Zero Break (33 page)

But like my father, I’d taken it all in and remained independent in my beliefs. I had a strong set of spiritual beliefs, about treating your fellow man the way you’d like to be treated, and I respected the ancient gods and goddess of Hawai’i—Pele, who ruled the volcanoes; Kanaloa, the god of the seas; and Lono, who brings rains, fertility and harvest, among them.

“Can you try to focus on the baby again?” I asked. “With the computer?”

“Kimo,” Ray said. “Can I speak to you outside?”

“I’ll boot up the computer,” Madame Okelani said. I stood up and followed Ray outside to her front lawn.

“Why are we wasting time here?” he asked. “The woman’s a crackpot who had a couple of lucky guesses.”

“You have any other ideas?” I held up my hand. “We have a dead woman who had no friends, and a little baby out there somewhere. Madame Okelani may be able to help.”

“What about the records from Alamea’s cell phone. We can work on those.”

“Just humor me, all right? Let’s see if she can come up with anything.”

We went back inside. Madame Okelani’s eyes were closed, and her fingers rested lightly on the laptop’s keyboard. We watched her for a moment. Then she opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t get anything. There’s some kind of interference.” She looked at my netbook. “Is your computer on, detective?”

“Hibernating. Is that the interference?”

“May I?” she asked, holding out her hand.

I gave her the netbook, and immediately she put it down on the table, as if it had burned her fingers. “Makiki,” she said. “The baby is in Makiki.” Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. I need to lie down.”

“Thank you for your help,” I said, taking the computer back. Ray and I turned toward the door.

“Oh, and detective? You’re not a pig, you’re a dolphin.”

It took me a minute to process that. “Yes, you’re right. Thank you.”

“What the hell was that about?” Ray asked, as we got into the Jeep.

“Which part? Makiki? Or the dolphin?”

“Whichever part makes sense.”

I opened the netbook and turned it back on. “I had an argument with Mike last night. The living room was messy, and he called me a pig.”

“And?”

I pointed to Madame Okelani’s sign, as the netbook came back to life. “You know what an ‘aumakua, a spirit animal, is?”

Ray shook his head.

“The ancient Hawaiians believed that their ancestors remained around them, often taking shape in a particular animal. A family would be protected by that particular animal. A family that lived in up in the mountains might have an owl for an ‘aumakua. One that lived by the water, like my family did, might have a shark or a dolphin.

“My father always told us this story about how he was surfing when he was a teenager, and the wind came up very strong, suddenly, and he got knocked off his board. He was floundering in the water, couldn’t keep his head up out of the waves. Then he felt something nudge him from below, pushing him toward land. It was a dolphin.”

I opened the PDF file of phone numbers Alamea had called.

“He told us that dolphin was our family’s ‘aumakua, and it would always protect us when we were out in the water.”

“And did it?”

“We’re all here, aren’t we? My brothers and I have all been caught by waves, tossed around and banged up. But we all survived.”

“Uh-huh. What do the phone records say?”

I looked down. “On Saturday afternoon, Alamea called a cell phone several times.” I flipped to another page. “That number is registered to a woman named Charlotte Montes, with an address in Makiki. I think that’s our next stop, don’t you?”

“We could have figured that out without the crazy lady.”

“Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean she’s crazy.”

We drove down to Makiki, to a small stucco house on a tiny piece of land, with a chain link fence all around. The gate into the small front yard was locked.

I called the number from the printout, and through the open front window I heard a tinny rendition of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “N Dis Life.” As the phone rang, a baby began to cry.

No one answered the phone, and the baby inside continued to cry. “I think we have reason to believe that Alamea’s baby is inside this house and may be in danger,” I said. “We need to take whatever measures necessary to check it out.”

“I agree.” Ray grasped the top rail of the fence, testing it. Then he climbed up and over, dropping lightly into the front yard. I followed him, a little less gracefully.

I unholstered my gun. “If we’re right, the woman inside killed Alamea.”

Ray nodded, and pulled his gun out as well. I stepped up and rapped on the front door. “HPD. Open the door, please.”

There was no answer. All we heard was the baby continuing to cry.

I tried the handle. The door was locked. I nodded to Ray to go around the left side of the house, and I went right, toward the open window. I approached it carefully, peeking in from the side.

Through the screen I saw a baby in a crib in the middle of the room. And on the floor, a young dark-haired woman sat with her legs out in front of her. She was crying, too, though more quietly than the baby. “Charlotte Montes?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Can you open the door, please?”

“He won’t stop crying,” she said. “No matter what I do.”

“We’ll help you,” I said gently. “If you can just get up and open the door.”

She took a deep breath and stood up. Without a backward look to the baby she walked out of the room, and a moment later she was opening the front door.

We both holstered our guns and followed her inside. The baby was still crying, and Ray walked over and picked him up from his crib. He began rocking the baby and cooing to him, and soon had him calmed down.

In the meantime, I sat down at the kitchen table across from Charlotte. Up close I could see she was a bit older than I had thought, probably late twenties or early thirties. “How did you know Alamea Kekuahona?” I asked.

“From the drugstore. I used to talk to her sometimes. One day I saw her checking out pregnancy tests, and she told me she didn’t believe she was pregnant.”

Ray stood behind her, holding the baby in his arms and swaying gently.

“She didn’t even want the baby. And I did.”

I nodded.

“She wouldn’t go to the doctor or anything. Finally one day I told her that I was a midwife, and I would deliver the baby for her, and no one had to know.”

