Mahu Blood (15 page)

Dex jumped back up onto the loading dock. He was a wiry guy, with strong arms that could have wielded whatever bashed Stuart McKinney’s chest in. “I gotta get back to work,” he said and disappeared into the dark warehouse.

“He sure freaked when he heard Stuey was dead,” Ray said.

“Yeah. That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill him, though. You look at those arms?”

“First the guy’s ass, now his arms,” Ray said.

“He has the upper body strength to cave in Stuey’s chest.

And I’m sure he knows more about that pai gow game than he’s letting on.”

We followed Dex into the warehouse, where we interviewed a couple of pallet jockeys and Tuli, the Thai woman who worked the switchboard. The warehouse workers left at three, just as Stuey was arriving; none of them even knew his name.

Tuli was with Stuey until five, but she said she was on the switchboard most of the time, and when he started to talk she just tuned him out. None of them seemed to have a motive, and they all had alibis which needed to be verified.

“Considering I’m fresh off the boat from Philadelphia,” Ray said, as we drove back to headquarters. “You want to tell me what this pai gow thing is?”

“Chinese domino game. I don’t know all the rules, but you start out with four tiles, and the goal is to group them into two pairs. If you bet on the game, you can win big or lose big. I’ve heard about games where ten or fifteen grand changes hands over the course of the evening. My godfather used to play, and I watched him sometimes.”

“That the old tong guy?” Ray asked.

I nodded. My father’s best friend, and my godfather, was a man I knew as a child as Uncle Chin. It was only when I became a MAhu BLood
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cop that I discovered Uncle Chin was also a leader of one of the Honolulu tongs, or Chinese gangs. He was retired by that point, so I was never forced to investigate or arrest him, but by the time he passed away I had learned more than I wanted to about his criminal past.

We speculated for a while. “My mother told me that Leelee complained about Dex playing pai gow,” I said. “Maybe we’ve been looking at Edith’s death all wrong. Suppose she knew something about the game from living with Dex, and he killed her because of it.”

“And then when Stuey started to talk about the money to us, Dex had to kill him, too,” Ray said.

“We need to know more about this pai gow game. If it really is at the center of the case.”

We got back to headquarters, where Steve Hart wasn’t happy to learn that Ray and I had taken over Stuart McKinney’s murder from him and his partner. The chip on his shoulder seemed so heavy he was listing to one side. If he wasn’t so damn tall he would have tipped over.

“We think it’s related to the old lady shot at the rally,” I said, trying to be patient. “We interviewed McKinney the afternoon before he was killed.”

“It’s a loser case.” He looked at me like he was trying to figure out what my angle was, why once again I was trying to shoulder him out of an investigation. “You think you know who did it?”

His eyes opened wider. “Hey, that fire investigator,” he said.

“Riccardi. He’s a buddy of yours, isn’t he? Wasn’t he like, your boyfriend or something? That why you want this case? He giving you some information he wouldn’t give to me?”

“Not at all,” I said. “He agrees with you, thinks it was just a random thing.”

“That’s what you’re going to find. That it was just kids preying on a homeless guy.”

“He wasn’t homeless,” I said. But it was useless to argue with
126 Neil S. Plakcy

Steve. He handed over the notes he had, and I took them back to my desk to go over with Ray.

Despite the fact that I thought Steve Hart was a jerk, he was a competent investigator, and his notes were thorough. He had sketched the area where McKinney’s body had been found and recorded his interview with Mike, whose last name he had misspelled.

He and Kawika had attempted a canvass, but it was an industrial neighborhood, and the offices and warehouses had all been closed. Ray and I split up the alibis for the Kope Bean warehouse workers and started making calls. It didn’t take long to discover that they all checked out. Leelee said Dex had been with her all night, which didn’t match his story, but did place him in Papakolea at the time of Stuey’s murder.

When I hung up with Leelee, I called my old partner from Waikīkī, Akoni Hapa’ele, who had transferred to Vice after both of us moved downtown. “We’re looking for information on a pai gow game in Chinatown. You know anything about it?”

He yawned. “I know a little. You want to meet me at the Kope Bean on Hotel Street? I’ve got a serious caffeine jones going. The
keiki
kept us up all night.”

