Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I think your attitude toward your parents changes as you get older. You’re more able to see them as human beings who have made choices and handled their lives as best they could. I didn’t always agree with the decisions my father had made; I would rather he had worked less when I was a kid, and spent more time with us. I thought we could have had a few less toys, eaten more rice and poi and less steak, and in return had more of him, but it was the fifties and sixties then, and that’s what fathers did. I’m sure my mother, born poor and determined never to be poor again, had a lot to do with that, too, but again, you couldn’t fault her for doing what she thought was best for her family.

  It was saddening to know that I would never have more family than this, and that I would lose them eventually. I wouldn’t have a wife, though I hoped someday I would find a partner. I would never have children and have to make choices on how to raise them; never see their first steps or first day at school, nor their graduations or weddings. I would never have a luau to celebrate the birth of my child, and never have grandchildren to swarm over me the way my nieces and nephews did to my father.

  I would always be a part of my brothers’ lives, or hoped I would, be Uncle Kimo to Jeffrey and Ashley and their brothers and sisters, and that would have to be enough. Like my parents, I took the hand I was dealt and tried to make the best of it.

  I looked at my watch. It was already late; I had to drive back to Waikīkī and pick up Tim, and then go out to the Boardwalk and see if anyone could identify Wayne or Derek. I made my excuses as my mother and Aunt Mei-Mei were clearing the dessert dishes. “So late, you have to work?” my mother asked.

  “I have to check out a suspect’s alibi. He was there late, I have to go there late.”

  She shook her head. My father said, “Be careful, Keechee.”

  “I will be.” To Uncle Chin I said, “I am very sorry, for you, about Tommy. I’ll do my best to catch whoever killed him.”

  Uncle Chin smiled at me. “You my son, too, Kimo,” he said. “He kanaka pono ‘oe, lokomaika‘i ‘oe.”

  I looked down. “You flatter me, Uncle Chin.” He had told me I was a powerful person, and good-hearted as well.

  “He says the truth,” my father said. “Your mother and I are very proud of you.”

  How proud would they be, I thought, as I drove back down to Waikīkī, if they knew who I really was?

  * * *

  The Boardwalk looked nondescript from the outside, stuck near the end of a strip mall, with nothing but a wooden walkway over the concrete sidewalk to distinguish it from the Karate school and beeper store on either side. Tim said, “This is it?” when we pulled up in my truck.

  “This is it.” We walked up to the front door, and stepped through a beaded curtain into a dark vestibule. I heard the pounding beat of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as we turned right and stepped through another curtain into a pile of sand.

  At least that’s what it felt like. It was a long, narrow sandbox that I guess those in the know stepped over. As it was we both stepped in it, and then as we walked farther in, the sand sifted out of our shoes.

  The room was dark, but spotlights washed places on the rough wooden walls. It was as kitschy as the Rod and Reel, but in a different style. This was early beach bum, with fishing nets hung from the ceiling, and tattered pin-ups of boys in skimpy bathing suits on the walls. The centerpiece was a long bar that ran the length of one wall. Instead of a polished top its surface was made of rough wood planks, like a beachfront boardwalk, and at about the middle a well-muscled Hawaiian boy in his early twenties strutted and danced in a jockstrap, reaching in often to fondle himself. At the far end, in his own pool of light, an equally well-muscled, dark-haired haole boy of about the same age practiced his own posturing.

  “They have bars like this back in Boston,” Tim whispered. “But I never went to one.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” I whispered back.

  There was another smaller bar in a back room, through a wide archway, and on the other side of the room there were four pool tables, each lit by its own fake stained-glass lamp. There were two or three guys at each of the tables, and maybe a dozen by the bar.

  I hadn’t changed from the clothes I’d worn all day—a maroon polo shirt and jeans. Tim had taken off the tie I guessed he’d worn to work, but was still wearing a white oxford cloth button down shirt, and a pair of neatly pressed khakis. The guys around us, who ranged in age from what I guessed to be late teens to mid-fifties, were all dressed similarly, though there were a few in t-shirts and another couple in leather pants with chains attached to the pockets.

