Off the Grid, page 12
“Oh, yes,” Betsy interrupted. “Yes, that bodybuilder fellow Howie and Michael and, well, there were others. It was, you know, like one of those doors that go round and round.” She made a twirling gesture with her finger.
Koa suppressed a smile. Betsy didn’t even do a good job of pretending to be shocked. “Michael?”
“Michael Olina. She spent a lot of time, a lot of time at Michael’s. He’s a glassblower. Really nice work. I mean, really nice.”
“Where’s Michael’s?”
“On the road, back past the park.”
“And Gwendolyn spent time there?”
“Oh yes, yes. I mean, she hung out there most days, hours and hours.” Betsy covered her mouth. “Gwendolyn was very attractive, and, I mean, well, Michael has a reputation. And he’s married, too.” She shook her head in disapproval.
“Anything more specific?” Koa wanted hard facts and guessed she had a basis for her suspicions. In his experience women’s intuition was more fact than guesswork.
“Well, once, I mean, when I walked into Michael’s place they were … he had his hands on her … her body, and they were, you know, embracing. Yin and yang.” This time, Betsy’s hand made it only halfway up to her face. “There. I said it.”
* * *
Koa had seen the signs for Michael’s on the highway and had no trouble finding the place. He parked next to two other cars and entered a small warehouse building attached to what he assumed was Michael’s home. The front part served as an artist’s gallery. Elegantly shaped decorative bowls and vases in forest greens, burnt sienna, and yellow glass with irregular strands of copper, gold, and silver stood on shelves and display stands. Betsy was right: the pieces were stunning.
A well-outfitted glassblower’s workshop occupied the back of the building, cordoned off from the showroom with a purple plastic chain. A handsome, muscular man, wearing goggles and a leather apron over a bare chest and shorts, stood in front of a furnace. As Koa watched, he used both hands on a long tube to gather a blob of glass from a vat in the furnace. He rotated the tube, moving it slowly in and out of the furnace, as he gathered more glass and began to shape it into a vase. Sweat drenched his face.
He pulled the glass from the furnace and rolled it on a steel-topped table, beginning to turn the blob into a cylinder. Then, it went back into the furnace to continue the gather. So intensely did the man attend to his craft that Koa went unnoticed.
A large garage door stood open at the left end of the workshop, presumably for shipping and receiving, guarded on one side by a bench with bubble wrap, tape, and other shipping supplies, and on the other side by a pile of broken crates and cardboard boxes. Koa guessed the broken crates once held supplies. Chinese characters caught his eye, and he spotted several wooden boxes bearing markings from the Dowlong Artistic Supply Company in Hong Kong, China.
A second man entered the workroom and walked over to Koa to introduce himself as Kaha‘i, Michael’s second. Koa asked to speak to Michael. Kaha‘i exchanged words with his boss, then took over the blow tube. Michael removed his goggles and approached Koa.
“Chief Detective Koa Kāne.” Koa extended a hand. “I’m here about Gwendolyn Campbell.”
Michael wiped his sweaty palm on his shorts before shaking hands. “Damn shame about the accident.”
“Yes.” Koa took in the man’s high cheekbones, straight nose, and easy smile. Michael’s arms and chest were ripped. He hadn’t developed those muscles handling glassblower’s tools. Betsy was right. He could see how women might be attracted to this man. Thinking back to Howie, the bodybuilder, he guessed Gwendolyn Campbell had a fondness for muscular men. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Not much.”
“Oh, I thought you knew her pretty well,” Koa said. Although surprised by Michael’s lack of knowledge, he was skilled at hiding his reactions and remained poker-faced.
A look of concern clouded Michael’s face. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“She didn’t hang around your shop?”
“She came in here a couple of times, but I didn’t really know her.”
It wasn’t what Koa expected. Tolman had remembered seeing Gwendolyn’s car going toward this glassblower’s place “a bunch of times,” and Betsy Galant had said Gwendolyn had spent “a lot of time at Michael’s.” Still, Koa let the interview develop at its own pace. He wanted to get a feel for this man before he started pushing. “Any observations might help, Michael.”
