Mahu Fire m-3

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “How’re you doing?”

  Mike pulled a chair next to me, sat down, and put his arm around me.

  “I’ll be okay. Anyway, there’s a lot of people around. Somebody might recognize you.”

  “I don’t give a shit about what anybody else thinks.” He kissed my forehead, and then hugged me tight, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I let out everything I was feeling about my brushes with death, my father being sick, Uncle Chin’s death and Jimmy’s disappearance, my frustrations at not catching the bomber, how I felt about all of us unable to live our lives without fear. I cried, and Mike held me.

  When I looked up most of the crowd had gone and the two of us were sitting in a big open space. “I have a small piece of good news for you,” Mike said, as I wiped my face with my hand. “I saw your shooter. Haole woman in a black t-shirt, black running shorts, white sneakers. Short dark hair.”

  “You did?”

  “I ran after her, but she had an accomplice driving a black Toyota Camry, which slowed as it passed her, and she jumped in. They ran a red light on Kuhio and I lost them.”

  “Did you get a plate number?”

  He shook his head. “Only a partial. The first three digits were

  HXM.”

  “It’s a start.” I stood up, blew my nose. “A woman shooter? You’re sure?”

  “Yup.” He smiled at me. “I do know the difference, you know.”

  “Come on, show me where you were when you heard the shot.”

  PUPUKEA PLANTATION

  By the time Mike and I were finished, dark had fallen over Waikiki. I spoke to Lieutenant Sampson and filled him in with what I knew, and then Mike and I went back to my apartment.

  “Won’t your mom and dad worry if they don’t see your truck in the driveway?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They’ve gotten used to me getting called out at strange hours to go investigate fires,” he said. “I always call them to let them know I’ll be out.”

  It’s funny the things that make us uncomfortable with a lover. Sometimes it’s nakedness, physical or emotional. Sometimes it’s silly things, like seeing that we don’t pick up our underwear or the way we talk to our pets. I had a feeling Mike wanted some privacy to make his call, so I ducked out to the grocery at the corner to get us something for dinner.

  When I got back, he was lounging on my couch watching baseball on TV, and I sat next to him to watch. My dad played second-string baseball for a few years at UH, and he’d raised my brothers and me with baseball fever. He told us stories of the first baseball game ever in Hawai’i, played July 4, 1866, where the “natives” beat the “haoles,” 2-1. The great Babe Ruth had come to Honolulu in 1933, and in the 1940s, when my dad was a kid, he used to watch Major League All-Star games in the old wooden Honolulu Stadium, affectionately called “The Termite Palace.”

  Mike and I were both tired, though he insisted on rubbing more cream on my healing burns. When he’d finished, we started to cuddle in my bed, but we both nodded off before we’d had a chance to get very far. It was so nice to wake the next morning, the sheets tangled around us, Mike snoring softly next to me. I propped my head up on my elbow and looked over at him.

  I loved the way his hairy skin flowed over his muscular arms, the way his mouth relaxed into a smile, accentuated by his rich black mustache. There was a puckered scar on his right shoulder that looked like the result of a burn. I wanted to get to know every inch of his beautiful body, tracing my fingers over the fine black hairs on his chest and thighs, connecting the dots of the occasional freckles across his back.

  He woke up and saw me watching him. He yawned. “What time?”

  “At the sound of the tone it will be 6:05,” I said. While I was making my tone noise, he reached down and took hold of my dick.

  “Did you say ‘tone’ or ‘bone’?” he asked.

  I leaned across and kissed him, and we finished what we’d started the night before. By the time we were done, we had to rush out to avoid being late for work.

  My first stop was at the coroner’s office on Iwilei Road, where I picked up the bullet that had killed Charlie Stahl. Doc’s minions had been busy the night before; Charlie’s prominence and wealth had ensured a speedy autopsy. As I’d seen, the cause of death was a bullet wound to the throat. None of the other shots I’d heard fired had connected with a human being, which was something to be grateful for.

