Jimmy did not look happy. “Cardozo’s in the FTEP,” he said 156 Neil S. Plakcy

to us. FTEP stands for Field Training and Evaluation Program; newly graduated recruits were partnered with experienced officers so they could apply the theoretical knowledge they gained at the academy to hands-on field training.

I understood why Jimmy wouldn’t be happy. He was young, in his late twenties, though he’d been on patrol long enough to qualify as Kitty’s supervisor. If I were him, I’d worry that every screw-up, every shortcut, would end up filtering back to Sampson.

“Congratulations,” I said to Kitty. “And you, too, Jimmy. You won’t find a smarter, more dedicated trainee.”

“And I don’t tell my dad anything that happens on the job,”

she said.

Jimmy seemed to relax. “You see who was driving that pickup?” Ray asked, pointing to the truck we thought belonged to Brian Parker. Just as he did, though, a guy who matched Brian’s description exited the convenience store and headed for the truck.

Ray and I cut him off. “Mr. Parker?” I asked, showing him my shield. “Honolulu PD. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Brian looked around as if mapping out an escape route and saw Jimmy and Kitty behind us. “What’s up?”

He had a super-sized soda in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. I wondered if he’d been smoking pakalolo, but his eyes weren’t red. “We’ve been looking for you for a couple of days,” I said. “What have you been up to?”

“Just chilling.” He was a skinny guy, a couple inches under six feet, with what looked like military tattoos on his arms.

“You still pretty good with a rifle?” Ray asked. “You were some kind of marksman in the Army.”

Brian shrugged and took a drink of his soda. “I get out in the country and practice sometimes. No law against that, is there?”

“How do you feel about Hawaiian nationalism?” I asked.

“Your dad’s pretty involved in it. How about you?”

“What’s this all about? Is my dad in trouble again?”

MAhu BLood 157

“We’ll ask the questions for a while, how’s that?” Ray said.

“We ask, you answer.”

Brian took a long sip from his soda, then said, “The whole nationalism thing, it’s my dad’s gig. Me, I could care less.”

I nodded. “Want to tell us where you were on Statehood Day, eleven in the morning?”

He bit his lip. “You won’t tell my father, will you?”

I knew from his army records that Brian Parker was nearly thirty. Old enough that his father’s opinion shouldn’t matter. I wondered what he was hiding and why. “Not unless we have to,”

I said.

“I have a girlfriend,” Brian said. “She’s haole, though, and my dad don’t like us to mix. So I haven’t told him.”

“You were with her that Friday morning?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ve been working private security at night, off the books, for this rapper dude over from the mainland to work on an album. Days, I’m at her house.” We got her name and address, and Ray stepped away to call her and verify the alibi.

“You know anybody involved with your dad’s group, or any group for that matter, who might have had a reason to disrupt the KOH rally, kill that old lady?”

Brian relaxed and leaned back against his truck, tearing open the bag of chips. He offered it to me but I shook my head.

“My dad’s got a temper, you know that,” he said, grabbing a handful of chips from the bag. “But he’s not the kind of guy to plan out killing someone, certainly not an old lady.”

He chomped noisily and then drank some soda. I stood there in the sun, my patience wearing, as Kitty and Jimmy stood at ease in the background.

“Most of the people in my dad’s group, they’re the same way,”

Brian said, crumpling the top of the chip bag. “More interested in culture than violence. You ask me, the real nuts are the guys from KOH. You ever seen that Ezekiel dude, the one who says he’s descended from Kamehameha? He’s seriously crazy.”

158 Neil S. Plakcy

“Yeah, I got that idea myself.”

Ray came back to us, and I could see from the disappointment on his face that Brian’s alibi stood up. And after talking to Brian, I thought he wasn’t involved, but I took his cell number, in case we needed him again.

“Doesn’t mean she isn’t covering for him,” Ray said, as we got back in the Jeep. “Brian’s girlfriend.” But I could hear in his voice that he had given up.

We were frustrated. We had only two days to solve two murders, and no leads. And yet, we must be getting close, or why would someone shoot at us?

By the time we got back to headquarters it was time to clock out, and we had no reason to stick around and rack up overtime.

Mike was already home by the time I got there, and he’d walked and fed the dog. They were sitting on the sofa in the living room reading the newspaper. At least Mike was; I think Roby was just looking at the pictures.

Mike suggested we go out to dinner, to the little Italian place down the hill that we’d developed a fondness for. We talked out our current cases, and some of my frustration eased just being with him and being able to share what was going on in both our lives. When we got back home we ended up in bed, and I felt pretty good about the way things were working out between us.

RottiNg BeANs

I overslept, and by the time I woke up Mike had already left for work. There was a note on the kitchen table—“I fed and walked the dog”—with no signature. Since we had no menehunes, little Hawaiian elves, living with us, I figured it had come from him. There was a happy face at the end of the note.

When Ray and I met up at headquarters, he said, “I’ve been thinking. This case keeps coming back around to the Kope Bean.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down at my desk and leaning back in my chair. We’d been to the distribution center where Dex and Stuey worked, the branch in Kaneohe where Ezekiel had been a barista, not to mention various places we’d gone just for coffee, like the Chinatown store on Hotel Street, where we’d talked with Akoni and then with my brother Lui.

“If there’s money laundering going on, you’d think someone at the store level might know about it,” Ray said, drumming his fingers on his desk.

“I don’t know. Usually the baristas are teenagers. But there was that older woman we talked to. What was her name? Mili? We could go look her up again.”

“Sounds like a good place to start.”

I called the Kope Bean store and found out that Mili no longer worked there. “You know her last name?” I asked.

The girl put me on hold. I got to listen to Israel Kamakawiwo’ole while I waited, but by the third song I was ready to reach through the phone, grab his ukulele, and use it to bludgeon the clerk who’d left me on hold for so long.

When the girl came back, she said, “France.”

“Excuse me? She went to France?”

“No, it’s her last name,” the girl said. “Mili France. Listen, I got customers. I gotta go.”

160 Neil S. Plakcy

She hung up on me, which didn’t improve my disposition toward her. But at least we had a last name on Mili, and it wasn’t Peed or Meter. I looked Mili France up in the phone book, and found an address in Kaneohe, a few blocks from the Kope Bean.

I called the number, but there was no answer and no machine.

My cell rang. “I couldn’t get hold of Pua until now,” my mother said. “She has a new boyfriend.” The ice in her voice could have chilled Kilauea.

“And?”

“Your cousin Ben is at Pua’s till tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Mom. Love to Dad.”

I hung up and dialed my Aunt Pua’s condo. Ben had just gotten in from surfing; he said he could hang around and wait for us to stop by.

“Change of plan,” I told Ray. “Let’s swing out to Hawai’i Kai before we look for Mili, see if my cousin can read any of the Japanese stuff Harry found.”

My aunt’s condo was in a two-story building on a canal with a lanai overlooking the water. I figured aromatherapy must pay well, or else she had some good alimony coming in from one or more of her previous husbands.

Ben greeted us at the door. He’s good-looking, in a scrawny, surfer way, but he had a soul patch on his chin that made me want to hand him a razor. There didn’t look like an ounce of fat on his six-foot something body, and he wore his black hair loose, down to his shoulders. His father was a haole Aunt Pua married and divorced in Vegas, and none of us ever met him. Like me, Ben looks a little Asian around his eyes, and his skin takes a tan well.

He offered us beers, which sadly we had to decline, though he indulged. He led us out to the lanai, where we sat down amid a forest of purple and white Vanda orchids, the music of the current in the waterway behind us.

“Can you read some Japanese stuff for us?” I asked.

“I can try.”

MAhu BLood 161

I showed him the printouts Harry had found online.

Ben scanned them for a couple of minutes, as I leaned back in the comfortable armchair and looked at the water. A hedge of yellow hibiscus ran alongside the bank, and its blossoms were like a scattering of tiny suns. The orchids perfumed the air, and somewhere in the distance wind chimes tinkled.

Pua had owned the place for years, buying in long before prices rose to the stratosphere. If one of us won the lottery, I could see Mike and me living in a place like that someday. I wondered if the homeowner’s association allowed dogs. Roby, after all, had become part of our family.

Ben looked up. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“Tell us what it is.”

“As near as I can tell, it’s a report about yakuza action in Yokohama,” he said. “From some official agency with a long title.”

“Any mention of a guy named Jun Tanaka?” Ray asked.

Ben nodded. “It looks like they knew he was involved in gambling and something else I can’t understand, but they had no way to prosecute him.”

He pushed the pages back to me. “I studied business Japanese.

Sorry, there’s a lot there I don’t understand.”

“Thanks, brah, I appreciate it. So where’s the surf good these days?”

“I got back from the Billabong Pro in J Bay. Surf was awesome.”

“Jeffreys Bay is in South Africa,” I said to Ray. “Some of the most consistent waves on the planet.”

“And how,” Ben said. “It’s a pain to get to—you’ve got to fly to Cape Town and then go another couple hundred miles to Eastern Cape Province.”

“How’d you do?” I was already jealous; I’d never been a good enough surfer to get invited to a foreign tournament, and Jeffreys 162 Neil S. Plakcy

Bay was one of those sites I’d always wanted to surf.

“I came in fifth. Kelly Slater and Mick Fanning were both on fire.”

We talked surf for a while. Ben was leaving for Mundaka, on the Basque coast of Spain, for another Billabong tournament. I was glad for him, but I still wanted to knock him on the head, grab his board and take his place.

We left Ben starting to wax his board before the afternoon’s surfing. As we walked back to the Jeep, I said, “I can see Tanaka putting out a hit on Stuart McKinney because he talked too much about the money at the Kope Bean warehouse. He’s got the connections.”

“But how can we tie him to Edith Kapana’s shooting?”

“Not sure. But I feel in my bones that he’s involved in it somehow.”

From Hawai’i Kai I drove us up to Kaneohe to look for Mili France. We parked in front of her apartment building and rang the bell. She was home by then, and after we’d identified ourselves, she buzzed us inside.

She wore khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt with capped sleeves. She was apprehensive when she answered the door, worry etching lines in her forehead. With her close-cropped gray hair, though, she exuded a no-nonsense air.

“What can I do for you, Detectives? Are you still asking questions about Ezekiel?”

“If we could come in?” I asked.

Hesitantly, she stepped back and ushered us into the living room. The furniture was simple, but good quality, solid wood chairs and a sofa covered in a tropical floral pattern, hibiscus and bird of paradise against a green background. A galley kitchen took up the back wall.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions about the Kope Bean.

You’re not working there anymore?”

She shook her head. “I was let go on Friday. No notice. No MAhu BLood 163

reason. Just so long, sayonara and aloha.” There was a bitterness in her tone that I hadn’t heard when we spoke before.

“I’ll be frank with you, Mili,” I said. “We’re looking into some unorthodox business practices there, and we were hoping you could fill in some details.”

“With pleasure. I’ve been around the block a few times, Detective. I know when something stinks, and it’s not rotting coffee beans.” She paused. “Did you ever know the Kaplans?”

she asked, and we shook our heads. “Lovely people. Hyman and Sara Kaplan. They started the Kope Bean with a single store in downtown Honolulu. They had twelve locations by the time they sold to Mr. Tanaka.”

