Mahu (11 page)

One night in the spring I got drunk and was sitting on my bed with the door to my room open when Ted walked by. I don’t remember what I said to him, why he came into my room, but I know that after a while he got up, very deliberately, and locked the door. Then he stood in front of me, without speaking, and unbuttoned his shirt. He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and dropped them to the floor, then shucked off his shirt and tossed it next to his pants.

I remember being stunned that he didn’t wear any underwear. Then he came over to me.

By the time I got home that summer I was totally confused. But I knew that dating Peggy hadn’t cured me of my interest in men, so somehow that meant I had to stop seeing her. I didn’t have a reason to give her, and I don’t think she ever understood.

“Hello, Kimo,” she said. We kissed briefly, like friends.

“You look great,” I said. She wore a pink polo shirt and a navy skirt, and her hair, which was usually pulled up on her head, now hung free to her shoulders.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so busy,” she said. “And I can’t even stay long today, because that jogger hit and run is coming up before Judge Lap tomorrow and I’ve still got pages of discovery to go over.”

“Your parents look good,” I said. I nodded toward them, a nicely-dressed couple who had always been friendly toward me.

“You’re lucky you have brothers,” she said. “My parents are still waiting for me to give them grandchildren.” She made a face. “Peggy, when you gonna find nice boy, have keikis for us to play with?”

“I still get that. Parents have no shame when it comes to grandchildren.”

We talked for a while longer, walking around the party together. I wondered how I was going to tell Peggy that I was gay, that I’d been fooling her as much as I’d been fooling myself. I hoped that we had so much history that it didn’t matter that there weren’t any sparks between us anymore, that we were really just friends. At least, I told myself it didn’t matter.

TALK GEEK TO ME

Monday morning I was up at first light and on the waves at Kuhio Beach. By the time I made it to the station I was feeling almost myself again. Akoni arrived a few minutes after I did, and I said, as he arrived, “Hey, brah, how was your weekend?”

He pulled a chair up next to me and said in a low voice, “Look, Kimo, I don’t want to know about your personal life. I don’t want to know what kind of magazines you got stashed under your mattress, who blows in your ear and who you grab your ankles for. All right?”

All my good spirit evaporated. While the weekend had helped me put aside some of the problems of the week before, it obviously hadn’t worked that way for Akoni. “You want another partner? You want me to put in for a transfer? I will.”

“I don’t know who you are any more.”

“Well, here’s a news flash, buddy,” I said, as I turned to my computer. “I’m not sure I do either.”

We were scheduled to meet Harry back at the Rod and Reel Club at eleven. At about ten of, I asked Akoni if he wanted to come with me. “You handle it,” he said. “I don’t know any of that computer stuff anyway.”

Harry and I met up in the alley behind the bar. Arleen was on the phone with her mother, as usual. I introduced Harry as “my computer expert” and she waved us into Tommy’s office.

Harry sat right down at his computer and turned it on. “Let’s see what he’s got here.” He’d asked me to prepare some basic information about Tommy for him—his birthday, his wife’s name, birthday, and anniversary; Derek’s name and birthday. He did some typing and after a couple of unhappy sounds, the computer started whirring to life.

“Easy as pie,” he said, as the Windows warm-up screen appeared. “That’s not to say some of the files aren’t encrypted, too. We’ll have to see.”

Most computerese was gibberish to me. The computers we use
d
at the station
were
very simple, and pretty user-friendly. You move
d
a cursor around, click
ed
on items on lists, type
d
in what you want
ed
to search for, that kind of thing.

Around noon Arleen came in. “It’s almost lunchtime,” she said. “My boy’s on a half-day today, so I’ve got to go pick him up.”

“I wish I had a kid,” Harry said, shocking the hell out of me. “How old is he?”

“He’s five,” she said. “You want to see a picture?”

Harry nodded. She opened her wallet and pulled out one of those studio pictures, the kid posed on a carpet with a teddy bear. “Cute,” Harry said. “What’s his name?”

“Brandon.” She had a couple more pictures, which she showed us. I looked at them politely, Harry with more interest. “He’s why I have this job, you know. I’m not some kind of criminal or anything. I just need to work, and this way I get to see my son as much as I can.”

