Mahu Vice (12 page)

DATING DRAMA

My father picked me up just after four and we drove out toward the airport. Gray rain clouds clustered over the tops of the Ko’olau Mountains, but down on the Nimitz Highway it was sunny and breezy. “I made a couple of calls for you. We need to ask for Jerry Kaneali’i,” my father said, pulling into a used car dealership.

“You know him?”

“Better. The boss and I, we went to UH together. Long time ago.”

As we were getting out of his truck, my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number but I answered anyway. It was Dr. Phil.

“I’ve got a late shift tomorrow,” he said. “Want to catch an early dinner?”

I’d almost forgotten about Dr. Phil—our one date had been so long ago. But I didn’t want to get into all my romantic complications on the phone, and certainly not in front of my father. “Sure. Tomorrow would be great.” He had to be at The Queen’s Medical Center after dinner, so we made plans to meet at a steak house near the Aloha Tower.

The dealership was playing KINE, Hawaiian 105, in the background, and the two receptionists at the front desk wore fragrant leis of red carnations. Jerry Kaneali’i was a big Hawaiian guy in his late fifties, and he seemed pleased to see us. “The boss said to take good care of you,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously.

He led us around the lot, showing us the Wranglers he had, and he was just explaining the horsepower on a dark blue one when my phone rang again.

The display said the call was coming from Haoa’s office. “Hey, brah,” I said.

“Hey to you, too,” Sergei said. “How’ve you been? I had a great time with you last week—but you still owe me a tour of the bars of Waikiki.”

“Sure. When did you want to meet up?”

My dad was listening earnestly to Jerry explain about cylinders and torque. I was trying to understand, but I’d always just taken what I’d been given when it came to vehicles and I’d never paid much attention to what was under the hood.

Oops, I guess I was gay all along.

“I’m thinking Friday,” Sergei said. “You and me, having some fun.”

His voice was so loud that my father looked up. “Sure, that would be great,” I said. “I’ll talk to you Friday, okay?”

I hung up and said, “This one looks good. I’ll take it.”

“Kimo!” my father scolded. “We haven’t even gotten a price yet.”

“Don’t you worry,” Jerry said. “Like I said, the boss told me to take good care of you. Give you the special UH price.”

Yeah, I wanted to say, tell me another one. But I’d seen the sticker price on the Jeep’s window, and the figure Jerry quoted us when we went inside was a few grand less. I guess there’s something to be said for that old boys’ network after all.

There were a million pieces of paper to sign. My dad pulled out a check already made out to me in the amount of eleven thousand dollars, and I endorsed it over to the dealership as my deposit. I was in the middle of filling out the loan papers for the rest when my phone rang a third time.

“Sorry,” I said, seeing it was Mike. “I need to take this.”

I turned away from the two of them and said hello. Mike said, “Hey there, handsome. We said we’d get together and catch up. You free tonight?”

His voice boomed around the small room. I had to figure out how to lower the volume on the damn phone. I looked at my watch. “Sure. Say seven o’clock?”

“I’ll bring dinner. See you.”

I hung up, feeling red faced. We finished the paperwork and Jerry went off to get the keys. “Busy social life,” my father said.

“It’s not like that. Mike and I are working on the arson at the shopping center.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I have three sons, remember? Your brother Haoa, he dated two, sometimes three girls at the same time, until he met Tatiana. Then, no more. Just her.” He looked at me. “Is it like that with you and Mike?”

My immediate impulse was to protest. “Mike? No, not at all. I hadn’t seen him for a year before the fire.”

“He’s a nice guy,” my father said.

Fortunately, Jerry came back with the keys to the almost-new Jeep before I was tempted to reveal anything uncomfortable about my relationship with Mike.

Jerry had rolled up the flaps so the Jeep was completely open, and I hugged my dad and thanked him again before jumping in. Cruising down the Nimitz Highway was so cool—my first new car, even if it had been gently pre-owned for a year or so before I got it. The sun was just setting, but the air was still warm and the breeze whipped around the inside, bringing the smell of salt water that I always associated with my best days.

I took my time driving back to Waikiki, enjoying the ride. I kept the radio on Hawaiian 105, not minding the traffic, the fantail palms swaying in the light breeze, the hills glowing with the reflected light. A wild bougainvillea by the side of the road was a bright purple accent in an otherwise green landscape, highlighted by the last rays of the setting sun. I pulled into my parking space just as Mike stopped on the street in front of my building. “New wheels?” he asked.

