Mahu Fire

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Well, there was nobody there in leather, which I kind of expected,” she said. “I mean, everybody was so tame. I wanted to see wild outfits, men kissing each other in fits of passion. I wanted Lili to be outraged. I wanted some guy to come up and pinch Howie’s butt.”

  “Pity the poor guy who does that.” I told her about the sweaty guy Gunter and I had seen. “Did you see anybody who looked like that?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Your friend Gunter and that nice boy Robert were bringing plants in from the lanai, and I was helping them put them in the right places. When they finished, I was waiting for Howie to bring me a drink from the bar, and this guy who was sweating like crazy got in line for the bathroom. This older man got on line behind him, and even though the guy was sweating and obviously in some kind of distress, he insisted that the older man go first. I thought that was so polite, and that maybe he wasn’t sick, that he’d just moved here, hadn’t gotten accustomed to the climate yet. Believe me, I know what that’s like.”

  Tatiana had grown up in Alaska, and had met my brother while she was bumming around the islands waitressing and sketching portraits on the beach. Theirs was a true love match, and though sometimes awesome fireworks erupted between them, I had often seen the kind of magnetic attraction that kept them near each other at parties, even just hanging around their house. When Tatiana was anywhere in the vicinity, my grip on my brother’s attention was limited.

  As long as Tatiana was around, he was okay. And he could be totally with you if she was in a different place, miles away. But if she was in the house or at a party with him, it made him nervous to be out of her sight. He was happiest of all when he was working out in their yard, planting something, weeding, trimming, watering, and she was nearby, reading a book under an umbrella or playing in the pool with the kids. He was grounded by the land and by his love for his wife.

  “Would you recognize the sweaty guy if you saw him again?”

  “Sure. You know I have a memory for faces. I can sketch him if you want.”

  “That would be terrific. I sat with the artist this morning, and I’m sending him over to work with Gunter. After he’s done I’ll have him come up here and compare notes with you.”

  “I think Aunt Mei-Mei will want to go home soon, so I’ll take her and while I’m out I’ll stop by the house and get some stuff to draw with.”

  “How is Uncle Chin, do you think?”

  She shrugged. “I think when you get to be that sick you take the small pleasures you can. He seems to like that boy you brought over. Aunt Mei-Mei says his spirits are a lot better.”

  I looked at my watch. “I’d better say my good-byes. God knows what kind of chaos is going on back at the station.”

  Tatiana took my hand. “You know we all love you, don’t you, Kimo? I don’t want you to go thinking that Lili speaks for any of the rest of us.”

  I kissed her cheek. “You’re the best. Like you said, she was just upset.” I resolved, though, to move the Church of Adam and Eve up on my list. If they could make Liliha feel so strongly against gay marriage, what else could they do?

  BETWEEN BROTHERS

  Back at the station there was a message from Mike Riccardi, which I returned immediately. He’d left three numbers, and I finally reached him on his cell. “Where are you?” I asked. “This connection is terrible.”

  “I’m on the H2, heading back into town. I wanted to clear my plate so I could go full bore on your fire. I’m thinking it might be connected to some of the other arsons I’ve been investigating. The golf ball thing connects them, and the fact that they were all gay-owned or serving the gay community. I’ll know more when I get the full results back from the lab. Have you got any news?”

  “I’ve gone through all the witness statements the uniforms collected last night, and there’s nothing there. But I went over to Queen’s today at lunch and talked to some of the people who were hospitalized.”

  “Lunch? What’s that?”

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t eat either.” I figured if I concentrated enough on work I’d forget I was hungry. I told him about the artist—my sketch, Gunter’s, and Tatiana’s.

  “These guys are amateurs, I can feel it,” he said. “I’m heading in to the lab now, to see if they can connect that golf ball fragment you found to some of the other arsons. I spoke to the ATF guys, and because they think this is an arson, rather than a bombing, they’re going to back off and leave things up to us. The FBI’s going to hold off, too.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. We won’t have anybody to blame but ourselves.”

