Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  His phone rang, and he glared at it. As he picked up the receiver and barked into it, he motioned us to leave.

  Back at our desks, Ray and I looked at each. “Where do we go from here?” he asked. “Any ideas? We have to try and run Anna Yang to ground.”

  “We never heard back from Ellen Toyama, the girl who gave Greg Wyatt’s name.” I called and left another message for her, then turned back to Ray. “If she doesn’t call back by tomorrow we’ll track her down.”

  “You know any lesbians?” Ray asked. “I mean, I watched The L Word. In LA, they’re all sleeping with each other. Why not here?”

  “That’s a TV show. But I can give it a try.” I called my friend Sandra Guarino, an attorney with a prominent downtown law firm who’s also the most connected lesbian in the islands.

  “Kimo. You never call. Cathy and I were just talking about you the other day.”

  “Then you could have picked up the phone.” Cathy was her partner, the tiny half-Japanese woman who’d recruited me for the gay teen group. “Listen, do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you about something.”

  “You’re in luck,” she said. “My lunch date just cancelled a few minutes ago and nothing else has had a chance to take over the time. How about the Little Village, one o’clock?”

  While I was on the phone, Ray had been Googling Anna Yang. He found a website for her murals, including an email link. “I already emailed her,” he said, when I swiveled over to his desk. “We’ll see if she gets in touch.”

  Her work was beautiful, more photos of murals like the ones in the house on Lopez Lane and the apartment in Chinatown. Fortunately, there were a couple of client testimonials, and we were able to track down full names and phone numbers for three of them.

  We left messages at two of the numbers, but got the lady of the house on the third call. “Mrs. Buchanan?” I gave her my name and said I wanted to ask about Anna Yang.

  “I can’t recommend her highly enough. The mural she did for my daughter’s room is just lovely.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not calling for a recommendation. Do you think I could come over and talk to you for a few minutes?”

  She lived in a high-rise just a few minutes from downtown, and Ray and I got there about half-past noon. The doorman buzzed us up, and an elegant haole woman in her forties opened the apartment door to us.

  The first thing we saw was the magnificent view of Honolulu harbor. “Please come in,” Renata Buchanan said. “I hope Anna isn’t in any trouble.”

  “We’re just trying to learn about her,” I said, as she led us into the living room. We sat on a half-round white couch. “Can you tell us what she was like to work with?”

  “A real perfectionist. She knew exactly what she wanted to do, and she was determined to get it done right. The hardware store sent over the wrong color blue—and you should have heard her tell them, in no uncertain terms, what was wrong, and what she expected them to do to fix it.”

  “Would you say she had a temper?” Ray asked.

  Renata shifted uncomfortably on a plush chair. “Well, when you put it that way…” She hesitated. “I did see her get very angry a couple of times, when things weren’t going right. She accidentally put a brush with paint on it into a different color, and she got very upset.”

  She leaned forward. “She isn’t in any trouble, is she?” She hesitated again. “I never asked her for her papers. I didn’t think it was my responsibility. She was just an independent contractor, after all. Not like an employee. She spoke with an accent, of course, but so many people do. That doesn’t mean someone is illegal.”

  “We’re not from Immigration,” I said. “And Anna’s not in any trouble right now. We’re just trying to learn about her.”

  Renata relaxed. “She was devoted to her children, I know that,” she said. “She loves those girls. You should see her face light up when she talks about them.”

  We thanked Renata Buchanan for her time. “Well, we know she has a temper,” I said. “She has a motive, too.”

  “And she has the upper body strength to wield a knife,” Ray added.

  I dropped him back at headquarters and drove over to the Little Village, a Chinese restaurant favored by attorneys since the tables were far enough apart to have private conversations. I parked behind an SUV with a bumper sticker that read, “Your kid’s an honors student but you’re a moron.”