  We walked up to the bar and tried very hard to avoid the boy thrusting his crotch toward our heads. I ordered beers for both of us, and then when the bartender, a guy who looked half Hawaiian and half Chinese, brought them I showed him my ID. “Yeah?”

  I’d deliberately chosen a place where one of the spotlights washed a section of bar. I pulled out a picture of Wayne I’d found on a club page of the Yale website, and asked, “Have you seen this guy?”

  The bartender looked at it and shrugged. “I think so.”

  “You remember when?”

  He laughed. “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Think a little harder,” I said. “I’ve got some friends in the department who don’t like underage drinking very much. I could send them over here.”

  He didn’t like that. He picked up Wayne’s picture, looked at it again, and then closed his eyes. “Not for a couple of weeks,” he said when he opened them again. “He’s got a friend, doesn’t he?”

  I showed him a picture of Derek I’d found at the same place. “Yeah, that’s him,” he said. “They’re usually together, though sometimes the haole cruises by himself.”

  “So they weren’t in here a week ago Tuesday, the sixteenth?”

  He shook his head. “No. I know that for a fact, because we were closed that night.” He looked at me. “Your friends in the department were here the Saturday before. They said they were looking for drugs, but they didn’t find anything. And I don’t serve anybody under twenty-one. Still they decided they didn’t like the idea of a fag bar, so they closed us down. It took us a full week to get it cleared up and reopen.”

  I nodded. He walked away to serve somebody else down the counter. If the police didn’t like fags getting together at a bar on the edge of town, they certainly weren’t going to like one on their force.

  For an hour or so we stood around and watched the guys playing pool, me leaning back against Tim, feeling the contact my shoulders made against his chest, his arms around my waist. Every time his fingertips grazed my skin I felt shock waves rolling through my chest and down into my groin. I was hard almost the entire time.

  We drank our beers, and swayed to the rhythm of the music on the jukebox, and every now and then we turned around and kissed. Around us, men moved through the shadows and the light, talking in small groups, flirting, or silently cruising the bar waiting for sparks to fly. A Thai or Vietnamese boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen chatted at the bar with a haole man in his fifties, and as I watched, the man stroked the boy’s cheek in a gesture of unexpected tenderness.

  Tendrils of smoke drifted through the wash of a light near us, and the air smelled of cigarettes, beer and testosterone. At a table in the back, two men who looked like brothers alternately kissed and sat back and stared at each other with wide smiles. Near the door, three men had a heated discussion, one of them gesturing wildly and repeatedly pointing his finger at his head as if he was shooting himself. There was a rotating stable of six guys who danced on the bar, all of them young, well-muscled and well-hung.

  It was interesting to be out in public with Tim and not care about anybody else. And nobody seemed to care about us. A pool table opened up and we played, and then around midnight both of us started yawning and I drove us back to Waikīkī .

  “That was fun,” he said as I pulled up in front of his
building.

  “Yeah, it was, wasn’t it. I’ll tell you, it was a hell of a lot more fun going there with you than with Akoni.”

  He laughed. “I doubt you’d kiss Akoni in public.”

  It was my turn to laugh. “I think if I kissed Akoni, in public or in private, it would take him a minute to collect his wits, and then he’d give me a good roundhouse punch.”

  “Well, I’ll never do that when you kiss me.” He leaned across then and we kissed for a long minute, and then he yawned again and said, “Work in the morning. See ya.”

  LUCKY LOU

  The next morning I surfed for a half hour or so, just long enough to get my juices running, and was at my computer a few minutes before eight, trying to organize my thoughts. Akoni came in with a cup of coffee and I said, “You didn’t bring one for me?”

  “Hey, you were here first. You could have had coffee for me.” He sat down in his chair and turned around to face my desk. I told him what I’d discovered at the Boardwalk, that Derek and Wayne couldn’t have been there. “That means Wayne was lying,” I said. “Derek said they went up to Mount Tantalus and parked.”

