by Neil Plakcy
“A friend of Dom’s at Tripler knew a woman who taught Chinese cooking classes out of her house, and I signed up,” Soon-O continued. “Her name was Gladys Yuu.” She smiled. “I did learn a lot about using knives from her. I guess Mike said something about that.”
“Gladys Yuu couldn’t have carved the fish better,” Mike said. “We had dinner at Jameson’s, up on the North Shore.”
“Such a long way to go for dinner on a work day,” Dom said. He’d put aside his reading glasses, on top of a hardcover Tom Clancy novel on the wooden table next to his chair.
“I was chasing down a lead. My cousin Ben is on the board of a surf group that I thought might be tied into my case.”
Dom was a sports nut. Like my brother Haoa, he followed UH football, baseball and basketball. He watched golf and NASCAR on TV, and even followed surf competitions. “Ben Melville?” he asked.
I nodded. “I think you met him at our house once. He’s my Aunt Pua’s youngest son.”
“So how does this relate to Gladys Yuu?” Soon-O asked.
“The two women who were killed worked in the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. There’s a secretary there named Gladys Yuu. I wondered if it was the same woman.”
Soon-O frowned. “This was a long time ago, you understand. Mike was only seven, so that was more than twenty-five years ago. But I did keep up with a few of the women I studied with, for a while. I remember Gladys’s husband died, and she took a job with the state. I don’t know more than that.”
“Thanks. That’s helpful.”
Dom Riccardi wasn’t ready to let go so easily. “What makes you think this woman could be connected to your case?”
“The first woman who was killed was stabbed. You probably know it’s hard to kill someone with a knife.” As a doctor and a nurse, I figured the Riccardis had seen their share of stab wounds. “The person who killed Zoë Greenfield knew how to use a knife. When Mike said that Gladys had taught knife skills, I made the connection.”
“How was she killed?” Dom asked.
“Dominic,” Soon-O said. “You’re not a detective.”
“I have some background in this area, Soon-O.” He turned back to me. “Well?”
I tried to remember the autopsy report. “Zoë was slender, about five-seven. Her assailant was about the same height, and the first cut came from behind, right about here.” I pointed to where my neck met my right shoulder.
“As if he was trying to cut the jugular,” Dom said, nodding.
“Or she,” I said. “Then it looks like Zoë turned around to face the assailant. There were a couple of defensive wounds to her hands.” I held my own up in front of me, as if warding off the knife. “The final cuts were to her stomach, and it looks like she died from loss of blood.”
“Or shock,” Dom said. “Was she on any medication?”
“Dom, that’s enough,” Soon-O said. “Mike and Kimo don’t come over enough. We shouldn’t talk about murder when they’re here.” She patted her son’s hand. “So, tell us, Mike, what’s new?”
Dominic Riccardi grumbled but let it go. Mike told them about the case he’d gone up to investigate. “Stupidity, as usual,” he said. “This teenaged kid who’d been grounded was mad at his father. He knew that his dad kept a stash of dirty magazines in his bureau, so he dug around until he found them, then stacked them on the kitchen table and set them on fire.”
Soon-O looked like she was unhappy that she had changed the subject. “Of course, the house caught on fire,” Mike continued. “At first the kid said that the stove had shorted out but I could tell from the fire pattern that it had started at the table. Eventually he confessed.”
I’m fascinated by the technical aspects of Mike’s job, the way he can use the evidence to track back to how everything began. But Soon-O said, “Can’t either of you talk about anything happy?”
“Saturday afternoon we went to this kite festival up in the Ko’olaus,” I said. “My friend Terri’s son was flying in the competition.”
She turned to Mike. “In school we studied Admiral Yi of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea. When the Japanese invaded Korea in the 16th century, he used kites with special markings to command his fleet.” We spent a few minutes talking about the competition, and about the kites Soon-O had flown as a girl in Korea. “That must have been beautiful,” she said. “So many kites.”
