Mahu Vice

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I listened to the details and said, “Already on the scene, partner. You want to come up here?”

  Ray shared a car with his wife, a graduate student in East Asian studies at UH, and I drove us wherever we had to go. But on nights, he was able to get around on his own, so I gave him directions, then slapped the phone shut. I told Mike that my partner and I had caught the case.

  In the low light I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. “Looks like we’ll be working together,” I said.

  “Just like old times.” There was a flatness to his voice I couldn’t interpret.

  We walked over to his truck, and just as we’d done the night we first began working together, we stepped behind it and pulled off our shirts, pants, and shoes, getting ready to don a pair of yellow fire suits. That first night, the air had nearly crackled with sexual tension, as I kept stealing glances at Mike’s body, and my dick rose up in appreciation of his finely chiseled abs, his biceps, and strong calves.

  This time, though, the sexual tension that had been between us that first night was gone. There was a sadness in Mike that hadn’t been there before, and as I stepped into the pants, pulled them up by the waist, and then shrugged into the upper part of the suit, I kept remembering how we had broken up. I knew that I couldn’t trust my body’s reactions, because the last time I’d done so I’d gotten my heart broken.

  The hood of my suit got tangled, and Mike had to help me fix it. I felt his hot breath on the back of my neck, the closeness of his body to mine. My traitorous dick jumped to attention and I had to force myself to ignore the way his hand passed over my back as he popped the hood into place.

  Once dressed, we walked to the back of the salon, where we saw the charred remains of a body. Logic indicated it was the Chinese boy Tico had been sheltering in his back room, Jingtao, but it was going to be a pain to identify him, since there would be nothing to connect him to—no dental records, no fingerprints. We’d be lucky if his body type conformed to that of a pubescent boy of Asian origin.

  Had the fire been set to kill him? Tico knew nothing about him, just a guess that he was on the run, that he had been abused. I regretted not forcing the issue the day before, when I had been in the salon. Perhaps if I’d called social services myself, had the boy taken away to a group home somewhere, the fire might not have happened, and he’d still be alive.

  But that was getting ahead of myself. I looked at the burned-out ruin, finding it hard to believe that it had been a beautiful, lively hair salon just the day before. I could still make out the walls, the wash station, and a crumpled shelf that had once held Tico’s Barbie dolls, which were now a pile of melted rubber and charred fabric.

  Looking down the center, through what had been the dividing walls between premises, I could see that the travel agency, karate studio, acupuncture clinic, cell phone store, and pharmacy were all gone, too. “Any idea where the fire started?”

  “Behind the acupuncture clinic,” Mike said. “But the place went up fast. The wind carried the flames down the block—when the first engine got here the beauty parlor was already engulfed. The guy in the back didn’t have a chance, especially if he was asleep. Doesn’t look like there were fire alarms or sprinklers.”

  “And now it’s up to us to figure out what happened.”

  “Yup,” Mike said. “You and me.”

  GHOST MARKS

  Ray showed up a few minutes later. He’s about five ten, wiry and tough, with sandy brown hair. He’d just made detective in Philadelphia when his wife announced she wanted to pursue a master’s degree in Asian studies at the University of Hawai’i. He’d joined HPD a little over a year before and become my partner.

  He was Italian, very laid back, with an ironic sense of humor. He was also a savvy investigator, and though he was a newcomer to the islands, or malihini, he had a keen understanding of human behavior.

  Two crime scene investigators were behind him, and after I got out of the fire suit, I briefed them all on what we knew. We blocked off the site with tape, and Ray and I walked out to the edge of the parking lot. The night was dark away from the arc lights; there was only a neon sign half a block away. I could see the pattern of streetlights that rose into the mountains around us, broken in places where the ridges were too steep for housing.

  With all but one of the fire engines gone, traffic had resumed on Waialae Avenue: trucks and motorcycles and low-riding sedans. “We know who made the 911 call?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  I looked across the street. Most of the block was taken up with a two-story office building—insurance agents, doctors, and so on. Next door to that was a used car lot, dark behind a high fence. “No neighbors to see anything,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “Nope.”

  “Know any words other than nope?”

  “Yup.”

  The perils of having a partner who thinks he’s a comedian. There wasn’t anyone to canvass, though perhaps the next morning our 911 caller might resurface, or a passing driver might call in a clue. Mike came over and said, “They’re working on the overhaul now.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Once we think the fire’s been extinguished, we send some guys in to search for any bit of fire we might have missed. They pull out the furniture, open the walls and ceilings. We want to prevent any possibility of rekindle—when the fire starts up again, after it’s been extinguished.”

  In the glow of the arc lights next to the remaining fire truck, I followed Mike’s gaze back to the smoldering ruin. “I’ve got to stick around for the overhaul,” he said. “If they don’t do it right, they could remove evidence I need to determine the cause and origin of the fire.”

  He stretched his shoulders back and flexed his arms. “Going to be a long night. After that, I’m going down to company 22 to talk to the guys there. How about we meet back here at six? Should be first light then, not too hot.”

  “Ray and I are just finishing a night shift. We’re supposed to have two days off, then go back to days, but I’ll talk to my lieutenant and see if I can go straight to days tomorrow morning,” I said. “How about you, Ray?”

