“Did you see our coverage of the fire last night?”
“Not yet. I got a guy with the tape, we’re watching it later.”
“Good story. I made sure they played up the gay marriage side of things. And we’re leading with your friend Cathy on the five o’clock. We’ll see what the reporter does with the story, and if it looks good we’ll run it again on the six and the eleven.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Enough to keep me in the loop when you’ve got any new leads?”
“You know the drill, Lui. All information is supposed to get funneled through public affairs. That way all the media gets equal access.”
“I understand your position. I’m not asking you to shut anybody else out. I’m just saying that if you know something, and you call me first, we’ll be able to put together the kind of story you want to see. We’re trying to do serious journalism, to give our coverage a little dignity.”
I started laughing. “Dignity? Are you sure you’re talking about KVOL, Erupting News All Day Long? Aren’t you the station that shows the clip of those people on the Big Island running away from that lava flow?”
“You want me to say it? You want to make me say it? All right, I will. I deliberately skewed our coverage of the fire to make us sympathetic to the whole gay marriage deal. And you know why? Because I’ve got this brother that’s gay, and I want him to be happy. If he wants to get married to some other guy, I want him to be able to. And I’m going to use the power that I have here at the station to do that. Now are you going to help me or not?”
“Go ahead, make me feel like shit,” I said, and I was almost certain I had made him laugh. “Geez, how’d you get so good at making people feel guilty? You must have been listening to Mom all those years.”
“I’ve got three kids. It comes with the territory. So tell me, you in or you out?”
“Seems like the whole island knows I’m out, Lui.” I thought about it for a minute. “In the first place, I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. Everything you get ought to come from the public information office. And we shouldn’t release any information to you that we don’t release to the rest of the media. But what I think I can do is give you some direction for your peripheral coverage.”
“Like pointing us toward Cathy Selkirk.”
“Exactly.”
“So where do we look for a lead for tomorrow’s news?”
“You know what I think is an interesting angle on this case? The fact that out of all the people at the party, the only one who died was somebody who was on the same side as the bomber. There’s irony there.”
“A story on Wilson Shira, you mean. What was he doing there, and so on. Maybe there’s something in his past that made him so opposed to this idea. You gotta wonder what makes somebody come out and protest a thing like this.” He paused, and I could almost hear the wheels whirring in his head.
“Off the record, you might want to talk to some of the people at Homeless Solutions,” I said. “A little bird told me that yesterday somebody was going around there, offering to pay homeless people to join the protest.”
“I’ll get somebody on it. Hey, you ever consider the possibility that Shira was some kind of suicide bomber?” Lui asked. “Maybe he carried the bomb on his body! Maybe he brought it in there himself, planning to plant it, and it blew up before he could get out?”
“The facts don’t exactly support that theory, but, hey, you’ve made KVOL’s reputation on that kind of sensationalism, haven’t you?”
“Don’t get snotty. Remember, you’re still the kid brother.”
I shook my head as I hung up the phone.
PASTA PUTTANESCA
It was almost six forty-five by the time I dragged my sorry, exhausted and starving butt out of headquarters for the drive to Waikiki. Not even the prospect of seeing Mike Riccardi could generate much enthusiasm. I’d hoped to get home for a quick nap, a shower, maybe the chance to pretty myself up. No such luck; he’d have to take me battered and disheveled. And to top it off, every time I sat back I felt my shirt rubbing against the raw burn on my back. I was definitely not in a dating mood.
I’d never been to the restaurant he had suggested, a small storefront on Kuhio Avenue a few blocks ewa of my apartment. It was set between the lobby of a cheap hotel for vacationing Japanese and a Laundromat, where a bunch of German teenagers hung around their wash like sharks circling an unknowing surfer.
Mike was already there when I arrived, sitting at a table in the back drinking Chianti and bantering with a waiter. His hair was perfectly combed in a wave over his forehead, and his beige oxford-cloth button down shirt was spotless.
“Man, you look like shit,” he said in lieu of a greeting.
“I don’t know you well enough for such honesty,” I said. He looked terrific, of course; he had to have gone home and changed clothes. I didn’t know anybody who could keep pressed shirts so crisp after a day in the tropical sun.
“Come on, sit down. Want some wine?”
“Sure.” As he poured me a glass, the waiter brought us an antipasto platter, the greens glistening with olive oil, vegetables and cheeses all arranged carefully on a decorated plate.
“I ordered for both of us. I hope you don’t mind. They’ve got a terrific pasta puttanesca here-” he held up his thumb and two forefingers together in a gesture I’d only seen on television, then kissed his fingertips- “you’re gonna love it.”
This was sounding more and more like a date to me, and frankly I just didn’t have the patience for it. He was a gorgeous, hunky guy, sexy and charming, but all I wanted to do was get his information, watch the video tape, and then go to bed. Alone. I was afraid I might nod off before the pasta arrived.
“Let me tell you what I found out today,” I said. Before I left the station I’d printed out all my notes. As I started going through them, I noticed he’d pulled out the battered steno pad I’d seen him with the night before. Every now and then he stopped me for a question or two, making his own record.
When I was finished, he said, “You’ve been busy.”
“It makes the day pass.” The waiter cleared away our antipasto plates and refilled our wine glasses. “So, your turn now. What did you do today?”
“Like I told you on the phone, I went up to Central O’ahu to look over an arson-a pair of lesbians with a few acres of pineapple. Somebody torched their storage shed a couple of days ago, and at first I thought it was just kids, because it was so amateur.”
He sipped his Chianti. “But when I looked at it again, I saw a lot of connections to the bombing. Looks like the lesbians might have been a trial run for your guy.”
I shook my head. “We’ve got to stop these guys, Mike.”
“I know. While I was up there, I had guys go over the site again, and they found a couple of interesting things. Like a piece of pipe, for instance.”
“Pipe like you smoke?”
He shook his head. “Pipe like you put a bomb into. These guys are definitely amateurs. The fragment we found was only about three inches square, pretty standard hardware store issue. But it looks like we’re going to get a partial print off it. They were too dumb to use gloves-they must have figured all the evidence was going to blow up.”
“There’s something I don’t get. If they’re such amateurs, how do they know how to make a bomb in the first place? I couldn’t do it.”
“Sure you could. You’ve got a brain, right? And you know how to work a computer?”
“Pretty much.” The waiter brought a big tray of pasta, family style, and two plates. He prepared to dish it out, but Mike waved him away and started the work himself.
“So you get on the Internet,” he continued, as he heaped the creamy white pasta onto the plates. “And you do a search for ‘bombs.’ That brings up hundreds of hits. You start surfing around, you read, you go from link to link, and pretty soon you know almost as much about explosives as the fire department does.”