Mahu Blood (29 page)

“I can appreciate a good-looking woman. And if you want to know the truth, I could probably have sex with a woman again, if I wanted to. I just don’t anymore.”

Ray nodded. “Joey and I used to talk about this all the time.

We finally decided we were just wired differently. He’d talk about how cute some guy was, and I’d see it but not in the way he did.”

He turned toward me. “I guess I had this idea of you, being like Joey. And then seeing you with Peggy, it was kind of like, whoa.

You don’t mind that I get so personal, do you?”

“I spend more hours in a day with you than I do with Mike. If we didn’t get personal with each other life would be pretty dull.”

It started to pour as we got on the H1, gray clouds scudding across the sky and palm trees tossing restlessly in the wind. The battered old Toyota in front of us threw up rooster tails that splattered my windshield. We passed a pickup truck festooned with plastic leis in every color, so many that you couldn’t see the rails, with a battered statue of King Kamehameha propped up in the back.

“Dex worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean,” I said, the wipers sloshing against the windshield. “Could he have sent Dex to The Garage that night to find Adam and kill him?”

“Why would Tanaka think Dex could be a killer, though? As far as we know right now, he’s just a dude who works at the warehouse, who plays in the pai gow game. And even if he did hire Dex, how would Dex know that O’Malley would be at the bar that night?”

“Maybe Dex staked out O’Malley’s apartment. Followed him to the bar, saw his chance.”

“That part works,” Ray said. “But I still don’t know why Tanaka would look to Dex. He has those yakuza connections.

Why not just call in a professional hit?”

We both mulled that over as the rain eased and we switched to the Moanalua Freeway. By the time we began climbing Aiea Heights Road, the sun was back out. That’s Hawai’i weather. If you don’t like it, hold your breath for a minute, and it’ll change.

MAhu BLood
255

Arleen answered the door and led us to Harry’s office, where I handed him the documents. “Can you do anything to enhance these?”

Harry held up one of the pages, which had writing back and front. I could just make out the lines and the margins of the original paper. But all the writing had been done by hand, and the ink had faded almost completely. Arleen came in as we were peering down at them, with glasses filled with pink-orange liquid.

“Pineapple orange guava,” she said. “It’s all Brandon will drink these days.”

Harry had adopted Arleen’s son Brandon when he married her and both had changed their last name from Nakamura to Ho.

Brandon had asked if he could change his middle name to Tally, but both Harry and Arleen had refused. Brandon had turned nine the previous spring, a smart kid who had blossomed under Harry’s supervision.

“I went through a phase like that.” I flashed back to my childhood, drinking juice and flipping pogs with Harry.

Harry held up one of the pages to the light. “These look like church records to me.” He had been brought up in the First Chinese Church of Christ, though like me, he wasn’t big on organized religion. “We had an old book like this at my church, where they wrote all the births and deaths and baptisms.”

He found a big plastic magnifying screen, and laid it down over the first page. With the magnification we could make out the words “Opihi Baptist Church” on the top line, printed in a strong hand with ink that had remained dark. The rest of the lines were in a mix of cursive and print writing, from many different hands, and it hurt my eyes to look at them for too long.

A quick Internet search showed us the Opihi Baptist Church had been destroyed when the lava surrounded Opihi and Kalapana on the Big Island.

“Why would old church records be in the file on Kingdom of Hawai’i?” Ray asked.

“The book at my church tells you when people are born
256 Neil S. Plakcy

and died,” Harry said. “And who their parents are and their godparents and so on.”

“It’s like a family tree,” I said. “Telling us if Ezekiel really is descended from Kamehameha.”

Harry said, “Let me play around with some image enhancement tools and see what I can do with these pages.”

“We need it ASAP, brah.”

“Hey, why not? Anything else you need while I’m working for you? Want me to pick up your laundry? Walk your dog?”

“I might take you up on the dog thing,” I said.

gAy foR PAy

Ray and I walked out to the Jeep. “Salinas is supposed to be back from court by now,” I said, looking at my watch. “Suppose we pay him a visit and see what he’s willing to share about Tanaka.”