“Yup. My dad drove me down to the dealership to pick it out.”

“Pretty sharp. Give me a hand with the food.”

He’d brought takeout from Raimundo’s, the Italian restaurant where we’d had our first date—a family-sized platter of chicken parmigiana, garlic knots, a vat of salad drenched in oil and vinegar. We carried it all upstairs and laid it out on my kitchen table, then dug in.

I remembered when we’d eaten at the restaurant, and how we’d shared a bottle of red wine. Would we never be able to do that again? Would he have to avoid wine and beer, and would I always be watching to see that he did?

“So what have you got?” I asked him, spearing some of the lettuce and a couple of croutons.

“Nothing much. Like I said before, the guy was a pro, whoever he was. No trace evidence, just that piece of potato chip bag you found.” He ate some salad and then broke apart one of the garlic knots. “Unfortunately, a lot of guys use chips that way. So it’s not much of a lead.”

I told him about the UH student, and he pulled out his battered steno pad and made a couple of notes. “Think the guy could pull someone out of a lineup?”

I shook my head. “It was dark, and his mind was on getting back to his wife without getting caught. I don’t think he got much of a look at the guy. Couldn’t say more about the car other than it looked like a BMW or a Mercedes.”

“So we have nothing?”

“Well, we might have something.” I told him about Norma Ching, and that the prostitution at the acupuncture clinic was connected both to the lingerie store in Chinatown and the massage parlor in Waikele.

Mike whistled. “That is a lead. I’ll look at those fires again. Maybe there’s something in one of them that would tie us to a particular arsonist.” He started cutting into the chicken. “You ought to talk to Vice, too.”

“Well, actually…” I hesitated. Mike and I were delicately moving toward starting something up again, and I didn’t want my past mistakes to screw that up.

I sighed. “This guy came to me yesterday. A guy I had sex with, a few months ago. We didn’t know it, but we were videotaped, and he’s being blackmailed. I went down to talk to Vice about it, and Ray and I did a little investigating. Turns out the house where I went for sex is owned by the company that leased the acupuncture clinic.”

“Hold on—you were videotaped? Have you seen the tape?” He smiled. “Can I?”

I kicked him under the table. “I haven’t seen the tape. The blackmailers sent the guy a still from the video. All you can see is my back.” I paused. “There’s more.”

“More?”

“Remember what I told you yesterday afternoon? About some of the stuff I got into?” He nodded. “One of the guys Mr. Hu hooked me up with was a hustler. He cuffed me to the wall and paid the guy to fuck me until I bled.”

“Ow.”

“Yeah, that’s a good word for it. But that was the last straw. I stopped going up there after that. The hustler got picked up on a drug bust, though, and gave my name to Vice.”

“What does that mean for you?”

I shrugged. “I told the lieutenant that I’d had sex with the guy, but I hadn’t paid for it. The guy disappeared, so they never got anything more out of him. But I have to look for him, see if he has a way to get to Mr. Hu.”

“I don’t think you should be on this case,” Mike said, putting down his fork. “You’re too connected. From your dad owning the shopping center, to having sex with all these different guys. You need to tell your lieutenant and let someone else handle it.”

“Yeah, and then the whole department finds out what I was up to,” I said. “No way. Listen, it’s not a big deal. I’ll work it all out.”

It was clear that Mike thought it was a big deal, though, and I thought that was both sweet and a little too forward. Yeah, maybe we’d get together again at some point—but he had no say over my life until then.

My cell phone rang, and from the display I saw that it was Terri. Our friendship, strong since high school, had faded a bit as I got caught up in my problems and she recovered from her husband’s death and took over her family’s foundation, the Sandwich Islands Trust. She’d been in Philadelphia all summer with her sister, and it seemed that all we did was talk on the phone once in a while.

“I need to answer this,” I said to Mike. “Sorry.”

He held up a hand and went back to eating.

“I have somebody I want you to meet,” Terri said. “His name’s Levi. I’m hoping you can have dinner with us on Saturday night.”

“Dinner Saturday night?” I said. Mike looked up. “Gosh, let me check my social calendar.” I pretended to page through a book, and Mike smiled. “Looks like Saturday is free.”

I don’t know why, but I asked, “Can I bring someone?”

Terri said, “Of course.”

“You want to come to dinner on Saturday with Terri and meet her new boyfriend?” I asked Mike.

A grin spread across his face. “That’d be nice.”

“Count us both in—me and Mike. Call me Friday and tell me where and when.” I hung up before she could pepper me with a million questions.