I felt that sting in my eyes again as I told her how Danny had eventually let his go, sending it to his father in heaven. “I would like to go to a festival like that,” Soon-O said. “Will you let us know if you go again?”
We said we would, and left a few minutes later. “That was nice,” I said to Mike, as we walked into our own house, next door. “Your father didn’t bite my head off, and your mother got to enjoy a memory. We should do more with them. Maybe we’ll have them and my parents over for dinner sometime.”
Mike started to strip down. “If you want. I’m going to watch TV for a while and then hit the hay. How about you?”
I checked my email, surfed to a couple of websites, and then joined Mike in bed by ten. We snuggled up together, Roby on the floor by the bed, and my last thoughts were about how comfortable I felt there within the center of my family.
FIELD TRIPS
The next morning, I told Ray what I’d discovered about Gladys Yuu. “I went online and found some photos taken a few years ago, of Gladys teaching a cooking class. I’m pretty sure it’s the same woman.”
I showed him the album I’d found online. I printed a couple of the pictures, including a good shot of Gladys’s face. There was a photo of the students in front of what I figured was Gladys’s house. I popped her address into Google Maps and pulled it up on my screen, and what I saw there quickened my pulse.
But before I jumped the gun, I did some fiddling with another search engine. I found the address I was looking for—and I wasn’t surprised to find it wasn’t too far from Gladys’s. I hunted for a different picture and printed it. When I was finished I said to Ray, “Come on. Field trip.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
He raised his eyebrows, but tagged along. It had rained while we were inside, and the air was fresh with negative ions. I didn’t even mind sitting in traffic on South Beretania Street, because it was fun to pretend to be a tourist, spotting green coconuts nestling in the crooks of palms, the bright red bursts of hibiscus blossoms alongside an office building, all the little things that make our visitors feel like they’re in the tropics. The high-rises and stores in downtown could be in any US city, but few cities beyond Miami or LA can match us for tropical splendor.
A young woman zipped past us on a scooter, a small boy perched behind her. She wore a simple white helmet, but the boy’s was bright blue, with a red Mohawk strip in fake hair blowing in the wind. A troop of schoolchildren walked in double-ranks down the sidewalk, holding hands in pairs, with what looked like a teacher or a mom in front and at the rear.
I took University Avenue until the commercial buildings faded and we were in a residential neighborhood. We passed an elderly woman in a baseball cap and sweat pants, walking backwards on the sidewalk, a harried Japanese mom pushing a tandem baby carriage, and an enormously fat man walking a very tiny Yorkshire terrier on a bright red leash.
When we came to Hillside Avenue, I said, “Recognize where we are?”
“The cat?”
“Yup. We brought her back to that house over there.” I pointed, and turned onto Hillside Avenue. Then I made a left, and pulled up in front of a single-story bungalow. “And this is where Gladys Yuu lives.”
“So Gladys could have picked up the cat and taken it up to Nuuanu Pali Drive,” Ray said.
We sat there for a few minutes, looking at Gladys’s house and thinking. Just as I put the car back in gear, the front door of the house opened, and a young Filipina in a nurse’s uniform pushed an elderly woman in a wheelchair outside.
As
they got closer to us, I could see the Filipina wasn’t so young; she was about forty, with a snaggle-toothed smile. The old woman was bundled up in a sweater, despite the morning heat, and her white hair blew around her like a halo. She was Chinese, and I heard her complaining loudly in a guttural voice as the aide bounced her down the broken walkway toward the street.
“That must be Gladys’s mother,” I said. “I remember she said something about her mother having an aide.”
“That’s tough,” Ray said. “Living so long that you end up in a wheelchair, some stranger wiping your behind.”
“Well, at least Julie’s growing a little stranger for you who’ll wipe your butt when you get old,” I said.
“Don’t even go there. We’ll be wiping the kid’s butt for the first few years.” He made a face.
“It’s not so bad. I pick up after Roby every day. I don’t usually wipe his butt, though, unless he has diarrhea.”
