Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  Ray and I nodded, sucking on our drinks. Wyatt took in a deep breath, then let it out. “When you told me she was dead, I got scared. I thought if I told you about giving her those spreadsheets, you’d arrest me. And I don’t have anything but this job anymore.”

  “Let’s start from the beginning,” I said. “How did you figure out there was something fishy going on?”

  Wyatt laughed. “I may have turned over a new leaf when I came out here, Detective, but I still recognize a scam when I see one. I put together all the statistics for Dr. Z to submit to the state. I knew we weren’t meeting our targets, and I was worried that if we didn’t get the next installment of money from the state, Dr. Z might not have the money to pay my salary.”

  They called our number, and Ray went up and got the platters, bringing them back along his arm like a seasoned waiter. “Your range of skills constantly surprises me,” I said.

  “I worked my way through college waiting tables,” Ray said. “Baseball cap, skinny tie, all those little badges. Don’t have the crap any more, but I have the pictures.”

  We started to eat, the three of us just making casual conversation about past jobs we’d had. Wyatt had worked with his uncle fixing lawn mowers and farm equipment back in Tennessee. “In a way, that was what started me on my life of crime,” he said. “Couldn’t stand going home every day with my hands full of grease.”

  I’d finished my burger and was working through the rest of the fries by the time I asked, “You talk to Zoë about Dr. Z not meeting her targets?”

  “I did. Like maybe a week before Zoë got killed.” He pushed his half-eaten burger away from him, as if he’d lost his appetite. “She was surprised. She said she’d just finished looking at the data, and Dr. Z had made every target. That’s when we figured out there was something strange.”

  “Who else had access to the data?” I asked.

  “Me. Dr. Z. She had a couple of investors who knew what was going on, too.”

  “Did you worry that Dr. Z would track the data back to you?” Ray asked.

  Wyatt shook his head. “I wasn’t supposed to know there was a second set of results. All I had was my data. Zoë put it together with the data Dr. Z had submitted to the state. That’s when we started to see what Dr. Z was up to.”

  “Did Zoë talk to anybody about the discrepancies?” I asked.

  “Miriam. This girl she worked with. You should talk to her. Cute Filipina chick.”

  “Miriam Rose is dead, too,” I said. “Last week.”

  Wyatt’s face paled. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope. We went over to the office last week, showed her the data, and she said she’d take a look at it. The next day she called to say she needed to talk to us. We were on our way up to her house when somebody ran her off the road.”

  Wyatt slammed his hand on the table so hard other people in the restaurant turned to look at us. “Goddamn mother fucker,” he said, way too loud.

  “Inside voice, Wyatt,” I said.

  “This is what you get when you try to go straight,” he said, lowering his voice. “See? What the fuck good is it trying to play by the rules when nobody else does?”

  “We do,” I said. “And we catch the people who don’t, and put them behind bars. You know that.”

  He gave a short, choked laugh. “The cops back in Tennessee were no better than the crooks. You know how many times I got the shit beat out of me, for no reason? How many days I did in jail when I didn’t do nothing?”

  “Yeah, yeah, the prisons are full of innocent men,” I said. “Let’s get back to Zoë and Miriam. You have any ideas about who could have killed them?”

  “No fucking idea,” he said. “Back in prison, I knew these guys, looked like choirboys, who were stone cold killers. And I knew this one guy, could have been in ZZ Top with the beer gut and the long pointing beard. Sweetest guy you’d ever want to know.”

  “How about Gladys Yuu?” Ray asked. “You know her?”

  “Gladys? Secretary at Zoë’s office?”

  Ray leaned forward. “That’s the one. A middle-aged Chinese woman pawned some of Zoë’s jewelry. And it looks like somebody picked up a cat from Gladys’s neighborhood and threw it in front of Miriam’s car, to make her go off the road.”

  “Jeez, Zoë always said the woman was a bitch, but you think she murdered Zoë? And Miriam?”

