Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Shit, I thought. “How many men?”

  “Two.” He continued, in short phrases, as if he was building up his strength for each new clause. “I was scared… and then I heard this really loud noise… and, and then… I heard the men go out the door.” He stopped and took a big gulp of breath. “Then, then I went… to the door… of my dad’s study, and, and I looked in, and there he was.”

  “So you never saw the men?” I asked. He shook his head. He didn’t say anything else for a while, and so we just sat there, me with my arm around him. He started to cry again, slowly and quietly. “It’s okay, Danny,” I said. “Nobody can hurt you anymore.”

  He looked up at me. “That’s all I remember, until, until you came, to, to the house.”

  I used the edge of my shirt to dry his eyes. We sat like that for a while, him against me, until I finally said, “What do you say we head back to your mom?” and he agreed, and I hoisted him up on my shoulders and we walked back to Terri.

  It was just twilight when we got back to Wailupe, the sky shading between violet and black. The warm breeze coming through the windows of my truck moved the scent of salt water and coconut tanning oil lazily around us. Terri sent Danny inside and stood outside the truck, leaning in the window. “Thanks for today, Kimo. It was good for both of us.”

  “Danny told me what happened the day Evan died,” I said. “He said two men came to the house and argued with his father. Then he heard a shot, and he heard the men leave.”

  “So he didn’t commit suicide! I knew it!”

  “Don’t jump ahead,” I said. “Evan might still have killed himself, he just might have done it in front of witnesses. Do you have any idea who the two men could be?”

  She shook her head. I had an idea myself, but the implications were too scary to think about. Akoni and I had shown the photo of Evan to Derek and Wayne, and they’d indicated he was the cop on Tommy’s payroll. Suppose they had tracked him down?

  But how could they have found him so quickly? We’d never identified him by name. I said, “The guy Evan mentioned in his letter, Tommy Pang. Did you ever meet him?”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re sure? His wife’s name is Genevieve, and he has a son named Derek.”

  “Wait a second. Derek Pang. I met him. He went to Punahou, you know, before Yale. When he got back to Honolulu he was looking for a job in a gallery, and he called up some Punahou alumni to see if anybody could help him. I met him for lunch one day and we talked about art and galleries and Punahou, of course. I gave him a couple of names but I never heard anything else.”

  “Did he ever come to your house?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever meet Evan?”

  “I only saw him that time.” She paused. “I wonder if he knows Evan was my husband.”

  He knew, I thought, because he’d seen the picture of Evan and Terri’s wedding. That was how Derek had been able to identify Evan so fast. While Akoni and I were back at the station getting our warrants in order, he and Wayne had come out to Wailupe and found Evan at home with his son. Their lucky day.

  SETTING THE TRAP

  I wanted to drive right to Derek and Wayne’s apartment and confront them. I paced around, fuming and raging vendettas of biblical proportions against them. But the truth was I had no real evidence that they’d had anything to do with Evan’s death, which Doc Takayama had ruled a suicide. Unless I could do something, that ruling would stand. Derek and Wayne must have thought Evan killed Tommy, then taken their own biblical-style revenge.

  With Gunter’s help, I thought I could tie Derek and Wayne to the Bishop Museum thefts that Peggy was investigating, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to nail them. I wanted to prove that they had killed Evan.

  There wasn’t going to be any physical evidence at the house. It had been a week, and no one had dusted the study or the rest of the house for fingerprints or searched for other evidence. There was no evidence linking Derek and Wayne to Evan other than the fact that they’d identified his picture.

  What could I do to prove they were guilty? I knew in my heart that they were the two men Danny had heard yelling at his father. If I got pictures of them and their cars and canvassed the neighbors, maybe someone would remember seeing either of them around the Gonsalves house.

  But that would only be circumstantial. What I really wanted was a confession. I wanted Derek or Wayne to admit they’d shot Evan. That didn’t seem likely, though.

