Lui waved his hand. “You know Mom will listen to us.”
“Mom will listen to the doctors, and the doctors want Dad to stay here,” Haoa said.
I said, “Let me go in and see him. Then I’ll tell you what I think.”
“Good.” Haoa crossed his arms in front of him.
“Good.” Lui stalked down the hall toward the vending machines.
I went into the room. My father was lying back in the bed, my mother in the chair next to him. They were watching a game show on TV. “Well, at least you ate your lunch today.” I kissed him on the forehead, then leaned down and kissed my mother’s cheek. Most of the wires and tubes were gone, and except for one line running into his hand, and the faded hospital gown, he could have been home in bed.
“I’m glad you’re here, Kimo. Bring your brothers in. I want to talk to you about my will.”
“We’re not talking about wills.” Lui was right; there was definitely something wrong with my father’s attitude.
“I want to leave the business to Haoa because it matters to him, but I don’t want you and Lui to feel like I’m favoring him.”
This was very strange behavior. “You’re not leaving the business to anybody yet because you’re not leaving yet.”
I brought my brothers in then, and it took some talking, but we finally convinced him that whatever happened, the three of us would stand together, and there was no need to talk about wills at the present time.
My father’s cardiologist showed up, and we talked to him after he’d examined my father. The IV tube was delivering a course of medication, the doctor said, that would finish on Monday. Barring anything unforeseen, it would be safe to take my father home then.
We all agreed that would be fine, and that crisis averted, I said goodbye to my mother and brothers and went to the office. Even though I wasn’t on duty, I wanted to distribute the sketch of our potential bomber to the Vice guys, who could show it around to prostitutes and other contacts. But more important, I wanted to feel like I was doing something to solve the case.
EMOTIONAL INSIGHTS
On my way to headquarters I grabbed a sandwich and ate it at my desk as I went back over everything I’d collected so far, looking for anything I’d missed. While I was there, Frank Sit came up to speak with me.
He was the patrolman who’d seen the truck that shit-bombed the Marriage Project offices. I’d known him for a few years, working more closely with him when he was stationed on Waikiki, too. He was a stocky Chinese guy, in his late forties or early fifties, with a brush cut, a gut and a swagger.
“I saw that picture Lidia was showing around,” he said, coming over to sit at my desk. “I think I saw the guy.”
“Really? When?”
“First I gotta tell you how come I didn’t do anything about that truck with the missing plates. I was at the corner of Ward and Waimanu when I noticed this Volvo station wagon full of hippies ahead of me had Massachusetts plates with an expired tag. I turned on my flashers and pulled them over.”
He took a sip of department coffee, and made a face. “You won’t believe this. The driver, this shaggy-haired guy, had an expired Massachusetts driver’s license that said his name was Eddie Christ. Turns out the other guys were Christ too, Stan Christ in the front, and Jordan and Fritz Christ in the back. Jordan was black; the other three were haole.” He went on to tell me that all four of them were in their mid-twenties, wearing jeans and T-shirts. They were on a mission from Jesus, who was their brother, to deliver herbal tea to the islands.
“The back of the wagon was filled with boxes of the tea. I told the guy he had to have a driver’s license, even if he was on a mission from Christ, and he launched into this long explanation. That’s when I saw the pickup without plates pass by. I had my hands full with the Christ brothers, though, so I radioed in a description.”
He put the cup of coffee down on my desk. “But you know how it is. There wasn’t anybody else in the vicinity, so the truck got away. And you know what? Each of those Christ guys had different IDs, and outstanding warrants. Took me hours to get them all into the holding cells and squared away.”
“What about the guy in the picture, though?” I asked. “Was he one of the Christ brothers?”
Sit shook his head. “That was later, after I was back on the street. I was cruising past the YMCA when I saw this sedan parked on the street, a man and a woman in the front seat. At first I thought it might be a prostitute, so I went up to talk to them.”
I still had reams of paper to go through. But I knew if I rushed him he’d get cranky and I might never get the whole story. I straightened a couple of pieces of paper on my desk as I waited for him to continue.
“Woman gave me a story about waiting for a kid to come out of the Y,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. By the time that bomb went off, I’d forgotten all about them. Then when Lidia was showing the picture around, I thought that might be the guy.”
“Was he wearing a tux?”
“Didn’t get that clear a look, but definitely a dark jacket and a white shirt.”
“You get any information on the car-plate number, make and model?”
He frowned. “If I’d thought it was a john, I’d have done it, but the woman, she looked-you know, young and professional. Not like a working girl.”
“Thanks, Frank. This is good info anyway. Now we know he has a partner, a woman, and both of them were in the area at the time.” The Y was just around the corner from the Marriage Project offices; it would have been easy for the woman to pull up there and wait for the bomber to do his business and then return. From the time Frank described, and the timing mechanism Mike had found on the bomb, I figured they were waiting to make sure the bomb went off before leaving.
After Frank left, I was thinking about the fact that the guy’s accomplice was a woman, and that Gunter had recognized fear and longing on the guy’s face. So maybe he was married to a woman, but not happy, and that was fueling his anger against gay marriage.
It was only amateur psychoanalysis, but it made sense.
When I need help understanding human emotion, I call Terri. Ever since high school, she’s provided that insight, and when I’d been undercover on the North Shore her intuition about the behavior of suspects and victims had been very helpful.
I managed to reach her on her cell phone, and found she was just leaving her great-aunt’s home in Black Point. Since her parents were taking care of her son Danny for the afternoon, I didn’t have to twist her arm too hard to get her to agree to detour into Waikiki and meet me for a late-afternoon caffeine break.
We met one of the branches of the Kope Bean, an island-based coffee chain. As usual, she looked perfect, showing no hint of the trauma she’d been going through since her widowhood only months before. When I complimented her, she said, “Great-Aunt Emma has high expectations. A Clark always looks just so, you know.”
I’d never met her great-aunt, but I’d been hearing about her for years. “A command performance?”
“Trust business. I asked her about the grant for the Gay Teen Center, and she said absolutely not.”
“Oh, well.”
“Don’t forget, I’m just as much a Clark as she is,” Terri said, smiling. “I reminded her that the mission of the Sandwich Islands Trust is to help the people of the islands, and that if there were young people who were living on the streets, in financial or emotional trouble, it was our obligation as the stewards of the Trust to help them.”
“Good for you. Did it work?”
“We agreed to give them some money for a pilot program.”
“Have I ever told you I think you’re phenomenal?”
“Not often enough.” She smiled. “So what’s up?”