blame her. What little girl wants to be named after a part of her mother’s reproductive system? “We let her be the person she wanted to be,” Sunshine continued. “Even if she disagreed with us. We wouldn’t buy her dolls, you see, because they perpetuate unreasonable stereotypes of women. So she used to collect broken or discarded ones from the trash. One of her Barbies had no legs, so Zoë announced that she was a paraplegic. Her brother Vas built her a little wheelchair.”
It was always tough to learn about homicide victims, to see them as real people, as their families and friends did, because it made the tragedy of their deaths that much stronger. “She was a tough girl,” Sunshine said. “If someone broke into her house, I’m not surprised Zoë would stand up and fight.”
I told Sunshine I was sorry once again, and gave her the medical examiner’s phone number so that they could make the burial arrangements. “If you’d rather not be involved, her ex will handle things.”
“Colorado and I will take care of our daughter,” she said, and that was the only time I heard some real emotion in her voice.
While I was on the phone with Sunshine Greenfield, Ray faxed the picture of the dragon pendant to all the local pawn shops. Then we started reading through cases in the neighborhood around Zoë’s house, and in the adjacent areas, looking for patterns. We pulled up records on those accused of similar crimes, checking to see whether they were incarcerated.
The department kept detailed crime statistics, divided first between violent crime: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault; and property crimes: burglary, larceny-theft and motor vehicle theft. Since the crime at Zoë Greenfield’s home fit into both categories, we had a lot of files to look at. They were further divided by adults and juveniles, and since we had no idea who our perpetrator was, we had to look at them all.
It was slow, dogged police work. Fortunately most of the records we were searching were online—but even then, we were hampered by the slowness of our city-provided computers and the network in general. We did find one good suspect: a seventeen-year-old named Ryan Tazo who had been picked up a couple of times for theft at Honolulu Community College, a branch of the state university system. He lived near the house on Lopez Lane.
Just before our shift ended at three, we met with Lieutenant Sampson. “Where are you on this home invasion?” he asked, as we stood in his office doorway like a couple of misbehaving schoolboys.
“We should go over to her office, too,” Ray said. “See if anyone there had a beef with her.”
“This sounds more like a crime of opportunity,” Sampson said. “I can authorize you a couple of hours overtime this afternoon, but save looking into the victim’s personal life until you’ve exhausted your leads.”
Ray was glad; he was always happy to pick up some extra cash that could go in the new house kitty. I would have preferred to go home and relax.
We left Sampson’s office and drove to the crappy little house where Ryan Tazo lived with his mom and grandmother. He was asleep when we arrived; his mother said he was working a night shift at the Denny’s in Waikiki as a dishwasher. She woke him up and he came out to the living room where we were sitting, having resisted Denise Tazo’s offers of something to eat or drink.
Ryan was about six-five, skinny as a palm tree, with a bushy dark blond afro. Denise was haole, but Ryan’s dad was probably black; his skin was a café au lait, and his palms were noticeably lighter than the rest of his body. “I been straight, man,” he said, after we’d introduced ourselves and asked what he’d been up to lately. “I work, I play video games, I stay out of trouble.”
“I resent the fact that you suspect my son,” Denise Tazo said. She was a heavyset bleached blonde in her early forties. “He’s a good boy. He just got into a little trouble. But he’s over that.” She reached out and squeezed his hand, and he pulled away from her as soon as he could.
“Where were you Sunday night?” I asked.
“At work. You can check my time card. I clock in at eleven, and I didn’t leave til my shift was over the next morning. Seven a.m.”
I added the information to the file on my netbook, including his supervisor’s name. “They watch you like a hawk there,” he said. “There’s always dishes to wash, and if you hang out too long smoking a cigarette or in the john, they start to pile up.”
“You have a car?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I take the bus right now. But I work there long enough, I get a raise, and I can start saving up for a Camaro.”
That seemed to let him out, assuming his time card proved what he said. It was unlikely that he’d have been able to sneak away from work, get a bus back up to Lopez Lane, and kill Zoë Greenfield without being noticed.
We stood up. “Thanks for your help. Good luck with the car.”
We had a couple of other leads to follow, but none of them panned out. One guy with a rap sheet for breaking and entering was dead, and another was in Halawa State Prison. “All the good crooks are gone,” Ray said, shaking his head. “What are we going to do?”
I dropped Ray off at headquarters, and drove home tired and cranky, switching out Jake Shimabukuro for Fiji and the upbeat tempo of “Stone Cold in Love with You.” Once I opened the front door, I was attacked by Roby, the golden retriever Mike and I had adopted when his family was displaced by a fire and couldn’t keep him. He was happy to see me, jumping up and down like a demented kangaroo, twirling around trying to grab his blonde plume of a tail. I clipped his leash on and we went for a walk.
Cruising around the neighborhood, I looked at each house we passed as a potential burglary target. The house next to ours had a column of glass squares next to the front door. Even though they had a burglar alarm, you could look through the glass and see if the system had been armed or not, and if not, all you had to do was knock out one of the glass squares, reach in and flip the lock.
The landscaping on the house across the street was overgrown, providing lots of cover for someone hiding there, waiting to attack the homeowner as he opened the front door. The garage door was open at the house on the corner, but there were no cars in the driveway and the house looked empty.
