Mahu Blood

by Alex Beecroft

  “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Ray asked. “Anything else you aren’t saying?”

  He shifted around in his seat. “Nope.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but we had enough to start with.

  As we rode back up to O’Malley’s apartment, Ray said, “You think he picked up the guy in the bar for some rough sex, and it got out of hand?”

  “I’d say slitting his throat is getting pretty far out of hand.”

  “You think Greg Oshiro could tell us anything?” Ray asked.

  I was confused. “Greg? I don’t know what kind of guys he likes.”

  “I wasn’t asking that,” Ray said patiently. “But didn’t he say 194 Neil S. Plakcy

  that he had dated O’Malley at some point?”

  I nodded. My brain was moving slowly. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my career, and they have some affect on me; I couldn’t still be a cop if they didn’t. But O’Malley’s death had hit me hard.

  Despite the way his death looked I worried that scheduling the meeting with Ray and me had signed O’Malley’s death warrant.

  “You need to call up Greg and have a chat about sexual practices,” Ray said. “I’m a liberated guy and all that, but I think this is a conversation you’d be more comfortable with.”

  I didn’t want to do it, but I pulled out my cell and called Greg Oshiro. “Got a tip for you,” I said. “Can you get over here pronto?”

  I expected him to argue, but all he said was, “Give me the address.” I gave it to him and then snapped the phone shut.

  We waited for Greg in the Honolulu Sunset’s fancy lobby.

  One of the other residents walked in with a couple of Foodland bags, and my stomach grumbled so loud that Ray looked over at me and laughed. I realized we’d worked non-stop since the morning. It was closing in on the end of our shift by then.

  “I know this building,” Greg said, walking in. “This is…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is. Or was.”

  Greg stepped backward, and his balance wobbled. “Jesus.”

  We led him over to a group of chairs in a quiet back corner of the lobby, out of casual earshot, and he settled into a big leather armchair. Ray and I sat down across from him.

  “We need to know what you knew about O’Malley’s interests.

  But first of all, you’ve got secrets, and there are details here we wouldn’t want in the press. You protect us, and we’ll protect you.

  Are we clear?”

  Greg nodded. He took a deep breath and pulled out his notebook. “How did you guys get called here?”

  “Right now, I’m asking the questions. Later, after we’ve got what we need, we’ll take care of you.”

  MAhu BLood 195

  He frowned. But he knew the drill.

  “We had an appointment with O’Malley this morning,” I said.

  “To follow up on the lead you gave us, that he was the attorney for KOH. Right now, we have no idea whether that’s related to his death or just a coincidence. Evidence at the scene leads us to consider whether O’Malley might have picked up the wrong sort of guy. What do you know about his tastes?”

  Greg looked sick. “You know The Garage?”

  Ray was a bit confused, but I knew what Greg was talking about. “It’s a gay bar. A converted garage. Kind of seamy.”

  “More than kind of,” Greg said.

  “You go there?”

  He squirmed in his seat.

  “Sorry. Wrong question. O’Malley went there?”

  Greg nodded. “You have to understand, Adam had… issues.

  That conservative Irish Catholic background, sometimes he felt bad about the kind of things he liked.”

  “And he liked to be punished,” I finished for him. The Garage was known as a haven for guys with a taste for unorthodox sexual practices.

  “You think he could have picked somebody up at The Garage who killed him?” Greg asked.

  “It’s a possibility we’re investigating.”

  I saw the calculation in his eyes, probably thinking about the big story he could get out of Adam’s death, and then his body sagged and the corners of his mouth turned down.

  “Poor guy,” he said. “However it happened, I feel sorry for him.”

  the gARAge

  My cell rang. Mike had reprogrammed it a few days before so that the ring tone assigned to him was the Baha Men singing

  “Who Let the Dogs Out.” It reverberated around the high-ceilinged lobby of the Honolulu Sunset.

  I grabbed the phone and flipped it open, standing up and stepping away from Ray and Greg.

