Mahu Vice

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “What would be the penalties for someone who hired illegals?” I asked. “Unknowingly. I’m talking about a company owner, and it’s a guy who works for him who hired the guys.”

  He looked at me shrewdly. “Are we still talking about prostitution?”

  “Nope. This is a guy I know, and I want to be honest with him about what might be involved.”

  Frank punched a couple of keys on his desktop keyboard and glanced at the screen. “You say he had no direct knowledge that the workers were illegal?”

  “Nope. This has only been going on for about a month, we think, and he trusted the guy who was processing the papers.”

  “Is he willing to cooperate fully?”

  “Of course.”

  “He could probably get away with a plea and a fine, depending on the circumstances. When he’s ready to talk, bring him to me.”

  On my way back to the station, I called Haoa and let him know what Frank had said. “Tatiana’s going back to the office tonight to make copies of everything,” he said. “I swear, when this is over…”

  “When this is over, Sergei’s still going to be Tatiana’s brother,” I said. “You might as well accept that.”

  “That doesn’t keep me from beating the crap out of him.”

  “I have a feeling there’s going to be a line for that.”

  When I got back to the station it was time for our meeting with Lieutenant Kee, but Ray still hadn’t returned from his trial so I went downstairs by myself.

  “You’re the Lone Ranger today?” Juanita asked. “Where’s Tonto?”

  “He go speak with big chief wearing robes,” I said. “The LT around?”

  “In a meeting. But it shouldn’t last long. Have a seat.”

  Juanita was multitasking again, carrying on a conversation with me while she filed documents and bantered with passing detectives. After about fifteen minutes, a couple of guys left Kee’s office and Juanita told him I was there.

  “I might have a connection to that blackmail case I told you about the other day,” I said. I sat down across from him and told him about Gunter.

  “What’s the boss’s name?” Kee asked.

  “Stan LoCicero.”

  “You know the name of his company?”

  “Mahalo Manpower. They have the security and maintenance contracts for the Kuhio Regent.”

  He turned to his computer and started typing, two-fingered, cursing periodically as he must have hit the wrong key. “Goddammit, Juanita, get in here,” he bellowed after a while.

  “What’s up, Lieutenant?” she asked, appearing in the doorway with a smile on her face.

  “Come over here and type in my password.”

  He moved back from the computer, and she leaned over and punched a few keys. “While you’re there, find whatever you can on a guy named Stan LoCicero or a company called Mahalo Manpower,” he said.

  Juanita shot me a glance and I had to struggle not to laugh. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and then with a flourish, she hit the last key. “It’s printing,” she said.

  “Damned computers,” Kee grumbled as she walked out. He pulled a page off the printer and scanned it, then handed it to me.

  There was nothing on the company, and the information available on Stan LoCicero didn’t fill a page. He had been mentioned a few times in the course of investigations—but then so had I. Nothing had stuck.

  My brain buzzed, trying to fit together the pieces. Mr. Hu lived in a house owned by Wah Shing, which also owned the acupuncture clinic, which meant he was involved with the fire at the shopping center. He had hired Lucas Tyler to have sex with me. Lucas had told Vice that he was photographed or videotaped for blackmail purposes. And because Mr. Hu had set me up to have sex with Brian Izumigawa, I assumed he was the one behind the blackmail.

  But was he connected to Stan LoCicero, Gunter’s boss? Or was there more than one guy out there videotaping gay men and blackmailing them?

  Was Stan the haole guy who had burned Fouad, the law student? If so, had Stan left Fouad and then set the fire across the street? A lot of facts floated around, but what was missing was a good theory to tie them all together.

  “I want to know a lot more about Mr. LoCicero,” Kee said, bringing me back to the present.

  “So do I.” I told him I thought his investigation might tie into the arson and homicide Mike, Ray, and I were pursuing.

