Mahu Fire (13 page)

PASTA PUTTANESCA

It was almost six forty-five by the time I dragged my sorry, exhausted and starving butt out of headquarters for the drive to Waikïkï. Not even the prospect of seeing Mike Riccardi could generate much enthusiasm. I’d hoped to get home for a quick nap, a shower, maybe the chance to pretty myself up. No such luck; he’d have to take me battered and disheveled. And to top it off, every time I sat back I felt my shirt rubbing against the raw burn on my back. I was definitely not in a dating mood.

I’d never been to the restaurant he had suggested, a small storefront on Kuhio Avenue a few blocks ewa of my apartment. It was set between the lobby of a cheap hotel for vacationing Japanese and a Laundromat, where a bunch of German teenagers hung around their wash like sharks circling an unknowing surfer.

Mike was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table in the back drinking Chianti and bantering with a waiter. His hair was perfectly combed in a wave over his forehead, and his beige oxford-cloth button down shirt was spotless.

“Man, you look like shit,” he said in lieu of a greeting.

“I don’t know you well enough for such honesty,” I said. He looked terrific, of course; he had to have gone home and changed clothes. I didn’t know anybody who could keep pressed shirts so crisp after a day in the tropical sun.

“Come on, sit down. Want some wine?”

“Sure.” As he poured me a glass, the waiter brought us an antipasto platter, the greens glistening with olive oil, vegetables and cheeses all arranged carefully on a decorated plate.

“I ordered for both of us. I hope you don’t mind. They’ve got a terrific pasta puttanesca here—” he held up his thumb and two forefingers together in a gesture I’d only seen on television, then kissed his fingertips— “you’re gonna love it.”

This was sounding more and more like a date to me, and frankly I just didn’t have the patience for it. He was a gorgeous, hunky guy, sexy and charming, but all I wanted to do was get his information, watch the video tape, and then go to bed. Alone. I was afraid I might nod off before the pasta arrived.

“Let me tell you what I found out today,” I said. Before I left the station I’d printed out all my notes. As I started going through them, I noticed he’d pulled out the battered steno pad I’d seen him with the night before. Every now and then he stopped me for a question or two, making his own record.

When I was finished, he said, “You’ve been busy.”

“It makes the day pass.” The waiter cleared away our antipasto plates and refilled our wine glasses. “So, your turn now. What did you do today?”

“Like I told you on the phone, I went up to Central O’ahu to look over an arson—a pair of lesbians with a few acres of pineapple. Somebody torched their storage shed a couple of days ago, and at first I thought it was just kids, because it was so amateur.”

He sipped his Chianti. “But when I looked at it again, I saw a lot of connections to the bombing. Looks like the lesbians might have been a trial run for your guy.”

I shook my head. “We’ve got to stop these guys, Mike.”

“I know. While I was up there, I had guys go over the site again, and they found a couple of interesting things. Like a piece of pipe, for instance.”

“Pipe like you smoke?”

He shook his head. “Pipe like you put a bomb into. These guys are definitely amateurs. The fragment we found was only about three inches square, pretty standard hardware store issue. But it looks like we’re going to get a partial print off it. They were too dumb to use gloves—they must have figured all the evidence was going to blow up.”

“There’s something I don’t get. If they’re such amateurs, how do they know how to make a bomb in the first place? I couldn’t do it.”

“Sure you could. You’ve got a brain, right? And you know how to work a computer?”

“Pretty much.” The waiter brought a big tray of pasta, family style, and two plates. He prepared to dish it out, but Mike waved him away and started the work himself.

“So you get on the Internet,” he continued, as he heaped the creamy white pasta onto the plates. “And you do a search for ‘bombs.’ That brings up hundreds of hits. You start surfing around, you read, you go from link to link, and pretty soon you know almost as much about explosives as the fire department does.”

“I’d always heard about that, but I figured it was one of those urban folk tales—you know, some teenaged kid builds an atom bomb for his high school science project, and all he needs is the plutonium to make it work.” I paused to drink some more wine. “Can you give me a list of all everything you think they might need? I can get some uniforms out canvassing stores, see if we can trace any of the items.”

“Everything they used was pretty common, but I’ll put a list together. Who knows, you might get lucky.”

I was sure that was his leg brushing against mine under the table. We locked eyes and smiled. Mike kept looking at me as he twirled a forkful of pasta, lifted it to his mouth, and tasted. An expression somewhat akin to ecstasy passed over his face. “This is fabulous. Go on, taste it. Tell me what you think.”

I tasted. It was pretty terrific. The wine was good, too, and though the place had filled up our table was partially sheltered by a metal trellis with fake grape leaves twining around it. I was feeling more relaxed. Maybe this could turn out to be a date.

“I’d say this is just like my mother used to make, by my mom’s Korean,” Mike said. “And my dad’s from Long Island, so I didn’t see his family much growing up.”