So many houses had no exterior lights, front doors without peepholes, or open windows. You wouldn’t need to slam an aluminum chair into a sliding glass door to break into most of them.
At least our house was secure. We had a motion sensor light on the garage, a dog who barked when anyone got close, and a working burglar alarm. Because Mike was a fireman, he made sure there were no bushes close to the house that could catch fire during a dry season, so there wasn’t anywhere convenient for a burglar to hide.
Walking around as evening fell, I saw lots of kids out playing in the street, and remembered the games I’d played – tag, it, Mother May I, kickball and so on. It was always the biggest thrill when one of my older brothers would come out and play, too.
I had a ton of cousins, on both sides of the family, and I always felt secure in the middle of my family. But my brothers were both finished having kids, and if Mike and I did have a child, he or she would be the youngest cousin. Could the two of us give a kid the kind of life both of us had enjoyed? Sure, we made enough money. But we both had demanding jobs that took a lot of time.
My mother had helped my father with his business, but she’d always been home when I came back from school, helping me with my homework, fixing dinner, keeping the household running. Mike’s mom was a nurse, but she’d only worked half shifts while he was a kid. I didn’t see either of us doing that.
By the time Roby had finished his sniff and pee survey of the neighborhood, and I’d depressed myself even further, Mike was home, with a bucket of fried chicken and biscuits. “That stuff is so bad for you,” I said, as soon as I walked in and smelled the rich aroma.
Roby, the traitor, went right to Mike, sitting on his haunches next to Mike’s place at the table. Mike pulled off a piece of chicken and fed it to him.
“I told you not to feed the dog people food,” I said.
“Good evening to you, too. Who stuck a baseball bat up your ass?” He’d stripped down to a pair of shorts when he got home, and I was struck, as I often was, by how handsome he was. Six-four, with wavy dark hair, a black mustache, and eyes that sparkled when he wasn’t crabby. His looks weren’t perfect; his nose hooked down at the end, his eyebrows were bushy, and at 35, little tufts of hair were already growing out of his ears. But none of those mattered to me; when I looked at him all I saw was the man I loved.
I blew a breath out, and sat down next to him. “Sorry. Bad day. Home invasion that ended in a homicide—a lesbian mom with two little girls. At least the kids weren’t home when it happened. But it made me think about how safe—or unsafe—we are up here.” I didn’t say I was thinking about kids, too; I’d save that for a quieter time.
“You can’t let the job get to you,” Mike said, gnawing on a chicken wing. “You know that.”
“I know.”
I reached for a piece of chicken but Mike swatted my hand away. “I thought this stuff is so bad for you.”
“Yeah, but I’m hungry.”
“Well, wash your hands first.”
“Yes, Dad.”
Welcome to life at our household. Mike and I battled frequently, each of us trying to get the upper hand. Maybe it was testosterone, or maybe sheer orneriness. Or maybe I’d picked Mike because I could repeat some power play with my father, try and change some old grievances.
We ate dinner, talked about our days, and watched some TV. But around eleven, when I took Roby out for a quick pee before bed, I remembered Zoë Greenfield’s death as I looked at all the houses without outside lights, at how easy it would be to sneak up on any of us.
The only way to feel better, I knew, was to find the mokes, our homegrown name for tough guys, who had broken into Zoë’s house, ransacked it and killed her. Then, maybe, I’d worry a bit less.
Only a bit, though.
SEARCHING FOR SUSPECTS
The next morning, I retrieved the Honolulu Star-Advertiser from the driveway when I returned from walking Roby. I paged through, scanning articles with only the slightest interest, until I came to a brief article about a woman’s death in a home invasion robbery. She wasn’t named in the paper; our public information officer regularly w
ithholds that information until given the go-ahead by the investigating officers.
The police blotter stories were compiled by Greg Oshiro, the reporter who covered law enforcement for the Star-Advertiser. Usually he was all over Ray and me when we had homicide cases, always hoping that there would be something sensational in the crime that would elevate his position at the paper. Like most newsgathering organizations, the Star-Advertiser was teetering on the brink of economic trouble, always threatening layoffs and cutbacks.
I wondered why Greg hadn’t already called Ray and me about Zoë Greenfield’s murder, looking for something he could make a story out of. A young mother had been cut down in her prime, and if he could get hold of pictures of the little girls then heart strings would be tugged all over the island. He could flesh the story out with statistics, especially the ones I’d seen the day before that showed crime escalating in the area around Lopez Lane, the rates rising on robbery, burglary and homicide.
I pulled up the Star-Advertiser’s website on the netbook and copied the article into a file for the folder on Zoë Greenfield’s murder.
When I got to headquarters, Ray and I sat down to brainstorm leads. Beyond Ryan Tazo and those two guys we’d eliminated the day before, our search through case histories had come up empty. Every moke with a record for that type of home invasion was either dead or in jail on other charges. I leaned back in my chair. “We must be doing something right. Putting the bad guys behind bars.”
“There are always new ones.” Ray was leaning toward the crime being drug-related; the frenzy of stab wounds in Zoë’s body implied, to him at least, that the assailant had been high, or desperate for a fix. “How about if we expand our search area? Look at Waikiki, for example. Lots of mokes hang out there to prey on tourists.”
“We could do that.” I pulled up a few cases, and Ray did the same, and we started reading. “Hey, here’s a familiar name,” I said, about an hour later. “Judy Evangelista.”