  “Don’t know yet. Xiao Zenshen’s also a middle-aged Chinese woman. And she could have picked up the cat, too.”

  We drove Wyatt back to his office. “Watch your step,” I said, as I let him out of the car. “If one of these women killed Zoë and Miriam, you could be next.”

  Wyatt smirked. “All due respect, Detective, I know how to take care of myself. I couldn’t have lasted in prison otherwise.”

  “You’re not in prison now,” I said.

  Wyatt said, “We’re all in some kind of prison, one way or another.” Then he turned and went into the office building.

  NISHIMURA

  When Ray and I got back to headquarters, we went over what we had. “Somehow, Dr. Zenshen found out Zoë had the spreadsheets,” I said. “Maybe Zoë didn’t realize Gladys was working with her, and she went to her.”

  “Or she went to Nishimura, and Gladys heard about it.”

  “That means we need to talk to Nishimura. But without Gladys knowing about it.”

  “We could go to his house,” Ray said. “But I’m doing special duty tonight. Some foreign dignitary coming into the airport, needs a motorcade.”

  “I can do it myself. You have the address?”

  It was close to quitting time, so I drove up to Aiea Heights and took Roby for a long walk. Mike was working late, so Roby and I had dinner, and then I drove down to Nishimura’s place, a small ranch house on a corner lot.

  The Japanese woman who answered the door was tall, with iron-gray hair, wearing a simple white kimono patterned with black bamboo, tied with a black obi. “Mrs. Nishimura?” I asked.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we’re not interested,” she said, and started to slam the door.

  “HPD,” I said, holding up my badge. “I’d like to talk to your husband.”

  She frowned and tried to take my ID from me, but I held on to it so that she had to lean out the door to see it. “Franklin!” she called back into the house. In Japanese, she said, “What did you do now, you stupid idiot? Why do the police want to talk to you?”

  It can be convenient, looking the way I do. People don’t assume I can speak Japanese, not knowing that my mother spoke it to my brothers and me when were small. Her father never spoke English, so whenever we wanted to talk to Oji-san we had to speak Japanese to him. I’d even taken a couple of years of it at Punahou, as my mandatory foreign language.

  “What do you mean, woman?” Nishimura said, coming out of the kitchen with a dish cloth in his hand. He was still wearing his suit pants, and a white shirt, though he’d taken off his tie and undone the first couple of shirt buttons. “What are police doing here?”

  He saw me and switched to English. “Oh, it’s you.” To his wife he said, “This is about work. A woman who was killed.”

  He put the towel down on the dining room table and motioned me to the living room. “Why didn’t you just come to the office, detective? I was in all day.”

  “I need to talk to you about Gladys Yuu. I thought it would be best if she didn’t know.”

  Mrs. Nishimura continued in Japanese. “I told you that woman was bad. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

  “Your behavior is embarrassing me in front of my guest,” Nishimura shot back to her in Japanese. To me, he said, “Please sit down, detective. May I offer you a cup of tea? Coffee? Soda?”

  “No, thanks, I’m fine.”

  He sat across from me, while his wife hovered in the background.

  “How long has Gladys been working for you?”

  “Ten years. I’d be lost without her. She’s my right hand.” He paused. “What’s t
his about?”

  “When we were going through Zoë Greenfield’s belongings after her death, we found some very interesting spreadsheets,” I said. “First, confusing, because Zoë had given the files strange names, and hidden them in a folder with an odd name as well. Once we started to look into it, we discovered that the data in the spreadsheet relates to contracts administered by your office.”

  Nishimura’s face paled. “You are saying someone killed her because of what was in those files? Gladys?”

  “We don’t know yet,” I said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. How closely do you look at the invoices presented for payment?”

  “My husband is a very good man,” Mrs. Nishimura said. “You cannot blame him for anything those idiots at his office do.”

