Mahu Fire (15 page)

EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS

On my way to headquarters I grabbed a sandwich and ate it at my desk as I went back over everything I’d collected so far, looking for anything I’d missed. While I was there, Frank Sit came up to speak with me.

He was the patrolman who’d seen the truck that shit-bombed the Marriage Project offices. I’d known him for a few years, working more closely with him when he was stationed on Waikiki, too. He was a stocky Chinese guy, in his late forties or early fifties, with a brush cut, a gut and a swagger.

“I saw that picture Lidia was showing around,” he said, coming over to sit at my desk. “I think I saw the guy.”

“Really? When?”

“First I gotta tell you how come I didn’t do anything about that truck with the missing plates. I was at the corner of Ward and Waimanu when I noticed this Volvo station wagon full of hippies ahead of me had Massachusetts plates with an expired tag. I turned on my flashers and pulled them over.”

He took a sip of department coffee, and made a face. “You won’t believe this. The driver, this shaggy-haired guy, had an expired Massachusetts driver’s license that said his name was Eddie Christ. Turns out the other guys were Christ too, Stan Christ in the front, and Jordan and Fritz Christ in the back. Jordan was black; the other three were haole.” He went on to tell me that all four of them were in their mid-twenties, wearing jeans and T-shirts. They were on a mission from Jesus, who was their brother, to deliver herbal tea to the islands.

“The back of the wagon was filled with boxes of the tea. I told the guy he had to have a driver’s license, even if he was on a mission from Christ, and he launched into this long explanation. That’s when I saw the pickup without plates pass by. I had my hands full with the Christ brothers, though, so I radioed in a description.”

He put the cup of coffee down on my desk. “But you know how it is. There wasn’t anybody else in the vicinity, so the truck got away. And you know what? Each of those Christ guys had different IDs, and outstanding warrants. Took me hours to get them all into the holding cells and squared away.”

“What about the guy in the picture, though?” I asked. “Was he one of the Christ brothers?”

Sit shook his head. “That was later, after I was back on the street. I was cruising past the YMCA when I saw this sedan parked on the street, a man and a woman in the front seat. At first I thought it might be a prostitute, so I went up to talk to them.”

I still had reams of paper to go through. But I knew if I rushed him he’d get cranky and I might never get the whole story. I straightened a couple of pieces of paper on my desk as I waited for him to continue.

“Woman gave me a story about waiting for a kid to come out of the Y,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. By the time that bomb went off, I’d forgotten all about them. Then when Lidia was showing the picture around, I thought that might be the guy.”

“Was he wearing a tux?”

“Didn’t get that clear a look, but definitely a dark jacket and a white shirt.”

“You get any information on the car—plate number, make and model?”

He frowned. “If I’d thought it was a john, I’d have done it, but the woman, she looked—you know, young and professional. Not like a working girl.”

“Thanks, Frank. This is good info anyway. Now we know he has a partner, a woman, and both of them were in the area at the time.” The Y was just around the corner from the Marriage Project offices; it would have been easy for the woman to pull up there and wait for the bomber to do his business and then return. From the time Frank described, and the timing mechanism Mike had found on the bomb, I figured they were waiting to make sure the bomb went off before leaving.

After Frank left, I was thinking about the fact that the guy’s accomplice was a woman, and that Gunter had recognized fear and longing on the guy’s face. So maybe he was married to a woman, but not happy, and that was fueling his anger against gay marriage.

It was only amateur psychoanalysis, but it made sense.

When I need help understanding human emotion, I call Terri. Ever since high school, she’s provided that insight, and when I’d been undercover on the North Shore her intuition about the behavior of suspects and victims had been very helpful.

I managed to reach her on her cell phone, and found she was just leaving her great-aunt’s home in Black Point. Since her parents were taking care of her son Danny for the afternoon, I didn’t have to twist her arm too hard to get her to agree to detour into Waikiki and meet me for a late-afternoon caffeine break.

We met one of the branches of the Kope Bean, an island-based coffee chain. As usual, she looked perfect, showing no hint of the trauma she’d been going through since her widowhood only months before. When I complimented her, she said, “Great-Aunt Emma has high expectations. A Clark always looks just so, you know.”

I’d never met her great-aunt, but I’d been hearing about her for years. “A command performance?”

