Mahu Fire Read online

  A couple of the fires had been simple accidents—a cigarette extinguished in dry brush, an air conditioner short-circuiting. But others were clearly arson—a failing restaurant in Chinatown, a trash fire outside a gay bar in Salt Lake, a duplex in Kaka’ako where a married woman had moved in with her new boyfriend, an amateur Molotov cocktail through the window of an X-rated video store on Kuhio Avenue, a warehouse fire just off the Pali Highway where a bag of greasy potato chips had been used as an accelerant.

  About half the arsons had some connection to gay people or businesses serving them, which was enough to get the local bar rags in an uproar about official indifference to the gay and lesbian community. I’d been called for an opinion by one of them, but I’d said I had no comment.

  It seemed that all over the island, gay and straight people were living in an uneasy balance. When we’d been quiet enough in our closets, our businesses had been allowed to run, with darkened windows and little advertising. Now that we were pressing our claims to live freely, marry like everyone else, things were getting more difficult.

  It couldn’t have been easy for an openly gay couple like Jerry Bosk and Victor Ramos to live next door to a religious family, the kind who kept a statue of St. Joseph on the front lawn.

  The house itself was nondescript, maybe a little more rundown than the average house on the street. It was a single-story ranch, painted a faded green, with brown grass in the front yard and a small outbuilding at the back. The slant-eyed St. Joseph said nothing as I walked up to the door and rang the bell.

  A trim, dark-haired young woman in a light-blue polo shirt and dark slacks answered. I showed her my badge and introduced myself. Though I knew she was a tenant, and not the owner, I asked, “Are you Mrs. Pender?”

  “Mrs. White. We’re renting from the Penders.” She didn’t invite me inside.

  “I understand you’re a runner,” I said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “A man was shot about a block away from here, early this morning,” I said. “Did you hear or see anything out of the ordinary?”

  “I wear headphones when I run. I get into a zone, and I block everything else out.” I could just imagine her; I saw women like that every day on the streets of Waikiki, their grim determination seeming to suck all the joy out of exercising.

  “I know what you mean. I’m a surfer, and I focus the same way.” I paused for a minute. “Did you ever notice the homeless man living on the empty lot?”

  She grimaced. “Creepy guy. The city shouldn’t let people like that live on the street.”

  “Did he ever threaten you?”

  I thought I saw something flicker in her eyes, but she said, “No. I never had anything to do with him.”

  “Well, thanks anyway.” I checked her left hand before I said, “Your husband. Can I speak with him?”

  Again, there was something strange about her eyes, the way alarm seemed to register in them. “He sleeps late. He snores. He wouldn’t have heard anything.”

  “If it’s okay, I’d still like to talk to him.” I looked over her shoulder. A man I assumed was her husband stood in the background. “Mr. White?”

  Grudgingly, the woman stepped aside, and her husband came forward. He was dark-haired, a bit pudgy, wearing a shapeless T-shirt and jeans that were too tight around the waist. There was something familiar about him, but couldn’t place him. I repeated what I’d told his wife. “Did you see anything this morning?”

  When I’d first come out, my friend Gunter gave me some interesting advice. “Straight men won’t look you in the eyes,” he said. “Gay men will. That’s a big part of gaydar. It’s not about whether a guy has a limp wrist or says Mary every five minutes. It’s about whether he’ll make eye contact or not.”

  I’d put that to the test a couple of times, with interesting results. Especially because an awful lot of gay people on O’ahu knew who I was, that I was the gay cop, I’d gotten some surprising readings. It was equally surprising that this guy, Mr. White, looked me in the eyes with something that looked a lot like hunger.

  No wonder his wife hadn’t wanted me to talk to him.

  Unfortunately, Mr. White really had been asleep that morning, and hadn’t heard a thing. Probably to interrupt any additional flirtation, his wife put her hand on the door. “I’m sorry, detective, but we’re very busy right now. You know how it is, you get home and there’s so much to do.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. and Mrs. White. You have a good evening, now.”

