Mahu Vice Read online

  We walked off to a bench in the shade of a big kukui tree. I saw Ray leaning up against a palm across from us, watching, and I said, “I remember you. You didn’t give me your name then, either.”

  “My situation is difficult. My wife doesn’t know what I do. Her father is paying my law school tuition, and he will cut me off and force my wife to divorce me if he ever finds out.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “I thought this was about the fire?”

  He frowned. “I was here at the library Sunday night. Studying. I got a text from a man I had met on MenSayHi. He was working late, had the whole office to himself. Wanted me to come over.”

  “Office on Waialae Avenue?” I asked.

  “Across from that shopping center that burned. We finished, like maybe ten o’clock, and I walked out to my car.”

  “Where was your car parked? In the lot in front of the office building?”

  The guy shook his head. “I was afraid someone might see my car. So I parked around the corner, on that side street that dead-ends into Waialae Avenue.”

  I pictured it in my head. “Facing toward the street, and the shopping center?”

  He nodded. “I sat in the car for a while, thinking. I knew that what I had been doing was wrong, and that I needed to stop.” His mouth set into a frown and his brows came together. His palms were sweating and he wiped them on his pants.

  I knew the feeling. I’d had it myself, more than a few times. It wasn’t until I’d come out of the closet that those feelings of shame began to fade away.

  “After a while I knew I couldn’t just sit there forever, and I was about to leave. I saw this guy, like a ninja or something, all dressed in black, come running out from behind the shopping center. From where I was parked, I couldn’t see where he went, but about a minute later, a dark sedan came zooming across the parking lot, turned onto Waialae Avenue, and drove off.”

  A group of students passed us, laughing and fooling around. One of the guys was shirtless and buff, and I watched my caller’s eyes track him as he passed. I could see beads of sweat pooling on his forehead. “Just then my cell phone rang, and I saw that it was my wife. She wanted to know when I was coming home.”

  He wiped his forehead. “I told her that I was just leaving the campus. She wanted me to stop at the ABC Store near our apartment and get some milk for the morning. We talked for a couple of minutes, and I was so scared that she knew I wasn’t at the library at all.”

  A gray cloud passed overhead, heavy with rain, throwing us into shadow. “When I hung up the phone, I turned the car on and rolled down the windows. As I drove away, I smelled smoke and realized it was coming up from behind the center, and I called 911.”

  “That was pretty good of you,” I said. “Considering the circumstances.”

  “I’m not a bad person. I believe in the law.” He paused. “I saw you on TV, and I thought I could trust you. That you’d understand.”

  A cool breeze swept past us, rustling the dead leaves under the kukui tree. “I do. I understand. Tell me about this ninja. Man or woman?”

  “Definitely a man. I saw the way he ran.”

  “Height? Weight?”

  He shrugged. “Too far away to see much. Maybe a little on the chunky side, average height, but I didn’t pay a lot of attention.”

  “How about the car. Did you notice anything about the car as it drove away?”

  “Fancy sedan,” he said. “BMW or Mercedes. I have to drive a piece of crap Toyota. I tell you, as soon as I pass the bar I’m leasing one of those nice cars.”

  “Color?”

  “Dark blue,” he said. “With a white interior.”

  “You saw that in the dark?”

  “Oh, the ninja’s car. I thought you were asking about the car I want.”

  I wanted to bop the guy on the head. He was cheating on his wife, and maybe he’d married her just so that her father would put him through law school. But he thought he was honest and righteous because he’d called me. I did understand the pressure he was under, though, so I cut him a little slack.

  “The ninja’s car,” I said patiently. “Notice anything about it? The color?”

  He shook his head. “Dark color, that’s all I saw.”

  I pulled out a business card and scrawled my personal cell on the back. “If you think of anything more, please call me,” I said.

  “You don’t need to know my name?” The relief was evident on his face.

  “I appreciate your call, and the information you’ve given me,” I said. “But I have your e-mail address if I need to get in touch with you. I don’t want to know your name because I don’t want it to get into any paperwork.”

  “Thank you.” It felt as though he wanted to hug me, but it was a public place—and after all, we’d done a lot more than hug the one time we’d hooked up. He settled for shaking my hand once again.

