Mahu Vice

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “I’ve still got to walk through the last two businesses,” Mike said, putting down his pad and capping his pen. “Want to walk it with me?”

  “Sure.” I noticed that the vodka bottle was gone and wondered if that meant Mike had finished it. But as we walked toward the acupuncture clinic, I couldn’t see any evidence of intoxication. I’d been on road patrol early in my career, and seen a number of roadside sobriety tests given, and I’d seen guys I knew were completely drunk pass with flying colors. So just because Mike didn’t stumble or slur his words didn’t mean he wasn’t plastered.

  As we walked, we went over the report from the crime scene techs, who hadn’t been able to find much. There was no evidence that Jingtao had been restrained in any way, no bullet holes in the remaining walls, no spent cartridges. The fire had done a very efficient job of burning what was flammable; what was left held few clues, if any.

  We walked through the cell phone store, a scrap heap of mangled metal and plastic. The acupuncture clinic was the last step before we went back to the station, and I was eager to get it over with.

  When I walked into the front room where there was a reception desk and a couple of chairs, I felt something was wrong. The place was too empty. Though the fire had begun behind the clinic, the wind had whipped it down the center before it could cause much damage. There had been no decoration on the walls beyond a couple of cheap posters of Chinese sights, and no personal items at all.

  “See the stains on the floor tiles?” Mike asked, pointing to the strange outlines on the floor. “We call them ghost marks. They’re produced by dissolution and combustion of tile adhesive.”

  While Mike and Ray surveyed the back of the building, analyzing the point of origin, I nosed around the reception area, looking for the stuff I expected to find—insurance forms, appointment books, and so on. Nothing. I found only couple of ballpoint pens, a deck of worn playing cards, and a box of rubber gloves in one of the drawers. Each of the three small treatment rooms was similarly barren—the remains of some built-in cabinetry, a tiny restroom with a single toilet.

  “Looks like they pulled out,” Ray said, coming inside to join me. “You said your dad used to own the center, didn’t you? He know the current owners?”

  “I’ll ask him. See what he can give us on all the tenants.”

  Mike was behind him. “You know whether the center was profitable?”

  “Last year, when my dad was sick, we all sat down and talked about money. Back then, the center was owned by a trust—with my parents as the trustees. No mortgage. My dad called it a cash cow, mostly income and little expense. But he’s getting older, and he wanted to sell off the real estate to make things easier for my mom in case anything happened.”

  I took a deep breath. I didn’t like thinking about the possibility that my dad would pass away. I relied on his quiet strength too much.

  “He went to a shopping center convention in Arizona and hooked up with some big mainland company that was looking to expand here in the islands. I think he sold them seven properties in all. He walked away with cash, though I’m not sure what kind of financing they have.”

  Ray was snooping around the inside of the acupuncture clinic while Mike was taking notes. “My sense is that the new owners are landlords rather than builders,” I continued, “so the place was worth more to them intact, even after the insurance.”

  “Good information. Let me know if your dad knows anything else.” He hesitated for a moment. It felt like there was something charged in the air, and it wasn’t just the smoke. “Tell your folks I said hello.”

  There it was. That sense that he had once been part of my life. “I will.”

  “I’m going to stick around here for a while,” Mike said. “I’ve got a couple of the guys from the fire last night coming over to walk around some more with me, see what they remember. I need to do some calculations, figure out the fire load.”

  “What’s that?” Ray asked, coming back to join us.

  “The total amount of fuel that might be involved in a fire. I count up what was here in the building that might have been fuel. I figure out the origin of the fire, then I examine that spot for sources of ignition. Then I evaluate those ignition scenarios to see if they’re capable of creating sufficient heat energy to cause the fuel that was present here to burn.”

  “We’ll leave all that stuff to you,” I said. “Science was never my strong point. You’ll call us with whatever you find?”

  “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” Mike said.

  “We’ve already done that,” I said. “And see where it got us.”

  BETRAYAL

  Once I dropped Ray at UH to meet Julie, I couldn’t stop yawning. But because my father had sold the center only a few months before, I knew his records would be relevant and I wanted to pick up whatever he had. Since his heart surgery, he had closed the office he’d kept in Salt Lake, moving all his paperwork into Haoa’s old bedroom.

  “Are you sleeping enough?” my mother asked, as soon as she opened the door. “You look very tired.”

  “Just temporary,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Shift change.”

  “You should go to your room and take a nap. I’ll make up the bed for you.”

  “Thanks, but I want to get back home.” I sniffed the air. “What’s cooking?”

  “Chicken long rice. I’ll make you a plate.”

  My father was sitting at the kitchen table, a pile of papers around him, half-glasses perched on his nose. An old Alfred Apaka CD was playing softly in the background, and he wore a T-shirt proclaiming him the world’s best grandfather. “Aloha, Tutu Al,” I said, kissing the top of his head and calling him by the nickname his grandchildren had given him.

  I sat across from him and he started handing me papers. “Lease agreements for the center,” he said. “Liliha kept the records for me, on computer. She’s going to e-mail you the spreadsheet up to the time the center was sold.”

