Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  Sunday we met Gunter for brunch in Waikiki. The beautiful weather had moved on, as it often does, and a cold front had come in. Not too cold, you understand, just enough so that we had to bring out the long-sleeved shirts and sit indoors to eat. Bruddah Norm was singing “We are Hawaiian” on the loudspeakers.

  As if the universe was conspiring to keep the idea of child-rearing in the air, Gunter was full of news of a mutual friend who had just discovered that he was a father. “Can you just imagine?” Gunter said, after we’d ordered. “Out of the blue, this girl he slept with in college calls him up and tells him he has a kid.”

  We were drinking mimosas at a window table, and the restaurant buzzed around us, a combination of gay men and vacationing tourists. When a man passed us wearing a t-shirt that read “I’m shy, but I have a big dick,” I saw Gunter try to catch his eye. Fake flower leis hung from the ceilings, and the walls were hung with reproductions of hapa-haole music covers, the ones from the twenties and thirties with a beautiful island girl strumming a ukulele.

  “Is he sure it’s his?” Mike asked.

  “She wants him to have his blood tested,” Gunter said. “The kid is twelve or thirteen, and he has some kind of a blood disease. He needs a transfusion from a close relative who matches him, and no one in her family will work.”

  “Wow,” I said. “What a way to find out.”

  “Yeah. He’s flying to Chicago tomorrow for the testing.”

  The waiter, a slim-hipped blond with a flirty manner that I was sure brought in big tips, delivered our platters. Gunter was having an egg-white omelet with a side of steamed vegetables. “A boy’s got to watch his figure,” he said. “Now you two, you can get fat together and no one will mind.”

  “I’ll mind if Kimo gets fat.” Mike poked my stomach. “We both need to do some more exercise.”

  “Speak for yourself, big boy,” I said.

  Neither of us were heavy—but settled domesticity, regular meals together, and a lack of physical activity were definitely adding a couple of pounds. But I still ordered a plate of chocolate chip pancakes with a side of bacon, and Mike had a sausage, onion and pepper scramble with home fries.

  “So, Kimo,” Gunter said, a sly grin on his face. “You ever worry you’ll get a phone call like that?”

  Mike looked over at me. He knew that I’d slept with a lot of girls before coming out. And I knew that he’d never been with a woman, despite staying in the closet for years before he met me.

  I shrugged. “I was always pretty careful. Haoa got a girl pregnant when he was in high school, and that made my folks hyper-conscious. From the time I was fourteen or so, my father was leaving condoms in my room.”

  “You never told me that about Haoa,” Mike said. “What happened?”

  “The girl had an abortion. She was sweet, but kind of lost. Beautiful voice, though. Eventually she moved to Vegas to become a singer.”

  “Wow,” Mike said. “That experience must have been tough for your brother.”

  “This is Haoa we’re talking about. He’s not exactly Mr. Sensitive now, and he sure as hell wasn’t when he was seventeen.”

  “Still. You see how he loves his kids. I wonder if he ever thinks about that one.”

  “Somebody wants to be a daddy,” Gunter said.

  “We’ve been talking,” Mike said.

  I was surprised he’d bring it up again—and with Gunter there. It was too public a space, and I hadn’t figured out where I stood on the issue.

  “You thinking turkey baster, or doing it the old fashioned way?” Gunter asked.

  Trust Gunter to get right to the nitty gritty. “We’re not even at that stage yet,” I said.

  The waiter kept stopping by to see how we were doing and flirt with Gunter, so there was no way we could have a serious conversation. The subject seemed to hang in the air the rest of the day, though neither Mike nor I addressed it. I didn’t even want to talk about Zoë Greenfield’s murder, because every time I thought of her I remembered those two little girls and wondered what was going to happen to them.

  Mike and I went for another run in the afternoon, working off that big brunch, and everywhere where we ran we saw families and kids. Sometimes they were having fun, but other times babies were crying or parents were yelling.