“I’m not your source.”
An attractive blond entered the shop and approached them. “Who’s the handsome stranger?” She ran a hand through her hair. Koa noticed a wedding band set next to a diamond engagement ring. Koa figured she must be the reason for Michael’s reticence to talk about Gwendolyn.
“He’s a cop, Marcia, here about that woman who died in the car accident.” The pair exchanged a look, communicating some message that escaped Koa, but he caught the odd use of “that woman” and tried to parse its significance. “This is my wife, Marcia.”
“Mrs. Olina,” Koa acknowledged her, “I am looking for information about Gwendolyn.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that woman,” Marcia said with a flip of her hair. No love lost there, Koa thought. Betsy Galant was probably right about Michael’s affair with Gwendolyn. And not surprisingly, Mrs. Olina didn’t like “that woman.”
Michael and Marcia plainly knew things they weren’t willing to share, and Koa decided on an alternative approach. Promising to return, he left the shop, taking note of the license numbers on the two cars parked outside Michael’s shop. One license plate bore a “combat veteran” designation. The county reserved those plates for owners who’d served in the armed forces during hostilities. A call to Sergeant Basa confirmed the other plate belonged to Michael’s assistant, Kaha‘i. Thirty seconds later, Koa had a text from Basa with Kaha‘i’s home address.
Koa visited Kaha‘i that evening. Olina’s assistant lived alone in a tiny house on the outskirts of Volcano Village. Kaha‘i answered Koa’s knock.
“Hello. What can I do for you?”
“We need to have a chat. Want to invite me in?”
Kaha‘i stepped back, and Koa entered a room sparsely furnished with packing crates from Michael’s workshop. Koa noted the Chinese markings he’d seen earlier. Elegant glass bowls and vases like those in Michael’s showroom seemed out of place on packing boxes. The glass vessels, Koa noticed, had odd misshapen characters. Seconds, or perhaps thirds—mistakes from the glass shop, he surmised, although they radiated their own unique beauty—like Japanese pottery deliberately misshapen to enhance its appeal.
Kaha‘i, a large Hawaiian man with bands of geometric tattoos around his neck and upper arms, sat on a green futon opposite Koa with a quizzical look. “What’s this all about?”
Koa came to the point. “Did you know Gwendolyn Campbell?”
“The lady in the accident. Sure, I knew her.” Kaha‘i’s widely spaced eyes met Koa’s gaze with disarming directness. “She hung around the shop most every day.”
“And her relationship with Michael?”
Alarm registered in Kaha‘i’s eyes. “Hey. You’re not going to get me in trouble with Michael, are you? I need that job.”
“This is between us. It won’t get back to Michael,” Koa reassured him.
Kaha‘i hesitated. “Okay. Well, at first it was just business, but then, you know, it became something else.”
“Business?” Koa leaned forward. “What kind of business?”
“I don’t really know. At first, she came in for the packages.”
Kaha‘i had Koa’s full attention. “Packages?”
“Small boxes, wrapped in newspaper, like the other packing material in the shipments.”
“I don’t understand. What packing material? Give me some background.”
“Okay. You see, Michael uses rare earth metals in his glass, stuff with names like lanthanum and cerium. That’s what gives his glass pieces their metallic colors and makes them so popular. He gets the metals from China. It’s the world’s biggest supplier of rare earths. The shipments come in once or twice a month in crates like the one you’re sitting on, but the Chinese don’t use regular packing material. They use this crazy foam. It falls apart, so they wrap the foam packing material in newspapers, Chinese newspapers.”
“And there were boxes for Gwendolyn in these shipments?”
“Right. There’d be a box in the shipment. She’d come by the shop, and Michael would give her the box.”
“What was in these boxes?” The interview had developed a rhythm, as many successful interviews did, where the questions and answers flowed as the witness talked naturally.
“I’ve no idea. Michael wouldn’t let me touch them. I’d pry the tops off, but he insisted on unpacking the crates himself.”
“How big? How big were these boxes?”
“About the size of a Kleenex box, the family size.”
