An Old Friend

Because it was my body, I went in to watch it being cut up. We’d found him on the side of the road up on Round Top Drive.

When I walked into the lab, I was doubly surprised. First, Hank Lee, the longtime coroner was absent. Second, the woman performing the autopsy was an old classmate from Roosevelt High School.

Kathy Sakaguchi and I had graduated together. She’d gone off to school in California. I stayed home and attended Hawai‘i University. I’d known through mutual friends that she’d gone on to med school over there and had specialized in forensic medicine. I’d also heard she’d gotten married.

I don’t think anything when a doctor marries another doctor. Why not? But Kathy’s case was odd. I mean, she married her gynecologist. I don’t know about you, but the word ‘ethics’ leaps to mind. Another word is ‘creepy’.

How do you approach a woman when you’re in a situation like that? What, when you’ve got her on the table and you’re going in, you say, “Can I take you out sometime?” I can’t picture how you do it. Creepy. Absolutely creepy.

Now what she was doing in the coroner’s office here, as I say, surprised me. She had my guy on the slab and had already sliced him up some.

“Kathy Sakaguchi, is that you?”

She looked up. “David Chan.” She put down her scalpel. “Or should I address you as, what is it now, Chief of Police Chan?”

I laughed. “Just a Lieutenant. I seem stuck there.” Normally, I would have hugged her, but she was a bit too blood splattered at the moment.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“Well,” she said, “just before you came in here, I was juggling limbs. You’d be surprised what we do when there’s no one around but corpses.”

Now I wanted to laugh at this, but I was kind of uneasy about doing it. The reason was, even with the terrific sense of humor I remembered her having, I could still instantly picture her tossing around arms and legs in the air. And that, I wasn’t sure I should laugh at. It seemed too real and too gory.

“What?” she asked. “Are you picturing me tossing arms and legs in the air.”

And she was psychic. Well, I don’t believe in that kind of thing. But we were always quite sympatico. Out wavelengths messed well. “Of course I was,” I said. “It’s amazing how you do that.”

She laughed. “You mean read your mind?”

I nodded. “Haven’t we always had a telepathic connection? I think you must be psychic,” I said.

“Come on, David, you know you don’t believe in that kind of hooey.”

I had to shake my head. Sometimes it felt as if she could read me like a proverbial book.

“So what are you doing back here?” I asked.

“Got tired of the L.A. life. Too fast and furious for me. I needed to come back home. When I heard there was a coroner’s position open, I applied, and here I am.”

“So, ah, did your husband come with you?”

“Hah, no way. I dumped him. I’ve been living on my own for three years now.”

“You have kids?”

“No, we never had any. No regrets, though. I shudder to think what having a father like that would have done to them. Turned them into little jerks, just like him.”

“Not to pry, but what happened?”

She laughed. “David, you ever notice when people start with ‘not to pry’, you know they’re going to pry, and they don’t really care if you mind or not?”

Guilt consumed me.

“But, if anyone’s going to pry, it’s going to be a policeman. And if he has to pry, then I’m glad he’s you. So hear’s the scoop. He cheated on me.”

I felt relieved, but of course I felt bad, too. Kathy and I had been great friends back in high school. She’d come to Roosevelt from Central Intermediate, I from Stevenson. From the moment we met in homeroom on the first day of 9th grade, we hit it off. Sometimes I wondered, if she’d gone to HU instead of USC, what would have happened between us?

“So did you miss me?” she asked, picking up the scalpel again.

“If I say ‘no’, will you use that knife on me?”

“Well yeah, of course I will,” she said as she continued to cut. “I’m already picturing myself tossing around your limbs after hours.”

I had to laugh at that. “Well, to tell you the truth, I did kind of miss you.”

“So you’re saying just a little? I’m hurt.”

“Well, maybe a little more than a little. We had great times in high school.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, lifting out the heart. “Who knows? If I’d gone to school here, I might have proposed to you.”

Was she kidding? Not about the proposing part. But that she missed me that much.

Changing the subject I said, “The reason I came down here is because this guy’s my case. I wanted to get any information I could right away.”

“Oh,” she said, pulling out another organ. “Then I should tell you, he’s dead.”

Now you want to laugh at something like that, don’t you? But I held back. It was hard.

“Really? I was wondering about that.”

Would she find my comment amusing.

“Very amusing, Lieutenant,” she said. “I should laugh, but I’m holding back.”

This all really was very eerie. It’s like she was parroting back everything thought.

“And the cause of death,” she said, “is not, as you might believe, all these bullets.”

“What?”

“Really, David, he died of natural causes. None of the five bullets hit any vital spots.”

“That’s kind of hard to believe,” I said.

“Of course it’s hard to believe,” she said. “I made it up. At least three of these could have killed him. Maybe four. But with this many shots, I’d say we’re looking at a crime of passion. If it were a pro, he’d make the first shot sufficient.”

“Or it would have been to the back of the head if it were an execution,” I said.

“Or one in the head and two in the heart if it were mob hit,” she added.

“Hey,” I said, “so did Hank Lee retire?”

“Oh no. They created the position of a second coroner. Honolulu’s getting bigger. The more people, the more bodies. Poor Hank was overworked. So here I am,” she said, weighing the liver she’d pulled out.

“So anything else I should know?” I said.

“You mean about this guy?” she asked, “or about the cup of coffee and a burger you’re going to buy me when I’m finished here?”

This made my mind spin some. I said, “Ah, how about the guy first.”

“Nah, nothing special beyond the crime of passion angle. So what do you say?”

“Coffee? Ah, yeah, sure.”

“Your wife won’t mind?”

“My wife, no. She passed away, Kathy. Cancer. It’s been nearly ten years now.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, David.”

I nodded, then shook my head. “It’s, well, it’s all good now. Me and my son have had plenty of time to work through it okay.”

“Oh, that’s good, David, I’m glad for that.”

“Thanks.”

“So you have a son.”

“Yes, David the Third. He’s actually in med school at UCLA right now.”

“So he won’t be a detective?”

“Probably not, thank God. I needed the chain to be broken for him. His great-grandfather, his grandfather, and his father, that was enough of our police family business. I wanted him not to have to feel the burden of any kind of family tradition.”

“Is he your only child?”

This one hit harder than my wife’s passing. I was still pretty raw about my daughter. “I had a daughter, Sarah, but she passed away.”

“Oh God, David, I’m so sorry about that as well.”

“Yeah, that was rough for both me and my son. That loss, I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.”

Kathy stood there staring at me. I think she was reading just how badly I felt about Sara’s murder.

Finally, after so much silence, she said, “But hey, I meant it about the coffee and a burger. I’m starving. You feel up to it?”

“Sure,” I said, getting a kind of feeling I’d not felt for a long time. Something like happiness combined with, you know, the anticipation of something good about to happen. It had been a while.

“Great. I hear there’s a new restaurant. It’s called Zippy’s. You know it?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s on King, past Kalākaua, just after Washington Intermediate.”

“Yeah,” she said, “your neck of the woods, right? The police station’s over in that old Sears store on Beretania, right?

“Yes, we moved there a while back.”

“I loved that store,” she said. “That was a big part of my childhood.”

“Of course,” I said. Where else could you ride an escalator? I think that’s what I liked most about the place.”

She laughed. “Real space-age stuff. So I’ll meet you there. Maybe give me an hour or so.”

Instead of returning to the station, I drove straight to Zippy’s. Grabbing a booth, I ordered a cup of coffee and told the waitress I was waiting for a friend. I was excited. My old friend Kathy. We’d had some good times together. Maybe we’d have some more starting now.