  From the coroner’s I drove downtown, and took the bullet down to ballistics on the lower level. At the door of the lab someone had hung a big poster of a chicken. Or at least, that’s what was on the left side. In case you didn’t know what it was, the word “chicken” was written underneath, with (before) next to it.

  To the right side, someone had drawn what looked like an explosion, jagged little shards flying in all directions. Under that (after) was written. Below that was a photo of the bullet that had killed the chicken, blown up so that its distinctive striations were clearly visible.

  On the bottom, in big letters, it read, “A case of fowl play. If you have any information about this dastardly deed, report to Detective Kimo Kanapa’aka.”

  Billy Kim, the round-faced ballistics tech, came out as I was reading the poster. “Very funny,” I said.

  “Hey, you work in ballistics, you take your humor where you find it. No offense?”

  “I’ll let you make it up to me. Tell me everything you know about this bullet, all right?” I handed it to him in a plastic baggie. “Take good care of it. It’s my only clue.” Well, that and a partial license plate, I thought.

  As I was leaving the lab, Billy’s phone rang. “Hey, Kimo, hold up,” he called. “It’s your boss. He wants you upstairs, pronto.”

  Sampson was in his office watching a small battery-operated TV. Reception was lousy so he kept playing with the rabbit ears, but I could see enough to tell we were watching a press conference with Betty Yamazuki, one of the Honolulu County Commissioners, who was demanding to know more about Wilson Shira’s death.

  She stood with her arm around Shira’s widow as she fabricated a story that had no relationship to reality. She implied that someone within the Marriage Project had deliberately lured Shira into the building, then orchestrated the bombing in order to kill him and shift blame away from themselves. “Is it a coincidence that the only person to die in this blast was one of this group’s most formidable opponents?” she said. “I call that a real mystery.”

  “I call it irony,” I said.

  Back at the studio, the anchor said, “Citing the confidentiality of their ongoing investigation, Honolulu police officials have declined to comment on Ms. Yamazuki’s allegations.”

  “They’re a piece of crap, is what they are,” Sampson said. “But until you find something better, they’re going to stand. What have you got?”

  “You notice how she didn’t even mention Charlie Stahl?” I asked. “I’m sure the two cases are related. We’ve got a bullet and a partial license plate number. I’m going all out on this, Lieutenant. I’ll get you the results you want.”

  “Soon.” Sampson looked back down at the paperwork on his desk, and I left his office.

  Back at my desk, I worked up a profile on Charlie Stahl, just to eliminate anybody else in his life who might have wanted to kill him. I found out a bunch of things about his personal life I’d just as soon not have known, but I couldn’t find anybody who could have killed him. Though he was wealthy, so was the rest of his family, and most of his money was tied up in family trusts. His friends all liked him, and he wasn’t involved in any suspicious business deals. He wasn’t a drug user or an alcoholic, though his sexual tastes were unusual. In short, he was an average citizen.

  Just before noon, I got a call from Thanh Nguyen at the fingerprint lab. As soon as I had copied down the information I hung up and did some work at the computer. When I was finished, I phoned Mike Riccardi’s cell.

  “We finally got a break,” I said. “Remember I told you about the rock in the pape
r bag that went through the window of the Marriage Project a couple of hours before the bomb? We got a make on the prints. I pulled the guy’s rap sheet and he’s got a half dozen arrests for assault, assault with a deadly weapon, felony assault, malicious mischief, you name it.”

  “Anything for arson?”

  “No, but people change.”

  Mike laughed. “You got an address on the guy?”

  “I’ve even got a job address. A farm up outside Wahiawa. You want to go for a ride?”

  “How could I turn down an invitation like that?”

  “Good. Where are you? I’ll pick you up.”

  He gave me an address in Waikiki, a few blocks from my apartment. I knew the place, a small storefront that rented and sold X-rated videos. I’d stopped there once or twice myself, that is, until someone had poured gasoline behind the back door and set it afire. I thought it was the first of the gay-related arsons.