“Cool,” Harry said.

“I actually have an associate’s degree in computer science,” she said shyly, making eye contact with Harry. Once again I was amazed at his ability to attract women. It was almost like I wasn’t there, this thing that was going on between them. “But I make more here than I could as a junior programmer somewhere, and the hours are better.”

Arleen gave us a menu for a local deli before she left, and we ordered take-out. Harry sat back down at the keyboard and I wandered around the office, looking for anything we might have overlooked. But I guess there just wasn’t much there to find, and I’d been over every inch by the time the delivery boy came. I paid him, tipped him, and took the sandwiches in to Tommy’s office.

“Find anything interesting?”

“Nothing much. But I still have to crack into his Palm backup software.”

Just then we heard the door open. Arleen had that same cute little boy with her who I’d seen before, with coal-black hair in a short crewcut, wearing blue and white striped overalls with a pattern of trains across the bib. He looked
hapa haole
, or half white, his eyes a little too round to be fully Japanese.

She smiled shyly, and introduced Brandon to Harry. I felt like drumming my fingers on Tommy’s desk, hurrying them along, but I caught myself. It was like this transformation was going on inside me—I’d never been an “us versus them” kind of guy, maybe because my family’s such a melting pot I never felt like there was a group I didn’t have at least one relative in.

But being gay was different. Every time I heard the word fag, I felt my body go tense. I was starting to look at straight couples together and get mad, that they had something I didn’t. I was about to start calling people with kids breeders. And all within less than a week. Kind of took my breath away.

It took Harry a little longer to break into the Palm Pilot software than it had to get past the computer’s password, but eventually he was able to synch up the Palm to a copy of Microsoft Outlook on Tommy’s computer, and export the calendar and address book. “This won’t be completely up to date,” Harry said, as the PC whirred and clanked. “I mean, if you’re expecting to see he had a meeting Tuesday night, it might not be there. This is only current up to the last time he hot-synched to the computer.”

“I love it when you talk geek to me. What does that mean in English?”

“It means that he carried the Palm around with him and made entries directly into it,” Harry said. “Adding people to his address book, putting in appointments, making notes. But in order to get that stuff into this file
,
”
h
e pointed at the icon on the screen
,
“
h
e had to perform this function they call a hot synch. You drop the Palm into the cradle, press a couple of buttons, and everything copies.”

We discovered that the last time Tommy had done a hot synch had been a week before. “So nothing on his calendar for last Tuesday,” I said.

“But you wanted some names and numbers,” Harry said. He clicked over to the address book. “Voila.”

We printed out his address book, which was unfortunately quite sparse. A few names and numbers I thought the FBI might like, but very little in the way of personal contacts.

We finished up after that, but it took a couple of minutes to get Harry past Arleen’s desk. Brandon was fascinated with his glasses, pointing again and again to his own reflection and laughing. Harry found all this very cute, though I got tired of it fast. I love my nieces and nephews, but I think they’ve gotten more interesting as they’ve started to have interesting things to say—usually around nine or ten. Harry promised to send Arleen some information on classes at UH, too, even volunteering to get together with her and help her polish her programming skills.

I finally got Harry outside. The trade winds had died, and Waikīkī sat under a dark gloomy cloud. As we got out to Kuhio Avenue, a guy in a red Porsche with vanity plates DR DR veered in front of a huge black Lincoln Navigator, and the Navigator almost crunched his very expensive bumper. There were times when I really wanted to drive a black and white again.

“You up for a little wahine action tonight?” Harry asked. “Canoe Club bar?”

I don’t know how it came out. I certainly hadn’t been planning to say it. I said, “Harry, I’m gay,” as we turned makai toward Kalākaua. “No more wahine action for me. I’m not lying anymore.”

“I wondered when you were going to figure it out,” Harry said. “Good for you.”

“You mean you knew?”

I looked over at him, and he nodded. “I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but I had an idea. I mean, you could never stick with a woman for more than a week or so.”