  “That’s the way I like it. I had a couple of guys combing the place this morning, too, and I think we might have a few more clues.”

  “I want to know what you’ve got,” I said. “Can we meet?”

  “I’m not gonna get out of the lab until dinner time, at the earliest. You want to get something to eat around seven? You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

  “I can do that.” He suggested an Italian place on Kuhio Avenue and we agreed to meet there. “I’m half Italian, half Korean, you know. It’s either pasta or Kimchee.”

  “I’ll take the pasta.”

  Mike swore at a driver who’d gotten in his way, then came back to me. “I’m getting tapes of all the news coverage. You never know who’s lurking around in the background of those shots. You got a VCR?”

  “Yup.”

  “Good. I’ll bring the tapes. After dinner we can go over to your place and look at them.”

  I hung up the phone, wondering for a moment or two what Mike Riccardi’s story was. I mean, he’d all but asked me out on a date and was already planning to go home with me. That is, if I was right and he was gay, and he was interested in me. Of course there was always the chance that he was busy until dinner, and it was a good use of both our time to eat together as we compared notes. And when we were so close to my apartment, why go back to the fire station or police headquarters to watch the tape?

  Right. I gave up speculating and got back to work. I spent the afternoon wading through reports. I arranged for the police artist to go over and meet with Gunter, I sent the paper bag that Robert had given me down to be checked for fingerprints, and I asked the Vice Mayor’s office for a list of the people who had joined his protest outside the building.

  His secretary, who sniffled on and off during our conversation, said that because Shira had organized the march himself, the office didn’t have any records. I figured that was a code for “Most of the people there were homeless folks hired for the night.”

  I wrote a memo to all the beat officers and other detectives in all the districts on O’ahu, asking if they’d seen anyone acting suspicious that afternoon or evening, particularly any men in tuxedos sweating heavily.

  Lieutenant Sampson said that I could pull one of the beat cops to help with running down leads, and I chose Lidia Portuondo. I had her canvass the neighborhood around the Marriage Project, hoping someone might report some suspicious activity. I was also looking for witnesses who could tell me more about who’d tossed the manure. I was sure it had to be tied to the bombing.

  It might all lead to another heap of useless paperwork, but it had to be done. I also fielded a dozen more calls from the press, including one from my oldest brother.

  Usually Lui has his secretary call me, and then he leaves me holding on the phone for a minute or two, reminding me that he is first boy, after all. But that afternoon he called direct. I wondered if he had spoken with Liliha, but even if he had I doubt she would have told him about her outburst. My brother is the most Japanese of the three of us, the most reserved with his feelings. Sometimes I think he was born in a business suit, a little tiny tie hanging around his chubby neck.

  “Did you see our coverage of the fire last night?”

  “Not yet. I got a guy with the tape, we’re watching it later.”

  “Good story. I made sure they played up the gay marriage side of things. And we’re le
ading with your friend Cathy on the five o’clock. We’ll see what the reporter does with the story, and if it looks good we’ll run it again on the six and the eleven.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Enough to keep me in the loop when you’ve got any new leads?”

  “You know the drill, Lui. All information is supposed to get funneled through public affairs. That way all the media gets equal access.”

  “I understand your position. I’m not asking you to shut anybody else out. I’m just saying that if you know something, and you call me first, we’ll be able to put together the kind of story you want to see. We’re trying to do serious journalism, to give our coverage a little dignity.”

  I started laughing. “Dignity? Are you sure you’re talking about KVOL, Erupting News All Day Long? Aren’t you the station that shows the clip of those people on the Big Island running away from that lava flow?”

  “You want me to say it? You want to make me say it? All right, I will. I deliberately skewed our coverage of the fire to make us sympathetic to the whole gay marriage deal. And you know why? Because I’ve got this brother that’s gay, and I want him to be happy. If he wants to get married to some other guy, I want him to be able to. And I’m going to use the power that I have here at the station to do that. Now are you going to help me or not?”

