Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

I held out a picture of Tommy Pang. “Recognize this man?”

  “Sure. He owns the place. Mr. Pang.”

  I nodded. “He here last night?”

  “He comes by almost every night. I think he was here last night. But not at closing. Fred and I had to close up ourselves.”

  “Fred the bartender?”

  The waiter nodded. “Look, I got customers. Can I take care of them?”

  “Sure.”

  The waiter walked away. “That was easy,” Akoni said.

  “Too easy. You wait here. I’m gonna talk to Fred.” Akoni looked distinctly uncomfortable, and the idea that a guy his size would worry about anything made me laugh. “Don’t worry, anybody comes over to talk to you, you just tell them you’re my bitch.”

  “Keep it up, you’ll see what a bitch feels like,” Akoni said, but he sat back in his chair and picked up his beer.

  I carried mine with me to the bar. It took a couple of minutes for Fred to finish with a gaggle of pretty young boys at the far end of the bar, but eventually he came over to me. Up close, he was older than he looked from far away, the kind of guy who spent too much time in the sun when he was younger and too much time in the gym now. I showed him my badge and said, “Tell me about Mr. Pang.”

  He shrugged. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anybody ever threaten him?”

  Fred laughed. “No, my guess is that Mr. Pang does all the threatening.” He leaned close to me. “What’s this all about? He in trouble? I’ve seen his tattoo.”

  “Yeah? You know what it means?”

  “Tong,” Fred said. “He’s some kind of gangster. But he only comes out here for a minute at a time—he doesn’t particularly like our clientele. And I only go back to his office to lock up the receipts for the night.”

  “You do that last night?”

  “Sure, just like always.” A light bulb seemed to go on over Fred’s head. “Say, there were a lot of police out there last night, when I was closing up. You have anything to do with that?”

  “They were out there because your Mr. Pang’s body was out there.”

  “Shit,” Fred said. “He’s dead?”

  I nodded. “You have any idea who might have wanted him dead?”

  Fred shook his head. “Not a clue. I said maybe five words to the guy on a daily basis, usually just a greeting.” He grabbed a rag and started wiping down the bar. “So who’s gonna take over here?” he asked. “Not that peckerwood kid of his?”

  “Peckerwood?” I asked. “That some kind of tree?”

  “Where I come from it means jerk,” Fred said. “That pretty much sums up Derek.”

  “So Derek comes around here?”

  “With his boyfriend. Usually when his dad’s not here.”

  I started taking notes. “Got a description?”

  “Derek’s a kid, just out of college. Chinese, about five-seven, hundred fifty pounds soaking wet. Black hair down to his shoulders. Sometimes he wears it pulled back into a ponytail, he looks like a gangster. Beautiful clothes—silk shirts, linen pants. Italian shoes. Guy has a thing for Italian shoes. Skinny. Moves like a dancer. Cute butt.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “So we get him in a lineup, we gotta turn him around so you can see his butt?”

  Fred smirked. “You asked, I told.”

  “Know the boyfriend’s name?”

  “Wayne Gallagher. Six-four, I think. Maybe two fifty, maybe a little more or less. Hard to judge at that size. Curly hair, kind of halfway between blond and brown, cut just to the neck. He’s much looser than Derek. You know, sometimes he does the Ralph Lauren polo look, oxford cloth button down shirts and khakis, but sometimes he wears big aloha shirts and tight jeans. Caucasian, in case the name didn’t tell you that. Big hands, big feet. Dick the size of a beer can.”

  I put my pen down. “I’m not even going to ask how you know.”

  Fred held up his hand. “I was pissing next to the guy one night. ’Course I had to look.”

  “’Course. Anything else?”

  Fred shrugged again, and the party of boy toys called for him.

  “One last thing,” I said. “Anybody else work back in the office there?”

  “Arleen,” he said. “Secretary.” He looked at his watch. “She’s still there, at least another few minutes.”

  I let him go, and went back to Akoni, where I told him almost everything I’d heard, leaving out the part about Derek’s butt and his boyfriend’s dick.

