= HIGHWAY 7
  A Kay Yoshinobu Mystery 
  by John A. Broussard


Kay Yoshinobu slipped into the nearly empty courtroom and sat beside Sidney Chu, her partner in their Hawaii law firm. 

"What's up?" she asked.

Sid looked glum. "The clerk just came out to tell me it would be another few minutes before the judge will be out. My guess is he's taking a nap. And all I want is two minutes of his time. The prosecutor has already stipulated to a continuance, but Schreiber still insists I show up to set the calendar."

His attention shifted to Kay. "What are you doing here? You don't have any appearances today."

"New case." Kay pulled a copy of a police report from a manila folder. "Not terribly exciting, but different." She began to read, "Vandalism, destruction of state property, marijuana possession." 

"Sounds like someone went on a rampage. What did they do? Get stoned and try to burn down the courthouse?"

"Nothing that dramatic, but bad enough. Sand in the fuel tanks of some equipment they're using over at the new highway-over a dozen trucks, bulldozers and what not. Some belong to the State. The rest are the contractor's. The Highway Department is saying the damage is going to run to over forty thousand dollars, but that's probably a wild exaggeration. And it wasn't a 'they,' just a lone woman." Kay flipped over the top sheet of the report. "Name's Lily Stone. She hasn't even had a bail hearing yet."

At that moment, the court clerk came out to announce that the judge had canceled the remainder of the day's hearings. No reason given.

Sid snorted as they left. "Long nap."

"How about coming with me to the station to interview Lily?"

Sid shrugged. "Why not? The morning's shot anyway."

Even Sid, who tended to be skeptical of clients' stories, had to admit after the interview that Lily didn't seem much like a vengeful destroyer of vehicles and earth-moving equipment. 

She was a anorexic-looking creature, only four-ten or so, and certainly not weighing much over eighty pounds. Considering her small frame, the ritual of bringing her into the interrogation room, manacled hand and foot - with a chain connecting the cuffs through a metal belt - seemed especially absurd.

Kay introduced herself as her court-appointed attorney and then also introduced Sid. Lily looked terrified, and Kay decided the best thing to do was to get her talking. "I have a copy of the police report and your statement, but I'd like to hear it again in your own words. First, though, did you ask for an attorney when you were arrested?"

Lily shook her head. There was a long pause before she said, in a high-pitched, girlish voice, "I didn't think I needed one. It was like a mistake. I didn't do any of the things they said I did. And they had to vacuum my fanny pack to find any pakalolo. There couldn't have been anything but a couple of specks there, cuz I stopped smoking pot months ago."

"OK," Kay said, soothingly. "Let's start at the beginning. According to the report, you were at the construction site. Why?"

"Well, it's a long story."

"That's all right. We have all morning."

"It all goes back to the Queen Emma Mall. You know about that, don't you?"

Kay and Sid both nodded. It wouldn't have been easy to find a resident on the island of Elima who didn't know about it. The project, located on the new Highway 7, had been on the books for almost five years and had finally received all of its approvals. Now the developer was racing to have the Mall completed by the time the State finished construction of the highway.

"We weren't opposed to the Mall, but when the State wanted to put the road right through Puulani Heiau-that's when we turned out in protest."

"We?" Kay asked.

"Yeah. A bunch of Hawaiians and me and my boyfriend and some others. The Hawaiians formed the Puulani Protection Association and took the State to court. The Mall developer, Milton Fordyce, got into it too. You should have heard him. He kept saying the heiau was nothing but a bunch of rocks. Boy! Was he ever mad at us! Called us crazy activists and a lot worse than that. Said we were deliberately trying to prevent the Mall from being built, when we weren't opposed to it at all. In fact, most of the Hawaiians wanted it because of the jobs. They just didn't want the road to, like, destroy the heiau or anything like that.

"Anyway, the lawyer for the PPA was able to prove it was a sacred site, and he finally got the State to agree to move the right of way."

"So what was the reaction of the PPA?"

"They thought that was just great. That's what's so silly about all this. Why would I have wanted to stop the road construction? We won what we wanted in court."

Kay gently moved Lily on to the more immediate happenings. "According to the report, you were stopped by the police at the construction site and you said you were meeting someone there."

"That's right. That's what I told them. And it's true. I was supposed to meet Clyde Kealoha there. He's President of PPA. He sent Jerry a note, asking to meet him there. Only Jerry twisted his ankle, so..."

Kay, who had been jotting notes on a legal pad, interrupted. "Wait a minute. Slow down. Who's Jerry?"

