Mahu Fire

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I agreed, and then begged off to go see my father. When I got to his room, Lui and Haoa were standing in the hallway outside his room arguing. “How do you think he’s doing, Kimo?” Haoa asked.

  The collar of his aloha shirt was tucked in and I reached over and fixed it for him. “He seems to be getting better. He isn’t so cranky any more.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Lui said. Though it was Saturday, he was wearing his standard business suit. “You always know Dad is getting better the crankier he gets. He’s not acting like Dad now, he’s acting like a—like a sick person. I say we need to get him out of here ASAP.”

  “He has to stay in the hospital until they finish all the tests,” Haoa said. “Then we’ll know what’s wrong with him.”

  They were faced off against each other in the hallway. Haoa has two inches in height on Lui and about a hundred pounds in weight, but Lui has always been first boy so he retains a big psychological advantage. I hadn’t seen the two of them fight since they were teenagers and I wondered who would win. “Is it up to us?” I asked. “What about the doctors? What about Mom?”

  Lui waved his hand. “You know Mom will listen to us.”

  “Mom will listen to the doctors, and the doctors want Dad to stay here,” Haoa said.

  I said, “Let me go in and see him. Then I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “Good.” Haoa crossed his arms in front of him.

  “Good.” Lui stalked down the hall toward the vending machines.

  I went into the room. My father was lying back in the bed, my mother in the chair next to him. They were watching a game show on TV. “Well, at least you ate your lunch today.” I kissed him on the forehead, then leaned down and kissed my mother’s cheek. Most of the wires and tubes were gone, and except for one line running into his hand, and the faded hospital gown, he could have been home in bed.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Kimo. Bring your brothers in. I want to talk to you about my will.”

  “We’re not talking about wills.” Lui was right; there was definitely something wrong with my father’s attitude.

  “I want to leave the business to Haoa because it matters to him, but I don’t want you and Lui to feel like I’m favoring him.”

  This was very strange behavior. “You’re not leaving the business to anybody yet because you’re not leaving yet.”

  I brought my brothers in then, and it took some talking, but we finally convinced him that whatever happened, the three of us would stand together, and there was no need to talk about wills at the present time.

  My father’s cardiologist showed up, and we talked to him after he’d examined my father. The IV tube was delivering a course of medication, the doctor said, that would finish on Monday. Barring anything unforeseen, it would be safe to take my father home then.

  We all agreed that would be fine, and that crisis averted, I said goodbye to my mother and brothers and went to the office. Even though I wasn’t on duty, I wanted to distribute the sketch of our potential bomber to the Vice guys, who could show it around to prostitutes and other contacts. But more important, I wanted to feel like I was doing something to solve the case.

  EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

  On my way to headquarters I grabbed a sandwich and ate it at my desk as I went back over everything I’d collected so far, looking for anything I’d missed. While I was there, Frank Sit came up to speak with me.

  He was the patrolman who’d seen the truck that shit-bombed the Marriage Project offices. I’d known him for a few years, working more closely with him when he was stationed on Waikiki, too. He was a stocky Chinese guy, in his late forties or early fifties, with a brush cut, a gut and a swagger.

  “I saw that picture Lidia was showing around,” he said, coming over to sit at my desk. “I think I saw the guy.”

  “Really? When?”

  “First I gotta tell you how come I didn’t do anything about that truck with the missing plates. I was at the corner of Ward and Waimanu when I noticed this Volvo station wagon full of hippies ahead of me had Massachusetts plates with an expired tag. I turned on my flashers and pulled them over.”

  He took a sip of department coffee, and made a face. “You won’t believe this. The driver, this shaggy-haired guy, had an expired Massachusetts driver’s license that said his name was Eddie Christ. Turns out the other guys were Christ too, Stan Christ in the front, and Jordan and Fritz Christ in the back. Jordan was black; the other three were haole.” He went on to tell me that all four of them were in their mid-twenties, wearing jeans and T-shirts. They were on a mission from Jesus, who was their brother, to deliver herbal tea to the islands.

  “The back of the wagon was filled with boxes of the tea. I told the guy he had to have a driver’s license, even if he was on a mission from Christ, and he launched into this long explanation. That’s when I saw the pickup without plates pass by. I had my hands full with the Christ brothers, though, so I radioed in a description.”

  He put the cup of coffee down on my desk. “But you know how it is. There wasn’t anybody else in the vicinity, so the truck got away. And you know what? Each of those Christ guys had different IDs, and outstanding warrants. Took me hours to get them all into the holding cells and squared away.”

  “What about the guy in the picture, though?” I asked. “Was he one of the Christ brothers?”

  Sit shook his head. “That was later, after I was back on the street. I was cruising past the YMCA when I saw this sedan parked on the street, a man and a woman in the front seat. At first I thought it might be a prostitute, so I went up to talk to them.”

  I still had reams of paper to go through. But I knew if I rushed him he’d get cranky and I might never get the whole story. I straightened a couple of pieces of paper on my desk as I waited for him to continue.

  “Woman gave me a story about waiting for a kid to come out of the Y,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. By the time that bomb went off, I’d forgotten all about them. Then when Lidia was showing the picture around, I thought that might be the guy.”

