“She’s not answering her cell phone,” he said. “She tell you what time this picnic was?”
I shook my head. “Just that it was in the afternoon.”
“If I have to, I’ll drive up to her apartment tomorrow morning and pick her up,” he said.
Back at my desk, Lui called me looking for a news hook and I had to admit I didn’t have anything. “But you can’t run that,” I said.
“It’s not exactly news, is it? The police have no suspects and no new leads. How about the murder on Sunday? You think that’s related?”
I debated telling my brother about the ballistics match. I’d trust him with my life, and I had in the past. But he did run a news operation. “It’s obvious to me that Stahl’s murder is connected to the bombing at the Marriage Project. But I don’t have any evidence that links the two crimes other than the fact that Stahl was a supporter. He was at the party the night of the bombing, and he was killed as they were announcing he was funding the Project to reopen. That’s all I’ve got.”
“We’ve been hearing stories about some unorthodox sexual activities. You think there’s any connection?”
My first reaction was to scoff, but then I reconsidered. “I hate to malign a dead guy, Lui, but I guess it’s something we have to consider. The kind of stuff he was into, there’s usually a mutual trust between the two parties, safe words and so on.”
“Safe words?” he interrupted. “What’s that?”
“From what I’ve heard, and you’re my brother so I feel I have to tell you I don’t know any of this from first-hand experience, when you do anything with somebody else that involves pain or bondage or anything, you have these safe words. That way the person getting tied up can say, no, you’re hurting me, ouch, and so on, which I guess adds to the fun somehow.”
“And the safe words?”
“Well, when things go too far, the person just has to say, pickle, or sandwich, or whatever, and then things are supposed to stop. It’s possible that something Stahl was doing got out of hand, and somebody wanted to take revenge on him, but that’s a real long shot, considering the circumstances.”
“It may be a long shot, but as a tease it’ll play on the news. Thanks, brah. I’ll get a reporter onto it.”
“Let me know if you find anything out.” When I hung up I felt like shit. I didn’t want to drag Charlie Stahl’s personal life through the gutter. He’d seemed like a nice enough guy, and he had that record of good works and charitable donations. But it was possible I was going on the wrong track, linking his shooting to the bombing, and Lui might find something out that could move the case forward.
Thinking about that, I wondered if somebody who lived around Hiroshi Mura might have had sex with Charlie Stahl. Maybe Mura saw them. I had heard he was always snooping around the neighborhood. It was a long shot, but I called Harry and suggested he try and correlate the partial license plate to Makiki. He said he’d try.
I met up with Mike that night for dinner, and a long walk along the beach. I got such a positive charge from being with him-seeing his handsome face, touching the dark curl of his hair, feeling his body heat. We talked about the case, sat next to each other and stared at the gibbous moon, and kissed in the dark behind the gate of the zoo. The air smelled of animal droppings, sea salt, and the sewage pipe that runs out into the Pacific, but I didn’t care.
I held onto Mike, heard the palm fronds rustle in the light breeze, and looked out at the crescent of lights along Diamond Head Road. I felt like I had a tenuous grasp on happiness.
We cruised Waikiki and Ala Moana Beach Park once again, looking for Jimmy, without success, ending up back at the rest room where we’d seen Frankie and Lolo.
“I’ve got to take a leak,” Mike said.
“I’ll come with you.”
There was something sexy and dangerous about standing there next to Mike at the urinals, seeing the dick that I had sucked that morning poking its way out of his pants. I’ve never been one for water sports, but I definitely got an erotic charge out of being there next to him in a public place, our dicks out. He was on my left, so I reached my left arm around his shoulders and brought his head to mine so we could kiss.
We finished pissing, and I put my right hand on his dick, which was stiffening, as mine was. We kissed, and began stroking each other.
“You know this is crazy,” I said, between kisses. “Anybody could walk in here and catch us.”
“One of those kids you know,” Mike said, nuzzling my ear. “Or a cop.”
“We could end up in jail.”
“You and me in a cell together,” Mike said.
My pulse rate was accelerating and I was having trouble breathing. There was a single stall, handicap size, next to us, and I dragged Mike into it. Well, I didn’t exactly have to drag him; he was a willing accomplice. In that relative privacy, we kept on kissing and rubbing against each other.
We heard two male voices, giggling in Japanese. My mother’s father was Japanese, and I learned a few words to be able to talk to him, but I couldn’t understand much of what the guys were saying to each other. They knew we were there, though, and it didn’t seem to bother them. I pressed against Mike to let him know that it was okay, and he pushed back.
The guys outside the stall were grooving on us; I could hear them kissing and their bodies rubbing against each other just as we were doing.
Mike whispered in my ear, “You are a very bad boy.”
“You’re no better,” I whispered back. “But if we’re going to do any more than this, we ought to get a room, you know.”
The door to the restroom slammed as the two Japanese guys exited. Mike and I were alone again, and kissed once more before we opened the stall door, then walked back out into the cool night. ????
The phone woke us both. I looked at the clock, bleary-eyed. It was only six-thirty. “I did it, brah,” Harry crowed. “I came up with a match I think you’re gonna find very interesting.”
“Harry. You know what time it is?”
“Yeah, it’s six-thirty. You’re lucky I didn’t call you at four, when I figured this out. I thought by now you’d be up and ready to surf.”
I yawned. “Oh, well. Tell me what you found.”
“There’s black Toyota Camry, license plate HXM 691, registered to a Jeffrey White in Makiki. That’s your minister, right? He lives down the street from where you found the old man, and around the corner from the address where the rooster got shot. And your buddy Mike saw the guy who shot Charlie Stahl get into a car that matches this plate.”
“Thanks, brah. You’re a winner. I’ll talk to you later.”
I rolled over and looked at Mike. “We’ve finally got enough to connect the Whites to the bombings and the shootings.”
It took us only about twenty minutes to get pulled together. While we drove down to police headquarters, I remembered Frank Sit mentioning the couple in a dark sedan the night of the bombing. I was sure that was the Whites.
The streets were strangely quiet, and Mike helped me write my search warrant. By nine o’clock we had it ready to go.
Judge Yamanaka was a few blocks away, at the Criminal Courts building, and though on a slower day we might have walked over to deliver the warrant, we drove instead. “Try to get us there in one piece, okay?” Mike asked, as I swerved around slow moving trucks and used the flashing light on my dash.
“Hey, I took the defensive driving course at the Academy.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
Judge Yamanaka insisted that I tell him everything that had led me to my conclusions. “We tracked the partial license plate that Fire Inspector Riccardi saw on the gunman’s escape vehicle to this address,” I said. “And we matched the ballistics on both homicides. That gives us probable cause to search the residence and the vehicle, as well as the other vehicle registered at the same address.”