Mahu Vice m-4

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Ray and I got roped into a stakeout for another case, and we spent the rest of the day sitting in my truck, hoping that a teenaged gangbanger would show up at his mother’s house in Wahiawa. The gangbanger was a suspect in the murder of two drug dealers in Waikiki, one of whom was his girlfriend’s brother. “Want to get this case resolved before Thanksgiving,” Ray said. “Be awkward having that big family dinner when you’re worried your boyfriend might have killed your brother.”

  “Think about bringing him home to meet Mama,” I said. “Nice to meet you. Did you kill my son?”

  We sat like that, just shooting the shit, and I felt damn lucky that Ray was the guy who’d stumbled into the department when I needed a partner. He was smart, in brains and street knowledge, he was patient, and he had a good heart. Plus he liked Hawaiian music, so we went through CD after CD of Sam Alama and his Islanders, Pua Almeida and his Club Pago Pago Orchestra, and the Brothers Cazimero.

  Most days, you spend more time with your partner than you do with your significant other. You’ve got to find a guy who’s on the same wavelength you are, or else you butt heads all day long. Ray and I argued sometimes, but neither of us held a grudge for long.

  “Any more ideas on tracking the dead kid?” he asked late in the day. “I was thinking maybe homeless shelters. This might not be the first time he ran away.”

  “Good idea. There’s a gay teen center on Waikiki, too. A lot of those kids live on the street. Maybe one of them has seen him.”

  I’d volunteered at the center myself, leading a group of kids once a week through workouts and some self-empowerment stuff. I stopped going after I broke up with Mike, when I started thinking that I didn’t have anything good I could say. But maybe it was time to go back.

  Just before the end of our shift, the radio crackled with the news that the gangbanger had been nabbed in Waikiki, and I dropped Ray off on my way home. I was feeling at loose ends, so I walked through the humid evening, tiki torches being lit on the street around me, to the Gay Teen Center.

  Cathy Selkirk, the tiny, half-Japanese lesbian who ran the center, was in her office, and I settled into the big comfy chair across from her desk to pour out some of my troubles. But first I had to apologize.

  “I’m sorry I blew off the group. I was going through some stuff and I didn’t feel much like a role model.”

  “Any time you want to come back, the door’s open.”

  “I was thinking about it.”

  “How about a week from tonight?” Cathy asked. “That’ll give us time to get some posters up, see if we can draw a crowd.”

  I agreed, and then I showed her Jingtao’s picture. She didn’t recognize him, but she promised to get it passed around among the kids.

  I kissed Cathy good-bye, sent my regards to her partner Sandra, and walked down Kalakaua Boulevard for a while, showing the hookers and the street vendors Jingtao’s picture and not getting any response.

  There was a steady stream of traffic down Kalakaua-buses and rental cars and delivery trucks, the occasional horn or screeching brakes blending in with the hawkers selling heritage jewelry and the sound of slack key guitar music coming out of a T-shirt shop. It was just after six, and the sun was setting over the ocean. Tiny white lights wrapped around the trunks of the palm trees, and car headlights bounced off the elegant storefronts and the homeless oddballs equally.

  It’s a strange thing, living in a tourist paradise. Every day, you go to work, live your life, and all around you are people who’ve saved all year to spend just a few days in this beautiful place you sometimes take for granted. Every now and then I like to see it through their eyes, and I always end up surprising myself with its beauty and hidden danger.

  Thursday morning, Ray and I caught another case, a vehicular homicide near the Aloha Tower. We spent most of the day interviewing witnesses and tracking the suspect car. Just before the end of our shift, the driver turned himself in, accompanied by his attorney. Since I had to go out to the STD clinic that evening, Ray agreed to stick around and walk the guy through the system. “Hell, I can use the overtime,” he said. “Maybe someday Julie and I can afford a second car.”

  I felt sorry for him. He was already pulling temporary duty whenever he could: security gigs at the Aloha Bowl flea market, Hawaiian nationalism rallies, special events at the Blaisdell Center. I was lucky that my living needs were simple, and my parents had announced a week before that they were going to start giving each of us an advance on our inheritance, so if I needed anything I’d have that money to fall back on.

