Mahu (9 page)

“I’ll get Derek,” Gallagher said. “He’s resting.”

“Perhaps we could talk to you first,” I said, regaining my voice.

“Sure.” He sat down on a black leather recliner catty-cornered to the sofa and motioned to us. “Have a seat.”

His arms and calves were lightly dusted with sandy blond hair. When he sat, the kimono fell away from his right thigh and I could almost see down to his crotch.

Get hold of yourself, I thought. “Let’s start chronologically,” I said. “Where were you Tuesday night, the night Tommy was murdered?”

“We were at the club for a while, the Rod and Reel Club. Derek was trying to convince his father to make me the manager.” He preened a little. “I’ve been working in bars and clubs for years. Worked my way through Yale as a bouncer, bartender and assistant manager.”

“Around what time was that?”

Wayne had to think for a minute. It was almost like he was running through his story and making sure he got the details straight. “I guess around midnight. Yeah, had to be around then, because we went off to another club after that.”

“Anyone else in the office when you were there?”

“Some guy who worked for Mr. Pang came over for a meeting. I don’t know his name. Mr. Pang had a lot of other businesses besides the club. He was an important guy.”

“Did he know about you and Derek?”

“You mean did he know we like to suck each other’s dicks?” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms in front of him. “We never talked about it. If he wanted to ignore it, then that was his business.”

“You and Derek knew each other in college?”

“Doesn’t your friend ever talk?” He looked at Akoni. “What are you, the strong, silent type?”

Akoni said, “I’ll talk when I have something to say.”

Gallagher turned back to me. The lapel of his robe had fallen open, exposing one pink nipple surrounded by dark blond hair. “We met sophomore year. We both lived in East Asia House. It’s a dorm, but they have special programs, Japanese culture, Pacific Rim cooking, world politics, that kind of thing. I was always interested in the Orient—my father was a businessman, and we lived in Japan for a year when I was a kid.”

I nodded. “You moved out here a couple of months ago, isn’t that right?”

He shifted position, closing his robe, tucking his right leg under him. “Derek had to get settled, see what things were like out here, before I could come out. He hadn’t really been home much since he went away to college.” He laughed. “He didn’t even know his dad owned a gay bar, can you believe it?”

“Do you recognize any of these names?” I handed Wayne the list we’d made up of known tong members.

Wayne shifted around a little in his chair and the black silk rode up on his thigh again. I was getting pretty annoyed at myself for noticing so much about him, but somehow I couldn’t help it. He read through the list, pausing once or twice. Finally he looked up and shook his head. “None of them ring a bell. Mr. Pang really wanted Derek to go legit, you know. He didn’t want to tell Derek about anything he did that was shady at all. I mean, we only knew about the bar because the office is in back there.”

He handed the list back to me. I looked down at my notes. “How about this ‘guy who worked for Mr. Pang.’ Do you have any idea who he was, what he was doing at the bar on Tuesday night?”

“I don’t know what made me think so, but I always thought the guy was a cop. Not in a uniform, but he kind of carried himself that way.”

“You ever been arrested?” Akoni asked.

“So you do talk,” Wayne said. “I know cops. Every bar I ever worked in, we had to call the cops now and then.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I don’t like your tone,” Wayne said. “And I don’t think I want to answer that.”

“What was it?” Akoni asked. “You get caught sucking some guy off in the bus station? Maybe in a men’s room at Yale?” Akoni put a particular emphasis on the college name.

I could see Wayne was starting to get worked up, so I jumped in. “Look, that’s not important,” I said. “You said you went to another club after the Rod and Reel. Where’d you go?”

He was clearly making it up. “A bar out near the Aloha Bowl.”

“That far out?” I asked.

“It’s a gay club, the Boardwalk. An after hours kind of place.” He paused. “If Derek and I want to hang out, we can’t exactly do it at the bar his dad owns. Some dumb queen would have ratted us out in a heartbeat.”

“You see anybody you know at this place, the Boardwalk?”

He shook his head. “It’s pretty dark in there. We got a couple of beers and sat in the corner. I guess maybe we were there an hour or two.”

I was willing to bet no one at the bar could ID either of them.

