Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I looked around. The rest of the room was neatly organized—books on the bookshelves along one wall, the stereo and the TV off, Danny’s Nintendo sitting on a shelf with the cords neatly wrapped. I knew Evan had been in trouble, and I hadn’t reached out to him—I had been too careful, waited too long, because I thought I was protecting him and his family. Fat lot of good that had done.

  There was something in the room, some kind of negative energy, and finally I had to walk back out to the living room. Akoni was sitting on the floor next to Danny, talking to him gently, but Danny was not responding. I watched Akoni reach out to stroke the boy’s shoulder, and Danny flinched and moved away. I rarely saw Akoni being gentle, and it was always a surprising sight. For such a big man, he was light on his feet, a great dancer, and he had something sweet and kind inside him that he rarely let out, usually only around kids and animals.

  It was the same with Danny. Akoni responded to whatever was hurt inside him, and wanted to make it better. I hoped he and Mealoha would have children soon, though Akoni often pooh-poohed the idea. I knew he would make a good father.

  I had thought Evan was a good father, too, and I didn’t believe he’d kill himself when Danny was around. He’d been a cop long enough to see what death looked like, and how it hurt those who saw it. What if this wasn’t suicide at all, but just a carefully constructed replica?

  Akoni looked up and saw me, and got up from the floor. “You think he knew we were coming for him?”

  “Must have,” I said. “Though I didn’t say anything to him. Maybe he knew somebody in the DA’s office, who tipped him off.”

  “Damn shame,” Akoni said.

  We searched the house until we found a list in the kitchen, places Terri was going to be, and their phone numbers, in case anything happened to Danny and Evan needed to reach her. Her flight from Maui was due in at three, so she was probably on her way home.

  The crime scene techs arrived and got to work. We notified District 4 and claimed jurisdiction because of our investigation into Evan, and a couple of the local cops came out to give us a hand. Even though we thought it was a suicide, it was still a crime scene, and Akoni and I took careful notes regarding the condition of the study and the house itself.

  Terri arrived as we were finishing up, and Alvy Greenberg held her outside and called for me. “What is it, Kimo?” she asked. “What happened? Is Danny okay? Where’s Evan?”

  “Danny’s okay,” I said. “It’s Evan.” I paused. “It looks like he killed himself.”

  She crumpled. I put my arms around her and she cried. Then Akoni brought Danny to the front door, and when he saw his mother he ran for her. She cried even more, kneeling on the ground holding her son. It was a beautiful day in Wailupe, high seventies, mauka trades, a light scent of plumeria on the breeze, but there was something hard in my throat, and all I could think of was Terri on our graduation day from Punahou, how pretty she’d looked holding down her cap as the wind lifted the black gown and her brown hair flew back from her face.

  It was a scene that happened all too often in the islands, and I was sure, even more often on the mainland. The lives of ordinary people were touched by tragedy, and they would never be the same again. I felt worse than I ever had before. I didn’t kill Evan, and I didn’t make him turn bad, but I had put the events in motion that had led us to this point, from the day I first heard about black tar and made arrangements for the bust.

  I spent a while with Terri, holding her, letting her cry. While my brain ran forward at a hundred miles an hour, I said I was sorry, and promised her it would be all right, though I knew I was lying. Police and technicians ebbed and flowed around us, Akoni managing them, coordinating with the local cops.

  Terri called her parents and her sister Betsy, and there was more crying. Danny sat nearly catatonic next to his mother, and screamed if anyone tried to move him away. Eventually Akoni and I left and drove back to Waikīkī. The black and whites, ours and the local ones, pulled away and were replaced by the cars of Terri Clark Gonsalves’s friends and family. The memory of what he’d seen would stay with Danny Gonsalves for years, no matter how much therapy he had, and those images would probably recur in his dreams and nightmares forever.

