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I wanted to know what kind of book Greg Oshiro was working on with Alexander Fields, and if anything that had come up might have bearing on Fields’ murder. But I called Mike first, using the Bluetooth as I drove back to headquarters.
“I need to talk to Greg Oshiro, and I was thinking of seeing if he was free for dinner. How do you feel about that?”
I’d gotten in trouble with Mike before when I’d made plans without consulting him. It was one of those little things about being part of a couple I was learning how to handle. It was hard, because my natural temperament is to act first and think second.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing his girls,” Mike said. “See what we have to look forward to when we have a kid. Maybe we can meet up at their house.”
Greg had donated sperm to a lesbian couple a few years before, and become the father of twin girls. After the birth mother’s death, he and the other mom, an artist named Anna Yang, had moved in together to look after Sarah and Emily. It was an odd situation, as far as I was concerned. What if Greg met a guy? Or Anna met a woman? How could both of them settle for a relationship like the one they had, linked only by the two girls?
I hung up and called Greg. He covered the police beat for the Star-Advertiser, and I’d known him for years. We got along fine until I came out of the closet, and then he turned into an asshole. I thought he was a homophobe until Ray pointed out, some years later, that Greg was as gay as I was, but angry that I could be out and he was closeted.
Once we got over that hurdle, we’d become friends again. “Hey, Kimo,” he said. “Got a scoop for me?”
Since he didn’t immediately assume I was calling about Alexander Fields, I figured he didn’t know. So I decided to be cagey. “Yeah. But it’s something I want to talk to you about face to face. You free for dinner tonight?”
“That depends. Big story or little one?”
“Big one.”
“You’ve got my attention. You want to meet somewhere?”
“Mike wants to see the keikis. Can we come over to your house around seven? How about if we bring takeout?”
“Two large from Piece A Pizza, one meat lovers with a thin and crispy crust, one veggie with the stuffed crust. And a dozen garlic rolls.”
“That just for you?”
Greg was a big guy, with an appetite to match.
“If you’re nice, Anna will share the veggie with you. The meat lovers is all for me.”
I was tempted to ask if there was anything else he needed, but I held my tongue. “See you at seven.”
When I got back to my desk I told Ray about meeting with Greg. “Be careful what you tell him,” Ray said. “You don’t want everything spilled out in the paper tomorrow.”
“I do have some experience working with the members of the fourth estate. Get those subpoenas?”
“Had Judge Yamanaka sign off on both of them and faxed them over. We should have the records tomorrow morning. And I called the agency Marikit works for. They said she never gave Fields or the agency any trouble. I’m still running her information, just to be sure, though.”
It was close to the end of our shift, so we walked over to Lieutenant Sampson’s office, and Ray rapped on the door frame.
Sampson looked up from his paperwork. “Have a suspect in the arson homicide?”
“Not yet. But we do know who the victim is.”
He nodded toward the chairs, and we walked in and sat down. “Alexander Fields?” he asked, once we told him how we’d identified the victim. “That’s going to get hot fast. He had a lot of very powerful friends in town.”
We spelled out how we were proceeding, and he said, “Let me know if you need any juice on this. I’m sure Winston Yamato’s going to start pulling strings soon. It won’t look right if he doesn’t press this when Fields was his partner.”
“We’re hoping to talk to Yamato tomorrow,” I said. “Peggy Kaneahe is pulling the records on all Fields’ cases, in case any of those might lead us to a motive or a suspect.”
“Only in Hawai’i,” Sampson said. “There’s only one or two degrees of separation between every person on this island. Your ex-girlfriend works for the victim’s law firm. And that’s just the start.”
“There’s Greg Oshiro, too,” I said. “The housekeeper said Greg was working on a book with Fields. I’m having dinner with him tonight.”
“I’m sure there will be more. Just be careful.”
We stood up and went back to our desks, and a half hour later I was on my way home. I thought about detouring past the Women’s Community Correctional Center to see Dakota’s mom, but I didn’t have the time to make it up there and back before dinner. Instead I walked and fed Roby, then took a shower before Mike got home.
I was sitting in the living room, wearing only a pair of nylon running shorts, with the fan blowing cool air at me, when he walked in. “Hey, handsome,” he said, as Roby came running toward him.
