by Neil Plakcy
By the end of our shift we were both discouraged. “Maybe Harry will come up with an email connection between Freddie Walsh and Zoë Greenfield,” I said.
“We still have to find him in order to arrest him.”
“We’ll go back to Judy. She said she knew Freddie’s dealer. We find the dealer, we find the ice head.”
We drove down to Waikiki but couldn’t find Judy at any of her regular hangouts. We’d already put in an hour of overtime without making progress, so we hung up our shields for the night.
THE LINEBACKER
Haoa and Tatiana had invited Mike and me for a barbecue that night. Mike loved going over there; he often joined Haoa on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights to watch football on Haoa’s big screen TV. Because he had no siblings, and his only cousins were far away, he liked being part of my big family. That was fine with me, because I liked them, too.
Plus, Tatiana is an amazing cook. My mother can prepare a good meal, but Tatiana combines her artistic nature, her Russian heritage, and the fresh fish, meat and produce of the islands to create meals that rival any restaurant. Between my brother’s skill at the barbecue and hers in the kitchen, eating there is always a great time.
My niece Ashley answered the door. She’s the oldest kid, and at sixteen she was blooming into a great beauty. She was five ten, with her mom’s ash-blonde hair and blue eyes, as well as the high cheekbones from the Russian side of the family. From us, she got her deeply tanned skin and a slight epicanthic fold above her eyes. Haoa had been complaining about boys buzzing around for the last two years, and I could tell it was only going to get worse.
She kissed us both on the cheek, hardly stepping up on tiptoe to do so, and then said, “You are such a tease!”
It wasn’t until I saw the Bluetooth earpiece that I realized she wasn’t talking to us. “They’re all in the back yard,” she said. “No, I don’t say that to all the boys. Only the cute ones.”
I looked at Mike and we both laughed. We walked through the house, passing thirteen-year-old Alec, sprawled on the living room floor playing a video game. He was going to be as tall as his dad soon, but it looked like his arms and legs were waiting for the rest of him to catch up. I remembered poses like that myself, one leg on the sofa (when my mother wasn’t watching), the rest of me on the carpet, one arm crooked behind my head, though I was usually reading a book, not playing a game.
I waved hello to him, and heard his two younger sisters, Ailina and Akipela, squabbling somewhere upstairs. I wasn’t about to intervene.
The night was just cool enough to make you want to stand next to the barbecue, and that’s where I found Haoa and Tatiana, talking with Tico Robles, Tatiana’s best friend. Tico owned a hair salon, with Tatiana as a silent partner. He was about fifty, Puerto Rican, the kind of very dramatic gay man who made me uncomfortable before I came out of the closet.
Next to him was a handsome young guy in jeans and a white shirt, which showed off his biceps and his deep tan. “Tico’s got himself a young boyfriend,” Mike whispered to me as we walked through the sliding doors.
When Tico saw us, he said, “My favorite defenders of law and order!” and rushed over to hug and kiss us. Then he said, “I have someone I want you to meet.” He looked shy, which is unusual for him, but I assumed it was because his boyfriend was so much younger. “This is Alfredo. My son.”
“Close your mouths before the flies get in,” Tatiana said, laughing at Mike’s and my surprise.
Why did it seem like every gay man I knew was turning out to have kids? First Greg Oshiro, then Tico Robles. The next thing I knew Gunter would be cradling a buzz-cut blond baby in his arms.
“You didn’t know I was married back in Puerto Rico,” Tico said. “Just for a little while. But long enough to make a beautiful baby.”
Alfredo blushed. He shook hands with both of us, and Haoa delivered a couple of rum punches in big plastic globes. “You both look like you could use a drink,” he said, laughing.
“My son has finally come to visit me,” Tico said, putting his arm proudly around Alfredo’s shoulders. “After all these years.”
Tatiana brought out a tray of appetizers, tiny pastry tarts filled with cheese, chopped meat, and green vegetables. We learned that Alfredo had graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a major in Spanish, hoping to become a teacher, and decided to visit his father before embarking on his career. We nibbled, we talked, and eventually Haoa said, “I’m going to put the steaks on. Kimo, you want to help me?”
