Mahu m-1

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “He owes me a favor, the asshole. He could have called our parents when he knew there was a story on me, but he wimped out.”

  “This won’t be easy, Kimo. You might get in a lot of trouble.”

  “I’ve worn a wire before. I’ve set up stakeouts. I know, things could get hairy. But I’m prepared to take that risk. I have to. I set all this in motion and I have to bring it to a close.”

  The waitress brought the pizza, and we ate. I told Harry about the other things I had to do to prove what Derek and Wayne had done. “Poor Terri,” Harry said. “She was always a sweetheart. I remember when I had a monster crush on Elise Chung and she gave me lots of advice. She even went with me when I got my hair cut and told the barber just what to do.” He sighed. “That was the best haircut I ever had.”

  “You’re a sap,” I said. “You got a quarter? I need to make a phone call and I don’t want to use my cell in case they have caller ID.”

  “Sure.” He handed me the quarter and I walked to the back of the pizza parlor, where the pay phone was mounted on the wall. I dialed Derek and Wayne’s number, and Wayne answered.

  “Wayne, it’s Kimo Kanapa‘aka,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Kimo.” Even his voice was sexy. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could go forward with my plan, but I knew I had to. “Heard about your troubles.”

  “Yeah, most of the island has by now. It’ll get to my auntie on Kaua‘i pretty soon.”

  “Maybe we can get together,” Wayne said. “I could give you some advice.”

  “Who knows? I might see you at the Boardwalk sometime. You do go there, don’t you? By yourself?”

  “I can.” He lowered his voice. “Friday night?”

  “I think I can be there then.” I cleared my throat. “Can I talk to Derek?”

  “Sure, hold on.”

  “Hey, Wayne,” I said. “What kind of underwear do you wear?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  Derek picked up the phone a minute later. “What’s up? I thought you were suspended.”

  “I am. This is more a personal thing. It’s about a mutual acquaintance we have, somebody who knows you through your family. I’d rather talk to you about it in person, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. You want to come by here, or meet at the club, or what?”

  “I can come by the club. How about tomorrow, like two o’clock.”

  “That’ll work.” We said our goodbyes and hung up. I walked back to the table where Harry was paying the bill.

  “Harry, I can pay.”

  “You don’t know where your next paycheck is coming from. I can treat you once in a while.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I hate to eat and run, but I’ve established that Wayne and Derek are both home. I’m going to run over there and take pictures of their cars.”

  “You can’t do that by yourself. You need a lookout. What if they see you?”

  “I don’t want to get you involved. I’ve gotten too many people in trouble already.”

  “You’re my friend. I’m already involved. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

  While we drove, I called my brother Lui and made a date with him for lunch the next day. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t think I had a right to be, but, no, I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry I put you in a bad situation.”

  “I should have called Mom and Dad. But I figured you’d already talked to them. I didn’t know you were holed up in your apartment with the phone off the hook.”

  “Your reporter could have told you,” I said. “But come on, I don’t want to argue with you, Lui. Just name the time and place for lunch.”

  We agreed to meet at noon at a little coffee shop around the corner from his station. “You talk to Mom at all?” he asked before we hung up.

  “Last night,” I said. “She was all right.”

  “She laid into me the other day for not calling them. You think you can tell her to lay off?”

  “I can try,” I said. “See you at noon.”

  We parked around the corner from the high-rise in Kaka‘ako where Derek and Wayne lived and walked over to their building, a luxury condominium with valet parking and an underground garage. While the valet was in the lobby chatting with the security guard, we slipped through a fire door that had been propped open and into a stairwell that led to the garage. “How are you going to tell which ones are theirs?” Harry asked.

  “While you were hacking into Tommy’s computer, I was chatting with Arleen. She was telling me how egotistical Wayne and Derek both are-they have vanity license plates, DEREKS and WAYNES. If I were still on the job, I could just run a DMV check, but instead we’ll just have to find the cars that match those plates.”