Mike said, “We could make a habit of this dinner thing.”

“We could. We’ll see how things go.”

He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to make a meeting at eight thirty.”

“What, no dessert?”

“We could both do without dessert,” Mike said, patting my stomach.

“Hey, watch it, bud,” I said, standing up and pulling up my shirt to expose my abs. Looking down, though, I could see they weren’t quite as good as they’d been in the past, and I let the shirt drop.

“Exactly,” Mike said.

“You saw mine. Let me see yours.”

He stood up, a sly grin on his face. He was wearing a light blue chambray button-down shirt, and he began unbuttoning the buttons one at a time, swaying ever so slightly to an unheard rhythm. I laughed and said, “You can skip the striptease,” but he wouldn’t stop.

When he had the shirt completely unbuttoned, he flipped open one side, then the other, tantalizing me with glimpses of his erect nipples, his hairy chest, the waistband of his shorts. “Just want you to see what you’ve been missing,” he said.

I reached over and poked him in the stomach. “I see where all that beer’s been going.” There was a band of fat just above his waist that hadn’t been there the year before.

He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward him. We kissed, and there was so much passion between us that my dick got hard and my pulse began racing.

Then Mike pulled away. “Like I said, got a meeting. You get to clean up.”

He walked to the door, his shirt still open. “See you later, handsome,” he said, and then the door closed behind him.

I took a deep breath. It was the same story for me, my hormones getting ahead of my brain. When I was I going to be able to change that behavior?

I slid a slack key guitar CD in the stereo, then I cleaned up the dishes and turned on my computer. I’d first come across Mr. Hu on MenSayHi.com; maybe I could still find him through there.

After my brothers and Harry took me surfing, I put my MenSayHi account on hold, but I reactivated it now and started looking through the profiles, trying to see if Mr. Hu was listed, or if there was anyone online who might know him.

It didn’t take long for the messages to start coming in. I sat there in my boxers, drinking the Longboard Lager I hadn’t been willing to open when Mike was there, and tried to figure out which of the offers might be from Mr. Hu.

It was exercise in both eroticism and frustration. I didn’t want to get my rocks off—I wanted to catch a criminal. But I couldn’t help getting turned on by some of the messages. Nothing came in from Mr. Hu. Just a lot of horny guys looking for cybersex or a real-time hookup. Feeling no closer to finding Jingtao’s killer, or whoever was blackmailing Brian Izumigawa, I gave up around eleven, turned the computer off, and went to sleep.

CLEANING HOUSE

Ray and I caught a double homicide in Makiki as soon as our shift began—two Asian women killed while they slept in a cheap one-bedroom—and we spent most of the morning at the crime scene. There was suspiciously little in the apartment to identify the women—no family pictures, no wallets or driver’s licenses, though each woman had a tiny purse with cosmetics and cigarettes.

The front door showed pry marks, indicating that whoever got in did so without the women’s knowledge. The crime scene techs, Larry and Ryan, dusted for fingerprints and found a couple of pieces of hair and fiber that might be evidence. But there wasn’t much else they could do beyond take digital pictures of the door and the pry marks.

It must have been a slow day at the morgue, because Doc Takayama, the medical examiner, was there himself. Or maybe it was the presence of Lidia Portuondo, who had responded to the 911 call. I had the feeling they were carrying on a sub-rosa relationship; something about the flirtatious way they talked over dead bodies, I guess.

Doc had turned thirty a few weeks before. Prior to that he’d never actually said how old he was. He was a prodigy in college and medical school, and he chose pathology because he got tired of patients calling him Doogie Howser and asking if he’d gone directly to medical school from kindergarten.

“What do you think, Doc?” I asked.

“Preliminary? Both women were killed by a single gunshot to the head. My guess is that the killer used a silencer, because the position of the bodies indicates that both appear to have been killed in their sleep.”

“Don’t forget the stippling,” Lidia said. She was looking fine that morning, her dark hair pulled into a French braid, her uniform crisp. There was a light blush on her cheeks, as if she’d been in the sun—or put on makeup just before Doc’s arrival.

“Of course,” Doc said, smiling at her. Stippling was a fancy word for a pattern of dots around the wound that indicated the gun was fired at close range.

“Time of death?” Ray asked.

“Four to six hours ago,” Doc said. “I’ll be more precise after the autopsy.”

The building looked like it had once been a motel—two stories with a staircase at one end. Eight small apartments on each floor. A tired middle-aged Japanese woman was taking care of a couple of keikis in an apartment down the hall from the murder scene, but the kids were making such a racket I could barely hear her tell me she didn’t know anything.