  I walked in the restaurant a few minutes before Sandra and snagged us a table under the trellis, ordering us both water and hot tea. She was talking when she walked in, the picture of the corporate lawyer, in a dark suit and sensible pumps. It took me a minute to notice the wireless earpiece and realize she was on the phone. Only the pink pin on her lapel in the shape of the Greek lambda indicated she was anything beyond the norm.

  “So how’s that handsome fireman of yours?” she asked, after she’d finished her call, kissed my cheek and sat down.

  “Still as handsome as ever. Though if I could train him not to leave his underwear on the living room floor, our house would be more peaceful.”

  “You sound just like a woman,” she said. “Don’t you drop your shorts on the floor too? Leave the toilet seat up? And all those other stereotypical man things?”

  “Spoken like a true lesbian,” I said. “Some of us have manners, you know.”

  The waiter brought us a dish of cucumber pickles with our water and tea. I ordered the clams in lemon grass sauce, and Sandra had the steamed basa, catfish fillets in ginger and green onions. “So what’s new in the world of homicide?” she asked. “I know you didn’t call me just to chat.”

  “Sandra. I’m hurt.”

  “I refer to our previous conversation. You’re a man.”

  “Did you or Cathy know Zoë Greenfield and Anna Yang?”

  She pursed her lips. “Let me think for a minute. Neither of them are someone I know well, that’s for sure.” She pulled out her Blackberry and started scrolling through it. “Greenfield. Yup. Accountant, right? Works for the state?”

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “You have every lesbian in Hawai’i in there?”

  “Almost. A girl’s gotta network, you know.”

  “Did you know her personally?”

  Sandra shook her head. “What was the other name again?”

  “Anna Yang. She’s an artist. Paints murals in peoples’ houses.”

  She frowned. “Don’t know how she got past me. I haven’t heard of her.”

  The waiter brought our platters, my clams balanced on each other and smelling sweet and tart at the same time. “Which one of them is in trouble?” Sandra asked, cutting off a piece of her fillet.

  “Zoë Greenfield’s dead, and Anna Yang’s in the wind.” As we ate, I gave her the basics of the case.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Ask around. See if any of your friends knows anything about Zoë, or why someone might have killed her. And if you can get a handle on Anna’s whereabouts, we need to talk to her.”

  “Sounds like she could use an attorney.”

  “Not quite yet. But if she overstayed her visa, she’s in trouble for sure.”

  “I have an idea you might not have checked yet.” She pushed her plate away while I was still working on my clams and pressed a couple of keys on her Blackberry. She placed the phone down on the table and stared into space. “Lucy, it’s Sandra Guarino,” she said after a minute. She laughed and made some small talk, then said, “I need a quick favor. Can you check your database for a woman named Anna Yang?”

  She laughed again. “No, not one of those.” She looked at me. “What’s the guy’s name?”

  I looked at her, and then it clicked. “Greg Oshiro.”

  She repeated the name to Lucy, whoever she was. “You’re going to need to write this down,” she said to me.

  I pulled out my pad and pen. “Great. That’s what I thought. June 21, you said, 2010?”

  I wrote the date down. She thanked Lucy and promised that th
ey’d get together.

  “Let me guess,” I said, when she was finished. “Greg Oshiro and Anna Yang are married.”

  “Two points for the boy in blue,” she said, even though I was wearing an aloha shirt in shades of green and white. “Lucy works in the Department of Health.”

  I knew that was the department that issued marriage licenses; I’d gone down for the license with Haoa and Tatiana when they applied. “So why doesn’t INS know about that?” I asked. “Marriage is Anna’s ticket to citizenship.”

  “Did they all live together?” she asked. “Zoë, Anna and this guy?”

  I shook my head. “Not that I know.” I told her about the house on Lopez Lane, and Anna’s apartment in Chinatown.

  Sandra shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a backup plan,” she said. “ICE is cracking down on marriages between citizens and foreign nationals. If they weren’t living together, it could have been construed as immigration fraud.”

  She insisted on paying for lunch. “Call it a chit you owe me. You and Mike have to come over to the house for dinner sometime.”

