evening news on Lui’s station again, and saw a special report on a gay task force in a city on the East Coast. It was a mixture of straight and gay officers and detectives who investigated crimes against gays, patrolled gay neighborhoods, and gave lectures to the community on personal safety and community patrols. The report compared it to other units in communities with language or cultural barriers. “Our officers in Little Saigon speak Vietnamese,” one spokesman said. “In the gay community we have officers who are sensitive to residents’ concerns. It’s the same thing.”
It was an interesting idea. I yawned and went to bed. I woke early and went for a brief surf, which refreshed and energized me, and prepared me for all I had to do.
SOMEONE IS WATCHING
The next morning, Thursday, I stopped off at Harry’s apartment, where he had downloaded new copies of the photos of Derek and Wayne for me from the Yale website and printed them on his color printer. He wanted to come to Wailupe with me, but he had a class at UH to teach.
“I have to give a pop quiz this morning, which I already know is a bad idea. Then I’ll have twenty-five quizzes to correct.”
“What you need to do,” I said, “is give multiple choice tests. Then you just make a guide with the right answers on it, and stick it over the papers and then check, check, check, you’re done.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Wahine I dated once, teacher from Wisconsin,” I said. “She told me.”
“You dated a vahine from Visconsin?” he asked, giving both words the Hawaiian pronunciation.
I laughed and headed out the H1 toward Wailupe with the pictures and the Polaroids I’d taken of Derek’s and Wayne’s cars. I parked in Terri’s driveway and knocked on her door. Though it was still early, the sun shone strongly in a cloudless sky, and it was already getting hot.
Danny answered. “Kimo!” He put his arms around my leg.
Terri came up behind him. “I guess you can see he missed you. He kept asking me when you were coming back.” She sighed. “I still can’t get him to go back to school. Maybe next week.”
I leaned down and picked him up. “You missed me, huh? I wish I could be here more, pal, but I’ve got lots of stuff to do. I’ll come and see you as often as I can, okay?”
He nodded. I put him down and explained to Terri what I was going to do. “Why don’t I come with you?” she asked. “I know the neighbors, and they’re more likely to talk to you if I’m around.”
“I don’t know. They may feel awkward, seeing you, thinking Evan killed himself.”
“You’re not a cop anymore, Kimo. You don’t have any authority to go poking around out here. If I’m with you, nobody will complain.”
She made a quick phone call and arranged for Danny to go over to the next door neighbor’s. Unfortunately, the woman had been away the previous week, and couldn’t help us. Danny argued a little but I promised we would go surfing again, and he relented.
It was a mixed neighborhood, some stay-at-home moms and some working ones, and some older couples as well. We started to the left of Terri’s house and worked our way down the street, up and down driveways, past manicured lawns, basketball hoops, and sport fishing boats up on trailers, until we came to the Kalaniana’ole Highway. Then we crossed the street and started working our way back down. We didn’t have much luck until we came to an older house across from hers and two down.
An elderly woman answered the door. “Hello, Mrs. Ianello,” Terri said. “This is my friend Kimo. I wonder if we could ask you a couple of questions about last Friday?”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I saw all the police cars. I’m so sorry for you, dear.”
“Thank you,” Terri said, looking at the ground for a minute. She had perfected her response over the last week, driven by necessity and years of training to be a Clark, with all that entailed.
“Were you home that morning, ma’am?” I asked.
“I was,” Mrs. Ianello said. “Why don’t you come inside. I have some iced tea.”
“That would be nice,” Terri said. As the sun climbed the day had gotten hotter, and for a change there were no trade winds sweeping down her street from the ocean.
Mrs. Ianello was tiny and mouse-like, with short brown hair going gray and quick movements. As we walked into her living room I saw a comfortable arm chair positioned with a nice view of the front window. A good sign. She had a pair of small, expensive binoculars on the table next to the chair. An even better sign.
We sat in the living room and she brought us both tall glasses of iced tea with paper-thin lemon slices and long-handled spoons. Her furniture was very formal, some kind of French style, I think, tassels on the lampshades and fancy handles on drawers. “You mentioned you saw the police cars at the Gonsalves house that morning, ma’am,” I said, after taking a long sip of my tea. “Did you see anything happen before that?”
Terri and I sat side by side on the sofa, and Mrs. Ianello faced us from her armchair, sitting forward, her hands on her knees. She thought for a minute. “Let’s see, Thursday was garbage day. I always watch to make sure they take everything away.” She looked over at Terri. “You know, sometimes they leave a bag behind, or a bag comes open and they don’t pick everything up.”
Terri nodded encouragingly. “They probably came around seven,” Mrs. Ianello said. “Then I watched to make sure all the kids got on the school bus okay.” This time she looked at me. “You read about terrible things that happen to little children. I just want to do my part to help.”
“It’s very good of you,” I said.
She nodded approvingly. “I think so.” She put her index finger up to her mouth, then took it away. “Mrs. Yamanaka’s mother came to baby-sit while she went to the grocery. That was about ten. She came back around eleven-thirty, and I remember she had to drive very slowly down the street because there was a big black car in front of her cruising down the street slow, like they were looking for house numbers.”
A big black car, I thought. That sounded promising. “Mrs. Yamanaka has a tendency to drive a little too fast,” Mrs. Ianello said. “After all, this isn’t the Indianapolis 500 around here.”
I wanted her to get on with it, but it was clear there was no rushing her. She said, “The big black car stopped down the street, at the corner of Wailupe Circle. I thought it was funny that they parked there and then walked back up to your house, dear. I wondered why they didn’t just park in your driveway?”
“You said they, ma’am,” I said. “Could you describe the people who got out of the car?”
“Certainly. A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing shorts, with sandy blond hair, and a shorter man, Asian I think from his build, with black hair. He was dressed very nicely, like for business. I remember thinking maybe the Asian man was the boss and the other man was like a bodyguard.”
I could see Terri getting more and more upset. If I’d have been her, I’d have wanted to scream something like “You saw the men who killed my husband and you didn’t do anything?” but she seemed to be struggling for control.
“They went up to the front door, and then they went inside,” Mrs. Ianello continued. “I saw them leave about half an hour later, and then I went in and fixed myself some lunch, and then the next thing that happened was when several police cars pulled up.” She peered at me. “Are you a policeman?”
“I’m a detective, ma’am.”
“I thought so,” she said, nodding. “I thought I recognized you. I may be getting old but I still have my eyesight.”
And high-powered binoculars, I thought. I brought out the pictures of Wayne’s car, and of Wayne and Derek. “I don’t know much about cars,” she said. “I suppose it could have been this one. But I couldn’t be sure.”
She was even less help with the photos of Wayne and Derek. “I’m sorry, I didn’t really see their faces, just their general build. Without seeing them in person, I couldn’t really tell.” She looked at me somewhat eagerly. “Do you want me to come down to your station for a lineup?”
“We probably will, ma’am,” I said. “But we have more information to gather. We’ll be in touch with you.” We thanked Mrs. Ianello for the tea and stood up. It was a good start, I thought, and it placed Derek and Wayne at the scene. It wasn’t enough to make the case, but it was the first step.
No one else was home until we came to Mrs. Yamanaka, who was busy with twin girls, two years old. Her
