Christmas in Honolulu

by Neil Plakcy

By the time I arrived at the scene, the man in the Santa hat was dead. Two bullets to the heart will do that to you. In addition to the red hat with its white pompon, he wore a pair of board shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt that read ??. An island-style Santa, one who looked like he'd just surfed in on his board, ready to deliver the roof-rack full of presents atop his Jeep. He didn't have the white hair or full beard, though he did have a little soul patch on his chin.

The patrol officer who'd responded to the initial call, Jimmy Chang, finished his radio call and walked over to me. “Hey, Kimo, howzit?”

“Hey, brah, they got you moving up in the world.” We were indeed up, in the mountainside suburb of Manoa, which looks down on Honolulu like a rich older sister. I had driven past the University of Hawaii, then taken Manoa Road farther up to the campus of the Honolulu Arts College, where a couple of academic buildings clustered around an open green. A Norfolk island pine had been decked with strings of lights, and a banner hung from one building read “Mele Kalikimaka,” the Hawaiian for Merry Christmas.

Jimmy recapped the situation for me. The body of an unidentified haole, or white, male had been found outside Reese Hall, the building sporting the banner, which housed faculty and administrative offices. Two other buildings held classrooms, including digital labs, filled with computers, scanners, and all manner of hardware used in teaching students about web design, animation, and various other kinds of software.

Since it was the 22 nd of December, the campus was pretty deserted, except for the police and a young Chinese girl whom Jimmy introduced as Wendi Ho. She was petite and chunky, with black hair that hung like a curtain over half her face.

“What brought you up to campus when everything's closed?” I asked her, as we walked over to a cluster of wrought-iron benches painted white. A crumple of wrapping paper blew past us in the light breeze.

“Today's officially the last day of school,” she said. “Most classes are finished, but my English teacher said if I dropped my paper off before four he wouldn't take off points for being late.”

I looked at my watch. It was about half-past four; the 911 call had come in at 3:45. “Cutting it a little close, weren't you?”

“I had to work lunch at my parents' restaurant,” she said. “He was in his office, so I gave him the paper, and then I came downstairs. As I was walking out the building, I heard these two noises—it sounded like firecrackers. Then I saw that man.”

She looked like she was ready to cry, so I patted her shoulder. “It's OK,” I said. “Take it as slow as you need.”

“That's all I know,” she said. “I called 911 right away.”

“Did you look at his face?” I knew the body had been found face up.

She nodded. “But I don't know who he is.”

I established that the student body was pretty small, and that Wendi Ho was pretty sure she knew everybody by sight. Nor was the dead man a faculty member or a member of the staff, as far as she knew. “But they have lots of adjuncts,” she said. “Professionals who come up here to teach a course or two. He could be one of those.”

I got Wendi's address and phone number, and let her go. By then, the crime scene techs had checked out the area, and the Medical Examiner's guys were ready to take the body away. I snapped a couple of Polaroids, scribbled some notes, and let them go.

In the hour we'd been there, no one had come or gone. There were still a dozen cars in the parking lot, though, so I knew somebody had to be around. I went into Reese Hall and started knocking on doors. The ground floor administrative offices were clustered around a central atrium —admissions, registration, student services. There was only one person in each office, and none of them had heard the shots, or recognized a Polaroid of the dead man.

I climbed a circular ramp to the second floor, where I found four office suites: Computer Applications, Sciences, Fine Arts, and Humanities. The doors to the first three were all locked, but Humanities was propped open, and I walked in, calling out a hello.

A tall, lanky man in his early sixties stuck his head out of an office door. “School's closed,” he said. “You'll have to come back after New Year's.” He wore a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals, and had a red and green plastic lei around his neck.

“I'm a detective,” I said, showing him my badge. “Kimo Kanapa'aka. Can I ask you a few questions?”

He shrugged. “Not sure how good my answers will be, but you can ask,” he said, stepping back into his office so I could follow.

I saw Wendi Ho's paper in a plastic tray affixed to his door as I walked in. A big picture window on the far wall looked downhill toward downtown Honolulu, the ocean a blue strip on the far horizon. Bookshelves lined both side walls, stacked haphazardly with books thin and thick. Papers flowed over piles on the floor and the desk. A placard on the desk, nearly buried by debris, said his name was Ted Keily.

I told him about the body that had been found outside, and asked if he'd heard anything.

He shook his head. “We had a little party here earlier this afternoon,” he said. “I'm afraid I had too much to drink, and didn't feel up to driving home, so I took a nap while I was waiting for any late papers. I had just woken up when I heard you calling.”

“May I show you a picture of the man we found?” He nodded, then caught his breath as he looked.