  “Go ahead, make me feel like shit,” I said, and I was almost certain I had made him laugh. “Geez, how’d you get so good at making people feel guilty? You must have been listening to Mom all those years.”

  “I’ve got three kids. It comes with the territory. So tell me, you in or you out?”

  “Seems like the whole island knows I’m out, Lui.” I thought about it for a minute. “In the first place, I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. Everything you get ought to come from the public information office. And we shouldn’t release any information to you that we don’t release to the rest of the media. But what I think I can do is give you some direction for your peripheral coverage.”

  “Like pointing us toward Cathy Selkirk.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where do we look for a lead for tomorrow’s news?”

  “You know what I think is an interesting angle on this case? The fact that out of all the people at the party, the only one who died was somebody who was on the same side as the bomber. There’s irony there.”

  “A story on Wilson Shira, you mean. What was he doing there, and so on. Maybe there’s something in his past that made him so opposed to this idea. You gotta wonder what makes somebody come out and protest a thing like this.” He paused, and I could almost hear the wheels whirring in his head.

  “Off the record, you might want to talk to some of the people at Homeless Solutions,” I said. “A little bird told me that yesterday somebody was going around there, offering to pay homeless people to join the protest.”

  “I’ll get somebody on it. Hey, you ever consider the possibility that Shira was some kind of suicide bomber?” Lui asked. “Maybe he carried the bomb on his body! Maybe he brought it in there himself, planning to plant it, and it blew up before he could get out?”

  “The facts don’t exactly support that theory, but, hey, you’ve made KVOL’s reputation on that kind of sensationalism, haven’t you?”

  “Don’t get snotty. Remember, you’re still the kid brother.”

  I shook my head as I hung up the phone.

  PASTA PUTTANESCA

  It was almost six forty-five by the time I dragged my sorry, exhausted and starving butt out of headquarters for the drive to Waikïkï. Not even the prospect of seeing Mike Riccardi could generate much enthusiasm. I’d hoped to get home for a quick nap, a shower, maybe the chance to pretty myself up. No such luck; he’d have to take me battered and disheveled. And to top it off, every time I sat back I felt my shirt rubbing against the raw burn on my back. I was definitely not in a dating mood.

  I’d never been to the restaurant he had suggested, a small storefront on Kuhio Avenue a few blocks ewa of my apartment. It was set between the lobby of a cheap hotel for vacationing Japanese and a Laundromat, where a bunch of German teenagers hung around their wash like sharks circling an unknowing surfer.

  Mike was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table in the back drinking Chianti and bantering with a waiter. His hair was perfectly combed in a wave over his forehead, and his beige oxford-cloth button down shirt was spotless.

  “Man, you look like shit,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

  “I don’t know you well enough for such honesty,” I said. He looked terrific, of course; he had to have gone home and changed clothes. I didn’t know anybody who could keep pressed shirts so crisp after a day in the tropical sun.

  “Come on, sit down. Want some wine?”

  “Sure.” As he poured me a glass, the waiter brought us an antipasto platter, the greens glistening with olive oil, vegetables and cheeses all arranged carefully on a decorated plate.

  “I ordered for both of us. I hope you don’t mind. They’ve got a terrific pasta puttanesca here—” he held up his thumb and two forefingers together in a gesture I’d only seen on television, then kissed his fingertips— “you’re gonna love it.”

  This was sounding more and more like a date to me, and frankly I just didn’t have the patience for it. He was a gorgeous, hunky guy, sexy and charming, but all I wanted to do was get his information, watch the video tape, and then go to bed. Alone. I was afraid I might nod off before the pasta arrived.

  “Let me tell you what I found out today,” I said. Before I left the station I’d printed out all my notes. As I started going through them, I noticed he’d pulled out the battered steno pad I’d seen him with the night before. Every now and then he stopped me for a question or two, making his own record.

  When I was finished, he said, “You’ve been busy.”

