Mahu Blood (20 page)

Big players, including a couple of Hong Kong Chinese. He wants me to be there.”

“So tell him no.”

“It’s not that easy.”

I looked at my brother. We were walking inside the mall by then. It was cool, but sweat was dripping off his forehead. His dark suit looked uncomfortably tight, the knot of his red power tie askew. His body was as tense as a guitar string waiting to be plucked.

“How much do you owe him?” I asked.

“How did you know?” Lui’s whole body relaxed, as if a weight had been transferred from his shoulders.

“I’m a detective, brah. It’s what I do.”

“Close to a hundred grand. I was the banker a couple of
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times, and I ran into some bad luck.”

“So you lied to me the other day, when you said this was just penny-ante. That you won some and you lost some.”

“I was embarrassed. And I thought I could deal with it. But he’s pressuring me. Says he has to go back to Japan soon and he needs to collect his debts. I get one last chance to win some money before he’s calling the marker. If I don’t show on Friday night, he’s going to go after me. He said he’ll call Liliha, tell her about it. Then he’ll spread the word around town, ruin me in business.”

That was interesting—that Tanaka was preparing to leave town. Was it because we were closing in on him? “I’m assuming you don’t have that kind of money handy,” I said.

He shook his head.

“First of all, gambling’s illegal. So if he starts bragging about your debt, he exposes himself as running the game.” I stopped in front of the Disney Store, where a teenager in a Mickey Mouse costume waved his white gloves at shoppers. “Any threats of physical violence?”

Lui looked like he’d swallowed a sour lump of poi. “You think he might?”

“It’s the standard threat. Break your kneecaps. That kind of thing.”

My brother is a tough, savvy businessman. Put him across from you at a negotiating table, and you’d never have a chance.

But he was way out of his league.

“I have to think about this,” I said. “We think Jun Tanaka, your Tung, has ties to the yakuza back in Japan. And he’s mixed up in a world of trouble here.” We started walking again, and I told him that we suspected Tanaka of filtering the game’s proceeds through the Kope Bean stores.

“That’s money laundering,” he said. “You could put him away.”

“Your problems can’t be solved so easily. For starters, don’t MAhu BLood
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get ahead of yourself. We’re nowhere near bringing charges. And he wants you in that game on Friday.”

I reassured my big brother that I would look out for him. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that, but I looked to my father as a role model. He’d always taken care of us, no matter what fate threw his way. I couldn’t do anything less.

When I got home, Mike was out at the grill in the back yard with steaks, Roby sitting obediently next to him waiting for his chance to steal the meat. I fixed a salad and some rice, and we ate at the kitchen table, talking about movies we wanted to see, a neighbor he had spoken to, a dog Roby had befriended. Mike slipped Roby a couple of hunks of steak when he thought I wasn’t looking.

We adjourned to the sofa to watch TV, a reality show about chefs living together in a house and competing to see who could cook the strangest food. Roby turned around a few times, then sprawled at the foot of the sofa. It was the kind of evening I’d hoped we would have once we lived together, and it felt really good.

The next morning, I sat down with Ray, Akoni and Tony Lee and went over what my brother had told me about the big game scheduled for Friday night.

“Why do you think they’re pressuring your brother?” Akoni asked.

“Tanaka says he’s going to Japan and needs to collect on his debts. He’s threatening blackmail if Lui doesn’t show up at the game on Friday and then pay up what he owes.”

“You talked to the FBI about this?” Akoni asked. “They may already be following Tanaka. You don’t want to screw up a case the Bureau is working on. Don’t you know a guy over there?”

“Yeah, you’re right. I need to call him.” Francisco Salinas was a Fed I had worked with when an Indonesian diplomat involved in money laundering had been murdered.

When we went back upstairs I called him, and as soon as I mentioned Tanaka’s name he told me we had better get over to
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his office pronto. That was the way it was with the FBI: give, give, give. But we were all working toward the same goal, after all, so we had to play nice.

