Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  “You think it’s arson?” Ray asked.

  “Not sure yet. It looks like one of the generators the contractors were using might have short-circuited and started the fire. But it’s not clear why that happened.”

  I was always fascinated to hear the details of Mike’s cases; they were a lot like mine, in that they required deductive powers and lots of nose-to-the-grindstone footwork. But there was an extra layer of knowledge he needed, about fire and electricity and combustion. Sometimes the details made my head spin. I was always in awe of his ability to interpret the data and come up with conclusions.

  When we got home, Mike and I relaxed on the couch with Roby. It had been a nice evening, and I wondered how things would change if we had a child to worry about. I saw the way my brothers’ kids dominated everything that went on in their households. They needed to be fed and clothed and driven around, and even when the whole family was at home, they were always asking questions, banging things around, playing music too loud.

  My sisters-in-law were often frazzled, even Liliha, who tried to make everything look effortless. Tatiana, the artsy one, was more haphazard in her parenting, but I had seen her put her painting ability on the sidelines while she focused on her kids. Even now, when her youngest daughter, Akipela, was seven years old and in school all day, Tatiana was swamped with laundry, PTA and chauffeuring duties.

  Did Mike and I want to sacrifice everything in our lives that way? It wasn’t all taking the kids surfing or playing video games with them. Were we too selfish to let ourselves in for years of diapers, homework and then dating dramas?

  I wondered if the idea of kids was percolating through Mike’s brain the way it was with mine. Neither of us brought it up again as we watched TV, but the idea stayed in the back of my mind.

  WHAT JUDY KNOWS

  On my way in to work Wednesday morning I plugged in my Bluetooth and dialed Anna Yang’s apartment in Chinatown on my cell. When she answered, I heard at least one of the girls crying in the background. “I’ll try and make this quick,” I said. “Did Zoë have an email account?”

  We thought maybe Zoë might have been corresponding with the guy she had dinner with, but I didn’t see the need to pass that information on to Anna until it became relevant. “Yes. She has an account with IslandMail. Her user name is MissNumbered.” She spelled it for me.

  “Clever. Password?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know it.”

  “I have a friend who might be able to get into the account. Can you give me some clues? Maybe her birthday, the girls’, that kind of thing?”

  She listed a bunch of dates and a couple of Zoë’s favorite words, and I pulled up in front of Harry Ho’s house and added them to my computer file. I heard her turn to the girl who was crying. “Because I say so,” she said.

  I remembered that one from my own childhood. I guess Anna had heard the same thing, growing up in China, and it had imprinted on her the same way it sunk in to every American kid who grew up to be a parent. I hung up and sat in front of Harry’s house for a minute.

  Harry and Arleen live in the same neighborhood as Mike and me, though their house is a lot nicer than ours. They have a single-family, while ours is a duplex with the added pleasure of having Mike’s parents sharing a wall. We have two bedrooms, while Harry and Arleen have three. We had a nicer bathroom, because Mike had remodeled it a year before he met me, but I knew it was just a matter of time before Harry’s house surpassed ours in that regard, too.

  Arleen had had the kitchen remodeled and expanded before they moved in, with sliding glass doors to the back yard, where they’d had a swimming pool put in as well. Our kitchen was small and dark, but since neither Mike or I cooked much, that didn’t matter. I did want a pool, though.

  In addition to being my best friend, aside from Mike of course, Harry’s a computer genius with degrees from MIT and a bunch of patents in his name. Arleen was just walking out the front door, with Brandon in tow. Harry had met Arleen a couple of years before, when she was working for a man who’d been murdered, and Harry had helped me with some computer problems. Brandon was a toddler then, but he was growing up smart and confident.

  Arleen was a sweet Japanese girl, just a couple of years younger than Harry and me. She had finished her associate’s degree in computer science with Harry’s tutelage, and now worked with him. She’d lost the baby fat she once had, and her black hair was styled into a sleek bob.

  I watched Harry kiss them both goodbye. Once again I felt that little pang, wondering about parenthood.