  “It makes the day pass.” The waiter cleared away our antipasto plates and refilled our wine glasses. “So, your turn now. What did you do today?”

  “Like I told you on the phone, I went up to Central O’ahu to look over an arson—a pair of lesbians with a few acres of pineapple. Somebody torched their storage shed a couple of days ago, and at first I thought it was just kids, because it was so amateur.”

  He sipped his Chianti. “But when I looked at it again, I saw a lot of connections to the bombing. Looks like the lesbians might have been a trial run for your guy.”

  I shook my head. “We’ve got to stop these guys, Mike.”

  “I know. While I was up there, I had guys go over the site again, and they found a couple of interesting things. Like a piece of pipe, for instance.”

  “Pipe like you smoke?”

  He shook his head. “Pipe like you put a bomb into. These guys are definitely amateurs. The fragment we found was only about three inches square, pretty standard hardware store issue. But it looks like we’re going to get a partial print off it. They were too dumb to use gloves—they must have figured all the evidence was going to blow up.”

  “There’s something I don’t get. If they’re such amateurs, how do they know how to make a bomb in the first place? I couldn’t do it.”

  “Sure you could. You’ve got a brain, right? And you know how to work a computer?”

  “Pretty much.” The waiter brought a big tray of pasta, family style, and two plates. He prepared to dish it out, but Mike waved him away and started the work himself.

  “So you get on the Internet,” he continued, as he heaped the creamy white pasta onto the plates. “And you do a search for ‘bombs.’ That brings up hundreds of hits. You start surfing around, you read, you go from link to link, and pretty soon you know almost as much about explosives as the fire department does.”

  “I’d always heard about that, but I figured it was one of those urban folk tales—you know, some teenaged kid builds an atom bomb for his high school science project, and all he needs is the plutonium to make it work.” I paused to drink some more wine. “Can you give me
a list of all everything you think they might need? I can get some uniforms out canvassing stores, see if we can trace any of the items.”

  “Everything they used was pretty common, but I’ll put a list together. Who knows, you might get lucky.”

  I was sure that was his leg brushing against mine under the table. We locked eyes and smiled. Mike kept looking at me as he twirled a forkful of pasta, lifted it to his mouth, and tasted. An expression somewhat akin to ecstasy passed over his face. “This is fabulous. Go on, taste it. Tell me what you think.”

  I tasted. It was pretty terrific. The wine was good, too, and though the place had filled up our table was partially sheltered by a metal trellis with fake grape leaves twining around it. I was feeling more relaxed. Maybe this could turn out to be a date.

  “I’d say this is just like my mother used to make, by my mom’s Korean,” Mike said. “And my dad’s from Long Island, so I didn’t see his family much growing up.”

  “Your folks meet during the Korean War?” I asked.

  Mike nodded. “If you believe them, it was love at first sight. My dad had taken some shrapnel, and my mom was a nurse. He came out of the anesthesia, and hers was the first face he saw.”

  He smiled, and our eyes met again. I remembered the first time I’d seen him, at police headquarters. Would that be our story someday—love at first dead chicken?

  “They moved back to New York after the war, and my mom worked as a nurse while my dad went to medical school. My mom hated it out east, though. She didn’t fit in, and she wanted to go back to Seoul. So they compromised on Hawai’i. They both work out at Tripler.”

  “So how come you don’t have a stethoscope around your neck?”

  “Teenaged rebellion? Plus I hated science at the time. Kind of ironic that so much of what I do now revolves around science.”

  “You go to school for this stuff?” I asked. “The arson investigation?”

  “Took a few courses. Spent a lot of time online.”

  I was about to respond when he continued. “The Internet is an amazing thing. I’m still exploring a lot of it myself. I mean, it seems like anything you’re into, there’s something out there. You want to make a bomb, or find out who won the World Series in 1986, or try out some cool new software, all you have to do is point and click.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You must have seen how much gay material is out there. Chat rooms and pictures and stories and all.”