THE MASTER OF HANDLING
“Did he offer you anything, Detectives?” Derek asked after we’d introduced ourselves. “Coffee? Juice? Sometimes the man has no manners.” Without waiting for an answer from us, he continued, “I’m making cappuccino. You want?”
We agreed. He led us over to the kitchen, and Akoni and I sat at a round glass table with a white marble gargoyle at its base as Derek Pang started making cappuccino. While the coffee brewed, Derek busied himself getting out mugs, spoons, even a little shaker of toppings like you see in fancy coffee shops. His movements were quick and delicate, and I was reminded of someone describing a homosexual as “light in his loafers.”
That description really worked for Derek. He could have been a ballet dancer, perhaps, with the kind of china-doll looks I saw in some of my aunts and girl cousins on my mother’s side. It’s a fragility and femininity that many men, obviously including Wayne Gallagher, found attractive.
I started asking Derek the same questions we’d asked Wayne.
“We left the club around midnight on Tuesday,” he said. He stuck a metal pitcher filled with milk under the frothing arm of the cappuccino maker. He had to talk louder over the noise of the steam frothing the milk. “I wanted my father to make Wayne the manager. So we were hanging around the Rod and Reel a lot, trying to show that Wayne knew the business.”
He poured the cappuccino, and I took a sip of mine. It was good. “Wayne mentioned an associate of your father’s was there that night, too. Did you know him?”
Derek looked into his mug, holding it with both hands. It took him a long time to answer. “How much do you know about my father?” he asked, finally.
“A lot,” I said. “He had a pretty extensive record.”
“Growing up, I never knew what my father did. Or I knew, but I didn’t, you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“He owned a bunch of legitimate businesses, you know. The bar’s just one. Once I came back from college, he promised that if I worked with him for a while, he would help me set up my own gallery.”
“My father wanted me to work with him,” I said. “He’s a contractor, and I spent most of my summers on crews on his projects. When it came time to choose, I became a cop instead.”
“Then you know what it’s like. It’s worse when your father’s a crook, Detective. You always try to keep your head turned so you won’t see what’s going on. I know the guy who was with him was a cop, but I didn’t want to know any more than that.”
“You’re sure?” Akoni asked.
Derek nodded. “I’m sure it’s not unheard of,” he said dryly. “For gangsters to have cops on their payroll. And make no mistake, my father was a gangster. I don’t know what he did, exactly, what put the food on our table or paid my tuition to Yale, but it wasn’t pretty.”
I kept worrying that Wayne would come out and join us, so I hurried on. “The night your father was murdered, you left around midnight, you said. Where did you go after that?”
He thought, and for a minute I thought they had worked their stories out in advance. “We went for a drive.” He looked down at his mug for a minute and said, “We went up to Mount Tantalus eventually and parked, and we, well, made out for a while.” He looked up at me again. “Kind of crappy, isn’t it? My dad’s getting killed and I’m off getting laid.”
Gallagher came in then, and pouted because Derek hadn’t made him a cappuccino too. “I didn’t know whether you’d eaten or not,” Derek said. There wasn’t a chair at the table for him, so Gallagher stood awkwardly against the counter, dressed now in white shorts and an emerald-green polo shirt that was a little too tight for him. He reminded me of my brother Haoa, big and beefy, but even clothed there was a sexuality to him that I found very attractive.
“This associate of your father’s, the man you think was a cop,” Akoni said. “Do you think you could recognize him again?”
“I think so,” Derek said. “He came around a couple of times. My father gave him something that night, in a box.” He thought for a minute. “I remember thinking it was funny. It was a little box, kind of long and narrow, like you’d put a necklace or a bracelet in, and I thought it was a funny gift for my father to give him.”
I finished the last of my cappuccino and handed the mug to Derek, who stood up and took all three mugs to the sink.
“Can you clean up, Wayne?” he asked. “We’re going back into the living room.” As he passed by, Wayne’s hand passed over Derek’s chest and I was sure he tweaked Derek’s nipple.
“How about his associates, from his other businesses?” I asked Derek, when we were sitting in the living room again. “Are there any you might have met sometime?”
He thought about it for a while. In the kitchen I heard Wayne banging pots and pans and generally reminding us he was around and mad that he hadn’t been asked to join us. “There’s one man I met a couple of times,” he said finally. “An old man, a little stooped over. He said to call him Uncle Chin.”
I felt an electric jolt run through my body. My father’s closest friend, a man I considered my own godfather, was a gangster of sorts, retired by then. I had always called him Uncle Chin.
“Did you feel that this Uncle Chin was a gangster like your father?” Akoni asked.
Derek nodded. “I mean, I got the feeling he was some kind of Godfather, you know? An old guy who didn’t really do much but everybody kind of looked up to him. It was almost like, I don’t know, I was presented to him. It was all very formal.”
I was lost in thought, but Akoni and I had talked about Uncle Chin in the past, so he kept the interview going. “Do you have other family?”
“My father was an only child, but he had a lot of cousins,” Derek said. “They’re all still back in China. My mother was a bar girl in Hong Kong when my father met her. She’s never told me about any family at all.” He must have noticed the look on our faces, because he said, “Does that surprise you? The very proper and respectable Genevieve Pang was a bar girl in Hong Kong? It’s amazing how we can reinvent ourselves, isn’t it?”
“How about your father’s other businesses,” I said. “Do you know anything about them? Who runs them, what they do, that kind of thing?”
He shook his head. “He wouldn’t tell me anything. I knew, but I didn’t know, you understand?”
“I understand,” I said.
There wasn’t much else we could ask. Derek looked over the list of tong members, too, but didn’t recognize any of the names. Wayne finished in the kitchen and came into the living room, and the four of us talked for another couple of minutes. They both walked us to the front door. “You’ll let me know if you discover anything about my father’s murder?” Derek asked, and we both agreed.
“So what do we do next?” Akoni asked, as we rode down in the elevator.
“Maybe we need to think about the murder weapon,” I said. I thought back to the autopsy. “Doc’s best guess was something like a lead bar or pipe.”
“Where the hell do you get one of those in Waikiki?”
Something was nagging at the back of my brain. I’d seen a bar like that only recently. Where had it been? Suddenly I remembered. “We are really lousy detectives,” I said. “Come on, if I’m wrong, I’m buying you dinner.”
“Duke’s Canoe Club,” Akoni said. “I’ve been wanting to go there.”
We grabbed sandwiches at a fast food place and ate in the car. We made a quick stop at the station so I could pick up an extra-large evidence bag, and we were at the Rod and Reel Club just after one. Arleen buzzed us in. “Hey, guys, what’s up?” she asked.
“My partner here’s had an inspiration,” Akoni said, as I walked around behind the door and kneeled to the floor. “But he’s been keeping me in the dark.”
I looked closely at the police lock, a long steel bar that rotated in a groove on the floor. No matter how well someone had tried to clean it up, I could still spot a couple of flecks of blood on it. “Our weapon,” I said, pointing it out to Akoni.