“Well, when I was little, my mom always told me if I was lost, to go ask a policeman. So if you can’t trust the cops, who can you trust?” She smiled goofily.
The locksmith popped the door to Tommy’s office easily, and we walked in. The room was as sparse as the rest of the office, just a big leather chair and a desk, and two chairs across from them. A big computer sat on the desktop, but unfortunately it was password-protected and Arleen didn’t know the password.
“What’s that?” Akoni asked, pointing to a little contraption on the desk next to the computer.
“The docking station for his Palm,” Arleen said. “You want to find out everything about Mr. Pang, you find the Palm.” She bit her lip, thought for a second. “But I think he backed everything up onto the computer, too. If you can find somebody to break into that file, you’ll know where he went, who he saw, all that stuff.”
We looked through the desk but there was nothing to find. Tommy Pang had held his cards close to his vest.
Before we left, we looked carefully at the door, to make sure no one could have broken in. There was a police lock on it, a rounded metal bar about three feet long, maybe two inches in diameter. It slipped into a catch on the door and then slid in a semi-circular track set into the floor. It was designed so that you could open the door just enough to pass something through, but wouldn’t open wide enough to let a person in.
“So nobody broke in,” I said. “Hey, Arleen, how do you get in if this lock’s on?”
“That door there goes through to the bar,” she said, pointing. “Usually Mr. Pang sets the lock before he leaves, and goes out through the bar. I come in that way.”
I nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything else to look at, so we left. “It’s going to be days before we can get some computer guy out of downtown,” Akoni said as we walked down the alley.
“You know my friend Harry? He can break into any computer-I know, he’s bragged about it enough, no matter how much I tell him it’s a crime. Maybe I can get him to come back with us.”
“I don’t like involving civilians in a case.”
“We hire experts all the time,” I said, stepping aside to let a pair of nuns pass. “It’s either that or wait for the department to send us somebody, after the trail is cold.”
“Won’t get us much, but if it pleases you.” We didn’t talk much on the way back to the station; when we stall on a case it gets us both down. “I’m heading over to see what the Feebs know about Tommy Pang,” Akoni said, when we came to the garage where he parked his car.
“I can go with you.”
Akoni planted his feet and looked off toward Diamond Head, not at me. “I need to do this on my own.”
There are times when we go off and investigate on our own. Usually it’s when we have so many leads that we can’t afford to waste time together. That wasn’t the case now. “Why?”
He shuffled his feet. “Don’t stonewall on me, Akoni. Tell me what’s up.”
He opened the door to the garage stairwell. Before he went in, though, he said, “I’ve done as much for you as I can, Kimo. Now I gotta look out for me.”
“What?” I asked, but he’d already gone inside.
I didn’t know what to think anymore. Was he in a bad mood? Was he separating himself from me in case I took a fall? It only took me a few minutes to get back to the station, but all the way I kept wondering what freight train Akoni saw heading my way. It was easy to believe it was something going wrong with the case, but it was also quite possibly something else. Akoni had always criticized my bull-headedness, the way I had to see something through once I started it. It’s a trait that frightened me sometimes.
Back at the station, I sat at the computer, pulling up names of every person known to be part of a tong, and then got on the phone, calling detectives and snitches to see who might have had it in for Tommy Pang. Printouts piled up on my desk, I got a backache, and my garbage can filled with crumpled coffee cups. There were no rumors of tong wars, and nobody had a special grudge against Tommy Pang. As a matter of fact, he was a relatively small player, not even catching much notice among the big boys.
When Akoni still had not returned by lunch, I left for the records office in Honolulu Hale, our city hall, an impressive stone building with a pseudo-Spanish motif-narrow windows, turrets, the whole nine yards. You walked through a short lobby and into a central courtyard with a high ceiling. Straight ahead were the city council chambers, but the records office was tucked away in a corner in the back. I stood in line and checked out the microfiche I needed, then took it to one of the readers.
I was interested to find out if Tommy Pang really owned the club, or if perhaps he was a front man for some larger group. I slid the fiche into the machine and navigated to the appropriate section, where I discovered that The Rod and Reel Club was owned by Hui 812.
Hui is a common Chinese term for a kind of holding company. It was what I expected; if you’re going to own a gay bar, you probably don’t want to make it easy to find out who you are. I pulled the fiche out and got back in line.
By the fourth fiche, I was annoyed and intrigued. I started taking notes and drawing lines on my pad from one company to the next. It took me all afternoon. I went back and forth between the records library and the tax office, showing my badge and asking questions. Finally I found a name, hidden under layers of bureaucracy and red tape. The eventual owner of the Rod and Reel Club, once you went back through level upon level, was Tommy Pang. No other name showed up anywhere.
By the time I got back to the station, Akoni had returned. The FBI had nothing, he said. No open investigations involving Tommy Pang, no rumors of tong wars, nothing. I told him what I’d found.
“Doesn’t get us any farther, does it?” he said. “What now?”
“We wait for Derek to call us back, or we call him again tomorrow. Then we start questioning Tommy’s business associates. Anybody with known tong affiliations. See if this is business-related.”
He frowned. “You think it could be anything else?”
“You heard Mrs. Pang. He had ‘company’ sometimes. Maybe the company had a jealous husband or boyfriend.”
“I hate this part of a case,” he said. “Too many ways to go, no real leads. Just lots of legwork.” He started packing up his stuff.
“Listen, Akoni, you want to get a beer? We could strategize.”
“I gotta get home.”
“Look, I think we ought to talk.”
He stood up. “We got nothing to talk about. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He walked out, and the door shut behind him with a bang.
YOU’RE A CHAMP, KIMO
I sat at my desk for a while, until Alvy Greenberg, one of the uniforms who’d been with us on the drug bust, came in and said, “Hey, Kimo.”
Alvy was about five years younger than I was, and a surfer, too. We’d met when I’d just come back from the North Shore, when I was in the academy, and because he was maybe interested in becoming a cop we’d talked, off and on, about my experiences there. At the time he’d been a waiter, taking a couple of classes at UH, trying to decide, as I had, if he was good enough to make a career out of surfing.
He wasn’t, either, and just before I made detective he’d entered the academy. I guess I had been kind of a mentor to him, advising him on how to deal with problems that came up, surfing with him now and then. Once in a while on a holiday weekend we’d throw our boards into my truck and drive up to the North Shore, just to keep our hands in.
“Hey, Alvy.” He was the kind of guy who looked older than he was, the one you always sent in to buy the beer when you were still illegal. About five-seven, thin, already balding rapidly at twenty-seven, and incredibly ambitious. You couldn’t take the detective’s exam until you’ve had three years on the beat, and most officers wait another year or two beyond that. Alvy had taken the exam right after his third anniversary, just a couple of weeks before. He was still waiting for the results, but we’d already talked about where he might be posted. He didn’t want to leave Waikiki, but he was tactful enough to realize that unless they expanded our staff, he’d have to wait for me or Akoni to leave. So we’d talked about District 1, which covered most of downtown and was administered out of the main headquarters on South Beretania Street. Lots of government and corporate offices, and Chinatown to provide work, and the chance to be at headquarters and make contacts.