“Your folks meet during the Korean War?” I asked.

Mike nodded. “If you believe them, it was love at first sight. My dad had taken some shrapnel, and my mom was a nurse. He came out of the anesthesia, and hers was the first face he saw.”

He smiled, and our eyes met again. I remembered the first time I’d seen him, at police headquarters. Would that be our story someday—love at first dead chicken?

“They moved back to New York after the war, and my mom worked as a nurse while my dad went to medical school. My mom hated it out east, though. She didn’t fit in, and she wanted to go back to Seoul. So they compromised on Hawai’i. They both work out at Tripler.”

“So how come you don’t have a stethoscope around your neck?”

“Teenaged rebellion? Plus I hated science at the time. Kind of ironic that so much of what I do now revolves around science.”

“You go to school for this stuff?” I asked. “The arson investigation?”

“Took a few courses. Spent a lot of time online.”

I was about to respond when he continued. “The Internet is an amazing thing. I’m still exploring a lot of it myself. I mean, it seems like anything you’re into, there’s something out there. You want to make a bomb, or find out who won the World Series in 1986, or try out some cool new software, all you have to do is point and click.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You must have seen how much gay material is out there. Chat rooms and pictures and stories and all.”

It was finally on the table, the g-word. I tried to phrase what I wanted to say carefully. “You do much of that? Hanging out on line, I mean.”

Our eyes met across the table once again. I could fall in love with those eyes. Clear, light green, steadily focused on me. “I’m working on it. Finally broke down and bought a laptop, got my own account at home a couple of months ago.”

“What’s your screen name?” I’d been on-line with Harry a few times, as he was trying to drag me into the digital generation, and I knew his name was PhysWiz, referring to his Ph.D. in physics from MIT.

Mike blushed.

“Go on, you can tell me.”

“Toohot.” He paused. “You know, from too hot to handle.”

“Oh, baby,” I said. We locked eyes again.

Time to get back to business. “We’ve got at least one amateur bomb maker with Internet access,” I said. “He may or may not be the sweaty guy who Gunter and my sister-in-law and I all saw around the bathroom. What else do we know?”

We didn’t know much more, though we had a seemingly endless supply of questions. Mike believed that the bomb could have been built in anybody’s kitchen, without requiring much in the way of special supplies. It wasn’t a particularly expensive proposition, either. I laid out for him my plans to research the groups that had opposed the gay marriage lawsuit, and how I had recruited Harry, and Lui’s station, to help. “I managed to catch the five and six o’clock news from the station,” I said. “KVOL did a nice piece on Sandra and Cathy. Maybe tomorrow they’ll come up with some leads.”

By the time we finished off the pasta I was way too stuffed for dessert, but the waiter brought us complimentary little glasses of grappa, a strong Italian brandy. Mike downed his in one shot, so of course I had to do the same.

But I was without the benefit of his Italian ancestry, or his undoubted years of drinking the stuff. Man, did it burn going down! I started coughing and choking, and he laughed. I wondered if this was what dating him would be like, the two of us constantly struggling to get the upper hand.

Somehow that didn’t seem too unpleasant.

SECRETS

Mike insisted on paying the bill. “The fire department can get this one, and the police department can get the next one, all right?” I doubted he’d actually expense the meal—though we’d talked about the case, I couldn’t see him explaining to his chief that he’d had dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant with the only gay cop on the Honolulu police force—or at least the only openly gay one.

My apartment was a half-dozen blocks away, but we drove over in his truck. “The tapes are right behind the seat,” he said, as he began to parallel park in front of my building.

I twisted around to get them and felt waves of pain surging through my back. “Shit.” I thought I whispered but he heard.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve got a little burn on my back. I tried to go surfing this morning and ever since I get these wicked twinges.”

He slotted the truck neatly in place. “I’ve got some cream you can use. It’s one of the necessities of life as a fire fighter.”

He got the cream from the case in the truck bed, and we climbed the stairs to my apartment. “And you complain about the way my truck looks,” he said as we walked in.

I had to admit the place looked pretty bad, even by my standards. It’s just one big room, with a kitchenette, though I have this Japanese-style screen I built from broken-down surfboards that separates the bedroom area from the rest of the room. I usually throw dirty clothes onto it. I hadn’t made the bed in the morning, nor had I gone through on one of my weekly binges where I put all the sports equipment away neatly. There were piles of books on the floor and a messy stack of newspapers by the front door, waiting for recycling. At least the kitchen was pretty clean; I try never to go to sleep with dirty dishes in the sink.

He walked over to look at my garbage can. “No fast food wrappers,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”

A good sign of what, I wanted to ask. I was losing my patience again, feeling tired. Oh, I still wanted to get into his pants, and I was getting increasingly confident that he wanted to get into mine as well. But it didn’t have to be that night.

