Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  Pua was a tough girl, the kind who wouldn’t be caught dead in a dress, while Frankie was chubby and feminine, with his sleek black hair pulled into a ponytail. They were sitting on mats already, so we said hi to them, then focused on the new kids, introducing ourselves and asking a couple of questions. Dakota was thirteen, a recent transplant from the mainland, who lived with his mom on the back side of Waikiki. He was haole and slim-hipped and had black hair that cascaded down his back. Naiuli was fifteen, Samoan, with the build of a sumo wrestler.

  Zoë Greenfield’s murder had me thinking about knife attacks, which I knew were more common on the streets than HPD would like to admit. So I decided we’d talk about how to defend yourself from an assailant with a knife that night.

  “Your first choice when someone threatens you with a knife should be to run away,” I said. “You can’t outrun a bullet, but you have a chance to outrun someone who’s holding a knife, especially if you can get to a more populated area.”

  I did a slow motion jog for a couple of steps, and the kids laughed. “But if you can’t get away, then you have to consider the kind of knife.” I had brought a rubber knife with me, for demonstration purposes. “Who can give me some examples of knives you’ve seen on the street? Naiuli? How about you?”

  He frowned, but said, “Ice picks. Steak knives. Switchblades.”

  “Some knives have blades on both sides,” Frankie said. “And they can be short or long.”

  I nodded. “There’s a lot of variety out there. Once you know what kind of knife, you have to think about where your assailant is in relation to your body.”

  Mike stood up with the rubber knife. “He or she could be a few feet away. Or close up, in front of you.” Mike stepped up, holding the knife toward my stomach. “On your side, or behind you.” Mike moved around as I spoke, indicating not just position of his body, but how the assailant could be holding the knife.

  “The key is to move quickly, and to act as soon as possible,” I said. “Look for a time when your attacker’s attention is slightly distracted, such as when he is talking or giving orders. Stay as far from the hand holding the knife as you can, and if possible, use something to defend yourself, like a book or a backpack.”

  Mike came at me with the rubber knife, and I jumped out of his way. “See how I’m trying to stay out of range,” I said, talking to them but focused on Mike. “If you can’t get away from your attacker, try to get hold of the hand he’s holding the knife in.”

  I reached out and grabbed Mike’s wrist. Though he fought against me, I was able to keep him from getting the knife close to me. “See what I’m doing? I’ve got my open hand pressing against the back of Mike’s hand, and I’m pushing his hand away from me. Once I’ve got the knife out of the way, I can kick or punch or scratch with my other hand.”

  We went through a couple of scenarios, and then I said, “Let’s get you guys trying this out. Pua and Frankie, come on up.”

  Pua stood up awkwardly, and I realized she was pregnant—probably about three or four months along and just starting to show. That threw me for a loop; I’d always believed she was a lesbian. But I covered, and got her and Frankie to act out the scenario I thought had happened to Zoë Greenfield—Frankie coming up behind Pua and putting the knife at her neck. Then I walked them through how to get out of it. It made me wish I’d known Zoë before her death, and been able to show her the same kind of move.

  I shook that off, and we tried a couple more exercises. After an hour we called it quits. As the kids were getting up to go I walked over to Pua. “So…” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m pregnant.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I’m almost finished with my certificate in diesel mechanics technology,” she said. “I’m going to have the baby, then go into my internship program. My auntie runs a day care program so I can leave the baby with her while I work.”

  Mike and Frankie joined us. “So, Pua,” Mike said. “You’re playing for the other team now?”

  “I wanted a baby,” she said, crossing her arms over her stomach. “There was this guy in my program and I thought we could make a pretty baby together. So I pretended to be straight for him.”

  I looked at Mike. Neither of us seemed to know what to say.

  “Pua’s going to be an awesome mom,” Frankie said. “And she said I can be the godfather.”

  “What about you?” I asked him. “You in the same program as Pua?”

  “Are you kidding? These hands are not touching car engines. I’m getting my AS in Audio Engineering Technology. I already have a part-time job with this computer company, processing audio files for computer games.”

