“So much to know,” Malo said. “He was in ’Nam. Had a business on the mainland—sold it for big bucks. He came here to live a great life—so many friends. So generous. Everybody loved him. Never mind he’s a haole, the guy was so pono.” He paused a moment, then added, “Plus a surfer.”

Olive said, “I’m sure all that is true, but Officer DeSouza—and other people, his friends—say he had some issues.”

Lowering his head, shortening his neck, looking bull-like, Malo said, “No clouds in your life, sister? And this guy—”

“Joe Sharkey,” she said.

“No clouds in Joe Sharkey’s life?”

“Plenny clouds,” Sharkey said. “And one of them a big cloud.”

“As far as Max goes, I could show you the logs,” Malo said. “Excessive speed, controlled substances, DUI, vagrancy, loitering.” Malo folded his hands and placed them on his blotter. “But so what?”

“The charges were dropped—all of them?” Olive said.

“On my orders.”

“I’m sure you had a reason.”

“I had a lot of reasons,” Malo said.

He pulled out a drawer in his desk and pawed the objects inside with the wide rake of his thick fingers, finally alighting on a disk encased in a square of plastic. Rising from his desk with a grunt, he crossed the room to a DVD player and fed the disk into the slot with one hand, then manipulated a remote control the size of a candy bar with the other hand.

“Show you something,” he said as the monitor brightened. Without any prologue or narration the exterior of a church with a pencil-point steeple flickered into view, buttery in sunshine. “Central Union Church,” Malo said. “Most holiest church on O‘ahu.”

Men wearing aloha shirts and women in colorful dresses, carrying garlands of flowers, walked among the royal palms, hundreds of them in a procession, filing into the church. Mingling among the bright shirts were police officers in blue uniforms and white gloves, many of them with armloads of blossoms.

“Some kind of service,” Olive said.

Malo shushed her, and as he did so the interior of the church filled the screen, white pillars lining the sides, an altar decked in flowers, and a clergyman, decorous in a white surplice trimmed with lace, standing before the congregation, holding what had to be a Bible.

A dark bare-chested man wearing a crown of flowers approached the altar rail, a red cloak knotted on one shoulder and billowing across his body as though he were wrapped in a flag. He carried a wooden staff, which he raised to silence the congregation. In a clear piercing voice he began crying out in his own language, a lilting litany that echoed in the church, that at some moments sounded like praise and at others like a sustained and lyrical denunciation.

“Oli mahalo—the chant for thanks,” Malo said. “Hawaiian kine.”