“Great. What’s the bad news?”
“It’s a gas guzzler.”
“Bad for you. Not for me.”
“At least now I won’t have to depend on you to pick me up and drive me around.” I told Ray what I’d learned from Treasure, and we decided we’d check out the office she mentioned when we were driving her to Norma’s, though she thought it had been cleared out.
The wind waved the palm fronds and shreds of rain clouds scudded overhead as we drove up to St. Louis Heights. We had the flaps rolled down on the Wrangler, and I kept the intermittent wipers on. It was a cruddy day, and that matched the way I felt.
Across the street from the building Treasure had told us about, a demolition company was razing the remains of the shopping center, and I felt a pang of loss. It was my dad’s first commercial project, and he’d recruited all of us to help. I was only six or seven, but on the weekends, I carried supplies around, bringing my dad and brothers water, taking away trash.
Lui and Haoa were teenagers and they complained about having to spend their weekends working, but even my mother helped, spackling holes in the drywall, painting, and washing the glass storefronts.
“Remember that law student?” Ray asked, bringing me out of my reverie.
“The one who called 911?”
“That’s the one. He said he was having sex across the street, right? You think this is the place?”
I shrugged. “I can ask him.”
The building was two stories tall, with a staircase at each end and a balcony that ran across the front. There was no lobby; each office opened to the street. Most of the doors advertised some kind of import or export business, though there was an insurance agency, an acupuncturist, and a law office on the ground floor.
We walked up to the second floor, where the salt air had pitted the concrete banisters along the front rail. Chunks were missing, showing the rebar underneath. We found the door marked Wah Shing, with a Realtor’s box hanging from the lock. A combination lock through a hasp kept the box closed.
Just in case there was evidence somewhere, we both put on plastic gloves. I read Ray the combination Treasure had given us, and the lock dropped open. He pulled out the key and unlocked the office door.
I wasn’t expecting much, and I wasn’t disappointed. The place was nearly as barren as the acupuncture clinic. A beat-up, puke green couch sat along one wall, where I figured the law student had gotten his ass plowed the night of the fire. Across from it was a metal desk with a single drawer and a cheap swivel chair.
There wasn’t a picture on the wall, or a piece of paper on the desk. The plastic waste basket was empty. “We could always dust for prints,” Ray said.
“To prove what? This isn’t a crime scene.”
The space had been divided in two by a wall with a door set in it, and I walked through to another barren room. At least there was a poster on the wall there, a photo of a Chinese landscape taken in Gansu Province, where the travel agent had said Jingtao was from.
Carefully I pried the poster from the wall. There was some Chinese writing on the back, which I couldn’t decipher. Ray came in the room and I showed it to him.
“You know anybody who can read that?” he asked.
“My godmother. She doesn’t live far from here. We’ll swing past her house on our way back to the station.” I shrugged. “It probably doesn’t mean shit, but there isn’t anything else here.”
There was a metal desk like the one in the outer office, a slightly more comfortable chair on casters, and an empty file cabinet. “Phone jack,” Ray said, pointing to the wall. “Maybe we can get a number and trace the calls.”
“That project has your name written all over it, partner.”
We left a few minutes later, after satisfying ourselves that whoever had cleaned the place out had done a great job. I called Aunt Mei-Mei and asked if we could stop by, and she said, “You out early, Kimo. I make you breakfast.”
“No, Aunt Mei-Mei. Don’t go to any trouble.”
“No trouble.”
When she greeted us at her front door, wearing her apron once again, I introduced Ray to her, and she served us scrambled eggs with unidentifiable little bits in it, which were delicious. “I still make big meals,” she said. “Lots of leftovers.”
She ate like a bird, picking a small piece of egg with her chopsticks, then rolling it in sticky rice. Ray loved the food and was effusive with his praise. Aunt Mei-Mei blushed.
After we finished, I put a fresh pair of gloves on and showed her the poster, which I unrolled on the kitchen table when the plates had been cleared.
“Is name and address,” she said. “In China.”
“Can you write it in English?” I asked.
She found a pad from a Chinese store, and wrote, in careful letters, the name Guo Yeng-Shen, with an address below it. “Gansu. That’s the place where the picture was taken?”
“Yes.” She looked at me with a keen interest in her dark eyes. “This help you find who burn down your father’s shopping center?”
“I hope so.” I kissed her cheek and thanked her for her help. As we drove back down to the station, Ray said, “That woman should open a restaurant.”
“You guys need to get out more. Don’t get me wrong, Aunt Mei-Mei’s a great cook. But I can show you places in Chinatown that make her look like an amateur.”
“Maybe we’ll double date sometime. Me and Julie, and you and the fireman.”
I remembered the dinner Mike and I had with Terri and Levi Hirsch on Saturday night. It was fun, despite all the angst over our relationship that had arisen in the truck on the way there and home.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll do that sometime.”