  “Wow. I’m proud of you guys,” I said.

  Frankie put his arm in Pua’s. “Come on, Mommy. You have to take your vitamins. We want the baby to be healthy!”

  Pua smiled and squeezed up next to Frankie. “See you soon, guys,” she said.

  Mike and I didn’t talk about Pua until we were back in the Jeep on our way home. “So easy for her,” he said. “She just picked a guy and went to bed with him.”

  “She’s just a kid herself. It’s crazy.” I shook my head. “I mean, what was she thinking? She has no idea what she’s getting herself into.”

  “She’ll grow up quick,” Mike said. “It’s what our parents did, right? And their parents before them?”

  “I just never thought we’d have to talk about stuff like birth control and parenting in a gay teen group,” I said, as we swung onto the H1 toward home. I turned on the CD player, and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s sweet tenor filled the space, singing his mashup of “Aho Wela” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Mike and I both sat back and listened to the music.

  When we got home, we played with Roby for a bit, then ended up in bed, watching TV. “Straight people have it easier,” Mike said, when the program was over. “For them, making a baby together is an expression of the love they feel for each other. But no matter how much I love you, or how many times we have sex, we’re never getting a baby without bringing a third party in. I’m just not ready to change what we have forever.”

  I leaned over and kissed him. “We do have a pretty good thing going.”

  “That we do.” He pushed me back to the bed, and climbed on top of me, and we made love. I felt a momentary pang when I was cleaning up, thinking about the sperm I was washing away, wondering if I was denying some biological imperative—or maybe Mike and I were part of nature’s grand plan to avoid overpopulation.

  It was too much to think about, so I just went to sleep.

  JUVENILE RECORDS

  The next morning, Greg Oshiro called my cell when I was on my way into work. “I have some information for you about the guy Zoë was seeing,” he said.

  That was Greg. No hello, how are you, sorry for calling so early.

  “Wyatt Collins.”

  “You know about him?”

  “We talked to him yesterday afternoon.” I turned from Houghtailing onto North King, and blew my horn at a clueless tourist who thought it was okay to stop in the middle of the street to take a picture.

  “Did he tell you about his criminal record?”

  I darted around the tourist, then had to stop short for an SUV with a turn signal on, who didn’t want to bother getting into the median lane. “You dug something up?” I asked. “When can we meet? I want to see everything you’ve got.”

  “The Kope Bean downtown at eight-thirty,” he said, then disconnected.

  I didn’t even bother to park; I called Ray and arranged to meet him outside headquarters. We got to the coffee shop before Greg and staked out a corner table. Once he showed up and got his coffee, he plunked down in the big chair we’d saved for him.

  “After we talked on Tuesday night, I started calling anyone I knew who might have known Zoë. I remembered this lesbian I’d met at their house once, and she gave me the guy’s name. Wyatt Collins.”

  “We’ll need to talk to her, too,”
I said.

  He nodded. “It’s all here.” He held up a couple of photocopies. “He’s 38, divorced, no kids. He just got out of ten years in a state prison in Tennessee, for armed robbery.”

  I looked at Ray. “You got copies of his record?”

  Greg shook his head. “There’s a woman in Tennessee who posts all the parolees in the state on a website. I can’t get anything on his record without official authorization.”

  “We can do that,” I said.

  “Collins was paroled last November. It looks like he moved to Honolulu about two months ago. Here’s the address I found for him.”

  He handed Ray a piece of paper. “I knew he was bad news,” he continued. “I met him once, when I went over to see the girls. Skinny redneck with a chipped tooth and tattoos up and down his arms. Zoë just introduced him as a friend, another accountant. But he didn’t look like any accounting geek I ever met.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “That’s all I’ve got, but I’m going to keep on it.”

  “How are the girls?” Ray asked. “Did Anna tell them yet?”