  Nishimura held his hand up. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She is a good woman, but very protective.” He sighed. “I admit, there is so much going on at the office that sometimes I simply sign off on things that my staff presents me with. That is the purpose of staff, isn’t it? There is no way I could check the data in every report. I would never get anything done.”

  “I know what you mean. There’s an awful lot of paperwork at the police department.” I could see his wife was ready to interrupt again, so I said, “Maybe I could use a cup of tea.”

  “Very good,” Nishimura said. “We have just received some delicious karigane green tea from my cousin in Tokyo. Fumiko-san? Can you make us tea, please?”

  I knew enough about the rules of hospitality to know that there was no way Fumiko Nishimura could turn down such a request, and I knew it would give Franklin and me a few minutes to talk.

  “Who gives you the paperwork to sign off on?” I asked. “The analysts?”

  He shook his head. “Everything goes through Gladys. She receives the materials from the companies we supervise, and logs them in to our system. Then she gives the analysts the materials to review. When they sign off, she brings me the paperwork to issue the checks.”

  I began to take some notes. “Which company do you suspect is involved?” Nishimura asked.

  “Néng Yuán. Zoë had a friend who worked there, and he says he told her that the experiments were failing, and asked what would happen to the company’s payout. She was surprised, because the data she had received indicated everything was fine.”

  “I would have to check,” Nishimura said. “But I believe Néng Yuán is current on its progress and its disbursements.”

  I nodded. “Zoë compared the data presented to the state with what her friend had collected, and put them together into a spreadsheet. She never showed that to you?”

  He shook his head. “Each month, there are many contracts to review. I have been very busy. I don’t think I spoke with Zoë in at least a week before she died.”

  I heard Fumiko clattering cups and saucers angrily in the kitchen. I figured she had failed in learning the grace of the tea ceremony. “Is it possible that Zoë confronted the management of Néng Yuán?” Nishimura asked. “That someone there might have killed her?”

  “Yes, it’s possible,” I said. “But then there’s Miriam Rose.”

  “Miriam?” He looked surprised. “But she was killed in a traffic accident.”

  I nodded. “As she was on our way to meet with me and my partner. We had asked her to look over the data and give us some insight.”

  Fumiko Nishimura entered the living room carrying a tray with a black ceramic teapot and two tiny cups, as well as a small platter of Japanese chocolate-covered cookies. She bowed briefly to her husband and placed the tray on the coffee table between us. She kneeled at one end of the table, and then poured the tea into the two cups.

  She nodded to her husband, who picked up one cup and passed it to me. I brought it up to my nose. “The aroma is most pleasant,” I said, smiling to Nishimura first, and then to his wife. I took a small sip, and made an appreciative sound. It was very good tea.

  I sipped the tea. “Thank you very much for your kindness. I have just a few more questions. Do you think Miriam might have asked Gladys about Néng Yuán’s account?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that Gladys watched the analysts very closely. It’s possible she was monitoring Miriam’s work and recognized what she was looking at.”

  Even as he spoke, it looked like the idea caused him physical pain. “You think Gladys might have killed Miriam? But how? She had already left the office when Miriam said good night to me.”

  “My partner and I went up to the scene of the accident,” I said. “We found a white cat there, a cat from a home near Gladys’s, which was many miles away. It’s possible that Gladys left the office early, drove up to Miriam’s exit on the Pali Highway, and when she saw Miriam’s car coming towards her, she threw the cat in front of Miriam’s car, causing her to swerve.”

  “Miriam would never have run over a cat,” Nishimura said, shaking his head.

  “How was the first woman killed?” Fumiko asked. “Zoë.”

  “She was stabbed with a kitchen knife.”

  “Then you must arrest Gladys,” Fumiko said. “She knows how to use knives very well.”

  “I understand she used to teach cooking classes. Did you ever study with her?”

  “I learned to cook from my mother and my grandmother. I had no use for Gladys.”

