Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

  That hit the jackpot. Melvin smiled. “Tommy often had reason to become friendly with police officers. Because of the work he did, he sometimes needed both business and personal security. And,” he paused, again searching for delicacy, “occasionally he may have skirted the law and needed an officer to look the other way.”

  Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. “Names, Melvin. We want to know who these cops were.”

  His face fell. “He never told me. I know most of the officers he dealt with were Chinese. There was at least one haole, I know, with a Portuguese name. Tommy was particularly pleased to have recruited him. Apparently the man had financial problems, and was in a particular position to do Tommy good. But he never told me the man’s name, or if he did, I forgot it.”

  “Great,” Akoni said. “A haole cop with a Portuguese name. There must be hundreds of those.”

  There wasn’t anything more Melvin Ah Wong could tell us, though he did give us an address and phone number for Dong Shi-Dao, who he said worked in import-export. He said he couldn’t be more specific. We walked back through the storeroom with him. “Can I get a soda, Dad?” Jimmy asked.

  Melvin frowned. “All right, but come right back. You still have homework.”

  Jimmy walked out of the store with us, and hesitated for a moment, waiting to see which way we turned. Then he followed us.

  “Give me a few minutes,” I whispered to Akoni. “Go on ahead a little.”

  He picked up his pace and I slowed down. In a minute Jimmy Ah Wong was walking next to me. “Where do you go to school?” I asked.

  “Honolulu Christian,” he said, naming a Chinatown private school not far away.

  “Good school. I was in a speech and debate club when I was at Punahou, and we used to compete against them.”

  He nodded. We came to a little convenience store across the street from Nu’uanu Stream. “I think I need a soda, too,” I said. “Hot day.”

  We went inside and got Cokes. There was a tiny park alongside the water and I said, “Want to go over there?”

  “Sure.”

  The smell of something rotten was stronger right there by the river, but when the trade wind blew it didn’t bother me too much. We sat down on a picnic bench under a big kiawe tree. There was a clutch of old men behind us, gabbing in Chinese, but they couldn’t hear anything we said. “If you have something to tell me, you can,” I said.

  He looked down at the picnic table. “I’m ashamed.”

  “Hey, when I was your age I was ashamed all the time,” I said. “Ashamed and scared. Matter of fact, I still am. I’m just more accustomed to it.”

  He didn’t speak. “You know something about Tommy Pang’s murder?” I asked gently. “Was your father involved?”

  He looked up fast. “No, nothing to do with my father.”

  Then I knew. “Derek and Wayne, right? They got friendly with you, didn’t they?”

  There was a tear trickling down his left cheek but he made no move to wipe it away. I could see that I’d moved too quickly. “So what’s with the hair?” I asked, flicking a couple of fingers at his yellow coxcomb. “Pretty radical. I bet your dad’s not too pleased.”

  He didn’t say anything. “You like music?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re a punker. Sex Pistols and all that retro ’80s music.” I drummed my fists against the picnic table and howled, “I wanna kill you and put lots of goo in my hair and talk in a funny British accent.”

  The clutch of Chinese men looked up in alarm, then went back to their conversation. Jimmy finally smiled. “It was just something to do,” he said. “Piss my dad off. You know.”

  “I know all about it. I was the youngest of three boys. I practically had to dance on the dinner table to get anybody to pay attention to me.”

  “I never had to do that.” The tension seemed to have left his shoulders, and I thought I could try again. “You were going to tell me about Derek and Wayne.”

  I could tell he made a decision then, just to get it off his chest, and I knew that though that would be painful it would be good for him in the long run. “Just Wayne,” he said, almost whispering. “He said we could never tell Derek.”

  “It’s really hard to be a teenager and like other guys,” I said as casually as I could. “I remember when I was about sixteen I was scared shitless of taking a shower after gym, afraid I’d get a hard-on in the shower and the other guys would tease me.”

  “He was nice to me,” Jimmy said, and he was really crying now. “Nobody else was ever nice to me like that.”

