A Waimea detective named Tommy, in plainclothes and wearing a University of Hawai‘i cap, took Kawika to her door. A tile hung above the bell: “Hawaiian style—Please remove your shoes. Mahalo.” Kawika slipped his off. Big and black, they dwarfed a pair of pink sandals set neatly by the mat.
“Patience Quinn,” said Tommy. “Crazy name, yeah? She’s from San Francisco.”
A petite blonde answered the door, and instead of flashing a badge, Kawika handed her his card. “Kawika Wong,” she pronounced, hesitantly but correctly.
“Good,” he said, and smiled. “Hawaiian’s tricky, even for me.” He didn’t want to mislead her, let her think him more Hawaiian than he really was. With Mainlanders, he knew, race could create discomfort and excessive caution.
Patience Quinn told a simple story. She’d awakened at six, brewed coffee, then taken a cup outdoors. She liked to watch the first rays of sun strike the summit of Haleakalā across the channel on Maui. In the early light she’d noticed an unfamiliar shape on the championship tee box about two hundred feet from her condo. She couldn’t quite make it out. Then she’d seen it was a man—a man with something sticking out of him.
She led Kawika onto her lanai so he could stand where she’d stood, see what she’d seen, minus the body and the spear. He took in the scene, then motioned her back inside. A fragrance, faint and pleasant, trailed behind her.
Kawika asked routine questions. No, she hadn’t seen anyone else. She hadn’t heard any unusual noise, just the crash of breakers and the calls of doves and francolins. No, she wasn’t a tourist; she considered herself a kama‘āina, or resident. Her parents once owned the condo, but it was hers now; she visited several times a year for extended stays, by herself or with family. On this trip she’d arrived alone. She and her husband had recently separated. No children. She worked for San Francisco magazine. She wrote feature stories. She was here to do a possible article on Hawai‘i’s 9/11 victims, the ones who’d died on Flight 93.
Kawika glanced around the condo, out at the golf course, then back again at Patience Quinn. They were “all of a piece,” his mother would say: elegant, well-kept. Patience appeared to be in her twenties still—like him. She couldn’t have been married long.
Kawika’s phone vibrated. He excused himself and stepped outside, walking back to where Patience Quinn had watched the sunrise touch Haleakalā.
“They ID’d the body,” Tanaka told him. “Ralph Fortunato. Big-time real estate developer. Got a wife and kid up in Waimea. You’re in charge, so better get up there, yeah?”
Kawika walked back inside. Patience Quinn looked inquisitive.
“The victim’s named Ralph Fortunato,” he said. “Heard of him?”
“Oh my God!” Her hand leapt to her mouth. She grabbed a chairback to steady herself, and her lightly tanned face became paler instantly. “Oh my God!” she repeated. “He’s the one trying to build Kohala Kea Loa!”
Kawika observed her shock; it was real. “A new resort,” she explained after a deep breath and a shake of her head. “A huge one. Across the highway, all the way up to Waikoloa Village. KKL, people call it. It’s a giant controversy. Oh my God.”
Kawika’s cell phone vibrated again. “Wong,” he answered curtly.
“Aloha, Little Wong,” the caller said, chuckling. “It’s Big Wong. You over here? You spend the night? Come for dinner? We talk story?”
Kawika sighed. “Yeah, Pops,” he said. “All those things. Call you later.” He snapped the phone shut and smiled with embarrassment.
“My dad,” he explained. “Lives in Puakō. No one can do anything on the Big Island without him knowing it. Now I gotta go see him.”
Patience Quinn smiled slightly, recovering herself. “Sounds like you should go see him,” she offered. “Maybe he knows who did it.”
Kawika noticed her teeth: very even, very white. They went with that lightly tanned and cared-for skin, the fineness of her clothes and facial features. He wasn’t used to standing next to women like this one, especially haole women. He wished his plainclothes weren’t quite so plain. He thought of Raymond Chandler’s ill-dressed detective, Philip Marlowe, in Farewell, My Lovely: about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.
Departing, Kawika turned to look at her once more than necessary. Then he let Tommy the local cop drive him up to Waimea, past the broad lava fields, grown grassy now, where Kamehameha—Hawai‘i’s last great warrior king—had trained his armies. On the way, Tommy told him more about Ralph Fortunato and KKL, his controversial real estate development.
“You didn’t recognize his body, though?” Kawika asked.
“Never seen ’im before,” Tommy replied. “But you live here, you know the man, believe me. He’s not popular.”
Kawika looked away, up the slope of Kohala Mountain, the dormant volcano looming ahead of them, up to the dark green line of ironwood trees on the Kohala Mountain Road, the road to Hāwī. Tommy noticed.
“Heard you were born in Hāwī,” Tommy said. “Like Kamehameha, yeah?”
Kawika merely nodded. He was concentrating on an inconvenient sensation: the god of desire, with the tip of his ancient spear, had nicked Kawika’s heart.
2Waimea
“Fucking Hawaiians.”
The newly widowed Corazon Fortunato spoke contemptuously.
“Fucking Hawaiians,” she repeated, this time with anger. Sitting across a koa wood coffee table from her, Kawika could guess she was a Filipina. Dark and smooth-skinned, ordinarily she might have seemed beautiful. Today she looked tear streaked and blotchy. A painting of a sunlit sandy beach fringed with palms hung behind her. On the adjacent wall hung color photos of a beaming Ralph Fortunato in head shots with individual suntanned golfers, presumably famous ones; even from a distance, Kawika recognized Tiger Woods.
“Fucking Hawaiians.” Kawika could guess
