rough part, and then swam back out for my board, floating on the tide. “Did you see, Mommy?” he called out as he ran up the beach. “I was surfing!”
“I saw,” Terri said.
She started to clean up the picnic things, but Danny was antsy and couldn’t sit still. “Tell you what, Terri,” I said. “Why don’t Danny and I take a little walk while you clean up?” I leaned down to Danny’s level. “You want to do that, champ? We can walk along the water line and see what else we can find for your collection.”
“Yeah,” he said eagerly, and he reached up for my hand. We started down the shore, looking out at Rabbit Island, and Danny pointed there and said, “My dad always promised to take me out there.” He looked down at the ground. “We never went.”
“I can take you out there sometime,” I said. He didn’t say anything, but held on tight to my hand. “Danny, what happened the day your Dad died?”
He was silent.
“It’s important,” I said. “Knowing would make your Mom feel a lot better.”
He stopped walking, and I sat down on a piece of rock and made a place next to me for him. He sat close to me and said, “I was taking a nap, and I heard these men yelling.”
Shit, I thought. “How many men?”
“Two.” He continued, in short phrases, as if he was building up his strength for each new clause. “I was scared… and then I heard this really loud noise… and, and then… I heard the men go out the door.” He stopped and took a big gulp of breath. “Then, then I went… to the door… of my dad’s study, and, and I looked in, and there he was.”
“So you never saw the men?” I asked. He shook his head. He didn’t say anything else for a while, and so we just sat there, me with my arm around him. He started to cry again, slowly and quietly. “It’s okay, Danny,” I said. “Nobody can hurt you anymore.”
He looked up at me. “That’s all I remember, until, until you came, to, to the house.”
I used the edge of my shirt to dry his eyes. We sat like that for a while, him against me, until I finally said, “What do you say we head back to your mom?” and he agreed, and I hoisted him up on my shoulders and we walked back to Terri.
It was just twilight when we got back to Wailupe, the sky shading between violet and black. The warm breeze coming through the windows of my truck moved the scent of salt water and coconut tanning oil lazily around us. Terri sent Danny inside and stood outside the truck, leaning in the window. “Thanks for today, Kimo. It was good for both of us.”
“Danny told me what happened the day Evan died,” I said. “He said two men came to the house and argued with his father. Then he heard a shot, and he heard the men leave.”
“So he didn’t commit suicide! I knew it!”
“Don’t jump ahead,” I said. “Evan might still have killed himself, he just might have done it in front of witnesses. Do you have any idea who the two men could be?”
She shook her head. I had an idea myself, but the implications were too scary to think about. Akoni and I had shown the photo of Evan to Derek and Wayne, and they’d indicated he was the cop on Tommy’s payroll. Suppose they had tracked him down?
But how could they have found him so quickly? We’d never identified him by name. I said, “The guy Evan mentioned in his letter, Tommy Pang. Did you ever meet him?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re sure? His wife’s name is Genevieve, and he has a son named Derek.”
“Wait a second. Derek Pang. I met him. He went to Punahou, you know, before Yale. When he got back to Honolulu he was looking for a job in a gallery, and he called up some Punahou alumni to see if anybody could help him. I met him for lunch one day and we talked about art and galleries and Punahou, of course. I gave him a couple of names but I never heard anything else.”
“Did he ever come to your house?”
“No.”
“Did he ever meet Evan?”
“I only saw him that time.” She paused. “I wonder if he knows Evan was my husband.”
He knew, I thought, because he’d seen the picture of Evan and Terri’s wedding. That was how Derek had been able to identify Evan so fast. While Akoni and I were back at the station getting our warrants in order, he and Wayne had come out to Wailupe and found Evan at home with his son. Their lucky day.
SETTING THE TRAP
I wanted to drive right to Derek and Wayne’s apartment and confront them. I paced around, fuming and raging vendettas of biblical proportions against them. But the truth was I had no real evidence that they’d had anything to do with Evan’s death, which Doc Takayama had ruled a suicide. Unless I could do something, that ruling would stand. Derek and Wayne must have thought Evan killed Tommy, then taken their own biblical-style revenge.
With Gunter’s help, I thought I could tie Derek and Wayne to the Bishop Museum thefts that Peggy was investigating, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to nail them. I wanted to prove that they had killed Evan.
There wasn’t going to be any physical evidence at the house. It had been a week, and no one had dusted the study or the rest of the house for fingerprints or searched for other evidence. There was no evidence linking Derek and Wayne to Evan other than the fact that they’d identified his picture.
What could I do to prove they were guilty? I knew in my heart that they were the two men Danny had heard yelling at his father. If I got pictures of them and their cars and canvassed the neighbors, maybe someone would remember seeing either of them around the Gonsalves house.
But that would only be circumstantial. What I really wanted was a confession. I wanted Derek or Wayne to admit they’d shot Evan. That didn’t seem likely, though.
Or was it? Maybe I was focusing too much on Derek and Wayne as a couple. Divide and conquer. I remembered the bartender at the Boardwalk telling me Wayne had a taste for Asian boys, that he trolled there by himself on occasion. Suppose I offered myself up as bait? I already knew he was attracted to me. Of course, I was attracted to him, too, which was a problem. Maybe I could get him in a situation where he had his pants off and his guard down.
The phone rang. It startled me, bringing me back down to earth. “Hey, brah, just checking in,” Harry said. “Howzit?”
“I’m glad you called,” I said. “I’ve got a lot to talk to you about.”
We met at a pizza place on Kuhio Avenue just after dark. It was just a hole in the wall, a half dozen linoleum-topped tables and a couple of tattered posters of the Italian Riviera on the walls, but the crust was thick and chewy and they topped it with about a pound of shredded cheese. They did a major take-out business, sometimes customers lined up out the door waiting patiently for their pies.
By then I had refined my plan. “I want to be wired up when I get together with Wayne, but I can’t go to Yumuri for the equipment,” I said, when Harry and I were sitting at a two-top in the front window. “You’re the electronics wizard. Can you rig something up for me?”
“I can put the stuff together, but you need a lot of equipment,” Harry said. The waitress came over and we ordered a large pizza with mushrooms and sausage and a couple of Cokes. “A lot of it’s specialized stuff. You can’t just walk into a store and buy it. Some things, I might have to mail order from the mainland. I mean, I could have it Fed Exed, but I still might not get it until the beginning of next week.”
“I don’t want to wait that long. I mean, I wish I could go over there right now.”
I forced myself to calm down and think things through. Okay, we needed electronic equipment. Where else could we get it? We could rent it. There had to be a place on the island that rented that kind of equipment, for movies or TV shows, for example. “Would a TV station have the kind of stuff you need?” I asked.
“Sure. I might have to do some jury-rigging, but they’d have most of the things-you’re going to ask your brother, aren’t you?”