We grabbed a quick lunch and got to the FBI office on Ala Moana just as Salinas was walking up to the front door. The sun was directly overhead and bounced off car windshields in harsh shards. I hailed Salinas and said, “Got a lot to talk to you about.”

“You can talk. I’ll listen.”

“Can you ask Tanaka about Dexter Trale?”

“Slow down, Kimo,” Ray said. “Say hello to the nice G-Man.

Hi, Francisco, how are you today?”

Salinas laughed. “I’m good, Ray. What’s new in the world of Honolulu homicide?”

He led us up to his office, chatting in the elevator about the weather and a new energy drink he’d found that gave you a boost without caffeine. He took us directly into a small conference room off the lobby, and I couldn’t help comparing the simple round, wooden table and metal chairs to the furnishings at Fields and Yamato. The walls were hung with government directives in plain frames instead of original landscapes of Honolulu and the North Shore.

“What can you tell us about Jun Tanaka?” I asked, when we were sitting.

“He’s the subject of an ongoing investigation.”

“Yeah, I got that part. Has your investigation turned up anything that ties him to any of our homicides—Edith Kapana, Stuart McKinney or Adam O’Malley? We have a witness who says he told Tanaka that O’Malley was having a meeting on his day off about KOH business. On Thursday afternoon, just a few hours before O’Malley was killed.”

258 Neil S. Plakcy

He shook his head. “None of those names has come up.”

“Can we talk to Tanaka?”

“Nope. Not till we’re finished.”

“When do you think that will be?”

“We’re the government, Kimo. We take the time we need.”

He leaned back in his chair. “You might want to practice your surveillance techniques,” he said, smiling. “You guys stood out like a sore thumb in Chinatown on Friday night.”

“Sometimes that’s the point.” We stood up. “Thanks for the cooperation, Francisco. I’ll remember it the next time you need something.”

He was still smiling when we walked out.

“We shouldn’t have told him about Tanaka’s connection to our homicides,” Ray said. “I feel like a teenage girl who puts out and then gets slapped for her trouble.”

“That’s something else you need to take up with your wife.”

After that productive little meeting, we went back to headquarters, where O’Malley’s autopsy report was waiting for us. It indicated that the cause of death was exsanguination, which means loss of blood. The method of death was a “necklace incision” across his throat, in which both his carotid arteries and his jugular vein had been cut.

Doc Takayama had noted, in clinical language, that the extra large black dildo in O’Malley’s butt had caused damage to the anal walls, but the fact that no blood was present indicated that the device had been inserted there post-mortem.

“Kinky,” Ray said.

“Or a red herring. The killer wanted to make sure we thought it was a sex thing.”

“He’s doing a good job of it.”

Sampson called us in as we were packing up to leave for the day, no closer to finding our killer than we had been that morning.

“Do you like this guy Tanaka for your murders?” Sampson MAhu BLood
259

asked, when we’d laid out our progress. “The one the FBI has in custody?”

“We think he’s pulling the strings,” Ray said. “But we have nothing that ties him to the weapons, and only theories that connect him to the victims. Once the FBI makes their case for money laundering, we might get a shot at Tanaka.”

“I’m putting you back in the rotation tomorrow. There’s no use chasing your tails until the Feds are finished.”

Sampson was right; we knew Tanaka was involved in the murders and we would have to wait for Francisco Salinas to let us talk to him.

When I opened the front door, Roby was delighted to see me, and I took him for a long walk around the neighborhood.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Adam O’Malley, though. Was his death a random sex crime? Or was it connected to our case?

Did Tanaka have an alibi for Thursday night, when O’Malley had been killed? What about for the other killings? He was Japanese, but in the dark he could have passed for haole. Did he have the kind of tattoos we had seen in the video of the man following O’Malley into the Honolulu Sunset? Or had he simply hired Dex to do his dirty work? And what would have made him think a warehouse worker like Dex could function as a hired killer?

By the time we circled back to the house, my head was so full of questions that I didn’t know what was real and what was speculation. When we walked in the house, Mike was in the living room, unbuttoning his shirt. Roby raced across the floor to jump up and nose his crotch. He pushed the dog away, laughing, and we kissed.

“I’m really antsy,” I said. “You want to go for a run?”

