It was one of those moments after which your life is never the same. I finally understood what I had been feeling in gym class, and not feeling on dates with smart girls from Punahou who wore wire-rimmed glasses and serious expressions. And imagine, it only took me sixteen years to get from that bookstore to the food court at Ala Moana Mall where I bared my soul to Akoni.
I let myself in the front door with my key. “Hey, Mom, you here?” I called as I closed the door behind me.
Surprisingly, it was my father who appeared first. Usually, like Uncle Chin, he holds court from his recliner in the living room. “Hello, Keechee,” he said. It’s always been his nickname for me, and when Lui or Haoa had tried to tease me with it he’d come down hard on them. He had a nickname for each of us, a special name that was between the two of us alone. Lulu was Lui, of course, and Howgow was Haoa. “Your mother will be pleased to see you.”
“And you? Is this torture for you, seeing me?”
“You have always been the wicked son,” he said, smiling. My mother came out of the kitchen then and leaned up to kiss my cheek. The Kanapa‘aka boys were also lucky to inherit their father’s height; my father never quite reached six feet, stopping at five-eleven and three quarters (and he was always so precise in his measurements that he could never give himself the extra quarter of an inch) but the three of us all hovered between six foot and six two. Me, I was six foot and a half inch, and the difference between me and my father was that I told people I was six one.
My mother was barely five six, though, and already she had started to shrink. She’s sixty-five, my father sixty-eight, though he swore he would never retire. He had been working a lot with Haoa lately, though, joint construction and landscaping projects, and I could tell he wanted my brother to take over more of the business. He even wanted me to take over for a long time, and tolerated my years of surfing because he believed I would come back and build with him, eventually. I think one of the biggest disappointments of his life, though I was totally unaware of it at the time, was when I came back from the North Shore and announced I was entering the police academy. Like my moment at the bookstore, he must have lost some illusions then, and seen the future in a clearer light, though he was probably unwilling to admit it.
We went immediately to the dinner table. “You went to see Uncle Chin,” my father said, as my mother passed a platter of roasted chicken toward me. “Tell us about your case.”
Uncle Chin’s associations have always been an unspoken matter between my father and me. When I was a child, I didn’t know what tongs were, and thought criminals were those guys on TV with bad hats and guns. When I became a cop, and I started seeing Uncle Chin’s name on the police computer system, I never actually confronted my father. Uncle Chin had always been a nice man to me, with crack seed or some other treat for me as a kid, and I wasn’t about to change my opinion of him because he had a record. But I think my father was a little afraid of my disapproval of his friend, which was an interesting position to be in with your father.
“A homicide,” I said, taking chicken and passing the plate to my father. “We can’t seem to get a handle on it. A Chinese guy, owned a bar on Kuhio Avenue. The body was found in an alley behind the bar last Tuesday night.”
“What bar?” my father asked.
I took a forkful of roasted potato to my mouth and said, “The Rod and Reel Club.”
“I know that place. Mahu club,” my father said, using the Hawaiian for homosexual. “I did renovation there couple months ago.”
I put my fork down. “You know Tommy Pang?”
“A little. A friend of Uncle Chin. A referral.” He looked at me, and I could see the wheels working behind his head. “Tommy Pang dead?”
“That’s him. Interesting, isn’t it? Uncle Chin said he hardly knew the man.”
“No more work talk at the table,” my mother said. “So, Kimo, who you dating this week?”
“After dinner,” I said to my father. “You and I are going to have a talk. All right? Maybe we’ll even go back and visit Uncle Chin.”
“My association with Tommy Pang was entirely honorable.”
“Have you been surfing a lot?” my mother asked.
I put my fork down and looked at my father. “I’ve never had a reason to doubt your honor,” I said. “You’re entitled to have your own friends and conduct your business as you see fit. I’ve never said anything to you, have I?”
“Your Uncle Chin is a good man.”
“I know.”
My mother was starting to sound desperate. “How is Harry?” she asked. “Does he like teaching at the University?”
I turned to her. “He seems to like it well enough. It’s going to take him a while to become Hawaiian again.” I made a face. “A little too much Boston in him now, not enough Waikiki. But I’m working on him.”
We talked about my brothers and their wives and my nephews and nieces. “They all come here much more often than you do, Kimo,” my mother said. “What’s the matter? You don’t like your old mother and father anymore?”
I pushed my plate away and wiped my mouth with my napkin. “When I come here you try and make me fat. What kind of surfer will I be, fat?”
“Oh,” my mother said, getting up to clear the table. “You fat? That would be a sight.”
She took a stack of dishes to the kitchen and my father said, “It’s a difficult time for the contracting business now. Hard to get work. Take business where you find it.”
“Did he ask you to do anything illegal?”
My father looked horrified. Even in an aloha shirt, his hair graying at the sides and receding at the top, he looked like a proper businessman. “Of course not.”
“Did you have any reason to believe he was going to use the premises for illegal purposes, or that his money came from some illegal source?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Just tell me, from the start, what you know about Tommy Pang.”
“Let’s go into the living room,” he said, standing.
My mother hovered in the doorway of the kitchen. “No dessert?”
“Maybe later,” my father said.
He sat on his recliner and I sat on the sofa. “About six months ago,” he began. “February, March. I was finishing a big job with Haoa, beach cabanas at that resort in Hawai‘i Kai. We had nothing new lined up together; he was starting that contract with the Mandarin Oriental. Uncle Chin sent this man, Tommy Pang, to talk to me.”
“Where did you meet, your office?” My father had a small office in an industrial building on the Ewa side of downtown Honolulu, near Salt Lake.
“Yes, he came to my office. He wanted to change the image of the club, make it more like a real fishing lodge. Your cousin Mark did the drawings and I pulled the permit. We started work about four months ago and finished the punch list in July.”
I got a pad and pen and came back to the couch. “Did you meet anyone else who worked for Tommy Pang?”
My father thought. “I met his son. Nice boy. Dick? Danny?”
“Derek.”
“Derek.” He frowned and sighed a little. “It’s very difficult to be a father, you know that, Kimo?”
“What do you mean?”
“Some fathers, it seems like their sons can never please them. Work hard, bow low, no matter. Fathers never satisfied.”
“Tommy Pang was like that?”
He nodded. “You could see, all he wanted was his father’s approval, but Tommy could never give that to him.” He shook his head again. “Unhappy people. Now his father is dead, and they can never make up.”
He looked up at me. “I’m not like that with my boys, am I, Kimo? You boys know I love you. I accept each of you for what you are.” He sat up a little straighter. “I wanted one of you to work with me. To pass my business on to you. But more than that, I want you to be happy. You, and Lui, and Haoa.”