about us. A pool table opened up and we played, and then around midnight both of us started yawning and I drove us back to Waikiki.
“That was fun,” he said as I pulled up in front of his building.
“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it. I’ll tell you, it was a hell of a lot more fun going there with you than with Akoni.”
He laughed. “I doubt you’d kiss Akoni in public.”
It was my turn to laugh. “I think if I kissed Akoni, in public or in private, it would take him a minute to collect his wits, and then he’d give me a good roundhouse punch.”
“Well, I’ll never do that when you kiss me.” He leaned across then and we kissed for a long minute, and then he yawned again and said, “Work in the morning. See ya.”
LUCKY LOU
The next morning I surfed for a half hour or so, just long enough to get my juices running, and was at my computer a few minutes before eight, trying to organize my thoughts. Akoni came in with a cup of coffee and I said, “You didn’t bring one for me?”
“Hey, you were here first. You could have had coffee for me.” He sat down in his chair and turned around to face my desk. I told him what I’d discovered at the Boardwalk, that Derek and Wayne couldn’t have been there. “That means Wayne was lying,” I said. “Derek said they went up to Mount Tantalus and parked.”
Akoni sat back in his chair. “What do you think really happened?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that it matters. Derek and Wayne couldn’t stay at the Rod and Reel because they didn’t want Tommy to know about them. So they left. Tommy must have gone back to the club after his date with Treasure, where he met up with the cop, who was probably there to get a payoff for tipping Tommy about the bust earlier that night.”
“They argued?”
“Must have. Maybe Tommy didn’t want to pay, they got into a scuffle, the cop whacked him over the head.”
Akoni and I looked at each other for a while. In the background we heard the radio crackle with beat cops checking out license plates and driver records. The 6-1 officer was checking “Golf, Bravo, Golf, 343,” and the dispatcher told him it was a 1998 red Mazda Miata, and gave him the registration information. They checked the driver and made sure he had no outstanding warrants.
Finally, the phone rang and I answered. “Really,” I said. “Cool. Keep it in the back; we’ll be out to see you.”
“That was Lucky Lou.” He ran a pawnshop out by the Aloha Bowl, and he was responding to a list of Tommy Pang’s jewelry we’d circulated around the city. “He thinks he’s got Tommy’s watch.”
“Looks like we get to get out of here.” Akoni stood up. “You want some lunch? We could hit Zippy’s,” he said, and it was almost like having my partner back.
Lucky Lou’s pawn shop was located in an industrial neighborhood out by the Aloha Stadium just beyond Pearl Harbor, not far from the Boardwalk. We took the H1 Ewa, found ourselves a Zippy’s, and ordered our burgers.
“Who do you think pawned the watch?” I asked, when we’d given in our orders.
Akoni shrugged. “The murderer?”
“Good a guess as any,” I said, as the clerk brought our burgers out to the window. “No way we’re going to get prints, but maybe they’ve got video surveillance.”
Akoni laughed. “If the camera works.” We ate, Akoni telling me about how Mealoha had dragged him out to an outlet mall in Waipahu, about fifteen miles west of Honolulu.
Lucky Lou ran a tourist trap operation out front, catching visitors on their way to Pearl Harbor with counterfeit Guccis and Cartiers, and rows of shiny gold chains that would turn your neck green about a day after you got home from your vacation. Around the back, there’s another entrance for the pawn shop, and that’s the one we took.
Lucky Lou was about three hundred pounds and balding, a crabby New Jersey transplant. “Hey, Lou,” I said, making my way past racks of nearly new guitars, stereo equipment that would probably be warm to the touch, and cameras soldiers from Schofield Barracks pawned to pay for cootchie-cootchie girls and their tender ministrations. “Let’s see that watch you got.”
He pulled out a tray. It was a Rolex like the one Genevieve Pang had described for us, engraved with “Tommy” on the back in fancy script, next to a couple of Chinese characters which I knew meant luck. I guessed Tommy’s luck had run out.
“The guy bring anything else in at the same time?” Akoni asked.
Lucky Lou grimaced. “I knew you were going to ask that,” he said. He pulled out another tray, and there were the diamond rings and gold and diamond bracelet Tommy’d also been wearing. “You know we’re going to have to pull this in,” I said.
“This gives me a credit, right?” Lou asked. “I get in any trouble, you vouch for me?”
“That depends,” Akoni said. “You murder your wife, we can’t do a thing for you. Parking ticket, that’s another story.”
“You know what I mean,” Lou said.
“Yeah, Lou, we’ll be a character reference for you.” I wrote him up a voucher for the watch, the rings and the bracelet. After the investigation was over, it would all go back to Genevieve Pang, and she could decide what she wanted to do with it.
“So, Lou,” Akoni said. “Your cameras working all right?”
“One step ahead of you,” Lou said. “I already checked. The guy was smart, kept his head down the whole time he was here.”
“And you didn’t suspect a thing,” I said.
He shrugged. “I got a lot of customers don’t want to get recognized,” he said. “You’re out pawning your mom’s engagement ring so you can buy crack, you really want your picture taken?”
“So what you’re saying is you got nothing for us,” Akoni said.
“One t’ing,” Lou said. “The guy was packing. He shifted his feet, his jacket came open a little, I saw the holster.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You think the guy might have been a cop.”
“You know him?” Lou asked.
I shook my head. “You got a description?”
“Haole guy,” he said. “Maybe late twenties, early thirties. Good build, not fat or scrawny. Dark hair, wedding ring. That’s about all I noticed.”
“You noticed the wedding ring?” Akoni asked. “What, you thinking about asking the guy out?”
“My line of work, I see a lot of guys pawning jewelry, all right?” Lou said. “Lots a times, it’s the wife’s. I got in the habit of looking for wedding rings. Sometimes I mention it, the guy’s willing to pop it off and add it to the stash, he’s desperate enough.”
We bagged the jewelry and left the pawn shop. “You want to see if we can connect with Derek Pang?” I asked. “Get him to ID the jewelry, confront him and Wayne about their stories?”
“We could do that,” Akoni said.
I checked my notes, dialed up Derek Pang’s home number. Surprise, surprise, he answered. He and Wayne were going out soon, but we could stop by on our way back to the station.
The day had not yet cooled down even though there was a light trade wind blowing. The mountains around us shone green in the mellow light, and heat seemed to rise up in waves from the steaming black pavement around us. I thought about haole cops who had connections to the case, and my thoughts kept coming back to Evan Gonsalves.
FOOLING AROUND ON TANTALUS
