Neil Plakcy - Mahu Fire

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

As I walked down the path to the street, he called out behind me, “Keep up the good fight, Detective.”

I wasn’t sure which kind of fight he meant.

I made it back to headquarters just before noon, and took the dead rooster down to ballistics on the first basement level of the building. A couple of hours in the hot Hawaiian sun hadn’t done much for the carcass, and as I walked down the hall carrying the evidence bags people stopped, stared and sniffed.

“Homicide’s a dirty business, isn’t it, detective?” said a secretary from the photo lab.

“Jesus, Kimo, get some air freshener,” a detective from narcotics said, waving his hand in front of his face. I smiled at everybody, nodding politely, like I wasn’t carrying something that stank to high heaven in my outstretched hand.

Special investigations, which encompasses ballistics, wasn’t excited to see me. “Ew, what is that?” said Gloria, the secretary at the front desk. There was an incredibly handsome guy standing next to her, tall, dark-haired, and Eurasian, wearing a khaki shirt with a fire department emblem on it.

“The remains of a murder victim. Where do you want it?”

“Don’t remains go to the coroner?”

“Only human remains,” I said.

The handsome fireman looked my way and made a big show of squeezing shut his nostrils for Gloria. “Seems like fowl play,” he said, and she laughed.

I saw Billy Kim, a young tech with an Elvis-like pompadour, in the back area and called out to him. “Hey, Billy, your chicken lunch is here.”

I walked past Gloria’s desk to show him what I had. “What the hell?”

“I got a murder out in Makiki this morning. Neighbor’s rooster got shot at the same time. I need a ballistics match between this bullet,” here I held up the evidence bags, “and the one from my stiff.”

He took the bags from me, his nose crinkled up. “This is above and beyond the call of duty.”

“Many are called, but only the really dumb ones answer,” I said. “I don’t think the owner wants the carcass back when you’re done with it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

When I came out, the handsome fireman was gone. I stopped at the men’s room before getting into the elevator, but no matter how much I washed my hands, there was still a faint aroma of dead chicken around me.

People looked at me funny in the elevator, but I ignored them. I hoped the scent would dissipate during the day, but I wasn’t holding my breath. Only the people around me were.

I stuck my head into Lieutenant Sampson’s office. He’s a big, burly guy, wiry beard going gray, fond of polo shirts. He has them in every color ever made in extra large. He once told me he hated wearing suits because you had to wear a tie with a suit, and his neck was larger than it should have been so he never could get dress shirts that closed properly.

Today his polo shirt was emerald green. He was on the phone, but motioned me to a seat in front of his desk. My eye was caught, as always, by the photos he kept there. One was an old clipping from a newspaper, an AP wire photo of a half-dozen people in their early twenties, a mixture of men and women, dancing naked in the mud at Woodstock. The tall man in the middle, with the wiry hair, was Lieutenant Sampson, at a younger and more foolish time in his life. He said he kept it there as a reminder of who he was. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I kind of liked it, working for a guy who’d once danced naked in the mud at a rock concert, and was comfortable enough about it to keep the picture on his desk.

The other was a photo of his daughter, Kitty. I picked it up to look more closely at it. She was quite a beautiful woman, in her late teens or early twenties. She looked like a young Catherine Deneuve, that same icy blondness, yet with a simmering sensuality underneath. I didn’t envy him being her father.

He put the phone down and I said, “Your daughter’s very pretty.”

“Stepdaughter,” he said. “Kitty’s my second wife’s daughter from her first marriage.”

I took a minute to process that. I knew Sampson had been married and divorced three times. “Kitty’s mother and I got married when Kitty was six,” he said, nodding toward the picture. “We were only married for three years, but Kitty got attached to me. No matter who her mom was married to, she thought of me as her dad.” He smiled. “Her mom moved back to the mainland when Kitty was thirteen. I think that was husband number four, though maybe it was number five.”

“I thought Kitty lived with you?”

“She does. When my ex left she asked if I’d take Kitty, and I said I would, only if I could adopt her. So I did. Kitty goes to visit her mom during the summer, wherever she happens to be living. It’s good for her-gets her off this rock. I see too many of these island kids whose world is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. Kitty’ll never feel that way.” He stopped and sniffed the air. “What do I smell?”

“Chicken.”

“Don’t eat at that place again.”

“I didn’t eat there. You know that homicide in Makiki?”

“Yeah. What do you know about it?”

“Doesn’t look like an easy one. Homeless man, nobody in the neighborhood saw anything or heard anything. No clues at the scene, either.”

He shook his head. “I don’t like these statistics. Unsolved homicides are piling up here like empty dishes at dim sum.”

“I do have one lead, though. Neighbor’s rooster was shot around the same time. I’ve got ballistics doing a match on the bullets.”

“The dead chicken,” he said, nodding. “You think that’s a homicide, too?”

“Don’t even start,” I said, holding up my hand. “I’ve heard the jokes already. I’ll keep you posted.”

“From a distance,” he said, waving me out. He turned on a little fan on the credenza behind him. “I always knew homicide was a dirty business. Try not to make it a stinky one, too.” He paused. “That’s a residential neighborhood out there, isn’t it? Working class?”

I nodded. “Tried to canvass this morning, but most people had already left for work.”

“Why don’t you sign out for a couple of hours. Go home, take a shower. Then hit Makiki after some of the neighbors get home.”

“You just want to keep me from stinking up your squad room, don’t you?”

He laughed. “Close a couple of cases for me, will you, detective?” he asked. “This one would be a good start. I don’t need PETA picketing downstairs over cruelty to chickens.”

“I’ll get right on it, chief,” I said.

I stopped at my desk on my way out, and Steve Hart, a night shift detective who’d come in early to work some cases, pointedly got up and moved away. He was a tall, tanned Texan who had a chip on his shoulder the size of Amarillo. At least I was getting shunned for being smelly, rather than being gay. That was a start.

I ran Hiroshi Mura through the computer, but didn’t get anything more than I already knew. So I gave up and went home. I took a nice, luxurious shower, then dropped my stinky chicken clothes in the washer on the ground floor of the building. While they ran through rinse and spin, I researched my latest case, using my spiffy wireless laptop.

The network didn’t have far to reach; I live in a studio, with a galley kitchen, a small bathroom, and a picture window with a view of a narrow slice of Waikiki Beach. I sat at the kitchen table and pulled up the property appraiser’s website, where I saw that Hiroshi Mura was no longer the owner of the property where he’d been shot; it had been transferred a few months earlier to a corporation.

I made a list of all the homeowners on the streets around where Mura had been killed, and typed up the notes on my interviews with Rosalie Garces and Jerry Bosk. By then it was time to switch the clothes to the dryer. After that, I checked department records for all shootings of homeless men and women over the past year, hoping that there would be a match in some way to my crime.