Akoni showed his ID and introduced us. We established quickly that Tommy was the owner of the store, and a personal friend of Melvin’s, but that he was not involved in the business. “How about his son, Derek?” I asked.
Melvin Ah Wong nodded. “Yes, Derek comes by once, sometimes twice a week.”
“For what? To look at the books?”
Ah Wong looked offended. “I have full responsibility for running this business. They don’t look at my books at all.”
“Then why does he come here so often?”
Melvin Ah Wong looked around. “We should go in the back. Where we can be private.” He opened the hinged countertop and we followed him past a huge hopper full of peanuts and stacks of flattened boxes. “Jimmy!” he said as we turned a corner.
A teenaged boy was sitting at a desk in front of us, doing what looked like his homework. Though he was Chinese, he had a shock of bright yellow hair that stood straight up, like a Mohawk, and the rest of his head was shaved. He was about sixteen, thin, and effeminate. “Go watch the desk,” Melvin said.
Jimmy slouched off to the front and Melvin closed the door behind the three of us. “Derek and Wayne come here to ship packages,” he said. “They do everything themselves. Weigh, wrap, fill out customs forms.”
“Do you know what’s in those packages?”
He shook his head vehemently. “No! I don’t know, I don’t want to know.”
“But you suspect they’re doing something illicit.”
“Who am I to suspect? Maybe they’re just very careful. Perhaps these are important things of great personal value. They don’t trust anyone else to handle them.”
“Or they’re smuggling something.”
Melvin shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“How about other friends of Tommy Pang’s? You know any of them?”
“Dong Shi-Dao,” he said. “He’s a friend. And then Chin Suk, he’s like Tommy’s mentor, I guess you could call it. Knew Tommy’s family in China.”
There was Uncle Chin again. It was clear I was going to have to talk to him about Tommy at some point. It wasn’t something I looked forward to; since becoming a cop, I’d managed to maintain a good relationship with Uncle Chin by keeping my professional life and my personal life separate. Though it appeared that concept had flown out the window the night I went to the Rod and Reel Club. “Anybody else?”
“Tommy didn’t have many friends.”
“How about enemies?”
Melvin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Akoni said, “Sure you do. Anybody who disliked Tommy enough to kill him.”
You could see the wheels turning in Melvin Ah Wong’s head. He was trying to say something without incriminating himself. “We know Tommy Pang was a criminal,” I said. “And I don’t care what you know or don’t know about his businesses. I just want to know if he mentioned any particular rivalries to you, anybody he cheated, anybody who might want him dead.”
That didn’t seem to make the connection for Melvin. He was still thinking. I had a flash of inspiration. “How about cops? Any cops who might have been working for Tommy on the side, who might have a grudge against him?”
That hit the jackpot. Melvin smiled. “Tommy often had reason to become friendly with police officers. Because of the work he did, he sometimes needed both business and personal security. And,” he paused, again searching for delicacy, “occasionally he may have skirted the law and needed an officer to look the other way.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. “Names, Melvin. We want to know who these cops were.”
His face fell. “He never told me. I know most of the officers he dealt with were Chinese. There was at least one haole, I know, with a Portuguese name. Tommy was particularly pleased to have recruited him. Apparently the man had financial problems, and was in a particular position to do Tommy good. But he never told me the man’s name, or if he did, I forgot it.”
“Great,” Akoni said. “A haole cop with a Portuguese name. There must be hundreds of those.”
There wasn’t anything more Melvin Ah Wong could tell us, though he did give us an address and phone number for Dong Shi-Dao, who he said worked in import-export. He said he couldn’t be more specific. We walked back through the storeroom with him. “Can I get a soda, Dad?” Jimmy asked.
Melvin frowned. “All right, but come right back. You still have homework.”
Jimmy walked out of the store with us, and hesitated for a moment, waiting to see which way we turned. Then he followed us.
“Give me a few minutes,” I whispered to Akoni. “Go on ahead a little.”
He picked up his pace and I slowed down. In a minute Jimmy Ah Wong was walking next to me. “Where do you go to school?” I asked.
“Honolulu Christian,” he said, naming a Chinatown private school not far away.
“Good school. I was in a speech and debate club when I was at Punahou, and we used to compete against them.”
He nodded. We came to a little convenience store across the street from Nu’uanu Stream. “I think I need a soda, too,” I said. “Hot day.”
We went inside and got Cokes. There was a tiny park alongside the water and I said, “Want to go over there?”
“Sure.”
The smell of something rotten was stronger right there by the river, but when the trade wind blew it didn’t bother me too much. We sat down on a picnic bench under a big kiawe tree. There was a clutch of old men behind us, gabbing in Chinese, but they couldn’t hear anything we said. “If you have something to tell me, you can,” I said.
He looked down at the picnic table. “I’m ashamed.”
“Hey, when I was your age I was ashamed all the time,” I said. “Ashamed and scared. Matter of fact, I still am. I’m just more accustomed to it.”
He didn’t speak. “You know something about Tommy Pang’s murder?” I asked gently. “Was your father involved?”
He looked up fast. “No, nothing to do with my father.”
Then I knew. “Derek and Wayne, right? They got friendly with you, didn’t they?”
There was a tear trickling down his left cheek but he made no move to wipe it away. I could see that I’d moved too quickly. “So what’s with the hair?” I asked, flicking a couple of fingers at his yellow coxcomb. “Pretty radical. I bet your dad’s not too pleased.”
He didn’t say anything. “You like music?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re a punker. Sex Pistols and all that retro ’80s music.” I drummed my fists against the picnic table and howled, “I wanna kill you and put lots of goo in my hair and talk in a funny British accent.”
The clutch of Chinese men looked up in alarm, then went back to their conversation. Jimmy finally smiled. “It was just something to do,” he said. “Piss my dad off. You know.”
“I know all about it. I was the youngest of three boys. I practically had to dance on the dinner table to get anybody to pay attention to me.”
“I never had to do that.” The tension seemed to have left his shoulders, and I thought I could try again. “You were going to tell me about Derek and Wayne.”
I could tell he made a decision then, just to get it off his chest, and I knew that though that would be painful it would be good for him in the long run. “Just Wayne,” he said, almost whispering. “He said we could never tell Derek.”
“It’s really hard to be a teenager and like other guys,” I said as casually as I could. “I remember when I was about sixteen I was scared shitless of taking a shower after gym, afraid I’d get a hard-on in the shower and the other guys would tease me.”
“He was nice to me,” Jimmy said, and he was really crying now. “Nobody else was ever nice to me like that.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
He nodded and looked down at the table. His shoulders were shaking, and I put an arm around him. “It’s all right, Jimmy. You didn’t do anything wrong. Wayne was the one who was wrong. It’s not right for an adult to take advantage of a kid.”