Mahu Surfer

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “No buts.” He handed me a pile of folders. “Take these home and read them. Don’t tell anyone we’ve had this conversation. Think about it. Then come back here tomorrow morning and we’ll talk again.”

  “What if I say no?”

  Sampson sat back in his chair and stared at me for a minute, and in that show of confidence I had an inkling of why he had received so many of those commendations. “You’re a good cop, Kimo. I need you on this investigation. If you can’t do it, well, we’ll talk about that when we have to.”

  When I left Sampson’s office, I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I’d prepared myself to begin work again that morning, and that clearly wasn’t to be. I walked to my truck, turned the engine on and started to drive, not knowing where I was going.

  There was a lot of traffic in Honolulu as I circled past the Aloha Tower, that old 1920s building where people used to gather to watch the cruise ships go in and out. Past the Iolani Palace, the only royal palace on American soil, guarded by the tall gold statue of King Kamehameha. Around and around, through downtown, along Ala Moana Beach Park and the Ala Wai Yacht Basin, where Gilligan and the Skipper left with their boatload of tourists for their three-hour tour.

  I ended up at the top of Mount Tantalus, overlooking Honolulu. It was a real tourist office day, temps in the low 70s, trade winds off the ocean, just a few puffy white clouds floating across the sky to add interest to what otherwise would have been an unbroken expanse of light blue.

  From up there, I could see all the way from the extinct volcano of Diamond Head to the naval base at Pearl Harbor. It was only about a dozen miles, but it was a trip that ran from the origin of the island all the way to the latest innovations in military technology. I looked out at the city for a while, saw the line of surf where waves broke against the shore, planeloads of tourists landing and taking off from Honolulu International, the steady traffic of tiny cars along the ribbon of the H1, the highway the federal government requires us to call an interstate. I guess subconsciously I’d hoped that coming up there would allow me to put all my troubles into perspective, see myself as just one of those infinitesimally small people below me, going about their daily lives.

  I’m not sure it worked, but I did get out of the truck, sit on a bench, and start to read the dossiers, as Sampson knew I would.

  Though there was a lot of paperwork—crime scene reports, interviews with witnesses, friends and relatives—there wasn’t much information. There was no thread that tied together all three victims other than the fact that all three were surfers. Michael Pratt was haole, or white, a mainlander who lived in Hale’iwa when the surf was high, traveling around the globe to compete, from France to Australia and Costa Rica to South Africa. He usually finished in the money in surfing championships, and supplemented his income by teaching surfing at clinics and exhibitions.

  Nineteen-year-old Lucie Zamora was a Filipina who had moved to Honolulu at age ten when her mother, a maid at a Waikiki hotel, sent for her and her younger brother. She had been living on the North Shore for the last two years, working as a clerk and waitress while struggling to become a professional surfer. She had a couple of high finishes in local tournaments, but was nowhere near Pratt’s caliber.

  Ronald Chang was twenty-five, a computer technician and weekend surfer. Born in Hong Kong, he had grown up on Maui, where his parents ran a Chinese restaurant. Like me, he’d been surfing most of his life, and like me, too, he had a full-time job. But he’d never placed in the money at a surf competition.

  Though Zamora and Chang knew each other, neither seemed to know Pratt. Zamora and Pratt were shot with the same gun, and Chang had disappeared earlier on the day that Zamora was shot. There had to be a connection between these three that had led to their deaths, but the detectives on the case hadn’t been able to find it. Did I think I was better? No. I knew I was good, but almost every detective I’d met on the force was as smart, or as dogged, or as lucky, as I was. Sampson believed that because I was a surfer, I’d have some special entrée to the world of North Shore surfing that would provide the missing clue. But was it worth lying to people I cared about—and the general population as well—and putting my life on hold to find out if he was right?

  That phrase struck me. Putting my life on hold.

  Michael Pratt’s life, Lucie Zamora’s life, and Ronald Chang’s life had been put on permanent hold. How many others would suffer the same fate if I didn’t do anything?

  I closed the dossiers and looked out at the landscape again. Those big puffy clouds had multiplied and were massing over Diamond Head. O‘ahu is an island of microclimates—it can be gloriously sunny in Kahala, but rainy in Manoa, just a few miles away. Partly sunny in Pearl City, windy in La’ie, cool in Hale’iwa. And yet, they say if you just stay where you are, the weather will change soon.

  I felt as unsettled as the weather, and equally vulnerable to being blown one way or the other. So I decided to get my father’s advice.

  Telling Lies

  My dad has spent most of his career as a general contractor, building the homes, stores and offices where the people of our island live and work. He has always impressed upon me and my brothers the honorable nature of hard work, the need to put others before yourself, the importance of remaining true to your ideals no matter what pressure is brought to bear on you.

