He handed the list back to me. I looked down at my notes. “How about this ‘guy who worked for Mr. Pang.’ Do you have any idea who he was, what he was doing at the bar on Tuesday night?”
“I don’t know what made me think so, but I always thought the guy was a cop. Not in a uniform, but he kind of carried himself that way.”
“You ever been arrested?” Akoni asked.
“So you do talk,” Wayne said. “I know cops. Every bar I ever worked in, we had to call the cops now and then.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I don’t like your tone,” Wayne said. “And I don’t think I want to answer that.”
“What was it?” Akoni asked. “You get caught sucking some guy off in the bus station? Maybe in a men’s room at Yale?” Akoni put a particular emphasis on the college name.
I could see Wayne was starting to get worked up, so I jumped in. “Look, that’s not important,” I said. “You said you went to another club after the Rod and Reel. Where’d you go?”
He was clearly making it up. “A bar out near the Aloha Bowl.”
“That far out?” I asked.
“It’s a gay club, the Boardwalk. An after hours kind of place.” He paused. “If Derek and I want to hang out, we can’t exactly do it at the bar his dad owns. Some dumb queen would have ratted us out in a heartbeat.”
“You see anybody you know at this place, the Boardwalk?”
He shook his head. “It’s pretty dark in there. We got a couple of beers and sat in the corner. I guess maybe we were there an hour or two.”
I was willing to bet no one at the bar could ID either of them.
Derek emerged from the bedroom then, looking freshly-showered, wearing black linen pants and a white t-shirt, his short black hair slicked back. He was about five seven, a hundred and fifty pounds. Behind wire-framed aviator glasses, his eyes were red. “You look like shit,” he said to Wayne. “That’s the way you come out and talk to people?”
“I didn’t have time,” Wayne said, with a little whining edge to his voice. “You were in the bathroom.”
“That’s never stopped you before.” He motioned to the bedroom with his thumb. “Put some clothes on.”
“I want to stay here with you.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Gallagher.” Akoni and I stood up to shake hands with Derek. “We won’t be too hard on him.”
Wayne tried to give Derek a look but Derek wasn’t having any of it. So Wayne got up, tightened his kimono, and strutted back to the bedroom. I have to admit I was a little sorry to see him go, and I hoped nobody noticed the way I watched his ass as he left.
THE MASTER OF HANDLING
“Did he offer you anything, Detectives?” Derek asked after we’d introduced ourselves. “Coffee? Juice? Sometimes the man has no manners.” Without waiting for an answer from us, he continued, “I’m making cappuccino. You want?”
We agreed. He led us over to the kitchen, and Akoni and I sat at a round glass table with a white marble gargoyle at its base as Derek Pang started making cappuccino. While the coffee brewed, Derek busied himself getting out mugs, spoons, even a little shaker of toppings like you see in fancy coffee shops. His movements were quick and delicate, and I was reminded of someone describing a homosexual as “light in his loafers.”
That description really worked for Derek. He could have been a ballet dancer, perhaps, with the kind of china-doll looks I saw in some of my aunts and girl cousins on my mother’s side. It’s a fragility and femininity that many men, obviously including Wayne Gallagher, found attractive.
I started asking Derek the same questions we’d asked Wayne.
“We left the club around midnight on Tuesday,” he said. He stuck a metal pitcher filled with milk under the frothing arm of the cappuccino maker. He had to talk louder over the noise of the steam frothing the milk. “I wanted my father to make Wayne the manager. So we were hanging around the Rod and Reel a lot, trying to show that Wayne knew the business.”
He poured the cappuccino, and I took a sip of mine. It was good. “Wayne mentioned an associate of your father’s was there that night, too. Did you know him?”
Derek looked into his mug, holding it with both hands. It took him a long time to answer. “How much do you know about my father?” he asked, finally.
“A lot,” I said. “He had a pretty extensive record.”
“Growing up, I never knew what my father did. Or I knew, but I didn’t, you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“He owned a bunch of legitimate businesses, you know. The bar’s just one. Once I came back from college, he promised that if I worked with him for a while, he would help me set up my own gallery.”
