Mahu

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Everybody’s busy tonight,” my father said. “You, and Lui, and Haoa are together tonight, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Liliha and Tatiana are coming here with their kids tonight because Haoa and Lui are having a boy’s night out. It must involve you, too.”

  I didn’t say anything. “I want to come with you,” my father said. “I know you’re all up to something. They’re going to help you get your job back, aren’t they?”

  The last thing I wanted was my father in Haoa’s van listening to me and Wayne making out as I tried to get him to confess. “Not at all. We’re going out for a few drinks, that’s all. Just to make things better between us.”

  “I could come too. Make sure you’d don’t end up in jail again.”

  “You have to be here, ready to bail us out.” I paused. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep them in line. You stay here with your grandchildren. Imagine how they would complain if Tūtū Al weren’t here.”

  He wasn’t happy, but I had no intention of telling him what we were up to, and I hoped my brothers had as much sense. It was almost three by then, so I begged off and drove back down to Waikīkī, where I went through my wardrobe looking for something to wear. I was no fool; I knew what looked good on me. Pale colors like pink, light blue and yellow went well with my coloring. I had a narrow waist and broad shoulders, so I liked to wear tightly fitted shirts that showed off my physique. But nothing I took out of the closet seemed to work. Everything was too baggy, or too faded, or just didn’t feel right. My wardrobe needed a major makeover.

  So I walked down to the Clark’s on Kalākaua Avenue. I tried on a dozen different shirts, finally settling on a pink oxford-cloth button-down that made me look younger and preppier. It was a size too small, and with the top three buttons down and my chest threatening to burst through, it even looked a little sexy. I picked up a pair of white painter’s pants that fit snugly, particularly across the crotch, and yet had plenty of pockets in case I wanted to carry anything. I stood in front of the mirror, closed my eyes, and thought about Wayne Gallagher.

  It didn’t take much for my penis to swell up, and I looked at it in profile, easily outlined against my thigh. That’ll do, I thought, though it made me nervous to think how easily I could get excited by a guy who had bad news written all over him. I charged it all on my Clark’s revolving charge, and took the shopping bag with me as I walked back out to Kalākaua Avenue, where I nearly ran into Jimmy Ah Wong.

  “Detective!” he said, surprised. He looked the same—the coxcomb of bright yellow hair, Smashing Pumpkins t-shirt and flip flops.

  “Hi, Jimmy. How’s it going?”

  He nodded. “It’s okay.” He motioned me with his head, off to a more secluded spot back in from the street. Though it was bright and sunny, back under the trees on this little plaza it was cooler and shady. We sat down on a concrete bench. “I took your advice. I went to the gay teen center today.”

  “Good. How’d it go?”

  “I liked it. The people there were pretty cool.” Then he looked down at the ground, and spoke softly. “He came back to the store on Wednesday,” he said. “Wayne. He knew I would be there by myself. I told him I didn’t want to do anything with him anymore, but then he got down on his knees and he—he sucked me, and it felt so good, I didn’t know what to do. I knew I needed help so I came here.”

  “Good for you. Don’t worry about Wayne. I’m going to take care of him.”

  “I don’t know what you can do.” He looked up at me and there were tears in his eyes. “I think I might be in love with him.”

  I put my arm around him. “I know it’s hard at your age,” I said, “but try and be careful not to confuse love with lust. Just because you want to be with somebody, because you want to have sex with him, doesn’t mean you’re in love with him.” I pulled back and looked at him. “Can I tell you a secret?”

  He nodded. “I think he’s pretty sexy myself. I mean, I haven’t done anything with him, but I’m not sure I could resist.” I pulled a tissue out of my pocket and wiped his eyes. “So don’t feel bad about the way you feel, okay?”

  “I’ll try. Will you let me know if you ever arrest him?”

  “You’ll hear,” I said. “Oh, yeah, you’ll hear.”

  BOYS’ NIGHT OUT

  I gave Jimmy Ah Wong my home phone number and cell number, and told him to call me if he ran into any trouble with Wayne, or if he just wanted to talk. Heading down Kalākaua, I saw Officer Saunders approaching me with a big grin on his face.

