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Ray called Stephanie Cornell, on the pretense of giving her an update on her father’s case. He discovered that she and her boyfriend, Lee Poe, would be coming to Honolulu over the weekend, to attend her father’s funeral on Monday. Ray made arrangements to speak to her after the interment.
For such a rich man, Alexander Fields had a very simple will. He made a few specific bequests to charities, but the bulk of his estate was divided equally between Shepard and Stephanie. His bank and phone records came in, and we looked through them. There was no pattern of large cash withdrawals, no payments other than the ones necessary to keep his lifestyle going. And Marikit’s record was clean, too; she had no major debts and no association with known criminals.
We ordered credit reports on both Stephanie and Shepard, and then spent the rest of the afternoon going through the materials we had gotten from Fields & Yamato, organizing and prioritizing. Even though we had some good suspects in Stephanie and Lee, we couldn’t ignore the other possibilities. There was still the question of the elderly woman who’d been with Fields; who was she and where did she fit into the case? Were the two bodybuilders hired thugs, or did they have some other connection?
Late in the afternoon, we sat down with Lieutenant Sampson to go over our progress. “Convenient,” he said, when we were finished. “I don’t have to pay you overtime this weekend, and you get a couple of days off. I like the way this case is working out.”
Ray admitted that he could use the chance to catch up on sleep, and I planned to get some surfing in. Since our prime suspects weren’t going to be in town until Sunday, that meant we could put the case aside without guilt. “You can come back to your other suspects on Monday morning, and plan to attend Fields’ funeral. Talk to the brother and the sister and anyone else who has something to say.”
I drove home and walked Roby. I didn’t feed him; he was going with us to my parents’ house and I knew my father would slip him table scraps. Mike got home as I was getting out of the shower, and after he cleaned up we drove over to St. Louis Heights.
My parents still live in the house where I grew up, along a twisting road that abuts Wa’ahila Ridge State Park. I always have this sense of déjà vu as I drive up their street, remembering the flat place where my father taught me to ride a two-wheeler, the hilly slope where I used to hide as a teenager when I needed to escape, the homes of neighbor kids, and the corner where I waited for the school bus.
Mine was a pretty good childhood. My father worked too much, and let his temper loose on us kids too often, but I always had a roof over my head and food in my stomach and the deep sense that I was loved.
Looking back now, I wonder how they managed. My father’s business rose and fell with economic cycles. When times were good he had plenty of work, building houses and stores and warehouses. When the economy tanked he did small remodeling jobs and managed the investment properties he had begun to assemble.
My mom kept the house and supervised the three of us. I imagine she was just able to catch her breath with both my older brothers in school and then she turned up pregnant with me. My parents always insisted that I wasn’t an accident, even though Lui and Haoa kidded me I had to be. But I never knew what had convinced my parents to have a third child, if it was a conscious decision.
My father is one of six children, four of whom lived to adulthood. He was born just short of a year after the death of his oldest brother, also named Alexander. My grandparents had clearly decided to have another kid in the wake of the death of Alexander the first, as we called him. There was one girl after my father, a baby who died in infancy. By then, I imagined my grandparents were done.
As we pulled up in the driveway, Roby started going crazy, jumping around in the back seat and trying to climb up front with us. He loved his tutus, and they spoiled him even more than we did. They always said that was their right as grandparents.
My niece Ashley, Haoa’s eldest, came out of the house as we walked up the driveway. “Aloha, Uncles.” She no longer had to get up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek; she was almost as tall as I was. She still had to stretch a bit to kiss Mike, though.
She got more breathtakingly beautiful each time I saw her. The genetic soup she inherited from her parents had resulted in ash blonde hair, a lean, willowy frame, and a heart-shaped face with a trace of her Japanese great-grandfather around her eyes. She was about to graduate from Punahou, and was going to try her hand at the surfing circuit, postponing college for at least a year.
She was carrying a plastic container. “You’re not taking all the coconut cake, are you?” I asked, reaching for it.
She kept it away from me. “Just enough for me, Ailina, and Apikela,” she said. Those were her sisters. “Alec can come get his own cake if he wants some.”
Alec was her brother, and there was the same kind of rivalry between him and Ashley as I’d had with Lui and Haoa.
“Aloha!” she said, waving her hand and hurrying down the driveway.
“Can you imagine what Haoa must go through every time she goes out on a date?” Mike asked, watching her walk away.
“Ashley can take care of herself,” I said. “She’s got her mother’s beauty but her father’s personality. Not that Haoa and Tatiana don’t worry.”
The front door opened again, and I saw my mother in the frame. She looked smaller and more frail than the last time I’d seen her, though I’m sure that was my imagination. She was a petite China doll, and even in her late sixties she still looked lovely. She wore an orange silk blouse with a Mandarin collar and fine white embroidery.
After a flurry of hugging and kissing we followed her into the kitchen, where my father was already sitting at the kitchen table. His hair seemed sparser, his face a little less full, than the last time I’d seen him. He was as handsome as my mother was beautiful; I’d gotten great genes from both of them.
“I was wondering when you were going to get here,” he grumbled. “I’m hungry.”
“You don’t look like you’re starving,” my mother said.
His jet-black hair started to go gray about five years before, and he looked quite distinguished. He had a few forehead lines; the rest of his face was smooth. The older I get, the more I look like him.