“I do know him, but I'm not sure of his name,” he said. “He's a book buyer.” He turned to his desk drawer and started fishing around. “I have his card here somewhere.”

“What do you mean by book buyer?” I asked, as he bent his shaggy white-haired head over the drawer.

“The textbook reps send us dozens of books every year, trying to convince us to select them for our courses,” he said. “Book buyers come around and buy them from us for a few bucks, then resell them to wholesalers—which eventually sell them to stores that cater to students, or to used book stores, or web sites.”

He looked up. “Here are the cards. There are four buyers who come around regularly—but clearly your victim isn't Luisa Santa Maria or Nguyen Giap. Your man is either Jerry Epworth or Rich Figueroa.”

Keily handed me the two cards. “May I keep these?”

“Certainly. The one who is alive will come by again at the beginning of the year with another card, and the one who isn't…” He shrugged.

“Can you tell me anything about him?” I asked. “Beyond the fact that he was a book buyer?”

“We don't get into personal conversations much,” he said. “I had the feeling he was kind of simple, you know? Not necessarily stupid—perhaps just naïve. You couldn't have a conversation with him about the books—they were just inventory to him.”

“You said there was a party earlier?”

“One of the aforementioned textbook reps,” he said. “Brought us pizza and beer, by way of a Christmas party. We ate and drank in the faculty lounge. When I got sleepy and retired back here, there were still a few people left, but I'm sure they're gone by now.”

I got the details he could provide—names of those who had attended the party, along with their home addresses and phone numbers. “Conveniently, I have the department directory here somewhere,” he said. After shuffling through papers for a while, he found it. “Take it,” he said. “I'll have the secretary run me a new one in January.” He also found the card for the textbook rep who'd thrown the party, a man named Miller Stevenson, which he said I could keep as well.

I thanked Keily and stood to leave. “Sad, isn't it?” he asked. “I mean, simple or not, the poor man had a right to live. And just before the holidays, too.” He paused. “Reminds me of a quotation,” he said. “I'm sure I've got it here somewhere.”

I looked at my watch. “Wish I could stay to hear that, sir,” I said. “Unfortunately, I've got a lot of people to call. Thanks for your help.”

The headquarters for the Honolulu Police Department is located on South Beretania Street downtown, and it was in full holiday mode by the time I got back to my desk. Little white lights in the palm trees outside, an inflatable Santa in board shorts and flower lei, miniature Christmas trees on a number of desks and tables. There was a radio going somewhere in the background, Jimmy Buffett's version of “Mele Kalikimaka” playing. Man, I hate that song.

And I really hate a murder at Christmas time. It's hard enough to talk to the next of kin the rest of the year—but to know you've ruined their holidays, now and probably for years to come—that's worse.

Fortunately, Rich Figueroa answered his phone quickly, verifying that he was indeed very alive. Just to be sure, I asked what color hair he had. “Black. Why?”

I explained about the murder. “Our victim's hair was a kind of dirty blonde,” I said. “Just wanted to make sure I was still on the right track.”

“Jerry Epworth has dirty blonde hair,” Figueroa said.

“You know him?”

“Just to say hello,” he said. “Sometimes our paths cross on a campus somewhere.” He filled me in on some more of the details of the book buying business. “Jerry carrying any cash?” he asked.

“No wallet, no cash or ID,” I said.

“I usually carry a couple hundred bucks cash with me all the time,” Figueroa said. “You run across a professor with books to sell, he's not going to take American Express.”

I wrote Motive = Robbery? on the pad in front of me, and thanked Rich Figueroa for his time.

Epworth's card only had his name, the words “Book Buyer” and a cell phone number. The number rang once and voice mail picked up. I left a message, asking anyone who retrieved the message to call me at the station, and hung up.

It took a couple of minutes, but I was finally able to pull up the address Epworth had used on his driver's license. There was no phone number listed at that address, though, so I figured I had to drive out there. But hell, I was on duty til midnight.

First, though, I started calling Ted Keily's colleagues. One by one, they confirmed what he had said. There had been a party, sponsored by Miller Stevenson, and most of the department had left the building by two p.m. Keily had a reputation as a cat napper; no one was surprised that he'd hung around, especially as he often accepted late papers, and no one knew of anything that connected Jerry Epworth—if indeed that's who our dead man was—to Keily or anyone else in the department, other than the occasional commercial transaction.

Finally, around eight o'clock, after I couldn't delay any longer, I drove to Epworth's address in Pearl City—which not surprisingly is on the same bay as Pearl Harbor. It was a non-descript apartment building, three stories and a little patch of grass out front guarded by a single tall palm tree. No one had bothered to decorate for the holidays, though a few other homes in the area were lit up with lights and little dioramas of Santa, reindeer and elves.