  “You’re back there? Got a new lead?”

  “Nope. Just tidying up loose ends. They’re reopening tomorrow, so I wanted to give them some advice.”

  “Maybe they’ll cut us a discount on some video rentals.”

  “I’ll be waiting out front,” he said. “I’ll be the one wearing the big smile.”

  “Oh, if only that were all you were wearing.” I hung up, smiling to myself. This could be our big break. All we had to do was lean on the rock-thrower until he gave up his partners, and we’d be home free.

  He’d gone home at some point and put on clean clothes and he looked handsome in his button-down chambray shirt with the HFD logo on the breast pocket.

  It was sunny and dry as we cruised up the Kamehameha Highway toward Wahiawa. “This weather makes me nervous,” Mike said.

  “Nervous? It’s gorgeous.”

  “Yeah, but you feel how dry it is? We haven’t had significant rainfall in a couple of weeks.”

  We’d passed through the miles of strip malls and light industrial development that marked the outskirts of Honolulu, and we were climbing through the cleft of hills into Central O’ahu. I looked out at the fields around us. They were beginning to look parched. “I’m sure it’ll rain soon. It always does.”

  “I hope you’re right. In addition to the arsons I’ve been investigating, we’ve already started to get some small fires out in the country. We had one near Schofield Barracks the other day, had to evacuate the area until we got it under control.”

  We drove up the highway beyond the Dole plantation, looking for the street address I had, and then turned off onto a red dirt road that was signed toward Pupukea Plantation.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said. “The Church of Adam and Eve had a meeting up here a month or two ago.”

  I pulled up in front of a low wooden building that looked like it had been a set for some old Western, an overhanging roof supported by thin posts, sheltering an empty porch. A line of cars and trucks were parked in the dirt in front of the building. “Son of a bitch,” I said. I pointed at a green pickup parked at one end. The latch on the gate was broken on the right-hand side, just as Frank Sit had described.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” Mike said.

  We went through a screen door into the office, showed our badges, and asked to speak with Ed Baines, the guy whose prints we’d matched. The secretary said she’d call him in from the field, and ushered us back to a big room filled with chairs and a speaker’s podium.

  “We use this when we have to get all the workmen in one place,” she said, and left us. The walls were lined with safety posters and a complicated anatomical description of the stages in pineapple development. I tried to read one of them but couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking that we were close to solving our whole investigation.

  A few minutes later a tall, blond haole with tattoos on both arms stuck his head in the door. “You guys looking for me?”

  “Ed Baines?”

  He nodded.

  “Come on in.” We showed our badges again and introduced ourselves.

  His skin was rough and weathered, and he wore jeans and a chambray shirt with ragged short sleeves. A packet of Marlboros threatened to fall out of his torn breast pocket at any moment. “I don’t know what you guys want, but I been clean since the last time I got out of the joint. They give me a good chance here, and I’m trying not to fuck it up.”

  “Then I’m sure you’ll be willing to help us,” I said. “Like maybe telling us where you were last Wednesday afternoon, for starters.”

  He looked wary. “I was here on the farm, working. Every day, 7 to

  4.”

  “You punch a clock?”

  He nodded.

  “So I could check your punch out, if I wanted to.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “I’m having a little trouble believing you were here on the farm last Wednesday, is all,” I said. “When I’ve got a paper bag with your fingerprints on it, and that bag had a rock inside it last Wednesday that went through somebody’s window.”

  “I want to call my lawyer.”

  “Whoa, that’s a big turnaround in attitude,” I said. “One minute you’re gonna help us, the next you’ve gotta call your lawyer.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Mike said, leaning forward. “You want to call a lawyer, that’s your right. Under the Constitution. But you know what lawyers are like. I know you do, you’ve been around the block a few times. Your lawyer steps in, and then we can’t do anything to help you. See, we’re not so concerned with you, Ed. We’ve read your rap sheet. Unless you’re turning into a firebug in your old age, we’re just looking at you as a way to get to who we want.”

