Mahu Fire (12 page)

FAMILY HAPPINESS

I walked out into the hallway to intercept them. I knew otherwise it would take forever for the room to settle down so I could ask my questions. Tatiana kissed me on the cheek, her long, ash-blonde hair rustling, and said, “Let me give this magazine to your mother and I’ll come right back out.”

When she’d gone in the room, Liliha said, “Well, you’re finally here.”

“Excuse me?”

She was wearing a crisp suit I was sure was by some famous fashion designer, the kind of solid-color thing with brass buttons and epaulets that Nancy Reagan used to wear. Her black hair was perfectly coiffed and her makeup immaculate. It was hard to remember that when Lui first brought her to meet us she only owned one nice dress and lived with her family in a trailer on Hawaiian homestead land on the windward side of O’ahu.

“It’s all your fault that your father is here in the hospital, and you didn’t even come to see him last night. And here it is almost one o’clock before you’re here today. Tatiana and I have been here since early this morning.”

I was flabbergasted. “I was investigating. That’s what I do, remember? I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

“I can tell you what happened. You were indulging yourself in this perverted homosexual marriage business and you dragged all of us into it. You know what you’re doing is wrong but you just won’t face up to it. And now see where it’s gotten you. Your father is in the hospital because of you.”

“How dare you say that, Lili?” Tatiana said, coming out of my father’s room. “Al is in the hospital because he’s sick, and you know damn well Howie and Lui and Kimo have been trying to get him to the doctor. This is not anybody’s fault. Shame on you for saying that!”

“You always defend him!” Liliha said. “You and your silly hairdresser friend. It’s sick and perverted, and this is God’s punishment on all of us for tolerating it.”

I finally found my voice. “Liliha, when you married my brother I took you in like a sister, and I’ve loved you and put up with your eccentricities and your temper for fifteen years. Because my brother loves you, I love you. I always assumed it was the same for you. That because you loved Lui, you loved me—and Haoa and Tatiana and Mom and Dad, all of us. Isn’t that what your religion teaches you, love thy neighbor?”

“Obviously not when your neighbor is gay,” Tatiana said.

“I don’t have to take this kind of abuse. I’ll come back later when things aren’t so upset.” Liliha turned and walked out of the intensive care unit, leaving the double doors swinging in her wake.

Tatiana looked into my father’s room and saw my mother and Aunt Mei-Mei watching Liliha leave, and she led me over to a bench out of earshot. A big-boned woman, she was a cross between a suburban mother and an unreformed hippie, Reeboks and jeans with a tie-dyed blouse and a necklace of big, clunky stones. Her hair, which had been piled up the night before in a fancy do created by her hairdresser friend Robertico Robles, now cascaded around her shoulders. “Lily’s just upset,” she said. “You know how she is. She feels everything Lui does, and if he feels bad about Dad being in the hospital, he just transfers that to her.”

I remembered seeing Lui and Liliha at the Church of Adam and Eve, and I was pretty sure her feelings went deeper than Tatiana wanted to allow. “I never knew she resented me so much.”

“Lui keeps her on a pretty tight string. I know she’s mad that Howie lets me get away with a lot. She’s just jealous. You and I are both a lot freer than she’ll ever be.”

“I don’t feel free most of the time. Sometimes I wish all I had to do in life was get dressed up and talk to the servants once in a while.” Lui and Liliha had a maid, a gardener, and a nanny for the kids; sometimes Tatiana and I got together and wondered what Liliha did all day, besides her nails and makeup. I was beginning to get a better idea.

“Makeup can be hell,” Tatiana said, deadpan, and we both laughed.

I filled her in on my investigation, and asked if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary.

“Well, there was nobody there in leather, which I kind of expected,” she said. “I mean, everybody was so tame. I wanted to see wild outfits, men kissing each other in fits of passion. I wanted Lili to be outraged. I wanted some guy to come up and pinch Howie’s butt.”

“Pity the poor guy who does that.” I told her about the sweaty guy Gunter and I had seen. “Did you see anybody who looked like that?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. Your friend Gunter and that nice boy Robert were bringing plants in from the lanai, and I was helping them put them in the right places. When they finished, I was waiting for Howie to bring me a drink from the bar, and this guy who was sweating like crazy got in line for the bathroom. This older man got on line behind him, and even though the guy was sweating and obviously in some kind of distress, he insisted that the older man go first. I thought that was so polite, and that maybe he wasn’t sick, that he’d just moved here, hadn’t gotten accustomed to the climate yet. Believe me, I know what that’s like.”

