“I’m still an ADA at heart. I want you to find the bastard who killed Adam.”

Peggy said it was all right for Sarah to pull up records of hours O’Malley spent on KOH and Kope Bean business, and the screen filled with a long list. “You weren’t kidding when you said they generated a lot of work for him,” I said.

It looked like O’Malley spent at least twenty hours a week MAhu BLood 229

on Tanaka’s business, mostly having to do with the Kope Bean and its intertwined companies. “I can see why he’d want to keep Tanaka as a client,” Ray said. “Twenty hours is half his workload.”

Peggy laughed. “You don’t know much about how corporate lawyers work, do you?” she asked. “Twenty hours a week is just a drop in the bucket. We charge in fifteen-minute increments, so a good associate can generate at least five billable hours out of each hour of work. Make a two-minute phone call? That’s a fifteen-minute charge. While you’re on the phone, sign a set of documents for a different client. There’s another fifteen-minute charge. If you’re smart and you work hard, you can bill twenty-four hours a day.”

We scrolled through the database with Sarah’s help, but all it told us was that Adam O’Malley racked up the hours. Then we let Sarah go, and Peggy looked through the paper files. From the way she was flipping through pages, it didn’t look like anything there could help us finger O’Malley’s killer.

She was almost to the end of the folder as I started to wonder if maybe Ray was right. Suppose Adam O’Malley’s death had just been a terrible accident, unconnected to our case. He had gone to The Garage and picked up the wrong guy.

“What’s this?” Peggy asked, snapping me out of my reverie.

She was looking at two different sets of documents and moved them so we could look, too. Five pages, a list of handwritten names and dates, appeared to have been sliced from a book. The papers were very old, faded in some parts and water-stained in others. Without knowing what we were looking at, it was almost impossible to decipher.

The other set comprised records of intake and discharge at the Hawai’i State Hospital, for someone named Ezekiel Lopika.

“Why would this be in the KOH file?” Peggy said, leaning over my shoulder. I could smell her perfume. If it wasn’t the same one she’d worn in high school, it was a close match. “Who is Ezekiel Lopika?”

“Maybe these records really belong to Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, 230 Neil S. Plakcy

who’s the poster child for KOH,” I said. “You know who he is, don’t you, Peggy?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen him on TV a couple of times.”

“If these are his records, they may be here because he’s the person Kingdom of Hawai’i proposes should be king if the monarchy is restored. He might have been hospitalized under a different last name to keep people from realizing he was crazy.”

“Like that would be easy,” Ray said. “You said you’ve seen him, Peggy. Didn’t he strike you as kind of squirrely?”

“There’s a big difference between being eccentric and being crazy enough to be hospitalized,” Peggy said. “And if these records really belong to him, it’s a lousy attempt at camouflage.

Why change his last name but not his first? Ezekiel’s not a common name.”

“I don’t know. But maybe this is what O’Malley was concerned about.” I looked over at Peggy. “Edith Kapana, the woman who was gunned down at the Kingdom of Hawai’i rally? She was from the same town on the Big Island as Ezekiel. She must have known him as a young man. People said she was his hanai tūtū.”

I stood up and started pacing around the conference room.

“Suppose she brought these records to O’Malley when she met with him,” I continued. “Somebody could have killed her to keep her from making his hospitalization public.”

“You’re saying that’s why she went up to the Ohana?” Ray asked. “But why go up there to ask about his medical records when she already had the paperwork?”

I stopped by the conference room door. “Maybe she was worried about Ezekiel, about the stress that being involved with KOH could cause him. She could have wanted to talk about that with David Currie, but he wouldn’t discuss Ezekiel’s condition with her.”

Ray made me stop for a minute so he could fill Peggy in on Edith’s visit to the Ohana Ola Kino. Even though I was worried that I was spinning a fantasy without any proof behind it, I couldn’t help continuing my story once he’d finished.

MAhu BLood 231

“Maybe it wasn’t even a threat. She might have thought that by releasing his records she was protecting him from another breakdown. But Jun Tanaka wouldn’t feel the same way. Ezekiel’s his main man when it comes to KOH.”

My brain was racing so fast my mouth was having trouble keeping up. I had to start pacing around the conference room again just to slow myself down. “Somebody broke into Edith’s room a couple of days after she was killed and stole a lot of papers and photos she had there,” I said to Peggy. “Whoever it was could have been looking for these records, but she’d already given them to O’Malley.”

“I’m confused,” Peggy said. “I thought you said the FBI was investigating Tanaka for money laundering. How would these hospitalization records have any bearing on that case?”

“If Tanaka is using KOH as a front for the money laundering, then he’d want to do anything to protect his investment. If Edith’s revelation threatened him he could have had her killed.”

“If this is what he wanted to tell us about, why is this material here and not at O’Malley’s apartment?” Ray asked. “We didn’t find anything about KOH at there.”

“Maybe he was going to bring us here. And if he did have copies with him at home, the killer would have taken them away.”

Peggy said, “It’s our firm’s policy not to let original documents leave the office. He probably made copies to show you.”

“See?” I asked Ray. “He couldn’t bring the originals home with him.”

“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Ray said. “It would be nice if you had even a shred of proof to back any of this up.”

Peggy stood up. “I’m glad I’m not an ADA any more. Life is a lot simpler here. I’ll see if I can get copies of these for you.” She took the papers and walked out.

While she was gone, Ray and I went back and forth. I felt like a big hot air balloon, struggling to take off, while he held down 232 Neil S. Plakcy

my guide rope. I knew that one of us had to be the rational one, but it was still frustrating.

“It’s a motive,” I insisted. “In addition to protecting his money laundering operation, Tanaka could be looking after his investment in KOH. Whoever controls KOH could be in line for a whole lot of money.” I leaned forward. “You’ve got to admit it’s starting to make sense. What if Dex told Tanaka that Edith went to the Ohana to research Ezekiel’s hospitalization? Killing her at the rally could have been a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning the real motive.”

Peggy came back to the conference room. “I spoke with Mr.

Yamato. I can’t give you copies of any of this material until he’s had a chance to look at it himself and talk with the other partners on Tuesday.”

I wanted to argue, pound the table, demand cooperation. But I knew I had no legal right and so I reined myself in.

While I was mastering my emotions, Ray said, “Thanks.

You’ve already helped us a lot. More than we expected.”

“I’ll call you Tuesday,” Peggy said.

We stood up to go. “It was good to see you again, Peggy,” I said.

“You too, Kimo.” She leaned up and kissed my cheek, and just for a moment I remembered kissing her in her parents’ den and how much my life had changed since then.

the oLd swiMMiNg hoLe

By the time we got back to the station after our visit to Fields and Yamato, it was the middle of Saturday afternoon, and our investigation had run out of juice. We wouldn’t get the autopsy results until Tuesday, and we couldn’t get the copies from Peggy until then, too. We had no new leads on Edith’s shooting, Stuey’s death or even the sniper attack on us at the Ohana. It was frustrating, and I didn’t look forward to telling Sampson we had made no progress. I also didn’t want to ship the cases to cold storage and move on.

But despite that desire, we called it quits for the rest of the weekend. Ray was on special duty on Sunday and Monday, picking up some extra cash toward a down payment for a house.

“I’ll swing by that Māhū Nation picnic tomorrow afternoon. See if any of those guys knew O’Malley or had the same kind of experience, picking up a guy at The Garage and having things go sour.”

“Mike won’t be happy about that,” he said. “You going to a party full of gay guys.”

“I’ll just have to convince Mike to go with me.”

“Good luck with that.”

When I got home, Mike was vacuuming the living room and running a load of laundry. “How was your day?” I asked Mike, after a quick kiss hello. “You and Roby have fun?”

He shut off the machine, and Roby came running out from the bedroom.

“Nah. Just cleaned up and ran errands. How was yours?”

“Frustrating.” I told him about all the dead ends we had run across. “And you won’t believe this. I found Gunter’s name in O’Malley’s address book. So I had breakfast with him at the Beachfront Broiler. He confirmed that O’Malley liked rough trade.”

234 Neil S. Plakcy

“I believe Gunter’s name is in the address book of most of the gay men on this island,” Mike said. I couldn’t tell if the tone of his voice implied disdain or envy.

“Gunter suggested I go up to this picnic tomorrow with this group of gay guys he belongs to called Māhū Nation. One of them might know about a guy picking up marks at The Garage and mugging them.”

Mike crossed his arms over his chest, and I readied myself for a fight. “I’ve heard of them. They do these nudie swim things up in the hills. But neither of us are taking our clothes off.”

“You’re going?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not letting you go some place full of naked men by yourself.”

That wasn’t the fight I was expecting. Common sense told me to shut up, and for a change, I did. I kissed Mike’s cheek, stripped down to my boxers, and started cleaning with him.

We grilled some steaks for dinner and spent the evening on the sofa watching Shock to the System, a TV movie made from one of Richard Stevenson’s gay mysteries.

Sunday morning I couldn’t concentrate on the paper or the crossword puzzle. I took Roby out in the back yard and tossed the Frisbee to him, but he had forgotten the concept of “fetch.”

He grabbed it and settled down on the lawn to chew it. Once I wrestled it back from him and tossed it again, he took it and hid under the hibiscus hedge.

“You’re not very cooperative.” I wanted to ask Mike to go for a bike ride or run, anything to work off some nervous tension, but when I went back inside, he was napping on the bed, his white briefs a contrast to his tanned skin and black hair.

I put on a T-shirt and a pair of board shorts and drove down to Makapu’u Point, where I surfed until my arms and legs felt like jelly. As I was walking back up the beach with my board, I passed a shirtless twenty-something haole with long blond dreadlocks.

He was waving a fist in the air and yelling at a woman with him.

I was worried he might be threatening her, so I stopped MAhu BLood 235

nearby, planting my board in the sand and pretending to examine it for dings.

“See, that’s the beauty,” he told the woman, a petite blonde in a bikini that did little to cover her ample endowments. “We wait until no one’s home. So there’s no chance anybody gets hurt.”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. What was this guy planning?

“I’m telling you, that’s my dog,” he said. “I’m getting that dog back no matter what.”

I picked up my board and continued back to my Jeep. At least he wasn’t threatening the woman or setting up a home invasion robbery, I thought. But people with crime on their mind should keep their voices down. That reminded me of Stuart McKinney, talking so loudly to Ray and me outside the Kope Bean warehouse.

What if Dex, standing in the doorway waiting for him, had overheard him talking to us about the money Mr. T brought in at night? Could that have signed Stuey’s death warrant? And could that be the connection we needed to make Stuey’s murder fit into the story we were constructing?

I pushed thoughts of the case out of my head as I drove back up to Aiea. I called Gunter and got directions to the picnic, and an hour later, Mike and I followed them up Waimano Home Road, through the center of Pearl City and then up into the Ko’olaus.

We parked on a cleared piece of land just off the road, along with a jumble of cars old and new, everything from gleaming luxury SUVs to beat-up Hondas and Nissans. I made sure my gun and badge were securely locked in my glove compartment before we left the Jeep.

A narrow, overgrown path led down the hill toward the natural pool at the bottom of the valley. The sound of Jason Mraz singing “I fell right through the cracks, and now I’m trying to get back,” from the song I’m Yours, floated up toward us.

I felt really happy being there with Mike, as if both of us had come back from tough times and were lucky to be together. But maybe it was just the second-hand pakalolo smoke, mixed with the aroma of a charcoal grill.

236 Neil S. Plakcy

The path opened up into a cleared area of about a quarter-acre. On the far hill, water gushed over a tiny waterfall into a stone pool about twice the size of the man-made one in my brother Lui’s back yard.

A dense thatch of brown and dark green trees and vines climbed the slopes, and the place gave me the feel of a hidden paradise. A makeshift cabin stood next to the pool, with a small sandy beach leading into it. A half dozen guys were in the water, though I couldn’t tell if they were wearing bathing suits.