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t ex-Detective Dicksucker,” he said.

  “What’s your problem, Saunders?” He was wearing street clothes, and I guessed he was heading to the station for the start of his shift. “I ever do anything to you?”

  “Guess I just don’t like faggots on the force.” He leaned in close to me. “I’m glad they booted your ass out. I hope you end up running security for some shopping mall, rent-a-cop with a little go-cart. Then you can pull your carpet-muncher buddies over for a quickie in somebody’s back seat, out in the mall parking lot.”

  “You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said. “Sounds like you’re the one with the problem. You having wet dreams about guys sucking your cock?”

  “You asshole. You pervert that badge you used to wear.”

  “You’re not on duty yet, are you, Saunders?”

  “I was on second watch. I got off duty at three-fifteen.”

  “Good.” I punched him in the eye, knowing I could blacken it easily. “Then you can’t say I assaulted a police officer,” I said, as he went reeling backwards. “Unless of course you want to cry about the fairy who gave you the black eye.”

  My hand started to throb, but I didn’t care. I brushed past Saunders and headed for home. “You haven’t heard the last of this, faggot!” he called after me.

  I smiled all the way home, despite the pain in my hand, imagining the excuses he would come up with for sporting a shiner. He was more flab than muscle and more bark than bite, and everybody knew it. His tiny Chinese wife was really the one who wore the pants in the family. I figured there’d be a lot of snickering at the station, guys asking if his wife had given him the black eye. Good. He’d been talking stink about me; now he’d be the butt of fun.

  I decided to change into my new clothes before going over to Harry’s to help set up the equipment. I stripped down to my Gap boxers, printed with tropical fish, then poured myself into the too-tight pants and shirt. When I was finished, I admired the results in the mirror.

  It didn’t look like me, not the me I usually was. It was like I was getting into costume, preparing for a performance. I combed my hair one last time, and left.

  When I got to Harry’s parking lot, Haoa’s van was nowhere in sight. So I walked across the street to the Ala Wai Canal and sat on the stone wall at the water’s edge. From there I could look down towards Diamond Head, looming in the distance, or straight ahead to the Ko‘olau Mountains, where the spill of suburbia trailed down its sides.

  Clouds were starting to mass over the mountains, and though the sun was behind me it got cooler due to the wind. There was a steady buzz of traffic on Ala Wai Boulevard behind me, as I sat there staring at the placid water. The occasional jogger or walker went by, but I hardly noticed them, thinking about what lay ahead.

  Based on the note Evan Gonsalves had left for Terri, I was pretty sure that Evan hadn’t killed Tommy Pang. That only left Wayne. He wanted to manage the club and he wanted to stay with Derek, and I was sure Tommy wouldn’t have liked that.

  I was pretty sure that Derek and Wayne had been at Evan’s house, and that it was because of them that he was dead. I just didn’t know why.

  A black bird landed next to me, pecked at the ground, then flew away. Then I understood. Suppose Wayne had killed Tommy, and somehow Evan had witnessed it? Evan could have been blackmailing Wayne, threatening to tell Derek what had happened.
<
br />   That would explain the cryptic message Evan had left, that he had one more thing to do before he could go back to being legit. Wayne was probably making a lot of money from the sale of those Hawaiian artifacts, money Evan thought could pay for his future with Terri.

  I wasn’t sure how I could get Wayne Gallagher to admit it, though. I hoped that I could get him talking, into a bragging mood, and let nature take its course. I was in a good position for that. As far as Wayne was concerned, he had won, and I’d lost my job, and he had every reason to gloat.

  The tougher question was what I’d do if he came on to me. How would I react? It was like he emitted some kind of pheromone that was irresistible to me—a combination of sex and danger, a physical and mental presence that drew me in. I had to remember I wasn’t there for fun, that I was playing a part and I had to stay in character. But I knew from my brief experiences with Tim and Gunter that I was hungry for that physical contact, and that it would be a struggle to hold back.