"Oh, Jerry's my boyfriend. Jerry Francisco. I'm living at his apartment."

"And you received a note from Clyde to meet you at the construction site?" Kay sounded skeptical.

"Well, like I said, the note wasn't to me. It was to Jerry. And since Jerry'd twisted his ankle real bad, he couldn't go. But he figured one of us should be there, because Clyde's been real concerned about the project. We figured something might have gone wrong. You know, like with the plans to move that section of the road."

"Didn't he think it was kind of strange for Clyde to write a note instead of phoning."

For the first time in the interview, Lily's face went from concerned to something resembling a smile. "The apartment house we live in is just rooms. No one there's got a phone. We use the pay phone on the corner if we need to make a call." She added, as though surprised that she needed to make the point to Kay, "Everyone who knows us knows that." 

Deciding this was a sufficient glimpse into Lily's lifestyle, Kay went on, "So you went alone?"

Lily nodded. "I waited around a few minutes for Clyde. I was actually a little early. That was when the patrol car drove up, and the cops started to question me. They took down my name and address. But it wasn't until the next day, sometime around noon, that they came by the apartment and arrested me."

The rest of the interview was a preparation for the bail hearing. Kay pointed out that Lily needed something more than a live-in arrangement with a boyfriend to convince the court she wouldn't jump bail. Reluctantly, Lily admitted to having an aunt on the island who would be willing to take her in until the trial. Kay thought that would make reasonable bail a possibility, but gave Lily no promises.

"What do you think?" Kay asked Sid as they were walking back to the office. 

"It's a frame-up. Her boyfriend's getting tired of her, so he did the dirty work and sent her out to take the blame."

Kay laughed. "For you, that's pretty devious thinking. But you do agree that she's probably innocent?"

Sid shrugged. "I doubt that she did it alone, anyway. She might have been with someone else, maybe that Clyde, and is covering for him."

"Whatever. I'm convinced she didn't do it, and the best way to prove it is to find whoever did do it."

"Oh, oh! Here we go again. Special investigator Yoshinobu hot on the trail. You going to have the sand tested and trace it back to the source?"

"Not on a court-appointed attorney's budget, though that's not a bad idea. Maybe I'll petition Judge Schreiber for the money to do a test. Meanwhile, I am going to go to the construction site and talk to the foreman. And I'm definitely going to interview Jerry. Clyde, too. The police report says someone called in about a loiterer around the construction site. Unfortunately, there's no tape recording of the call, since it didn't come in on 911. But it was a man who made the call, and he didn't identify himself. Now, that's someone I'd like to interview. About all he said was that there was someone roaming around the site who looked suspicious."

"A man or woman?"

"He said he couldn't tell for sure, because it was dark by then, but he thought it was a man."

"See. I told you. It was a frame-up. I'm betting on the boyfriend."

"So, if he was the one who made the call, why didn't he tell the police it was a woman prowling around?"

Sid mulled that one over for a moment, then answered, "A red herring."

Kay guffawed.

The bail hearing went well. An added bonus was the presence of Lily's boyfriend, who hobbled in on a pair of crutches. Kay took a moment to question him in the hall outside the courtroom. Jerry claimed to be "Happy to help," but he turned out to be less than helpful.

Yes, he'd received a note from Clyde. It had been slipped under the door of their apartment when they weren't home. Yes, it had asked him to be at the site at nine that evening. Yes, the handwriting had looked like Clyde's. No, he couldn't be positive. No, he hadn't kept the note.

Lily filled in some of the blanks when Jerry thumped his way off to the men's room. "I never saw the note. I was out buying groceries. Jerry just said it sounded real important, but by then his ankle was hurting so bad he knew he wouldn't be able to go. That's when he asked me to go instead."

"Did Jerry go to the doctor about his ankle?"

"Huh-uh. He hates doctors."

"Did you get a look at his ankle?"

Lily seemed puzzled by the question, then shook her head. "Jerry doesn't like to be fussed over when he's not feeling well. He just goes to bed and looks miserable. Why you asking?"

"It could be broken."

"Oh no. He can walk on it. And it's much better today." As she said that, Kay saw Jerry making his way back from the men's room, seemingly in considerable pain.

After parting from the pair, Kay went on to visit the site. She found the foreman, a big barrel-chested Portuguese called Manuel Gomes. He agreed to talk to Kay, but made no secret of his opinion of Lily. As far as he was concerned, she was guilty, and he denounced her bitterly.