  I watched him leave, and Ray came over to me. I told him what I’d learned. “Ninja, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah. A ninja in a fancy sedan.”

  “Arson pays well,” Ray said.

  “Better than police work,” I said.

  FINALISTS FOR MISS CHINATOWN

  Ray hung around UH to wait for Julie, and I walked to my truck. On my way, Mike called my cell. “I’ve got a lead,” he said. “You going to be home tonight?”

  “I’m on my way there now,” I said, then regretted it. I was having enough trouble dealing with Mike on neutral ground, with others present. What was I doing inviting him over? And what was he doing asking?

  It was just after five, the height of rush hour, and the sun was setting. The streets were alive with neon and with car stereos blasting hip-hop as the tropical night descended rapidly. The air was hot and humid, without a hint of a trade wind. The slow traffic and intermittent showers made me edgy, combined with the sense that our case wasn’t moving forward either. Or maybe it was just knowing that I was going to see Mike.

  When I pulled into my parking space, he was sitting in his truck on the street, the same one with the flames painted on the side that he’d been driving when we dated. “I had an idea,” he said, getting out of the truck and walking toward me. “I cross-referenced a bunch of unsolved arsons, and I think I found a pattern.”

  He showed me a list of ten arsons over the past two years, but the sun was setting and it was too dark to see clearly, so I led him upstairs to my apartment. Fortunately, I’d cleaned up on Sunday so most of the clothes and sports equipment were put away, and there were no crusty dishes in the sink or dirty underwear on the floor to embarrass me.

  He sat down at my kitchen table, and I got us a pair of Longboard Lagers from the fridge—only realizing as I popped the caps that if Mike was an alcoholic, based on that vodka in his water bottle, it was a bad idea to give him a beer.

  He accepted the bottle gratefully and took a deep swig. “Long day,” he said.

  I sat across from him and looked at the list. The other fires had been at a massage parlor in Waikele, a quick mart in Kaneohe, a coffee shop near the airport, a Christian religious shop downtown, and a lingerie shop in Chinatown. “They were all places where the business closed down before the fire,” Mike said. “I want to see if there’s anything else that connects them. Business licenses, phone numbers, that kind of thing. You have any ideas?”

  There was something familiar about that lingerie shop, and I struggled to make the connection. Then it hit me. “I know this shop.”

  Mike looked at me, his eyebrows raised. “My old partner from Waikiki, Akoni, and I went there when we were investigating Tommy Pang’s murder. Tommy owned the place. I wonder if any of these others were owned by tong guys.”

  “Can you run them by your Organized Crime unit tomorrow?”

  “I will.” Something was tickling around the edge of my brain. “The pharmacist’s wife told me that she thought the old Chinese woman at the clinic was named Norma. And at this lingerie shop, there was another old Chinese woman named Norma.�
� I reached over to the sofa, picked up my laptop, and brought it to the table, where I turned it on. “If I can pull up the report online, maybe I can find her last name, and we’ll see if we can connect her to both places.”

  Mike scooted his chair around next to me and looked on as I logged on to the department’s intranet and searched for the right files. Being so close to Mike unleashed a wave of pure longing, followed by sadness. I had loved him, and I’d been devastated to find out that he’d cheated on me, thinking at the time that it meant he hadn’t loved me the way I’d loved him. I’d over-reacted—but if we hadn’t broken up over that incident, something else would have happened to tear us apart.

  Mike still wore the same lemon-scented cologne, and I wondered if he’d reapplied it in his truck while waiting for me to pull up. What did he want from me? Why couldn’t this meeting have waited until the next morning, and included Ray?

  I multitasked—talking to Mike, searching the files, and at the same time considering Mike’s motives. I’m no computer geek; I leave that to Harry Ho. It took me a lot of searching, because I wasn’t giving it my full attention, to pull up the reports from Tommy Pang’s murder.

  It wasn’t an investigation I was happy to recall, since it was the one that had dragged me out of the closet two years before. But I found Norma Ching’s name in one of our reports. “You think this might be the same old woman?” Mike asked.