  I heard a couple of quick beeps behind me and got up. I saw Haoa’s green landscaping van pulling into Harry’s parking lot, and crossed the street. Haoa straddled two guest parking spaces and as I walked up, Lui was sliding open the side doors to reveal Harry sitting amongst a jumble of boxes and cables. “Hey, guys,” I said.

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Harry said from inside the van, as he stood up. “You guys are all going to have to pitch in.”

  We spent the next couple of hours, as night fell around us, unpacking boxes, connecting cables, and hooking up receivers. By eight o’clock we were running tests, and I was running scared. I pulled off my shirt so that Harry could start taping me up, and saw my skin was covered with goose bumps.

  I’d been through situations like this before, most recently that drug bust in Kapiolani Park that now seemed a lifetime away. I remembered that was the night I’d gone to the Rod and Reel, the night that Tommy Pang had been murdered and my life had started falling apart.

  “Hold still,” Harry said. “Every time I touch you, you jump a foot.”

  Before, though, the danger had never seemed so great. It was easy to ignore the possibility you might get killed—the brain loves to shelve that kind of stuff in the back, some primitive form of self-preservation. Besides, in a standard stakeout I’m walking in armed, or at least with a half-dozen armed officers behind me. If anything goes wrong, they’re there for me.

  In a normal stakeout, you want to make your case and put the bad guy away, but if it doesn’t work, if he won’t talk or he makes your wire, you can go back to your desk the next day and get on with your life. If I didn’t get a confession out of Wayne Gallagher, I didn’t know where I was going.

  Or, actually, I did. I was going to my disciplinary hearing, and then most likely, despite the fact that Yumuri had no case, I was going off the force. I might be able to hold onto my badge for a while, but I’d probably lose my detective shield and end up on patrol somewhere like Pearl City, living with snickers in the locker room and dying inside.

  Harry taped the wire to my chest and back. “Jesus, Harry, you can hardly touch me without feeling a wire,” I said. “Can’t you make it a little more discreet?”

  “Just keep your shirt on.”

  “Easier said than done.” I pulled him close so that my brothers wouldn’t have to hear. “You know, he might want to feel me up. As soon as he goes for a tit, he’s going to feel a wire. End of story.”

  He re-routed the wire so that it was taped to my shirt, running up my back and around my collar. It was so thin that if you casually ran your hand over my back you might think it was an imperfection in the fabric. “Excellent,” I said, when he was done.

  He stuck the transmitter in the back of my pants. “Jesus, these pants are tight,” he said. “I can barely get a wire out of them.”

  “That’s the idea. They show off the merchandise.”

  “I don’t want to get into this,” he said. Sitting at a makeshift table inside the van, my brothers snickered.

  “No comments from the peanut gallery,” I said. Harry took the wire off to play with the acoustics some more, and I went out and got us a couple of pizzas and some half-gallon sodas, though I was ready for a few quick beers by then.

  We locked up the van and went upstairs to Harry’s apartment to eat. “Okay, I’ve got a couple of things I want to tell you about tonight,” I said as we sat around the kitchen table. “First of all, remember I’m working. A deal like this is kind of like a play, one of those improvisational things where the audience throws out suggestions and the actors have to bounce off them. In this case, I’m the actor and Wayne Gallagher’s going to throw me lines. I’ve got to react.”

  I took a bite of my pizza and chewed. “So you have to remember this isn’t necessarily real. I may have to do some things that will surprise you or bother you, but you’ve got to remember I’m doing it all for a purpose.”

  “I think we’re all grown-ups,” Haoa said. He picked up his glass of soda and took a drink.

  “So if I have to suck his dick you won’t flip out,” I said, and he sputtered up the last of his soda, just as I’d expected.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Lui said.

  “I might. If that’ll get him to spill the beans, then I will. I’m sure we’ve all said a few things we didn’t mean in the heat of passion.”

  “I love you for one,” Harry said, and we all laughed.

  “And he may get a little rough,” I said. “He’s got a mean mouth on him, and he’s called me some names before. You can’t react to anything.”

  “Have you been with this guy before?” Haoa asked.