  When Arleen had Brandon in the car, backing down the driveway, Harry turned to me. “Hey, brah, howzit?” he asked.

  “Pretty good. Think you can hack into an email account?”

  “Brah, you insult me. Of course I can.”

  I could have tried to get a subpoena to IslandMail, and if I needed evidence that would stand up in a court case, I would. But for now I just wanted to figure out who Zoë was dating.

  We went into Harry’s home office, where computers, printers, scanners, and all kinds of other equipment were on tables that lined the room. He sat down at a monitor and keyboard and started typing. “Give me the user name.”

  “MissNumbered.” I spelled it for him, just as Anna had spelled it for me. We worked our way through her birthday, their address, the kids’ birthdays. None of them worked.

  “Time to get creative,” Harry said. “Know anything about her childhood? Address? Nickname?”

  “She grew up on a commune, but she hated it,” I said. “You know what, though? Try fallopian.”

  “You mean as in tubes?”

  “Yeah, that was the name her parents gave her.”

  Harry made a face. “Yuk.”

  “She has a brother named Vas,” I said. “As in vas deferens.”

  “At least they didn’t call him Scrotum.”

  Harry typed fallopian into the password box, and immediately the screen clicked forward into Zoë Greenfield’s email list.

  She was still involved with the volunteer group she’d met Anna Yang through; there was a message from one of the organizers. A bunch of spam, too. Nigerians asking for help investing money, someone touting açai as a breakthrough drug, that kind of thing. She didn’t seem to archive old messages, and there weren’t any emails from guys confirming a date for Sunday evening.

  We read through everything in her in box, and there was nothing useful. “Great, another dead end,” I said.

  “You doubt my skills, young grasshopper.” Harry opened a new message and clicked into the “to” box. When he typed the letter ‘a,’ the web interface obligingly listed all the people Zoë had ever emailed whose addresses began with that letter.

  “You want to take notes?” Harry asked.

  “Yes, honorable master.”

  A lot of the addresses weren’t useful; it was doubtful, for example, that Zoë had made plans to meet “support@amazon.com” for dinner on Sunday night. But I did harvest about fifty email addresses, from a to z.

  “So what do I do with these?” I asked Harry, when I had added the last address to the list on my netbook. “Email them all and ask if they had dinner plans with Zoë Greenfield on Sunday night?”

  “It’s a possibility. But let’s try something more subtle first. Give me a couple of hours to play around with these addresses and see what else I can dig up.”

  Under Harry’s tutelage, I’ve been getting better at using the computer. I can Google, email, and place online orders as good as anyone, and I was increasingly comfortable with using my netbook as a tool for organizing case materials. But when you get into more sophisticated techniques, I bow at his feet.

  When I finally got to headquarters, Ray was filling out paperwork. I explained that I had Harry on the case, and I sat down to help him. The brass hadn’t yet moved into the computer generation, so we had to transfer my notes to the appropriate forms. We had to document everything we’d seen and done at the house on Lopez Lane, as well as ou
r interviews with Ryan Tazo, the people at Zoë’s office, the receptionist at the homeless shelter, and the waiters and other staff at the restaurants we’d visited, including Shinichi at Simple Sushi.

  We worked until noon, and we were just about to break for lunch when my cell phone rang. From the display I could see it was Judy Evangelista, the Waikiki prostitute. “Yo, Judy,” I said. “Wazzup?”

  “Cut the crap, detective. I’ve got a name for you, but it’s going to cost you.”

  “Judy, Judy,” I said. “I just gave you fifty bucks yesterday.”

  “You want the name? It’ll cost you another fifty.”

  I arranged to meet her back in an hour at the International Marketplace in Waikiki, an open-air market of stalls and carts that was a tourist favorite. It was also where Judy scored her regular fixes, so I figured it was convenient that we’d be giving her the cash to complete her next transaction.