The lively beat of Times Five playing “School’s Out” was on the CD as he slapped the big hunks of meat on the grill and a sweet smell rose from the charcoal. “I called around to see what I could find out about Freddie Walsh.”
In the light of a tiki torch, I could see him frowning. “I feel bad for the guy. He was in the hospital for a week after he broke his legs, and then a month in rehab. In the end, he missed so much school that he flunked out. He didn’t want to go back to the mainland, so he moved around. A couple of the alumni tried to do right for him, but he pissed away everything anybody tried to give him.”
He placed the last steak down, then took a swig of his punch. “He’s in trouble, isn’t he? That’s why you’re looking for him.”
I didn’t want to reveal details of the case when I didn’t know how Freddie Walsh could be connected so all I said was, “Just want to talk to him.”
Haoa considered for a minute. “I think he might be at the homeless shelter on North Vineyard. An old teammate I called does some volunteer work there, said he saw him.”
“Thanks. We’ll check it out.”
We went back to the lounge chairs where Mike, Tatiana, Tico and Alfredo were relaxing. The pool lights were on, blue shadows moving restlessly as the trees around us swayed in the light breeze. Haoa’s back yard is a showplace of his landscaping skills and Tatiana’s knack for using color. Purple and white orchids hung in the boughs of a big kiawe tree, and the hibiscus hedges were full of red blossoms as big as dinner plates. In one corner, fragrant plumeria blossoms bent branches like the arms of a beautiful hula dancer.
Sitting down across from Alfredo, I tried to figure out if, like his father, he was gay. I knew a number of older gay men who had kids the old-fashioned way, often as a result of a straight marriage, and in many cases the kids were gay, too. But from the way Alfredo talked, he was straight; at least he said he had a girlfriend back home.
Well, I dated girls for a long time myself, so that’s no real indicator.
The steaks were great, served with baked potatoes and grilled asparagus. Even Mike, who’s not the biggest vegetable fan, asked for second helpings of the caramelized stalks.
When Tatiana brought out a massive chocolate cake, decorated with tiny flowers made of icing, all four kids came out to join us, and as always, the world revolved around them. Ashley was full of stories about high school, cheerleading and prom, which her brother snorted at. Alec bragged about playing basketball at Punahou, the private school where my brothers and I had all gone, talking stink about Farrington High, where Mike had gone. That got him a cuff on the head from his dad.
Ailina, the quiet one in the middle, was nine years old, a round, brown girl with dark hair in a ponytail. She didn’t have much to say, but I could see she was watching everything. Akipela, the baby, was playing a princess in the second grade play.
“Typecasting,” Haoa said, and Tatiana punched him in the arm.
By the time Mike and I got home, we were both feeling sleepy. We let Roby out for a quick run in the back yard, then stumbled into bed.
“I like your family,” Mike said, just before we dozed off.
“They’re your family, too, now,” I said. But I couldn’t help wondering if he was trying to tell me that he wanted our family to grow.
I woke to find Mike sitting up in bed next to me tapping at his phone. “Just answering an email.” He yawned, and put the phone down. “Weird about Tico having a son, huh?”
> “It was a surprise. But I’m glad Alfredo is getting to know his father.”
“Not always a good thing,” Mike said. “Look at my dad and me.”
“You argue with your father because you’re too much like him,” I said. “Besides, relations between fathers and sons are tough. I think I’m lucky that my father has almost always been supportive of me.”
“You think that’s because you’re the baby?”
“Hardly a baby at thirty-five,” I said. “But you’re right, maybe it’s because I’m the third son, and by the time I came along my parents had already gotten worn down by Lui and Haoa. But when I wanted to go surf after college, my dad was the one who stood up for me.”
“I think my life would have been easier if my dad hadn’t always been pushing me to be a doctor,” he said.
