Mahu Fire m-3

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I flipped on the TV and the VCR and slotted the first tape into the drive. He sat on my sofa with a proprietary air and I decided it was time to shift the balance of power a little. “How do you tell when a fireman is dead?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “The remote control slips from his hand. That’s the oldest joke in the book.”

  “Sometimes the old ones are still funny,” I said. As the first news credits started to roll I sat next to him. Close, so that our thighs were barely touching. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move away either.

  We watched all four tapes carefully, pausing and rewinding, but we didn’t see anybody who looked too interested. The KVOL tape was the last. “Hey, that’s my friend Terri,” I said, as she appeared on the screen. The reporter interviewed her about the party, and the cause. She looked beautiful and poised, despite having just escaped a major fire. I was sure Lui had approached her to appear on camera. Briefly I gave Mike a quick rundown on Terri, including the recent death of her husband, a cop I’d worked with.

  “I guess that’s it, then,” I said, as the anchor went on to another story. I leaned forward toward the VCR and my back rebelled. I must have winced, and Mike saw it.

  “Let me see that burn,” he said. “Take your shirt off.”

  “I’ll survive. How often should I put that cream on?”

  “Let me see the burn.”

  I unbuttoned my shirt and threw it on top of the surfboard screen. “I can see that comes in handy.” Mike looked at my back. “Whoa. You should have gone to the hospital with this.”

  “I had a fire to investigate, remember?”

  “Yeah, Officer Macho, I know.” He pointed me toward the surfboard screen, and my bed beyond it. “Lie down so I can put some of this cream on you. You’ll never be able to get it on right by yourself.”

  “Really, I can…”

  “No arguments.”

  I shrugged, and walked over to the bed. It felt terrific to lie down, and I was afraid I’d doze off, leaving Mike Riccardi to have his way with me. Well, that might not be so bad.

  There was no chance of that, though. The cream smarted, making me recognize nerve endings in my back I’d never known existed. Mike’s hands, though, were sure and strong. “Your muscles are so tense. You ever get massages?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “I get one every week, or else my back tenses up just like this. We’ve got stressful, physical jobs, you know. Chasing down crooks and dragging heavy equipment around. You’ve got to take care of your body if you want it to last.”

  “I take care of my body,” I yawned.

  “I can see that.” He’d given up applying the cream by then, and he was gently massaging my shoulders. The ceiling fan above us moved the air around lazily, tickling my bare back and floating scents of aloe, smoke and salt water around us.

  “That feels really good,” I said.

  He leaned down and kissed the back of my neck. “You like that?”

  “Yeah. I do.” I made a half turn so that I was facing up toward him. I hooked an arm around the back of his neck, pulled his face closer to mine, and kissed him. “I like that, too.”

  “Mmm,” he said, licking his lips. “I can still taste the grappa.”

  I sat up and unbuttoned his shirt. He had well-defined pecs, and small nipples only a little browner than his skin. I began exploring his hairy chest with my tongue and my teeth, and he shivered and groaned lightly. It took us a while to strip totally naked, after an intense exploration of each other’s bodies, kissing and licking and rubbing and even biting a little. His cock was average sized, though standing out straight from his body it looked plenty big enough. I leaned down and took him in my mouth, and I felt his whole body go tense.

  “Oh, man,” he said.

  I sucked him for a minute or two, then moved back up to kiss him again. And so we went for at least the next hour or so, learning the intimate geography of armpit and ass, cock and mouth, nipples and knees. I’d had relatively little experience with men by then; you could count all the men I’d slept with on your fingers and toes and have a few left over. Neither of us were particularly well-versed in what to do, but we managed, and we both made up in ardor for what we lacked in technique.

  Finally we both brought each other off, him first, then me a moment later, cum spurting on our hands and stomachs. I pulled him close to me then, hugging him fiercely, feeling his long, hairy body connecting with mine at a hundred different points. I nestled into his shoulder, smelling the last vestiges of his cologne, my lips nuzzling his neck. He held me gently, careful of my burns, and I fell asleep.

  When I woke the next morning it was already light, and I was alone in bed. I had no idea how long Mike had stayed. There was a note on the table that read, “Awesome! I’ll call you today. Mike.”

  I felt alive, sexy, energized. I twisted around to see my back in the mirror and the burns looked less red and angry than they had the night before. I took a quick shower and applied the cream myself, as best I could. I kept smiling, wondering when I would see Mike Riccardi again.

  The morning passed in a blur of busy work. I called the hospital and found that Gunter had been discharged, and Robert’s condition upgraded. My father had been moved from intensive care to a regular room, and my mother said he was breathing more easily. There were still a lot of tests left to do, though, and the doctors hadn’t said when he could go home.

  Sandra’s parents had arrived late the night before, but after Cathy had appeared on all three of KVOL’s newscasts, the doctors were paying attention to her and she and the Guarinos were in a stage of truce. Sandra had shown more activity, moving and blinking her eyes, though she hadn’t woken up yet, and everybody was feeling optimistic.