  I hadn’t known that Liliha was involved in my dad’s business, but it made sense. She had been a secretary and bookkeeper at KVOL when Lui met her, quitting her job when their first child was born.

  My father shook his head. “When this center first opened, I knew every tenant personally. They gave me the rent, in cash, and I gave them a paper receipt. Now, everything is on computer. Some tenants were on automatic pay—the bank sucked the money out of their account, dropped it into mine the first of the month.”

  “Made it easier for you,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Nothing easy about business these days. That’s why I wanted to sell everything. I won’t be around forever, you know. I want things to be easy for your mother.”

  “Enough, old man,” my mother said. “You know the saying, only the good die young. You will live forever.”

  I laughed. My parents had bickered like that for as long as I remembered. Mike and I had done the same thing, a combination of our family legacies and all that free-floating testosterone between us.

  We talked for a while, and I kept yawning, even as I devoured the shredded chicken and the short, gooey noodles. Finally I couldn’t stay any longer, and I gathered the papers up, kissed my parents, and got into my truck.

  Only by blasting a CD could I stay awake enough to keep my truck on the road down to Waikiki, and as soon as I pulled into my parking space I had to lean my head against the steering wheel and rest for a minute before I went inside.

  I fell asleep almost as soon as I crawled into bed, though it was only six o’clock outside. I slept till midnight, when I awoke with a full bladder and an empty stomach. After I took care of the bladder, I pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, and rubber slippas and headed out to Kuhio Avenue to handle the stomach.

  Sitting at a table by the window at Denny’s, listening to an instrumental number by Hapa coming out of the speakers, I stared out at a couple of drunken twenty-something guys laughing and mock brawling on the street. The way they were having so much fun rem
inded me of the good times Mike and I had had—and then of the vodka in Mike’s water bottle.

  There was something seriously wrong with that. But what could I do about it? I could say something to Mike, but I doubted it would do any good. If anything, it would make the relationship between us that much more strained.

  I could go to his boss—but that would mean a suspension, maybe losing his job. I could never do that to him, even after what he’d done to me.

  I didn’t know any of his friends; he’d always been careful about keeping our relationship a secret, though he’d met my family and Harry, Terri, and Gunter. He’d never introduced me to his parents, either. But I had met them once.

  A week after Mike returned from his conference, I woke up with a yellowish discharge and pain when I tried to urinate. I did a little online research before I had to leave for work, and that’s when I figured it out.

  Mike had given me an STD.

  Which meant he’d been with somebody else, when we’d agreed to be faithful to each other. We’d used condoms for any penetration, but because the chance of transmitting something was so slim with activities like blow jobs and rimming, we’d been less careful with those.

  I’d had this romantic ideal when Mike and I were dating, but now I saw that I’d been foolish. It was the first real relationship for both of us, and we were both feeling our way along. How much time did we want to spend together? How much did we have to share about our past, and about who we saw and what we did?

  Mike was stingy with details. I told him about every guy I’d slept with, each bad date and embarrassing rendezvous. But all he said was that he’d gotten his first blow job from another guy in college and that he’d fooled around with a couple of men he’d met online—nothing serious.

  I see now that he wasn’t ready to commit to a serious relationship. He still had wild oats to sow; he had to date a bunch of jerks in order to recognize a keeper. He was still figuring out what he liked in bed, too, as I was, and we both needed more experience before we settled down to monogamy.

  Sitting at my computer that morning, with the evidence on my screen in front of me, I was so angry with Mike I was tempted to drive over to Fire Department Headquarters and out him. But hell, I didn’t even know what I had. And then, fear jolted through my body. If Mike had passed me an STD, was there was a chance he’d passed me HIV as well? Had I ruined my life by trusting a guy who couldn’t be trusted?

  All I wanted was to curl back up in bed and cry—out of fear for my life, out of sadness that Mike had cheated on me. Out of general despair that a world that had seemed so happy and full of possibility the night before had suddenly turned dark and deadly. My limbs felt heavy, as if I could barely stand up, and I kept imagining tiny viruses circulating from my dick throughout my body.

  But I had to go to work, and I wasn’t going to create an audit trail on my office computer that showed me visiting gay Web sites or googling STDs. All day long, it felt like the bottom had dropped out of my stomach, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Ray made a couple of cracks about my grouchiness and distraction, and I wanted to confide in him, but something held me back.

  We were working the homicide of a teen-aged girl who had also been raped, and the sense of violation I felt pushed me over the edge as Ray and I interrogated the suspect, a lowlife friend of the girl’s mother who already had two convictions for sexual assault under his belt. When he refused to answer and I raised my hand to smack him, Ray grabbed my arm.

  I turned on him, vicious as a caged animal. “Don’t touch me!”

  Ray dropped my arm and held up his hands. “Cool down, Kimo. Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said, but I recognized I was out of control. “Can you finish this up? I need to get out of here.”

  Ray agreed and I signed out a couple of hours before the end of the shift, telling Lieutenant Sampson I needed personal time. He was busy with a funding request so he just nodded his head and I hurried to my truck.

