I sat back in my chair and looked around. The Rod and Reel wasn’t that scary in the light of day. It was just a bar, after all. There were gay people there and straight people, and nobody seemed to care who was who. That was nice.
Akoni went home for dinner with Mealoha, and I went back to my apartment. I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I kept watching the clock, until finally it was ten and Akoni called to say he would be at my apartment in a couple of minutes. He parked out front, and we walked back down Kuhio Avenue toward the Rod and Reel.
From a block away, we could hear the music and noise coming from the club. We walked in together, and for a minute my heart seized up the way it had when I’d gone in there two weeks before. But then I looked around, and I realized it was still just a bar.
We circled slowly around the main room. Akoni was careful not to establish eye contact with anyone. I thought his unease was kind of funny. So what if a guy came up to him and asked him to dance, or blew in his ear? If he wasn’t interested he shouldn’t have been threatened. “No” worked pretty well if you weighed over two-thirty.
Gunter wasn’t in the main bar. I headed toward the back bar, wondering what Akoni’s reaction would be when he saw the explicit videos being shown there. The one playing was a little wild even for me, a close-up shot of one guy humping another’s butt. They’d lit it so that the lube and the sweat glistened in the light, and there was a thumping beat behind it establishing a rhythm.
Akoni looked away almost as soon as he saw the screen. Then I saw Gunter sitting at the edge of the bar, nursing a shot glass of something clear.
I showed him my ID and explained. Gunter said, “I don’t think I remember you. You said I walked up to you?”
“And blew in my ear.”
“That sounds like me,” he said, laughing, “But you don’t look like my type.”
“I’d been working undercover, I was a little grungier, a little more like…”
“Rough trade,” he said, and I nodded. He stared at me for a minute, and I had the feeling he was trying to envision me without my clothes on. It was a weird feeling. “I remember. You ran away!”
I nodded. “Out towards the alley.”
“And I followed you to the door, but then I came back inside.” He nodded. “I met the most delightful boy after you left. A fraternity brother from Illinois, I think. He just wanted a beer, he didn’t realize what kind of place this was. But he was happy to let me suck his dick.”
Akoni winced. “They like it, you know, straight boys,” Gunter said to Akoni. “Their girlfriends won’t suck their dicks for them. Does yours?”
“My partner’s married,” I said. “So Gunter, would you come down to the station and give us a statement?”
“A statement? Of what?”
“Of what you just said. That you saw me here, two weeks ago, around three a.m.”
“That’s all?”
“Just that. I need some proof that I was here, then.”
“What ever for?”
“I witnessed a crime, just after I left here. I need to establish I was in the area.”
Gunter nodded. “The body they found in the alley. You saw it?”
I nodded.
“I work from three to eleven,” he said. “I sleep in the mornings. I like to sleep in, particularly if I have a guest. Can I come in tomorrow afternoon, before work?”
We agreed, but before we let him go I got his full name, home address and phone, and his work address. He was a security guard at a fancy condo tower. He was thin, but wiry, and you could see he was strong. With his evident muscles and his no-nonsense haircut, you wouldn’t want to mess with Gunter.
“Hallelujah,” Akoni said when Gunter had walked away. “We can go home. And never come back to this place.”
“Never say never,” I said.
LIDIA’S LISTENING
We had to table Tommy Pang’s murder the next morning, because Akoni and I had to attend a training session at the downtown station. Neither of us wanted to go, but since the case wasn’t going anywhere we didn’t have much of an excuse. We spent the morning watching videos and hearing speakers about diversity training, sustainability and community policing. I was interested to note that the diversity training included a section on the rights of gay people.
Akoni called in for messages when we broke at one. “Our buddy Melvin called and said he found a bunch of the receipts from packages Derek and Wayne sent. We ought to swing past his place on our way back and find out what that’s all about.”
“We’ve got Gunter coming in this afternoon for a statement,” I reminded him.
“Why don’t you go back and do that interview yourself,” he said. “I’ll go back to the pack and ship place. We can compare notes later.”
I was back at the station by two, and a little later Gunter showed up. I pulled Lidia Portuondo in with me to take his statement, so that there was somebody else there. Knowing how Peggy Kaneahe and the lieutenant felt, I wanted to be extra careful. And besides, I thought that since Lidia had her own secrets, namely her relationship with Alvy, she ought to be able to keep mine.
Gunter looked a lot more presentable in his work clothes than he did in the torn t-shirt he’d worn the night before. He wore a pressed white shirt with epaulets and a nametag and khaki slacks, and even his buzz-cut head looked more normal in the light of day.
Lidia and I took him into one of the interview rooms. There was a coffee maker on a table against the far wall. “Coffee?” I asked. I poured one for myself.
“I can’t take caffeine,” Gunter said. I motioned him to sit down at the table. “What do you want from me?”
“Just what we told you yesterday. Just write down what happened to you at the Rod and Reel Club on the night of Tuesday the sixteenth.”
“You want me to write down how I blew in your ear?” He leered at me, and I shivered a little. I thought a night with Gunter was more than I was willing to get into.
“You can leave that part out.”
Lidia had just come in from her shift, and her uniform made her look tougher than she did in street clothes, especially with her long brown hair pulled into a bun. She leaned against the wall across from the coffee maker, crossed her arms and listened.
“I think I cruised you for about an hour before I went up to you,” Gunter said, looking up from his writing. “That sound about right to you?”
I held up my hands. “You write it the way you remember it.”
He went back to writing. He finished and then pushed the paper over to me. He wrote in a neat, careful script, crossing his sevens and his Z’s. I had a momentary flash of Gunter as a small boy with the same haircut, painstakingly practicing his penmanship, and then he didn’t seem frightening at all. I picked it up and read through it. It was just as he’d said the night before, and corresponded pretty closely to what I remembered. He wrote that he had first seen me at the bar at about two o’clock or so, and described the couple of times we’d made eye contact. He ended by noting he’d looked out the door of the club and seen me duck into the alley.
I signed the bottom, and then handed it to Lidia for her signature as witness. She read it, and then signed next to my name.
“All right, you can go now,” I said. “Thanks for coming in.”
He stood up. “So, you hang out at the Rod and Reel a lot?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Shame,” he said. “You’re cute.” As he walked past me he casually ran a hand over my chest. “I’m there most nights. If you change your mind.”
Lidia didn’t say anything until Gunter had left the room. “Were you on a stakeout or something? At that club.”
I shook my head. “I just wanted to go there. Kind of dipping my foot in the waters, you know?”
She nodded like she understood and left to sign out. I didn’t say anything specific to her, but I was sure she’d respect my privacy and not spread any gossip.