"This is the second day we've spent repairing these rigs," he waved a hand at the mass of equipment lining the road. "We just now got some of them going, and we have to be finished by the first. We'll have to work our tails off to get up to schedule. That bitch even managed to get some sand into the hydraulic lines."

"How much sand did you find in the fuel?"

"Hell, I don't know. It only takes a handful to gum up the works, but she put in a lot more than that. I can show you what we've flushed out so far, but it's all mixed with oil and gas. Maybe two or three buckets full."

"How much would that much sand weigh?"

Manuel seemed taken aback by the question, then said, "Fifty-sixty pounds, I suppose. Maybe more. What difference does that make?"

"I was wondering how it was brought here. Could you show me one of the tanks it was poured into? How about that one?" She pointed over to an enormous bulldozer.

Manuel's eyes narrowed. "You figuring she couldn't have done it by herself? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if she did have help. Those damn activists have already raised a lot of hell about this project; all I want is to get my job done and go on to the next one." As he spoke, he walked her over to the bulldozer and pointed out the cap on top of the equipment's huge fuel tank. The top of the tank was shoulder high on Kay's five-foot five. She reached out for the shiny black cap and tried unsuccessfully to twist it off.

Manuel laughed at her efforts, wrapped one of his enormous paws around the cap, tried to turn it, gave a grunt and put his other hand over the first one. Only after considerable effort did he manage to remove it.

Back at the office, Sid insisted that he had been convinced from the outset that Lily hadn't been the vandal.

"Sure," Kay agreed, "but will the judge be convinced?"

"That's damn good evidence. She looks like she'd have a tough time carrying a quart of milk home from the store, never mind hauling around fifty pounds of sand. And if you can get that foreman on the stand to testify about how hard it is to get the caps off the fuel tanks, that should go a long way toward convincing a judge, not to mention a jury. 

"Besides, it would have to take someone pretty knowledgeable about that kind of machinery to be able to get sand into the hydraulic system. I wouldn't even know where to start. But I do know some people who'd know. Aren't those workers getting a lot of overtime for this repair work? Maybe one of them decided he needed some extra cash."

Kay grinned. "You're way behind, Sid. I already looked into that. They don't get overtime, just comp time. Which means that instead of a big paycheck, they just get to sit at home some other day. And you should have seen them out there crawling under those machines and getting all covered with oil; I'd bet they'd much rather be sitting on them, carving out the right of way."

"OK. I'll go back to Jerry. Did you check to see if he really got a note to go out to the site?"

Kay nodded. "I ran down Clyde, and he insists he never wrote the note, didn't know anything about it, would never have wanted to go out to the site, and certainly wouldn't have done any damage to the equipment, since the work there is fine with him. In other words, he denies everything."

"So there," Sid crowed. "Jerry's lying. There never was any note, he faked the sore ankle to get Lily out to the site, and then he called the police once she got there."

"You're assuming a lot, Sid. If Clyde didn't write a note, and I'm not certain he didn't, it doesn't mean that someone else didn't. That would have fit in with someone calling in and saying it was a man they saw at the site."

"Oh. You figure the guy who called in was the one who wrote the note, and he expected Jerry to be there. That's why he reported that it looked like a man."

"Right. And you're still just guessing that Jerry faked a sore ankle. On that score, and just in case you're right, I've persuaded Lily to nag him into going to a doctor. Maybe we'll get a definite answer about that, one way or the other. If he still refuses to go, I'll see if I can get a court order." 

"Phew. You're getting serious. What's next, in the meantime?"

"There were three houses along that re-alignment that were torn down to allow the bypass..."

"Hey! That could be it. A disgruntled landowner evicted from his property and taking revenge on the State."

"Exactly. The same person, an Elaine Okabayashi, owned all three houses. She's next on my list."

Mrs. Okabayashi seemed to be an even less likely prospect than Lily for the role of saboteur. Not only was she nearly as small as Lily, and about fifty years her senior, it also turned out that Mrs. Okabayashi was enormously pleased at the State's purchase of her houses.

"I couldn't believe what they offered to pay for them. Forty years ago, when Hideyo-that was my husband-bought those houses, they were offered to him for five thousand dollars. He was really smart about real estate and got them for fifteen hundred apiece. I thought he was paying too much at the time, but he rented two of them out without much trouble, and we lived in the third one.