Akoni and his wife, Mealoha, had a baby boy, and after years of protesting that he didn’t want to bring a kid into this lousy world, he’d become the most devoted father I’d ever seen.

We were drowning in coffee in this case, and it all seemed to revolve around the Kope Bean. Ray and I drove into the heart of Chinatown, parking in a garage on Pauahi Street, named for one of the royal families of Hawai’i.

Chinatown used to be an exotic location, a place where GIs on R&R from Vietnam found comfort in the arms of prostitutes.

But now the streets are dirty, with old soda cans, shriveled dog turds and shreds of newspaper rustling in the wind. Most of the storefronts are shuttered, and many are scrawled with graffiti; the prostitutes only come out at night, along with the ice dealers, and there’s nothing much Chinese about it.

MAhu BLood
127

There are still a bunch of lei stores on South Beretania and Maunakea Streets, but they’re tiny rooms with folding shutters or rolling grills, and most of the leis are behind glass refrigerator cases. You can walk past and only smell car exhaust and fried oil, just a light scent from the flowers the old ladies are stringing.

North King is the only street with any life on it—groceries with tubs spilling out to the street, stacked with garlic, ginger, hard-boiled eggs and packages of dried mushrooms, noodles and soy sauce.

There was tinny Chinese music playing somewhere as we walked over to Hotel Street, past a stand with row upon row of leis made of orchids, velvety orange ‘ilima flowers and fragrant maile leaves intertwined with tiny white pikake blossoms. Behind the counter, an elderly grandmother sat stringing even more.

Chattering teenagers and haole tourists crowded around the booth, debating the merits of different leis and bargaining for better prices.

Akoni was waiting for us with a longboard-sized macadamia latte in his hand. He’s the kind of oversized Hawaiian you see working the surfboard concessions at Kuhio Beach Park, wearing a XXL aloha shirt, board shorts and rubber slippers. Tack a badge on his shirt and a gun on his hip, and you’ve got my ex-partner.

The room was pungent with the smell of fresh-ground coffee, decorated like the others in the chain with sepia-tinted photos of coffee pickers and plantations. A group of Japanese tourists sat in the corner comparing pictures on their digital cameras, and a bald old man with a spotted skull stood by the bar telling stories to the barista.

After Ray and I got our own caffeine bursts, we sat down with Akoni. After seeing pictures of the baby and hearing about how big his lungs were, I asked, “You said you knew about a pai gow game?”

“There are a few games that float around. You know anything specific?”

I told him about Dexter Trale and our suspicion that he was laundering money from a Chinatown game through the Kope
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Bean stores.

“You’re talking a high stakes game,” Akoni said. “To generate that much cash. There’s only one game for high rollers. We think it runs out of a back room behind the Wing Wah restaurant, but we haven’t been able to get in.”

“Tell us about how you play. I told Ray all that I knew, which wasn’t much.”

“There are seven players. Your four tiles are divided into a front hand and a back hand, two tiles each. You twist them around, trying to match up the dots so you end up with two pair.”

He took a sip of his coffee and sighed happily. “If you lose both hands, you lose whatever you bet. If you win one hand and lose the other, it’s a push, and you get your bet back.”

“Are you playing against all the other players?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It’s like blackjack, in that you play against the bank—although the bank can move from person to person.

That’s how you win big, but it’s also how you can lose a ton, if you’re the bank and you have to pay off the winners.”

“You know when the next game is?” Ray asked.

“Rumor on the street is that there’s one going on tonight,”

Akoni said. “But it’s a closed game—you’ll never get in the front door.”

“We don’t need to get in the game—we just need to follow Dexter Trale. He’s going to have to stay at the Kope Bean warehouse past his usual shift, because the night guy got killed.

We figure he won’t bother going home when he finishes—that he’ll just go direct to this game. You want to help out with a surveillance?”

Akoni yawned. “Tonight?”

“If you can stay awake that long.”

“It’ll take a lot more caffeine than this,” Akoni said, holding up his paper cup.