  That was life, for sure. But was it going to be our life?

  MOVING TO THE MAINLAND

  Monday morning, Ray and I drove back out to Hawai’i Kai to talk to Wyatt Collins again. He wasn’t happy to see us. “Look, I told you everything the other day,” he said. “I didn’t kill Zoë.”

  The Chinese receptionist, the one with the limited English, seemed to know enough to understand what Wyatt had said. “Let’s go outside,” I said.

  “No. If you don’t have a warrant for my arrest, then I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Actually, we can take you down to the station,” I said. “We can hold you for twenty-four hours without charging you. But then, you probably already know that, don’t you?”

  In the background I saw the receptionist on the phone, speaking to someone. “This is harassment,” Wyatt said.

  “Your employers here know about you?” I asked. “Or did Zoë fudge the facts a little?”

  An elegant young Chinese woman stepped through the door from the main office into the reception area. “I’m Dr. Zenshen,” she said, with a heavy accent. “How can we help you gentlemen today?”

  She was probably in her early thirties, slim and pretty, in a well-tailored gray business suit. She wore funky glasses with multicolored frames, and her black hair hung loosely to her shoulders.

  I showed her my ID. “We have some questions for Mr. Collins,” I said. “About a personal matter.”

  She looked to Wyatt, who stood with his feet apart, his arms crossed in a posture of defiance. “Why don’t you use our conference room.” She opened the door back into the office, and motioned us to follow her.

  Wyatt recognized that he didn’t have any choice, and followed her sullenly, Ray and me behind him. “Please let me know if I can help you in any way,” she said, opening the door to a large room that faced the waterway behind the building.

  She closed the door as she left, and Wyatt turned to look at us.

  “Why won’t you leave me alone?” he asked, the southern twang in his voice getting stronger. “I told you everything I know.”

  “Well, that’s not really true,” I said, taking a seat across from Wyatt at the round conference table. Ray sat next to me. “You didn’t tell us about your record.”

  “Not relevant.”

  “We’ll be the judge of what’s relevant and what’s not,” I said. “Let’s start with how you met Zoë. You started corresponding with her when you were in prison?”

  “It’s not like what you’re thinking. I wanted to turn my life around. I never did so well in school, because the teachers hated me. They thought I was some low-class loser who deserved to fail. But I got my GED and the teachers in prison said that I had a brain, and a head for numbers.”

  I nodded and smiled. “Go on.”

  “So I got my associate’s degree in accounting. I had a 4.0, man. I was good. But nobody would give me a job when I got out because of my record.”

  “It’s tough, I agree,” I said.

  “So I was emailing back and forth with Zoë all that time. We got to be friends, you know? There weren’t a lot of people in her life she could depend on. She invited me to come out here, said she could help me get a job.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “She was a good person. But everybody around her was taking advantage of her. That ex-girlfriend, Anna. She was always whining to Zoë about money. And that loser guy, Greg. He wanted more time with the girls, and Zoë had to fight to keep her time with them.”

  He blew out a breath. “She was having a lot of problems at work, too. Her boss is a fool and his secretary is a bitch. She was always making problems for Zoë. We started talking about movi
ng to the mainland, to get away from all of them. We could go to California, she said. She could get a job there easy, and I’d help out with the girls until we could find something for me.”

  “Anna and Greg probably wouldn’t like that,” I said.

  “You should have seen Anna when Zoë told her. She went ballistic. I swear, I’ve seen tough guys, but I was scared of her.”

  “Did she tell Greg, too?” I asked.

  “I think so. I only met the guy once, so I can’t say for sure.”

  He looked at us. “Come on, guys, I need this job. Especially without Zoë around, I’m on my own here. I lose this, I’m going back to Tennessee, and I’m up shit creek.”

  “We’re not looking to hang you out to dry, Wyatt,” I said. “But if we find you left anything else out, or we find some evidence that you killed Zoë Greenfield, we’ll be back.”

