Mahu Blood (16 page)

A couple of minutes later Haoa and I were on the phone again. I told him only that we had a pai gow game staked out, and I wanted to make sure Lui wasn’t involved.

“Shit,” Haoa said. “I told him that game was bad news.”

“You knew he was playing?”

“He hinted, thought I might want to join in. You know how much money you can run through in a game like that? I told him no thanks.”

A guy walked by carrying half a dragon costume, and couples passed us every so often, many talking in Chinese. A string of round red lanterns was suspended over the street, and across from me, a strand of tiny white lights had been wrapped around the trunk of a palm tree.

When Haoa pulled up down the block and walked over to my Jeep, I said, “We’re not going to bust the game tonight. I want to know if he’s in there for dinner, or if he’s in some back room gambling.”

“You really want to know?” Haoa said. He’s as tall as I am but broader in the chest, and his skin is a shade darker. He was wearing a dark green U.H. Warriors T-shirt, ratty sweat pants and MAhu BLood
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rubber Crocs. “What if he’s got some girl there?”

Lui had never said anything, but both Haoa and I thought our oldest brother had stepped out on his wife a time or two.

“Whatever he’s doing, it’s a mistake. I want to know, and you do, too.”

“Yeah. I’ll be back.”

I watched him walk across the street and go into the restaurant.

“You think this is a smart idea?” Ray asked.

“Maybe, maybe not. But it’s the only one I’ve got.”

My cell rang, with a call from Harry. I let it go to voice mail, figuring I’d get back to him when things were slow. Then Haoa stepped out onto the sidewalk and pulled his cell out of his pocket. It was weird watching him dial, then having my phone ring with his call.

“I don’t see Lui anywhere,” he said. “That side door must lead to a private room. Keep your mouth shut. I’m going to conference him in.”

I was impressed. I didn’t know how to set up a conference call on my cell; I barely knew how to turn the damn thing on and off.

I held the phone out so Ray could listen, too, and we heard the sound of dialing and ringing. Then I heard Lui’s voice, low. “This is a bad time, brah.”

“You bet it is,” Haoa said, keeping his own voice low so no one on Lui’s end could overhear him. “If you’re in a pai gow game at the Wing Wah restaurant, get your ass outside pronto.”

“How the fuck do you know where I am?” Lui said, and I was so surprised at hearing my very proper big brother curse I nearly dropped the phone.

“Outside. Now,” Haoa said. “Or you’re going to be in a world of trouble.”

Haoa hung up, and I did too. And then we waited.

About five minutes passed before Lui walked out of the front door of the restaurant. I saw him start to argue with Haoa, who motioned over toward my Jeep. I said, “I’ll be right back,” to Ray
134 Neil S. Plakcy

and jumped out.

“Are you fucking spying on me?” Lui said to me as I walked up. “Your own brother?”

His tie was askew, and there was alcohol on his breath. This was not the brother I knew, the one who was always so well-groomed, so much in control.

“Jesus, Lui, get a grip. You walked right in the middle of my case. You expect me to leave you in there?”

The red neon from the Wing Wah window played against his face. “For real?” he asked.

“Let’s get you a cup of coffee.” I turned to Haoa. “Thanks, brah. I can take it from here.”

“I don’t even want to know,” Haoa said, and he walked off toward his truck.

I motioned to Ray to join us, and we all walked around the corner to the same Kope Bean where we’d met Akoni earlier in the day. While Ray ordered three more of the macadamia lattes and my brother sat in an overstuffed chair looking sick, I called Akoni and filled him in.

“We’ll keep an eye on Dex,” he said. “Let me know what your brother has to say.”

“You put me in a bad situation,” Lui said, when we’d sat down. “The game had just started, and I had to fold.”

“You put yourself in the bad situation, brah. Start from the beginning. How long have you been playing?”

“Off and on? Since college.”

It was my turn to be incredulous. “For real?” I asked, echoing him.

He shrugged.

“How long at this game?”

He pursed his lips. “Maybe six, nine months. A buddy of mine introduced me.”

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“Some buddy. In addition to gambling being illegal, which a solid, upstanding citizen like you ought to know, we’re thinking there’s something corrupt about this game, that it’s connected to a couple of murders.”

