Mahu Vice

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I wasn’t that impressed, but Ray was loving every detail. I could see him promising Julie that one day they’d live in a place like that.

  The concierge was a beautiful Filipina in her late twenties, wearing a tailored navy suit. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. How may I help you?”

  We showed her our badges. “We’re interested in apartment 609,” I said. “You guys have a key to that unit?”

  “Let me see.” She went into a back room, and came out a few minutes later with a tall, muscular guy with black hair tending toward salt-and-pepper, wearing a similar suit—though I liked it better on him than on her. “I’m Sean Hackbarth,” he said. “The manager. You’re the detective I spoke to about unit 609?”

  “That was me,” Ray said. “The corporation that owns the unit has come up in one of our investigations, and we’re just curious to see if anyone’s living there.”

  “So you don’t have a warrant?”

  Ray shook his head. “Nope. And to be honest with you, we don’t have grounds for a warrant. This is just curiosity.”

  “Four employees of this corporation have turned up dead in the last week,” I said. “Three of them shot execution style while they slept. One of the employees is missing.” I showed them both the picture of Treasure Chen. “A Chinese woman in her late twenties, very beautiful.”

  Hackbarth looked at the concierge and she shrugged. “If you have a parking card, you can enter the building directly from the garage,” she said. “Some of the residents we never see unless they have a package delivered.”

  “Can you show us the apartment?” Ray asked Hackbarth. “We want to see if Ms. Chen’s body is there. If it’s not, we’re good to go.”

  “I’ll take you up,” he said.

  We followed him to an elevator bank. “Residents have key cards they use for the elevator,” he said. “You slide it in, and then choose your floor.”

  “Cards coded to a particular floor?” Ray asked as we stepped inside.

  Hackbarth slipped his card into the reader and pressed six. “No. Once you’ve swiped your card, you can go to any floor. If you’re a guest, the concierge calls your party. Once you’ve been approved, she punches a code in the system that calls the elevator for you, with your floor preprogrammed.”

  Ray nodded. “Good security.”

  “There are flaws,” Hackbarth admitted, as the elevator door opened on six. “A visitor who enters the elevator with a resident can punch any floor once the resident has swiped a card.”

  He held the door as we stepped out, then pointed up at a security camera. “We do monitor the cameras, but we don’t chase someone who gets out on the wrong floor. We don’t have the manpower.”

  “Still, it’s a place Treasure could feel pretty safe,” I said to Ray.

  “A lot safer than Norma Ching’s place, or that apartment in Makiki,” he said.

  Hackbarth led us to apartment 609 and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, he unlocked both locks.

  There was a security chain but it wasn’t engaged. We walked into the apartment, a one-bedroom with a view toward the airport and a small, half-round balcony off the living room.

  “Somebody’s been living here,” Ray said. There were dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and a pint of milk in the fridge that hadn’t expired yet. In the bedroom, we found some women’s clothes, the kind of slinky dresses and expensive underwear that we’d found at Treasure’s apartment in Hawai’i Kai.

  “So if Treasure’s been staying here, where is she now?” I asked.

  “Great question,” Ray said. “Get back to me when you figure it out.”

  TREASURE AND THE TAPES

  We thanked Sean Hackbarth and walked out in the hallway, where I saw a security camera. “You keep the tapes?” I asked, pointing toward it.

  “It’s all digital. Every day, the system overwrites the data from a week before.”

  “So you’ve got a week’s worth of data from this camera?”

  “Come on down to the office. I’ll show you.”

  We started working backward, and didn’t have far to go. At ten o’clock that morning, a tall, attractive Chinese woman left apartment 609 and walked to the elevator. She got in and disappeared from the frame.

  “That her?” Ray asked.

  I compared the photo we had of Treasure to the digital image, and the match was close enough for me. “How about cameras in the garage?” I asked.

  Hackbarth punched in some buttons on the keyboard, but the cameras in the garage were no help. We saw Treasure exit the elevator, then walk out of the frame.

