“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
