He pulled out a tray. It was a Rolex like the one Genevieve Pang had described for us, engraved with “Tommy” on the back in fancy script, next to a couple of Chinese characters which I knew meant luck. I guessed Tommy’s luck had run out.
“The guy bring anything else in at the same time?” Akoni asked.
Lucky Lou grimaced. “I knew you were going to ask that,” he said. He pulled out another tray, and there were the diamond rings and gold and diamond bracelet Tommy’d also been wearing. “You know we’re going to have to pull this in,” I said.
“This gives me a credit, right?” Lou asked. “I get in any trouble, you vouch for me?”
“That depends,” Akoni said. “You murder your wife, we can’t do a thing for you. Parking ticket, that’s another story.”
“You know what I mean,” Lou said.
“Yeah, Lou, we’ll be a character reference for you.” I wrote him up a voucher for the watch, the rings and the bracelet. After the investigation was over, it would all go back to Genevieve Pang, and she could decide what she wanted to do with it.
“So, Lou,” Akoni said. “Your cameras working all right?”
“One step ahead of you,” Lou said. “I already checked. The guy was smart, kept his head down the whole time he was here.”
“And you didn’t suspect a thing,” I said.
He shrugged. “I got a lot of customers don’t want to get recognized,” he said. “You’re out pawning your mom’s engagement ring so you can buy crack, you really want your picture taken?”
“So what you’re saying is you got nothing for us,” Akoni said.
“One t’ing,” Lou said. “The guy was packing. He shifted his feet, his jacket came open a little, I saw the holster.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You think the guy might have been a cop.”
“You know him?” Lou asked.
I shook my head. “You got a description?”
“Haole guy,” he said. “Maybe late twenties, early thirties. Good build, not fat or scrawny. Dark hair, wedding ring. That’s about all I noticed.”
“You noticed the wedding ring?” Akoni asked. “What, you thinking about asking the guy out?”
“My line of work, I see a lot of guys pawning jewelry, all right?” Lou said. “Lots a times, it’s the wife’s. I got in the habit of looking for wedding rings. Sometimes I mention it, the guy’s willing to pop it off and add it to the stash, he’s desperate enough.”
We bagged the jewelry and left the pawn shop. “You want to see if we can connect with Derek Pang?” I asked. “Get him to ID the jewelry, confront him and Wayne about their stories?”
“We could do that,” Akoni said.
I checked my notes, dialed up Derek Pang’s home number. Surprise, surprise, he answered. He and Wayne were going out soon, but we could stop by on our way back to the station.
The day had not yet cooled down even though there was a light trade wind blowing. The mountains around us shone green in the mellow light, and heat seemed to rise up in waves from the steaming black pavement around us. I thought about haole cops who had connections to the case, and my thoughts kept coming back to Evan Gonsalves.
FOOLING AROUND ON TANTALUS
Wayne answered the door again and showed us in to the living room. “Derek’ll be right out,” he said. “He’s just on the phone.”
“I went to the Boardwalk last night,” I said. “You could have warned me about that sandbox by the front door.”
He smiled. “It’s a little thing they do to keep track of who’s been there before.”
“And you’ve been there. The bartender recognized you. Said you go there sometimes with Derek, sometimes without. Cruising, I think he called it.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes I want a beer and Derek doesn’t.” He picked a paper clip up from the table and started fiddling with it.
“Just to refresh your memory, you told us that the night Tommy was murdered, you and Derek left the Rod and Reel and went to the Boardwalk. That true?”
“Yeah, we needed to chill out.”
“When you’ve been to the Boardwalk in the past, you ever see anybody in there drinking, doesn’t look old enough?” I asked.
“There are guys there who like chicken.” We must have looked confused, because he added, “Younger guys. Boys, almost. So the chicken comes there, and sometimes they drink, I guess. I never paid much attention.”
I nodded. “See, the liquor control board, they pay attention. Matter of fact, they closed the place down Saturday, the ninth. They didn’t get open again until the following Saturday. So the Boardwalk was closed on the Tuesday night you said you and Derek went there. You want to rethink that story a little?”
By then he had twisted the paper clip into a tortured shape that resembled the double helix of DNA. “Okay, you got me, I lied,” he said. “You’ve got to understand, I come from an Irish Catholic family. My older brother’s a goddamn priest.” He shook his head. “I’m accustomed to lying when it comes to my sex life. The fact is, I still don’t think it’s anybody’s business who I get off with and where, but I don’t want you guys to think I’m holding out on you.”
He looked right at me, smiled, and then licked his lips. I felt he was looking right into my heart, and knew that even as I sat there, I was lusting for him. He said, “Derek and I have been together three years now, and sometimes, the sex gets boring, so we try and spice things up a little. The truth is, after we left the Rod and Reel I was horny and I wasn’t taking no for an answer.”
He licked his lips again, and I shivered. I hope neither he nor Akoni noticed. “We drove up to Mount Tantalus and I spread Derek against the hood of the car, and plowed his ass, howling at the moon like a dog in heat. I was hoping some breeder couple would stumble on us and get the shock of their lives, but no such luck.”
“You’re a pervert,” Akoni said.
“You ever had a piece of ass up against a warm engine, Detective?” he asked. “You ought to try it sometime. Your wife, maybe one of those boys from the Boardwalk. You just might like it.”
“You freak,” Akoni said, jumping up.
I jumped up, too, holding him back, just as Derek Pang entered the room. If he’d heard anything, he didn’t let on. “You have jewelry that belonged to my father?” he asked.
We sat back down, Wayne putting his arm protectively around Derek’s back, and I showed them both everything, in plastic bags. Derek nodded. “It was all his.” He seemed to swallow hard. “You think the man who pawned this stuff is the one who killed him?”
“We don’t know yet, but it’s a good chance,” I said. “Listen, Derek, there’s just one little thing we need to clear up. Would you tell us again what happened after you left the Rod and Reel Club the night your father was murdered?”
He relaxed back into Wayne’s embrace. “It’s like I told you,” he said. “Wayne and I wanted to fool around, and we weren’t comfortable doing it where my father might find us. So we went up to Mount Tantalus and parked.”
“You stayed in the car the whole time?” I asked.
Derek blushed. “Is that important?”
“Just checking the details,” I said.
Derek reached over and squeezed Wayne’s knee. “We made out in the car for a while, and then Wayne asked me to get out and pull my pants down.”
“Okay,” Akoni said. “That’s all we need.” He stood up. “You’ll be able to get this jewelry back after the investigation’s over.”
I didn’t say anything until we were in the elevator. “What was that all about?” I asked. “Derek was in the middle of his statement.”
“Yeah, and you know as well as I do the two of them rehearsed the whole thing,” he said. “They were baiting us, Kimo. I didn’t need to hear the details all over again.” He looked over at me, and I was sure he’d seen what was in my heart when I looked at Wayne Gallagher. “And you didn’t either,” he said.
We were on our way back to the station when we got a radio call, that a man’s body had been found in Kapiolani Park, on the Diamond Head end of Waikiki. When we arrived, we found Lidia Portuondo keeping traffic away from the spot and Alvy Greenberg standing over a body, which had been discovered by a young haole woman out walking her dog. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition, so much so that we could not even determine, at first glance, whether it belonged to a man or woman.