Mahu m-1

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “So that’s why some beaches are better for surfing than others,” Tim said. “Because they have different reef configurations.”

  “Exactly.” We dropped our towels on the beach and swam out beyond the breakers, me dragging one end of my board. “Now we wait,” I said, once we were in position. There were more surfers around than I liked; that’s why I usually surfed so early in the morning or late in the day. On a beach like Waikiki, where there weren’t very many good waves, you didn’t want to have to compete for them with too many other surfers. I even saw Alvy Greenberg down the beach and waved at him.

  “How do you know when the right wave is coming?” Tim asked.

  “You can’t explain it,” I said. “You just have to feel it. Let’s hang out here and just let a bunch of waves wash over us.”

  So we did. I relaxed, treading water and holding onto one end of my board, Tim on the other. We felt the waves, and watched the other surfers. “That wasn’t a good choice for him,” I said, pointing to one guy as he fell off his board. “See, there wasn’t enough power to sustain him.” We watched another and I said, “His balance is off. He’s going to fall,” and sure enough, he did.

  “You jinxed him,” Tim said, with a smile.

  “Surfing is hard. Nobody gets it right the first time.” After a while, I felt a really good wave building under us. “Get on the board,” I said, and I held it down a little in the water as he put one leg over. “Now crouch up toward the front.” As he did so, I swung myself onto the board, too, just behind him, not crouching but straddling the board with my legs in the water. The board rode lower in the water than usual, because of the extra weight, but if the wave was as strong as I thought, it would carry us.

  “Hold on.” The wave started to carry us forward, and I paddled fast to help it. When it really had us, I stopped paddling, pulled myself into a quick crouch, and then stood up. Tim was still crouched beneath me, holding the sides of the board. “Stand up,” I yelled, over the roar of the water. “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.”

  I held his shoulders, and then slid my hands down to his waist as he stood. He had good balance, especially with me holding him. “Wow,” he yelled, as we knifed through the water, the beach and high rise hotels rushing toward us, salt spray and sun and the noise of the water and the clear exhilaration of it all.

  As the wave started to die, I moved back into a crouch, pulling Tim down with me. We lost our balance then and took a spill, but the water was shallow and the coolness felt great. I was surprised to find, as I came up for air, that the ride had given me an erection. Fortunately, it was already subsiding. “So?” I asked, as Tim appeared beside me. “You like?”

  “That was amazing. I see why you like it. Can we do it again?”

  “Let’s get you a board.” We headed down the beach toward one of the rental concessions. “The widest, longest boards are best for beginners,” I said. “They catch the waves earlier, and you get a chance to get accustomed to the wave before it gets too steep.” My board was six feet long, made of fiberglass and resin and specially cut, shaved and sanded by hand to my own instructions. His was a regulation beginner board, dinged up and bruised, and looked like a big fat older brother to mine.

  We practiced for an hour or so, spending a lot of time just hanging out beyond the breakers, waiting for the right waves. Every now and then we’d see Alvy but I never did speak to him. By the end of the hour, Tim was starting to get a feel for which wave to choose, and he’d mastered all the beginning steps: getting on the board, paddling fast to catch the wave, standing up. He couldn’t ride for very long without taking a tumble, but that would come with time and practice.

  Finally we quit and returned his board. “I’ll bet you’re kind of achy,” I said. “Your muscles really take a beating when you first start surfing.”

  “You’re not kidding. I want to go directly home and tumble into the hot tub.” He looked over at me. “Want to come?”

  “Sure.” We stopped at my apartment to drop off my board, and then walked down Lili‘uokalani to a low-rise building of six stories clustered around a central pool and patio area. The hot tub was off to one side, shaded that late in the day by a big koa tree.

  It felt great to slip into the hot water. We both submerged down to our necks in front of jets, feeling the pulsing water massage our tired muscles. The buoyancy kept pushing us up to the surface, and our legs kept touching. I opened the top of my bathing suit to let a big bubble of air out, and then settled back to the shelf inside the tub. The toes of his right foot grazed my thigh. He sat back against the side of the hot tub and his legs rode up and brushed against mine.

  After about twenty minutes, not really talking, just looking and each other goofily and smiling, Tim wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. “I’m ready to get out. How about you?”

  I agreed, and we dragged ourselves out and flopped onto lounge chairs nearby to dry off.

  We lay in the sun for a while, but our suits were still wet when Tim said, “My place is just over there. Why don’t you come over-I’ve got fresh towels.”

  “Sure.” We stood and walked across the courtyard to his first-floor apartment. He used his key on the patio door and we stepped inside. I followed him through a simple living room to a vanity area adjacent to the bathroom, where he opened a tall closet and pulled out plush dark green towels from a low shelf.

  Standing again, he said, “Ow, that hurt,” and put his hand on the small of his back.

  “The hot tub doesn’t do everything,” I said. “Come on, let me rub your back.”

  He was still hunched over, crab-like, as he led me to the bedroom, where he flopped down on the big queen-sized bed in pain. “Shit, that hurts.”