  As we were walking out, I said, “You guys ever think about kids?”

  She stopped and looked at me. “Are you and Mike thinking about it?”

  I shrugged. “Everywhere I look these days, gay men and lesbians are having kids, or adopting, or showing up with kids from some previous relationship. It’s like it’s in the air or something.” We stepped out into the sunshine.

  “We’ve talked about it,” Sandra said. “But Cathy’s so busy with the teen center, and she doesn’t have the chance to write as much as she should.” Cathy was a poet with an MFA. I’d read a couple of her poems in the past, and though I’m no expert, I’d been moved by them.

  “I love my career and my volunteer work. Neither of us think it would be fair to bring a child into the mix right now.” She paused. “Cathy had fibroids a few years ago,” she said, lowering her voice. “So if we decide to have children, I’d be the birth mom. We have some time to make the decision, though, so the jury’s still out.”

  She looked at me. “How would you feel about being the sperm donor?”

  I can’t say I hadn’t thought about it. When I discovered, a year before, that Greg had donated sperm and fathered two kids, I had wondered if anyone would ever ask me. Sandra and Cathy were my closest lesbian friends, so they’d been the obvious choice.

  “Anna told me that they picked Greg Oshiro because Zoë was going to be the birth mom, and they wanted kids who were mixed race,” I said.

  Sandra looked at me like I was on a witness stand avoiding one of her questions. And I was. “It was great to see you,” I said, kissing her cheek. “I promise we’ll have dinner soon.”

  She laughed. “Think about it.” Then her Blackberry buzzed and she was a corporate attorney once again, walking off down the street speaking into the air about an upcoming deposition.

  When I got back to headquarters, Greg Oshiro was at Ray’s desk talking to him. “Good, you’re back,” Ray said. “Greg just got here.” He stood up. “Let’s go into an interview room so we can talk.”

  Greg and I followed him down the hall. “What have you found out?” Greg asked, as soon as we were all in the room.

  “How about if we ask a couple of questions first,” I said. “That’s the way we generally work it around here, you know.”

  Greg frowned. But he put down his notebook and pen.

  “Let’s talk about marriage first,” I said. “Like you and Anna Yang, exchanging vows.”

  He looked down at the table, twiddling his pen back and forth in his fingers. Finally, he looked up. “Yeah, we got married. A couple of months before the twins were born.”

  “Why?” Ray asked. “For her citizenship?”

  Greg looked at him. “I thought she had a green card. She worked all over the place.”

  Ray shook his head. “She had a student visa, which expired when she finished her degree. Nothing after that.”

  “Shit. I didn’t know that. It’s not like we were trying to scam ICE or anything.”

  “Then why did you get married?”

  He looked embarrassed. “We were protecting ourselves,” he said. “You know, in case something happened with Zoë.”

  “And something did,” I said.

  He glared at me. “It was nothing like that. It’s just that Anna had no rights to the girls, and I was worried that the two of them might gang up on me and shut me out. I mean, for the longest time, they kept calling me the sperm donor, not even the dad.”

  Greg had started to sweat, and he reached into his pocket and found a handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

  “You see how it looks,” I said, playing the bad cop once more. “You and Anna thinking for so long about ganging up on Zoë. Then she ends up dead. And who benefits? Well, you and Anna get to keep the kids here in Hawai’i, for one thing.”

  Greg’s eyes narrowed.

  “Yeah, Greg, we know that Zoë was threatening to move the kids to the mainland with her new boyfriend. That must have made you and Anna both pretty angry.”

  “I didn’t kill Zoë,” he said. “If you’re accusing me, then you should be reading me my rights and letting me call an attorney.”

  “Nobody’s accusing you of anything yet,” I said. “We’re just asking questions. And you know we don’t have to Mirandize you until we take you into custody and you’re no longer free to leave. Right now we’re just talking.”

  Ray jumped in. “Kimo gets a little over excited, Greg. You know that. We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. And you want to help us find out who killed Zoë, don’t you?”