“Hey yourself,” I said.
He looked sexy, with a loosened tie hanging askew over his white shirt. He didn’t often dress up, but I figured that his morning meeting had been with someone high up.
“I was talking to the dog.”
I threw one of the decorative sofa pillows at him. “Asshole.”
He laughed and caught the pillow, then tossed it back at me. “That how you’re going to dinner?”
“Depends. Maybe I’ll get the information I need from Greg if I put out.”
Mike shrugged. “Usually works for me. You put out, and I give in.”
“Really?” I stood up, and dropped my shorts to the ground. I was proud of my body. Though I was thirty-seven, I still ran and biked and surfed, and watched what I ate. I wasn’t going to win a body-building competition, but I had muscles in the right places, and though I didn’t have a six-pack, I didn’t have a pot belly either.
“You feel like giving in now?” I asked.
“That depends on what you want from me.” He pulled off his tie and tossed it on the sofa, then began unbuttoning his shirt.
“Whatever you want to give.” I crossed the room to him and wrapped my arms around him, and he leaned his head down to kiss me, bridging the distance in our heights.
Roby nosed around my legs and I nudged him away. “Go lie down,” I said.
“Good idea,” Mike said.
“I was talking to the dog. But you can obey, too, if you want.” I turned toward the bedroom, looping my hand in his belt and tugging him behind me.
We were both naked soon, rolling around in our king-sized bed, and by the time we were finished we both needed a quick shower before we could go over to Greg’s house.
I called Piece A Pizza with our order, with a large ham and pineapple for Mike and me to share, and by the time we had taken the H3 through the center of the island to Kaneohe, on the windward coast, the pizzas were ready. It was just a few blocks to Greg and Anna’s townhouse, in a development just off Haiku Road.
Greg had owned the place for years, and moved Anna and the girls in soon after the death of their birth mother, an accountant named Zoë Greenfield. He converted the first-floor den to a bedroom for himself, and turned the master bedroom and the smaller bedroom upstairs over to Anna and the girls.
Greg let us in, taking the pizzas from me. Three-year-old Sarah and Emily were playing with magnetic dress-up dolls in the center of the living room when we walked in. They wore matching white shorts but different tops, one red and one blue, and they jumped up and ran over to us as Mike knelt down to hug them.
Anna waved hello from the kitchen where she was setting the table. She was barely five feet tall, and her glossy black hair was cut on a sharp angle. She wore a sleeveless white blouse speckled with blue paint or blueberry baby food—hard to tell at that distance.
Greg carried the pizzas to the kitchen, and I joined Mike on the floor for hugs and kisses and baby play, laughing as the girls tried to climb all over us. They were identical and I had no idea which was Emily and which was Sarah, but it didn’t matter.
The twin in the blue shirt sat down on the floor and yawned. Anna picked her up. “All right, ready for bed,” she said. She was mainland Chinese, and still had a heavy accent. Mike picked up the other twin and followed Anna upstairs, the two of them talking about kiddie sleeping habits.
I sat down across from Greg and we popped open the pizzas. “So what’s this case?” Greg asked, taking a slice of the meat lovers’ pizza.
“Arson homicide.” I watched his face carefully. “The victim was an attorney named Alexander Fields.”
I was satisfied to see that Greg nearly choked on his pizza. I know, it’s mean. But the police and the press are natural enemies, and Greg had pulled a bunch of stunts on me in the years that I’d known him.
“But...” he said. “I was working with him.”
“I know. That’s why I came to you.”
He put the pizza down. “I should get my pad.”
I was impressed that he was willing to postpone dinner for his story. “No, let’s eat,” I said. “I’ll give you all the details later.”
Greg looked like he might burst, but Anna and Mike returned from tucking the girls in and Anna said, “Yes, please. Let’s eat first. You can talk about murder later.”
Anna was a very talented artist, and she had painted murals all around the living and dining room, and we talked about them, and about some new commissions she had gotten. She and Greg had married, to solidify her citizenship status as well as provide stability for the girls, and she was building her freelance art business.
They both looked happy with their arrangement, and I gave them credit for that. Anna smiled a lot, and so did Greg. I’d seen many heterosexual married couples who got along worse.