  On the other hand, I knew I’d rather be sitting around a courtroom waiting for our errant driver to be arraigned than going out to the STD clinic near Tripler to tell Mike’s parents that their son was a drunk. But if I stalled, I’d have to wait another few weeks for them to be on duty, or attempt to corral them somewhere else.

  At the clinic, I showed my badge to the receptionist and asked to speak with Dr. Riccardi. “He’s with a patient now,” she said.

  “I’ll wait.”

  Once again, the reception area was filled with an interesting cross-section of locals who wanted discretion. I avoided eye contact with anyone, and sat in a corner-the location expressing something about how I felt being there. The People magazines I’d read the last time I was there were gone, replaced with newer yet still out-of-date editions. I was skimming one when the receptionist called.

  I was struck again by how much Mike resembled his father. Mike had a slight epicanthic fold to his eyes, and a mustache, but the shape of the face, the cheekbones, the curve of his lips-they were all the same.

  “What can I do for you?” Dr. Riccardi asked, escorting me to a run-down office that was clearly shared by a bunch of different doctors, since there was nothing personal there-just a collection of posters and pamphlets about STDs. “I hope you know I can’t reveal any information about patients without a warrant.”

  “I’m not here on an official basis,” I said. “My name is Kimo Kanapa’aka, and I’m a detective with the Honolulu police department.”

  “I know who you are, detective,” Dr. Riccardi said, turning to face me. “You’re the man who broke my son’s heart.”

  Every now and then, in the homicide business, you run across someone who says something so totally unexpected that you don’t know how to respond. Sometimes it’s a confession, from someone who wasn’t even a suspect. Sometimes it’s the revelation of a life behind the facade we all present to the world.

  Dr. Riccardi’s statement was one of those. I’d been so concerned about not outing Mike to his father that I’d never considered his father might already know.

  “I may not have been the greatest father, detective, but I know my son. I’m sure Michael has had a few choice words to say about me, and my expectations of him, but I love him, no matter what.” He motioned me to a hard chair across from the desk, and he sat down behind it in a worn armchair.

  “Michael’s mother and I always wondered why he never brought any young women home to meet us,” he said. “Was he embarrassed of us? Living in New York, we knew he was uncomfortable that his mother was Korean, and maybe that was why he didn’t bring friends home, but we thought that moving to Hawai’i had helped him get over that.”

  He steepled his fingers and stared at me. It wasn’t a comfortable stare at all. I’m accustomed to being the interrogator and I didn’t like the role reversal. From the glare in Dr. Riccardi’s eyes it was clear he didn’t like me, and I didn’t know how I was going to tell him about the vodka in the water bottle without seeming like a tattletale as well as a heartbreaker.

  “About a year ago, Mike stopped joining us for dinner, and he didn’t do anything except go to work and then lock himself up in his side of the house. One day, I got fed up.”

  I could see from Dr. Riccardi’s eyes that it wasn’t a happy memory. But he worked in an STD clinic; he was accustomed to tough conversations.

  “I found him passed out on the sofa, an empty six-pack
of beer next to him. I woke him, and had some harsh words for him.” He sighed. “Not one of my finest moments as a father, I know. I demanded to know what was wrong with him. I said that I’d put up with a lot-his poor academic performance, which was far below what I knew he was capable of. His choice of a dangerous career. His Peter Pan complex-trying to remain a boy forever.”

  “That must have been difficult for both of you,” I said.

  “I suppose I should thank you for prompting the conversation, but I’m afraid I can’t.” Man, if looks could have killed, I’d have been dead in my chair. “He told me about you then.” A hint of a smile crossed his lips. “I still think of him as my little boy, you know. I want to fight his battles for him, though I know I can’t. When he told me how much you had hurt him, I wanted to hurt you in return.”

  “Mike hurt me plenty on his own,” I said.

  “But you were the one who broke up with him,” Riccardi said. “Because he wouldn’t become the kind of poster child you’ve made yourself for gay rights.”