  Or was it? Maybe I was focusing too much on Derek and Wayne as a couple. Divide and conquer. I remembered the bartender at the Boardwalk telling me Wayne had a taste for Asian boys, that he trolled there by himself on occasion. Suppose I offered myself up as bait? I already knew he was attracted to me. Of course, I was attracted to him, too, which was a problem. Maybe I could get him in a situation where he had his pants off and his guard down.

  The phone rang. It startled me, bringing me back down to earth. “Hey, brah, just checking in,” Harry said. “Howzit?”

  “I’m glad you called,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to talk to you about.”

  We met at a pizza place on Kuhio Avenue just after dark. It was just a hole in the wall, a half dozen linoleum-topped tables and a couple of tattered posters of the Italian Riviera on the walls, but the crust was thick and chewy and they topped it with about a pound of shredded cheese. They did a major take-out business, sometimes customers lined up out the door waiting patiently for their pies.

  By then I had refined my plan. “I want to be wired up when I get together with Wayne, but I can’t go to Yumuri for the equipment,” I said, when Harry and I were sitting at a two-top in the front window. “You’re the electronics wizard. Can you rig something up for me?”

  “I can put the stuff together, but you need a lot of equipment,” Harry said. The waitress came over and we ordered a large pizza with mushrooms and sausage and a couple of Cokes. “A lot of it’s specialized stuff. You can’t just walk into a store and buy it. Some things, I might have to mail order from the mainland. I mean, I could have it Fed Exed, but I still might not get it until the beginning of next week.”

  “I don’t want to wait that long. I mean, I wish I could go over there right now.”

  I forced myself to calm down and think things through. Okay, we needed electronic equipment. Where else could we get it? We could rent it. There had to be a place on the island that rented that kind of equipment, for movies or TV shows, for example. “Would a TV station have the kind of stuff you need?” I asked.

  “Sure. I might have to do some jury-rigging, but they’d have most of the things—you’re going to ask your brother, aren’t you?”

  “He owes me a favor, the asshole. He could have called our parents when he knew there was a story on me, but he wimped out.”

  “This won’t be easy, Kimo. You might get in a lot of trouble.”

  “I’ve worn a wire before. I’ve set up stakeouts. I know, things could get hairy. But I’m prepared to take that risk. I have to. I set all this in motion and I have to bring it to a close.”

  The waitress brought the pizza, and we ate. I told Harry about the other things I had to do to prove what Derek and Wayne had done. “Poor Terri,” Harry said. “She was always a sweetheart. I remember when I had a monster crush on Elise Chung and she gave me lots of advice. She even went with me when I got my hair cut and told the barber just what to do.” He sighed. “That was the best haircut I ever had.”

  “You’re a sap,” I said. “You got a quarter? I need to make a phone call and I don’t want to use my cell in case they have caller ID.”

  “Sure.” He handed me the quarter and I walked to the back of the pizza parlor, where the pay phone was mounted on the wall. I dialed Derek and Wayne’s number, and Wayne answered.

  “Wayne, it’s Kimo Kanapa‘aka,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Kimo.” Even his voice was sexy. For a moment I wasn’t sure I could go forward with my p
lan, but I knew I had to. “Heard about your troubles.”

  “Yeah, most of the island has by now. It’ll get to my auntie on Kaua‘i pretty soon.”

  “Maybe we can get together,” Wayne said. “I could give you some advice.”

  “Who knows? I might see you at the Boardwalk sometime. You do go there, don’t you? By yourself?”

  “I can.” He lowered his voice. “Friday night?”

  “I think I can be there then.” I cleared my throat. “Can I talk to Derek?”

  “Sure, hold on.”

  “Hey, Wayne,” I said. “What kind of underwear do you wear?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see.”

  Derek picked up the phone a minute later. “What’s up? I thought you were suspended.”

  “I am. This is more a personal thing. It’s about a mutual acquaintance we have, somebody who knows you through your family. I’d rather talk to you about it in person, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. You want to come by here, or meet at the club, or what?”