  I drained the last of my beer. “You want to head back and say hello to this Arleen?”

  “Why not,” Akoni said. “Though I got to tell you, Arleen’s a guy in drag, you do all the talking.”

  Born to Run

  The waiter told us that the door into the office was locked and visitors had to go around to the alley side. The Rod and Reel Club occupied a square at the corner of Kuhio Avenue and Launiu Street. A group of tall trees sat at the corner, behind a wooden fence, and shaded a large open patio. The bar itself wrapped around the patio as an L, with one side facing Kuhio and the other Launiu. Roll-down grilles sealed off the bar area from the patio when the club was closed.

  An alley ran parallel to Kuhio Avenue; it was narrow but cars often parallel-parked back there. The waiter pointed down the hallway where I’d seen guys coming and going the night before and said there was a door back there that led to the office, but it was locked, and we’d have to go out to Launiu and then up the alley to the first door on the left.

  At the entrance to the alley I stopped. “I heard the guy dragging the body as I was standing in the shadows over there, by the patio entrance.” I remembered the giraffe following me out the door, making eye contact with him and shaking my head. “He’d just dumped the body over there, by that kiawe tree, when I came around the corner. I saw him run up to the Cherokee, which was parallel-parked up there, facing this way. He jumped in, and zoom down the alley toward me.”

  “Where were you standing then?”

  I pointed to the left about ten feet. “Under those trees over there. It wasn’t until the Cherokee had passed me that I walked over to the kiawe and saw Tommy Pang’s body.”

  We walked down the alley to the office door, and I buzzed the intercom. “Who is it?” a woman’s voice said.

  We identified ourselves, and the door buzzed. We walked right into an open reception area, where a young Japanese woman stood behind a desk. The room was slightly dingy and not very attractive—nothing on the walls, the furniture older, kind of crappy. A little boy, about five, sat on the floor in the corner, coloring. On the desk there was a little nameplate that read Arleen Nakamura. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Arleen?” I asked.

  “Uh huh. What’s this about?”

  I told her Tommy Pang had been killed, and she said, “Oh, wow. I wondered why he wasn’t answering his cell phone, why he didn’t call me.”

  “What’s your job here?”

  “I’m Mr. Pang’s personal assistant. I answer the phones, order the supplies, you know, that kind of thing.” She sat down in her chair and motioned me to her visitor’s chair. Akoni leaned up against the wall.

  “What kind of business did Mr. Pang do besides run the bar?”

  She held her hands out, palms up, in a gesture of defeat. “I have no idea,” she said. “Nobody ever comes by. It’s like totally boring, but my little boy goes to school around the corner, and I can bring him over here when he’s done.” She motioned to the boy in the corner, still absorbed in his coloring book. “So mostly I surf the internet and talk on the phone.”

  Just then the phone rang and she answered it. I noticed she just said hello. Then she quickly switched into Japanese. It was her mother, so that was probably a natural kind of thing, but I always think it’s rude to switch languages in front of someone. Makes it sound like you want to hide something.

  Because my family is so mixed up, I don’t look too much like anything, so she probably figured I didn’t speak Japanese. But t
hen, she didn’t know that my mother’s maiden name was Kitamura. I couldn’t help listening in, though my Japanese was a little rusty and I missed some nuances. She sounded almost gleeful in explaining that Tommy was dead, which I thought was ghoulish. After a couple of minutes she switched back to English and said, “Listen, Mom, I have to go. The cops are still here. I’ll call you later.”

  She smiled at me as she hung up. “My mother.”

  She toyed with the rings on her fingers, and I noticed there was no wedding band, though there was a picture of her with her little boy in a silver frame on her desk. At first I’d thought she was barely twenty-one, but looking closer I saw the fine lines that had started around her mouth and eyes, and refined my estimate upward at least five years.

  “Kind of strange to have a secretary when there’s no business going on,” I said.