  “Worth checking,” I said. A few minutes later, I’d run out of options. There was no listing for Norma in the phone book, or in Yahoo’s people search, and she had no criminal record.

  Tommy Pang, who had owned the lingerie shop, was my Uncle Chin’s illegitimate son. Would his widow, my Aunt Mei-Mei, have known Norma? I looked at my watch. It was dinnertime, and I knew if I showed up at her house she’d ply me with delicious food. Mike, too, if he was along for the ride.

  “Want to take a trip up to St. Louis Heights with me?” I asked.

  On the way to Aunt Mei-Mei’s house, I reminded Mike of my relationship with her and Uncle Chin. “This is the guy whose wake was going on when we were fighting that fire in Wa’ahila State Park?” he asked.

  “Yup. You met her there, or maybe at my parents’ house.”

  Mike had come over for dinner a couple of times, and was being gradually absorbed into the Kanapa’aka clan when we’d broken up. Both of us were quiet, probably thinking the same things, when I pulled into Aunt Mei-Mei’s driveway.

  She came to the door in a flowered dress, with a white apron over it. From inside, I could smell something delicious cooking. “Kimo! You just in time for dinner,” she said. “Jimmy on his way from college with bunch of friends.”

  A year and a half before, just before Uncle Chin’s death, they had taken in Jimmy Ah Wong, a gay teenager whose father had kicked him out. Since then, he had completed his GED and been admitted to the University of Hawai’i, where he’d started as a freshman a few months before.

  “Do you remember Mike?” I asked Aunt Mei-Mei. “He’s a fire inspector, and we’re working on a case together—the fire at the center my dad used to own. We wanted to ask you a question.”

  It was strange to introduce Mike that way, without mentioning all that had gone between us. But if Aunt Mei-Mei was surprised to see Mike, she didn’t mention it. “You ask while you eat.” She hugged us both, then led us into the dining room, which had been set for a crowd. “Always room for more. Sit.”

  She brought out a platter of tiny dumplings, delicately fried, and sat with us as we ate. “What you want to ask?”

  “You know a woman named Norma Ching?”

  Aunt Mei-Mei’s face darkened. “What you want with Norma?”

  “I think she might have been working at an acupuncture clinic in the center.”

  Aunt Mei-Mei laughed, exposing a row of tiny white teeth. “Acupuncture,” she said, and it was good to see her smile. She hadn’t done enough of that since Uncle Chin’s death. “No acupuncture if Norma there.”

  “That’s what we were thinking,” I said.

  “Do you know how to get in touch with her?” Mike asked. “These dumplings are amazing, by the way.”

  I’d been so busy eating I hadn’t stopped to tell Aunt Mei-Mei how good they were, but I did.

  She waved her hand. “Just dumplings. Lots more food in kitchen. Jimmy’s friends, they always hungry.”

  “Norma Ching,” I said.

  “I no want to talk about Norma,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “You eat.”

  I was about to protest, but a car pulled up in the driveway, with the sound of loud music and laughter. Aunt Mei-Mei’s face broke into a smile again, and she hurried to the door. “You okay to stay?” I asked Mike.

  “If the rest of the food’s as good as this, I’ll move in.”

  Jimmy’s friends were all guys from his dorm, mostly straight, as far as I could tell, and as Aunt Mei-Mei had said, they were all hungry. We ate honey chicken, white rice, wonton soup, more dumplings, spare ribs—the woman must have been cooking all day to generate so much food.

  The guys were all curious about being a cop and a fireman, and we carried on rapid-fire discussions, even as Norma Ching kept percolating in the back of my mind. One of the guys said, “Man, you guys must get a lot of babes in your jobs.”

  I looked at Mike, and he looked at me, and we both burst out laughing. Jimmy laughed, too, then looked at his friend and said, “Dude, can’t you tell? They’re both gay. They used to be boyfriends.”

  My heart did a flip-flop and I stole a glance at Mike. He was intent on eating.

  The guys didn’t seem to care, just kept peppering us with questions. It was almost nine before we finished.