  We’d done what we were supposed to do. We had closed the case. As we walked into the station, Saunders was standing at the desk talking to the sergeant. “So just be careful,” he said loudly, as we walked past. “If you’re in the shower with him, don’t drop the soap.”

  They both laughed, and Saunders gave me a particularly piercing look. I stared him back down, and he looked away.

  Akoni and I filled out paperwork for the rest of the afternoon, closing out the case on Tommy Pang. I felt bad about what had happened, but at least the case was closed, and I could get on with my life. I called and left a message for Tim, who was in a meeting. Akoni left and I hung around for a couple of minutes, hoping Tim would call back. While I was waiting Alvy Greenberg came up to my desk.

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  “I think so. We have witnesses who put Evan together with Tommy Pang.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean is it true you’re a fag?”

  I sat up, and looked at him. He looked kind of half angry and half ready to cry. “That’s the rumor going around the station, you know. You’re a cocksucker. I just want to know, is it true?”

  “Does it matter to you?”

  “Damn right it does. I looked up to you, Kimo. I thought you were the kind of cop, the kind of detective, I wanted to be. Now I see who you really are.”

  “I haven’t changed,” I said. “I’m still a good cop. I’m just not lying to myself anymore. Or anybody else.”

  “So it’s true.” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “You make me sick.”

  He turned and walked away.

  I sat back at my desk, reeling. I couldn’t believe he’d been so angry at me. I’d never come on to him, never acted like anything more than a friend or a mentor. I thought it was bad when I told Akoni, but his reaction had been easy compared to Alvy’s. I wondered if everyone at the Waikīkī station knew, and if that was the way they all felt.

  While I wondered about that, my phone buzzed. “Kanapa‘aka,” Lieutenant Yumuri’s voice sounded out of the speaker. “To my office, now.”

  Jesus, what next, I thought. I supposed the rumors had traveled up the line of command and reached his ears. I got up immediately and walked down the hall to the lieutenant’s office. “Have a seat.”

  “I’ll get right to the point,” he said, as I sat down. “Your work on this case was a mess. If you had handled this case better, Evan Gonsalves might still be alive. I’m suspending you, pending an internal investigation.”

  “There was nothing wrong with our investigation,” I said. “We did everything you asked for. It’s all spelled out in the files.” I paused and suddenly I understood. “Word got out, didn’t it?” I asked. “That’s what Saunders was talking about, and Alvy Greenberg. You don’t want a gay cop on your force, do you?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “Clean out your desk and your locker. You’ll be hearing from the department attorney.”

  I left his office in a daze. It had been a hell of a day. From my encounter with Wayne, through discovering Evan’s body and ruining Terri’s life, to the failure of my own career. I stumbled through a quick cleanup of my desk and locker, avoiding the stares of the other cops, and walked out onto Kalākaua Avenue, without an idea of what I was supposed to do next.

  CERTAIN CONDITIONS

  I don’t know how I made it home. I dumped my things in my apartment and curled up on the bed. I knew I ought to get out, go surfing, clear my head, but I couldn’t. I didn’t sleep much that night, just lay there thinking and worrying. I always thought, whenever I had trouble nodding off, that sleep was this kind of magical land far away. Sometimes you just forgot how to get there.

  I tried to go over everything I had done in the case, remembering each detail, every co
nversation, every note, every official police document. The guy upstairs was playing Pearl Jam at high volume, blasting the same CD over and over again, but I didn’t bother to yell or call him or go upstairs. It just didn’t seem to matter.

  As the sun was rising I did doze off for a little while, then woke finally at seven-thirty and decided to get up and take a shower. I thought about going to the beach, but I just couldn’t seem to get myself together. I scrubbed the kitchen, throwing away anything in the refrigerator that looked suspicious, reorganized the books on my bookshelves, and I’d started filing away articles I’d clipped from the paper when the phone rang.

  It was nine-thirty. I jumped for the phone, hoping it was Tim, but instead it was Peggy Kaneahe. “We need you down at the main station,” she said. “Ten-thirty.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t talk about it with you now. We’ll talk then.”