“But you’re not a midwife, are you?”

She shook her head. “I thought I would help her deliver, and then she would give the baby to me. But she started bleeding, and she wouldn’t stop, and then she passed out.”

She looked up at me. “I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to call 911 but I knew if they came, they would take away the baby.”

“So you just let her die?”

“We were both so stupid. We thought the baby would just come out and she could go home. When she passed out I got scared, and I took the baby and went for a walk. By the time I got back she was dead. I didn’t know what to do—she was so big and I couldn’t carry her anywhere. So I had to cut her up in pieces.” She shivered and began to cry.

I sat there with my arm around Charlotte’s shoulder as Ray called Social Services to take custody of the baby, and a squad car to take Charlotte downtown. Lidia Portuondo answered the call, and I knew she’d be kind, yet careful, with Charlotte.

As Lidia was driving away, the crime scene techs showed up and sprayed a mix of luminol and a chemical activator in Charlotte’s bathroom. The luminol reacts with the iron in blood to show traces of any blood residue, even after the surface has been cleaned, and the activator causes the luminescence that reveals the traces. It works best on non-porous substances, like the nubby tile on the bathroom floor. They turned the lights out, and we saw a blue glow where Alamea’s blood had spattered. They took some long-exposure photographs that documented the traces.

Fortunately Charlotte wasn’t a great housekeeper; if she had scrubbed the entire bathroom with bleach or some copper-containing substance, the whole room would have reacted with the luminol, giving us a false positive and effectively camouflaging any of the blood traces.

When the crime scene techs were finished we locked up the house and drove down to headquarters, where we read Charlotte her rights and she gave us a full statement.

≈≈≈

Alamea had never told Charlotte who the baby’s father was, and no one else even knew she was pregnant. As next of kin, Betty signed the papers so the baby could be put up for adoption. Charlotte was arraigned on charges of negligent homicide, and released on bail.

We moved on to other cases, but I couldn’t help thinking about Charlotte Montes, and the lengths some people went to in order to have a baby.

Saturday morning, Mike and I drove to St. Filomena’s with Dominic and Soon-O. It was our first opportunity to meet both Ray’s and Julie’s parents, who had flown in for the occasion, and it was funny to me how quickly Dominic and Mike blended into the crowd of exuberant Italian-Americans from Philadelphia. I was left on the sidelines with Soon-O.

“Was this what it was like when you guys lived on Long Island?” I asked her.

Dominic and Soon-O met in Korea, when he was a wounded soldier and she was his nurse. After some opposition on both sides of the family, they had married, and she had worked to put Dominic through medical school, living near his big family in New York.

“Yes,” Soon-O said. “Except there was a lot more talk in Italian. Dom’s parents were born there, you know.”

I knew that Soon-O had been unhappy in New York, far from her family and her culture, and that Mike had been uncomfortable as a mixed-race kid. The Riccardis had moved to Hawai’i when Mike was seven, in an effort to make both of them happier. As far as I could tell, it had worked.

“I’m sorry Michael couldn’t grow up around his cousins, on both sides,” Soon-O said. “And now Vinnie will be the same, so far from family.”

“We make our own family.” I took Soon-O’s hand. “Look at us.”

“I know,” she said. “I almost feel like your mother is my sister. And now, Michael will be connected to Vinnie, and to Ray and Julie and their families. That means we all will be, too.”

I looked up and saw Ray at the door of the church, trying to get everyone to go inside. “Well, then, we’d better go in and join them,” I said.

I gave one last thought to Alamea Kekuahona and her baby, and hoped that both of them would find loving families, in Heaven and on Earth, and then I joined my family of choice for the ceremony to welcome our newest member.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NEIL PLAKCY is the author of
Mahu
,
Mahu Surfer, Mahu Fire, Mahu Vice, Mahu Men
,
Mahu Blood
,
Zero Break
about openly gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka. His other books are
Three Wrong Turns in the Desert, Dancing with the Tide, The Outhouse Gang, In Dog We Trust, Invasion of the Blatnicks
, and
GayLife.com.
He edited
Paws & Reflect:A Special Bond Between Man and Dog
and the gay erotic anthologies
Hard Hats, Surfer Boys
and
Skater Boys.
His website is www.mahubooks.com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A writer needs an ohana, a family and a community, in order to put out a book—and I’ve been lucky to have a very supportive ohana during the years of the Mahu series. Christine Kling, Sharon Potts, Mike Jastrzebski, and Miriam Auerbach all critiqued parts of this book, and their help has been invaluable.

Cindy Chow once again provided invaluable service by reading the manuscript and pointing out so many mistakes I’d made about Hawai’i, though any remaining errors are my fault, not hers. She has been a wonderful tutor into the intricacies of life in the Aloha State.

For their personal support I am grateful to my mother, to Eliot Hess and Lois Whitman, Fred Searcy, John Spero, Steve Greenberg, Eileen Matluck, Andrew Schulz, Elisa Albo, and Lourdes Rodriguez-Florido. And as always, gratitude is due to my other colleagues in the English department at Broward College’s South Campus for their support and encouragement, and to the college’s Staff and Professional Development program, which has allowed me to attend conferences and conventions.

For professional advice and encouragement I want to thank Wayne Gunn and my fellow members of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

A big mahalo to Laura Baumbach, Kris Jacen, J.P. Bowie, Lisa Edwards and Victoria Landis, for all their help in bringing this book out.

TRADEMARKS ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

7-11: Southland Corporation