  “Julie’s in school. Won’t matter to her if I’m off or at work.” He smiled. “Will get me out of a bunch of chores, though.”

  The crime scene techs went off to look for anything related to cause of death—spent cartridges, rope that might indicate the victim was bound. Then the medical examiner’s office took away the body, and Ray and I waited around until they had cleared the site.

  Then we went back to the District 1 station, inside the police headquarters downtown, and spent the next few hours clearing our desks so that we could focus on the dead body at the back of Tico’s salon. I believed it was Jingtao, who had so carefully touched my hair on Saturday, and felt that I owed it to him, to Tico, and to my family to figure out what had happened to him and bring his killer to justice.

  Sampson came in at seven, and I explained the circumstances to him. He told us both to go home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, then clock back in. Ray left for home, but I drove directly up to Waialae Avenue. I was tired, but at the same time my adrenaline was high, and I was determined to work through my fatigue.

  I wasn’t sure I could work with Mike again without all the baggage of our personal relationship. On the way up to the center, I wondered if I could shift coordination with Mike to Ray. That would be the coward’s way out, though. I would have to suck it up and work with him, and avoid being distracted by memory or sexual attraction.

  By the time I got to the burned center, Mike had set up a temporary command post in an Army tent in the parking lot and it was already hot and humid. The night’s strong winds were gone; no breeze came down from the Ko’olau Mountains, and not a single cloud blocked the sun’s rays. I parked on a side street, out of the way, and walked across to the center, waving at an officer I knew named Lidia Portuondo, who was keeping foot and vehicle traffi
c out of the center while consoling the pharmacist and his wife, who had seen the morning news in disbelief.

  The trees my brother Haoa had carefully planted and tended over the years had burned, leaving no shade anywhere except under the tent, and when I met Mike there it was swelteringly hot.

  Mike had two firefighters delegated to him, who were already out in the ruins looking for clues. “The ME hasn’t given us a cause of death for the body we found,” he said. “And it was burned so much that he might not be able to tell. Looks like the work of a pro. I want to isolate the ignition point and see if I can identify any accelerants. Every pro has his own signature; if we find the clues we find the guy.”

  Mike had a pint bottle of water in his hand, and he unscrewed it, then took a deep gulp. His radio buzzed and he stepped away to take the call, leaving his water bottle on the table. I used the sleeve of my aloha shirt to wipe my sweaty forehead, and grabbed the bottle for a drink.

  As soon as the liquid hit my tongue, though, I knew it wasn’t water. Way too much kick for that. I jerked the bottle back, spilling a few drops on the counter, and then sniffed. The liquid was odorless and colorless, but I thought it was vodka.

  I capped the bottle, wiped the spilled drops with a tissue, then put the bottle back on the table and went out to the ruins of the shopping center my father had built, in part with his own hands.

  As I walked, I yawned, and wondered if I’d have passed the call to another detective if I’d known Mike would be involved. Maybe. But how could I have justified that to my family? They had met Mike a few times before we broke up, and liked him. No one had ever questioned why we’d stopped seeing each other, and until I told Harry when we were surfing, I’d never volunteered an explanation.

  And what was up with the vodka bottle, at eight in the morning? When we’d dated, Mike had been a wine drinker, preferably red and Italian. He’d gotten a little loopy sometimes, but I had too. I’d never considered that he had a drinking problem.

  In the daylight, the center looked worse than it had at night. Traffic slowed on Waialae Avenue as onlookers gaped, but Lidia kept the cars moving, and prevented foot traffic from getting in our way. The devastation the fire had caused was clear, and the harsh smell of burnt wood and plastic was still everywhere. I stifled another yawn as Mike and I started at the far end of the center, by the acupuncture clinic, looking for anything we could find.

  “A fire needs three things,” he said, as we began investigating. “Oxygen, heat, and a fuel source. Last night, I talked to a bunch of the guys about what they found when they started fighting the fire. The flames were light yellow, almost white, and the smoke was black. That means gasoline was part of the fuel source.”

  He pointed at a charred piece of wood framing. “This building had a lot of wood. If the wood was the only material burning, the flames would have been more red, and the smoke brown.”

  I nodded, writing notes for myself.

  “You can see various points throughout the center where the fire seems to have burned hotter and stronger. Those were the places where the gasoline was spread. The rapid progress of the fire indicated that those places were linked with some kind of accelerant.”

  He pointed to the ground behind the clinic. “The fire was started on the exterior of the building. So our arsonist either didn’t have access to the clinic, or didn’t want to waste time breaking in. There was an alarm system, yeah?”

  “An old one—just a keypad outside each back door, and sensors on the front and rear exits. If you broke down the door, you’d trip the sensor, but that’s about it.”

  It was weird working with Mike again. I couldn’t help looking at him when his attention was elsewhere, remembering the wiry feel of his hair against my chest, noticing the curve of his ass in his dark jeans. The ghost of our failed relationship hung between everything we said to each other. He felt the tension, too; I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the awkward way he tried to avoid touching me.