  “Then I’ll never see you again,” Wyatt said, standing up.

  “He’s a sharp guy,” Ray said, as we walked back through the underground garage to his Highlander. “He shifted suspicion very neatly away from him and onto Anna and Greg.”

  “Yeah, a nice long time in prison gives you lots of practice talking to cops and guards. I’m not willing to wipe him off the suspect list, but I can’t see his motive. I mean, Zoë helped him find a job, she trusted him, she was ready to move things forward. He’s not going to get many chances like that. And he seems smart enough to recognize that.”

  “But he’s got a violent past,” Ray said. “Suppose they had an argument Sunday night and he snapped. Then he tried to cover it up by making it look like a home invasion.”

  “I wonder if he used a knife in any of his past crimes?” I opened my netbook and made notes about our interview with Wyatt. As Ray drove, I flipped through the files and found Wyatt’s arrest record for the convenience store robbery that had sent him to prison the second time. The weapon there was a knife; he’d held it to the clerk’s neck while the guy pulled the cash out of the drawer.

  Accidentally or on purpose, Wyatt’s hand had slipped, and the clerk’s neck had been cut, though not fatally. That had added extra time to Wyatt’s sentence. It also showed us that he liked knives.

  My cell rang. “You guys want to stop by here?” Harry asked. “I’ve pulled up a couple of emails I want to show you.”

  We were already on the H1, so it was easy to turn mauka at the Punahou Street exit and climb the hill to Harry’s house.

  “Hey, brah, howzit?” I asked, when he met us at the front door.

  “Don’t ask. Brandon has decided he doesn’t want to go to school any more. Every morning it’s a major battle, and every afternoon we have to fight with him to get him to do his homework.”

  “What’s behind it?” I asked. “Something going wrong at school?”

  “He flunked a test last week,” Harry said, sitting back down at his computer. “So he decided that he’s stupid and he doesn’t need to go to school any more. He says he wants to be a motorcycle mechanic instead. We’re working on it, but it’s an uphill struggle.”

  “Better you than me, brah. So what have you got?”

  He showed us some printouts of emails that supported what Wyatt had said—Zoë had been emailing people about jobs in California. A couple of messages were obviously to college friends and business acquaintances, and at least two emails attached copies of her resume and cover letters for accounting jobs, one in San Francisco and the other in Silicon Valley.

  “Anything in there between Zoë and Anna, or Zoë and Greg?” I asked. “To prove that they knew she was considering moving?”

  Harry looked up. “You think one of them might have killed her?”

  “I don’t know. But neither Greg nor Anna had a strong legal claim on those kids. If Zoë took them to the mainland, I don’t think either could have convinced the courts to intervene.”

  “And remember, Greg told us the other day that his parents love the girls,” Ray added.

  “He did really want to have them,” I agreed. “And he seems to love them a lot.”

  “Anna too,” Ray said. “I saw her with them when we went to her apartment. You don’t want to get in the way of a mom with her kids.”

  “Even though she wasn’t the biological mom,” I put in.

  Harry hunted through Zoë’s email box, finding messages to both Anna and Greg. The message to Anna read, “I am tired of your constant begging and harassment. If you don’t ease up I am going to take the girls and you will never see them again.”

  “That must have made Anna crazy,” I said.

  The message to Greg was pretty strong as well. “Remember, you don’t have any legal standing in whatever Anna and I do,” Zoë wrote. “I believe that the girls need to know their father, so I don’t intend to shut you out. But I have to do what is best for me and them.”

  I called Anna’s cell, hoping to catch her, but the number she had given me was disconnected. “That’s weird. Why would she change numbers now?”

  “Maybe because she’s fleeing from the police,” Harry suggested.

  “Thanks, brah. Any luck on getting into that online backup you said Zoë had?”