  “Yeah, we told them together. They’re so little though, it’s hard to know if it’s sunk in. Anna said she needed some time on her own, so they’re with my parents right now.” He smiled. “They love those girls. It makes me so happy to see them all together. You know, like all the aggravation is worth it.”

  We went back to headquarters and set out to learn as much as we could about Wyatt Collins. Ray worked on getting copies of his police records, and I started looking into his personal life. I found the street address where he had lived as a kid, in a small town in eastern Tennessee, and used a reverse directory to get phone numbers of every house on the street.

  The first person I reached was his next door neighbor, Rebecca Czick, which she pronounced Chizzik. “I’m not surprised he’s in trouble,” she said, after I’d introduced myself as a police detective. “Honolulu, you said? That’s in Hawai’i?”

  “Yes, it is, ma’am.”

  “That Wyatt, he was always trouble,” she said, and there was a slight southern twang in her voice. “He was a nasty little bully, used to beat up other kids on the corner and in the school yard. But he started getting in serious trouble when he turned twelve.”

  “What happened then, ma’am?”

  “He started smoking cigarettes. He was real proud of it, used to sit on the porch smoking. And then I caught him in a shed in his family’s back yard when he was thirteen, drinking moonshine whiskey and making out with this trampy girl who was twenty if she was a day.”

  I started taking notes. “He was smoking marijuana when he was fifteen. I used to smell it coming across my yard. No matter how much I complained to his parents they didn’t do a thing about him. And then a year later the sheriff caught him with cocaine.”

  That meant he had a juvenile record. It had probably been sealed, but I scrawled a note and passed it to Ray.

  “He went to prison when he was nineteen, and I thank God every day he got out of this neighborhood,” she said. “I used to just live in fear of what he might do. I could have been murdered in my bed.”

  That reminded me of Zoë Greenfield, who had been in bed when the events that led to her murder began.

  “Thank you very much for your help, ma’am,” I said. “Is there anyone else in town that I should talk to?”

  She gave me a couple of names and phone numbers. “Most of the old timers, they’ve passed on,” she said. “Wyatt’s parents went to Jesus while he was in prison. And the young people, they don’t stay in town, with no work for them.”

  I worked my way down the list of neighbor houses, and then spoke to the two women Mrs. Czick had given me. They didn’t have as much specific information as she did, but they agreed that Wyatt had been a very bad boy. A woman named Mary Elizabeth Kraun told me that a girl had accused Wyatt of raping her when he was seventeen.

  “Of course, she was no better than he was,” Mrs. Kraun said. “So no one believed her. She liked the bad boys, anyway.”

  I left a message for Ellen Toyama, the woman who had given Wyatt’s name to Greg. When I hung up, Ray swiveled his chair around to face me.

  “Wyatt has an impressive record,” he said. “He went to prison at nineteen for his role as the getaway driver in a bungled bank robbery, and served six years. But almost as soon as he was released, he robbed a 7-Eleven and went back to prison.”

  “What the hell did Zoë see in him?” I asked. “He sounds like a loser from the word go.”

  “When he was in prison the second time, he passed his GED and got an associate’s degree in accounting. That must be how he came to be reading accounting journals, and came across Zoë.”

  “I wonder how many other women he was corresponding with from prison,” I said. “If we subpoena her bank records you think we’ll find that she was sending him money?”

  We went in to see Lieutenant Sampson and give him an update. His polo shirt was white, and there was a loose thread on his sleeve, but I resisted the impulse to pull it off. There’s only so far you can go with your boss.

  “So you think this guy is a solid suspect?” Sampson asked, when we’d laid it out for him. “What’s his motive?”

  I looked at Ray. “Not sure yet.”

  “The woman likes him enough to get him a job. He’s trying to go straight. I’m not saying he didn’t kill her—but you’ve got to have something more than what you’ve got if you want to charge him.”

  “We’ll talk to him again,” I said. “See what he says when we tell him we know about his record.”

  “Give it ’til Monday,” Sampson said. “It doesn’t sound like he’s going anywhere, and my overtime budget for this month is shot.”

