Mahu m-1

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I learned that Akoni had passed on to Peggy what Gunter had told me, that Derek and Wayne had been buying stolen Hawaiian artifacts and shipping them through the pack and ship, forcing Jimmy Ah Wong to forge the paperwork. He told me she wasn’t very happy that I’d been the one to break the case.

  My suspension hearing was held on the Monday morning following Wayne’s death. I got up early and surfed for an hour, then went home and showered. I was about to put on my one good suit when I changed my mind and decided to wear my uniform. I was a cop, after all, and if I was going to end my career I wanted to end it in the uniform that had always made me proud.

  Lieutenant Yumuri and Hiram Lin were waiting for me in that same conference room at the main station on South Beretania. There was another man there, too, a Lieutenant from the Special Investigations Section whom I recognized but didn’t know.

  The DA himself was at the hearing, but Peggy Kaneahe was not. The Honolulu County District Attorney was a half-Chinese man with the unlikely name of Peter Furst, and he began by announcing that because of ADA Kaneahe’s personal relationship with me she had been removed from the case. He went on to apologize to me, personally, saying he had been unaware of the relationship, and that he was investigating to make sure that no department policies had been breached.

  Hiram Lin beamed as if he was announcing a newborn grandson. Furst continued, “As a result of my office’s investigation, I have found that it was appropriate for the Department to suspend Detective Kanapa‘aka while his personal involvement in the criminal investigation was reviewed.” This was it, I thought. The beginning of the end.

  “Further, we find that while he may have exhibited questionable judgment in the initial stages of the investigation, that his practices were sound and followed department procedures.”

  I looked at Yumuri and, to his credit, he held my gaze for a minute, and then looked away. Despite his attitudes and problems, I didn’t bear any grudges against him. He was a good cop and a good boss.

  “In light of the publicity surrounding this case, and Detective Kanapa‘aka’s unique qualifications, an administrative decision has been made to reassign him. Lieutenant Sampson?”

  He turned to the lieutenant from Special Investigations. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, with a salt and pepper beard. “I’m aware of your record in Waikiki, Detective, as well as the good things Lieutenant Yumuri has had to say about you. I’ve requested that you be transferred to headquarters to work as a detective in my unit.”

  He stood up and began to walk around the room. “Sometimes I think we’re fighting a losing battle out there. The criminals come up with new crimes every day, and it seems that every new crime that passes my desk is bloodier and more violent than the one before it. We need sharp detectives more than ever.”

  He stopped and leaned against the round concrete column. “More is demanded of us every year. We’re not just here to chase the bad guys, but to help the good guys as well. I think your,” and he paused for a second, “sensitivity, to people who might not get a fair shake otherwise, will be important to us, and valuable.”

  No one else was saying anything. “It won’t be easy,” Sampson said. “There’ll undoubtedly be units, and individual officers, who won’t think you ought to be a cop. That’s a battle you’ve got to be prepared to fight, although I want you to know I’ll be in your corner.” He paused. “You may not be comfortable continuing on the force given all your recent notoriety. I wouldn’t blame you if you decided it was time for a change in your life. I don’t expect you to make up your mind immediately, but I’d like a response within forty-eight hours. There has been a lot of pressure to get your situation resolved, and I want to be able to relieve some of that pressure.”

  It was clearly my turn to talk by then. “I appreciate everything you’ve said, Lieutenant. You’re right, there are some things I need to change in my life. But my career as a detective is not one of them. I’d be honored to work with you, and I’m prepared to return to active duty as soon as you need me.”

  Sampson smiled. “I needed you last week.” Then his smile died. “I’ve discharged my weapon four times in the line of duty, Detective. I can still remember each one of those times. I was walking past the Iolani Palace two years ago when I saw a man come out of the post office with a sawed off shotgun in his right hand. His left arm was around a woman’s neck. I identified myself as a police officer and told him to drop the weapon and let the woman go.” He looked at all of us. “He refused, and fired at me. I shot once and killed him.”

  No one in the room said anything. Finally Sampson said, “It took me quite a while to get over that, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I felt. You may not know it, Detective, but you need a few more days, especially now that this hearing is over. Think about it, and then call me.”

  I saluted him, and he saluted me back. I was a cop again.

  Afterwards, Yumuri came up to me. “I expect we’ll continue to work together,” he said. “You know how I feel, but I believe there’s no discipline in a force unless we all agree to follow our orders. You shouldn’t expect anything less than that from me or the men in my command.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” I said.

  After the hearing, I drove up to my parents’ house to tell them the news, as I had promised them. My father hadn’t gone to the office; he said he’d have been too worried to concentrate on anything. “Good news?” my mother said when she opened the door.

  “I got my job back.” I leaned down and kissed her cheek. My father came up behind her. “They’re reassigning me to downtown. But I’ll still be a detective.”

  “I knew they wouldn’t be able to let you go,” my father said.

  “How about some iced tea?” my mother asked. “I’ll get some.”

  “The lieutenant who would be my new boss told me there’s been a lot of pressure to resolve my situation,” I said, as my father and I walked into the living room. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  “Me? How would I know anything?”

