“I hope you’re right. In addition to the arsons I’ve been investigating, we’ve already started to get some small fires out in the country. We had one near Schofield Barracks the other day, had to evacuate the area until we got it under control.”
We drove up the highway beyond the Dole plantation, looking for the street address I had, and then turned off onto a red dirt road that was signed toward Pupukea Plantation.
“I’ve been here before,” I said. “The Church of Adam and Eve had a meeting up here a month or two ago.”
I pulled up in front of a low wooden building that looked like it had been a set for some old Western, an overhanging roof supported by thin posts, sheltering an empty porch. A line of cars and trucks were parked in the dirt in front of the building. “Son of a bitch,” I said. I pointed at a green pickup parked at one end. The latch on the gate was broken on the right-hand side, just as Frank Sit had described.
“I’ve got a good feeling about this,” Mike said.
We went through a screen door into the office, showed our badges, and asked to speak with Ed Baines, the guy whose prints we’d matched. The secretary said she’d call him in from the field, and ushered us back to a big room filled with chairs and a speaker’s podium.
“We use this when we have to get all the workmen in one place,” she said, and left us. The walls were lined with safety posters and a complicated anatomical description of the stages in pineapple development. I tried to read one of them but couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking that we were close to solving our whole investigation.
A few minutes later a tall, blond haole with tattoos on both arms stuck his head in the door. “You guys looking for me?”
“Ed Baines?”
He nodded.
“Come on in.” We showed our badges again and introduced ourselves.
His skin was rough and weathered, and he wore jeans and a chambray shirt with ragged short sleeves. A packet of Marlboros threatened to fall out of his torn breast pocket at any moment. “I don’t know what you guys want, but I been clean since the last time I got out of the joint. They give me a good chance here, and I’m trying not to fuck it up.”
“Then I’m sure you’ll be willing to help us,” I said. “Like maybe telling us where you were last Wednesday afternoon, for starters.”
He looked wary. “I was here on the farm, working. Every day, 7 to
4.”
“You punch a clock?”
He nodded.
“So I could check your punch out, if I wanted to.”
“What’s this all about?”
“I’m having a little trouble believing you were here on the farm last Wednesday, is all,” I said. “When I’ve got a paper bag with your fingerprints on it, and that bag had a rock inside it last Wednesday that went through somebody’s window.”
“I want to call my lawyer.”
“Whoa, that’s a big turnaround in attitude,” I said. “One minute you’re gonna help us, the next you’ve gotta call your lawyer.”
“Here’s the deal,” Mike said, leaning forward. “You want to call a lawyer, that’s your right. Under the Constitution. But you know what lawyers are like. I know you do, you’ve been around the block a few times. Your lawyer steps in, and then we can’t do anything to help you. See, we’re not so concerned with you, Ed. We’ve read your rap sheet. Unless you’re turning into a firebug in your old age, we’re just looking at you as a way to get to who we want.”
“What do you mean, firebug?”
I sat back and listened, watching Ed’s face for a reaction.
“See, this place where the rock went through the window, later that night a bomb went off there,” Mike said. “The whole place burned down, and a man was killed.”
Ed started looking pretty scared at that point. I was getting the feeling his involvement had gone only so far, and no further.
“We figure the same people responsible for the rock through the window had a hand in the bombing, but that doesn’t mean we expect that was you,” Mike continued. “Must have been somebody behind you, maybe behind the bombing, too. You turn over that guy, we forget about any charges against you for this rock-throwing. Your parole officer doesn’t even need to know. But once you’ve got your lawyer involved, well, it’s harder for us to do that.”
“I don’t know anything about no bombing,” Ed said. “No fire either. This guy just said he wanted to do a little mischief. He had us collect a bunch of horse shit, put it into bags, and then splash it on the sidewalk. The rock was just like a calling card, so’s the people inside knew what it was about.”
“Kind of like a warning,” I said. “Get out before we torch your asses.”
“There wasn’t nothing like that,” he said. “I swear it. You can hook me up to a lie detector, whatever you want. I swear I didn’t know nothing about any bombs, or fires, or anything.”
He looked down at his shoes. “I know I shouldn’t a done it. But this guy, he’s my minister, and he swore it wouldn’t be breaking my parole. Nothing more than malicious mischief, he said.”
He looked up again. “See, I got this ex lives down by Pearl. What with being in the joint, I’m way behind on my alimony, and she keeps threatening to haul my ass into court. I’d been talking to the Reverend about it, and he offered me a thousand bucks to make some trouble for those gay marriage people. That’s enough to make myself whole with her.”
As soon as Baines said minister, I thought about Jeff White, whose Church of Adam and Eve had met at the Plantation. “You got a name and an address on your minister?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I pulled out my notebook and a pen, and handed them to him. “Write it down.”
“You promise you won’t screw me up?”
“You give us the right guy, we forget we ever even talked to you,” I said.
“All right.” He quickly scribbled a couple of lines on a fresh page in my notebook and handed it back to me.
I took a quick look at it, and saw exactly what I’d expected. Reverend White, the Church of Adam and Eve, and the address on Wai’alae Avenue.
MAKING APOLOGIES
As we were driving back down to Honolulu, my Bluetooth buzzed with a call from Terri.
“I know you’re probably swamped with the bombing investigation,” she said. “But I’m at my wit’s end, and I just don’t know what to do.”
“What’s the matter?”
“It’s Danny.” Her five-year-old son had witnessed his father’s murder six months before, and he’d taken it hard. But I thought he’d been coming around. “He’s been acting up at kindergarten, and today he hit another boy with a rock. They’re threatening to kick him out unless I get him some help. But he’s been in therapy, Kimo.”
She started to cry. After Eric’s death, I’d promised to spend time with Danny, and for a while I had. But it had been a month or more since I had gone to Wailupe just to hang out with her and the boy. “Okay, hold on.” I turned to Mike. “Can we make a quick detour to Wailupe? My friend’s got a crisis.”
“Sure.”
Back to Terri, I said, “I’m on the Kam now. I’ll get on the H1 and be to you in about 45 minutes.” I paused for a minute, to concentrate on a bend in the road. “I’m bringing somebody with me. I think you’ll like him.”
Her voice faded out, and then she said, “See you soon.”
I hung up and told Mike more about my friendships with Terri and Harry, and about Danny. “I had you figured for a Punahou boy,” he said.
We spent the rest of the ride trading personal information. Where we’d grown up, gone to school, what we’d done and who we knew. Mike had grown up in Aiea, a suburb just beyond the Aloha Stadium, and the only city in the US whose name is spelled only with vowels.
“My parents liked the area because it was convenient to Tripler,” he said. “Easy for them to get to their jobs. The neighborhood’s gone through some trouble, but it’s coming back. Living there, it’s easy for me to get down to the new fire department HQ on South and Queen.”