Gunter came romping up, wearing a pink T-shirt that read Māhū Nation, with tiny white shorts and matching rubber slippers. He grabbed me in a big bear hug and kissed me on the lips—something I thought he did just to piss off Mike.

“I’m so glad you came,” he said, looking like a giant six-foot-two pink puppy dog with a spiky blond buzz cut.

“Don’t I get a kiss?” Mike grabbed Gunter and planted a big one on his lips.

I was astonished. Mike doesn’t like public displays of affection, and he doesn’t like Gunter either. But I guessed the big dogs were trying to show each other up. Gunter seemed surprised by the kiss and even more by Mike’s hand squeezing his ass, but he rallied.

“I just might start to like you,” he said.

He turned and introduced us to Ira, a balding man in his sixties with a fringe of graying hair like a medieval monk.

“Gunter said you might be coming. Welcome.”

He hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks, but Mike short-circuited his own hug by sticking out his hand for a shake.

“I’m Mike. Kimo’s partner.”

“Great to meet you,” Ira said. “Come on in. We’ve got hot dogs and burgers grilling over there, swimming in the pool.

Dance if you want, or just hang out and enjoy the vibe.”

Another group of guys, mostly in their twenties, were dancing, but most were standing around talking in small groups, drinking MAhu BLood 237

beer from a keg. We’d brought a tub of cookies from Costco, and we dropped them on a folding table already groaning with potato salad, chicken wings, rice and potato chips.

It looked more like a church social of the kind I’d gone to as a kid with my folks, though everyone was male and there were no children playing. Gunter was deep in conversation with a gray-haired guy in his fifties who was thin to the point of anorexia, so Mike and I got a couple of beers and started making the rounds.

“Not exactly a den of iniquity,” I said to Mike.

A group of a half-dozen men, mixed ages, was standing near the cabin whispering to each other as we walked up. I figured they were gossiping about me, sharing the news that there was a cop on the property.

A forty-something guy with tousled brown hair stepped up as we got close. “Hey, Kimo, great to see you!” he said, enveloping me in another hug.

“Thanks. Ummm….”

“I’m Roy. We met a couple of years ago through the Hawai’i Gay Marriage Project.”

“Oh yeah. Good to see you, too.” I introduced Mike, and we met the rest of the guys.

“You’re not here to bust us for a little pakalolo, are you,” Roy asked, only half joking.

“Not my job. I won’t join you, but I won’t stop you, either.”

A young guy in the group pulled a joint from behind his back and took a drag, and the crowd laughed. We all stood around for a while, talking about ordinary stuff—the weather, new movies and so on.

A Chinese guy discovered Mike was a fireman and wanted to hear all about his job. Mike told great stories, and quickly he had the whole group hanging on his every word.

I was happy to see Mike relaxed in a group of gay men.

When we first met, he was so deep in the closet that he was uncomfortable around anyone who might be gay, afraid that 238 Neil S. Plakcy

something in his behavior would betray his secret. My high profile in the gay community was very tough for him back then, but he was getting more and more relaxed.

Mike and the Chinese guy went off to get some more beers for the crowd, and I thought the vibe with the group was comfortable enough to say, “I’m working on a case, and I was hoping somebody up here might be able to give me a lead. Any of you heard about a guy who picks men up at clubs like The Garage and then mugs them?”

“The Garage is sleazy,” one guy said.

“And that’s bad?” Roy said, laughing.

None of them knew anything concrete, though one guy said he’d heard some rumors. I gave him my card and asked him to get back to me if he heard anything more. Mike and the Chinese guy brought back the beers, and we all chatted for a few minutes more. Then I saw Gunter motioning me over.

“This is Simi,” he said, introducing us to the thin guy with him, who looked Thai. “Tell Kimo what you were telling me.”

Simi frowned and clutched his hands together.

“Anything you tell me stays confidential. And maybe with your help I can catch whoever’s doing this and make it stop.”

“I was at The Garage about six months ago.” Simi pushed a tear from his eye with his right knuckle. “It’s stupid. I was stupid.

This guy picked me up, and I took him home with me. But before we could do anything, he hit me. I fell down and passed out for a couple of minutes.”

Gunter reached around and hugged Simi. “This is good,” he said. “Let it out.”

“When I woke up, he was gone, and so was my wallet, all my jewelry, my laptop computer and my portable CD player.”

“You make a police report?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I was too embarrassed. I cancelled my credit cards, got a new license. I just wanted to put it all behind me.”

MAhu BLood 239

“Can you describe the guy?”

“Haole, maybe thirties, blue dragon tattooed on his right arm.”

A blue dragon tattoo. Just like the one that Dexter Trale had.

But I put that idea aside for a moment and focused on Simi.

“Anything more?”

“Very skinny,” Simi said. “And very sexy. Very masculine, you know? The dominant type.”

“You think you could recognize him again, if I showed you some mug shots?”

Simi pursed his lips together and nodded. “But I wouldn’t have to see him again, would I?”

“I can’t promise anything. But for now, you’d just look at pictures. And after that, we might ask you to pick him out of a lineup, but you’d be behind glass and he wouldn’t see you.”

He nodded again. I took down his full name, which was very long, and his contact information.

By the time we were finished with Simi, the smell of the hot dogs and hamburgers had made us all starving. Gunter, Mike and I filled up plates and sat on the grass.

“You had those guys eating out of your hand,” I said to Mike. I turned to Gunter. “He loves anybody who’ll listen to his stories.”

Mike kicked me and we all laughed. As we were finishing, two older men came by, naked, running for the pool.

“Come on, Gunter,” one called as they passed. “Everybody in the water!”

Gunter jumped up. “You don’t have to ask me twice.” He skinned off his T-shirt, kicked off his rubber slippers and dropped his tiny white shorts, then took off after them.

“Gunter can set a land speed record for getting out of his clothes.” I looked over at Mike and saw his dick stiffening under his shorts. I smirked and asked, “You enjoying the view?”

Gunter’s naked body disappeared under the surface of the water, 240 Neil S. Plakcy

coming back up to romp with one of the younger guys.

Mike shifted his empty plate over his lap.

“You make a big show out of being straight-laced, but you’re just like me,” I said. “You have a dick, and you like to use it.”

“I don’t like being naked in public. It reminds me of the locker room in high school. I was always scared I’d get a boner in the shower, from all those naked guys around me.”

“You were scared they’d know you were gay,” I said, “but I’ve got a news flash for you. Everybody here knows. They knew it the minute you walked in and introduced yourself to Ira as my partner.”

“Your point?”

“So what else are you scared of? Me? Are you scared if I get naked out here I’ll end up making out or fucking some random guy?”

He looked away.

“That’s it, isn’t it? You still don’t trust me.”

It felt like the day had gotten a lot colder. I had struggled to trust Mike around alcohol; it still made me a little nervous to see him with a beer in his hand, knowing the trouble he’d had in the past. But I believed in him, and I knew it wouldn’t help him to think I was watching every bottle he drank.

It had to work both ways. If he didn’t trust my commitment, if he was going to get jealous every time I was around other gay men, that was going to be a big stumbling block.

He locked eyes with me. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I was scared. Suppose he admitted that he’d never trust me? What would I say? Could I live that way?

Very slowly, he reached down and pulled his T-shirt over his head. A drop of sweat glistened between his hairy pecs. He smiled and stood up.

“Come on, baby,” he said. “Let’s go for a swim.”

Big eAgeR PuPPy

The guys in the pool hooted as we approached, both of us naked and hard and holding hands.

“Young love,” Ira said, as we stepped into the water and submerged under the surface.

The water was cold, and as cold water does, it shrank the equipment quickly. We laughed and talked with the Māhū Nation guys, roughhousing a little, splashing and dunking.

“I see what you see in Mike now,” Gunter whispered to me.

“You never saw him naked before?”

“How was I going to? You’ve never invited me for a threesome.”

“And we never will,” Mike said.

Gunter splashed the surface of the pool in mock petulance.

We laughed, and Mike tackled him, dragging him under the water.

By the time we left the pool, we were both relaxed and happy.

We had both bumped up against various naked body parts under the water, and our relationship had survived intact.

I remembered again that Mike was my best friend, not just my partner. We spent a couple of hours at the picnic, then climbed back to the Jeep late in the afternoon. By the time we pulled into the driveway, my body was still damp and clammy and I was worried that scum had penetrated some intimate parts.

“Feel like a shower, stud?” I asked, as I unlocked the front door.

Roby tackled both of as the door swung open.

“You beast,” Mike said. “Get down!”

The shower had to wait a few minutes, until Roby had emptied his bladder and romped around the yard, but it was worth waiting for. Mike and I had an awesome connection; I already knew that.

242 Neil S. Plakcy

But sex in the shower that evening was among the hottest we’d ever experienced, leaving us both drained and satisfied.

Lying in bed later, Mike on his back snoring gently next to me, I thought about how Mike had changed his mind and decided to go skinny-dipping—but there was more underneath that. It was like he’d relaxed somehow and come to trust me more. That was important, and it could only mean good things for our future together.

Roby padded into the bedroom, turned around a couple times on the floor next to my side of the bed and then settled to the ground. With my little ohana around me, I went to sleep, too.

My subconscious must have been telling me something, because I dreamed of dragons, and when I woke up on Labor Day morning I decided to follow a hunch and see if Dexter Trale, who had a dragon tattoo, was the guy who had picked up Simi at The Garage and then mugged him.

I was too antsy to wait until the next day to bring Simi in to headquarters to look at a photo array, though. If Dex was the guy who attacked Simi, then that made it more likely that Dex was the guy who’d picked up O’Malley the night he was killed. I thought it was a good idea to show that array to the bartender at The Garage, too, so I dug through my notes and found his name.

I left Mike playing with Roby and drove into headquarters, where I assembled a bunch of shots of Dex and similar-looking men. I tracked down both guys, going to Simi at his apartment in Pearl City first.

“That’s him,” he said immediately, pointing at Dexter. “How come you have his picture? Has he done this to other men?”

“Yeah. I think he has.”

Sadly, I didn’t think we could prosecute Dex for the attack on Simi. It had happened too long before, and he hadn’t reported it at the time. But if we could nail Dex for O’Malley’s murder, that would be put him away for a lot longer than a simple assault.

I drove over to the bartender’s apartment next, but he couldn’t give me a definite ID.

MAhu BLood 243

“Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “It’s dark in the bar, and I’m usually swamped.” He put three of the photos in a single line and looked at them again. “It could be any one of these three.”

He did include Dex in that trio, but that wasn’t something I could take to a judge.

By the time I got back home, Mike was waiting, ready to go out to an afternoon movie and an early dinner, and it wasn’t until we were about to walk out the door that he said, “I asked my mom and dad to come with us. I hope that’s okay.”

It wasn’t okay—but I had dragged Mike to dinner with Terri and Levi, to my parents’ even to the Māhū Nation picnic, and it was time for me to do something for him. I could suffer an afternoon of his father’s frosty disdain and his mother’s aloofness if I had to.

So I said, “Fine with me, sweetheart.”

When we walked outside, his father was picking a few tiny weeds from the pikake bed in front of their side of the house.

Fragrant white flowers were dotted among the lustrous green vines, which Dr. Riccardi had trained to grow on a wooden frame.

He was meticulous about pruning and fertilizing them—as he was about everything. I thought it was evidence of his controlling temperament, but Mike insisted it was just a nice hobby.

His father is almost as tall as Mike, with the same black hair and dark eyes. But Mike’s face has been tempered by the Korean influence of his mother. His father’s face is narrow and angular, his cheekbones sharp. Mike’s chin is rounder than his father’s, and his thick black mustache contrasts his father’s clean shave.

Dr. Riccardi stood up and wiped his hands on a moistened wipe that Mike’s mother handed him. Mike kissed his mom, leaving me and his father facing each other awkwardly.

