Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Here’s the way I see it,” Akoni said finally. “You did two things wrong. You failed to report a crime under your badge number and notify your lieutenant, and you failed to secure the scene of a crime. Neither of those is enough to lose your badge.”

  He took a sip of coffee. I didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t have to say anything else. Nothing to anybody. Not the business about being in the Rod and Reel Club, or the guy who stuck his tongue in your ear. If you feel you want to tell somebody something, you say you had a lot to drink, you went for a long walk, you stumbled on to the body, the guy in the Jeep. You were pretty drunk, confused.”

  “I wasn’t drunk.”

  “Cops and drinking, they go together. It’s a long tradition. Guys can handle that. The department can handle that. This other thing, you’re blazing new territory. You want to take your chances?”

  “You’re telling me to lie.”

  Akoni crushed his empty cup and pitched it into a trash can. “I have never told you to lie about anything and I never will,” he said. “You know me better than that. But you’re no virgin, Kimo. You know the way the world works. Sometimes you have to put some spin on the truth to make things come out the way they should.”

  I thought about it. It was true. Many times, we’d known who the bad guy was, and we’d eliminated confusing evidence from our reports. Or we’d bluffed our way to confessions, pretending we knew more than we did. It was just something you did. But those situations weren’t about me. Somehow I’d always applied a higher standard to my personal life.

  “You want to tell the truth?” Akoni said. “The way I see it, you’ve been lying for years, never telling anybody you were really a fag. What about all those girls you took home. You tell them the truth?”

  There was a sour taste in my mouth. I said, “No.”

  “So why start now, when the truth can ruin you?”

  “Because I owe it to Tommy Pang,” I said, before I could think about what I was saying. The conviction built inside me. “That poor jerk is dead and I did wrong by him. In the past, when we’ve adjusted the truth, it was because we were trying to be faithful to the dead, to do right by them. This is the opposite.”

  “Tommy Pang was a two-bit crook who never did anything nice for anybody,” Akoni said. “Nothing would probably give him more pleasure than to feel like his death caused a cop to lose his job. You come out with this, they’ll reassign you to a desk downtown, or put you on leave. You won’t be able to do a thing for Tommy Pang, or for any other vic we ever find.” He paused. “You won’t be able to do a thing to feel better.”

  He was right. It would be the end of my career. Not right away. I’d ride a desk for a while, and then there’d be a hearing, and eventually I’d turn in my badge. Maybe they’d ask for it; maybe I’d just do it in the end out of frustration. “So I write up what you said. What then?”

  “We keep it between ourselves for now. If we never find the bad guys, it goes into the cold case file. If we do, and we take the case to the DA, we see what he has to say.”

  “You could get fried over this yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a part of my troubles.”

  “You’re my partner.” He started walking. “Come on, let’s get back to work.”

  When we got back to the station, there was an elderly Chinese lady at the front desk complaining about kids making noise in her building, and a couple of tourists in processing reporting a purse snatching. I called the number Genevieve Pang had given us for her son and left a message, that it was important he call me at the station. Then I called the locksmith, who arranged to meet us at the alley behind the Rod & Reel Club, and Akoni and I walked over there together.

  Arleen met us at the door. She was so tiny, barely five feet, and next to me and Akoni she looked like an elf, or maybe some kind of Japanese pixie. She even bounced on the balls of her feet when she walked. As the locksmith got to work on the door, I said to her, “You’re sure this is okay, giving us this permission?”

  “Well, when I was little, my mom always told me if I was lost, to go ask a policeman. So if you can’t trust the cops, who can you trust?” She smiled goofily.

  The locksmith popped the door to Tommy’s office easily, and we walked in. The room was as sparse as the rest of the office, just a big leather chair and a desk, and two chairs across from them. A big computer sat on the desktop, but unfortunately it was password-protected and Arleen didn’t know the password.

  “What’s that?” Akoni asked, pointing to a little contraption on the desk next to the computer.