“Trust business. I asked her about the grant for the Gay Teen Center, and she said absolutely not.”

“Oh, well.”

“Don’t forget, I’m just as much a Clark as she is,” Terri said, smiling. “I reminded her that the mission of the Sandwich Islands Trust is to help the people of the islands, and that if there were young people who were living on the streets, in financial or emotional trouble, it was our obligation as the stewards of the Trust to help them.”

“Good for you. Did it work?”

“We agreed to give them some money for a pilot program.”

“Have I ever told you I think you’re phenomenal?”

“Not often enough.” She smiled. “So what’s up?”

“Why do you think people are so opposed to gay marriage?”

She took a sip of her decaf macadamia nut latte and considered. “Big question,” she said. “I think they fall into a couple of categories. People who accept the Bible as the word of God, for example, and when they see that passage from Leviticus they decide it has to be obeyed.”

“But just before that, the priests are telling people that if they mix fabrics they should be killed with stones,” I said. “The same for eating shellfish.”

“You’re trying to apply logic to something very emotional.”

“I have a different idea.” I took a sip of my raspberry mocha (caffeinated, of course) and said, “Let’s say there’s a guy who has some kind of same-sex urges. Maybe not strong enough to act on—but enough to make him uncomfortable. Could he feel like those urges are coming from Satan, and need to be resisted?”

“Sure. Remember Lucy Carson?”

That threw me, and I had to run through my mental directory to remember Lucy, a girl who’d gone to Punahou, our private high school, with us, and been arrested for shoplifting. “Yeah?”

“After she was arrested, she started going to church. She decided that it was the devil who was making her steal, and she could pray her way to honesty.”

I couldn’t remember what had happened to her. “Did it work?”

Terri shrugged. “Don’t know exactly. She went to college on the mainland and never came back. I heard a couple of rumors that she’d dropped out of school and gotten into some kind of trouble, but never anything more than that.”

“Getting back to my point, do you think the person who bombed the Marriage Project could be some kind of thwarted homosexual, taking out his frustrations on people who are able to be out, when he can’t?”

“Why can’t he?”

I described the man and woman Frank Sit had seen in the car. “If that’s his wife, he could be stuck in a marriage and unable to come out.”

“That’s a big assumption,” Terri said. “I’m sure that there are some guys who are uncomfortable around gay men because they’re not sure about their own sexuality. But it’s a big jump from making some homophobic cracks or avoiding gay guys in the locker room to building a bomb and detonating it.”

“What about the Church of Adam and Eve?” I asked. “Do you know about them?”

Terri frowned. “The Trust gives them money. I don’t agree with it, but Aunt Emma went to one of their meetings and she was impressed by the minister and his wife. I think they’re nuts, but mostly harmless.”

“I’m not so sure. I went to one of their revival meetings last month, and it made me uncomfortable. I could definitely see somebody getting the wrong idea from what they’ve been preaching and deciding to do something about it. Vigilante justice.” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell her about Kitty Sampson and her ideas about the church. But I knew that would shift the focus back to me and how I shouldn’t be doing something like going to church with Kitty behind her stepfather’s back, so I skipped it.

“You may be right,” Terri said. “Tell you what, I’ll look into the funding the Trust provides, see what kind of materials they’ve given us. If there’s anything wrong there, I’ll convince Aunt Emma to pull the plug.”

“Every little bit helps.” I finished my coffee and walked Terri to her SUV. “How’s Danny doing?”

Terri’s son had suffered a lot from his father’s death. He hadn’t spoken for quite a while afterwards, and then only gradually. “He’s getting better. It helps that his grandparents spoil him terribly. He always comes home from their house stuffed with treats and clutching some new toy.”

“Give him my love,” I said. “I’ll try and get out to see him sometime. He’s still got a lot to learn before he can call himself a surfer.”

“He’s only six, Kimo,” she said, smiling. “Give him a couple of years.”

When I got home, there was a message from Mike. I was embarrassed, even all by myself, about how eager I was to call him back. “So what did you do today?” he asked.