  We got there early, so we wandered under the banyan trees, looking at the tourist crap. They were playing the Matt Catingub Orchestra’s cover of “Oh, Pretty Woman,” and I liked the way they’d changed up Roy Orbison with an island beat.

  Moms with babies in strollers navigated the crowd, kids carried shave ice that dripped on the ground, and a tourist with a heavy German accent was trying to negotiate for a koa bangle with a woman whose Chinese accent was equally as impenetrable. We picked up some gourmet hot dogs from Hank’s Haute Dogs and sat at a table in the food court, next to a tiki-hut stand.

  “You think Judy will have anything useful to give us?” Ray asked.

  I shrugged. “This case just isn’t adding up yet, so who knows? Maybe somebody hired this person Judy knows. Or maybe it’s just a waste of time.” I took a bite of the hot dog. “At least we get a good lunch out of it.”

  “My gut is telling me that somebody wanted her dead,” Ray said.

  “Yeah, but yesterday your gut was telling you it was drug-related, because of the number of times she got stabbed. I think maybe your gut is suffering from indigestion.”

  “As long as you keep thinking a couple of hot dogs are a good lunch, that’s not unlikely.”

  We finished eating, threw our trash in a basket with the word “Mahalo” on the flap, and started looking for Judy. We found her a few minutes later at the Maui Divers store, looking at a ring with a giant Tahitian black pearl in the center and tiny diamonds wrapped around it.

  “That’s a little out of my price range, honey,” I said, walking up to her.

  “Everything about me is out of your price range.” She nodded her head toward a banyan tree outside, and we followed her out there.

  “This name, you didn’t get it from me,” she said.

  “Of course not.” I opened my wallet and pulled out another fifty, which I held folded in my fingers.

  “I only know the guy as Freddie,” she said. “Skinny ice head, they say he used to play football at UH til he wrecked his knee. His dealer told me Freddie’s suddenly flush with cash, and his knuckles are banged up, like he’s been breaking into places.” She took the bill from me. “He’s a crazy motherfucker. Be careful with him.”

  “Judy. You care. I could almost kiss you.”

  “That’d be at least another fifty.” She turned on her heel and walked away, but I caught a smile before she left.

  If there’s a bigger UH football fan in Hawaii than my brother Haoa, I’d be surprised. He was a linebacker when he was in college, and since then you’d think he bled green and white, the colors of the Rainbow Warriors. I wondered if he knew anything about Freddie.

  “Kanapa’aka Landscaping,” he said, when he answered his cell phone.

  “Hey, brah, it’s me. Can I ask you a question?”

  “I’m just finishing up a meeting.” He named a hotel a few blocks from the International Marketplace. “Can I call you back?”

  “How about I meet you over there?”

  “Give me ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Ray and I walked down Kalakaua Boulevard, taking our time. The sun had come out again, and it was a gorgeous spring day. You might wonder how I knew it was spring, because we don’t have a lot of seasonal change in Hawaii. But there are little things—trees budding, new bedding plants at the big hotels, a kind of freshness in the air. It’s not like we have crocuses pushing up through the snow or anything, but it’s spring.

  Haoa was just coming out the front door of the hotel as we walked up. He’s the middle child, two years younger than Lui and eight years older than I am. He’s the most Hawaiian-looking of the three of us—as tall as I am, but broader. He looked like a proper island businessman, in a polo shirt with his company logo and a pair of aviator-framed sunglasses on his head.

  “You bidding on this job?” I asked.

  “Yeah. They’re not happy with the guy they’ve got doing it now. And they shouldn’t be. Look at these yellow leaves. And over there—weeds. A job like this, you’ve got to be on it every day.” He looked at us. “So what’s up, brah?”

  “You ever hear of a UH football player named Freddie, who wrecked his knee?”

  “Freddie Walsh. Tight end. Recruited from northern California, I think. Must be about twenty-eight, twenty-nine by now. Why do you ask?”

  “His name came up in an investigation,” I said.

  Haoa frowned. “I heard he got hooked on pain pills after his knee blew out. Then I think it got worse. Ice.”