  “I want you to find out everything about LoCicero,” Kee said. “Where he’s from, what he’s into, down to what kind of toilet paper he uses. I want you to know him as well as you know your best friend.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Tell your friend to stall for a day or two. Say he’s got a flu bug or something, call in sick. Once we know more about LoCicero, we’ll know how to proceed.”

  When I got upstairs, I called Gunter and told him what Kee wanted. “Fine with me,” he said. “I didn’t want to go to work today anyway.”

  “I’ll call you tonight. We’ll do some brainstorming.”

  “I brainstorm best over alcohol,” Gunter said. “Preferably in the presence of hot, handsome manflesh.”

  “No you don’t,” I said. “And I’d stay away from the Rod and Reel Club if I were you, since Stan knows that’s your hangout.”

  “You sure know how to ruin the fun of a day off.”

  “Gunter, you have enough resources to entertain yourself for a month without breaking a sweat. I’ll call you later.”

  By the time I hung up, Ray had returned from court. I briefed him on what I’d heard from Frank O’Connor and Lieutenant Kee. He asked, “What was the name of LoCicero’s company?”

  “Mahalo Manpower.”

  “That name sounds familiar.” He flipped through his notes. “Mahalo Manpower was one of the other companies owned by Wah Shing.”

  “Well, that connects Mr. Hu and Mr. LoCicero.” That was a relief; it meant that all our cases were linked. We looked LoCicero up and found that despite his appearance on Vice’s radar, he had no criminal record. He owned a house in Hawai’i Kai, near where Treasure Chen had lived, and a Harley-Davidson VRSCDX, the Night Rod Special, was registered at his address. The corporate office for Mahalo Manpower was in a small building just on the other side of the H1 expressway.

  “I say we find Mr. LoCicero and follow him around for a while,” I said. “See where he goes and what he does.” I thought for a minute. “And I think this is a good time to bring in our computer consultant.”

  “Your friend Harry?”

  “The same. There must be something in cyberspace about Stan LoCicero.”

  “In the meantime, maybe Stan will lead us to Mr. Hu.”

  We roughed out a plan, and then got Lieutenant Sampson to buy into the program. “With your permission I’m also going to get my friend Harry to do some cybersearching on him,” I said.

  “Your friend still charging the same price?”

  Harry had always worked for free, to help me out and because he loved poking around in places he wasn’t supposed to be. “Sure.”

  “Then it’s fine with me. You need any overtime, I’ll authorize it.”

  Back at my desk, I put everything I knew about Stan LoCicero into an e-mail to Harry. “I sent you a message, brah,” I said, when he picked up his cell.

  “Just got it.”

  It sounded like he was in some public place, so I said, “Where are you?”

  “Looking at wedding invitations with Arleen.”

  “How’d you get the e-mail, then?”

  “BlackBerry,” he said. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, brah.”

  I was barely up to speed with my laptop. “You have time to look into it?”

  He lowered his voice. “Arleen’s got us booked all afternoon with wedding crap.” Back at normal volume, he said, “If you need this stuff ASAP, I’ll get right on it.” I heard him explaining to Arleen in the background. When he came back to me he said, “I owe you one, brah. Talk to you later.”

&
nbsp; Ray and I drove to the offices of Mahalo Manpower. A black Mercedes was parked in the lot, and the license plate corresponded to one of the three cars registered to Wah Shing. Who was driving it, though? Richard Hu? If it was Stan’s car, it was one more thing that connected him to Mr. Hu.

  My stomach grumbled. “Stan’s probably working. Let’s get something to eat, then come back here at the end of the day,” I said. We drove up University to a Zippy’s near UH and got some of their killer chili, and sat in the front window to consider what we knew.

  Ray pulled out a steno pad and said, “I’ve been making some notes.”

  The pad reminded me of Mike Riccardi, and I remembered the electricity that had passed between us the night before, wondering what would have happened if Gunter hadn’t shown up when he did.

  But that, as they say, was another story entirely.