I could never relate to the traditional Santa Claus when I was a kid. I didn't know from snow and reindeer and coats with fur collars. My image was an island Santa, a big fat jolly guy like the ones who rent surfboards out on Waikiki. My Santa wore board shorts and drove a team of dolphins. My Christmas carols all featured slack-key guitar and island melodies, and when I went to the mainland for college and saw the Santa the rest of the country knew he seemed like a foreign creature.

The door to the building lobby was unlocked, and on the mailbox for apartment 3-D I saw the name Stevenson, with “Epworth” scrawled next to it in pencil. I climbed the stairs and knocked.

The man who answered the door was haole, in his early thirties, wearing a t-shirt that read “So many books, so little time.” He had tousled brown hair, and he looked like he'd had a bad day. I showed him my badge and asked his name.

“Miller Stevenson,” he said.

It took a minute for my brain to connect the dots. “The textbook rep?” I said.

He nodded. “What's this about?”

“May I come in?”

“Sure.” He stepped back to let me into the apartment, which had a kind of Zen simplicity to it—a few knockoffs of famous pieces of furniture, simple lines and solid colors. The simplicity of the décor was marred, though, by the books—books on shelves, books spilling out of boxes, books covering the coffee table and piled in teetering stacks along one wall. A Santa hat similar to the one Jerry Epworth had been wearing was tossed on the dining room table, next to a backpack a laptop computer, and a pile of red and green plastic leis.

“Do you recognize this man?” I asked, showing him the Polaroid once he had closed the door behind me.

His face paled, and he swallowed hard. “It's—Jerry,” he said. “Jerry Epworth. My roommate.”

“Why don't we sit down,” I said gently, motioning him to the sofa. I sat across from him.

“What happened?” Stevenson asked.

I explained how Epworth's body had been found. “When was the last time you saw him?” I asked.

“This morning,” he said. “He wanted to get an early start, catching professors before they left for the holidays. He hoped that some people who wouldn't normally deal with him might need money for last minute Christmas shopping.”

“Did he usually carry a lot of cash with him?”

Stevenson nodded. “At least two or three hundred. He said he was going to hit the ATM on his way to UH.”

I gradually drew information out of him. Epworth's plan had been to spend the day at UH, traveling from one office building to the next. He dragged around a rolling suitcase behind him, stashing the books he bought inside, periodically dropping them at his car. I got the make and model of Epworth's car and made a note ask patrol to see if it was still in the parking lot at HAC.

I looked around. “These books all Jerry's?”

“The ones along the wall are texts, ones Jerry was going to wholesale just before school starts in January. Everything else is either from my publisher or my own collection.”

We talked some more about the book business—that lots of people had reason to believe Jerry would be carrying cash, that his unassuming demeanor made him a target for crooks. He had been robbed once, leaving UH after dark one day, and after that he'd been much more careful.

“How about the two of you?” I asked. “You getting along?”

He shrugged. “As well as usual.”

I had the feeling that Epworth and Stevenson were more than just roommates, but I don't generally have a very good sense of what my friend Gunter calls gaydar—gay radar that lets gay men recognize each other. So I chose not to ask anything more. Besides, it looked like a robbery gone bad, in which case what Jerry and Miller got up to on their off time was nobody's business.

I got whatever information Stevenson had about Epworth's next of kin, and left, after telling him that I was sorry for his loss. Roommate or boyfriend, they had still had a relationship, and now it was gone.

The next day I subpoenaed Epworth's bank records and found he had indeed taken $400 out of an ATM that morning. Epworth's car was towed to the police lot, and an evidence tech and I looked it over. There were only a few books in the trunk, so it was likely he'd still had most of that cash by four o'clock in the afternoon.

I caught another homicide late that day, and worked that right up until Christmas Eve, when I finished my shift at midnight. It was too late to drive up to my parents' house in St. Louis Heights, and yet I was too worked up to head for home. So I found my way to the Rod and Reel Club, a gay bar just a few blocks from my apartment in Waikiki.

The celebration was well under way by the time I arrived. Shirtless muscle boys wearing too-tight shorts, plastic leis entwined with mistletoe, and little else, danced to a pounding beat on the patio. I made my way in to the bar, where I found my friend Gunter engaged in conversation with the bartender, Fred.

I kissed Gunter and wished him a Merry Christmas, then ordered my usual, a Longboard Lager. “What, no cute boy ready to unwrap under your tree tomorrow morning?” I asked.

“The night is still young,” Gunter said. “And so am I.”

He leaned over. “I've got my eye on that honey in the corner—the one in the Santa hat.”

