Sins of the Mother

by B K Johnson

  Loke was dressed in a red brocade, scooped necked sheath with a slit up the left side. It accentuated every curve as she swayed her hips in front of the star struck young man. Her dark hair shone brightly, and the little makeup she’d applied accentuated, rather than distracted from, her natural beauty. Dave followed her meekly into her kitchen, while Loke cut the stems on the roses. She asked Dave to reach around her and up to the top of the cupboard to retrieve a Waterford vase she’d placed beyond her reach on purpose, knowing this time would come. She’d had to use the stepladder to place the vase, while Dave’s greater height made it easy as pie for him to gain access to it. As he reached over her, Loke angled her body so her breasts swept enticingly across his lower chest. Dave had to catch his breath and steady himself so he could bring the vase down without dropping it.

  Totally aware of the effect she was having on him, Loke took the vase and filled it ¾ full, skillfully arranging the roses into a lovely display. She tucked the ferns and baby’s breath the florist had thoughtfully supplied around the flowers and took the vase into the dining room to place it on the already set table. As she did so, she asked Dave sweetly to please open the wine to allow it to breathe. “We don’t really need to do that with this white wine, my dear,” responded Dave, asserting what he thought was his superior knowledge. It’s not as if it is a full-bodied red,” he added somewhat professorially.

  In that moment Loke reminded herself that he might look and smell as delicious as the pork she was heating, but that she couldn’t stand it when a man treated her as if she was an idiot. Patronization was something she abhorred, and rarely suffered. She had grown so accustomed to using her feminine wiles whenever she’d had to bend a man to her will that she forgot that some of them began to think of her as just the simple little woman who would please them without thought. “If you only knew who I really was,” thought Loke to herself, “you wouldn’t begin to be so condescending.”

  Dave had grown up in China and Hong Kong, where most women, while seeming somewhat docile and subservient, were actually strong and far more intelligent than their counterparts. Many of them chose not to flaunt their intellect, but rather to keep their men attracted and bound to them through subtle manipulation. Not at all like the independent, female chauvinistic women of the United States who considered ball-busting the way to control a man. He was not unfamiliar with the female chauvinist. After all, Tommy had been his best friend since he met her at the University of Hawaii Law School several years ago. He even admired her greatly. It was just that he much preferred the smaller, weaker, dependent Asian woman when it came to satisfying his carnal, as opposed to intellectual, desires. He had no idea that he was being chauvinistic himself in considering his female companions, including Loke, as inferior and needing, as well as wanting, his masculine strength and wisdom.

  Loke ushered Dave into the dining room and held his chair for him to take his seat. ‘Please let me serve you, Dave. You are a guest in my home, and this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to take care of you. You have been so wonderful to me these last few weeks, and I have grown to be so dependent upon you. I look forward to all of our dinners and excursions with a joy I thought was long lost to me.”

  Dave gratefully sat in the plush dining room chair and surveyed the table with a critical eye, seeing the hard work Loke had gone to in presenting him with a minor work of culinary art. While she went back into the kitchen to remove the pork from the oven, his eyes following her every move, he sighed in gratitude to all the powers that be for having brought this lovely woman into his life. “Now if she’ll just serve me in bed, like she is serving me at this table, I will spend this night in heaven,” he assured himself. Laughing lightly to cover his own chagrin at his demeaning thoughts, Dave decided just to enjoy dinner without any expectations regarding dessert.

  When at last Loke seated herself, the couple enjoyed their dinner together, Dave congratulated her on the ambience of her home and the flavor of all the delicious foods. Loke encouraged him to talk about himself, and remained silent through most of the next few hours of conversation, but for commenting occasionally to spur him on to tell her more of his life. He had been born in Nanjing, China, and lived there with his mother and father for the first 10 years of his life. They had been so grateful to have a son, since the government decreed that couples in China could only have one child. Daughters were not favored, as they would go to live with their husband’s families, leaving their parents to be cared for by grandchildren or other family members. Sons, on the other hand, would always care for their parents and elders out of the immense respect engrained in them by their culture.