“TMI.”
We watched the aide, smiling grimly, as she pushed the old woman down the street. “Must be expensive to have an aide like that,” I said.
“And I’ll bet Gladys doesn’t make that much as a secretary.”
“I want to show you one more place.” It was only a couple of blocks to Puuhonua Street, which backed up against the lower reaches of Round Top. “See that house there?” I pointed to a ranch-style with overgrown foliage in the front yard.
“Who lives there?”
“Dr. Xiao Zenshen.”
Ray gave a low whistle. “So both of them live close enough to pick up the cat. We know if Dr. Z needs money?”
“You run a science project like she’s got, you always need money. Whether you get it from the state or from investors like Levi Hirsch.” I put the car back into gear. “Let’s see if Lucky Lou remembers either of them.” We drove out to Salt Lake and had to wait while a crew-cut soldier pawned a digital camera. He kept looking over at us nervously, and as soon as Lou gave him the money and the claim ticket he was out of there fast.
“You guys are great for business,” Lou grumbled. “What do you want now? Want to confiscate more of my merchandise? I could go bankrupt the way you guys keep coming back here.”
“Just want to see if you recognize someone.” I showed him the photo of Gladys Yuu.
He shrugged. “Looks like any Mama-san you’d see at the grocery,” he said. “I’m supposed to know her?”
“How about this one?” Dr. Zenshen’s photo was a headshot from Néng Yuán’s website.
Lucky Lou didn’t recognize her either.
“You think either of them could have pawned that dragon pendant?” I asked.
“That was like a two weeks ago. You know how many customers have been through here since then? They don’t have big knockers, I don’t pay any attention.”
A shy-looking young woman entered the pawn shop, carrying a rifle case. I didn’t want to get involved, so we left.
“How are we going to get Gladys’s fingerprints, to see if they match the one on the pendant?” Ray asked. “And we need a cast of her tires to see if they match the tracks we found where Miriam Rose got run off the road.”
“I don’t know if we’ve got enough evidence yet. We can ask Sampson, but I think that’s what he’s going to tell us.”
And that’s exactly what he said. We sat in his office and presented what we had. “She worked with both the victims,” I said.
“But the pawnbroker can’t ID her?”
“Nope.”
“What’s her motive? She have money problems? A history of beefs with the defendants? Any connection to this power company, what’s it called?”
“Néng Yuán,” I said.
“We’ll get into her,” Ray said. “A day or two, we’ll have all the answers to those questions.”
“And then maybe you’ll have enough for a warrant,” Sampson said. “Maybe.”
“We should have anticipated that,” I grumbled, as we walked back to our desks. “We’re not a pair of rookies.”
“We got over excited,” Ray said. “I’ll run the credit check. You see what else you can find out about Gladys and Dr. Zenshen. Maybe Harry can do some searching.”
“Good idea.” I called Harry and told him what we knew about both women. “Nothing illegal,” I said. “Just see if you can dig up anything on her that we can use to get a search warrant.”
I called Levi and asked if he had anything on Néng Yuán yet. “We’re trying to connect the company to a secretary in the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism,” I said.
“I found a guy you can talk to,” Levi said. “His name is Mike Cheng, and he used to work with Néng Yuán, but now he runs his own consulting business.”
Cheng agreed to meet with us, so we went over to his office, in a four-story building out Ala Moana Boulevard beyond the Kewalo basin, almost at Honolulu Harbor. It was some kind of office co-op, with a single receptionist out front. Cheng himself was a short, stocky Chinese guy, about fifty, with an accent almost as heavy as the receptionist at Néng Yuán.
He led us back to his office, a single room with a desk, a plan table, and a couple of visitor chairs. “Levi said you wanted to talk about Néng Yuán?” he asked.
We sat across from him. “You worked there?”
“I knew Xiao Zenshen back in Shanghai,” he said. “At the university. I was a lecturer and she was very smart graduate student. Both of us interested in wave energy. So when she come here and start business, she ask me to come, too. Get me visa and everything.”