  “We having dinner tonight?” Mike asked. “Or are you going direct to the surveillance of that pai gow game your brother’s in?”

  “Ray and I have a couple of things to wrap up. But I can pencil you in for a dinner date.”

  “Sweet. I’ll be the handsome guy playing with the cute dog.”

  I flipped the phone shut and came back to Ray and Greg. Ray had pulled out the list of questions we had for Adam O’Malley.

  “You know anything about accounting at KOH?” he asked Greg. “Based on the stories you’ve been writing about Hawaiian nationalism?”

  “They use a small practice in a walk-up office in Chinatown.

  I spoke to the guy in charge, but he wouldn’t give me any information.” He pulled the firm’s name and address from his notes and Ray copied it down.

  We went over the rest of our questions, but Greg didn’t have anything to say that he hadn’t already given us. He left to write an obituary on Adam O’Malley, and we faced the fact that we had to call someone in O’Malley’s family and notify them of his death.

  “Rock-paper-scissors?” I asked.

  We both shook our fists three times. I went with scissors, and Ray chose paper.

  “That looks like the night concierge,” I said, nodding toward the front door. “I’ll talk to him while you make the call.”

  198 Neil S. Plakcy

  I left Ray dialing a number from O’Malley’s address book and walked across the lobby. The night concierge was a middle-aged Chinese man with close-cropped hair and the same monogrammed aloha shirt as Malik Jefferson. His name tag read

  “Eli.”

  I introduced myself and asked, “Did you see Mr. O’Malley get home last night?”

  “Yeah. It was around two, and he had a ‘friend’ with him.”

  I didn’t like the way the guy put those imaginary quotes around the word, but it wasn’t my business to be the language police. I had enough to do being the regular police.

  “What do you mean by ‘friend’?”

  “He brought guys home every couple of weeks,” he said.

  “On Thursday nights. Usually sleazy-looking men, not the kind of person who lives in this building. You ask me, it’s not right. A man like that shouldn’t be allowed to live here.”

  “That part of your job here, Eli? Deciding who should and shouldn’t be allowed to live here?”

  “You know what I mean, Detective. Not only was he a homosexual, he exposed the rest of the residents to a dangerous element.”

  “What made you think the guy with Mr. O’Malley was dangerous?” I asked, trying to keep my temper in check.

  “I can tell what those people look like,” he said. “Anyone can.

  They wear their depravity right there on their faces. I could tell they were going upstairs for something illegal, whether it was drugs or sex or both.”

  I took a deep breath. “Would you recognize the man with Mr.

  O’Malley again? Considering you took such a good look at his face that you could tell what he was going to do?”

  Eli realized the trap he’d gotten himself into. “I didn’t so much look at his face as his general attitude. The tight T-shirt, the torn jeans, the tattoos. I wouldn’t recognize him again, though.”

  Ray joined us at the desk. “Spoke to O’Malley’s father,” he MAhu BLood 199

  said. “He wasn’t exactly broken up ov
er his son’s death.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Eli said. “Given the kind of man he was.”

  “That’s enough. A man is dead, and if you had any sense of human decency you’d speak about him with respect. But then, you can probably see in my face that I’m a deviant, just like O’Malley was, so you won’t care what I think.”

  “We done here?” Ray said, as Eli gaped at us.

  “Yeah, we’re done. I’ll make sure that the building management hears what a high opinion you have of its residents, Eli.” I turned and walked out, Ray on my heels.

  “I’m not even going to ask what all that was about,” Ray said, as we drove back to headquarters. “But I assume he didn’t have anything to contribute.”

  “Nothing useful,” I said.

  We caught Lieutenant Sampson as he was packing up for the day and told him about O’Malley’s death. “The bodies are piling up, Detectives,” he said. “An elderly woman, a homeless guy, now an attorney.”

  “He wasn’t homeless,” I said. “He just looked that way.”

  Sampson glared at me. “I don’t care if he lived in mansion in Kahala. He’s dead and it’s your case. Get it solved.”

