Mahu Box Set

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Same caliber weapon was used as on Ronald Chang. We’ll have to wait for ballistics tests to be sure, but my gut tells me they are.”

  The fields around us were laden with pineapple plants, and we walked around an exhibit showing the different varieties of pineapple and where they were grown.

  “Any particular reason?” I asked.

  “Too many coincidences. Pratt and Zamora killed with the same weapon. Zamora and Chang killed on the same day. Then two more surfers killed in the same general area, with the same type of weapon used on Chang. You do the math.”

  “Let me play devil’s advocate,” I said, stopping in front of a display of pineapples from Indonesia. “The first three were all involved somehow with professional surfing. I don’t recognize this kid’s name, so I’m willing to bet he wasn’t professional grade, at least not yet. The first three victims were all killed individually; this one is part of a pair. And by the way, Brad Jacobson wasn’t a surfer.”

  “So the alternative is two different killers, both in the same area, with similar weapons and similar targets. My coincidence meter rings on that.”

  Sampson toed the red ground with his black dress shoe. “Doc Takayama will do the autopsy tomorrow morning,” he said, “and I’ll get you the results as soon as I can. I already sent a detective over to the boy’s dorm room at UH to see what we can find out about him, and I’m talking to the parents myself as soon as I get back to town.”

  “So this is a full-court press.”

  Sampson nodded. “I have a daughter. If anything happened to her, I’d want to see the force do the same for me.”

  I understood. We began to walk back toward the parking lot and our cars. Around us, tourist families were oohing and aahing over the tiny pineapples, the oddly-colored ones, the very idea that their morning juice began in fields like these.

  “I’ll get on line as soon as I get back to Hale’iwa and see if I can find any record of the kid in any surfing competitions, and I’ll keep my ear to the ground and see who’s talking about him.” I hesitated for a minute. “Am I going to be able to talk to the local detectives at all?”

  Sampson shook his head. “If they want to talk to you, tell them what you know about your friend. But don’t make any connections to the other murders, at least not yet. I’ll send you copies of whatever they discover.”

  We stopped in front of his Lexus. “There is one thing I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Unintentionally, you’ve developed a personal connection to this case.”

  Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to call me on the carpet for sleeping with Brad. My heart rate started to accelerate.

  “Each and every member of the force has a personal life, Kimo. I’m not here to tell you how to run yours. And I’m very sympathetic to your situation—I have gay friends, and I’ve watched them go through all kinds of problems, both internally and with the world around them.” He leaned back against the car, crossing his arms in front of his polo shirt.

  My throat was dry and all I could do was nod along.

  “But you’re going to have to find a way to balance your personal life with your investigation. I’m not telling you to become a monk, but I will tell you what I would tell any detective who worked for me, gay or straight. It’s a bad idea to get personally involved with anyone you meet through a case, as long as the case is ongoing. Once a case is cleared, you want to reconnect with someone, that’s fine. But you see where things can go wrong—if Jacobson’s murder turns out to be connected to the first three, as I think it will be, your involvement with him only complicates matters.”

  “I understand,” I said, struggling to get some moisture back in my mouth. “I know I made an error in judgment in starting a relationship with Brad. I guess I justified it at the time because he wasn’t a suspect, just a source of information. But I promise you I will be more careful in the future.”

  I wanted to salute him, but out there in the parking lot, under the relentless sun, surrounded by red-skinned tourists and the hum of harvesting machinery, it didn’t seem right. So I shook his hand instead.

  My heart rate had returned to normal by the time I got back to my truck. I was impressed by how skillfully Sampson had handled the situation—I didn’t feel that I’d been called on the carpet, though clearly he could have expressed a lot more anger with me. And I didn’t feel that I’d been discriminated against because I was gay; I knew straight detectives who had gotten personally involved in cases, in many different ways, and knew that it was a dangerous road to tread.

  If I was going to be gay, I thought, as I waited for traffic to open up a way onto the Kam for me, I was going to have to learn to keep my personal life separate from my job. I needed to practice some restraint; I needed to keep my pants zipped for a while. Not just for my job, but for my own sanity.

  Despite the gentleness of the reprimand, I was pretty shaken up. It had been a tough day so far, probably one of my worst, beginning with seeing Brad’s body on the beach. I won’t say I had fallen in love with him, because I hadn’t; I can’t even call him a friend, because I hadn’t known him for long enough.

  But I had cared about him, and he had cared about me, and he was dead. Knowing that at least part of the responsibility for discovering who had killed him rested upon my shoulders was a heavy burden, and when it was added to the burdens I’d been accumulating and carrying for the past weeks, I started to feel like I was stumbling.

  The only cure to that was to focus again on solving the murders. I knew even more clearly what was at stake: I wanted to find out who had killed the surfers, and who had killed Brad. And I wanted to earn the right to go back to Honolulu and pick up my career again.

  I tuned in to the news radio station to see if there was anything about the bodies. Within minutes I heard, “Police announced the discovery of the nude bodies of two gay men, found on a North Shore beach just after sunrise,” the announcer read. “The two men, who are unidentified pending notification of relatives, are alleged to have met at a gay bar in Hale’iwa called Sugar’s and then retreated to the beach to consummate a sexual relationship.”