  We looked around. The garage was about half-empty, which was good for us. Even better, the parking bumpers had unit numbers painted on them. It was harder to figure out how the numbers ran. They seemed to go in sequence for a while, then have a break and a bunch of random numbers in them, and then resume again in order, and so on.

  ‘This is the goofiest system,” I said. Harry stood there, lost in thought. “Harry? You still with me?”

  “It is a system. There’s a pattern here. See, wherever the garage is completely sheltered, the numbers run in sequence. Wherever there’s a grating, they jump out.”

  “So?”

  “So when they first assigned parking spaces, they must have given one good space to every unit. Then I’ll bet people started wanting second parking spaces, so they got these ones that aren’t so good, that were probably intended as guest spaces originally.”

  “Fascinating,” I said dryly. “So find me the spaces for unit

  1612.”

  “You take the sequential ones,” he said. “I want to see if I can find a pattern in the non-sequential ones.”

  I shook my head and walked down the aisle. Once a geek, always a geek. It was a little spooky in the garage, open and brightly lit and echoing, and I wanted to get out as soon as possible. I found the space for #1612 easily and took a couple of pictures of the big black Jeep Cherokee that was parked there. It had a Yale sticker on the back windshield and the vanity plate I expected, WAYNES.

  Alarm bells started going off in my head. A black Jeep Cherokee, just like the one I had seen peeling away from the Rod and Reel Club the night Tommy Pang had been murdered. Was Wayne the guy Evan and I had both seen dragging Tommy’s body down the alley? Were Wayne and Derek responsible not just for Evan’s murder, but for Tommy’s as well? And if they’d killed Tommy, then why had they killed Evan?

  All those thoughts were ricocheting around my brain when I saw Harry down the aisle waving toward me. Just then I heard the engine noise of a car coming down the ramp. I waved to Harry and we both ducked behind cars.

  The valet squealed around the curve and slid into a space, stomping the brakes at the last minute as the concrete wall loomed ahead of him. We get our thrills where we can, I thought. The valet, a cute blond guy in tight white shorts and a white shirt with epaulets, jumped out of the car and jogged back up the ramp.

  I hurried down to the white BMW convertible Harry had found. It had a Yale bumper sticker, and a vanity plate that read DEREKS. I snapped my pictures and we got out of the garage.

  Back at my truck I showed Harry the Polaroids. They were pretty standard shots, showing the front and side of each car, along with the license plates. They were both in mint condition, not a ding or a dent, nothing to identify them to witnesses.

  It was almost ten by then, and I drove Harry back to his condo and then went home myself. I watched the evening news on Lui’s station again, and saw a special report on a gay task force in a city on the East Coast. It was a mixture of straight and gay officers and detectives who investigated crimes against gays, patrolled gay neighborhoods, and gave lectures to
the community on personal safety and community patrols. The report compared it to other units in communities with language or cultural barriers. “Our officers in Little Saigon speak Vietnamese,” one spokesman said. “In the gay community we have officers who are sensitive to residents’ concerns. It’s the same thing.”

  It was an interesting idea. I yawned and went to bed. I woke early and went for a brief surf, which refreshed and energized me, and prepared me for all I had to do.

  SOMEONE IS WATCHING

  The next morning, Thursday, I stopped off at Harry’s apartment, where he had downloaded new copies of the photos of Derek and Wayne for me from the Yale website and printed them on his color printer. He wanted to come to Wailupe with me, but he had a class at UH to teach.

  “I have to give a pop quiz this morning, which I already know is a bad idea. Then I’ll have twenty-five quizzes to correct.”

  “What you need to do,” I said, “is give multiple choice tests. Then you just make a guide with the right answers on it, and stick it over the papers and then check, check, check, you’re done.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Wahine I dated once, teacher from Wisconsin,” I said. “She told me.”

  “You dated a vahine from Visconsin?” he asked, giving both words the Hawaiian pronunciation.