  I finished the rest of the tea, and declined another cup. “Please accept my apologies for disturbing your evening,” I said. “And I must ask you not to mention this interview to Gladys.”

  “My husband is stupid, but not that stupid,” Fumiko muttered in Japanese.

  “Smart people still do stupid things,” I said to her, watching the surprise on her face as she realized I had been understanding her all evening.

  “I’ll let myself out,” I said, standing.

  Levi Hirsch called as I was driving home. “Listen, I was thinking I could make this clearer to you if I took you and Ray out on my boat,” he said. “Show you what the wave attenuators look like, and help you put those numbers into perspective.”

  “I’ll never pass up a chance for a boat ride,” I said. “When were you thinking of going out?”

  “How about tomorrow afternoon? I need to swing past and look at the stuff my company has out there as well. Say four o’clock?”

  “Sounds good. I’ll check with Ray in the morning and let you know.”

  Mike was home by the time I got there, and we compared notes on our days, then walked Roby together just before bedtime.

  “Nestor’s wife is pregnant,” Mike said. “He’s kind of freaking out.”

  Nestor Matsuoka was one of the analysts at fire department headquarters, a guy Mike sometimes had lunch with. “Really? Why?”

  Mike shrugged. “It’s their first. He goes from stressing about not being able to sleep once the baby comes to worrying about paying for college.”

  “Sounds like he’s getting ahead of himself.”

  “Yeah. But you’ve got to admit, things change a lot when you have a kid.”

  We stopped so Roby could sniff a couple of bracts someone had cut off a palm tree. “I think as long as you really want to have the baby, everything else fades away.” I took a deep breath. “I’m just not sure I want a baby, even if someone else is raising it and we’re only the weekend dads.”

  Mike looked at me. “I was afraid to say that myself. I thought maybe you would really want to be a dad.”

  “We’re already dads,” I said, as Roby tugged me forward. “And uncles. And nobody’s shutting the door yet. Sandra said she’s not ready to get pregnant for a while anyway.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. I felt the tickle of his mustache, which always made me smile. “I think we’d both make terrific dads. When we’re ready.”

  BREAKING UP

  When I walked into headquarters the next morning, Sampson was standing in the doorway of his office, motioning us in. His polo shirt, like his mood, was dark.

  “Where do you stand on
your two murder cases?” he asked.

  “We’ve been making the connection between the spreadsheets Zoë Greenfield had and the murder,” I said. Sampson made no motion to us to sit, so we stood awkwardly just inside the door of his office. “Right now, we have two strong suspects, but we’re not sure yet which one did the killings.”

  “We’re leaning toward a secretary in the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism,” Ray said. “She had the means and the opportunity for both killings.”

  “And the motive?” Sampson asked.

  “Right now, we’re assuming that she was paid by the company who was fudging the data,” I said. “But there’s also the woman in charge of the company.”

  “A middle-aged Chinese woman pawned a piece of jewelry we traced back to the first woman who was killed,” Ray said. “Both the secretary, and the head of the company, fit the description, but the pawn broker can’t be more specific.”

  “Both women live near each other, in Manoa,” I said. “Someone picked up a cat from that area last Thursday, and we found it near where Miriam Rose’s car ran off the road. So either of the two women could have been the one to manipulate the accident.”

  “This case is going on too long,” Sampson said. “Wrap it up. If you have to, bring both women in and question them.”

  “Will do, chief,” Ray said, and I nodded along.

  “Let’s step back,” I said, when we were back at our desks. “Zoë and Wyatt are talking one day, and they figure out there’s something screwy going on with Néng Yuán—they’re not getting the results they’re reporting to the state.”

  “Either Dr. Z or someone working for her broke into Zoë’s house and killed her, and took her laptop, not realizing that Zoë had an online backup, too,” Ray said.

  “But how did anyone besides Zoë and Wyatt know that Zoë had the data?”

  “Must have been Gladys,” Ray said. “Nishimura said that Gladys monitored the analysts very closely.”