I heard the sirens going down Kuhio Avenue as I ran home. At least the poor sucker wouldn’t be alone, I thought. The avenue was nearly deserted, just a skinny black guy on the other side of the street going in my direction, and an old woman swathed in layers waddling along on a side street. The air was hot and humid, heavy with the scent of motor oil and crushed plumeria blossoms. The light breeze died as I ran past darkened store windows and lonely hotel lobbies.
All the events of the evening seemed to catch up to me by the time I got to Lili‘uokalani Avenue and the exterior stairs to my apartment. From the moment we put the sting in action, I’d been running on adrenaline, and it finally ran out. Sweat dripped off my forehead and my heart was racing, as much from exertion as from my own fear and panic. I knew it wasn’t right to leave the body there, and yet I knew I couldn’t stay. I careened into the decorative railing, palm trees encased in a cage of wrought iron, and used it to pull myself upstairs. With a shaking hand, I unlocked my door and stumbled inside.
I pulled off the rest of my clothes and stepped into the shower. Just before I turned the water on, my hand brushed my face and I found it was wet. As the hot water started to pound I realized it wasn’t sweat; I’d been crying.
I couldn’t sleep. I felt as guilty as if I’d killed the guy myself. What kind of cop was I? By hearing that guy drag the body out to the street and not staying around to report what I’d seen to the officer who responded, I’d made myself into an accessory to a homicide. I was as bad as every crappy witness I’d ever interviewed. No, I didn’t see the license number of the car. I couldn’t give more than a general description of the guy I’d seen dragging the body. It all happened so fast, officer. There was nothing I could do.
I paced around my little studio apartment until just before dawn, waiting for dispatch to call me, trying to convince myself I should call in. Akoni and I are not the only homicide detectives currently assigned to district six, Waikiki, but in a departmental experiment on community policing, the two of us had been assigned to work out of the Waikiki substation on Kalakaua. Other detectives, including ones from the other units, work out of the main headquarters. I guessed maybe dispatch was handing the call to detectives from downtown, so finally I said, “The hell with this,” and put on my bathing suit. I grabbed my board and walked out to Lili‘uokalani Street, which leads directly to Kuhio Beach Park, where I surf.
I am renewed, reborn and revitalized every time I step into the salty water. With my board under me, balanced on a wave, surrounded by sea spray and blue skies, I am finally complete. It’s a moment of rare transcendence for me, a chance to rise up out of the scum and bitterness and shame I find on the streets. It’s the only way I can keep being a cop.
The sun hadn’t come up over the Ko‘olau Mountains by the time I waded into the water, and the surf was cool, but there was a halo of light over the rocky crests beyond the city that promised day was not far behind. The waves were small, and it wasn’t hard to paddle beyond them. I lay on the board, dangling my right hand in the water, trying to get a feel for the surf.
I could take a while like that, falling into the rhythm of the waves. That morning it took even longer than usual. I couldn’t seem to empty my mind of the image of that guy, lying in the alley, or of the shame I felt at leaving him there. Finally, though, I relaxed at least a little, and then saw a good wave building. I paddled fast to catch it, then stood up on the board just as a ray of light rose beyond the top of the Ko‘olau, stabbing me in the eye. The nose of the board pearled, or dipped below the wave, and I wiped out, tumbling into the water. The wave washed over me, dragging my board toward the shore, and the leash that kept me tied to the board dragged me forward with it.
The dunking and the swim toward shore revitalized me. The sets were good, and I caught a couple of powerful waves. Before I knew it, it was daylight and it was time for me to get back home. And sure enough, when I got home I found a message to call dispatch. I called in before I stepped into the shower again. “Homicide reported at 2:38 a.m. in the alley behind the Rod and Reel Club on Kuhio Avenue,” the dispatcher told me. “Detective Hapa‘ele is en route.”
That was Akoni. I jumped through the shower and came out running, and about twenty minutes later I was next to Akoni in the alley, a narrow strip of often-patched pavement that ran between Kuhio and Kalakaua Avenues. It looked even more desolate in the full light of day than it had in the middle of the night.
