Mura. Maybe he could help me bring some measure of peace to Mura’s restless spirit.
The card was old and a little faded, but Thanh sat at the AFIS console and scanned it in. While I watched, the computer marked the minutiae points-the things that differentiate one print from another-and assigned each a weight. Then it went through its database looking for matches.
“What do you know.” He motioned me to look at the console. “See that? You’ve got a match.”
The system brought up a mug shot and arrest record for Edward Kapili Foster. He had been convicted of similar crimes around the same time as Patricia Mura’s murder, and had died at the Halawa Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison, a few years before.
Case cleared. I took the information in to Sampson, and he called it into a source at the paper he knew. “This doesn’t get you off the hook for Mura’s murder, though,” he said.
“I’m on it.” Back at my desk, the phone rang. It was Rory Yang, the sergeant in charge of the holding cells in the basement of the headquarters building. He asked, “Hey, Kimo, you know about that sweep last night in Waikiki?”
“Another one?” Vice had been cracking down on prostitutes and drug peddlers in anticipation of a big Shriners’ convention in a few days. The bad thing was that once they moved all the prostitutes and pushers out of Waikiki, they just moved into District 1.
“One of ‘em says he knows you.”
“Who?”
“Kid we picked up on solicitation. Name of James Wong.”
“James Wong.” I thought for a minute. “Jimmy Ah Wong?”
“Chinese kid about sixteen, blond hair in one of those funny stand-up cuts?”
“That’s him. I’ll come right down.”
My mind was racing ahead. The last time I’d seen Jimmy he was happy, going to the gay teen center in Waikiki and getting accustomed to being gay. But then I realized I had missed him at the teen center for the last few weeks.
I tracked down Rory Yang, a forty-something career sergeant with a round face and an unfortunate taste for malasadas, a kind of Portuguese donuts. He showed me Jimmy’s arrest record. Jimmy had no priors, and a preliminary drug screen had come up clean. Then Rory buzzed me through to the cell block, where I found Jimmy in a skin-tight T-shirt and a pair of torn cutoffs, sitting on a bunk. He was leaning back against the rough concrete wall, and his head was down between his knees. His effusive coxcomb of yellow hair, however, was a dead giveaway.
“Hey, Jimmy.”
His head came up. “They told me I could call someone, but I didn’t know who.” He looked anxious. “I hope it was okay. I’m not gonna get you in trouble, am I?”
“No. What happened?”
He looked away. “They picked me up on Kalakaua Avenue.”
“What were you doing there?”
“What do you think?”
“Does your father know?”
“He doesn’t give a shit.”
I leaned against the cell bars. “You want me to give him a call?”
“He won’t care. He kicked me out.”
“He did? When? Why?”
“About a month ago. I told that DA lady everything, all that stuff I told you, about having sex with Wayne and forging my dad’s name. He hit the roof and threw me out.”
“Where have you been living?”
“Around. I stayed with friends for a while, but then my dad stopped paying my tuition at Honolulu Christian, and since I wasn’t going to school nobody’s parents would let me stay there.”
It was a pattern I’d seen before. Gay teens get tossed out of their homes after they come out, and they end up on the street. “Are you clean?”
“I don’t do drugs, okay? I just do stuff to get some money to eat and all.”
“You want me to get you out of here?”
For the first time I saw something like a smile cross his face. “Can you?”
“I can try. You hang in there. I’ll come back when I know where you stand.”
Jimmy wasn’t the only teenager they’d picked up in the sweep, though he was the only boy. A caseworker from Social Services was already on the ground floor, talking to one of the girls. While I waited, I called Melvin Ah Wong at the pack and ship company he ran.
I didn’t get the reception I wanted.
“Why are you calling me?” he asked.
“You’re his father.”
“Not any more. I don’t want anything to do with him.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Melvin. He’s a minor. You’re his father. You can’t just abandon him.”
“He’s a mahu,” he said, and I could hear the venom in that one little word, Hawaiian for homosexual. I’d been called it myself more than a few times. “He’s no longer any son of mine.” And then he hung up.
The social worker was a pleasant, heavyset woman named Wilma Chow. I’d met her once or twice before but didn’t know her. After the teenage girl was escorted back to her cell, I walked into the little conference room Wilma was using as an office. She wore a shapeless white cardigan over a peach-colored silk blouse.
“Sorry, I haven’t gotten to his case yet,” she said, when I told her I wanted to talk about Jimmy Ah Wong. “Let me take a look at the file.”
She read for a moment, and then looked up. “You know him?”
I explained about Jimmy’s evidence, and that I felt responsible for him because I was the one who convinced him to talk. “What about the father?”
“He’s pissed off. Says he doesn’t want anything more to do with Jimmy.”
“I could get him out of here on his father’s say-so, since he’s clean and he doesn’t have any priors. But he’s only sixteen, so if the father doesn’t want him he becomes a ward of the state.”
The charms on her gold bracelet jingled as she flipped the pages in his report. “I have to find him placement somewhere, most likely in a group home. The prospects aren’t very good. He’ll have to stay here for a few more days, and then the group home won’t be much better. He’ll probably run away again as soon as he can.”
“There must be something else we can do.” I paused. “How about if I sign him out myself?”
“You can’t do that, detective. You don’t have any authority here.”
“How can I get myself appointed his guardian?”
She sat back. “I know you’re trying to help, but this isn’t the right way. No judge is going to release a gay teen to a gay man he hardly knows.” She held up her hand. “We have to pay attention to the way things look.” She checked the file again. “His hearing is this afternoon, four p.m. I can’t find him placement by then.”
“How about if I get somebody else to vouch for him. My parents, for instance.”
“It would be better if it was somebody not related to you. Somebody who can give him a home, put him back in school. You find me somebody like that, and I can work.”
I knew who I could call.
HELPING A BOY
Uncle Chin is not my uncle, but my godfather, and my father’s best friend. Because of that long-time relationship, I never spoke with Uncle Chin about what I knew were his impressive, if quiet, connections to the tongs, or Chinese gangs, on the island. I tried to avoid the topic with my father as well.
Uncle Chin had cancer now, and we feared that every hospital trip would be his last. He’d just come home from one stint, and I hoped he and Aunt Mei-Mei would be up to the favor I was about to ask of them.
I signed out on the Vice case and drove up to St. Louis Heights, the residential neighborhood above Honolulu