  She shut the door firmly without wishing me the same. I could see why Vic Ramos called her Mrs. Whack Job. Not the friendliest person to have for a neighbor. But rudeness wasn’t a crime under the Hawai’i Penal Code, though if my mother had her way it would be.

  I had a couple more houses to canvass, but didn’t learn anything more about either shooting—man or chicken. Sometimes it goes like that. I didn’t like to think that this murder would add to my string of unsolved cases, but without a break it probably would.

  The next morning, I was adding notes on the evening’s canvass to those I’d already written when Sampson appeared at my desk. “Seen the paper this morning?” he asked, dropping the local section in front of me. It was opened to an article headlined “Makiki Tragedy Continues.”

  “Twenty years ago this month, Patricia Mura was brutally slain, her body dumped on the slopes of Diamond Head. Her killer is still at large. Yesterday morning, her father, Hiroshi Mura, was just as brutally murdered, a single bullet fired into his brain at close range.”

  “How’d the press get that information?” I asked Sampson. “I haven’t released anything.”

  “Read on,” Sampson said.

  The article went on to imply that the murders of Mura and his daughter, twenty years apart, were somehow connected. The heart-wrenching story detailed his tragic fall into mental illness, beginning with the death of his wife, continuing with Patty’s drug use and arrests for prostitution.

  To make things worse, though, the article’s author, a reporter named Greg Oshiro who was generally critical of the HPD, brought up the rash of unsolved homicides, ending with a generalized indictment of the department for decades of ineptitude.

  It was the kind of article that made me angry. Honolulu police officers risked their lives every day to protect and serve with aloha, as our logo promised, and there was a wall right downstairs with dozens of names of officers who had died in the line of duty. I believe that the press should be able to criticize us, especially if we’re not doing our jobs well—but reporters like that were simply out to grab headlines rather than engage in a debate over police procedures.

  “The chief’s already been on to me,” Sampson said. “He wants to see some progress in this case. Have you looked up the information on the daughter’s murder?”

  I looked at Sampson. “You think it’s connected?”

  “I don’t think. That’s your job.”

  “I’ll get the file,” I said. He retreated to his office, and I finished my notes on Mura’s murder, then printed them up and stuck them in the case file. I spent most of the rest of the day digging up what little information there was on Patricia Mura’s arrests, her time in juvenile hall, the times she had run away, and her murder.

  The crime scene guys had pulled fingerprints off the belt that had been used to bind her hands, though there had been no match at the time. I took the card and went downstairs to the Special Investigations Section and found Thanh Nguyen, a fingerprint tech I knew who worked downstairs in the Records and Identification Division. His division was responsible for serving warrants, firearms registration and permits, handling of evidence, fingerprinting and identification. He was a Vietnamese guy in his early sixties, and word around the building was that he’d been in the South Vietnamese army, escaping on one of the last planes out of Saigon.

  “Can you run these through the system for me?” I asked.

  He looked at the tenprint card I handed him. “You on a cold case?”
r />   I shrugged. “You see the paper today? This girl was the daughter of my the homeless man shot yesterday in Makiki. The Advertiser dug it up, so I figured I’d rule out any connection.”

  Thanh nodded. “Come on. I’ll see what I can do. We must have over 200,000 sets of prints in the system by now. Maybe you’ll get lucky.” He was a short, skinny guy, and I was struck by his general resemblance to Hiroshi Mura. Maybe he could help me bring some measure of peace to Mura’s restless spirit.

  The card was old and a little faded, but Thanh sat at the AFIS console and scanned it in. While I watched, the computer marked the minutiae points—the things that differentiate one print from another—and assigned each a weight. Then it went through its database looking for matches.

  “What do you know.” He motioned me to look at the console. “See that? You’ve got a match.”

  The system brought up a mug shot and arrest record for Edward Kapili Foster. He had been convicted of similar crimes around the same time as Patricia Mura’s murder, and had died at the Halawa Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison, a few years before.