  The boys left first, after lots of compliments to Aunt Mei-Mei, and kisses and hugs from her. “The poor woman’s going to spend the next two days cleaning up,” Mike whispered to me as we watched them pile into somebody’s old Chrysler LeBaron convertible, a rental car reject from the 1980s.

  They turned up the car’s meager stereo and backed away, heading downhill to the tune of some Jawaiian reggae. “The future of America,” Mike said, as we walked back to the kitchen, where Aunt Mei-Mei had begun loading the dishwasher.

  “Let us help you,” I said.

  “No, no, you go,” Aunt Mei-Mei said.

  “About Norma Ching,” I began, but Aunt Mei-Mei held up a tiny hand with pink lacquered fingernails.

  “I have to ask for address for you,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “Someone tell me.”

  We had to be content with that. But there was something else there, and I knew I couldn’t let it loose. When we were back in my truck, I picked up my cell phone and dialed my parents’ number.

  My dad answered. “Hey, Tutu Al,” I said. “Howzit?”

  “I’m not your tutu, boy.” He was grumpy, which probably meant my mom was watching his diet. “You can call me Dad.”

  I laughed and said, “I’m driving, Dad, so I’m putting you on speaker. You ever hear of a woman named Norma Ching?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone, and for a minute I worried he really was angry that I’d called him grandpa. “What do you want with Norma?”

  “Why does everybody ask me that? Aunt Mei-Mei said the same thing.”

  “You asked Mei-Mei about Norma? Are you stupid?”

  “Hold on, Dad. I’m missing something here.”

  He sighed. “Your Uncle Chin was a good man, but he had many weaknesses. Pretty women were one of them.”

  I remembered meeting Norma. “Dad, she’s an old woman.”

  Mike poked me in the side and I looked across at him.

  “She used to be one of the most beautiful women in Honolulu.” There was a wistfulness in my father’s voice that made me wonder a little. “She had Chin at the tips of her fingers. He bought her the apartment in Chinatown where she lives.”

  I’d always heard rumors that Uncle Chin was a womanizer, but in the past my father had been cagey when I asked him. I knew that Tommy Pang wa
s Chin’s manuahi, or illegitimate son, from a woman in Hong Kong, but I never paid much attention to any women he might have had after that.

  “You know where that apartment is? Aunt Mei-Mei said she didn’t know the address, though she was going to try to find it for me.”

  “Best to let Mei-Mei,” my father said. “She and Norma, they go back a long way. They were both finalists for Miss Chinatown, you know, way back when Chin and I were in college.”

  “Aunt Mei-Mei?”

  The disbelief must have crackled in my voice, because my father laughed. “We were all young once.”

  I thanked him and hung up. “I can see that, you know,” Mike said. “I’ll bet Aunt Mei-Mei was quite a babe.”

  “What do you think she meant when she said that if Norma was around there wasn’t any acupuncture going on?”

  He shrugged. “Could be she knows about the gambling. You said her husband was a crook, yeah? You think she knew about his business?”

  I shook my head. “She was always just a housewife. Uncle Chin never let her know anything that could have hurt her.” I paused. “I’ll tell Ray about your list tomorrow. I can take it down to Honolulu Hale, and run it by Akoni, too, in case Organized Crime knows anything. You got any other ideas?”

  I realized I wanted to know if Mike had any ideas about the two of us—but I didn’t say that. Mike shook his head. “Making the connection to those other fires was my big leap. I’ll start going over the case files tomorrow. Maybe there’s a lead.”

  I pulled into my parking space, wondering how the night was going to end. Mike yawned theatrically. “Got to get my beauty sleep,” he said. We stood next to each other beside my truck, both of us unsure how to part. Should I hug him? Shake his hand? Or just walk away?

  We both made little movements toward each other, and I gave up and hugged him. It felt good to be close to him again. “It’s been good seeing you again, Kimo,” he said, as we pulled apart.

  There was a warmth in his voice that thrilled me a little. “Me too. See you around.”

  As he walked away I tried to make myself stop thinking about him, about the way his body had felt against mine. I watched him get into his truck, then wave as he drove past. I waved back, unable to shake the feeling that the evening had felt almost like a date.