Mahu m-1

by Neil S. Plakcy

  He opened the door to the garage stairwell. Before he went in, though, he said, “I’ve done as much for you as I can, Kimo. Now I gotta look out for me.”

  “What?” I asked, but he’d already gone inside.

  I didn’t know what to think anymore. Was he in a bad mood? Was he separating himself from me in case I took a fall? It only took me a few minutes to get back to the station, but all the way I kept wondering what freight train Akoni saw heading my way. It was easy to believe it was something going wrong with the case, but it was also quite possibly something else. Akoni had always criticized my bull-headedness, the way I had to see something through once I started it. It’s a trait that frightened me sometimes.

  Back at the station, I sat at the computer, pulling up names of every person known to be part of a tong, and then got on the phone, calling detectives and snitches to see who might have had it in for Tommy Pang. Printouts piled up on my desk, I got a backache, and my garbage can filled with crumpled coffee cups. There were no rumors of tong wars, and nobody had a special grudge against Tommy Pang. As a matter of fact, he was a relatively small player, not even catching much notice among the big boys.

  When Akoni still had not returned by lunch, I left for the records office in Honolulu Hale, our city hall, an impressive stone building with a pseudo-Spanish motif-narrow windows, turrets, the whole nine yards. You walked through a short lobby and into a central courtyard with a high ceiling. Straight ahead were the city council chambers, but the records office was tucked away in a corner in the back. I stood in line and checked out the microfiche I needed, then took it to one of the readers.

  I was interested to find out if Tommy Pang really owned the club, or if perhaps he was a front man for some larger group. I slid the fiche into the machine and navigated to the appropriate section, where I discovered that The Rod and Reel Club was owned by Hui 812.

  Hui is a common Chinese term for a kind of holding company. It was what I expected; if you’re going to own a gay bar, you probably don’t want to make it easy to find out who you are. I pulled the fiche out and got back in line.

  By the fourth fiche, I was annoyed and intrigued. I started taking notes and drawing lines on my pad from one company to the next. It took me all afternoon. I went back and forth between the records library and the tax office, showing my badge and asking questions. Finally I found a name, hidden under layers of bureaucracy and red tape. The eventual owner of the Rod and Reel Club, once you went back through level upon level, was Tommy Pang. No other name showed up anywhere.

  By the time I got back to the station, Akoni had returned. The FBI had nothing, he said. No open investigations involving Tommy Pang, no rumors of tong wars, nothing. I told him what I’d found.

  “Doesn’t get us any farther, does it?” he said. “What now?”

  “We wait for Derek to call us back, or we call him again tomorrow. Then we start questioning Tommy’s business associates. Anybody with known tong affiliations. See if this is business-related.”

  He frowned. “You think it could be anything else?”

  “You heard Mrs. Pang. He had ‘company’ sometimes. Maybe the company had a jealous husband or boyfriend.”

  “I hate this part of a case,” he said. “Too many ways to go, no real leads. Just lots of legwork.” He started packing up his stuff.

  “Listen, Akoni, you want to get a beer? We could strategize.”

  “I gotta get home.”

  “Look, I think we ought to talk.”

  He stood up. “We got nothing to talk about. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He walked out, and the door shut behind him with a bang.

  YOU’RE A CHAMP, KIMO

  I sat at my desk for a while, until Alvy Greenberg, one of the uniforms who’d been with us on the drug bust, came in and said, “Hey, Kimo.”

  Alvy was about five years younger than I was, and a surfer, too. We’d met when I’d just come back from the North Shore, when I was in the academy, and because he was maybe interested in becoming a cop we’d talked, off and on, about my experiences there. At the time he’d been a waiter, taking a couple of classes at UH, trying to decide, as I had, if he was good enough to make a career out of surfing.

  He wasn’t, either, and just before I made detective he’d entered the academy. I guess I had been kind of a mentor to him, advising him on how to deal with problems that came up, surfing with him now and then. Once in a while on a holiday weekend we’d throw our boards into my truck and drive up to the North Shore, just to keep our hands in.

