Zero Break

by Neil Plakcy

  I used a pair of tongs to grab some barbecue spare ribs, ladled some salad on my plate, and took a bowl full of won ton soup. We paid the cashier, a wizened old woman with missing teeth, and sat at a table by the front window.

  As we ate, we watched the passing parade of trucks, tourists and teenagers. “Does it mean that I’m getting old because I want to go out there and pull that kid’s pants up to his waist?” I asked, nodding to a Hawaiian guy who thought he was some kind of rap star, with jeans down to his hips, showing off six inches of plaid boxer shorts.

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “Pretty soon you’ll be listening to Don Ho sing “Tiny Bubbles” and calling guys my age, Sonny.”

  “You’re a year younger than I am.”

  Ray speared a hunk of honey chicken. “Your point is?”

  “By the time my dad was my age, he was married with two kids and me on the way. He was a foreman for Amfac, one of the biggest companies in the state, and he was almost ready to start his own business. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, all that pressure, all those people depending on him.”

  “Our generation is definitely spoiled,” Ray said. “My dad was like yours. He worked his ass off trying to provide for me and my brothers and sisters. You think two kids was bad; imagine having six.”

  We finished eating, and pushed the trays away from us. “So where do we go from here?” I asked. “I guess we start with the people Zoë worked with.”

  “But how do we get in there without tipping them off?”

  “Gladys Yuu already knows something’s up,” I said. “You saw the way she was looking at us when we checked out Miriam’s cubicle. I say we ask her for a list of employees. She’s the secretary, after all. She’d be the logical choice.”

  When we got back to the office, I called Gladys and asked her to put together a list of those who worked with Zoë and Miriam. “Why?” she asked. “I thought Zoë was killed in a break-in and Miriam died in a car crash.”

  “Just crossing all the t’s and dotting the i’s,” I said. “You know what bureaucracy is.”

  I guess she did, because she faxed us a list a half hour later. We started with Franklin Nishimura, who was a career civil servant, the kind who kept his head down, did his work, and made the wheels of state government move forward. We split up the databases, and about an hour later we compared notes. “Salary eighty-K a year,” I said. “Owns a house in Aiea, wife and two sons, Jeremy and Jonathan. Nothing jumps out at me.”

  “Jeremy Nishimura has a record,” Ray said. “Possession, possession with intent to distribute, public intoxication, and so on.”

  I made a note. “If we were just looking at Zoë, I could see Jeremy. He meets this single woman who works for his dad, thinks her house could be easy pickings. But Miriam?”

  “Jeremy’s been in and out of rehab,” Ray said. “Could be Franklin needs some cash to send him someplace expensive, get him clean.”

  “Could be.”

  We went down the list. Nishimura had an associate director below him, Maun Li, and then three senior analysts: Zoë Greenfield, Winston Cheng, and Donna Paulson. Maun Li and Donna Paulson raised no red flags, but Winston Cheng made fifty grand a year and lived in Black Point, one of Honolulu’s most expensive neighborhoods.

  That in itself was suspicious. Then add to that the BMW 7 series he drove, and you had a guy who looked like he was living above his means. That’s always a red flag when you are researching suspects. We made a note to look into his background more carefully.

  There were also two junior analysts—Miriam Rose and Alan Stark—and two secretaries, Gladys Yuu and Penny Stillwater.

  While researching Alan Stark, I stumbled across a picture of him at an official function. He looked very familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was a heavyset haole in his late twenties, with a round, unlined face. I tried Googling his name, but didn’t come up with anything. But I was sure I knew him. Was he gay? I knew I’d never dated him, but perhaps I’d run into him at a party.

  I called Gunter, who never forgets a trick. “You know a guy named Alan Stark? Big guy, baby face?”

  “You mean Helen Wheels?”

  “That’s it! I knew I recognized him but I couldn’t place him.”

  Helen Wheels was a plus-size drag queen who MC’d events in various gay bars. His drag persona was a roller derby queen, complete with skates, knee pads, bouffant hair, and tight, sequined Capri pants. He moved around pretty well for a big guy and did a passable lip-synch to seventies pop hits.