“How come you’re not still working with her?” I asked.
He wrinkled his nose like there was a bad smell in the room. “I don’t like how she do business. If you scientist, true scientist, you go up and down with your experiments. Ride the wave, they say. But Xiao, she want to succeed, big time. When numbers don’t work her way, she make them work.”
He shook his head. “Not good way to do business. The hand that is always open never hold on to what matters.”
I looked at Ray. He didn’t seem to understand that either, so I pushed on. “Could Dr. Zenshen be giving incorrect data to the state government?”
When Mike Cheng smiled, I could see he had terrible teeth—some missing, some broken, others stained by tobacco. “Xiao do that all the time.”
“And nobody ever caught on?” Ray asked.
Cheng rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for money. “Easy to look other way when money involved.”
“Who did she pay off?” I asked. “Franklin Nishimura?”
Cheng shook his head. “His chair always empty. Woman who make everything go in that office is secretary. Gladys. She hand reports to Nishimura to sign, he say, okay, Gladys.”
“So Dr. Zenshen paid Gladys to get Nishimura to sign off on false data,” I said.
Cheng smiled again.
“You have any proof of this?” Ray asked.
Cheng shrugged. “Xiao, she always keep two sets of records. Actual data, and data reported to state. You find those records, you have proof.”
I pulled the little flash drive Harry had given me out of my pocket. “Can you take a look at the data on here?”
He put on a pair of reading glasses, stuck the drive into the side of his computer, and focused on the screen. He made a bunch of sounds in Chinese as he flipped from page to page. Then he took the glasses off and looked at us again.
“Where you get these from?” he asked.
“A woman at the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism,” I said. “She had this file on her computer. We found it while we were investigating her murder.”
Cheng closed out the file on his computer and returned the drive to me. “You have to give to lawyer, make demand for wave attenuator results. Then you compare to milestones Xiao met, and payments state gave her. Those your two sets of data.”
“Where do you think she could have gotten these?” I asked.
“Xiao very careful about h
er data,” Cheng said. “When I work there, only she and I have access. When I leave, she replace me with other analyst. Must be him.”
When we were back in Ray’s Highlander, I said, “So Wyatt saw something fishy at Néng Yuán, and he must have told Zoë about it. He gave her the data.”
“And she knew there was something hinky going on,” Ray said. “That’s why she hid the files on her backup drive with different names.”
“I think we need to talk to Wyatt again,” I said. “You can get back onto the H1 at the Pali Highway on-ramp.”
LUNCH BREAK
It took us a while to get all the way back to Hawai’i Kai, and it was lunch time when we pulled up in front of Néng Yuán’s building. Wyatt Collins was standing out in front of the building, smoking a cigarette and talking to a dark-haired young woman in a severe black skirt and white blouse.
“Hey, Wyatt,” I said through the window, as Ray pulled up at the curb. “Why don’t you join us for lunch?”
He looked at the woman and then back at us. “Why not,” he said, and he got in the back seat.
“There’s a good burger joint in the Koko Marina shopping center,” I said to Ray. “Down the street a couple of blocks.”
“Got a new girlfriend already, Wyatt?” I asked, turning my head to face him.
“She works down the hall,” Wyatt said. “It a crime these days to talk to a pretty girl?”
“No crime,” I said. “Now, stealing confidential data from your employer, that might be a crime.” I turned back to Ray. “Left in there, at the shopping center.”
I let Wyatt stew until we were parked and waiting in line at the burger place. “Go wild,” I said to him, motioning to the menu. “My treat.”
He looked like a dog that had been beaten and then offered a treat. But he ordered himself a burger and fries, and Ray and I did the same.
While we waited for the burgers, we took a table by the window. The shopping center was busy, cars pulling in and out, moms and kids and whole tourist families in matching T-shirts. “It’s not like I stole the data,” Wyatt said. “I mean, it was something Zoë should have seen anyway.”