  “I can come by the club. How about tomorrow, like two o’clock.”

  “That’ll work.” We said our goodbyes and hung up. I walked back to the table where Harry was paying the bill.

  “Harry, I can pay.”

  “You don’t know where your next paycheck is coming from. I can treat you once in a while.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I hate to eat and run, but I’ve established that Wayne and Derek are both home. I’m going to run over there and take pictures of their cars.”

  “You can’t do that by yourself. You need a lookout. What if they see you?”

  “I don’t want to get you involved. I’ve gotten too many people in trouble already.”

  “You’re my friend. I’m already involved. Come on, let’s get a move on.”

  While we drove, I called my brother Lui and made a date with him for lunch the next day. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t think I had a right to be, but, no, I’m not mad at you. I’m sorry I put you in a bad situation.”

  “I should have called Mom and Dad. But I figured you’d already talked to them. I didn’t know you were holed up in your apartment with the phone off the hook.”

  “Your reporter could have told you,” I said. “But come on, I don’t want to argue with you, Lui. Just name the time and place for lunch.”

  We agreed to meet at noon at a little coffee shop around the corner from his station. “You talk to Mom at all?” he asked before we hung up.

  “Last night,” I said. “She was all right.”

  “She laid into me the other day for not calling them. You think you can tell her to lay off?”

  “I can try,” I said. “See you at noon.”

  We parked around the corner from the high-rise in Kaka‘ako where Derek and Wayne lived and walked over to their building, a luxury condominium with valet parking and an underground garage. While the valet was in the lobby chatting with the security guard, we slipped through a fire door that had been propped open and into a stairwell that led to the garage. “How are you going to tell which ones are theirs?” Harry asked.

  “While you were hacking into Tommy’s computer, I was chatting with Arleen. She was telling me how egotistical Wayne and Derek both are—they have vanity license plates, DEREKS and WAYNES. If I were still on the job, I could just run a DMV check, but instead we’ll just have to find the cars that match those plates.”

  We looked around. The garage was about half-empty, which was good for us. Even better, the parking bumpers had unit numbers painted on them. It was harder to figure out how the numbers ran. They seemed to go in sequence for a while, then have a break and a bunch of random numbers in them, and then resume again in order, and so on.

  ‘This is the goofiest system,” I said. Harry stood there, lost in thought. “Harry? You still with me?”

  “It is a system. There’s a pattern here. See, wherever the garage is completely sheltered, the numbers run in sequence. Wherever there’s a grating, they jump out.”

  “So?”

  “So when they first assigned parking spaces, they must have given one good space to every unit. Then I’ll bet people started wanting second parking spaces, so they got these ones that aren’t so good, that were probably intended as guest spaces originally.”

  “Fascinating,” I said dryly. “So find me the spaces for unit 1612.”

  “You take the sequential ones,” he said. “I want to see if I can find a pattern in the non-sequential ones.”

  I shook my head and walked down the aisle. Once a geek, always a geek. It was a little spooky in the garage, open and brightly lit and echoing, and I wanted to get out as soon as possible. I found the space for #1612 easily and took a couple of pictures of the big black Jeep Cherokee that was parked there. It had a Yale sticker on the back windshield and the vanity plate I expected, WAYNES.

  Alarm bells started going off in my head. A black Jeep Cherokee, just like the one I had seen peeling away from the Rod and Reel Club the night Tommy Pang had been murdered. Was Wayne the guy Evan and I had both seen dragging Tommy’s body down the alley? Were Wayne and Derek responsible not just for Evan’s murder, but for Tommy’s as well? And if they’d killed Tommy, then why had they killed Evan?

  All those thoughts were ricocheting around my brain when I saw Harry down the aisle waving toward me. Just then I heard the engine noise of a car coming down the ramp. I waved to Harry and we both ducked behind cars.