  The police artist brought me a composite sketch, based on what Gunter and I had both described, and what Tatiana had drawn herself. I couldn’t be completely sure, but I thought it looked remarkably like the guy I’d seen at the party. But was he our bomber? So far the only thing indicting him was his sweatiness.

  A fax came in from Mike Riccardi, listing all the ingredients in the bomb. Depressingly, I recognized almost all of them, and knew that you could find almost everything on the list in any ordinary kitchen or garage. But just seeing his name at the top of the fax gave me a nice little boost.

  Lidia came by with a copy of the autopsy report on Wilson Shira I’d asked her to pick up at the medical examiner’s office. She seemed excited by the chance to participate in the investigation, or maybe it was just seeing Doc Takayama. Apparently he’d taken the time to go over the report with her. I figured it was seeing him that brought that sparkle to her brown eyes, rather than the details of the charred corpse. I wondered what they’d talk about if they ever went on a date, if they’d share notes about dead bodies over pasta and wine, like Mike and I had.

  I was happy to see that she and Doc were taking an interest in each other. “So tell me, officer, did you dig up anything by canvassing the offices around the Marriage Project?”

  She pulled out her note pad. “By the time of the party, all the offices in the area were closed, so I couldn’t find anyone who had been around who hadn’t already spoken to an officer.” She looked up. “But I did find something interesting.”

  “Spill.”

  “Around three-thirty the receptionist at a computer place across the street was coming back to the office with cappuccino for her boss, and she saw this pickup truck slow down, and a guy in the bed of the truck started throwing paper bags on the sidewalk in front of the Marriage Project. She’s pretty sure he broke a window there, too. Then the truck drove away. She said she was so surprised that she didn’t think to get a license number.”

  “We’re tying the pieces together, Lidia.” I told her about the paper bag Robert had given me. “Good work.”

  “Anything else I can do to help?”

  I handed her the list of ingredients Mike had faxed over. “See what you can do with this. Most of t
he stuff is pretty common, but you never know when you’ll come up with something.” I thought for a minute. “It’s a long shot, but my friend Gunter says the tuxedo the sweaty guy was wearing looked rented.” I handed her the yellow pages and said, “Want to give it a try? You can use the desk over there.”

  Within a half-hour, Lidia had a list of formal wear rental places, and she left to show around the sketch of the sweaty guy. She agreed to stop downstairs and leave a stack of the sketches for the beat cops on all three shifts; maybe one of them might recognize our guy.

  I spent the next hours on the phone. I found out the fingerprint lab had lifted one print, probably a middle finger, from the paper bag that had gone through the window of the Marriage Project’s office. They were running it through their computers, but since it was Friday, they didn’t expect to get a match before the first of the week. They also had the piece of pipe Mike’s investigators had found, but they were still working on it.

  I had a couple of reports from beat cops in the district, but only one seemed interesting. Around the time the Marriage Project had been shit-bombed, an officer named Frank Sit had seen a dirty pickup truck with a couple of guys in the back, without a license plate. He’d called it in, but no units had been able to respond. He did remember the back gate had been broken in a distinctive way. That was quite possibly the truck the receptionist had seen outside the Marriage Project’s office.

  One of the secretaries picked up a plate lunch for me from a vendor outside and I sat at my desk and ate. I was just finishing when Kitty Sampson walked in. She wore a blue UH T-shirt, a pair of cargo shorts and huarache sandals. On her right arm jangled half a dozen bracelets, some set with gemstones, others carved in intricate patterns.

  “If you’re looking for your dad, he’s not here,” I said. “He went to some kind of statewide police conference in Hilo. The secretary out front might know how to reach him, though.”

  “I know he’s not here.” She sat next to my desk. “That’s why I came in today. I wanted to talk to you, and he’d kill me if he knew.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. What’s the problem?”

  “I’m a lesbian. Jim and I don’t talk about it, but I’m sure he knows.”

  I was surprised, more by the fact that she called him Jim than by her revelation. Since I came out, gay people have become very open with me. It’s like, they know I am, and they want to level the playing field right from the start.

  “And you’re here because…”

  “I want to help you investigate the bombing Wednesday night.”

  “Whoa,” I said, holding up my hand. “Let’s take this one step at a time. You didn’t witness anything, did you?”

  She shook her head. “But I’ve been pumping Jim for everything he knows about the case, and I have an idea. You know that Reverend White and his wife? The ones who are preaching against gay marriage all the time?”

  I nodded. “We’re looking into them. Investigating everybody who’s expressed opposition to the lawsuit.”

  “They came to preach at UH last week,” she said. “A friend and I went to hear them, just to know what they were saying. And I can’t say exactly how, but I know they’re involved.”

  “I appreciate the advice. I’ll take a good look at them.”

  “You won’t be able to find anything out. They know you’re gay.”

  “The whole island knows I’m gay. Sometimes I think the whole state. But that hasn’t stopped my investigation yet.”

  “You need someone on the inside.” She waved her arm, and the bracelets clacked against each other. “Nobody knows I’m gay, not really. I want to volunteer to help them, get into their circle. I’m sure I can find out what’s going on.”

  I shook my head. “I just can’t let you do that.”