  “He’s come on to me,” I said. “A couple of times. Once in his apartment and once at his office. I pushed him away both times. But I know how he operates, and I can make it seem like I was just playing hard to get.”

  “This is a crazy deal,” Haoa said, shaking his head.

  “One more thing. Remember I’m the professional. I don’t want any cowboy heroics. If I get into trouble, count on me to get out of it. If I’m going to end up in a jail cell, or in the morgue, for that matter, I don’t want any of you next to me.”

  “There is no way we’re going to let anything happen to you without doing something about it,” Lui said. “You might as well accept that. That’s our function tonight—to look out for you.”

  “No, it’s not. Your job is to run the equipment, and make sure we get the evidence. Don’t do anything that will keep us from frying his ass in court. Even if I can’t testify, for whatever reason, if you have the tapes we can still put him away.”

  “I don’t like that,” Haoa said.

  “I don’t either. But that’s the way it has to be, or we can’t do this.” I looked at each of them in turn. “Are we all agreed?” And one by one, they nodded. “Good. Then let’s finish eating and get out of here.”

  It was almost ten by the time we pulled up at the Boardwalk. I did a quick scan of the parking lot and didn’t see either Wayne’s or Derek’s car. I said, “Okay, I’m going in.” The problem with our setup was that I didn’t have any way to know if they’d heard me or not, but even before my haircut my hair had been short enough so that my ears were fully exposed and I couldn’t have a receiver there without being obvious.

  By the time I reached the door of the bar my stomach was turned upside down and my hands were shaking. It’s just a bar, I repeated to myself. It’s just a bar. Just go inside and get something to drink, and wait for Wayne to show up. I stepped through the door, and just at the last minute remembered the sandbox and stepped over it. I felt an unexpectedly large sense of relief. I’d met the first obstacle and conquered it.

  Alanis Morrisette was pouring out of speakers mounted around the room, but the volume wasn’t too loud. The bar was pretty busy, small groups of guys standing around talking or playing pool or watching the boyish model in his jockstrap slink down the runway. I stepped up to an empty place at the bar just as the model was
approaching. He turned his back to me and bent down, sticking his ass in my face.

  “I think he wants a tip,” the guy next to me said, and laughed.

  “A tip or a kiss,” I said. I hoped I could pull money out of my wallet without dropping it or showing how badly my hands were shaking.

  The guy next to me laughed. “You can kiss him, I’ll tip him.” He rolled up a dollar bill and pulled aside the strap that ran down the model’s butt crack, and stuck the bill right into his hole, then put the strap back across. The model straightened up and did a little curvy dance, then pulled the bill out of his butt and stuck it in his mouth. He made a lewd sucking gesture and smiled at me and the guy, then moved off down the bar.

  The bartender came up and I ordered a coke. I desperately wanted a beer, but I knew I needed all my faculties for dealing with Wayne.

  “My name’s Jerry,” the guy next to me said. He was about forty, thin but not particularly in shape, and nobody must have told him that his mustache was too thin and wispy to look good.

  “I’m Kimo,” I said, and gave him my hand.

  “You come here often?”

  I shook my head. “Friend recommended it. I might meet him here later tonight.”

  He nodded. “I wouldn’t kick his butt out of bed for eating crackers,” he said, moving his head in the direction of the model, who was now grinding his hips in front of a couple of guys down the bar from us.

  “Too much of a twink for me. Though you gotta admire those butt muscles.”

  We talked, on and off, for the next half hour or so. I tried not to drink my Coke too fast, and kept scanning the room for Wayne Gallagher, and finally Jerry got the hint and moved on. I got another Coke and decided to scout the room, to find the quietest corner. I made eye contact a couple of times with guys but then looked away. I was only on the prowl for one guy and I didn’t want any complications.

  I had to say I liked the men at the Rod and Reel better. They were handsomer, better dressed, and on the whole, younger. This place seemed to attract a slightly older crowd, though there was a contingent of Chinese, Japanese and Thai boys who looked barely old enough to drink. That’s why Wayne came here, I remembered. The bartender had said he had a taste for Asian boys. I wondered if he’d dump Derek as he aged, keep looking for the boys who attracted him.