NOBODY DIES IN CHINATOWN
I e-mailed the law student and asked him about the office he’d visited. Then I called a guy I knew in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a freckled, red-headed haole from the mainland named Frank O’Connor, and arranged to meet him at the Kope Bean near his office on Ala Moana Boulevard. Ray stayed at the station to work on getting phone records from the office across from the shopping center.
The first time I met Frank I mistook him for an intern, but I was assured he was a Stanford grad who’d distinguished himself in the San Francisco office before being posted to Honolulu. We had worked together a year before, when an illegal immigrant had turned up dead in the lobby of a downtown office building.
“What’s up?” he asked, settling into one of the big armchairs in the window of the coffee shop.
“You know anything about smuggling illegals in from China for prostitution?”
“Big topic. What specifically do you want to know?
“How do they get in? Boat?”
“Pretty long sail. Sometimes, yeah, they come up from the Marianas that way, but mostly they fly into Honolulu on tourist visas, then they disappear. There’s a saying, you know. Nobody dies in Chinatown. Somebody dies, somebody new comes in and takes over the identity.”
“One ring behind everything, or multiple?”
“Multiple. You’re from Homicide. You have a dead girl?”
“Two girls, two guys. Three of them might be from Gansu Province.”
Frank nodded. “Somebody’s been bringing people in from Gansu, promising them a better life in the U.S. But they’re so much in debt from the travel that they don’t have any choice but to work it off.”
I gave Frank the information we had on the acupuncture clinic and the other places that had burned, and he said he’d see if they had any leads. Then I remembered the poster we’d found at the abandoned office. “You recognize this?” I asked, showing him the name and address as Aunt Mei-Mei had written it.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked, immediately on alert.
“It was on the back of a poster.” I explained where we’d found it.
“I recognize the name—a guy we’ve been looking at, on the ground in Gansu. He recruits the prostitutes and sends them here.”
“So how do they get to the U.S.? Why not just stay in Beijing?”
Frank shrugged. “It’s the old story. The streets of America are paved in gold. Guys like Guo Yeng-Shen convince these kids that they can do better over here. They get fake social security numbers, and they think they’re working toward green cards. But when they’ve exhausted their usefulness they either disappear or get sent back home.”
The talk about illegal aliens reminded me of my conversation with Sergei, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer to talk to Haoa. After I left Frank, I pulled out my cell phone and called my brother.
“Hey, brah, howzit?” he said.
“I need to talk to you. Can I meet you somewhere?”
“Sounds serious. What’s up?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Where are you now?”
“Out by the airport.” He gave me the name of a hotel. “I’m giving them a quote for landscaping. You want to meet me in half an hour? I’ll buy you lunch.”
I’d just walked into the hotel’s restaurant when he came in, wearing pressed khakis and a white polo shirt with his landscaping business’s logo embroidered on it. With his sunglasses on his head, he looked like the model of a prosperous island businessman.
He charmed the hostess, as he does with any woman from six to ninety-six, and she giggled as she seated us at a table overlooking the pool. “Look at that grass,” he said, pointing out the window. “Looks like crap, because they’re cutting it too short, and it burns.”
I ordered a burger, and Haoa a chicken Caesar salad. “Tatiana’s got me on a diet,” he grumbled.
I told the waiter to change my order to a chicken Caesar as well. “Couldn’t eat a burger in front of you.”
“You’re a prince among men. So what’s with all the urgency?”
“I was talking to Sergei on Friday night. I’m worried he might be hiring illegal aliens to work on your crews.”
I’ve known my brother all my life, and I can read him pretty well. Unless he’d turned into a masterful liar, this was all news to him. He groaned. “Please do not tell me that my lame-ass brother-in-law is involved in something shady. Tatiana thinks he’s gone totally straight.”
We both laughed. “Well, in a manner of speaking,” Haoa said.
“Was he in trouble in Alaska?”
The food arrived. Haoa looked at his salad and said, “I wish I’d ordered the burger.”
I waited.
“Yeah, Sergei’s a general fuckup. Nothing major, you understand. But every other week he was in some kind of trouble. Getting drunk at a bar. Beating up a guy who made a crack at him. Pissing in the street where a cop could see him. Receiving stolen goods. Possession with intent to distribute.”
“Whoa. And you hired this guy?”
“Tatiana swore up and down that she would keep him in line. Hell, I see the way she runs me and the kids. I figured she could do the same for him.” He shrugged. “Everybody needs a second chance, Kimo. Sergei’s a fun guy, Tatiana loves him, I thought I was doing a good deed.”
“We don’t actually know that he’s doing anything shady.”
Haoa frowned. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots.” He ate some lettuce and then said, “I’ve had my suspicions. We’ve been expanding like crazy the last six months, and it’s hard to hire good help for what I can afford to pay. But Sergei, it’s like he found this pipeline of guys. And they’re good workers, too.”
“Chinese?”
“All kinds. Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian.”
“You ever ask to see their papers?”