  “Did you have sex with him?”

  He nodded and looked down at the table. His shoulders were shaking, and I put an arm around him. “It’s all right, Jimmy. You didn’t do anything wrong. Wayne was the one who was wrong. It’s not right for an adult to take advantage of a kid.”

  It made me want to nail something on Wayne Gallagher, but I couldn’t do it in a way that would hurt Jimmy Ah Wong even more than he’d already been hurt. That’s child abuse in my book, taking advantage of somebody young and scared. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll make sure he can’t hurt you anymore.”

  We sat there for a few minutes, Jimmy resting against my shoulder, that improbable coxcomb of yellow hair in my face. It made me think about community policing, about how our job, at its heart, was to be out there among the citizens, protecting them from anyone who wanted to harm them, in any way. I’d thought for a while, while I was at the academy, about going to work in the school system, riding around in a patrol car protecting kids from drug dealers and child molesters and people who sped through school zones. Kind of like a Hawaiian J. D. Salinger, out there catching the kids in case they should fall.

  Jimmy seemed to regain his composure, and sat up. I was about to get up and go meet Akoni when Jimmy said, “He had me do stuff.”

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  “Not that kind of stuff,” he said, wiping a hand across his face. “I mean, that stuff, too, but other stuff. My father’s a notary public, he has a seal he stamps on papers to testify that they’re legitimate. He keeps it in his drawer.”

  I pulled out a pad and started to make notes. “Wayne would come by sometimes when he knew my father was out with Mr. Pang, that I would be there by myself. He’d bring these papers, and he’d make me get the seal out and stamp them, and then sign my father’s name.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Sometimes we got forms back from Customs about things they shipped, Derek and Wayne. I’d get the mail and keep them back from my father, give them to Wayne to handle. Sometimes he had me sign my father’s name to those too.”

  He had stopped crying by then but there were still shiny places on his face that glistened in the hot afternoon sun. I had him go over as many dates as he could, remembering when Wayne had come to the store and what he’d had Jimmy do. “I don’t want my dad to get in trouble because of me,” he said when he’d finished. “I never should have done it.”

  “Here’s a sad fact of life, Jimmy,” I said, sitting back on the bench. “Men will do almost anything for sex. Believe me, I’ve done a lot of stuff myself I’m not proud of. But sometimes you get so—sad and horny and I don’t know what—and all you want is somebody to be nice to you, to hold you. You do whatever you have to do to get that.”

  “You’re really nice.”

  “And I’m way too old for you,” I said. “You know there’s a center for gay teens on Waikiki, don’t you?”

  “I could never go there,” he said, registering something like shock.

  I nodded. “You could. And you should. There are people there, counselors, who can help you figure out everything you’re feeling.”

  “What’s going to happen to my dad?”

  “We’re not investigating anything other than who killed Tommy Pang,” I said. “If your dad didn’t kill him, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  He looked at his watch. “I better get back. He looks at my homework every day. If
I don’t finish by supper he gets really mad.”

  He stood up. “Thanks,” he said. Then he turned and headed back to the store.

  As he walked away, Akoni pulled the Taurus up next to me. “Man, it’s hot today,” he said when I got in. “Must be ninety degrees. Days like today, you get a trade wind and it still doesn’t do any real good.”

  I leaned my face down to the air conditioning vent and felt the cold air blast me. My polo shirt was soaked under the arms, and I could feel the tiny drops of sweat sliding down my back, but at least the cold Coke had done my throat a world of good.

  As we drove back to the station, I told him what Jimmy had said. “So Derek and Wayne were much more involved in Tommy’s businesses than either of them let on,” Akoni said finally. He looked over at me. “What about the kid? He gonna be all right?”

  “I told him to go to the center in Waikiki. Who knows, maybe it won’t take him another twenty or thirty years to figure it all out.”

  Akoni nodded but didn’t say anything for a while.

