Neil Plakcy - Mahu Fire

“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 truck for an evidence bag.

I got my digital camera from the truck and took a few pictures of the crime scene before Doc Takayama’s techs loaded Hiroshi Mura’s body onto the gurney. I tried to get Doc to take the rooster, too, but he wasn’t having any of it. Parts of the dead chicken were in six different evidence bags, and Doc insisted they could go direct to ballistics without passing through his office. “People yes, chickens no,” he said. “I gotta have some standards, Kimo.”

Lidia thought this was all very funny, and I was having trouble keeping from laughing myself. “And I get to tell Lieutenant Sampson about this,” I said. “Lieutenant, we’ve got a serious situation out there in Makiki. Double homicide. Man and moa.” I used the Hawaiian word for chicken-just because it sounded right.

“Isn’t that chickencide?” Lidia asked.

“Poultrycide,” Doc said.

I groaned. “Get a new lifecide.”

Once the body had been removed and Doc and his team had left, Lidia and I scoured every inch of the area looking for evidence. There wasn’t any.

“Can you run the chicken downtown for me?” I asked her. “I want to do a quick canvass of the neighborhood and I don’t want to leave it in my truck.”

Just then her radio crackled to life. There was a traffic altercation on McCully Street, a few blocks away. All available units were called to the area. “Sorry, Kimo, got to go.” She jumped into her black-and-white and burned rubber.

I put the dead chicken in the bed of the truck and hoped it’d be safe from marauding cats, then I started knocking on doors.

It was a working class neighborhood, and by ten o’clock in the morning most people were doing just that, working somewhere else. I went down the block, ringing doorbells at small, often run-down houses from the 1950s, and leaving my card in the jamb with a note at each place. There was little attempt at landscaping there; the occasional hibiscus blooming forlornly in a corner of the yard, a couple of stunted wiliwili trees, a few cabbage palms. One house had a shrine in the center of the yard, a chipped statue of St. Joseph with slanted eyes, surrounded by a burst of morning glories. The grass grew around the base of the statue in long spikes, and hadn’t been trimmed in a long time.

Then I came to a small green bungalow with white shutters, much better kept than the neighboring houses. You could tell a lot of loving care had gone into the placement of the rocks, the neatly weeded beds, the precise arrangement of the miniature trees.

There was also a rainbow flag hanging above the garage, and an open Suzuki Samurai in the driveway. That was a good sign. The man who came to the door was haole, in his late forties, in cut off jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt. I showed my badge and introduced myself.

“Come on in, detective,” he said, stepping back. He said his name was Jerry Bosk, and he showed me into the living room. When I was sitting on the chintz sofa, falling backward into a mass of plush cushions, he took a good look at me. “You’re the gay cop, aren’t you?”

My stomach felt queasy. “I don’t like to think of myself that way, but, yes, I’m gay.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it as an accusation.” He sat forward in a gnarled wooden rocking chair, one hand on his thigh. “You’ve been an inspiration to us, you know. I mean, to me and the people I know. You’ve been showing the world that all gay men don’t have to be nelly queers who like to dress up in women’s clothes and wear makeup. I admire you.”

“Thanks. I’m here about a murder that happened down the street. Did you see or hear anything unusual this morning?”

Bosk sat back and rocked a little in his chair, thinking. He was a handsome guy, sandy hair and a strong face, with a smudge of sawdust on his cheek. “I can’t say I did. I wish I could help you. I’m a carpenter, a cabinet maker, and I’ve often got equipment going. When I’m not working, we’ve always got music in the house-it helps to drown out the neighborhood racket.” Indeed, I could hear some kind of baroque concerto coming out of the stereo speakers, very low, just enough to wash out background noise.

“You didn’t see anyone unusual, hear any strange sounds?”

He shook his head.

“You said we, Mr. Bosk. Someone else lives here with you?”

“My lover, Victor Ramos,” he said. “He’s at work now.”

I stood up and handed him a card. “Well, thank you. If you or Mr. Ramos think of anything, will you give me a call?”

“Have you talked to our neighbors?” he asked, as he walked me toward the door. He nodded with his head to indicate the house to the left, the one with the statue of St. Joseph. “She jogs early in the morning. She might have seen something.”

“No one was home. I’ll be sure to check back with them, though. Thanks.”

“They’re a funny couple,” he said, as we stood at the front door. “They don’t fit in with the rest of the neighborhood.” He laughed. “I mean, not that Vic and I really fit in either, but we try. We talk to people, we have a mango tree in the back yard and we always give people fruit.” He laughed again. “Funny, fruits from the fruits. But them, well, there’s just something strange about them. I can’t say any more than that.”