  I said, “We know you love the girls. Your parents love them, too. You want them to stay in Hawai’i. You’ve got to admit, you’ve got a motive.”

  He looked from me to Ray, and then back at me again. I could see he was struggling to keep his voice calm. “I didn’t kill Zoë. Hell, I haven’t even been in a fight since junior high. But Anna had a temper. I saw her and Zoë argue sometimes. If you’re looking for a personal motive, Anna’s the one with the most to gain.”

  Nice, I thought. Throw your wife under the bus.

  But then, there was the possibility that Anna Yang, Zoë’s life partner for nearly seven years, had turned around and killed her. That was even worse than throwing suspicion on someone.

  Greg asked a couple of questions about Zoë’s death, but I had to tell him that we couldn’t say much as long as he was a possible suspect. He didn’t like that, but he knew the way things worked.

  Ray and I stayed in the interview room after he left. “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think you shook him up,” he said. “Beyond that, I don’t know. A week ago, if you’d asked me if Greg Oshiro could kill somebody, I’d have laughed. But parenting is a powerful thing, especially if he thought those girls were in danger.”

  “Taking them to the mainland’s not putting them in danger.”

  “Taking them to the mainland with an ex-con, though?” Ray said. “You love your nephews and nieces. How’d you feel if one of your brothers died, and your sister-in-law was dating some guy with a rap sheet?”

  “Crazy.” I nodded. But crazy enough to kill? I didn’t know that. But how many of us would?

  SCHOOL DAYS

  We gave up at the end of our shift. I was in a bad mood, and knew that if I didn’t do something to shake myself up, I’d make Mike miserable too. So I went home, took Roby for a quick walk, put on shorts and a T-shirt, and threw my short board into the back of the Jeep.

  I drove down to Makapu’u Point, parked alongside the road, and pulled on my rash guard. The wind was calm and the swell direction was just right for a good point break to the left. It was about an hour before dark, and the early evening sky was flecked with clouds and painted in a hundred different shades of blue, so many different ones that there weren’t names for half of them.

  I nodded to a couple of other surfers, then plunged into the coo
l water and duck dived through the incoming waves. I sat on my board and felt myself finally relaxing.

  When I was single and lived in Waikiki, I surfed nearly every day. It was as important to me as breathing. But love does strange things to you. It became more important to me to live with Mike up in Aiea Heights than it was to be able to walk to the beach. As a result, I didn’t get into the water as much as I wanted.

  Sitting there on my board, I tried to empty my brain of Zoë Greenfield’s murder, and all the questions about kids that had come up in its wake. Surfing is great for that; you have to focus on the waves, the wind, and the other surfers, and there isn’t room for anything else.

  I caught a strong wave, jumped onto my board, and immediately turned to ride the lip. I kept my balance, did a bottom turn, and rode the wave into the shore. Not a world class ride, but it felt great.

  I kept on surfing for an hour, until my muscles had that old familiar ache and my brain felt clear. When I got back up to my car, I found Mike had called my cell. “Where are you?” he asked, when I called back.

  “Makapu’u Point. I had to surf for a while.”

  “What are we doing for dinner?”

  I said I’d pick up a pizza on my way home. “I’ll walk the dog,” he said.

  We finished the call with mutual promises of love. And by the time I got home, pizza in hand, I was feeling relaxed and happy.

  That all changed the next morning.

  Ray and I went back to Chinatown, asking around the neighborhood for Anna Yang without much success. It was about 9:30 when the radio crackled. “All available units,” the dispatcher said. “Student with a gun at Chinatown Christian Academy.” She read off the street address. “Approach with extreme caution.”

  We were only about five blocks away. While I looked for a parking spot, Ray unholstered his gun and popped the magazine, making sure he had ammunition.

  I was carrying mine in a belt holster, and I pulled it out and handed it to him, grip first. “Check mine, will you?”

  “Don’t suppose you have a vest, do you?” Ray asked, sliding the magazine out.

  I shook my head. “Who knew we’d need them?”