  Sugar’s, I thought. I wondered who had seen the two of them there, besides Ari, who had mentioned to me only that Brad had been at Sugar’s and then left before I arrived.

  “Jacobson, manager of an exclusive North Shore ladies’ clothing boutique, is reputed to have frequently picked up strangers for sex. Sources close to the investigation hinted that a former lover may have been jealous of Jacobson’s latest conquest.”

  That nearly caused me to drive off the road. Did Brad have jealous former lovers floating around? He’d never mentioned one, nor had any of his friends.

  Suddenly I realized they might be talking about me. I was, after all, a “former lover” of Brad’s, and though he was the one who had been jealous, people had seen us have an angry break-up at Waimea Bay Beach Park. It’s a strange feeling to hear about yourself on the news, even in a veiled reference, and unfortunately a feeling I was quite familiar with.

  I’d have to find someone who was at Sugar’s the night before to tell me how it had all looked. Given the jungle drum hotline of Brad’s friends, who seemed to know where I was at all times, that shouldn’t be hard. All I had to do was sit back, and one of them would find me soon enough.

  The news jumped on to the beaching of a killer whale off Lahaina, and I turned the radio off. My brain was still working on Brad’s murder by the time I turned into The Next Wave’s parking lot.

  It was noon by then, and I desperately needed some caffeine. It had already been a long day, and I had a lot of work ahead of me. I got a grande raspberry mocha and laid my laptop out on a wooden table. By the time two hours had passed, I’d assembled all there was to know about Tommy Singer’s surfing career, and there wasn’t much there.

  I’d also done some checking on Brad Jacobson. No one had shut off my access to the police computer system, or perhaps it had been shut off and Sampson had reinstated
me. I was able to get into the network remotely and surf a couple of databases. Brad had been arrested once, a misdemeanor charge involving offering a blow job to an undercover agent in Honolulu two years before. He was as fastidious in his financial life as he’d been in his dress; he had a number of credit cards, all up to date, and he was almost finished paying the loan on his Camry. He had a small nest egg in mutual funds.

  Frank, the bartender at the Drainpipe, came over. “You hear about those two guys they found out at Pipeline?”

  “I was there,” I said. “Heard this girl screaming. I was the one who got somebody to call 911.” I paused. “You know either of them?”

  “I think I might have known the one dude,” he said. “Brad. I think I met him once or twice with Lucie.”

  That made sense. “How about the other one, the surfer?”

  Frank shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

  It was the same with everyone I talked to at The Next Wave. I hung around for a couple of hours, striking up conversations with people I recognized from the waves. It was an easy thing to do, and Brad and Tommy were on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Though several people claimed at least a passing acquaintance with Brad, no one seemed to know anything about Tommy.

  That made it certain to me that he wasn’t a serious surfer. The world of the North Shore is a close one, as I’d already discovered, and everybody knew everybody else—or least knew someone who did. Tommy Singer was an outsider, a college kid who made it up on weekends, and hadn’t penetrated the inner circle of rhino chasers—the slang term for those who follow big water wherever they can.

  It was frustrating, though. I knew there had to be a connection, but just couldn’t figure out what it was. Just as I was finishing, KVOL’s five o’clock news began playing from the TV by the cappuccino bar. I stood up as a bunch of other people gathered around to watch.

  My brother’s station, always first with any scandalous news, led with coverage of the murders, as I expected. They began with a pan around the beach, showing surfers out at Pipeline, then focusing in on the hollow in the sand where the bodies had been found. Ruiz and Kawamoto had set up plastic traffic cones around the area, where the bodies had been found, and roped it off with yellow police tape.

  Ralph Kim, the guy who’d interviewed me, had been dispatched up to the North Shore for a stand up. He was all smarmy professionalism, his crisply pressed aloha shirt a poor attempt to seem like a North Shore kind of guy. He repeated what I’d heard on the radio, describing Brad and Tommy and how they’d met.

  “In a bizarre twist to the case,” Kim continued, “police have identified a lover of one of the dead men as former Honolulu police detective Kimo Kanapa’aka, who left the department in disgrace over the revelation of his homosexuality, and who has recently been seen at numerous locations on the North Shore.”

  “Holy Shiite Muslim,” I heard a voice next to me say. “They got you, brah.”

  I turned and saw Dario. He looked tired and drawn, and even the bright red aloha shirt he was wearing didn’t bring up his natural color. Everyone in the area had swiveled around to look at me. So much for keeping a low profile.

  Dario took my arm and hustled me back to his office. “What exactly are you doing up here?” he asked me. “Because you know, you’re not a cop any more, and you can’t go around playing at being one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been asking around about Lucie Zamora, haven’t you?”

  “What if I have?”

  “But why? You didn’t know her. What’s it to you if she’s dead?”

  “I was a cop for six years, Dario. Even if they say I can’t be a cop here anymore, it’s still part of who I am. I guess I just can’t let go of that yet.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to. It’s going to look pretty suspicious if you keep nosing around dead people. Especially if they’re dead people you fucked.”

