“Yes. Mr. Fortunato stopped the car—this was on the Queen K—and pulled her out. He struck her several times, causing facial injuries. Another motorist pulled over and took her to get medical attention. Mr. Fortunato jumped back in his car and drove off.”
“So someone knew Fortunato had beaten her,” said Kawika. “That’s why she figured she’d be a suspect in his murder?”
“Exactly,” Pohano said. “But, uh, she would not have killed Mr. Fortunato. Believe me. She was in a relationship with him—a physical relationship.”
“Yeah, getting beaten,” Tanaka said. “Pretty physical.”
“No,” said Pohano. “You know what I mean. They’d conspired together and somehow they’d become close.”
Poor Joan, thought Kawika. Poor Corazon. Ralph was cheating on them both. Uncomfortably, he remembered that he’d become something of a cheater himself.
“The names,” Tanaka prompted. “We need the names.”
“Well, the motorist was a doctor who took her to the hospital in Waimea,” Pohano responded.
“And—let’s see—the doctor just happened to have medical privileges there,” Kawika said. “Dr. Terrence Smith.”
Pohano seemed surprised. “How did you know?” he asked.
“A wild guess.”
“She asked him not to report it.” Pohano repeated. “She was afraid.”
“And the woman’s name? You can tell us now.”
Suddenly Carolyn interrupted. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I bet I know. It’s Melanie, isn’t it? Melanie Munu.”
Pohano, startled, turned to Mele Kawena Smith.
“C’mon,” Carolyn insisted. “You told us you knew her from Peter Pukui’s group. That kinda narrows the field, Counselor. It’s not a group with a lot of women. Plus Melanie’s one of your founders here too, right? An old bud of Mele Kawena? What could possibly be the reason you didn’t mention that just now?”
Mele Kawena Smith glared.
“Melanie Munu is Peter Pukui’s girlfriend,” Carolyn said distinctly, looking directly at her.
“Sort of,” admitted Mele Kawena Smith.
“Ah!” exclaimed Carolyn. “The orator speaks!”
“Wait a minute,” Kawika said. “I thought Melanie Munu was Maori. She’s Hawaiian, descended from a chief?”
“Hawaiian enough,” replied Pohano.
Carolyn pushed back from the table in disgust. “You guys don’t need me anymore,” she said to Tanaka. “I’m outta here.”
23Hilo
Carolyn’s abrupt departure left a sudden void, an awkward silence. Without words spoken, it seemed the meeting had come to an end. Without ceremony and with jaws set, the S&R delegation silently followed Carolyn out the door. Tanaka and Kawika watched them go, but didn’t linger. They went to check their messages. Kawika had one from Patience and one from Tommy.
“Detective Wong,” the voicemail from Patience began, “I saw something today I thought you might want to know about. I went to Waikoloa Village for groceries, and as I parked, a car with the KKL logo pulled in beside me. A tall white guy in an aloha shirt got out and took a piece of office equipment from the trunk. I thought it was a printer. Then he went up to the KKL office, above the shops, two steps at a time, in a hurry. I thought about following him, telling him I’m a journalist, asking him questions, but I’ve promised not to sleuth. So I went into the Village Market, and as I was handling a Maui sweet onion, the outer skin—you know, the papery part—fell to pieces, just disintegrated in my hand. And then I realized: that wasn’t a printer the KKL guy had—it was a shredder. Anyway, like I said, I thought you’d want to know. That’s all. Okay, goodbye now.”
Michael Cushing with a shredder? Why? Kawika wondered.
Tommy’s voice message asked Kawika to give him a call. “Hey, man,” Tommy said when Kawika reached him. “Just want to update you on tracing the ihe. We’ve checked with museums and dealers throughout the state, but nobody’s missing theirs. I thought we were close at Kohala Historical—after all, it’s the museum closest to the crime scene. But we struck out there too.”
“What happened?” Kawika asked.
“The assistant curator, a woman named Kiku Takahashi, looked at the photos of the murder weapon, and she oohed and ahhed over it. Said it’s really old and valuable, definitely dates from Kamehameha’s time. She said the museum has one that’s really similar. So she took me to the display case to see it, but it wasn’t there.”
“Where is it then?”
“A little card in the case says it’s on loan to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. She hadn’t known that. But she says it can’t be ours anyway.”
“Why?”
“Theirs has a different number of barbs. She showed me a picture. They don’t have one with three barbs, like the murder weapon, and all the other museums and dealers, if they do have any three-barbed ones, they’ve still got those. No one is missing any. They all checked.”
“Hmm. So, close but no cigar with Kohala Historical?”
“Right. But she did make a good suggestion. She said we should check with private collectors too, not just dealers and museums.”
“Okay, how are we going to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy replied. “But we’ll figure it out.”
A few moments later, just as Tommy said goodbye, Tanaka walked into Kawika’s office, smiling but shaking his head. “Got a call back from our friend Shimazu-san,” Tanaka said. “He left me a nice long voice message. I thought my Japanese was pretty good. Not good enough, it seems. I’ll have to call him back, test his English. Why do I suspect his English language skills will disappear suddenly?”
“Well, he does seem skilled in sudden disappearance,” Kawika replied.
24Hilo
Kawika awoke feeling cheerful and knowing why: S&R hadn’t proven so scary after all. He rolled over and found Carolyn awake, lying on her stomach, her face resting on her smooth brown hands. She was gazing into the distance—although the distance was limited to palm fronds rattling against her louvered window—and looking past him with a countenance so profoundly sad that his spirits sagged.
He summoned his mother’s wisdom: “How she feels depends on what she’s thinking.”
“What are you thinking, Carolyn? You look so sad.”
She blinked, re-focused, forced a small smile, reached out and stroked his hair. “I love you so much,” she said. Looked into directly, her eyes seemed even sadder.
“That makes you