  Could he be a blackmail target, I wondered? Nishimura appeared like a pretty straight-laced guy; suppose he didn’t approve of drag queens, and someone had threatened Alan with exposure?

  Ray and I split up the two secretaries, Gladys and Penny. I got Penny, a 38-year-old divorced mother of a six-year-old son with autism. She lived in a rental apartment in Halawa Valley and had her son in a private school. That had to be expensive.

  I told Ray. “You find anything interesting on Gladys?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “She’s divorced, lives near UH with her eighty-year-old mother.”

  “Look like she needs money?”

  “Not that I can tell. No kids, no mortgage.”

  We decided that the three people who needed more investigation were Franklin Nishimura, Winston Cheng, and Alan Stark, aka Helen Wheels. I discovered that Helen was the MC for a wet jockey short competition at the Rod and Reel Club, a gay bar in Waikiki, that night. “I’ll take that one.”

  “Yeah, like I was going to fight you for it,” Ray said. “I’ll go out to Aiea and nose around Nishimura’s house, see if the neighbors have anything to say.”

  “We’ll do Winston Cheng together. I know a great deli in Black Point. We’ll meet up there tomorrow morning for coffee and malasadas and then check out Cheng’s place.”

  Gunter was working until nine, and I offered to buy him a beer if he’d go with me to the Rod and Reel Club when he got off. “I don’t know,” he said. “You might cramp my style.”

  “It would take a crowbar to cramp your style.”

  “Is that a crowbar in your pants or are you just glad to see me?” He laughed. “You can park in my driveway and we’ll walk over together. Give me a few minutes to get home from work and get changed, though.”

  I was cooking up a quick stir-fry when I told Mike I was going out that night. He was not happy that I was going to the Rod and Reel Club. “You’re not going to take your pants off, are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. You think I could win a wet jockey short competition?”

  “If Gunter wasn’t such a tattletale, I’d worry about you,” he said, draining the rice and portioning it out between us. “But I know that he’ll tell me whatever you do.”

  “You could always come with us.”

  “I have a date. Me and Roby and the TiVo.”

  I got to Gunter’s about nine-thirty and rang the bell of the single-story house he shares with an ever-changing series of roommates. When he answered he was naked.

  Now, that’s not unusual. Gunter’s life is a clothing-optional one. He wears a uniform to work, and then as little as he can get away with everywhere else. He is six-three, rail thin, and muscular, with a blond buzz cut. Before I met Mike, Gunter and I had fooled around occasionally, and I knew that he was an imaginative, athletic lover, with a dick that would have pleased any size queen.

  “I think you need to wear jockey shorts if you want to enter a wet jockey short competition,” I said.

  “I need your advice. Come on in.”

  I am usually the last guy Gunter asks for fashion advice. I live in aloha shorts, khakis and deck shoes. I wear boxers, usually in wild patterns, like ice cream cones, flamingoes, or fire trucks. Gunter long ago gave up trying to make me over.

  I followed his tight, hairless butt across the living room and into his bedroom. “So which do you think?” he asked, holding up a pair of bright red jockey shorts. “These? Or these?”

 
The second pair were barely-there bikini bottoms. “I can’t tell without seeing them on you,” I said, sprawling on his bed. “Try them on.”

  There was a method to my madness. My dick had sprung to attention as soon as Gunter answered the door, and I figured that I could adjust myself more surreptitiously if I did it while falling to his bed. And getting his dick under cover would only help.

  We decided on the bikini bottoms. Gunter pulled on shorts, Crocs, and a t-shirt that read “I’m not glad to see you. I just have a big dick.”

  When we got to the Rod and Reel Club, Helen Wheels was lip-synching to “My Baby Takes the Morning Train,” by Sheena Easton, including some very impressive kicks and spins. I admired her ability to stay balanced on those roller blades, especially in such tight pants.