“It was just a little innocent gambling, like betting on ball games. Where’s the harm in that?”

“Are you stupid, brah?” I asked. “Where’s the harm? The harm is in violating the law. You want to get pulled in on a sting one day? See your face in the
Star-Advertiser
? Maybe even one of the camera guys from your station films you doing the perp walk?

How long you think you can keep your fancy job, your big house, your Mercedes, after they arrest you?”

He opened his mouth to argue and then shut it. It looked like he was finally realizing the trouble he was in.

It was nearly ten, and I’d been on the go since six when I woke up and walked the dog. I was running out of patience, even for a guy who changed my diapers a time or two. “You know a
moke
named Dexter Trale?” I asked Lui, trying to soften my voice a little. Moke was an island term for a two-bit hood, which was a pretty good description of Dex.

“We don’t use names. Everybody has a Chinese nickname.”

“Skinny haole. Tattooed like crazy.”

“Yeah. That’s Lan Long. Blue dragon. Like his tattoo.”

“I have to ask. What’s yours?”

“Yuan.”

I racked my brain for the little Chinese I knew. “Money?”

“It either means dollar, or first,” he said.

Of course. Lui was the first of us boys and the one who cared most about money. “How much cash changes hands in a typical game?” I asked, thinking of Stuey’s assertion that Dexter Trale was packing up bundles of cash in the warehouse at night.

“I don’t pay that much attention,” Lui said, but I knew he was lying.

136 Neil S. Plakcy

I kept looking at him.

“Maybe twenty grand a night,” he said, looking down at his lap.

Ray whistled. “From seven players?”

“High stakes,” Lui said.

I didn’t even ask if his wife Liliha knew what he was doing—

because of course, she didn’t. “Who walks off with the money at the end of the night?”

“Depends on who wins.”

Again, I looked at him.

“I win sometimes, all right? This guy we call Tung runs the game. He always walks away with some cash.”

“Not Dexter—I mean Blue Dragon?”

He shook his head. “Lan Long’s the worst player. I think he works for Tung somehow, that’s how he gets in the game. And plus, he’s so bad, he draws money out from the rest of us.”

“How often do you play?” I asked.

“Once a week. That’s all, I swear. I just lose a couple of grand here and there.”

“Still, if Tung walks away with ten or fifteen grand for a night, it’s hardly worth a big money laundering operation,” I said, frowning.

Lui looked back toward the restaurant. His profile was tense.

“It’s not the only game.” He looked back at me. “Tung runs a couple of games.
Fan tan
, 13 card, a couple of other pai gow games with lower stakes. And he’s got a room full of video poker machines in an old warehouse off River Street.”

I pulled out a pad and pen. “Details, brah.”

“I never played any of the other games,” Lui said. “But Tung mentions them now and then. And he said any time we want to play video poker, we just let him know.”

“What do you know about this guy Tung?” I asked. “Chinese?”

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He shook his head. “Japanese. Scary. He was changing his shirt one day and his whole body looks like it’s covered in tattoos.

Like a yakuza, you know?”

The yakuza were Japan’s version of the Mafia, a criminal network that had its fingers in all kinds of bad stuff, there and in the US.

“Could be he just likes tattoos,” Ray said.

“You see rings on his arms?” I asked Lui.

He nodded. “Bunch of them.”

“Yakuza tattoo a ring around the arm for each crime they commit,” I said. “Yeah, it could be he’s just an ordinary Japanese guy who happens to like tattoos. Or he could be a yakuza.

Considering he’s running illegal gambling, I’m tending to think he’s a criminal.”

Lui either didn’t have more details than that, or he wasn’t saying. He kept drumming his fingers on the arm of the chair and licking his lips. I realized he was scared, and that was something I’d never seen in my big brother, the one who had always seemed to have everything under control.

“Time for you to head home, brah. Don’t even think about going back to that game. Not unless you want your brothers dragging you out of there on your ass.”

“You won’t tell Liliha, will you?”

For a minute there, I could see my brother Lui, maybe fifteen or sixteen, asking me to keep a secret from our parents. I don’t even remember what it was, but I didn’t tell then, and I wouldn’t now.

“Go home. Your wife and kids love you.”