  “I haven’t made myself a poster child. I accepted the responsibility that comes with who I am and what I do. But that isn’t why Mike and I broke up.”

  He waved his hand. “This is all old news, isn’t it, detective? Is that why you came here today? To ‘out’ my son to me?”

  “Not at all.” I took a deep breath. “Mike and I are working together on a case again, and Monday morning I picked up a water bottle he’d been drinking from-just to take a sip myself. It wasn’t water.”

  Dr. Riccardi’s brows closed together and he sighed again. “I was afraid something like this would happen. Seeing you has driven him to drink again. Why can’t you just leave my son alone?”

  At that point I’d had enough of Dr. Riccardi’s attitude, and I stood up to leave. “I guarantee you, Dr. Riccardi, I didn’t want to come down here and speak to you. But I didn’t know who else to tell, and I do care about Mike and want to make sure he gets some help.” I took a deep breath. “But if you want to know the truth about why we broke up, it’s in your records here. Patient number 1423.”

  I shouldn’t have said anything, and as I drove back to Waikiki I felt lousy. Not only had I told Mike’s dad that Mike was a drunk-I’d branded him as a careless slut as well. From the little I knew of Mike’s relationship with his parents, I could imagine his father’s icy stare, the disappointment radiating from him. I remembered Mike telling me that every time he got sick as a kid, his father took it as a personal affront. “How does it look when a doctor’s son is so careless about the flu,” I remembered Mike repeating to me.

  How much worse would it be when it wasn’t the flu Dr. Riccardi was complaining about, but gonorrhea. Especially when he and Mike’s mom volunteered at the safe sex clinic.

  It was after eight by the time I got home. I picked up a mystery novel I’d been reading, one of Charles Knief’s Honolulu private eye books, but I couldn’t concentrate. I got online and started making lists of homeless shelters and places that helped teenagers that Ray and I could check out the next day.

  Around eleven I looked at the clock, yawned, and stripped down for bed. I’d just turned out the lights when somebody started pounding on my front door. “Jesus, hold on,” I said, jumping up and fumbling around in the dark for a pair of shorts. I looked through the peephole and saw Mike Riccardi there.

  “You know what time it is?” I said, when I opened the door. “You’re gonna wake up the whole neighborhood.”

  “You had to go and do it,” he said, slurring his words and pushing past me. I closed the door and turned around to look at him. “You had to tell my parents.”

  “I was worried about you.”

  “Fuck you, Kimo. You were pissed.” A wave of alcohol fumes washed over me. Mike was pissed, too-in more than one sense of the word. He was angry, and he was drunk. “Jesus, Mike, take a look at yourself. You’re drinking vodka out of a water bottle at eight o’clock in the morning. You don’t think that’s a problem?”

  “What I do is my business. I’m maintaining.” He wavered a little on his feet, and I was worried he’d fall over on me.

  “Yeah, and the first time somebody from the fire department catches you, you’re out on your ass.” I poked him in the chest and pushed him back. “Take a look at yourself, pal. How much have you had to drink?”

  “None of your fucking business,” he said, and he burped.

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t just walk away and pretend I didn’t see what I saw. I had to tell somebody, and the only person I could trust was your dad.”

  Mike’s eyes glazed over, and suddenly he threw up-all over himself and the tile floor in front of my refrigerator. He looked at me and then he just collapsed. I caught him, getting his vomit all over me and my shorts, and he passed out.

  I figured it was my penance. I stripped him, sponged him off, and laid him down on my bed. It was a level of intimacy we’d never shared when we were dating; we’d both been pretty self-sufficient, and the only times we’d undressed each other had been as a prelude to sex. But there was something sweet about the intimacy, despite the stink of vomit.

  He started snoring as soon as his head hit the pillow. I cleaned myself up, scrubbed the tile floor, then took his dirty clothes and my shorts downstairs to the washing machine on the first floor of the building. There was a comfy chair there, and I sat there and read my book and dozed while the clothes washed and then dried.

