Mahu Fire

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Then I saw Mike Riccardi, in jeans and a striped shirt. He was off toward the side, not mingling with anyone, and I wanted to go to him, put my arms around him, draw him into the crowd. Despite how uncomfortable I was with my recognition, what came with it was a sense of community, of belonging. These were my people, I thought, and I wanted them to be Mike’s people too. I tried to catch his attention but he seemed to be looking everywhere but at me. A cameraman from KVOL roamed the crowd, taking random shots, and I thought Mike was trying to stay behind him, out of the range of the camera.

  Sandra got up to the microphone and welcomed everybody. She started a chant. “What do we want? Equal rights. When do we want them? Now!”

  The audience chanted with her. Finally she stopped chanting and started applauding, and then the crowd quieted. “Thanks for coming out today,” she said. “And I mean that in every sense of the term. It’s important for us to be out in all our communities, not just the gay and lesbian community. We have to show our friends, neighbors, relatives, and fellow voters that we are just like them—but with a twist.”

  “Yeah, we know how to dress,” a guy called out from the audience, and everyone laughed.

  “So this rally is very important, because it shows that we’re going to keep on fighting for what we want, what we deserve,” Sandra said. “I’m pleased to announce that a generous grant from Charlie Stahl, one of Honolulu’s most prominent citizens, is going to put the Hawai’i Marriage Project back on its feet immediately.” The crowd cheered.

  Sandra looked back at Cathy, who helped Robert unfurl a big rainbow flag. “You all know those lines from The Star-Spangled Banner, don’t you?” Sandra said. Then she sang, a cappella, in a beautiful soprano I never knew lurked within her stocky body. “The bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there.”

  Her last note was shimmering on the breeze when the series of shots rang out. All was chaos on the platform as we dove for cover. Fortunately the crowd stood paralyzed. The microphone was knocked to the ground and I crawled over to it, then stood up. “Everybody stay calm,” I said. “If anybody saw where that shooting came from, please come up and see me.”

  To my right, Charlie Stahl was laying on his back, the blood spilling across his white shirt, while Sandra and Cathy crouched over him. I looked out over the crowd. The mothers had hurried over to their children, but everyone else seemed to be just looking around to see what was going on. Almost everyone, that is. There was one man running away, and I could just see his back. But I could recognize him. It was Mike Riccardi.

  I heard sirens almost immediately, and within moments I saw the flashing lights that heralded the arrival of the police and an ambulance for Charlie Stahl. But leaning over him as the EMTs came through the crowd, I realized they were too late. An unlucky shot had hit him in the neck, right at the aorta, and despite Sandra’s attempts to staunch the bleeding, he had bled out.

  Sandra was sobbing at the edge of the stage, with Cathy next to her, holding on. I wanted to go over to them but I knew I couldn’t. I was afraid I’d break down, too. I’d seen many homicide victims in my career, including one man I cared about, and I’d killed one man myself, but I had never stood next to an innocent man, chatting and laughing with him, only to have him die next to me moments later.

  I could feel the pressure building on me, just as it had on Sandra. We’d both narrowly escaped the bombing, and now this. How long could our luck hold out? It was a very scary thought.

  There were a half-dozen guys at the foot of the stage, too, calling for me. I got Lidia and a couple of the uniforms to help me, and we corralled them into a line, and I sat in a folding chair at ground level and pulled out a notebook. Each guy seemed to have a different piece of information. A tall man, shorter than average, heavyset, no—gym build, no—swimmer’s build, dark hair, blond, unshaven, a goatee. No one had actually seen the shot, but they’d all looked around in the vicinity where the shot had come from.

  It took about half an hour to get through them all. I took their names and phone numbers, though one guy said the only way I could contact him was through his post office box. “Sorry,” he said, holding up the hand that held his wedding ring.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s cool that you were willing to come up here and talk to me.” Once the line was clear the uniforms left and the crowd started to disperse. I put my head down in my hands, trying to concentrate. Was there anything else I ought to do?