We worked out the details and left Akoni calling his partner MAhu BLood
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to set up his end. Back at headquarters, I called Bunchy Parker again. We still needed to talk to his son Brian about his ability to shoot a rifle and his whereabouts when Edith was killed. But Bunchy swore his son wasn’t there, and he hadn’t seen or spoken to him since the boy left.

“Who knows, maybe he’ll show up in Chinatown tonight,”

Ray said. “If Edith’s death and Stuey’s are connected to each other and to this game.”

I put a request in to see if Brian had left the island by plane, but that was going to take a while. We pitched the stakeout to Lieutenant Sampson, who complained about his budget but eventually authorized the overtime.

By three o’clock, Ray and I were positioned across from the Kope Bean warehouse in my Jeep, in a parking lot for a shipping company where there was enough traffic that we wouldn’t be noticed.

We watched as the pallet jockeys left. Dexter remained inside, as we expected, and a beat-up white pickup that matched his registration stayed in the parking lot, sporting a peeling bumper sticker that read “Welcome to Hawai’i. Now go home.” A truck arrived from a restaurant supply company, and from our vantage point we could see the driver unload pallets and Dex check them off on a clipboard.

A Kope Bean truck pulled in after the supply truck left, and Dex and the driver loaded it up. After that, nothing more happened until five, when Tuli left.

I called Mike and left a message on his cell that I’d be out late.

Akoni and his partner Tony Lee had gone home to take a nap, and around seven they showed up to relieve us. Ray and I went off to dinner, and as we were finishing, Akoni called and said that Dex was on the move.

Trading the lead back and forth, we tracked Dex to Chinatown, where he parked on a side street off North Hotel Street, around the corner from the Wing Wah restaurant. I pulled around to the front of the restaurant and parked down the block, where
130 Neil S. Plakcy

Ray and I had a good view of people going in and out. Akoni and Tony parked by the side door, facing the alley behind the restaurant.

It was about nine o’clock by then, and the restaurant was busy. We hunkered down for a long wait. But no more than a few minutes had passed before I saw a familiar figure approach the restaurant and knock on the side door. The sight was so unexpected, though, that it took me until the door had opened, and he’d been ushered in to realize that it was my oldest brother, Lui.

BRotheR Lui

“What’s up?” Ray asked. “You recognize somebody?”

I looked over at him. You have to trust your partner; if you hold back information on one case, then you start to get into a pattern, and that’s the kind of thing that can get you killed.

“My brother. Lui.”

“That’s the one from the TV station? You think he’s going in there to eat?”

“I wish I knew. We don’t even know for certain there’s a pai gow game going on in there.”

“He ever gamble that you know of?”

I couldn’t remember. “My other brother, Haoa, he puts a few bets down on ball games. But Lui, he’s always been the straight arrow.”

My cell rang. “Hey, brah, isn’t that your brother?” Akoni asked.

We’d been friends since the academy and partners in Waikīkī for a couple of years, so he’d had the chance to meet my family a bunch of times.

“Yeah.”

“Well, get him the fuck out of there. You don’t want him falling in the middle of our case.”

I couldn’t walk up to that side door myself, because ever since I’d come out of the closet and had my picture splashed on the front page of the
Honolulu Advertiser
and the
Star-Bulletin
and become part of the nightly news on Lui’s station, KVOL, I was recognized all over town. Usually it was a gay or lesbian person, but I had no way of knowing who would be in that restaurant.

And if I saw Dex he’d know we were on to him.

Ray wouldn’t be any good, either; Dex knew him, too. And scratch Akoni and his partner; as soon as vice cops walk in some place, everything closes down.

132 Neil S. Plakcy

“All right. Give me a few minutes to work something out.” I hung up on Akoni, then punched in Haoa’s number.

After I exchanged some pleasantries with my sister-in-law, she put my brother on the phone.

“Can you get down to Chinatown, brah? Right now? I need your help.”

“I’m gonna miss the last half of the game,” he grumbled.

“Call my cell when you’re on the road. I’ll fill you in.”

I slapped the phone shut and looked around. Chinatown’s a different place at night. It wakes up, and lights flicker behind storefronts shuttered during the day, though shades are pulled down over any big windows. Restaurant neon glows on every block, and brave tourists mingle with shadowy figures dealing in drugs or other human vices.