  Dave’s father, Wai Hung Lee, was an artist of great renown, who finally decided it was time to leave China for Hong Kong, where capitalism still had a great hold. There his watercolor paintings would sell for thousands of dollars instead of a few hundred in China, and not be confiscated by government heads as their due in a communist society. Dave did not want to leave. He loved Nanjing and his favorite haunt as a child was the Sun Yat Sen temple, where he would climb the hundred steps over and over, partly as a form of exercise, and partly as an obeisance to a man he had been taught to revere as a great leader of China, pre-Chiang Kai-shek and Chairman Mao.

  Still, he went obediently with his father and mother to Hong Kong, and adapted quite easily to the lifestyle there. For the next four years he studied and played with children of all nationalities, since Hong Kong was a very cosmopolitan capital. Dave took quite an interest in basketball, and because of his superior height, had become so well-known that he was offered an athletic scholarship to Punahou, an elite private school in Hawaii. At that time, his father was becoming more concerned with aftereffects of the reversion of Hong Kong to China’s control, since the 100 year lease to Britain had expired in 1999. As many Chinese, especially those in Hong Kong, had become accustomed to capitalism and its rewards for individual effort and talent, the requests for immigration visas to the United States were at a premium and hard to come by. The waiting list was long, indeed.

  But because Punahou wanted an outstanding basketball team, it’s principal and the wealthy men who donated to it pulled out all the stops. They managed to get visas for Dave’s mother and father as well as giving him a four-year scholarship to Punahou. They even went so far as to offer him another four-year scholarship to the University of Hawaii if he proved to be as good as they thought he would be. And so the Lees moved to Honolulu, and Dave focused his discipline on becoming the best basketball forward ever. He did not disappoint through all four years of high school, and earned his scholarship to the University of Hawaii. There, however, the competition became greater, and the one thing Dave was not that a great basketball player must be was competitive and aggressive.

  Dave had always been of an easy-going nature, and he was the one who supported other teammates’ efforts. He had no trouble making baskets, and he could move quickly and adeptly across a court. But when he would have to fight to get or retain ownership of the ball, or bump chest to chest with a defender, or elbow someone out of his way to take a shot, he just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that important to him. Combativeness was foreign to his nature. And he reveled in the introduction to the law course he took. It was a far more scholarly and considerate pursuit, to his way of thinking. He gave up the scholarship for his last two years of college, and his father, who was by now a millionaire, had no trouble paying for the prelaw courses Dave preferred. Or for sending his son to the University of Hawaii Law School, where he would meet Tommy.

  Loke feigned complete interest in Dave’s lengthy recitation of his family and personal history, offering conciliatory commentary wherever she thought appropriate. And, unbeknownst to Dave, she taped every single word.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Tommy, call me,” demanded Rod on the message he’d left on her office machine. She played back all of the sixteen messages which had been left in the time she had been to her father’s and retur
ned. Three of them were from Rod, each more insistent than the last. Two were from Trish, and two were from Nadine, both of whom iterated their concern for her and desire to get together to assure them she really was okay. The remaining nine messages were from Clay Cox and/or Geoff Gage, both trying desperately to have her return their calls and give them a progress report on the ongoing investigation into Samantha’s murder.

  “Let’s see,” she mused, “Business or pleasure.” Deciding that she really didn’t have that much more to tell Clay and Geoff until she followed through with her premonition that the brunette Samantha had visited a few blocks down the street from the Gage mansion might have some valuable information, Tommy picked up the phone and called Trish’s cell phone first. Getting her voicemail, she left a message that she was perfectly fine, and that she would be happy to meet Nadine and her for brunch in the morning. She left the same message on Nadine’s voicemail, and named the Sea Cliff Restaurant, which all three women loved.

