Mahu (21 page)

“We’ve got to get this solved,” Akoni said. “Or it’s both our asses.”

“I know,” I said, as I walked out of the station.

DINNER WITH FRIENDS

My parents were already at Uncle Chin’s house by the time I arrived, the four of them sitting out on the lanai chatting, surrounded by birds and flowers. “You know your father built this house,” Uncle Chin said, as I settled into a lounge chair across from him.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “How long ago?”

“This was my first project on my own,” my father said. “Right after you were born, when I left Amfac and went on my own.” In my memory, my father had always had his own business, but I knew that at some time in the past he had worked for Amfac, one of Hawai‘i’s Big Five companies, as a construction superintendent.

“This was new area back then,” Uncle Chin said. “I bought many pieces land. Sold your father one where your house is.”

They kept on talking about the old days, when they were young men and the world stretched out before them like a treasure chest of riches waiting to be plundered. It was hard for me to concentrate, because I kept thinking about my own future. What would I do if I left the force? I was too old to be a professional surfer by then; I had let that chance pass me by when I fled the North Shore. Like Akoni suggested, I could become a private cop, working security details for fancy condos or Ala Moana Center. I could become a private detective, chasing down errant husbands and bogus slip-and-fall claims.

I looked at my father. He was still a handsome man, graying, distinguished. He had once had many powerful friends and connections, but his friends aged as he did, and consequently the business he had built, which had provided for us all for so many years, was fading away too. Maybe I could work with him, rejuvenate the business, become a minor tycoon like he was.

But would he want me? I’d seen his face when he described Derek Pang as māhū. He didn’t want a gay son any more than Tommy Pang had. “
È
, Kimo, you gone away somewhere?” my father asked.

I looked up. “Sorry, Dad. It’s been a long day.”

“Time for dinner,” Aunt Mei-Mei said, standing up. “Lokelani and me, we have dinner ready chop chop.”

When the women had left the room, Uncle Chin said, “I ask many people about my son. What he do, who hate him.”

I looked at my father. He said, “I knew Tommy was Chin’s son. I helped him get his papers.”

I guessed my father was willing to stay and listen, so I said to Uncle Chin, “What did you find?”

He picked up a silver harmony ball from the table next to him and rolled it in his palm. “He was hard man, like I tell you, but no one know anyone who kill him. He was smart, my son. Not like his father like that.”

“You’re plenty smart, Chin,” my father said.

Uncle Chin smiled. “Good to have friends, no?” Then his smile faded. “My boy not have many friends. Not many enemies either, but not many friends. Many women, lots of money.”

“What kind of stuff was he doing, Uncle Chin? I know about the legitimate businesses—the bar, the pack and ship, the lingerie shop. But he must have been doing some illicit stuff too. Smuggling? Gambling? Prostitution? Drugs?”

“Hate drugs,” Uncle Chin nearly spit out. I remembered Robert, his death. Uncle Chin had always been adamantly against the drug trade. “Stupid business,” I remembered him telling me once. “Get customers, then kill them. How make life like that?”

“Did Tommy deal in drugs?” I asked gently.

Uncle Chin nodded. “Bad business. I told him many times, stop. Drugs kill his brother, he not care. Truth, I think he resent Robert’s memory, Robert born here, have advantages he no have. Even though I tried make up to him.”

“Was Derek involved in any of Tommy’s businesses?” I asked. “I know about the bar. How about the others?”

“Sounds like,” Uncle Chin said. “Two boys, Derek and friend. They collect money sometimes, carry messages. Like learning business.”

“The drugs, too?”

Uncle Chin shook his head. “No. Tommy said. Derek no in drugs. I make him promise.”

“He gets all the businesses now?” I asked. “Derek?”

Uncle Chin looked disturbed, like he was seeing where I was going. “Wife gets, but Derek runs. You think Derek kill Tommy?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. You think Derek could kill his father?”

“I’m a contract builder,” my father said unexpectedly. “You hire me, I work for you. There are men like that, who kill.”

I wondered again about the relationship between my father and Uncle Chin, how much my father knew about Uncle Chin’s business, how closely he was connected. “Could that be?” I asked Uncle Chin. “Could Derek have hired someone to kill Tommy?”