I told him about roller blading over to Gunter’s, and then going to the office. “I read background material until my eyes crossed,” I said. “I talked to my friend Terri about the possible motivation of our bomber, which I can tell you about when I see you. There was a message from Lidia, too. She found the formal wear shop where our guy rented his tux, but he paid cash and gave what appears to be a fake name, so that lead fizzled out. I ran off extra copies of the artist’s sketch for the vice detectives to pass around.”

“Sounds good.”

“Gunter made a good suggestion this morning, to pass the sketch around at some gay bars, see if the guy ever shows up at any of them.” I paused. “You interested in helping me?”

Mike didn’t say anything, but I waited. “I don’t think so, Kimo,” he said finally. “I mean, I know this is legitimate, job-related and all, but it’s just not something I can do.”

“You mean be seen in a gay bar with a known homosexual.”

“You know the kind of hell you’ve been through. You must still get some. You want me to go through that same shit?”

“You mean coming out?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

“That’s what it’s called, Mike. When a gay man accepts who he is and isn’t ashamed to let anybody and everybody know about it.”

“I can’t do that. What I do in my private life is my own business. I don’t want it to affect my job, what my family thinks, my friends, the guys I work with.”

“So you want to lie to all of them.”

“I don’t lie. I don’t come in on Monday morning with made up stories about the babes I scored over the weekend. I just don’t tell anybody anything.”

“Sounds like a pretty sucky life, to me.”

“Kimo, we had a great time Thursday night. At least I had a great time. I want to see you again.” He took a deep breath. “I want to kiss you again. I want to suck your dick again. I want to make love to you.”

“But you don’t want to be seen with me in public.”

“Not at a gay bar, for Christ’s sake. I mean, everybody knows about you, Kimo.”

“Fine, Mike. I’ll call Gunter. He’s probably done with his threesome by now. He won’t be embarrassed to be seen in public with me.”

“Can we have dinner? Tomorrow night? I want to see you.”

“I want to spend some time at the hospital with my dad tomorrow. I’ll call you in the afternoon.” I hung up the phone and then sat there for a while. I had been in love once before with a man, very briefly. He was an attorney from Massachusetts who had moved to Hawai’i so that no one back home would ever know he was gay. He was a low-profile kind of guy, and when my life erupted into the press he backed away fast. I wondered if Mike would be the same way. Was it something about me? Was I only able to fall in love with extremely closeted guys? How could I even daydream about a future with Mike Riccardi if I could never go to a bar with him, introduce him to my parents, meet his friends and family?

Maybe I ought to stick with Gunter after all. I picked up the phone and dialed his number. I arranged to pick him up later that night.

A GUIDE TO THE NIGHT

Though it was back downtown and I was already in Waikiki, I swung past The Queen’s Medical Center before going home. My father was still grumpy, but Haoa had smuggled him in a burger from Zippy’s so he was slightly more cooperative. He was definitely looking forward to going home when he finished his IV treatment on Monday, and I hoped nothing would happen to set him back. As he’d pointed out himself, hospitals were dangerous places. People died in them all the time.

I got home around five, grilled myself a piece of chicken and some veggies on my tiny hibachi, and then took a power nap. If I was going to be out cruising with Gunter I needed some more energy.

A few minutes before eleven, I was pulling up in Gunter’s driveway. He stepped out of his doorway looking like sex on wheels—a tight T-shirt that left visible a couple of inches of taut stomach, and skinny jeans that clung to him in all the right places. “Any ideas where we can go?” I asked when he got in the truck.

“There’s a reason why they have you on homicide, not vice. Let me be your tour guide to the night.”

“I’m not exactly naïve.”

“Let’s start with Ala Moana Park,” Gunter said. “After that, we’ll hit Waikiki.”

As we drove, I was thinking about Jimmy Ah Wong, hoping he was settling in okay with Uncle Chin and Aunt Mei-Mei. I told Gunter what had happened.

“Did you ever run away from home?” he asked.

“Once. I was about fourteen, I think. My brothers were both living at home that summer. Lui was already working at KVOL, some kind of entry-level intern thing, I think. Haoa had just graduated from UH, and he was working on a road crew out near the airport. He had this explicit porno magazine, all kinds of things. Men and women, women with dogs, oral sex, anal sex, even a couple of threesomes. The only thing it didn’t have was gay sex.”

“Let me guess. You stole it.”