  MEN WHO SAY MORE THAN HI

  Ray turned to a clean page and wrote Wah Shing in the center, drawing a circle around it. Then he drew a line to Mahalo Manpower, and circled that, too. He did the same for each of the business names we knew about, including the acupuncture clinic, the massage parlor, and the lingerie store. The only name I didn’t recognize was Island Internet. I called Harry and asked him to check it out.

  “So who’s behind Wah Shing?” Ray asked, when I hung up. “Mr. Hu?”

  “Must be. He’s the only guy who comes up over and over again. And the house he lived in is owned by Wah Shing.”

  “How’d you hook up with him, anyway?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Had I answered his ad? Had he answered one of mine?

  I joined MenSayHi about a month after I broke up with Mike, once the gonorrhea was completely gone. I’d been celibate since my diagnosis and the horniness was building up. The first guy I answered said his name was Lenny, and that he was a muscular top into dominating other well-built, well-hung men.

  I flattered myself into thinking he’d believe I fit the bill, and e-mailed him a couple of digital photos, including one of me flexing with a hard-on. My face was always in shadow; because of my very public coming-out, I had a recognition factor in the gay community and I wasn’t eager to reveal myself to a total stranger.

  Lenny responded a day later and we met up at his house in Mililani, where he had a variety of toys, including dildos, vibrators, and a sling. “I thought I recognized you from your photo,” he said, when I showed up.

  We had some fun together, and when we were done he said he had a friend I might like to meet. I was noncommittal, and over the next few weeks I answered a number of ads and had a lot of sex. Some of it was good, and some was bad. By the time I heard from Lenny again, I was ready for somebody who knew what he was doing, and I agreed to meet up with him and his friend.

  My first impression of Mr. Hu was that he was very ordinary. A middle-aged Chinese guy wearing a business suit, he looked more like he was ready to interview me for a job than to fuck me.

  But fuck me he did, after watching Lenny do the same.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it then—and even now, after months of encounters, it’s hard to quantify—but there was something about him that I connected to. It was as if he got me, in some very basic way, and I reacted to that.

  It was similar, in a way, to what I felt for Mike. I loved Mike, and I didn’t love Mr. Hu at all, but I felt like they were able to see into me and accept what they saw.

  I couldn’t explain all that to Ray; I barely understood it myself. So I simply said that I’d met Lenny online and then he’d introduced me to Mr. Hu a little later.

  “You know anything about this Lenny?” Ray asked. “Maybe he could give us a line on Mr. Hu.”

  I couldn’t remember the address of the house in Mililani, but I thought I’d recognize it again if I saw it. “Let’s take a drive,” I said.

  We’d just thrown away our lunch trash when my cell phone rang. “Hey, brah,” Harry said. “Island Internet owns a couple of Web sites—looks like they’re all gay porn, gay hookups. The big one is called MenSayHi.com.”

  “Thanks, brah. You have an address on them?”

  “In Mililani.” He read it to me and I wrote it down.

  It was another gorgeous day in paradise, so we rolled up the flaps on the Wrangler and hit the H1. We were surrounded by rental cars full of vacationing tourists, going slow, changing lanes without warning. I blasted my horn a couple of times, but it was a losing proposition.

  After the third time I’d tailgated some clueless vacationer, Ray said, “I know this must be weird for you, getting your sex life dragged into a case.”

  “Not so weird as you’d think. I wish it weren’t this way, but I have a habit of letting my dick get me into trouble.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Remember I told you about that case that dragged me out of the closet? I stumbled into it because I went to the Rod and Reel Club one night and I found a body behind the club. And then when I was undercover up on the North Shore, I fooled around with a guy who ended up getting killed.” I sighed. “Sampson gave me this big lecture then, how I had to learn to separate my personal life from my cases. But is it my fault that a guy I had sex with turns out to be a criminal?”

  “Sampson might suggest you be more careful about who you have sex with.”

  “And how do I do that? Require a background check from every guy before I get naked with him?”

  “Come on, Kimo,” Ray said, grabbing onto the door frame as I took a fast curve merging onto the H2. “You knew there was something weird with Mr. Hu from day one. And then you said he admitted he paid that guy to fuck you. I’m not trying to bust your chops, you know, but those were red flags that you just ignored.”