On the Diamond Head side the alley backed up against the blank rear wall of a budget restaurant, and on the Ewa side sat the Rod and Reel Club’s back door. At the Kuhio Avenue end, a couple of the high trees inside the Rod and Reel’s patio hung out over the alley, but the rest of it was open to harsh sun. There were a couple of small dumpsters scattered at intervals, behind other back doors, and coupons for some tourist restaurant skittered in the wind. The walls that faced into the alley had been painted different colors, and some looked like they hadn’t been painted in years. It was a back side of Waikiki most tourists don’t see.
“You missed him,” Akoni said sadly. “I finally had to let the body boys take him away, because nobody knew where the hell you were.”
“You know where I was,” I said. I nodded my head toward the ocean. The sun had cleared the tops of the mountains and was shining brightly on the tourists, the orange-vested guys working on the street, the Japanese men in suits and the little girls in plaid uniforms on their way to school.
“Jesus, what time did you get to bed last night?”
“Tell me what I missed.”
We started walking down the alley. “Apparent gay bashing,” Akoni said. “Somebody called in a dead body about three this morning. Uniforms on the scene found a John Doe, underneath the kiawe tree over there. The night shift was swamped with a gang-banger scene downtown, so nobody could get here to investigate until dispatch finally called me an hour ago.”
“So no detectives interviewed anybody last night?”
Akoni shook his head. It made me feel worse, knowing that if I’d stuck around I could have started a canvas, interviewed guys at the bar, the bartender, people passing by.
“The ME speculated that the cause of death was blunt trauma to the cranial region. Not hard to do with a big chunk taken out of the side of the guy’s head. No ID. No jewelry except a thick gold chain around the victim’s neck that was probably too bloody to get off.”
My stomach was doing flip-flops. I needed a cup of coffee bad. Saunders, a beefy haole uniformed cop with sandy hair and a bushy mustache, was standing under the tree, trying to look busy, so Akoni and I got him to get us some coffee from the malasada shop across the street. These little shops were springing up all over the islands, serving a kind of Portuguese donut, usually alongside pretty decent coffee.
“I figure the guy left the club late last night, ran into some bad dudes, and they tried to knock him for a loop. They knocked a little too hard and the guy bought it.”
“Think they stole his ID?”
“Maybe. Maybe he was afraid to carry anything.” He leered a little. “Thought he might get lucky, didn’t want to risk getting rolled.”
I nodded toward the club. “They ID there?”
“We can ask, once they open.” He looked at me. “You know I’m not going in there alone.”
“Oh good, can we hold hands when we go in?”
“One of these days I’m going to hurt you,” he said.
The two techs were already searching the alley, while a uniform stood guard at each end, blocking access. They’d strung yellow crime scene tape along both ends and I could see one of the uniforms arguing with a delivery truck. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and one of the techs will find his wallet,” I said. “Maybe the bad guys just took the cash and left the ID somewhere. Why don’t you see if a uniform can check out the trash cans along both of the avenues for a couple of blocks in either direction.”
While Akoni got on the radio, I walked up and down the narrow pavement with my hands behind my back, looking slowly and carefully at everything. There was clear trail of blood from a spot at the back end of the alley up to where the body had been found. I followed it, then walked back to where I’d seen the Cherokee the night before.
Akoni had already taken notes, but I got out my pad and pen and starting taking my own. It was getting hot, so I stood in the shade of the high trees and drew a rough sketch of the alley first, including the back door of the club, the position of the body, and, in a cryptic note only I could understand, the direction the Cherokee had traveled.
Saunders returned with coffee and a malasadas, and I kept writing while I ate and drank, leaning up against the side wall of the club. It was seven a.m., and the street was already busy. Delivery trucks pulling up at the back of the Kuhio Mall, joggers out for their morning runs, elderly mama-sans scurrying home from night jobs. There was a mass of gray cloud cover over the Ko’olau, but a stiff trade wind coming in off the ocean kept it away from Waikiki. It was going to be a great day for the beach, a tourist office poster kind of day, full of thong bikinis, surfboards and palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze. Oh, and murder, too.
I wrote down everything I could remember from the time the giraffe followed me out of the club until the time I left the alley to find a phone. Then I started taking notes on what I saw around me. It’s a rule you have to pound into your head when you graduate from the beat to detective-write everything down. Even if it doesn’t seem important, write it down. You’ll forget it otherwise, and then it’s bound to be the one thing you need to know, or the first thing the D.A. asks when he’s putting together his case.