  By then it was the end of our shift. “You want to call Sampson, get him to authorize the overtime for a stakeout?” Ray asked.

  “Suppose we have to.” I was to meet Sergei Baranov that night at eleven at the Rod and Reel Club, but if we were running late I could always call him. He was a big boy; he could occupy himself at the club on his own.

  I walked outside and called Sampson, reaching him on his cell phone. “You aren’t sure that this is the girl?” he asked.

  “We’re looking for a beautiful Chinese girl who works for the company that owns the apartment and ran the acupuncture clinic that employed Norma Ching and the two dead girls. Logic says the girl we saw is Treasure Chen.”

  He authorized us, and then I called the detectives’ area and asked the receptionist to put me through to whoever was on duty.

  “Hart.”

  Great. Steve Hart was already unhappy that we’d made some progress on his cold case—the death of Lucas Tyler. But I needed his cooperation. “Can you pull up a motor vehicle registration for me?” I asked. “I’m out in Kaka’ako for a stakeout and I need to know what I’m looking for.”

  “Got a name or address?”

  I gave him Treasure’s name and the address in Hawai’i Kai. He was gone for a while. “I’ve got a license in that name and address, but no vehicle.”

  “Can you check a corporate?” I gave him Golden Needles and Wah Shing.

  He sighed loudly. “Hold on.”

  “Yeah, you’re a prince,” I muttered. He came back a couple of minutes later. “Three vehicles under the Wah Shing name. A Mercedes, a BMW, and a Lexus.”

  “Can you read me the data?”

  Another big sigh. But he did, and I copied it all down. “Thanks, Steve. I owe you one.” He hung up without saying anything else. Ray came outside and I showed him what I had.

  “What kind of car did that guy see?” he asked. “The guy from UH who saw the arsonist?”

  I struggled to remember. “BMW or Mercedes, I think. Dark color.”

  “So could have been any of these three cars,” Ray said.

  “Could have been. Maybe Treasure’s our ninja, and our shooter too. We could wrap this case up tonight.”

  “Chance would be a fine thing,” he said.

  There was a coffee shop across from the entrance to the condo’s garage, and we agreed that I’d sit there scanning license plates of suspect cars, and Ray would stay in the control room with Sean Hackbarth, whose shift didn’t end until eleven. If I got a hit, I’d call Ray, and he’d pull up the camera in the garage and see if a woman who matched Treasure’s description rode up to the sixth floor. Once she did, we’d go up and pay her a visit.

  It got dark after seven, and when a parking space opened up in front of the coffee shop I moved the Wrangler and took up position there, where it would be easier to see license plates as the cars paused and waited for the garage grille to rise. Around seven o’clock, a black BMW pulled up with a plate that matched one we were waiting for, and I called Ray.

  By the time I got to the control room, the woman had parked and gotten into the elevator, and Ray and Hackbarth were watching the sixth floor camera. The woman got out of the elevator and walked to the door of apartment 609. We watched her go inside. “You’ll call if she goes out before we get up there?” I asked Hackbarth.

  “You got it.”

  The concierge programm
ed the elevator to stop on six. At the door to 609, I knocked, and said, “Miss Chen? Honolulu PD. We’d like to talk to you.”

  I was just about to knock again when the door opened.

  Treasure Chen didn’t look as beautiful as she did in the photo with her sister, but seeing everyone around you get murdered can have a bad effect on your looks. I showed her my badge, and she said, “I remember you, detective.”

  “May we come in?”

  She shrugged. “I guess so.”

  I realized as we sat down in the living room that until that evening I’d never considered Treasure as a suspect in the murders. I wasn’t sure why; was it because she was beautiful? And yet, Lucas Tyler had been handsome, and cruel as well.

  “Where were you on Tuesday morning?” I asked.

  She looked wary. “I didn’t kill them. I called 911. Why would I do that if I’d killed them?”

  “So you know what we’re talking about,” I said. “Why don’t we start from the beginning. Last I saw you were working at the Lobster Garden. What happened?”