  “I want to be a cop,” she said. “I’ve been watching Jim since I was a little kid, seeing what it is that he does. And I can be good, too. I can pass every physical test the academy gives already, and I’ve got my marksmanship certificate. But I know that when people see me they think of me as Jim’s daughter. I don’t want anybody to think I’m crawling along on his coattails. I’ve been working on this paper, on the relationship between religious cults and violent activity, and if I can tie the Church of Adam and Eve to the bombing then I can win the essay prize in criminal justice, and nobody can say I did that because of who my stepfather is.”

  “I can see you’re serious. But you’ve got to recognize that if somebody in that church is responsible, then it’s way too dangerous for you to get involved.”

  “It’s too dangerous to sit back and let them keep on killing.” She leaned forward. “I can’t do that. I’m going to join up with them, whether you help me or not. I have to do it.”

  “Your father would kill both of us if he knew.”

  “I’m not going to tell him. You’re not either, are you?”

  I sighed. “You’re putting me in a terrible position.”

  “They’ve got a worship session Sunday at that storefront they use for a church. I’m going to go and talk to people.”

  I thought about it for a minute. Sampson would kill me with his bare hands if I let something happen to Kitty. But she had a point; somebody needed to get into the Church of Adam and Eve and see what was going on.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  When she started to protest, I held up my hand. “There is no way I’m letting you do this by yourself. These people are malihinis, after all. They think all islanders look alike. I’ll get myself enough of a disguise to pass. And it’ll be easier for you to blend in if you’re my wife, than if you’re a single girl.”

  She thought about it. Finally she nodded, and we agreed to meet on Sunday morning before the church service. “But you know,” she said, “you don’t have to worry about me. I know how to keep a secret. After all, I’m gay, aren’t I?”

  I had to admit she had a point.

  HERE’S THE AIRPLANE

  Harry called me late that afternoon to report in. Brandon was better, but Arleen was keeping him at her mother’s for the weekend, just to be extra careful. He’d finally caught up on his sleep, and then he’d spent some time surfing the Internet looking for people and groups that were opposed to same-sex marriage.

  “Way more than I expected,” he said. “I mean, it’s amazing. Don’t these people have lives? Like those people who were out protesting on Wednesday night. Don’t they have anyplace better to be?”

  “I don’t know, brah.” He had printed out a lot of stuff for me, he said, and I told him to fax it over to the station. “I’ll read it. Sometime.”

  “I’ll keep looking. I just wanted to get you what I found so far.”

  The fax spewed out pages for a depressingly long time. I started reading, taking notes, making piles based on how crazy the people seemed to be. Some of the arguments were clear and well-reasoned, though they all failed to change my mind. There were a couple of arguments from libertarians, who said that government shouldn’t regulate any interchange between private individuals. There was a group of bitter, divorced men who said that nobody should get married because marriage was an institution, and who wants to be confined to an institution?

  A few made pseudo-scientific arguments, saying that men had a biological imperative against monogamy. Most of them were ungrammatical rants that strayed into religion and fear of pedophiles. Those writers seemed to believe that once men were allowed to marry each other, the next step was guys marrying their Labradors, or women copulating with donkeys in church. The writers hid behind screen names or pseudonyms, though when I found an actual name I ran it through the computer.

  I was surprised, though probably I shouldn’t have been, how many of those who made religious arguments had criminal records. They were my most promising suspects, including a guy in Makiki Heights with a record of felony assault, a woman in Aiea who’d served time for graft, and a guy from Red Hill who had a string of misdemeanors for disturbing the peace, public
drunkenness and indecent exposure. None of them had any record for bombings, arson or deadly assault.

  Lidia called in at the end of her shift. The only item on the list that was unusual was potassium chlorate, and only the Long’s on University had sold some within the last month. “I found the clerk who sold it, and he recognized the sketch.”

  “Lidia, you’re a gem.”

  It was after seven when I finally gave up and left the station. I walked down the street to The Queen’s Medical Center, rubbing my arms against a chilly breeze that swept down South Beretania, skittering trash along the deserted sidewalk. The small cafes and convenience stores that service the downtown population were closed and the line of parking meters were all available and showing red expired circles in their windows, like a long row of tombstones at an unattended cemetery.

  My brothers and their wives had gone home to their families, leaving my mother alone with my father. He was grumpy, refusing to eat his dinner and demanding again to go home. “Maybe you can talk to him,” my mother said when I arrived. “He’s driving me crazy.”

  My father sat up in bed when he saw me come in. There was more color in his face than the day before, and he looked stronger, more rested. “Kimo. Do you know where they put my clothes? I want you to find my clothes so that I can go home.”

  I looked at him sitting there, an IV hooked into his left arm, some kind of wires attaching him to a heart monitor going out the other side, and I started to laugh.

  “What are you laughing at? I could still kick your ass if I wanted to.”

  “You couldn’t even kick a pebble along the street,” I said. “And you aren’t going to be able to if you don’t eat. What was wrong with dinner?” I pointed to the nearly untouched plate sitting on his bedside table.

  “Lousy. They left all the taste out.”