“Ick,” Arleen said. “I’ve been touching that bar since Tuesday.”
We carried the bar back to my truck, and then drove it over to the evidence lab at the main police headquarters. We had a pretty modern lab down there, in the special investigations section on the B1 level, along with a little mini-museum of how far crime detection equipment had come. They had ancient scientific equipment like a centrifuge, a spectroscope, and a compound microscope. Also an old ultraviolet lamp and an ancient fingerprint camera, and photos of old evidence types.
In the document lab, they analyzed stuff like typewriters, documents, footprints, and tire treads, as well as fingerprints. One of my favorite signs was down there, on the wall outside. It read, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“So we’ve got our weapon,” Akoni said as we walked down the hallway from the document lab to the elevator. “You got a couple of suspects up your sleeve, too?”
The hallway was lined with windows into the other labs, like the drug lab, and serology, where they did the blood analysis. The firearms lab had a chart with actual bullets on it for matching purposes, and a one-lane firing range for firing tests. There were eyewash and safety shower signs all over.
“You want everything, don’t you?” We both agreed the week had been a long stressful one, and we’d feel better about tackling the idea of suspects on Monday. Akoni dropped me back in front of my building, and as I was climbing up to my apartment, my cell phone rang.
The number belonged to Harry Ho, my oldest friend. Harry had just come back to Honolulu a few weeks before, after a protracted stretch on the mainland, which involved several degrees from MIT and a few patents registered in his name. From what I understood, he’d made enough money that he could afford to tinker on his inventions, and at the same time he’d taken an adjunct teaching job at UH.
In high school, Harry and I had snuck off as often as we could to surf. We’d ride the city bus down to Kuhio Beach Park with our bathing suits on under our school clothes. We stored our boards with the guy who ran the surfboard concession at the Beach Princess hotel, and we’d ditch our clothes on the sand and surf until dark. I don’t know when he managed to do his homework-I rarely did mine. But he graduated at the top of our class at Punahou, and dragged me along behind him somehow.
I went to college at UC San Diego because I could surf there, and Harry went to MIT. We kept in touch-I sent him photos of me surfing, with snotty captions, and he wrote regularly to tell me what an asshole I was. Now that he’s back, he’s mad to surf again, even though he’s terrible. I’m not much good anymore, though, so I don’t mind going out with him.
Harry’s brain isn’t like mine. He can do lots of things at once, and never seems to be shorting any one of them. If he’d been able to get the education he wanted at UH, or somewhere else near a beach, he could have gotten a lot higher than fifth place in a regional tournament in the off season. But we’re over thirty now, and he missed that peak when he could have been great, and even with all those degrees and the money and the patents, he regrets it. Since I have my regrets, too, I humor him.
“Hey, brah, how’s life?” he asked.
“I’d say it pretty much sucks.” I had no intention of telling Harry why life was sucking at the moment, beyond Tommy Pang’s corpse at the county morgue. I’d stepped out on that limb once already, and found it pretty damn shaky.
“Sounds like you need some attitude adjustment. What do you say you meet me at the Canoe Club bar in twenty minutes and we work on some wahine action?”
I took a deep breath. “I could use a beer, but maybe someplace quieter. Can you handle that?”
“I am the master of handling,” Harry said. “How about the Gordon Biersch at the Aloha Tower?”
“I’m there. You just can’t see me yet.”
I picked up a second wind as I drove back downtown. I parked on the pier and walked over to the Aloha Tower Marketplace. The tower was the tallest building in the islands when it was built in 1926, and on “Boat Days,” when the cruise ships left Honolulu, it was the place to be to watch the ships go out, kind of like that scene at the start of The Love Boat when the horn sounds and everybody gathers on all the decks to wave and throw streamers. Now there were clusters of clever shops selling island handicrafts, postcards and magnets of island girls (and boys) in thong bikinis, and jars of po’a jam and coconut syrup.
The Gordon Biersch brewpub is at the far end of the marketplace, just a stone planter filled with orange, red and purple bougainvillea and a short piece of tarmac separating you from Honolulu Harbor. I walked through the indoor bar and the restaurant, looking for Harry. As I came back out into the fierce afternoon sun I saw him at the outdoor bar, where he’d just gotten a beer. Fortunately, he’d ditched his habitual pocket protector full of mechanical pencils, but, god bless the guy, he still looked like a geek. He’s thin, Chinese, about five-foot-six, with his black hair cut like somebody put a bowl on his head and snipped. As you'd expect from someone who looked the way he did, he was a genius; as you would not expect, he was also very good with people and able to charm the pants off any wahine he set his sights on.
He raised his wheat-logo mug to me and headed off to snag us a table, not an easy task in a bar crowded with happy-hour beer drinkers. He was successful, though, as he seems to be in everything he tries, and by the time I had my glass of marzen, a German wheat beer they specialized in, he was sitting at a table at the very edge of the patio. Just beyond us a tanker was coming in through the narrow channel, silhouetted against the setting sun. There were a few clouds massed over the Waianae Mountains, but otherwise it was a glorious, clear, golden afternoon. Then why did I feel so bad?
“It sounded like you wanted to talk,” Harry said, motioning to our relative obscurity.
“I do,” I said, sitting down. “How’s it going?”
“It goes. I’m remembering how to sense the waves. It’s something I’d forgotten, you know? I know all the physics, but I forgot how you just have to sit there and feel the water.”
I nodded. “You settling in all right at the university?”
“I’ve got a couple of smart students,” he said. “Better than I expected. But enough crap. What’s wrong?”
I shifted uneasily in my seat. A young Japanese couple just beyond us on the pavement stood by one of the yellow bollards and kissed, and then a fat tourist in a garish aloha shirt offered to take their picture. I realized again I would never go on a honeymoon, never mug for the camera with a pretty wahine on my arm, never build up memories to share with my children and grandchildren. I had an urge to spill everything to Harry, but I’d done that with Akoni already and look where it got me.
“Just a case,” I said. “Listen, maybe Monday morning, you can give us a hand? We got a computer with a password we don’t know, and a missing Palm Pilot that maybe was backed up onto the hard drive. You know anything about that?”
“You have to ask?” Harry put his hand over his heart. “I’m hurt. Of course I know about that. They haven’t made a password yet I can’t break.”
We made a time to meet at the station Monday, and then I directed the conversation back to surfing, and Harry went along with it. We ordered some food, and by the time we staggered away I was feeling almost good again. I’d been thinking for a while that I was being the good friend to Harry, helping him get adjusted to life in Hawaii again, going surfing with him while he flailed his way back to proficiency. But it was clear he was doing something for me, too.
BROTHERLY LUAU
The next morning was Saturday, and I spent most of it surfing, riding my bicycle, and trying not to think about Tommy Pang or any revelations that his death might bring up about me. I was only partially successful.