“My father wanted me to work with him,” I said. “He’s a contractor, and I spent most of my summers on crews on his projects. When it came time to choose, I became a cop instead.”
“Then you know what it’s like. It’s worse when your father’s a crook, Detective. You always try to keep your head turned so you won’t see what’s going on. I know the guy who was with him was a cop, but I didn’t want to know any more than that.”
“You’re sure?” Akoni asked.
Derek nodded. “I’m sure it’s not unheard of,” he said dryly. “For gangsters to have cops on their payroll. And make no mistake, my father was a gangster. I don’t know what he did, exactly, what put the food on our table or paid my tuition to Yale, but it wasn’t pretty.”
I kept worrying that Wayne would come out and join us, so I hurried on. “The night your father was murdered, you left around midnight, you said. Where did you go after that?”
He thought, and for a minute I thought they had worked their stories out in advance. “We went for a drive.” He looked down at his mug for a minute and said, “We went up to Mount Tantalus eventually and parked, and we, well, made out for a while.” He looked up at me again. “Kind of crappy, isn’t it? My dad’s getting killed and I’m off getting laid.”
Gallagher came in then, and pouted because Derek hadn’t made him a cappuccino too. “I didn’t know whether you’d eaten or not,” Derek said. There wasn’t a chair at the table for him, so Gallagher stood awkwardly against the counter, dressed now in white shorts and an emerald-green polo shirt that was a little too tight for him. He reminded me of my brother Haoa, big and beefy, but even clothed there was a sexuality to him that I found very attractive.
“This associate of your father’s, the man you think was a cop,” Akoni said. “Do you think you could recognize him again?”
“I think so,” Derek said. “He came around a couple of times. My father gave him something that night, in a box.” He thought for a minute. “I remember thinking it was funny. It was a little box, kind of long and narrow, like you’d put a necklace or a bracelet in, and I thought it was a funny gift for my father to give him.”
I finished the last of my cappuccino and handed the mug to Derek, who stood up and took all three mugs to the sink.
“Can you clean up, Wayne?” he asked. “We’re going back into the living room.” As he passed by, Wayne’s hand passed over Derek’s chest and I was sure he tweaked Derek’s nipple.
“How about his associates, from his other businesses?” I asked Derek, when we were sitting in the living room again. “Are there any you might have met sometime?”
He thought about it for a while. In the kitchen I heard Wayne banging pots and pans and generally reminding us he was around and mad that he hadn’t been asked to join us. “There’s one man I met a couple of times,” he said finally. “An old man, a little stooped over. He said to call him Uncle Chin.”
I felt an electric jolt run through my body. My father’s closest friend, a man I considered my own godfather, was a gangster of sorts, retired by then. I had always called him Uncle Chin.
“Did you feel that this Uncle Chin was a gangster like your father?” Akoni asked.
Derek nodded. “I mean, I got the feeling he was some kind of
Godfather, you know? An old guy who didn’t really do much but everybody kind of looked up to him. It was almost like, I don’t know, I was presented to him. It was all very formal.”
I was lost in thought, but Akoni and I had talked about Uncle Chin in the past, so he kept the interview going. “Do you have other family?”
“My father was an only child, but he had a lot of cousins,” Derek said. “They’re all still back in China. My mother was a bar girl in Hong Kong when my father met her. She’s never told me about any family at all.” He must have noticed the look on our faces, because he said, “Does that surprise you? The very proper and respectable Genevieve Pang was a bar girl in Hong Kong? It’s amazing how we can reinvent ourselves, isn’t it?”
“How about your father’s other businesses,” I said. “Do you know anything about them? Who runs them, what they do, that kind of thing?”
He shook his head. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. I knew, but I didn’t know, you understand?”
“I understand,” I said.
There wasn’t much else we could ask. Derek looked over the list of tong members, too, but didn’t recognize any of the names. Wayne finished in the kitchen and came into the living room, and the four of us talked for another couple of minutes. They both walked us to the front door. “You’ll let me know if you discover anything about my father’s murder?” Derek asked, and we both agreed.