Uncle Chin looked very sad, very old. “Don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t know.”

Just then my mother came in. “Come for dinner, now,” she said. My father stood and offered his arm to Uncle Chin, who struggled up from his chair. He murmured something to my father, who laughed. I wondered if Harry and I would end that way, still friends, helping each other over the rough places in our lives.

We didn’t talk any more about Tommy Pang. At dinner, Aunt Mei-Mei and my mother kept a light banter going, my father occasionally making jokes. I was happy they could all be together, support each other. Uncle Chin had aged a lot over the last few days, and it surprised me to consider that he must have loved Tommy Pang very much, even though he had called him a hard man. I knew that my father loved me and my brothers very deeply, in a way that often could not even be expressed, and I was sure he would be as crushed as Uncle Chin if one of us were to die.

I think your attitude toward your parents changes as you get older. You’re more able to see them as human beings who have made choices and handled their lives as best they could. I didn’t always agree with the decisions my father had made; I would rather he had worked less when I was a kid, and spent more time with us. I thought we could have had a few less toys, eaten more rice and poi and less steak, and in return had more of him, but it was the fifties and sixties then, and that’s what fathers did. I’m sure my mother, born poor and determined never to be poor again, had a lot to do with that, too, but again, you couldn’t fault her for doing what she thought was best for her family.

It was saddening to know that I would never have more family than this, and that I would lose them eventually. I wouldn’t have a wife, though I hoped someday I would find a partner. I would never have children and have to make choices on how to raise them; never see their first steps or first day at school, nor their graduations or weddings. I would never have a luau to celebrate the birth of my child, and never have grandchildren to swarm over me the way my nieces and nephews did to my father.

I would always be a part of my brothers’ lives, or hoped I would, be Uncle Kimo to Jeffrey and Ashley and their brothers and sisters, and that would have to be enough. Like my parents, I took the hand I was dealt and tried to make the best of it.

I looked at my watch. It was already late; I had to drive back to Waikīkī and pick up Tim, and then go out to the Boardwalk and see if anyone could identify Wayne or Derek. I made my excuses as my mother and Aunt Mei-Mei were clearing the dessert dishes. “So late, you have to work?” my mother asked.

“I have to check out a suspect’s alibi. He was there late, I have to go there late.”

She shook her head. My father said, “Be careful, Keechee.”

“I will be.” To Uncle Chin I said, “I am very sorry, for you, about Tommy. I’ll do my best to catch whoever killed him.”

Uncle Chin smiled at me. “You my son, too, Kimo,” he said. “
He kanaka pono ‘oe, lokomaika‘i ‘oe
.”

I looked down. “You flatter me, Uncle Chin.” He had told me I was a powerful person, and good-hearted as well.

“He says the truth,” my father said. “Your mother and I are very proud of you.”

How proud would they be, I thought, as I drove back down to Waikīkī, if they knew who I really was?

* * *

The Boardwalk looked nondescript from the outside, stuck near the end of a strip mall, with nothing but a wooden walkway over the concrete sidewalk to distinguish it from the Karate school and beeper store on either side. Tim said, “This is it?” when we pulled up in my truck.

“This is it.” We walked up to the front door, and stepped through a beaded curtain into a dark vestibule. I heard the pounding beat of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as we turned right and stepped through another curtain into a pile of sand.

At least that’s what it felt like. It was a long, narrow sandbox that I guess those in the know stepped over. As it was we both stepped in it, and then as we walked farther in, the sand sifted out of our shoes.

The room was dark, but spotlights washed places on the rough wooden walls. It was as kitschy as the Rod and Reel, but in a different style. This was early beach bum, with fishing nets hung from the ceiling, and tattered pin-ups of boys in skimpy bathing suits on the walls. The centerpiece was a long bar that ran the length of one wall. Instead of a polished top its surface was made of rough wood planks, like a beachfront boardwalk, and at about the middle a well-muscled Hawaiian boy in his early twenties strutted and danced in a jockstrap, reaching in often to fondle himself. At the far end, in his own pool of light, an equally well-muscled, dark-haired haole boy of about the same age practiced his own posturing.