  Akoni sat back in his chair. “What do you think really happened?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know that it matters. Derek and Wayne couldn’t stay at the Rod and Reel because they didn’t want Tommy to know about them. So they left. Tommy must have gone back to the club after his date with Treasure, where he met up with the cop, who was probably there to get a payoff for tipping Tommy about the bust earlier that night.”

  “They argued?”

  “Must have. Maybe Tommy didn’t want to pay, they got into a scuffle, the cop whacked him over the head.”

  Akoni and I looked at each other for a while. In the background we heard the radio crackle with beat cops checking out license plates and driver records. The 6-1 officer was checking “Golf, Bravo, Golf, 343,” and the dispatcher told him it was a 1998 red Mazda Miata, and gave him the registration information. They checked the driver and made sure he had no outstanding warrants.

  Finally, the phone rang and I answered. “Really,” I said. “Cool. Keep it in the back; we’ll be out to see you.”

  “That was Lucky Lou.” He ran a pawnshop out by the Aloha Bowl, and he was responding to a list of Tommy Pang’s jewelry we’d circulated around the city. “He thinks he’s got Tommy’s watch.”

  “Looks like we get to get out of here.” Akoni stood up. “You want some lunch? We could hit Zippy’s,” he said, and it was almost like having my partner back.

  Lucky Lou’s pawn shop was located in an industrial neighborhood out by the Aloha Stadium just beyond Pearl Harbor, not far from the Boardwalk. We took the H1 Ewa, found ourselves a Zippy’s, and ordered our burgers.

  “Who do you think pawned the watch?” I asked, when we’d given in our orders.

  Akoni shrugged. “The murderer?”

  “Good a guess as any,” I said, as the clerk brought our burgers out to the window. “No way we’re going to get prints, but maybe they’ve got video surveillance.”

  Akoni laughed. “If the camera works.” We ate, Akoni telling me about how Mealoha had dragged him out to an outlet mall in Waipahu, about fifteen miles west of Honolulu.

  Lucky Lou ran a tourist trap operation out front, catching visitors on their way to Pearl Harbor with counterfeit Guccis and Cartiers, and rows of shiny gold chains that would turn your neck green about a day after you got home from your vacation. Around the back, there’s another entrance for the pawn shop, and that’s the one we took.

  Lucky Lou was about three hundred pounds and balding, a crabby New Jersey transplant. “Hey, Lou,” I said, making my way past racks of nearly new guitars, stereo equipment that would probably be warm to the touch, and cameras soldiers from Schofield Barracks pawned to pay for cootchie-cootchie girls and their tender ministrations. “Let’s see that watch you got.”

  He pulled out a tray. It was a Rolex like the one Genevieve Pang had described for us, engraved with “Tommy” on the back in fancy script, next to a couple of Chinese characters which I knew meant luck. I guessed Tommy’s luck had run out.

  “The guy bring anything else in at the same time?” Akoni asked.

  Lucky Lou grimaced. “I knew you were going to ask that,” he said. He pulled out another tray, and there were the diamond rings and gold and diamond bracelet Tommy’d also been wearing. “You know we’re going to have to pull this in,” I said.

  “This gives me a credit, right?” Lou asked. “I get in any trouble, you vouch for me?”

  “That depends,” Akoni said. “You murder your wife, we can’t do a thing for you. Parking ticket, that’s another story.”

  “You know what I mean,” Lou said.

  “Yeah, Lou, we’ll be a character reference for you.” I wrote him up a voucher for the watch, the rings and the bracelet. After the investigation was over, it would all go back to Genevieve Pang, and she could decide what she wanted to do with it.

  “So, Lou,” Akoni said. “Your cameras working all right?”

  “One step ahead of you,” Lou said. “I already checked. The guy was smart, kept his head down the whole time he was here.”

  “And you didn’t suspect a thing,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I got a lot of customers don’t want to get recognized,” he said. “You’re out pawning your mom’s engagement ring so you can buy crack, you really want your picture taken?”