“How heavy?”
“I don’t know. I never held one, but it wasn’t like lead or anything, the way he handed them to Gwendolyn.”
Curiouser and curiouser. “How often did these boxes come?”
“I didn’t keep a calendar or anything, but probably about once a month.”
“Did Michael ever open any of them?”
“I think so, but I’m not positive. I didn’t see him with the box open, but one day I went into his office, and it looked like he was just finishing rewrapping the box. I caught him with kind of a funny look on his face. I guessed he’d opened it.”
“You said the relationship developed into something else—”
“Yeah, well, she was pretty hot. She knew it, really flaunted it, and Michael has a wandering eye. They spent a lot of time in his office, and they weren’t blowing glass.” He let out an awkward laugh. Koa had a good idea what kind of blowing had gone on.
“Michael’s wife know?”
“Yeah, she knew.”
“About the packages or the affair?”
“Both. I heard them talking about the packages, and she knew Michael chased skirts. Gwendolyn wasn’t his virgin foray.”
Koa remembered the combat veteran designation on one of the license plates outside Michael’s. “Michael ex-military?”
“Yeah, some kind of Special Forces tour in Kosovo.”
* * *
After leaving Kaha‘i, Koa got down to business. He instructed Sergeant Basa to bring Michael Olina into the station. They left the glassblower alone in an interrogation room for forty-five minutes before Koa entered and sat opposite him with Piki at the end of the table. Koa liked to have a second person in his interrogations in case his subjects tried to claim police misconduct. Besides, Piki needed the training.
Koa began by reading Michael his Miranda rights, and watched expressions of shock, consternation, and fear float across the artist’s face. “You lied to me.” Koa hit him in a stern voice. “Obstruction of a police murder investigation is a felony.”
“Gwendolyn was murdered?” Michael half-rose from his chair.
“Yeah, she was murdered.”
“Oh, my God. That’s awful.”
Koa glared at the man. Koa had shaken him.
“Maybe I—I should call a lawyer.”
Koa forced a smile, but his tone remained frosty. “We can proceed formally, if you wish.”
“What’d ya mean?”
“It means I can file charges and deal with your lawyer. Or,” he added after a pause, “you can answer my questions informally.”
“And you won’t charge me.” Michael took the bait like a pueo, a Hawaiian owl, swooping in to pick up a rodent.
“That depends on what you have to say.”
Michael considered his predicament for a long moment. “Okay, ask your questions.”
“You lied to me once. Do so again at your peril. Understand?”
“Yeah, I understand. I haven’t done anything.”
“Tell me about Gwendolyn.”
“Okay, she came on to me, and I screwed her.” Michael stared at the table. “I just didn’t want my wife to know.”
“How charming, but I’m more interested in your business relationship with her.”
Michael appeared puzzled. “Business relationship?”
“The packages—”
“How?”
Koa smiled inwardly. If a witness thought you knew more than you did, they became wary of getting caught in a lie. “Never mind how I know. Just tell me about the arrangement.”
“Dates back more than a dozen years. She knew I got rare earth shipments from China and wanted to piggyback. You know, use the shipments for certain packages. She offered me five hundred bucks a pop for each delivery.” He paused, trying to explain himself. “You know how many hours I have to sweat in front of that furnace to make that kind of money?”
“Go on.”
“She said she had money coming from her family in China. They couldn’t send it the normal way ’cause of Chinese government exchange controls. I made her promise she wasn’t shipping drugs. I didn’t want to get involved in that. She promised no contraband, so I agreed. The boxes came every month, wrapped up with the rest of the packing material, and I gave them to her. Pretty simple, really.”
“What was in the packages?”
Michael hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“I’m betting you do. Like I said, we can do this the formal way if you’re not going to cooperate fully.”
Michael looked down at the table, as though the answer might be printed there. “I wasn’t supposed to look.”
“But you did look, didn’t you?” Koa pushed.
“Yeah, once. Just once. It was a lot of freaking money—hundred-dollar bills in bands, five bundles, fifty K, can you believe it?”