  “After Tommy died, I got fired. That bitch Mae never liked me. Her husband liked to flirt with the hostesses, so they never lasted long. A while later, Norma offered me my job back at the lingerie shop.”

  “As a prostitute?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. I modeled lingerie, and sometimes the men wanted more.” She made a sour face. “I didn’t like giving massages. But at least I made money. No one wanted Norma, so she hated it. The only money she made was from managing us. But what else could an old woman like her do?”

  “There were more of you?”

  “Always three or four girls,” she said. “And usually a boy, too.”

  “Did you ever meet the man who owned the shop?”

  “Eventually. One day he came to Waikele.” She pursed her lips together. “I offered to give him a massage, but he didn’t want me. Only the boy.”

  “Was that Jingtao?”

  She shook her head. “No, he only came a few months ago. This was another boy, one who left.”

  Ray, who’d been taking all the notes, continued the questioning. “Did you know about the fires?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The lingerie store burned shortly after you moved to Waikele. And then after you left that place, it burned, too.”

  She looked surprised, and I saw the wheels in motion in her head. “And then the acupuncture clinic burned, too.”

  He sat back on the sofa and crossed his legs. “You know anything about it?”

  “No. I didn’t realize that the first two locations had burned down.”

  “Why did you move from Waikele to St. Louis Heights?” he asked.

  “One day Mr. Hu showed up, said we had to move. So we moved.”

  I looked around the living room. It looked as if someone had walked into a showroom and bought the whole room, from the cream-colored sofa to the glass coffee table, even the mass-produced artwork on the walls.

  Ray was still asking questions and taking notes. “Did he pick the new location, or did you or Norma?”

  “He did. But when we moved, he made me co-manager, with Norma. He wanted to get rid of her, but he had to train me first. He promised me that one day she’d be gone, and I’d be in charge.”

  “How did you contact Mr. Hu?” I asked, hoping she had better information than I did.

  “We didn’t. He always called us. When the boy ran away, we didn’t know what to do. We had to wait a couple of days until he called. He came to the clinic a few hours later and told us that we had to move out.”

  I leaned forward. “Where were you supposed to go?”

  “He didn’t have a new location yet. He was very angry that we’d let Jingtao get away. He said that if Jingtao went to the police, he could compromise our whole operation.”

  “So what happened after that?” Ray asked.

  “We packed up everything. We were short on staff, so Meiying and Meizhen and I did most of the work, with Norma supervising.” The way she said the word it was clear what she thought of Norma. “She sent the three of us home and said she’d be in touch. I was supposed to keep tabs on Meiying and Meizhen, and I called them every day to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.”

  Ray asked how to spell their names, and if Treasure knew their last names. “The last name on their paperwork was Wang,” she said. “But they weren’t related. So it could be their real name, or not.”

  “When was the last time you spoke to them?” I asked.

  “Monday afternoon. I was supposed to pick them up on Tuesday morning and take them grocery shopping, since they didn’t have a car. But when I got there, there was no answer at the door.”

  “Did you have a key to the apartment?”

  “The lock was broken when I got there. I was worried that they’d run away, like Jingtao, but then I went into the bedroom.”

  She started to cry, but I wasn’t sure if the tears were just for our benefit or not. “I was so frightened. I thought someone had killed them to…”

  “To what?” I asked.

  She took a deep breath. “We had cameras in the clinic. We would take movies of what happened in the rooms, and then Mr. Hu would look at them. If he recognized a man, he would take the tapes away.” She began to cry in earnest. “I thought one of those men—came and killed the girls—because of the tapes.”

  Ray got up and got her a paper towel from the kitchen, which she used to wipe her eyes. “You have any idea who those men might be?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t recognize them. And Mr. Hu took all the tapes.”

  “Even the ones from Friday?” I asked.

  “Yes. When he came, he took everything. Even the cameras.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do next. Treasure didn’t know how to get hold of Mr. Hu. That meant that I was the only person who might be able to find him. And if I didn’t soon, then both Treasure and Brian Izumigawa could be at risk.