The day was unseasonably cool for September, when we hadn’t even had Labor Day, and there was a stiff breeze that made it seem almost cold outside. I wanted more heat—outside and inside our case, too, which was turning colder than the top of Haleakala at sunrise.

Just before the entrance to the FBI building, near the Ala Moana Mall, Ray swerved to avoid a tourist reading the map behind the wheel of his rented convertible and not paying attention to things like stop signs. I braced myself against the dashboard and struggled not to press my foot into the floor, the way my father had done when he was teaching me to drive.

We made it past the security checks at the entrance to the parking lot and in the building lobby and took the elevator up to the FBI regional office. Salinas was a tall, dark-haired Cuban-American haole, with a military-short hair cut and navy suit and white shirt. He came out to the reception area to meet us, and I introduced him to Ray. In his office, with a big picture window looking out at Ala Moana Beach Park, I sketched out what we knew about Jun Tanaka and the large amounts of cash he seemed to be moving around. I mentioned the yakuza tattoos and what we knew of his background.

“You found out about his record back in Japan?” Salinas leaned back in his leather chair.

I nodded. “We had a Japanese translator look over some materials.” I didn’t mention that my hacker friend had provided the materials or that the translator was my surfer cousin. Less is more, you know.

“We’ve had our eye on Mr. Tanaka for a while,” he said. “And we’d love to send him back to Japan. But he was born here, and he has a US passport, and we haven’t managed to pin anything on him yet that would let us send him to jail.”

“What about if you catch him running a pai gow game?”

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“Depends on what you mean by running. If we can tail him taking the proceeds from the game and putting it into the Kope Bean bank accounts, then we can make a case.”

“What about the other guys in the game?” Ray asked. “Do they walk away? Or do they get caught in the net?”

I was glad Ray asked the question. Salinas picked up a gold Mont Blanc pen from his desk and played it back and forth between his fingers.

“You have an informant?”

We both nodded. “But we don’t want Tanaka to know which of the guys ratted him out.”

“I want to get Tanaka,” Salinas said. “The other guys clean?”

“I don’t know. I only know my informant is.”

“I don’t mind ignoring the other guys, if I get Tanaka. You have the details?”

I told him about the Wing Wah and the game the next night.

He took notes, checking a couple of things on the computer. “I’ll get a team together.”

Even though Salinas said the other players didn’t matter, I wanted to look out for my brother’s interests. “We’ll help,” I said.

He shook his head. “This is a Bureau operation. We appreciate the offer, but we’ll run with what you’ve given us.”

“What about the Joint Terrorism Task Force?” I asked. “You work with HPD on that. How’s this any different?”

“HPD detectives who are part of the JTTF have gone through our screening already,” Salinas said. “You want to turn your case over to one of them?”

I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t giving up my case, and Salinas was firm. We left, me wondering what I had dropped my brother into.

A heAd foR NuMBeRs

I called Lui and asked when we could talk. “I’m meeting Dad for lunch,” he said. “After I told you about my trouble, I thought a long time about what I could do to get out of it. The only person I kept coming back to was Dad.”

I knew how he felt. Our father had always been there for us, through our many difficulties. He was a voice of reason.

“You want to come with us?” Lui asked.

I was so accustomed to Lui being the oldest brother, the most confident, the one who always seemed to know what to do with his life, that it took me a minute to recognize the undercurrent in his voice.

“Sure,” I said.

Ray and I spent the rest of the morning trying to put the pieces together. Based on what Lui had told us about the game and what Mili France had said, it sounded like there was a lot of cash moving around. “Suppose Tanaka makes cash donations to the Ohana,” I said. “That gives him a tax write-off. And I’m sure he’s got some creative ways of funneling the money back once it’s clean.”

“He could do the same with the KOH,” Ray said. “Plus, he owns a couple of other businesses.”

“And Edith connects to this case because she knew something about the money laundering?”

“Must be,” Ray said. “She lived with Dex, she knew Ezekiel.

And we know she was a nosy old woman, the kind who didn’t mind stirring up trouble.”

“So who killed her?”

Ray looked at me. “Dex?”