  “I know. I ought to be a monk.”

  “No. You just need to find the right guy and settle down with him.” He looked over at me. “You think the right guy is the fireman?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. If he gets his shit together.”

  I pulled off the H2 and started to navigate the local streets of Mililani, trying to find my way back to Lenny’s house. I spotted a car with a bumper sticker for MenSayHi and pulled up. “Here’s our address. And I think this is Lenny’s place.”

  The house was a nondescript ranch, painted beige, with a couple of scraggly hibiscus bushes with big red blossoms in the front yard. Ray and I walked up to the front door and I rang the bell. It sounded like he had a herd of dogs inside, barking like crazy. It took a couple of minutes until Lenny answered, a pair of small, furry white Pekingese yapping at his feet. “Kimo,” Lenny said. “What’s up?”

  I introduced Ray. “You mind if we come in and talk?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He leaned down and picked up the two dogs. “This is Bette Davis, and this is Greta Garbo,” he said, showing them off. “I’ll put them in the bedroom.”

  When he wasn’t wearing his leather chaps, with studded black straps crisscrossing his chest, Lenny looked like an ordinary guy. He was about six feet tall, broad shouldered, with a bit of a gut. He was barefoot, and wore a UH T-shirt and sweats. We followed him into the living room, and when he came back we all sat down. The furniture was a mix of styles, as if he’d inherited half of it and picked up the rest at a thrift shop. If I hadn’t had sex with him, I’d have doubted he was gay.

  “What can you tell us about MenSayHi?” I asked. “What’s your connection?”

  “I’m the webmaster. I’ve got a ProLiant DL380 G5 Server with quad-core processors and a smart array in my spare room, with a T1 fat pipe.”

  “I didn’t understand anything you said,” I said. “But what I want to know is how you’re connected to Wah Shing Corporation?”

  Lenny looked wary. “Wah Shing is our corporate parent. They provided the start-up funding.”

  “Is Mr. Hu behind Wah Shing?”

  “What’s this all about, Kimo?”

  “That’s what we need you to tell us, Lenny. We’ve got this giant jigsaw puzzle, and we’re trying to fit the pieces
together.”

  Lenny looked from me to Ray and back. “I knew it was too good to last,” he said. “I met Richard Hu about two years ago, online, through another site. We hooked up, and after sex we started talking. I had this idea for a Web site, and Richard provided the money.”

  He sat back against the sofa. “We launched about a year and a half ago. The main site is self-supporting through ads and basic memberships. Then there’s the private site, for premium members. Streaming video, live chat, exclusive photo galleries. You know, Kimo, it’s a class site.”

  “Except for the prostitution in the background,” I said.

  “Hey, I don’t get involved in any of that,” Lenny said, leaning forward. “Everything I do is completely legit. All I do is provide a venue for guys to hook up. What they do after they hook up is their business, and out of my control.”

  “We’re not interested in you, Lenny. We’re interested in Richard Hu. What do you know about him besides the money he provided?”

  “Should I have a lawyer?” Lenny asked.

  I shrugged. “That depends. If you broke the law, then yeah, you should have an attorney to protect your rights and broker a deal. But if you didn’t, all you’re doing is giving us information, and nobody ever went to jail for that.”

  Lenny shifted around uncomfortably on the sofa, then said, “I don’t know much. I never let him put cameras in here. Hell, I’m not interested in being somebody’s performing monkey. If I want to have sex, I want the only people watching to be people I invite.”

  “But he filmed other people?” Lenny nodded. “And then he gave you the pictures to post, didn’t he?”

  His face looked like he’d swallowed something nasty. “Come on, Lenny, I recognized myself.” I saw Ray looking at me. “I know I didn’t sign any release that said you could put naked pictures of me on your site.”

  “You can’t see your face,” Lenny said. “It could be anybody.”

  “I recognize my own ass.”