“There was Peggy in high school. That was three years. Although I have to say I’m not quite sure what I’m doing dating her again.”

“High school was different. None of us knew what was going on back then.” He paused. “So what made up your mind?”

“It wasn’t really one thing. I don’t know why, all summer long, I’ve been noticing things I never noticed before. Porno magazines in a bookstore window. Two guys holding hands at midnight on the beach. Then I came here.”

I told him about that night, from the failed drug bust down to finding Tommy Pang’s body in the alley. “It doesn’t matter to me, you know that,” Harry said. “You’re my friend and I hope you’ll always be my friend, no matter who you decide to sleep with.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt elated, and also a little scared and weird, like my secret was out. I’d told Akoni, of course, but the circumstances and his reaction had been so different. Harry put his hand on my shoulder. “Mahalo,” I said. “I’ll call you. Maybe we’ll surf tomorrow.”

“Just not at six a.m., okay?” he asked. “I need my beauty sleep.” Then he smiled. “Plus, now you’re not going to know if I’m alone or not.”

I nodded and smiled, and he crossed the street, heading back toward his apartment.

On the way back to the station I ran into Alvy Greenberg on patrol, under the trees behind the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center. It was cool back there, nicely landscaped, quiet. We stood in the shaded lobby of the shopping center, surrounded by the hushed voices of serious shoppers and the occasional small child racing around the courtyard. We talked for a couple of minutes, mostly me expressing my frustration at how few leads we had on Tommy Pang’s murder. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” he said. “If you want my honest opinion, I think you’re the best detective we’ve got on the force.”

“Mahalo, brah. I appreciate the vote of confidence, even if I don’t feel like I deserve it most of the time.”

I walked past the open air market, full of t-shirts, plastic leis and coconuts you could send home like postcards. A parrot called out, “Hey, pretty baby,” over and over again. There was a lazy flow of tourists from one stall to the next, but nobody seemed to be buying much.

Back at the station, I checked out all the people in Tommy Pang’s address book. Akoni was out tracking down his own leads, and I only spoke to him long enough to determine that we’d start talking to the people in the book together the next day.

As I left the station, I passed an elderly Japanese woman, dirty and dressed in rags, sitting on the curb shouting obscenities. Alvy Greenberg was on his way to roust her, and I nodded as we passed each other.

I took my time walking home. At Kuhio Avenue and Lili’uokalani Street, a good-looking guy passed me, heading toward the beach. He had a surfer’s physique, like mine—strong chest, well-defined pecs, a dusting of blond hair down the center of his chest. His legs were long and his calves and thighs well-muscled. He was wearing a skimpy bikini that didn’t cover much, and as we made eye contact I experienced a sudden pang of horniness. Our eyes met for a moment, but both of us kept on walking. I couldn’t help turning to stare at him; though I forced myself to look away eventually, I watched his butt go halfway down the block before he blended in with the rest of the crowd. And then I knew what Akoni was worried about, and it scared the hell out of me.

My life had become my latest case. And like a bulldog, I was going to keep gnawing at my personal problems until I had worked them out. I knew then that I couldn’t keep my sexuality a secret forever, and that revealing it would rip open my life and hurt many people around me.

I knew my parents loved me, but I also knew my father’s bad temper and remembered the frequent disparaging comments he’d made about māhūs when I was growing up. And though my brothers loved me, too, they had teased me mercilessly when we were kids. Suppose they chose to shut me out now?

I’d always appreciated my sense of being rooted in Honolulu. Landmarks in town had personal meaning to me, and my parents’ network of friends and distant relatives was all around. Now that I was an adult, I often ran into distant cousins and Punahou classmates at the grocery, on the beach, or on street corners downtown. What if I was shut out of that community, shunned? What if I didn’t belong in my own home anymore?

There was a storm coming. Akoni had just felt the winds a little sooner, and was scrambling to get under cover.

TERRI’S GIFT

When I got inside the red light was blinking on my answering machine. I thought it would be my mother, with some follow-up to the party of the day before, and I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone. There was still a couple of hours of daylight left, and I thought I might go for a swim. I hit the play button on the machine as I started to strip down.