We all stood up together, and my reserved brother, the one I almost never see without a suit and tie, hugged me. I hugged him back, my arms reaching around his broad back as if I could protect him from his own bad impulses.

I yawned as Lui walked out. We hadn’t heard anything from Akoni, which meant the game was still going on.

138 Neil S. Plakcy

“Big money,” Ray said. “And your brother thinks Dexter works for this guy called Tung. You think maybe he’s Mr. T?

Tung? Not Dexter?”

“Don’t know. But I think those nicknames stay in the game. I wouldn’t expect an outsider like Stuey to know that name.”

“But what if Dexter called him that?”

My cell rang. “Looks like the game’s breaking up,” Akoni said.

“You out front?”

We were, in a manner of speaking. “Yup. We’ll cover the front door. And tomorrow, brah, I gotta talk to you.”

We saw a group of men exit, Dexter Trale among them. A couple were laughing and talking, while the others were silent.

Winners and losers, I thought.

One of the guys, Japanese by the looks of him, was wearing a bright aloha shirt with a pattern of ‘ilima flowers, the kind used in fragrant leis, and carrying a white canvas bag with a wooden handle.

Ray and I had a choice. We could go after Dexter Trale or the guy with the satchel. It seemed a no-brainer to follow the money.

I called Akoni, and he pulled up behind us as the guy in the

‘ilima shirt got into a Mercedes sedan. We traded off following him, one of us dropping back while the other stayed close, then reversing positions, until he led us to the Kope Bean warehouse.

We both parked under a kiawe tree across the street and watched as the man with the satchel walked up to the warehouse building, punched a code at the front door and stepped inside. I dialed Akoni.

“I’d love to know what’s going on in there. But I don’t see how we can. We don’t have a warrant, and we don’t have any grounds to get one, especially without some testimony by the late Stuart McKinney.”

“Just adding data to the bank,” he said.

I called the license plate in to the dispatcher, who put me on hold. When he came back he said the car was registered to a MAhu BLood
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corporation—Mahalo Coffee, LLC.

“That doesn’t tell us much,” Ray said. “We’re at the Kope Bean warehouse, and we know Mahalo is the name of the corporate parent.”

We sat there and watched and waited. There was a constant hum of traffic from the H1, a block away. Clouds moved across the dark sky, obscuring the quarter moon and whatever stars might be shining. A few minutes after midnight, a man walked out the front door. I pulled out my binoculars and adjusted the focus. It was Ezekiel Kapuāiwa.

Akoni called. “You know who that is?”

I filled him in on Ezekiel. “He used to work at the Kope Bean.

Maybe somebody called him to help out now that McKinney’s dead.”

Ezekiel walked over to the Mercedes and stood there. A couple of minutes later, the man in the ‘ilima shirt came out.

Both got into the Mercedes, which pulled out of the parking lot.

I called Akoni. “You ready to follow again?”

“You take lead,” he said.

We followed the Mercedes, which ducked under the H1

freeway and continued up into Papakolea. Ezekiel got out in front of a house a few blocks from where Edith Kapana had lived, and the Mercedes returned the way it had come, getting on the H1 going Diamond Head.

Akoni and I traded off position on the highway as we followed the Mercedes off the H1 and onto local roads all the way to Black Point, an exclusive neighborhood on the far side of Diamond Head. The car pulled up in front of a wrought-iron gate, which slowly swung open as we cruised past.

We noted the address, and Akoni headed back toward the highway.

“What’s going on here?” Ray asked, as we drove away. “Does Edith’s murder tie into the pai gow game? How could she have known about the game or the money laundering?”

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“Well, she lived with Dexter Trale, and Dex worked with Stuey at the Kope Bean warehouse. Maybe she overheard Dex talking to Leelee. Everybody said she was a nosy old woman.”

“I can’t see Ezekiel playing pai gow; he doesn’t seem to have two nickels to rub together,” Ray said.

“Suppose Edith knew money from the game was going to support KOH. She believed in the kahiko ways, the old-time beliefs. So she probably didn’t like gambling. Ezekiel told Edith, and she tried to either stop the game or stop the money coming to KOH.”

We kept going back to her visit to the Ohana, where she had been asking about Ezekiel. What was that about? Was she trying to get in touch with him to confirm her beliefs about the pai gow game?