  Helen took a break after that, announcing that the wet jockey short competition would be starting at ten out on the patio. “We’ll see if we can get you all wet!” she said.

  The house music picked up, and I waved her over as she was leaving the stage. She skated to a hard stop and dropped into a chair at our table with a boom. “Well, well,” she said. “Officer Hot and his sexy sidekick.”

  “Detective Hot, if you don’t mind. You want something to drink?”

  “I would kill for a lemonade. But then you’d probably arrest me, wouldn’t you?”

  I handed Gunter a twenty and asked him to get Helen a drink. “I’ll make this quick,” I said, when Gunter had left. The music had changed to Katy Perry singing about kissing a girl—something I thought most of the men in the Rod and Reel Club had never done. “I need to talk to you about your office.”

  “You’re making me frown,” Helen said. “That’s not good for my face.”

  “You knew Zoë Greenfield?”

  He nodded. “Poor thing. I heard somebody broke into her house and killed her.”

  “That’s true. You know anything more about it?”

  He backed his chair away. “What do you mean?”

  “They know about you at work?” I asked. “I mean, about your sideline?”

  He laughed. “Are you kidding? Frankie loves me. He even got me a gig at this Japanese New Year party.” He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t think…”

  I shrugged. “Just chasing down leads. You know she was friends with Miriam Rose, right?”

  “Oh, sure.” His eyes widened as Gunter returned with his lemonade. “Oh, my God!” he said. “You mean what happened to Miriam wasn’t an accident?”

  “I don’t think so. Zoë ever say anything to you about irregularities? Companies reporting incorrect data?”

  Alan had turned pale under his makeup. “She wasn’t the chatty type. The only one she talked to in the office was Miriam. I mean, yeah, we’d say hello, how was your weekend, that kind of thing. But I work on overall energy conservation statistics, and she worked on alternatives. We didn’t overlap.”

  “Don’t tell anybody I was talking to you, all right?” I said. “Not yet, at least.”

  “Am I in danger? I have some vacation time coming. I could just stop going to work.”

  “If you don’t know anything, there’s no reason to worry. But is there anybody in the office you think I should look at? Anybody who’s in a position to fudge statistics?”

  “I work with those people,” he said, his voice going up an octave. “You think somebody in my office killed Zoë and Miriam?”

  “Keep your voice down and your wig on, Helen. Like I said, I’m just chasing down leads.”

  “The only person in that office who’s really evil is Gladys,” Alan said. “She’s like this malevolent dragon, with her tail curled around Franklin. God forbid you should ever need anything from her. Just getting her to process expense reimbursements is a nightmare.”

  Fred, the bartender, was waving at Helen. “I’ve got to go on. Oh my God, I’m so upset. I can’t believe somebody in my office might be a killer.”

  “Come on, sweetie,” Gunter said, standing up and extending his hand to Helen. “The show must go on, right? And the pants must come off.”

  Helen took Gunter’s hand and rose to his feet, wobbling on his roller blades. He looked down at me. “You competing?”

  “Sorry. I retired from competition years ago. But Gunter will represent.”

  Helen stole a glance down at Gunter’s endowment, and some of the color came back to her cheeks. “Yes, I guess he will. Well, come on, then, honey, let’s get the hose out.”

  “I thought we were keeping our shorts on,” Gunter said.

  Helen giggled, and the two of them went off to the patio. I took my beer outside and watched Helen hose down Gunter and a half-dozen other guys. After Gunter had been crowned the champion, I left the bar and walked back alone to where I’d parked at his house; he was enjoying his celebrity too much to drag him away.

  If Alan Stark wasn’t a good suspect, that narrowed the field. I just hoped that I hadn’t put him in danger by talking to him.

  NORTH SHORE

  Mike was waiting up for me when I got home, sitting in bed with his reading glasses and a fire magazine, Roby on the floor next to him. I leaned over to kiss his forehead, and he took my head and brought it down so that we could lock lips. “Mmm,” I said as I pulled away. “Did you miss me?”

