“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.