Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Akoni had already taken notes, but I got out my pad and pen and starting taking my own. It was getting hot, so I stood in the shade of the high trees and drew a rough sketch of the alley first, including the back door of the club, the position of the body, and, in a cryptic note only I could understand, the direction the Cherokee had traveled.

  Saunders returned with coffee and a malasadas, and I kept writing while I ate and drank, leaning up against the side wall of the club. It was seven a.m., and the street was already busy. Delivery trucks pulling up at the back of the Kuhio Mall, joggers out for their morning runs, elderly mama-sans scurrying home from night jobs. There was a mass of gray cloud cover over the Ko’olau, but a stiff trade wind coming in off the ocean kept it away from Waikīkī. It was going to be a great day for the beach, a tourist office poster kind of day, full of thong bikinis, surfboards and palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze. Oh, and murder, too.

  I wrote down everything I could remember from the time the giraffe followed me out of the club until the time I left the alley to find a phone. Then I started taking notes on what I saw around me. It’s a rule you have to pound into your head when you graduate from the beat to detective—write everything down. Even if it doesn’t seem important, write it down. You’ll forget it otherwise, and then it’s bound to be the one thing you need to know, or the first thing the D.A. asks when he’s putting together his case.

  On my first case as a detective, I neglected to write down whether the window in the victim’s bedroom was open or closed, and we nearly lost the case over whether the perp could have escaped that way. Fortunately a witness came through who remembered seeing the curtains flying through the open window, and I got off the hook. Since then I’ve written everything. I sniff the air, I listen for ambient sounds, I feel the textures of things. Even stuff that seems ordinary, that you take for granted, like garbage cans in an alley, I write down. You never know when you’re going to find out it wasn’t trash day that day, and that there was valuable evidence in the garbage.

  I finally ran out of things to write. While the crime scene techs finished up their search, I walked over to Akoni and stood with him at the end of the alley, drinking another cup of coffee. “He look like a tourist?” I asked.

  “He no had ID, Kimo. How I gonna tell he tourist?”

  When Akoni gets angry he lapses into pidgin, the Hawaiian dialect we were all suckled on. “Red skin from sunburn,” I said. “A new t-shirt that says I heart Waikīkī. Rubber slippers fresh from Woolworth. One of those cheap shell leis they give you when you tour the aloha shirt factory. You know the signs just as well as I do, Akoni. Why you so bull-headed this morning?”

  In the distance we heard the protesting squeal of hydraulic brakes, and somewhere nearby a truck was backing up and beeping. “You know what time they called me? Five a.m. I didn’t get home ‘til after midnight. I was going to sleep late this morning. Maybe call in late for my shift. Maybe do a little dirty with Mealoha. Instead I roll out of bed at five, and nobody knows where the hell you are.”

  “I’m sorry, all right? I’ll make it up to you. Someday you get Mealoha ready for some afternoon delight, and I’ll cover for you.”

  He was still grumpy, but I could see that idea had some appeal to him. “So what you think? Tourist? Malihini? Kama‘āina?” A malihini is a newcomer to the islands, one step above tourist. A kama‘āina, literally “child of the land,” is a native or long-time resident, like Akoni or me.

  He thought. “Chinese. Mid to late forties. Expensive suit, fancy shoes. No way to tell if he’s a tourist or not.”

  “Good start,” I said. I wiped a bead of perspiration off my forehead. “Maybe he was out to dinner, had a couple of drinks, didn’t know what kind of place he was going into. Somebody might have seen him as easy prey. Remember, the other bashings here have been big fights, half a dozen guys on each side.”

  “You can’t just take the easy way out, call him a faggot? You haven’t even seen him.”

  “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 Waikīkī substation on Kalākaua Avenue, right in the heart of Waikīkī, 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. Waikīkī 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 Kalākaua Avenue, filling out forms, I could almost forget I had any personal involvement in this case. Almost.

  Kalākaua 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 c
hecked 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 Waikīkī, 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 Waikīkī, 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.