We sat down and my mother began dishing out the food. Because of my father’s heart disease and high blood pressure, she had begun grilling meat and fish, serving more vegetables, and using a light hand with rich sauces. He grumbled about the low fat content and the skimpy portions of rice, but the food was delicious.
Roby stationed himself next to my father, who dropped him tidbits of chicken. I didn’t realize dogs liked broccoli; it’s not a vegetable you’d ever find in our house. But Roby gobbled up whatever his tutu gave him.
Over coconut cake, I brought up the reason for our visit. “I’m working a case right now, and the victim is Alexander Fields,” I said.
“The attorney?” my father asked.
“Yeah. Did you know him?”
He shrugged. “I ran across him a few times over the years. I wouldn’t say I knew him.”
“I knew his wife,” my mother said. “Yuki. She was in the PTA at Punahou with me and Evelyn Clark. Her boy was in Haoa’s class.”
“You ever hear anything about him?” I asked. “People who didn’t like him or had a grudge against him?”
“He was a tough businessman,” my father said. “When you’re like that there are always people who don’t like you.” He sat back in his chair. “You remember I used to work for old Judge Fong when I was a teenager, taking care of his yard?”
I had met the ancient, wizened judge a few times when I was a kid. He had been a mentor to my dad, convincing him to go to UH instead of getting a job after high school. “Fields used to come over to the judge’s house all the time back then. Even I could tell he was going to be an important man.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Middle of the 1950s,” he said. “I graduated high school in what, 1956? I kept on working for the judge my first couple of years at UH.”
“That must have been such an interesting time,” Mike said. “Before statehood.”
My father snorted. “Interesting is one word for it. For most of us, it wasn’t an issue at all. The businessmen, they had a lot at stake. We were paying federal tax—more than some of the states—and we had no voice in setting tax rates, and we were never sure of getting our fair share back in federal services and money for improvements. People said that only statehood could guarantee us our rights.”
He took a long drink of water. “But other people wanted Hawai’i to remain a territory, because they hoped that someday we could be an independent people again.”
“How about you?” I asked. “What did you think?”
“I was a teenager. I didn’t know what to think. But I listened to the judge, and he said that there were over half a million people in Hawai’i, more than some states, and nine out of ten of them were born on U.S. soil. They shouldn’t be denied the rights of citizenship.”
Roby got up and walked over to Mike, nuzzling against his knee. “I remember learning something in high school social studies class about the opposition to statehood,” Mike said. “Didn’t most of it come from the mainland?”
“The haoles on the mainland were worried about us mixed-race people. This one Senator even came to Honolulu for an investigation.” He laughed. “Turned out he was investigating the prostitutes in Chinatown instead. Somebody killed him and the police hushed it up. Didn’t want it to look like we were all savages.”
“I wonder where Alexander Fields stood,” I said.
“Fields was always on the side of big business,” my father said. “I remember one case, a friend of mine. He wanted to get some work on the Pali Tunnel. This must have been what, right after statehood? Fields represented a big company that wanted the work, and they shut my friend out. That was the kind of man he was.”
“Things were very difficult back then,” my mother said. “My father went on strike a couple of times in the sugar cane fields.” My mother’s father had been recruited from his native Tokushima Prefecture, on Japan’s Shikoku Island, to work chopping and weeding sugar cane on a huge plantation. The workday was long, the labor exhausting, and, the workers’ lives were strictly controlled by the plantation owners.
“I never heard that,” I said.
She nodded. “During the strikes, my father was out of work and we had to live with my mother’s family for a while.” She looked at Mike. “They were native Hawaiians and they didn’t have much money, either. My father had to learn to fish to help out.”
She put her hands on the table in front of her. “Statehood was good for us. We got money from the government for food, and I was able to stay in school and graduate. I got a job in the Amfac office, and met Al.”
“You two worked together?” Mike asked. Roby gave up on being petted and sprawled on the floor on his side.
“I was a construction superintendent by then,” my father said. “I heard they had hired this beautiful wahine in the office and so I made it my business to go over there.” He reached out and took my mother’s hand. “As soon as I saw Lokelani I knew she was the one for me.”
“Love at first sight,” Mike said. He looked at me. The first time I saw him, I was carrying a dead chicken and I smelled of blood and feathers. When I saw him again a few days later, and I realized he was gay, too, I felt an electric current surge through my body. I wondered if that’s what my parents had felt when they met.
“You tell your parents about your situation at work?” Mike asked me.
“What?” my father asked. “Someone making trouble for you, talking stink?”
I shook my head and smiled. My father was always quick to jump to my defense, and I’d often relied on his strength. “Nothing like that. HPD may send me and Ray on assignment to the FBI.”
“I like that,” my mother said. “That’s office work, isn’t it? Much safer for you than what you do now. Maybe I can relax some.”
“Mom. My job isn’t that dangerous.”
“Every night I say prayers for all my boys and their families. I say a special one for you, to keep you safe.” She looked at Mike. “You, too. Running into fires.”
We both laughed. “Thanks, Mom.” My family had never been big on organized religion; we had too many races and traditions all jumbled together. But my parents had both always been spiritual, and it didn’t surprise me that my mom still said her prayers every night.
We convinced Roby to get up, and took a big hunk of coonut cake home with us.