“I recognize my own ass.”
“Maybe I should call my lawyer after all,” Lenny said.
“Suppose I get the DA’s office to promise we won’t prosecute you for posting the photos. In exchange for you telling us everything you know about Richard Hu.”
Lenny said, “In writing?”
“That’s the way they do it over there.”
“Can I think about it for a minute? I need to talk to Bette and Greta.”
Somehow it didn’t surprise me that Lenny’s closest associates were a pair of Pekingese. He went into his bedroom and closed the door behind him.
Ray turned to me. “He has pictures of you on his site?”
“From the back. Nothing anybody else could recognize.”
“So Lieutenant Sampson wouldn’t know it’s you?”
“Unless he’s seen my naked ass, which I know I’d remember.”
Ray looked toward the bedroom. “Awful quiet in there. You don’t think…”
“Shit.” We both jumped up and hurried over to the bedroom. I knocked on the door. “Lenny?”
I turned the knob, half expecting to see Lenny sprawled on the floor dead, the Pekingese already starting to nibble on him. But instead he was on his back on the bed, one dog on each side of him. My blood pressure slowed as he said, “All right. The girls think it’s a good idea.”
I called an assistant district attorney Ray and I often worked with, and briefed him on the situation. He agreed to put something in writing. “You have a fax here?” I asked Lenny. He gave me the number, which I passed on to the ADA.
While we waited for the fax to come through, Ray asked, “You know a guy named Stan LoCicero?”
“Yeah. He works for Richard.”
“Doing what?”
Lenny shrugged. “Whatever Richard tells him. Richard funds a business for him, too. Some kind of temp agency.”
“Mahalo Manpower,” Ray said.
“That’s it. I’ve only met him a couple of times. The dude’s kinky.”
We heard the phone ring, and the fax in the other room pick up. “How kinky is Stan?” I asked.
“Dude’s kind of a firebug,” Lenny said. “Likes to smoke cigars, you know? And sometimes he likes to burn guys.”
Lenny left us again, and I knew that we had our connection between Stan and the shopping center arson. If the law student could put Stan, a known firebug, across the street from the center at the time it burned, that meant there was a very good chance Stan was our arsonist, and responsible for Jingtao’s death.
When Lenny returned, he was carrying a sheaf of papers. The first page was on the district attorney’s office letterhead. Ray and I both read it.
“This is Richard’s list of everything in the private member directory,” Lenny said, when we looked up. “It tells you who’s who in the pictures.”
I scanned the list. Lucas’s name figured in many of the pictures, though there were different guys with him. I recognized some of the names-Brian Izumigawa, a dean at UH, and a member of the Honolulu City Council, among others.
“You know anything about blackmail?” I asked Lenny.
He shook his head. “If Richard’s blackmailing anybody, he never told me.”
“But you had to know something was up with all these pictures,” Ray said.
“Richard said the guys got a thrill from seeing themselves online. Like you, Kimo, you can’t see their faces. But they know it’s them.”
“Are there pictures where you can see their faces?” I asked.
“If there are, Richard never gave them to me.”
“Where does Richard live?” I asked. “In that house in Black Point?”
“As far as I know. He also has an office in St. Louis Heights, and an apartment in Kaka’ako. Some of the pictures were taken there.”
They were all addresses we knew. We quizzed Lenny for a while longer, but it was clear we’d gotten all we could out of him.
ENCOUNTERS OF THE SEXUAL KIND
We took the sheaf of papers back to the station, where we split the list in two and started investigating the names. As it got close to four o’clock, we tabled the research and get back to the offices of Mahalo Manpower. Ray wanted to show off his new ride, so we got into the Highlander and I kicked the seat as far back as it would go. “Any perps we pick up are going to have a field day in this mom-mobile,” I said. “Even got the video thing back there to keep them occupied. Got any cartoons on DVD?”
“As long as it’s clear I’m the dad and you’re the mom.”
“Hey there. I’m not into role-playing.”
“Too much information.”
“Just saying, is all.” Between construction on the H1 and a fender bender blocking one lane on North King Street, it took us longer than expected to get into position. I was pleased to see the black Mercedes still in the parking lot.
It was a ragged, industrial neighborhood, a lot of buildings with roll-down garage doors and little landscaping. Ray parked across from a convenience store and we sat back to wait. We didn’t have to wait long; Stan LoCicero came out about fifteen minutes later, got in the car, and drove off.
“Game on,” Ray said.
Stan followed North King to North Beretania and headed toward Waikiki. It was easy to keep him in sight in the rush-hour traffic, which was moving about as fast as a green sea turtle crawling on shore to lay her eggs.
When he turned onto Kalakaua, I said, “I’ll bet I know where he’s going. Drop me by the Rod and Reel Club. If he goes somewhere else, call me.”
Fred, the handsome, brainless bartender who normally worked the late shift, was behind the bar, and I flirted with him for a few minutes, my cell phone on vibrate in my pocket. The sound system was playing some old hapa- haole music for the tourist crowd, including an elderly man in an aloha shirt in a pattern of heart-shaped red anthurium flowers, and his wife, who wore a muumuu in matching fabric. Tiny fairy lights twinkled in the trees that lined the outdoor patio, and the occasional leaf fell from the trees above to the stone pavers.
“Hello, detective,” a voice said over my shoulder. “Can I buy you a drink?”
I turned to smile at Stan, holding up my Mehana Volcano Red Ale. “I’ve got one now, but maybe later. Who knows what the evening holds?”
“Who knows indeed,” Stan said, taking the stool next to me. His left leg slid next to my right one as he did.
“What brings you here this evening?” I asked.
“I was hoping to run into your friend Gunter. He called out sick today. Wanted to see if that was true.” He shrugged. “Guess it must be so.”
Good thing I had told Gunter to lay low. I’d have to call him and let him know Stan was on the prowl.
“You’re quite the public figure,” Stan said, taking a swig of the Longboard Lager Fred brought for him. “How is it for you, among your fellow officers? They accept you?”
“It’s been a tough road. But you know, cops are people just like everybody else. Some are okay, some aren’t.”
“Still, you must need to keep your nose clean. Can’t get into any scandal.”
I looked at him innocently. “What do you mean?”
The elderly man in the anthurium shirt got up to do a little hula dance, and his wife laughed and filmed him for the folks back home with a tiny hand-held camera.