  “I was thinking of you,” he said, pulling back the covers and showing me just how much he had me on his mind. “You and that wet jockey short competition.”

  “Don’t worry, I dried off before I got into the Jeep,” I said, pulling my shirt off and tossing it toward the laundry hamper.

  “You did not,” he said.

  “Dry off?”

  “You did not let them hose you down in your jockey shorts,” he said, closing the magazine and putting his reading glasses on the bedside table.

  I kicked off my deck shoes and shucked my khakis, turning my boxer-clad butt toward Mike and hanging the pants up in the closet. “Are you kidding?” I said. “You think I could compete with Gunter?”

  “Gunter entered the contest?”

  I turned back to him and dropped my shorts. I was hard already. “Gunter won the contest.”

  “Come here, you,” he said, turning on his side and reaching around to my butt to pull me closer to him. He licked his tongue up the length of my dick, and my whole body shivered with anticipation.

  We made love for a while, in various positions and combinations, and then we relaxed next to each other in the king-sized bed. “You could have won that contest,” Mike said, resting one hand on my chest.

  “That’s sweet. But only if you were the judge.”

  “We could always run our own little contest. In the back yard, some sunny Saturday afternoon.”

  I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I’d get to hose you down?” I said. “I’m up for that.”

  He looked down the length of my body. “You’re up for something, all right.”

  And I was.

    

  The next morning, I met Ray at the deli in Black Point, where we left his Highlander and rode up in the Jeep to Winston Cheng’s house, surrounded by black iron gates. We parked across the street, under the shade of a spreading kiawe tree, and while we waited for him to leave the house on his way to work, we traded information. Ray had gone around Franklin Nishimura’s neighborhood the night before with Julie, pretending that they were considering moving into the area.

  “We spoke to a bunch of the neighbors. This one lady was very forthcoming on the Nishimuras.”

  “Got to love a gossip,” I said.

  “Yeah. She went on about the boy with the drug problems, but it turns out he’s in a residential program in California, something state-run. Everybody else only had good things to say.”

  I told him about Alan Stark’s relationship with his boss. “So that’s a dead end, too.”

  Winston Cheng’s garage door opened, and the BMW 7 series convertible backed down the driveway, with the top down. He was waiting for the gate to open behind him
when a dark-haired woman opened the front door and stepped out. “You forgot this!” she called, holding out a briefcase.

  Ray whistled softly. “What a babe.”

  The woman was probably ten years older than either of us, but the years had been very kind to her. She had a luscious figure, wrapped in a light blue sheath that hugged every curve, and wore high heels that accented her long legs.

  Cheng parked the convertible, leaving it running, and walked up to get the briefcase. “Thanks, sweetheart,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  “Don’t forget we’re having dinner with my parents at Roy’s,” she said. “I think they’re finally going to give us the deed to the condo in Beaver Creek.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. Actually, couldn’t miss it, could I?”

  “Not if you want them to keep giving us money,” she said, laughing.

  He got into the convertible and backed through the gates and into the street. The woman went back inside, and the gates closed.

  “Where’s Beaver Creek?” Ray asked as I drove him back to the deli.

  “Colorado, I think. Ski resort.”

  “So maybe all the money comes from her parents?”

  “We can check.”

  It didn’t take much time, once we knew what we were looking for. Diana Cheng got her name in the social pages a lot, and we discovered that her father was C.K. Chu, a Hong Kong industrialist who had retired to Honolulu a few years before.

  We were running out of people with motives. Everyone we’d checked on seemed to have no more than the ordinary quotient of secrets and troubles. I’ve found that you need a strong motivation to go against the social order and take another life. Unless you’re some kind of psychopath, you need to be pushed to the edge. And none of Zoë’s co-workers seemed like they’d go that far.

  Around ten, I got an email from Levi that he was still looking into the stuff in the spreadsheets, and he’d get back to me soon. There was a link to Wave Power’s website at the end of the message, and I clicked through. I started watching an animation of their technology, and then I remembered our conversation about how surfers were objecting to the use of wave energy.