  “Was he wearing a tux?”

  “Didn’t get that clear a look, but definitely a dark jacket and a white shirt.”

  “You get any information on the car—plate number, make and model?”

  He frowned. “If I’d thought it was a john, I’d have done it, but the woman, she looked—you know, young and professional. Not like a working girl.”

  “Thanks, Frank. This is good info anyway. Now we know he has a partner, a woman, and both of them were in the area at the time.” The Y was just around the corner from the Marriage Project offices; it would have been easy for the woman to pull up there and wait for the bomber to do his business and then return. From the time Frank described, and the timing mechanism Mike had found on the bomb, I figured they were waiting to make sure the bomb went off before leaving.

  After Frank left, I was thinking about the fact that the guy’s accomplice was a woman, and that Gunter had recognized fear and longing on the guy’s face. So maybe he was married to a woman, but not happy, and that was fueling his anger against gay marriage.

  It was only amateur psychoanalysis, but it made sense.

  When I need help understanding human emotion, I call Terri. Ever since high school, she’s provided that insight, and when I’d been undercover on the North Shore her intuition about the behavior of suspects and victims had been very helpful.

  I managed to reach her on her cell phone, and found she was just leaving her great-aunt’s home in Black Point. Since her parents were taking care of her son Danny for the afternoon, I didn’t have to twist her arm too hard to get her to agree to detour into Waikiki and meet me for a late-afternoon caffeine break.

  We met one of the branches of the Kope Bean, an island-based coffee chain. As usual, she looked perfect, showing no hint of the trauma she’d been going through since her widowhood only months before. When I complimented her, she said, “Great-Aunt Emma has high expectati
ons. A Clark always looks just so, you know.”

  I’d never met her great-aunt, but I’d been hearing about her for years. “A command performance?”

  “Trust business. I asked her about the grant for the Gay Teen Center, and she said absolutely not.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “Don’t forget, I’m just as much a Clark as she is,” Terri said, smiling. “I reminded her that the mission of the Sandwich Islands Trust is to help the people of the islands, and that if there were young people who were living on the streets, in financial or emotional trouble, it was our obligation as the stewards of the Trust to help them.”

  “Good for you. Did it work?”

  “We agreed to give them some money for a pilot program.”

  “Have I ever told you I think you’re phenomenal?”

  “Not often enough.” She smiled. “So what’s up?”

  “Why do you think people are so opposed to gay marriage?”

  She took a sip of her decaf macadamia nut latte and considered. “Big question,” she said. “I think they fall into a couple of categories. People who accept the Bible as the word of God, for example, and when they see that passage from Leviticus they decide it has to be obeyed.”

  “But just before that, the priests are telling people that if they mix fabrics they should be killed with stones,” I said. “The same for eating shellfish.”

  “You’re trying to apply logic to something very emotional.”

  “I have a different idea.” I took a sip of my raspberry mocha (caffeinated, of course) and said, “Let’s say there’s a guy who has some kind of same-sex urges. Maybe not strong enough to act on—but enough to make him uncomfortable. Could he feel like those urges are coming from Satan, and need to be resisted?”

  “Sure. Remember Lucy Carson?”

  That threw me, and I had to run through my mental directory to remember Lucy, a girl who’d gone to Punahou, our private high school, with us, and been arrested for shoplifting. “Yeah?”

  “After she was arrested, she started going to church. She decided that it was the devil who was making her steal, and she could pray her way to honesty.”

  I couldn’t remember what had happened to her. “Did it work?”

  Terri shrugged. “Don’t know exactly. She went to college on the mainland and never came back. I heard a couple of rumors that she’d dropped out of school and gotten into some kind of trouble, but never anything more than that.”

  “Getting back to my point, do you think the person who bombed the Marriage Project could be some kind of thwarted homosexual, taking out his frustrations on people who are able to be out, when he can’t?”

  “Why can’t he?”

  I described the man and woman Frank Sit had seen in the car. “If that’s his wife, he could be stuck in a marriage and unable to come out.”

  “That’s a big assumption,” Terri said. “I’m sure that there are some guys who are uncomfortable around gay men because they’re not sure about their own sexuality. But it’s a big jump from making some homophobic cracks or avoiding gay guys in the locker room to building a bomb and detonating it.”

  “What about the Church of Adam and Eve?” I asked. “Do you know about them?”

  Terri frowned. “The Trust gives them money. I don’t agree with it, but Aunt Emma went to one of their meetings and she was impressed by the minister and his wife. I think they’re nuts, but mostly harmless.”

  “I’m not so sure. I went to one of their revival meetings last month, and it made me uncomfortable. I could definitely see somebody getting the wrong idea from what they’ve been preaching and deciding to do something about it. Vigilante justice.” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell her about Kitty Sampson and her ideas about the church. But I knew that would shift the focus back to me and how I shouldn’t be doing something like going to church with Kitty behind her stepfather’s back, so I skipped it.

  “You may be right,” Terri said. “Tell you what, I’ll look into the funding the Trust provides, see what kind of materials they’ve given us. If there’s anything wrong there, I’ll convince Aunt Emma to pull the plug.”