I pulled out my notebook and started writing. “About five years ago, things started to change. Little things, at first. New machines that brewed with fewer beans. The coffee was weaker, but nobody noticed except some of the regulars. Then we started hiring from the Ohana.”

She looked at us. “Where are my manners?” she asked. “I never even offered you something to drink. I still have a stash of good beans.”

I looked at Ray. “I could use a cup of coffee,” I said, and he nodded.

She stepped over to the galley kitchen and pulled a bag of the Kope Bean’s signature blend of arabica beans and macadamia nut flavors from her freezer. I remembered a similar situation with Maile Kanuha at her office, when she brewed coffee for us from beans she swore by. I hoped Mili’s beans were better.

We didn’t talk while she ground the beans, but once the coffee was brewing she came back to us. “I have nothing against the handicapped,” she said. “Some of the staff we hired were lovely people. Sometimes a little slow, to be sure, and a couple did have anger management problems and had to be let go. But…”

“But what?” Ray asked.

“Mr. Tanaka got federal funds for hiring the disabled. And I know for a fact that he fudged some of the numbers. I didn’t 164 Neil S. Plakcy

like that.”

“But you stayed,” I said.

“I’m sixty-two years old, Detective. My husband dumped me ten years ago, and I hadn’t held a job in twenty years. The Kaplans gave me a chance, and I felt I owed it to them to stay at the Kope Bean. I didn’t want to see everything they worked for go down the drain.”

She turned to the coffee pot and began to pour. “And at my age, I’m not the most employable person. You’d be surprised at what people turn a blind eye to when it means keeping a paycheck.”

She brought us the coffee, and I noticed she wasn’t above bringing home cups and napkins from the Kope Bean, too.

“What else did you have to turn a blind eye to?” Ray asked, as she sat back down.

“We were instructed to exaggerate any shortages from suppliers, lose the occasional shipment if the driver ever got careless. Most of the staff, they’re kids, they don’t keep good track of their time cards. If Brittany forgot to clock in, she didn’t get paid for the time. When Devin quit, his time card mysteriously disappeared, and he didn’t get paid for his last week.”

She stopped to drink her coffee, and so did we. It was pretty damn good, better than you could get at most coffee shops, the Kope Bean included. Without the steamed milk, the coffee and macadamia flavors were even richer.

“The Kope Bean is a chain,” she said, putting her cup down on the table. “But not big enough to have much of a central office staff. Mr. Tanaka handled everything from payroll to depositing store receipts. He’s a slimy snake, and I don’t trust him a bit.” She frowned at some memory. “As the store manager, I closed out the tills at the end of the day and bundled up the cash for the bank. With the Kaplans, I made the night deposit myself, but Mr.

Tanaka started sending a runner every night to collect the cash instead.”

She ran her fingers up and down along the side of her cup.

MAhu BLood 165

“About two years ago, I had to go to the bank to resolve a dispute, and the manager handed me a printout of deposits from our store. I was astonished to see they were sometimes three or four thousand dollars more than we took in.”

“Did you do anything about it?” I asked.

She shook her head. “The manager at the Chinatown store asked me one day if I’d noticed anything funny, and that’s when I figured out it was happening at his branch, too. We both knew we couldn’t say anything.”

She finished her coffee. The anger seemed to radiate from her. “My ex-husband handled all the finances. When we split up I didn’t even know how to pay a bill. So I don’t understand what was going on. But I’m sure it was something funny.”

“And you never complained or told anyone?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“Any idea why they fired you?”

“They had me training this young girl. A friend of Mr. Tanaka’s.

Once he saw she could do the job, it was goodbye, Mili.”

We stood up. “Thanks for your time,” I said. “I wish you a lot of luck in the future.”

“We could subpoena the store’s cash deposits and its register tapes, and compare them, documenting any discrepancies,” Ray said, when we were back in the car. “But that will tip our hand.

We need to nail somebody on a murder charge.”

“Fraud may be all we can prove,” I said, but I didn’t like the idea at all.

i toLd you so

From the Jeep, Ray called Greg Oshiro. “You know anything about a guy named Jun Tanaka?” He held the phone out so I could hear.

“Depends on what you want to know,” Greg said. “You buy me coffee, I might spill some beans.”

“Meet you in half an hour?” Ray asked.

“We just had coffee with Mili, brah,” I groaned when Ray hung up. “I need food, not more caffeine.”

“We’ll get Mickey D’s on the way.”

We scarfed a couple of burgers and some fries and met Greg at the Kope Bean near the Star-Advertiser office on Kapiolani Boulevard. At least this time he was polite to me, and we made some chit-chat while we waited for Ray to fetch yet another round of macadamia lattes.

“You still working with that gay teen group?” Greg asked.

“Once a month. I’m going over there tomorrow night. A bunch of us rotate so the kids get a variety of voices.”

“I might be willing to come over sometime, if you could use me.”

Well, well. “Sure. I don’t think most of them read the paper, but you could talk to them about how the media shapes our ideas about sexual orientation. That sort of thing.”

He nodded, and Ray returned. “It takes a lot of cash to keep a movement going,” Greg said, pulling out his notebook. “About a month ago, I started to look into where the money for KOH

comes from.”

He pulled out a sheet of paper. “It’s a 501(c)(4) organization, a charitable non-profit,” he said. “So that means individuals and corporations can make tax-deductible contributions. The last time we met I told you that the biggest donors were a bunch 168 Neil S. Plakcy

of corporations, including the Kope Bean. I could tell that they were interconnected, but I didn’t know who was behind it all. I kept digging, and eventually I found out that it’s a guy named Jun Tanaka. He has yakuza ties in Japan, and a lot of his businesses here are pretty shady-looking, too.”

Interesting, I thought. He’d found out what we had—without having Harry on his team.

“What makes them shady?” Ray asked, raising his coffee to his lips.

“For example, he owns a malasada shop in a warehouse district near the airport,” Greg said, looking back at his paper.

A malasada is a kind of Portuguese donut popular in the islands. As my dad scaled back his construction business, he’d built a few dozen of those shops around the island, because they were small and simple.

“I’ve been out there a couple of times,” Greg continued.

“It took me a while to find it because there’s no sign. There’s just one old lady, behind a counter with a single tray of donuts.

But corporate records show it takes in nearly five grand a day in receipts. At least that’s what Tanaka reports for tax purposes.”

“Can you give us copies of what you’ve got, or should we be taking our own notes?”

He pushed some papers over to me. “Already made copies for you.”

I started to get suspicious. Until we started this investigation, Greg Oshiro wouldn’t have pissed on me if I was on fire.

Suddenly he wanted to be my best friend, offering me documents and volunteering to meet with the gay teen group. Something was very strange.

He went over the details on the paperwork he’d given us.

“How’d you put all these details about Tanaka together?” I asked.

“A friend who’s an attorney pointed me in the right direction.”

My suspicions got the better of me. “Why are you being so cooperative?”

MAhu BLood 169

For a minute it looked like he might argue, but he said, “The Star-Advertiser’s cutting back, like papers everywhere. I’m forty, I’m fat, I’ve got high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I’ve got two kids in Kaneohe. I can’t pick up and move someplace else. So I’ve got to do what I can to hold on to my job. I figure if I break a major exposé on KOH, or Tanaka, that gives me some job security.”

Two kids in Kaneohe? I was confused. Yeah, a lot of gay guys, and couples, are having kids; it’s not that unusual. But my first reaction when a guy told me that he had kids was that he was straight. Maybe, despite Ray’s gaydar, Greg wasn’t gay after all—just sucking up to me over the youth group so I could help him keep his job.

I looked back at the paperwork. “KOH brings in a lot of contributions in cash,” I said. “You think Tanaka is washing money through them?”

He nodded. “What I don’t know is where the cash comes from. I have an unverified report that he has a pakalolo operation up in the hills somewhere. I figure he’s selling dope, maybe ice, and he needs a place to put that cash.”

It was time for us to share with Greg. I looked at Ray, who said, “Tanaka’s running at least one pai gow game. A lot of cash comes in that way.”

Greg took a couple of notes. “You can’t print anything about it yet,” I said. “We’ll let you know when it all comes together, give you an exclusive in exchange for your help.”

He smiled, then slid one more piece of paper across the table.

“You might want to talk to this guy. He’s the attorney for KOH.”

I looked down at the page. He’d scrawled Adam O’Malley’s name, along with his office number. I remembered his card stuck in Aunty Edith’s desk and that his firm represented KOH. “How do you know him?” I asked.

Greg blushed. “We dated a couple of times. He wanted to see somebody look into KOH, so he passed this stuff on to me.”

Okay, I know I shouldn’t be so focused on somebody’s sexual 170 Neil S. Plakcy

orientation. But I’d bounced back and forth so much about Greg during that conversation that I had to laugh. “I didn’t know O’Malley was gay,” I said. “Guess you and he are two of the few guys on O’ahu I didn’t fool around with when I was single.”

All three of us got a chuckle out of that. I thought I could detect relief in Greg’s laughter, that he felt better now that he’d stuck his toe out of the closet and gotten a positive response.

I remembered the first few times I’d come out. How much relief I’d felt that I wasn’t keeping secrets any more. Akoni was the first person I told, because I had to confess that I’d been at a gay bar when I found a dead body, and he hadn’t taken it well.

Even so, it felt like a burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I hoped, for Greg’s sake, that he felt the same way.

As we left, Ray said, “Do I say ‘I told you so’ now or later?”

“You have disturbingly accurate gaydar for a straight guy.” We waited at a light as a dirty white pickup with a bumper sticker that read “I’d rather be pillaging” made a turn on red.

“The attorney Greg mentioned. He’s the same one whose business card we found at Edith Kapana’s?” Ray asked, when we started moving again.

“Yup. I called his office, and the secretary said he was on a case on the mainland. I’ll call again.”

O’Malley was back in Honolulu, I discovered, when I reached him later that afternoon, Ray listening in on the other phone.

“Sorry I didn’t get a chance to call you back, Detective,” he said.

“I just got back in town last night.”

I said, “Greg Oshiro suggested I should talk to you about Kingdom of Hawai’i. You’re their attorney?”

“Fields and Yamato handled the incorporation for Kingdom of Hawai’i. We’ve consulted with them on a couple of issues, but I wouldn’t characterize myself as their attorney, per se.”

God save me from lawyers. “Can we get together and talk?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “There are some things you should know. But like I said, I got back from the mainland MAhu BLood 171

yesterday, and I’m swamped. I have depositions scheduled later today, and all day tomorrow, but I’m taking a personal day Friday.

I know it’s irregular, but I’d rather not have you come to my office, if you don’t mind. Could you come over to my apartment around ten?”

I wondered how closeted Adam O’Malley was. Did he want me to come to his apartment because he was afraid to have a gay detective show up at his office?

Yeah, maybe I’m paranoid, but I still get crap from other officers, three years after coming out myself. And I know a lot of professional men who don’t want their sexual orientation to be public knowledge. O’Malley was probably one of those.