  “Lieutenant, with Labor Day on Monday, we’re not getting anything out of the medical examiner in a hurry,” Ray said.

  “Don’t let that stand in your way.” Sampson picked up his briefcase and walked out.

  “Have a nice weekend,” I called after him. Sampson turned around and glared, just in time to see Ray kick me in the shins.

  “Keep him in line, will you, Donne?” Sampson asked, just before disappearing into the elevator.

  “You have some kind of self-destruct button?” Ray asked me.

  “You kick into wise ass mode at the dumbest times.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I sat down at my desk and brought up the website for The Garage. “Look at this,” I said, turning the 200 Neil S. Plakcy

  monitor toward Ray. “Thursday night is Hard Hat night. Free well drinks to anybody in uniform or carrying a union card.”

  “Kinky,” Ray said. “You ever go there?”

  “They’d have to give me a lot more than free drinks to get me in my uniform,” I said. “But that’s why the concierge saw O’Malley bring guys home on Thursday nights.”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Ray said. “You’re going to need to hit that bar tonight, see if anyone saw who O’Malley left with. But at the same time we’ve got your brother’s pai gow game.”

  “Shit.” I was screwed, in more ways than one. Mike was going to have a jealous fit over my going to The Garage. But it wasn’t the kind of assignment Ray could take. “I’ll go to the bar early.

  Before it gets crazy. If I need to go back after the game, I will.”

  My stomach grumbled again, angry over our missed lunch.

  Ray laughed and said, “I called the KOH accountant’s office and got a recording that the office is closed until Tuesday. So I’m going to go home, have dinner with my wife and then set up outside the Wing Wah to keep an eye on the FBI. You just get over there when you can.”

  “Will do.” I called Mike and asked him to meet me at Raimundo’s in Waikīkī, an old favorite restaurant from the days when we were dating. On my way there, I called Lui and told him the FBI was interested in the game that night. “I don’t know if they’re going to do anything. But they just want Tanaka. My contact swears they’re not interested in the players.”

  “You can’t bust Tung before the game?”

  “Have to catch him in the act.”

  Lui grumbled, and I stopped paying attention, searching for a parking spot near Raimundo’s. I finally got him to hang up just as I spotted a prime spot only a few blocks from the restaurant.

  Mike and I were early enough to miss the dinner rush, and by six we were seated, tearing into garlic rolls and digging into an antipasto platter. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for days.

  “Slow down, tiger,” Mike said. “They aren’t taking the food MAhu BLood 201

  away from you. Jeez, you eat like Roby.”

  “You say the sweetest things.” I smiled at him, glad once again that I was out of the sex and dating circuit that had been so dangerous for Adam O’Malley.

  But that made me think about my case again and what I had ahead of me. When I had some food in my stomach, I felt ready to say, “The meeting I had this morning. It was with an attorney for Kingdom of Hawai’i. He said he had some information he didn’t want to pass on in public, so Ray and I arranged to meet him at his apartment.”

  “So?”

  “He was dead when we got there.”

  Mike nodded. “I’d say that’s a complication.”

  “There’s more, though. He was gay, this attorney. And he might have gotten killed by a guy he picked up at The Garage last night.”

  The waiter brought our entrees, and Mike didn’t speak as he busied himself cutting his veal and tossing his pasta with the freshly grated parmesan.

  “I should go over to The Garage tonight and see if anyone saw who this attorney was with,” I said, looking down at my chicken piccata.

  “And you were thinking that I would go with you,” Mike said.

  I looked up at him.

  “Because I know you were not thinking you were going to that sleazy bar by yourself. You need adult supervision.”

  “Really?” I said, smiling. My foot brushed against his leg.

  “And are you my supervisor?”

  “Well, for sure, I’m the responsible adult in this relationship.”

  He smiled back at me. “I know I need to trust you more. You’ve never given me any doubt. But it makes me crazy to think of you going to a bar by yourself, flirting or fooling around with some other guy.”