I flipped on the TV and the VCR and slotted the first tape into the drive. He sat on my sofa with a proprietary air and I decided it was time to shift the balance of power a little. “How do you tell when a fireman is dead?” I asked.

He looked at me. “The remote control slips from his hand. That’s the oldest joke in the book.”

“Sometimes the old ones are still funny,” I said. As the first news credits started to roll I sat next to him. Close, so that our thighs were barely touching. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move away either.

We watched all four tapes carefully, pausing and rewinding, but we didn’t see anybody who looked too interested. The KVOL tape was the last. “Hey, that’s my friend Terri,” I said, as she appeared on the screen. The reporter interviewed her about the party, and the cause. She looked beautiful and poised, despite having just escaped a major fire. I was sure Lui had approached her to appear on camera. Briefly I gave Mike a quick rundown on Terri, including the recent death of her husband, a cop I’d worked with.

“I guess that’s it, then,” I said, as the anchor went on to another story. I leaned forward toward the VCR and my back rebelled. I must have winced, and Mike saw it.

“Let me see that burn,” he said. “Take your shirt off.”

“I’ll survive. How often should I put that cream on?”

“Let me see the burn.”

I unbuttoned my shirt and threw it on top of the surfboard screen. “I can see that comes in handy.” Mike looked at my back. “Whoa. You should have gone to the hospital with this.”

“I had a fire to investigate, remember?”

“Yeah, Officer Macho, I know.” He pointed me toward the surfboard screen, and my bed beyond it. “Lie down so I can put some of this cream on you. You’ll never be able to get it on right by yourself.”

“Really, I can….”

“No arguments.”

I shrugged, and walked over to the bed. It felt terrific to lie down, and I was afraid I’d doze off, leaving Mike Riccardi to have his way with me. Well, that might not be so bad.

There was no chance of that, though. The cream smarted, making me recognize nerve endings in my back I’d never known existed. Mike’s hands, though, were sure and strong. “Your muscles are so tense. You ever get massages?”

“Once in a while.”

“I get one every week, or else my back tenses up just like this. We’ve got stressful, physical jobs, you know. Chasing down crooks and dragging heavy equipment around. You’ve got to take care of your body if you want it to last.”

“I take care of my body,” I yawned.

“I can see that.” He’d given up applying the cream by then, and he was gently massaging my shoulders. The ceiling fan above us moved the air around lazily, tickling my bare back and floating scents of aloe, smoke and salt water around us.

“That feels really good,” I said.

He leaned down and kissed the back of my neck. “You like that?”

“Yeah. I do.” I made a half turn so that I was facing up toward him. I hooked an arm around the back of his neck, pulled his face closer to mine, and kissed him. “I like that, too.”

“Mmm,” he said, licking his lips. “I can still taste the grappa.”

I sat up and unbuttoned his shirt. He had well-defined pecs, and small nipples only a little browner than his skin. I began exploring his hairy chest with my tongue and my teeth, and he shivered and groaned lightly. It took us a while to strip totally naked, after an intense exploration of each other’s bodies, kissing and licking and rubbing and even biting a little. His cock was average sized, though standing out straight from his body it looked plenty big enough. I leaned down and took him in my mouth, and I felt his whole body go tense.

“Oh, man,” he said.

I sucked him for a minute or two, then moved back up to kiss him again. And so we went for at least the next hour or so, learning the intimate geography of armpit and ass, cock and mouth, nipples and knees. I’d had relatively little experience with men by then; you could count all the men I’d slept with on your fingers and toes and have a few left over. Neither of us were particularly well-versed in what to do, but we managed, and we both made up in ardor for what we lacked in technique.

Finally we both brought each other off, him first, then me a moment later, cum spurting on our hands and stomachs. I pulled him close to me then, hugging him fiercely, feeling his long, hairy body connecting with mine at a hundred different points. I nestled into his shoulder, smelling the last vestiges of his cologne, my lips nuzzling his neck. He held me gently, careful of my burns, and I fell asleep.

When I woke the next morning it was already light, and I was alone in bed. I had no idea how long Mike had stayed. There was a note on the table that read, “Awesome! I’ll call you today. Mike.”

I felt alive, sexy, energized. I twisted around to see my back in the mirror and the burns looked less red and angry than they had the night before. I took a quick shower and applied the cream myself, as best I could. I kept smiling, wondering when I would see Mike Riccardi again.

The morning passed in a blur of busy work. I called the hospital and found that Gunter had been discharged, and Robert’s condition upgraded. My father had been moved from intensive care to a regular room, and my mother said he was breathing more easily. There were still a lot of tests left to do, though, and the doctors hadn’t said when he could go home.

Sandra’s parents had arrived late the night before, but after Cathy had appeared on all three of KVOL’s newscasts, the doctors were paying attention to her and she and the Guarinos were in a stage of truce. Sandra had shown more activity, moving and blinking her eyes, though she hadn’t woken up yet, and everybody was feeling optimistic.

