“How about the boyfriend. What’s his name?”
“Wayne. I don’t know him that well. He’s only come by a couple of times. He’s really big, though, doesn’t look gay at all.”
I wondered if Arleen thought I looked gay, but I didn’t say anything. “Mr. Pang didn’t have a watch, wallet or keys on him when he was found,” Akoni said, stepping into the breach. “Did he usually?”
“Oh, yeah, he had this gold Rolex, and a thick gold and diamond bracelet, and a diamond pinky ring. He told me once he was born in April, it was his birthstone, the diamond.”
Akoni took notes. “And he always carried a wallet, a money clip, and a key ring,” Arleen continued. “Oh yeah, and his Palm Pilot.”
“Really,” I said. “You know what kind of stuff he kept on there?”
“Not a clue.” The phone rang, and Arleen said, “Mom, I’ll talk to you tonight, okay? The police are still here.”
“I don’t want to hold you up much longer,” I said, looking at the clock. It was almost five, beyond the end of our shift, and I figured Arleen would be closing up soon anyway. “We’ll have to get a locksmith in and come back tomorrow.”
“Don’t you need a search warrant?”
“Not if we have the approval of the person in control of the office,” I said. “That would be you, right?” She nodded. “And you want to do what you can to help us find out who killed Mr. Pang, don’t you?”
“Sure.” She thought for a minute. “I come in around nine, after I drop my son off at school. Then I go out at 2:30 to pick him up and get some lunch, but I’m usually back by three.”
Akoni and I walked out into the alley. “I’ll call the locksmith first thing tomorrow,” I said. “That’s about all we can do. You think the same person who bashed him in the head stole his jewelry?”
“Awful big coincidence if it wasn’t,” Akoni said. “E, you see any jewelry first time you see him?”
I tried to remember but couldn’t.
“How long you think the body was alone?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”
“Enough time for somebody to see him, think he’s drunk, and roll him.” Akoni shook his head.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel worse about what I’d done, but ways just seemed to keep cropping up.
I didn’t feel like going home yet, so I got my truck, put an old Springsteen CD on and just started to drive. I ended up way up the Pali Highway, driving fast and singing along with Bruce. I wanted to wipe everything out of my brain, give it a chance to cool down. I kept thinking about my confession to Akoni at the mall, trying to figure out what it meant for my future. It seemed like it had happened so long before, but it had really only been hours.
Eventually I pulled off at a switchback that gave me a view of the city and the Pacific below, and I got out of the truck. It was almost dusk and Waikiki glowed against the dark ocean. It seemed to me like some fantastic golden city, the place where all my dreams could come true, if only they didn’t shut me out of it.
There was a rustling in the brush across the road from me, and somewhere an owl hooted. I stood there for a while longer, people in cars passing on their way home to their families, me just standing there outside the city, wondering.
I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I pulled up in front of my apartment building. Then it hit me, and I barely made it up the stairs and into bed before I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
KEEP IT TO YOURSELF
I woke early the next morning, surfed for an hour, and was at my desk at eight o’clock. Akoni came in a few minutes later and said, “Let’s take a walk.” As we left, we passed a tourist wahine in a skimpy g-string bikini who was complaining about having her wallet stolen on the beach.
“The bad guys get an early start, miss,” I heard the desk sergeant telling her. “You’ve got to watch out all the time.”
Good advice, I thought. Outside, the morning air was fresh and bright. You could see tiny bits of dust and sand dancing in the shafts of sunlight coming from over the top of the Ko’olau Mountains. We got coffee from a little hole in the wall souvenir place on the mauka side of Kalakaua Avenue and walked along the beach.
“Here’s the way I see it,” Akoni said finally. “You did two things wrong. You failed to report a crime under your badge number and notify your lieutenant, and you failed to secure the scene of a crime. Neither of those is enough to lose your badge.”
He took a sip of coffee. I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to say anything else. Nothing to anybody. Not the business about being in the Rod and Reel Club, or the guy who stuck his tongue in your ear. If you feel you want to tell somebody something, you say you had a lot to drink, you went for a long walk, you stumbled on to the body, the guy in the Jeep. You were pretty drunk, confused.”
“I wasn’t drunk.”
“Cops and drinking, they go together. It’s a long tradition. Guys can handle that. The department can handle that. This other thing, you’re blazing new territory. You want to take your chances?”
“You’re telling me to lie.”
Akoni crushed his empty cup and pitched it into a trash can. “I have never told you to lie about anything and I never will,” he said. “You know me better than that. But you’re no virgin, Kimo. You know the way the world works. Sometimes you have to put some spin on the truth to make things come out the way they should.”
I thought about it. It was true. Many times, we’d known who the bad guy was, and we’d eliminated confusing evidence from our reports. Or we’d bluffed our way to confessions, pretending we knew more than we did. It was just something you did. But those situations weren’t about me. Somehow I’d always applied a higher standard to my personal life.
“You want to tell the truth?” Akoni said. “The way I see it, you’ve been lying for years, never telling anybody you were really a fag. What about all those girls you took home. You tell them the truth?”
There was a sour taste in my mouth. I said, “No.”
“So why start now, when the truth can ruin you?”
“Because I owe it to Tommy Pang,” I said, before I could think about what I was saying. The conviction built inside me. “That poor jerk is dead and I did wrong by him. In the past, when we’ve adjusted the truth, it was because we were trying to be faithful to the dead, to do right by them. This is the opposite.”
“Tommy Pang was a two-bit crook who never did anything nice for anybody,” Akoni said. “Nothing would probably give him more pleasure than to feel like his death caused a cop to lose his job. You come out with this, they’ll reassign you to a desk downtown, or put you on leave. You won’t be able to do a thing for Tommy Pang, or for any other vic we ever find.” He paused. “You won’t be able to do a thing to feel better.”
He was right. It would be the end of my career. Not right away. I’d ride a desk for a while, and then there’d be a hearing, and eventually I’d turn in my badge. Maybe they’d ask for it; maybe I’d just do it in the end out of frustration. “So I write up what you said. What then?”
“We keep it between ourselves for now. If we never find the bad guys, it goes into the cold case file. If we do, and we take the case to the DA, we see what he has to say.”
“You could get fried over this yourself, you know. You don’t have to be a part of my troubles.”
“You’re my partner.” He started walking. “Come on, let’s get back to work.”
When we got back to the station, there was an elderly Chinese lady at the front desk complaining about kids making noise in her building, and a couple of tourists in processing reporting a purse snatching. I called the number Genevieve Pang had given us for her son and left a message, that it was important he call me at the station. Then I called the locksmith, who arranged to meet us at the alley behind the Rod amp; Reel Club, and Akoni and I walked over there together.
Arleen met us at the door. She was so tiny, barely five feet, and next to me and Akoni she looked like an elf, or maybe some kind of Japanese pixie. She even bounced on the balls of her feet when she walked. As the locksmith got to work on the door, I said to her, “You’re sure this is okay, giving us this permission?”