Mahu (17 page)

He got out of the truck then. “’Til Saturday,” he said. “Aloha.”

“Aloha.” I sat there for a few minutes, watching him walk through the parking lot and turn onto Lili
’
uokalani. Then I got out and went upstairs to bed.

ST. LOUIS HEIGHTS

Thursday morning, Akoni and I had to put aside the investigation into Tommy Pang’s murder because we caught another homicide in Waikīkī
.
This one was fairly straightforward, though; a young Filipina was found in her car in the parking garage at a hotel downtown. She was an assistant in the hotel’s marketing department, and her co-workers told us that she’d recently broken up with an abusive boyfriend.

Looking at her cell phone, we found she’d received a call from the boyfriend’s number shortly before the garage ticket indicated she’d entered. It took us only an hour to track the boyfriend down and haul him in to the station for an interrogation, where he confessed to shooting her.

Even so, it took us most of the day to collect evidence, take statements, and handle the paperwork. It was almost the end of our shift before we could get back to Tommy’s murder. The organized crime division had passed on some information about tong rivalries, but after a dozen phone calls, neither of us could find anyone who would say that Tommy Pang had been involved on either side. Lieutenant Yumuri was pleased we’d closed the girl’s murder so quickly, but he was losing patience with our lack of progress on Tommy’s murder, and neither of us wanted it to go unsolved. When our shift ended, I decided to do something I’d been holding off, to stop on my way home and see Uncle Chin. It was possible he could tell me something about Tommy Pang that the computers couldn’t.

“Good afternoon, Aunt Mei-Mei,” I said, when Uncle Chin’s wife answered the door of their home in St. Louis Heights, not far from my parents.

She peered at me for a moment, looking up with eyes that fought against cataracts. “Kimo!” she said. “Come in! Uncle Chin will be so happy to see you.” I followed her inside, down a long hallway toward the back of the house. “He doesn’t get many visitors these days.”

Uncle Chin was sitting in a bamboo lounge chair on their screened porch, looking down the hillside into the ravine. The porch was jammed with flowering plants—jasmine, hibiscus, and dozens of trailing orchids in hanging baskets. There were also a half-dozen bird cages, covered at the moment, that I knew contained exotic parrots. Next to the chair was a bamboo table with glass top. Uncle Chin’s wire-rimmed glasses sat on top of a hard-bound copy of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
.

“Uncle Chin, look who has come to see you,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. Uncle Chin woke out of his light sleep and seemed instantly alert. He must
have been
in his late seventies, but his eyes were still keen, and his smile was broad.

“I will bring tea,” Aunt Mei-Mei said. “You sit.”

I sat. We talked first about my parents, my father’s heart troubles, my mother’s garden club successes. I heard about his plants and his parrots, and we discussed my brothers, especially Haoa and Tatiana’s new baby. Keikis always seemed to make Uncle Chin a little sad; I guess he remembered his own son, whose difficult birth had somehow prevented Aunt Mei-Mei from being able to have any more children.

His name was Robert, I knew, and he was a few years older than my brother Lui, so always a remote presence to me. He died when he was twenty-one, a drug overdose of some kind, and according to my father Uncle Chin had never been the same since.

But Uncle Chin had enjoyed the luau, and was glad to see us all at a happy occasion. “And what about you? No wife yet?”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

He wagged a finger at me. “You not young forever,” he said. “Must make choices for life. Soon!”

“Yes, Uncle. I know.” Aunt Mei-Mei brought cups of sweet-smelling Chinese tea and then disappeared again.

Finally Uncle Chin said, “Your work. It goes well?”

“Interesting cases,” I said. “Always interesting.” I paused. “A man killed behind the bar he owned in Waikīkī. Maybe you know him. A man named Tommy Pang.”

For a moment, the light seemed to go out of Uncle Chin’s eyes. Then he seemed to have returned, and considered, massaging the paralyzed nerve in his face with the fingers of his left hand. “I know him, but not well,” he said, finally. “Not important man.”