  WHO AMONG US IS INNOCENT?

  I looked out the window and saw a jet coming in for a landing at Honolulu International. Another planeload of tourists coming to spend a week in paradise. “Who else knows about this apartment?” I asked Treasure.

  “Mr. Hu bought this place so that a guy who worked for him could meet with high-profile clients.” She lowered her voice, as if Mr. Hu was listening in. “There are cameras in the bedroom. But this guy, Lucas, was always locking himself out, so Mr. Hu gave me a spare key. Then Lucas disappeared a few weeks ago, and I knew the apartment was empty. You see how good the security is. I thought I’d be safe here.”

  “Did you know that Lucas was dead?”

  Treasure shrugged. “I’m not surprised. He was using way too much ice. Men didn’t want him anymore, and Mr. Hu wasn’t happy.”

  “Does Mr. Hu have a key to the apartment?”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  We waited for Treasure to make the connections on her own. “You don’t think that Mr. Hu…”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think yet. But somebody’s tying up loose ends. Lucas, Jingtao, Norma, the two girls. Logic says Mr. Hu could be behind it. Or somebody who wants to take over Mr. Hu’s operation. Which is pretty much the same thing when it comes to you.”

  “Where can I go?” she asked.

  Ray and I looked at each other. I didn’t think there was much chance we could get Treasure into any kind of protected witness program; there wasn’t a case against anyone yet. And I had a feeling she knew more than she was telling us, so I wanted her someplace where I could keep tabs on her.

  “Did Mr. Hu know you and Norma didn’t get along?” Ray asked.

  “He agitated it. He’d tell me things about Norma, and then he’d tell her things about me.”

  “So he’d never think you’d hide out at Norma’s, would he?”

  “That shithole in Chinatown?”

  “You have a better idea?” I asked. “A sugar daddy who might put you u
p?”

  Treasure sighed. “I guess I could stay at Norma’s for a few days, until you find Mr. Hu and lock him up.”

  I wasn’t sure that Mr. Hu was behind the murders yet. But if Treasure believed it, she’d be willing to hide out for a while.

  We waited while Treasure packed up. By the time we were ready to leave she’d camouflaged herself, darkening her skin a few shades, pulling her shoulder-length black hair into a ponytail, and donning a UH T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and rubber slippas. Instead of a high-class madam, she looked like a college student.

  We walked out of the building, Ray first, scanning the street. It was dark, and we both had our weapons ready, not knowing what to expect. But the only people we saw were a middle-aged couple heading to Restaurant Row and a group of teens who’d just come from a movie.

  Ray climbed in the back of the Jeep with Treasure’s rolling suitcase, and she sat up front with me for the drive to Norma’s building in Chinatown. “Where were you today?” I asked as we drove.

  Treasure looked out the window. We were passing the Aloha Tower, all lit up like a beacon welcoming tourists to our beautiful islands. “There was an office,” she said. “I thought maybe Mr. Hu kept the information he was using to blackmail people there. I thought if I could get hold of the tapes, I could use them to protect myself.”

  “Where was the office?” I asked.

  “Across the street from the shopping center. But there was nothing there.”

  “Define nothing,” I said. “Cleared out like the acupuncture clinic?”

  She nodded.

  “You had a key?”

  “No key. A combination lock. I found the combination one day on a piece of paper and I memorized it. You never know.” She gave us the address and the number, and Ray wrote it all down.

  When we got to Chinatown, Ray remained in the Wrangler with Treasure, while I headed to Norma’s building. I didn’t know what to expect, so I moved carefully, looking left and right, my hand on my gun and ready to draw if I had to.

  A black cat scrambled across in front of me and my pulse raced. But there was no one around except a young Chinese couple hurrying home in the dark, and I got into Norma’s building unmolested. The crime scene tape was still stretched across her door, and I was glad I’d kept the key Norma’s neighbor had given us Tuesday morning.