Or maybe he just believed what they preached.
THE DEATH OF HIROSHI MURA
KVOL was headquartered in one of the gleaming high-rises downtown, and Lui’s position as station manager gave him access to the private club on the top floor, a white-linen place with stunning views of the airport and Honolulu Harbor. About a month after I saw him at the Church of Adam and Eve, he asked me and our middle brother, Haoa, to meet him for breakfast on a Monday morning, reason undisclosed. I’ll always be their little brother, younger than Lui by eight years and Haoa by six, so I agreed without question.
Haoa and I met in the parking garage and rode up in the elevator together. We were greeted, as the doors opened, by a vista of sunshine and sparkling water. A flat barge was making its way past the end of Sand Island, surrounded by a couple of fishing boats heading out to deep water. All around us, waiters in white jackets hurried from table to table. My eldest brother, whose sad-looking features were often enough to turn any day gloomy, waited for us at a round table near the window.
My family was a polyglot mix of Hawaiian, Japanese and haole, or white, and though my brothers and I shared the same genes we all seemed to have taken a different dip in the pool. Lui was the shortest, at just under six feet, and the most Japanese, both in features and bearing. Haoa was the most Hawaiian, tall and bulky, and his ‘uhane, or spirit, lies deep in the island soil. He has never left the islands, except for brief vacations. All three of us had dark, glossy black hair, though Lui’s was expertly cut, Haoa’s shaggy, and mine short and simple.
I had the most pronounced haole features, though my skin was always tan and my eyes were just a little elongated. I was six-one and my build was slim but muscular. If Lui belonged in a glassy high rise and Haoa out working the land, then I belonged in the water. Line the three of us up and you could see we were brothers, but just barely.
We ordered quickly and then Lui said, “Look, I know you guys don’t have much time, so I’ll get to the point. Mom says Dad is sick and he refuses to see a doctor. She wants us to lean on him.”
“Dad’s sick?” I saw my parents every couple of weeks, and they never seemed to change. We’d had dinner in Waikiki about a week and a half before. My father had been uncomfortable, I remembered, but had passed it off as something bad he’d eaten.
Lui nodded. “He’s been down for a while, upset stomach, general blah feeling, Mom says. But he’s grouchy and all he wants to do is complain.”
“Like that’s a change,” Haoa said.
“Did you ever know him not to do what she says, though?” Lui asked. “That’s the scary part.”
My dad had a strong personality, and he was always the one to enforce discipline among us boys. But my mother was the one who made our family go, the one who pushed me and my brothers through school and college. She managed the money, decided on major purchases, and bullied us all when we needed it.
“Tatiana’s dad had prostate cancer two years ago,” Haoa said. “They got it early but still, she was freaked.”
“Don’t even say the word.” Lui sat back as the waiter delivered his eggs. “Dad’s always been as healthy as a horse. That’s why I think he’s scared.”
Lui’s news was enough to put all of us off our appetites. I picked at my macadamia nut pancakes and drank some orange juice, but by the time we were done there was a lot of food left on our plates. If our mother had seen that, she’d have wondered if we were the three boys she’d raised. When I was growing up, there was never any such thing as leftovers.
“I think if we all gang up on him, we can force him to see the doctor,” Lui said. “Let’s make some time Wednesday night, at the party.”
“If that doesn’t work maybe we can get Kimo to arrest him and take him to the doctor in handcuffs,” Haoa said. For once Lui and I were united against him; we both gave him the same dirty look.
“I thought Liliha didn’t want to go to the party,” I said. It was a fundraiser for the Hawai’i Marriage Project, and my friend Harry had bought a bunch of tickets because his girlfriend’s cousin worked there. He’d invited me, my parents and my brothers and their wives. I was surprised that Lui and his wife would consider going, after having seen them at the Church of Adam and Eve.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “We have to go to a lot of social occasions for my job, and I wasn’t going to force Liliha to go to something that wasn’t a command performance. But if we’re all together, it gives us a chance to gang up on Dad. I put my foot down, told Liliha she didn’t have a choice.”
“Wonders never cease,” I whispered to Haoa, and we both smirked. It was no secret that Lui had married a woman just like our mother, and that it was rare enough for him to stand up to her. He just glared at us, and then a cell phone rang at our table.
We all started fumbling. The phone bleated again, and I said, “It’s mine.” I answered, listened for a minute and said, “I’m on my way. I’m downtown, so I can be there in about fifteen minutes.”
I snapped the phone shut. “Sorry, murderers always have bad timing.”
“You know you’re getting old when your little brother is busier than you are,” Lui said.
I had hoped to get to my desk at eight-thirty and catch up on paperwork. I’d been stationed in District 1, at the Honolulu Police Department headquarters on South Beretania Street, for about six months by then, after two years at the substation in Waikiki and a brief stint undercover on the North Shore. It seemed that there was a lot more paper moving around downtown than there had been in Waikiki, but maybe that’s because I had a partner there to share it. I’d been promised a partner downtown, but there hadn’t been anyone available, so I was still working solo. I didn’t know if it was because no one wanted to work with the new guy-or with the gay cop.
Along with the arsons, there’d been a rash of murders lately, all over the city. Another thing to chalk up to El Nino, maybe, like the hot, dry weather. The hills were turning brown and catching fire. Even the hibiscus hedge outside the station was looking limp.
The media was calling it a ‘hot wave,’ playing up the combination of the weather and the crime. The department was under a lot of pressure to clear cases quickly, and to increase the local police presence so that the rush of homicides might slow down. So far, nothing much was working. I had half a dozen unsolved cases on my desk, the kind that started out with no clues and never developed any.
It wasn’t like you see on TV, where somebody gets killed before the first commercial break, and by the time the credits roll the detective has tracked down the murderer and seen him safely behind bars. Instead of pursuing those old cases in the hopes of clearing one, I was on my way to a new homicide, with its own already accumulating file of paperwork.
On the way to the crime scene in Makiki, a residential neighborhood outside downtown, I phoned the department secretary and told her I was responding to a report, that I’d have my cell phone on. It was still early enough that most of the traffic was heading into downtown, and the drive outbound was relatively easy.
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.