“Maybe I should have Detective Donne meet you. He’s straight.”

“It’s not that.” O’Malley lowered his voice. “I don’t parade my sex life around the office, but it’s not like we’re dating, Detective.

It’s just—I feel like there is some illegal stuff going on with Kingdom of Hawai’i, and as an officer of the court I’m obliged to report it, as long as I’m not violating any client confidences.

Which I’m not, because like I said, I’m not the attorney of record. I don’t want you to come to the office because there are people behind this thing that might not take kindly to my talking to the cops.”

I felt dumb, projecting my own issues. So I agreed to come to his apartment on Friday, and he gave me the address, in a high rise near Ala Moana Mall.

“That was awkward,” Ray said, when I hung up. “I ever tell you about this girl I interviewed, in my first case as a detective?

Her name was Teresa Ambrosino, and she was a beauty. Like Julie, but with curves like the Indianapolis Speedway. The whole time I’m talking to her, I’m thinking she’s coming on to me. She’s leaning toward me, she’s fluttering her eyebrows, pursing her lips.”

“And she wasn’t?”

“Nope, she was after my partner, sixty-year-old guy with 172 Neil S. Plakcy

breath like dog shit. I almost asked her out, right there, but fortunately I remembered my ethics class. My partner saw me slobbering, though, and it took me months to live it down.”

“Well, you’ll go with me Friday. We can see which of us O’Malley makes a play for. Since you have such great gaydar and all.”

“What are partners for?” he asked.

ALA MoANA coNfessioNALs

As we were packing up for the day, my cell phone rang. From the display I saw it was Lui calling. “Hey, brah, what’s up?”

“I have to talk to you,” he said.

“We’re talking now.”

“Not on the phone,” Lui said. “Please, Kimo? I’ve got to get out of the office. Meet me at Ala Moana Mall, outside Shirokiya?”

“I’m about to head for home. Ala Moana’s out of my way, but I can be there in fifteen.”

He was standing in front of the store, looking in the windows like they contained treasure, when I walked up. “What was so urgent, brah?” I asked.

Lui looked around, lowered his voice. “He called me today.

Tung. From the pai gow game.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s putting together a high-stakes game for Friday night.

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 174 Neil S. Plakcy

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 175

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 176 Neil S. Plakcy

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?”

MAhu BLood 177

“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 180 Neil S. Plakcy

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 181

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 182 Neil S. Plakcy

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.

Consider this an advance.”

The waiter appeared and soundlessly slid away the salad plates and replaced them with our mahi-mahi fillets.

“I didn’t,” Lui said. “I mean, I couldn’t.”

“You did, and you could,” my father said, spearing a flaky forkful of fish. “But you aren’t going to gamble anymore.”

“Dad, we’re not kids. You can’t just lock Lui up in his room.”

“Lui?” My father looked at my brother, who hadn’t touched his fish.

“There’s a chapter of Gamblers Anonymous in Honolulu,”

he said quietly. “I’m going to a meeting tonight.”

My father nodded and continued to eat. I sat there and looked at them. You can grow up with people, you can share blood with them and then they can still surprise you.

“I appreciate the offer, Dad,” Lui said. “But like Kimo said, MAhu BLood 183

I’m not a kid any more. I can’t count on you to bail me out.

Tanaka says he needs me at this game to help him draw out some high rollers from Hong Kong. He’s going to stake me fifty grand.

If I lose, it doesn’t get added to what I owe, but if I win, I can use that money to pay down my debt.”

“Why is he offering you such good terms?” I asked.

“Sounds like he thinks he can make a big score from these Hong Kong players. And like I told you, he’s getting ready to run, so he’s trying to accumulate as much cash as he can. He’s betting that I can help him. I’m a good player, I swear. I’ve just had a run of bad luck.”

My father snorted.

I explained what we knew about Jun Tanaka—the money laundering, the possible connection to two murders. “The FBI is after Tanaka, but they need to catch him red-handed, walking out of the game with cash. If Lui doesn’t sit in, we won’t know for sure that the game is running.”

“You want to go to this game?” my father asked Lui.

He looked at me. “I have to,” he said.

I hoped that somehow Salinas would pull a brace of rabbits out of his hat and haul Jun Tanaka in before the game took place.

But I was pretty sure that I’d stopped believing in magic back when I was a kid.

When I got back to headquarters, Billy Kim from ballistics was in the detective bullpen, showing a piece of paper to Ray.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Billy came through,” Ray said. “The same rifle was used to kill Edith and to shoot at us in front of the Ohana.”

Billy showed us the striations where the shell casings matched.

When he left, Ray and I started brainstorming. “This tells us for certain that whoever killed Edith shot at us two days ago at the Ohana.”

“No,” Ray said. “All it tells us is the same gun was used. We don’t have the evidence yet to say it was the same shooter.”

184 Neil S. Plakcy

“Picky, picky.”

“We already had the feeling that Edith’s death was connected to the Ohana,” Ray said. “Stuey lived there, Ezekiel used to live there and Edith went there the day before she died. Jun Tanaka is on the Ohana’s board, and he’s also the money man behind KOH. We’ve got all that. But who killed Edith? Why? How are the two deaths connected to KOH?”

We went back to the diagrams we had drawn, arrows showing the links between the cases, the people, and the organizations. “I think it all comes back to the money laundering,” I said. “That’s what ties everyone together. Let’s say Edith knew, from either Ezekiel or Dex, that Tanaka was using KOH to legitimize his gambling profits. She was angry about it, and word got back to Tanaka.”

Ray continued, “He killed her, or had her killed, to protect his operation. And Stuey talked too much so he had to die. But there are still loose ends.”

“Such as?”

“What was Edith doing at the Ohana the day before she died?

She wasn’t looking for Ezekiel, because he hadn’t lived there for years.”

“Stuey?”

“We have no evidence that she knew him,” Ray said. “David Currie, the administrator, said she went up there to ask about Ezekiel.”

“Suppose he was lying,” I said. “Maybe Ezekiel told Edith that Tanaka was making cash donations to KOH, and she wanted to see if he was still crazy or he could be trusted.”

“It’s a theory. Should we pull Currie in for more questions?

Try and convince a judge to sign a subpoena for the Ohana’s financial records?”

“There’s that pesky ‘j’ word again,” I said. “Judge. I still don’t think we have enough to convince one. We don’t have a single thing that actually connects Tanaka to either murder. And we MAhu BLood 185

don’t have another strong suspect.”

Ray closed the case book with a thud. “That’s the sound of these murders getting shunted to the cold case files. Unless we get a major break in the next twenty-four hours.”

RecRuitiNg

When our shift ended, I drove up to Aiea for dinner with Mike. I didn’t tell him that Ray and I were going to meet Adam O’Malley at his apartment the next morning, though I should have. Mike’s the jealous type and even knowing that Ray would be going with me, he would have made a big dramatic scene about me meeting some other gay guy in his apartment.

Friday morning, Sampson wanted to see us. He was wearing a black polo shirt and gray slacks, and his mood matched his clothes.

“Remember, I’m putting you back in the rotation right after Labor Day unless you convince me otherwise today.”

Ray and I both shifted uncomfortably on our feet. Sampson hadn’t invited us to sit, so we stood there in front of his desk like schoolboys called before the principal. “You have two open cases right now. Edith Kapana, the old woman killed at the rally. Stuart McKinney, the homeless man who got torched.”

He saw me start to argue and said, “Yes, I know he wasn’t technically homeless. You’re trying to connect them to this pai gow game, right? And money laundering? What did the FBI have to say?”

When he’s in a mood like that, best to keep it short and simple. “Francisco Salinas from the FBI has taken over the pai gow investigation, but we’re following a bunch of leads which indicate that there are definite links between the sovereignty movement, the deaths of Edith Kapana and Stuart McKinney, the pai gow game and money laundering through the Kope Bean chain.”

For the first time that morning, Sampson smiled. “I think that’s the most concise statement I’ve ever heard you give, Detective. Now prove it.”

“Yes, sir,” we both said.

188 Neil S. Plakcy

Sampson picked up his phone. “You can go.”

It was barely eight o’clock, and we had two hours until our meeting with Adam O’Malley, the attorney for Kingdom of Hawai’i, at his apartment. We spent the time looking back at everything we had on KOH, preparing our questions.

“We need to know if there’s an accountant for KOH,” Ray said. “Or what O’Malley knows about the money trail.”

“I want to know who’s really in charge of that group. Is it Ezekiel, or is he just a figurehead? Is Tanaka pulling his strings?

And why?”

A few minutes before ten, we headed over to O’Malley’s building, a fancy tower off Ala Moana Boulevard called the Honolulu Sunset. Tourists cruised the area in top-down convertibles, and teenagers who weren’t back in school yet giggled and teased each other in packs.

The concierge, a balding older black guy named Malik Jefferson, called up to O’Malley’s apartment and got no answer.

“We have an appointment with him,” I said, showing him our ID.

“You have any idea if he went out today?”

Jefferson shook his head. “I came on at seven this morning. I know Mr. O’Malley, and I know he hasn’t left.”

“Anyone else come to see him today?”

He shrugged. There was security in the building, he said; you were supposed to come in the front door and get buzzed through to the elevator bank. But there were a couple of loopholes. If you came in with a resident, even just tagging along behind, you could slip in without anyone noticing.

At our insistence, Jefferson led us to O’Malley’s apartment on the sixteenth floor. As we rode the elevator I wondered what we would find. Had O’Malley chickened out on our meeting and left?

He’d said he was frightened by someone involved with KOH.

Or had he simply gone out on an errand and run behind schedule?

At the door, Jefferson knocked and called out. And then he MAhu BLood 189

stepped back, wobbling, as all three of us got a whiff of what was behind the O’Malley’s door. Blood and death.

I could tell from his behavior that Jefferson recognized the smell. Without further argument, he opened the door with his master key. It was locked, but the security chain hadn’t been engaged. With the door open, the odor was even stronger.

Jefferson stepped back and let Ray and me walk into the apartment ahead of him. We both drew our guns and prowled silently ahead. Ray went to the right, and I went left.

I drew the lucky straw. The master bedroom was to the left, and the body of a Caucasian male was in there, lying on his chest on the bed, naked, with an extra-large black dildo protruding from his ass. His hands and legs were secured to the corners of the four-poster bed with what looked like silk ties. His head was bent back, resting on a satin-covered pillow, and his eyes were open.

Blood soaked the sheets, and his throat had been slit.

“Bad?” Ray asked, coming up behind me.

I nodded, then went back to the living room. “I hate to do this to you, brah,” I said to Malik Jefferson. “But I need you to take a look at the body and see if it’s Mr. O’Malley.”

Jefferson gulped and then nodded. I led him down the hall; he ducked his head in the room, took a quick look and said, “That’s him,” in a strangled voice. Then he hurried back to the living room.

Ray was looking around in the bathroom as I called dispatch and notified them of the body. Then I took a set of digital pictures of the victim and the room. I had to struggle to breathe through my mouth because the smell of the congealed blood was playing havoc with my stomach.