  “Every little bit helps.” I finished my coffee and walked Terri to her SUV. “How’s Danny doing?”

  Terri’s son had suffered a lot from his father’s death. He hadn’t spoken for quite a while afterwards, and then only gradually. “He’s getting better. It helps that his grandparents spoil him terribly. He always comes home from their house stuffed with treats and clutching some new toy.”

  “Give him my love,” I said. “I’ll try and get out to see him sometime. He’s still got a lot to learn before he can call himself a surfer.”

  “He’s only six, Kimo,” she said, smiling. “Give him a couple of years.”

  When I got home, there was a message from Mike. I was embarrassed, even all by myself, about how eager I was to call him back. “So what did you do today?” he asked.

  I told him about roller blading over to Gunter’s, and then going to the office. “I read background material until my eyes crossed,” I said. “I talked to my friend Terri about the possible motivation of our bomber, which I can tell you about when I see you. There was a message from Lidia, too. She found the formal wear shop where our guy rented his tux, but he paid cash and gave what appears to be a fake name, so that lead fizzled out. I ran off extra copies of the artist’s sketch for the vice detectives to pass around.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Gunter made a good suggestion this morning, to pass the sketch around at some gay bars, see if the guy ever shows up at any of them.” I paused. “You interested in helping me?”

  Mike didn’t say anything, but I waited. “I don’t think so, Kimo,” he said finally. “I mean, I know this is legitimate, job-related and all, but it’s just not something I can do.”

  “You mean be seen in a gay bar with a known homosexual.”

  “You know the kind of hell you’ve been through. You must still get some. You want me to go through that same shit?”

  “You mean coming out?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it.”

  “That’s what it’s called, Mike. When a gay man accepts who he is and isn’t ashamed to let anybody and everybody know about it.”

  “I can’t do that. What I do in my private life is my own business. I don’t want it to affect my job, what my family thinks, my friends, the guys I work with.”

  “So you want to lie to all of them.”

  “I don’t lie. I don’t come in on Monday morning with made up stories about the babes I scored over the weekend. I just don’t tell anybody anything.”

  “Sounds like a pretty sucky life, to me.”

  “Kimo, we had a great time Thursday night. At least I had a great time. I want to see you again.” He took a deep breath. “I want to kiss you again. I want to suck your dick again. I want to make love to you.”

  “But you don’t want to be seen with me in public.”

  “Not at a gay bar, for Christ’s sake. I mean, everybody knows about you, Kimo.”

  “Fine, Mike. I’ll call Gunter. He’s probably done with his threesome by now. He won’t be embarrassed to be seen in public with me.”

  “Can we have dinner? Tomorrow night? I want to see you.”

  “I want to spend some time at the hospital with my dad tomorrow. I’ll call you in the afternoon.” I hung up the phone and then sat there for a while. I had been in love once before with a man, very briefly. He was an attorney from Massachusetts who had moved to Hawai’i so that no one back home would ever know he was gay. He was a low-profile kind of guy, and when my life erupted into the press he backed away fast. I wondered if Mike would be the same way. Was it something about me? Was I only able to fall in love with extremely closeted guys? How could I even daydream about a future with Mike Riccardi if I could never go to a bar with him, introduce him to my parents, meet his friends and family?

  Maybe I ought to stick with Gunter a
fter all. I picked up the phone and dialed his number. I arranged to pick him up later that night.

  A GUIDE TO THE NIGHT

  Though it was back downtown and I was already in Waikiki, I swung past The Queen’s Medical Center before going home. My father was still grumpy, but Haoa had smuggled him in a burger from Zippy’s so he was slightly more cooperative. He was definitely looking forward to going home when he finished his IV treatment on Monday, and I hoped nothing would happen to set him back. As he’d pointed out himself, hospitals were dangerous places. People died in them all the time.

  I got home around five, grilled myself a piece of chicken and some veggies on my tiny hibachi, and then took a power nap. If I was going to be out cruising with Gunter I needed some more energy.

  A few minutes before eleven, I was pulling up in Gunter’s driveway. He stepped out of his doorway looking like sex on wheels—a tight T-shirt that left visible a couple of inches of taut stomach, and skinny jeans that clung to him in all the right places. “Any ideas where we can go?” I asked when he got in the truck.

  “There’s a reason why they have you on homicide, not vice. Let me be your tour guide to the night.”

  “I’m not exactly naïve.”

  “Let’s start with Ala Moana Park,” Gunter said. “After that, we’ll hit Waikiki.”

  As we drove, I was thinking about Jimmy Ah Wong, hoping he was settling in okay with Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei. I told Gunter what had happened.

  “Did you ever run away from home?” he asked.

  “Once. I was about fourteen, I think. My brothers were both living at home that summer. Lui was already working at KVOL, some kind of entry-level intern thing, I think. Haoa had just graduated from UH, and he was working on a road crew out near the airport. He had this explicit porno magazine, all kinds of things. Men and women, women with dogs, oral sex, anal sex, even a couple of threesomes. The only thing it didn’t have was gay sex.”