  “I’m working on it. Gonna take at least another day or two, by the time I run through all the possible password combinations.”

  “Let’s go past Anna’s apartment anyway,” I said to Ray as we left Harry’s. “See if we can get a lead on where she is.”

  There was no answer at her door, but the old lady next door stuck her head out when she heard us banging. “She’s gone. Moved out yesterday.”

  “She had the girls with her?” I asked.

  The woman shook her head. “I didn’t see them.” She still had a key to the apartment door, and she let us in. The furniture was all there, and the kids’ toys and clothes, but all Anna Yang’s clothes were gone.

  “That moves Anna up on the suspect list,” I said to Ray as we left the building. “Where do you think she went?”

  “She doesn’t have any family here, does she?”

  I shook my head. “She told us that neighbor was like her adopted grandmother. Any other family she has is back in China.”

  “Could she be running scared? Maybe she knows more about why Zoë was killed than she let on, and she’s gone into hiding.”

  “Or she’s worried we’ll get on to her, and she’s on the run.”

  “All possibilities,” Ray said.

  On our way back to headquarters, I called Greg. He said his parents still had the girls, and he was running down a story. He promised to get back to me later in the day, when he had a couple of minutes to talk.

  We made one more stop, at the FBI office on Ala Moana. Francisco Salinas had worked with us in the past, and he owed both of us a couple of favors. He was a tall dark-haired haole with a military-short hair cut and navy suit and white shirt, the Cuban-American edition of standard FBI guy.

  “I hope you’re not bringing me more trouble,” he said, as he led us back to his office. “I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.”

  “Just need a small favor,” I said.

  We got to his office and he raised his eyebrows.

  “Really. Just a quick record check. You can get into the INS database, can’t you?”

  He walked into his office and got behind his desk. “What’s this about?”

  I explained about Anna Yang. “She moved out of her apartment yesterday and shut off her cell phone. We just want to know if she left the country.”

  He typed for a few minutes, swore once, and then typed again. “What was the name again?”

  “Anna Yang.”

  “There are a lot of them. Got a social security number?”

  “Address.” I gave it to him.

  “No matches,” he said, after a couple of minutes. “Any other identifiers?”

  We went back over what we knew of Anna. “Let me check expired student visas.” Salinas typed again. “OK, here she is. She entered the country on a F-1 visa eight years ag
o. She was allowed to stay in the US for as long as it took for her to complete her course of study. You said she went to UH?”

  “Yup.”

  He typed some more. “I swear, if I had a dollar for every different password I have, I could retire.” He pulled an address book out of his jacket pocket and paged through it. He typed something in, then said, “OK. She graduated from UH in 2001 with an MFA in painting. That means she should have left within 60 days after graduation.”

  He jumped back to his previous screen. “There’s no record that she ever left the country, or applied for any other paperwork. We’ve been cracking down since 9/11, of course, but it looks like she managed to slip through the cracks. Now that she’s out of status, she’s subject to immediate deportation.”

  “What about if she has kids who were born in the US?” I asked.

  “She’s not the birth mother,” Ray said.

  “But she’s the only one they’ve got now.”

  “Hard to say,” Salinas said. “She’d have to go before an immigration judge and plead her case. But the father’s a U.S. citizen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I don’t see much chance for her.”

  He agreed to put an alert out for all border guards, in case Anna tried to leave the country. Beyond that, there wasn’t much he could do to help. Which meant we were on our own, as usual.

  MARRIAGE MATTERS

  We got back to headquarters around noon and brought Lieutenant Sampson up to date. “The partner and Greg Oshiro both have motives,” Sampson said. “You need to talk to both of them again.”

  “Anna Yang is in the wind,” Ray said. “But she’s a mother. She’s going to check on those girls sooner or later. We’re talking to Greg later, and we’ll make sure Greg knows we’re looking for her.”

  “It’s been a week. Your trail is getting colder every day. I want to see some results soon.”