On my first case as a detective, I neglected to write down whether the window in the victim’s bedroom was open or closed, and we nearly lost the case over whether the perp could have escaped that way. Fortunately a witness came through who remembered seeing the curtains flying through the open window, and I got off the hook. Since then I’ve written everything. I sniff the air, I listen for ambient sounds, I feel the textures of things. Even stuff that seems ordinary, that you take for granted, like garbage cans in an alley, I write down. You never know when you’re going to find out it wasn’t trash day that day, and that there was valuable evidence in the garbage.
I finally ran out of things to write. While the crime scene techs finished up their search, I walked over to Akoni and stood with him at the end of the alley, drinking another cup of coffee. “He look like a tourist?” I asked.
“He no had ID, Kimo. How I gonna tell he tourist?”
When Akoni gets angry he lapses into pidgin, the Hawaiian dialect we were all suckled on. “Red skin from sunburn,” I said. “A new t-shirt that says I heart Waikiki. Rubber slippers fresh from Woolworth. One of those cheap shell leis they give you when you tour the aloha shirt factory. You know the signs just as well as I do, Akoni. Why you so bull-headed this morning?”
In the distance we heard the protesting squeal of hydraulic brakes, and somewhere nearby a truck was backing up and beeping. “You know what time they called me? Five a.m. I didn’t get home ‘til after midnight. I was going to sleep late this morning. Maybe call in late for my shift. Maybe do a little dirty with Mealoha. Instead I roll out of bed at five, and nobody knows where the hell you are.”
“I’m sorry, all right? I’ll make it up to you. Someday you get Mealoha ready for some afternoon delight, and I’ll cover for you.”
He was still grumpy, but I could see that idea had some appeal to him. “So what you think? Tourist? Malihini? Kama‘aina?” A malihini is a newcomer to the islands, one step above tourist. A kama‘aina, literally “child of the land,” is a native or long-time resident, like Akoni or me.
He thought. “Chinese. Mid to late forties. Expensive suit, fancy shoes. No way to tell if he’s a tourist or not.”
“Good start,” I said. I wiped a bead of perspiration off my forehead. “Maybe he was out to dinner, had a couple of drinks, didn’t know what kind of place he was going into. Somebody might have seen him as easy prey. Remember, the other bashings here have been big fights, half a dozen guys on each side.”
“You can’t just take the easy way out, call him a faggot? You haven’t even seen him.”
“That’s right, I haven’t seen him,” I said, and the lie made me wince a little. I hoped Akoni would just think it was the sun streaming in through the branches of the high trees. “That’s why I don’t have any preconceived ideas. Just because the guy was found behind a gay bar doesn’t make it a gay bashing.”
Akoni looked at his notes. “Spider tattoo between thumb and forefinger of his right hand indicates possible tong connection.”
“Tong connection,” I said. “Interesting. Wonder who owns this place.” I wiped my forehead again. It was going to be a bad day if it wasn’t even eight o’clock and I was sweating already.
We saw the techs begin to pack up their gear and walked over to them. They’d picked up a few things but nothing looked that relevant. Larry Solas, the head tech, said, “Trail of blood leads back to that back door there. Seems pretty clear he got whacked just outside the door, then dragged out to the street. There’s a lot of crap out here, but not much of it seems relevant. We’re done.”
I looked at Akoni and he shrugged. It wasn’t practical to leave the alley blocked off all day; there was already a line of trucks waiting to make deliveries. A clutch of drivers stood together on a shady corner across Kuhio Avenue, drinking coffee and grumbling about us. We pulled the crime scene tape down, though we isolated the small corner where the body had been found with cones and more tape.
Dispatch was busy with a massive accident on the H1 at the Pali Highway exit, and we had to wait a few minutes for the radio chatter to subside before we could convey our status. We let Saunders and the other uniforms go.
The drivers went back to their trucks and gunned their engines, and Akoni and I headed back to the station. We worked out of the Waikiki substation on Kalakaua Avenue, right in the heart of Waikiki, and ordinarily we would have walked back. But Akoni had driven in from home direct to the club, and his car, a Ford Taurus, was illegally parked down the block. It took us just as much time to drive to the garage where he parks as walking would have taken, between the slow lights and the even slower tourists. Waikiki is a small place, roughly one and a half miles long and a half-mile wide, and close to 25,000 people live here. Of course, there are also 34,000 hotel and condo rooms, and they are occupied close to 85% year-round. That means an average of 65,000 extra people crammed in on any given day. No wonder traffic’s so bad.
