door handle, expecting it to be locked, but it opened to a narrow, terrazzo-tiled foyer lit by an exposed light bulb. My eyes passed over a listing of floor numbers and names. Horace Liang, Doctor of Chinese Medicine, was supposedly on the third floor. Liang and Liang real estate was on the second, and Gerald Liang, construction, on the floor where I was standing.
“First floor, construction,” I said aloud, as if I were talking to myself, though of course I wasn’t. The Escalade was parked blocks away, and I wanted Vang and Fujioka to know exactly where, within the building, I planned to be.
The obvious way into the construction office was through a different glass door, which had brown paper, taped over it, the way businesses do before they open to the public. Interesting, this place looked as if it had been around for a long time. I tried the door lightly and found it to be locked.
“Yah?” A rough male voice answered my knock. I thought it sounded like Kainoa, but I couldn’t be sure.
“I can’t hear you,” I called back. “Can you let me in?”
I’d taken a gamble, but the door jerked open. I remained in place, but found myself looking at Kainoa. If he’d looked bad the morning of the fire, he looked worse now, with the kind of facial stubble that reminded me of the villain in old Popeye cartoons.
“Hi, there,” I said, and from the way his eyes studied me, it seemed as if he knew why I had come. Still, he kept the door open. Beyond the bulwark of Kainoa’s massive body I saw the edges of a dusty room packed to overflowing with cardboard boxes, pipes and other construction materials.
“How d’you figure to find me here?” Kainoa’s voice was still borderline unfriendly, but he stepped back into the room, allowing me to enter.
“So how long have you been working here in Chinatown?” I was scanning the room, looking for something, I just didn’t know what.
“Just got here this morning, to help Ger- my boss get some shit together. I need something full-time, and this is going to be it for a while. As I was asking, how did you find me?”
“Your cousin Carrie told me-I spoke to her on the phone this morning,” I added, when I saw Kainoa’s shaggy eyebrows rise slightly. “And she said you were the middleman for Gerald Liang on his construction projects.”
“Might be doing more, now that the shop’s gone.”
“Was it just labor you sub-contracted for him before?” I was trying to phrase my questions carefully, the way the cops had suggested.
“Yah. How you know that?”
I was going to get nowhere, if I didn’t reveal some of my hand. “I know about the rocks you’ve been stockpiling in my family’s old cottage.”
“That what Braden told you?” Kainoa’s voice remained calm, but his expression was deadly.
“No, I drove out and saw the rocks myself. Braden didn’t say anything; he was too scared, said the boss would kill him if he gave him away.”
“He said that about me?” Kainoa’s voice cracked. “What a liar-and you, too. I thought you were here out of compassion, or some bullshit thing like that.”
“Kainoa, just tell me what happened. You could save my cousin, if you’d just admit you sent him to get the rocks that morning.”
“But I didn’t! I mean, not exactly.”
I wondered if ‘not exactly’ was going to be enough to satisfy the cops-somehow, I doubted it. I tried again. “It was a case of bad timing, wasn’t it?”
“Who’s the girl?” A new voice cut through my concentration, and I saw Kainoa was no longer focused on me, but somebody else.
I turned and saw a short, scowling Asian man in his early forties. He wore a baggy green and white print aloha shirt and black shorts that revealed solid, muscular legs with tattoos like Kainoa had. But while Kainoa’s tattoos were geometric Polynesian designs, Liang’s were quite different; one leg was marked by the kanji characters for moon, power, and aggression, and the other bore the emblem of a Sino-Japanese mafia group, the Night Runners, which I recognized from a book of Michael’s.
“My name is Rei Shimura,” I said. “Are you Gerald Liang?”
“See if you can get him on the record,” Vang whispered into my ear.
No way, I said to myself. After reading the fine print on Liang’s legs, I intended to separate from him as fast as possible.
“Yes, I’m Mr. Liang. Has Kainoa been talking about his friends?”
“Not at all, Mr. Liang,” Kainoa said hastily.
My mind was working overtime as the men exchanged tense looks. The cottage with the rocks piled up was still rented by the Liangs, according to Josiah Pierce. Maybe my original assumption that Kainoa had seized a forgotten property for his own purposes was wrong. Gerald Liang might have known about the cottage’s uses for storage of illegally gathered lava rock-in fact, he might have been the one to decide to use the abandoned cottage to warehouse rock.
Belatedly, I realized both men were looking at me. I said, “I was just catching up with Kainoa before I left the island.”
“You know how the mainland chicks are, Gerry.”
I glanced at Kainoa, who seemed to be trying to help with my cover. Why? Was Gerald Liang that dangerous? Yes, I thought, and perhaps he, and not Kainoa, was the actual big boss that Braden feared.
“You work for me a long time, Kainoa. You should understand by now to keep your social life off this jobsite.” Now Liang was scowling at Kainoa.
“Got it, boss. You go, babe. But first, this.” Kainoa grabbed me at an awkward angle for a hug that filled my nose filled with his musky body scent and my ear with his hot breath. As he kissed my mouth, and then moved to my ear, he whispered one word: ‘Careful.”
And as I pulled apart from him, shocked by both the intimate touch and the warning, my earpiece dislodged. It bounced off my shoulder and landed on the floor with a soft click. Kainoa glanced at the earpiece lying between us, but, instead of picking up the tiny, peach-colored piece of plastic, he moved his foot over it. His eyes held mine for a second, as if to intensify his warning.
32
WITHOUT MY EARPIECE, I had no idea what Vang and Fujioka and even Michael might be advising me to do. I could only hope they’d shut up, because if voices started coming from the floor, it would surely alert Gerald Liang.
My instinct told me to leave. Fortunately, Gerald Liang seemed to think the same, because he grabbed me by my right elbow and started walking me to the door.
“How kind of you to walk me out, Mr. Liang,” I said as we passed through the papered-over door into the grimy vestibule I’d entered only five minutes earlier.
Hawaii was a place of courtesy, so I thought my words would ease things, but Liang reached for my other arm. Instinctively, I brought one elbow up to free myself, hitting his nose on the way.
“I’m sorry,” I lied, turning toward the grimy glass door that was the only barrier between the building and the street. I was doing my best not to sound scared in front of Gerald Liang.
“You’re not one of Kainoa’s girls.”
I looked toward the brown-papered door and considered raising my voice to call for help. But I doubted Kainoa would be suicidal enough to battle his gang-member boss.
“I heard you, when I came into the room the back way.” Liang’s voice was silky, and dangerous. “You’re trying to incriminate me.”
“What do you mean?” Resolutely, I turned away from the door. Now that it appeared he might say something worthy of the wire, I couldn’t duck out.
“Well, you may not know that the penalty for taking lava rock is maybe a thousand bucks-chump change. I also