  I laughed and headed out the H1 toward Wailupe with the pictures and the Polaroids I’d taken of Derek’s and Wayne’s cars. I parked in Terri’s driveway and knocked on her door. Though it was still early, the sun shone strongly in a cloudless sky, and it was already getting hot.

  Danny answered. “Kimo!” He put his arms around my leg.

  Terri came up behind him. “I guess you can see he missed you. He kept asking me when you were coming back.” She sighed. “I still can’t get him to go back to school. Maybe next week.”

  I leaned down and picked him up. “You missed me, huh? I wish I could be here more, pal, but I’ve got lots of stuff to do. I’ll come and see you as often as I can, okay?”

  He nodded. I put him down and explained to Terri what I was going to do. “Why don’t I come with you?” she asked. “I know the neighbors, and they’re more likely to talk to you if I’m around.”

  “I don’t know. They may feel awkward, seeing you, thinking Evan killed himself.”

  “You’re not a cop anymore, Kimo. You don’t have any authority to go poking around out here. If I’m with you, nobody will complain.”

  She made a quick phone call and arranged for Danny to go over to the next door neighbor’s. Unfortunately, the woman had been away the previous week, and couldn’t help us. Danny argued a little but I promised we would go surfing again, and he relented.

  It was a mixed neighborhood, some stay-at-home moms and some working ones, and some older couples as well. We started to the left of Terri’s house and worked our way down the street, up and down driveways, past manicured lawns, basketball hoops, and sport fishing boats up on trailers, until we came to the Kalaniana’ole Highway. Then we crossed the street and started working our way back down. We didn’t have much luck until we came to an older house across from hers and two down.

  An elderly woman answered the door. “Hello, Mrs. Ianello,” Terri said. “This is my friend Kimo. I wonder if we could ask you a couple of questions about last Friday?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I saw all the police cars. I’m so sorry for you, dear.”

  “Thank you,” Terri said, looking at the ground for a minute. She had perfected her response over the last week, driven by necessity and years of training to be a Clark, with all that entailed.

  “Were you home that morning, ma’am?” I asked.

  “I was,” Mrs. Ianello said. “Why don’t you come inside. I have some iced tea.”

  “That would be nice,” Terri said. As the sun climbed the day had gotten hotter, and for a change there were no trade winds sweeping down her street from the ocean.

  Mrs. Ianello was tiny and mouse-like, with short brown hair going gray and quick movements. As we walked into her living room I saw a comfortable arm chair positioned with a nice view of the front window. A good sign. She had a pair of small, expensive binoculars on the table next to the chair. An even better sign.

  We sat in the living room and she brought us both tall glasses of iced tea with paper-thin lemon slices and long-handled spoons. Her furniture was very formal, some kind of French style, I think, tassels on the lampshades and fancy handles on drawers. “You mentioned you saw the police cars at the Gonsalves house that morning, ma’am,” I said, after taking a long sip of my tea. “Did you see anything happen before that?”

  Terri and I sat side by side on the sofa, and Mrs. Ianello faced us from her armchair, sitting forward, her hands on her knees. She thought for a minute. “Let’s see, Thursday was garbage day. I always watch to make sure they take everything away.” She looked over at Terri. “You know, sometimes they leave a bag behind, or a bag comes open and they don’t pick everything up.”

  Terri nodded encouragingly. “They probably came around seven,” Mrs. Ianello said. “Then I watched to make sure all the kids got on the school bus okay.” This time she looked at me. “You read about terrible things that happen to little children. I just want to do my part to help.”

  “It’s very good of you,” I said.

  She nodded approvingly. “I think so.” She put her index finger up to her mouth, then took it away. “Mrs. Yamanaka’s mother came to baby-sit while she went to the grocery. That was about ten. She came back around eleven-thirty, and I remember she had to drive very slowly down the street because there was a big black car in front of her cruising down the street slow, like they were looking for house numbers.”

  A big black car, I thought. That sounded promising. “Mrs. Yamanaka has a tendency to drive a little too fast,” Mrs. Ianello said. “After all, this isn’t the Indianapolis 500 around here.”