An elderly Hawaiian man in a wheelchair was in one of the first-floor units, but he was disoriented and the room smelled of urine. He thought we were from the water department about his leaky faucet, and nothing we said could convince him otherwise. The rest of the neighbors were gone.

There was no superintendent on the property; the building was one of many owned by a small-time operator, and when I called over there the manager, whose name was Ed Millner, said that the lease was in the name of a corporation. “You don’t know the names of the tenants?” I asked.

“Sorry,” Millner said. “They paid the rent on time, they didn’t tear the place up, and they didn’t bother the other tenants. That’s all we care about.”

Doc had the bodies taken away and Lidia followed him outside. I saw them conferring before they parted and wondered if they were comparing forensic notes, or making a date.

“Let’s recap what we have,” Ray said, looking at his notepad. “Two unidentified Asian females, killed in the middle of the night by an unknown assailant. Anonymous 911 call. This case has ‘solved immediately’ written all over it.”

“Now, now,” I said. “We have the name of the corporation that signed the lease. Why does it sound familiar, though?”

Ray paged through his notes. “The house in Black Point,” he said. “Lease in the name of the same corporation.”

He looked up at me. “Well, the clinic was a front for prostitution. You think somebody’s cleaning house?”

“I think we need to go back and see Norma Ching again.” On our way to Chinatown, we stopped and picked up chili at Zippy’s.

While we waited to order, I checked my phone and found a message from Terri with the time and place for our dinner on Saturday. “So you’re back with Mike?” she asked. “What’s going on? Can’t wait to see you.”

If I knew what was going on I’d be ahead of the game, I thought.

We got our food and sat down. I wasn’t about to get my new ride crapped up with fast food wrappers in my first twenty-four hours of ownership. “Who do you think made the 911 call?” Ray asked between mouthfuls.

“Why?”

“These women were killed in the middle of the night. With a silencer. And we know they were working girls, so it wouldn’t be unusual for somebody to see men coming and going at night. So who discovered the bodies?”

“You think maybe Norma?”

He shrugged. “It’s a question we can ask her.”

I got a bad feeling from the fresh pry marks on Norma’s door. It was locked, though, and there was no answer to our knock. I was examining the door jamb when the lady next door came out in the hall. She looked about a hundred years old, no more than four feet tall, her hair a wild white tangle. “You look for Norma?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “You seen her today?”

The old lady shook her head. “She always bring me coffee first thing. But not today. I worried.”

I looked at Ray, then back at the old lady. “You wouldn’t happen to have a key to this door, would you?”

She ducked back into her apartment and returned a moment later with a security key on a red ribbon. I took the key from her and opened the door, calling, “Norma? Norma? You here?”

Ray and I walked into the apartment, already dreading what we’d find. Sure enough, Norma Ching was dead in her bed, a single bullet wound to her head. At a glance, it looked like the same caliber that had killed the two women in Makiki.

The neighbor started to cry. She hadn’t heard anyone during the night, but she said she took her hearing aid out when she went to sleep. She went back into her apartment, and I called the medical examiner’s office and asked Doc to come out himself.

I called the Scientific Investigation Section and asked Larry to come out with Ryan, even though they should have stayed in the lab processing the evidence from Makiki. “If these crimes are related, I figure it’s best to have all the evidence in the same hands. And bring those pictures of the door you took, and we’ll see if we can match them here.”

We looked the place over while we waited. We found a bunch of gold rings, bracelets, and chains in a jewelry box on Norma’s dresser and a few thousand dollars in cash in her freezer, so it was unlikely that her killer had broken in with the intent to steal.

While Doc examined Norma’s body, and Ryan and Larry went over the apartment, Ray and I canvassed the neighbors. They were all elderly Chinese, and none of them had heard anything the night before.

It did look like the pry marks matched, but Larry wouldn’t be able to say for sure without a detailed analysis. “If you’re lucky, the crowbar they used left some trace evidence we can match to both doors,” he said.

Ray and I were both beat by the time we made it back to the station, as our shift was ending. I yawned and looked at the clock. I was thinking about heading home for a nice nap when I realized that I had to meet Dr. Phil for an early dinner.

“You want to go back and canvass that apartment building in Makiki?” Ray asked. “People might start to come home soon.”

“Can you do it? I’ve got a date.” I explained about Dr. Phil’s schedule. “It’s his only night off this week.”