  He looked at me, an evil sort of grin twitching the edges of his lips. “You are a top, aren’t you? Don’t tell me under that macho man exterior there’s a bottom just eager to spread his juicy hole for any guy who asks.”

  I crossed my arms in front of me and started at him hard. “Are you asking, Dario? Because you could have fucked me that night, at your place. I was drunk enough.”

  Dario stalked around the room to the other side of his desk. “I knew I could get in your pants from the moment I saw you,” he said. “It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me? You didn’t have to get me so drunk I was passed out, and then basically rape me.”

  “If I’d asked you, would you have said yes? Answer me honestly.” He pointed his index finger at me and shook it.

  For what seemed like the twentieth time that day, my heart rate zoomed and I felt flooded with adrenaline. My body was shaking, but not with fear. “Nope. I was scared shitless about being gay. And what you did only made it worse. I went running home, gave up all my dreams of surfing, and signed up for the police academy because I thought there was no way a cop could be gay.”

  I didn’t realize I had so much anger in me towards Dario. I didn’t think much about that night, because the consequences, the way I’d lied to myself and others for so many years, were too painful.

  He pulled something out of one of the drawers, then came around to my side of the desk. “You were a lousy lay.”

  “I was drunk! Passed out!”

  He moved closer to me. I could smell the beer on his breath, and the perspiration mingling with a sharp lemon scent from his cologne. His whole body seemed to be twanging like a plucked guitar string. “Have you gotten any better?” he asked in a low voice, one tinged with sex.

  “You’ll never know.” I moved a little away from him.

  “Oh, yeah?” He came right up next to me again. “You want to show me, don’t you?”

  He was so close I could feel the heat radiating from him. But I was determined not to back down. He grabbed the back of my head and mashed his face against mine. It was so disorienting I closed my eyes, and then all I felt was his tongue forcing its way into my mouth, his crotch grinding against mine. I got hard immediately. So much for swearing off sex.

  I kissed him back. I don’t know why I have so little control over my hormones; maybe it’s all those years of denying them. Or maybe I did want to show Dario something, take back something I felt he’d stolen from me all those years before.

  “You wanted this,” Dario said, through clenched teeth. I heard a ripping noise, and then felt a condom being thrust into my hand. “You want me.” In a quick motion, he’d wriggled around so his back was to me, and he was facing the desk. He unzipped his pants and pulled them down, presenting his bare ass to me.

  Then he reached back for my dick, groping it through my board shorts. “Come on,” he said harshly. “Fuck me. I raped you all those years ago, you said it. Now do the same thing to me.”

  Confronting Dario

  My God. My dick was straining to get out of my shorts, but I knew if I took Dario there, like that, I’d hate myself for it. It was time for me to be a homicide detective again, and a professional one at that. I had promised Sampson, and myself, that I would learn to control these impulses, at least while I was investigating a case.

  I put my hands down around his chest, leveraged him back up against me. I leaned down and kissed the back of his neck. “I won’t do it like this,” I said into his skin. “Not out of anger. I don’t want to rape you.”

  He squirmed around again, and he was facing me. We kissed again, this time both of us pressing against each other, and I felt his dick, hard as a rock, up against mine. He caught his breath and spasmed for a second, and I knew what had happened. “Was it good for you?” I asked dryly.

  “Sorry.” He smiled sheepishly and backed away from me. There was a big wet spot on my board shorts, but it hadn’t come from the inside. “I guess you aren’t the only one who remembers that night on the beach.”


  I had a funny thought then. Suppose Dario had liked me, all those years ago, instead of trying to drag me out of th

  e closet out of some misplaced anger. What if I’d hurt him almost as badly as he’d hurt me, by abandoning him after that night?

  I didn’t know what to think. All I knew was that I had a case to investigate, and this blast from the past was only going to get in my way. “You’d better get out of those pants,” he said, tossing me a pair of blue board shorts with a surfboard pattern from a pile behind the desk. “I can turn my back if you want.”

  “Don’t bother.” I dropped my shorts. His cum had soaked through to my boxers, too, so I dropped them as well. My erection swung free as I bent down.

  “I can take care of that for you,” he said. He’d cleaned himself up, pulled his pants up.

  “Another time.” I pulled the new board shorts up, carefully tucking myself in, pulling the drawstring tight.

  “You know the press is going to be after you,” he said. “You can’t go back to living at Hibiscus House.”

  “I’m not running back to Waikiki. I came up here to surf, and I’m going to keep on surfing.”

  “I’d invite you to come stay with me, but my living situation is complicated. I’ve got a friend who rents out apartments,” he said. “Let me see if I can get you a place that’s a little more secure than that rat trap where you are.” He looked at me. “Please? Let me do this for you?”

  “That would be great, Dario. I appreciate it.”

  He dialed a number. “Hey, it’s Dario. Listen, I need a favor.”

  As he talked, I realized I knew who it was. Aristotle Papageorgiou, also known as Ari, Brad’s friend, Lucie’s former landlord. It was true, the North Shore was a small world.

  Dario hung up. “It’s cool. He’s going to meet you at this place.” Dario scribbled an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Give me your keys. I’ll get your stuff and bring it over there.”