  I wanted her to get on with it, but it was clear there was no rushing her. She said, “The big black car stopped down the street, at the corner of Wailupe Circle. I thought it was funny that they parked there and then walked back up to your house, dear. I wondered why they didn’t just park in your driveway?”

  “You said they, ma’am,” I said. “Could you describe the people who got out of the car?”

  “Certainly. A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing shorts, with sandy blond hair, and a shorter man, Asian I think from his build, with black hair. He was dressed very nicely, like for business. I remember thinking maybe the Asian man was the boss and the other man was like a bodyguard.”

  I could see Terri getting more and more upset. If I’d have been her, I’d have wanted to scream something like “You saw the men who killed my husband and you didn’t do anything?” but she seemed to be struggling for control.

  “They went up to the front door, and then they went inside,” Mrs. Ianello continued. “I saw them leave about half an hour later, and then I went in and fixed myself some lunch, and then the next thing that happened was when several police cars pulled up.” She peered at me. “Are you a policeman?”

  “I’m a detective, ma’am.”

  “I thought so,” she said, nodding. “I thought I recognized you. I may be getting old but I still have my eyesight.”

  And high-powered binoculars, I thought. I brought out the pictures of Wayne’s car, and of Wayne and Derek. “I don’t know much about cars,” she said. “I suppose it could have been this one. But I couldn’t be sure.”

  She was even less help with the photos of Wayne and Derek. “I’m sorry, I didn’t really see their faces, just their general build. Without seeing them in person, I couldn’t really tell.” She looked at me somewhat eagerly. “Do you want me to come down to your station for a lineup?”

  “We probably will, ma’am,” I said. “But we have more information to gather. We’ll be in touch with you.” We thanked Mrs. Ianello for the tea and stood up. It was a good start, I thought, and it placed Derek and Wayne at
the scene. It wasn’t enough to make the case, but it was the first step.

  No one else was home until we came to Mrs. Yamanaka, who was busy with twin girls, two years old. Her house was a dramatic change from Mrs. Ianello’s, very spare and Japanese, paper-thin shoji-screens and low cushions on the floor. Terri and I slipped off our shoes at the front door and stepped down into a sunken living room.

  Terri thankfully sat on the floor and played with the twins so that Mrs. Yamanaka could concentrate on my questions. She was a Nisei, first generation American, and she periodically threw Japanese comments at the little girls as they played.

  She always shopped on Thursdays, she said, because that was the day her mother could come and stay with the babies. “Do you remember anything unusual when you came home?” I asked. “Strange cars in the neighborhood, strangers walking around?”

  “This is a quiet area. Sometimes we get tourists looking for a way to the beach. But usually not.” She thought. “I remember I had bought ice cream,” she said, “And I was afraid it was going to melt, because it was such a hot day. So I was hurrying to get home, and just when I got here there was a car going so slowly in front of me I nearly hit it. I was annoyed. I almost blew my horn, but I only had a block to go and I was afraid they would go even slower.”

  “Did you see the car stop anywhere?”

  She shook her head. “As soon as I got home I started carrying in the groceries. And you know, the twins, they make a fuss, so I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” I said, only telling a small lie. She had indeed corroborated Mrs. Ianello’s story, which was important.

  No one else in the neighborhood had seen anything. It was eleven-thirty by then, and I had to hurry to meet Lui at noon downtown. “Danny will be disappointed he missed you again,” Terri said.

  “You tell him we’ll have another picnic. Soon.”

  I had to drive hell-for-leather to make it into downtown in time. My brother, the big executive, values his time, and refuses to wait more than five minutes for anyone. Anyone, that is, with the exception of his wife and our mother. Once, about six years ago, our parents were supposed to take him out to dinner to celebrate his promotion to assistant station manager. Our father got tied up on a project, and our parents were about twenty minutes late to meet him. He’d already left and gone on to something else. Between his mother and his wife, I think he got blistered enough to burn off a complete layer of skin. So he’s a little more patient with them.