  I pointed to a framed picture of my father with the former mayor of Honolulu, an old friend from UH. “Just wondering.”

  “I may have made some calls. Most people I know are old, like me. Not much influence any more.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.” I paused. “I do appreciate it, you know, Dad. You going out on a limb for me with your friends. I know it probably wasn’t easy for you.”

  “I collected a few favors over the years. Once in a while I use them.” He held up his hand. “Wait, wait, I know you. You want to complain. You want to do everything on your own, no help from anybody else. Well, you’re not the first of my sons I had to ask a favor for.”

  He sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the coffee table. “Your brother Lui was not a good student, you know. He barely graduated from UH. And then he couldn’t find a job. I knew he was a hard worker, just not a student. You remember my friend Milton Gardner?”

  I nodded. Gardner had once owned the TV station Lui manages. “I agreed to build a family room on his house, at cost, if he’d give Lui a job. I had to do most of the work myself, nights and weekends.” My father smiled. “Lui never knew about it. And if you tell him, I’ll deny it.”

  “I know how to keep a secret.”

  “Yes, I know.” He paused again. “You never knew Haoa was arrested, did you?”

  “You mean before last week?”

  “When he was seventeen, he and some of his friends from Punahou, from the football team, stole a car and went for a joyride, and crashed it. There was no question Haoa was the ringleader. Even the police could see that, from the way he acted with the other boys.”

  “I never knew this.”

  “We didn’t tell anyone. I knew old Judge Fong-I used to take care of his yard, when I was a boy. I rounded up the other fathers, and we made a deal. The boys worked that summer, for free, cleaning up the beach, and the other fathers and I chipped in
and bought a new car to replace the one that was destroyed.” He shook his head. “It all came out all right in the end, but Judge Fong never thought the same of me.”

  My father smiled. “I have three sons. Each of them so different, yet each of them so much like me. Or like a part of me. You know, when I was younger, before I met your mother, I had a bad temper. Like Haoa. Chin and I used to run together, we’d get in fights, make mischief.” He shook his head. “Ai, ya, I’m glad I grew out of that. I hope one day your brother will. And then Lui, well, Lui is the businessman in me. I knew some influential people in my time, the men who made things happen in this state. I was privileged to call a few of them my friends. Lui’s the same way, with his own generation.”

  “And me?” I asked. “What part of you is in me?”

  He smiled. “You’re my dreamer. You know, when I was a boy, I used to climb up to the roof of our house and watch the stars. Just like you. And I loved to be out in nature, swimming and surfing like you.”

  My mother came back in then, with three glasses of iced tea on a silver tray. My father picked up his glass and raised it to me. “To you, Kimo. Keep dreaming.” He and my mother smiled and we all clinked glasses. I knew he would never tell me the deal he had made on my behalf, what it had cost him in money, or work, or the regard of his fellows. And the funny thing is that it didn’t matter. I understood that he did these things for us as a matter of course, because he was our father, because he was the man he was.

  IT’S WHO YOU ARE

  After I left my parents I drove to Lui’s office downtown. It was just after five, but I knew he often stayed around until after the six o’clock news. I signed in with the guard, who recognized me. “Your brother’s in his office,” he said. “You can go right up.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I tell you something?” He was an older guy, haole, maybe in his late fifties.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got a nephew that’s gay. Sweetest kid you ever want to know. He worked for this department store on the mainland, and they fired him when they found out. He sued the bastards, and won. Got enough money to set up his own little store, he sells used clothes, vintage stuff.” He looked up at me. “You do your job, nobody should be able to stop you just because of who you are.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Where’s his store, on the mainland?”

  “Sausalito. Little town just north of San Francisco.”

  “I know it. I ever get over there, I’ll stop by.”

  “You do that.” He smiled. “You can take the first elevator, goes direct to the executive floor.”

  I found Lui in his office with the door open, and knocked on it. “Kimo,” he said. “Come on in.”

  I stuck out my hand to shake his, and instead he grasped me in a big hug. I hugged him back, surprised, because it was the second time in a week he’d hugged me.

  I told him about the hearing, and that I thought our father had pulled some strings on my behalf. “I wanted to tell you I appreciate that series you ran,” I said. “About gay cops. I didn’t catch all of them, but I’m sure that they helped convince HPD that they weren’t exactly blazing new trails.”

  “It wasn’t easy to convince the powers that be about that one.” He looked a little embarrassed. “We started out with a sensational angle. You know that’s the kind of stuff we do around here.”

  I smiled. “I know.”

  “But then as the guys did the research, they found all this positive stuff. So we kind of snuck it past, and I think the viewers liked it. We actually did some pretty good numbers because of that series.”

  My father was right, Lui was definitely the businessman in the family. “You stuck your neck out for me,” I said. “I appreciate it. If the numbers had gone the other way you’d have been in trouble.”

  “TV news is ephemeral.” He snapped his fingers. “You blink and the segment’s over. Nobody even remembers it twenty-four hours later.”

