Neil Plakcy - Mahu Fire

The address I’d been given was a small frame house on a corner a few blocks mauka (or toward the mountains, as we say in Hawai’i) of the H1 freeway. I saw, across the street, a beat cop I knew named Lidia Portuondo standing guard next to a little shack of cardboard and palm fronds. I didn’t have to look much further to see the body at her feet.

I worked with Lidia in Waikiki, where she’d dated another beat cop named Alvy Greenberg. I asked Lidia to sit in on the taking of a witness statement, and she figured out from the questions I asked that I was gay. She told Alvy, who told the rest of the squad. I got a temporary suspension and Alvy got promoted to detective.

The Lieutenant found out about Lidia and Alvy and decided they needed to be split apart. She’d spent a couple of months in Pearl City, but when the papers played up the shortage of female cops downtown, she ended up driving a patrol car through the outlying neighborhoods, or sometimes on foot patrol around the capitol.

I didn’t bear Lidia any grudge. It had been hard for both of us, adjusting to our new posts. I considered it a mark of my fellow officers’ comfort level with me when they were able to return to treating me as just another cop, when people stopped whispering and pointing and spreading rumors about me and my position in the department.

There were similar rumors about Lidia, after her transfer from Waikiki. She’s a good-looking woman, about twenty-six, with long brown hair she keeps pulled up into a bun when she’s on the job. In uniform, as she was that morning, she looked tough and competent. Nobody was going to mess with that body while she was on duty.

“What’ve you got?” I asked, walking across the street to her.

“Japanese male, approximately mid-fifties, one bullet hole to the head. Looks like a street person. I think this is his place.” She nodded to the hut behind her. “Since there’s some powder and tattooing around the wound, it looks like somebody held the gun right up to his head, almost execution style.”

I nodded. “Good. Got any suspects yet?”

She smiled. “Thought I’d leave that part for you.”

“Gee, thanks. Medical examiner on the way?”

“Should be here any minute. Crime scene tech, too.”

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.