  By the time I got there, my hands were shaking, my throat was parched, and I felt like I could burst into tears at any moment. All the way home, I gripped the steering wheel and repeated “maintain” to myself as a mantra. I nearly knocked the computer off the table trying to get it turned on, and kept fumbling the keys as I typed.

  I remembered Mike had told me his parents volunteered at an STD clinic out near Tripler, the Army medical center where they both worked. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse, and I thought it was poetic justice that I go out to their clinic to get tested.

  It was like the planets were lining up. I checked the clinic’s Web site, which listed the doctors and their schedules, and found his dad was scheduled that day. I drove out there, my stomach in knots the whole time. I just missed hitting an SUV that darted in front of me on the Moanalua Freeway, and yelled my fool head off at the driver, even though he was cocooned behind tinted glass.

  I pulled up in the parking lot of the clinic and sat there for a couple of minutes, scared to start the whole thing in motion. What if I was HIV positive? How would my life change? I’d come out of the closet two years before, and every part of my world had shifted, from my relationship to my family and friends to how I acted on the job. What would another shift do to me?

  Ever since I told people I was a mahu, the Hawaiian word for a gay man, I’ve faced the things that scared me—whether it was chasing down an armed suspect or telling Mike that I loved him when I didn’t know how he’d respond. So I knew I had to get out of my truck and find out what was wrong with me.

  Inside, I filled out a sheet of paper that I was assured was confidential, and I was assigned a number—1423. There were three other people in the room, and I took a seat next to a middle-aged Hawaiian woman in a blue Wal-Mart smock. Across from us were two men: a long-haired young guy, and an obvious military type, from his brush cut hair to his erect posture.

  The woman was called in first, then the military guy. I figured the longhair was next, but the receptionist called “1423,” and I went up to the door, where a middle-aged nurse who looked Korean led me back to an examining room. As I followed her, I realized that she had to be Mike’s mother, and my decision to come to the clinic where she and Mike’s dad worked started to look really stupid.

  When I was sitting on the white paper sheet, she took my medical history. “Have you experienced any anal discharge?” she asked me, and I thought, not for the first time, how glad I was not to work in the medical field. I’ll take dead bodies any day over anal discharge.

  “No,” I said.

  “How about pain or swelling in the throat?”

  “No.”

  “How many partners have you had in the last six months?”

  “Just one.” I took a deep breath. I could out Mike to his mother. But that would be childish and hurtful, and I just couldn’t do that to him, even after what he’d done to me. “I did see some discharge around the head of his penis once, a few days ago. I didn’t think anything of it until I had the same problem.”

  She smiled. “It sounds like gonorrhea. But I’m going to need throat and rectal cultures, and a urine sample, too.” She must have seen my evident discomfort. “Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle.”

  She stuck a swab down my throat and gave me a kit for a rectal swab and a urine sample. “I have a son just about your age,” she said. “I can just imagine how he’d feel in your circumstances.”

  Back in the waiting room, the housewife and the longhair were gone, but the brush cut was waiting for his results, and we were joined by a teen-aged Japanese girl. It was getting late, and the clinic was closing soon. I hoped I’d get my results before then; I didn’t want to wait days to find out my fate.

  I had enough time to read two different People magazines, both a couple of months old, and learn more than I needed to know about the drug and alcohol habits of the rich and famous, before the receptionist called “1423” again.

  The
nurse I thought was Mike’s mom led me back to the examining room, and said, “The doctor will be with you soon.”

  A few minutes later, a tall, handsome man in a white lab coat came in. I knew immediately that he was Mike’s dad, even before he introduced himself.

  I thought Mike’s parents didn’t know he was gay—but what if they did? What if he’d mentioned my name, or described me? How stupid was I to have put myself in this soap opera situation?

  But Dr. Riccardi didn’t appear to make the connection. “There are a number of different tests we can do. Here in the clinic, we’re only equipped to do the gram stain test, which showed that you have garden variety gonorrhea. That’s good news. The infection is localized in your penis, but you should refrain from any kind of sexual activity until the medicine has had a chance to work its magic.”

  He smiled, and I could see Mike in his eyes and the turn of his mouth. He was clean shaven, where Mike had a mustache, but his lips were just as full as his son’s.

  “We’ll give you one oral dose of Ofloxacin to kill the gonorrhea bacteria in your body.” He smiled again. “That is, unless you’d prefer Ceftriaxone. We administer that as an injection in the buttocks.”

  “The oral dose will be fine,” I said, my voice rough and a little squeaky. I still couldn’t get over the fact that he was Mike’s dad, that I could see Mike’s face in his.

  “I thought so.” He scribbled something on my chart. “Cheer up. I hope you’ve learned a mildly painful lesson about safe sex. If your symptoms persist you should see your regular physician, or go to a hospital facility that is equipped to perform advanced tests.”

  He put the clipboard down. “Now, let’s talk about your partner. You told the nurse that you’ve been monogamous with him?”

  I nodded. Damn. Was he going to ask me for names? I couldn’t tell him his son was the one who had infected me.

  “The most important thing is honesty. You’ll have to tell this partner about your infection, and you’ll have to refrain from any activity with him, or anyone else, until you’re cleared up.”