  “How’re you doing?”

  Mike pulled a chair next to me, sat down, and put his arm around me.

  “I’ll be okay. Anyway, there’s a lot of people around. Somebody might recognize you.”

  “I don’t give a shit about what anybody else thinks.” He kissed my forehead, and then hugged me tight, and I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I let out everything I was feeling about my brushes with death, my father being sick, Uncle Chin’s death and Jimmy’s disappearance, my frustrations at not catching the bomber, how I felt about all of us unable to live our lives without fear. I cried, and Mike held me.

  When I looked up most of the crowd had gone and the two of us were sitting in a big open space. “I have a small piece of good news for you,” Mike said, as I wiped my face with my hand. “I saw your shooter. Haole woman in a black t-shirt, black running shorts, white sneakers. Short dark hair.”

  “You did?”

  “I ran after her, but she had an accomplice driving a black Toyota Camry, which slowed as it passed her, and she jumped in. They ran a red light on Kuhio and I lost them.”

  “Did you get a plate number?”

  He shook his head. “Only a partial. The first three digits were HXM.”

  “It’s a start.” I stood up, blew my nose. “A woman shooter? You’re sure?”

  “Yup.” He smiled at me. “I do know the difference, you know.”

  “Come on, show me where you were when you heard the shot.”

  PUPUKEA PLANTATION

  By the time Mike and I were finished, dark had fallen over Waikiki. I spoke to Lieutenant Sampson and filled him in with what I knew, and then Mike and I went back to my apartment.

  “Won’t your mom and dad worry if they don’t see your truck in the driveway?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They’ve gotten used to me getting called out at strange hours to go investigate fires,” he said. “I always call them to let them know I’ll be out.”

  It’s funny the things that make us uncomfortable with a lover. Sometimes it’s nakedness, physical or emotional. Sometimes it’s silly things, like seeing that we don’t pick up our underwear or the way we talk to our pets. I had a feeling Mike wanted some privacy to make his call, so I ducked out to the grocery at the corner to get us something for dinner.

  When I got back, he was lounging on my couch watching baseball on TV, and I sat next to him to watch. My dad played second-string baseball for a few years at UH, and he’d raised my brothers and me with baseball fever. He told us stories of the first baseball game ever in Hawai’i, played July 4, 1866, where the “natives” beat the “haoles,” 2-1. The great Babe Ruth had come to Honolulu in 1933, and in the 1940s, when my dad was a kid, he used to watch Major League All-Star games in the old wooden Honolulu Stadium, affectionately called “The Termite Palace.”

  Mike and I were both tired, though he insisted on rubbing more cream on my healing burns. When he’d finished, we started to cuddle in my bed, but we both nodded off before we’d had a chance to get very far. It was so nice to wake the next morning, the sheets tangled around us, Mike snoring softly next to me. I propped my head up on my elbow and looked over at him.

  I loved the way his hairy skin flowed over his muscular arms, the way his mouth relaxed into a smile, accentuated by his rich black mustache. There was a puckered scar on his right shoulder that looked like the result of a burn. I wanted to get to know every inch of his beautiful body, tracing my fingers over the fine black hairs on his chest and thighs, connecting
the dots of the occasional freckles across his back.

  He woke up and saw me watching him. He yawned. “What time?”

  “At the sound of the tone it will be 6:05,” I said. While I was making my tone noise, he reached down and took hold of my dick.

  “Did you say ‘tone’ or ‘bone’?” he asked.

  I leaned across and kissed him, and we finished what we’d started the night before. By the time we were done, we had to rush out to avoid being late for work.

  My first stop was at the coroner’s office on Iwilei Road, where I picked up the bullet that had killed Charlie Stahl. Doc’s minions had been busy the night before; Charlie’s prominence and wealth had ensured a speedy autopsy. As I’d seen, the cause of death was a bullet wound to the throat. None of the other shots I’d heard fired had connected with a human being, which was something to be grateful for.