The police artist brought me a composite sketch, based on what Gunter and I had both described, and what Tatiana had drawn herself. I couldn’t be completely sure, but I thought it looked remarkably like the guy I’d seen at the party. But was he our bomber? So far the only thing indicting him was his sweatiness.

A fax came in from Mike Riccardi, listing all the ingredients in the bomb. Depressingly, I recognized almost all of them, and knew that you could find almost everything on the list in any ordinary kitchen or garage. But just seeing his name at the top of the fax gave me a nice little boost.

Lidia came by with a copy of the autopsy report on Wilson Shira I’d asked her to pick up at the medical examiner’s office. She seemed excited by the chance to participate in the investigation, or maybe it was just seeing Doc Takayama. Apparently he’d taken the time to go over the report with her. I figured it was seeing him that brought that sparkle to her brown eyes, rather than the details of the charred corpse. I wondered what they’d talk about if they ever went on a date, if they’d share notes about dead bodies over pasta and wine, like Mike and I had.

I was happy to see that she and Doc were taking an interest in each other. “So tell me, officer, did you dig up anything by canvassing the offices around the Marriage Project?”

She pulled out her note pad. “By the time of the party, all the offices in the area were closed, so I couldn’t find anyone who had been around who hadn’t already spoken to an officer.” She looked up. “But I did find something interesting.”

“Spill.”

“Around three-thirty the receptionist at a computer place across the street was coming back to the office with cappuccino for her boss, and she saw this pickup truck slow down, and a guy in the bed of the truck started throwing paper bags on the sidewalk in front of the Marriage Project. She’s pretty sure he broke a window there, too. Then the truck drove away. She said she was so surprised that she didn’t think to get a license number.”

“We’re tying the pieces together, Lidia.” I told her about the paper bag Robert had given me. “Good work.”

“Anything else I can do to help?”

I handed her the list of ingredients Mike had faxed over. “See what you can do with this. Most of the stuff is pretty common, but you never know when you’ll come up with something.” I thought for a minute. “It’s a long shot, but my friend Gunter says the tuxedo the sweaty guy was wearing looked rented.” I handed her the yellow pages and said, “Want to give it a try? You can use the desk over there.”

Within a half-hour, Lidia had a list of formal wear rental places, and she left to show around the sketch of the sweaty guy. She agreed to stop downstairs and leave a stack of the sketches for the beat cops on all three shifts; maybe one of them might recognize our guy.

I spent the next hours on the phone. I found out the fingerprint lab had lifted one print, probably a middle finger, from the paper bag that had gone through the window of the Marriage Project’s office. They were running it through their computers, but since it was Friday, they didn’t expect to get a match before the first of the week. They also had the piece of pipe Mike’s investigators had found, but they were still working on it.

I had a couple of reports from beat cops in the district, but only one seemed interesting. Around the time the Marriage Project had been shit-bombed, an officer named Frank Sit had seen a dirty pickup truck with a couple of guys in the back, without a license plate. He’d called it in, but no units had been able to respond. He did remember the back gate had been broken in a distinctive way. That was quite possibly the truck the receptionist had seen outside the Marriage Project’s office.

One of the secretaries picked up a plate lunch for me from a vendor outside and I sat at my desk and ate. I was just finishing when Kitty Sampson walked in. She wore a blue UH T-shirt, a pair of cargo shorts and huarache sandals. On her right arm jangled half a dozen bracelets, some set with gemstones, others carved in intricate patterns.

“If you’re looking for your dad, he’s not here,” I said. “He went to some kind of statewide police conference in Hilo. The secretary out front might know how to reach him, though.”

“I know he’s not here.” She sat next to my desk. “That’s why I came in today. I wanted to talk to you, and he’d kill me if he knew.”

“That doesn’t sound good. What’s the problem?”

“I’m a lesbian. Jim and I don’t talk about it, but I’m sure he knows.”

I was surprised, more by the fact that she called him Jim than by her revelation. Since I came out, gay people have become very open with me. It’s like, they know I am, and they want to level the playing field right from the start.

“And you’re here because...”

“I want to help you investigate the bombing Wednesday night.”

“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hand. “Let’s take this one step at a time. You didn’t witness anything, did you?”

She shook her head. “But I’ve been pumping Jim for everything he knows about the case, and I have an idea. You know that Reverend White and his wife? The ones who are preaching against gay marriage all the time?”

I nodded. “We’re looking into them. Investigating everybody who’s expressed opposition to the lawsuit.”

“They came to preach at UH last week,” she said. “A friend and I went to hear them, just to know what they were saying. And I can’t say exactly how, but I know they’re involved.”

“I appreciate the advice. I’ll take a good look at them.”