  “But what’s going on?” I asked. The phone went dead in my hand.

  I called Akoni at the station and told him what had happened. “I know,” he said. “The lieutenant called me in this morning.”

  I waited, and finally Akoni said, “I told you this was going to happen, Kimo. I tried to stand by you as long as I could, but I just can’t anymore.”

  “I understand,” I said, and I did. I hoped that if something happened to a friend of mine, I would have the courage to stand by him, all the way, but I wasn’t sure I would, and I wasn’t sure courage was really at the heart of it. After all, we were all born alone in this world, and we died alone, and there was a limit to what you could do for anyone else. “You’ve been a good partner,” I said. “I’ll try not to let any of this wash off on you.”

  “I’ll take my lumps. You do what you need to do. Don’t worry about me.”

  I wanted to say something more, but I didn’t know what to say. “Let me know how it goes,” he said finally.

  “I will.”

  I finished getting dressed, pulling on a white oxford cloth shirt and a pair of clean, pressed khakis. I thought about wearing my uniform but figured that was a bit much—and I guess maybe I was afraid they would make me take it off, hand it over to them. I didn’t think I could take that.

  At a few minutes after ten, I got into my truck for the ride to the main station on South Beretania. The weather seemed restless and quickly changeable, a brisk wind sweeping down from the mountains and bringing heavy gray clouds with it. I signed in with the desk sergeant and he told me to go to a meeting room on the third floor. I took the elevator up, and had to walk through a warren of cubicles. Maybe I was being self-conscious, but I couldn’t help feeling people were watching me, that the tide of conversation quieted in a wave before me, and then rose again as I passed. The cops around me worked in special operations, Vice, Sexual Abuse, School Intervention and the like, and there was a general feeling of despair there, of men and women who worked with the dregs of the population and never saw any hope for the future.

  I walked out to the exterior hallway that overlooked the courtyard at the center of the building. The sky was the color of burnished aluminum, a solid layer of cloud, and I could hear distant thunder. The static electricity in the air raised the hairs on the back of my arms.

  The meeting room was stuck in a corner of the building, and a big circular concrete column stood like a sentinel along one side. There was a cheap folding table and a handful of old wooden chairs, nothing on the walls and no window to look out.

  Peggy Kaneahe was there, with a leather briefcase by her side and a folder open on the tabletop in front of her. Lieutenant Yumuri sat on one side of her, and on the other side was Hiram Lin, a representative of the police union, a dried-up prune of a man counting the days until his full pension kicked in. He hadn’t been on the streets since statehood, I thought, and he hadn’t even ridden an active desk for a decade, preferring to hide out in the union office. “Come in,” Peggy said. “Sit down.”

  I sat across from her. The chair was hard and a little too low for the table, so I felt like a misbehaving kid called into the principal’s office. “You can look at my files,” I started to say.

  “You don’t have a voice at this time,” Peggy said. “There’ll be a hearing, and you can have counsel then, if you wish. That’s when you can give your side of the story. For right now, you just listen.”

  I looked at Hiram, and he nodded. The way they sat, three of them on one side of the table and me on the other, I felt like I was all alone in this. “You’re being suspended, effective immediately,” Peggy said. “Your salary will continue through your suspension period, provided you observe certain conditions.”

  “They are?”

  She held up her hand and ticked them off on her fingers. “No contact with police officers other than those specifically designated to communicate with you. In this case that will be Lieutenant Yumuri. No contact with any of the suspects or witnesses in the case you were handling. No comments to the media about the case or your suspension.”

  “What about police officers who are my friends?” I asked. “Akoni Hapa‘ele, for example.”

  Peggy looked at Yumuri, who nodded slightly. “As long as you don’t talk about this case or other cases pending,” she said. “Not without Lieutenant Yumuri present.”

  “I can do that.”