  Expecting to reach Rod’s voicemail as well, she was startled when he picked up the line and said, “Well, it’s about time.”

  “Don’t tell me,” responded Tommy disgustedly. “You have caller ID.”

  “Yes, I do,” agreed Rod. “And why the hell don’t you have a cell phone,” he lamented.

  “I used to, when I practiced law,” Tommy replied. “It really was a blessing and I grew quite dependent upon it. I still had my car phone, my office phone, and my home phone, all with message machines. I needed to be in touch with just about everybody then, at all times of the day and night, and rarely had a moment’s peace. When I quit being a legal eagle and became a dick, I came pretty close to giving up the cell phone just because I wanted to be less available and more private. Private eye, get it.”

  While Rod laughed, she continued, “And then one day during my first year investigating, I was hired by an attorney friend of mine to tail this guy who was selling business trade secrets to the highest bidder. The employer wanted to know who he was dealing with, and needed a record to fire the guy and then charge him with breach of contract and intellectual property espionage. They also intended to name the purchasers of the information as codefendants.”

  “Anyway, I’d followed this crook into several different restaurants and bars where he met his contacts. I’d changed my appearance a few times and was trying to keep a low profile so he wouldn’t make me. Here we were, in a quiet dining room at the Fairmont, and there weren’t very many guests. I sat by myself against the wall, trying to shrink behind a fake potted fichus, and my damn cell phone started bleeping so loud every customer in the place turned to look in my direction. Of course, the dude looked, too, and that made the next few days tailing him a very complicated process. So I got rid of the cell phone the next day.”

  “Silly girl, you could’ve just turned it off, you know,” chided Rod gently.

  “Sure I knew that, you dork,” sniffed Tommy. “I used to do it all the time when I had court appearances. The difference is, when you are not in control of when and where you are going at a moment’s notice, it is really easy to forget to keep turning it off and on. That’s what I’d done when I got to the Fairmont. I just forgot.”

  “Okay, sweetheart, you made your point, and I apologize for wanting you to have a cell phone on you just so I can keep bugging you to get you to call me. Why have you not been returning my calls?” questioned Rod. “Did I do or say something wrong?”

  “Of course, not, honey,” soothed Tommy. “With this Gage murder investigation, which has taken up most of my waking hours, and add my Dad’s illness and family responsibilities to that, I suffer from sheer exhaustion. I just didn’t feel like talking to one more person, no matter how much I might care about ‘em. I didn’t return either Trish’s or Nadine’s calls until today, if that makes you feel any better. And Dave Lee out in Honolulu is just about ready to call our friendship quits, since I have been so incommunicado.”

  “All right,” Rod relented. “But now that I have you on the phone, I want to see you even more. It’s been two weeks since our sailing date.”

  “What, horny again already?” teased Tommy.

  “Seriously, Tommy, you mean a great deal more to me than a casual and occasional lay. I would like to take our relationship to a much higher plane, but I can’t seem to get a commitment out of you to building a relationship of any kind,” Rod pestered.

  “Rod, I really like you and enjoy our time together immensely, especially the sex,” she sighed. “And you’re right. I’m just not ready to commit to a relationship with you right now.”

  “Is it just because I’m rich and you consider me a dilettante?” opined Rod.

  “I admit that was part of it at first, until I realized how hard you work and how willing you are to travel to pursue your own business. But we’re both just really too busy working to make the time needed for a real team effort,” cajoled Tommy. “And you travel far too much for any kind of physical commitment.”

  “I seriously dispute that,” disagreed Rod. “When a person is too busy to maintain their friendships and explore the possibility of a committed relationship, he or she’s got life’s priorities all wrong. I may travel a lot, but I always maintain contact with my friends.”

  “Okay, Rod. You got me. Now that you’ve made me feel incredibly guilty about not being a good friend or proper lover, and have me questioning what really is important to me, I’m sufficiently malleable for you to convince me to meet you somewhere, right now. But I will take my car, so I can get back to work as soon as we’ve done whatever we’re supposed to do to.”