  It was almost two o’clock when I went back upstairs. Mike was still asleep, still snoring, spread-eagled on my bed. I grabbed an extra pillow and lay down on the sofa. I was asleep myself within a few minutes, despite the noise emanating from the other side of the Japanese screen.

  It was just after daylight when I woke up to see Mike, naked, standing at the foot of the sofa. “What happened to my clothes?” he demanded.

  “Good morning to you, too,” I said, yawning.

  His body looked good-better than good, actually. Muscular forearms dusted with black hair. A broad chest that narrowed to his waist, meaty calves, and a half-hard dick that I remembered well. “What happened last night?”

  “You showed up at my door drunk off your ass,” I said, sitting up. I pulled the comforter over my crotch so he wouldn’t see that I was hard just from looking at him. “You threw up all over yourself, me, and my floor. Then you passed out. I washed your clothes for you-they’re over there.”

  I pointed toward the front door.

  “For real?” he asked.

  “For real. You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head. “I guess I am fucked up.”

  “Guess so.”

  I watched as he pulled on his clothes. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he was getting ready to leave.

  “Me, too,” I said. “For everything.”

  THE FIREMAN OR THE TIGER

  On Friday, Ray and I went around to homeless shelters and showed pictures of Jingtao, without making any connections. I was glad we had Saturday and Sunday off; maybe something would break over the weekend.

  Ray was doing special duty both days-security for a gun show at the Blaisdell Center-so he was fine with an easy Friday. Me, I was bored and antsy, trying not to think about Mike, or about my dinner that night with Haoa, Tatiana, and Sergei.

  Sergei, like his sister, was tall, sturdy, and blond. He’d bummed around a bunch of jobs in Alaska-working the pipeline, cooking at a diner, helping train dogs for the Iditarod. It didn’t sound like we had anything in common except being gay. Not the kind of fix up I was looking forward to.

  I arrived at my brother’s house just before seven. My truck was making some unhappy noises on the steep, twisting climb up into St. Louis Heights, and I thought that I’d have to make an appointment to take it in for what would turn out to be some very expensive repair.

  Most of the houses in the neighborhood had no yards to speak of, front or back, but Haoa’s was on a wedge-shaped corner lot. Walking into his backyard is like entering a tropical
exhibit at a botanical garden. Combine my brother’s intuitive feel for plants and flowers with Tatiana’s artistic sensibility, and you get a lush landscape full of short and tall palms; spiky red and orange heliconia; the five-petaled plumeria with orange centers and a frosting of white at the edge; dark red anthurium; and single, double, and triple hibiscus in red, pink, purple, and white. The sensory overload is amazing-from the bright colors of the flowers, to the glossy green leaves, to the scent of the tuberose. It’s like being draped in a full-body lei.

  I’d met Sergei before and liked him. Maybe it was a physical thing; I prefer my men big and beefy, and he had that in spades-six two, broad-shouldered, with thighs like tree trunks. He had tribal tattoos around both biceps, which bulged out of his short-sleeved aloha shirt. He wore long board shorts and rubber slippas, and his hair was the same honey blond as Tatiana’s and nearly as long.

  My brother was grilling steaks, and Tatiana went inside to get the salad. I asked Sergei, “What brings you to Hawai’i?”

  He laughed. “It’s Tatiana’s turn to watch me. Everybody else in the family has given up.” He downed his wine in one big gulp. “I was staying in our sister Natasha’s guesthouse until her husband caught me screwing the neighbor’s teenaged son in the sauna.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Hey, he was eighteen, and horny. Nothing illegal about it. Of course, Arnie had the whole sauna ripped out and rebuilt afterward. Tasha was pissed about that.”

  Tatiana returned and the meal passed quickly. I laughed and joked with my brother, my sister-in-law, and Sergei. At some point his bare toes were tickling the inside of my leg, and at another point he reached over to touch my hand and an electric current shot through my body.

  I helped Haoa clean up the grill after dinner. “You ever go over to the center on Waialae Avenue?” I asked, scrubbing a grate with a bristled brush.