  “You said the third thing the fire needs is oxygen,” I said, pushing my attention back to the case. “But isn’t there oxygen everywhere?”

  “There is. A fire needs oxygen to keep burning. If the arsonist had set a fire in one store that was airtight, it would have burned itself out. But by setting the fires outside the building, he guaranteed a supply of oxygen. And the narrow alley is perfect; the wind channeled the flames down alongside the building.”

  I saw something on the ground behind the hair salon and leaned over to look closely. “Think our arsonist was a potato chip fan?” I said to Mike, pointing at a scrap of a chip bag.

  “Not necessarily.” He leaned over next to me, and his head was so close to mine that I could have turned just a bit and kissed him. I could tell he felt something, too, from the quick way he pulled back.

  “Potato chips are greasy, yeah?” he said, standing up and stepping a little away from me. “So they’re a good accelerant. You lay a trail of chips away from the ignition, and the fire runs down the trail. Soon you’ve got a wall of flames going up.”

  He pulled out an evidence bag, and scooped the fragment of chip bag into it. “Good eye,” he said.

  He looked at me, and for a moment I saw a flicker of the old Mike in his eyes, as if he wanted to make a joke but then thought better of it. That connection between us was like an electrical spark in the air, only there wasn’t anything to fuel the combustion.

  We walked all the way down the alley to the beauty salon at the far end. “We’re not only looking for things that shouldn’t be here,” Mike said, “but things that should be, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there isn’t much reason for a gasoline can to be in a travel agency, for example,” he said. “But people decorate their workplaces with personal items.” He motioned through the damaged wall to the travel agent’s desk, where we could see the remains of photographs in twisted metal frames. “If she’d cleared her desk, that might mean she knew the fire was going to happen.”

  “So I guess we can wipe her out as a suspect.”

  “We can’t eliminate anyone as a suspect yet,” he said. “We’re just looking for clues, remember?”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “Gee, I remember when you used to say that and mean it.”

  My eyebrows shot up and I was about to say something when I saw Ray pull in the parking lot. “There’s my partner,” I said. “Let me go fill him in.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mike said.

  “I’ve got to pick Julie up at two,” Ray said, when I got over to his car. “If we’re still working, can you follow me down to UH and bring me back up here?”

  “Sure. Listen, I need to talk to you before we get started in there.”

  There was a hole-in-the-wall malasada shop across the street, and I steered Ray over there. A malasada is a kind of Portuguese donut popular in Hawai’i, and I figured I would tell Ray about my background with Mike over a big dose of sugar. We’d started working together just as I was breaking up with Mike, and I hadn’t felt comfortable enough with Ray then to say anything.

  Since then, we’d gotten closer. I remembered one of the first conversations we’d had together on personal subjects. We were in my truck on our way back from a case—an old man whose pills had been tampered with by his son. The daughter was a lesbian, and she’d been our primary suspect until her brother had done something dumb that gave him away.

  I said I worried that I’d bent over backward to think of the sister as innocent, because I empathized with her. I took a deep breath. “Because I’m gay, too.”

  “No shit?” he asked. “That’s cool. My cousin Joey was my best friend growing up—we used to have a hell of a time together. He turned out to be gay.”

  “You still in touch with him?”

  Ray shrugged, and turned to look out the window. “Joey got it into his head when we were about twenty that he wanted to own an X-rated porno store. He used to say he wanted to sit behind the
counter with his pants open, jerking himself off while the customers shopped.”

  “Not a pretty picture.” I realized I had been gripping the steering wheel tight, and relaxed a little.

  “He did some stupid stuff to raise the money. Started selling drugs, got killed. That was that for Joey.”

  “Wow. Must have been tough for you.”

  “That’s when I decided to be a cop,” he said, turning back to me. “I mean, I always knew cops growing up, had a few in the family, but I hadn’t been thinking about it for myself till then.”

  I still didn’t talk much about my personal life to Ray, but he’d known I’d been burned by a guy in the past, and when I told him about my date with Dr. Phil he’d cheered me on.

  We sat down at a rickety table in the malasada shop with a plate of hot, puffy donuts dusted with grainy white sugar and a pair of coffees, some funky Japanese pop music playing in the background. “So you remember I told you about that fire investigator I broke up with a couple of months after you started working at HPD?”

  Ray had a mouthful of malasada, so he just nodded.

  “And I never would tell you much about him, because he was so closeted? Well, that’s the guy. Mike.”

  “You okay to work with him?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t really okay to work with Mike; just the short time we’d spent together had already shown me that there was still a lot of unfinished business between us—half machismo and half sexual tension. But I was going to have to get over it. “Don’t have much choice. He’s the fire department side of this, and I want to figure out who torched the center. My dad built a lot of that place with his own hands. That makes this personal. Plus there’s the boy.”

  I told him about getting my hair cut on Saturday, and Jingtao. “You think that’s our victim?” Ray asked.

  “Most likely. Hard to ID him, though.”

  We finished the malasadas and coffee and walked back across the street, where Mike was making notes on a yellow legal pad, sitting on a folding chair under the tent. Though the wind had picked up, it was still brutally hot, the sunlight glaring off the windshield of a Menehune Water delivery truck parked across the street.