We got into the office just after nine and started filling out the paperwork. Akoni called Mealoha and apologized again, then covered his mouth and whispered something to her. I snickered, just on general principles, and he glared at me. Sitting at my desk, which faced out toward Kalakaua Avenue, filling out forms, I could almost forget I had any personal involvement in this case. Almost.
Kalakaua was swarming with tourists on their way to the beach. Honeymooners holding hands, elderly people walking with slow, arthritic gaits, busloads of Japanese tourists carrying Gucci shopping bags and talking fast. In the middle of them all were people handing out flyers for time-shares and restaurants with early bird specials. I called the medical examiner’s office on Iwilei Road, near the Dole cannery, and found that the autopsy was slated for two o’clock. “Just after lunch,” I said to Alice Kanamura, the receptionist there. “You guys schedule them deliberately like that?”
“We got lots of sickness bags, you need,” Alice said. “I’ll put one aside with your name on it.”
She was laughing merrily when she hung up. I guess you get your laughs where you can when you work for the coroner.
There were no witnesses to interview, yet. Dispatch faxed us a transcript of the call I’d made, which did us no good. The 911 operators have a computer-assisted dispatch system now, which transmits emergency information direct to the radio dispatcher. The computer shows the address any 911 call is made from, along with the phone number and subscriber name. That way, in case somebody’s in trouble and can only dial the number, the police have a way to trace the call.
On a whim, I dialed Motor Vehicles on my computer and checked registrations for a black Jeep Cherokee. There were thousands. I quickly disconnected when I saw Akoni coming over to my desk.
“We got nothing on this case, you know?” he asked. “Nothing.”
“We’ll have more this afternoon,” I said. “Let’s get the reports finished on yesterday before we get buried in this one.”
We spent the rest of the morning writing our reports on the failed drug bust. Neither Pedro nor Luz Maria were registered at the colleges they pretended to attend, and Luz Maria had a drug related rap sheet as long as her sleek black ponytail. We didn’t find any priors on Pedro, but that could have meant he’d been more careful, or maybe he’d given us a false ID. They’d been held downtown overnight and released when there was no physical evidence to tie them to any crime.
At 12:30 we walked up the block for a lunch of saimin, Japanese noodles in a broth flavored with chicken or beef. “Good choice, brah,” Akoni said as he slurped his from a paper bowl. “Easy going down, easy coming back up if the autopsy a bad one.”
The noodle shop was tucked into a corner of a building on a side street just makai of Kuhio Avenue, and we stayed back against the building to take advantage of the meager shade. In Honolulu, we don’t use north, east, south and west. We say something is mauka, meaning toward the mountains, or makai, meaning toward the sea. That’s roughly north and south. West is Ewa, pronounced like Eva Gabor, after a town beyond the airport. The other direction, toward Diamond Head, we simply call Diamond Head.
The sun was high in the sky and the shadows of the palm trees were nearly symmetrical around their bases. There was a light trade wind, though, so out of the direct sun the temperature wasn’t too bad. Around us swirled the constant parade of tourists, beachgoers and store workers who make up the daily population of Waikiki, including a tall Hawaiian guy in a red feathered cape and traditional curved headdress, passing out flyers for Hawaiian heritage jewelry. A rainbow covey of tiny kids, each wearing construction-paper name tags and holding hands in pairs and threes, passed us on their way to the IMAX theater, chirping and laughing.
“You want to go back to your place for your truck or take my car?” Akoni asked. Detectives drive their own cars in Honolulu, though we get an allowance from the department to help subsidize the cost. The department has to approve our choice of vehicles, and requires certain minimum standards-size of engine, ability to install a radio and so on. My truck was a hand-me-down from my father, and its black paint was pitted with dings and dents and the effects of salt water. The back windshield was cluttered with surf decals and the back end sagged a little, but I could carry as many surfers and their boards as I wanted, and it was comfortable and didn’t cost much to run.
Something about Akoni’s comment stung me, and it took me a minute to register why. I wondered how long I would associate going back to my apartment with running away from my troubles. I said, “We can take yours.”