Peter, exhausted, started talking to Sammy and wouldn’t stop. He explained why he’d gone into hiding. He had drug debts—bad ones. Pukui’s words came in a flood. Almost delirious, he kept babbling. Sammy wrapped him in a blanket to keep him from going into shock, gave him a bottled water. Peter seized it greedily.
He’d always been a user, Pukui said after a long drink, showing Sammy the tracks on his arm. Not pakalolo, not meth—heroin. He’d rarely had money, always had trouble paying. And with the heiau thing, plus his girlfriend Melanie sleeping with Fortunato—even though he’d agreed to it, her becoming an extortionist for him, to get him money to pay his debts—he found himself shooting up more and working at the boatyard less.
Peter explained to Sammy, who didn’t understand all of it, that once Fortunato agreed to pay Melanie Munu to wave around a page from the Māhele Book and announce herself as Chief Ku‘umoku’s heir, Pukui had convinced his dealers that big money was on the way. His credit became good again. He’d gotten more drugs; his debts grew.
“Then Fortunato wouldn’t pay,” Peter said. “Threw Melanie out of his car, beat her up. No money. I was a dead man.” He’d fled to the Pololū Valley, he said, because Pololū was the nearest impenetrable place of refuge.
Now, nearly two weeks later, he’d emerged from Waipi‘o, seven treacherously deep valleys and impassably high ridges south of Pololū. It was an extraordinary feat of cross-country travel. Yet Pukui had obviously done it. Sammy could tell, just by looking at his tattered and emaciated condition.
“So you didn’t kill Fortunato?” Sammy asked, smiling at his police buddies. “Not like Detective Wong thought?” Sammy didn’t really know what Kawika thought, but he’d read the newspapers.
“Kill Fortunato?” Pukui asked, seemingly baffled. “Detective Wong?”
“Forget about Detective Wong,” Sammy said. “Fortunato’s dead. Did you kill him?”
Pukui just sputtered, shaking his head, looking bewildered beneath the dirt and grizzled beard. “Fortunato’s dead?” he repeated, with evident disbelief.
“Yeah, Peter,” Sammy said, clasping his shoulder. “Mr. Fortunato is very, very dead.”
“I, I … I don’t … He was alive when I left. He beat Melanie. He was alive. I swear.”
“You willing to take a lie detector test?” Sammy asked.
“About killing Fortunato? Of course, of course. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know he was dead!”
“Calm down,” Sammy reassured him. “We believe you. But someone popped him while you’ve been gone.”
“Melanie?”
“No, a man did it,” Sammy replied.
“I mean, where’s Melanie now? Is she okay? Gotta find her,” Pukui said, struggling to stand.
“Okay, Peter,” Sammy said. “We’ll drive you to Hilo. I gotta take you in anyway. We’ll put you in County, you can call a lawyer. He’ll help you find your girlfriend.”
Sammy tried to notify Kawika. He couldn’t reach him, so he left a voice message: “Hey, we got Peter Pukui over here. Taking him to the station. But Kawika, I don’t think he’s your man.”
Within hours, Pukui had passed the polygraph test. Sammy gave him a lawyer’s number, and the lawyer arranged bail, receiving the money in cash from three young men in the courthouse parking lot as Sammy watched. Then the lawyer collected Peter Pukui, and the two of them vanished into the night, followed by the three men who’d put up the cash. There was barely enough light for Sammy to read the license plate of the second car. He wrote it down, just in case. Cash money for bail, handed to a lawyer in a parking lot, wasn’t all that usual in Sammy’s experience.
33South Kohala
Because Carolyn might try to call, Kawika kept his phone off while he was with Patience. When he drove away in the morning and turned it back on, he found himself far behind.
Listening to the newest message first, he heard, “Okay, Peter made bail, so now he’s gone.” Kawika flushed; his neck grew hot all at once. He hung up without listening to earlier messages and dialed Terry.
“Not back yet,” Tanaka’s assistant said. “Maybe still fishing with your dad.”
Kawika tried his own assistant next.
“How we feeling today?” she asked. “Like a king or a piglet?”
“What?”
“You got an e-mail from Carolyn. She says she read both reports on the bulldozed heiau. She says the one from the private firm is actually correct, because KKL isn’t located on any lava flow the British saw. She says you’ll understand. She went to the University to find the author of the first report, and he told her Fortunato paid the University team to say his rocks might be Kamehameha’s heiau—might be, she put it in caps—but they aren’t even a heiau. She says she’s disgusted and that she’s going home to Maui to stay with her dad and work on her dissertation. She hopes you’ll join her there.”
“That’s everything?”
“No. Like I said, she also calls you her king and her piglet—in Hawaiian, of course. There’s a story behind the piglet, am I right?”
“Can’t talk about it,” Kawika replied, trying to sound normal. She laughed and transferred him to Sammy Kā‘ai.
“Peter didn’t kill Fortunato,” Sammy declared. “Unless the lie detector lies. And believe me, he was in no condition to fool it.”
“Okay,” said Kawika. “So why was he hiding?”
“He was hiding from his dealers. Turns out he’s a junkie. Heroin, not meth. He owed them a lot of money. He thought they’d kill him.”
“And now they won’t?” Kawika asked, barely containing himself. He heard a muttered curse. “We put a tail on him, right?” he continued. “When we let him go?” It took a lot for Kawika to say we instead of you.
“Um, we didn’t do that, actually. He was gonna spend the night at his lawyer’s.”
I can’t believe this, Kawika thought. “Well, where was he going