When Ray came out of the bathroom, he was wearing rubber gloves and carrying a tub of Vicks VapoRub. “Fortunately Mr.

O’Malley had a well-stocked medicine cabinet,” he said. He handed me a pair of gloves, and then the open tub.

190 Neil S. Plakcy

I smeared some on my upper lip. “Lemon,” I said. I took a deep breath through my nose and felt a little better.

“We’ll see if it works any better than the menthol.”

We went back to the living room, where Malik Jefferson was waiting, looking sick and rubbing his stomach.

“We’re going to need to see the tapes from your security system for the last twenty-four hours,” Ray said. “Why don’t you get started on that, and we’ll call the medical examiner.”

“This is a good building. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen here.”

“They happen everywhere.” Ray put the VapoRub on the kitchen counter. “Go on, get the tapes,” he told Jefferson, who backed out of the room and closed the door gently behind him.

“Turns out to be a good thing you came with me,” I said. “I can imagine how it would look, me going to see some gay guy at his apartment, him ending up dead. People would think it was some kind of hook up.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Just because you’re cool doesn’t mean the rest of the world is.”

We searched the living room, but it was strangely impersonal—

no family pictures or souvenirs from vacations. It was as if he’d rented the place furnished and never bothered to add any personal touches.

By the time we finished the ME’s guys were there and the crime scene techs, and the apartment was buzzing with people and equipment. Ray pointed the techs toward a kitchen knife in the bathroom that had been wiped clean of prints; it looked like it was going to be our murder weapon. There was blood in the shower drain, perhaps the killer cleaning up before leaving.

Once the ME had taken the body away, we turned the AC

on high, rubbed some more Vicks under our noses and started to search the room carefully. It still smelled pretty bad, but we managed. A T-shirt, jeans and bikini briefs were tossed over a MAhu BLood 191

chair by the bed, and we packed them up to check for fingerprints.

A mahogany jewelry box on O’Malley’s dresser was empty, and we couldn’t find a wallet anywhere. I assumed that a busy attorney would have a cell phone, a PDA and a laptop computer, but there were no personal electronics at all, though we found chargers for a couple of different pieces of equipment in the drawer of an antique roll-top desk along one wall of the bedroom.

We looked through the papers in the desk, but all we found were a few unpaid bills, an Out magazine still in its plastic wrapper and some unopened junk mail. In a box on the top shelf of the closet we found an old address book, from the time before digital contacts, along with some explicit gay comic books and erotica anthologies, including one called Skater Boys. I flipped through the books, and it was clear the kind of guys who turned O’Malley on. Hoodlums, thugs, skateboarders, soldiers, men with muscles and tattoos.

While we waited for the crime scene techs to finish, we went downstairs to Malik Jefferson, who led us into a back room set up with a bank of monitors and introduced us to the security guard there, a tough-looking haole with dark curly hair and a nose that had been broken at some time in the past.

“Carl can show you the tapes.”

Carl shook our hands and then sat down and fast-forwarded through the grainy black and white footage, slowing down at a frame time-coded 5:38 PM. “That’s Mr. O’Malley,” he said, pointing. “Camera on the fourth floor of the garage. Mr.

O’Malley parks in space 421.”

O’Malley looked like an ordinary businessman, wearing a suit and carrying a leather satchel, his tie slightly askew. He approached the camera, which was focused on the elevator, stood there for a moment, then entered the elevator and exited the frame.

Carl turned a couple of knobs on the monitor and the footage zoomed ahead. Shortly after eleven at night, we saw O’Malley exit the garage elevator, this time dressed for clubbing, in the body-hugging black T-shirt and tight jeans we’d found strewn 192 Neil S. Plakcy

next to his bed.

“You only have cameras in the garage?” Ray asked.

“Each floor of the garage, by the elevator,” Carl said. “We have a couple in the health club on the garage roof and another set in various parts of the building—mail room, card room and so on. Nothing in the main lobby; the concierge is always on duty there. So the only way to track Mr. O’Malley’s movement is through the garage cameras or anything the concierge saw.”

We both nodded, and Carl continued ahead to two a.m., when O’Malley walked back into the frame of the garage camera. He was accompanied by another guy, who was careful to avoid getting his face on the camera, always staying a bit behind O’Malley.

“I’m thinking he’s been in this building before and knows where the cameras are,” Ray said.

“Could be. Or he’s the kind of guy who’s accustomed to hiding,” I said.

We could only make out he was a skinny haole in a white T-shirt and jeans, a few inches shorter than O’Malley, who was about five-ten. For a brief second we got a shot of the guy’s tattooed lower right arm.

“Think that could be Dex?” I asked.

“Dex is straight, though, isn’t he?” Ray asked. “He’s got Leelee. What would he be doing picking up gay men in bars?”

“You’d be surprised,” I said.

Once O’Malley and his visitor were in the elevator, we lost them. There were no cameras on the individual floors, so no way to see if the mystery man had been with O’Malley and gone into his apartment with him, or simply had been using him to get into the building.

“Mr. O’Malley often bring guys home?” I asked.

Carl shrugged. “We watch the cameras for suspicious activity, not to spy on the residents. I couldn’t tell you who comes to see who. That’s the concierge’s job.”

MAhu BLood 193

We went back out to the front and found Malik Jefferson behind his desk, a big semi-circle with a sign-in book for guests.

We asked him the same question. “I don’t usually work the late shift, and even if I do, I’m not always paying that close attention.”

Gunter is the concierge at a fancy building in Waikīkī, and he knows everything that goes on—who gets packages from fancy stores, who has late-night visitors, who has an illegal cat. So I doubted that Jefferson was telling the truth.

“We can put you on the witness stand,” I said. “You willing to go on record that you aren’t paying attention to who comes and goes in this building? You think your boss, and the residents, will appreciate that?”

He looked down at his desk.

“The man is dead. Do you understand that? If he had a pattern of doing things like this, then that may help us find out who killed him. If he didn’t, that sends our investigation in a different direction.”

Finally, he said, “Sometimes, on Friday mornings, I see guys leaving, look like that guy there. Tough guys, not the kind you normally see in this building. The night man, he said sometimes Mr. O’Malley would bring them home. Sometimes they’d show up, late night, early morning, ask for him.”

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Ray asked. “Anything else you aren’t saying?”

He shifted around in his seat. “Nope.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but we had enough to start with.

As we rode back up to O’Malley’s apartment, Ray said, “You think he picked up the guy in the bar for some rough sex, and it got out of hand?”

“I’d say slitting his throat is getting pretty far out of hand.”

“You think Greg Oshiro could tell us anything?” Ray asked.

I was confused. “Greg? I don’t know what kind of guys he likes.”

“I wasn’t asking that,” Ray said patiently. “But didn’t he say 194 Neil S. Plakcy

that he had dated O’Malley at some point?”

I nodded. My brain was moving slowly. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my career, and they have some affect on me; I couldn’t still be a cop if they didn’t. But O’Malley’s death had hit me hard.

Despite the way his death looked I worried that scheduling the meeting with Ray and me had signed O’Malley’s death warrant.

“You need to call up Greg and have a chat about sexual practices,” Ray said. “I’m a liberated guy and all that, but I think this is a conversation you’d be more comfortable with.”

I didn’t want to do it, but I pulled out my cell and called Greg Oshiro. “Got a tip for you,” I said. “Can you get over here pronto?”

I expected him to argue, but all he said was, “Give me the address.” I gave it to him and then snapped the phone shut.

We waited for Greg in the Honolulu Sunset’s fancy lobby.

One of the other residents walked in with a couple of Foodland bags, and my stomach grumbled so loud that Ray looked over at me and laughed. I realized we’d worked non-stop since the morning. It was closing in on the end of our shift by then.

“I know this building,” Greg said, walking in. “This is…”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is. Or was.”

Greg stepped backward, and his balance wobbled. “Jesus.”

We led him over to a group of chairs in a quiet back corner of the lobby, out of casual earshot, and he settled into a big leather armchair. Ray and I sat down across from him.

“We need to know what you knew about O’Malley’s interests.

But first of all, you’ve got secrets, and there are details here we wouldn’t want in the press. You protect us, and we’ll protect you.

Are we clear?”

Greg nodded. He took a deep breath and pulled out his notebook. “How did you guys get called here?”

“Right now, I’m asking the questions. Later, after we’ve got what we need, we’ll take care of you.”

MAhu BLood 195

He frowned. But he knew the drill.

“We had an appointment with O’Malley this morning,” I said.

“To follow up on the lead you gave us, that he was the attorney for KOH. Right now, we have no idea whether that’s related to his death or just a coincidence. Evidence at the scene leads us to consider whether O’Malley might have picked up the wrong sort of guy. What do you know about his tastes?”

Greg looked sick. “You know The Garage?”

Ray was a bit confused, but I knew what Greg was talking about. “It’s a gay bar. A converted garage. Kind of seamy.”

“More than kind of,” Greg said.

“You go there?”

He squirmed in his seat.

“Sorry. Wrong question. O’Malley went there?”

Greg nodded. “You have to understand, Adam had… issues.

That conservative Irish Catholic background, sometimes he felt bad about the kind of things he liked.”

“And he liked to be punished,” I finished for him. The Garage was known as a haven for guys with a taste for unorthodox sexual practices.

“You think he could have picked somebody up at The Garage who killed him?” Greg asked.

“It’s a possibility we’re investigating.”

I saw the calculation in his eyes, probably thinking about the big story he could get out of Adam’s death, and then his body sagged and the corners of his mouth turned down.

“Poor guy,” he said. “However it happened, I feel sorry for him.”

the gARAge

My cell rang. Mike had reprogrammed it a few days before so that the ring tone assigned to him was the Baha Men singing

“Who Let the Dogs Out.” It reverberated around the high-ceilinged lobby of the Honolulu Sunset.

I grabbed the phone and flipped it open, standing up and stepping away from Ray and Greg.

“We having dinner tonight?” Mike asked. “Or are you going direct to the surveillance of that pai gow game your brother’s in?”

“Ray and I have a couple of things to wrap up. But I can pencil you in for a dinner date.”

“Sweet. I’ll be the handsome guy playing with the cute dog.”

I flipped the phone shut and came back to Ray and Greg. Ray had pulled out the list of questions we had for Adam O’Malley.

“You know anything about accounting at KOH?” he asked Greg. “Based on the stories you’ve been writing about Hawaiian nationalism?”

“They use a small practice in a walk-up office in Chinatown.

I spoke to the guy in charge, but he wouldn’t give me any information.” He pulled the firm’s name and address from his notes and Ray copied it down.

We went over the rest of our questions, but Greg didn’t have anything to say that he hadn’t already given us. He left to write an obituary on Adam O’Malley, and we faced the fact that we had to call someone in O’Malley’s family and notify them of his death.

“Rock-paper-scissors?” I asked.

We both shook our fists three times. I went with scissors, and Ray chose paper.

“That looks like the night concierge,” I said, nodding toward the front door. “I’ll talk to him while you make the call.”