  “You’re going to have to.” She pushed a couple of forms at me across the table. “Sign these and we can get out of here.”

  I looked at the forms. They seemed to spell out in further detail the conditions she’d set. “Got a pen?” I asked.

  She gave me a pitying look and pushed a blue ball point over to me. The end had been chewed savagely, and I had a quick memory of her in tenth grade physics class, chewing her pen and puzzling over problems of velocity and motion. I signed the papers and pushed them and the pen back to her.

  “Your badge and your weapon,” Lieutenant Yumuri said.

  I took my Off-Duty .38 Special out of my holster and slid it across the table to him. He flipped open the barrel and took the ammunition out, then slapped the barrel closed. I opened my wallet and pulled my detective’s shield out. I realized I was doing something that was going to reverberate through every part of my life, but I had no control anymore. I just had to do what I was told. I unpinned the shield and slid it across the table.

  “You can go,” Peggy said. I wanted to talk to her about what was going on, to explain or apologize, but she was all business. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye.

  I decided not to wait for the elevator. The service stairs were next to the conference room, and I could avoid walking back through that dismal room, hearing the conversations rise and fall around me. I walked slowly down the stairs, wondering what to do next. I wasn’t a cop anymore, and probably would never be one again. I couldn’t go back to surfing full time and I didn’t think I knew how to do anything else. I worried about how long my savings would last, and how I would identify myself to the outside world, to myself. I was a gay man, a faggot, a cocksucker. I had accepted that, but in the context of who else I was. Now it seemed that was all I was, at least to the Honolulu Police Department.

  I came out of the stairwell into the lobby, and maybe it was my imagination again, but I couldn’t seem to make eye contact with anyone. It was like they all knew me and wouldn’t look at me. Then I said to myself that I was a fool, my imagination was running wild. I took a deep breath and walked outside.

  I was expecting clouds, rain, wild thunder. Instead there were flashbulbs and the clamor of news people. “Detective Kanapa‘aka,” a Chinese reporter said. “Is it true you’re being suspended from the police force because of your homosexuality?”

  I was stunned. How could they have found out so quickly? I just stared at the guy, my mouth agape. “Detective, have you hired an attorney yet?” a Hawaiian guy, who I recognized from my brother’s station, asked. “Will you be suing the police force for reinstatement?”

  “Do you think this is a discrimination case?” asked
another.

  I just stood there. They called out more questions, but I couldn’t answer them and I couldn’t seem to move. Finally a desk sergeant came out behind me and propelled me away from them, and another sergeant ordered them to disperse. I got my sense back and got back to my truck. The Hawaiian guy from Lui’s station ran along beside me as I was driving away, still trying to get a comment, and I wanted to do something, give him the finger or yell something, but I knew it would just end up on the news and so I drove off.

  I made it back to my apartment though I’m not sure how. I think my truck was on auto pilot. Seeing the guy from Lui’s station reminded me that my brothers would know what happened to me, my parents would know, my friends and my Punahou classmates and the guys I saw when I was surfing. I wanted to go back to that night when I went to the Rod and Reel, stop the movie, rewind, go somewhere else, anywhere else. I wanted to make it stop.

  Almost as soon as I walked in the door, the phone rang. It was one of the TV stations again. I unplugged it from the wall and sat down on the bed. I knew I should call my parents and warn them about the newscast, but I just couldn’t. I tried to take a nap, but I just tossed and turned on the bed for a while, and then finally I got up.

  This was stupid, I thought. I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t just hang around waiting to see what happened. I put on my bathing suit and got my short board, figuring I would challenge myself with the small waves off Kuhio Beach Park. If I could get out on the water, force myself to pay attention to the surf, then I could forget all this other stuff and maybe, in the forgetting, find a way to deal with it.

  I felt better already. I was still a surfer, no matter what else I was, and surfing was how I was going to get out of this mess. But as soon as I opened my door the reporters were there, taking pictures and calling out questions. I shut the door fast.