Tatiana had grown up in Alaska, and had met my brother while she was bumming around the islands waitressing and sketching portraits on the beach. Theirs was a true love match, and though sometimes awesome fireworks erupted between them, I had often seen the kind of magnetic attraction that kept them near each other at parties, even just hanging around their house. When Tatiana was anywhere in the vicinity, my grip on my brother’s attention was limited.

As long as Tatiana was around, he was okay. And he could be totally with you if she was in a different place, miles away. But if she was in the house or at a party with him, it made him nervous to be out of her sight. He was happiest of all when he was working out in their yard, planting something, weeding, trimming, watering, and she was nearby, reading a book under an umbrella or playing in the pool with the kids. He was grounded by the land and by his love for his wife.

“Would you recognize the sweaty guy if you saw him again?”

“Sure. You know I have a memory for faces. I can sketch him if you want.”

“That would be terrific. I sat with the artist this morning, and I’m sending him over to work with Gunter. After he’s done I’ll have him come up here and compare notes with you.”

“I think Aunt Mei-Mei will want to go home soon, so I’ll take her and while I’m out I’ll stop by the house and get some stuff to draw with.”

“How is Uncle Chin, do you think?”

She shrugged. “I think when you get to be that sick you take the small pleasures you can. He seems to like that boy you brought over. Aunt Mei-Mei says his spirits are a lot better.”

I looked at my watch. “I’d better say my good-byes. God knows what kind of chaos is going on back at the station.”

Tatiana took my hand. “You know we all love you, don’t you, Kimo? I don’t want you to go thinking that Lili speaks for any of the rest of us.”

I kissed her cheek. “You’re the best. Like you said, she was just upset.” I resolved, though, to move the Church of Adam and Eve up on my list. If they could make Liliha feel so strongly against gay marriage, what else could they do?

BETWEEN BROTHERS

Back at the station there was a message from Mike Riccardi, which I returned immediately. He’d left three numbers, and I finally reached him on his cell. “Where are you?” I asked. “This connection is terrible.”

“I’m on the H2, heading back into town. I wanted to clear my plate so I could go full bore on your fire. I’m thinking it might be connected to some of the other arsons I’ve been investigating. The golf ball thing connects them, and the fact that they were all gay-owned or serving the gay community. I’ll know more when I get the full results back from the lab. Have you got any news?”

“I’ve gone through all the witness statements the uniforms collected last night, and there’s nothing there. But I went over to Queen’s today at lunch and talked to some of the people who were hospitalized.”

“Lunch? What’s that?”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t eat either.” I figured if I concentrated enough on work I’d forget I was hungry. I told him about the artist—my sketch, Gunter’s, and Tatiana’s.

“These guys are amateurs, I can feel it,” he said. “I’m heading in to the lab now, to see if they can connect that golf ball fragment you found to some of the other arsons. I spoke to the ATF guys, and because they think this is an arson, rather than a bombing, they’re going to back off and leave things up to us. The FBI’s going to hold off, too.”

“I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. We won’t have anybody to blame but ourselves.”

“That’s the way I like it. I had a couple of guys combing the place this morning, too, and I think we might have a few more clues.”

“I want to know what you’ve got,” I said. “Can we meet?”

“I’m not gonna get out of the lab until dinner time, at the earliest. You want to get something to eat around seven? You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

“I can do that.” He suggested an Italian place on Kuhio Avenue and we agreed to meet there. “I’m half Italian, half Korean, you know. It’s either pasta or Kimchee.”

“I’ll take the pasta.”

Mike swore at a driver who’d gotten in his way, then came back to me. “I’m getting tapes of all the news coverage. You never know who’s lurking around in the background of those shots. You got a VCR?”

“Yup.”

“Good. I’ll bring the tapes. After dinner we can go over to your place and look at them.”

I hung up the phone, wondering for a moment or two what Mike Riccardi’s story was. I mean, he’d all but asked me out on a date and was already planning to go home with me. That is, if I was right and he was gay, and he was interested in me. Of course there was always the chance that he was busy until dinner, and it was a good use of both our time to eat together as we compared notes. And when we were so close to my apartment, why go back to the fire station or police headquarters to watch the tape?

