“No problem. I’ll do that. Why don’t you check in with Treasure?”
The time ticked by. It was a lot less fun than you’d think, looking over all the picture sets and trying to figure out who was the target and who else was involved. Lucas was in many of the shots, but there were also a lot of unnamed guys. Some looked Chinese, some Filipino, a couple Indonesian. Whether they were hookers or escorts or illegal immigrants was impossible to tell.
The only common denominator was that they were all male. Some displayed fetishes-diapers, urine, and kinky toys. Others were just vanilla sex. My shots, from the rear, were among the most ordinary.
Ray spoke to Treasure, and she admitted knowing Stan LoCicero. She said she thought Stan was creepy. Unfortunately, creepy was not against the law in Hawai’i.
I called Mike and brought him up to speed. “Stan sounds like a good candidate for the arsons,” he said. “We can get a warrant for his house if you get something useful on that tape.”
After scouring the Internet and police records, I found decent head shots of Richard Hu and Stan LoCicero, and put together a pair of photo arrays of guys who looked similar to them.
At three o’clock, Haoa and his superintendent, Naleo, showed up with a half-dozen Chinese men. Naleo was a Hawaiian bodybuilder, mid to late twenties, with some kind of inscription tattooed on his neck. He wore the Kanapa’aka Landscaping polo shirt, which clung to him in places that made me miss Mike Riccardi. He didn’t look happy to be in a police station, but maybe he was just nervous he’d get implicated in something.
Harry brought Aunt Mei-Mei, who had dressed up for the occasion in a bright blue pants suit with a blue- and-white striped blouse. She looked like she was going out for a ladies’ lunch with my mother. Maybe they’d meet up after my mother was done protesting outside the federal building.
Naleo brought the men into our conference room one by one. The first guy, Long, was tall and good-looking, with a shaved head and a big chest. I was pretty sure I recognized him from a couple of the pictures. He spoke a dialect that only Aunt Mei-Mei could comprehend. “Too bad Norma not here,” she said to me. “She speak like him.”
Long knew he was going back to China, and he wasn’t happy. There wasn’t much I could offer him without Frank O’Connor’s approval, so I brought my laptop in and logged onto the MenSayHi Web site.
It took me a few minutes to find the right pictures. Long, naked, stood over a nude haole man in a bathtub, a stream of urine flowing out of his fat dick, which was certainly long. The picture had been taken from the side, showing Long in profile, the haole full face. I’d identified him as an attorney with a prominent law firm that handled corporate litigation.
“Is this you?” I asked, showing Long the image on the laptop.
His face gave him away, though he didn’t say anything.
“Too bad,” I said. “If this was you, we might be able to help you.”
Aunt Mei-Mei didn’t see the picture, but I knew she had an idea what was going on. She translated, and Long looked interested.
“See, we want to get the guy who hired the men in these pictures,” I said. “If you help us arrest him we can’t send you back to China, at least not until after the trial is over. And after that, who knows?”
I could see the emotions warring in Long’s face. He didn’t want to admit that it was him in the photo. Maybe he was ashamed, or maybe he knew what he’d done was illegal. But he was smart enough to realize that this might be his ticket to stay in the U.S.
He said something in his guttural dialect, which Aunt Mei-Mei translated. “He says yes, this is him.”
In bits and pieces, we learned his story. He had been recruited in Gansu. He did not like having sex with men, but he needed money for his wife and family back in China. He had worked at the massage parlor in Waikele for about six months, and then at a series of manual jobs.
I showed him the array of photos that included Stan LoCicero. He didn’t recognize anyone. Then I showed him the array with Richard Hu, and Long said Mr. Hu had picked him up at the airport-he was the man who had brought him to the massage parlor. Long was very excited, chattering on so fast that Aunt Mei-Mei had to stop him several times so she could catch up.
It was good news for Frank O’Connor, but not for us, because Long couldn’t implicate Stan LoCicero in anything. I stopped the tape, thanked Long, and then turned him over to a federal marshal, who would see that he didn’t disappear until his role in Mr. Hu’s case was over and his immigration status resolved.
Harry translated for four of the remaining five, Aunt Mei-Mei the last. They all told variations of the same story and could only implicate Mr. Hu, not Stan. After the marshals had taken away all six, Harry said, “I have some stuff for you on Stan LoCicero. You got a computer I can hook up to?”
He plugged a little USB drive into my computer and started printing, while Aunt Mei-Mei sat at the big table, her hands resting on the wood in front of her, like a little blue bird.
“Arrest records from New Jersey, Illinois, and Nevada,” Harry said, as the aged printer started spitting out paper. “A couple for arson, a couple for petty theft, one for indecent exposure.”
“Stan’s been a busy guy,” I said, pulling the first pages off. Ray and I started reading. I didn’t ask how Harry got hold of some of this stuff, but after all, he was a police consultant. For all I knew he’d found a legal way to access the documents based on that. Or at least I hoped so.
Back in Jersey, Stan had been a breeder of Siberian Huskies. He worked in maintenance, security, and as a motorcycle mechanic. Harry found the incorporation papers for Mahalo Manpower, which indicated that Stan owned a 25 percent share in the business; the rest was owned by Wah Shing.
Unfortunately, there was nothing in Stan’s record that we could take to a judge. Yes, there was a connection between him and the management of the acupuncture clinic, and yes, he had a record for arson. But a judge would see that as purely circumstantial. We still needed Sergei to get Stan on tape.
INCIDENT AT THE ROD AND REEL
I spoke to Mike during the afternoon, telling him our plans. “You need anything from me?” he asked.
“Nope. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Walking back into the federal building, Ray and I saw the debris from the demonstration everywhere- crumpled flyers, crushed leis, and a lot of empty plastic water bottles. The wind had picked up, stirring the trash along the street and adding to my nerves. I was worried about the evening; Sergei was a certified fuckup, and I didn’t trust Stan LoCicero.
I was relieved to see that Sergei was there and ready to go. He’d had a serious conversation with his sister, and he recognized that he didn’t have any other options beyond cooperation. He was also pretty familiar with the process of getting wired up. I guess he’d been in trouble enough in Alaska to know the drill.
He and Ray went over their story a few times, getting the details straight. “Remember, we need something on the wire that shows that LoCicero knows these guys are illegal,” Frank said. “You’ve got to pin him down.”
“Leave that to me,” Ray said.
Sergei rode with Ray in the Highlander, and I drove the Wrangler home, then walked over to the club to join Frank in a surveillance van. Darkness was falling, but Kuhio Avenue hummed with traffic, and a young guy in a straw hat strummed a ukulele for the tourists, who dropped tips in a cup. A group of Japanese sightseers, led by a middle-aged woman waving a small rising sun flag, passed us, eagerly pointing and snapping pictures of an old Hawaiian woman in a yellow muumuu.
A few minutes before six, Ray and Sergei came into sight, walking down Kuhio Avenue toward the Rod and Reel Club. Frank had just made a note in his record when I heard the rumble of a motorcycle in the background.
“That’s gotta be Stan,” I said.
The motorcycle came out of the alley alongside the club and turned onto Kuhio Avenue. The driver was a husky guy in full leather and a black helmet, but I couldn’t see anything beyond that in the dark. I couldn’t tell if he was black, white, or some shade in between. If I hadn’t been watching closely, I might not have seen the flare from the gun the motorcyclist pointed at Sergei and Ray. The bike was loud, but I thought I heard at least three shots.
Sergei fell to the ground, and tourists scattered. A woman screamed and a Cadillac SUV blasted its horn as