  Lobster Dinner

  We went back to the station and worked for a while, and around six we headed for the Ward Warehouse, a complex of shops between downtown and Waikiki. It’s a mini-mall, two long lines of stores facing each other on two levels with parking in the middle. To me, it’s one of the least attractive shopping centers around—it looked like a child’s play set, girders bolted together, corrugated metal sheets painted clashing colors. The Lobster Garden was a touristy Chinese restaurant on the upper level.

  The very sexy Chinese girl behind the podium wore an incongruous happy face nametag attached to the shoulder of her tight red cheongsam that read “Hi, I’m Treasure.” We showed her our ID and asked if we could talk to her.

  “Here?”

  “You could get us a table, and then come over when you get a break,” Akoni said.

  “All right. Follow me.”

  The centerpiece of the restaurant was a huge fish tank filled with live lobsters, their claws tightly banded together. Grandma and Grandpa from Des Moines could walk up to the tank with their waiter and decide which of the spiny creatures crawling around on the bottom of the tank would become that night’s dinner. It was a festive place, decorated with framed Chinese calligraphy and red paper lanterns, and it was lively, full of tourist families resting after a day’s trek to Pearl Harbor, the Kodak Hula Show, or Hilo Hattie’s aloha shirt factory.

  Treasure seated us at a four-top in the back corner, where we could talk relatively undisturbed. “At six-thirty the second hostess comes on duty,” she said. “When she gets here I can take a few minutes break, but not much, because we get a big rush by seven.”

  We ordered cashew chicken and shrimp in lobster sauce. “So you think we made any progress today?” I asked, after the waiter left.

  Akoni shrugged. “Hard to say. We learned a lot about Tommy’s businesses, but not much about why anybody would want to kill him.”

  “There’s that stuff going on at the pack and ship. Those boxes Wayne and Derek bring over. There could be something there.”

  The waiter was back with big steaming bowls of won ton soup, and we dug in. We had just finished when I saw Treasure Chen approaching us.

  Treasure came up to sit with us, and I couldn’t help noticing Akoni’s appreciative glance at her narrow waist and tight butt. It was interesting, though, that she made no impression on me beyond an aesthetic one. “I guess this is about Tommy,” she said.

  “You knew him?”

  She nodded. “I was his mistress for the last six months or so.” She paused. “That is, until he dumped me for that Mexican bitch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The night he was killed, I worked until ten, and he picked me up here. We went out to a club for a couple of hours, and that’s when he told me, he was seeing another woman. Had been seeing her, for a month or more by then. We had some words, and then I left him. Took a cab home. I don’t know where he went from there—probably to see her.”

  “Do you know her name?” Akoni asked. “Anything about her?”

  “He said her name was Luz Maria,” she said, running her right hand through her sleek black hair, cut bluntly so that it just brushed her shoulders. “She’s a Mexican woman he met through some business deal. I don’t know anything more about her.”

  Akoni and I looked at each other.

  She looked directly at me. “I didn’t want to know anything about his business. I know he owned Sally’s, that’s the place I was working when he met me, and he owned a couple of other things, but he didn’t talk about business with me and I didn’t ask him.”

  “You worked at Sally’s?” I asked.

  “She’s my auntie, Norma. I didn’t do anything but model. I’d worked there for a couple of months when I met Tommy, and he helped me get this job.”

  “Do you know what he did after he left you?” Akoni asked.

  “He got a call while we were at the club, on his cell phone. I don’t know who it was, but it was somebody he was going to meet back at his office.”

  I made a note of that. We had to get hold of the records on Tommy’s cell phone. “Do you have any idea who it might have been?” I asked. “From the tone of his voice, from anything he said? Was it a friend, a business colleague?”

  “I was pretty angry,” she said. “I mean, we were in the middle of this big dramatic scene, he’s telling me he’s fallen in love with someone else, and his cell phone rings. I got up and went to the ladies’ room.”

  I looked at Akoni. “Anything else you want to ask?”