  “The docking station for his Palm,” Arleen said. “You want to find out everything about Mr. Pang, you find the Palm.” She bit her lip, thought for a second. “But I think he backed everything up onto the computer, too. If you can find somebody to break into that file, you’ll know where he went, who he saw, all that stuff.”

  We looked through the desk but there was nothing to find. Tommy Pang had held his cards close to his vest.

  Before we left, we looked carefully at the door, to make sure no one could have broken in. There was a police lock on it, a rounded metal bar about three feet long, maybe two inches in diameter. It slipped into a catch on the door and then slid in a semi-circular track set into the floor. It was designed so that you could open the door just enough to pass something through, but wouldn’t open wide enough to let a person in.

  “So nobody broke in,” I said. “Hey, Arleen, how do you get in if this lock’s on?”

  “That door there goes through to the bar,” she said, pointing. “Usually Mr. Pang sets the lock before he leaves, and goes out through the bar. I come in that way.”

  I nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything else to look at, so we left. “It’s going to be days before we can get some computer guy out of downtown,” Akoni said as we walked down the alley.

  “You know my friend Harry? He can break into any computer—I know, he’s bragged about it enough, no matter how much I tell him it’s a crime. Maybe I can get him to come back with us.”

  “I don’t like involving civilians in a case.”

  “We hire experts all the time,” I said, stepping aside to let a pair of nuns pass. “It’s either that or wait for the department to send us somebody, after the trail is cold.”

  “Won’t get us much, but if it pleases you.” We didn’t talk much on the way back to the station; when we stall on a case it gets us both down. “I’m heading over to see what the Feebs know about Tommy Pang,” Akoni said, when we came to the garage where he parked his car.

  “I can go with you.”

  Akoni planted his feet and looked off toward Diamond Head, not at me. “I need to do this on my own.”

  There are times when we go off and investigate on our own. Usually it’s when we have so many leads that we can’t afford to waste time together. That wasn’t the case now. “Why?”

  He shuffled his feet. “Don’t stonewall on me, Akoni. Tell me what’s up.”

  He opened the door to the garage stairwell. Before he went in, though, he said, “I’ve done as much for you as I can, Kimo. Now I gotta look out for me.”

  “What?” I asked, but he’d already gone inside.

  I didn’t know what to think anymore. Was he in a bad mood? Was he separating himself from me in case I took a fall? It only took me a few minutes to get back to the station, but all the way I kept wondering what freight train Akoni saw heading my way. It was easy to believe it was something going wrong with the case, but it was also quite possibly something else. Akoni had always criticized my bull-headedness, the way I had to see something through once I started it. It’s a trait that frightened me sometimes.

  Back at the station, I sat at the computer, pulling up names of every person known to be part of a tong, and then got on the phone, calling detectives and snitches to see who might have had it in for Tommy Pang. Printouts piled up on my desk, I got a backache, and my garbage can filled with crumpled coffee cups. There wer
e no rumors of tong wars, and nobody had a special grudge against Tommy Pang. As a matter of fact, he was a relatively small player, not even catching much notice among the big boys.

  When Akoni still had not returned by lunch, I left for the records office in Honolulu Hale, our city hall, an impressive stone building with a pseudo-Spanish motif—narrow windows, turrets, the whole nine yards. You walked through a short lobby and into a central courtyard with a high ceiling. Straight ahead were the city council chambers, but the records office was tucked away in a corner in the back. I stood in line and checked out the microfiche I needed, then took it to one of the readers.

  I was interested to find out if Tommy Pang really owned the club, or if perhaps he was a front man for some larger group. I slid the fiche into the machine and navigated to the appropriate section, where I discovered that The Rod and Reel Club was owned by Hui 812.

  Hui is a common Chinese term for a kind of holding company. It was what I expected; if you’re going to own a gay bar, you probably don’t want to make it easy to find out who you are. I pulled the fiche out and got back in line.