He shook his head. “That’s what I have him for.” He looked at me. “What am I gonna do, Kimo? I could lose my business over this. Hell, I could go to jail, couldn’t I? Who’ll take care of Tatiana and the kids?” He put his fork down on the table and it skittered away and fell to the floor. “Jesus, I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
“You’re not fucked yet. I was talking to a guy in Immigration today about something else. He’s a good guy. Let me ask him what you should do. You cooperate, maybe all you get is a fine.”
“Can you do that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, Haoa. But you know I’ll do everything I can to protect you. After everything you’ve done for me…”
“Thanks, brah.” He shivered. “Shit, I’ve got to tell Tatiana about this.”
“Who did all your paperwork before you hired Sergei?”
“Had another guy, but he quit. Tatiana was helping me out when she suggested we bring in Sergei.”
“So get Tatiana to go in and look things over,” I said. “Before we go all crazy. Meantime, I’ll talk to my guy, but I won’t use any names yet. See what he says.”
“We’ve got to do this fast.” Haoa pushed the half-eaten salad away from him. “I’ve got no appetite anymore.”
“Poor guy,” I said. “You’ll waste away to nothing in a few days.”
“Get even skinnier on prison food,” he grumbled.
I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to get back to work.” I reached over and clasped his shoulder. “Don’t worry, brah. I’m going to take care of you.”
BURN VICTIM
Ray and I spent the rest of the afternoon wading through information online. I had no idea there were so many different names for male prostitutes—from man-whores to program boys. Men had been selling sex to other men since ancient Greece and Rome, beginning in the United States in the late 1600s.
Men who identified as straight and yet had sex with other men for money were called gay for pay. Hustlers were guys like Jimmy Ah Wong, Frankie, and Lolo, who solicited for sex on the street. Escorts, like Lucas, made contact with clients through personal ads, Web sites, and agencies. According to the research I found, most guys who sold sex supplemented their income in other ways: pornographic actor or model, go-go boy, or by performing in sex shows or on a Web site. That matched what I’d seen on MenSayHi.com. Another common trade was massage therapist, which connected to the businesses Norma Ching and Treasure Chen had been running.
When I got home, I found an e-mail from the law student, who needed to talk to me. Between him and Brian Izumigawa, I couldn’t seem to get rid of past tricks. “Where are you?” the student asked when I called his cell. “I need your help.”
“I’m at my apartment in Waikiki. You want me to meet you up at UH again?”
“No, I’ll come down there. Give me your address.”
“You want to come to my apartment?”
“Please. I have to show you something. In private.”
Reluctantly, I told him where I lived. It didn’t sound like he wanted to hook up, and I didn’t have the energy to argue with him. While I was cleaning up, Gunter called me. “I’m still at work, but I need to talk to you. Can I come over when my shift is done?”
What was up? Why were all these guys desperate to talk to me at my apartment? “Sure, Gunter. I’ll be here.”
About a half hour later, my doorbell rang. I looked out the peephole and recognized the South Asian guy. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, bursting into the apartment. “I didn’t know who else to talk to. I’m in terrible trouble.”
“Slow down,” I said, closing the door behind him. “Come sit down, and tell me what’s wrong.”
“I can’t,” he said, and he burst into tears.
Awkwardly, I put my arms around his shoulders and hugged him, and he cried against me. “It’s okay. You can tell me anything.”
“I have to show you,” he said, sniffling. He pulled away and turned his back to me. He undid his pants and pushed
them and his white briefs to the floor, then leaned against my sofa.
“Holy shit! What happened?”
His hairless mocha buttocks were dotted with burns, and there was a white gauze patch awkwardly taped over his anus. “That fucker,” he said, talking through tears. “He burned me.”
I remembered the cream that Mike had used on my back when I’d been scorched at the Hawai’i Marriage Project fire. Unfortunately, I’d used it up and never replaced it. “I’ve got to make a call,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you. Lie down on the sofa on your stomach.”
He leaned down to pull up his pants, and I said, “You might as well leave those off.” He stepped out of them and lay down on the couch.
I dialed Mike Riccardi on my cell. “You still have some of that burn cream?” I asked, as soon as he picked up.
“Hello to you, too. Yup. I’ve always got a tube in my truck.”
“How quickly can you get over to my apartment?”
“You burned yourself?”
“Not me. Another guy.”
“Give me a half hour,” he said.
I sat down on the floor, so that my head was about the same level as the law student’s. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? My friend is on his way over with some cream to help you out.”
“Nobody can know,” he said. “I did not realize how bad it was until this morning. Fortunately my wife did not see me.”
“Start at the beginning. Who did this to you?”
“The man I had sex with the night of the fire. He called me yesterday, when I was at the library. He told me that he wanted to see me.”
He started crying again, and I patted his shoulder. “Take your time.”
“I said that I did not want to. I am trying to be a good husband. But he said that he had taken pictures of me that night, and that he would send them to my wife if I did not do what he said. He told me to come to an apartment. He made me take all my clothes off and lie down on the bed.”
He began sobbing again. “I am so ashamed. I should never have gone with him in the first place. Now my life will be ruined.”
“Where was the apartment?” I asked.
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