“Hi, Dr. Riccardi.” I reached out to shake his hand.

He shook my hand, his palm still damp, and then we switched and I kissed Mrs. Riccardi’s cheek. She had a heart-shaped face, with her own dark hair pulled back. I’d seen pictures of her as a young woman, when she was strikingly beautiful, and even over 244 Neil S. Plakcy

fifty she was still lovely. Mike came from good genes.

“We’ve been thinking, Kimo,” Dr. Riccardi said, as he unlocked the Mercedes sedan. “Soon-O and I know you have your own parents, so we wouldn’t expect you to call us Mom and Dad. But we were hoping you could call us by our first names.”

I looked at Mike, my eyebrows raised. He gave his shoulders a slight shrug. I guessed that Mike had been working on his parents to be warmer to me. I appreciated the effort, and knew I’d have to meet it.

“I’d like that. Dominic. Soon-O.”

Their names sounded strange on my tongue, but I figured I’d get accustomed to it. And I was pleased that we were able to move on from all the drama of the past to a new, warmer relationship. We climbed into the car, Soon-O and Dominic in the front, me and Mike in the back like a pair of high schoolers being chauffeured.

Soon-O turned around to face us and said, “I’ve been trying to convince Mike that he needs to take that dog in for obedience training. He’s a little wild.”

I resisted the urge to say that Mike could use some training, too. Instead I said, “He has a good heart. He just needs a firm hand on the leash.”

“Does he obey you?”

I wasn’t sure by then if we were talking about Roby or Mike, but I said, “He knows the basic commands: sit, down and so on. He’s housebroken, and though he likes to chew on socks he hasn’t caused any major damage yet. But if it looks like he needs it, I don’t mind taking him in for lessons.”

We talked all the way to the Pearlridge multiplex, and for the first time since I met Mike I felt relaxed around his parents, like I was part of their family. We saw a romantic comedy that made us all laugh, and that good feeling carried over through dinner at a barbecue joint where we sat at a big wooden picnic table and shared big platters of ribs, chicken, biscuits and fries.

MAhu BLood 245

“We used to come here all the time when Mike was a boy,”

Dominic said. “You should have seen him attack a platter of ribs.”

“And you complain about the way I eat,” I said to Mike, elbowing him.

I remembered something that my brother Haoa had told me, years before, soon after he married Tatiana and met her parents and her many brothers and sisters.

“You don’t just marry the person, you marry their whole family,” he’d said.

Mike was an only child, and his parents’ relatives spanned the globe, from Long Island to Seoul. I’d always focused mostly on integrating him into my family, and I was glad it seemed like I was becoming a part of his, too.

By the time we got home we were stuffed and tired, but we motivated ourselves to take Roby for a long walk around the neighborhood, savoring the last moments of our time off together. We spent the evening slumped together on the sofa, watching mindless TV with Roby sleeping on the carpet, his spine curled so his head met his back feet.

≈≈≈

Tuesday morning I drove to work so eager to tell Ray what I’d learned over the weekend that I felt like Roby, a big eager puppy with a bone to share. As soon as he came in, I explained about meeting Simi and getting him to identify Dex’s picture.

“But if the bartender can’t say for sure it was Dex who left with O’Malley we don’t have a connection,” Ray said. “And the concierge at the Honolulu Sunset didn’t see the guy who came in with O’Malley.”

“We can run Dex’s prints. See if they show up at O’Malley’s.”

Thanh Nguyen, the fingerprint tech, was backed up because of the holiday weekend, as was the ME’s office. I wanted to go out and shake somebody, because I felt like we were so close to understanding. “I think you’ve been drinking too much coffee 246 Neil S. Plakcy

on this case,” Ray said. “Calm down. We’ll get everything figured out.”

Sampson called us in to his office as I was pacing around Ray’s desk.

“Where are you with the lawyer’s murder?” he asked, as we sat down across from him. He’d gotten the haircut he needed over the weekend and a little sun, too. There were red patches on his cheeks and forehead, and his nose was peeling. I thought that his maroon polo shirt was a good choice that morning, because of the sunburn, but instead of commenting on it I plunged into a status update.

“I found a guy who picked up a trick at The Garage who mugged him. The victim pulled Dexter Trale’s photo out of an array and fingered Dex as his attacker. Dex lived with Edith Kapana and worked with Stuart McKinney, so we think that now we can connect him to all three murders. We’re waiting on a fingerprint comparison with the prints we found in O’Malley’s apartment. And we’re waiting for the autopsy results. Both offices are backed up because of the Labor Day holiday.”

“Death doesn’t take a day off,” Sampson said. “What’s your plan?”

“If we get something from either the prints or the autopsy that implicates Trale, we’ll pick him up,” Ray said. “Otherwise we’ll just keep looking for evidence.”

“Not exactly the kind of plan I was hoping you’d have. But it’ll have to do. Let me know what you find. And remember, Donne, you’re responsible for keeping Kanapa’aka from breaking too many laws.”

Ray gave Sampson a two-fingered salute and said, “Will do, chief.”

“Let’s call Salinas,” I said to Ray as we left Sampson’s office.

“I want to know what he pulled out of that game on Friday night.

See if we can figure out how Dex and Tanaka work together.”

Salinas’s secretary said that he was in court but would be back by two. I asked her to leave him a message that my partner and I MAhu BLood 247

would be there then to see him. Then I called Peggy, and she said that the partners were meeting to discuss our request.

“We’ll come over,” I told her, knowing it’s always harder to refuse a cop something to his face than it is over the phone.

fAded docuMeNts

“You think Peggy will come through with those documents?”

Ray asked, as I scooted through a traffic light that started out yellow. “And that was a red light, you know.”

“You’re taking the job of being my conscience seriously, aren’t you?” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’re relevant to our case.”

Peggy met us in the reception area and said, “The partners have agreed to let you have the copies. Sarah is putting them together now.” She led us back into the conference room and sat down across from us. “The partners are going to want to know if these files are related to Adam’s death. You know lawyers.

They’re worried about liability.”

“Right now we’re just developing our case.” I sketched in our thoughts about Tanaka as Sarah Byrne brought in the copies of the hospitalization records and the originals of the other sheets we had found in the folder.

“These old pages are too old and faded to get decent copies,”

she said, showing them to me.

“Can we take the originals?” I asked Peggy. “We’ll get them back to you, I promise.”

“I’ll ask Mr. Yamato.” She walked out, and Sarah stayed behind.

“Did you have something else you wanted to tell us?” I asked her.

She pursed her lips, deliberating. “I saw that these materials relate to the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and I wondered if you spoke to Akamu when you were here on Saturday.”

“Akamu?”

“Our student intern. I know he’s a volunteer with KOH.”

I looked at Ray, my eyebrows raised. “No, we didn’t speak to 250 Neil S. Plakcy

him,” he said. “Is he here now?”

“It’s his last day. I think he’s in the law library.”

Peggy came back in then. “Who’s in the library?” she asked.

“You have a student intern here who’s also a volunteer with KOH?” I asked.

She looked from me to Sarah. “Yes. Akamu Hastings. But he doesn’t have access to any case files.”

“Even so,” I said. “We’d like to talk to him.”

Peggy nodded toward Sarah. “Can you ask him to come in here? But don’t tell him why.”

Sarah left. “You think Akamu is connected to Adam’s death?”

Peggy asked.

“I don’t know, Peggy. But it’s certainly an interesting coincidence, don’t you think? O’Malley agrees to meet me and talk about KOH, and then he’s killed. And you have somebody in your office who volunteers for KOH.”

Peggy was about to argue when Akamu came to the door. I could tell from his eyes that he recognized us as the cops from Saturday.

“You wanted to speak to me, Miss Kaneahe?”

“Come in and sit down,” she said, pulling out a chair for him.

I could only imagine what she was thinking then. Adam O’Malley had been her friend, and he was dead, and it was possible that this kid was involved somehow. I wondered whether she’d revert to her prosecutor stance or be the kid’s advocate, as a representative of Fields and Yamato.

She introduced Ray and me. “The detectives have some questions for you about your involvement with Kingdom of Hawai’i,” she said. “I want you to be honest with them, okay?”

He nodded. I could see his right hand shaking a little on the big wooden table.

“It’s okay, Akamu,” I said. “Nobody’s in trouble here. We just want to ask you a couple of questions, all right? Peggy said MAhu BLood 251

you’ve been volunteering with KOH. What kind of stuff have you done?”

“Nothing major,” he said. “Mostly I’m like a gofer, kind of like I am here. I run errands, I help out at rallies and stuff.”

“That’s good. It’s important. My mom volunteers for KOH

sometimes too.”

“Oh, yeah, Mrs. Kanapa’aka. I know her. She’s really smart.”

“Thanks. I’ll tell her you said so. So is that how you got the internship here? Through KOH?”

“Sorta. A couple of times I drove around Mr. Kapuāiwa, and through him I met Mr. Tanaka. I told him I wanted to be a lawyer, and he said maybe he could help me out.”

I looked at Ray and Peggy. Ray kept a poker face, but I could see Peggy’s mouth setting into a grim line.

“Mr. Tanaka, huh?” I asked. “Jun Tanaka? From the Kope Bean?”

“Yeah. He’s super nice. He’s taken a real interest in me. He’s always calling me up and asking how things are going. A couple of times he even took me out to dinner.”

“I guess you heard about what happened to Mr. O’Malley,” I said. “How he was murdered last week.”

“Oh, man, I felt so bad. He was a nice guy. I was talking about him to Mr. Tanaka just the other day, how Mr. O seemed really committed to helping out KOH.”

Suddenly his mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh my God, oh my God.” He started shaking. “It was his meeting. The meeting he was talking about.”

Peggy reached over and took the kid’s right hand and squeezed.

“It’s going to be okay. But you have to tell us what you know.”

He took a deep breath, his teeth chattering a little. “It was Thursday afternoon. Right after lunch. I was walking past Mr.

O’Malley’s office, and I heard him on the phone. He was talking 252 Neil S. Plakcy

about meeting someone the next day to talk about KOH stuff. I thought that was so amazing of him, you know? I mean, he just got back from this big case on the mainland, and he was going to have some meeting about KOH on his day off.”

He looked from me to Ray. “That must have been who killed him, right? That person he was meeting with.”

I shook my head. “He was supposed to meet with us, Akamu.

But when we got to his apartment he was dead.”

“With you? With cops? But that’s not what… oh my God.”

“What?”

“Mr. Tanaka called me Thursday afternoon, just kind of to say that he had heard I did a really good job this summer, and he wanted to keep in touch with me in the fall. I think I… I mean, I didn’t even think about it, you know?”

“You think you what?”

“I told Mr. Tanaka that Mr. O was having a meeting the next day about KOH stuff.” He looked from me to Ray and back again. “I didn’t know he was meeting with you or that there was anything strange going on. I just thought it was great of him to do it on his day off, you know?”

The pieces clicked in place. Tanaka knew that Adam O’Malley was meeting with someone on his day off, to discuss KOH

business. Even if Tanaka didn’t know Adam was meeting with the cops, he’d have been right to be suspicious. And maybe even to have ordered his attorney’s death.

We got Akamu’s contact information, and he left the conference room. “Tanaka has to be connected to Adam’s death,” Peggy said.

“Looks like it,” I said.

“If you find out anything that compromises Fields and Yamato, will you give me a heads up? As a favor to an old friend?”

“Of course.”

I signed a receipt for the old faded documents Sarah had been MAhu BLood 253

unable to photocopy, and we left the law firm.

“Harry might be able to do something with these,” I said to Ray. “Mind if we swing by his place?”

“No prob.” As the elevator doors closed, he said, “So how long did you date her?”

“What?”

“The attorney. Peggy. You did date her, didn’t you?”

