Mahu Fire m-3

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Lui and Haoa sent their wives and children away but insisted on staying. “We can help you,” Lui said. “You know we know that park pretty well.”

  On her way out the door, Liliha stopped and turned to me. “I am a very proud woman, Kimo,” she said. “But I hope that I am not too proud to admit when I have been wrong. And I was wrong about the church. I hope you will forgive me.”

  I hugged her and kissed her cheek. “You’re my sister, Lili,” I said. “I’ll always love you, and nothing will get in the way of that.”

  For the first time since she’d married my brother, my sister-in-law hugged me back, and I could feel she meant everything she said.

  When we pulled apart, I looked up and saw Haoa and Tatiana ahead of us. Tatiana was crying and Haoa was stroking her long, streaked blonde hair. “Be careful,” she was saying. “Just be careful.”

  “I will be. Don’t you worry.”

  Liliha took control of the situation. “All kids in the cars,” she said, in a voice that reminded me very much of my mother’s. She took Tatiana’s arm, gently prying her away from Haoa. “We’ll all go to my house, Tati,” she said. “I want you to look at this catalogue with me. I’m thinking of changing around the living room.”

  I watched my sisters-in-law and my nieces and nephews load up and move out. Jeffrey and Ashley complained; they wanted to stay and help, but they were no good in the face of opposition from their parents, no matter how much they complained that they were teenagers and ought to be treated better than the little keikis.

  When the last of the guests had driven away, I went around to the back yard, where Akoni and Tony Lee where talking with my father and brothers. I could smell a faint odor of smoke on a breeze that came down the mountainside. “Somebody needs to evacuate the park,” Akoni said. “Lee and I can do that.”

  “I’ll have backup meet you at the entrance to the park,” I said. “Lui, you and Haoa go with them, help them scout the perimeter of the park, then come back here. The fire department should be on their way. You guys will have to coordinate with them, too.”

  “I’ve never seen the park so dry,” my father said. “You all better be careful.”

  We all walked around to the front yard. My father looked stronger, more energized than he had the day before, and he was able to walk by himself, only touching my mother’s arm occasionally.

  Haoa said, “I’ll drive,” and Lui, Akoni and Tony Lee jumped into his old panel van to head down to the park entrance.

  My parents stopped at my mother’s Lexus in the driveway, and I said, “Dad, remember those old maps of the park? We’re going to need them.”

  He nodded, and my mother said, “Mei-Mei, you and Genevieve come with us. It’s not safe for you to stay here.”

  Aunt Mei-Mei shook her head. “No, I stay with Chin. Genevieve, you go.”

  Genevieve took her mother-in-law’s hand. “No, Mother. I will stay with you.”

  My mother looked at me, and I shrugged. So she and my father got into her car and drove off. Aunt Mei-Mei and Genevieve walked back inside, past the implacable card players, just as Lieutenant Sampson arrived.

  “Run down for me what you know so far,” he said.

  We walked around the house to the back yard, where we could look into the park, and as we did I organized my thoughts. It was about three in the afternoon then, a hot, dry day with variable winds. Perfect weather for a forest fire.

  “This case started when somebody shot that chicken in Makiki,” I said. “I’m only speculating here, but I think both Jeff and Sheila White are wound pretty tight. They must have gotten tired of the rooster crowing every morning, and one of them went out and shot it to shut it up.”

  Sampson looked grim. “Go on.”

  “The homeless man, Hiroshi Mura, was shot because he saw something. Maybe he saw one of the Whites shoot the rooster. Maybe he knew what they were doing in that shed in the back yard. Either way, the same gun was used in both shootings.”

  I paused to think about what to say next. “Ballistics matched the gun to the one used to shoot Charlie Stahl as well. Until we made that connection, we had no idea that the Makiki shootings could be connected to the bombing at the Marriage Project party.”

  Sampson’s radio crackled. Akoni and Tony Lee had closed the park and gotten the picnic areas evacuated. No one matching the suspects’ description had been seen, but I knew there was a lot of wild country beyond the public area.