  Ray was disappointed; I could see he’d been hoping to pick up some extra cash for his new house fund. But there’s always special duty assignments; he could spend a few hours as a security guard for the Aloha Stadium flea market, if no one else had signed up for the job already.

  I went home, walked the dog, and read until Mike got home. We went to dinner, then ended up back on the sofa watching TV. I couldn’t help wondering how our lives would change if we had a baby to look after.

  BABY DADDIES

  Saturday morning we woke up early and went for a long run around our neighborhood. I did our week’s grocery shopping while Mike repaired a shutter that had come loose. I remembered when I was a kid, our Saturdays were filled with running errands and visiting family. How many hours had my mother spent buying us new shoes, fixing meals, sewing buttons back on, or doing the million other chores that went with having a family?

  At three, Mike and I went to see Lui’s oldest son Jeffrey in a junior surf competition at Makapu’u Point. It was a gorgeous afternoon, the kind the tourist office brags about, endless sunshine and blue skies, with just a few wisps of clouds decorating the sky. An offshore breeze churned the water, and Jeffrey’s first wave was a strong one. He had a great take off from the peak, followed by a backhand bottom turn.

  “Damn, that was nice,” I said.

  “He’s got the surfing gene,” Lui bragged.

  Jeffrey rode the rail a bit, managed a decent forehand snap, and finished with a bottom turn that showed excellent control.

  The key to success in a competition is to use the most powerful part of the wave, and demonstrate as much skill with it as you can. If you play it safe, you get a low score—so I’ve always believed you go big or you go home. Jeffrey was strong, agile and fearless. He had his father’s slimmer build, and the height my brothers and I share—he was nearly six feet tall, with none of his cousin Alec’s gangliness.

  In a contest, you can get anywhere from a point-five to a ten for your ride. The surfer who rides his or her wave with the most speed, control, and power in the most critical section gets the best score; getting to your feet and riding the wave, without doing anything more, gets you a .5. Every move you manage, every bit of difficulty in the wave itself, adds to t
he score.

  Jeffrey’s maneuvers brought him a nine-point-five, which I thought was pretty damn good. I couldn’t have done that well when I was just turning sixteen.

  The whole family—my parents, and both my brothers and their wives and kids—had turned out to watch and cheer Jeffrey, even my Aunt Pua and a couple of my cousins. Aunt Pua is my mother’s youngest sister, and as different from her as two siblings can be. My mother is organized and no-nonsense; she raised us with an iron hand. Aunt Pua is an aromatherapist in Hawaii Kai, a faded flower child whose kids were allowed to run wild.

  Her youngest son, Ben, was a championship surfer, but he was out of the country at a surf match somewhere. Her daughter Selena, from her second husband, was there, with her own two sons, who both wanted to be surfers. Selena reminded me of Zoë Greenfield in a way; though they looked nothing alike, they both had rebelled against flaky parents by becoming straight-laced worker bees, though Selena was an engineer rather than an accountant.

  Jeffrey wasn’t the best surfer in the competition; a kid a year older than he was scored a couple of perfect tens, and my nephew had to settle for second place. But it was a great performance, and lots of fun to watch.

  I couldn’t help thinking, though, of my conversation with my mother Thursday night. What would a kid with my genes be like? Would he look more Japanese, like Lui, or be big and Hawaiian like Haoa? Would the haole genes that dominated in me follow through to my son?

  Would he like to surf? To read? Would he be gay, too?

  Or would the combination of my sperm and a woman’s egg result in a girl? How in the world could Mike and I raise a daughter, in a house full of testosterone? I could just imagine Mike and me sitting down to a tea party with our little daughter, her eyebrows raising at our clumsiness.

  First, Mike and I had to be on the same page about procreating. I’d seen too many kids on the street who were the children of ill-advised couplings, teen moms who just wanted someone to love, babies born in attempts to save failing marriages, children brought into households without financial stability. I sure as hell wasn’t going to commit to bringing a child into my world until I knew that Mike and I both could manage.