“Not exactly. He caught me reading it and he and Lui laid into me. You know, snooping in their personal stuff, what a sneaky little weasel I was, that kind of thing. I was mad, so I told them I was going to go away, and they’d never find me, and they’d sure be sorry. They both laughed.”

“Brothers. You gotta love ‘em. Otherwise you’d kill ‘em.”

“So I left. I went out into the woods for a while, but then it started to get dark so I came back and hid behind some bushes across the street from my house. I watched my parents go out in their cars to look for me. My mother cruised around St. Louis Heights, and my father went down to Waialae Avenue and drove up and down, checking out the bus shelters and the pinball arcade and the drugstore and so on. They made Lui and Haoa go out into the woods with flashlights, looking for me.”

“What did you do?”

“As soon as I saw them all leave, I went back into the house. I fixed myself a TV dinner and ate, and then I was watching TV when they all came back. Nobody said a word about it. I found out later that my father had laid into Lui and Haoa—not about beating me up, but about bringing the magazine into the house in the first place. Of course, by the time I was old enough to get that kind of stuff for myself they didn’t care any more.”

“Some comic once said, my parents were protective of my older brothers, but by the time they got to me I was playing with knives and they didn’t mind.”

“That’s about right.” I looked over at him. “How about you? You ever run away?”

He leaned the seat back as far as it would go and pulled his knees up to the dashboard. His legs were so long and skinny it was hard to connect them to the rest of his body. “I remember once,” he said. “I was about sixteen, I think. I was still in high school, for sure. We lived a mile or two from this rest stop on the Jersey turnpike, maybe an hour outside New York. I was hating my life then, and one day, I just couldn’t take it any more, so I walked over to the rest stop and tried to hitch a ride into the city.”

I pulled into the park and we started driving real slow along the road, seeing if anyone was out. “I hung around by the men’s room for a while, trying to spot somebody who might be gay. I must have been a real piece of work—I was as tall as I am now, but skinny, no muscles at all. I had a ponytail—you believe it? Bell-bottomed pants and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Finally this one guy says to me,
You waiting for a ride somewhere?
I thought I was real cool, I said,
Yeah, where you going
?”

He laughed. “He said,
Come on, little buddy, I know just where you want to go
. He was this big fat guy, beard and a pot belly, drove a big truck. I followed him out to the truck and climbed up in the cab with him. He pointed down at his crotch and said,
Right there. That’s where you want to go
. And you know, it was.”

“You ever make it into the city?”

“Nope. Not that time, at least. I blew him, and he gave me twenty bucks. I mean, that was like a month’s allowance to me. I couldn’t wait to get home and figure out what I wanted to buy.” He sat up. “You better pull up and park. We’re not going to hand out any of those flyers sitting up here in this truck.”

We walked around the park for half an hour or so, threading our way between cabbage palms and kicking up small sprays of sand. The ocean was a constant murmur there, slapping against the shore in the background, fading in and out among the traffic noises on Ala Moana Boulevard and the sound of a car radio somewhere in the parking lot. The fronds of the palms moved mysteriously around us, dancing to an almost hidden breeze, and every so often we found a homeless person camped beneath a banyan or kukui tree, stumbling on signs of humanity in what otherwise was dark and natural.

We handed out copies of the sketches, but either nobody recognized our sweaty bomber, or nobody wanted to rat out a good customer. We were just about to head out when I saw someone step out of the men’s room, and even in the dim glow of the street light above the entrance I recognized him as Frankie, one of the kids from the Teen Center. His brightly-patterned silk shirt hung funny on his shoulders, as if he’d buttoned it hurriedly without looking, and a few wisps of dark hair had come loose from his ponytail.

I motioned silently to Gunter, and we hung back in the shadows for a minute or two, waiting to see who’d follow Frankie out of the men’s room. I felt protective of the kid, and I was worried what I’d do if the john turned out to be some closeted old toad who could only handle sex with young boys in public restrooms.

To my surprise, the next guy out was Lolo, the sulky tough guy. I stepped out into the light and said, “Hey, guys, howzit?”

Both of them turned toward me in alarm.

“Anybody else in the men’s room?” I asked.

They stole furtive glances at each other, and finally Frankie said, “No.”

“Hey, it’s cool. I know what it’s like to want to play around and not have any place to go.”