  Case cleared. I took the information in to Sampson, and he called it into a source at the paper he knew. “This doesn’t get you off the hook for Mura’s murder, though,” he said.

  “I’m on it.” Back at my desk, the phone rang. It was Rory Yang, the sergeant in charge of the holding cells in the basement of the headquarters building. He asked, “Hey, Kimo, you know about that sweep last night in Waikiki?”

  “Another one?” Vice had been cracking down on prostitutes and drug peddlers in anticipation of a big Shriners’ convention in a few days. The bad thing was that once they moved all the prostitutes and pushers out of Waikiki, they just moved into District 1.

  “One of ‘em says he knows you.”

  “Who?”

  “Kid we picked up on solicitation. Name of James Wong.”

  “James Wong.” I thought for a minute. “Jimmy Ah Wong?”

  “Chinese kid about sixteen, blond hair in one of those funny stand-up cuts?”

  “That’s him. I’ll come right down.”

  My mind was racing ahead. The last time I’d seen Jimmy he was happy, going to the gay teen center in Waikiki and getting accustomed to being gay. But then I realized I had missed him at the teen center for the last few weeks.

  I tracked down Rory Yang, a forty-something career sergeant with a round face and an unfortunate taste for malasadas, a kind of Portuguese donuts. He showed me Jimmy’s arrest record. Jimmy had no priors, and a preliminary drug screen had come up clean. Then Rory buzzed me through to the cell block, where I found Jimmy in a skin-tight T-shirt and a pair of torn cutoffs, sitting on a bunk. He was leaning back against the rough concrete wall, and his head was down between his knees. His effusive coxcomb of yellow hair, however, was a dead giveaway.

  “Hey, Jimmy.”

  His head came up. “They told me I could call someone, but I didn’t know who.” He looked anxious. “I hope it was okay. I’m not gonna get you in trouble, am I?”

  “No. What happened?”

  He looked away. “They picked me up on Kalakaua Avenue.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Does your father know?”

  “He doesn’t give a shit.”

  I leaned against the cell bars. “You want me to give him a call?”

  “He won’t care. He kicked me out.”

  “He did? When? Why?”

  “About a month ago. I told that DA lady everything, all that stuff I told you, about having sex with Wayne and forging my dad’s name. He hit the roof and threw me out.”

  “Where have you been living?”

  “Around. I stayed with friends for a while, but then my dad stopped paying my tuition at Honolulu Christian, and since I wasn’t going to school nobody’s parents would let me stay there.”

  It was a pattern I’d seen before. Gay teens get tossed out of their homes after they come out, and they end up on the street. “Are you clean?”

  “I don’t do drugs, okay? I just do stuff to get some money to eat and all.”

  “You want me to get you out of here?”

  For the first time I saw something like a smile cross his face. “Can you?”

  “I can try. You hang in there. I’ll come back when I know where you stand.”

  Jimmy wasn’t the only teenager they’d picked up in the sweep, though he was the only boy. A caseworker from Social Services was already on the ground floor, talking to one of the girls. While I waited, I called Melvin Ah Wong at the pack and ship company he ran.

  I didn’t get the reception I wanted.

  “Why are you calling me?” he asked.

  “You’re his father.”

  “Not any more. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Melvin. He’s a minor. You’re his father. You can’t just abandon him.”

  “He’s a mahu,” he said, and I could hear the venom in that one little word, Hawaiian for homosexual. I’d been called it myself more than a few times. “He’s no longer any son of mine.” And then he hung up.

  The social worker was a pleasant, heavyset woman named Wilma Chow. I’d met her once or twice before but didn’t know her. After the teenage girl was escorted back to her cell, I walked into the little conference room Wilma was using as an office. She wore a shapeless white cardigan over a peach-colored silk blouse.

  “Sorry, I haven’t gotten to his case yet,” she said, when I told her I wanted to talk about Jimmy Ah Wong. “Let me take a look at the file.”