  When I was born, he was working as a construction supervisor for Amfac, one of the “Big 5” companies in Hawai’i. At night and on weekends, he was building a small house on a piece of land his friend Chin Suk had given him. When the house was finished, he planned to sell it, and use the money to start his own construction business.

  But it was tough providing for a family of five on a superintendent’s salary, and he often had to wait weeks before he could afford to buy the materials he needed. One day, a man from a mainland company offered him a thousand dollars to approve a lucrative contract that would have been very costly to Amfac. That thousand dollars would have been enough to buy the rest of the materials my father needed, and get his business launched. But he turned the money down, and reported the bribe to his boss.

  The house wasn’t finished for another six months, but my father made up for it by working harder and working smarter, avoiding waste and watching every penny. He has always held that up to us as an example of how a man must listen to his conscience and not take the easy way out.

  Now, toward the end of his career, he worked out of an office above a small shopping plaza he owned in the industrial neighborhood of Salt Lake, near Pearl Harbor, and I knew if I hurried I could make it there just in time for lunch. I pulled into the parking lot just as he was descending the exterior stair.

  He has lost a little height, the osteoporosis compressing his spinal column in tiny increments, and his hair is flecked with silver. As my mother often points out, though, he is still as handsome as he is in their wedding picture, framed in our living room. She keeps him on a strict diet, but he’s a big man, broad-shouldered and a little paunchy in the gut. If I age as gracefully as he has, I’ll be glad.

  “Kimo!” he said, when I pulled up next to him and leaned out my window. “This is a nice surprise. How’s the first day back at work? You on a case out this way?”

  “Not exactly. You have lunch plans?”

  “I’m having lunch with you. Come on, I’ll buy you a plate lunch.”

  A plate lunch is an island tradition, developed to serve to plantation workers who needed to keep up their strength through long days. A main course, usually fish or chicken, two scoops of rice, a scoop of macaroni salad, and some shredded lettuce. As we walked past the storefronts, I noticed an odd pattern in the flooring—random tiles with unusual patterns. “Hey, Dad, what’s with the floor here? Surfboards? Footballs? Movie cameras?”

  As I walked I figured out the pattern. The tiles came in groupings of threes, scattered down the walkway as if tossed there. “Not movie cameras, TV cameras,” my father said. “For my sons. I wondered which of you
would be the first to see the pattern. Haoa comes here a couple times a week, but he never looks down. Lui even came once or twice, but he never saw. This is the first time you’ve noticed.”

  “For your sons,” I repeated. The TV camera for Lui, the football for Haoa, the surfboard for me. While we had been going on about our lives, leaving our parents behind, our father had been memorializing us in tile. “I hope you have the same number of each tile. You don’t want us to get jealous.”

  “Always the same for each of my sons. No difference.”

  We walked into my father’s favorite restaurant, a hole in the wall at the far end of the shopping center called Papa Lo’s. I didn’t know if there was a Papa Lo; if there was, I’d never met him. Instead the place was staffed by eager Vietnamese women who spoke only enough English to take orders and make change.

  While we sat at a linoleum-topped table and waited for our food, I said, “I met with my new boss today, and things aren’t going to be as easy as I expected.”

  “How come?”

  I squirmed uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair. “He wants me to lie about something. And I don’t want to.”

  “Lie? About what?”

  “Something in an investigation. One he wants me to work on.”

  “I don’t like him asking you to lie,” my father said, shaking his head. “Why be a policeman if you can’t tell the truth?”

  “You told me once,” I said, recalling a conversation we’d had only a few weeks before, “that you and Uncle Chin, when you were younger…”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “What?”

  Uncle Chin is my uncle in all but blood. My father’s best friend, he was once a powerful leader of a Honolulu tong, or Chinese gang. Now he is old and sick, but he and my father have always been, well, as thick as thieves, though I’ve never for a moment had reason to doubt my father’s honor.

  “You told me you had always acted with honor, no matter what you did. Was that true?”

  The waitress brought our lunches and laid them before us, bowing her head slightly. My father began to eat, without answering my question. Finally, he said, “You know the expression, no honor among thieves?”

  I nodded.

  “You may not understand, but your Uncle Chin was always an honorable man. And me, too, I try to live with honor and respect, try to teach that to you boys, too.”

  “I’m not sure we always paid attention.”

  My father made a noise in his throat that is impossible to render into an alphabet, but it is the same noise he made when any of us came in late with improbable explanations. Its meaning was something along the lines of “You expect me to believe that?”

  We ate for a while in silence. Eventually, my father finished, wiped his hands on his napkin, and crumpled it into a ball. “Will you still have a job if you don’t agree to do this thing he wants, that will make you lie?”

  I understood then that whether he knew it or not, my father was giving me the opportunity to take the job, even if it meant lying to him, to my mother, my brothers, and everyone else I knew. All I had to do was lie. I could tell my father that there would be no job for me with the HPD if I turned this opportunity down. It would give me a reason why I was leaving the force, a reason my parents, with their strong beliefs about honor, could understand. Instead of appearing weak, making it look like I could no longer handle being a cop now that I was out of the closet, I would be strong, holding on to my values in a world that didn’t appreciate them.