  “Hey, Alvy.” He was the kind of guy who looked older than he was, the one you always sent in to buy the beer when you were still illegal. About five-seven, thin, already balding rapidly at twenty-seven, and incredibly ambitious. You couldn’t take the detective’s exam until you’ve had three years on the beat, and most officers wait another year or two beyond that. Alvy had taken the exam right after his third anniversary, just a couple of weeks before. He was still waiting for the results, but we’d already talked about where he might be posted. He didn’t want to leave Waikiki, but he was tactful enough to realize that unless they expanded our staff, he’d have to wait for me or Akoni to leave. So we’d talked about District 1, which covered most of downtown and was administered out of the main headquarters on South Beretania Street. Lots of government and corporate offices, and Chinatown to provide work, and the chance to be at headquarters and make contacts.

  Or maybe District 2, Central O‘ahu, which also included a lot of military installations. It wasn’t as glamorous, but he’d get a lot of experience. I was also pushing for District 5, Kalihi, which included the airport, and I agreed with him that the other districts, Pearl City, Waipahu, Windward O’ahu, and East Honolulu, wouldn’t be very interesting, and wouldn’t give him the opportunities for advancement he was looking for.

  He walked over and sat on the edge of Akoni’s desk. “That was some bust yesterday, huh?”

  “You can’t win every time,” I said. “Sometimes things just go wrong.”

  “I heard you got another case already.”

  He was an eager guy, handsome in a way, red hair you might almost call auburn, blue eyes. He was a little too skinny to be a great surfer-he didn’t have enough weight to master the really big waves, but he made up for it with endurance.

  If you want to be a good surfer, I mean a really good one, you have to work at it. You have to be totally focused on making yourself the best surfer you can be. You spend hours out on the water, learning to anticipate the waves, practicing your moves. You have to understand a little about physics, a little about oceanography, a little about wind speed. Surfing has to be what you live for.

  I thought I could live for surfing when I was twenty-two, crashing on the floor of somebody’s house on the North Shore, surfing Haleiwa from dawn to dusk and talking surfing the rest of the time. Nobody screwed around too much up there-we were too focused, and at the end of the day, too tired. So I could ignore the part of my brain that was always scared, always holding my secret.

  Then I came in fifth in the Pipeline Spring Championships. By March, the great winter waves on the North Shore have died down a little, and the best surfers have gone to chase waves elsewhere on the globe. So I wasn’t facing top competition, but still, it was the best I’d ever done. I was riding high, thinking I was finally reaching for my potential. Most surfers start when they’re fifteen or sixteen, peak in their early twenties, and lose the competitive edge by thirty. I was twenty-three, and at the top of my form.

  A bunch of the guys took me out drinking that night, buying me beers and shots until they closed the bar and dawn started to streak the dark sky over the North Shore. I was in no condition to drive home, so my buddy Dario dragged me over to his place to crash. He was staying at a one-room cottage north of Haleiwa, right on the sand. I remember wanting to lay down right there on the beach, I was so wasted.

  The next thing I remember is waking up in Dario’s bed, naked, with his mout
h on my left nipple. He bit and sucked at both nipples until they were hard and sore, and then licked a trail down my stomach to my crotch, where he gave me a blow job.

  Then I must have passed out again, because when I woke again it was almost noon and there was a note on the refrigerator from Dario. “You’re a champ, Kimo,” it read. “I’m on the water.”

  I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded, and my body was sore in unaccustomed places. When I looked in the mirror I saw my nipples were raw and red, and I had a hickey on the side of my neck. I knew then that I had made the best showing I would ever make in a competition. It would only get harder to keep holding back my desire for men, and the effort I had to put to that task would take away from what I had left for surfing.

  So I left. I hitched back to the place where I was staying, packed up, and went home. After hanging around my parents’ house for a while, I entered the police academy, the most macho thing I could think to do. I thought if anything could save me from being gay, being a cop would be it.

  Alvy and I talked for a while, and eventually I felt better. If Akoni couldn’t deal with me, that was his problem. Alvy went back to the locker room to change out of his uniform, and I walked home.