“How did you know?”

“I’m a detective, dude. I look at the way people interact with each other. And you two have failed booty call all over you.”

“I guess you could call it that.”

We reached the ground floor, and I called Harry and said we were on our way over. We walked back to my Jeep, and I told Ray the whole sad story, from those make-out sessions in Peggy’s bedroom to the way she had tried to screw me after I came out of the closet.

“And all that time, you didn’t know?” Ray asked. “My cousin Joey, he couldn’t even talk about sex with girls. He’d get this weirded-out look on his face and squinch up his nose like he smelled something bad.”

“I was clueless, what can I tell you?” We got in the Jeep, and I backed out of the parking space and turned onto the street. “I look back at it now and wonder what I was thinking, but at the time, I thought everybody felt the way I did. That everybody was, you know, bi to some extent. I figured once I met the right girl I’d stop thinking about guys.”

“Do you still think about girls?” he asked. “Seeing Peggy again, that do anything for you?”

I thought about it as we waited at a red light. “I look at her now, and there’s so many things going on, you know? I remember high school and stuff we did. But it doesn’t make me want to get in her panties again. Not at all.”

“Other women?”

254 Neil S. Plakcy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not just call in a professional hit?”

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

MAhu BLood 255

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We need it ASAP, brah.”

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

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

gAy foR PAy

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

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

“You can talk. I’ll listen.”

“Can you ask Tanaka about Dexter Trale?”

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

Hi, Francisco, how are you today?”

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

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

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

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

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

258 Neil S. Plakcy

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

“Can we talk to Tanaka?”

“Nope. Not till we’re finished.”

“When do you think that will be?”

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

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

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

He was still smiling when we walked out.

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

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

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

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

“Kinky,” Ray said.

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

“He’s doing a good job of it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

260 Neil S. Plakcy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For what?” I asked.

“Just open your e-mail.”

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

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

MAhu BLood 261

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

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

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

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

“Are there more like this?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He get paid for this?” Ray asked.

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

262 Neil S. Plakcy

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

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

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

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

“Think it was a military injury?” Ray asked.

“Wonder if he’s getting any treatment at Tripler?” I asked.

That was the Army medical hospital in Honolulu where Mike’s parents worked, but I didn’t think I could ask either of them to pry into Dex’s records.

“Actually I have something that might relate to that,” Harry said, showing us a printout from a pharmacy a few blocks from the Kope Bean warehouse.

I groaned. “I don’t even want to look,” I said, but I looked anyway. “You know, you’re making Ray and me crazy with this. It is so illegal to go into someone’s medical records without a court order.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “So forget for the moment how I might or might not have gotten hold of this information. He has prescriptions for propranolol and primidone. I was curious to see what those are for, so I did some research. Propanolol is a beta blocker; doctors prescribe it in conjunction with primidone when a patient has a condition called Essential Tremor, ET.”

“Phone home,” Ray said, holding an imaginary phone to his ear.

“This ET condition would explain why his hands shook?” I asked.

MAhu BLood 263

Harry sat back in his chair. “Yeah. And taking his meds would block adrenaline in his system, calm him down enough so that he could shoot.”

“Tanaka has the motive for all three killings—to protect Ezekiel’s position as the KOH figurehead, because KOH is essential to the money laundering operation. And now we can see that he had the means—Dex.”

I got up and started pacing around, just like I’d done back at Fields and Yamato. For some reason that helped me think.

“Dex was in the military, so we could get a subpoena to determine if he was qualified on the M16A4 rifle with sniper scope,” I continued. “Which would give him the training to kill Aunty Edith and shoot at us outside the Ohana. And as long as he took his medication, his hand wouldn’t shake and he should be able to fire a rifle accurately.”

“And cut Adam O’Malley’s throat,” Ray said.

I looked through the paperwork on my desk until I found the images we’d captured from the video at the Honolulu Sunset.

The face of the guy with O’Malley never showed, but there was one good shot of the guy’s lower left arm, with a tattoo of a grinning skull there. It matched the skull tattoo we could see on Dex’s arm in the porno pictures.

“Suppose we go out to the Kope Bean warehouse and talk to Dex about his extracurricular activities?” I asked.

“Fine with me,” Ray said. “But if he starts striking poses I’m leaving the conversation up to you.”

he weN BAg

Harry left, and Ray and I went in to see Sampson. Fortunately we still hadn’t gotten a new case handed to us.

“Everything we’ve found in the three murders we’re investigating ties back to Jun Tanaka,” I said. “He was the biggest backer of Kingdom of Hawai’i, which he used as a conduit for money laundering. The figurehead for KOH is Ezekiel Kapuāiwa, and we believe that Edith Kapana, the first victim, was going to expose Ezekiel’s hospitalization.”

I showed him the copies of Ezekiel’s records. “She gave these pages to Adam O’Malley. That made them both a threat to Tanaka’s investment in KOH. Stuart McKinney was a witness to the large amounts of cash passing through the Kope Bean warehouse. Tanaka couldn’t afford to have that information get out.”

“And Trale connects how?”

“He played in Tanaka’s card games,” Ray said. “He worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean and also did other jobs for him, like driving Ezekiel around.”

I continued, “He lived with Edith Kapana, the first victim.

He worked with Stuart McKinney, the second victim. He fits the description of the man who went home with Adam O’Malley, the third victim.”

“Means?” Sampson asked.

“Dex served in the military,” I said, handing him a printout of what Ray’s friend had e-mailed. Sampson knocked the miniature cannon on his desk back and forth a couple of times as he thought.

Ray jumped in. “We have a witness who will testify that Dex picked him up at a gay bar called The Garage, then mugged him.

We think we can make Dex as the guy who left The Garage with O’Malley the night he was killed.”

266 Neil S. Plakcy

“Opportunity?” Sampson asked.

“We’re waiting on fingerprint comparison to see if we can place Dex in O’Malley’s apartment,” I said. “We’re going to find Dex and talk to him, see if he has an alibi for the times of the three killings.”

“Okay,” Sampson said. “If Trale doesn’t have an alibi, I think you’ve got enough to pull him in.”

I walked back to our desks with Ray, who held out his hand for a fist bump, and I knocked my hand against his. “You and me, brah,” I said. “You and me against the world.”

“Okay, quoting Helen Reddy is just a little too gay, even for me,” Ray said, and we both started laughing.

We drove to the warehouse under cloudless skies the color of the light-blue porcelain floor tiles in my parents’ kitchen.

My mother used to say that when she was stuck in the kitchen cooking for her husband and three sons, at least she could feel like she was outside, walking on air.

The white pickup registered to Dex wasn’t in the Kope Bean parking lot, but we still made a circuit of the property, looking for Dex on the loading dock, before we went inside.

Tuli was at her computer, taking orders, when we walked in, but Dex wasn’t there.

“He was supposed to be here Labor Day and yesterday,” she said, taking off her headset. “People don’t stop drinking coffee just because it’s a holiday, you know. But he didn’t show up.” She shook her head. “First Stuart McKinney, now Dexter Trale. It’s hard to get good help these days.”

“You haven’t heard from him?” I asked.

“Not since he left on Friday afternoon.”

We thanked her and drove out to the house in Papakolea where he’d been living with Leelee and her family. She answered the door, the baby attached as always to her hip. Her right eye had been blackened a few days before; the skin around it had turned yellow and purple. Her hair hung in greasy strands around her MAhu BLood 267

face.

“We need to see Dex,” I said.

She started to cry. “He wen bag.”

“Left,” I whispered to Ray.

“Friday. He fed up wid the keiki crying, hana hou, hana hou.”

She was wearing a shapeless T-shirt with what looked like baby vomit on it, a pair of shorts and rubber slippers. She looked so young and vulnerable, and I felt bad for her, stuck in such an awful situation without anyone to help her. Her shoulders shook.

“I don’t know why the keiki cry. Aunty Edith only one who make him pau.”

I dug a tissue from my pocket and gave it to her. Ray took the baby, who was crying, too. “I’m going to get him fixed up,”

he said.

Leelee led me into the kitchen. She hadn’t been cleaning up for a couple of days; dirty dishes and baby bottles were stacked in the sink, and ants crawled over an open package of crackers on the counter.

I felt out of my depth. Ray babysat as a teenager, so at least he had a handle on how to look after the keiki. I may be in my mid-thirties, but in some circumstances the first thing I think to do is to call my parents.

Leelee sat on the sofa, looking dejected. I walked into the kitchen and called my mother. “Mom, you remember Leelee,” I said, when she answered.

“Oh, no. What’s happened to her?”

I started washing the dishes, holding my cell phone against my shoulder as I gave her the quick rundown.

“You can’t call Social Services,” my mother said. “You know the first thing they want to do is take away the baby. Your father and I will come over now and help get things cleaned up.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“We’re all ohana,” she said.

268 Neil S. Plakcy

By the time I finished washing the dishes, Leelee had calmed down. “Dex come home Friday from work,” she said, when I found her back in the living room. “Maybe six, seven o’clock, in bad mood. I say, ‘Kay den, Dex, no make like dat.’”

She blew her nose. “He get all stink on me. He start grab his stuff, I was all like, wat doing? No leave me! Dat when he hit me.”

“You know where he went?” I asked.

She shook her head. She had gone to look for him on Saturday, walking all over the neighborhood, but no one had seen him. Or at least, no one would tell her if they had. After that, she’d stayed home, hoping he would show up. But she hadn’t been able to do much more than get out of bed and heat up some bottles of formula for the baby.

Ray came back in with the baby; he’d given him a quick bath and changed his diapers. “Not exactly what they’d call police work back at the academy,” he said, handing the baby to her.

“Keiki smell so ono!” Leelee said, snuggling her nose into the boy’s chest, and he giggled.

“Any chance Dex is going to come back here?” I asked Leelee.

She started to cry again. “He say he no come back, evah.”

Ray put out a BOLO on Dex’s license plate, warning that he might be armed and dangerous, while I called my brother.

“Hey, Lui, your buddy Lan Long did a runner. You know if he was friendly with any of the guys in your pai gow game?”

“Don’t think so. Tung was the only guy he ever really talked to. Though he bragged a lot to us about his time in the army, all his shooting skill and so on.”

I made a mental note of that. Dex really could shoot, and Tanaka knew it.

“You hear anything from the FBI after the raid?” Lui asked.

“Nothing. Listen, brah, you call me ASAP if Dexter Trale contacts you. Lan Long, that is. He’s very dangerous.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Lui said.

MAhu BLood 269

Ray sat on the sofa next to Leelee and asked if there was any place she thought Dex might go. “He have any friends? Family?

A place he could hide out?”

“I never met no family. He said his parents die long time ago.”

“Where did he live before he moved in here?” Ray asked.

She looked as if we’d asked her one of those analogy questions from the SAT, the kind that used to boggle my mind.

“Don’t know.”

“Come on, Leelee, you’ve got to give us something,” I said.

She started to cry again. “Don’t know. He just show up. I think he work with Uncle Amos on some job. He come over one day, and then he move in.”

I heard my mother’s car in the driveway and went to meet her. “Your father’s pressure is up so I left him at home,” she said, kissing my cheek. “How’s Leelee?”

“Getting better.” I led her into the kitchen, where she looked around.

“At least she has some diapers and some formula. So things haven’t fallen apart completely.” She shook her head. “After we get organized I’ll see if I can talk to the neighbors about helping her.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek.

Ray and I drove around the neighborhood looking for information on Dexter Trale. Everybody we found, though, was glad that he was gone. One old lady at the community center called him a pilau moke, a dirty crook.

“Is he why nobody helps Leelee?” I asked.

“Dat girl babooze to stay wid him. But now he gone, I make her some sticky rice.”

“That would be very nice of you, Aunty.”