I shook my head. “No, it wouldn’t. I know you. You function best when you have someone to push against. Your father, me. If no one ever pressured you, you’d never do anything.”
“Oh yeah?” He flipped over so that he was on top of me, his hands pressing my arms down. “You like it just as much as I do when we fight.”
“I like it even better when we make up.” I wrapped my leg around his, and he leaned down and kissed me. Then his phone rang. He groaned and let me go, rolling over to grab it. “All right, I’m on it,” he said, then hung up. “Fire at a house on Round Top Drive that looks like arson. We’ll continue this conversation later.”
I stayed in bed with Roby snuggled up next to me, thinking of my brothers. Because they were so much older than I was, they’d taken the pressure off me in many areas—both were married and successful by the time I graduated from college, which freed me up to take time off to surf. I think maybe my father liked that in me, too—that I had a chance to chase my dreams, when at my age he’d had to knuckle down and support his growing family.
Thinking of fathers and sons reminded me of Jimmy Ah Wong, who I’d adopted in a way, guiding him through the pitfalls of adolescence and coming out. I’d met Jimmy when he was sixteen, after he’d been victimized by a sexual predator and gotten roped into a case I was investigating.
When his father discovered he was gay, he kicked Jimmy out of the house. Jimmy had lived on the streets for a while, until I found him a place to live with my godparents, and he had finished his GED and then gotten in to UH.
There were the kids I mentored at the gay teen center on Waikiki, too. A couple of them had been real success stories, graduating from high school, getting jobs, and establishing real relationships. Maybe they would be all the kids I’d ever have.
But soon enough my furry child was crawling all over me like I was an obstruction in the roadway, trying to lick my face, and I knew I had to get up and walk him. Once outside, I saw the neighbor across the street shepherding her kids into the family minivan, and then a block away a baby was squalling like a fire alert siren, and I was glad I only had a dog to worry about.
I just didn’t know how Mike would feel about the same questions.
FINDING FREDDIE
Lieutenant Sampson called us in soon after Ray and I got to headquarters. This morning’s extra-large polo shirt was tan, over black slacks. “How are things going with your home invasion murder case?” he asked.
I looked at Ray, and he looked back at me. “We’ve got a lot of different directions going, and nothing’s adding up yet,” I said.
I described our fruitless search for similar break-ins, and the dragon pendant that had showed up at Lucky Lou’s pawn shop. “An older Chinese woman pawned it, and that doesn’t fit the idea of a break-in by local mokes or ice addicts.”
“She could be an intermediary,” Sampson suggested. “Did Lou recognize her?”
“Nope. But we can check other pawn shops, see if she gets around.”
“Good. Go on.”
“We got a lead late yesterday on a moke who’s been breaking into houses,” I said. “We’re going to keep looking for him today. We got a tip that he might be staying at the homeless shelter on North Vineyard.”
“Sounds like you’re making progress,” Sampson said.
“Maybe, maybe not. The way the victim was stabbed doesn’t fit the profile of a random assault.” I explained the unusual circumstance of Zoë Greenfield’s wounds. “It looks like her assailant was waiting for her with the knife.”
“Don’t forget the semen,” Ray said.
Sampson’s eyebrows raised.
“Yeah. She was a lesbian, or so we’ve been told. She had recently broken up with a long-time partner. But she had unprotected sex with a man within seventy-two hours before she was killed. She could have picked up a guy, brought him home, and things went wrong.”
“Are you looking into the victim’s life?” Sampson asked.
Ray took over. “Her stomach contents indicated her last meal was sushi, so we got a list of her favorite sushi places from her ex. We canvassed them last night and found she had dinner a few hours before she was killed with a Caucasian male in his late twenties or early thirties, with tattoos on his forearms.”
“What about the partner?” Sampson asked. “She have any motive?”
“Not sure yet,” I said. “They had twin girls, and Greenfield was the birth mother. So there could have been custody issues. And there’s the birth father, too, Greg Oshiro, the crime reporter for the Star-Advertiser.”
“Oshiro?”