  I wrapped the towel around my wet bathing suit and sat on the bed next to him. Starting at the shoulders, I worked his muscles, feeling them ease under my touch. At first he twitched with pain when I pulled on sensitive tendons, but gradually he relaxed. “Oh, man, that feels great. Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “The North Shore,” I said. “You really work yourself into the ground when you surf all day, every day. A bunch of us used to help each other out.”

  “Mmm.” To get a better position I pulled the towel off and straddled his legs, kneading the muscles in his lower back. “Geez, you don’t need to be a cop,” he said. “You could make a living doing this.”

  I was hard again in my Speedos. I was confused about what I wanted. I knew that sometime I would go to bed with Tim, but was this the right moment? How would we get there from where we were? I sat back on my haunches for a minute and Tim took that opportunity to twist around onto his back. He looked directly up at me and there was no way to disguise how I felt. He motioned to me with his finger.

  “Come down here.”

  I did. His skin was cool and his touch was slow and gentle, his fingers barely grazing the edge of my jaw, the center of my nipple, the inside of my thigh. I shivered and twitched under him like a rabid dog, unable to stand the teasing yet unwilling for it to stop. He wrapped his arms around my back and we kissed, deeply and hungrily, and then he pulled back. “Slow down,” he said. “We’re not in any hurry here.”

  We explored each other’s bodies. His was all uncharted territory to me, from a tiny, half-moon shaped scar on his right shoulder to the discovery that his insteps were sensitive and responded to tickling. He worked my body like he knew what he was doing, licking and sucking me until just that knife-edge before release and then pulling back. Together we charted the regions of armpit and groin, the inner ear and the erotic zone just behind the scrotum.

  I had never made love like this before. With women I’d been a tender and attentive lover, a good technician, making sure the patient was satisfied. My own pleasure had come easily and quickly, and had always seemed to me to be a separate part of the process. But with Tim, pleasing him and pleasing myself were part of one organic whole. We lingered so long over foreplay simply because it was f
un. I shut off my brain and let my body take over, as I did on my best surfing days, and when we were both spent and exhausted and I looked at the clock, I saw that hours had passed. I lay there under his arm, my hand on his warm thigh and felt, finally, comfortable.

  KIMO COMES CLEAN

  “Your suit’s still wet,” Tim called from the bathroom. “Why don’t you borrow something of mine and we’ll get some dinner?”

  “Better yet, why don’t we order in?”

  He came out of the bathroom and stood in the bedroom door, naked. “You’re a naughty boy. Pizza?”

  “Sure.”

  We ordered a large mushroom pizza, and he said, “I can’t answer the door like this. I’m going to put some clothes on. You can do what you want.”

  What I wanted, I thought, was to stay in bed with Tim all weekend long, practicing, exploring the whole new world that had opened up before me. But instead I went into his closet and pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. “You don’t wear underwear?” he asked.

  “I do. I just don’t want to wear yours.”

  He burst out laughing. “You’ll suck my dick but you won’t wear my shorts? Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

  I just shrugged. Fortunately then the doorbell rang.

  We watched old movies on TV after we finished the pizza, and then made love again before we went to sleep, snuggled next to each other with the window open and the ceiling fan creating a gentle breeze.

  I was an old hand at sleeping in strange beds. I did some counting once, and figured I’d slept in rooms in half the hotels in Waikiki. But I stayed awake for a few minutes, thinking about where I was and what I was doing. Though I tried, I just couldn’t feel bad about it. I liked Tim, and I’d had fun with him. There wasn’t anything wrong with that.

  The next morning I woke up before Tim. We had separated during the night, and he was curled up on the right side of the bed, one arm on top of the damask print sheets. His skin looked even more tanned against the white on white pattern.

  I wanted to reach out and touch him, stroke his shoulder, curl my fingers into his hair, but I thought it would be a shame to wake him. I did feel a little freaky, a little panicked by the speed with which my new life was moving, but I pushed down those fears and tried to concentrate on enjoying the moment.

  He woke then, yawned, and looked at me. He smiled. “Morning. You sleep all right?”

  “Great,” I said. “You?”

  He nodded, then reached out and took my hand. I smiled back at him and snuggled up close to him under the sheets. We fooled around a little, and then read the Sunday paper. We went to one of those big tourist buffet brunches, and then walked on the beach for a while. “This has been great, Kimo,” Tim said eventually, as we were sitting on the sand in front of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. “But I’ve got work I’ve got to do before tomorrow morning.”

  It was late afternoon but the sun was still high in the sky, the beach glittering golden around us. I said, “I understand.” We walked back to my apartment together, and this time we hugged each other, not caring who was around to see.

  Monday morning, I didn’t get a chance to tell Akoni any of my suspicions about Evan Gonsalves because he wasn’t at the station. There was a message from him that he’d gone to Honolulu Hale to check out an idea he had.

  Around ten, my phone rang, and I thought it was Akoni, but instead it was Lieutenant Yumuri. “I want you and Hapa‘ele in my office now,” he said.

  He hung up before I could tell him Akoni wasn’t there, so I went down the hall to his office alone. “Akoni’s at Honolulu Hale doing research,” I said. “Anything I can do for you?”