Right. I gave up speculating and got back to work. I spent the afternoon wading through reports. I arranged for the police artist to go over and meet with Gunter, I sent the paper bag that Robert had given me down to be checked for fingerprints, and I asked the Vice Mayor’s office for a list of the people who had joined his protest outside the building.

His secretary, who sniffled on and off during our conversation, said that because Shira had organized the march himself, the office didn’t have any records. I figured that was a code for “Most of the people there were homeless folks hired for the night.”

I wrote a memo to all the beat officers and other detectives in all the districts on O’ahu, asking if they’d seen anyone acting suspicious that afternoon or evening, particularly any men in tuxedos sweating heavily.

Lieutenant Sampson said that I could pull one of the beat cops to help with running down leads, and I chose Lidia Portuondo. I had her canvass the neighborhood around the Marriage Project, hoping someone might report some suspicious activity. I was also looking for witnesses who could tell me more about who’d tossed the manure. I was sure it had to be tied to the bombing.

It might all lead to another heap of useless paperwork, but it had to be done. I also fielded a dozen more calls from the press, including one from my oldest brother.

Usually Lui has his secretary call me, and then he leaves me holding on the phone for a minute or two, reminding me that he is first boy, after all. But that afternoon he called direct. I wondered if he had spoken with Liliha, but even if he had I doubt she would have told him about her outburst. My brother is the most Japanese of the three of us, the most reserved with his feelings. Sometimes I think he was born in a business suit, a little tiny tie hanging around his chubby neck.

“Did you see our coverage of the fire last night?”

“Not yet. I got a guy with the tape, we’re watching it later.”

“Good story. I made sure they played up the gay marriage side of things. And we’re leading with your friend Cathy on the five o’clock. We’ll see what the reporter does with the story, and if it looks good we’ll run it again on the six and the eleven.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Enough to keep me in the loop when you’ve got any new leads?”

“You know the drill, Lui. All information is supposed to get funneled through public affairs. That way all the media gets equal access.”

“I understand your position. I’m not asking you to shut anybody else out. I’m just saying that if you know something, and you call me first, we’ll be able to put together the kind of story you want to see. We’re trying to do serious journalism, to give our coverage a little dignity.”

I started laughing. “Dignity? Are you sure you’re talking about KVOL, Erupting News All Day Long? Aren’t you the station that shows the clip of those people on the Big Island running away from that lava flow?”

“You want me to say it? You want to make me say it? All right, I will. I deliberately skewed our coverage of the fire to make us sympathetic to the whole gay marriage deal. And you know why? Because I’ve got this brother that’s gay, and I want him to be happy. If he wants to get married to some other guy, I want him to be able to. And I’m going to use the power that I have here at the station to do that. Now are you going to help me or not?”

“Go ahead, make me feel like shit,” I said, and I was almost certain I had made him laugh. “Geez, how’d you get so good at making people feel guilty? You must have been listening to Mom all those years.”

“I’ve got three kids. It comes with the territory. So tell me, you in or you out?”

“Seems like the whole island knows I’m out, Lui.” I thought about it for a minute. “In the first place, I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. Everything you get ought to come from the public information office. And we shouldn’t release any information to you that we don’t release to the rest of the media. But what I think I can do is give you some direction for your peripheral coverage.”

“Like pointing us toward Cathy Selkirk.”

“Exactly.”

“So where do we look for a lead for tomorrow’s news?”

“You know what I think is an interesting angle on this case? The fact that out of all the people at the party, the only one who died was somebody who was on the same side as the bomber. There’s irony there.”

“A story on Wilson Shira, you mean. What was he doing there, and so on. Maybe there’s something in his past that made him so opposed to this idea. You gotta wonder what makes somebody come out and protest a thing like this.” He paused, and I could almost hear the wheels whirring in his head.

“Off the record, you might want to talk to some of the people at Homeless Solutions,” I said. “A little bird told me that yesterday somebody was going around there, offering to pay homeless people to join the protest.”

“I’ll get somebody on it. Hey, you ever consider the possibility that Shira was some kind of suicide bomber?” Lui asked. “Maybe he carried the bomb on his body! Maybe he brought it in there himself, planning to plant it, and it blew up before he could get out?”

“The facts don’t exactly support that theory, but, hey, you’ve made KVOL’s reputation on that kind of sensationalism, haven’t you?”

“Don’t get snotty. Remember, you’re still the kid brother.”

I shook my head as I hung up the phone.