I looked over at where he was pointing, and it took me a moment in the dim light to recognize Miller Stevenson. So my gaydar had been working, after all. And knowing that, I wondered if the case really had been more than just a simple robbery. “I'd stay away from him if I were you,” I said. “His last boyfriend ended up dead.”

“I wish you'd stop bringing your work home with you,” Gunter said. “You do have a way of wilting a boy's hard-on.”

“Gunter, you say the sweetest things,” I said.

“So what was it?” he asked, leaning in close to me. “A little S & M gone too far? Some auto-eroticism, perhaps?”

“Nothing so sexy. Robbery.”

“I thought there was something tormented-looking about him,” Gunter said. “Stupid me, I always find that sort of thing sexy.”

I looked over at Miller Stevenson. He did look sort of tormented. “Maybe I should offer him a little comfort and joy,” I said.

“Comfort and interrogation, more likely,” Gunter said. A pair of sweaty muscle boys entered from the dance floor, and one of them caught his eye and smiled. “You go ahead,” he said, nudging me. “I think I've found a new present I'd like to unwrap.”

I carried my beer over to where Stevenson sat, leaning against the wall at the end of the bar. “Howzit,” I said.

“I thought I recognized you,” he said. “You're the gay cop.”

“So you could have told me Jerry was more than your roommate.”

“It's a habit,” he said. “You know how it is. What I do in my bedroom is my business.”

“In a murder case, sometimes your business becomes police business,” I said.

“So what, I was supposed to tell you everything about him? That he could be a whiny little shit?” Stevenson asked. From the slight slur to his words, I could tell the beer he was holding wasn't his first.

I nodded. “Pretty much. Anything you tell me stays in confidence, you know, unless it's relevant.”

“I don't know what I can tell you. We dated for about six months, and then his lease ran out and he moved in with me.”

“Did you set him up as a book buyer?”

He nodded. “Not that he was grateful, you understand. I mean, Christ, the prick never even finished college, and he thought he should be rich, just because he had a sweet little ass and he could suck dick like a Hoover.”

I took a draw from my beer, giving Miller a chance to think. “He treated you like his sugar daddy?”

“You bet. I bought him that car, you know. And the laptop he carried around with him.”

“He didn't appreciate it, did he?”

“As if.”

“I'll bet you bought him a gun, too, to protect himself in case someone tried to rob him again.”

“I bought everything. The only thing Jerry ever bought was dope, booze and poppers.”

I racked my brain. It was late, and I struggled to remember the details of the autopsy. The medical examiner had indicated the bullets that killed Jerry Epworth had come from a 9 millimeter.

“A Glock's good for that purpose,” I said. “Small, lightweight. But it packs a wallop.”

“Yeah, that's what the guy at the gun shop said. He told Jerry he ought to go out to the range, get comfortable with it. But as usual, he couldn't be bothered.”

“I'll bet you knew how to handle it, though. You're that kind of guy. The one who keeps track of all the pieces.”

He nodded. “Yeah, that's me, all right.” He drained the last of his beer.

“What did you do with the gun?”

“Threw it in the ocean. Off Queen's Surf. That's where we met, you know.” He didn't seem to be paying attention to what he'd said—he just kept trying to get Fred's attention.

Queen's Surf was the gay beach in Waikiki, a narrow strip of sand next to the aquarium. “Why did you do it?” I asked.

“He was pressuring me to order books and hand them over to him,” he said, turning back to me. “He was tired of going around to the professors. Some of them are pretty rude to the book buyers. A couple even have these decals on the door, that they don't sell books.” He gave a half laugh. “My publisher actually makes those up, and I send them out,” he said. “That really pissed Jerry off.”

“Did you know he was going to be up at HAC?”

He nodded. “He knew I was hosting that party, that I was bringing books up to give to all the faculty. He caught me as I was leaving Reese Hall, wanted me to give him all the books I hadn't passed out. We argued.”

“How'd the gun figure into it?”

“He was such an idiot. He kept the gun in a pouch on the outside of his backpack. I just finally had enough, you know? I couldn't take any more. So I reached down, grabbed the gun, and shot him. He had the dumbest look on his face.”

He looked down, remembered that his beer was empty, and went to raise his hand to Fred for another. “I think you're done,” I said. “Come on down to the station with me, Santa. I don't think you'll be making it back to the North Pole this year.”

There was no cute guy waiting under my tree for me to unwrap when I finally made it back home as the sun was rising on another Honolulu Christmas. But sometimes, solving a case is just as good.

END

"Neil Plakcy is the author of Mahu, a Kimo Kanapa'aka mystery novel published by Haworth Press in 2005. Read more about Kimo at http://www.mahubooks.com ."