“They have bars like this back in Boston,” Tim whispered. “But I never went to one.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I whispered back.

There was another smaller bar in a back room, through a wide archway, and on the other side of the room there were four pool tables, each lit by its own fake stained-glass lamp. There were two or three guys at each of the tables, and maybe a dozen by the bar.

I hadn’t changed from the clothes I’d worn all day—a maroon polo shirt and jeans. Tim had taken off the tie I guessed he’d worn to work, but was still wearing a white oxford cloth button down shirt, and a pair of neatly pressed khakis. The guys around us, who ranged in age from what I guessed to be late teens to mid-fifties, were all dressed similarly, though there were a few in t-shirts and another couple in leather pants with chains attached to the pockets.

We walked up to the bar and tried very hard to avoid the boy thrusting his crotch toward our heads. I ordered beers for both of us, and then when the bartender, a guy who looked half Hawaiian and half Chinese, brought them I showed him my ID. “Yeah?”

I’d deliberately chosen a place where one of the spotlights washed a section of bar. I pulled out a picture of Wayne I’d found on a club page of the Yale website, and asked, “Have you seen this guy?”

The bartender looked at it and shrugged. “I think so.”

“You remember when?”

He laughed. “You gotta be kidding.”

“Think a little harder,” I said. “I’ve got some friends in the department who don’t like underage drinking very much. I could send them over here.”

He didn’t like that. He picked up Wayne’s picture, looked at it again, and then closed his eyes. “Not for a couple of weeks,” he said when he opened them again. “He’s got a friend, doesn’t he?”

I showed him a picture of Derek I’d found at the same place. “Yeah, that’s him,” he said. “They’re usually together, though sometimes the haole cruises by himself.”

“So they weren’t in here a week ago Tuesday, the
sixteen
th?”

He shook his head. “No. I know that for a fact, because we were closed that night.” He looked at me. “Your friends in the department were here the Saturday before. They said they were looking for drugs, but they didn’t find anything. And I don’t serve anybody under
twenty-one
. Still they decided they didn’t like the idea of a fag bar, so they closed us down. It took us a full week to get it cleared up and reopen.”

I nodded. He walked away to serve somebody else down the counter. If the police didn’t like fags getting together at a bar on the edge of town, they certainly weren’t going to like one on their force.

For an hour or so we stood around and watched the guys playing pool, me leaning back against Tim, feeling the contact my shoulders made against his chest, his arms around my waist. Every time his fingertips grazed my skin I felt shock waves rolling through my chest and down into my groin. I was hard almost the entire time.

We drank our beers, and swayed to the rhythm of the music on the jukebox, and every now and then we turned around and kissed. Around us, men moved through the shadows and the light, talking in small groups, flirting, or silently cruising the bar waiting for sparks to fly. A Thai or Vietnamese boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen chatted at the bar with a haole man in his fifties, and as I watched, the man stroked the boy’s cheek in a gesture of unexpected tenderness.

Tendrils of smoke drifted through the wash of a light near us, and the air smelled of cigarettes, beer and testosterone. At a table in the back, two men who looked like brothers alternately kissed and sat back and stared at each other with wide smiles. Near the door, three men had a heated discussion, one of them gesturing wildly and repeatedly pointing his finger at his head as if he was shooting himself. There was a rotating stable of six guys who danced on the bar, all of them young, well-muscled and well-hung.

It was interesting to be out in public with Tim and not care about anybody else. And nobody seemed to care about us. A pool table opened up and we played, and then around midnight both of us started yawning and I drove us back to Waikīkī .

“That was fun,” he said as I pulled up in front of his building.

“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it. I’ll tell you, it was a hell of a lot more fun going there with you than with Akoni.”

He laughed. “I doubt you’d kiss Akoni in public.”

It was my turn to laugh. “I think if I kissed Akoni, in public or in private, it would take him a minute to collect his wits, and then he’d give me a good roundhouse punch.”

“Well, I’ll never do that when you kiss me.” He leaned across then and we kissed for a long minute, and then he yawned again and said, “Work in the morning. See ya.”