  “Oh, he was doing business. Faxes and phone calls and deliveries, but he never let me see anything. The fax is in there—” she motioned to his office “—And he always locks it when he leaves.”

  “Was it locked this morning?”

  “Yup. And before you ask, I don’t have the key, so you’ll need a locksmith.”

  “How about that other office?” Akoni motioned to the open door.

  “We used to have a bar manager, but he quit a couple of weeks ago and moved back to the mainland. I was supposed to put an ad in, but Mr. Pang’s son told me not to. I think he wanted the job for his boyfriend.”

  “Tell us about them,” I said. “The son’s name is Derek, right?”

  “Yeah. He’s a pretty nice guy. He’s opening an art gallery, so I’ve been helping him with paperwork, like licenses and stuff.” She leaned over to me, lowered her voice. “I don’t think his father knows he’s gay.”

  Suddenly she sat back. “Guess I don’t have to whisper that anymore.”

  “How about the boyfriend. What’s his name?”

  “Wayne. I don’t know him that well. He’s only come by a couple of times. He’s really big, though, doesn’t look gay at all.”

  I wondered if Arleen thought I looked gay, but I didn’t say anything. “Mr. Pang didn’t have a watch, wallet or keys on him when he was found,” Akoni said, stepping into the breach. “Did he usually?”

  “Oh, yeah, he had this gold Rolex, and a thick gold and diamond bracelet, and a diamond pinky ring. He told me once he was born in April, it was his birthstone, the diamond.”

  Akoni took notes. “And he always carried a wallet, a money clip, and a key ring,” Arleen continued. “Oh yeah, and his Palm Pilot.”

  “Really,” I said. “You know what kind of stuff he kept on there?”

  “Not a clue.” The phone rang, and Arleen said, “Mom, I’ll talk to you tonight, okay? The police are still here.”

  “I don’t want to hold you up much longer,” I said, looking at the clock. It was almost five, beyond the end of our shift, and I figured Arleen would be closing up soon anyway. “We’ll have to get a locksmith in and come back tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you need a search warrant?”

  “Not if we have the approval of the person in control of the office,” I said. “That would be you, right?” She nodded. “And you want to do what you can to help us find out who killed Mr. Pang, don’t you?”

  “Sure.” She thought for a minute. “I come in around nine, after I drop my son off at school. Then I go out at 2:30 to pick him up and get some lunch, but I’m usually back by three.”

  Akoni and I walked out into the alley. “I’ll call the locksmith first thing tomorrow,” I said. “That’s about all we can do. You think the same person who bashed him in the head stole his jewelry?”

  “Awful big coincidence if it wasn’t,” Akoni said. “É, you see any jewelry first time you see him?”

  I tried to remember but couldn’t.

  “How long you think the body was alone?”

  “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “Enough time for somebody to see him, think he’s drunk, and roll him.” Akoni shook his head.

  I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel worse about what I’d done, but ways just seemed to keep cropping up.

  I didn’t feel like going home yet, so I got my truck, put an old Springsteen CD on and just started to drive. I ended up way up the Pali Highway, driving fast and singing along with Bruce. I wanted to wipe everything out of my brain, give it a chance to cool down. I kept thinking about my confession to Akoni at the mall, trying to figure out what it meant for my future. It seemed like it had happened so long before, but it had really only been hours.

  Eventually I pulled off at a switchback that gave me a view of the city and the Pacific below, and I got out of the truck. It was almost dusk and Waikiki glowed against the dark ocean. It seemed to me like some fantastic golden city, the place where all my dreams could come true, if only they didn’t shut me out of it.

  There was a rustling in the brush across the road from me, and somewhere an owl hooted. I stood there for a while longer, people in cars passing on their way home to their families, me just standing there outside the city, wondering.

  I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I pulled up in front of my apartment building. Then it hit me, and I barely made it up the stairs and into bed before I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Keep it to Yourself

  I woke early the next morning, surfed for an hour, and was at my desk at eight o’clock. Akoni came in a few minutes later and said, “Let’s take a walk.” As we left, we passed a tourist wahine in a skimpy g-string bikini who was complaining about having her wallet stolen on the beach.