  The valet squealed around the curve and slid into a space, stomping the brakes at the last minute as the concrete wall loomed ahead of him. We get our thrills where we can, I thought. The valet, a cute blond guy in tight white shorts and a white shirt with epaulets, jumped out of the car and jogged back up the ramp.

  I hurried down to the white BMW convertible Harry had found. It had a Yale bumper sticker, and a vanity plate that read DEREKS. I snapped my pictures and we got out of the garage.

  Back at my truck I showed Harry the Polaroids. They were pretty standard shots, showing the front and side of each car, along with the license plates. They were both in mint condition, not a ding or a dent, nothing to identify them to witnesses.

  It was almost ten by then, and I drove Harry back to his condo and then went home myself. I watched the evening news on Lui’s station again, and saw a special report on a gay task force in a city on the East Coast. It was a mixture of straight and gay officers and detectives who investigated crimes against gays, patrolled gay neighborhoods, and gave lectures to the community on personal safety and community patrols. The report compared it to other units in communities with language or cultural barriers. “Our officers in Little Saigon speak Vietnamese,” one spokesman said. “In the gay community we have officers who are sensitive to residents’ concerns. It’s the same thing.”

  It was an interesting idea. I yawned and went to bed. I woke early and went for a brief surf, which refreshed and energized me, and prepared me for all I had to do.

  SOMEONE IS WATCHING

  The next morning, Thursday, I stopped off at Harry’s apartment, where he had downloaded new copies of the photos of Derek and Wayne for me from the Yale website and printed them on his color printer. He wanted to come to Wailupe with me, but he had a class at UH to teach.

  “I have to give a pop quiz this morning, which I already know is a bad idea. Then I’ll have twenty-five quizzes to correct.”

  “What you need to do,” I said, “is give multiple choice tests. Then you just make a guide with the right answers on it, and stick it over the papers and then check, check, check, you’re done.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “Wahine I dated once, teacher from Wisconsin,” I said. “She told me.”

  “You dated a vahine from Visconsin?” he asked, giving both words the Hawaiian pronunciation. />
  I laughed and headed out the H1 toward Wailupe with the pictures and the Polaroids I’d taken of Derek’s and Wayne’s cars. I parked in Terri’s driveway and knocked on her door. Though it was still early, the sun shone strongly in a cloudless sky, and it was already getting hot.

  Danny answered. “Kimo!” He put his arms around my leg.

  Terri came up behind him. “I guess you can see he missed you. He kept asking me when you were coming back.” She sighed. “I still can’t get him to go back to school. Maybe next week.”

  I leaned down and picked him up. “You missed me, huh? I wish I could be here more, pal, but I’ve got lots of stuff to do. I’ll come and see you as often as I can, okay?”

  He nodded. I put him down and explained to Terri what I was going to do. “Why don’t I come with you?” she asked. “I know the neighbors, and they’re more likely to talk to you if I’m around.”

  “I don’t know. They may feel awkward, seeing you, thinking Evan killed himself.”

  “You’re not a cop anymore, Kimo. You don’t have any authority to go poking around out here. If I’m with you, nobody will complain.”

  She made a quick phone call and arranged for Danny to go over to the next door neighbor’s. Unfortunately, the woman had been away the previous week, and couldn’t help us. Danny argued a little but I promised we would go surfing again, and he relented.

  It was a mixed neighborhood, some stay-at-home moms and some working ones, and some older couples as well. We started to the left of Terri’s house and worked our way down the street, up and down driveways, past manicured lawns, basketball hoops, and sport fishing boats up on trailers, until we came to the Kalaniana’ole Highway. Then we crossed the street and started working our way back down. We didn’t have much luck until we came to an older house across from hers and two down.

  An elderly woman answered the door. “Hello, Mrs. Ianello,” Terri said. “This is my friend Kimo. I wonder if we could ask you a couple of questions about last Friday?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I saw all the police cars. I’m so sorry for you, dear.”