I leaned down to look at the corpse, who was as Lidia had described. He was slumped against the base of a mahogany tree, its long thin branches creating a shelter for his little shack. At the base of the tree a baby gecko poked his head out, looked at me, and then skittered away. He wore a torn beige T-shirt from the Great Aloha Run a few years back, tattered plaid board shorts, and a pair of bright pink rubber slippers. His skin was dark and leathery, his fingernails and toenails ragged and dirty.
I stood up again. “There wouldn’t happen to be any witnesses, would there?”
She pointed over toward the house where I’d parked. “Neighbor over there called it in. Heard the shot, but didn’t think anything of it until she looked out the window a little later and saw the guy slumped over.”
“I’ll talk to her. You’ll wait for the M.E.?”
“All things come to she who waits.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I wished I’d stopped for a cup of coffee on the way over. I was starting to regret my lack of appetite at breakfast, more so as I approached the front door of the house and smelled bacon frying.
My knock was answered by a plump, elderly haole woman with thinning white hair. Lidia had told me her name was Rosalie Garces and she lived alone. I showed her my ID and asked if we could talk.
“Certainly, detective. Come on in. Have you had breakfast?”
“Well…”
“Sit down. You like your eggs scrambled?” She patted her floral-print housecoat as if looking for her glasses, then realized they were on top of her head.
“Scrambled would be fine.”
While she cooked, Rosalie Garces told me that sometime around six that morning she’d heard a loud noise outside. “I guess it was probably a gunshot, but you never know. Some of the people in this neighborhood, they drive cars that aren’t that great. You hear a lot of backfires and noisy mufflers. After a while I just take those sounds for granted.”
She poured some runny scrambled eggs onto my plate and passed me a platter of fresh bacon draining on paper towels, then sat next to me to eat. “How’d you know I like my eggs just like this?” I asked.
She smiled. “I raised a houseful of kids, detective. I know a few things.” She’d gone out around seven-thirty to the store, but hadn’t noticed anything unusual then. “No, I don’t often go out that early, but I’d been feeling a little poorly yesterday and I never got to do my shopping. I didn’t have what to make for breakfast.”
She paused to eat for a minute. Her hands were skinny and speckled with liver spots. “When I go out, I back out and go the other way. I wouldn’t have noticed Mr. Mura anyway, what with my back to him.”
“That was his name? Mura?”
She nodded. “Hiroshi Mura. He used to live in a house there, where his shack is. Him and his wife and his daughter. His wife, she got cancer when the girl was still little, and she died. The girl grew up kind of wild. I don’t know that Mr. Mura was all there even back then, when things seemed to be going all right.” She took another mouthful. “She was just sixteen, I think, when it happened. She was hitchhiking, meeting boys, doing drugs. They found her body out by Diamond Head one day.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “It hit him hard. He let the house go, and the neighbors started to complain and then they had to have it condemned. He picked up a few things and built that little shack. He always thought his daughter Patty was going to come back. He was waiting for her.”
“You know anybody who’d have a reason to kill him?”
She looked surprised. “Who’d want to kill him? I mean, he was a little crazy, but he was harmless. Sometimes he’d go through people’s garbage, and I know there’s some in the neighborhood who didn’t like that, but that’s no reason to kill someone, is it?”
She looked so worried I had to say, “No, no, that’s no reason at all,” though I knew from experience people had been killed for a lot less.
When I got back outside the medical examiner, Doc Takayama, was already there, looking at the body. Just my age, he graduated from UH’s medical school at twenty-two and went into pathology to avoid the inevitable comments about his youth. He looked about fifteen, particularly when he grinned, as he often did around Lidia Portuondo.
He pointed a gloved finger at the bullet hole in the man’s temple. “Single shot, fired from close range, as your officer here has already pointed out.” He smiled a little.
I sensed something going on between him and Lidia. They often exchanged covert glances or stood a little too close to each other for casual colleagues. I thought he’d be a good match for Lidia, both of them smart and dedicated, and they would both understand the demands of law enforcement. After the messy breakup of her affair with Alvy Greenberg, it was time for her to start dating again.
“Any idea as to caliber?”
“Looks like a. 38. Won’t know for sure until I pull the bullet out.”
“Anything else you can tell me?”
Doc shook his head. “Not much to say. From the blood it seems pretty clear he was shot right here. Death would have been fairly instantaneous.”
I looked up. One of the techs, a skinny haole named Larry Solas, was already going over the ground. “Guess that means I start canvassing the neighbors.”
“You’re in luck,” Lidia said. “Here comes one right now.”
A man had emerged from the house across from Mrs. Garces’s, caddie-cornered to the site of the old man’s shack. As the neighbor got closer, I saw he was Chinese, somewhere around middle age, and very agitated.
“You here for shooting, no?” he asked Lidia.
“This is Detective Kanapa’aka,” she said, pointing to me. “He’s the investigating officer.”
“You know anything about this, sir?”
“’Nother shooting, same morning,” the man said. “You come see. Somebody shoot my cock.”
I looked at the man’s crotch. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. I stole a glance at Lidia and immediately had to look away. She and Doc were looking at each other, and both of them seemed on the verge of laughter.
“You come, must see.” The man, who wore faded jeans and an aloha shirt with a tattered collar, plucked at my shirt sleeve.
“I’ll be back, officer,” I said, and I could see Lidia was already laughing. I turned and followed the man back to his house. “What’s your name, sir?”
“Chin Lam,” he said. “Chin my last name. C-h-i-n. Like this chin.” He put his hand to the bottom of his face.
“I get it. Tell me more. Who got shot?”
“My cock,” he said, impatiently. He led me around the side of his house to a small low shack. A couple of chickens pecked in the ground around it.
“You allowed to have livestock in this neighborhood? Isn’t there an ordinance against it?”
“My chickens not the trouble.” He led me to the far side of the shack, to a pile of feathers and flesh that was already starting to stink in the hot sun. From the coxcomb, still intact though a few feet away, I figured out somebody had killed his rooster.
He kneeled down to the ground, and motioned me to follow. “See, somebody shoot.” He pointed, without touching, at the fleshy part of the chicken’s breast. A piece of bullet was lodged there.
“When did this happen?”
“This morning, early. Maybe just dawn. My cock, he always crow then. Better than alarm clock. I hear him crow, wake up. Then I hear shot. First I think, car noise. But I know gunshot. I turn on light, look out window. Don’t see anything. We get up, my wife go work, I go collect eggs. Find this.”
“You have any idea what time that was, first light?” I did some calculating in my head. Though I hadn’t been out surfing for a few days I knew roughly when the sun came up. “Say, five-thirty?”
“Five-thirty sound right. It maybe seven-thirty when I go collect eggs.”
“You see or hear anything else this morning?” I asked. “A second gunshot?”
He shook his head. “We have four keiki. House very busy, very noisy all morning, til they leave to school.” He looked at his watch. “Damn! Now I late to work. You call me, you find out who shot my cock?”
I took down his name again, his address and phone number. He hurried into the house and I went back to my