  By the fourth fiche, I was annoyed and intrigued. I started taking notes and drawing lines on my pad from one company to the next. It took me all afternoon. I went back and forth between the records library and the tax office, showing my badge and asking questions. Finally I found a name, hidden under layers of bureaucracy and red tape. The eventual owner of the Rod and Reel Club, once you went back through level upon level, was Tommy Pang. No other name showed up anywhere.

  By the time I got back to the station, Akoni had returned. The FBI had nothing, he said. No open investigations involving Tommy Pang, no rumors of tong wars, nothing. I told him what I’d found.

  “Doesn’t get us any farther, does it?” he said. “What now?”

  “We wait for Derek to call us back, or we call him again tomorrow. Then we start questioning Tommy’s business associates. Anybody with known tong affiliations. See if this is business-related.”

  He frowned. “You think it could be anything else?”

  “You heard Mrs. Pang. He had ‘company’ sometimes. Maybe the company had a jealous husband or boyfriend.”

  “I hate this part of a case,” he said. “Too many ways to go, no real leads. Just lots of legwork.” He started packing up his stuff.

  “Listen, Akoni, you want to get a beer? We could strategize.”

  “I gotta get home.”

  “Look, I think we ought to talk.”

  He stood up. “We got nothing to talk about. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He walked out, and the door shut behind him with a bang.

  YOU’RE A CHAMP, KIMO

  I sat at my desk for a while, until Alvy Greenberg, one of the uniforms who’d been with us on the drug bust, came in and said, “Hey, Kimo.”

  Alvy was about five years younger than I was, and a surfer, too. We’d met when I’d just come back from the North Shore, when I was in the academy, and because he was maybe interested in becoming a cop we’d talked, off and on, about my experiences there. At the time he’d been a waiter, taking a couple of classes at UH, trying to decide, as I had, if he was good enough to make a career out of surfing.

  He wasn’t, either, and just before I made detective he’d entered the academy. I guess I had been kind of a mentor to him, advising him on how to deal with problems that came up, surfing with him now and then. Once in a while on a holiday weekend we’d throw our boards into my truck and drive up to the North Shore, just to keep our hands in.

  “Hey, Alvy.” He was the kind of guy who looked older than he was, the one you always sent in to buy the beer when you were still illegal. About five-seven, thin, already balding rapidly at twenty-seven, and incredibly ambitious. You couldn’t take the detective’s exam until you’ve had three years on the beat, and most officers wait another year or two beyond that. Alvy had taken the exam right after his third anniversary, just a couple of weeks before. He was still waiting for the results, but we’d already talked about where he might be posted. He didn’t want to leave Waikīkī, but he was tactful enough to realize that unless they expanded our staff, he’d have to wait for me or Akoni to leave. So we’d talked about District 1, which covered most of downtown and was administered out of the main headquarters on South Beretania Street. Lots of government and corporate offices, and Chinatown to provide work, and the chance to be at headquarters and make contacts.

  Or maybe District 2, Central O‘ahu, which also included a lot of military installations. It wasn’t as glamorous, but he’d get a lot of experience. I was also pushing for District 5, Kalihi, which included the airport, and I agreed with him that the other districts, Pearl City, Waipahu, Windward O’ahu, and East Honolulu, wouldn’t be very interesting, and wouldn’t give him the opportunities for advancement he was looking for.

  He walked over and sat on the edge of Akoni’s desk. “That was some bust yesterday, huh?”

  “You can’t win every time,” I said. “Sometimes things just go wrong.”

  “I heard you got another case already.”

  He was an eager guy, handsome in a way, red hair you might almost call auburn, blue eyes. He was a little too skinny to be a great surfer—he didn’t have enough weight to master the really big waves, but he made up for it with endurance.

  If you want to be a good surfer, I mean a really good one, you have to work at it. You have to be totally focused on making yourself the best surfer you can be. You spend hours out on the water, learning to anticipate the waves, practicing your moves. You have to understand a little about physics, a little about oceanography, a little about wind speed. Surfing has to be what you live for.