"And, as long as he was alive, he did all the repair work. Yeah? But after he passed away, they really became a burden. Workers' wages are so high these days. I was actually thinking about selling them when the State made that offer. I couldn't believe it. I know property is worth so much more than when we bought, but it was ever so much more. More than enough to pay for this lovely apartment for the rest of my life. Yeah?"

Kay decided she had pretty much drained the well dry and rose to leave, thanking Mrs. Okabayashi for the tea and cookies. Her hostess was obviously reluctant to have her leave, following her out to the door and chatting as they went, with Kay only half listening.

"Who would have thought when the Queen Emma Mall was being proposed that it would make such a big change in my life? And, do you know, the developer was one of my renters twenty years ago. Yeah?"

Kay decided on the spot to stay a little longer.

"That's a twist," Sid commented an hour later when Kay gave him the details of her visit.

"She says that Milton Fordyce is a local boy. Used to be a building contractor right here in town. That was when he and his wife moved into one of her rental houses. They were there for almost two years. She says his wife took off with another man and moved to the Mainland. Actually, she considered Milton's wife to be a quiet, shy, mousy sort of thing - someone you would never expect to do such a thing."

"Still water runs deep, you know." 

"Oh, c'mon Sid, you can do better than that."

"When the cat's away, the mouse will play," Sid replied, grinning wildly.

In spite of herself, Kay had to smile, but then turned serious. "Mrs. Okabayashi says that Milton moved to Oahu shortly after his wife left him. That's where he became a major developer."

Sid's grin continued. "So now he's your prime suspect. He was so in love with the old homestead, and the fond memories of his life there, that he poured sand into the fuel tanks to keep it from being bulldozed."

Kay returned his grin. "I can't quite picture a big-shot developer like Milton Fordyce feeling sentimental about a house he'd rented for a couple of years-twenty years ago. But I did stumble across something else that I should have been aware of. Fordyce was so upset about the PPA's opposition to the original roadway that he sued for an injunction to keep the Department of Transportation from shifting this section of road to the new route."

"Why should he care? I can see why he objected to all the delay, but the new alignment doesn't affect access to the mall. What was his argument?"

"It would cost too much. He said he couldn't afford the extra impact fees that would be charged up to his development. Actually, there wasn't that much difference in cost. And he claimed that the re-alignment would delay the Mall opening. But he's about three months' behind in his completion date as it is, so I can't imagine why that would be such a big deal. His lawyer sounded pretty desperate. He even claimed that there was some kind of old Federal Road crossing the proposed road section, and that a Federal environmental impact statement would be needed before construction could continue. He could be right about that, though.

"Anyway, he couldn't convince the judge, so Fordyce has filed appeals. One, to overturn the original decision to shift the road section, and the other to force through that injunction. But he couldn't get that injunction in the meantime, and the work's going ahead."

"So what do you think his real reason is for fighting this road section?"

Kay looked thoughtful. "Maybe Lily had the answer. He really hated PPA and the other activists because of all the trouble they'd caused him by delaying the road building in the first place. Who knows, maybe he just wants to see that heiau destroyed to get even. Then again..." 

Kay paused. "There may be another reason. You may have been on to something when you said Fordyce didn't want to have the house torn down. He could have had something more substantial than a sentimental reason for wanting it left untouched. I think I'll call the Sergeant who's handling the case. He might be able to help me with that other reason."

"C'mon Sid," Kay said, the moment she hung up. "We're off to the building site. I think I know the answer."

"OK. Fill me in," Sid demanded, as they drove off to Highway 7. "What did the Sergeant tell you that set you off?"

"It's just a hunch," Kay answered. "Let's wait until we get there. I want to see how far the work's progressing. I especially want to see what they've done to that house site where Fordyce used to live."

The first worker they encountered was an angry Manuel Gomes standing at upturned ground next to the house site. "Damn! If anything else can go wrong, it will. So now one of our dozers uncovers a bunch of bones. Everything's going to have to stop until one of them university profs shows up to look at them. With our luck, it will probably turn out we're digging right in the middle of a Hawaiian cemetery and the bones are five hundred years old."

Kay shook her head. "I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I'd be willing to bet that those bones are only about twenty years old."


JOHN A. BROUSSARD was born in Cambridge, Mass in 1924 and graduated from Harvard and the University of Washington. He taught on the college level for twenty years and wrote non-fiction and reviews before turning to fiction; he's sold about sixty short stories recently. His first novel, a fantasy called MANA, will be published in November by Pulsar Books (ISBN 1-58697-206-5). You can find more information at www.fictionwritings.com. 

Copyright (c) 2000 John A. Broussard