“Yeah. I could use a run. Spent most of the day behind a desk, and I’m feeling stiff.”

“Stiffness we can deal with when we get back,” I said, smiling at him.

He laughed. “I might hold you to that.”

260 Neil S. Plakcy

We changed into T-shirts and running shorts and took off up the hill. Mike’s legs are longer than mine, but I kept up with him as we ran. We stopped high up on Aiea Heights Road, looking back down at Pearl Harbor and the Ford Island Bridge. The sky was turning from lavender to black, and street lights were coming on. In the far distance I saw the neon dragon that glowed over a Chinese restaurant at the boom of the street. Dragons again.

I remembered Dex’s tattoo, and his pai gow name, Lan Long, which meant blue dragon. It was time to do some research on Dex and see if we could connect him to the murders and to Jun Tanaka.

We turned around and went back down the hill toward our home and our dog, and I pushed thoughts of murder out of my head and focused on enjoying the evening with Mike.

The next morning, while we waited for a new case, Ray and I plunged into researching Dexter Trale. I called Karen Gold at Social Security and had her run Dex’s work record, and Ray called his Army contact and discovered that Dex had served two tours in Iraq.

Dex’s employment records started coming through the fax, and I pulled them out to review. Ray and I were looking them over when Harry walked in.

“Hey, brah, howzit?” I said. “You do something with those faded pages?”

“Didn’t get a chance to yet. But I couldn’t sleep last night and I was fiddling around online. I remembered that guy you asked about, Dexter Trale, and thought I’d look him up and see what I could find.” He pulled out his iPhone and started typing. “I’m sending you a link now.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Just open your e-mail.”

I turned to my computer and opened Harry’s message, then clicked on the embedded URL. I got a big warning message that said the material was suitable only for adults.

“Ray, look away,” I said, as I clicked through.

MAhu BLood
261

He gave me the finger, and I gave him a
shaka
back, the Hawaiian hand salute with the thumb extended, and the two middle fingers bent over, the others erect. We both laughed, and the two of them clustered around me as the page opened.

“That’s Dex,” I said, pointing at the photo of a naked skinny haole guy on the screen. Dex was standing in what looked like the living room of the house he shared with Leelee. He was flexing his arms, which were covered with tattoos, and his stiff dick, which was only average-sized, jutted out from his body. There was another man, naked, on all fours on the floor, presenting his butt to Dex. The other guy’s face wasn’t visible.

“Hello,” Ray said. “Guess Dex isn’t so straight after all.”

“I believe the term is ‘gay for pay,’” Harry said.

“Are there more like this?” I asked.

“You can’t see them without a membership. You have one?”

“Hey, I’ve got a boyfriend. I don’t need to go looking for one online.”

“Go ask Lieutenant Sampson if he’ll authorize the fee,” Ray said, poking me in the side. “I want to see what he says.”

“I was only kidding,” Harry said. “Other guys might need a membership, but not me.”

I looked at Ray as Harry’s fingers danced across the keyboard.

Before we could start to argue about hacking, though, a whole portfolio of pictures of Dexter Trale opened up. In some cases he was alone, touching himself and looking provocatively at the camera. In others he was either fucking or getting sucked.

Despite knowing what a scumbag Dex was, and the fact that Mike and I were fucking like bunnies every time we could, I still found myself getting hard. I wondered if all guys were wired like that. I guess that’s why porn is such a big business. I was glad I was sitting behind my desk so I didn’t have to make any adjustments.

“He get paid for this?” Ray asked.

“Looking to pick up some extra cash?” Harry asked.

262 Neil S. Plakcy

“Dex is the kind of guy who doesn’t do anything for free,” I said. “But interesting as this is, I don’t see how it relates to our case.”

“Between this, and what your witness said about meeting Dex at The Garage, Dex could be the guy who picked up O’Malley,”

Ray said. “I’ll bet he needs cash, too. You saw that place where they live. Leelee sure doesn’t work. With the uncle gone and Edith dead, he could be doing anything he can to pick up a few bucks.”

“Including a little sharpshooting,” I said. “But the person who shot Edith Kapana had damn good aim, and Dex’s hand shook when he was lighting his cigarette.”