Derek emerged from the bedroom then, looking freshly-showered, wearing black linen pants and a white t-shirt, his short black hair slicked back. He was about five seven, a hundred and fifty pounds. Behind wire-framed aviator glasses, his eyes were red. “You look like shit,” he said to Wayne. “That’s the way you come out and talk to people?”

“I didn’t have time,” Wayne said, with a little whining edge to his voice. “You were in the bathroom.”

“That’s never stopped you before.” He motioned to the bedroom with his thumb. “Put some clothes on.”

“I want to stay here with you.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Gallagher.” Akoni and I stood up to shake hands with Derek. “We won’t be too hard on him.”

Wayne tried to give Derek a look but Derek wasn’t having any of it. So Wayne got up, tightened his kimono, and strutted back to the bedroom. I have to admit I was a little sorry to see him go, and I hoped nobody noticed the way I watched his ass as he left.

THE MASTER OF HANDLING

“Did he offer you anything, Detectives?” Derek asked after we’d introduced ourselves. “Coffee? Juice? Sometimes the man has no manners.” Without waiting for an answer from us, he continued, “I’m making cappuccino. You want?”

We agreed. He led us over to the kitchen, and Akoni and I sat at a round glass table with a white marble gargoyle at its base as Derek Pang started making cappuccino. While the coffee brewed, Derek busied himself getting out mugs, spoons, even a little shaker of toppings like you see in fancy coffee shops. His movements were quick and delicate, and I was reminded of someone describing a homosexual as “light in his loafers.”

That description really worked for Derek. He could have been a ballet dancer, perhaps, with the kind of china-doll looks I saw in some of my aunts and girl cousins on my mother’s side. It’s a fragility and femininity that many men, obviously including Wayne Gallagher, found attractive.

I started asking Derek the same questions we’d asked Wayne.

“We left the club around midnight on Tuesday,” he said. He stuck a metal pitcher filled with milk under the frothing arm of the cappuccino maker. He had to talk louder over the noise of the steam frothing the milk. “I wanted my father to make Wayne the manager. So we were hanging around the Rod and Reel a lot, trying to show that Wayne knew the business.”

He poured the cappuccino, and I took a sip of mine. It was good. “Wayne mentioned an associate of your father’s was there that night, too. Did you know him?”

Derek looked into his mug, holding it with both hands. It took him a long time to answer. “How much do you know about my father?” he asked, finally.

“A lot,” I said. “He had a pretty extensive record.”

“Growing up, I never knew what my father did. Or I knew, but I didn’t, you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“He owned a bunch of legitimate businesses, you know. The bar’s just one. Once I came back from college, he promised that if I worked with him for a while, he would help me set up my own gallery.”

“My father wanted me to work with him,” I said. “He’s a contractor, and I spent most of my summers on crews on his projects. When it came time to choose, I became a cop instead.”

“Then you know what it’s like. It’s worse when your father’s a crook, Detective. You always try to keep your head turned so you won’t see what’s going on. I know the guy who was with him was a cop, but I didn’t want to know any more than that.”

“You’re sure?” Akoni asked.

Derek nodded. “I’m sure it’s not unheard of,” he said dryly. “For gangsters to have cops on their payroll. And make no mistake, my father was a gangster. I don’t know what he did, exactly, what put the food on our table or paid my tuition to Yale, but it wasn’t pretty.”

I kept worrying that Wayne would come out and join us, so I hurried on. “The night your father was murdered, you left around midnight, you said. Where did you go after that?”

He thought, and for a minute I thought they had worked their stories out in advance. “We went for a drive.” He looked down at his mug for a minute and said, “We went up to Mount Tantalus eventually and parked, and we, well, made out for a while.” He looked up at me again. “Kind of crappy, isn’t it? My dad’s getting killed and I’m off getting laid.”

Gallagher came in then, and pouted because Derek hadn’t made him a cappuccino too. “I didn’t know whether you’d eaten or not,” Derek said. There wasn’t a chair at the table for him, so Gallagher stood awkwardly against the counter, dressed now in white shorts and an emerald-green polo shirt that was a little too tight for him. He reminded me of my brother Haoa, big and beefy, but even clothed there was a sexuality to him that I found very attractive.

“This associate of your father’s, the man you think was a cop,” Akoni said. “Do you think you could recognize him again?”