***
“So what do we do next?” Akoni asked, as we rode down in the elevator.
“Maybe we need to think about the murder weapon,” I said. I thought back to the autopsy. “Doc’s best guess was something like a lead bar or pipe.”
“Where the hell do you get one of those in Waikiki?”
Something was nagging at the back of my brain. I’d seen a bar like that only recently. Where had it been? Suddenly I remembered. “We are really lousy detectives,” I said. “Come on, if I’m wrong, I’m buying you dinner.”
“Duke’s Canoe Club,” Akoni said. “I’ve been wanting to go there.”
We grabbed sandwiches at a fast food place and ate in the car. We made a quick stop at the station so I could pick up an extra-large evidence bag, and we were at the Rod and Reel Club just after one. Arleen buzzed us in. “Hey, guys, what’s up?” she asked.
“My partner here’s had an inspiration,” Akoni said, as I walked around behind the door and kneeled to the floor. “But he’s been keeping me in the dark.”
I looked closely at the police lock, a long steel bar that rotated in a groove on the floor. No matter how well someone had tried to clean it up, I could still spot a couple of flecks of blood on it. “Our weapon,” I said, pointing it out to Akoni.
“Ick,” Arleen said. “I’ve been touching that bar since Tuesday.”
We carried the bar back to my truck, and then drove it over to the evidence lab at the main police headquarters. We had a pretty modern lab down there, in the special investigations section on the B1 level, along with a little mini-museum of how far crime detection equipment had come. They had ancient scientific equipment like a centrifuge, a spectroscope, and a compound microscope. Also an old ultraviolet lamp and an ancient fingerprint camera, and photos of old evidence types.
In the document lab, they analyzed stuff like typewriters, documents, footprints, and tire treads, as well as fingerprints. One of my favorite signs was down there, on the wall outside. It read, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“So we’ve got our weapon,” Akoni said as we walked down the hallway from the document lab to the elevator. “You got a couple of suspects up your sleeve, too?”
The hallway was lined with windows into the other labs, like the drug lab, and serology, where they did the blood analysis. The firearms lab had a chart with actual bullets on it for matching purposes, and a one-lane firing range for firing tests. There were eyewash and safety shower signs all over.
“You want everything, don’t you?” We both agreed the week had been a long stressful one, and we’d feel better about tackling the idea of suspects on Monday. Akoni dropped me back in front of my building, and as I was climbing up to my apartment, my cell phone rang.
The number belonged to Harry Ho, my oldest friend. Harry had just come back to Honolulu a few weeks before, after a protracted stretch on the mainland, which involved several degrees from MIT and a few patents registered in his name. From what I understood, he’d made enough money that he could afford to tinker on his inventions, and at the same time he’d taken an adjunct teaching job at UH.
In high school, Harry and I had snuck off as often as we could to surf. We’d ride the city bus down to Kuhio Beach Park with our bathing suits on under our school clothes. We stored our boards with the guy who ran the surfboard concession at the Beach Princess hotel, and we’d ditch our clothes on the sand and surf until dark. I don’t know when he managed to do his homework-I rarely did mine. But he graduated at the top of our class at Punahou, and dragged me along behind him somehow.
I went to college at UC San Diego because I could surf there, and Harry went to MIT. We kept in touch-I sent him photos of me surfing, with snotty captions, and he wrote regularly to tell me what an asshole I was. Now that he’s back, he’s mad to surf again, even though he’s terrible. I’m not much good anymore, though, so I don’t mind going out with him.
Harry’s brain isn’t like mine. He can do lots of things at once, and never seems to be shorting any one of them. If he’d been able to get the education he wanted at UH, or somewhere else near a beach, he could have gotten a lot higher than fifth place in a regional tournament in the off season. But we’re over thirty now, and he missed that peak when he could have been great, and even with all those degrees and the money and the patents, he regrets it. Since I have my regrets, too, I humor him.