I figured it was up to us to make sure that Dexter stayed gone.

tRANsMissioNs

“Sticky rice,” I said, as we walked away from the old lady and climbed into the Jeep. My stomach grumbled. “What do you say we stop for some lunch on our way back to work?”

Ray was all for that plan, so I swung past a Zippy’s, where we both ordered bowls of chili. We stood around in the tiled lobby of the restaurant, hovering like everyone else until the server called our numbers.

“Edith Kapana was a nosy old woman,” I said. “She knew about Ezekiel’s stay at the mental hospital, and that could destroy the foundation of KOH. Who’s going to choose a crazy man as king of Hawai’i?”

“Dex worked for Tanaka at the Kope Bean. He told Tanaka about Edith, and Tanaka hired him to kill Edith, to protect his investment in KOH. And when Stuey started talking to us about the money being sorted at the warehouse, Dex killed him, too.”

The server called our numbers, and we carried our food to a table by the window.

“A skinny guy with tattooed arms picked up Adam O’Malley at The Garage,” I continued as we sat down. “That was Dexter Trale. Dex has been picking up extra cash posing for naked pictures and rolling gay men he picks up in bars. He went home with O’Malley, slit his throat, then staged the scene to make us think it was a sex crime.”

Ray sighed. “We still don’t have any concrete proof we could take to a DA.”

“We need to connect Dex to Jun Tanaka, because Tanaka is the one who benefits from the murders,” I admitted. “It’s not enough that Dex worked for him and that my brother heard Dex talking about his marksmanship skills at the pai gow game. But with Dex in the wind and Tanaka with the FBI, we don’t have any place to go.”

272 Neil S. Plakcy

My phone rang as we were leaving the restaurant. I looked at the display and saw it was my mother’s cell. “Hi, Mom, what’s up?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, I heard voices in the background, as if she’d dialed my number accidentally and I was overhearing her conversations.

I was about to hang up when I heard someone say, “Please, Dex.” It sounded like Leelee’s voice.

I turned the phone so Ray could listen. We walked to a shady spot by the side of the building, away from the noise of traffic.

“Stupid damn bitch,” a man’s voice said.

The idea that Dex was anywhere near my mother was pretty scary. The sound faded, and I pressed the phone to my ear, trying to hear more. Ray handed me his phone and mouthed, “Call your father. Where’s your mother?”

He took my phone from me and walked a few steps away.

My father answered, yawning as if I’d woken him.

“Dad, where’s Mom?”

“Still at that girl’s house, I guess. My blood pressure was up this morning so she made me stay home. What’s up?”

“Nothing, Dad. I’ll call her cell.”

“You and Mike should come by for dinner,” he said.

“Yeah, Dad, we will. Gotta go. Bye.”

I switched phones with Ray. Still nothing on my mom’s end.

“My mom’s at Leelee’s” I whispered.

“I’ll call for backup. Let’s roll.”

We ran for my Jeep. I popped the flashing light up on my roof and burned rubber. It was a good thing I excelled at the defensive driving class at the police academy, because I used every trick I knew to swerve around slow-moving cars, take curves at high speed and generally drive like a maniac for the next twenty minutes.

MAhu BLood 273

I lost the connection to my mother’s cell phone when we went through a dead zone, and I didn’t want to call her back because I didn’t know what was going on at the house.

I turned onto Wyllie, narrowly missing a soccer mom in a minivan plastered with decals of kids dancing and playing soccer.

“Watch the flashing lights, asshole!” I said as I slewed around her.

“Take it easy, Kimo,” Ray said, grabbing the passenger door.

“It won’t help if we smash up on our way there.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, jumping onto the Pali Highway and accelerating. We were lucky that there wasn’t much traffic; I was able to dart around the slower-moving cars. We took the first exit we could and climbed the narrow streets to Leelee’s house in record time, blasting the horn at a convertible full of clueless tourists and narrowly missing a garbage can that I swear jumped out at us as we passed.

One thing you’ve got to say about our SWAT teams, they mobilize fast. A block from Leelee’s house. I pulled up beside a black SUV I knew belonged to one of the SWAT team leaders, a crusty Nisei named Yamashita. He stood in front of it, with three other guys in bullet-proof vests checking various pieces of weaponry.

All around us I saw neighborhood residents clustered on porches and lawns, watching the action. “We passed a white pickup going fast as we were heading up here,” Yamashita said.

“The license plate was covered with dirt, so we couldn’t get a clear ID on it and didn’t want to initiate a chase without knowing what was going on in the house.”

“Did it have one of those “Welcome to Hawai’i—Now Go Home” bumper stickers on it?”

“Yeah. I saw that.”

“That’s Dexter Trale’s vehicle. Any passengers in the truck?”

Yamashita shook his head. “Not that we could see.”

“I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s going on,” I said, and drove on, pulling up in front of Leelee’s ramshackle house.

274 Neil S. Plakcy

I jumped out and raced up to the front door, Ray right behind me. My mother was sitting on the sofa with her arm around Leelee when I burst inside. Leelee held the baby on her lap. I hurried over and kissed my mother’s cheek.

“I’m sorry I got you caught up in this,” I said.

Her black hair was still perfect in its black bouffant, her white sleeveless blouse a crisp contrast to her tanned skin. With her pink cotton skirt and black ballet-slipper flats, she could have been on her way to lunch with one of her friends, instead of confronting a man who might have killed three people. She shivered, but then she smiled and hugged Leelee.

“It’s okay. He just left. That boy, that Dexter.” Her voice was shaky. “Leelee was very brave.”

“He was so mad,” Leelee said. Tears stained her cheeks, but she had combed her hair and was wearing a clean T-shirt and a pair of denim cutoffs.

Ray called dispatch and put out an APB—an all points bulletin—for Dexter Trale, and I tried to calm down, so I wouldn’t show my mother how upset I’d been. It was one thing to worry about a witness or a hostage in a dangerous situation—

and another thing entirely when it was your own mother.

Between them, my mother and Leelee told us what had happened. “I think he might be on drugs,” my mother said to me in a low voice. “He looked crazy.”

Dex had ranted and raved, yelling at Leelee, while he had packed up some of his belongings. That’s when my mother dialed my number, keeping the phone in her pocket.

“That was very smart, Mom. You’ve got a cool head in a crisis. Maybe you should have been the cop, not me.”

“No, thank you. I nearly fainted when Dexter started waving his gun and yelling at Leelee. She stood up to him, and he hit her in the mouth.” She took a couple of deep breaths. “He wanted all the money Leelee had in the house, which wasn’t much, and then he took the cash from my wallet.”

MAhu BLood 275

The anger kept bubbling up inside me, and I struggled to rein it in. Nobody messes with my family—especially not my mother.

“Did you notice what kind of gun it was?” I asked.

“It looked like your father’s Glock. But I’m not sure.”

My father had raised us all around handguns; his favorite was the Glock 9 millimeter. He had given us each one when we graduated from college. I still kept mine oiled and polished, in case he ever asked to see it. I didn’t want to endure a tongue-lashing about the care of firearms. I realized a couple of years into my career that everything I’d learned as a cop was just reinforcement of what my father had taught me. And that goes for a lot more than weapons.

“When he left, he took a rifle with him too,” my mother said, balancing the baby on her hip as if he was one of her own grandchildren. “There are some neighbors outside, I’m going to go out and talk to them.” She patted Leelee’s shoulder. “You’ll see, things will be better now.”

“Where do you think Dex might have gone?” I asked Leelee.

By then she was calmer, drinking some herb tea. “He say he want money. He say Ezekiel know where there lots from that group, da kine KOH.”

“Ezekiel Kapuāiwa?”

“Yeah, he used to drive him places.”

The front door opened, and soon the living room was filled with women comforting Leelee and offering her help. It seemed like Leelee’s ohana was finally pitching in now that Dex was gone.

A police car was going to sit outside the house, in case Dexter came back, and it was time for Ray and me to get moving.

I walked my mother out to her car. “Dex didn’t take your wallet, did he? Or any of your ID?”

She shook her head.

“Good. So he doesn’t know who you are or where you live.”

She beeped open the door of her car, and I could see in her 276 Neil S. Plakcy

eyes that she was glad to be going home.

“I don’t think we should tell Dad about this,” I said, “if his blood pressure’s up. But you should stay away from Leelee until we know that Dexter’s in custody.”

“That poor girl,” she said, shaking her head.

“Mom.”

“I know, I know. I just hope those women will help her.”

“You saw how they were talking. Like you always say, it’s ohana.”

We drove the few blocks to the house where I’d seen Tanaka drop off Ezekiel, but no one was home. Ray called Maile Kanuha to see if he was with her.

“Ezekiel doesn’t carry cash,” he said to me, after he hung up.

“But she admitted that there’s a safe deposit box with some cash in it, though she wouldn’t tell me where the cash came from.”

“Where’s the box?”

“A bank called Hawaiian People’s. Apparently there’s only one branch.”

“I know it. Let’s get a car out there.”

We started back down the twisting, narrow streets. I drove a lot slower now that my mother was out of danger and no garbage cans or other obstructions jumped in our way. We were about halfway to the Hawaiian People’s Bank when dispatch called.

“We have a radio car at Hawaiian People’s Bank that reports a truck there matching the description you put out,” the dispatcher said.

“On our way. Make sure all units know the suspect is armed and dangerous.”

hAwAiiAN PeoPLe’s

The bank was on Iolani Avenue at the foot of Tantalus, and we were there a few minutes later. When we pulled up in front of the single-story whitewashed building, Jimmy Chang and Kitty Cardozo were directing traffic away from the bank. It was late afternoon, and the sky was the color of a purple bruise behind the looming mass of the mountains.

“Sorry, the bank is temporarily closed,” I heard Kitty tell a woman in a pickup.

“I just saw someone come out,” the woman argued. “It’s only 3:40.”

“Please move along, ma’am,” Kitty said. Standing there in her uniform, hands on hips, she had a “don’t fuck with me” attitude, and the woman, grumbling, continued on past the bank.

I figured about forty-five minutes had passed since Dex left his house for Ezekiel’s, giving him enough time to pick Ezekiel up and drive down the hill to the bank.

The SWAT team was assembling again. Yamashita had one hand on the gun in his belt holster and was communicating by headset with someone when Ray and I walked up. He held up his index finger while whoever it was finished talking.

“There’s a disturbance in the vault,” he said to us. “Apparently there wasn’t any cash in that safe deposit box.”

“I didn’t think Tanaka would give Ezekiel a key to a box full of cash,” I said.

Yamashita listened again. “They’re coming out.” He positioned his sharpshooters around the parking lot. Into his microphone he said, “Suspect about to exit the building with a hostage. Hold fire unless you have a clear shot.”

Ezekiel walked out first, with Dex right behind him. “Dexter Trale!” Yamashita’s voice boomed through a megaphone. “Put your hands up.”

278 Neil S. Plakcy

Dex grabbed Ezekiel and held him as a shield. “I’ve got a gun!” he shouted. He took off at a run, dragging Ezekiel with him.

“That’s his truck,” I said to Yamashita, pointing to the white pickup a few hundred feet away. I felt impotent standing there—

this was my case, and I couldn’t do anything more than watch the SWAT team and see how things would play out.

“Take out the white truck,” Yamashita said into his headset.

Almost immediately, a series of shots rang out. I looked at the truck and saw the tires on the side facing us start to deflate.

Dex made it to the truck, though, using its body as a shield. As he ducked in, Ezekiel pulled away from him. Instead of running away, though, Ezekiel remained at the side of the truck, peering in the window. We couldn’t see what Dex was doing.

“He took a rifle with him when he left the house,” I said to Yamashita, as the barrel of the rifle poked out the driver’s side, Dex staying low.

Ray and I both had our hands on our guns, though at such long range neither of us would have a decent shot. It was instinct, I guess.

“Why doesn’t Ezekiel get out of there?” Ray asked. “Is he that stupid?”

“According to all reports.”