“I think so,” Derek said. “He came around a couple of times. My father gave him something that night, in a box.” He thought for a minute. “I remember thinking it was funny. It was a little box, kind of long and narrow, like you’d put a necklace or a bracelet in, and I thought it was a funny gift for my father to give him.”

I finished the last of my cappuccino and handed the mug to Derek, who stood up and took all three mugs to the sink.

“Can you clean up, Wayne?” he asked. “We’re going back into the living room.” As he passed by, Wayne’s hand passed over Derek’s chest and I was sure he tweaked Derek’s nipple.

“How about his associates, from his other businesses?” I asked Derek, when we were sitting in the living room again. “Are there any you might have met sometime?”

He thought about it for a while. In the kitchen I heard Wayne banging pots and pans and generally reminding us he was around and mad that he hadn’t been asked to join us. “There’s one man I met a couple of times,” he said finally. “An old man, a little stooped over. He said to call him Uncle Chin.”

I felt an electric jolt run through my body. My father’s closest friend, a man I considered my own godfather, was a gangster of sorts, retired by then. I had always called him Uncle Chin.

“Did you feel that this Uncle Chin was a gangster like your father?” Akoni asked.

Derek nodded. “I mean, I got the feeling he was some kind of Godfather, you know? An old guy who didn’t really do much but everybody kind of looked up to him. It was almost like, I don’t know, I was presented to him. It was all very formal.”

I was lost in thought, but Akoni and I had talked about Uncle Chin in the past, so he kept the interview going. “Do you have other family?”

“My father was an only child, but he had a lot of cousins,” Derek said. “They’re all still back in China. My mother was a bar girl in Hong Kong when my father met her. She’s never told me about any family at all.” He must have noticed the look on our faces, because he said, “Does that surprise you? The very proper and respectable Genevieve Pang was a bar girl in Hong Kong? It’s amazing how we can reinvent ourselves, isn’t it?”

“How about your father’s other businesses,” I said. “Do you know anything about them? Who runs them, what they do, that kind of thing?”

He shook his head. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. I knew, but I didn’t know, you understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

There wasn’t much else we could ask. Derek looked over the list of tong members, too, but didn’t recognize any of the names. Wayne finished in the kitchen and came into the living room, and the four of us talked for another couple of minutes. They both walked us to the front door. “You’ll let me know if you discover anything about my father’s murder?” Derek asked, and we both agreed.

* * *

“So what do we do next?” Akoni asked, as we rode down in the elevator.

“Maybe we need to think about the murder weapon,” I said. I thought back to the autopsy. “Doc’s best guess was something like a lead bar or pipe.”

“Where the hell do you get one of those in Waikīkī?”

Something was nagging at the back of my brain. I’d seen a bar like that only recently. Where had it been? Suddenly I remembered. “We are really lousy detectives,” I said. “Come on, if I’m wrong, I’m buying you dinner.”

“Duke’s Canoe Club,” Akoni said. “I’ve been wanting to go there.”

We grabbed sandwiches at a fast food place and ate in the car. We made a quick stop at the station so I could pick up an extra-large evidence bag, and we were at the Rod and Reel Club just after one. Arleen buzzed us in. “Hey, guys, what’s up?” she asked.

“My partner here’s had an inspiration,” Akoni said, as I walked around behind the door and kneeled to the floor. “But he’s been keeping me in the dark.”

I looked closely at the police lock, a long steel bar that rotated in a groove on the floor. No matter how well someone had tried to clean it up, I could still spot a couple of flecks of blood on it. “Our weapon,” I said, pointing it out to Akoni.

“Ick,” Arleen said. “I’ve been touching that bar since Tuesday.”

We carried the bar back to my truck, and then drove it over to the evidence lab at the main police headquarters. We ha
d
a pretty modern lab down there, in the special investigations section on the B1 level, along with a little mini-museum of how far crime detection equipment ha
d
come. They ha
d
ancient scientific equipment like a centrifuge, a spectroscope, and a compound microscope. Also an old ultraviolet lamp and an ancient fingerprint camera, and photos of old evidence types.

In the document lab, they analyze
d
stuff like typewriters, documents, footprints, and tire treads, as well as fingerprints. One of my favorite signs
was
down there, on the wall outside. It read, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”