I turned and introduced Gunter, who was holding the pile of sketches. “You a cop, too?” Lolo asked, surveying his lean build and buzz-cut hair.

Gunter laughed. “Hell, if I was, I’d have to arrest myself every other day for something.” He poked me. “Only reason Officer Kimo here doesn’t lock me up is cause I’d want to fuck every guy in lock up.”

“Detective Kimo,” I said. “Why does everybody get that wrong?”

Everyone laughed. “Either of you guys seen this guy?” I asked, showing them both the sketch.

Lolo nodded. “Just a looker, though. I see him cruising sometimes on Kalakaua, but he never actually picks anybody up.”

“Maybe you’re just not his type,” Frankie said.

“I’m everybody’s type,” Lolo said. At the youth center, he’d always worn baggy clothes, oversized sweatshirts, the kind of pants that hang off your hips. But that night he was wearing a form-fitting tank top, and tight bike shorts that rode low, exposing a band of taut flesh. He was hot, and he knew it.

I gave them both my cards. “Either of you see him, you call me right away,” I said. “Day or night, any time. This is a bad guy. You don’t want to mess with him.”

“I can take care of myself.” Lolo reached out for the other boy’s hand and said, “Frankie, too.”

“I’m sure you can,” I said. “But even so, you call me, all right?”

Both boys nodded. I was about to turn away when Gunter said, “Here, take a couple of these,” and he pulled some foil packets from his pocket. “They glow in the dark. Pretty cool.”

Frankie and Lolo grinned, and I wondered where they’d go to try them out. On the way back to the truck I said, “You’re a sweetheart, you know that, Gunter?”

“Yeah, but don’t let it get around. Bad for my image.”

We spent the next couple of hours bar-hopping on Waikiki, showing the sketch around, having a few drinks, even dancing a little. Around three o’clock Gunter said, “Well, it doesn’t look like I’m gonna get lucky tonight. Hanging around with a cop tends to turn away romance.”

We were sitting on stools at the Rod and Reel Club, the seedy outdoor bar where we’d first met, some months before. A club remix of a Barbra Streisand song was playing in the background, and a few men gyrated athletically on the dance floor. The tables around us were littered with empty glasses and beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays. “So am I gonna get lucky with you?”

I thought then of Mike, and how much I wanted him there with me at that moment. I wanted to be able to kiss him at the bar, hold his butt while we danced, let everyone in the Rod and Reel Club know that he was my boyfriend.

And that meant that I couldn’t have sex with Gunter, even though he was hot and sexy and I knew we’d have fun. I had to follow my heart, and my heart had latched onto a closeted firefighter with a dark mustache and dancing eyes.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Gunter said, smiling. He finished the last of his Primo, draining the bottle. “You’re in love. With that fireman.” He turned to look at me. “There’s a difference between sex and love, you know. You can have sex without love, but you shouldn’t have love without sex.” He put his arm around me. “And I love you, man.”

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing, and Gunter looked a little offended. “If you’re going to talk like a bad beer commercial you’ve got to expect me to laugh,” I said. “Come on. Let’s start walking.” I had parked my truck back at my building before we started drinking. My legs were rubbery but I managed to keep my balance as we walked down Kuhio Avenue under the stars. Gunter leaned into me a little more than he probably had to, but I didn’t mind. It felt good.

We stopped at my apartment building. “You want me to walk on with you for a while?” I asked.

“If you’re not going to take me upstairs, rip my clothes off and make passionate love to me, then who needs you?” Gunter asked. “Gimme a kiss, at least.”

We leaned up against my truck and kissed, his tongue searching around in my mouth, finding mine, the two of them doing an intricate little dance. Then he started sucking on my upper lip, and reached down to my crotch to grope me. Of course I had a hard-on; I’m only human. But I pulled away. “Hey, you got any more of those glow-in-the-dark condoms?”

“You want to try one out with me?”

“Well, not with you.”

“Jesus. What a tease you are.” He pulled a couple of the foil packs out of his pocket and handed them to me. “I’m going to be thinking of you,” he called, as I started climbing the steps.

“Think of this.” I pulled down my pants and mooned him, and he laughed.

“You bet I will,” he said, as he staggered off into the night.