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other uniforms go.
    The drivers went back to their trucks and gunned their engines, and Akoni and I headed back to the station. We work ed out of the Waikīkī substation on Kalākaua Avenue, right in the heart of Waikīkī, and ordinarily we would have walked back. But Akoni had driven in from home direct to the club, and his car, a Ford Taurus, was illegally parked down the block. It took us just as much time to drive to the garage where he parks as walking would have taken, between the slow lights and the even slower tourists. Waikīkī is a small place, roughly one and a half miles long and a half-mile wide, and close to 25,000 people live here. Of course, there are also 34,000 hotel and condo rooms, and they are occupied close to 85% year-round. That means an average of 65,000 extra people crammed in on any given day. No wonder traffic’s so bad.
    We got into the office just after nine and started filling out the paperwork. Akoni called Mealoha and apologized again, then covered his mouth and whispered something to her. I snickered, just on general principles, and he glared at me. Sitting at my desk, which faced out toward Kalākaua Avenue, filling out forms, I could almost forget I had any personal involvement in this case. Almost.
    Kalākaua was swarming with tourists on their way to the beach. Honeymooners holding hands, elderly people walking with slow, arthritic gaits, busloads of Japanese tourists carrying Gucci shopping bags and talking fast. In the middle of them all were people handing out flyers for time-shares and restaurants with early bird specials. I called the medical examiner’s office on Iwilei Road, near the Dole cannery, and found that the autopsy was slated for two o’clock. “Just after lunch,” I said to Alice Kanamura, the receptionist there. “You guys schedule them deliberately like that?”
    “We got lots of sickness bags, you need,” Alice said. “I’ll put one aside with your name on it.”
    She was laughing merrily when she hung up. I guess you get your laughs where you can when you work for the coroner.
    There were no witnesses to interview, yet. Dispatch faxed us a transcript of the call I’d made, which did us no good. The 911 operators have a computer-assisted dispatch system now, which transmits emergency information direct to the radio dispatcher. The computer shows the address any 911 call is made from, along with the phone number and subscriber name. That way, in case somebody’s in trouble and can only dial the number, the police have a way to trace the call.
    On a whim, I dialed Motor Vehicles on my computer and checked registrations for a black Jeep Cherokee. There were thousands. I quickly disconnected when I saw Akoni coming over to my desk.
    “We got nothing on this case, you know?” he asked. “Nothing.”
    “We’ll have more this afternoon,” I said. “Let’s get the reports finished on yesterday before we get buried in this one.”
    We spent the rest of the morning writing our reports on the failed drug bust. Neither Pedro nor Luz Maria were registered at the colleges they pretended to attend, and Luz Maria had a drug related rap sheet as long as her sleek black ponytail. We didn’t find any priors on Pedro, but that could have meant he’d been more careful, or maybe he’d given us a false ID. They’d been held downtown overnight and released when there was no physical evidence to tie them to any crime.
    At 12:30 we walked up the block for a lunch of saimin, Japanese noodles in a broth flavored with chicken or beef. “Good choice, brah,” Akoni said as he slurped his from a paper bowl. “Easy going down, easy coming back up if the autopsy a bad one.”
    The noodle shop was tucked into a corner of a building on a side street just makai of Kuhio Avenue, and we stayed back against the building to take advantage of the meager shade. In Honolulu, we don’t use north, east, south and west. We say something is mauka, meaning toward the mountains, or makai,