198 Neil S. Plakcy

I left Ray dialing a number from O’Malley’s address book and walked across the lobby. The night concierge was a middle-aged Chinese man with close-cropped hair and the same monogrammed aloha shirt as Malik Jefferson. His name tag read

“Eli.”

I introduced myself and asked, “Did you see Mr. O’Malley get home last night?”

“Yeah. It was around two, and he had a ‘friend’ with him.”

I didn’t like the way the guy put those imaginary quotes around the word, but it wasn’t my business to be the language police. I had enough to do being the regular police.

“What do you mean by ‘friend’?”

“He brought guys home every couple of weeks,” he said.

“On Thursday nights. Usually sleazy-looking men, not the kind of person who lives in this building. You ask me, it’s not right. A man like that shouldn’t be allowed to live here.”

“That part of your job here, Eli? Deciding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to live here?”

“You know what I mean, Detective. Not only was he a homosexual, he exposed the rest of the residents to a dangerous element.”

“What made you think the guy with Mr. O’Malley was dangerous?” I asked, trying to keep my temper in check.

“I can tell what those people look like,” he said. “Anyone can.

They wear their depravity right there on their faces. I could tell they were going upstairs for something illegal, whether it was drugs or sex or both.”

I took a deep breath. “Would you recognize the man with Mr.

O’Malley again? Considering you took such a good look at his face that you could tell what he was going to do?”

Eli realized the trap he’d gotten himself into. “I didn’t so much look at his face as his general attitude. The tight T-shirt, the torn jeans, the tattoos. I wouldn’t recognize him again, though.”

Ray joined us at the desk. “Spoke to O’Malley’s father,” he MAhu BLood 199

said. “He wasn’t exactly broken up over his son’s death.”

“I’m not surprised,” Eli said. “Given the kind of man he was.”

“That’s enough. A man is dead, and if you had any sense of human decency you’d speak about him with respect. But then, you can probably see in my face that I’m a deviant, just like O’Malley was, so you won’t care what I think.”

“We done here?” Ray said, as Eli gaped at us.

“Yeah, we’re done. I’ll make sure that the building management hears what a high opinion you have of its residents, Eli.” I turned and walked out, Ray on my heels.

“I’m not even going to ask what all that was about,” Ray said, as we drove back to headquarters. “But I assume he didn’t have anything to contribute.”

“Nothing useful,” I said.

We caught Lieutenant Sampson as he was packing up for the day and told him about O’Malley’s death. “The bodies are piling up, Detectives,” he said. “An elderly woman, a homeless guy, now an attorney.”

“He wasn’t homeless,” I said. “He just looked that way.”

Sampson glared at me. “I don’t care if he lived in mansion in Kahala. He’s dead and it’s your case. Get it solved.”

“Lieutenant, with Labor Day on Monday, we’re not getting anything out of the medical examiner in a hurry,” Ray said.

“Don’t let that stand in your way.” Sampson picked up his briefcase and walked out.

“Have a nice weekend,” I called after him. Sampson turned around and glared, just in time to see Ray kick me in the shins.

“Keep him in line, will you, Donne?” Sampson asked, just before disappearing into the elevator.

“You have some kind of self-destruct button?” Ray asked me.

“You kick into wise ass mode at the dumbest times.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I sat down at my desk and brought up the website for The Garage. “Look at this,” I said, turning the 200 Neil S. Plakcy

monitor toward Ray. “Thursday night is Hard Hat night. Free well drinks to anybody in uniform or carrying a union card.”

“Kinky,” Ray said. “You ever go there?”

“They’d have to give me a lot more than free drinks to get me in my uniform,” I said. “But that’s why the concierge saw O’Malley bring guys home on Thursday nights.”

“We’ve got a problem,” Ray said. “You’re going to need to hit that bar tonight, see if anyone saw who O’Malley left with. But at the same time we’ve got your brother’s pai gow game.”

“Shit.” I was screwed, in more ways than one. Mike was going to have a jealous fit over my going to The Garage. But it wasn’t the kind of assignment Ray could take. “I’ll go to the bar early.

Before it gets crazy. If I need to go back after the game, I will.”

My stomach grumbled again, angry over our missed lunch.

Ray laughed and said, “I called the KOH accountant’s office and got a recording that the office is closed until Tuesday. So I’m going to go home, have dinner with my wife and then set up outside the Wing Wah to keep an eye on the FBI. You just get over there when you can.”

“Will do.” I called Mike and asked him to meet me at Raimundo’s in Waikīkī, an old favorite restaurant from the days when we were dating. On my way there, I called Lui and told him the FBI was interested in the game that night. “I don’t know if they’re going to do anything. But they just want Tanaka. My contact swears they’re not interested in the players.”

“You can’t bust Tung before the game?”

“Have to catch him in the act.”

Lui grumbled, and I stopped paying attention, searching for a parking spot near Raimundo’s. I finally got him to hang up just as I spotted a prime spot only a few blocks from the restaurant.

Mike and I were early enough to miss the dinner rush, and by six we were seated, tearing into garlic rolls and digging into an antipasto platter. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for days.

“Slow down, tiger,” Mike said. “They aren’t taking the food MAhu BLood 201

away from you. Jeez, you eat like Roby.”

“You say the sweetest things.” I smiled at him, glad once again that I was out of the sex and dating circuit that had been so dangerous for Adam O’Malley.

But that made me think about my case again and what I had ahead of me. When I had some food in my stomach, I felt ready to say, “The meeting I had this morning. It was with an attorney for Kingdom of Hawai’i. He said he had some information he didn’t want to pass on in public, so Ray and I arranged to meet him at his apartment.”

“So?”

“He was dead when we got there.”

Mike nodded. “I’d say that’s a complication.”

“There’s more, though. He was gay, this attorney. And he might have gotten killed by a guy he picked up at The Garage last night.”

The waiter brought our entrees, and Mike didn’t speak as he busied himself cutting his veal and tossing his pasta with the freshly grated parmesan.

“I should go over to The Garage tonight and see if anyone saw who this attorney was with,” I said, looking down at my chicken piccata.

“And you were thinking that I would go with you,” Mike said.

I looked up at him.

“Because I know you were not thinking you were going to that sleazy bar by yourself. You need adult supervision.”

“Really?” I said, smiling. My foot brushed against his leg.

“And are you my supervisor?”

“Well, for sure, I’m the responsible adult in this relationship.”

He smiled back at me. “I know I need to trust you more. You’ve never given me any doubt. But it makes me crazy to think of you going to a bar by yourself, flirting or fooling around with some other guy.”

202 Neil S. Plakcy

We ate in silence for a few minutes, both of us finishing our dishes, and then Mike said, “The Garage. You ever been there?”

“A couple of times, in the past. The Rod and Reel is more my speed.”

“I went there once. They have that bar in the back where they show the videos.”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said.

“I might have gotten a little carried away, when I was drinking.” Mike had gone on a couple of binges while we were apart, leading his father to believe he was an alcoholic, but I’d never pressed for details.

I speared the last piece of my chicken and pushed the empty plate away. “Carried away how?”

“Somehow I ended up naked, imitating Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.”

I burst out laughing. “Man, I wish I’d been there for that.

There isn’t a video on YouTube, is there?”

“Thankfully not. I could never go back after that, though.”

“Gee, we’ll have to see if anyone recognizes you tonight.

Asks for an encore performance.”

“I’m a private dancer now.”

“You and Tina Turner. Ooh, strut that stuff, baby.”

“Get out of here,” he said, laughing and kicking my leg under the table.

We walked around Waikīkī for a while after dinner. The streets were packed with tourists and locals enjoying the holiday weekend. We strolled down Kalākaua toward Queen’s Surf, the gay beach just before the aquarium, away from some of the neon and bustle from the strip. We held hands and sat on the curb overlooking the beach.

I wondered if I would have ended up like this, in love with Mike and settled down, if I hadn’t been dragged out of the closet a few years before. Would I be like O’Malley, hiding my MAhu BLood 203

sexuality and picking up dangerous guys in bars? I’d done a few stupid things when I was single, despite my cop instincts and training, and I was lucky I’d never had any problems bigger than a couple of angry exes and a painful, though not deadly, visit to the emergency room.

The tide was coming in and the breeze smelled of salt and dead fish, but I was happy to be there with Mike. From the way he squeezed my hand, I had an inkling he felt the same way.

Shortly after eleven, we got up and walked back to where I’d parked my Jeep. I had a picture of O’Malley with me, one I’d picked up from his bureau, and I showed it to Mike as we drove to The Garage.

“Handsome guy,” Mike said, and stretched his long frame back in the seat. “What kind of thing was he into?”

“We found him tied up, with a big black dildo sticking out of his ass,” I said. “Creeped me out. Ray had to hold my hand for a while, metaphorically speaking.”

Mike shook his head. “That guy is way too tolerant. I expect you to be trading blow job tips with him any day.”

“Been there, done that.” I laughed at how quickly Mike’s head swiveled around. “Not.”

“So was he the kind of guy you’d go for?” Mike asked. “This attorney?”

“You know my deal, sweetheart. I like sex a lot better when I’m with a guy I love. I love you. You’re the first guy I can say that about. So sex with you is better than with anyone else. Ever.”

“Good answer. Keep that in mind if anybody flirts with you tonight.”

“Me?” I asked. “You’re the big handsome firefighter stud with the sexy mustache. While I’m asking questions about a dead guy, you’re the one the boys will be swarming over.”

It was still early, so there was only a short line outside The Garage, the bouncer checking IDs. He waved us both in.

“Great, too old to be carded,” I grumbled as we walked into 204 Neil S. Plakcy

the darkened room, with neon wrapping the walls below the ceiling level. The place was decorated with gasoline memorabilia, with an old-fashioned gas pump along one wall. The floor was bare concrete, the DJ station behind glass windows as if it was where the clerk would stay.

Groups of two and three guys leaned against the walls and talked. A rap song pounded out through the sound system, and two men danced in the center of the room. There were two bartenders; I stepped up to talk to the cuter one while Mike went to order a beer from the other.

I palmed my shield and said, “Can I ask you some questions?”

The bartender was barely legal, a skinny haole in a tight tank top that showed his nipple rings. He had piercings in his eyebrow, his ears, his lip and who knew where else, though I could guess.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

I showed him O’Malley’s picture. “Recognize this guy?”

He took the picture from me, turned to the bar back where the light was better. When he handed the photo back to me he said, “Yeah. He comes in sometimes on Thursday nights.”

“Was he here last night?”

The guy nodded.

“You see him leave with anyone?”

He might have looked brainless, but he wasn’t. “Shit.

Somebody hurt him?”

“Last night.”

“Sometimes he leaves alone, sometimes he doesn’t,” the bartender said. “Last night, he left with this tough-looking dude, tats up and down his arms. He was making a play for your guy, for sure.”

“Making a play how?”

“I saw him come up to your guy at the bar, start talking. Put his arm around him, that kind of thing. They didn’t dance or anything, just hung out and drank and played around.”

MAhu BLood 205

“You recognize him?”

“He’s been in a couple of times before, but I don’t know his name.”