“The things I do for my partner,” Ray said. “If you can drop me up there, I’ll get Julie to pick me up on her way home.”

“You’re a prince among men. This makes up for, oh, at least two times I’ve chauffeured you around.”

Before we left, I tried Karen at Social Security, to see if she’d found anything on Treasure, but she’d already left for the day.

“I’m worried about Treasure,” I said to Ray, as we walked to the elevator. “If the same person killed the two women and Norma, she may already be dead.”

“Or maybe Treasure’s our killer. Or maybe she was the one who called 911 about the girls.”

“At this point, anything’s possible.”

I drove Ray up to the apartment building in Makiki. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot, which meant somebody was home. “Good luck. How about I pick you up tomorrow morning on my way in? Save Julie the trip.”

“Have fun on your date. I’ll try and get the case solved for you.”

I realized on walking in to the steak house that I wasn’t dressed well enough; an aloha shirt and black jeans are fine for homicide, but the men around me were all wearing business suits. Mel Tormé was on the sound system, and even the waiters wore ties. It was like I’d stumbled into my brother Lui’s world.

Dr. Phil was waiting for me at the bar with a glass of fizzy water in his hand. “Alcohol doesn’t mix well with medicine,” he said, apologetically. “But you go ahead and have a drink if you want.”

“I think I will,” I said, imagining that if I did start dating Mike again this was how our relationship might play out. I ordered a cosmopolitan.

“Not the drink I’d expect of you,” Dr. Phil said. “You seem more like a beer-and-a-shot kind of guy.”

I wasn’t sure how to take that, but I chalked it up to those getting-to-know-you jitters. “I do like a beer now and then. What’s the matter, you not masculine enough for a fruity drink?” I wanted it to sound like a joke, but I don’t think Dr. Phil thought of it that way. Another date off to a rocky start.

The hostess came over and showed us to a booth of dark wood, with a single spotlight hanging high above us and shining on the glossy table top. The menu and wine list were bound together in a leather-covered book, and the prices were a lot higher than I’d expected. I was cranky with Dr. Phil for picking such an expensive place, and for not telling me about the dress code, either.

But then he said, “Now, this was my invitation, so it’s my treat. This is my favorite place and I don’t get over here often enough. The food is amazing.”

I followed his lead and ordered the filet, with a baked potato and a Caesar salad. The potato was as big as my foot, and the beef was tender enough to cut with a butter knife.

“What’s up?” Dr. Phil said, as we were eating our main course. “You’ve been kind of distracted. Bad case?”

“Three murders in one day.” I told him, briefly, about Norma and the two Chinese girls, and their connection to prostitution at the acupuncture clinic.

“I can’t tell you how many prostitutes we treat at the ER,” he said. “Not just STDs, either. Girls who get beat up, or cut, who don’t have medical insurance, so anything that happens to them gets very bad before they come to us. Not just girls—boys, too. A couple of weeks ago, I saw this Chinese boy who somebody had used pretty badly. Rectal bleeding, anal fissures, and a bad infection. He didn’t speak a word of English, and he had this older man with him who was supposed to be his translator, but I think he was more like a guard.”

“Did you call anyone?”

Dr. Phil shook his head. “Not my job. The older man said that the boy was over eighteen, that he’d been attacked in an alley by some guys who got away.”

Immediately I thought of Jingtao. “You remember a name for this boy?”

He shook his head. “And whatever name they gave, I’m sure it wasn’t his real one.” He drank his fizzy water. “Prostitution’s a victimless crime. We ought to decriminalize it, regulate it, make sure the girls—and guys—get regular checkups.”

I was tempted to tell him about Jingtao, how he’d escaped from the acupuncture clinic and then died in the fire. But I couldn’t find a way to make it sound like I wasn’t accusing Dr. Phil in his death, and neither of us said anything else for a while; we just sat listening to Dean Martin and the rest of the Rat Pack singing about the past. I didn’t have the energy to court Dr. Phil when my mind was on Mike, and I’m sure he figured out something was up.

I yawned when the waiter asked if we’d like dessert, and Dr. Phil said, “No, I’ve got to get to work, and I think my friend here needs a nap.”

“Sorry. I’m normally more animated on a date.”

“It’s okay. With schedules like ours, we’ve got to fit dates in when we can.”

He paid the bill and said, “I’ll see what my schedule’s like for next week and I’ll call you.” I had a feeling that he wouldn’t. He did let me leave the tip—which was more than I’d have spent on dinner with a date at a restaurant of my choice. It made me feel better about the way things were ending—but only a little.