“Do you know what he did after he left you?” Akoni asked.
“He got a call while we were at the club, on his cell phone. I don’t know who it was, but it was somebody he was going to meet back at his office.”
I made a note of that. We had to get hold of the records on Tommy’s cell phone. “Do you have any idea who it might have been?” I asked. “From the tone of his voice, from anything he said? Was it a friend, a business colleague?”
“I was pretty angry,” she said. “I mean, we were in the middle of this big dramatic scene, he’s telling me he’s fallen in love with someone else, and his cell phone rings. I got up and went to the ladies’ room.”
I looked at Akoni. “Anything else you want to ask?”
He shook his head. Treasure looked at her watch. “I have to get back,” she said, and stood up.
I handed her my card and said, “If you think of anything else, will you call?”
She took the card and nodded. “I did love him, you know. I mean, he was very good to me, up until that night, and lots of people thought he was really hard, but he had a good side. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”
She turned and walked away fast, dodging a party of six with two babies, and two busboys carrying infant seats behind them. The waiter was right on Treasure’s heels with our dinners. We started to eat. “That Luz Maria’s got to be the same one from the black tar bust,” I said.
“Got to be. That would mean Tommy was behind the drug deal. You think she was mad that things didn’t go as planned, maybe blamed Tommy?”
It was my turn to shrug. “It’s a possibility. Maybe this Dong Shi-Dao will know something useful.”
Akoni was about to answer me when the restaurant erupted into song. It was someone’s birthday at the next table, and we had to wait while the waiters sang a Chinese-accented Happy Birthday to him.
“We’ll put him at the top of our list tomorrow,” Akoni said. He bent over his teacup, and I couldn’t help noticing the way his black hair stood up in stiff bristles at the top of his head, falling into spiky bangs on his forehead. Funny, I thought, you can work with somebody for years and never really look at him.
I thought about the way Norma had been able to look at me and see who I was, see something others hadn’t seen, or at least that I’d tried to hide for years. I wondered what Akoni was hiding, and if it would change my opinion of him.
I picked up my fortune cookie and cracked it open. None of the numbers looked particularly lucky to me, but then I wasn’t feeling very lucky. I flipped it over to read the fortune. “Your future will be very interesting,” it said.
I read it out loud to Akoni. “I’ll bet.” His read, “You are talented in many fields.” He said, “Be nice if investigation was one of them,” and threw it in the ashtray.
The next morning I called Harry at six. “Hey, brah, you want surf?”
“Shit, Kimo what time is it?”
“Come on. I’ll meet you at the park in fifteen minutes.”
“Asshole,” he said, and hung up. But he was there, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. The sky was gray and there were still street lights on, and the water was cold when you first stepped into it. But I felt connected, and peaceful. Happy, almost.
We didn’t speak much, just paddled out beyond the waves and then surfed back in, and passed at least an hour that way. By then the sun was up and I was feeling great. There was a little tightness in my thighs and my lower back, but it was a good feeling, reminding me I had muscles. I watched Harry off and on, saw that he was starting to gain his confidence again. It reminded me of the endless hours we’d spent as kids at that very beach, surfing waves that had seemed so much bigger then. Energy seemed to flow back and forth between us, rising up out of the salty water and the trade winds.
We walked back through the streets of Waikiki together when we were finished. We passed a man with a bulldog on a leash. The dog was wearing a flowered hat, and two Japanese women stopped to take its picture.
An elderly woman wearing headphones and towing a shopping cart stopped in front of us, in the middle of the sidewalk, and began to do a little dance. “Waikiki,” Harry said. “You gotta love it.”
I picked up coffee for myself and Akoni on the way into the station, and we arrived at the same time. “Just to let you know, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at nine,” Akoni said. “You’ll have to keep things together here for an hour or so.”
“How about we try for an appointment with Dong Shi-Dao,” I said, picking up the phone. Just to show that luck comes when you don’t particularly need it, I got through to him right away and scheduled a meeting for eleven a.m.
I called Peggy and left a message for her, letting her know we were going to need a subpoena for Tommy Pang’s cell phone records. Akoni left a little later, and I got caught up in a bunch of Internet articles on tongs, not noticing the clock until it was almost too late. I had just enough time to make it to Dong Shi-Dao’s office downtown. I sprinted home for my truck, racing past eager families on their way to or from the beach. It was a nice day, and sprinkled among the commuters on the drive downtown were bunches of tourists, driving rented convertibles with the top down or strolling along Fort Street gawking at the high-rise office buildings. I could almost hear them commenting how our business district looks just like home, only with palm trees.
My favorite thing is when mainland tourists ask dumb questions, like if I ever get over to the States, or if we accept all the regular U.S. coins, or wonder if they have to dial any special telephone codes to call back home.
I parked in a garage and cut across King Street to Smith, where the office was, in a small one-story building sandwiched between high-rises. There was a nice trade wind coming off the ocean, and the sky was a deep blue dotted with small white clouds. I had a moment of real longing, wanting to chuck this case and go back to the beach. Then I ran into Akoni.
Just as we met, I saw a woman come out of Dong Shi-Dao’s office. She looked both ways, then set off in the direction opposite us.
“She looks familiar, doesn’t she?” I asked. Akoni and I walked a little faster, trying to catch up to her.
“We’ve seen her before,” he agreed.
She stopped at the corner of Smith and Hotel to let a bus pass, and turned her profile toward us. “I know,” I said, stopping short. “It’s Luz Maria.”
NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK
Without any communication between us, we both took off after her, but she was already a block away, heading mauka on Smith Street. We got stuck at a traffic light, and by the time we got across she had disappeared in a crowd of tourists.
We split up and circled the block in opposite directions, but neither of us could pick her up again. “She was Tommy’s mistress,” I said. “You think maybe now she’s moved over to his friend?”
“We’ll find out,” Akoni said as we headed back to Dong Shi-Dao’s office, where we entered a small reception area, painted white with a few simple watercolors on the wall. A very attractive Vietnamese woman in her early twenties was sitting behind a small desk typing from a handwritten page. She looked up as we came in.
We explained our business, and she got up from her desk and knocked at a door behind her. Then she opened the door, stuck her head in and announced us. “Please come in,” she said, turning back to us. “Would you like coffee? Tea?”
We both declined. Dong Shi-Dao was a Vietnamese man in his mid-forties, wearing a khaki-colored Armani suit and a black turtleneck. He stood up to shake our hands. His grip was solid and firm and his voice carried echoes of some kind of untraceable accent. “Let me say I want to do everything I can to help you solve this terrible crime. Tommy Pang was a dear friend of mine. I was horrified to hear that he had been murdered.”