“If we find him, you think you could pick him out of a lineup?”

“I can try.”

“Any other regulars who might have noticed something last night?”

“Thursday night’s a specialized clientele,” he said. “Hard hats night, you know. Tonight the promo’s for younger guys. Different group entirely.”

“I understand. Mahalo.” I went down the bar and spoke to the other bartender, who hadn’t noticed O’Malley or his mystery date.

I looked around at the interesting mix of guys. Older men, all races. A couple of middle-aged business types, looking scared.

Some younger guys, the kind I might expect to see at a meeting of my gay teen group. And a guy like the one O’Malley had picked up the night before, with sunglasses propped on his head, as if he’d need them in the dim room. A sleeveless gray T-shirt showcased his beefy biceps. He wore loose athletic shorts that hung low on his hips and backless sandals.

He didn’t have tattoos on his arms, though, so I gave up and scanned the crowd, looking for tall, dark and handsome. I spotted him in a corner, drinking a Bud and flirting with a young blond with a buzz cut.

I walked up and put my hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Ready to go?” I asked.

“We’re talking here,” the blond said.

Mike looked amused. He drained the last of his beer and put the bottle down on a nearby table. Then he leaned back against the wall, his hands in his pockets, stretching his pants tight and displaying his ample endowment.

I turned to the blond. “Beat it. He’s mine. I’m tougher than 206 Neil S. Plakcy

you are, I’m better in bed and I carry a gun. Get it?”

“Hey, fuck you,” the blond said, but he turned away.

I wasn’t exactly on duty, at least I wasn’t going to put in an overtime sheet for this trip to the bar or for my unofficial surveillance later that night at the Wing Wah.

The DJ segued to a Lady Gaga song and turned the volume up high. “You want to hang around here for a while, or you want to go?” I yelled into Mike’s ear.

“Neither.” He shook his head. “I want to make out.”

He grabbed me around the ass and pulled me toward him. His kiss was loose and beery, and I wondered if maybe he’d downed more than one bottle while waiting for me to finish questioning the bartenders.

But then I got caught up in the moment. Our bodies swayed in time to the music, and I felt his stiff dick grinding into my thigh. I got hard, too, and everything around us fell away as I kissed him, this man I loved.

We were putting on a show for the guys around us, who were on the prowl, after all, most of them strangers to each other.

After Mike and I had kissed and felt each other up for a while, he led me to the back bar, where an X-rated film was playing on a couple of plasma TVs. A guy in an obviously fake police uniform was getting his dick sucked by a punk.

Mike said, into my ear, “Cops. You know that excites me.” He slid hand into the waistband of my jeans, teasing the tip of my dick with his index finger.

“You’re bad,” I said, leaning up against his ear. “You’re going to make me come in my pants.”

He leaned down and kissed me again.

I whispered in his ear, “Wish I could stick around, stud, but I’ve got another date. In Chinatown.”

wiNNeRs ANd LoseRs

I dropped Mike back where he’d parked his truck and drove into Chinatown. It was the end of a long week, and I wanted nothing more than to relax and enjoy the Labor Day weekend.

But I had a new murder on my plate and one more thing to do that night before I could go home and get some rest. I had to stake out the pai gow game, unofficially, and do my best to make sure nothing bad happened to my oldest brother.

I parked a couple of blocks from the Wing Wah and joined Ray in his Highlander shortly before midnight, where I told him what I’d learned at the bar. Even though the night was cool, I couldn’t help sweating, waiting for the game to break up. Ray and I tried to figure out where the FBI guys were, but we couldn’t make them.

Close to two a.m., two Ford sedans and a squad car drove up and parked right in front of the restaurant’s side door.

“Something’s going down,” Ray said.

Two uniforms stepped out of the squad, while five guys in FBI piled out of the Fords. I recognized Salinas as he walked up to the door and pounded on it.

“FBI! Open up!” we heard him yell.

There was no response from behind the door so he stepped aside and an agent holding a rammer stepped up. It was about forty pounds, basically a concrete tube with handles. The agent holding it smashed the door handle, destroying the lock, so that the door swung open. Then he stepped aside as the rest of the team streamed in. He dropped the rammer, swung his gun around and followed them in.

My heart rate accelerated as I watched. “My brother’s probably pissing his pants right now.”

The two uniforms pulled their weapons and led the way through the open door, with Salinas right behind them.

208 Neil S. Plakcy

“I’m going to scoot over there and see what I can hear,” I said, opening the Highlander’s passenger door.

“No you’re not.” Ray grabbed my arm. “You’ll only get in the way.”

I sighed. “You’re right.” I closed the door. “But I hate sitting here waiting, not knowing what’s going on.”

“Trust Salinas.”

“You obviously haven’t worked with the FBI enough to know how dumb that statement sounds.”

A man too thin and short to be my brother stepped through the door, stumbling in his haste to get away. He scurried down the street like a cockroach when you turn the lights on. A minute later, he was followed by another man, who behaved the same way.

“Jesus, what’s going on?” I said.

“You know,” Ray said. “You’ve been there. They’re questioning each guy, searching them and then letting them go one by one.”

I did know that, but it didn’t make me feel any better about my brother. Two more men came out, and then Lui appeared, silhouetted in the light from the room behind him.

“I’m going after him. Can you hang around and see how things play out?”

“Sure.”

I jumped out of the car and ran to my brother. “Lui! Hold up!”

He pivoted as I reached him, and he reached around and grabbed me in a big hug. I could smell liquor on his breath.

“What happened in there?” I asked, pulling back.

“I won, brah!” he crowed. “That fucker Tanaka made me the banker, trying to drive me even further into the hole, but I came out ahead.”

I was so surprised at once again hearing my brother curse that it took me a minute to process. “So you didn’t lose any of your MAhu BLood 209

inheritance?”

Lui laughed. “I didn’t make back everything I owe Tanaka, but I walked away with a stack of bills. I didn’t even count it yet. You know that song, ‘you don’t count your money as you’re sitting at the table.’”

OK, Lui singing country songs was just too much for me.

“What about the FBI? What happened when they blasted in?”

“Man, it was like something out of a movie. Cops and robbers, brah. They grabbed Tanaka and then started searching everybody for guns. At first I was scared shitless, but when they started letting everybody go, and I realized how much I’d won, I felt like I was the king of the world.”

He spread his arms out and spun around, like Leonardo di Caprio in Titanic.

“Are you drunk, brah?”

“I’m high on life.”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. “Come on, brah, I’ll drive you home.”

“I can drive, little bruddah. Only had two rumrunners. Don’t worry about me.”

I shook my head. I still had a lot to worry about—like would he be able to stop gambling, now he’d started again? I knew that winning that money would make him feel lucky again and make the temptation that much greater.

I decided I’d follow him up to St. Louis Heights, make sure he got home all right. “You drive safe, brah,” I said, as we reached his car.

As I walked away, I heard him turning the radio up loud and starting to sing. I wished I’d had a video camera trained on him; might make good evidence the next time he was acting like a stuck-up prig.

I got in my Jeep and caught up to Lui, who was driving with exaggerated care. I stayed behind him until he pulled into his own driveway. As I was heading back downhill, Ray called.

210 Neil S. Plakcy

“I’m outside the Kope Bean warehouse,” he said. “The FBI brought Tanaka here for a search party.”

“Very cool.”

“Nothing more I can do here, though. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

When I got home, Roby was waiting for me by the front door, jumping up and down like a demented kangaroo. The rest of the house was quiet, so I figured Mike was already asleep. I grabbed the leash, and Roby and I went for a long walk, up and down hills, as I tried to decompress from the evening.

I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been about my brother’s safety until I saw him walk out of the restaurant. I was tired of feeling nervous about people; I’d spent a lot of energy worrying about Lui’s gambling and my mother’s work with Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Even the goofy golden retriever on the other end of the leash had suffered a loss and was recovering from the trauma of the fire that had destroyed his home and sent him away from the family who loved him. By the time Roby and I circled back to the house, I was pretty sure he had no more urine left in his bladder, and I was yawning and ready for bed.

Saturday morning I woke to find Mike’s leg crossed over mine and his tongue tickling the outside of my ear.

“Missed you last night.”

He ran his hand down my chest to my dick, which responded to his touch. We began carrying out the promises our bodies had made at The Garage the night before.

We were kissing and rubbing our bodies together when Roby’s big golden head appeared over the side of the bed.

“Down, boy,” Mike said. “This is not a participatory sport.”

I laughed and pushed the dog away. He settled down on the floor next to the bed and had to wait until Mike and I had both had our fill of each other before I crawled out of bed, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and took him for his walk, as Mike rolled MAhu BLood 211

over and went back to sleep.

I skipped breakfast in order to make it to headquarters and meet Ray just after eight. “I’ve been thinking about what you found out at the bar last night,” he said, as I handed him a bodyboard-sized macadamia latte I’d picked up for him from the Kope Bean on my way in.

“Yeah?”

“What if O’Malley’s death isn’t related to the others at all—

just a coincidence? You said that the bartender recognized the hustler had been in there before. He made a play for O’Malley, then went home with him. Both concierges confirmed that he often brought tough-looking guys home with him.”

“But why kill O’Malley?” I asked. “He was already hog-tied.

The hustler could have just picked up O’Malley’s wallet and jewelry and walked out.”

“Maybe O’Malley threatened him. Let me go, or I’ll drag your ass into court.”

“I don’t think O’Malley could have been that stupid.”

“Why stick the dildo up his ass?” Ray asked. “That’s anger, don’t you think? Like O’Malley did something to piss the guy off.”

“Could be. Or it could be a red herring, the killer trying to make us think this was a sex thing.”

I sipped my coffee and thought. “Besides, it’s just too coincidental. He told me he was worried about people involved with KOH, that they were dangerous. I think his death has to be connected to our appointment with him.”

“That’s certainly one theory,” Ray sipped his coffee, and sighed with pleasure, “but just to be thorough, let’s see if there’s anybody on duty in Vice who can tell us if there’s someone out there committing similar crimes.”

“They’ve probably all cut out for Labor Day,” I said, but followed Ray down to the B1 level, where I was surprised to find Juanita Lum at her desk.

212 Neil S. Plakcy

“Big sweep last night in Waikīkī,” she said. “I had to come in this morning to help out. You know the lieutenant, he’s lost without me.”

“I heard that,” Kee boomed from his office. He had a long, sad face like a Bassett hound and brush-cut black hair going gray at the sideburns. “What brings you gentlemen down to the bowels of the building?” he asked when we walked in.

I sketched out the details of O’Malley’s murder. Kee frowned.

“Let me see what we can dig up. Juanita! I need you in here.”

He swiveled his computer keyboard around so that she could lean over the desk and type. “Get me all the crimes involving gay men and sexual violence.”

“There’s a course next week,” she said, as she started to type.

“Computers for Dummies. You should sign up for it.”

“What do I need a course for when I’ve got you?”

“You want domestics, too, or just prostitutes?” she asked us.

“Nothing between long-term partners,” I said. “But not just prostitutes, if you can do that.”

“I keep this department running. I can do anything.”

