“I have. But I’m not done thinking yet. I just need a little more time.”
“A little,” she said. “I can give a little. Do you want to have dinner tomorrow night? Maybe we can both relax.”
I waffled. “Let’s wait and see how we both feel,” I said, knowing I was surfing with Tim at three. I knew Peggy, and knew if she was this stressed on Friday she was likely to cancel on Saturday. We went back to work on the subpoena, and then we went upstairs to Judge Yamanaka’s chambers, where she signed it with hardly a glance. I hand-carried it to the phone company office a couple of blocks away, and handed it to the Japanese woman behind the counter. “Do you want to wait for the printout?” she asked. “It’ll probably take a half hour or so.”
“I’ll wait.” I sat down in an uncomfortable plastic chair and tried to look through a couple of magazines, but I was too fidgety to concentrate. I felt like our investigation was finally moving forward, and I was antsy to get on with things.
Finally the woman came back, carrying my printout. There were two incoming calls the night Tommy was killed, one right after the other. I didn’t recognize the first number, though the second seemed familiar to me. I ran it through my brain until it came up with a match. Uncle Chin. Of course, Tommy was his son, after all. I pointed to the first call. “This number,” I said. “Can you trace it for me?”
She took the printout and walked to a terminal, where she sat down and typed something in. She waited a minute and then looked up at me. “It’s a pay phone.” She read off the address to me, and I realized it was a couple of blocks from the bar where we’d all gone after the failed black tar bust. I drove past it on my way back to the station, and saw it was a single phone attached to a post on the sidewalk. Anyone could pull up on the street and use it, or walk up after leaving a nearby bar.
I thought of Evan Gonsalves again, and tried to remember what time he’d left the bar. The details of that part of the night were fuzzy, but I thought he must have left around midnight. Just when the call came through to Tommy’s cell phone, as he was breaking up with Treasure Chen.
By the time I got back to the station, Akoni had left-he was taking Mealoha up to the North Shore for a family reunion weekend. It saved me having to share my suspicions about Evan with him, and let me table the whole investigation until Monday morning.
I passed on dinner with Harry, even though it was Friday night. I picked up a chicken breast at the grocery and left it marinating in a mango sauce while I went for a swim. I felt the heat of the pavement rising up through the cheap plastic of my slippas and crossed Lili‘uokalani to walk on the shady side of the street. There wasn’t a hint of a trade wind, and the palm trees at Kuhio Beach Park stood still. The air was heavy with humidity, sweat, and the smell of seaweed washed up on the shore at high tide.
I jumped in the ocean hoping it would be cool, but it was warm as bathwater until I swam out beyond the shallow breakers. I finally hit a pocket of cold water and it stunned me, raising goose bumps on my arms. It was as if I’d forgotten what cold felt like.
I swam for almost an hour but didn’t see Tim, and then went home and grilled the chicken breast on my barbecue, cutting a green pepper into slices and roasting them until their skins charred. I drank a macadamia nut brown ale in a twenty-two-ounce bottle with dinner, turned the ceiling fan on high, and relaxed for what seemed like the first time in days. It was a brief jump back into my old life, the one where I knew what was going on.
I slept late the next morning, a treat I almost never allowed myself, and it felt great to be able to look at the clock, smile, and then just roll over. I finally got up around nine-thirty, made myself macadamia nut pancakes, and then got back into bed with a surfing magazine.
The phone rang around eleven, and I half hoped it was Tim Ryan, and then worried he’d be canceling our surfing lesson. It was Terri Gonsalves, and she was crying. “Okay,” I said. “It can’t be so bad. Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“This morning I told Evan that I wanted him to take back the bracelet he gave me, that it was too nice a present. He said he couldn’t.”
“Yeah?”
“He said he’d been doing some private security work, just like you said. A jewelry dealer visiting Honolulu who needed somebody to go along with him. For payment, he gave Evan the bracelet.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“He’s lying, Kimo, I know he is. I didn’t believe him, and he got mad, and he walked out.” In the background I heard her son come into the room. To him, she said, “It’s okay, Danny. Sometimes Daddy and Mommy get mad at each other. Why don’t you go to your room and play for a while, and then Mommy will come and get you?”
She came back on the phone, speaking softly. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“He can’t take back what he’s already done, however he got the bracelet. Just tell him not to do any more. Whatever he’s into, you have to say it doesn’t matter, you just want him to stop. I’d offer to talk to him myself, Terri, but you know we’re walking a fine line here. I don’t want to find out anything I don’t want to know.”
“I understand,” she said. “All right, I’ll tell him.”
“Good girl. Call me whenever you need to.”
I hung up, and then paced around the apartment for a while. I thought about Evan, about the growing list of ways he might be connected to Tommy Pang. Was the bracelet he gave Terri what Derek had seen his father give to the nameless cop? Had Evan been the leak on the black tar bust? I didn’t want to call Akoni and ruin his weekend; if indeed Evan was our guy, he would still be around on Monday morning.
It was a gorgeous day, too nice to stay cooped up inside, so I went for a walk, all the way through Waikiki past Fort DeRussy, to the Ala Moana Center, where I turned around and walked all the way back. It was wonderful to turn my brain off, just concentrate on the walk and the world around me.
When I got back there was a message on my machine from Peggy Kaneahe. I returned her call, and we talked about a case that was keeping her swamped. A pair of petty thieves had stolen some rare and valuable artifacts from the Bishop Museum, but were refusing to name their fence. She was sure they were part of a bigger plan to smuggle Hawaiian art treasures out of the country, and was frustrated because they wouldn’t cooperate.
“You sound beat,” I said. “Would you rather skip tonight?”
She paused. “You wouldn’t mind? I just, I need to, I guess, just relax.”
“Sure. Read a book tonight, or watch TV. We’ll talk next week.”
“You’re sweet, Kimo,” she said. “Aloha.”
I felt lucky, and guilty at the same time. I puttered around until just three o’clock, when Tim Ryan rang my bell, and as we walked down Lili‘uokalani toward the beach together, I gave him a brief lesson on surfing. “Light winds cause ripples out in deep water. The water molecules travel in stationary circles as these ripples travel over them, gradually getting stronger and becoming waves. As that wave hits the coral reef, its height and speed increase. That’s when the surfer jumps on and rides.”
“So that’s why some beaches are better for surfing than others,” Tim said. “Because they have different reef configurations.”
“Exactly.” We dropped our towels on the beach and swam out beyond the breakers, me dragging one end of my board. “Now we wait,” I said, once we were in position. There were more surfers around than I liked; that’s why I usually surfed so early in the morning or late in the day. On a beach like Waikiki, where there weren’t very many good waves, you didn’t want to have to compete for them with too many other surfers. I even saw Alvy Greenberg down the beach and waved at him.
“How do you know when the right wave is coming?” Tim asked.
“You can’t explain it,” I said. “You just have to feel it. Let’s hang out here and just let a bunch of waves wash over us.”