“Hey, brah, how’s life?” he asked.
“I’d say it pretty much sucks.” I had no intention of telling Harry why life was sucking at the moment, beyond Tommy Pang’s corpse at the county morgue. I’d stepped out on that limb once already, and found it pretty damn shaky.
“Sounds like you need some attitude adjustment. What do you say you meet me at the Canoe Club bar in twenty minutes and we work on some wahine action?”
I took a deep breath. “I could use a beer, but maybe someplace quieter. Can you handle that?”
“I am the master of handling,” Harry said. “How about the Gordon Biersch at the Aloha Tower?”
“I’m there. You just can’t see me yet.”
I picked up a second wind as I drove back downtown. I parked on the pier and walked over to the Aloha Tower Marketplace. The tower was the tallest building in the islands when it was built in 1926, and on “Boat Days,” when the cruise ships left Honolulu, it was the place to be to watch the ships go out, kind of like that scene at the start of The Love Boat when the horn sounds and everybody gathers on all the decks to wave and throw streamers. Now there were clusters of clever shops selling island handicrafts, postcards and magnets of island girls (and boys) in thong bikinis, and jars of po’a jam and coconut syrup.
The Gordon Biersch brewpub is at the far end of the marketplace, just a stone planter filled with orange, red and purple bougainvillea and a short piece of tarmac separating you from Honolulu Harbor. I walked through the indoor bar and the restaurant, looking for Harry. As I came back out into the fierce afternoon sun I saw him at the outdoor bar, where he’d just gotten a beer. Fortunately, he’d ditched his habitual pocket protector full of mechanical pencils, but, god bless the guy, he still looked like a geek. He’s thin, Chinese, about five-foot-six, with his black hair cut like somebody put a bowl on his head and snipped. As you'd expect from someone who looked the way he did, he was a genius; as you would not expect, he was also very good with people and able to charm the pants off any wahine he set his sights on.
He raised his wheat-logo mug to me and headed off to snag us a table, not an easy task in a bar crowded with happy-hour beer drinkers. He was su
ccessful, though, as he seems to be in everything he tries, and by the time I had my glass of marzen, a German wheat beer they specialized in, he was sitting at a table at the very edge of the patio. Just beyond us a tanker was coming in through the narrow channel, silhouetted against the setting sun. There were a few clouds massed over the Waianae Mountains, but otherwise it was a glorious, clear, golden afternoon. Then why did I feel so bad?
“It sounded like you wanted to talk,” Harry said, motioning to our relative obscurity.
“I do,” I said, sitting down. “How’s it going?”
“It goes. I’m remembering how to sense the waves. It’s something I’d forgotten, you know? I know all the physics, but I forgot how you just have to sit there and feel the water.”
I nodded. “You settling in all right at the university?”
“I’ve got a couple of smart students,” he said. “Better than I expected. But enough crap. What’s wrong?”
I shifted uneasily in my seat. A young Japanese couple just beyond us on the pavement stood by one of the yellow bollards and kissed, and then a fat tourist in a garish aloha shirt offered to take their picture. I realized again I would never go on a honeymoon, never mug for the camera with a pretty wahine on my arm, never build up memories to share with my children and grandchildren. I had an urge to spill everything to Harry, but I’d done that with Akoni already and look where it got me.
“Just a case,” I said. “Listen, maybe Monday morning, you can give us a hand? We got a computer with a password we don’t know, and a missing Palm Pilot that maybe was backed up onto the hard drive. You know anything about that?”
“You have to ask?” Harry put his hand over his heart. “I’m hurt. Of course I know about that. They haven’t made a password yet I can’t break.”
We made a time to meet at the station Monday, and then I directed the conversation back to surfing, and Harry went along with it. We ordered some food, and by the time we staggered away I was feeling almost good again. I’d been thinking for a while that I was being the good friend to Harry, helping him get adjusted to life in Hawaii again, going surfing with him while he flailed his way back to proficiency. But it was clear he was doing something for me, too.
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