“Does it matter to you?”
“Damn right it does. I looked up to you, Kimo. I thought you were the kind of cop, the kind of detective, I wanted to be. Now I see who you really are.”
“I haven’t changed,” I said. “I’m still a good cop. I’m just not lying to myself anymore. Or anybody else.”
“So it’s true.” He paused, then looked me in the eye. “You make me sick.”
He turned and walked away.
I sat back at my desk, reeling. I couldn’t believe he’d been so angry at me. I’d never come on to him, never acted like anything more than a friend or a mentor. I thought it was bad when I told Akoni, but his reaction had been easy compared to Alvy’s. I wondered if everyone at the Waikiki station knew, and if that was the way they all felt.
While I wondered about that, my phone buzzed. “Kanapa‘aka,” Lieutenant Yumuri’s voice sounded out of the speaker. “To my office, now.”
Jesus, what next, I thought. I supposed the rumors had traveled up the line of command and reached his ears. I got up immediately and walked down the hall to the lieutenant’s office. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll get right to the point,” he said, as I sat down. “Your work on this case was a mess. If you had handled this case better, Evan Gonsalves might still be alive. I’m suspending you, pending an internal investigation.”
“There was nothing wrong with our investigation,” I said. “We did everything you asked for. It’s all spelled out in the files.” I paused and suddenly I understood. “Word got out, didn’t it?” I asked. “That’s what Saunders was talking about, and Alvy Greenberg. You don’t want a gay cop on your force, do you?”
“I don’t,” he said. “Clean out your desk and your locker. You’ll be hearing from the department attorney.”
I left his office in a daze. It had been a hell of a day. From my encounter with Wayne, through discovering Evan’s body and ruining Terri’s life, to the failure of my own career. I stumbled through a quick cleanup of my desk and locker, avoiding the stares of the other cops, and walked out onto Kalakaua Avenue, without an idea of what I was supposed to do next.
CERTAIN CONDITIONS
I don’t know how I made it home. I dumped my things in my apartment and curled up on the bed. I knew I ought to get out, go surfing, clear my head, but I couldn’t. I didn’t sleep much that night, just lay there thinking and worrying. I always thought, whenever I had trouble nodding off, that sleep was this kind of magical land far away. Sometimes you just forgot how to get there.
I tried to go over everything I had done in the case, remembering each detail, every conversation, every note, every official police document. The guy upstairs was playing Pearl Jam at high volume, blasting the same CD over and over again, but I didn’t bother to yell or call him or go upstairs. It just didn’t seem to matter.
As the sun was rising I did doze off for a little while, then woke finally at seven-thirty and decided to get up and take a shower. I thought about going to the beach, but I just couldn’t seem to get myself together. I scrubbed the kitchen, throwing away anything in the refrigerator that looked suspicious, reorganized the books on my bookshelves, and I’d started filing away articles I’d clipped from the paper when the phone rang.
It was nine-thirty. I jumped for the phone, hoping it was Tim, but instead it was Peggy Kaneahe. “We need you down at the main station,” she said. “Ten-thirty.”
“Why?”
“I can’t talk about it with you now. We’ll talk then.”
“But what’s going on?” I asked. The phone went dead in my hand.
I called Akoni at the station and told him what had happened. “I know,” he said. “The lieutenant called me in this morning.”
I waited, and finally Akoni said, “I told you this was going to happen, Kimo. I tried to stand by you as long as I could, but I just can’t anymore.”
“I understand,” I said, and I did. I hoped that if something happened to a friend of mine, I would have the courage to stand by him, all the way, but I wasn’t sure I would, and I wasn’t sure courage was really at the heart of it. After all, we were all born alone in this world, and we died alone, and there was a limit to what you could do for anyone else. “You’ve been a good partner,” I said. “I’ll try not to let any of this wash off on you.”
“I’ll take my lumps. You do what you need to do. Don’t worry about me.”
I wanted to say something more, but I didn’t know what to say. “Let me know how it goes,” he said finally.
“I will.”
I finished getting dressed, pulling on a white oxford cloth shirt and a pair of clean, pressed khakis. I thought about wearing my uniform but figured that was a bit much-and I guess maybe I was afraid they would make me take it off, hand it over to them. I didn’t think I could take that.
At a few minutes after ten, I got into my truck for the ride to the main station on South Beretania. The weather seemed restless and quickly changeable, a brisk wind sweeping down from the mountains and bringing heavy gray clouds with it. I signed in with the desk sergeant and he told me to go to a meeting room on the third floor. I took the elevator up, and had to walk through a warren of cubicles. Maybe I was being self-conscious, but I couldn’t help feeling people were watching me, that the tide of conversation quieted in a wave before me, and then rose again as I passed. The cops around me worked in special operations, Vice, Sexual Abuse, School Intervention and the like, and there was a general feeling of despair there, of men and women who worked with the dregs of the population and never saw any hope for the future.
I walked out to the exterior hallway that overlooked the courtyard at the center of the building. The sky was the color of burnished aluminum, a solid layer of cloud, and I could hear distant thunder. The static electricity in the air raised the hairs on the back of my arms.
The meeting room was stuck in a corner of the building, and a big circular concrete column stood like a sentinel along one side. There was a cheap folding table and a handful of old wooden chairs, nothing on the walls and no window to look out.
Peggy Kaneahe was there, with a leather briefcase by her side and a folder open on the tabletop in front of her. Lieutenant Yumuri sat on one side of her, and on the other side was Hiram Lin, a representative of the police union, a dried-up prune of a man counting the days until his full pension kicked in. He hadn’t been on the streets since statehood, I thought, and he hadn’t even ridden an active desk for a decade, preferring to hide out in the union office. “Come in,” Peggy said. “Sit down.”
I sat across from her. The chair was hard and a little too low for the table, so I felt like a misbehaving kid called into the principal’s office. “You can look at my files,” I started to say.
“You don’t have a voice at this time,” Peggy said. “There’ll be a hearing, and you can have counsel then, if you wish. That’s when you can give your side of the story. For right now, you just listen.”
I looked at Hiram, and he nodded. The way they sat, three of them on one side of the table and me on the other, I felt like I was all alone in this. “You’re being suspended, effective immediately,” Peggy said. “Your salary will continue through your suspension period, provided you observe certain conditions.”
“They are?”
She held up her hand and ticked them off on her fingers. “No contact with police officers other than those specifically designated to communicate with you. In this case that will be Lieutenant Yumuri. No contact with any of the suspects or witnesses in the case you were handling. No comments to the media about the case or your suspension.”
“What about police officers who are my friends?” I asked. “Akoni Hapa‘ele, for example.”
Peggy looked at Yumuri, who nodded slightly. “As long as you don’t talk about this case or other cases pending,” she said. “Not without Lieutenant Yumuri present.”
“I can do that.”