  I looked around his office. One wall was filled with photos of Lui talking, shaking hands, sharing drinks with most of the movers and shakers in Honolulu. “I want you to know I appreciate everything you did for me,” I said. “Everything. The series helped, but I know it took more than that for me to keep my job. Dad knows a lot of people, sure, but even he admits you know more of the people who make things happen nowadays. I’m sure you put a word or two in on my behalf.” I nodded my head in the general direction of the photos.

  “I might have called in a few favors.”

  “That must have cost you.”

  “Nothing I can’t afford.”

  That night I called Akoni at home. He’d already heard, from Yumuri, the basic outline of what had happened. “Are you going to take the job?”

  “I worked hard to get to homicide. I’m not going to give it up. There are guys who aren’t going to like me, but that’s their problem. I’ve got to be who I’ve got to be.”

  “You’re the first homosexual I’ve known.” Akoni paused. “It’s made me think a lot, you know. Changed my attitudes. I mean, I’m not saying I don’t still have a long way to go. But it isn’t even a place I ever thought of going until you-came out, I guess.”

  “So?”

  “So I’ll bet there’s lots of other guys, cops and other people, too, who could start changing the way they think. That’s an important job, changing the way people think.”

  “That’s the part of the job I don’t like,” I said. “I’m not all that comfortable with being gay yet. I want people to think of what I can do, not who I am. I’m worried people are going to see me as the gay cop, and they’ll only see the gay part, not the cop part. And that’s not who I am.”

  “I think it is,” Akoni said quietly.

  “What?”

  “You’re not just a cop anymore, Kimo. Like it or not, you’re a gay cop. True, people are going to see you that way, just like if you went to the mainland they’d see you as a Hawaiian cop, or some kind of mixed-race cop. You better get accustomed to it.”

  “Maybe I should just quit the force. I could be a security guard or an insurance agent or something.”

  “You’d still be a gay security guard or a gay insurance agent. At least as a gay cop, you can do some good. People still like to victimize fa-I mean gays. Look at that guy your brother beat up. Just minding his own business and somebody whales on him. You could do something about that. And that gay teen center in Waikiki. You could go there, help out. Maybe you can make it so it’s not so hard to come out for some kids there.”

  I thought a lot about what Akoni said after we hung up. There were good things I could do. I could be an example, raise some consciousness, be a role model for some confused kid. But it would mean sacrificing privacy, letting myself be defined by my sexuality, opening myself up to the kind of conversations like the one I had with the security guard at Lui’s station, who wanted to talk to somebody about his gay nephew. For Christ’s sake, I didn’t want to be gay at all, if I could help it. It made me really uncomfortable to become the poster boy for gay life in Honolulu.

  There was just too much to think about, and I had to shut if all off for a while. I surfed, and then I swam until my arms and legs felt like jelly. Then I dragged myself home and read for a while in the afternoon. Eventually I got into my truck and started to drive.

  It was as if the truck was on automatic pilot, finding its way out to Wailupe on its own. I turned the volume up on an Uluwehi Guerrero CD, letting the pounding of the ipu hula take over my brain, keep it from thinking. I played with Danny for a while, hide and go seek in the backyard, then racing him down the street until he collapsed happily. After he went to bed, Terri poured us a pair of Fire Rock Pale Ales into two tall Pilsner glasses, and we sat out in the backyard under the stars.

  “We’re in the same situation, you know,” she said. “We both have to reinvent our lives. I can’t just be a housewife and mother anymore. I have to do something.”

  “If you need some money I can proba
bly give you a loan.”

  She laughed. “I don’t need the money. My trust fund isn’t huge, but I could certainly run the house on it. And my parents have already put away money for Danny’s education.” She shook her head. “No, I need to do something more with my life. I’m not sure what. Maybe some volunteer work at first. Or else I could go back to the cosmetics counter at Clark’s.”

  A bank of clouds moved in front of the moon and the yard darkened. “You’ve got options,” I said. “Options are good.”

  “You have them too. If this job makes you uncomfortable, then don’t take it.”

  “Actually I kind of think that’s a reason to take it,” I said. I took a long draw of my beer and thought about what I wanted to say. “These last couple of weeks have been really awful, you know? But at the same time they’ve been exciting. I mean, I remember the summer I was thirteen I was miserable, just lying around the house, sleeping like eighteen hours a day, and my whole body ached, because I was having a growth spurt. I was five foot two when school let out and I was five foot nine when it started again. And it was great. I wasn’t the baby anymore. My basketball improved dramatically. My mother started buying my clothes in the men’s department.”

  I had some more beer. “So even though it was miserable, in the end I was better off. Maybe this is just the next step in my growth process.”

  “It’s funny how society labels us. You’re a gay man, now, and I’m a widow. And you know, we’re not the same people we were a month ago, before we had these labels. So maybe the labels change as we change. Who knows what they’ll be calling us a year from now.”

  “To new labels,” I said, clinking my glass against hers. “And to becoming new people.”

  That’s what finally decided me. Just like sharks had to keep moving to stay alive, I thought we all had to keep growing and changing. Sometimes that growth hurts, and sometimes you had to give up things that mattered to you. My father had made sacrifices for me and my brothers, and though I’m sure they hurt him, he made it through. They made him the person he is.