  From the coroner’s I drove downtown, and took the bullet down to ballistics on the lower level. At the door of the lab someone had hung a big poster of a chicken. Or at least, that’s what was on the left side. In case you didn’t know what it was, the word “chicken” was written underneath, with (before) next to it.

  To the right side, someone had drawn what looked like an explosion, jagged little shards flying in all directions. Under that (after) was written. Below that was a photo of the bullet that had killed the chicken, blown up so that its distinctive striations were clearly visible.

  On the bottom, in big letters, it read, “A case of fowl play. If you have any information about this dastardly deed, report to Detective Kimo Kanapa’aka.”

  Billy Kim, the round-faced ballistics tech, came out as I was reading the poster. “Very funny,” I said.

  “Hey, you work in ballistics, you take your humor where you find it. No offense?”

  “I’ll let you make it up to me. Tell me everything you know about this bullet, all right?” I handed it to him in a plastic baggie. “Take good care of it. It’s my only clue.” Well, that and a partial license plate, I thought.

  As I was leaving the lab, Billy’s phone rang. “Hey, Kimo, hold up,” he called. “It’s your boss. He wants you upstairs, pronto.”

  Sampson was in his office watching a small battery-operated TV. Reception was lousy so he kept playing with the rabbit ears, but I could see enough to tell we were watching a press conference with Betty Yamazuki, one of the Honolulu County Commissioners, who was demanding to know more about Wilson Shira’s death.

  She stood with her arm around Shira’s widow as she fabricated a story that had no relationship to reality. She implied that someone within the Marriage Project had deliberately lured Shira into the building, then orchestrated the bombing in order to kill him and shift blame away from themselves. “Is it a coincidence that the only person to die in this blast was one of this group’s most formidable opponents?” she said. “I call that a real mystery.”

  “I call it irony,” I said.

  Back at the studio, the anchor said, “Citing the confidentiality of their ongoing investigation, Honolulu police officials have declined to comment on Ms. Yamazuki’s allegations.”

  “They’re a piece of crap, is what they are,” Sampson said. “But until you find something better, they’re going to stand. What have you got?”

  “You notice how she didn’t even mention Charlie Stahl?” I asked. “I’m sure the two cases are related. We’ve got a bullet and a partial license plate number. I’m going all out on this, Lieutenant. I’ll get you the results you want.”

  “Soon.” Sampson looked back down at the paperwork on his desk, and I left his office.

  Back at my desk, I worked up a profile on Charlie Stahl, just to eliminate anybody else in his life who might have wanted to kill him. I found out a bunch of things about his personal life I’d just as soon not have known, but I couldn’t find anybody who could have killed him. Though he was wealthy, so was the rest of his family, and most of his money was tied up in family trusts. His friends all liked him, and he wasn’t involved in any suspicious business deals. He wasn’t a drug user or an alcoholic, though his sexual tastes were unusual. In short, he was an average citizen.

  Just before noon, I got a call from Thanh Nguyen at the fingerprint lab. As soon as I had copied down the information I hung up and did some work at the computer. When I was finished, I phoned Mike Riccardi’s cell.

  “We finally got a break,” I said. “Remember I told you about the rock in the paper bag that went through the window of the Marriage Project a couple of hours before the bomb? We got a make on the prints. I pulled the guy’s rap sheet and he’s got a half dozen arrests for assault, assault with a deadly weapon, felony assault, malicious mischief, you name it.”

  “Anything for arson?”

  “No, but people change.”

  Mike laughed. “You got an address on the guy?”

  “I’ve even got a job address. A farm up outside Wahiawa. You want to go for a ride?”

  “How could I turn down an invitation like that?”

  “Good. Where are you? I’ll pick you up.”

  He gave me an address in Waikiki, a few blocks from my apartment. I knew the place, a small storefront that rented and sold X-rated videos. I’d stopped there once or twice myself, that is, until someone had poured gasoline behind the back door and set it afire. I thought it was the first of the gay-related arsons.