Dex fired the rifle and a blast shattered the window of Jimmy Chang’s police cruiser.

“Does anybody have a shot?” Yamashita asked, the frustration evident in his voice.

Jimmy Chang was at the front door of the bank, keeping the patrons from spilling out onto the sidewalk. There were SWAT

officers poised behind vehicles and one on the roof of the bank.

A couple of EMTs from the fire station down the street were on hand in case there were injuries.

Kitty Cardozo was in the middle of Iolani Avenue, yelling at people on the street to get down and motioning cars to move MAhu BLood 279

away. It looked like she was so busy doing her job that she didn’t realize that she was right in the line of fire. But she was a rookie, after all; this was probably the first real police action she’d been involved with.

I didn’t want to call attention to her by yelling her name, and I didn’t have her cell phone number. But I knew someone who did: her stepfather.

I pulled out my cell and pressed the speed dial for Lieutenant Sampson. When he answered I said, “Call Kitty right now and tell her to get out of the street.” One thing I love about working for Jim Sampson is that he has the innate ability to react in a crisis. He disconnected from my call, and I slapped my phone shut. Then I watched.

I could hear sirens of other patrol cars approaching. I figured Dex could, too, because he took out the windshield of a Lexus parked close to the street entrance. I watched as Kitty reached down to her belt and picked up her cell phone. She scanned the display, then popped the phone open.

She stood there frozen. It was clear that Sampson had gotten through to her—but she didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t blame her; most cops don’t get into serious trouble while they’re still in the FTEP. The point of the training program is to get them some street knowledge under the supervision of a seasoned officer.

Unfortunately, Jimmy Chang was too far from her to get her out of the way.

Dex kept shooting, blasting at cars passing by on the street.

Suddenly I saw Kitty grab her upper arm and fall to the ground on the median strip. A few feet from her, there was a hibiscus hedge that could shelter her from further fire—if she could get there. But she wasn’t moving.

“Shit. I’ve got to get her out of the way,” I said to Ray.

“Sampson will kill us both if anything happens to her.”

Ray pulled his Glock and assumed a shooting stance, focused on Dex in the truck. “I’ll cover you.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Yamashita yelled, as I took 280 Neil S. Plakcy

off across the open parking lot.

I heard Ray start shooting toward Dex, hoping to distract him. I sprinted as fast as I could, pumping my arms. I reached Kitty, lying on the grass clutching her arm, with her face turned toward me, her mouth open in surprise. I grabbed her under the arms and dragged her behind the hibiscus. I collapsed on the ground beside her, one of the bright red blossoms in my face.

The air was filled with the sound of gunfire, but I couldn’t tell if it was aimed at us or just distracting Dex. I was panting and my heart was racing. I felt sweat beginning to drip down my forehead.

Kitty began crying, and I put my arm around her. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re okay.” The hedge didn’t provide us with much shelter, and if Dex wanted, he could get a direct bead on us through the shrubbery. But I didn’t want Kitty to know that.

“I froze,” she said. “Jim told me to get out of the way, and when I realized how vulnerable I was, I just couldn’t move.”

Her whole body shook with sobs. “Today was my last day in the FTEP. But I froze. How can I be a cop if I can’t handle the pressure?”

She was clutching her upper left arm, and I could see blood seeping out between her fingers. “Remind me sometime, and I’ll tell you a few of the stupid things I did when I was on patrol,” I said, unbuttoning my aloha shirt. I pulled it off and made a rough tourniquet for her arm. “Right now, though, you’ve got to pull together. All right? I know you can do that, Kitty.”

She looked at me. “You’re right,” she said, wiping her hand across her eyes. “I can do that. What should I do?”

Kitty’s phone buzzed. “For starters, answer the phone, and tell your dad you’re okay.”

She started to cry again. I took the phone from her and popped it open. Sampson was not only my boss, but also a man I respected. He had taken a chance on me when no one else in the department would, and I owed him. I couldn’t help feeling that I had disappointed him by letting Kitty get hurt. Yeah, he MAhu BLood 281

was a cop, and so was she. Both of them knew the risks of the job. But Kitty was more to me than just my boss’s stepdaughter; she was a friend, a mentee, another gay person traveling the same road I was.

I took a deep breath. “I’m with Kitty,” I said into the phone. “She took a hit to her upper arm, but we’ve controlled the bleeding. As soon as the shooter is contained we’ll get her medical attention.”

“I’m on my way,” Sampson said and disconnected the call.

I snapped the phone shut and handed it back to Kitty, then looked over at Dex’s pickup. From the street angle, I could see the passenger side.

“Jesus, Ezekiel, what the fuck are you still doing there?” I muttered, watching him staring into the passenger window like he was at the aquarium watching the sharks.

Then he opened the door and reached in.

My phone had stayed clamped to my belt through my run and dive. It buzzed, and I flipped it open. “Can you see what’s going on?” Ray asked.

“Ezekiel’s grabbing for something in the truck.”

“The rifle’s pulled back inside,” Ray said. “What the fuck is going on?”

“He’s got Dex’s foot. He’s pulling him out of the truck.”

I heard Ray relaying the news to Yamashita. “Jesus, the guy’s an idiot,” I said. Ezekiel kept backing up, dragging on Dex’s leg, as Dex kicked at him. Two of the SWAT cops rushed toward the truck.

Dex was too close to Ezekiel to turn the rifle on him, but he had his Glock, too. If he got hold of it he could shoot Ezekiel and the SWAT cops. But the cops converged on the truck before Dex could get a shot off. One of them pushed Ezekiel out of the way as the other grabbed Dex. Within seconds, they had Dex on the ground in handcuffs.

A pair of beat officers helped me and Kitty up. The cool 282 Neil S. Plakcy

breeze felt good on my bare skin, though I was a little embarrassed to be walking around a crime scene without a shirt.

Other cops surrounded Dex, and still others converged on the front door of the bank to help Jimmy control the crowd from the inside. The whole area around the bank was blocked with cars and flashing blue lights.

“Come on, let’s get you fixed up,” I said to Kitty, leading her toward the fire truck where the EMTs waited. “Can you walk okay?”

“I’m good.” She put a hand on my arm. “Thanks, Kimo. For everything.”

“You’re going to make a great cop, Kitty.”

I led her to the wagon, where one of the EMTs pulled off my bloody shirt and began cleaning her wound. The other guy looked at me and said, “You look familiar. Aren’t you Mike Riccardi’s partner?”

My mouth opened, but I didn’t say anything. Mike had always been so careful at work—how did this guy know he was gay?

Would I be outing him by saying anything? Then I caught a look at the guy’s face, and I knew it was okay.

“Yeah.” I shook his hand. “I’m Kimo.”

“Nice to meet you. You and Mike are doing good things for all of us.” He reached back into the wagon and handed me T-shirt with the Honolulu Fire Department logo on the front and the saying “Firemen do it with big hoses” on the back.

I pulled it on as Lieutenant Sampson rolled up, the blue light on his car blazing in the bright sun. I could see him holding back, though, walking, not running, toward us.

“Everything under control here?” he asked us.

“The scene has been secured, sir,” Kitty said to him. She had a bruise on her cheek and some smudges of dirt on her uniform, but otherwise, she looked just like she was—a good cop, who’d gone through her first trial by fire.

“You joining the Fire Department, Kimo?” Sampson asked MAhu BLood 283

me, half smiling.

“Detective Kanapa’aka used his shirt as a tourniquet,” Kitty said. “I’ll owe you a shirt, Kimo.”

“I’ll give you a tip, Kitty. Mix a little laundry soap with some hydrogen peroxide and blot the blood before washing,” I said.

“This won’t be the first time you get blood on your clothes.”

I left Kitty and Sampson at the EMT wagon and walked over to Ray. The SWAT guys had Dex in cuffs, and Ray and I arranged to have a pair of uniforms deliver him to a holding cell at headquarters while we conducted interviews at the bank. I was glad that the incident had been resolved without anyone else getting killed, but I knew that our work wasn’t over yet. We still had to nail Dex for the three murders, using evidence that would hold up in court. That wasn’t going to be a slam dunk.

too BAd he wAs cRAzy

Sampson took Kitty to Queen’s Medical Center to get her arm checked out, and I called Mike and let him know I was going to be home late. It was after six by the time Ray and I set up at the manager’s desk inside the bank and began taking statements from customers and employees.

Outside, a couple of uniforms managed the traffic on Iolani Street. The SWAT team cleared up, including having the damaged cruiser and Lexus towed away. Ryan Kainoa and another evidence tech showed up to collect the bullets and casings, in case we needed proof of who shot where and when.

Our next-to-last statement came from the manager, a sallow-faced Indian named Pradeep Singh. “Mr. Kapuāiwa is one of the registered signers on a box rented by his organization, the Kingdom of Hawai’i. He had his key with him, so I had him sign our log, and I opened the vault for him.”

“Did you recognize the man with him?” Ray asked.

Singh shook his head. “But Mr. Kapuāiwa always has someone with him when he comes to the bank. As I understand it, he doesn’t drive.”

“As you’ve probably heard, the man with Mr. Kapuāiwa was Dexter Trale, who is under suspicion for numerous crimes. Did Mr. Kapuāiwa appear to be under any pressure from Mr. Trale?”

I asked.

“It is not really my business to pay attention to such things,”

Singh said. “I opened the vault and used my key to unlock the box, after Mr. Kapuāiwa had inserted his. Then I returned here, to my desk.”

“And what happened next?” Ray asked.

“This Mr. Trale began yelling,” Singh said. “Things like,

‘where’s the money?’ He was very loud, and I got up to ask him to be more quiet. When I reached the door to the vault I saw that 286 Neil S. Plakcy

he had a handgun, and I backed away before he saw me.”

He took a breath, and his teeth chattered a little. “I was very frightened, but I came back to my desk and pressed the emergency alert, just as I have been trained and according to bank policy. I notified the tellers and the other bank officers, and we were beginning to escort the customers from the lobby when Mr. Kapuāiwa and Mr. Trale came out of the vault.” Singh’s breath was coming in short bursts, and I worried that he might have some kind of attack.

He pulled an inhaler out of his jacket pocket and used it, then relaxed. “I’m sorry,” he said, between pants. “I have asthma.”

“Take your time,” I said.

“Mr. Trale began waving his gun and yelling. We were all very frightened. But Mr. Kapuāiwa spoke to him, and then suddenly Mr. Trale took his arm and yanked him toward the front door.

That is when I looked outside and saw the police.”

We asked a few more questions, clarifying details, then thanked Singh for his time and told him he could go. “Oh, no,”

he said. “I must remain to lock up the bank.”

“We’ll try and get out of your way soon, then,” I said. We nodded to Jimmy, who came over and escorted Singh back out to the lobby.

We left Ezekiel for last. “You were quite a hero today, Mr.

Kapuāiwa,” I said, as Jimmy returned with him.

“Oh, no,” he said, sitting down.

“Sure you were,” Ray said. “You pulled Dex out of the truck, kept him from hurting anybody else.”

“I had to do it. It is in my blood, you see. The blood of the kings of Hawai’i. I am responsible for my ohana.”

I nodded. Ezekiel was so earnest, it was clear that he believed his own publicity. Too bad he was crazy; he might have made a great king.

He didn’t look half as squirrely as he had the day Maile Kanuha brought him to headquarters, and I wondered if his MAhu BLood 287

behavior was controlled by medication—or just affected by being around Maile.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened today?” I asked.

“I was at my home when Dexter came to visit,” he said.

It was an odd choice of words for the appearance of a guy with a gun, but that was Ezekiel. “You knew him?”

“Of course,” he said. “I often visited Aunty Edith at the home she shared with Dexter and Leelee. And sometimes Mr.

Tanaka asked Dexter to drive me to events. I do not drive myself, you know.”

I nodded.