  He shook his head. Treasure looked at her watch. “I have to get back,” she said, and stood up.

  I handed her my card and said, “If you think of anything else, will you call?”

  She took the card and nodded. “I did love him, you know. I mean, he was very good to me, up until that night, and lots of people thought he was really hard, but he had a good side. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”

  She turned and walked away fast, dodging a party of six with two babies, and two busboys carrying infant seats behind them. The waiter was right on Treasure’s heels with our dinners. We started to eat. “That Luz Maria’s got to be the same one from the black tar bust,” I said.

  “Got to be. That would mean Tommy was behind the drug deal. You think she was mad that things didn’t go as planned, maybe blamed Tommy?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “It’s a possibility. Maybe this Dong Shi-Dao will know something useful.”

  Akoni was about to answer me when the restaurant erupted into song. It was someone’s birthday at the next table, and we had to wait while the waiters sang a Chinese-accented Happy Birthday to him.

  “We’ll put him at the top of our list tomorrow,” Akoni said. He bent over his teacup, and I couldn’t help noticing the way his black hair stood up in stiff bristles at the top of his head, falling into spiky bangs on his forehead. Funny, I thought, you can work with somebody for years and never really look at him.

  I thought about the way Norma had been able to look at me and see who I was, see something others hadn’t seen, or at least that I’d tried to hide for years. I wondered what Akoni was hiding, and if it would change my opinion of him.

  I picked up my fortune cookie and cracked it open. None of the numbers looked particularly lucky to me, but then I wasn’t feeling very lucky. I flipped it over to read the fortune. “Your future will be very interesting,” it said.

  I read it out loud to Akoni. “I’ll bet.” His read, “You are talented in many fields.” He said, “Be nice if investigation was one of them,” and threw it in the ashtray.

  The next morning I called Harry at six. “Hey, brah, you want surf?”

  “Shit, Kimo what time is it?”

  “Come on. I’ll meet you at the park in fifteen minutes.”

  “Asshole,” he said, and hung up. But he was there, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The sky was gray and there were still street li
ghts on, and the water was cold when you first stepped into it. But I felt connected, and peaceful. Happy, almost.

  We didn’t speak much, just paddled out beyond the waves and then surfed back in, and passed at least an hour that way. By then the sun was up and I was feeling great. There was a little tightness in my thighs and my lower back, but it was a good feeling, reminding me I had muscles. I watched Harry off and on, saw that he was starting to gain his confidence again. It reminded me of the endless hours we’d spent as kids at that very beach, surfing waves that had seemed so much bigger then. Energy seemed to flow back and forth between us, rising up out of the salty water and the trade winds.

  We walked back through the streets of Waikiki together when we were finished. We passed a man with a bulldog on a leash. The dog was wearing a flowered hat, and two Japanese women stopped to take its picture.

  An elderly woman wearing headphones and towing a shopping cart stopped in front of us, in the middle of the sidewalk, and began to do a little dance. “Waikiki,” Harry said. “You gotta love it.”

  I picked up coffee for myself and Akoni on the way into the station, and we arrived at the same time. “Just to let you know, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at nine,” Akoni said. “You’ll have to keep things together here for an hour or so.”

  “How about we try for an appointment with Dong Shi-Dao,” I said, picking up the phone. Just to show that luck comes when you don’t particularly need it, I got through to him right away and scheduled a meeting for eleven a.m.

  I called Peggy and left a message for her, letting her know we were going to need a subpoena for Tommy Pang’s cell phone records. Akoni left a little later, and I got caught up in a bunch of Internet articles on tongs, not noticing the clock until it was almost too late. I had just enough time to make it to Dong Shi-Dao’s office downtown. I sprinted home for my truck, racing past eager families on their way to or from the beach. It was a nice day, and sprinkled among the commuters on the drive downtown were bunches of tourists, driving rented convertibles with the top down or strolling along Fort Street gawking at the high-rise office buildings. I could almost hear them commenting how our business district looks just like home, only with palm trees.