  “You’re back there? Got a new lead?”

  “Nope. Just tidying up loose ends. They’re reopening tomorrow, so I wanted to give them some advice.”

  “Maybe they’ll cut us a discount on some video rentals.”

  “I’ll be waiting out front,” he said. “I’ll be the one wearing the big smile.”

  “Oh, if only that were all you were wearing.” I hung up, smiling to myself. This could be our big break. All we had to do was lean on the rock-thrower until he gave up his partners, and we’d be home free.

  He’d gone home at some point and put on clean clothes and he looked handsome in his button-down chambray shirt with the HFD logo on the breast pocket.

  It was sunny and dry as we cruised up the Kamehameha Highway toward Wahiawa. “This weather makes me nervous,” Mike said.

  “Nervous? It’s gorgeous.”

  “Yeah, but you feel how dry it is? We haven’t had significant rainfall in a couple of weeks.”

  We’d passed through the miles of strip malls and light industrial development that marked the outskirts of Honolulu, and we were climbing through the cleft of hills into Central O’ahu. I looked out at the fields around us. They were beginning to look parched. “I’m sure it’ll rain soon. It always does.”

  “I hope you’re right. In addition to the arsons I’ve been investigating, we’ve already started to get some small fires out in the country. We had one near Schofield Barracks the other day, had to evacuate the area until we got it under control.”

  We drove up the highway beyond the Dole plantation, looking for the street address I had, and then turned off onto a red dirt road that was signed toward Pupukea Plantation.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said. “The Church of Adam and Eve had a meeting up here a month or two ago.”

  I pulled up in front of a low wooden building that looked like it had been a set for some old Western, an overhanging roof supported by thin posts, sheltering an empty porch. A line of cars and trucks were parked in the dirt in front of the building. “Son of a bitch,” I said. I pointed at a green pickup parked at one end. The latch on the gate was broken on the right-hand side, just as Frank Sit had described.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” Mike said.

  We went through a screen door into the office, showed our badges, and asked to speak with Ed Baines, the guy whose prints we’d matched. The secretary said she’d call him in from the field, and ushered us back to a big room filled with chairs and a speaker’s podium.

  “We use this when we have to get all the workmen in one place,” she said, and left us. Th
e walls were lined with safety posters and a complicated anatomical description of the stages in pineapple development. I tried to read one of them but couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking that we were close to solving our whole investigation.

  A few minutes later a tall, blond haole with tattoos on both arms stuck his head in the door. “You guys looking for me?”

  “Ed Baines?”

  He nodded.

  “Come on in.” We showed our badges again and introduced ourselves.

  His skin was rough and weathered, and he wore jeans and a chambray shirt with ragged short sleeves. A packet of Marlboros threatened to fall out of his torn breast pocket at any moment. “I don’t know what you guys want, but I been clean since the last time I got out of the joint. They give me a good chance here, and I’m trying not to fuck it up.”

  “Then I’m sure you’ll be willing to help us,” I said. “Like maybe telling us where you were last Wednesday afternoon, for starters.”

  He looked wary. “I was here on the farm, working. Every day, 7 to 4.”

  “You punch a clock?”

  He nodded.

  “So I could check your punch out, if I wanted to.”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “I’m having a little trouble believing you were here on the farm last Wednesday, is all,” I said. “When I’ve got a paper bag with your fingerprints on it, and that bag had a rock inside it last Wednesday that went through somebody’s window.”

  “I want to call my lawyer.”

  “Whoa, that’s a big turnaround in attitude,” I said. “One minute you’re gonna help us, the next you’ve gotta call your lawyer.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Mike said, leaning forward. “You want to call a lawyer, that’s your right. Under the Constitution. But you know what lawyers are like. I know you do, you’ve been around the block a few times. Your lawyer steps in, and then we can’t do anything to help you. See, we’re not so concerned with you, Ed. We’ve read your rap sheet. Unless you’re turning into a firebug in your old age, we’re just looking at you as a way to get to who we want.”