I nodded. “There was some talk, apparently, that she might be taking the kids to the mainland. He wasn’t happy about that.”
“We’ve got Kimo’s friend looking into her emails, too,” Ray said. “See if there’s anything there might lead us to someone interesting.”
“You’ve got your hands full, I see. Keep me in the loop.”
He picked up his phone, which meant we were dismissed. As we walked back to our desks, Thanh Nguyen, the fingerprint tech, stepped out of the elevator.
He was a wiry guy in his early sixties, and word around the building was that he’d been in the South Vietnamese army. “I did some work on that dragon pendant you sent down,” he said, as we met at my desk. “A couple of the prints on it match the pawnbroker. But there was a pretty decent thumbprint that doesn’t match anyone in our files, so I ran a couple of other tests.”
“What kind of tests?”
“I’ve been reading about new work from England that extrapolates information about the subject from the sweat in their fingerprints. Our prints contain a mixture of skin cells, sweat secretions and other stuff we pick up. Metabolites – breakdown parts of substances people consume – end up in our pores, and they get transferred along with our fingerprints.”
“Cool,” Ray said. I nodded in agreement.
“I got the department to authorize some research and thought your case would be a good test. I used gold nanoparticles to give me some idea of the profile of the person behind the print. Based on what I found, I can say that the print belongs to a woman, and there was a good chance she was a heavy coffee drinker, based on the secretions in the print.”
“Great, let’s stake out every Kope Bean in town and take comparison prints,” Ray grumbled.
Thanh held up his hands. “Hey, just trying to help.”
“It’s interesting stuff,” I said. “Anything else?”
He shook his head. “The print tested negative for tobacco or any controlled substances, so that’s all I’ve got.”
We thanked him, and after he left we decided to go look for Freddie Walsh. Since it was Ray’s turn to drive, we climbed up into the Highlander, pulling into traffic behind a woman in a blue convertible who appeared to be applying makeup and talking on her cell phone at the same time she was driving.
“Makes you wish for the old days when you were on patrol, doesn’t it?” I asked. “If we were in a squad car we could light her up and pull her over.”
“Nothing is going to make me wish for those days,” Ray said. “You know how bad the snow and ice get in Philly in the winter?”
“Nope, and I don’t want to.” We rocked along to a classic Bruce Springsteen CD until we arrived at the homeless shelter on North Vineyard. We parked behind a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that read “Talk is cheap until you hire a lawyer.”
The homeless shelter was a former church, a one-story building with a gothic arched roof and a makeshift addition out back. The receptionist told us Walsh was in the back courtyard, and there were five guys there, each one sitting by himself. A skinny moke with ropy upper arms sipping coffee in the shade of an anemic palm tree matched the description we had. “Mr. Walsh?” I asked, showing him my badge. “HPD. Can we ask you a few questions?”
Freddie was a tough-looking haole with a brown buzz cut and tribal tattoos on his biceps. I noted that and wondered if Shinichi, the waiter at Simple Sushi, had gotten his body parts wrong; he had said the man with Zoë Greenfield the night she died had tattoos on his forearms.
“What’s this about?” Walsh asked.
“Mind if we sit?” I motioned to the two other chairs at the wire table.
“It’s a free country.”
I thought I’d try the direct approach. “You know a woman named Zoë Greenfield?”
That wasn’t what he was expecting, and it threw him. “Zoë? Yeah. We grew up together in that rat hole commune.”
“Really? What was your name back then?”
He laughed. “I was lucky. My parents were big fans of Queen, so they called me Freddie, after Freddie Mercury. Zoë wasn’t so lucky. You know her parents called her Fallopian? And her brother Vas? That family was like a living anatomy lesson.”
“You been in touch with her lately?”
He looked suspicious. “Why?”
“How about if I ask the questions, and you answer them? That work for you?”
“Maybe a month ago,” he said. “She took me to dinner.”
“That all?” Ray asked. “She take you to bed, too?”
Freddie laughed. “Zoë’s a dyke, man.”