She typed for a bit, scanned the monitor and then typed some more. “Next time we need something, we can come to you, huh, Juanita?” Ray asked. “Bypass the lieutenant altogether.”

“I’m not deaf, Detective,” Kee said. “Just computer-challenged.”

The printer on Kee’s credenza started spitting papers, and Juanita went back to her desk. Kee picked them up and scanned them before handing them to us.

“Mostly it’s the working boys who get hurt,” he said, as Ray and I moved together to look at the sheets. “Customer realizes the goods aren’t what he expected, he gets angry. That kind of thing.”

He handed us another couple of sheets. “Every now and then you get a john who gets ripped off and calls us, though.”

MAhu BLood 213

Two complaints stood out. The most important was one filed by Adam O’Malley over a year before.

“Guy sure didn’t learn his lesson,” Ray said, looking over my shoulder.

According to the police report, O’Malley had met a man at a bar, then gone to a secluded area of Kapiolani Park with him.

The guy had pulled a knife and taken O’Malley’s watch, wallet and college ring. I remembered being that desperate, long before, when I was still in the closet and picking up the occasional guy in a bar. I’d been lucky never to get in trouble, but I knew what it felt like to throw caution out the window when you were horny.

The other looked more promising. A tourist had gone to The Garage a couple of months before and picked up a man whose description fit the guy who’d left with O’Malley, in a very general way—skinny, white, tattoos.

According to the tourist, the skinny guy had picked him up and taken him to a cheap motel a few blocks away. Skinny had suggested that the tourist jump into the shower, promising to join him there. By the time the hot water had run out, the tourist figured something was wrong. When he stepped out of the shower, the skinny guy was gone, along with the tourist’s watch, wallet and clothes. There was no phone in the room, so he’d had to walk down to the office wrapped only in his towel.

“You know anything about this guy?” I asked, pushing the paper back to Kee.

He picked it up and scanned it. “I remember this one,” he said. “The tourist left, and then a couple of weeks later his gold Rolex showed up at a pawn shop. We pulled in Shakey Simons, but he swore he got the watch from another guy in exchange for some information. Of course, he didn’t know the other guy’s name or where to find him.”

“Can we talk to Shakey?” I asked.

“Wish you could. He died a couple of weeks ago. HIV, complicated by ice.”

“So it’s unlikely he was at The Garage on Friday.”

214 Neil S. Plakcy

“That’s what I like about working with you bruddahs from Homicide. Always so quick to pick things up.”

“This is all you’ve got?” I asked.

“If that’s all Juanita found, then that’s all we’ve got.”

“Which leaves us with nothing,” Ray said, as we headed back to the elevator.

MeetiNg oLd fRieNds

When we got back to our desks, Ray said, “We should look around for any similar MOs, guys picked up at that bar or others. You’ve got contacts. See if there’s anyone who’s been too embarrassed to report something.”

Ray googled O’Malley, trying to guess what he might have known about Kingdom of Hawai’i. I flipped through the old address book I had found in O’Malley’s closet, looking for familiar names. On the F page, I found one I knew: Gunter Franz.

“Jesus, Gunter,” I muttered to myself. “Have you slept with every gay man on this island?”

It was just after ten, time to wake Gunter from his beauty sleep. “You have a few minutes to assist the police with their inquiries?” I asked, after he picked up.

“Are you buying breakfast?” I heard him yawn through the phone.

“Beachside Broiler in fifteen.” I hung up and told Ray, “I’m taking a run over to Waikīkī. Be back in a while.”

Gunter and I often ate breakfast at the Beachside Broiler when I lived in Waikīkī. It was a touristy buffet in one of the hotels on Hobron Lane, with an ocean view and pretty decent food. On my way inside I picked up one of the free magazines and found a two-for-one coupon. I was flipping through the magazine and looking at the ads for gay bars when Gunter came in, skinny as ever, his blond buzz cut newly shaved. He wore a skin-tight white tank top with a rampant dragon on it, flames from the dragon’s mouth swirling all the way around to his back.

“So what’s the occasion?” Gunter asked, as we loaded up our trays with macadamia nut pancakes, sausage patties, fluffy rolls and slices of fresh pineapple and papaya.

I waited until we were seated, in a quiet corner of the restaurant, before I asked, “You know a guy named Adam O’Malley?”

216 Neil S. Plakcy

Gunter’s forkful of hash browns stopped halfway to his mouth. “When you ask me about men, it usually means they’re either under arrest or dead.”

“Dead.”

His fork clattered back to his plate. “Shit.”

“So you did know him?”

“Yeah. Not that well. I tricked with him a couple of times, and then I gave him a client referral about a year ago. He took me out to a fancy dinner to say thanks.”

“What kind of referral?”

“Guy I knew who was starting a business, needed some legal advice. What happened to Adam?”

I told him about finding O’Malley’s body the day before. He just nodded, and we both ate in silence for a few minutes.

“That jive with what you knew about him?” I asked, pushing my half-finished plate away. I’d lost my appetite. “That he picked up the wrong kind of guy?”

“Yeah.” He told me the same story I’d heard from Greg Oshiro—conflicted about his sexuality, O’Malley looked for men who’d treat him badly.

I shook my head. “Poor son of a bitch. You know any of his friends?”

“Not really. I’d just see him at bars now and then.”

“You hear of anybody else who’s gotten in trouble the same way Adam did? Picking up a guy and getting mugged?”

“Usually it’s the tourists who get in trouble,” Gunter said.

“But if you want to ask around, this group I belong to, Māhū

Nation, is sponsoring a picnic tomorrow afternoon. One of the guys there might be able to point you toward someone.”

“Māhū Nation? What kind of group is that?”

“Just a bunch of guys. Once you abandoned me for domesticated life, I had to look for friends elsewhere.”

MAhu BLood 217

“I can do without the drama queen routine. I get that from Mike.”

“Yeah, he’s so hot he has to wear asbestos underwear.”

I’d seen Gunter get catty before, but there had always been an undercurrent of fun. That day, though, he didn’t seem happy.

Was he jealous that I’d moved in with Mike? Left him to his single life?

I remembered my purpose. “Thanks for the tip about the picnic. I’ll talk to Mike about it. It might be a good way to find someone who saw my victim at The Garage.”

When I got back to headquarters, Ray told me he had found O’Malley’s name in conjunction with KOH in a couple of places online. Once he had been quoted in a Star-Bulletin article, and he’d been mentioned a few times as the attorney of record for KOH. But there was no indication of what kind of damaging information he might have had.

I tried the FBI, but the agent on duty informed me that Salinas was involved in a case and all the agent could do was take a message.

We hadn’t released O’Malley’s name to the press yet, and I wondered what kind of reaction we could get out of his coworkers. I called his office, and a human being answered the phone. I hung up without saying anything; I just wanted to see if anyone was there.

“It’s a wonderful world, isn’t it?” I said. “Hard-working attorneys piling up billable hours over the Labor Day holiday.”

“Even better, it’s your turn to drive,” Ray said.

The Fields and Yamato office was in a high-rise tower overlooking the port of Honolulu. A teenaged Hawaiian boy sat at the reception desk, working at a computer monitor. “Aloha,”

he said. “How can I help you?”

I introduced myself and Ray and showed her our badges. “We need to ask some questions about Adam O’Malley.”

“Mr. O’Malley isn’t in today. Would you like to speak with his 218 Neil S. Plakcy

paralegal?”

“Sure.”

He picked up the phone and punched in a couple of numbers.

“Sarah, it’s Akamu, out at the front desk. There are a couple of police officers who need to speak to someone about Mr.

O’Malley.”

He listened for a moment, then hung up. “She’ll be right out.”

“I’m surprised to see the office open on a Saturday,” I said, as we waited.

“We’re not officially open. Just a few of the attorneys and paralegals are here. I’m a student at U.H., and I’m interning here for the summer. I go back to school right after Labor Day, and I figured I would get a few more hours in while I can.”

He was a cheerful kid in a light blue chambray shirt, and we chatted for a couple minutes until a stocky woman in an open-necked blouse, navy skirt and matching pumps came out to the lobby. I thought the bright red streak in her dark hair was an interesting touch in such a conservative environment.

“I’m Sarah Byrne,” she said. “You have some questions for Mr. O’Malley? If it’s important, I can call him.” She had a crisp Australian accent.

I shook my head. “We need to speak to someone about him, and the cases he worked on here. Is there a place we can talk?”

She led us to a small conference room off the lobby. Floor to ceiling windows looked out at the port, where despite the holiday a crane was offloading containers from a big ship.

“I’m afraid we have some bad news for you,” I said. “Mr.

O’Malley was found dead in his apartment yesterday morning.”

She reached out to one of the plush armchairs to steady herself. “Oh, my,” she said, and she began to cry.

Ray poured her a glass of water from a pitcher on a side table, and I helped her sit in the big captain’s chair.

“Do you know what happened?” she asked, once she’d MAhu BLood 219

dabbed at her eyes and taken a sip of water. “Was it a heart attack or—was he killed?” Her eyes widened.

“We’re still working on the details,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”

She began to stand up. “I think you should speak to one of the associates.”

“We will, soon. For now we just want to get some background on Mr. O’Malley.”

“Where there any clients that you know of who were unhappy with his work?” Ray asked. “Anyone who might have threatened him?”

Sarah sat back down, clutching the tissue in her right hand.

“We focus on corporate litigation,” she said, shaking her head.

“We don’t handle criminal work at all. And Mr. O’Malley was a very quiet sort of a man—not the type to get into arguments, certainly not with clients.”

“Was he upset about anything?” I asked. “Or did he seem worried, or unusually agitated?”

“Not at all. He had just come back from a business trip, and he said he was glad to be home.”

“I understand he was in Washington, DC last week,” I said.

“Do you know what kind of case that was?”

“I can’t give you any information about our clients or ongoing litigation,” she said. “But I can tell you the case involved copyright infringement and both parties are large, well-known multi-national corporations. Mr. O’Malley was in touch with various members of their in-house counsel, so there wasn’t a specific individual who was involved in the case.”

“Was it usual for him to take a Friday off?” I asked.

“Mr. O’Malley worked very hard,” Sarah said. “I know he put in long hours when he was in Washington, because of the time difference. But when he did take a day off it was usually a Friday.

I don’t know why, because most of the time he’d be back in the office that weekend.”

220 Neil S. Plakcy

“How about his personal life?” Ray asked. “Can you tell us about any friends or activities?”

“He started at the same time I did, about five years ago,” she said. “He went to college and law school in San Francisco and then worked for a firm there for a few years. I don’t know very much about his private life.” She paused. “He wasn’t the kind of boss to get personal. I knew he wasn’t married, because he didn’t wear a wedding ring or have any pictures on his desk. But I don’t even know if he had a girlfriend.”

“Is there anyone here that he was friendly with?” I asked.

“Any other attorney he might have confided in?”

She thought for a moment. “I know who you could talk to. I’ll be right back.” She hurried out of the room.

“She didn’t even know if he had a girlfriend,” Ray said, when she was gone.

“That’s life in the closet.”