  Of course, the irony was that I would be lying as I pretended to be unable to lie.

  But what else could I do? Six years of work with the Honolulu PD had shown me that being a cop touched something deep inside me. It was a privilege and a responsibility, and I could not turn my back on either of those things. If I had to make a few personal sacrifices for the public good, tell a couple of small lies to my family and friends in order to catch a killer, that was nothing compared to the men and women who had given their lives in the line of duty. To pretend otherwise would demean them, and the badge I believed in.

  It was time for me to make a decision, and there would be no going back on it. While my father waited for my answer, I felt that my senses were magnified. I smelled the chickens roasting in the back kitchen, and the pineapple an elderly couple were sharing next to us. The sun streaming in the front windows was almost too strong, hurting my eyes. When the door opened, I heard a siren outside, police, fire or ambulance rushing to provide help to someone who needed it.

  “Sampson said we’d talk about that,” I said. “But I have a feeling I won’t be reporting to work at the headquarters downtown any time soon. And if that happens, I think I might just go surfing for a while.”

  » » »

  I met with Sampson again the next morning, ready to make a deal. “Who will I report to up on the North Shore?”

  “No one up there will know you’re working on this case. I’ll give you my personal email address and my cell phone number, and that’s the only way I want you to contact me.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Any particular reason?”

  “I have no idea who’s behind these murders,” he said. “But I have to be suspicious when two good detectives in District 2 can’t come up with any information. I’m not saying that I think there’s a cop, or cops, involved in this, but something doesn’t smell right.”

  The thought that someone on the North Shore could be sabotaging the investigation made me uncomfortable, but it was just one more problem heaped on my plate, a plate that had gotten fuller and fuller since the day my closet door opened.

  We mapped out a strategy. I would tell my family and friends that I had decided not to accept the department’s offer, in order to sit back and think about all that had happened to me in the last few weeks, not just my coming out but the man I had killed in the course of solving my last case. I was going to take my severance check and head for the North Shore, to surf while I thought about my next move.

  Sampson would issue a press release to local media indicating that while my name had been cleared, I had chosen not to return to the force, and he would field all inquiries regarding me. He would work out the details to ensure that my salary would continue to be deposited into my bank account, and that my benefits, including health and life insurance, would continue.

  One of my brother Lui’s reporters, a Korean guy named Ralph Kim, had followed my story from the beginning. After I left headquarters, I called Ralph to break the news of my resignation from the police force.

  I had to leave a message on Ralph’s voice mail, but he called me back as I was walking into my apartment, excitement and feigned outrage in his voice. “I knew this was going to happen,” he said. “That department is never going to accept a gay cop.”

  “It’s not about the department. It’s about me. That’s why I want to talk to you.”

  “Have you hired an attorney? You know that series we ran last week, about gay cops around the country? There’s some big money in discrimination settlements.”

  I stretched out on my sofa, the phone at my ear. “I need some time off, Ralph. That’s the story. It’s not about discrimination or how the HPD treats its cops. If you want to talk to me, those are the ground rules.”

  “I want to talk to you, but that’s not much of a story.”

  “Sure it is, if you pitch it right,” I said, sitting up. I found myself waving my free arm around, even though I knew Ralph couldn’t see it. “What effect does coming out have on somebody’s life—career being one part of that? You could talk to that guy at the power company, and that top salesman at the big car dealership near the airport. Some other high-profile gay men and lesbians. You might even get another series out of it.” I paused, giving Ralph a chance to think. “This could be a big career move for you, Ralph. But the story’s got to be about me, and my decisions, not a smear campaign against the HPD.”

  “It’s still a so-so story, but I’ll pitch it to my news director and see wha
t he says. In the meantime, let’s schedule something.”

  I didn’t want to do the interview at KVOL, because I didn’t want Lui to know about it until it was over. I knew he’d waste a lot of time trying to talk me out of it, or putting obstacles in my way, out of a misplaced sense of family loyalty. Once he got over that, I was sure his newsman’s instincts would take over, and he’d run the story. So Ralph and I met just after lunch at Kuhio Beach Park, with the squat, single-story Waikiki station right behind us. I wore a pair of khakis, a dark green polo shirt, and brown leather sandals, trying to look relaxed and confident.

  Ralph knew something was up, but couldn’t figure out what. “You’re just walking away?” he asked me. “After all your years on the force?”

  “I need some time to think about my future.” We strolled along the beach together, the cameraman walking backwards in front of us. “My life has been in turmoil for the last couple of weeks, and I need to process everything that has happened to me. Remember, I solved a high-profile murder case, acknowledged my sexual orientation to the world, and killed a man with his own gun. That’s a lot for anybody to handle.”