  “What do you mean, firebug?”

  I sat back and listened, watching Ed’s face for a reaction.

  “See, this place where the rock went through the window, later that night a bomb went off there,” Mike said. “The whole place burned down, and a man was killed.”

  Ed started looking pretty scared at that point. I was getting the feeling his involvement had gone only so far, and no further.

  “We figure the same people responsible for the rock through the window had a hand in the bombing, but that doesn’t mean we expect that was you,” Mike continued. “Must have been somebody behind you, maybe behind the bombing, too. You turn over that guy, we forget about any charges against you for this rock-throwing. Your parole officer doesn’t even need to know. But once you’ve got your lawyer involved, well, it’s harder for us to do that.”

  “I don’t know anything about no bombing,” Ed said. “No fire either. This guy just said he wanted to do a little mischief. He had us collect a bunch of horse shit, put it into bags, and then splash it on the sidewalk. The rock was just like a calling card, so’s the people inside knew what it was about.”

  “Kind of like a warning,” I said. “Get out before we torch your asses.”

  “There wasn’t nothing like that,” he said. “I swear it. You can hook me up to a lie detector, whatever you want. I swear I didn’t know nothing about any bombs, or fires, or anything.”

  He looked down at his shoes. “I know I shouldn’t a done it. But this guy, he’s my minister, and he swore it wouldn’t be breaking my parole. Nothing more than malicious mischief, he said.”

  He looked up again. “See, I got this ex lives down by Pearl. What with being in the joint, I’m way behind on my alimony, and she keeps threatening to haul my ass into court. I’d been talking to the Reverend about it, and he offered me a thousand bucks to make some trouble for those gay marriage people. That’s enough to make myself whole with her.”

  As soon as Baines said minister, I thought about Jeff White, whose Church of Adam and Eve had met at the Plantation. “You got a name and an address on your minister?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I pulled out my notebook and a pen, and handed them to him. “Write it down.”

  “You promise you won’t screw me up?”

  “You give us the right guy, w
e forget we ever even talked to you,” I said.

  “All right.” He quickly scribbled a couple of lines on a fresh page in my notebook and handed it back to me.

  I took a quick look at it, and saw exactly what I’d expected. Reverend White, the Church of Adam and Eve, and the address on Wai’alae Avenue.

  MAKING APOLOGIES

  As we were driving back down to Honolulu, my Bluetooth buzzed with a call from Terri.

  “I know you’re probably swamped with the bombing investigation,” she said. “But I’m at my wit’s end, and I just don’t know what to do.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Danny.” Her five-year-old son had witnessed his father’s murder six months before, and he’d taken it hard. But I thought he’d been coming around. “He’s been acting up at kindergarten, and today he hit another boy with a rock. They’re threatening to kick him out unless I get him some help. But he’s been in therapy, Kimo.”

  She started to cry. After Eric’s death, I’d promised to spend time with Danny, and for a while I had. But it had been a month or more since I had gone to Wailupe just to hang out with her and the boy. “Okay, hold on.” I turned to Mike. “Can we make a quick detour to Wailupe? My friend’s got a crisis.”

  “Sure.”

  Back to Terri, I said, “I’m on the Kam now. I’ll get on the H1 and be to you in about 45 minutes.” I paused for a minute, to concentrate on a bend in the road. “I’m bringing somebody with me. I think you’ll like him.”

  Her voice faded out, and then she said, “See you soon.”

  I hung up and told Mike more about my friendships with Terri and Harry, and about Danny. “I had you figured for a Punahou boy,” he said.

  We spent the rest of the ride trading personal information. Where we’d grown up, gone to school, what we’d done and who we knew. Mike had grown up in Aiea, a suburb just beyond the Aloha Stadium, and the only city in the US whose name is spelled only with vowels.