  “So what you’re saying is you got nothing for us,” Akoni said.

  “One t’ing,” Lou said. “The guy was packing. He shifted his feet, his jacket came open a little, I saw the holster.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “You think the guy might have been a cop.”

  “You know him?” Lou asked.

  I shook my head. “You got a description?”

  “Haole guy,” he said. “Maybe late twenties, early thirties. Good build, not fat or scrawny. Dark hair, wedding ring. That’s about all I noticed.”

  “You noticed the wedding ring?” Akoni asked. “What, you thinking about asking the guy out?”

  “My line of work, I see a lot of guys pawning jewelry, all right?” Lou said. “Lots a times, it’s the wife’s. I got in the habit of looking for wedding rings. Sometimes I mention it, the guy’s willing to pop it off and add it to the stash, he’s desperate enough.”

  We bagged the jewelry and left the pawn shop. “You want to see if we can connect with Derek Pang?” I asked. “Get him to ID the jewelry, confront him and Wayne about their stories?”

  “We could do that,” Akoni said.

  I checked my notes, dialed up Derek Pang’s home number. Surprise, surprise, he answered. He and Wayne were going out soon, but we could stop by on our way back to the station.

  The day had not yet cooled down even though there was a light trade wind blowing. The mountains around us shone green in the mellow light, and heat seemed to rise up in waves from the steaming black pavement around us. I thought about haole cops who had connections to the case, and my thoughts kept coming back to Evan Gonsalves.

  FOOLING AROUND ON TANTALUS

  Wayne answered the door again and showed us in to the living room. “Derek’ll be right out,” he said. “He’s just on the phone.”

  “I went to the Boardwalk last night,” I said. “You could have warned me about that sandbox by the front door.”

  He smiled. “It’s a little thing they do to keep track of who’s been there before.”

  “And you’ve been there. The bartender recognized you. Said you go there sometimes with Derek, sometimes without. Cruising, I think he called it.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes I want a beer and Derek doesn’t.” He picked a paper clip up from the table and started fiddling with it.

  “Just to refresh your memory, you told us that the night Tommy was murdered, you and Derek left the Rod and Reel and went to the Boardwalk. That true?”

  “Yeah, we needed to chill out.”


  “When you’ve been to the Boardwalk in the past, you ever see anybody in there drinking, doesn’t look old enough?” I asked.

  “There are guys there who like chicken.” We must have looked confused, because he added, “Younger guys. Boys, almost. So the chicken comes there, and sometimes they drink, I guess. I never paid much attention.”

  I nodded. “See, the liquor control board, they pay attention. Matter of fact, they closed the place down Saturday, the ninth. They didn’t get open again until the following Saturday. So the Boardwalk was closed on the Tuesday night you said you and Derek went there. You want to rethink that story a little?”

  By then he had twisted the paper clip into a tortured shape that resembled the double helix of DNA. “Okay, you got me, I lied,” he said. “You’ve got to understand, I come from an Irish Catholic family. My older brother’s a goddamn priest.” He shook his head. “I’m accustomed to lying when it comes to my sex life. The fact is, I still don’t think it’s anybody’s business who I get off with and where, but I don’t want you guys to think I’m holding out on you.”

  He looked right at me, smiled, and then licked his lips. I felt he was looking right into my heart, and knew that even as I sat there, I was lusting for him. He said, “Derek and I have been together three years now, and sometimes, the sex gets boring, so we try and spice things up a little. The truth is, after we left the Rod and Reel I was horny and I wasn’t taking no for an answer.”

  He licked his lips again, and I shivered. I hope neither he nor Akoni noticed. “We drove up to Mount Tantalus and I spread Derek against the hood of the car, and plowed his ass, howling at the moon like a dog in heat. I was hoping some breeder couple would stumble on us and get the shock of their lives, but no such luck.”

  “You’re a pervert,” Akoni said.

  “You ever had a piece of ass up against a warm engine, Detective?” he asked. “You ought to try it sometime. Your wife, maybe one of those boys from the Boardwalk. You just might like it.”