“He told you all this?” Kee asked.
“We met up yesterday afternoon and I got him to open up.”
“This needs some delicacy,” Kee said. “You want to run this? Keep it quiet that way.”
“If you want.” Good. There was little chance that the story would spread around the department if I was in charge.
“I’ll clear it with your boss. Get back in touch with this guy. Tell him not to do anything until they contact him again. In the meantime, see what you can run down on this Hu guy.”
I dropped the note off for fingerprint processing, taking a photocopy back upstairs with me, and filled Ray in on the case, leaving out my personal involvement. I checked the property records for the mansion in Black Point where Brian and I had been fixed up. It was owned by a corporation, of course. I put in another call to Ricky Koele.
“You’re turning into my new best friend,” he said. “Pretty soon we’ll be surfing together.”
“You get a lead on some good waves, you let me know.” I gave him the name of the corporation that owned the mansion, and a few minutes later he was back on the line.
“It’s a shell,” he said. “The stockholders are another corporation out of Hong Kong. Wah Shing Ltd.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?” I asked him.
“Hold on. Let me do a cross-reference search.”
He was back on the line a couple of minutes later. “You won’t believe it. Remember that acupuncture clinic you called me about last week? Golden Needles? Wah Shing was their corporate parent.”
“No shit? Or should I say no Shing?”
“Call if you need anything else,” Ricky said.
After I hung up, I sat there staring into space. It was too weird that this random trick and his blackmail case had somehow become connected to our arson homicide. A million things were running through my head, not the least of which was how I was going to come out of all this with my secrets intact.
I didn’t realize Ray had been talking to me until he was waving his hand in my face and saying, “Earth to Kimo.”
I told Ray about meeting Brian Izumigawa and the blackmail attempt. I showed him the picture, too, and he didn’t recognize me-though there was no reason why he should have. “You’re sure this isn’t just some random shot from a porn movie?”
“Very. But here’s the weird part. The same corporation was behind the lease on the acupuncture clinic and the house where this was taken.”
“Whoa. What do you think that means?”
I looked at Ray. I liked him, and we worked well together. We’d shared bits and pieces of our personal lives as we got to know each other better. I knew about the money problems he and Julie were having, the way they argued sometimes about them. He knew about my complicated history with Mike Riccardi. But this was bigger. It was time to see if I could trust my partner.
“Let’s head over to Norma’s,” I said. “I’ve got some stuff to tell you.”
As detectives, Ray and I can either use personal vehicles for police business, or sign out an unmarked Crown Vic from the Vehicle Maintenance Section. Call me fussy, but if I’m going to feel something sticky on the seat or the dash, I want to have a general idea what it is. If there’s a funny smell in the car, I want it to be one of my funny smells. And I don’t want to have to worry about whether the last guy to drive it did something that’s going to cause me a problem.
So I was reluctant to take a car out, and Ray was willing to drive us into Chinatown in Julie’s Mini Cooper. Which put us on the road in a vehicle that didn’t say, “We are the police. Fear us.” But it had to do in a pinch.
There were big, puffy clouds outside, and a restless wind shook the kukui trees along South Beretania Avenue as Ray drove us. “I told you about how I broke up with Mike, right? About a year ago? After that, I started getting into this web site called MenSayHi. com, a hookup site. Through it, I met this older guy, Chinese. I always called him Mr. Hu. He got off on choreographing these scenarios for me. He’d pair me up with guys, for whatever reason in his head, and then sometimes he’d watch, and sometimes he’d participate.”
“Did you meet him up at that house?” Ray asked. “The one where the blackmail guy went?”
“Yup.”
Ray looked over at me. “Shit. Is that you in the picture with him?”
“Yup.”
“And you complain about me and one-word answers.” Ray pulled the car over a couple of blocks from Norma’s. “Tell me the whole story.”
I took a deep breath. “There isn’t much more to say. I didn’t know who Brian Izumigawa was, and I didn’t know we were being filmed.”
“You cannot tell anyone else that’s you in the picture, Kimo.” He looked back at the street ahead of him. “You do, and they pull you off the case, and your name goes down the drain. I’ve seen that happen. You’re too good a cop to lose that way.”
“Thanks.” I felt a little better, knowing Ray was on my side. “But I have to say, I don’t know what to do.”
Ray looked out at the street, then turned back into traffic. “Right now, we go see Norma. If she worked for your Mr. Hu, maybe she can help us find him. Then we get both cases wrapped up fast.”
Norma Ching lived in a run-down high-rise just off Hotel Street, which had once been the center of Honolulu’s red light district. I’d heard stories about the brothels there during the second world war, when there were nearly 150 of them within a few blocks, servicing the servicemen.
Now, though, it’s just another neighborhood. A lei stall was already open across the street, the beautiful colors and pungent scents a dramatic contrast to the shuttered storefronts around it. The only other business open was a Chinese grocery, and as we passed I looked in the window and saw a familiar face.
“Hey, Melvin, how you doing?” I asked, walking inside to the aroma of barbecued pork and roast duck. The shelves were lined with canisters of salty dried plums and apricots, tapioca pearls, and shrink-wrapped mushrooms. Chinese characters decorated bottles of vinegar and soy sauce. A couple of dusty red paper lanterns hung from the ceiling.
“Detective.”
Melvin Ah Wong was Jimmy’s father, if you could still call him that. He’d kicked the boy out at sixteen, when he discovered his son was gay. I introduced him to Ray, then said, “You seen your son lately?”
“My son is dead.”
“Your son is very much alive, Melvin. He’s at UH now, you know that? Looks happy, got lots of friends. You’d be proud of him.”
“My son is dead, detective,” Melvin said, and he walked past us.
“I always admire your people skills,” Ray said, as he paid the shopkeeper for a package of salty dried plums.
“The guy’s lucky I don’t knock him out,” I grumbled.
We walked over to Norma’s building and took the elevator up to the tenth floor. We knocked on the door of 10-F and a moment later Norma opened it.
I wasn’t sure I’d have recognized her on the street. Her white hair was wild and uncombed, and she wore a black cotton dressing gown hastily tied. I introduced myself and Ray.
“I’m not dressed for gentlemen callers,” she said, smiling coyly. She was missing her front teeth and her smile reminded me of a Halloween pumpkin.
There was just a trace of a Chinese accent. She smiled flirtatiously at Ray. “Will you come in and give me a few minutes to fix myself up?”
We sat in her black lacquer living room, and all the hothouse plants reminded me of Uncle Chin’s lanai, where he had spent much of his last years surrounded by flowers and birds. A glass etagere along one wall was cluttered with dragon figurines, bonsai trees, and a pile of round coins with a square cut out of the center-I Ching charms. A rice paper scroll hung on the wall with a bunch of characters signifying good fortune. I recognized love, peace, and harmony, among others. Through the doorway into the kitchen I saw a Buddha kitchen god and a Chinese calendar.
Ten minutes passed, and when Norma reappeared from the bedroom she was a different person. She’d put