  The lieutenant had a small office at the back of the station, but its size was made up for by its window on the beach. Through the glass I could see sunshine, surf, sand, and hundreds of tourists turning red. I didn’t know if I could ever concentrate on my job if I had that office and that window.

  “How close are you to closing that murder case?” he asked. “It’s been almost two weeks. Why haven’t I seen any progress? I thought this was a simple gay-bashing.” He shook his head. “Goddamned faggots. Just what I don’t need on my watch.”

  “That was our first direction,” I said. “Because the victim wasn’t gay, because he had tong connections, because he was robbed, we’ve eliminated that as a possibility. But it took us a while. That was just one of the dead ends we ran into.” I explained about the information we’d gotten from other divisions that hadn’t panned out. Then I hesitated. “The victim’s son said he believed his father was paying off a cop,” I finally said. “He says the cop was there that night. Akoni and I have been examining the victim’s background to see if there’s any possible connection to someone on the force.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Yumuri said. “That’s the first thing these people do, they blame the cops.”

  “We’ve actually been finding some connections,” I said. I told him about the black tar bust, and a couple of more tenuous connections we’d found in the past.

  “And what are you going to do when you find this cop?”

  “We found the murder weapon and the lab is checking it for trace evidence,” I said. “We may get a print we can match.” I hesitated again. What the hell, I thought, I’d been covering it up for long enough. “And I actually have some additional evidence we haven’t put on paper yet.” Deep breath.

  “I was out late that night, and I was on my way home past the alley when I saw a man drag the body down the alley, from the office door to the street.”

  Yumuri laughed. It certainly wasn’t what I expected of him. “Good try. But you’ll never get the DA to believe that.”

  “I saw it,” I said. “The man left in a black Jeep Cherokee.” I closed my eyes for a second and saw again the man dragging Tommy Pang’s lifeless body down the alley. I remembered what I had done, and felt the shame again. “I went over to the victim and felt for a pulse, and I was the one who made the call to 911. The coroner lifted my fingerprint from his neck.”

  “You could have put that print on his neck during the investigation.”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t present at the scene while the body was still there. By the time I arrived the body had already been taken to the ME’s office. I had no further contact with the victim until I was present at the autopsy, when the fingerprint was lifted from his throat.”

  While Yumuri digested what I had to say, I looked around at the walls of his office. I’d never really noticed the pictures there-Yumuri with the mayor, Yumuri in a crowd of officers being blessed by the Archbishop of Honolulu, though he wasn’t Catholic. Every citation he’d ever received had been carefully framed and hung, even the routine commendations for passing a year without discharging his weapon that were sent out by some computer program downtown.

  There were three photos of his family on his desk, including one of him, his wife and his sons in ski parkas and goggles. They looked like large insects from a snowy planet in a distant galaxy.

  The impact of what I was saying finally hit Yumuri. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and I wondered if that would be considered blasphemy from a non-observant Buddhist. “This is the sloppiest piece of police work I have ever seen in my career. If you’re not lying through your teeth you’re telling me you witnessed a murder and then left the scene?”

  “I didn’t see the murder, Lieutenant. All I saw was a man drag something down an alley, which I didn’t discover was a man’s body until after the perp had left the scene. I had to leave the scene to find a phone so I could call 911.”

  “I saw the report. That was a citizen call, not a cop. A cop would have given his badge number, and a cop would have returned to secure the scene until backup arrived.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  I was conscious that my life was falling apart while just a few feet away hundreds of people were enjoying the vacation of a lifetime. “I’d been in a bar for a
while,” I said, looking down at the floor. “I didn’t want anyone to know.” I looked up. “I know what I did was wrong. But I want to keep investigating this case. I know we can wrap it up.”

  He shook his head. “You know what your trouble is, Kanapa‘aka? You just don’t think half the time. When you think, you’re a good detective. But god damn it, you’ve screwed this one up royally.”

  I didn’t say anything. Finally he said, “I want to see you and Hapa‘ele back here before your shift is over.” He looked back down to his desk. “Dismissed.”

  It was about two o’clock by then. I didn’t know when Akoni would be back, but I knew he’d check in by four, the end of our shift. I tried to go back to research but I couldn’t keep my mind on the paper in front of me. I hadn’t really spilled my secret yet, just told the lieutenant that I’d been in a bar, but eventually the truth was going to come out. Soon enough I was going to have to confront my homophobic boss, and probably the rest of the world, with the news that I was gay.

  Finally the phone rang and I pounced on it. “Kanapa‘aka, Waikiki station,” I said, hoping it would be Akoni.

  Instead it was Thanh Nguyen from the special investigations section, with the results on the police lock. It was indeed the murder weapon; traces of blood and hair on it matched the victim. There were no clear prints, though, only smudges.

  I had always assumed that once we found a suspect, my evidence would be added to what we had found. I’d be able to show that I was in the alley, that I’d seen the man drop Tommy’s body and take off in the Cherokee. But talking to Lieutenant Yumuri, I realized how tenuous my evidence would be, because I had made the 911 call anonymously. There was nothing but my fingerprint to prove I’d been in the alley at all.