“Dexter said he needed money very quickly. I only had a few dollars to offer him, and that made him angry. He hit me in the head with his handgun and demanded that I come with him, here, to to this bank.”

“So he already knew about the safe deposit box?” Ray asked.

“Yes. I tried to explain that the box was only used to protect important papers, but he would not listen. He believed there was much money here.”

“What happened when he found there was no money in the box?” I asked.

“He began speaking of robbing the bank. I knew that would be a terrible thing. Many Hawaiian people trust this bank with their money. So I told him that he should not do such a thing, that we could go and speak with Mr. Tanaka, and he would give Dexter the money he wanted.”

“That was good thinking,” Ray said.

I disagreed; if we hadn’t gotten to the bank when we did, Dex and Ezekiel could have slipped away. Ezekiel would still be in danger, and Dex would still be on the loose. But I didn’t say anything.

We went back over Ezekiel’s statement, confirming the time Dex had arrived at his house. It was only a few minutes after he 288 Neil S. Plakcy

had left my mother, Leelee and the baby at his own home and made sense when compared to the time he and Ezekiel arrived at the bank.

By the time Maile Kanuha arrived to take Ezekiel home, the sun had set, and the crime scene techs and SWAT team were gone. Jimmy stayed behind until Pradeep Singh could lock the bank up, and Ray and I grabbed some fast food on our way back to the station.

The blood had dried on my aloha shirt, and I put it back on before we went into the interrogation room with Dex, who’d waived his rights to an attorney. Sampson and Francisco Salinas watched from behind a two-way mirror as Dex explained how it had all started.

“That nosy old Aunty Edith. She had these records showed Ezekiel had been in the mental hospital. She was bragging about it to me and Leelee one night. I knew that the boss was backing Ezekiel, so I told him about it.”

“The boss?” I asked.

“Mr. T. Mr. Tanaka.”

“That would be Jun Tanaka?” I showed him a photo of Tanaka and he nodded.

“For the tape, could you please identify this picture?”

“That’s him. Mr. T. My boss.”

He said that Tanaka had paid him ten grand to kill Aunty Edith. It was Dex’s idea to do it at the rally, making it look random, like one of the other groups was trying to disrupt KOH.

“He never gave me no money, though,” Dex said. “I owed him from the pai gow game.”

He explained that periodically Tanaka would send him to retrieve cash from the video poker machines in the warehouse off River Street or other fan tan or pai gow games. Then, while Stuey stood guard, thinking he was just watching the coffee beans, Tanaka would divide up the cash into separate deposits for each Kope Bean store and prepare a bag of cash for his safe MAhu BLood 289

deposit box. Dex had heard Ezekiel talk about a box once, and he figured Ezekiel had access to the box that Tanaka had been using.

“But there was nothing in the one at Hawaiian People’s,” Dex said. “Nothing but a bunch of papers.”

We asked him about Stuart McKinney. “Screwy Stuey,” Dex said, shaking his head. “He started to mouth off about the money that Mr. T sorted at the back of the warehouse. I told Mr. T, and he paid me another ten grand to take care of things. That paid off the last of what I owed from pai gow. I even had a little extra, picked up some fine pakalolo from the Campbell brothers.”

He smiled, and then his eyebrows went up. “Hey, maybe I can do a deal with you guys. Be one of those informant types. I could get you the Campbell brothers easy.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” I said. “What about Adam O’Malley? How’d you know he was going to be at that bar?”

“Mr. T, he told me about this lawyer, said he had some papers he shouldn’t have. He told me to get hold of the guy and collect the papers. He showed me the dude’s picture, and I recognized his face, knew I’d seen him at this māhū bar, The Garage, on hard hat nights.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Some of these māhūs, they’re like shooting pigeons at the park,” he said, shaking his head. “When I need cash I go to The Garage on Thursdays. The guys there love me. The tattoos really turn them on.” He leaned forward again.

“Only on Thursdays, though. The rest of the week it’s more of a pansy crowd.”

He told us about picking up guys at The Garage, letting them suck him off, sometimes tying them up or hitting them, then stealing their cash and jewelry. “So it was real lucky it was Thursday afternoon when Mr. T came over to the warehouse,

‘cause I was pretty sure this O’Malley guy would be at The Garage that night.”

Not so lucky for Adam O’Malley, I thought.

Dex flexed his shoulders like a rooster strutting. “I went over there looking for him, and sure as shit, he was right there at the 290 Neil S. Plakcy

bar.”

Ray and I shared a glance. Premeditation was always good to have on the record.

“I went up to the bar, chatted him up,” Dex continued. “He was all over me. It was easy as pie to get him back to his place.

And once we were inside, he was all mine.”

Dex grinned broadly, remembering. “I made him take all his clothes off, and I tied his wrists and ankles to the bed. The dude was squirming, he was so eager for it. But I told him he was going to have to cooperate with me if he wanted my dick.”

“Cooperate how?” I asked.

“I told him I needed those papers for Mr. T. That if he was a good boy and gave me what I wanted, I’d give him what he wanted. But he got all crazy on me. Said I didn’t know who I was messing with, that he’d drag my ass to jail.”

“That must have pissed you off,” I said.

“You bet. I went into the kitchen and got a knife from the drawer, and when I came back I held it to his balls. He caved like a little baby. Told me all the papers I wanted were in a folder on his desk.”

He looked at us. “After that, I couldn’t just let him go. I mean, what if he did try to drag me to court? Mr. T wouldn’t be happy about that. So I grabbed him by the hair and sliced his throat.”

Well, there went our premeditation. But it was still murder.

“I mean, if he’d cooperated, I’d have fucked his ass, grabbed the papers and walked out. But not after those threats. Anyway, I was pissed by then. So I dug around his drawers and found that big black dildo, and I rammed it up his ass so you guys would think it was just a sex thing.”

I felt bile rising in the back of my throat. I wanted to see Dex get locked up for a good long time, preferably with a big tough cellmate who’d make Dex his bitch.

It took us hours to get everything down on tape and to get the warrants issued for Dex and Tanaka for all three murders.

MAhu BLood 291

We booked Dex, but Tanaka remained in federal custody while Salinas assembled his money laundering case.

It was after midnight by the time I got home. I was exhausted, and I wanted nothing more than to climb into bed and go to sleep. Mike, however, had other plans.

When I came in he was sitting at the kitchen table with a pad of paper, making lists. Roby was sprawled at his feet and barely looked up at me as I walked in.

“What happened? Where’s that blood from?” Mike said, looking at my shirt.

“Don’t worry, it’s not mine.” I thought it was pretty cool to have someone to come home to who cared about me. I leaned down and kissed his stubbled cheek.

He sniffed. “Smells like shit. Take it off.”

I smiled. “There’s a surprise for you underneath.”

I unbuttoned the shirt, showing off the fire department T-shirt, and Mike burst out laughing. “You’re joining my team.”

“Speaking of your team.” I told him about the EMT who knew I was his partner.

I was worried he’d freak out. But instead he said, “Yeah, I know him. Cool guy.”

Maybe I was just too tired. That didn’t sound like Mike. But instead of starting an argument, I sunk into the chair across from him and motioned to the pages on the kitchen table. “What’s all that?”

“I want to have a housewarming party.”

I yawned. “You’ve been in this house for years.”

“Yeah, but you just moved in. Look at this list of people I want to invite.”

He pushed a sheet of paper across the table to me. He’d included my parents and his, my brothers and their families, Terri and Levi, Harry and Arleen, Ray and Julie and a bunch of other people I didn’t know. I recognized some names as his coworkers 292 Neil S. Plakcy

and friends.

“You want to have this many?”

“I want to make a big luau. Haoa can dig the imu for us, right?”

An imu is a big pit in the back yard where you roast a pig.

“We have to make sure Roby doesn’t dig it up,” I said. Roby looked up from the floor as if my mentioning his name indicated there was a treat in his future. When he saw nothing coming, he slumped back to the tile.

“Yeah, dogs,” Mike said. “Everybody has to bring their dogs.”

He made a note on another piece of paper. “And the Greshams.

They’ll want to see how Roby is doing.”

The only way I could drag him away from the kitchen was to start stripping, there in front of him. I had the fire department T-shirt and my pants off, my dick poking out of the slit in my boxers, before he finally got the hint.

After Mike and I had licked and sucked and rubbed each other to orgasm, he went right to sleep, but I lay there in bed next to him for a few minutes, relishing the feeling, once again, of bringing down the bad guys and making things right with the world, even if only for a little while.

LuAu

The next morning, Ray and I were back in the rotation, but we made time, over the next few days, to pull together all the details. Once Dex was in jail, Leelee confessed that she thought Dex had done something with her uncle Amos. Dex and Amos had fought a lot, especially when Amos was drunk and Dex was high.

One day Amos didn’t come home, and Edith and Leelee had both been too frightened of Dex to say anything—not to mention the consequences from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs if the ownership of the property had to change to Leelee, who didn’t have the 50 percent Hawaiian blood to qualify to stay.

Edith had the blood but didn’t want the responsibility. So neither had done anything.

Though the pressure let up at work, as Ray and I handled a stream of simpler cases, it only got worse at home. When Mike got his mind on something, I couldn’t distract him. He spent the weekend making luau plans and fixing little things that had broken over the years. We argued and fought and then had make up sex, and I started wishing for an emergency to call me back to work. I was relieved when Monday morning came.

We recruited my mother, his mother and both my sisters-in-law to help us cook, and every day that week someone was ferrying foodstuffs over to our house. We filled up the extra refrigerator-freezer in the garage with fruits, vegetables and platters and spent our spare time cleaning the house from top to bottom. My mother even sent us her maid to scrub down the kitchen and the bathrooms and polish the furniture.

Mike and I both took Friday off from work. Haoa and his crew showed up to dig the imu shortly after 7:00 a.m., rousing us out of bed and sending Roby into a frenzy of barking, especially as the earthmover rolled down off the back of the pickup.

The imu had to be about 2’ by 4’, with sloping sides. Haoa 294 Neil S. Plakcy

brought a lot of twigs and other combustible material he’d been gathering from work sites for the last week, and Mike and I helped him and his guys place the kindling at the bottom of the pit. There was a separate pile of banana leaves, ti leaves and palm fronds, or hali’i, to put on top of the pig and the other food once the fire was going.

Mike and I positioned some big logs on top of the kindling, then a tier of stones on top of the logs. My parents arrived around nine, bringing with them a bunch of old woven lauhala mats and tapa cloths that we would use the next day, once the pig was in place, to cover the whole mess.

Tatiana and Liliha came over while their kids were in school to help set up the rest of the yard, putting up tables and chairs.

Mike hung decorative Japanese lanterns from the tree branches, and I kept busy running stuff back and forth.

Everybody left halfway through the afternoon, and Mike and I took a break with a couple of beers, sitting in the back yard with Roby at our feet, nibbling bits of roast chicken that Mike fed him when he thought I wasn’t looking.

“I never thought I could have this,” Mike said.

“A luau?”

“This,” he said, waving his beer to encompass the yard and all the preparations. “You. Me. Roby. A big luau like this with all our family and friends.”

“I thought I could,” I said. “But I always thought there’d be a wife and kids involved.” I sipped my beer. “When we first graduated from the academy, Akoni was dating this divorced woman, a few years older than us, with a couple of kids. I remember asking him how he would feel about raising somebody else’s kids. He said they weren’t that serious, they were just dating.”

I stretched my legs and leaned back in my chair. “I couldn’t understand that, dating a woman for fun. I thought the only reason to date somebody was so that you could get married eventually.”

Mike laughed. “That why you dated so many women? You MAhu BLood 295

wanted to marry them all?”

“I kept hoping things would be different,” I said. “That I’d really, I don’t know, like it, you know? That I would feel that thing I felt when I looked at guys.” I reached over and squeezed his hand. “That thing I feel with you.”

