He’d brought takeout from Raimundo’s, the Italian restaurant where we’d had our first date-a family-sized platter of chicken parmigiana, garlic knots, a vat of salad drenched in oil and vinegar. We carried it all upstairs and laid it out on my kitchen table, then dug in.
I remembered when we’d eaten at the restaurant, and how we’d shared a bottle of red wine. Would we never be able to do that again? Would he have to avoid wine and beer, and would I always be watching to see that he did?
“So what have you got?” I asked him, spearing some of the lettuce and a couple of croutons.
“Nothing much. Like I said before, the guy was a pro, whoever he was. No trace evidence, just that piece of potato chip bag you found.” He ate some salad and then broke apart one of the garlic knots. “Unfortunately, a lot of guys use chips that way. So it’s not much of a lead.”
I told him about the UH student, and he pulled out his battered steno pad and made a couple of notes. “Think the guy could pull someone out of a lineup?”
I shook my head. “It was dark, and his mind was on getting back to his wife without getting caught. I don’t think he got much of a look at the guy. Couldn’t say more about the car other than it looked like a BMW or a Mercedes.”
“So we have nothing?”
“Well, we might have something.” I told him about Norma Ching, and that the prostitution at the acupuncture clinic was connected both to the lingerie store in Chinatown and the massage parlor in Waikele.
Mike whistled. “That is a lead. I’ll look at those fires again. Maybe there’s something in one of them that would tie us to a particular arsonist.” He started cutting into the chicken. “You ought to talk to Vice, too.”
“Well, actually…” I hesitated. Mike and I were delicately moving toward starting something up again, and I didn’t want my past mistakes to screw that up.
I sighed. “This guy came to me yesterday. A guy I had sex with, a few months ago. We didn’t know it, but we were videotaped, and he’s being blackmailed. I went down to talk to Vice about it, and Ray and I did a little investigating. Turns out the house where I went for sex is owned by the company that leased the acupuncture clinic.”
“Hold on-you were videotaped? Have you seen the tape?” He smiled. “Can I?”
I kicked him under the table. “I haven’t seen the tape. The blackmailers sent the guy a still from the video. All you can see is my back.” I paused. “There’s more.”
“More?”
“Remember what I told you yesterday afternoon? About some of the stuff I got into?” He nodded. “One of the guys Mr. Hu hooked me up with was a hustler. He cuffed me to the wall and paid the guy to fuck me until I bled.”
“Ow.”
“Yeah, that’s a good word for it. But that was the last straw. I stopped going up there after that. The hustler got picked up on a drug bust, though, and gave my name to Vice.”
“What does that mean for you?”
I shrugged. “I told the lieutenant that I’d had sex with the guy, but I hadn’t paid for it. The guy disappeared, so they never got anything more out of him. But I have to look for him, see if he has a way to get to Mr. Hu.”
“I don’t think you should be on this case,” Mike said, putting down his fork. “You’re too connected. From your dad owning the shopping center, to having sex with all these different guys. You need to tell your lieutenant and let someone else handle it.”
“Yeah, and then the whole department finds out what I was up to,” I said. “No way. Listen, it’s not a big deal. I’ll work it all out.”
It was clear that Mike thought it was a big deal, though, and I thought that was both sweet and a little too forward. Yeah, maybe we’d get together again at some point-but he had no say over my life until then.
My cell phone rang, and from the display I saw that it was Terri. Our friendship, strong since high school, had faded a bit as I got caught up in my problems and she recovered from her husband’s death and took over her family’s foundation, the Sandwich Islands Trust. She’d been in Philadelphia all summer with her sister, and it seemed that all we did was talk on the phone once in a while.
“I need to answer this,” I said to Mike. “Sorry.”
He held up a hand and went back to eating.
“I have somebody I want you to meet,” Terri said. “His name’s Levi. I’m hoping you can have dinner with us on Saturday night.”
“Dinner Saturday night?” I said. Mike looked up. “Gosh, let me check my social calendar.” I pretended to page through a book, and Mike smiled. “Looks like Saturday is free.”
I don’t know why, but I asked, “Can I bring someone?”
Terri said, “Of course.”
“You want to come to dinner on Saturday with Terri and meet her new boyfriend?” I asked Mike.
A grin spread across his face. “That’d be nice.”
“Count us both in-me and Mike. Call me Friday and tell me where and when.” I hung up before she could pepper me with a million questions.
Mike said, “We could make a habit of this dinner thing.”
“We could. We’ll see how things go.”
He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to make a meeting at eight thirty.”
“What, no dessert?”
“We could both do without dessert,” Mike said, patting my stomach.
“Hey, watch it, bud,” I said, standing up and pulling up my shirt to expose my abs. Looking down, though, I could see they weren’t quite as good as they’d been in the past, and I let the shirt drop.
“Exactly,” Mike said.
“You saw mine. Let me see yours.”
He stood up, a sly grin on his face. He was wearing a light blue chambray button-down shirt, and he began unbuttoning the buttons one at a time, swaying ever so slightly to an unheard rhythm. I laughed and said, “You can skip the striptease,” but he wouldn’t stop.
When he had the shirt completely unbuttoned, he flipped open one side, then the other, tantalizing me with glimpses of his erect nipples, his hairy chest, the waistband of his shorts. “Just want you to see what you’ve been missing,” he said.
I reached over and poked him in the stomach. “I see where all that beer’s been going.” There was a band of fat just above his waist that hadn’t been there the year before.
He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward him. We kissed, and there was so much passion between us that my dick got hard and my pulse began racing.
Then Mike pulled away. “Like I said, got a meeting. You get to clean up.”
He walked to the door, his shirt still open. “See you later, handsome,” he said, and then the door closed behind him.
I took a deep breath. It was the same story for me, my hormones getting ahead of my brain. When I was I going to be able to change that behavior?
I slid a slack key guitar CD in the stereo, then I cleaned up the dishes and turned on my computer. I’d first come across Mr. Hu on MenSayHi. com; maybe I could still find him through there.
After my brothers and Harry took me surfing, I put my MenSayHi account on hold, but I reactivated it now and started looking through the profiles, trying to see if Mr. Hu was listed, or if there was anyone online who might know him.
It didn’t take long for the messages to start coming in. I sat there in my boxers, drinking the Longboard Lager I hadn’t been willing to open when Mike was there, and tried to figure out which of the offers might be from Mr. Hu.
It was exercise in both eroticism and frustration. I didn’t want to get my rocks off-I wanted to catch a criminal. But I couldn’t help getting turned on by some of the messages. Nothing came in from Mr. Hu. Just a lot of horny guys looking for cybersex or a real-time hookup. Feeling no closer to finding Jingtao’s killer, or whoever was blackmailing Brian Izumigawa, I gave up around eleven, turned the computer off, and went to sleep.