“No, it doesn’t seem so. Yet someone found him important enough to kill.”

“Ah, importance relative, no,” he said. He thought for a while. “I no can help you, Kimo. I not know who could have found this man important in way you suggest.” For the first time since I had known him, Uncle Chin looked old. He was older than my father, though I remembered him best when I was a child and he was tall and imposing and yet somehow not frightening at all. Now he had become an old man, retired among his flowers and his birds.

We finished our tea and Aunt Mei-Mei came back in. “You will go to see your parents now,” she said. “You are so close to them.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m tired. It’s been a long day.” I looked at my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. Not enough daylight left by the time I got back to Waikīkī for surfing, or even swimming. A quick dinner, and then maybe a book. A quiet evening.

“Oh, no, your mother will be so disappointed. She has already put out a place for you at the dinner table.”

Of course, I thought. While Uncle Chin and I talked on the porch, Aunt Mei-Mei had been on the phone to my mother, announcing my presence in St. Louis Heights. There was no way out now.

The streets in St. Louis Heights are steep and narrow, and all the houses are very close to each other. We were lucky that my father had decided early he wanted to live in the neighborhood, and had built a simple fifties-style ranch on a lot that backed onto Waahila Ridge State Recreation Area. As a consequence, our backyard is several thousand steeply pitched acres of pine and ravine, and on an island where real estate prices are high, such a huge empty space is now nearly priceless. Though both my brothers have beautiful homes, I know they covet my parents’ property.

My parents had the main level of the house, street level. The master bedroom suite, the kitchen, living room, and dining room were all there. My brothers and I shared the basement, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a big playroom that spilled out to a patio my father had built into the hillside. It was a wonderful place to grow up—when my brothers picked on me, as big brothers always do, I could sneak out into the underbrush, climb the hill, and set my sights on the ocean. The other wonderful thing about our house’s situation was that if you climbed to the roof, as I did sometimes, you could see all the way from Diamond Head to downtown Honolulu, and the vast ocean between them. Sometimes my father would disappear for a few hours at a time, usually after a fight with my mother or after the three of us boys were making too much trouble. I knew he went up to the roof, but I never told.

I wondered if my parents would ask, like Aunt Mei-Mei, when I was going to settle down, add to their brood of grandchildren. They were baffled by my frenzied dating, the endless parade of one-night stands and tourist wahines that their friends saw me with all around Waikīkī. My new situation would probably confuse them even more. That is, if I ever told them. I sat in Uncle Chin’s driveway for a while, thinking, before I turned the key in the ignition.

NEVER THE SAME

I pulled my truck up in the driveway, right behind my father’s. He could afford a Mercedes if he wanted. Instead he bought new trucks every few years, and handed down the old ones to his sons. The four Kanapa‘aka boys, driving around Honolulu in Ford pickups in various states of disrepair. Oh, and then there’s my mother, who dr
o
ve a maroon Lexus with gold trim, and her two daughters-in-law, who
we
re much the same.

My brothers and I
we
re alike in many ways, and then of course very different too. From our father, we inherited a love of the outdoors, the land and the sea, of working with our hands, stubbornness, and a tendency to laugh easily. From our mother, who was born poor on a plantation on Kaua‘i, the daughter of a Japanese workman and a young Hawaiian girl, we seem
ed
to have inherited a certain kind of strength that my father
wa
s missing. He ha
d
always been successful, but my mother
wa
s the one who pushed. It
wa
s because of her that we all went to Punahou, and on to college.

Until 1962 it was actually illegal to give a kid a Hawaiian first name. My father ha
d
always gone by Al, though his actual first name
wa
s Alexander, and my mother’s first name
wa
s actually Reiko, though she ha
d
always been known by her middle name, Lokelani, which mean
t
Heavenly Rose
in Hawaiian. Our names
we
re Louis John, called Lui; Howard Frederick, called Haoa; and James Kimo. In my case, Kimo
wa
s simply the Hawaiian pronunciation of James, which was the name of my Montana great-grandfather. I always wanted to know why I didn’t have two English names, why my first and middle names were essentially the same. It was one of those things the youngest always picks on, to wonder why he is different from his brothers.