  There were still a couple of hours of daylight left when I got home, so I went surfing. It felt good to empty my mind of all my troubles-my sexuality, the danger I might face if I came out as a gay cop, the dead ends in Tommy Pang’s murder case.

  On my way home, I stopped at a little grocery just across Lili’uokalani from my apartment and picked up some shrimp, mushrooms, and red and green peppers to grill on my little barbecue. It’s a tiny, dark little store, and from the outside you’d think it was nothing more than a place for cigarettes and beer. But the owners, an elderly Chinese couple, took a fierce pride in the quality of the produce, and it was better than any grocery I knew in Honolulu. The clerk was a surfer, and he let me run up a tab when I didn’t have cash with me. “How were the waves?” he asked as he rang me up.

  “I got a couple of good ones. Not many, though.”

  “Yeah, it’s been slow.”

  He was a skinny blond dude, long stringy hair, and tiny silver rings in his right ear, his nose and his left eyebrow. He was wearing a tank top and as he reached for a bag his shirt shifted a little and I noticed he’d gotten his nipple pierced, too. To avoid looking at him anymore I turned a bit and scanned the store. “Hey, throw these in too, will you?” I asked, spotting a bag of chocolate-covered Oreos and putting them on the counter.

  “Eating healthy, dude,” he said, with a smirk. “These are killer, by the way. I keep a bag behind the counter and scarf them for energy sometimes.”

  Back outside, the sun was setting through the low motels and high-rise towers, turning the sky a range of pastels from yellow to blue. It was a peaceful time of day, and I started to feel like someday I might get my life back in order again, and that in the end all the uproar might just be worth it.

  I skewered the shrimp and veggies and grilled them, and put them on a plate over rice. With a Rhino Chaser, it was a perfect supper, and then I sat back with a Sue Grafton mystery until I was yawning more than I was reading. I could do this, I thought, as I crawled into bed, under the Hawaiian quilt my haole grandmother had pieced together in the first days after she’d married my grandfather, when she was struggling to fit into life as Mrs. Keali‘i Kanapa‘aka. I could make a nice life for myself, by myself, without the complications of romance or sex. But then, as sleep overcame me and I snuggled up next to my pillow and I missed having someone next to me, I doubted my own resolve.

  DEREK AND WAYNE

  The next morning, Akoni and I spent the first hour of our shift catching up on paperwork. By nine o’clock I was ready to get back to Tommy Pang’s murder. “I’m tired of giving Derek time to grieve,” I said. I picked up the phone and dialed Derek’s number, and was rewarded by a sleepy voice in my ear.

  I introduced myself and asked if I was speaking to Derek Pang. “Derek can’t really speak to anyone now,” the voice said. “He’s very upset.”

  “Mr. Gallagher, I know Mr. Pang is upset, and I sympathize with him, but we’re investigating a murder. I’m sure he’ll recognize it’s very important to catch whoever killed his father. We need to talk to you both as soon as possible. How soon could you see us?”

  He tried to put me off but I wouldn’t give up. Finally he said, “Give us an hour?”

  I agreed to meet them at their apartment at ten o’clock. Akoni printed out a list of known tong members we could ask Derek about, and then we sat and brainstormed on a bunch of questions as well. At nine-thirty we headed Ewa from Waikiki, hitting a lot of traffic on Ala Moana Boulevard. The address Wayne had given me was for a pair of luxury high-rise condominiums in Kaka‘ako, an industrial neighborhood across from the port of Honolulu, out past the Kewalo basin, with its assemblage of small boats.

  Kaka’ako was in the middle of a transformation. The condo tower where Wayne and Derek lived dominated the neighborhood; on one side was Restaurant Row, a collection of twenty-some restaurants and a multiplex cinema, but on the other side was a derelict empty lot. There were low warehouses and parking lots all around. We parked at a meter on a side street and walked up to the condo, where we checked in with the doorman, then rode the elevator to the twentieth floor.