  I thought I could live for surfing when I was twenty-two, crashing on the floor of somebody’s house on the North Shore, surfing Haleiwa from dawn to dusk and talking surfing the rest of the time. Nobody screwed around too much up there—we were too focused, and at the end of the day, too tired. So I could ignore the part of my brain that was always scared, always holding my secret.

  Then I came in fifth in the Pipeline Spring Championships. By March, the great winter waves on the North Shore have died down a little, and the best surfers have gone to chase waves elsewhere on the globe. So I wasn’t facing top competition, but still, it was the best I’d ever done. I was riding high, thinking I was finally reaching for my potential. Most surfers start when they’re fifteen or sixteen, peak in their early twenties, and lose the competitive edge by thirty. I was twenty-three, and at the top of my form.

  A bunch of the guys took me out drinking that night, buying me beers and shots until they closed the bar and dawn started to streak the dark sky over the North Shore. I was in no condition to drive home, so my buddy Dario dragged me over to his place to crash. He was staying at a one-room cottage north of Haleiwa, right on the sand. I remember wanting to lay down right there on the beach, I was so wasted.

  The next thing I remember is waking up in Dario’s bed, naked, with his mouth on my left nipple. He bit and sucked at both nipples until they were hard and sore, and then licked a trail down my stomach to my crotch, where he gave me a blow job.

  Then I must have passed out again, because when I woke again it was almost noon and there was a note on the refrigerator from Dario. “You’re a champ, Kimo,” it read. “I’m on the water.”

  I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded, and my body was sore in unaccustomed places. When I looked in the mirror I saw my nipples were raw and red, and I had a hickey on the side of my neck. I knew then that I had made the best showing I would ever make in a competition. It would only get harder to keep holding back my desire for men, and the effort I had to put to that task would take away from what I had left for surfing.

  So I left. I hitched back to the place where I was staying, packed up, and went home. After hanging around my parents’ house for a while, I entered the police academy, the most macho thing I could think to do. I thought if anything could save me from be
ing gay, being a cop would be it.

  Alvy and I talked for a while, and eventually I felt better. If Akoni couldn’t deal with me, that was his problem. Alvy went back to the locker room to change out of his uniform, and I walked home.

  There were still a couple of hours of daylight left when I got home, so I went surfing. It felt good to empty my mind of all my troubles—my sexuality, the danger I might face if I came out as a gay cop, the dead ends in Tommy Pang’s murder case.

  On my way home, I stopped at a little grocery just across Lili’uokalani from my apartment and picked up some shrimp, mushrooms, and red and green peppers to grill on my little barbecue. It’s a tiny, dark little store, and from the outside you’d think it was nothing more than a place for cigarettes and beer. But the owners, an elderly Chinese couple, took a fierce pride in the quality of the produce, and it was better than any grocery I knew in Honolulu. The clerk was a surfer, and he let me run up a tab when I didn’t have cash with me. “How were the waves?” he asked as he rang me up.

  “I got a couple of good ones. Not many, though.”

  “Yeah, it’s been slow.”

  He was a skinny blond dude, long stringy hair, and tiny silver rings in his right ear, his nose and his left eyebrow. He was wearing a tank top and as he reached for a bag his shirt shifted a little and I noticed he’d gotten his nipple pierced, too. To avoid looking at him anymore I turned a bit and scanned the store. “Hey, throw these in too, will you?” I asked, spotting a bag of chocolate-covered Oreos and putting them on the counter.

  “Eating healthy, dude,” he said, with a smirk. “These are killer, by the way. I keep a bag behind the counter and scarf them for energy sometimes.”

  Back outside, the sun was setting through the low motels and high-rise towers, turning the sky a range of pastels from yellow to blue. It was a peaceful time of day, and I started to feel like someday I might get my life back in order again, and that in the end all the uproar might just be worth it.