I frowned. “I saw his hand shake a couple of times when he was lighting cigarettes,” I said. “You think he could make such
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clean shots?”

“Tanaka?”

“Could be. Tanaka knows both Dex and Ezekiel. Through either of them he could have found out about Edith.”

I stood up and started pacing around. “But why shoot her at the rally?” I asked. “Tanaka’s smart enough to know that a shooting at the rally could make problems for KOH.”

“Yeah, but remember that flyer we got, trying to shift blame to Bunchy Parker’s group,” Ray said. “He could have thought shooting Edith at a KOH event would point the finger at one of the competing groups.”

“And he could have hired someone.” I sighed. “I hate this kind of case. Too much money, too many details—it all makes my head spin.”

I was relieved when we tabled the discussion so I could head over to KVOL’s headquarters in one of the gleaming high-rises downtown. Lui’s position as station manager gave him access to the private club on the top floor, a white-linen place with stunning views of the airport and Honolulu Harbor.

A maitre d’ in dark suit and a green tie with the U.H. logo led me to the table where my father and brother sat. Beyond them, a speedboat left a V-shaped wake as it sped past the end of Sand Island, and a Hawaiian Air jet took off, rising like an eagle into the clouds. “Haoa coming too?” my father said as I approached, quirking an eyebrow.

“He couldn’t make it.” I kissed the top of my father’s head and slid into the third chair, knocking the table leg and rocking the water glasses. You can’t take me anywhere.

Though Lui, like Haoa and me, is only part Japanese, on him those features make him look perpetually gloomy, and that morning he appeared worse for wear.

“Are you going to tell me what all this is about?” my father asked.

“After we order,” Lui said. “I recommend the macadamia-MAhu BLood
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crusted mahi-mahi fillet.” We took his word for it and ordered three. When the waiter left, Lui sighed. “It’s a long story.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his plush, French-style chair.

“I started gambling at Berkeley. I was pretty good, you know.

I always had a head for numbers, and I could keep track of the cards.”

My father shook his head. “Your mother and I, we figured you were tight with your money. That’s why you never asked us for anything.”

Lui smiled. “I wanted to prove I could make my own way. I gambled a little when I was single, back here in Honolulu, mostly poker. Then I married Liliha, and Jeffrey was born, and I pulled back. My luck had turned, and I figured I better focus on my family.”

“Good idea,” my father said.

I wanted to kick him. “Let Lui finish, Dad. I’m sure this isn’t easy.”

The waiter brought our salads and puffy white rolls with pats of ice-cold butter. As Lui took a roll, I noticed his hand was shaking, and that reminded me of Dexter Trale, his fellow pai gow player.

“A couple of months ago, I met this man, Jun Tanaka, at a charity fund-raiser. We talked, we joked around. Somehow we got onto the topic of pai gow. He told me he ran a game and invited me to join.”

Lui started to cut into the roll with his butter knife, but his hand slipped and the roll slid off his plate. He put the knife down and took a deep breath. “Things were getting crazy at home.

The kids turning into teenagers, Liliha bitching at them and me.

Nothing was ever right. I had to get away sometimes.”

My father looked like he smelled something bad. “How much?” he asked. “How much did you lose?”

“How do you know I lost?” Lui asked, almost belligerently.

It was rare for any of us to stand up to our father, who had
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dominated our childhood with his height, his bulk and his often bad temper.

“Because you wouldn’t have asked me here if you were winning.” My father’s voice was gentle, but there was steel underneath. I remembered why we all looked up to him so much.

“About a hundred grand.” Lui busied himself with his salad. I already knew the figure, so I didn’t stop eating, but my father put his fork down and stared at Lui. Then he shook his head.

“I don’t have that much in my checking account,” he said. “I’ll have to sell some CDs, move some money around. It might take a couple of days.”

We both gaped at him. I’d always known our parents were comfortable; my dad had his own construction business, and he and my mom had owned a couple of strip shopping centers and office buildings. But I’d never thought of them as the kind of people who had a hundred grand to throw around.

“It will come out of your inheritance,” my father said.

“Everything we have is divided equally between the three of you.