  202 Neil S. Plakcy

  We ate in silence for a few minutes, both of us finishing our dishes, and then Mike said, “The Garage. You ever been there?”

  “A couple of times, in the past. The Rod and Reel is more my speed.”

  “I went there once. They have that bar in the back where they show the videos.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said.

  “I might have gotten a little carried away, when I was drinking.” Mike had gone on a couple of binges while we were apart, leading his father to believe he was an alcoholic, but I’d never pressed for details.

  I speared the last piece of my chicken and pushed the empty plate away. “Carried away how?”

  “Somehow I ended up naked, imitating Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.”

  I burst out laughing. “Man, I wish I’d been there for that.

  There isn’t a video on YouTube, is there?”

  “Thankfully not. I could never go back after that, though.”

  “Gee, we’ll have to see if anyone recognizes you tonight.

  Asks for an encore performance.”

  “I’m a private dancer now.”

  “You and Tina Turner. Ooh, strut that stuff, baby.”

  “Get out of here,” he said, laughing and kicking my leg under the table.

  We walked around Waikīkī for a while after dinner. The streets were packed with tourists and locals enjoying the holiday weekend. We strolled down Kalākaua toward Queen’s Surf, the gay beach just before the aquarium, away from some of the neon and bustle from the strip. We held hands and sat on the curb overlooking the beach.

  I wondered if I would have ended up like this, in love with Mike and settled down, if I hadn’t been dragged out of the closet a few years before. Would I be like O’Malley, hiding my MAhu BLood 203

  sexuality and picking up dangerous guys in bars? I’d done a few stupid things when I was single, despite my cop instincts and training, and I was lucky I’d never had any problems bigger than a couple of angry exes and a painful, though not deadly, visit to the emergency room.

  The tide was coming in and the breeze smelled of salt and dead fish, but I was happy to be there with Mike. From the way he squeezed my hand, I had an inkling he felt the same
way.

  Shortly after eleven, we got up and walked back to where I’d parked my Jeep. I had a picture of O’Malley with me, one I’d picked up from his bureau, and I showed it to Mike as we drove to The Garage.

  “Handsome guy,” Mike said, and stretched his long frame back in the seat. “What kind of thing was he into?”

  “We found him tied up, with a big black dildo sticking out of his ass,” I said. “Creeped me out. Ray had to hold my hand for a while, metaphorically speaking.”

  Mike shook his head. “That guy is way too tolerant. I expect you to be trading blow job tips with him any day.”

  “Been there, done that.” I laughed at how quickly Mike’s head swiveled around. “Not.”

  “So was he the kind of guy you’d go for?” Mike asked. “This attorney?”

  “You know my deal, sweetheart. I like sex a lot better when I’m with a guy I love. I love you. You’re the first guy I can say that about. So sex with you is better than with anyone else. Ever.”

  “Good answer. Keep that in mind if anybody flirts with you tonight.”

  “Me?” I asked. “You’re the big handsome firefighter stud with the sexy mustache. While I’m asking questions about a dead guy, you’re the one the boys will be swarming over.”

  It was still early, so there was only a short line outside The Garage, the bouncer checking IDs. He waved us both in.

  “Great, too old to be carded,” I grumbled as we walked into 204 Neil S. Plakcy

  the darkened room, with neon wrapping the walls below the ceiling level. The place was decorated with gasoline memorabilia, with an old-fashioned gas pump along one wall. The floor was bare concrete, the DJ station behind glass windows as if it was where the clerk would stay.

  Groups of two and three guys leaned against the walls and talked. A rap song pounded out through the sound system, and two men danced in the center of the room. There were two bartenders; I stepped up to talk to the cuter one while Mike went to order a beer from the other.

  I palmed my shield and said, “Can I ask you some questions?”

  The bartender was barely legal, a skinny haole in a tight tank top that showed his nipple rings. He had piercings in his eyebrow, his ears, his lip and who knew where else, though I could guess.