The amount surprised Koa. Fifty thousand a month? That was $600,000 a year.
“Who was paying her?”
“She said it was her family.”
“And you believed that?”
“Hell. I was getting half a grand a month for doin’ nothing. I didn’t really care.”
That had a ring of truth. A former Special Forces guy like Olina was smart enough to understand that too much knowledge could boomerang. Koa shifted gears. “Where’d you first meet her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She didn’t just walk into your shop and ask you to be her delivery boy. How’d she know you?”
Again, Michael paused. “We met overseas while I was on active duty after my reserve unit got called up.”
“Where overseas?”
Again, Michael hesitated, and Koa sensed he might not answer. Finally, he said, “Kosovo.”
“What was she doing in Kosovo?”
Michael shook his head.
According to Kaha‘i, Michael had been Special Forces. “You were military?”
“SEALS. I was a Navy SEAL and then stayed in the reserves.”
“And she was?” Koa pressed.
“It’s classified.”
Koa knew he was going out on a limb, but he nevertheless tried. “Not anymore it’s not, not in my murder investigation.”
Yet he’d come up against the witness’s red line. “I’m not going to jail for your murder investigation.”
Koa swore. He’d been on a roll. Pixels had come alive giving him the barest glimmer of a picture before Olina’s hard stop. All investigations had moments like that, but he hated the frustration and wanted to ring Olina’s neck.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
KOA PARKED HIS car near Wailoa Park, on the Hilo waterfront, where the Nihoa rally would be held in two days. Chief Lannua had instructed all his officers, even detectives and administrative personnel, to increase their presence on the streets, keeping an eye on the potentially volatile situation in advance of the Nihoa rally and reporting trouble.
Over a hundred public school teachers were marching with anti-Nihoa placards: “Save Public Schools,” “Respect Our Teachers,” and “Reject Racial Politics.” Across the park, more than five hundred Nihoa supporters paraded. Their placards read: “Quality Education First,” “Justice for Native Hawaiians,” and, most powerfully of all, “Reduce Government Waste … Cut Taxes.”
Koa shook his head at the deceptive simplicity of the messages as he recalled Wailoa Park’s violent history. Just a few feet above sea level, it had been home to Shinmachi, Hilo’s Japanese community. Tsunamis had destroyed Shinmachi twice, once in 1946 when 159 people died and again in 1960 when a wall of water thirty-five feet high flooded most of downtown Hilo, killing sixty-one residents. After the second disaster, the city had turned the area into a park. Koa never walked its paths without thinking of the people who had died there. Suddenly, he had a bad feeling about the political rally.
He wandered through tree-lined paths and across its grassy fields, listening to various factions rally their supporters. His concern grew rapidly. In the shade of an old banyan tree, a crowd of public employees opposed to cuts in government surrounded a speaker, screaming over a megaphone. Three or four other groups scattered around the park held their own rallies. Each had its own agenda, with compromise invisible.
Eventually, Koa noticed a heavyset, red-haired man on a soapbox. The man’s crudely hand-lettered “Kill the Sovereignty Movement” placard caught Koa’s eye. The word “KILL” was ten times larger than the other words. A crowd of a couple dozen around the speaker was mostly hoales. Several were shabbily dressed and unshaven, and Koa guessed most came from poorer communities.
The speaker, also a haole, was big, like Sergeant Basa, but fair-skinned beneath a freckled face reddened by the sun and his palpable anger. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, but his desert combat boots made Koa think he might be a veteran. Koa, trained to take in details that others missed, noticed the man’s hands. They were covered with pale-colored blisters or boils, almost as though the man had contracted leprosy.
The man pumped his sign up and down as he screamed through a megaphone: “Nāinoa will turn back the clock. Native Hawaiians will take our homes. He must be stopped.” His mouth took on a boar-like snarl that reminded Koa of other political demagogues. “Kill the sovereignty movement! KILL the sovereignty movement!” the man chanted. “Nāinoa must be stopped!” The man seemed to draw energy from the spectators, who pumped fists in the air and yelled, “Right on, brah.”