  “The bad guys get an early start, miss,” I heard the desk sergeant telling her. “You’ve got to watch out all the time.”

  Good advice, I thought. Outside, the morning air was fresh and bright. You could see tiny bits of dust and sand dancing in the shafts of sunlight coming from over the top of the Ko’olau Mountains. We got coffee from a little hole in the wall souvenir place on the mauka side of Kalakaua Avenue and walked along the beach.

  “Here’s the way I see it,” Akoni said finally. “You did two things wrong. You failed to report a crime under your badge number and notify your lieutenant, and you failed to secure the scene of a crime. Neither of those is enough to lose your badge.”

  He took a sip of coffee. I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t have to say anything else. Nothing to anybody. Not the business about being in the Rod and Reel Club, or the guy who stuck his tongue in your ear. If you feel you want to tell somebody something, you say you had a lot to drink, you went for a long walk, you stumbled on to the body, the guy in the Jeep. You were pretty drunk, confused.”

  “I wasn’t drunk.”

  “Cops and drinking, they go together. It’s a long tradition. Guys can handle that. The department can handle that. This other thing, you’re blazing new territory. You want to take your chances?”

  “You’re telling me to lie.”

  Akoni crushed his empty cup and pitched it into a trash can. “I have never told you to lie about anything and I never will,” he said. “You know me better than that. But you’re no virgin, Kimo. You know the way the world works. Sometimes you have to put some spin on the truth to make things come out the way they should.”

  I thought about it. It was true. Many times, we’d known who the bad guy was, and we’d eliminated confusing evidence from our reports. Or we’d bluffed our way to confessions, pretending we knew more than we did. It was just something you did. But those situations weren’t about me. Somehow I’d always applied a higher standard to my personal life.

  “You want to tell the truth?” Akoni said. “The way I see it, you’ve been lying for years, never telling anybody you were really a fag. What about all those girls you took home. You tell them the truth?”

  There was a sour taste in my mouth. I said, “No.”

  “So why start now, when the truth can ruin you?”

  “Because I
owe it to Tommy Pang,” I said, before I could think about what I was saying. The conviction built inside me. “That poor jerk is dead and I did wrong by him. In the past, when we’ve adjusted the truth, it was because we were trying to be faithful to the dead, to do right by them. This is the opposite.”

  “Tommy Pang was a two-bit crook who never did anything nice for anybody,” Akoni said. “Nothing would probably give him more pleasure than to feel like his death caused a cop to lose his job. You come out with this, they’ll reassign you to a desk downtown, or put you on leave. You won’t be able to do a thing for Tommy Pang, or for any other vic we ever find.” He paused. “You won’t be able to do a thing to feel better.”

  He was right. It would be the end of my career. Not right away. I’d ride a desk for a while, and then there’d be a hearing, and eventually I’d turn in my badge. Maybe they’d ask for it; maybe I’d just do it in the end out of frustration. “So I write up what you said. What then?”

  “We keep it between ourselves for now. If we never find the bad guys, it goes into the cold case file. If we do, and we take the case to the Prosecuting Attorney, we see what he has to say.”

  “You could get fried over this yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a part of my troubles.”

  “You’re my partner.” He started walking. “Come on, let’s get back to work.”

  When we got back to the station, there was an elderly Chinese lady at the front desk complaining about kids making noise in her building, and a couple of tourists in processing reporting a purse snatching. I called the number Genevieve Pang had given us for her son and left a message, that it was important he call me at the station. Then I called the locksmith, who arranged to meet us at the alley behind the Rod & Reel Club, and Akoni and I walked over there together.

  Arleen met us at the door. She was so tiny, barely five feet, and next to me and Akoni she looked like an elf, or maybe some kind of Japanese pixie. She even bounced on the balls of her feet when she walked. As the locksmith got to work on the door, I said to her, “You’re sure this is okay, giving us this permission?”