“There’s a first time for everything,” I whispered back.
There was another smaller bar in a back room, through a wide archway, and on the other side of the room there were four pool tables, each lit by its own fake stained-glass lamp. There were two or three guys at each of the tables, and maybe a dozen by the bar.
I hadn’t changed from the clothes I’d worn all day-a maroon polo shirt and jeans. Tim had taken off the tie I guessed he’d worn to work, but was still wearing a white oxford cloth button down shirt, and a pair of neatly pressed khakis. The guys around us, who ranged in age from what I guessed to be late teens to mid-fifties, were all dressed similarly, though there were a few in t-shirts and another couple in leather pants with chains attached to the pockets.
We walked up to the bar and tried very hard to avoid the boy thrusting his crotch toward our heads. I ordered beers for both of us, and then when the bartender, a guy who looked half Hawaiian and half Chinese, brought them I showed him my ID. “Yeah?”
I’d deliberately chosen a place where one of the spotlights washed a section of bar. I pulled out a picture of Wayne I’d found on a club page of the Yale website, and asked, “Have you seen this guy?”
The bartender looked at it and shrugged. “I think so.”
“You remember when?”
He laughed. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Think a little harder,” I said. “I’ve got some friends in the department who don’t like underage drinking very much. I could send them over here.”
He didn’t like that. He picked up Wayne’s picture, looked at it again, and then closed his eyes. “Not for a couple of weeks,” he said when he opened them again. “He’s got a friend, doesn’t he?”
I showed him a picture of Derek I’d found at the same place. “Yeah, that’s him,” he said. “They’re usually together, though sometimes the haole cruises by himself.”
“So they weren’t in here a week ago Tuesday, the sixteenth?”
He shook his head. “No. I know that for a fact, because we were closed that night.” He looked at me. “Your friends in the department were here the Saturday before. They said they were looking for drugs, but they didn’t find anything. And I don’t serve anybody under twenty-one. Still they decided they didn’t like the idea of a fag bar, so they closed us down. It took us a full week to get it cleared up and reopen.”
I nodded. He walked away to serve somebody else down the counter. If the police didn’t like fags getting together at a bar on the edge of town, they certainly weren’t going to like one on their force.
For an hour or so we stood around and watched the guys playing pool, me leaning back against Tim, feeling the contact my shoulders made against his chest, his arms around my waist. Every time his fingertips grazed my skin I felt shock waves rolling through my chest and down into my groin. I was hard almost the entire time.
We drank our beers, and swayed to the rhythm of the music on the jukebox, and every now and then we turned around and kissed. Around us, men moved through the shadows and the light, talking in small groups, flirting, or silently cruising the bar waiting for sparks to fly. A Thai or Vietnamese boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen chatted at the bar with a haole man in his fifties, and as I watched, the man stroked the boy’s cheek in a gesture of unexpected tenderness.
Tendrils of smoke drifted through the wash of a light near us, and the air smelled of cigarettes, beer and testosterone. At a table in the back, two men who looked like brothers alternately kissed and sat back and stared at each other with wide smiles. Near the door, three men had a heated discussion, one of them gesturing wildly and repeatedly pointing his finger at his head as if he was shooting himself. There was a rotating stable of six guys who danced on the bar, all of them young, well-muscled and well-hung.
It was interesting to be out in public with Tim and not care about anybody else. And nobody seemed to care about us. A pool table opened up and we played, and then around midnight both of us started yawning and I drove us back to Waikiki.
“That was fun,” he said as I pulled up in front of his building.
“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it. I’ll tell you, it was a hell of a lot more fun going there with you than with Akoni.”
He laughed. “I doubt you’d kiss Akoni in public.”
It was my turn to laugh. “I think if I kissed Akoni, in public or in private, it would take him a minute to collect his wits, and then he’d give me a good roundhouse punch.”
“Well, I’ll never do that when you kiss me.” He leaned across then and we kissed for a long minute, and then he yawned again and said, “Work in the morning. See ya.”
LUCKY LOU
The next morning I surfed for a half hour or so, just long enough to get my juices running, and was at my computer a few minutes before eight, trying to organize my thoughts. Akoni came in with a cup of coffee and I said, “You didn’t bring one for me?”
“Hey, you were here first. You could have had coffee for me.” He sat down in his chair and turned around to face my desk. I told him what I’d discovered at the Boardwalk, that Derek and Wayne couldn’t have been there. “That means Wayne was lying,” I said. “Derek said they went up to Mount Tantalus and parked.”
Akoni sat back in his chair. “What do you think really happened?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know that it matters. Derek and Wayne couldn’t stay at the Rod and Reel because they didn’t want Tommy to know about them. So they left. Tommy must have gone back to the club after his date with Treasure, where he met up with the cop, who was probably there to get a payoff for tipping Tommy about the bust earlier that night.”
“They argued?”
“Must have. Maybe Tommy didn’t want to pay, they got into a scuffle, the cop whacked him over the head.”
Akoni and I looked at each other for a while. In the background we heard the radio crackle with beat cops checking out license plates and driver records. The 6-1 officer was checking “Golf, Bravo, Golf, 343,” and the dispatcher told him it was a 1998 red Mazda Miata, and gave him the registration information. They checked the driver and made sure he had no outstanding warrants.
Finally, the phone rang and I answered. “Really,” I said. “Cool. Keep it in the back; we’ll be out to see you.”
“That was Lucky Lou.” He ran a pawnshop out by the Aloha Bowl, and he was responding to a list of Tommy Pang’s jewelry we’d circulated around the city. “He thinks he’s got Tommy’s watch.”
“Looks like we get to get out of here.” Akoni stood up. “You want some lunch? We could hit Zippy’s,” he said, and it was almost like having my partner back.
Lucky Lou’s pawn shop was located in an industrial neighborhood out by the Aloha Stadium just beyond Pearl Harbor, not far from the Boardwalk. We took the H1 Ewa, found ourselves a Zippy’s, and ordered our burgers.
“Who do you think pawned the watch?” I asked, when we’d given in our orders.
Akoni shrugged. “The murderer?”
“Good a guess as any,” I said, as the clerk brought our burgers out to the window. “No way we’re going to get prints, but maybe they’ve got video surveillance.”
Akoni laughed. “If the camera works.” We ate, Akoni telling me about how Mealoha had dragged him out to an outlet mall in Waipahu, about fifteen miles west of Honolulu.
Lucky Lou ran a tourist trap operation out front, catching visitors on their way to Pearl Harbor with counterfeit Guccis and Cartiers, and rows of shiny gold chains that would turn your neck green about a day after you got home from your vacation. Around the back, there’s another entrance for the pawn shop, and that’s the one we took.
Lucky Lou was about three hundred pounds and balding, a crabby New Jersey transplant. “Hey, Lou,” I said, making my way past racks of nearly new guitars, stereo equipment that would probably be warm to the touch, and cameras soldiers from Schofield Barracks pawned to pay for cootchie-cootchie girls and their tender ministrations. “Let’s see that watch you got.”