  “Kitty said Eli Harding’s family had a cabin somewhere in the park,” I said. “My dad’s bringing over a bunch of old maps which show the trails and locations of cabins. If we can skirt the fire, we can head up some of those trails.”

  Akoni said he and Lee were on their way back, and signed off. Sampson turned his attention back to me.

  “Mike Riccardi, the fire inspector, was at the rally at Waikiki Gateway Park and he saw the woman who shot Charlie Stahl get away in a dark sedan, and he got a partial license plate,” I said.

  “What was the fire inspector doing at a rally?”

  I stopped. When I’d first seen Mike, I’d assumed he was there for the rally itself, that my influence was going to gradually move him out of the closet.

  But of course, that wasn’t the reason at all. “I think he was worried that there might be another bombing attempt. After all, the rally was organized by the Marriage Project and the Marriage Project had just been bombed. You know that some of the arsons over the last few weeks have been at gay and lesbian businesses?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Mike thinks the arsonists are amateurs, that they’ve been getting more sophisticated with each attack. At the rally, he was keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior. That’s how he spotted our shooter.”

  I had to stop and regroup. “Okay, so we had these shootings that matched up. When I was canvassing in Makiki, I talked to both Sheila and Jeff White. A couple of days later, when I was at the Marriage Project party, I saw a sweaty guy who looked familiar to me, and we identified this unknown guy as a chief suspect. Then we pulled a fingerprint off a paper bag that had been tossed at the Marriage Project office a few hours before the bombing, and we traced it to a guy at Pupukea Plantation, where the Church of Adam and Eve holds some services.”

  My father and mother returned with the maps, and I set my father to figuring out where the Hardings’ cabin might be. My mother went back into the house to stay with Aunt Mei-Mei and Genevieve Pang. Even the increased smell of smoke in the air didn’t seem to faze the gamblers, though.

  “The guy at Pupukea Plantation told us that Jeff White had paid him to throw those shit-filled bags at the Marriage Project office, but White denied it. At that point, you and I were talking about a lineup to try and connect White to the sweaty guy.”

  “Which we can still do, if we need to.”

  My cell rang, and I could see from the display it was Mike Riccardi. “Yeah, Mike?” I said, answering it.

  “I’m on my way over to Wa’ahila State Park, with a couple of engines,” he said. “There’s a big fire brewing there. I remembered your parents live up there and wanted to tell you they might want to get out.”

  “Already ahead of you.” I told him where we stood.

  He whistled. “You think White started this fire?”

  “Don’t know. But I know he’s up there somewhere, with a bunch of innocent people.” I glanced over at Sampson and knew he was thinking of Kitty.

  “Listen, I gotta go,” Mike said. “Be careful out there.”

  “You too.”

  PICNICKERS

  I hung up and turned back to Sampson, telling him what Mike had said. Then I continued explaining the situation. “We got our big break when my friend Harry connected the partial plate Mike saw to a dark sedan that the Whites own. That helped us get the search warrant from Judge Yamanaka. At White’s house, we found a bunch of unregistered handguns as well as a makeshift laboratory. Mike is having the materials we found there analyzed at the
fire department’s lab.”

  “So we have the Whites connected to two shootings and the bombing.”

  “That’s right. Kitty and I met the Hardings at the Church of Adam and Eve, and it appears that the Whites went with all of them on their picnic.”

  Lui and Haoa returned from the park then, and joined us for the rest of my rundown. I was pretty sure that Sampson didn’t want my TV station manager brother to hear every detail of our case, but we were in a crunch situation and as long as we needed Lui’s knowledge of the park, he had to hear what we knew.

  “The Whites aren’t married, as they’ve been presenting themselves; they’re brother and sister. I think that their own incestuous relationship is what’s motivating them to protest against gay marriage.”

  Lui asked, “The minister and his wife aren’t married? They’re brother and sister?”

  I could see the headlines in his eyes. “About an hour ago, a sightseeing helicopter headed up from Diamond Head spotted a fire at a cabin up on Wa’ahila Ridge and flew up to take a closer look.”