I was different. I used to hide from Lui and Haoa, taking books and scrambling away into the woods, where I’d find a quiet safe place and lose myself in the pages of another world. Because they were so much older than I was, I was spoiled sometimes, often treated like the baby, and then from the time I was nine and Haoa left for college, I was the only child.

Of course I was different in other ways too. My big brothers would come home from college, or from their lives as young studs on Waikīkī, and talk about their girls, and I would wonder if I’d ever feel the way they did. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I realized I probably never would.

I was browsing in a used bookstore off Fort Street on a rainy afternoon when I found a stack of all-male porno magazines. I had never known such magazines existed. My heart sped up and my arms and legs began to feel like jelly as I flipped through the pages. I particularly remember a naked guy walking out of the ocean, on a beach somewhere in California. I got so hard it hurt. There were stories as well as pictures, and ads for talk lines and dirty books. I had to buy at least one of those magazines.

I picked the one that had the tamest cover and casually walked up to the register, carrying a paperback I wanted as well. I was glad I didn’t have to speak, because my throat was dry and hoarse. The proprietor, an old man, merely looked at the prices and rang them up on his register. I handed him the money, and he put the book and magazine in a brown paper bag and handed them to me.

It was one of those moments after which your life is never the same. I finally understood what I had been feeling in gym class, and not feeling on dates with smart girls from Punahou who wore wire-rimmed glasses and serious expressions. And imagine, it only took me sixteen years to get from that bookstore to the food court at Ala Moana Mall where I bared my soul to Akoni.

I let myself in the front door with my key. “Hey, Mom, you here?” I called as I closed the door behind me.

Surprisingly, it was my father who appeared first. Usually, like Uncle Chin, he holds court from his recliner in the living room. “Hello, Keechee,” he said. It’s always been his nickname for me, and when Lui or Haoa had tried to tease me with it he’d come down hard on them. He had a nickname for each of us, a special name that was between the two of us alone. Lulu was Lui, of course, and Howgow was Haoa. “Your mother will be pleased to see you.”

“And you? Is this torture for you, seeing me?”

“You have always been the wicked son,” he said, smiling. My mother came out of the kitchen then and leaned up to kiss my cheek. The Kanapa‘aka boys were also lucky to inherit their father’s height; my father never quite reached six feet, stopping at five-eleven and three quarters (and he was always so precise in his measurements that he could never give himself the extra quarter of an inch) but the three of us all hover
ed
between six foot and six two. Me, I
was
six foot and a half inch, and the difference between me and my father
wa
s that I t
old
people I
was
six one.

My mother
wa
s barely five six, though, and already she ha
d
started to shrink. She’s sixty-five, my father sixty-eight, though he sw
ore
he w
ould
never retire. He ha
d
been working a lot with Haoa lately, though, joint construction and landscaping projects, and I c
ould
tell he want
ed
my brother to take over more of the business. He even wanted me to take over for a long time, and tolerated my years of surfing because he believed I would come back and build with him, eventually. I think one of the biggest disappointments of his life, though I was totally unaware of it at the time, was when I came back from the North Shore and announced I was entering the police academy. Like my moment at the bookstore, he must have lost some illusions then, and seen the future in a clearer light, though he was probably unwilling to admit it.

We went immediately to the dinner table. “You went to see Uncle Chin,” my father said, as my mother passed a platter of roasted chicken toward me. “Tell us about your case.”

Uncle Chin’s associations have always been an unspoken matter between my father and me. When I was a child, I didn’t know what tongs were, and thought criminals were those guys on TV with bad hats and guns. When I became a cop, and I started seeing Uncle Chin’s name on the police computer system, I never actually confronted my father. Uncle Chin had always been a nice man to me, with crack seed or some other treat for me as a kid, and I wasn’t about to change my opinion of him because he had a record. But I think my father
wa
s a little afraid of my disapproval of his friend, which
wa
s an interesting position to be in with your father.