  She read for a moment, and then looked up. “You know him?”

  I explained about Jimmy’s evidence, and that I felt responsible for him because I was the one who convinced him to talk. “What about the father?”

  “He’s pissed off. Says he doesn’t want anything more to do with Jimmy.”

  “I could get him out of here on his father’s say-so, since he’s clean and he doesn’t have any priors. But he’s only sixteen, so if the father doesn’t want him he becomes a ward of the state.”

  The charms on her gold bracelet jingled as she flipped the pages in his report. “I have to find him placement somewhere, most likely in a group home. The prospects aren’t very good. He’ll have to stay here for a few more days, and then the group home won’t be much better. He’ll probably run away again as soon as he can.”

  “There must be something else we can do.” I paused. “How about if I sign him out myself?”

  “You can’t do that, detective. You don’t have any authority here.”

  “How can I get myself appointed his guardian?”

  She sat back. “I know you’re trying to help, but this isn’t the right way. No judge is going to release a gay teen to a gay man he hardly knows.” She held up her hand. “We have to pay attention to the way things look.” She checked the file again. “His hearing is this afternoon, four p.m. I can’t find him placement by then.”

  “How about if I get somebody else to vouch for him. My parents, for instance.”

  “It would be better if it was somebody not related to you. Somebody who can give him a home, put him back in school. You find me somebody like that, and I can work.”

  I knew who I could call.

  HELPING A BOY

  Uncle Chin is not my uncle, but my godfather, and my father’s best friend. Because of that long-time relationship, I never spoke with Uncle Chin about what I knew were his impressive, if quiet, connections to the tongs, or Chinese gangs, on the island. I tried to avoid the topic with my father as well.

  Uncle Chin had cancer now, and we feared that every hospital trip would be his last. He’d just come home from one stint, and I hoped he and Aunt Mei-Mei would be up to the favor I was about to ask of them.

  I signed out on the Vice case and drove up to St. Louis Heights, the residential neighborhood above Honolulu where I grew up, and where Uncle
Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei lived in a simple split-level house that did little to demonstrate how wealthy they actually were. Aunt Mei-Mei answered the door. She was a tiny little woman, with a bouffant of dark hair. When I leaned down to hug her she felt as light as a palm frond. “How is Uncle Chin doing?” I asked.

  “Ai ya, not good, Kimo. They send him home but he still very sick. Not just body sick, but heart sick too. He miss Derek.”

  Derek, Uncle Chin’s grandson, had gone to jail a few weeks before, and as soon as he went away, Uncle Chin’s health declined.

  She sighed. “He lonely old man, Kimo. Derek gone, he feel he done here, go on next world, see Robert and Tommy.”

  Robert and Tommy were Uncle Chin’s sons. Robert overdosed, and Tommy, who had become a drug pusher, had been murdered.

  She led me to the bedroom, where I found Uncle Chin propped up in an elaborate black lacquered bed, his reading glasses on the night stand and his eyes closed. “He very tired,” whispered Aunt Mei-Mei behind me.

  He had been a handsome young man, and I could still see that in his face. Uncle Chin opened his dark, bird-like eyes, and smiled. “Ni háo ma?” I asked, using the traditional Chinese greeting he had taught me when I was barely old enough to speak.

  “Good to see you, Kimo.” He tried to sit up and failed, sinking back against the pillows. Seeing how frail he was, I regretted the idea that had brought me to his bedside, but I felt I had no choice but to see it through.

  “I have come to ask you a favor, Uncle.” I sat gently on the edge of his bed, while Aunt Mei-Mei hovered in the doorway. I leaned forward and adjusted the collar of his black silk pajama top. “There’s a boy who needs your help.”

  “Derek?”

  I shook my head. “Not Derek, but a boy like him. Chinese boy, sixteen years old. His father found out about him and threw him out of the house. He was arrested last night for prostitution. His father won’t take him back, so he’ll have to stay in juvenile hall, and then go to a home.” I paused. “You know those are bad places.”