While we waited for Sarah to return, we went back over what she had said, looking for anything we might have missed. Ray was facing the door, and said, “Here she comes.”

I turned around. The first person through the door, though, wasn’t O’Malley’s paralegal—it was Peggy Kaneahe.

Peggy’s dark hair, always down to her shoulders in the past, was now cut in a severe, yet fashionable bob. She was nearly 100% Hawaiian, and her skin had always been a rich olive-cocoa, a few shades darker than mine. Now, though, she appeared pale, as if she hadn’t been out in the sun in months. There were a few more lines around her eyes than I’d seen before, and she had the attenuated, rail-thin aspect of a single woman who exercised too much.

She and I had a long history. Because of our last names, Kanapa’aka and Kaneahe, we always sat next to each other at Punahou. When we were sixteen I took her to our junior prom, and she was the first girl I ever kissed. She was the first I had sex with, too, one Saturday afternoon when her parents were at a christening on the North Shore. I broke up with her right after MAhu BLood 221

coming home from my first year in Santa Cruz, after I’d had my first sexual experience with another guy.

We dated again, briefly, when she returned to Honolulu after law school and was working in the DA’s office. Since I’d come out of the closet, though, I’d been careful to avoid running into her.

She looked as surprised as I was. “Kimo,” she said.

“Hi, Peggy. I didn’t realize you’d left the DA’s office.”

“Two years ago.”

She turned to Sarah Byrne. “I can take it from here, Sarah.

Thanks.” She looked at us. “Assuming you’re done with Sarah?”

I nodded. “If we have any more questions, we’ll get back to you.”

Sarah left, and I introduced Peggy to Ray. “Peggy and I went to high school together,” I said, leaving out the gory details.

We sat at the round table. Ray and I faced the water and the brilliant sun, while Peggy sat with her back to the light. I was sure it was some kind of attorney trick to put us at a disadvantage.

“You’re working on Labor Day weekend,” I said, to get the conversation started.

“I’m trying to make partner.” She paused. “Sarah said this is about Adam O’Malley? I have to say, I’m not surprised that he’s dead.”

AdAM’s cAseLoAd

I sat back in my chair and looked at Peggy. “That’s a pretty strong statement.”

“Adam had a low self-image,” she said. “I know it’s a cliché, but he worked twice as hard because he didn’t think he was smart enough, or a good enough lawyer, to become a partner here. But at the same time he desperately wanted the prestige that comes with that title, not to mention the money.”

She sighed, and the corners of her mouth turned down. I wondered if she was talking about herself as well. She had always been a driven student in high school, not content with anything less than an A in every class. She was on a full scholarship at Punahou, always feeling inferior to our rich haole classmates despite her grades.

“From what I could tell, Adam’s inferiority complex carried over to his personal life,” Peggy said. “He never said so, but I knew he was gay. We were friends, and we were each other’s date sometimes when we had to go to business dinners.” She pursed her lips together and looked directly at me. “I seem to have a knack for attracting gay men.”

I felt the sting of that dart but avoided acknowledging it.

Fortunately Ray stepped in and asked, “He talked to you about his personal life?”

“Not in much detail. But I knew enough not to ask him who he went out with on the weekend or why some lucky girl hadn’t snatched him up yet.” She paused. “I had the feeling he was attracted to the wrong kind of guy. Once he told me that he’d been mugged and had his wallet stolen, and from how cagey he was about the details I thought it was a hook up. And another time I saw a bruise on his arm, and his explanation was lame.”

I made a couple of notes, then looked back up at Peggy. “From what we’ve discovered, Mr. O’Malley went to a bar on Thursday night, where he met a man he took back to his apartment. That 224 Neil S. Plakcy

man is certainly someone we want to talk to, but we’re trying to cover all our bases. Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill him?”

“I used to get death threats in the DA’s office,” Peggy said, picking unconsciously at one fingernail with another. “That’s one of the reasons I left. I just got tired of the personal hassle. But here, we don’t deal with real human beings and their problems. I like that. Nobody comes rampaging in, yelling at the receptionist.

Nobody waves weapons at us or stalks us outside our houses.”

She looked up at us. “Adam was a very quiet guy, and this is a low-key practice.”

“Ray and I had an appointment with O’Malley on Friday afternoon, to discuss some suspicions he had about one of his clients, which relate to two other murders we’re investigating. He was threatened enough that he didn’t want to discuss things in the office.”

“Which client?” Peggy asked.

“Kingdom of Hawai’i. I understand he was the attorney of record for the group?”

“If there’s any client who could have gotten Adam in trouble, they’re the one. I encouraged him to get rid of them, but he didn’t listen.” Her voice cracked at the end of the sentence, and I could see her struggling to maintain control.

When we were in high school, our mothers were close friends, and her mother in particular was very proud of their Hawaiian lineage. I doubted Peggy would have let her mother volunteer for KOH. Even though my mother hadn’t been hurt at the rally, I wished I’d been more aware of what was going on and tried to keep her away from what was turning out to be a very questionable group.

“What was it that you found suspicious?” I asked Peggy.

“Adam mentioned they took in a lot of cash donations,”

she said. “The man behind the group said that they had a lot of grassroots support among native Hawaiians, who didn’t trust banks. But I knew that was bullshit. Most of my family is MAhu BLood 225

Hawaiian, and we’ve all got Bankoh accounts.”

“So you didn’t believe him,” I said. “But did Adam?”

“He believed what he wanted to. The non-profit and some allied corporations generated a lot of billable hours because of some kind of complicated corporate structure and interconnected transactions between companies. Adam was up for partner at the end of the year. He thought if he could hold on to them until then, the partners would see him as a rainmaker and make him an offer.”

She bit her lower lip, and I remembered how she used to do that when she was uncomfortable. “How did he die?” she asked.

“He was killed in his apartment,” I said. “It’s possible that there was sexual activity involved or that the killer wanted to create a false impression. We just don’t know yet.”

“I was an ADA for years, Kimo. You don’t need to sugarcoat for me.”

“He was naked, tied to the bedposts, with a dildo stuck up his ass. His throat was slit.”

As soon as I said it I felt bad, letting my anger and frustration and my discomfort at seeing Peggy again get the better of me.

She didn’t even flinch, though. “And despite that situation you think there’s a possibility that his death is connected to his work?”

“As I said, when I spoke to him on Thursday, he told me that he felt there were dangerous people connected with KOH and that he was frightened by them.” I thought about what I wanted to say next. “You can see we don’t have enough to show a judge.

But we have a hunch that his death was more than just a hook up gone bad.”

“And you want me to open up our confidential files to you,”

she said. “Without a warrant. On the strength of your hunch?”

I looked at Ray, then back at her. “That’s about it.”

Looking at Peggy’s face, I figured she was running through her whole history with me. How many times had I dumped her 226 Neil S. Plakcy

for the chance to go surfing with Harry Ho? How many times had I disappointed her or hurt her? She had gotten in hot water at the DA’s office over her attitude toward me. And here I was, asking her for a favor that could potentially damage her standing with Fields and Yamato.

Ray stepped in to rescue me. “We have more than just a hunch,” he said. “Our investigation keeps leading us to a guy named Jun Tanaka, who runs the Kope Bean chain, and who’s a big backer, through his various corporations, of Kingdom of Hawai’i. The FBI picked him up last night on suspicion of money laundering.”

“The FBI?”

Ray continued, “Yup. They’re probably filing subpoenas right now. They’re not going to care about our murder victims, though.

They’ll get your files, they’ll hold them up for a couple of years while they build their case.” He paused. “You know how that works. We’ll never get a conviction on any of these murders.”

I watched Peggy’s body language. Her back stiffened, and she stopped biting her lip. Ray had played her perfectly, without anything more than a gut instinct. He thought she would care about seeing Adam’s killer brought to justice. And he was right.

She sighed. “I can’t open up our files on my own. I’ll have to talk to one of the partners.”

“We can wait,” I said.

Peggy led us to O’Malley’s office. “Before you go, you guys must have some kind of program where you track billable hours, don’t you?” I asked her.

“Why?”

“Our first victim, Edith Kapana, who was killed at the KOH

rally, had O’Malley’s business card. I’d like to know if she came in to speak with him and why.”

She considered that. “I suppose we can look into that. I’ll get Sarah to help you.”

While we waited for O’Malley’s paralegal, Ray and I prowled MAhu BLood 227

the room, looking for evidence of O’Malley’s life. Like his apartment, his office was impersonal. His college and law school diplomas had been framed and hung on one wall, along with various certificates from legal seminars. Another wall was taken up with bookshelves filled with thick volumes of legal codes.

He hadn’t even hung one of those ubiquitous landscapes or motivational posters.

It was sad to think that so much of his life had transpired in such settings. What mattered to him? What was he passionate about? I couldn’t tell from anything around us. When we realized there was nothing else to see, we sat down in leather armchairs across from O’Malley’s desk.

Sarah Byrne came in and went right to the computer.

“Everything is online here,” she said as it booted up. “The database is searchable by attorney and client.”

“You have O’Malley’s password?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t need it. Because I worked on cases with him, I have access to his client records.”

As she typed her name and password into the database, she began to sing a little under her breath. I didn’t recognize the song, but then, most of what I listen to comes with slack key guitar accompaniment. Ray did, though.

“Is that ‘My Attorney Bernie’? I love that song,” he said.

She blushed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was doing that.”

“No, you have a good voice,” Ray said. “I’m a big Dave Frishberg fan. ‘Bernie is a purist, not your polyester tourist,’” he sang. His voice was surprisingly good.

“I sing with a jazz group,” Sarah said, hitting a couple of keys.

“We do a lot of his songs. You should come by some time. You and your wife.”

She was sharp, Sarah. I liked her.

She looked at us. “We’re in. What are we searching for?”

“Edith Kapana,” I said. “She was a volunteer for Kingdom of Hawai’i, and she had O’Malley’s business card.”

228 Neil S. Plakcy

“The woman who was killed at the rally,” Sarah said. “I read about that.” She typed and hit a couple of keys, and a single record popped up.

“She met with him a couple of days before the rally,” I said, pointing at the screen. “Any idea what it was about?”

She shook her head. “He has it coded new client consultation.”

“Would there be a paper file? Maybe he dictated something about the meeting?”

“I can check. Anything else while we’re in the database?”

“How about Kingdom of Hawai’i?” I asked.

“Isn’t that the file Peggy went to get for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I think we should wait until she gets back to look up his appointments with regard to them.”

OK, maybe Sarah was a little too sharp. She wasn’t going to let us do an end run around Peggy.

She looked through the file folders on his desk and in his drawers but couldn’t find anything on Edith. By then Peggy returned to O’Malley’s office, carrying a couple of heavy green hanging folders. “I had to get Mr. Yamato’s permission, and he wasn’t very happy. Attorney-client privilege doesn’t end just because Adam is dead. Mr. Yamato gave me some latitude—if I think there’s anything in the file you should see, I can show it to you. But if you need any copies I have to clear it with him first.

And you can’t use any of this in court.”

“I know. And I appreciate this, Peggy,” I said.