  We all turned to look up at the ridge, and for the first time we could see gray smoke rising above the tree line. A breeze blew past us, and the tang of the smoke registered in my nostrils. “He couldn’t get too close, but he said he saw a pickup and a dark sedan parked near the cabin. As he was leaving, he spotted two individuals fleeing the area on foot. Based on his description, I think they were the lieutenant’s daughter Kitty and a boy named Jimmy Ah Wong.”

  “Now I start to get lost,” Sampson said. “Who’s this boy? What do you think he was doing there?”

  I explained how Jimmy had been helpful in making the case against Wayne Gallagher and Derek Pang, and that subsequent to his interview with the DA, his father had discovered he was gay and kicked him out of the house. Then I stopped.

  “So you don’t know where he is now?” Sampson asked.

  “Well, not really.” I told him I had signed Jimmy out of custody and left him with Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei, and then Jimmy had disappeared after Uncle Chin died.

  “Let me get this straight. You took responsibility for a teenaged prostitute and then left him in the custody of a known gangster?” He looked incredulous, and then something unhappy passed over his face. “You don’t have any other interest in this boy, do you?”

  My brothers both stiffened, and I could tell from their body language they were ready to jump to my defense. We all knew what Sampson meant. I felt the anger bubbling up inside me but I tried to keep it down. We were both worried about Kitty, up there somewhere on the mountain with a fire raging around her, not knowing where the crazy Whites were or how they fit into the picture.

  “Jimmy’s a good kid,” I said. “He’s smart and he’s got a sweet nature. He’s been coming to the self-defense classes I lead at the Waikiki Gay Teen Center. But that’s my only involvement with him.” I took a deep breath. “I know you don’t want to ask this but I’ll tell you anyway. I am not sexually involved with him in any way, shape or form. He’s just a kid I feel like needs a friend.”

  “What you did was pretty stupid,” Sampson said. “You know how vulnerable you are to any innuendo in the press, don’t you?” He took a sidelong look at Lui. “If somebody gets hold of the connection between you and a teen-aged boy prostitute, just the speculation could lose you your badge. It would hurt you and it would hurt the department.”

  “He didn’t have anybody else to look out for him.” I turned to look at the fire again. “I understand what you’re saying, but I’d do it again if it came to that.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said. “So you don’t know how he got up on the mountain with Kitty?”

  I shook my head. “I know Jimmy was back on the streets, though I’ve been looking for him for two days and I couldn’t find him. I saw Jeff White out on Kalakaua late one night, and I think he might have been out looking for prostitutes himself. Maybe just to bring them into the church, maybe not. And maybe somebody from the church took Jimmy in. The helicopter also saw another car, a Volvo, looked like it had been abandoned along the trail. We know Kitty was meeting the Hardings and their two children, and there might have been other church members at this picnic.”

  “So there could be a whole church full of picnickers out there in this fire,” Sampson said. “Lovely.”

  I turned to Lui. “Do you or Liliha know anything about this church we should know?”

  Haoa and Sampson turned toward him as well. “Don’t tell me, brah,” Haoa said. “You’ve been going to this dumb church? Your kids, too?”

  “We just went to a couple of their meetings,” Lui said defensively. “Liliha thought they had a good, family-friendly message.”

  “Get a pair of balls, brah,” Haoa said. “Your wife expects you to choose between her and your brother, who you gonna choose?”

  Lui is two years older than Haoa, and since childhood they’ve been sparring, each determined to be the best. When Lui threw a luau for his oldest son Jeffrey’s eight-grade graduation, Haoa had to throw a bigger one the next year for the birth of his youngest child. I was lucky that I’d avoided rivalry with them; the only times it seemed that they’d collaborated had been to pick on me, the baby brother.

  But there was no time for rehashing old family rivalries. “All right,” I said. “Let’s table this discussion for later. Nobody’s choosing between anybody right now. And besides, Liliha and I kissed and made up before she left.”