After we had demolished the pizzas and the garlic rolls, accompanied by big draughts of root beer and water, Anna and Mike retired to the living room, and Greg got out his notebook. He and I sat at the kitchen table and I said, “Tell me about the book you were working on with Fields.”
He frowned. I knew he wanted to get the details of the murder first, so he could work on his story, but I’d played that game with him a few times. I had to get my information first or he’d never tell me anything.
“Vanity biography, basically,” he said. “Alexander Fields, pioneer of Hawaiian statehood, that kind of thing.”
“He digging up any old scandals?”
“Not that he told me. Everything we’ve gone over so far is puffery.”
“You have a publishing contract for this?”
“No, he was going to self-publish—e-book with Amazon and so on, put out his own paperback with one of the services.”
“Tell me some of it,” I said. “I’m looking for a motive for his murder and I can use any background I can get.”
“Born in San Francisco in 1921; graduated from Stanford in ’42, then went right into the Navy for two years in the Pacific theater. He met his wife, Yuki, when he was stationed in Yokohama.”
I pulled out my netbook and started taking notes. I had finally become a member of the computer generation, thanks to Harry’s help and the need to keep a lot of information together. I used my netbook to take notes, take pictures of crime scenes, and keep track of data like autopsy reports, websites, and so on.
“Fields went back to Stanford for law school, and once he had his degree he moved to Honolulu and began working with import-export firms who needed U.S. legal expertise,” Greg said.
“Good time for a smart guy to move to the islands,” I said. “Must have been a lot going on then.”
Greg nodded. “He chaired a public interest group that advocated statehood, and then in 1959 he and a couple of other lawyers formed a partnership. Handled mostly civil cases like business disputes. When Winston Yamato retired from the state Senate in 1980, he and Fields got together. In 1995, Fields retired, though he stayed “of counsel” to the firm for another ten years.”
“He ever mention any specific cases that got ugly? Any threats?”
Greg shook his head. “If there were cases like that he was covering them up. Although...”
“Although what?”
“He did say he had a few things he was saving up to tell me. More explosive. But the guy was such a bullshitter I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.”
“He never said what those things were?”
“No. But he did say he had a lot of records from the past that would substantiate everything he said.”
“He probably kept those in the warehouse on Lagoon Road. Mike says that a lot of paper went up in flames there.”
Now it was Greg’s turn to start taking notes. “Any idea why he was killed there?”
“Hold on, cowboy. We don’t know that he was killed there. He could have been killed somewhere else, then brought to the warehouse.”
That wasn’t true; Dakota said he saw Fields alive, going into the warehouse. But I needed to be careful what I told Greg, because whatever I said would end up in the Star-Advertiser.
“Let’s step back,” I said. “We know that Alexander Fields left his home on Monday evening, after six-thirty, when the housekeeper left him watching Wheel of Fortune. We know his body was found in the ashes of the warehouse fire. The warehouse was owned by a company called Inline Imports, which in turn was owned by Fields.”
Greg scribbled quickly. “You could have told me this earlier today,” he said, when he finished. “I’ll never make tomorrow’s edition.”
“Too bad. But think what a great story you can put together for Saturday’s paper. If it’s a slow news day, you could even get a couple of inches above the fold.”
“Anyone else know about this?”
I shook my head. “We haven’t released any more information. I came to you because you were working with Fields and I was hoping you could give us some information, maybe even a motive.”
“The only motive I can suggest is that he was an asshole,” Greg said. “On the surface he was this very courtly gentleman, but underneath he was a money-grubbing bastard who trampled over people whenever he had to.”
“That’s the impression I got from his kids,” I said. “But you don’t know anyone he trampled on who’d have a reason to kill him now?”
“You’d have to go back and look at his old cases. He was never a criminal attorney, but some of his cases did put people in jail. He did some union-busting back in the fifties, for example.”
“The fifties? You mean before statehood?”
Greg nodded.
“Come on, Greg. The movers and shakers from that time must be in their eighties by now. Or dead.”
“Fields was alive. Until Tuesday night.”
He had a point there. And he had last been seen in the company of an elderly woman—perhaps someone who had been around in the fifties in Honolulu, too.
I knew someone else who’d been around during that time, and I was surprised that I hadn’t thought to ask him what he might know.
My father.