  With that, they agreed to meet for dinner in one hour at Tommy’s Joint. Rod knew better than to pressure Tommy into coming over to his place, and was willing to take whatever time she had available for him. He didn’t know why, but she seemed to dominate a lot of his thoughts. Sure, she was beautiful, had a great athletic body and was a scintillating partner in bed. But she was difficult, and moody, and intense. And he was sure that she really didn’t have a very good opinion of the male population. He was going to do his damnedest to find out what had gone on in her early years that so soured her on a male/female relationship.

  Rod had met her ex, Robert Sheldon, at several political functions. He’d found him to be handsome, articulate, and charismatic, and had no difficulty encouraging his family to support Robert’s candidacy. But he suspected that Robert had wounded Tommy in some irrevocable way. And Rod knew for a fact that Tommy had not had a whole lot of male companions until after the divorce. She’d been pretty slutty while she was drinking too heavily, but he didn’t hold those one-night stands against her. He understood she’d been trying to wrestle with her demons and punish herself for her daughter’s death.

  Rod himself had made it a practice to limit himself to safe sex encounters that lasted less than a whole evening. In his case, it was because he always had to wonder if the woman in bed with him wasn’t more interested in his family money than in his good looks, strong body, or superb skill in bringing a woman to orgasm before meeting his own needs. With Tommy, who looked down her nose at the wealthy and almost regarded them contemptuously, Rod never had to doubt her sincerity. She was the only woman he’d ever met whom he had to wheedle into being with him.

  Maybe, he thought to himself, that was part of the attraction. It wasn’t that he always pursued what he couldn’t have, although there was some of that in his psyche. It was more that he really reveled in coaxing Tommy into having some fun and learning to relax a little. She was so driven, whatever her career, that Rod cherished being the one to make her laugh and play and enjoy some down time. It made his own experience that much more pleasant, knowing that he’d shared something more intimate than just lovemaking. Just one of her smiles, which lit up her entire face, was worth every effort he made. He was a determined man, and Tommy had become his next project, and well as his motivating force. He was going to have to work a little harder to get her to be as interested in him as he was in h
er. But he had never shied away from a little work, regardless of the fact that he never had to work another day in his life to support an entire legion of paramours. Poor Tommy was doomed, whether she knew it or not.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Rod and Tommy had to wait quite a while for a table at Tommy’s Joint. It was one of the landmarks in San Francisco, and very popular well before Tommy was born. They opted to wait until one of the little tables cleared before they ordered their food. Rod was very solicitous of Tommy’s desire to limit her time sitting at bars, whether or not the temptation to drink alcohol reared its ugly head. In the interim they chatted amiably about their respective weeks, and looked at the appetizing array of roasted meats scenting the entire restaurant with delectable smells.

  Tommy hadn’t realized how hungry she was, and while Rod went to claim a table for them, she ordered the house special for both of them. When she got to the register, Rod waved her over to the table and paid for their slabs of roast beef with garlic mashed potatoes and gravy and salads. They already had their root beers, and Tommy thought to herself that the last time she went out for a nice dinner it was for prime rib. And that was recently. Thank goodness she worked out every day at the gym or running up and down the hills of San Francisco!

  While they ate they surreptitiously eyed each other. Tommy noticed Rod’s broad chest swelling with every breath, and Rod desperately tried not to stare at Tommy’s breasts peeking up over her low-necked sweater. Rod asked her if she would like to go to Hawaii with him the following week, as he was opening up another surf shop in the North Shore of Oahu. She really wished she could go, especially since she’d gone with Rod before to his family’s home in prestigious Black Point on Oahu. She certainly enjoyed the luxurious residence, as well as Rod’s attention. So much for her antipathy of the rich and the amenities they could afford.