We got up and finished the preparations, nibbling on the platters for dinner, trying to artfully rearrange the cold salads so that it didn’t look like we’d been at them. We spent the evening hanging out, Mike watching reruns on TV and me playing a computer surfing game that alternated between fun and frustration.

We were up at six lighting the fire, and it was ready by the time Mike’s father got back from the butcher in Ewa Beach with the pig, which would take about eight hours to cook. Roby was so excited he kept dancing around the car and then us.

As Mike and I dragged the pig out of the car, Haoa showed up to supervise. “More hali’i , ” he said, from the sidelines, as Mike and I piled on the banana leaves. “You want the pig to steam, not to burn.”

We were both sweaty and tired by the time we had the pig in the pit, the hali’i piled on top, then the lauhala mats over it all, covered with a layer of dirt. Haoa left, and we took the opportunity to take showers and eat some breakfast before the next wave of people showed up.

Our kitchen was commandeered by my mother, working with Tatiana, while Liliha went next door and helped Mike’s mother.

They prepared platters of chicken long rice, poi, shark-fin soup, sweet and sour spareribs and Portuguese sausage and beans.

There were Korean dishes, Chinese ones, even a boat load of Russian pierogies from Tatiana’s mother’s recipe.

My mother and Tatiana had been baking cakes and pies and cookies all week, which they piled on the tables along with platters of fruit, tubs of mango sherbet and chocolate ice cream in coolers and about ten different types of crack seed.

The smell of the pig roasting began rising from the pit, and 296 Neil S. Plakcy

Roby positioned himself right at the edge, alternately leaning forward to sniff and backing away from the heat. By noon, the yard was full of kids and dogs. Roby pretended to be the big shot, barking at every newcomer then jumping up to be petted and adored. We set up speakers in the yard and played The Makaha Sons, Keola Beamer and Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu and the Kamehameha School Children’s Chorus singing Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride. It was just like something out of Lilo and Stich, only without the space alien.

I worried about the different groups of people we invited.

Would the cops, like Ray, Kitty and Lieutenant Sampson mingle with my gay friends from the North Shore? How about Gunter, who brought a couple of guys from Māhū Nation? I had spoken with Peggy Kaneahe and invited her, and she’d asked if she could bring some attorneys and paralegals from her firm, who wanted to thank me for arresting Adam O’Malley’s killer. Would they get along with everyone else?

My fears were unfounded. When Mike’s old boyfriend, the one who worked at the Halekulani, arrived with his new sweetheart, they bonded with Harry and Arleen. Greg Oshiro showed up with his two-year-old twins, and every mom in the place gathered to coo over them. Peggy and a male lawyer from her firm played croquet with Jimmy Ah Wang, a kid I had met on a case years before, and a college friend of his from Chicago. The Gresham kids played with Roby and my nieces and nephews.

By the time we opened up the pit and pulled out the pig, the party was in full swing. My cousin Ben was the focus of an adoring group of kids who realized that they had a champion surfer in their midst. Uncle Kimo, usually the fountain of all surf wisdom, was relegated to the sidelines. My mother and Aunt Pua, Ben’s mom, were getting along, the two of them talking story in a corner of the yard with their other sisters. Miscellaneous cousins renewed old friendships and feuds, with Lui’s son Jeffrey and Haoa’s daughter Ashley organizing a touch football game that ended with the ball on our roof and Mike climbing up there to retrieve it.

MAhu BLood 297

My dad and Mike’s were turning into fast friends, regaling each other with stories of how badly each of us had behaved as keikis. Gunter and Jimmy began planning a Māhū Nation party at the U.H. campus, in conjunction with the GLBT group there. It was much more than just a luau; it was a meeting of worlds, and just as Rodney King would have wanted, we were all just getting along.

Late in the afternoon, Harry came over to me carrying a manila folder. “I managed to enhance those birth records you gave me. Want to take a look?”

“Sure.” I called over Ray and Lieutenant Sampson, and we added Peggy Kaneahe and Sarah Byrne since the materials had come to us through Fields and Yamato. I explained that to Sampson as the six of us sat down at the picnic table.

Starting with the most recent page, I traced my finger down the list. “Look here,” I said. “1968. Ezekiel Kapuāiwa Lopika.

Parents Alfred and Leilani Lopika.”

“Ezekiel Lopika,” Peggy said. “That’s the guy whose hospitalization records we found.”

“So it looks like those records do belong to Ezekiel Kapuāiwa,”

I said. “He must have dropped his last name after he got out of the mental hospital.”

“King Kamehameha’s birth name was Lot Kapuāiwa,” Peggy said. “We learned what Kapuāiwa meant in Hawaiian school, didn’t we, Kimo?”

I struggled to recall anything I’d learned in those open-air classrooms, washed in memories of Peggy and me as little kids learning the Hawaiian language and the legends of the gods.

We usually think of kapu as something forbidden—but really it means something sacred, restricted only to royalty. Tossing that idea in my head, I tried to put kapu together with āiwa, which means mysterious or strange. Then it came back to me in a flash.

“Yeah. Something like a sacred one protected by supernatural powers.”

298 Neil S. Plakcy

“Something sure protected Ezekiel at the bank,” Ray said.

“The way he was able to pull Dex out of that truck without getting himself killed.”

“So maybe Ezekiel really is a descendant of Kamehameha,”

Peggy said excitedly. “And Tanaka convinced Ezekiel to drop Lopika in order to focus on the connection. Didn’t you say you found some big koa bowls somewhere?”

“That’s right. My mother said bowls that big were reserved for royalty. Edith was Ezekiel’s hanai tūtū, so she may have been holding them for him.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Ray said. “We have the records right here. Let’s see what we can find.”

We hunted backward until we found Alfred’s birth record, in 1925. No father’s name was given, but his mother was Victoria Lopika. In 1906, we found the birth of a baby girl by that name.

I struggled to remember the details Maile Kanuha had given us.

“Victoria’s father is supposed to be Moses Kapuāiwa, who was the grandson of Kamehameha V.”

“Kamehameha?” Sampson said. “I’m no expert on Hawaiian history, but I thought he never had any children. Isn’t that when Hawai’i started electing kings, after he died?”

“The story that Kingdom of Hawai’i tells is that Kamehameha had an illegitimate son named Ulumaheihei, maybe with one of the girls who was at the Royal School with him, who dropped out and got married quickly. That his advisors would never let him recognize the boy, and that’s why he refused to name a successor.

Ulumaheihei died when Moses was young, and the family never came forward until now.”

“Let’s look for Moses, then,” Peggy said.

But there was no Moses, no one designated to lead his people out of slavery. Victoria’s parents were John and Apikela Lopika. The records didn’t go back far enough to track John Lopika’s birth, but I was willing to bet he wasn’t related to Moses Kapuāiwa, if such a person existed.

“If it’s true, then Ezekiel isn’t descended from Kamehameha, MAhu BLood 299

and he has no more right to a restored throne than you or me,”

I said.

“Speak for yourself,” Peggy said. “My great-grandmother insisted she was a distant cousin of Queen Lili’uokalani.”

“It would destroy the foundation of KOH, though,” I said.

“If Jun Tanaka was betting on Ezekiel and then he discovered his horse was out of the running, he might do whatever he could to keep the information from getting out.”

“So what do we do with this material?” Peggy asked. “It shuts down KOH.”

“I think KOH is going down anyway,” I said. “Without Tanaka’s money, without him pulling the strings, you’ve got Ezekiel. And everyone who knows him admits he’s a little squirrely. He did act like a hero at the bank, though.”

I sat back in my chair. “Ezekiel said something to me. That he believed it was in his blood to protect the people of Hawai’i.

That they were his ohana. And who knows, maybe those big bowls Aunty Edith had really did come down through his family and that means he has royal connections somewhere.”

“He may be nuts, but he’s a good guy,” Ray said. “If he hadn’t pulled Dex out of the truck, Dex could have killed more people.”

We were agreed. The secrets of Ezekiel’s parentage and hospitalization would stay between us, at least until there was some reason to make them public. The Bishop Museum had contacted Leelee about buying the bowls from her, and Peggy had agreed to look after Leelee’s interests in the deal. Some of the money would go to get her settled off homestead land, and some would be put away in trust for the baby.

The CDs had all ended by then, and no one had gotten up to put new ones on. “I think we need a little live music,” Peggy said. “To cap off a great luau. Sarah, you want to sing something for us?”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” Sarah said. “Not without a band behind me.”

300 Neil S. Plakcy

“You have a great voice,” Ray said. “You know Frishberg’s song I’m Home? The one Al Jarreau sings? It’s a great song for a housewarming.”

After a little more persuading, Sarah stood up, and we shushed the crowd. When she sang, “I knew that I’d found what’s at the end of the rainbow... There’s no place on earth I’d rather be than stayin’ right here with you,” I looked around for Mike.

He was standing at the back door, where two steps led up into the house. He looked so handsome, in his Honolulu Fire Department T-shirt and geometric-print board shorts. A smile curled out from beneath his mustache. I had this powerful desire to be with him—the kind of magnetic attraction I’d seen between Haoa and Tatiana, where neither of them looked complete without the other. I’d always envied that about them, and now I knew what it felt like from the inside.

I climbed up there with him, and we listened the music and looked at everyone enjoying themselves, celebrating a union that neither of us had ever dreamed we could enjoy.

Sarah finished the song, and everyone applauded. Then, holding hands, Mike and I stepped down to take our places in our ohana.

ABout the AuthoR

NEIL PLAKCY is the author of Mahu, Mahu Surfer, Mahu Fire, Mahu Vice, and Mahu Men, about openly gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka. His other books are Three Wrong Turns in the Desert, Dancing with the Tide, The Outhouse Gang, In Dog We Trust, Invasion of the Blatnicks, and GayLife.com . He edited Paws

& Reflect:A Special Bond Between Man and Dog and the gay erotic anthologies Hard Hats, Surfer Boys and Skater Boys. His website is

www.mahubooks.com.

Trademarks Acknowledgment

The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

Bankoh: Bank of Hawaii

Billabong: GSM (Operations) Pty LTD

Bluetooth: Bluetooth Sig Inc.

CHiPs: Turner Entertainment

Colt Python: Colt Manufacturing Company Disney Store: Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Dodge: Daimler Chrysler Group LLC

Flashdance: Paramount Pictures

Foodland: Foodland Super Market, Ltd.

Frisbee: Wham-O Mfg. Co.

Gamblers Anonymous:

Glock: Glock Inc.

Google: Google Inc.

Hawaii Five-O: CBS Productions and Leonard Freeman Productions

Hawaiian Airlines: Hawaiian Airlines

Highlander: Toyota Motor Company

Honda: The Honda Motor Company

Honolulu Advertiser: Honolulu Star-Advertiser Indianapolis Speedway: Brickyard Trademarks, Inc.

iPhone: Apple Inc.

Jeep: Chrysler Group LLC

Kona Fire Rock Ale: Kona Brewery LLC

Lexus: Toyota Motor Company

Lilo and Stitch: Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Longboard Lager: Kona Brewery LLC

Mercedes: DaimlerChrysler

Mickey Mouse: Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Mont Blanc: Montblanc-Simplo GmbH

Nintendo Wii: Nintendo of America Inc.

Nissan: Nissan Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha TA Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.

Out magazine: Here Media Inc.

Primidone: AstraZeneca

Propranolol: AstraZeneca and Wyeth

Shirokiya: Shirokiya International

Shock to the System: Richard Stevenson Starbucks: Starbucks Corporation

Star-Bulletin: Honolulu Star-Advertiser The A Team: Universal Television and 20th Century Fox TheBus: Oahu Transit Services Inc.

Titanic: 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and Lightstorm Entertainment

Vicks VapoRub: Proctor & Gamble

YouTube: Google, Inc.

Zippy’s: Zippy’s Inc.