  Ice was what we called the smokeable form of crystal meth, a real scourge in the islands. “That’s what we heard,” I said. “Thanks. Now that we have a last name, we can run him down.”

  Back at headquarters, Ray ran Freddie Walsh through the system while I Googled him. He had been a promising player at Mendocino High in northern California, as Haoa remembered, recruited for the Rainbow Warriors—who used to be called the Rainbows, until someone in the college administration thought that was too gay. He’d played JV for a year, then started on the varsity team his sophomore year. He was a good player, though a better partier, and one night during his junior year he’d fallen from a dorm balcony and broken both his legs.

  That was the end of his football career. Ray picked up his story from police records. Freddie had built up a record over the past few years, starting back when he was still at UH with a couple of arrests for public intoxication, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Then he moved on to assault, possession, and possession with intent to distribute.

  He hadn’t been picked up for burglary yet, which is why he hadn’t shown up on our earlier searches. “There’s something just on the edge of my brain,” I said to Ray, when we’d looked it all over. “I just can’t put my finger on it yet.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Let’s go look for him. Maybe it’ll come to me while we drive.” We got his latest address, an apartment building a few blocks off the UH campus, and got into the Jeep. There was an accident on University Avenue, a Kawasaki motorcycle that had broadsided a Toyota Camry, so it took us forever to get up there. The building was a nondescript two-story on a side street, the kind of place that a bunch of undergrads share. We climbed the outside stairs and walked down the catwalk to apartment 2D.

  Along the way, we passed several open doors. College kids were hanging out, playing music or video games. One or two were even studying. The aroma of pakalolo, home grown Hawaiian dope, floated around us. The door to 2D was open, too, and a Hawaiian kid in his late teens was sprawled on the sofa. I knocked on the door and stuck my head in.

  “HPD,” I said, flashing my badge. “Looking for Freddie Walsh.”

  The kid looked up from an anatomy textbook. His eyes were red and his speech was slurred. The future of medicine. “We kicked him out. Like two weeks ago. He was just too crazy.”

  “You know where he went?”

  He shrugged. “Dude had serious problems, you know? Anger management, for one.” He nodded across the room, where there was a fist-sized hole in the wall. “Landlord say
s we’ve got to fix that.”

  “Focus,” I said. “He have any friends he might be crashing with?”

  “Maybe this older chick named Zoë he knew from home,” the kid said. “I remember him talking about her. Nobody else would have anything to do with him.”

  Mendocino. Zoë Greenfield had grown up on a commune in Mendocino. Had she known Freddie Walsh then? “You have any recent pictures of Freddie?” I asked. All we had been able to find were photos of him as a Rainbow Warrior, and then mug shots. None of those were going to be all that close to what he actually looked like.

  “Facebook.”

  “Under whose name?” Ray asked. “His?”

  The kid got up reluctantly, and pulled a laptop computer out of a pile of junk on the kitchen table. “There’s some shots of him at a party in my album,” he said.

  Ray looked at me while the kid booted up the computer. “Aren’t you and Mike on Facebook yet?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have time for that crap.”

  “Yeah, well, you still live where you grew up. I use it to keep up with my old crowd from Philly.”

  By then the kid had his computer up and showed us a slide show of party pictures, kids hanging out on the catwalk, drinking, mooning the camera. The kind of stuff potential employers would love to see. I handed the kid my card and asked him to email me the photos, and we waited there until I saw the email show on my netbook.

  It was already the end of our shift. We had no leads on how to find Freddie Walsh, though he was looking like a good suspect in Zoë Greenfield’s murder. Perhaps he knew a middle-aged Chinese woman who had pawned Zoë’s jewelry and given him the cash; savvy pawn brokers like Lucky Lou were suspicious of ice heads pawning jewelry, after all.

  We spent the next hour going from room to room in the building, asking if anyone knew Freddie Walsh or where he might be. Some of the kids were downright hostile, others too busy studying to be polite. The few who would talk to us had nothing new to contribute.