Mahu Fire m-3

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “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 leading 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 Waikiki. 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.
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br />   “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.”

  It was finally on the table, the g-word. I tried to phrase what I wanted to say carefully. “You do much of that? Hanging out on line, I mean.”

  Our eyes met across the table once again. I could fall in love with those eyes. Clear, light green, steadily focused on me. “I’m working on it. Finally broke down and bought a laptop, got my own account at home a couple of months ago.”

  “What’s your screen name?” I’d been on-line with Harry a few times, as he was trying to drag me into the digital generation, and I knew his name was PhysWiz, referring to his Ph. D. in physics from

  MIT.

  Mike blushed.

  “Go on, you can tell me.”

  “Toohot.” He paused. “You know, from too hot to handle.”

  “Oh, baby,” I said. We locked eyes again.

  Time to get back to business. “We’ve got at least one amateur bomb maker with Internet access,” I said. “He may or may not be the sweaty guy who Gunter and my sister-in-law and I all saw around the bathroom. What else do we know?”

  We didn’t know much more, though we had a seemingly endless supply of questions. Mike believed that the bomb could have been built in anybody’s kitchen, without requiring much in the way of special supplies. It wasn’t a particularly expensive proposition, either. I laid out for him my plans to research the groups that had opposed the gay marriage lawsuit, and how I had recruited Harry, and Lui’s station, to help. “I managed to catch the five and six o’clock news from the station,” I said. “KVOL did a nice piece on Sandra and Cathy. Maybe tomorrow they’ll come up with some leads.”

  By the time we finished off the pasta I was way too stuffed for dessert, but the waiter brought us complimentary little glasses of grappa, a strong Italian brandy. Mike downed his in one shot, so of course I had to do the same.

  But I was without the benefit of his Italian ancestry, or his undoubted years of drinking the stuff. Man, did it burn going down! I started coughing and choking, and he laughed. I wondered if this was what dating him would be like, the two of us constantly struggling to get th
e upper hand.

  Somehow that didn’t seem too unpleasant.

  SECRETS

  Mike insisted on paying the bill. “The fire department can get this one, and the police department can get the next one, all right?” I doubted he’d actually expense the meal-though we’d talked about the case, I couldn’t see him explaining to his chief that he’d had dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant with the only gay cop on the Honolulu police force-or at least the only openly gay one.

  My apartment was a half-dozen blocks away, but we drove over in his truck. “The tapes are right behind the seat,” he said, as he began to parallel park in front of my building.

  I twisted around to get them and felt waves of pain surging through my back. “Shit.” I thought I whispered but he heard.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve got a little burn on my back. I tried to go surfing this morning and ever since I get these wicked twinges.”

  He slotted the truck neatly in place. “I’ve got some cream you can use. It’s one of the necessities of life as a fire fighter.”

  He got the cream from the case in the truck bed, and we climbed the stairs to my apartment. “And you complain about the way my truck looks,” he said as we walked in.

  I had to admit the place looked pretty bad, even by my standards. It’s just one big room, with a kitchenette, though I have this Japanese-style screen I built from broken-down surfboards that separates the bedroom area from the rest of the room. I usually throw dirty clothes onto it. I hadn’t made the bed in the morning, nor had I gone through on one of my weekly binges where I put all the sports equipment away neatly. There were piles of books on the floor and a messy stack of newspapers by the front door, waiting for recycling. At least the kitchen was pretty clean; I try never to go to sleep with dirty dishes in the sink.

  He walked over to look at my garbage can. “No fast food wrappers,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”

  A good sign of what, I wanted to ask. I was losing my patience again, feeling tired. Oh, I still wanted to get into his pants, and I was getting increasingly confident that he wanted to get into mine as well. But it didn’t have to be that night.