  My brothers were glaring at each other as my father came to the back door and called out, “Come take a look at the maps of the park and the ridge.”

  We went inside, where he had spread a faded topographical map on Uncle Chin’s dining room table. I saw Sampson glance over at Uncle Chin’s coffin, at the incense and platters of food, but I guess he knew enough of Hawai’i not to be surprised.

  The four of us clustered around the table with my father, who leaned heavily on the table. His hospitalization, and the death of Uncle Chin, wore heavily on his big frame, and though he was clearly healing, I felt very protective of him. I wanted to make him go home, lie down and rest, but there was too much to do and we needed whatever help he could provide.

  “See how the Wa’ahila trail continues up the ridge?” he said. “There are some old homestead cabins up there, just outside the park boundary. No one lives up there full time, but people still use the cabins.”

  “So somebody set one of those cabins on fire,” Sampson said.

  “Looks like it. The good news for you is that there’s only one road in or out of the area. It leads down into the park.”

  “My partner from Waikiki, Akoni Hapa’ele, and another guy from Organized Crime have already gone up there to coordinate a blockade and any evacuation.”

  My father continued. “The bad news is that the road snakes back and forth up the hill. So if your suspects are on foot, they won’t bother using it. There are at least two trails that lead down the mountain, but go in different directions.”

  Akoni came walking into the kitchen then. “We’ve got a bunch of black and whites, and a SWAT team at the park entrance, ready to head in.” He’d hitched a ride over with some campers who were leaving. “Tony’s over there, but he needs to know what to do.”

  “Lui, Haoa and I can each take a team into the park,” I said. “We know the trails and the road better than anyone, from all the time we’ve spent hiking and camping in the park and up on the ridge as kids.”

  Sampson looked grim. “I don’t like to involve civilians, but we’re in a crisis situation here,” he said. “Let’s head out.”

  We went out front, and I saw the elderly gamblers were still there. Their duty was to protect Uncle Chin’s corpse, and nothing short of flames licking at their heels was going to drag them away.

  Behind us, my parents, Aunt Mei-Mei and Genevieve Pang clustered around the front door. My father leaned against the door frame, and my mother stood close to him, fiercely protective, clearly torn bet
ween her responsibilities to him, to her sons, and to her lifelong best friend.

  Lui, Haoa and Sampson took Haoa’s panel truck again, and Akoni climbed in with me for the ride down the hill and around to the park entrance. For a couple of minutes it was like we were partners again. There was so much that I wanted to tell him and no time.

  By the time we reached the park entrance, the smell of smoke was overwhelming. The narrow neighborhood roads were crowded with black and whites and undercover cars parked in driveways and on grassy verges, as every available unit had been called to the ridge to help search for the fugitives. We could barely snake through in my truck.

  The two-lane entry to the park was lined with tall Norfolk pine trees, with wild roosters and hens wandering around below them. We parked next to a stone wall by the wooden park gate.

  I assembled the cops and my brothers into a semi-circle. “We all know what we have to do.” I pointed at my brothers. “You guys remember, you’re tour guides, not cops. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Haoa knelt down to finger some leaves, then held them up to us. “This mountain is dry as a bone. If you see a small fire, you can try to stamp it out, but anything bigger you’ve got to get the hell away.”

  I thought of Mike Riccardi then, and hoped he would be all right. I didn’t like the idea of him running into forest fires, but then again, he probably didn’t like my going after bad guys with guns either.

  I took Akoni, Lidia Portuondo, and Gary Saunders, a uniform I’d known in Waikiki, on my team. I punched Saunders in the face after he called me a faggot once, but at least I knew him, his strengths and weaknesses. He was a big, strong guy, too, which might help us if we ran into somebody up on the ridge who needed to be restrained.

  Haoa took Tony Lee, Frank Sit, Steve Hart and another uniform, and Lui got Alvy Greenberg and three uniforms.

  I was just ready to pull out when Mike Riccardi arrived, loping up the hill from where he’d parked his truck. I was so damn glad to see him-but at the same time, I knew that his presence meant he was about to go into that fire.