  Gallagher answered the door. He was about six four, broad-shouldered, with sandy hair and a mustache. He probably weighed two-sixty, which was about thirty pounds too much for a man with his build. He was barefoot, wearing a black silk kimono embroidered with red dragons. His eyes were still sleepy and he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair yet. I thought he was incredibly sexy.

  The thought jolted me and made me tongue-tied for a minute. Akoni introduced us and Gallagher led us into the living room, a large, white room with a white marble floor. There was a black leather sofa along one wall, and a big entertainment center with a large-screen TV and a fancy stereo system. Sliding glass doors led to a half-round balcony overlooking Waikiki, Diamond Head, and a vast expanse of Pacific Ocean. What dominated the room, though, was the art.

  All four walls were hung with paintings. Some large, splashy colorful flowers, a couple of Jackson Pollock spatters, even a small Impressionist style piece in a heavy gilded frame. There were Chinese watercolors and what looked like South American primitives, as well as a large Hawaiian quilt on one wall that even I could tell was quite valuable.

  The art wasn’t confined to the walls, either. In one corner was a brightly painted wooden chair, and around its base was a collection of wooden animals painted in clashing colors. A small pedestal held a glass-topped box with a few pieces of what looked like museum-quality, early Hawaiian artifacts. It was like walking into a gallery.

  “I’ll get Derek,” Gallagher said. “He’s resting.”

  “Perhaps we could talk to you first,” I said, regaining my voice.

  “Sure.” He sat down on a black leather recliner catty-cornered to the sofa and motioned to us. “Have a seat.”

  His arms and calves were lightly dusted with sandy blond hair. When he sat, the kimono fell away from his right thigh and I could almost see down to his crotch.

  Get hold of yourself, I thought. “Let’s start chronologically,” I said. “Where were you Tuesday night, the night Tommy was murdered?”

  “We were at the club for a while, the Rod and Reel Club. Derek was trying to convince his father to make me the manager.” He preened a little. “I’ve been working in bars and clubs for years. Worked my way through Yale as a bouncer, bartender and assistant manager.”

  “Around what time was that?”

  Wayne had to think for a minute. It was almost like he was running through his story and making sure he got the details straight. “I guess around midnight. Yeah, had to be around then, because we went off to another club after that.”

  “Anyone else in the office when you were there?”

  “Some guy who worked for
Mr. Pang came over for a meeting. I don’t know his name. Mr. Pang had a lot of other businesses besides the club. He was an important guy.”

  “Did he know about you and Derek?”

  “You mean did he know we like to suck each other’s dicks?” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him. “We never talked about it. If he wanted to ignore it, then that was his business.”

  “You and Derek knew each other in college?”

  “Doesn’t your friend ever talk?” He looked at Akoni. “What are you, the strong, silent type?”

  Akoni said, “I’ll talk when I have something to say.”

  Gallagher turned back to me. The lapel of his robe had fallen open, exposing one pink nipple surrounded by dark blond hair. “We met sophomore year. We both lived in East Asia House. It’s a dorm, but they have special programs, Japanese culture, Pacific Rim cooking, world politics, that kind of thing. I was always interested in the Orient-my father was a businessman, and we lived in Japan for a year when I was a kid.”

  I nodded. “You moved out here a couple of months ago, isn’t that right?”

  He shifted position, closing his robe, tucking his right leg under him. “Derek had to get settled, see what things were like out here, before I could come out. He hadn’t really been home much since he went away to college.” He laughed. “He didn’t even know his dad owned a gay bar, can you believe it?”

  “Do you recognize any of these names?” I handed Wayne the list we’d made up of known tong members.

  Wayne shifted around a little in his chair and the black silk rode up on his thigh again. I was getting pretty annoyed at myself for noticing so much about him, but somehow I couldn’t help it. He read through the list, pausing once or twice. Finally he looked up and shook his head. “None of them ring a bell. Mr. Pang really wanted Derek to go legit, you know. He didn’t want to tell Derek about anything he did that was shady at all. I mean, we only knew about the bar because the office is in back there.”