Sandra over my back. I guess I must have blushed.
“Hey everybody, Kimo big hero!” she said to the restaurant at large. There were about twenty people there, mostly Midwesterners on package tours, and a few of them looked up with mild interest. “He save lady from big fire last night.”
There was some slight applause. “Come on, Connie,” I said. She wouldn’t take money for my breakfast, just handed me a tray and waved me through. I walked all around both steam tables, loading up on bacon, eggs and sausages. It was going to be a long day and I wasn’t sure I’d get any lunch at all, maybe not even dinner.
When I’d finally piled as much food on my tray as possible I walked over to the long counter that faces the water. I laid the paper down face up and put my tray next to it. Just then one of the Midwestern couples, an elderly pair in matching aloha shirts, blue pineapples against a purple backdrop, came up to me. “You did a good thing, son,” the man said. He reached out to shake my hand.
“I knew she was inside,” I said. “I didn’t think about it.”
“We’d be proud to have police officers like you back home,” his wife said. “You just hold your head up high and don’t listen to anything bad anybody says about you, all right?”
I didn’t quite understand what she meant, but I nodded anyway. “I will. Thank you.”
“Enjoy your breakfast,” the man said, and they left. I was puzzling over his wife’s comments when I opened the paper and saw the headline, in big hundred-point type, just below the fold. “Gay cop saves woman at gay marriage party,” it read.
Oh, God. It was starting again.
THE LOOK ON HIS FACE
I took a cab to the garage where I’d parked the night before, ransomed my truck, and was at my desk by seven-thirty, staring at a pile of paperwork. Steve Hart had left me a detailed account of everything he’d done, as well as all the witness interviews collected by the uniforms the night before.
I’ve never been a big paperwork cop. When I worked on Waikiki, my partner, Akoni, and I used to alternate filling out the endless forms required by the department. I like to be out on the street, talking to people, gathering information, making my own judgments. But without a partner, there was nobody to push this mound of paper off on.
Regretfully, I moved Hiroshi Mura’s murder to my pile of unsolved cases, and buried myself in paperwork regarding the bombing, reading endless variations on how no one saw or heard anything. I looked up around nine only to see Lieutenant Sampson coming my way. “Have you seen the circus outside?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I got here pretty early.”
“The pressure is already building, Kimo. What have you got so far?”
I looked at him. It was barely nine o’clock in the morning. What did he expect me to have, the bomber on a silver platter? I told him about walking the fire with Mike Riccardi, the cooperation with ATF, the ideas we had on the bomb and the amateur nature of the crime. I told him there was nothing much in the witness statements but I would continue to go through them.
“One thing, I’m wondering if this is tied to the arsons lately. I’m going to get with the fire investigator again, see if he’s found any connections. A couple of the places that burned were gay businesses, so they could have been done by the same people.”
“Solve this one, Kimo,” he said as he walked away. “Solve this one fast, or it’s both our asses on the line.”
“Yes, sir,” I muttered. I called for one of the department sketch artists, and a little later a guy came up to my desk so I could try to recreate the sweaty guy’s face. I didn’t do a very good job of it; after all, I’d only seen the guy in passing, and it was just because he seemed familiar that I paid any attention at all.
The morning crawled by. I left a message for Mike Riccardi, asking if he thought the bombing was related to the other gay arsons. I read eyewitness reports in between reviewing the artist’s sketch, dodging calls from the press, and searching for past crimes that might be similar. By noon I was antsy to get away from my desk, to feel like I was actually doing something. I decided to walk over to The Queen’s Medical Center, check on my dad, and see if anybody there could help me.
At the front desk I found out that Robert and Gunter were sharing a room, down the hall from Sandra Guarino. The clerk gave me a funny, knowing look, and I remembered what it had been like before, when it seemed everybody in Honolulu was looking at me, puzzling over the details of my private life.
Robert was asleep in the bed by the window when I walked into the room, but Gunter was awake. He looked funny against the white sheets, his dark blond hair so short it was barely there. The stubble on his chin was the same color, and almost as long. The pale green hospital gown definitely wasn’t his color.
I remembered that I still had his bow tie, and I told him. “You can keep it for a while,” he said. “Though I’ll have to teach you how to tie it.”
“You’ll have to do that.” I sat on the side of his bed. “How are you doing?”
He shrugged. “Not too bad. I’ve got some second degree burns on my arms and legs.” He coughed. “Some smoke inhalation, too, they said. But I’ll probably get out of here today.”
“You have somebody to stay with you at home?”
He smiled. “Baby, I’ve always got somebody to stay with me.”
“So you know what happened, right? Somebody planted a bomb in the men’s room.”
“I read the morning paper, Mr. Hero. I notice that even though I carried Robert over there out of the fire, I didn’t get my picture on the front page.”
“Believe me, I wish it had been you rather than me. Did you see anything suspicious, any time during the party? Anybody who looked like they didn’t belong?”
“You mean somebody who might have planted a bomb?” He paused, playing with a loose thread on his hospital gown. “Well, there was this one guy I remember.” I must have smiled, because he said, “Don’t look like that. I remember guys for more than one reason. I mean, one reason the most, but I can think about things besides sex.” I grinned even more and he said, “If you don’t want to hear this you can just go on back to your police station.”
“I want to hear it, Gunter. I’ll be serious.”
“Yeah, right. Just before the speaker started, I helped Robert carry some plants in from the lanai, and I needed to wash my hands. I went into the restroom, and when I came out, there was a line, a couple of people wanting to get things taken care of before they sat down.”
He coughed a little, and I felt like a jackass pressuring him to remember and talk when he was in the hospital. But there was no way around it. Once he’d gotten his breath back, he continued.
“There was this guy at the very end of the line,” Gunter said. “He was all sweaty, his hair plastered down over his head, looking like he was going to be sick. But when Charlie Stahl tried to get behind him, the guy insisted that Stahl go first.”
He took a little sip of water. “That was when I got a good look at his face. I see it sometimes on guys at the Rod and Reel Club. You, maybe, that first night I saw you. This look that says you want so much to be a part of what’s going on but you’re dead scared.”
“So you’re saying this guy was gay.”
“I don’t know for certain. Curious, absolutely. But you know how these bi guys are. They’re on a seesaw, one day it’s boys, one day it’s girls, up and down, up and down. Never make up their mind.”
“Do you think you’d recognize him if you saw him again?”
He frowned. “Not sure. The look, I’d recognize the look again. I could give you a general description of him. I can tell you one thing-I’d bet you a blow job he was wearing a rented tuxedo.”
“That’s a bet you can’t lose, either way. What makes you think so?”
“Darling, I know how clothes are supposed to fit. If he owned that tux then the store that sold it to him ought to be fire-bombed.” He suddenly realized what he had said. “Oh, well, that’s an expression I’m going to have to retire.”
“I’ll send over a police artist this afternoon. I think I saw a guy like the one you’re describing; we’ll see if your
