I told her I thought she looked lovely. I knew it was the first time she’d been out to a big party since her husband had died, and I was sure she was feeling melancholy.
“Since I don’t have a man of my own, you’ll both have to be my escorts.” She hooked her arms around Gunter and me and we strolled down the street. With a pair of strappy black high heels, she was almost as tall as I was.
The evening was clear and dry, despite the smell of smoke, and beyond the lights of downtown I could make out a few dim stars above. We walked through a neighborhood of one- and two-story offices and stores, a travel agency with vertical columns of Chinese-language ads next door to a place selling medical uniforms. I asked her about Cathy’s application to her great-aunt’s foundation, and she promised she’d look into it.
The sounds of a jazz piano floated toward us as we approached the offices of the Hawai’i Marriage Project, glowing with light. The two-story stucco building had a big open office on the first floor, where Robert worked. There was a bathroom at the rear and a door that led out to an open lanai. Up on the second floor, there were two offices, one looking to the street and the other to the back. The front room was used for meetings and storage, and Sandra Guarino used the back office.
When we walked in, Harry and Arleen were standing around Robert’s desk talking with him. Arleen, a tiny pixie of a woman with dark hair and Japanese features, was holding her young son Brandon, who had already fallen asleep. “I’m going to take this big boy upstairs,” she said. “Sandra said I could leave him in her office.”
“You’re sure he’ll be all right?” Harry asked. He’d dressed up, too, in a double-breasted tux with black satin lapels.
“I’ll leave the window open. If he wakes up and starts to cry, you can bet we’ll hear it.” She hoisted him against the shoulder of her form-fitting little black dress and walked toward the stairs. Harry smiled goofily as she passed.
Robert was the only one who’d opted for a white dinner jacket. He had a green carnation in his lapel-a nod, I was sure, to Oscar Wilde. It was nice to see a gay symbol other than the color pink or the rainbow triangle. I asked him what he was saying about the broken panel in the front window. “I don’t want anybody to know,” he whispered. “I’m just telling people that one of the caterers accidentally knocked into the window.”
He pulled me aside. “There is a problem, though,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’ve heard a rumor that we might get some protesters tonight.”
“Really? How’d you hear that?”
“I have a friend who works at Homeless Solutions,” he said.
I knew it; it offered temporary and transitional housing services. It was a place that might have helped Hiroshi Mura, had he been willing to leave the shack in Makiki.
“He told me that somebody was going around today, recruiting for a demonstration tonight. They were paying twenty bucks just to show up here and be part of a crowd.”
I shook my head. “What’s up with that? Who cares enough about us to go to so much trouble?”
“The same people who broke the window? Or the ones who threw the shit on the sidewalk?”
Just then, Cathy and Sandra came down from the office above, and Robert and I stopped talking. Poor Cathy looked like she could have been Arleen’s homely sister-she was even smaller than Arleen, and her shapeless linen dress looked like an elegant flour sack. She was only half-Japanese, and the contrast between Arleen’s delicate beauty and Cathy’s pallor was dramatic. Sandra wore a navy business suit and sensible pumps, and it looked like both she and Cathy had sworn out a no-makeup pact for the evening.
The four of us walked out to the lanai together. It was surprisingly large, paved with flat stones, with several big kukui trees shading it. A large frangipani tree with its exotic purple blossoms bloomed directly in the center, above a bar set up on folding tables. The waiters and waitresses all wore plumeria leis and aloha shirts, and they were offering a choice of mai tais or champagne cocktails. I noticed several of the women guests were wearing long, formal muumuus, called holokus, in colorful patterns.
Sandra came over and steered me and Gunter toward a short, chubby man in an immaculate tuxedo, with a lavender cummerbund and matching bow tie. “I want you to meet one of our biggest benefactors, Charlie Stahl.”
“I knew I should have gone on a diet before coming to this party,” he said. Everybody laughed, and Sandra introduced us. “So, detective,” he said to me, holding my hand for just a little too long to be comfortable. “You’re even more handsome in person than you are on television.”
Gunter snaked his hand around my waist and said, “Yes, I always tell him that. Especially when he’s… out of uniform.”
Charlie Stahl gave him an appraising glance, said, “I’ll bet,” and went on to meet some other guests.
Gunter and I were momentarily alone. “If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were jealous, Gunter.”
“You don’t want to get mixed up with that old leather queen.”
“He’s also the heir to a huge pineapple fortune.” While Dole made sure that every pineapple off their plantation came with a red and yellow sticker on the side, the Stahl pineapples were primarily canned under store names, pressed into juice and used in flavorings. But that didn’t make them any less successful than Dole.
“Well, who would you rather be with?” Gunter struck a pose, one hand on his hip, the other behind his ear. “The heir to a huge fortune, or moi?”
I pretended to look around behind him. “Did you see which way he went?”
My parents arrived a few minutes later with Lui and Liliha, followed almost immediately by Haoa and Tatiana. All three women wore modern versions of the holoku, floor-length formal dresses in floral patterns. My father and brothers were handsome in their tuxes, though I could tell Haoa would have rather worn an aloha shirt and flip-flops no matter the occasion. For a few minutes I forgot about the unsolved murders on my desk, about the rumors Robert had heard and the vandalism earlier in the day.
This is what my life could be, I thought. Surrounded by family and friends, a handsome man on my arm. Maybe all the torment that had accompanied my coming out of the closet was over, and I was ready to move on with my life. It had been six months, after all. I’d dated a couple of guys casually, had some good sex and some bad sex, and gotten more comfortable being recognized.
Right after I returned to the force, I spent a month undercover on the North Shore, working on a big case, and that chance to get away had been good for me. I met some gay friends, I surfed, I caught a killer. Then I returned to Honolulu and started my new life as an openly gay man.
I introduced Gunter to my family, and we all made small talk for a few minutes. Then, expertly, Lui cut my father from the crowd and led him away, with a nod to me and Haoa to follow.
“Well, isn’t this nice,” my father said. “All my boys together.”
“So what’s up with you, Dad?” Haoa asked. “You won’t go to the doctor?”
Lui groaned at Haoa’s lack of tact. “I thought you were going to let me handle this.”
“Handle what?” Dad asked.
“Mom says you don’t feel well and you won’t see Dr. Yu.”
“I feel fine.”
“No you don’t,” I said. “We can all see it. Your stomach hurts, you’re tired.”
“Why are you being stubborn?” Haoa asked.
“Why are you doing this?” Dad asked. “It takes three of you big boys to gang up on one old man like me?”
“We love you, Dad,” Lui said. His eyes flashed at the both of us. “We want you to be well, to live a long time to spoil your grandchildren. You remember you and Mom used to drag us to the doctor every time one of us sniffled? Well, it’s the same thing. We just want you to take care of yourself.”